Island of Divine Music (6 page)

Joe followed the boy and was through the mirrors and in the center of the Funhouse in two minutes. He gave the kid four bits. The kid stuffed the quarters into his baggy dungarees and raced off.

The open center of the Funhouse smelled like an old gymnasium, like dirty socks and stinky shoes and the pine-scented wax and cleansers used on the hardwood floor. Penny was flying down the enormous wooden slide on a potato sack, her black hair and her petticoat sweeping back, her mouth open in a huge smile. When she got to the bottom she grabbed a girl by the wrist and dragged her over to Joe.

Dad, she yelled, her face flushed and damp, guess who this is!

The girl was nearly a young woman, and although Joe was a straight shooter and teetotaler compared to his brothers, he knew enough about the blue-light district to guess this girl had been around. She was beautiful and dark, to be sure, but there was something tawdry about her, something in her eyes, which had street
corners in them, some odor of desperation, of drugs or booze. I don’t know who this is, Joe said. And I don’t want you to hang around somebody like this, he said to himself.

His daughter laughed. Dad, this is Maria!

Who?

Your stepmom!

The young woman shook his hand, then gestured for them to wait before she darted off. Penny ran once through an obstacle course of rolling barrels and tipping boards while Joe pictured his old man in the labyrinth of mirrors, a lusty, snorting, white-haired monster with booze on his breath and goat horns sprouting out of his skull. He imagined how he might scare the children, and how some boy like the little guy who’d just guided Joe through the mirrors might trip the old man into a glass panel or jump on his back and strangle him. Maria and Penny were talking, as much with hands as with words, near the giant barrel while Joe mused about Giuseppe. Penny ran to him.

Grandpa’s lost! She tugged on Joe’s arm.

So what else is new?

He took off with the baby!

G
iuseppe had been getting lost on a routine basis. Penny told Joe about an afternoon spent with Aunt Francesca and Cousin Susan hunting all over Little Italy, down Columbus Street to Washington Square and the boccie courts, to the liquor stores in Chinatown,
and finally finding him at the wharf staring at the water. Joe wanted to know why in the hell this young mother had left the baby with an old drunk whose brain had one foot on a banana peel, but he couldn’t navigate her Spanish. They jogged through the carnival crowd, under the Ferris wheel, which turned slowly and disappeared in fog, among the dart-throwing and ring-tossing booths, then into the huge arcade. Joe remembered putting a penny into one of the old machines many years ago, cranking the handle until he saw, in a jerky, magical dance of white flesh against a black background, his first glimpse of a naked woman.

They crossed the highway to the beach. The fog lifted, swept to the south like wind-tossed hair, and the sudden gleam of sunlight made Joe squint. Penny saw them first and pointed, across the slick plane of sand which disappeared in fog, at the tiny, smoky figures of a man in a fedora and a toddler holding his hand. The old goat was moving stiffly, and the child’s shiny black hair bounced in the wind. Penny and Maria stepped over the garbage and driftwood and kicked off their shoes while Joe sat on the seawall and looked at his watch. He yelled to Penny that he needed to make another phone call pretty soon, and she called back that they’d be on the beach with Grandpa.

Don’t get your clothes wet, he yelled. Something stank, a dead seal or some bum’s turd buried in the sand, and he stepped down to the beach and walked over to a log upwind. He imagined that his brothers were probably drunk and laughing while a bunch of sleazy bastards put their business in the shitcan. He imagined his father having sex with a teenaged whore, the woman dancing around in
the surf with his daughter. The girls raised their skirts high above their knees while the water foamed around them.

He crushed a crab shell under his heel and hurled a stone at a log. He picked up a shell and observed it among the tabulations he’d made on his palm in the house of mirrors. Joe imagined some hermit crab had once lived in it, and wondered how the hell a crab could build a house like that, then realized that the crab had probably just found it and taken it the way his old man had snagged neglected land from lazy investors for next to nothing. But something built it, he said to himself, some little shellfish, and as he studied the perfect spiral he thought how somebody might explain its design with a series of triangles, a progression of right triangles, the hypotenuse of one becoming the base of the next. He held the shell, closed his eyes, and as he took in the scent of the briny air he returned in memory to the arcade from childhood, the secret peep-show world in the machine. That distant afternoon when he’d chased friends up and down this same beach and seen the woman in the box was linked somehow to looking into the heart of the shell today.

