Streets of Gold

II

They stood on line outside the free employment agency, four thousand men every day of the week, six thousand on Mondays, when presumably the chances of finding work were higher. There was not much talking on the line. Most of the men knew they would not get a job, but they were still trying, their hopelessness was not yet total. They waited in the bitter cold for two hours, sometimes three, and then a thousand of them were led inside, following each other up the long flight of steps to the huge open room with desks and telephones and men with megaphones. They filled out forms — name, address, age, education, religion, color. And then they waited for the phones to ring. A ringing phone meant a job offer. One of the megaphone men would answer a phone, and then call out a job — “Man needed to shovel snow, forty cents an hour” — and there would be a rush to the desk, and the job-seekers would be warned again to stay in line behind the rope, and another phone would ring, and a megaphone man would announce, “Skilled mechanic, seventy-five cents an hour, might be a full day’s work,” and another rush to the desk, and another warning. Each of the men knew if he didn’t get a job in the hour allotted to him upstairs, he would have to leave and come back the next day, and fill out the form again, and wait another sixty minutes for that phone to ring. If nothing came during that length of time, they would all be herded out of the big room again, and another thousand men who’d been waiting on line outside the building would be led upstairs to listen for those ringing telephones that meant someone had a job offer for them. Two hundred, three hundred men found temporary work each day. Most found nothing. They would wander over to the park afterward, and sit on benches and stare at their shoes. It was better than going home.

I was blind, and I did not see those long lines’ outside the employment bureaus and the soup kitchens. I did not know that men in shabby overcoats and caps stood on street corners selling apples for five cents apiece. I did not see the mob of depositors outside the bank on 116th Street, clamoring to withdraw lifelong savings, storming the big brass doors after they were closed. My grandmother Tess lost three thousand dollars when they shut down that bank. The Hooverville shacks that sprang up overnight along the shores of the Hudson were described to me by my mother, but I never saw them. Dust storms and floods, natural disasters that perversely aggravated the nation’s miseries, were something I heard about only on the radio or in the Movietone newsreels whenever my mother took me to the pictures, but I could neither see nor visualize events of such enormity. An angry mob of unemployed veterans marching on Washington and demanding World War I bonuses was a spectacle I could not have conjured in my wildest imaginings.

This was the winter of our despair, but I did not realize it. I was part of something far more exciting.

I was in on the creation of a myth.

In 1932, a month short of my sixth birthday, I began attending the Blind School, as it was called by fourteen of its pupils, including me. Actually, it was a standard New York City elementary school, except that it also had a class of fourteen blind kids. The school I should have gone to, had I been able to see, was P.S. 80 on 120th Street near First Avenue. But P.S. 80, like most of the other schools in the city, simply wasn’t equipped to teach the sightless, and so we were bused from surrounding neighborhoods to 104th Street and Third Avenue, where a classroom with a specially trained teacher and suitable equipment had been set up in the old brick building there (since torn down, I understand). We rarely had contact with the sighted kids in the school, except for joint activities like assembly programs and school plays. For the most part, the fourteen of us were isolated in a virtual one-room schoolhouse, with the ages of the pupils ranging from five to eleven. Miss Goodbody taught all our subjects, and referred to us aloud all the time as “My dear little darlings.” This was not condescending; she adored children, and all the kids at the school, sighted or blind, were her dear little darlings. But we referred to ourselves as “little blind bastards.” Some of us were less blind than others, of course, but none of us could see worth a damn, and the appellation seemed appropriate — even if it did try to disguise self-pity with arrogance.

We were cruel to each other sometimes.

We were blind, but we were children.

Despite the loving care of Miss Goodbody, we remained convinced that we were misfits, a freakish band of outsiders isolated in a classroom at the end of the hall, or being marched to assembly or play in a chattering sightless unit, the corridors around us going mysteriously still as we passed through. Unlike Orphan Annie’s countless legions, we wore the badges of our secret society without pride or passion. Little blind bastards, we were... and ashamed of it, I suppose. Ashamed because we felt if only we’d been better (Christ knows where; in the womb?), we wouldn’t have been born blind. We could not accept the possibility that our parents, those sources of sustenance, comfort, and support, had done anything to deserve the likes of us, and so we figured we ourselves were somehow to blame. And no matter how hard Miss Goodbody tried to engender a feeling of self-worth in us, we always came away with a single inescapable fact: we were blind. We were not as good as other people. We were inferior products. Why was anyone bothering with us at all? Why didn’t they simply throw us into the nearest incinerator?

When I began taking piano lessons from Miss Goodbody, I told all the kids in class that I was better than they were. They were the little blind bastards; I was musical — Miss Goodbody had said so. Whenever I wore a new suit to school, even though I couldn’t see what the hell it looked like, I boasted about my grandfather the tailor, and told all the other kids he made clothes for very rich people, a lie no one ever believed. And even though I recognized this same cruelty in the other blind kids whenever it was directed at me, I turned insight into sight and told myself that only I was smart enough to see through the ploy (to see through it, mind you), and understand that a bragging little blind bastard was nonetheless blind, a part of the club, a freak, an outcast — a nothing.

The thing I liked most about the Blind School was those piano lessons with Miss Goodbody, who had discovered during our Bluebird-Blackbird sessions in the school auditorium that I could accurately reproduce by voice any note she struck on the keyboard. This must have astonished her. I was officially a Blackbird with a terrible singing voice, but I never sang off key, and she was beginning to find out I had perfect pitch. Today, I can identify as many as five notes being struck simultaneously on the keyboard, even if they’re cacophonous. That’s not an extraordinary feat; you’re either born with a good ear or you’re not. But Miss Goodbody took it as a sign from above that I was destined to study the piano. Since the lessons were free, they were encouraged by my mother — even though I hated them at first. In defiance and frustration, I would sometimes get up from the piano and, groping for the nearest wall, place my hands on it, palms flat, and repeatedly bang it with my head. The white keys were impossible. The black notes stood out from the keyboard, and I could feel them and distinguish them from the whites. But that endless row of seemingly identical keys stretching from Mongolia to the Cape of Good Hope? Impossible. There are blind pianists (not very good ones) who play only in F sharp, B, and D flat because there are five black keyboard notes in each of those tonalities. A showboat blind pianist like George Shearing can reach out suddenly with his right hand and plink a G above high C, unerringly true and clean and hard, but that’s a very difficult thing to do, believe me, even for men who can see.

I worked like a dog memorizing that keyboard and the major scales, Miss Goodbody drumming intervals into my head and teaching me to play simple five-note pieces in different keys, accompanying them with basic chords, identifying the chords for me. My repertoire of chords was limited in the beginning to the tonic, the dominant seventh, and the subdominant, but I learned to identify and to play these in all the keys. (Miss Goodbody, I’ve since learned, was somewhat advanced for her time, in that she believed a person could not play intelligently or feelingly unless he knew what was happening harmonically.) Rhythm was a serious problem. I could hear the rhythm as well as any sighted person, but conceptualizing a “quarter note” or “four eighth notes” without being able to see those notes was enormously difficult. Miss Goodbody helped me with this by singing out the values of the notes. “Quarter, quarter, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth,” simultaneously clapping her hands in tempo. By the time I was ready to begin reading Braille music, Miss Goodbody had acquainted me with the entire keyboard, encouraging me to play with “big” motions, forcing me to move out of a habit I’d had in the beginning (clinging to that middle C for dear life, my thumb firmly rooted on it), and teaching me to identify the major, minor, diminished, and augmented triads in all twelve keys.

I should explain that Braille musical notation is rather complicated, and involves a great deal more than simply embossing or raising a sighted person’s music so that it can be felt by the blind. To begin with, the bass clef and the treble clef are not normally indicated in Braille music. Instead, the keyboard is divided into seven octaves starting with the lowest C on the piano, and using each successive C as a reference point. When Miss Goodbody was identifying a specific note, she would say, “That’s a second-octave D,” or “No, Iggie, you’re looking for a sixth-octave G.” I’d been having enough trouble learning to read regular Braille, and now I was presented with an entirely new language — just as music for the sighted is a language quite different from English or Bantu. To give you some idea, this is what a simple exercise would look like in European notation:

I’ve been told by sighted people who are not musicians that those sixteenth notes in the bass clef of the first and second measures look forbidding, as do the triplets in the treble clef of the last two measures. But believe me, this is a very simple exercise. Well, here’s that same passage as it would look (or, more correctly, feel) in Braille:

Try, then, to imagine the Braille notation for a beast like the “Hammerklavier.” The mind boggles. And mine did. In fact, I still find Braille music confusing at times, even though I studied it for the better part of ten years. Space is a problem in music for the blind, and very often the same symbols are used to mean different things. Imagine being a blind musician for a moment (thank God, you don’t have to) and running across a symbol that stands for a whole note as well as an eighth note. Rampant bewilderment? I tell you. Or stumble across a shorthand musical direction that says, “Count back twelve measures and repeat the first four of them.” Dandy, huh?

