“No.”
“It should,” Passaro said.
“Miss Goodbody doesn’t think I’m sloppy.”
“If you can play better than she can, how would she know if you’re sloppy?”
I burst out laughing.
“You think that’s funny?” Passaro said
“Yeah,” I said, still laughing.
“Don’t laugh when the professore is talking,” my grandfather said.
“When can you get me this Braille list?” Passaro asked.
“Will you teach him?”
“First I want to see the list. If there are enough compositions on it, compositions I want to teach...”
“There are millions of pieces in Braille,” I said.
“Including Chopin’s C-Minor Polonaise?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if I told you you’ll be playing it in three months’ time?”
“I don’t even know what it sounds like.”
“It sounds like this,” he said, and he reached across me with his left hand, and began playing simultaneously with his right hand, and what I heard was impossibly intricate.
His hands stopped abruptly. “Well?” he said.
“It took me three months to learn the ‘Solfegietto,’ ” I said.
“And you still play it badly,” he said. “What do you think of what I just played?”
“It sounded hard.”
“It is hard.”
“I don’t know if I could play it in three months.”
“You’re right. You probably won’t be playing it for three years.”
“Allora, dottore,” my grandfather said. “Sì o no? Will you teach him or not?”
“Get me the list,” Passaro said.
It is my brother who takes me to my weekly piano lesson in the Bronx. My mother says we resemble each other. “Ike and Mike, they look alike,” she says, making reference to the Rube Goldberg cartoon creations, and not to what my name will become one day in the distant future. Tony has blond hair, like mine, but it is curly. His eyes are blue, too. His chin has a cleft in it. I have explored it with my hands; I know his face as well as I know my own. We board the Third Avenue El on 125th at eleven o’clock each Saturday morning. We sit side by side on the caned seats, and exchange dreams while we ride up to Tremont Avenue. I am going to play at Carnegie Hall one day. (I know what Carnegie Hall is now; Passaro has told me. He has also promised me I will play there.) My brother is going to be a famous ballplayer. Winter or summer, he wears a leather mitt on his left hand and repeatedly socks a baseball into the pocket as we ride uptown, the steady rhythm counterpointed by the clacking of the wheels along the track.
He reels off batting averages, and lifetime records, and describes a game my Uncle Dominick took him to see in Yankee Stadium. Lou Gehrig is his hero. He tells me he is going to marry Letitia. (They are both eleven years old.) He says he is going to become rich and famous and then he and Letitia will move to Mamaroneck, in a private house where he’ll live all the time except when he has to go on the road with the team. When he was in the third grade, his teacher invited him and three other kids to her house in Mamaroneck for a Saturday outing. Tony says the house was like in the movies. That’s the kind of house he wants to live in someday. He tells me I’ll come visit him. He says I’ll play a concert someplace, and come to his house afterward in a big black Cadillac limousine driven by a chauffeur, I’ll still be wearing my black tuxedo from the concert, and he and Letitia will be having a big party for me with champagne and everything in their private house in Mamaroneck. And when he plays at Yankee Stadium, he’ll get Uncle Dominick or Uncle Luke to take me to the game, and they’ll describe the action to me, and when he comes to the plate he’ll point his bat at the left-field bleachers and that’ll mean he’s going to put one away for me.
He says he will ask Letitia if she has a friend for me. He promises that when I’m a big concert player and rich and famous, I’ll have beautiful girls hanging all over me, rich girls in long satin dresses, wearing pearls at their throats, draped on the piano, and never mind that I’m blind, that won’t matter to them, Iggie. He doesn’t want no rich girls in satin, my brother Tony. All he wants is Letitia, who’s the most beautiful girl in the world. He tells me he wishes I could see her, she’s so nice, Iggie, I mean it, I love her so much. And then he describes her for me again, and I try to conjure Letitia, try to create an image that will match the voice I have heard so many times. We will both be rich and famous, my brother and I.
This is America.
It is entirely possible.
On my ninth birthday, he gives me a dog. The dog is a mutt he paid three dollars for in the pet shop on Third Avenue. With a little help from my grandfather, I name the dog Vesuvio. Vesuvio is a good dog with but a single failing: he refuses to be housebroken. My mother is a compulsive housekeeper, then and now, and does not need a half collie-half spitz (imagine that mating scene!) messing up her nice linoleums. In a desperate attempt to keep Vesuvio out of the dining room and bedrooms, thereby encouraging him to go on the paper we have put under the kitchen sink, she removes two leaves from the dining room table and stretches them across the doorway to the kitchen at night, one on top of the other, constructing a barrier she hopes will keep him out of the rest of the apartment. But one night, getting out of bed and walking toward the kitchen for a glass of water, she forgets about those two dining room leaves and bangs her shins against them and, according to her, almost breaks both her legs. That does it. I come home from school one day to discover that Vesuvio has been taken away by the ASPCA. Naturally, I decide to leave home. The first person I complain and confide to is my grandfather.
“She gave Vesuvio away.”
“Who?”
“Mama.”
“Ma perchè?”
“He was making in the house.”
“Sit down, stop crying. Now stop. You’re a man, no? Men don’t cry all the time. Who took him?”
“The ASPCA.”
“Who’s that?”
“It’s a place that takes dogs. Grandpa, I’ll bet they’re gonna kill him.”
“No, no.”
“Yes, Grandpa. They’ll put him in a room with gas.”
“Why would they do that? No. They’ll find a home for him in the country, where he can run free. That’s what a big dog like Vesuvio needs, a lot of room. Don’t worry, they’ll take good care of him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Ignazio, I’m sure.”
“Grandpa, let’s go to Fiormonte.”
“Right this minute?”
“Yes. I never want to see her again, Grandpa, I mean it. I hate her.”
“So you’ll go to Fiormonte in hatred? To such a beautiful village? No, Ignazio, that would be wrong.”
“Then I’ll go to Newark, New Jersey.”
“Newark? Why Newark?”
“Goomah Katie lives there.”
“Goomah Katie has five sons of her own.”
“She’d take me in.”
“Maybe. But even so, I don’t think you’d like Newark.”
“You know why this happened?”
“Why?”
“Because somebody put the Evil Eye on me.”
“Who told you that?”
“Aunt Victoria.”
“Aunt Victoria is a fool. There’s no such thing as the Evil Eye.”
“Mama sent me there because I was coughing, and she wanted to find out if somebody’d taken me by eyes, and Aunt Victoria dropped the oil in the water, and held the plate under my chin, and it made eyes.”
“That’s because oil and water don’t mix.”