Rumors from the Lost World (3 page)

“Every right in the world, sister,” Olsen said. Grinning, he pulled one of my long dark braids. “That's some head of hair you got, sugar.” He looked over at my father, sitting stiffly at attention, perspiring in his frayed, worsted suit. “We're just making sure you all cooperate with the war effort.” He slashed the chair until stuffing came out, then overturned a steamer trunk. Worn keepsakes, sweaters, shawls, and doilies spilled across the floor.

Seeing red, nothing but the motion of my blood, I rose to my toes and pummeled Olsen in the back. “You damn palooka!”

Shoulders hunched, he pivoted, frowning, and took one long steady look before bursting into a low-registered laugh. Gasper, the second man, came up behind me and hoisted me to the couch, sat me down with my parents. “That's enough, Joe Louis.” My father, jaw grinding, studied the frayed carpet in that self-conscious way people have when they're embarrassed for the furniture. As for my mother, she was no Sicilian, but she knew what poverty was. She also knew we were just a bad break from more of it.

“They put up with that shit?” Emily's face gets puffy with anger. She snaps open her purse and digs in it, as though searching for the cigarettes she no longer smokes.

What could we do? her mother says to her, staring at chipped china, drip-drying in a wire drain next to the sink. New Orleans was a military center. Soldiers all over the place, Army hospitals on the lakefront, Nazi subs at the mouth of the river. We were supposed to roll bandages, knit socks and sweaters, save tinfoil and coat hangars, old license plates. There was the rationing, the blackouts. We didn't know we had any rights. Olsen and Gasper had official business, they said. “Why do you have a radio but no transmitter?” Olsen said. “Where's your transmitter? You have a short-wave?”

“We listen to Beethoven,” I said, “but you wouldn't know him, would you?”

“He's a dago. Who else would you listen to?”

“Beethoven?” Gasper furrowed his brows. “He's not Italian, is he? Verdi, that's your man. You listen to him, sweetheart?”

“And Caruso. We listen to Caruso. You wouldn't know him, either. You're stupid.”

My mother squeezed my knee with a large-veined hand. “Just be quiet.”

“What are these questions, Mother?” my father asked in his heavy English, his long big-boned face twitching a little, his downtumed nose engraving sadness onto his features. He required me strictly to be home by ten, allowed chaperoned dates only, and suspected my volunteer work at the USO. He forbade me to attend late-evening get-togethers, especially dances for servicemen. He didn't trust soldiers with his baby, and the more I argued the darker his face became, like the skin of an eggplant. “I have every right in the world to go to that dance,” I had been screaming, almost in tears, when the two men knocked.

Outside it started to rain, a sudden gale from the gulf. Winds thirty miles an hour, the tops of big oaks waving like people adrift in lifeboats. It was better than Beethoven, those storms. Before the war, I'd sit by the window, lights out, the night turning off and on, sheets of rain plinking the glass, the ballgame droning on the radio for my brother's benefit, sheet-lightning punctuated by shouts of victory or disgust. When the war came, he got sent off to the European theater, where he met one of his heroes, a pitcher from Mississippi.

“Look, Mister,” Gasper told my father, who was running his watch-chain through his fingers like rosary beads, “we're fighting fascism. You should be glad we're vigilant.”

“Yeah, right,” Emily says, retrieving one of her own father's butts from the ashtray and breaking it apart.

Fascism? For all I knew, Olsen was a fascist. He was certainly dressed for it in his wrinkled, shiny black suit. He pulled out a cigarette, without permission to smoke, tapped it in his palm, and struck his match. “What's a little discomfort, a little annoyance, compared to freedom?” he said. “You all don't know how good you have it. Suppose you were still over there in that stinkhole? You think you'd get a place like this to feel at home in? You think you'd get all that good Spam to eat when there wasn't enough meat to go around?”

My father studied the jiggling glint of his watch-chain.

He had the shakes. When he was little, I found out later, his parents spoke of innocent men dragged by dead of night to stakes in the scorched uplands of Sicily, where predators and insects and the sun would kill them. In America, it was rumored that the government relocated people into prisons in the desert, that Italians were never safe from a beating or the kind of grilling that convinces you you're guilty.

“If it's not our country, too,” I said, “then what's my brother doing over there? Why don't you send him home? He's fighting for his country.”

