Читать книгу The Road to San Donato - Robert Cocuzzo - Страница 13

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!

—Goethe

Papa was sitting in his recliner when I arrived. The volume to the television was cranked, booming the murmurs of a golf analyst through the house like the voice of God. Papa was as good as deaf. A lifetime of pushing lawn mowers without ear protection had left him with tinnitus, a constant ringing in his ears that at one point was so maddening he considered “buying a gun,” as he put it. Thankfully, my uncle Joe finally convinced Papa to get hearing aids, which mercifully reduced the tinnitus. And yet the TV remained loud enough to drive a terrorist out of hiding.

“Hey, Papa!” I called out.

He turned to me and his face lit up. “Hey, guy! How ya doin’?” He fumbled with the remote. “Let me turn this damn thing down.”

He looked painfully frail. His skinny legs were crossed, and even in baggy sweatpants I saw how bony they’d become. He looked as wispy as old grass clippings, a shell of his former self. All that was left was his big head and catcher’s mitt hands.

“How you doin’, Papa?” I asked, plopping down on the couch across from him.

“I’m still here,” he said.

“Well, that’s good.”

“It’s like I told the nurse the other day. I says, ‘I feel very fortunate. I’m eighty-six years old. I’ve lived the better part of my life. I’m beyond expectancy. The only thing is that if I would happen to go all of a sudden, I would miss my family . . . ’”

“How’s the nurse?”

“Oh, she’s a big girl. Probably throws manhole covers around like they’re nickels. Gave me a shower the other day. Oh, was she rough! For Chrissakes, you’d think she was washing down a mule or something.”

His comedic timing was still impeccable. “You look good, Papa.”

“Well, I’m down to 175 now. I’m trying to put a few pounds back on, but I just can’t do it . . . With the medication I’m taking, everything tastes like sawdust. I can’t get the food down. Outside of soups and cereal. Ah well, what can you do?”

That seemed like the greatest indignity of Papa’s decline. As if his physical deterioration wasn’t enough, the cancer had also robbed him of the simple satisfaction of eating with his family. While we gorged on my grandmother’s legendary eggplant parmesan, stuffed peppers, heaping plates of pasta, and antipasti, Papa spooned mouthfuls of cold, soggy cereal that he could barely choke down.

For the past five or so years, I’d flipped on my voice recorder whenever my family sat down at the dinner table with my grandfather. He was the consummate storyteller, and I had hours of tapes of him regaling us about his Italian neighborhood in Boston called Buggs Village. The neighborhood originally got its name from an Irish contractor, John “Buggs” Behan, who gave masonry and bricklaying jobs to Italian immigrants in the early 1900s. Over the years, discrimination toward Italians caused people to forget about the neighborhood’s namesake, and they assumed that the area might as well have been called something equally vulgar, such as “Guinea Town” or “Wop City.”

The vast majority of the Italians who came to Buggs Village, including my grandfather’s family, were from the remote village of San Donato. Papa’s grandfather, Giuseppe, immigrated to the States with his eldest son, Loreto (Papa’s father), and got a job as a dynamiter. Blowing up tunnels for highways and railroads in Boston, Giuseppe saved up eleven thousand dollars to buy a small plot in the neighborhood and built a compound of triple-deckers that became known as “Cook’s Yard,” where his entire extended family—grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins—lived together. Papa was the eldest child in his family of five, but often told me he didn’t enjoy any of the special treatment typically reserved for the first born. He didn’t even have his own bed growing up—he slept on the living room couch. There was never enough money, so Papa would collect his father’s empty wine bottles and return them to the store for a penny a piece.

His mother was a fashionable lady who dressed with the flair of a Roaring Twenties flapper. She wore high heels and red lipstick while tending to her house and baking Italian pastries. She and Papa’s father were known to squabble when he got home from work, and occasionally she would hurl one of her pies at him from across the room. Although she adored her eldest son, whom she called “Joe-Joe,” she rarely hugged or kissed him because his father forbade it.

What companionship he did find was in the streets of Brighton, running around with a terrific cast of characters who went by names like Jumbo, Jingles, Jopa, and Fats. Every afternoon they’d line up outside Pew’s Soda Shop, smoking cigarettes, talking about cars, and catcalling women, one of whom became my grandmother. Although she made eyes with him outside the shop, my grandmother formally met my grandfather when her family ordered a couch that he delivered to her house. Papa came wearing a leather jacket and his olive-black hair perfectly coiffed. They married a few years later and moved into the Yard to start their family. My father, their firstborn, was gleefully passed around by the extended family, where love was expressed in food. When my father became tubby from all the cannoli and pasta, my grandmother draped a sign around his neck that read: Non darmi da mangiare. (“Don’t feed me.”)

