Mile High (6 page)

When it was over this time he lay on top of her like a landed manta ray, gasping and frightened that he was having a coronary for, at last, his age had protested horribly. She grappled him off herself and rolled away. He mewed piteously that if he had to take it from her every time he wanted a little piece throughout their married life, he might well find himself at death's door. Jesus! What a wedding night after so many long months of such glorious dreams. The injustice righted him. “What the hell is wrong here?” he raged. “You're my wife. Here we are. This is alla sacred
jooty
for botha us.” She hawked and spat at him, then tried to kick him swiftly in the groin, and they had the last exchange of their life in the English language. “Every time you want to put that big hairy thing in me,” she said in a shrill, strident voice, “you'd better get Carmelo the Wolf and some button men to hold me down.”

“Why—you shameless little cooze!” he shouted at her from the floor.

“And remember this, you old mess. My father, that wet little shit, told me I had to marry you because I was a Sicilian woman. All right, you rancid, goat-bellied ruin, I will become a Sicilian woman from now until you are dead.”

She never spoke to him in English again. When he spoke to her she answered obscenely in the Alcamo dialect that is not, in any way, as dulcet from a woman as, say, Parisian French. If he wanted her body he had to fight her desperately for it. She exercised with forty-pound iron dumbbells and grew stronger and stronger while he felt himself grow weaker until, after a short while, the whole damned struggle wasn't worth it. She let herself go. She seemed to live on pasta and grow fatter by the hour. She wore the same shapeless black dress at all times and her dank black hair looked as though it had been arranged with an egg beater. She would not leave the house except to buy food. She cooked and served him only Sicilian dishes—
riso chi cacuocciuli
or
farsumagru
or
pomaruoro o gratte
, all a terrible mess to Paddy, a meat-and-potatoes man. He came home to eat less and less often. Neither her father nor her sisters visited Maria, and in a relatively short time it was as though no one remembered that she was in that house or that she had ever married or that she existed at all. Except her son, Eddie.

One of the first two rapes “took,” as the old wives would say. She swelled up and in exactly ten lunar months from her wedding day she gave birth to their son and demanded so shrilly and hysterically of Father Passanante that the infant be christened Courance that the priest prevailed upon Paddy to include it as the child's middle name. He became Edward Courance West, an odd enough name for a Sicilian-Irish baby.

Until her son was fourteen years old—which was as long as the boy had her—she spoke to him only in Sicilian. She treated him distantly, with her special, stupid haughtiness, and the boy thought of her as a queen, regal in beauty and in bearing. The more he adored her the more she took care of herself, and her little raisin-eyes found their way out of their pillows of fat. She began to clean and scent herself. She cast off the black rag of a dress for other dresses, engaging and colorful, and after a while even took to going to the ladies' barber in the neighborhood to get her hair dressed stylishly. Then, when the boy was fourteen and his heart totally hers and filled with love and joy of her, she ran off with a woman who sold silk stockings from door to door. She left behind a letter, in English, for her husband so that he would be sure to know what she had done. A door had opened for her. No one had been able to understand what had been wrong with her for all these years, but the touch of the lady sales agent's hand and the look in her eye at that moment had put everything right in one flash.

Paddy and his son responded bitterly to her desertion. Eddie held it against all women for all of his life. He never stopped seeking revenge upon every one of them for what his mother had done to his father and what she had done—the greater betrayal within the lesser one—to him.

Eddie West saw his mother as a coldly beautiful snarler who spoke in a mysterious code that separated her from the rest of the world. The Dance itself and her aborted world triumphs as a dancer were in imagination totally achieved by her because they had been denied her. She paddled on her back in a limpid pool of wistful fantasies, always looking back to where she had almost begun. She transmitted her own frustration to her son and gave it form for him. Frustration at never being able to get through to her, at having to hear her speak a language that he thought no one else could speak, describing with disdain and emasculating indifference a world he could neither enter nor imagine. He would beat upon walls because he could not beat upon her. In his boy's mind, then within his deserted adolescent consciousness, he thought of all women as repositories of some enormous secret that could not be dislodged unless it were shaken out or beaten out or stamped and kicked and strangled out. The discovery of this secret, this enigma, would explain the mystery of women and prove the key to open the mile-high doors that separated one vital part of him from the other deadened part with which he was forced to live.