“Which country is that?” Olsen said.

“Olsen,” Gasper said. “That's enough.” He furrowed his brows again, bushy, gray things like caterpillars, and walked to our tiny picture window.

“The point is, sister,” Olsen said, “they're not in Italy. They might have some trouble with that.”

“When we get to Italy, they'll be there,” I said, “protecting a coward like you.”

Olsen turned to my mother. “You got any coffee? How about a little hospitality here?” He sat next to my father, in the spot my mother vacated when she went for the coffee. “Where's your registration papers, old man?”

“This is his country,” I said. “He's been here since he was a kid. He's been here forever.”

Gasper, staring at the rain, turned from the window. “I wish that was true, sweetheart. The truth is, I'm sorry about this, but he was born overseas, he never naturalized. There's a man here who says he likes Mussolini.”

“Who says he likes Mussolini? Mantegna? Was it Mantegna? That's a lie.”

“Maybe that's true, sister, maybe not, but how come he never naturalized?”

Even today, Emily's mother doesn't know for sure. He was born in 1877, came by boat to America. He was still a child, spoke Italian for years, part of that huge melting-pot immigration that filled those aging sway-backed houses in the French Quarter chock-a-block with Italians. His parents grew produce in Kenner and opened a small grocery on Ramparts Street. He learned English waiting on customers. It wasn't a bad life, certainly an improvement over the arid soil of Sicily, the scourge of absentee landlords, the life of an indentured farmhand. In South Louisiana there was rent, hard backbreaking work, French Creoles and Irish who called them dagos and worse, there was the heat. But it was paradise compared to Sicily, where bandits and bloodshed in the uplands restricted travel one way, while the fertile coast had nothing for peasants. America had always been a bright shining dream.

“Where the rich get richer,” Emily says.

Anyway, he couldn't explain to the men why he never naturalized, though he tried. He made box-like gestures with his hands and clawed at the air, reaching for something tangible, something plausible, as though kneading dough, but finally shrugged the question away. “I have my papers,” he said.

“Well, why didn't you say so? Let's see them,” Olsen said. He waved at the mess in the living room. “Nobody likes this, but it's like a hurricane. You don't want it to happen, but it just does. It's nobody's fault, you understand. It's like that rain outside. You don't make a big deal about a rainstorm, do you? That wouldn't do nobody any good.” He leveled his gaze at Papa. “Especially the people waiting out the storm.”

“I know where the papers are, you big jerk,” I said. “I'll go get them.”

My father sat very still, as though posed for a picture. He was terrified. That I could use the language I did without a stern reprimand was evidence enough. Imprisonment, deportation, the loss of his family. He was uncharacteristically paralyzed. How it must have shamed him, his own daughter going up the stairs for the tin box, Garibaldi-proud, his watch-chain still jiggling in his lap.

Upstairs, the tin box wouldn't open. Mama had the key. I sat on the edge of my bed, defeated. It was a standard-issue tin box, though, and finally I shrugged and carried it before me, hands outstretched, like something intended for the Church. Maybe it was all an elaborate Carnival hoax, maybe the box was full of trinkets. Maybe I'd walk to the top of the stairs with an armful of beads and doubloons and everyone would laugh at our little joke, scream out the classic Mardi Gras refrain: “Hey, Mister, throw me something!”

Downstairs, my mother was serving coffee and cinnamon toast. Coffee was a precious commodity in wartime, hoarded for special occasions, and the cinnamon was pre-war.

Gasper smacked his lips.

“You like that?” I said.

“Your mother's a saint,” he said, sipping hot coffee with chicory. “Those the papers?”

“Give it to me,” my mother said, “sit down.” I put the tin box on her lap. She took a key from a single large pocket stitched to her plain dress and opened the box. On one document I saw the embossed stamp of a notary public. She slipped the registration from the box, leaving the flag buried among other official notices that our family existed.

Gasper studied it, rubbing his eyes, then turned to my father. “So, you used to live on Annunciation Street.”

