A Painful Duty Read online

  Mike had two grown sons, Jake and Tony. Was there a wife and mother? No one ever seemed to have seen one. The Skippys lived on the part of John Street, rough and unpaved, that dove downhill off Langley Road and ended dead against a chunk of crumbling ledge.

  Old Mike was forever smiling and ready with a quip. He never fell back into Neapolitan dialect and yet his English was hopeless. It was plain that he was dependent on his sons for everything, especially on Jake, who was a mailman.

  Occasionally Mike dropped in at the club on Langley Road and drank a bottle of beer. The bottles were brown, long-necked, Budweiser. He held the bottle by the neck between his thumb and forefinger. He jiggled it. One bottle, big smile on his face, little to say. Then Mike went home.

  He relied on his son Jake just as the post office relied on Jake. When letters came from Italy in a spidery handwriting that no one else could read, it was Jake who deciphered and delivered them.

  Mike was injured at work. A wheelbarrow, brimming with concrete, slipped on a ramp and skidded against his leg. The barrow ground his shinbone and tore the skin off down to his ankle. Mike hopped up and down in pain, unable to get out a word, unable to curse. His cronies lifted him aside but no position was comfortable. He sat clutching his thigh and rocking back and forth over his maimed leg.

  At the end of the day he was taken to a doctor. No bone was broken. The shin was stripped raw but no dressing was called for. There was little the doctor could do except tell Mike he would need time off work.

  As soon as he could, Mike hobbled about. Half hidden, he tended the rows of tomatoes in his patch.

  ‘Don’t let no one see you working,’ Jake grumbled.

  Mike grinned. Plucking at tomato plants was work? Not even his neighbors could spot him.

  Once in a while, bent over for show, he made it to the club. He jiggled his bottle of Bud. Mostly he sat on his porch. He was in pain. Despite his lameness he never grimaced or complained. His brown furrowed face smiled as cheerful as ever.

  Jake watched his father getting about. Jake coached Mike how to walk, how to stop and rest after ten or fifteen steps. He prepared his father for the day of the insurance inspector’s visit.

  The man came, business suit and necktie. Mike lifted his trouser leg to show the insurance man his unhealed shin. The man asked him to walk up and down the porch. Mike stood erect and strode back and forth like a young athlete.

  When Jake got home he asked how the visit went.

  ‘Fine and dandy,’ Mike said. ‘He make me walking. First I’ma walk over there, then I’ma walk over here.’

  ‘Show me how you walked,’ Jake said.

  Mike pulled himself up straight and proud. He lifted his chin. He crisscrossed the porch.

  Jake clutched at his forehead. He tore at his hair.

  ‘That’s the way you walked?’ the son said. ‘I told you limp. When I tell you limp, for chrissake limp!’

  La Ciconetta, or the Three-Inch Woman

  She was very small – barely three feet tall – and was known by her nickname La Ciconetta. Her nickname was not enough for my grandfather. He had been her lodger for a number of years. He loved to tease, sometimes even cruelly, so he dubbed her the Three-Inch Woman.

  When La Ciconetta went to her stove to fry an egg, the event unleashed a string of curses. ‘Damn this stove,’ she would say, ‘they made it too high.’

  No matter how tall she made herself standing tip-toe, on most days at least one cracked egg would miss the frying pan and land on the stove top.

  One morning, when two eggs in a row went astray, the cursing knew no limits. ‘Scimpis’ la stufa,’ the three-inch woman railed. ‘It’s too high.’

  This was an opportunity my grandfather could not let pass. His lips formed a wry smile that ended in a taunt. ‘The stove was made to measure,’ he told her. ‘It’s you who weren’t made to measure.’

  * * *

  The three-inch woman had given birth to a son who was so big that his nickname was House. She gave birth to a second son. He was stunted and had to walk with two sticks. In his thirties he contracted pneumonia and asked the doctors to let him die.

  Card Games with Little Green Apples

  Summer nights on a grassy slope in what we called the Park, half a dozen boys played cards for money. The leader in this enterprise seemed to be Frankie Macchione. Frankie was a classmate of mine.