His daughter was still lifting her knees in the foam, her black hair tossed back and bouncing, and his father and the baby were trudging in the opposite direction now, along the water’s edge, their distant shapes silhouetted against the radiant mist. Joe turned and brushed the sand from his trousers.

The arcade was dark after the shore’s brilliance, and it took a moment for his eyes to read the signs. He got change from a cigar-smoking boy in a booth and scanned the dark recesses for a phone. Sammy answered and said that his brothers were still out with New
Jersey. The carousel started up as he spoke, and it was hard to hear him. Joe watched the horses moving up and down. Could they do any damage without his signature? Sammy didn’t see how they could, and Joe agreed.

Several kids were at pinball, but none at the ancient penny arcade machines (which now demanded a nickel), and as Joe strolled among them he realized that the boy had given him twenty nickels for his buck, and he had eighteen left, and his brothers probably couldn’t do anything without his signature, so what the hell. He glanced up and down the aisles of dusty machines, sighed, and dropped a nickel into one of them.

A little man with a bushy mustache was crank-starting a car. Joe could adjust the speed of the jerky black-and-white images with his arm, and he found it amusing that he and the man were cranking handles simultaneously, the ghost of an actor who died years ago and Joe moving their right arms in perfect sync. When the man hopped into the jalopy, the fenders fell off. Joe shook his head and peered up and down the aisles sheepishly. He wondered if he could find it or if it had long since been replaced.

He peeped into a few more machines. On some the metal visor above the eye sockets was worn smooth and shiny. The actors in the little films were obscure, the scenes taken from all manner of unsuccessful projects and experiments with the moving picture craft. Physical comedy, pratfalls, smoke and combustion were the main fare, but there were several very odd pieces: men rowing boats and lifting dumbbells, soldiers marching like wind-up toys. He had three nickels left when he found it.

The tiny figure in profile was running in place, the muscles of her hip moving to the rhythm of Joe’s arm, her small breasts bouncing with the sway of Joe’s shoulder. She was so small and naked, so white and vulnerable jogging before the pitch-black backdrop, her long hair pinned on top of her head. Her eyes looked frightened or startled, and Joe’s heart pounded as he cranked the handle. The screen went black.

He dropped another coin and moved more slowly this time, and still again more slowly with his last nickel. When he finished and started out of the semi-open, cavernous building he felt beads of sweat dribble down his dress shirt. He stood above the gleaming ocean feeling a bit foolish and ashamed.

Penny and Maria were in almost the precise place they’d been when Joe had left, silhouettes moving in the radiant mist, wading in the surf. Joe shuffled toward them and peered down the beach for the old man. A good fifty yards south of the girls the toddler crouched and bounced atop a log, but Giuseppe was nowhere in sight. Damn that old goat, Joe said to himself, leaving a child alone by the water. He started for Jesús. Obviously, the girls hadn’t seen the old man disappear. The toddler walked on the log and pulled something off one end of it. Then he ran west, across the smooth expanse of sand, clutching something round and floppy. Kelp? Jellyfish? No: the object left the boy’s hand and rode the wind a moment like a cartoon spacecraft before it landed on the wet sand. It was a fedora.

Joe ran, too, but he slipped in soft sand and bit his tongue. He knew it was his father who lay motionless, looking from this perspective
more like driftwood washed ashore than a man, and that the child was heading for the receding water. The girls heard him yell and stared at him. Joe hadn’t run for years, not since a charity ballgame, and as he lifted his legs he thought of the little naked woman running in place, how the muscles of her hip flexed. He thought how she’d been filmed in some clinical setting and possibly against her will, like a Jewess studied by Nazi doctors, and he realized that he had always held a secret love for her, for her beauty as well as her vulnerability. Baby Jesús ran with his arms out, as if to embrace the water, and Joe could see that a large wave was coming, green and gleaming like a polished stone, just starting to crest and tumble toward the child, and Joe lifted his knees and pumped his arms and legs as hard as he could.

