A Painful Duty Read online

  Mike’s wife was a big woman. She had two kids and two sisters. They all lived in Thompsonville. Except for their surnames they were nearly identical. The swill man lived across from the schoolyard in an upstairs apartment that was part of a brick-built development. One time or other it contained a tailor’s and a couple of grocer’s.

  Mrs Capello might be called a window woman. Whenever she wished to communicate with anyone she flung open her window and her mouth. Little Butchie, like most boys of his age, found it difficult to get home on time.

  ‘Butchie,’ his mother shouted from the window, ‘come home right now or I’ll break your legs and stick them under your arm.’

  Celtic Twilight

  Thompsonville was once German and after that Irish. In the days of the Italians only two tiny Irish remnants still existed. One was old man Curry. He was a harmless drunk who inhabited a shack in a little tangled wood on John Street. He was seldom seen but instilled great fear in the neighborhood children. That he was Irish and not Italian was the source of the fear he generated. When he hadn’t been glimpsed for days the police were called. The old man was found dead of age or drink or both in his filthy hovel. The yard around the shack and the rusted garage where he sometimes pottered was littered with empty bottles of cheap wine.

  Thompsonville’s other Irishman also lived on John Street. His was the best house on the street. He was the city’s fire chief, a man always dressed in a suit and tie and occasionally in a smart uniform. A chauffeured car delivered him to John Street for lunch. Sometimes the car’s roof light flashed to help speed him on his journey. His name was Keating. None of the Italians knew anything about him. Likewise, Chief Keating knew nothing about the Italians.

  A family known as the Doyles, living in a tenement in Newton Center, one day turned up in a rented house in Thompsonville. The Italians began locking their doors. Young Pipe Doyle and his brother Jimmy had reputations. They were layabouts, troublemakers. They had been thrown out of school and never found themselves jobs. Pipe and his brother were frequently seen with cigarettes behind their ears in the back of police cars.

  * * *

  Johnny Di Filippo kept chickens. His hens were his pride and joy. They had a small coop with a screened pen attached. He carefully built them himself. Pipe Doyle approached Johnny with a wobbly sack. Did Johnny want to add to his stock? A deal was quickly struck. Johnny paid Pipe Doyle in cash. The poultry, six red hens, were released into Johnny’s coop.

  The police car drove right around the back of the Di Filippo house. It appeared as if they were trying to cut off an escape. Pipe Doyle sat stone-faced in the back seat. A cigarette was tucked behind his ear.

  Johnny wanted to know what was going on.

  ‘You got chickens?’ one of the two police asked.

  Johnny did not need to answer. The police car sat right in front of Johnny’s coop.

  ‘Have you a bill of sale from the man in the back seat for some chickens he sold you a few days ago?’

  Johnny asked what a bill of sale was. The policeman told him.

  ‘You bought six hens from this man. Where is your bill of sale?’

  Johnny’s mother came flying into the yard. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked her son in Neapolitan. She wrung her hands in her apron.

  ‘It’s nothing, ma,’ Johnny said in their tongue.

  The police drove off with Pipe Doyle in the back seat and a sack of hens in the trunk of their car.

  ‘You sunnavabitch,’ Johnny said to Pipe Doyle.

  Pipe Doyle and his brother had stolen the hens from a poultry farm a few days earlier. The police lost no time in catching the culprits. There were no charges against Johnny. The police told him to get a bill of sale the next time he bought anything.

  Johnny was sore. All Thompsonville saw the police car. He was humiliated. Besides, he had lost his money.

  ‘Bill of sale,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Fucking bill of sale.’

  When his older brother Mikey got home, he clipped Johnny around the ears. ‘That’ll teach you to have truck with Irish bastards.’

  Thompsonville was mute. Not a peep or act from anyone. The Doyles left town the very next week.

  A Fleck of Varnish

  A fleck of varnish. A small chip. It smells desiccated. My grandfather held me up. In my hand a meat cleaver, half in his grip.

  ‘Kill him!’ he was shouting in my ear. ‘Kill him!’