  Evenings he gave his mother no cause to worry. He went to bed at a reasonable hour without being nagged. In fact, Frankie was out on his low roof, which put him in no danger. From there in only a minute or two he could be under the street lamp in the Park shuffling a deck of cards.

  Across the street from this gambling lair was a sloping lawn with a small apple tree growing in the middle. The tree could be climbed with ease. Among its branches grew hundreds of small green apples. They were unripe, bright green, and, when we snatched them, about two or three inches wide.

  The boys raided the tree night after night. There was never an outcry from the family it belonged to. One of the raiding gang tossed down the apples, which went into another raider’s shirt front. Frankie always came to the card games armed with a salt shaker. It was of the old- fashioned type, like those found in cheap restaurants. It had large holes from which the salt poured easily. A small bite of the fruit and the rest was ready for a sprinkling of salt. This dash of salt transformed the little green stolen apple from a sour bite of unripe fruit to a delicious treat.

  Around one o’clock Frankie would sum up his winnings for the night (he always won) and skeddadle home, scampering over the convenient roof and his waiting open window. As has been said, the thoughtful son gave his mother no cause for worry. ‘My Frankie,’ his mother told the other women. ‘Good as gold.’

  One night when Frankie reached the window he found it locked from the inside.

  John Spera

  John Spera was a careful man. He staked out the Newton Center Savings Bank. He sat in the lobby. He watched who came and who went. He eyed the tellers. He sat there two or three times a week, watching, eyeing.

  A neighbor from Thompsonville came into the bank once a week. He nodded to John. He went straight to the teller’s cage. When he left the lobby he nodded to John again.

  Two weeks passed. The neighbor was visiting the bank. John Spera sat in the lobby as usual. He did not nod to his Thompsonville neighbor. He patted the seat next to him, as if to say to sit down.

  John Spera leaned to the neighbor’s ear. ‘This bank is stronga?’ he whispered.

  The neighbor understood. At the outset of the recent depression banks had crashed like ninepins. John Spera wanted to be careful.

  On his next visit to the bank the Thompsonville neighbor spotted John Spera on his bench. He surveiled the bank. John Spera motioned again, sit here with me.

  Nothing was spoken. John Spera waited for a moment of stillness in the bank’s activities. He took his time, weighing up what he wanted to say.

  He raised an arm. He swept it in the air to indicate the row of caged tellers. He lifted his chin. In his throat he made the sound Italians make when they know something but are of two minds whether to reveal it.

  ‘These people have been to college,’ the neighbor said.

  ‘Hah, college,’ John Spera said. ‘College for foola the people.’

  Carmine di Filippo

  In summer Carmine Di Filippo came around with his ice wagon. He carried blocks of ice to houses that still had iceboxes. On his back was a rubber cape. At the bottom of it was a long pocket to catch the water that melted off the huge cakes of ice.

  As soon as he was out of sight making his delivery we swarmed around and attacked the massive white blocks with stones and hammers to break off pieces we could suck on. When Carmine came back to the ice wagon he shooed us away with a few words of mild reproach. He never tried to collar any of us.

  A mild-mannered kindly man with a dark, lined Neapolitan face, he worked for Brookline Ice & Coal. When refrigerators
became common he delivered fuel oil.

  Carmine’s eldest daughter, good-looking Isobel, married the son of the head of the company. Carmine had two other lovely daughters. All feisty. They were older than we were. We sucked on our ice. We were not thinking of girls.

  A Thompsonville Tragedy

  It was after eleven. Gino was coming home late. He’d been out with friends, Carmine Di Felice among them. Each of the two lived in the big square tenement that housed four families. Carmine lived downstairs on the right. Gino, upstairs on the left.

  All Thompsonville was asleep. The boys entered with extra care to make no noise. Gino entered his house. Immediately there was an ear-splitting scream.

  ‘Carmine,’ he shouted. ‘My father has killed my sisters.’

