Giuseppe pulled the salmon, two feet long and stiff as a plank, from the icebox and placed it in a pan to thaw. He moved slowly, as if most of his joints were as frozen as the fish, crushing garlic and basil leaves into a bowl. The young man asked why in the hell Maria had chosen him to fleece. Giuseppe didn’t understand his English. There was a pistol, shiny as tinsel, in the young man’s hand. This he understood. What the fuck did this anciano think he was doing? Ancient old man in pajamas holding a fish.
In the old stories, in the Good Book which Giuseppe couldn’t read, the Lord made a man and a woman and kicked them out of paradise for being nosy. Later, in Giuseppe’s recollection, He sent a child to save us all. It was a strange plan when you thought about it. He gets with child a virgin, then appoints some old man to look after them.
The young man said he needed Maria because she brought it in fast and because nobody ducks out on him. He laughed. You can buy it on the street next week, if I don’t kill you.
The gun barrel was less than a yard from Giuseppe’s face. The flat was silent, save the ticking of a clock and the occasional bleating of ships on the bay. Giuseppe wondered what God might have up His sleeve. Was it time for him to die? Was it time for Maria and her little miracle to die? And at that moment the little miracle screamed.
It was a scream like an ice pick in the head, like a siren to wake the dead out of hell. The young man covered his ears, and Giuseppe made like his old hero, DiMaggio, clearing the bases at Seals Stadium. He made like he was bringing down the house with one swing, with a fish as his hammer. The man’s shiny head cracked like a walnut against the door frame. Blood seeped from his ears and mouth. Maria knelt and picked up the pistol. Gracias, she whispered to Giuseppe.
He fitted into a large burlap potato sack, but it took both of them to carry him to the pier. Already the produce trucks were arriving with their many gifts from the fields and valleys of California, with dates and avocados, with oranges bright as the sun from the south. And the child on his mother’s hip pointed the way, singing in his own tongue as Maria and Giuseppe slouched under the weight of our world and trudged through the darkness to the water.
THE PENNY ARCADE
Joe
Joe would have been Giuseppe but for his mother’s trick. Giuseppe and Rosari Verbicaro’s first child, whom they’d named after his father, had died when delivered from the womb. The old midwives were as confused and distraught as the mother, and they searched their brains for reasons. Rosari was too young, perhaps. Rosari didn’t drink enough wine or nanny-goat milk. The mother had her own theory, which had to do with the name and the smoldering temper of her husband, and she insisted on giving the second, also a boy, his own name. He grew to be a beautiful but slow-witted lad, and Rosari succeeded in giving birth to five more after him, three girls and two boys, the last of which Giuseppe demanded to tag his name onto. Rosari nodded, but when the time came for signing the certificate, she smiled and wrote the name Joe.
By this time, English had invaded the household vernacular of all but the old man, and the children preferred calling the baby Joe, anyway. It took Giuseppe a few years to catch on. He sat at the table after a day of backbreaking work, stewed on homemade wine, while the children were laughing and fighting over the last serving of string beans. When he asked what the boy’s name was, Giuseppe or Joe, Rosari said, in Italian, What’s it to you, old-timer? It worked.
Joe’s brothers and sisters were all taken out of school in order to work, either to haul debris for the old man or to sew at some sweatshop, but Rosari kept her youngest in class because she recognized his shrewd mind. Little Joe had a better head for math than his elementary school teachers. He discovered the Fibonacci sequence on his own, the wonderful pyramid of relationships, while doodling in his notebook during grammar. He stared at ceilings and buildings and calculated the dimensions, the number of joists and beams in the school. He figured probabilities for an illiterate bookmaker at the dog track when he was ten, the numbers tumbling inside his brain while he groomed and walked the whippets after school, and was given a nickel for his efforts.
He was adorable and bossy in the way that only the youngest can be, the baby that Mama protects and defends before the rest of the brood, and he was a shrimp and a know-it-all who was usually right. He hated his family’s poverty, which forced him to wear all the hand-me-downs, even his sisters’ shoes, to school, and determined to make piles of money when he grew up. When he got teased he lashed out with his fists, and he was a scrapper. He once broke a boy’s nose for saying the word ravioli.
Ranking next to poverty was shame for his family heritage. He watched the newsreels and movies in which Italians were happy idiots who played the concertina and drank wine like his pop, and he dreamed of being a famous inventor with a nose job and a penthouse in San Francisco. Joe thought of changing his last name, too, especially for business purposes. Joe Verb: Action Enterprises. But the business Joe eventually steered was a family affair, a group of hungry Italians building, first on the swamp his father had bought for next to nothing, and later anywhere Uncle Sam asked them to, during the war boom of the ’40s.
By the late ’50s, Joe and his brothers and sisters, whose husbands worked for the family business, were doing well, but they thought their father had lost his mind. He’d always been a drinker and wanderer, and had often spent months away from home at jobs with other Italians or just hanging out in the island culture of North Beach, but now his brain had stepped off a cliff, and at the bottom of that cliff was a teenaged hooker and her illegitimate baby.
No ugly stereotyping could have disgusted Joe more than these latest shenanigans, no joke about Italian soldiers or Italian funerals with only two pallbearers could have angered him further. He looked at himself in the barber’s mirror and asked for a flattop; he avoided Italian food, except on Sundays at his mother’s; he hid the Sinatra records under a stack of magazines until his daughter Penny found them and filled the house with Frankie Boy swinging with Nelson Riddle’s band.
It was Penny who talked him into going to see the old man. They were at a little Italian hole in the wall celebrating her twelfth birthday, just daddy and daughter, and she brought the subject up as if it had just occurred to her. Isn’t Grandpa’s place a few blocks from here? Shouldn’t we drop in on them?
Why? Joe glared at the menu.
You’ve got to see that baby, Dad. He is so beautiful! Your, um . . . brother, Jesús.
Maria, the young Mexican mother who pronounced Jesús like Hej-Zeus, fascinated Penny as much as the baby did. Giuseppe, the butt of a thousand jokes in Rosari’s repertoire, was a harmless geezer to his granddaughter, a funny old guy who would probably slip her a five-dollar bill as a birthday present.
They’d taken the L train from Berkeley over the Bay Bridge and a cable car to Chinatown, from which they’d walked to North Beach. A waiter spoke to Joe in Italian, and Joe reminded the guy that they were in America, if he didn’t notice. Joe checked his watch, tapped his fingers on the table, made notations on a napkin. He had a hell of a lot on his mind because his brothers were watching the shop and an important deal was imminent, but he wanted to give Penny her day. He left the table to call Ludovico, read him some numbers from the napkin, and told Lu to take them down, but his brother, whose moods were sudden and violent, told him to butt the hell out and enjoy his daughter and his ravioli, for Christ’s sake.
Try prime rib, Joe said. You sure you guys are all right? These bastards from New Jersey will have your peter in their pocket the minute you shake hands, Lu.
Hey, what are we, a bunch of rubes? You think we just got off the banana boat?
Giuseppe’s flat in Little Italy reminded Joe of the poverty he’d escaped and kept from his children: clothes on the lines between buildings, peppers and garlic hanging not far from them, loud voices yelling from one stoop to the next, broken glass and strong smells of urine and garbage in the alleyway. There was an old Mexican woman in the flat, and she said that la familia had gone to the beach. Joe laughed and thanked God. He fairly danced down the steps and the