Patiently, Miss Goodbody taught me to read. I memorized the keyboard, I memorized the chords, I memorized pieces in Braille, feeling the raised dots with one hand while I played the notes with the other, and then reversing the process with the other hand. By the end of my first year of study with her, I was reading and playing simple pieces like Schumann’s “The Merry Farmer” (which I heard sung as a bawdy tune years later, the lyrics proclaiming: “There once was an Indian maid/who always was afraid/some young buckaroo/would slip her a screw/while she lay in the shade”) and Tchaikovsky’s “Doll’s Burial,” which I hated, and was struggling with more complicated stuff like Beethoven’s Sonatina in G and his “Ecossaise.”

And meanwhile, the myth was taking shape around me.

The apartment we lived in was a fourth-floor walk-up, consisting of a kitchen, a dining room that doubled as a living room because that’s where the radio was, and two bedrooms next door to each other — one shared by my mother and father, the other by Tony and me. The apartment was not a railroad flat in the strictest sense. That is, the rooms were not stretched out in a single straight line, like train tracks. But it was a railroad flat in that there were no interior corridors, and to get to one room you had to pass through another. My parents must have made love very tiptoe carefully, lest Tony or I, on the way to the bathroom in the dead of night, stumble upon their ecstasy. The kitchen was tiny, with the icebox, the gas range, and the sink lined up against one wall, a wooden table with an oilcloth cover (I loved the feel and the smell of that oilcloth) against the opposite wall. A window opened onto the backyard clotheslines, and also onto the windows of countless neighbors with whom, like an Italian (excuse me — American) Molly Goldberg, my mother held many shouted conversations as she hung out the laundry.

Molly Goldberg was part of the growing myth.

We needed that myth in the thirties. We needed it because we were desperate. I used to think my mother was a lousy cook. I used to think her menus were unimaginative. I can still recite the entire menu for any given week from 1933 through 1937, because they didn’t change an iota until my father was appointed a regular and we moved to the Bronx. We began eating a little better then. But in those years when he was bringing home his twelve dollars a week from the post office (plus eight cents a letter for special delivery mail), the menus were unvaried. I knew, for example, that Monday night meant soup. The soup was made with what my mother called “soup meat,” and which I now realize was the cheapest cut of beef available, stringy and tasteless, and boiled in a big pot with soup greens and carrots. On Tuesday and Thursday nights, pasta was served with a meatless sauce, spiced and herbed, accompanied by salad and bread. On Wednesday night, we ate scrambled eggs with bacon. Eggs cost twenty-nine cents a dozen in those days, but my mother used only eight of them with a pound of bacon (at twenty-two cents a pound) and could serve a dinner for four, including Italian bread and an oil-and-vinegar salad, for about fifty-two cents. Friday night was fish, of course. On Saturday night, we ate breaded veal cutlets. Veal cost sixteen cents a pound as opposed to twenty cents a pound for pork or twenty-six cents a pound for round steak. On Sunday, we went to my grandfather’s house for the weekly feast. We were not starving. I don’t mean to suggest we were even hungry. I’m only saying that we (not me, not Tony, but certainly my parents) were aware of our plight, and further aware that millions of other Americans were hungry and were starving.

In 1932, the wife of President Hoover had said, “If all who just happened not to suffer this year would just be friendly and neighborly with all those who just happened to have bad luck, we’d all get along better.” Maybe she started the myth, who the hell knows? Or maybe it was Hoover’s Secretary of Labor who, again in 1932, while people were aimlessly wandering the nation in boxcars and eating roots in barren fields, said, “The worst is over without a doubt, and it has been a disciplinary, and in some ways, a constructive experience.” Well, by 1933, the worst was still far from being over without a doubt, and everyone in the country knew that whereas some people had it slightly better than other people, everybody had it bad. We’d been riding high on those fat years following World War I, and suddenly, literally overnight, we’d fallen into an abyss so deep it appeared bottomless. We rushed to elect Roosevelt in 1932, not because we thought he’d miraculously pull us up into the clear blue yonder, but only because we thought he might somehow arrest our downward plunge before we hit the jagged rocks below. And now it was 1933, and FDR and the NRA and the CCC and the PWA and the WPA and the AAA had given us a whole lot of alphabets, but still not much soup to put them in. “Hard times” was still the common denominator; without that specter of hunger constantly leering in the background, the myth would never have come into being.

If Hoover’s woman had naively stated one element essential to the creation of any myth in any time (a cultural ideal), and if Hoover’s man had optimistically stated another (a commonly felt emotion or experience), it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who became the first of literally thousands of thirties’ heroes (or villains) without which the myth could not have functioned. Everybody either hated him or loved him. There was no in between. You never heard anyone saying, I can take the man or leave him alone. He was “That Man,” and there was no possible way of remaining indifferent to him or his programs. But if love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin, and you spin the coin often enough and fast enough, the emotions become blurred and all you know is that something’s spinning on the table there, and it’s got two sides to it, and you can’t remember anymore which side was love and which was hate. Hating Roosevelt or loving Roosevelt became almost identical emotions. But more important, in terms of the myth, they became commonly shared emotions. Love him or hate him, he was ours. Deliverer or nemesis, he was ours. Thinking about him one way or the other, or both ways, or now one way and then the other, became part of what it meant to be American. We were becoming American, you see. Not the way my grandfather had (he still wasn’t in 1933, as a matter of fact) or the way my mother had, but in a way that was entirely new and unexpected and naive and exciting and sometimes deliriously exhilarating. We were beginning to claim people and things as our own, establishing tradition where earlier there had been only history to hold us together. The building blocks of the burgeoning myth were Buck Rogers guns and Charlie McCarthy insults, Busby Berkeley spectaculars and John Dillinger stickups, “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” Shirley Temple dolls, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” They were here again. For the first time. Because however superficial it may seem now, the myth had been conceived innocently and in desperation, and it is no accident that people today look back upon those terrible years of the 1930s with a sense of keen nostalgia. It was then that we became a family.

“I think we’re gonna have to march, too,” my father said. “If we can’t get a decent living wage, Stella, we have to march.”

“How can government employees march?” my mother asked.

“It won’t be the same as a strike. It’s just a way of letting them know we’re alive.”

“You know what Grandpa told me this afternoon?” I said.

“What did Grandpa tell you?”

“That Mussolini is right about Ethiopia. It does belong to the Italian people.”

“Sure, your grandfather’s a greaseball,” my mother said. “What do you expect him to say?”

“He’s not a greaseball no more,” Tony said. “He’s been here more than thirty years already.”

“Can he run for president?” my mother asked.

“No, but...”

“Then he’s still a greaseball,” she said flatly.

“I can run for president,” I said. “And Tony can, too.”

“Why don’t you run together?” my mother said, not without a touch of sarcasm. “President and vice-president.”

“Would it be any worse than Roosevelt and Garner?” my father asked, and then said, “How come fish again?”

“It’s Friday,” my mother said.

“I hate fish,” my father said.

“So do I,” Tony said.

“Me, too,” I said.

“That’s right, teach them to be heathens,” my mother said.

“Miss Goodbody says Mussolini is a bad man,” I said.

“Is she a Jew?” my father asked.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because the Jews are for Ethiopia.”

“Grandpa says Roosevelt is a Jew,” Tony said.

“Another one of his greaseball ideas,” my mother said. “I get sick and tired of hearing him talk about the other side all the time. If he likes it so much there, why the hell doesn’t he go back?”

“He is going back,” I said. “And I’m going with him.”

“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” my mother said.

“The streets are so clean in Fiormonte, you could eat right off them,” Tony said.

“Try eating off your plate right here, why don’t you?”

“In Fiormonte, everybody’s poor but happy,” I said.

“Sure, that’s why your grandfather came here. Because everybody was so happy in Fiormonte.”

“He came here to make his fortune,” Tony said.

“So he made it. So tell him to shut up about the other side.”

