Pete Hamill - Loving Women

He had beautiful handwriting when he was young. They call it calligraphy now. Just beautiful, done with goose feathers, he said, and with special black inks he bought from some Chinaman on Chatham Square. When he and his wife first came here, he worked in a horse-and-buggy place during the day, and at night he would write these beautiful business cards for rich people — wedding invitations and diplomas, all that kind of thing. His wife was always mad at him because he spent all the extra money on books instead of clothes or things for the house. I’ve seen a few of them, on cardboard that’s yellow now, ones he did for his sample case, that he’d take around to these mansions on Fifth Avenue, him with his lousy English, and they’d laugh and say hey, a Wop who can write!

Then he got hurt in an accident and his hand, the one he used to write with, was all smashed up and the doctors amputated his forefinger. It must of broke his fuckin heart. Just telling you this, it almost breaks mine. But when he told me about it, a half a century later almost, he just shrugged. It was meant to be, he said. If it wasn’t one thing, it would have been another. I guess he was what they call a fatalist. But I didn’t really believe him when he just shrugged it off. I used to see him sometimes in a corner of the apartment, just staring at the hand .

He worked in a garage during the twenties; I guess that’s where my father got his thing for cars. But when the Depression came, Grandpa opened a grocery store in The Bronx, moved from the Lower East Side to Pleasant Avenue uptown and finally to the Bronx. “With the store, I knew we would always eat,” he said. “In the Depression, nobody drove cars.” After my grandmother died, the heart went out of him (everybody said) but he kept the store going. He lived upstairs and he always had something for me when I went over there, ice cream, tea, little pastries. And he would tell me about the books. Most of them were in Italian, but he told me I had to read them, that nobody who claimed to be civilized could live without these books: Dante, Machiavelli (The Discourses, he said, read them, the plans for a republic, and remember that The Prince was really a job application) and Leopardi and Manzoni and Guicciardini. He talked about these guys as if they were his personal friends. “Like Dante said once …” He knew Latin, and when I went to Cardinal Hayes he would get me to read Caesar and Cicero and Virgil out loud, telling me how to pronounce the words with passion, as if they were written by living breathing men, not dead guys, not professors. He made me love Latin. When it was my turn to read, the brothers and the priests didn’t know what the fuck I was up to. They were used to Latin sounding like a chant from the mass and not like a language that people used for giving orders and fucking women. I was good at it but I could never get the hang of Tacitus. Even Grandpa bitched about the man’s style .

He hated Mussolini with a passion and that is what caused all the trouble in the family. My father married a woman whose parents were from Sicily. The Siggies hated the old Garibaldi people, because when Garibaldi conquered Sicily he got rid of all the old fucks, the Mafia, the hustlers, the guys bleeding the poor, the landlords. My mother’s family thought people from Firenze (that’s what we always called Florence because that was its name) were snobs, faggots, commies. My other grandfather wouldn’t speak to Grandfather Infantino .

The families barely talked. Me and my sister were like prizes, passed back and forth from one family to the other. My mother was one of nine kids, so her side of the family acted like my Grandfather Infantino was some kind of faggot for only having two kids. But nobody had a monopoly on common sense. Grandpa couldn’t stand my mother either. I heard him call her “that Arab” once and didn’t know what he meant until I read how the Arabs were in Sicily for hundreds of years. They were opposites, those families; the Florentines were very clear about most things, a little cold, able to talk about subjects besides themselves. The Sicilians were hot, silent, and devious; I always felt there was something else going on , always; and then there would be those sudden explosions, screaming, yelling, even flat-out violence. It was like once a week someone got punched out. For staying out late. For flirting with some bad guy. For fucking up the toast. Anything would do as an excuse. My Aunt Marie got her jaw busted for going out with an Irish cop. My Aunt Marie was beaten with a belt for saying she didn’t believe in God — by the other grandfather, who didn’t even go to church. They were nuts .

But all during the war, we ate good. I gotta say that. We had my grandfather’s store and there were two of my uncles on my mother’s side who came around sometimes with steaks. They wore striped suits and pinkie rings and when they were there everybody whispered. I guess they were connected. Wise guys. I don’t know. Nobody ever explained. Even today, my mother just says, “They’re in business.” I know one thing: they didn’t go off and fight in the war .

My father did. That’s why I barely knew the guy. He was gone almost from the time I started remembering things. Then in ’44 he was in a place called the Hurtgen Forest and had part of his leg blown away. He came back home in the spring of ’45. He never told anyone he was on his way, just came home, two days after Easter, in uniform and on crutches. And when my mother went to the door to answer the knock and she saw him she started bawling. I didn’t know who the fuck he was. My sister Fioretta started bawling too; she’s three years older than me so she remembered him. They sent me over to get my grandfather and wow! That night! That night! There musta been two hundred people in the apartment, coming from all over, my mother’s people too, with trays of spaghetti, lasagna, ravioli, sodas, beer, whiskey. One guy had an accordion and they all started singing in English and Italian and every once in a while my mother would start bawling again. She never left my father’s side. Not once. The noise was beyond belief. I wanted it to go on forever, for a week, a month, a fucking year .

The next day, my father slept until three in the afternoon, like he was catching up on three years’ worth of sleep. My mother brought him breakfast in bed, pancakes and bacon and cold milk. And then she led him to the bathroom for a hot bath and that’s when I saw how he needed help, he needed to lean on her, he couldn’t walk without a crutch. He didn’t say anything to me or my sister. He didn’t complain. He just said to my mother, Okay, it’s okay, thanks, it’s okay .

He’d put on weight while he was away and didn’t fit into his civvies, so that first day we called Ralph the Tailor to come up the flat and he made measurements, all of them talking in Italian, and then the tailor went away and for the next four hours my father just sat by the window in the living room, in the big chair, dressed in a bathrobe, looking out at the street. He didn’t say a word to me. Not a fucking sentence. I was only eleven but I knew he had gone through some bad shit. I went to see my grandfather, to find out what I did wrong, whether it was my fault my father didn’t talk to me, and Grandpa said to me, “He will never be the same, so you better get used to it.” Now I meet some of these bullshitters in bars who tell you how they won the fucking war and I always think of my father on that first day, staring out the window, and I want to punch someone out .

I was getting pretty angry myself then. I was the top student in my class in grammar school, but the fucking Irish priests and nuns never encouraged me to do anything more. I was some kind of freak to them. I was Italian, so I had two choices: the Sanitation Department or the rackets. Somehow, around that time, I discovered that if I hit people on the chin they went down. That’s what got me some respect. Not that I could read Latin or I knew who Leopardi was, but that I could beat the shit out of somebody. My mother’s family began to approve of me at last. Some of my cousins saw me belt out two Irish guys at Orchard Beach one day and thought I was the next Rocky Graziano. They wanted me to start going to the gym, go in the Gloves; the two wiseguy uncles said they would take care of everything. I started to feel I was hot shit .