The toddler disappeared underwater a moment before Joe ran into the frigid ocean. A black ball, more like a sea palm than the head of a child, popped above the foam. Jesús’s beautiful brown face rose above the surface of the wave, as if the sea were debating whether to take the baby or deliver him. The water knocked Joe down once, but he regained his feet. His good suit dripped and poured from the pockets, his best loafers got sucked off his feet and swallowed. He stumbled and crept in waist-high surf, and the boy floated into his arms.

The water hissed up to Giuseppe as well and soaked his old flannel shirt and khaki trousers. Joe, still up to his thighs in water, saw Maria struggling toward him, her dress soaked and clinging to her body, and in the distance Penny turning the old man onto his back because the water had covered his face. The baby wheezed and
spewed seawater, the mother shrieked and staggered with arms outstretched, and Joe could see his daughter stooped beside his father. He handed Jesús to Maria and held her elbow as they trudged to shore.

Penny leaned above her grandfather the way she’d stand while examining the rocks and tidal pools, the way she’d lean on the rail other days to gaze down at the alligators. Daddy, is he, she asked, is he, is he? Before kneeling to examine him Joe already knew that his father was gone, knew as much as he’d known anything in his life that the drunk old goat, the
paisano
who’d followed sheep into the Calabrian hills, had finally wandered off where nobody could find him.

He could see that his daughter was taking this in, was recording in her mind the look of the corpse of the old tyrant, an artifact no more alive than a sarcophagus or a piece of petrified wood. He knelt and touched the place where a jugular should tap back, brushed his fingers across the old man’s cheek and ear, and thought of the heart of the shell and the arcade, of that moment when the design, maybe the intent, of a mystery is revealed.

Giuseppe’s eyes and mouth were open; flecks of water and mica glittered in his whiskers like stars. Joe opened his mouth and wept for the first time since childhood. He begged God’s pardon that both he and his daughter must stare into the private chambers as Penny clung to his shoulder and wailed. He asked forgiveness that they must trespass on others’ grief and feed their eyes again and again.

Jesús

M
aria and her son, Jesús, had to flee the pimps and collectors of San Francisco after the old man died. Giuseppe’s family argued among themselves about their obligation to the girl, a teenaged hooker without a mother or father of her own. The women offered babysitting and a pool of cash, saying that the girl deserved a hand, whether or not the baby was of their blood. Giuseppe’s sons Ludovico and Joe knew that the smart money said he wasn’t.

A few months after the funeral Maria was approached at a produce market in Chinatown by a prostitute who’d worked with her four years earlier. It was this conversation with Lin, the Chinese hooker, along with a profound fatalism in Maria’s soul, which tipped her back into the oldest profession and the addictive powders that sustained her.

She would leave the toddler with Giuseppe’s granddaughters or with an old Mexican woman named Rosanidia and sit on the laps of drunk businessmen on Broadway. One of them turned out to be the bill collector hired by her landlord, a Neapolitan nickel-and-dime
thug named Paolo who proposed marriage daily and professed torment when he saw her sitting on other men. The fire of love in his heart was often translated into punching and kicking, and Maria found herself weeping one morning with a broken jaw, shaking like an epileptic, craving cocaine and imagining the many ways she should end her life. But not now, God seemed to say to her, because the child needed her.

The next day she took Jesús and a duffel bag to Rosanidia’s flat in the Mission District. There she hid and rode out the drug nausea while her jaw healed. It took two months for the various men with financial and romantic interests to find her, but by then Rosanidia had a plan.

The old woman’s nephew had a friend named José, a migrant farm worker who traveled alone. The man had a wife and seven children in Chihuahua that Rosanidia didn’t know about. The nephew just said he was lonely and had tender feelings for Maria, whom he’d never spoken to, but whose loveliness would be apparent to a blind armadillo.

They took off in José’s station wagon for the Salinas Valley and picked artichokes. José’s hands were swift and strong, and it didn’t take them long to find their way under Maria’s skirt as they lay in the
patron’s
shack with Jesús sleeping an arm’s length away. Maria tried to push him away, but no word or gesture of discouragement could stop José from forcing himself on her. After he was done, she told him, God has a dark plan for you and for me, and laughed. José lay panic-stricken in the musty one-room shack, wondering if this
woman were a witch or possessed by an evil spirit. A few hours later, unable to sleep, he slipped out to his station wagon.