“Vinny the Mutt hit the numbers for five hundred bucks the other day,” my father said. “Now that’s a fortune.”

“Miss Goodbody says the numbers is a racket,” I said. “What time is it?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“ ‘Amos ’n’ Andy’!” I yelled, and shoved back my chair, and ran into the dining room. “She says it supports prostitution.”

Radio was the best entertainment medium ever devised for humanity. I am one day going to form a blind men’s marching society, and we are going to begin screaming at the tops of our lungs outside movie theaters and television studios, demanding the abolition of any form of entertainment that requires the use of eyes. If you yourself are blind and reading this in Braille (fat chance) or having it read aloud to you by someone who will undoubtedly distort its tonal quality, please consider seriously the possibility of joining this lonely voice, and forming (in the tried-and-true American way) a group that will demand something vitally important in its own tiny, selfish way — the return of the radio as something more than a conduit for bad music and bad news. We will be the only true minority group on these shores; the smallest one, anyway.

Calling ourselves the Consolidated Organization to Correct Kinescopic Excesses, Yelling to Eliminate Discrimination to the Sightless, we will become known in brief (and again in keeping with the American way of reducing long titles to acronyms) as the COCK-EYEDS. And having a title, and a shorthand word representing that title, we will then be able to take our place alongside all those other organizations shouting for separateness and apartness instead of solidarity-proud, worthy, and righteous conclaves like the Brotherhood of Abortion Banners Insisting on Egg Survival; or the Regional Independent Federation of Lovers of Egret Shooting; or the American Readiness Association Clamoring to Halt the Nasty and Intolerable Destruction of Spiders; or, finally, the Committee Against Virtually Everything Stalagmitic. And one day, all of us will happen to meet in the middle of Fifth Avenue, marching in all directions, and we will shout, “Brother!” together at the same instant, mistaking this for a cry of unity instead of an echo in a closed, locked, windowless room. On that day, we will finally discover we’d all been blind. I should only live to see it.

The radio was a blessing, and whereas in those days I felt it had been invented exclusively for the sake of the blind, I now realize it was a necessary ingredient in the mortar that held the myth together — one part radio, one part movies, and equal parts of ballyhoo and hullabaloo. Being the cheapest form of entertainment around, the radio was perfectly suited to the times. But more important, it provided us with hundreds of fictitious families who in turn were incorporated into the larger American family, the myth endlessly reflecting itself in a series of mirrors that threw back images of images. The Goldbergs, the Barbours, Easy Aces, Vic and Sade were all families in the strictest sense of the word, but if a family consists of any group of people whose idiosyncrasies, affectations, speech patterns, and personalities are intimately known, why then Jack Benny’s gang was a family, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto were a family, and so were The Green Hornet and Kato, and Major Bowes and all his amateurs, and the super-intellects on “Information, Please,” and the nuts in Allen’s Alley — Senator Claghorn and Mrs. Nussbaum, and boisterous Ajax Cassidy, and Titus Moody saying, “Howdy, bub,” each and every time. We were surrounded by families within families, and not all of them were suffering like the people who came to Mr. Anthony for radio advice each week. (“No names, please,” he always cautioned, and this was picked up at once and made an inside family joke on other radio shows, and then it filtered its way into the streets so that whenever anyone said, “Hello, Louie,” or “Hello, Jim,” the response was invariably, “No names, please.”)

Each week, we waited breathlessly for that Monday-night radio voice to tell us, “This is Cecil B. De Mille coming to you from Holllllywood.” We wondered along with Bob Hope just who Yehudi was, and fell off our chairs when Jerry Colonna replied, “Ask Yehudi’s cutie.” And when Hope said, “Who’s Yehudi’s cutie?” Colonna answered, “Ask Yehudi,” bringing the expected, “Yes, but who’s Yehudi?” — the whole hilarious nonsensical round delighting us. We knew George Burns would end his show with, “Say good night, Grade,” and we knew Baron Munchausen would say, “Vas you dere, Sharlie?” and yes, I vas dere, Sharlie, and I loved every minute of it. I had relatives all over Harlem, and all over the airwaves, and by extension all over the United States, because I knew we were all listening to that little box and, somehow, the sound waves miraculously being carried into all our homes were transforming the entire nation into a single giant living room.

In 1933, at seven o’clock every weekday night, the family thirty million Americans listened to was “Amos ’n’ Andy.” During the ensuing fifteen minutes of air time, telephone traffic dropped by fifty percent, movie theaters called off their scheduled performances and tuned their loudspeaker systems into NBC’s Red Network, and the nation’s more urgent business stopped dead while a pair of white men named Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll portrayed a gallery of Negro characters they themselves had invented — Amos, Andy, the Kingfish, Lightnin’, Brother Crawford, and the whole marvelous crowd at the Fresh Air Taxicab Company. “Those niggers are hot stuff,” my mother would say, and indeed they % were. I would go around the house after each show, quoting dialogue I had just heard and partially memorized, causing Tony to roll on the floor in laughter all over again.

“Say, s’cuse me for protrudin’, stranger,” I would say in Andy’s voice, “but ain’t you got a hold of my watch chain?”

“Your watch chain?” I would answer as the Kingfish. “Well, so I does. How you like dat? One of dese solid gold cuff links of mine musta hooked on your watch chain dere.”

Ah, yes.

In the thirties, we were well on the way to becoming one big happy family.

On the day they stole Dominick’s college ring and Luke’s watch (not to mention their trousers), I was in the tailor shop on First Avenue with my grandfather and Pino. It was November, and the streets outside were cold and deserted. The shop, as my grandfather described it to me, had a plate-glass window fronting on First Avenue, the legend F. Di Lorenzo, Tailor lettered on it in curving gold leaf. The wooden flooring of the shop window served as a seat for visitors to the shop (seven-year-old me, on this occasion), as well as a repository for a clutter of badly designed and poorly colored posters of men and women wearing the fashionable clothes of 1933, advertising “Dry Cleaning” and “Custom Tailoring” and “Expert Alterations.” There were also cardboard movie posters for most of the theaters in the neighborhood, the Cosmo, the Grand, the RKO Proctor’s, and even the Palace — familiarly called the Dump by everyone in the ghetto. And, in one corner of the window, the NRA-member poster, with its blue eagle clutching lightning bolts in one claw, and a gear wheel in the other, and the red-lettered legend WE DO OUR PART.

There was a bell over the door of the shop, and it tinkled whenever anyone came in. The numerals 2319 were lettered onto the glass of the entrance door in the same gold leaf that spelled out my grandfather’s name and occupation. A sewing machine was just inside this front door, to the left as you came in, facing the long counter upon which my grandfather cut cloth and behind which he did most of his hand stitching. Running at a right angle to the counter was a double tier of clothing rods upon which were hung suits, trousers, dresses, skirts, overcoats, sweaters, all the garments left to be repaired or cleaned or pressed, each bearing a paper ticket pinned to the sleeve or the hem. A flowered curtain behind the counter covered the doorway to the back room, where my Uncle Luke ran the pressing machine. Whenever he was pressing, great billowing clouds of steam poured from between the padded jaws of the machine and seeped into the front of the shop. There was always the smell of steam in that shop. In the wintertime, it was particularly reassuring.

My mother has told me that my grandfather’s hair was already white in 1933, entirely white, giving him an older look than his fifty-three years. He was undoubtedly wearing thick-lensed eyeglasses with black frames, and his customary work costume — black trousers and white shirt, over which he wore an unbuttoned, chalk-dusted, black cardigan sweater, a tape measure draped over his shoulders. The big cutting shears that were almost an extension of his right hand were surely on the countertop within easy reach. Pino was sitting at the sewing machine, putting buttons on Salvation Army uniforms. He had lost his job shortly after the Crash, and now worked alongside my grandfather in the shop which was largely sustained by the Salvation Army uniform orders he himself had first brought to his friend. In 1933, he was described to me as a dapper little man with a neatly cropped black mustache, customarily and meticulously dressed in a pin-striped suit, an anachronistic celluloid collar on his shirt, an emerald stickpin holding his tie to his shirt.