When she left him it was not that something wonderful and irreplaceable had vanished, leaving him unloved and alone. While she was with him he felt more unloved than after she'd gone. His father loved him and proved that every day, then proved it again and again. But when his mother went away without revealing the engima's explanation and thus releasing the lock within the mile-high doors, his frustration multiplied itself, then squared itself, broadening, lengthening and deepening until the enigmas (more of them and all of them) were sunk at the center of a gigantic cube that was his “peculiarness,” standing alone on the barren plain of his existence at the geometric center of his frigid brain.

When she was gone he convinced himself that it was not just his mother who was alien and hateful and the creator of frustration and pain, but all women, because the only opposite of his mother was his father, his father and the people his father brought to see him—heavyweight champions of the world, famous actresses, high-riding jockeys, Presidents of the United States, all activists, people who revealed, never concealed, amiable, outgoing, attentive and interesting. As the years went on he thought he had forgotten everything he had felt so keenly in that first month of nights after she had gone away, but the pain of the frustration had settled deeply into the cold mists inside his head, so deeply that he was not aware it was still there. Except that he hunted women, preferring the compliant, extroverted, instantly surrendering, totally available. And when, as it happened several times in his life, these total availables suddenly revealed an antic selfishness that thwarted him, the gigantic old frustration was dragged out of his head. He had then to shake, strike, stamp and strangle to try to rid himself of the old locked-in secret. Although he thought later that he had at last seen a glimpse of the explanation with his own wife, the echo of his mother's meaning-within-no-meaning was still heard.

His father's public essence was strong and whole, but the boy could not match its splendid shape with the grotesque private form his father assumed inside the house, and thus was never able to see his father whole. Outside, the father was a giant figure, all-powerful, feared/loved. People came to him to try to realize their fortunes through him; the singers sang sweetly and the magicians their wonders did perform. But inside the house this majesty shrank into gabbling garrulousness that pleaded as it followed the icy, foul-tongued mother up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, apologizing for something that the son could not understand. “Maria! Wait! Listen to me! I have two tickets for a center box at the opera wit' all that beautiful dancin'.”

She would halt and turn on the stairs, look far down at her husband and say in Sicilian, “Why don't you cover those tickets with dog shit and eat them for breakfast?” Only the boy understood what she had said. One dark winter afternoon (she would not use electric light because it was “not Sicilian”), while she was making pasta and talking to the boy, they heard the father move behind the kitchen door in the stair hall, secretively, trying to learn something desperately important to him. His mother began to talk more and more torrentially in Sicilian, flinging the dough, slamming it into the marble tabletop. After a while the father's steps moved away and after a while his mother's voice became calm and distant again.

That night the father came into the boy's dark room and sat on the edge of the bed and asked what the mother had been shouting so passionately that afternoon. Eddie told him she had been describing the grace of the great Sicilian dancer Evalina Perseguitare, the first dancer to remove heels from her slippers to assist her
batterie
, one of the most brilliant inventions of the ballet. She was also the woman who was credited with having perfected the
entrechat six
and who, in order for her feet to be seen as her Achilles tendon sent her into flight, shortened her skirts to mid-leg; but it took one hundred years more for them to go still higher, to the knee. The ballet is life in the air, Mama said. The ground is there only as a point of departure. Humans stay imbedded in the ground, Mama said; Gods and dancers defy the flypaper and soar, free of all restraint.

“Does she always talk like that?”

“Sure. She wants me to know all about it.”

“Why?”

“I'm going to be a dancer.”

“Eddie!”