  I was eight. All was chaos, terror. Why was I being lifted up to hack at my parents’ bedroom door? My grandfather had to hold the cleaver for me, my hand in his. We hacked away. I understood only that this was one more skirmish in the ongoing war between father and son. Endless bitterness, endless hatred on each side. It had no beginning. It had no end.

  Why was I pinned against the jamb? Why was I ordered to kill my father? No one ever explained. Decades have passed and that fleck of dried varnish still haunts me.

  Handlebar Hank and the Little Squirt

  He was known to one and all – except to his face – as Handlebar Hank. He was a teamster. At the end of the day he drove his heavy wagon and four draft horses at a flying speed through Thompsonville and down Florence Street to his firm’s yard a mile or two away in Chestnut Hill. The combination of the four horses, the speed, and the peerless moustache was breathtaking. He looked formidable, unapproachable, the last of the old-timers. His ample old-time baffi and the blue scarf he wore around his neck somehow marked him as dashing, dangerous. It was easy to see that early in his life he hailed from some Abruzzese mountaintop village.

  Hank lived at the end of the conglomeration of brick shops that all Thompsonville knew as the Block. Separating his house from the shops, a narrow alleyway led down to Jackson Street. After work he sat in peace on his front porch watching the traffic pass by on the busy Boston road. The other side of the Block, at the corner of Langley Road, was where all Thompsonville’s young gathered for two or three hours of laughter and gossip and flirting and bragging and showing off and making mild mischief. When the drugstore closed at ten o’clock everybody withdrew and went home.

  One of the evening frequenters of the Block was Remo, a boy of twelve. To his much older cousins, but to no one else, he was known as the squirt. They called him the squirt because the word suggested to them a kid who was a showoff and a bit of a know-it-all, someone who at times could be funny and at times annoying. While others were baffled, Remo knew the name of each Pacific island the Marines clawed back from the Japanese.

  Remo was forever dreaming up daring schemes to impress the girls and the older boys down at the Block. He was the first to figure out how to climb onto the Block’s flat roof. He hoisted himself up the hardware of the grocery store’s closed awning and climbed over the parapet onto the roof. There were abandoned tennis balls up there. He made his way gingerly over the drugstore roof so as not to be heard from below. He would then pepper the bystanders on the sidewalk with his cache of balls. This got him laughs.

  One night Remo figured it was time to up the ante, time for a new challenge. What could he do to stir the fearsome Handlebar Hank? Remo told the others to watch. He then made his way to the end of the block and stood below his adversary’s porch. From there he called out, ‘Handlebar Hank! Handlebar Hank!’ Then a dash back to the others.

  Five minutes later he returned to the porch. Again he twice called out, ‘Handlebar Hank!’ and scrambled back. When he got to the others he was full of himself and his daring. Remo saw approval in the others’ faces. He performed his daring act one more time.

  The outcome was different. Handlebar Hank was fed up with the squirt. After the boy retreated, Hank rushed down the Jackson Street alley and circled around the Block from the other direction. Just as the squirt was enjoying his moment of glory he found himself face to face with a growling Handlebar Hank.

  The squirt was paralyzed. Not a foot away was Hank’s face, his teeth bared. Remo could not move, could not think. Hank radiated triumph. The squirt expected an almigh
ty slap on the cheek in the presence of the mob of onlookers. Maybe worse, a swift kick in the ass.

  Handlebar Hank had made his point. He had showed the squirt that he was not as clever as he took himself to be. When Handlebar saw the fear on Remo’s face, he stepped back and roared with laughter. The laughter was devastating, humiliating, contagious. Everyone joined in. Hank’s behavior was irreproachable. He made his way home to his porch and sat down with a satisfied broad grin. The scent of the laundry soap he used to kill the smell of horses followed him the whole way.

  Remo melted into the night. He wanted to disappear. The scene of his downfall would not leave him. He relived it endlessly. Remo sat in the same small class as Hank’s daughter Julia. He kept away from the square for a week. Apologizing to Handlebar Hank was out of the question. Italian immigrants did not apologize. They just steered clear of the party in question.