The only sounds in the shop were the ticking of the big, brass-pendulumed clock on the wall opposite the clothing racks, and the clanging of the radiators, and the incessant clicking of Pino’s thimble and needle. The smells were those of the twisted De Nobili cigars both men were smoking, and the individual human scents (which I knew by heart) of my grandfather and Pino, and a subtler aroma that is difficult to describe unless you have spent a considerable amount of time in a tailor shop. It is the elusive aroma of clothes. A lot of clothes. Clothes of different fabrics and different textures and different weights, but nonetheless giving off a different collective aroma at different times of the year. In November, with the wind rattling the plate-glass window of the shop, the clothes gave off the scent of hidden corners. I sniffed in the aromas, I listened to the sounds.

“Grandpa,” I said, because this had become a running gag between us, and I never tired of it, “why do you smoke those guinea stinkers?”

“Who says they’re guinea stinkers?” my grandfather said.

“Everybody.”

“Che ha detto?” Pino asked.

My grandfather said, “Ha chiamato questi ‘guinea stinkers.’ ”

“Ma perchè?”

“Why do you call them guinea stinkers?” my grandfather asked me.

“Because they stink.”

“What?” Pino said. “You’re wrong, Ignazio. It does not stink. It smells nice.”

“That’s no guinea stinker,” my grandfather said expectedly, delighting me. “That’s a good see-gah.” He puffed on it deliberately and ceremoniously, raising a giant smelly cloud of smoke. “This suit is for you,” he said, and rustled a paper pattern. “On Christmas Day, you’ll be the best-dressed kid in Harlem.”

“I know,” I said, and grinned.

“In Fiormonte, on Christmas... Pino, do you remember il Natale a Fiormonte?”

“Sì, certo,” Pino said.

“Some one of these days, Ignazio,” my grandfather said, “I’m gonna take you home to the other side. I’ll show you my home, okay? You want to come to Fiormonte with Grandpa?”

“Sure.”

“È vero, Pino? Non è bella, Fiormonte?”

“È veramente bellissima.”

“From where I lived, Ignazio, you could see the river, no? And before la fillossera.”

The front door of the shop flew open, the bell tinkled. I smelled my Uncle Luke’s aftershave and my Uncle Dominick’s b.o.

“What’s the matter?” my grandfather said immediately.

“They took our pants!” Luke shouted.

“What?”

“Our pants!” Dominick said.

“Who took your pants?”

“They came in the club, Pop,” Luke said in a rush, “and they took all our rings and watches, and then they made us take off our pants so we couldn’t chase them.”

“Who took your pants?” my grandfather said patiently.

“They took my class ring,” Dominick said. “Why are you so worried about my pants?”

“Who?”

“Some gangsters.”

“What gangsters?”

“We don’t know. They had guns.”

“From la vicinanza?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “I never seen them before, did you, Doc?” he asked his brother.

He had begun calling him “Doc” as soon as Dominick entered Fordham University, from which he’d been graduated in June of 1929, shortly before the Crash. In 1933, when I was seven years old, Dominick had just begun his third year of law school. Years later, when my parents first took Tony and me to the World’s Fair, my mother spotted the trylon and perisphere and immediately said, “There’s Luke and Dominick.” She never called him “Doc.” In fact, no one in the family ever did, except Luke.

“You got some pants for us, Pop?” he asked.

“Where am I going to get pants for you?”

“This is a tailor shop,” Luke said. “You mean to tell me you ain’t got pants for us?”

“In the back,” my grandfather said. “The ones near the sink. The ones I use for patches. Don’t touch no customer’s clothes!” he shouted to them as they went through the curtain. “Che pensa?” he asked Pino.

“Non è buono,” Pino replied. “È quasi come Sicilia.”

“Sì,” my grandfather said, and then suddenly turned to the curtain and shouted. “What is this, Sicily? Where some bums come in the club and steal from you?”

“What are you hollering at us for, Pop?” Luke yelled back.

“Because you let it happen.”

“They had guns,” Dominick said.

“Hurry up, put on your pants,” my grandfather said.

“What’s the hurry? They got away already.”

“I want you to get your brother-in-law.”

Luke came out of the back room. “You mean Matty?” he asked.

“At the taxi stand. Go.”

“What for, Pop?” Dominick asked, coming out of the back room.

“He plays cards with thieves,” my grandfather said.

The bell over the door tinkled. The scent of soap and lilac pierced the stench of cigar smoke — my Aunt Bianca.

“Good evening, Frank,” she said.

“Hello, Bianca,” my grandfather said wearily.

“Their pants were robbed, Aunt Bianca,” I said.

“Hello, Iggie,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. “Where’s your Grandma?”

“Home,” my grandfather said. “Cooking.”

Luke opened the door and was starting out of the shop when Aunt Bianca said, “What do you mean, your pants were robbed?”

“That’s right, Aunt Bianca,” he said, and ran out of the shop.

“You, too?” she asked Dominick.

“Yeah,” Dominick said.

“A college boy like you?”

Dominick shrugged. “They had guns,” he said.

“The broken record,” my grandfather said.

“They did, Pop.”

“What kind of guns?” I asked.

“Big ones, Iggie.”

“Did they have masks on?”

“No, no masks.”

“Then why don’t you know who they are?” my grandfather asked.

“I never saw them before,” Dominick answered. “I don’t know if you ever noticed, Pop, but I don’t usually hang around with crooks.”

“I have to see Tessie about doing the table,” Bianca said.

“No more table,” my grandfather said flatly.

“I have a widow who wants to talk to her husband.”

“Not in my kitchen!”

“Then where?”

“Do it in your corset shop.”

“My shop doesn’t have a three-legged table. I’ll talk to Tessie about it. Good evening, Frank.” She opened the door, the bell tinkled. She turned back, and said, “You look very handsome today, Iggie.”

“Thank you, Aunt Bianca.”

“Don’t take him by eyes,” my grandfather said.

“Come give your aunt a big kiss.”

I found her immediately. She pulled me into her arms and into her bosom, and bent to kiss me on the cheek, and then patted me on the head, and I suffocated ecstatically on lilac and soap. “Tell your mother to come to the shop once in a while, it won’t kill her,” she said.

“I’ll tell her, Aunt Bianca.”

“Close the door,” my grandfather said. “We’re not partners with a coal man.”

“I was just leaving,” Bianca answered, and went out.

“No three-legged table!” my grandfather shouted after her.

“She smells nice,” I said.

“The butcher thinks so, too,” Dominick said.

“Sta zitto,” my grandfather warned.

“What for?” Dominick said. Everybody knows about Aunt Bianca.”

“You mean about her sleeping with the butcher?” I said.

“Who told you that?” my grandfather asked.

“She’s a widow,” Dominick said. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Is that what they teach you in law school?” my grandfather asked. “That there’s nothing wrong with your mother’s sister sleeping with the butcher?”

“Well, what’s wrong with it, Pop, would you tell me?”

“Why doesn’t he marry her?” my grandfather asked.

“Maybe he doesn’t like her,” Dominick said.

“Then why’s he sleeping with her?” I said.

“You hear what this child hears?” my grandfather said.

The bell over the door tinkled again, and Luke and Matty came rushing into the shop, out of breath. Matty always smelled of Camel cigarettes.

“What took so long?” my grandfather asked.

“We ran all the way over,” Matty said. “Hi, Iggie, how’s the kid?”

“Fine, Uncle Matt.”

“You love my daughter?” my grandfather asked him.

“What?”

“Your wife, my daughter.”

“What is he crazy?” Matty said. “È pazzo questo?” he asked Pino. “We been married eleven years, she’s gonna have another baby any day, what are you asking me now if I love her?”

“Then get back their pants.”

“What?”

“And my ring,” Dominick said.

“And my watch,” Luke said.

“They’re crazy, right, Iggie?” Matty said. “How do I know who stole your stuff?”

“Ask who you play cards with,” my grandfather said.

The shop fell silent. They were waiting for Matty to say something. I turned to where I figured he was standing. The clock ticked noisily on the wall. Matty sighed.

“What kind of watch, Luke?”

“A Bulova. Seventeen jewel.”

“And the ring, Dom?”

“From Fordham. Gold, with a red stone.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Ma subito,” my grandfather said. “Quick, you hear?”

“Pop, I ain’t Al Capone,” Matty said, and went out.

“There much pressing back there?” Luke asked.

“There’s always pressing back there,” my grandfather said. “Thank God.”

“Who wants some hot chocolate?” Luke asked. “You want some hot chocolate, Iggie?”

“Don’t get chocolate on the clothes!” my grandfather said. Dominick had opened the door and was starting out of the shop. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“Home,” Dominick said. “I got torts.”

“You got torts, I got clothes,” my grandfather said. “Help your brother sort them, then you can go.”