  Carmine dashed up the stairs. In the middle of the kitchen floor lay Gino’s elder sister Mary. She had been beaten about the head. Her hair was matted and blood-soaked. Gino quickly searched for his younger sister in one of the bedrooms. Nina lay dead. She was barely fourteen. Gino was stricken. His head registered nothing. He knew exactly what had taken place. He could not allow himself to dwell on it.

  Carmine panicked. Gino had mentioned his father. What if the old man materialized wielding an axe? Gino’s instincts told him that his father was in the cellar. When the boys reached the man they found him doubled over. He was retching. On a bench nearby was an open bottle of muriatic acid. Gino’s father had attempted a gruesome suicide but had gagged on the acid.

  The revolving blue lights of police cars lit up the street. Two ambulances added to the commotion. Mary was breathing. Her skull was fractured but she had somehow survived.

  The next morning none of the Thompsonville kids went to school. They milled around the neighborhood. Some of the girls supplied newspapermen with snapshots of Nina. These were taped to the outside stair risers of neighboring houses and re-photographed. For two days the newspapermen hovered like flies. The atmosphere in Thompsonville was like during a holiday. Everyone talked about Nina’s death but there was a general refusal to talk about what had caused it. Immediately one local paper’s headline read, ‘Newton Father Runs Amok’. But the paper gave nothing away.

  The funeral was held in the hall of the Filippo Corsi Mutual Aid Society. All Thompsonville attended. Dressed up to look like a doll, Nina filled her coffin. Gino was limp. Wherever he went two boys supported him, holding him under the arms.

  The idea of the father’s incest gradually became known. Nobody spoke the word. It was too shameful. Nina, people said, resembled her dead mother. The father got off with a life sentence in the Massachusetts penal system. He was deemed too unwell to undergo a normal trial. Henry Ginzberg, Thompsonville’s favorite lawyer, was hired for the defense. There was no money. The father owned a large piece of land on John Street, across from Mike who failed to limp. It was a carefully tended garden with fruit trees and prize vegetables. The plot went to Ginzberg.

  Thompsonville was stricken for months. The word incest was never used by anyone. The worst that was said was that the father ‘was having something to do with his daughter’. Incest, the word and the concept, carried such a burden of shame that it simply could not be spoken.

  It took weeks for Mary to recover from her ordeal. When she was well enough she was married to the faithful Murph Pignatelli. They went to live elsewhere. Gino had been an outstanding baseball player. It was arranged for him to go off to play professional baseball for a minor league team in the south. The strain proved too much for him. He returned to Thompsonville where he suffered several breakdowns. Eventually he married a local girl, Judy Spezzano, and found a calling as a carpenter.

  Leo the Red, the Early Years

  Leopoldo, the future Leo the Red, was born in Massachusetts into an unhappy family. At the age of four he returned with his mother and younger sister to her husband’s humble Abruzzese village of Sant’ Eusanio Forconese. Without ever seeing each other again, they remained married and apart for the rest of their lives.

  Concetta Pasquantonio, Leo’s mother, had a rare background. She was a Protestant – what the Italians call an Evangelista. At the same time she was an ardent Socialist. She did not preach her religion or her politics. She practiced them. She gathered children around her doorstep and taught them to read. Her textbook was the New Testament. Some of Sant’ Eusanio admired her for her independence and outspoken manner. Most hated her for her heathen ways. Whenever her path crossed with that of the parish priest in the square of Sant’ Eusanio she initiated a heated argument. In the end, whenever he saw their paths converging, he turned in another direction.

  The husband, Gaetano Di Giovanni, returned to Thompsonville. He and his son boarded with Concetta’s sister, Angelina. Leo knew no English. His father was a gardener of the old school. Grass cutting, formal flower beds. Leo went to work with him. It was a doomed union. Gaetano was a drunkard. His son had long hated him for wrongdoings the old man had committed years before.

  During the summer holidays, Cousin Dino joined them. Angelina adored Leo. She spoiled him as if he were another son. The two boys were inseparable. Leo picked up a smattering of English from his Cousin Dino. Leo also picked up a taste for fruit pies – lemon, apple, blueberry. He tagged along after Dino into a shop. Dino pointed into the glass cabinet and said, ‘A piece of pie.’ Leo tried this a couple of times on his own. ‘Pizza pine,’ he said.