  But Remo was a clever boy and not insensitive. He knew there was a lesson to be learned from his encounter with Handlebar Hank. What was it? Handlebar Hank had never done anything to offend the boy. Why had Remo gone out of his way to offend Hank? Remo was showing off at someone else’s expense. He craved to be the center of attention.

  Remo cringed. He was, exactly as his cousins knew, just a little squirt.

  Ronnie and the Jews

  Ronnie had six toes on his left foot. The condition caused him no physical pain, no physical discomfort. As a boy he showed the foot to anyone who cared to see it. When he grew older the extra toe became an embarrassment. He never uncovered it.

  One summer morning at the playground where Thompsonville boys gathered Ronnie announced that they were operating on his foot the next day. They were removing the extra toe. He was pleased but he reined in the great excitement he felt. For several days after, he said, he would use wooden crutches. Everyone was pleased for him.

  Behind the playground, in what had been a scrubby oak wood, were some brand-new houses. In Thompsonville there was nothing like them. A winding road led to their driveways and front doors. They were expensive. New owners had begun to move into them.

  Ronnie was out of the hospital. He hobbled about on his crutches. There weren’t many games the boys could play until Ronnie’s foot healed. He got better by the day. A few of them disliked waiting around for the invalid to catch up with them. They sometimes set out for the Block and the Park ahead of him and waited for him there.

  Ronnie was never left to cope on his own. Three or four boys hung around the benches with Ronnie. It was a fine summer morning. A newcomer, a small boy, clambered over the wall that marked the edge of the playground. He came from one of the new houses. He approached hesitantly.

  ‘Hey, kid,’ one of the Thompsonville regulars said. ‘You live here?’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘You like it here?’ another asked.

  There was nothing aggressive in their manner or in their questions. They were curious. They were asking questions out of curiosity. It seemed the newcomer to the neighborhood was ill at ease. He looked over his shoulder a couple times to estimate the distance to the wall.

  * * *

  They sensed the newcomer’s fear. They wanted him to know he needn’t fear them. One of them said straight out, ‘Are you a Jew?’

  The new boy let out a whelp and scampered up to the wall and over it. The others gave a little laugh. They set off to join their friends at the Block. On his crutches Ronnie trailed behind.

  A man vaulted the stone wall. He ran to the Thompsonville boys. They scattered and did not look behind. Ronnie panicked. He fell to the ground and lifted a crutch in defence. The man was ashamed. ‘It’s all right, I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said.

  Ronnie whimpered. ‘We didn’t do nothing to your kid, I swear,’ Ronnie said.

  Remo had not abandoned Ronnie. He approached the man. He helped Ronnie to his feet. ‘He’s telling the truth, mister. None of us touched your kid. Why would we do that?’

  ‘We never meant anything, mister, honest.’

  There was a long silence. The man looked troubled. He struggled for words.

  ‘I know,’ he said. His voice had gone very low. ‘If you were a Jew you’d understand.’

  Sebastiano & Son

  Sebastiano Di Felice was from the Abruzzese mountaintop village of Navelli. His wife, whose surname also happened to be Di Felice, was from the nearly village of Capestrano. Many of Thompsonville’s immigrants hailed from Capestrano.

  Sebastiano in his youth had a fiery temper. Woe be to anyone foolish enough to dare light his fuse. His family lived in a modest house perched on the hillside just below the Palazzo Santucci. At some point there was a fracas that involved the police. A policeman tried to wrest Sebastiano to the ground. Blows were thrown. There was a good deal of grappling and struggling. Sebastiano held the policeman in an embrace. They tottered back and forth, gripping each other in their arms.

  There was nothing for it. Sebastiano found himself breathing hard into the policemen’s ear. Without thinking Sebastiano took a nip out of the ear. He spat it out. It was a chunk of flesh. The policeman let go. He clapped a hand to his ear. It spurted blood.

  Sebastiano made a break. Leaping over walls and sliding down steep slopes he reached home. He searched a drawer or two and drew out a fistful of papers.