“I can do it alone,” Luke said. “Go on, Doc.”

“Okay?”

“Go, go,” my grandfather said.

“Buy me a charlotte russe and stick it in the icebox for when I get home, okay, Doc?”

“Right,” Dominick said, and started out again.

“Watch when you cross!” my grandfather said.

“Pop, I’m twenty-six years old,” Dominick said, and closed the door behind him.

“Well, back to the eighth circle,” Luke said, and went through the curtained doorway, and started the pressing machine. I don’t know where he picked up that reference to Dante. He had dropped out of high school in his sophomore year, going to work first for my Uncle Marco in Brooklyn, and then later helping out part time in the tailor shop. He was now my grandfather’s full-time presser, and he earned a good salary, more than my grandfather would have paid an outsider. He rarely played violin anymore, but he banged the piano obsessively, and I think he dreamed of starting his own band one day, I don’t know. He once approached my father about joining his band, and my father (hypocrite who couldn’t read a fucking note) said, “Can you read music, Luke?”

“Sure I can read music,” Luke said. “I studied violin for four years, didn’t I?”

“I mean piano music,” my father said.

“Well, no, I can’t read piano music, no. I mean, I can read the notes, but no, I couldn’t play from no sheet music, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, suppose somebody should come up to the piano with her own music, like, you know, to sing a song at one of these affairs? Could you play it for her?”

“If I knew the song, I could play it by ear.”

“But suppose you didn’t know the song?”

“Then I guess I couldn’t play it,” Luke said. “But I know almost every song ever written.”

“Sure, but suppose the sax player or the trumpet man know it only from the sheet music, you understand me? Only in the key it’s written. Then what?”

“Well, then I don’t know what,” Luke said.

I overheard that conversation when I was supposed to be asleep, the way Luke had overheard my mother’s story about the Chinese rape artist. Luke was the one who later repeated the Charlie Shoe story to me. He told me he thought maybe it was true, but why anyone, even a Chink, would have wanted to touch Stella when she was eleven and ugly as sin (according to Luke) was beyond him. “Your mother puts on airs,” he said to me. “She always did.”

My Uncle Matt got back the ring and the watch, but not the pants. It was not to be the last of our family’s encounters with that other family — the Murdering And Filching Italian-Americans.

I knew my way around the neighborhood by heart, and was allowed almost complete freedom in moving from the house of one aunt or goomah or cousin to that of another; the only restriction was that I ask someone to cross me whenever I came to a curb. On Easter Sunday in the year 1934, we were still living on 120th Street between First and Second Avenues, and my Aunt Bianca was living above her corset shop on 116th Street, also between First and Second. The route to her building was a simple one.

I came down four flights of steps to the ground floor of our own building, and then across the wide top step of the stoop, and down four narrower si to the sidewalk. Then I turned right and walked down to First Avenue and made another right at the comer. I always walked close to the buildings, rather than the curb, and I knew each of the tenements on the block, knew where two iron posts with a chain hanging between them indicated there were steps leading down to a basement (careful!), knew where a wrought-iron fence separated Dr. Mastroiani’s sandstone building (the only two-story building on the street) from the pavement, knew the pillars on either side of the wide stoops of the three buildings after the doctor’s, and the open court in the big apartment building close to the corner, and then the barber pole (which I’d walked into two or three times before I firmly located its exact distance from the barbershop door), and then the plate-glass window of the pasticceria on the corner, and then the right turn onto First Avenue. I carried a bamboo cane in those days; it was the cane my father once used in his Charlie Chaplin imitation.

From the corner of First Avenue and 120th Street, there were four streets to cross before I got to my Aunt Bianca’s house. In musical terms, and in descending diatonic order, these were 119th Street, 118th Street, 117th Street, and last but not least, since it was a very wide street, a street held for a full four beats, rather than a single beat like the streets before it, the concourse or boulevard or esplanade or simply big mother of a street that was 116th. The musical reference above is no accident, I’m sure. I made the mistake that day because of a difficult (for me) waltz, which I was playing in my head as I carried an Easter plant to my Aunt Bianca. The plant was a gift from my mother. She did not particularly like Aunt Bianca, but Aunt Bianca had made her six brassieres free of charge two weeks before, and this was my mother’s obligatory payoff, and thank God Aunt Bianca hadn’t made the bras two weeks before Christmas because that would have required a grander gift, and I’d have been carrying an entire forest down First Avenue.

Visualize Blind Iggie Di Palermo, beribboned aspidistra in a red clay pot clutched in my left hand and pressed against my scrawny, almost eight-year-old chest, Daddy’s discarded Charlie-Chaplin-imitation bamboo cane in my right hand, blue eyes open wide and naked, Grandpa’s new Easter jacket on my back, brand-new knickers covering my skinny legs, tap-tap-tapping down the avenue with that waltz in my head. What happened was that I made it to the curb at 119th Street and then, perhaps because at that moment I was five bars into the coda, just after the trills, and the piece called for a seven-bar run of eighth-note triplets in the right hand — I turned right with my feet also, instead of waiting for someone to cross me to the other side. I tapped blithely up 119th Street, mentally playing that piece for all it was worth, the bamboo cane rapping out the three/four beat while the melody soared in my head, and when I got to the corner of Second Avenue, I asked someone to cross me, thinking this was the corner of 119th Street and First Avenue, believing I was heading south instead of west, and knowing I still had three streets to cross before turning right again toward my Aunt Bianca’s shop in the middle of the block. Those streets were, in my busy, busy head, 118th Street, 117th Street, and then 116th Street. Instead, I crossed in succession and with the kindly help of pitying parading pedestrians, Third Avenue, and then Lexington Avenue, and then Park Avenue, and made a right turn on Park Avenue, heading uptown, heading north again instead of west, in which direction I should have been heading had I been on 116th Street, where I was supposed to be... Are you hopelessly confused? So was I.

I heard voices.

The voices belonged to black people.

I knew those voices well. I imitated them every day of the week. But it was rare for any black people to wander down to 116th Street between First and Second Avenues, which is where I believed I was at the moment. I suddenly began to wonder exactly where I was. Vague memories began to filter back. Hadn’t I heard the sound of an elevated train roaring overhead as I replayed the first section of the piece, and while I thought I was being helped across 119th Street? When had they built a crosstown elevated structure on 119th Street, and how come nobody had told me about it? And hadn’t I heard another elevated train when I thought I was being led across 118th Street? I was suddenly frightened. I stopped stock still in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Buck, buck, how many fingers’re up?”

They were playing Johnny-on-a-Pony.

“Three!”

“Wrong, man, two.”

“How come when you on our backs, we can never guess the ’mount of fingers?”

“You think I’m lyin’?” I heard the sound of sneakers slapping against the sidewalk; the person talking had leaped off the backs of the “pony” team. “How many fingers did I had up, kid?” There was a sudden silence. I could hear the shuffling of more feet on the sidewalk now. “You there with the flower pot,” he said. “How many fingers was I holin’ up?”

“Me?” I said.

“Tell ’em how many fingers they was.”

“I didn’t see,” I said. He was much closer to me now. They were all moving close to me. I didn’t know how many there were. I began listening for separate voices.

“Why wuhn’t you payin’ ’tention?”

“Whut you doin’ on this block, man, you can’t pay ’tention?”

“Where you goin’ with that plant?”

“To... to my aunt’s.”

“Who your aunt?”

“Aunt Bianca?”

“Who? Talk English, man.”

“Aunt Bianca.”

“Look at me when you talkin’. Whutchoo lookin’ ever’ which way for?”

“He blind.”

“That ain’ no reason for him not to be payin’ ’tention when we got a serious prolum to solve. How many fingers was I holin’ up there?”

“I... I couldn’t see the fingers,” I said.

“Where’d you get that horse blanket?”

“What?”

“This thing.” A hand flipped at the lapel of my jacket. I backed away a pace.

“It ain’t a horse blanket,” I said.

“Where’d you buy that thing? Over to the horse stables?”

“I didn’t buy it. My grandfather made it.”

“What’s he do, sell horses?” somebody asked, and they all laughed.

“He’s a tailor.”

“What kind of tailor? A horse tailor?”

“He’s a real tailor,” I said. “He’s got a shop on First Avenue.”

“Oh, on First Avenue?” somebody said. “Whut’s he, a wop tailor?”

“Are you a wop, too?”

“I’m an American,” I said.

“Americans doan go roun’ wearin’ horse blankets.”