The boy thought his father was electrified with elation. “It's a wonderful life,” he said dreamily. “The world is at your feet. You travel and you see all the beautiful things of Rome, London and Berlin. I start my lessons in two weeks, then after a while Mama and I are going to Paris.”

Paddy was sick with horror. He groped his way out of the house. When he returned the next morning he gave Eddie ten cents to buy himself some of that special cake at Boehm's, six blocks away, then he went into his wife's room, talked to her briefly about her plans to turn the boy into a ballet dancer, then beat her unconscious and left her bleeding, stuffed far under the bed like a chamber pot. He stopped talking to her forever on that day. That afternoon he took Eddie with him on his rounds, and from then on, in the weekends and during winter, summer and autumn holidays he took him to baseball games, horse races and boxing matches without much letup and began his basic education in the uses of power and money. Eddie forgot about dancing. His father told him to put it out of his head, that it was work for women and that men had a damned sight more of better things to do in their lives than balance on their toes and jump in the air in tights.

The people around the courts—the cops, the gamblers, the businessmen and the madams—got used to seeing Eddie at his father's side. Every leader of Tammany Hall from 1900 forward knew the boy as though he were a favorite nephew; so did the gang leaders. Paddy West got a big kick out of having Eddie talk Sicilian with the Italian mobs and some of the most famous killers of their time. Ignazio Saieta made Eddie an honorary member of the Unione Siciliane, which Eddie made stick when he got older and decided he needed it. The Irish gangs took for granted he was Irish. So did the Jews. The Italian gangs knew he was a Sicilian and that nobody and nothing could change that. His father, whose ponderous wisdom no one ever doubted, was careful to keep the balance correctly weighted. He taught Eddie the value of concealing from the Jews and the Irish (and everyone but Sicilians) that he could speak the Sicilian language. “They're a canny, clannish people, Eddie,” he said, “and they'll like it best if you show the Sicilian to them alone. When in doubt, think like Aaron Burr, Ed. Ice in the veins is money in the bank, and always take the long view.”

On the day Eddie became fourteen his father chose Lorette des Anges, the leading soubrette of the day, eight times the cover girl on the
Police Gazette
, to “break Eddie in.” He took the boy to her beautiful flat in Murray Hill on a clear, sunny Sunday morning and had a glass of champagne with them before he left Eddie there. Eddie was pleasured so much he thought his hair would leap off his head in one piece. All in all, in a choice between his mother and father, there was never any real contest for Eddie's soul—not apparently, anyhow.

The day after the first time he was ever laid Paddy told him he was going to be a lawyer and that he would be going away to school in New England to prepare for college and be ready to handle the kind of boys he would meet there. Eddie was a bright boy. Paddy could line up the best sponsors. Eddie qualified for the junior form at the Gelbart Academy, where the boys were taught odd speech, something not too unlike the speech at Cambridge University in England—although no one ever identified it for Paddy West or the boy would not have been allowed to stay. Eddie entered Yale at sixteen, Harvard Law School at eighteen. He was admitted to the New York bar when he was twenty, a prodigy, on July 4, 1908.

Each summer, from the time he was fourteen, his father rented a large cottage at Canoe Place, Long Island, and conducted his business from there while Eddie entertained friends from school, all of them talking high in their noses, swallowing vowels and vocally punching at odd syllables. The speech stayed with Eddie for all of his life. He was an aristocrat, so, it followed, he spoke like an aristocrat.

Paddy worked out a clear policy for the selection of his son's roommates. Eddie was always younger than the other boys, although usually taller and always more worldly. Therefore part of his standard equipment when he went off to Gelbart was autographed pictures—James Jeffries, Lorette des Anges (in spangled tights and inscribed “Stay warm for Lorette, baby doll”) and a signed cabinet photograph of William McKinley (Republican), twenty-ninth President of the United States (“For Edward C. West, a grand young American, The White House, January 27, 1904”).