  Before he could think he was in Naples aboard a ship bound for Boston. He disembarked in the New World. He was a fugitive. He headed straight for Thompsonville. There he spent the rest of his life in quiet peace.

  * * *

  Sebastiano spoke only a few words of English. The same with his wife Erminia. (She was later known as Milly.) When their son Carmine was school age the authorities would not accept him. He had no English. Carmine was wounded by this. All around the neighbors and their children spoke broken English. Carmine was determined to learn the new language.

  Erminia thought of one way to teach him. She sent her son to buy small items at the local grocery.

  ‘We need latte,’ she told him. ‘Go to the store and ask for milk.’

  Carmine was delighted and he dashed off on his errand.

  Another time she said, ‘We need pane. Go to the store and say bread.’

  Slowly he built up a vocabulary of everyday items.

  One day Milly said, ‘Go to the store and get half a pound of salame.’

  ‘Salame,’ Carmine repeated. ‘How do you say that in English?’

  Erminia was baffled. ‘Salame,’ she said.

  ‘No, in English,’ Carmine insisted.

  ‘Salame,’ she said.

  Carmine lost his patience. He struck out at his mother. He began to shout. To stop his outbreak she lifted him in her arms. He squirmed. His face was near her ear. She held him tight. Carmine nipped his mother’s ear.

  She put him down and slapped him. He was adamant. ‘How do you say salame in English?’ he screamed.

  Leo the Red and the Scrofa

  Scrofa is Italian for a sow. In street parlance it also means loose woman, anybody’s, strumpet, slut, trollop, tart.

  Leo the Red was a young committed Italian Socialist. He was a shining example of idealism. He was married with a young son and daughter. He was forever engaged in small community improvements. When for several weeks the garbage was not removed on John Street, it was Leo the Red who dreamed up and organized its swift collection. He decorated a number of bushel baskets with crepe paper, filled them with the stinking garbage, and delivered them in his pickup to the steps of City Hall. Leo the Red’s direct action won the day. The City’s oversight never happened again.

  Leo attended Socialist meetings and gatherings. He was forever haranguing. He was outspoken. He made a lot of friends in Thompsonville and also some enemies.

  Our house in John Street was what was called a triple-decker. We lived on the ground floor. We moved a couple of times, always only a few blocks away. All seemed to be going along normally – as normal as life could go for a poor family.

  My mother did
her best to enhance our lives. She was a fair cook of traditional Abruzzese dishes. She had been born into extreme poverty on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She had next to no schooling. She was affectionate. She appeared happy in her marriage. At one point we had a boarder. Frankie De Santis, Bill’s younger brother. He called my mother ‘Bird’. Frankie was mild-mannered, always fun, and pleasant to be around. Frankie was an artist. He painted picture-postcard scenes. When he had his own place he excelled at trompe l’oeil decoration.

  So all seemed to go along well until the day Leo the Red decided he had fallen in love with the scrofa. It’s easy to see how they met. She was a neighbor. She lived on John Street in what we called one of the twin houses – though there were actually three. She was smart, good-looking, had a husband and several children. I myself was fond of her – until the blow was struck that ruined my life and nearly killed my mother.

  There was a long series of bitter incidents that went on for years.

  Incident: I surprised my father in the cellar one day. Oblivious, he was bent over a vise. Locked in it was a wristwatch. He was filing an inscription off the back of it.

  Incident: The scrofa was out walking across the street from our house. She pushed a stroller with a baby in it. A man accompanied her. On a whim I crossed the street and joined the party in its walk. That night my father interrogated me about the man. Who was he? I told him. How do you know it was him? my father pressed. The man in question was well known for having two small holes in his nostrils. My answer satisfied my father but I saw that it also vexed him.

  Incident: We were driving in my father’s Chevy coupe. My mother sat in the passenger seat. I was directly behind her. The two were shouting and fighting. My mother told him to stop the car. She was getting out. I clutched her. Her hand was on the car door’s handle.