“On’y wops ’n’ horses do.”

“Let’s see that horse blanket, anyway,” someone said, and I felt hands tugging at the jacket.

“Leave it alone,” I said, and backed away again.

“Whut you doin’ comin’ roun’ here in that shitty horse blanket, carryin’ that pot full o’ shit?”

“Get away from me,” I said, and raised my father’s bamboo cane.

“Well, now, lookee here,” somebody said.

“He’s a real fierce li’l bastard, now ain’ he?”

“Le’s see that cane.”

“Le’s see that flower pot.”

“Where you get that horse blanket?”

“Please, I want to go to my Aunt Bianca’s.”

They were all around me now. They were poking me. Somebody reached for my cane. Somebody else yanked at the sleeve of my jacket, and I pulled my arm away. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and giggled and danced away when I whirled on him.

“Please,” I said. “I’m blind.”

“Please,” someone mimicked, “He blind.”

I felt someone tugging at the potted plant, heard a tearing sound, realized a leaf had been pulled from the aspidistra, and then felt it striking my face. I backed away and collided with someone who pushed me forward against someone else. They began shoving me back and forth then, spinning me around in, the circle they had formed, tossing me from one to the other as I flailed at them with my father’s bamboo cane, the cane whistling on the air and never striking home. Neighing like horses, they snatched leaves from the plant as I spun dizzily in the circle, tossed the leaves into my face, laughed as I tried to protect the plant, the cane always moving but never connecting, until someone snatched it from my hands, and I heard a sudden loud cracking sound, and realized it had been snapped in two. I held the potted aspidistra in two hands, using it as a weapon, swinging it back and forth in front of me, but someone knocked it to the pavement, and I heard the pot smashing into a hundred pieces, and then someone tore at my right sleeve, loosening my grandfather’s careful stitches, and then ripped it all the way, pulling it free of the shoulder, and someone ripped the other sleeve loose, and someone else tore the jacket up the back. One of them shoved at me from behind, and I fell to the sidewalk, trying to cushion the blow with my hands, and my hands hit some of the broken pieces from the aspidistra pot, and I pulled them back in pain and hoped they were not bleeding. On my knees, I crouched on the sidewalk, and somebody laughed, and then they all laughed, and then they left.

I don’t know how long I crouched on that sidewalk, listening for sounds, turning my head sharply from right to left, uncertain whether they were really gone or were silently preparing another attack. No one came to my assistance. (Many years later, when I asked Biff Anderson why no one had come to my assistance, he laughed heartily and said, “Man, you was white. This whole fuck-up didn’t just happen yesterday, you know.”) I got to my feet. I did not know where I was. My cane was gone. Flailing the air with both hands, I groped for a building that would define the inner limits of the sidewalk. Instead, I fell off the curb, and scrambled back onto the sidewalk, and got to my feet again, rushing forward in panic, hands outstretched, palms open, and slammed into a solid brick wall. Hand over hand, I felt my way along the side of the building, and came at last to the corner. If I had made a right turn when stumbling into this street, then I would have to make a left turn to get back home.

My grandfather found me wandering along First Avenue. He must have been dressed in his own Easter finery, black suit, white shirt, black tie, a straw boater on his head. He was carrying a white cardboard carton of pastries in his hand, I later learned. He was not out looking for me, he had merely gone to the pasticceria on the corner to buy some pastry for the holiday, and was undoubtedly walking back to the apartment with a jaunty spring in his step on this beautiful clear bright sunny Easter morning, and had seen his grandson in tears and in tatters, and perhaps even then did not rush to me at once, but approached me slowly and cautiously, as though unwilling to believe his own eyes.

“Ignazio!” he shouted, and I rushed to him, rushed to his voice, rushed sightlessly into his outstretched arms, and he clutched me to his chest, and said, “Madonna mia! Ma, che successe? Oh, Madonna, Ignazio, Ignazio, chi ha fatto questo?” and stroked my face with his hands, brushing at the tears, and said, “No, no, non piangere, caro, caro, non piangere,” and then angrily shouted, perhaps to the heavens, “What kind of place is this, what kind of country?” and hugged me to him again, and said, “No, no, carissimo, non ti preoccupare,” and then said, “What happened? Tell Grandpa.”

Sobbing, I said, “They didn’t like my...” and then stopped short of saying the word “jacket” because my grandfather had made the jacket for me, and I did not want to hurt him. “My haircut,” I said.

“Your haircut?” he said, puzzled. “What’s the matter with your haircut? Oh, Madonna, look what they did, your jacket is ruined. Who did this?”

“Some boys,” I said. “Five or six boys.”

“Were they Irish?” he asked immediately and suspiciously.

“No.”

“Then what? Colored?”

I nodded.

“Bastardi,” he said.

“Grandpa?” I said, and began to weep again.

“Yes, yes. Ignazio. Come now, no more tears.”

“Grandpa . .. why do I have to be blind?”

“Ah, ah,” he said, and hugged me and rocked me. “Ah, Ignazio, dear baby, dear child, I would give you my own eyes if that would make you see. Come, you must not cry. Here, here,” drying my eyes and my cheeks with his handkerchief, and then abruptly and surprisingly saying, “Do you want a cannolo? See? Here’s the pastry box. Do you feel the string? Give me your hand. Here. Do you see the string?”

“Yes, Grandpa.”

“Ooooo, I can’t break the string,” he said. “It’s too strong for me. Help me break the string, Ignazio.”

“You can break the string, Grandpa.”

“No, I can’t, I can’t. Look! Do you see? I can’t do it. Oh, what a strong piece of string. Help me, Ignazio.”

I felt along the string with both hands, and took it in my fingers, and broke it. Then, sobbing, I threw myself into my grandfather’s arms again.

“Don’t you want a cannolo?” he said gently. “Tch. No more crying, please. We’ll go to the tailor shop and wash your face before your mother sees you. Do you know what Grandma made for us? Rigatoni! That’s your favorite, no? And antipasto, and meatballs, and roast beef, and potatoes, and salad, and nuts, and I’ll slice a peach in wine and let you have some of that. We’ll get you drunk, eh, Ignazio, we’ll make a regular ubriacone out of you, eh? Tch, look at your jacket. Never mind, I’ll make a new one for you. Come. Take my hand.”

He was standing opposite me. I knew he was holding out his hand, but he did not reach for my own hand. He simply stood there, waiting.

And I reached. I touched air. I groped.

And finally, I found his hand and took it in my own.

“Well, there are good and bad in every kind.”

My mother used to repeat this maxim on the average of twice weekly. I don’t think she meant it to apply to black people; it didn’t apply to them that Easter morning. It occurs to me that she repeated those identical words to me years later, when I told her I was going to marry a Jewish girl. “Well, there are good and bad in every kind.” Then she went to stick her head in the oven. (Just a joke, Mom, full of little jokes.) Actually, she was very tolerant about the entire matter, which was more than could be said for Rebecca’s father, the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer.

In 1934, though, when my mother viewed her demolished little boy, she was not quite so tolerant. Immediately, she challenged the manhood of all the assembled wops in my grandfather’s apartment and demanded a Sicilian vendetta in the grand old style of the one that had been visited upon poor Charlie Shoe way back there during the Perils of Pauline. It was my father who reasoned that we would never be able to find a half-dozen anonymous niggers on Park Avenue, and even if we did find them, what were we supposed to do? Beat them up? In their own territory? The “in their own territory” was an afterthought. My father had no stomach for violence, even if his own darling little blind bastard had just been the victim of violence. In that respect, my father was distinctly anti-American. He managed to convince the others that discretion was the better part of valor, and we all sat down to enjoy my grandmother’s rigatoni.

I kept thinking about those kids who’d beat me up.

I kept wondering why they’d done it.

I don’t wish to nag a theme the way I would a note in a blues chorus, but when I first began playing jazz, there were no factions, no divisions, you either knew how to blow or you didn’t. Jazz was the true melting pot, the full realization of the American myth I’d learned as a kid. I can honestly say I never got any draft about being a white man playing black music until 1950. I’d been married to Rebecca for almost two years by then. We had one child and another on the way, and times were not precisely rosy. I was still playing here and there in some of New York City’s lesser-known toilets, and when I got a shot at cutting a record with some fairly well-known musicians, I thought success was just around the corner. I met the leader of the band and his trumpet player in front of the Brill Building. Both men were black. The leader, a bassist named Rex Butler, took one look at me and (just as my mother had said, “Mama, it’s the Jew,” in the presence of the dry-goods salesman) said to his trumpet player, “This white cat won’t swing, man.” The worst thing you can say about any jazz musician is that he doesn’t “swing.” He can have great chops, he can be inventive as hell, but if he doesn’t swing, forget him. The trumpet player remained silent. I didn’t know whether he was nodding his head in agreement or picking his nose noncommittally. “Sorry, man,” Butler said, and that was that; they cut the record with a black piano player.