My grandmother joined the ladies kibitzing beneath the grapevine in the Yard, while the men worked as mechanics, masons, and landscapers. Papa went into the landscaping business with his uncle, maintaining properties in the surrounding towns. At the end of each day, he and his neighborhood cronies funneled into the Brighton Elks Lodge, where Papa was a charter member and pulled beers behind the bar. The guys would play poker, drink Canadian Club, smoke cigars, and talk about the Old Country. The lodge was converted from the old Egyptian Theater on Washington Street in Brighton Center. To commemorate the opening, someone had the bright idea of bringing in the circus to perform during the week of Thanksgiving. “circus coming to brighton,” the headline read in the local newspaper. “Lions ‘n’ everything.”

Indeed, the show boasted five lions, five elephants, and a famous clown named Balloono. Everything was going to plan when suddenly one of the lions, a five-hundred-pounder named Eloise, broke out of her cage and rushed the crowd. Four hundred men, women, and children screamed to the exits, trampling a few unlucky souls. Papa and five of his buddies crammed into a phone booth. One woman locked herself in the ticket counter and refused to let anyone else join her. With the crowd funneling out the exits, the lion turned her attention to the elephants. She leapt onto the back of one of the elephants, which abruptly hurled the cat to the ground with its mighty trunk. Someone ran to the Brighton Police Station and alerted the cops, who screeched up to the theater guns drawn. When they arrived, the lion tamer had subdued Eloise with a stool and a pistol full of blanks. “The populace of Brighton enjoyed Thanksgiving Dinner, happy that they had avoided being one,” read the minutes in the Elks’ logbook in November 1962.

THAT WAS THE WORLD my grandfather regaled me with in his stories, a sepia-toned past of Italian-American life. Some of his friends worked as bookies, or made careers as gamblers. A few were in the mob. One was a hit man. But above all, they were a hardworking class of bootstrapping immigrants, working tirelessly to drive stakes into their own plot of American soil. I reveled in Papa’s tales and never tired of hearing stories that I already knew verbatim. These stories made me want to become a writer.

Coming to grips with the fact that he was nearing the end of his life, I realized that I was missing critical information despite all the hours of recordings. I desperately wanted him to pass on some life lessons. I had interviewed hundreds of people over the course of my career, but no matter how many questions I asked or how I asked them, my grandfather tiptoed around the meat of his memory. I wanted him to bestow his wisdom on me. Wasn’t that the most valuable inheritance?

“So you guys must be leaving soon?” he said.

“Yeah, this Friday.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful, Robbie. Just wonderful. I’m so happy you guys are going.”

“Yeah, Papa, should be a hell of a trip. We’ll say hi to all your old cronies in the village,” I told him.

His dimples pinched his hollow cheeks. “San Donat,” he said, clipping the O as he always did. “Can’t believe you guys are going.”

“I know—it’s going to be something else.”

“And you’re biking?”

“Yep, from Florence.” Like most of us, Papa had long since given up trying to understand my father’s obsession with cycling—all the miles and crashes.

“You’ll take care of your father, won’t you?” he asked. “He’s not a young man anymore, you know.”

“I will. And we’ll get back here to tell you all about what we found in Italy.”

“That’d be nice,” he said. “I’d like that.”

I leaned forward on the couch, toward him. “Papa . . . what would you say is your greatest accomplishment?” The question seemed to take him aback.

“The family,” he finally said. “I’m proud of the family.”

I pushed a bit further. “What about it?”

“You know . . . I wasn’t the best husband . . . but I was a good father.”

“You were. Yes, you were.”

“I did my best to take care of everyone. You know, if your father needed anything. Or Uncle Joe, or Aunt Nancy and Jodi—if I had a few bucks, I gave it to them. I tried to help however I could. Doing work over at your father’s. I built that deck for Joe. When Nancy’s kids were sick in California, we tried to be there. And Jodi, living in the place in Brighton. I did my best.”

I could tell he wanted to move on, but I wanted more. “What would you say was your philosophy on being a good father?”

“I don’t know . . . I just did it,” he said. “I did my best to keep the family together. That’s what you need to do: keep the family together.”

“Keep the family together,” I repeated. I reached for his hand to shake. I tried to hold the moment in my mind, knowing that this could very well be the last time I saw him alive. I wanted to tell him just how much he meant to me. I wanted him to know that he represented everything it was to be a stand-up guy, a true patriarch in my mind. But I couldn’t. Papa hadn’t given up hope yet, and I wasn’t about to betray him by revealing that I already had.