  ‘Come again?’

  After that day’s humiliation, Leo ended up jabbing the cabinet glass to indicate his choice.

  Sco

  The Block was owned by old man Gasbarri. No one ever saw him. He was a widower, a hermit. The market in the Block was called Gasbarri Market. A rough dirt track that led off the Boston road to a dead end in some fields was known as Gasbarri Avenue. A forlorn house stood there. The old man rented it out. At the corner of the Boston road and Gasbarri Avenue he’d built a strange brick building. The upper floor was an apartment. He lived here. Below was a shop. It had a huge plate glass window that was always taped inside with sheets of blank paper. Around the corner on Gasbarri Avenue was a loading platform. The building served as an upholsterer’s shop. It was built of the same hard, sharp-edged bricks as the Block. It was in the same style.

  Old Gasbarri had a nephew. His name was Dario. He ran the hardware store in the Block. For some unknown reason he was known as Sco.

  The old man had money. He was a master of knowing what to do with it. His money made him more money. He donated to the City a worthless triangle of land bounded by streets on three sides. It was small and just opposite the Block. Its only pleasant feature was a gigantic oak. It cost the City a sum to groom the place. To Thompsonville it became known as the Park. On summer nights boys flocked to the Park. Under a street light they played cards for small change. When old Gasbarri died his money and property went to the church.

  Sco’s shop was nondescript. No sign over the front or on the windows identified it. It had shelves and counters. The barber shop flanked it on one side. The shop on the other was empty. A painter used it for storage.

  Sco seemed to have few customers. Still, he was well-liked and highly regarded by all Thompsonville. He was a one-off. He was quick and intelligent. Some noted a touch of mechanical genius in him. Others considered him a mere eccentric.

  Thompsonville was full of men who cut grass and called themselves gardeners. Each had a pickup truck, a wheelbarrow, mowing machines, rakes and brooms, shovels and spades, picks and mattocks. In the cellar of the shop Sco installed a complicated machine to sharpen lawn mowers. His business turned the corner.

  Sco liked a fried egg. He liked a dozen of them. He cursed when his pan refused to hold twelve eggs at a time. Sco was consulted by the people of Thompsonville on various mechanical problems that plagued them. If they had an electrical fault he would sell them a handful of different-sized fuses. Whatever was unneeded or unused he told them to bring back so he could give them a refund.

  One time Sco became a doctor. Johnny Di Fi
lippo, who was eight or ten, was fishing with a gang of boys down the Hammonds. Hammond Pond was the biggest around. In the old days it had been used to harvest ice. The hook on a line came whizzing around to catch Johnny on the cheek. It lodged in the flesh. Everyone’s first thought was Sco. The line was cut. A bevy of bicycles made their way to the Block. Sco sat Johnny on a counter. He said it was going to hurt. He then pressed the embedded hook through the flesh of the cheek until the barbed end stuck out. From Johnny not a whimper, not a wince. Sco snipped off the barb with a pair of pliers and withdrew the hook.

  Sco shooed the bicycle mob out. The kids were speechless, impressed, grateful for Sco’s free services. Johnny left the hardware store last, a wad of cotton pressed to his cheek.

  During the war Sco was drafted. He went into the army air corps. He worked in airplane maintenance. Sco died young of peritonitis.

  The Swill Man

  Mick Capello was Thomsonville’s swill man. He came around with two others once a week. He would slip behind the houses and empty individual swill pails into the big bucket he carried slung over one shoulder. He went back to the truck with it, where it was emptied with a great deal of clatter. One of his colleagues covered the other side of the street. The third man drove the truck.

  They worked for Jancey, who raised pigs out in the country. Everybody knew who Jancey was but nobody ever laid eyes on him. The worst thing about the swill collection was the smell. It followed behind the truck for yards and yards. Worse was the plague of flies.

  Mike was a short, stubby man. Everybody liked him – at a distance. On weekends he smartened up. He did not smell. He did not move among swarms of flies.