That was in 1950.

Sixteen years before that, I was still trying to reconcile what had happened to me on Park Avenue with what was happening everywhere around me. I was almost eight years old and beginning to make some value judgments of my own, and it seemed to me that whereas my grandfather’s concept of family was a limited one, including as it did only half the wops in Harlem, Fiormonte, and the suburbs of Naples, it nonetheless was not in conflict with the larger concept of family being developed in the American myth. I did not yet know it was a myth; that realization would come later, much later. For me, at eight, it was a glowing dream which had as its basis an impossible and unlikely collection of people from different nations who, united by a common ideal and a rapidly growing common tradition, and working together to achieve that ideal, could make this the strongest, most prosperous, most enlightened country on the face of the earth, with liberty and justice for all whether they were Irish, Italian, Negro, German, English, Czech, or double-check American.

In 1934, I thought I knew what being American meant, even though my concept seemed to clash violently with my mother’s. To her, Fiorello La Guardia, the goddamn mayor of New York, was “just another greaseball,” whereas Father Coughlin was an “American,” and she wouldn’t have missed his radio broadcast every Sunday night if you’d offered her “all the tea in China.” I still don’t understand that woman, and I’ve known her for forty-eight years. I was thirty-seven before I discovered she’d always hated fish and therefore cooked it in the most impossibly inedible manner every Friday night of my childhood merely because she considered herself a good Catholic. But she had quit going to confession when she was sixteen, and I don’t think she’s stepped inside a church since the day she got married, and I know she practiced birth control because when I was a kid I found a small box in the top drawer of the dresser, on the side belonging to my father, and my brother Tony said, “Iggie, those are nothing but scum bags.” I listened to my mother when I was young, but I couldn’t decipher what she meant by “I’m American, don’t forget,” because it didn’t jibe with the larger concept of the American family as it was being taught everywhere around me — and especially by Miss Goodbody.

Miss Goodbody told me that the proper descriptive term for a colored person was neither nigger nor boogie, but instead Negro. She told me that calling a Negro a nigger was tantamount to calling an Italian a wop. Since I hadn’t ever been called a wop except by the six niggers on Park Avenue, I wasn’t even aware that the term was derogatory. The only other place I’d heard the expression was in my own kitchen, from the lips of Stella the Ail-American Girl, who used it interchangeably with “greaseball,” “ginzo,” “guinea,” and sometimes “greenhorn” (though this last term of affection was usually reserved for the Irish). But I began thinking about it. And I decided I would be very careful about using the word “nigger” so casually, and that I would not refer to Jews as “Jews,” which somehow also sounded derogatory, but instead say “Jewish people.” Similarly, Miss Goodbody taught me to say Pole for Polack and Spanish for Spic — which I’d never said, anyway, since the massive Puerto Rican influx hadn’t yet begun in New York, and the slur was alien to us wops in the ghetto. In fact, the first time I ever heard the word was when Miss Good-body warned me against using it.

Well, once you’ve revised your vocabulary, you’ve come a long way toward revising your thinking. I find it ironic that after all those years of training myself to say “Negro,” I then had to learn to say “black,” which in my youth was only half a word, the unvoiced expletive “bastard” being clearly understood, as in the black expression “mother,” where the “fucker” is as silent as the X in “fish.” Do I sound bitter? The hell with you; Fm blind. And besides, I know something now that I did not know then, and there is almost as much exhilaration in recognizing the lie as there was in living it. It’s the truth that keeps eluding me; it’s the truth that’s so difficult to find. The lies are always there, you see, and just when you think you’ve cornered one with the broom, another one pops out of a tinned-up hole on the other side of the room, and you’ve got to start all over again. There are times, admittedly, when you think you’ll never be able to cope with this place that’s overrun with scampering lies, times when you wonder why in Christ’s name you bother searching for the truth at all; who the hell are you — Diogenes? Wouldn’t it be easier to just lie down and relax somewhere under a shade tree, with clouds drifting through an azure sky you’ve never seen and can never hope to see, and just allow the lies to run free over your body, to lick your face into final submission and pick the flesh from your bones, revealing at last the stark white truth of your skeleton? Or is there perhaps a sweeter form of surrender? Might you not put a bullet in your brain, or a knife in your heart, could you not slit your wrists in the bathtub, or jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, or onto the tracks of the subway your grandfather or mine built, and end it, shit, just end it? Yes, I suppose you could. But then you’d never have known, isn’t that so? And how can you hope to learn anything, sonny, if you don’t ask questions?

My Aunt Bianca’s corset shop on a Saturday afternoon in September, shortly before my eighth birthday. I am curled up in a floppy armchair draped with brassieres. My aunt is working at one of her dress dummies, fashioning a corset for a lady of gigantic proportions. There are pins sticking in her mouth, and when she answers my questions, she mumbles around the pins. A soft, slow, gentle autumn rain nuzzles the plate-glass window of the shop. Somewhere far in the distance, there is the lingering intermittent rumble of thunder.

“Are brassieres sexy?” I ask.

“What?” she says.

“Tony says they are.”

“Well...”

“Are they?”

“Not to me,” Aunt Bianca says.

“What does that mean, anyway?”

“What does what mean?”

“Sexy.”

“Go ask Tony.”

“Do you think he knows?”

“Maybe,” Aunt Bianca says. “He’s advanced for his age.”

“Yeah.” Silence. Distant thunder. “Aunt Bianca?”

“Mmmm?”

“Why do ladies wear them, anyway?”

“You ask too many questions,” she says.

My grandfather first took me to meet Federico Passaro on a bitterly cold day in January of 1935. Showing the proper deference to an educated man (and especially a man educated in music!), he alternately addressed Passaro as either Dottore or Professore, telling him how long I’d been studying, and how beautifully I could play, and then explaining that I had perfect pitch, which phenomenon he demonstrated by striking three random notes simultaneously on the keyboard, and asking me to identify them — which of course I did. Passaro seemed singularly unimpressed by my feat. At least, he made no comment about it. I later learned that he, too, had perfect pitch, so what was the big deal? All he wanted was to hear me play, but I was shivering (literally and figuratively) at the electric heater in the corner of the room, and beginning to think my hands would never get warm.

I liked his voice. His English was tinged with a faint accent, and when he spoke to my grandfather in the Neapolitan dialect, even this sounded less harsh than it did in the streets of Harlem. He was described to me later by my grandfather as a short, squat man in his early sixties, with a wild thatch of black hair, a hooked nose (“like a Jew’s, Ignazio”) and lips perpetually pursed as though in displeasure. When I finally sat down to play a piece I knew cold — C. P. E. Bact’s “Solfegietto” - he stood by my side at the piano and listened attentively, his even breathing interrupted only once, when I fluffed a passage I’d played without error perhaps a hundred times before.

I wish I could say that something startling happened the first time I played for Passaro. I couldn’t see his reactions, of course, but I can guarantee there was no dramatic B-movie-type revelation, with Passaro shouting “Madonna mia!” in discovery of a remarkable child prodigy in his living room. I simply played the piece through, cursing myself for the fluff (but blaming it on my cold chops), and when I’d struck the final chords, I sat at the piano in silence, my hands in my lap, and waited.

“Well,” my grandfather said in Italian, “what do you think?”

“Who has been teaching you?” Passaro asked.

“Miss Goodbody. At school.”

“And you’ve been playing for how long?”

“I started when I was six.”

“How old are you now?”

“I was eight in October.”

“So that’s more than two years.”

“Yes.”

“Has your teacher given you any Chopin?”

“Just the A-Major Prelude.”

“Bach, of course.”

“Yes.”

“Mendelssohn?”

“The ‘Six Pieces for Children.’ ”

“No Brahms, eh?”

“No.”

“How does she teach you? Does she play the piece for you, or what? I’ve never taught a blind person.”

“The pieces are in Braille,” I said. “She usually plays them through first, and then I read the notes. In Braille.”

“Ah,” Passaro said.

