husbands worked for the family business, were doing well, but they thought their father had lost his mind. He’d always been a drinker and wanderer, and had often spent months away from home at jobs with other Italians or just hanging out in the island culture of North Beach, but now his brain had stepped off a cliff, and at the bottom of that cliff was a teenaged hooker and her illegitimate baby.
No ugly stereotyping could have disgusted Joe more than these latest shenanigans, no joke about Italian soldiers or Italian funerals with only two pallbearers could have angered him further. He looked at himself in the barber’s mirror and asked for a flattop; he avoided Italian food, except on Sundays at his mother’s; he hid the Sinatra records under a stack of magazines until his daughter Penny found them and filled the house with Frankie Boy swinging with Nelson Riddle’s band.
It was Penny who talked him into going to see the old man. They were at a little Italian hole in the wall celebrating her twelfth birthday, just daddy and daughter, and she brought the subject up as if it had just occurred to her. Isn’t Grandpa’s place a few blocks from here? Shouldn’t we drop in on them?
Why? Joe glared at the menu.
You’ve got to see that baby, Dad. He is so beautiful! Your, um . . . brother, Jesús.
Maria, the young Mexican mother who pronounced Jesús like Hej-Zeus, fascinated Penny as much as the baby did. Giuseppe, the butt of a thousand jokes in Rosari’s repertoire, was a harmless geezer to his granddaughter, a funny old guy who would probably slip her a five-dollar bill as a birthday present.
They’d taken the L train from Berkeley over the Bay Bridge and a cable car to Chinatown, from which they’d walked to North Beach. A waiter spoke to Joe in Italian, and Joe reminded the guy that they were in America, if he didn’t notice. Joe checked his watch, tapped his fingers on the table, made notations on a napkin. He had a hell of a lot on his mind because his brothers were watching the shop and an important deal was imminent, but he wanted to give Penny her day. He left the table to call Ludovico, read him some numbers from the napkin, and told Lu to take them down, but his brother, whose moods were sudden and violent, told him to butt the hell out and enjoy his daughter and his ravioli, for Christ’s sake.
Try prime rib, Joe said. You sure you guys are all right? These bastards from New Jersey will have your peter in their pocket the minute you shake hands, Lu.
Hey, what are we, a bunch of rubes? You think we just got off the banana boat?
Giuseppe’s flat in Little Italy reminded Joe of the poverty he’d escaped and kept from his children: clothes on the lines between buildings, peppers and garlic hanging not far from them, loud voices yelling from one stoop to the next, broken glass and strong smells of urine and garbage in the alleyway. There was an old Mexican woman in the flat, and she said that la familia had gone to the beach. Joe laughed and thanked God. He fairly danced down the steps and the steep sidewalks to the streetcar stop with his daughter, calculating the time it would take to get her home and himself to the business. Penny reminded him that they were going to the Natural History Museum next. The what? The place with the alligators. He’d promised.
Christ. Joe hated it: waiting on the corner, squeezing in with all those people, rocking up and down the hills while the Jersey deal might be going down. They were stuck in a jam for fifteen minutes, and the siren of an ambulance announced the reason for the delay. Penny opened the bus window and stuck her head out as the attendants hustled with the stretcher, and Joe scolded her for snooping. Her eyes and mouth were open with wonder. Penny, you get back in your seat this minute, he hissed, and her face colored as she obeyed.
It was a mild summer afternoon in the city, fresh with strands of fog drifting among the buildings and the sunny eucalyptus and Monterey pines of the park. Joe and his daughter walked through the grove of pollarded sycamores to the museum and found the building closed. Penny suggested they walk to the beach and Playland.
Walk? Joe asked. On purpose?
It’s only a mile or so, I think.
Christ, Penny, only a goddamned idiot would walk clear from here to the beach. Excuse my French.
Then I must be a goddamned idiot, the girl said. She wore a summery dress and saddle shoes, and a new alpaca sweater was draped over her shoulders to ward off the pockets of fog and sea breeze. Joe figured that more loot had been spent on this one outfit than his entire wardrobe from age one to nineteen, and she kept growing out of things. Already her legs were nearly as long as his, her stride brisk and determined. They passed the lake with the pedal boats, crossed a polo field big as a goddamned aircraft carrier, muddied Joe’s best shoes near a creek. He saw a booth and told her to wait a minute while he got on the horn again. Narciso answered.
Ciso, what’s up? Did the guys from Jersey call?
They’re here, Joe. They’re real nice guys.
Oh, Christ. Joe’s stomach turned, and he asked to talk with his other brother, Ludovico. Penny was feeding French bread to a group of noisy ducks right next to the booth.
Joe, Narciso said after a bit, Lu says it’s all taken care of. It’s fine, Joe. These are great guys. How’s little Penny?
Jesus Christ, Ciso, of course they’re nice guys, they’re about to ask us to drop our pants and spread our legs. Get Lu.
There was a long pause. The ducks snapped at Penny’s legs, and she shrieked happily. Joe could hear voices, laughter, maybe a radio broadcast of a ballgame, a man saying the word southpaw. Then Sammy, the bookkeeper from the Philippines: Hello? Is somebody on the line?
Get me Lu, Sam, right now.
Oh, hey, Mr. Verbicaro! Hey, I’m sorry. He and Ciso just took off with these guys for lunch.
Son of a goddamned bitch. Joe slammed the receiver so hard the ducks bolted.
As they neared the shore the fog assaulted them. It rolled through the cypress and over the grass, tumbling against itself like an avalanche. The amusement park glowed and squawked somewhere in those snowy depths, its tacky music and Christmas lights beckoning like a buried city of sin which God had failed to destroy. Every foolish pleasure from the ’20s and the turn of the century, gartered legs, beer foaming the underside of handlebar mustaches, flapper dresses, wheels of fortune, and penny arcades, was depicted in garish colors which, though blasted by years of weather and generations of children, beamed at Joe through the fog as he approached.
Penny wanted to go to the Funhouse first, and they stood in line before the mechanical hag, the laughing, wild-haired, freckle-faced old woman in the booth. Joe fumed about his brothers, his father, and, to some degree, his willful daughter, who had dragged him to this spot, in bitter fog, before this ugly, guffawing woman. Her head rocked back when she let loose with the biggest laughs, and her arms in the wild striped sleeves jerked like a spastic’s. It made Joe wonder about laughter itself for the first time in his life; it made it suspect in his mind. What a miserable thing it was, really, a desperate and mindless noise. What an ugly animal sound, imbued with nothing nobler than retching or ejaculating.
Daddy, where are you? Penny shrieked and laughed, lost somewhere before him in the house of mirrors. Joe’s anger was like his father’s, slow-building, deadly, filled with resentment and purpose. His brother Lu would explode at the slightest provocation and laugh a moment later, and Narciso’s fuse was so long it might circle the earth twice before a wisp of smoke could be seen on the horizon, but Joe banked his logs in silence toward a coming forest fire. He stepped slowly through the house of mirrors while children squeezed past him, shrieking black and brown and yellow and white
