Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

You fucking wop who killed him, I wish you the plague!

As best I can piece this together, my father worked as an errand boy in a delicatessen only after he was released from the orphanage. By that time, his older sister Liliana had a steady job with the telephone company, and my grandmother figured she could safely afford to take her sons home. And, again filling in the gaps, I think he was drafted into the Army sometime after the jobs in the transit authority’s repair shop and the laundry, and after the apprenticeship with the florist. In brief, he was working in the “business of embroidery and crochet beading” while simultaneously playing “weddings, socials, baptisms, block parties, at most of the ballrooms in and around New York” when he met my mother. And I estimate this to be in August of 1922, long after the armistice had been signed and the country was attempting a return to normalcy.

Now make of this what you will, analysts of the world.

The first band my father formed was called Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Five. Even given the enormous popularity of Griffitt’s film The Birth of a Nation , which had opened in Los Angeles at Clune’s Auditorium in February of 1915 and had gone on from there to play to enormous crowds at theaters all over the country, a film that vividly depicted sheeted and hooded Ku Klux Klansmen riding the night; and given the resurgence of the Klan in the years immediately following the war (its membership would total four cotton-pickin’ million by 1924!); and tossing in the arrest on May 5, 1920 (shortly before my father formed his band), of two immigrants named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on charges of felony murder, and the attendant publicity given the case when it was discovered that both these ginzoes were anarchists and draft dodgers besides, which might very well have caused my father to pick the Anglicized nom d’orchestre Jimmy Palmer, and to further shield his true identity by hiding his face as well as his Italian background; even taking into account my father’s penchant for disguises (his Charlie Chaplin imitation was a pip, he says), does it not seem passing x strange that he would choose as the costumes for himself and his musicians (are you ready?) white sheets and hoods? I am not for one moment suggesting that standing in the sun for close to two years, with a piss-laden sheet over his head, warps the personality and causes paranoia. I am only stating a simple fact. My father’s band was called Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Five and they wore long white sheets with sleeves sewn into them, and they wore white peaked hoods with stitched eye holes, and they wore these costumes winter, spring, and fall, and also during the hottest summer in years — which was when my Aunt Cristina got engaged to the man who would become my Uncle Matt.

Stella didn’t know which one of the Phantom Five was Jimmy Palmer; they all looked the same under those hoods with their eyes peering out of the holes like dopes. Also, was the name of the band strictly correct English? Since there were only five musicians, shouldn’t they have called themselves Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Four ? Stella suspected, too, that the reason they were wearing those disguises was that they were lousy and afraid they’d be lynched in the streets afterward if anybody recognized them. She was, to tell the truth, altogether bored by Cristina’s engagement party. She had been kissed and hugged by distant cousins and aunts and uncles and goombahs and goomahs she didn’t know existed, some of them from places as far away as Red Bank, New Jersey, and if another smelly greaseball with a walrus mustache pressed his sweaty cheek to hers, she would scream. She had been told that maybe Uncle Joe would be coming in from Arizona for the party, but at the last minute, he couldn’t make it. Her sister had boasted that her fiancé Matt had connections, and would be able to supply beer for the party (prohibition having been in full force for almost two years now), but as usual Matt had failed to make good on his promise. The only beverages were soda pop, and some hooch certain to cause blindness or baldness, plus the ever-present dago red, still being fermented in basements all over Harlem, just as though the Volstead Act hadn’t been passed at all. Her father was ossified by eight o’clock. It was the first time she’d ever seen him that way. He kept telling everyone what a pity it was, che peccato , that Umberto, Tess’s father and Cristina’s grandfather, the man who had taught him his trade, had passed away two years ago and could not be here to enjoy the joyous occasion of Cristina’s engagement to this fine young man, Matteo Diamante (already known as Matty Diamond in the streets, years before Legs Diamond achieved renown as a gangster). And then he said it was also a shame that none of the family back in Fiormonte could be here, either, and seemed to recall quite suddenly that a great many members of the Di Lorenzo family were now dead, his father having passed away in 1916, and his mother the following year, and then his youngest sister, Maria, who had asked him why there were no gifts on Christmas morning in the year 1900, and he had promised her there would be gifts the following year, but had never returned, and now she was dead of malaria, none of them here to share this festive occasion — and he began to cry, which Stella thought extremely sloppy and very old-fashioned.

Her sister’s fiancé was a darkly handsome young man who affected the speech and mannerisms of some of the gangster types he knew only casually, and who was enormously flattered to have been dubbed Matty Diamond, which seemed to have class and swagger and a touch of notoriety besides. Actually, he was an honest cab driver, who went to confession every week, and he’d probably have fainted dead away if anyone so much as suggested that he assist in the commission of a crime. But it was hinted in Harlem nonetheless that he had “connections,” and these mysterious connections were supposed to be capable of performing services such as providing beer for his engagement party, which they hadn’t. He was crazy about Cristina, and insanely jealous as well. He was drinking the bathtub gin, and was almost as drunk as Francesco.

Stella, at twenty, loved her sister dearly and wished her nothing but the best of luck, but she did think seventeen was a little young to be getting engaged, especially when the man in question was six years Cristie’s senior, and reputed to have lost two toes to frostbite during the war. (He certainly danced as though he had two missing toes.) She herself had been offered proposals of marriage by two different men in the past year, one of whom was a second cousin, naturally turned down since she didn’t want to have idiot children. The other was a rookie policeman named Artie Regan, whom she’d met at her father’s tailor shop, where he always seemed to be dropping in to pass the time of day with Pino and Papa until she got wise to the fact that he was really coming by to catch a glimpse of her. She had dated him on and off for more than six months until she realized he was serious. Her father had never shown anything but the coldest courtesy to Regan, and she knew that if she even mentioned that Regan “wanted her,” her father would take to the streets with a meat cleaver. An Irishman? The memory of the southern Italian is long, long, long. So she’d said so long to Artie, who really was a very nice and gentle sort of person for an Irish cop, and had decided she’d take her time finding the right man, even if Cristie was in such a hurry to get herself engaged to a fellow with only eight toes.

On the night of her sister’s engagement party, Stella was wearing a red-beaded dress with black fringe and plunging V neck, breasts bound in the flapper style, stockings rolled below her rouged knees, red satin slippers. She had had her hair shingle-bobbed two months before, in the current vogue, and she was wearing golden hoop earrings and carrying a black-beaded bag with red fringe. A package of Sweet Caporal cigarettes was inside the bag. She wouldn’t have dreamt of smoking in her father’s presence, or even in public, but whenever she was in the bathroom alone, she puffed away like a steam engine. (She once caught Cristie smoking, and swatted her, telling her she was too young.) Dancing with her brother Luke to the miserable music Mr. Jimmy Palmer and his five specters were making, she felt sophisticated and chic and svelte and gorgeous and desirable, and she had no idea that Jimmy Palmer himself, watching her through the holes in his hood while banging away at his drums, was thinking the exact same thing. Her chubby brother Dominick came waltzing out onto the floor in a wise-aleck, fifteen-year-old solo imitation of his older sister and brother, and Luke kicked out at him playfully with one long leg, and Jimmy Palmer watched Stella’s backside as she bumped it in disdain at the younger boy, and saw, as Luke turned her in his direction, the creamy white expanse of throat above the V-necked yoke of the red dress, and not bad gams either, altogether a very spiffy dish.