My father smiled for the first time all evening, sensing something in Gasper's voice that passed right over me. Earlier, almost in tears because he refused to admit my volunteer work at the USO was part of the war effort, I had to bite my tongue and sit on my hands. Now I sulked, suddenly quiet, but nobody noticed. What had happened down here when I was upstairs, staring at the magic box whose contents might save us so much trouble? Does coffee and cinnamon toast make such a difference? The key to the adult world, the world I wanted entrance to, was the size of the topsy-turvy room I sat in, and it was a room full of lunatics.

Outside, water dripped from the gutters, splashing on the long, slick leaves of our elephant ear plant. I smelled coffee and cinnamon on my mother's breath. She wants a glass of wine, I thought, reading her mind.

“Salaparuta,” Gasper said. “Where's that?”

My father's hands went into motion again, an artful improvisation to conjure up language. “Western Sicily,” he said. “Near Gibellina, Ninfa, Belice River. Le isole, siamo cosi buoni.” We are so good-natured.

Gasper smiled and nodded. “All right, then.” He tugged at his rumpled coat, dark under the armpits. Olsen stood too, pulling at his crotch. “What about that gramophone? There's something funny about it. Should I take a look inside it?” He caressed the dark mahogany.

My father stiffened, but Gasper placed a hand on his partner's shoulder. “Let it go. We've got other business.” He turned to my father. “Good evening.”

“Auguri infinitie buon Viaggio,” my father said heartily, clasping Gasper's hand, as though consummating a business deal. Infinite good wishes and a good journey. He caught me studying his face and stared for a moment at the broguings on his wingtips. After that night, I never had quite so much trouble getting out for USO dances. I didn't see him anymore as the domineering Sicilian he tried to be, or as the helpless immigrant he was that rainy night, but as a man, one who could be cajoled, who loved the world and its chicanery.

My mother's jaw was set, though, the squiggles around her eyes as taut as wires. “It was none of their business,” she said. “Those papers are personal.” The idea of a brown-edged piece of paper with an official stamp being personal made no sense to me. Through the picture window, the asphalt glistened like dark soil. Olsen and Gasper walked under the streetlights to their car, Olsen with a notebook in one hand. I could see him stand beyond the elephant ear plant, the great wheeling shadows of its leaves washing over him. He unclipped his pen, made a notation, and pointed down the street.

Emily, leaning over the sink, staring into the backyard at begonias, snorts out a lungful of air. “Did Grandma even ask those goddamn jokers for identification?” Emily shakes her head sadly. “I can't believe you all let them get away with that shit. They might have been thugs—plenty of those around, just like in Italy. Am I right about that? Or maybe they were just vigilantes. You know, entertaining themselves, having a little fun, the way men like to do?”

You let it drip-dry for years, her mother tells her, the anger gets shaved away. Nowadays you think the only important thing is placing blame or realizing yourself, a woman coming to herself, but there's so much water under the bridge. V-J Day on Canal Street, church bells, whistles, horns, people screaming their lungs out. Air conditioning, television, the Superdome, the bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Nothing was ever the same after the war. Well, live and let live. I do know I carry some sort of history in my bones. Mama died in 1947, I got married in 1949 to your father, Papa died in 1953. A heart attack. At the hospital, they wouldn't give him oxygen until the doctor arrived. By then he was dead and I was seeing my own blood again, screaming at the head nurse. “You goddamned Olsen!” I remember screaming. They sedated me. When I woke, your father was there. He wanted to know who Olsen was.

“It's early enough, Mantegna's shop is still open,” Mama said that night, forcing some coins into my hand. “Go get us some flowers.”

“From Mantegna?” I said, confounded by what I was hearing. “The jerk who caused us all this trouble?”

“You don't know that,” Mama said. “Now go.”

I got a bunch as bright as the Italian flag. I walked back to the house under that February sky, where clouds were mountains in the moonlight, and moss hung from live oaks like witch-hair. Louisiana became the sky and the trees, not the shops or the swaybacked houses, certainly not Olsen or the government. I even had to fight an impulse to jump on the trolley and light out for the USO dance. Back home, my father was asleep, or at least alone up in his room, but my mother was hard at work with cleaning rags, threads, and a needle, with antimacassars, old sheets, and a shawl, putting things back together. Manic after my errand on the wet romantic streets, I walked to the top of the stairs with the flowers. “Hey, ma'am, you want me to throw you something?” I shouted, my voice a little too bright, like a waxy apple.