Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

“I’ll enlist, anyway,” Tony said. “I’ll he about my age.”

“And I’ll call the Air Corps and tell them you’re a liar,” my mother said. “And a little snotnose besides.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Tony said. “I could be a good flier. I could be a goddamn ace !”

“Don’t use that kind of language around your mother,” my father said.

“You want Hitler to take over the world?”

“Hitler won’t take over the world, don’t worry,” my mother said.

“How do you know? What does he do, call you on the telephone every day? ‘Ja, hello, Shtella?’ ” Tony said, falling into an imitation of all the Germans he’d ever seen on the motion picture screen. “ ‘Das iss Adolf here. I haff decided not to take over d’vorld. Votchoo tink of dat, Shtella?’ For Christ’s sake Mom!”

“The matter is settled.”

“And don’t talk like that.”

“Who told you to say no? Grandpa?”

“The matter is settled.”

“Was it him?”

“Grandpa had nothing to do with it. I’d have to be out of my mind to let you go fly an airplane. That’s that , Tony.”

“And we don’t want to hear no more about it,” my father said.

“Wait’ll some Jap comes marching in here with a bayonet,” Tony said.

“Sure,” my mother said.

“It could happen,” Tony said.

“Sure,” my mother said. “It could also rain elephants.”

“ Damn it, Mom...”

“Tony,” my father said, “I’m not going to warn...”

“This is important to me, Pop!”

“I thought baseball was important to you,” my mother said.

“ Baseball? The whole fu... the whole world is at war, and you expect me to think about baseball?”

“No, you want to think about flying airplanes,” my mother said.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Sure,” my mother said,

“Right,” Tony said.

“The matter is settled.”

Tony went down to see my grandfather the very next day. He got back to the house at about six o’clock. I was in my room, practicing. When I heard his knock on my door, I immediately pulled my hands from the piano.

“Igg?” he said. “Okay to come in?”

“Sure, Tony.”

He walked in, shut the door behind him, and sat on the bed. I turned from the piano.

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“Argh,” Tony said.

“Did you tell him?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him I wanted to join the Air Corps.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he knew. He’s a fuckin’ old greaseball , Iggie. He asked me if I wanted to go bomb Italy. He asked me what I’d do if they told me to go bomb Fiormonte. I said Who the hell is going to ask me to bomb Fiormonte, Grandpa? What the hell is in Fiormonte to bomb ? So he tells me it’s a beautiful village. So I said Grandpa, the generals aren’t interested in bombing beautiful villages; what they want to do is bomb military targets, not beautiful villages. So he says there’s a bridge in Fiormonte, across the river there, and maybe the generals’ll tell me to bomb the bridge so supplies won’t be able to go to Bari or wherever, because Bari is a seaport. So I said Grandpa, the generals aren’t going to be interested in a shitty little bridge in Fiormonte, and he said It’s a nice bridge, Antonio. So I said Look, Grandpa, I’m not trying to take away from the goddamn bridge, I’m just trying to tell you nobody’s going to send me to bomb Fiormonte, and anyway, I don’t want a fly a bomber, I want to fly a fighter plane, I want to be a fighter pilot.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“ Sure , that’s right. You know what he said? He said Then what’ll you do, machine-gun innocent women and children from your airplane? I said Grandpa, why would I do something like that? And he said Because it’s war.”

“You should’ve told him you wouldn’t do nothing like that, Tony. You wouldn’t, would you?”

“Of course not, what the hell do you think I am? I thought you knew me better than that, Iggie.”

“But suppose they ordered you to do it?”

“Who?”

“The generals.”

“Do what?”

“Machine-gun women and children.”

“I wouldn’t do it,” Tony said. “I just told you I wouldn’t do it, didn’t I?”

“Then they’d court-martial you.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

“Sure, they would. If you don’t obey orders...”

“Iggie, we’re getting off the goddamn track! Here’s what I want you to do. After your piano lesson Saturday, I want to take you to the tailor shop.”

“What for?”

“To talk to him.”

“To Grandpa?”

“Well, now, who the hell do you think I mean? Pino? Of course to Grandpa.”

“Well...”

“He’ll listen to you,” Tony said. He hesitated, and then said, “He likes you better than me.”

“No, he don’t, Tony. He likes us the same.”

“Listen, I don’t care about that, I swear to God. I just want you to convince him, okay? If he says I can enlist, then he’ll tell Mom, and she’ll sign the papers. Will you do it, Igg?”

“Sure, Tony, but I don’t know. If you couldn’t convince him . ..”

“Just say you’ll try, okay? This means a lot to me,

“Sure, Tony.”

“Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t tell Mom.”

“I won’t.”

“We’ll say we went to a movie on Tremont Avenue.”

I knew it wouldn’t work even before I went to talk to him. I had tried something like this with him a long time ago, when my mother had given away Vesuvio. If he wouldn’t let me go to Goomah Katie’s in Newark, he sure as hell wasn’t going to let Tony drop bombs on Fiormonte.

I talked to him for three hours.

He refused to change his mind. In June of 1942, Tony turned eighteen and registered for the draft. A month later he received his greetings from Uncle Sam, and left to begin his training as an infantryman in the United States Army.

I immersed myself in music.

I realize now that Passaro was an extraordinary teacher, who encouraged me to take reckless musical chances, allowing me to swim out as far as I dared, but always ready to dive in and pull me back to shore if and when I got into serious trouble. Shortly after Tony was drafted, for example, he started me on Beethoven’s C-Minor Concerto, which, as I’m sure you know, is not exactly “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” ( That tune, as I’m sure you also know, is the theme for the Mozart K. 265 variations, sometimes known as “Ah, vous dirai-je, maman,” especially to French scholars like my own dear maman, Stella Di Palermo.) Passaro probably knew that Beethoven was beyond my depth, but he also knew I was a gifted musician, and when you’ve got a truly talented student — or so the theory goes — you push him relentlessly, you give him tremendously difficult compositions, you keep after him day and night because if he’s going to be a concert pianist, he’s got one hell of a large repertoire to learn, and he isn’t going to learn it by playing the “Mikrokosmos” over and over again.

Well, hell, Passaro had me playing the Grieg Concerto when I was twelve , though he’d prepared me beforehand with a series of little exercises he himself invented. He had decided that Czerny and Hanon were not helping me build my repertoire — my repertoire, my sacred, spiring repertoire. “You must build a repertoire, Iggie, there are thousands of compositions to master!” And so he would teach me a single precise exercise, and I would discover to my surprise that it miniaturized a very tricky technical passage in a piece he was about to present. When he sprang the Grieg Concerto on me, I realized I’d been practicing (as an exercise!) the descending double thirds in the first movement, and when I got to them in the actual piece, they seemed relatively easy.