“So what do you think?” my grandfather asked in Italian.

“I’ve never taught a blind person,” Passaro answered in Italian.

“How long do you practice every day?” he asked me.

“Two hours.”

“If I teach you, I want you to practice not only during the hours you’ve set aside for practice, but also when you simply feel like playing. That is important to me.”

“Okay,” I said.

“How will I know what compositions are available in Braille?” Passaro asked.

“I can get a list from Miss Goodbody,” I said.

“Why do you want to leave her?” Passaro asked.

I hesitated. Then, looking up from the keyboard for the first time, I turned in the direction of Passaro’s voice, and said, “I can play better than she can.”

“I see,” Passaro said. “Will you expect to play better than I can?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ve played at Carnegie Hall,” Passaro said. “I gave a recital at Carnegie Hall fourteen years ago.”

“Okay,” I said, and nodded.

“Okay? What does that mean, okay?”

“If you want me to play at... whatever you said, I’ll do it.”

“What do you want?”

“I just want to learn how to play better.”

“For what? To amuse your friends?”

“Just to be real good,” I said.

“Do you think you’re good now?”

“Yes.”

“You’re very sloppy,” Passaro said. “If a student of mine had been studying with me for two and a half years...”

“It’s not that long,” I said.

“Then what? Two years and two months? Even so. I would stop giving lessons to someone who was still so sloppy after all that time.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t think I’m so sloppy. Just because I made a dumb mistake...”

“I’m not talking about the mistake. I’ve heard giants make mistakes, though rarely. I am talking about your fingering. I am talking about this,” he said, and his right hand must have darted out because the next thing I heard was a descending arpeggio, “instead of this,” he said, and the identical arpeggio sprang clean and crisp and true from the instrument. “Do you hear a difference?”

“Yes.”

“Can you play what I just played?”

“Maybe.”

“Try it.”

“Was that an F sharp?” I asked. “The first note?”

“Was it?”

“Yes.” I found F sharp above high C, positioned my right hand over the keys, and played the arpeggio slowly and carefully, F sharp, C sharp, A, and then to F sharp again, repeating the notes until I reached the center of the keyboard. I took my hand off the keys.

“That was sloppy,” Passaro said.

“Well, it was the first time I played it.”

“I’ve never taught a blind person,” Passaro said. “I don’t like students who whine or complain or who don’t do the work. If I have to worry about hurting your feelings because you’re blind, then I don’t want to teach you.”

“Well, how would you hurt my feelings?” I asked.

“Doesn’t it hurt your feelings to know you’re sloppy?”

“No.”

“It should,” Passaro said.

“Miss Goodbody doesn’t think I’m sloppy.”

“If you can play better than she can, how would she know if you’re sloppy?”

I burst out laughing.

“You think that’s funny?” Passaro said

“Yeah,” I said, still laughing.

“Don’t laugh when the professore is talking,” my grandfather said.

“When can you get me this Braille list?” Passaro asked.

“Will you teach him?”

“First I want to see the list. If there are enough compositions on it, compositions I want to teach...”

“There are millions of pieces in Braille,” I said.

“Including Chopin’s C-Minor Polonaise?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if I told you you’ll be playing it in three months’ time?”

“I don’t even know what it sounds like.”

“It sounds like this,” he said, and he reached across me with his left hand, and began playing simultaneously with his right hand, and what I heard was impossibly intricate.

His hands stopped abruptly. “Well?” he said.

“It took me three months to learn the ‘Solfegietto,’ ” I said.

“And you still play it badly,” he said. “What do you think of what I just played?”

“It sounded hard.”

“It is hard.”

“I don’t know if I could play it in three months.”

“You’re right. You probably won’t be playing it for three years.”

“Allora, dottore,” my grandfather said. “Sì o no? Will you teach him or not?”

“Get me the list,” Passaro said.

It is my brother who takes me to my weekly piano lesson in the Bronx. My mother says we resemble each other. “Ike and Mike, they look alike,” she says, making reference to the Rube Goldberg cartoon creations, and not to what my name will become one day in the distant future. Tony has blond hair, like mine, but it is curly. His eyes are blue, too. His chin has a cleft in it. I have explored it with my hands; I know his face as well as I know my own. We board the Third Avenue El on 125th at eleven o’clock each Saturday morning. We sit side by side on the caned seats, and exchange dreams while we ride up to Tremont Avenue. I am going to play at Carnegie Hall one day. (I know what Carnegie Hall is now; Passaro has told me. He has also promised me I will play there.) My brother is going to be a famous ballplayer. Winter or summer, he wears a leather mitt on his left hand and repeatedly socks a baseball into the pocket as we ride uptown, the steady rhythm counterpointed by the clacking of the wheels along the track.

He reels off batting averages, and lifetime records, and describes a game my Uncle Dominick took him to see in Yankee Stadium. Lou Gehrig is his hero. He tells me he is going to marry Letitia. (They are both eleven years old.) He says he is going to become rich and famous and then he and Letitia will move to Mamaroneck, in a private house where he’ll live all the time except when he has to go on the road with the team. When he was in the third grade, his teacher invited him and three other kids to her house in Mamaroneck for a Saturday outing. Tony says the house was like in the movies. That’s the kind of house he wants to live in someday. He tells me I’ll come visit him. He says I’ll play a concert someplace, and come to his house afterward in a big black Cadillac limousine driven by a chauffeur, I’ll still be wearing my black tuxedo from the concert, and he and Letitia will be having a big party for me with champagne and everything in their private house in Mamaroneck. And when he plays at Yankee Stadium, he’ll get Uncle Dominick or Uncle Luke to take me to the game, and they’ll describe the action to me, and when he comes to the plate he’ll point his bat at the left-field bleachers and that’ll mean he’s going to put one away for me.

He says he will ask Letitia if she has a friend for me. He promises that when I’m a big concert player and rich and famous, I’ll have beautiful girls hanging all over me, rich girls in long satin dresses, wearing pearls at their throats, draped on the piano, and never mind that I’m blind, that won’t matter to them, Iggie. He doesn’t want no rich girls in satin, my brother Tony. All he wants is Letitia, who’s the most beautiful girl in the world. He tells me he wishes I could see her, she’s so nice, Iggie, I mean it, I love her so much. And then he describes her for me again, and I try to conjure Letitia, try to create an image that will match the voice I have heard so many times. We will both be rich and famous, my brother and I.

This is America.

It is entirely possible.

On my ninth birthday, he gives me a dog. The dog is a mutt he paid three dollars for in the pet shop on Third Avenue. With a little help from my grandfather, I name the dog Vesuvio. Vesuvio is a good dog with but a single failing: he refuses to be housebroken. My mother is a compulsive housekeeper, then and now, and does not need a half collie-half spitz (imagine that mating scene!) messing up her nice linoleums. In a desperate attempt to keep Vesuvio out of the dining room and bedrooms, thereby encouraging him to go on the paper we have put under the kitchen sink, she removes two leaves from the dining room table and stretches them across the doorway to the kitchen at night, one on top of the other, constructing a barrier she hopes will keep him out of the rest of the apartment. But one night, getting out of bed and walking toward the kitchen for a glass of water, she forgets about those two dining room leaves and bangs her shins against them and, according to her, almost breaks both her legs. That does it. I come home from school one day to discover that Vesuvio has been taken away by the ASPCA. Naturally, I decide to leave home. The first person I complain and confide to is my grandfather.

“She gave Vesuvio away.”

“Who?”

“Mama.”

“Ma perchè?”

“He was making in the house.”

“Sit down, stop crying. Now stop. You’re a man, no? Men don’t cry all the time. Who took him?”

“The ASPCA.”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s a place that takes dogs. Grandpa, I’ll bet they’re gonna kill him.”

“No, no.”

“Yes, Grandpa. They’ll put him in a room with gas.”

“Why would they do that? No. They’ll find a home for him in the country, where he can run free. That’s what a big dog like Vesuvio needs, a lot of room. Don’t worry, they’ll take good care of him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Ignazio, I’m sure.”

“Grandpa, let’s go to Fiormonte.”

“Right this minute?”

“Yes. I never want to see her again, Grandpa, I mean it. I hate her.”

“So you’ll go to Fiormonte in hatred? To such a beautiful village? No, Ignazio, that would be wrong.”

“Then I’ll go to Newark, New Jersey.”

“Newark? Why Newark?”

“Goomah Katie lives there.”

“Goomah Katie has five sons of her own.”

“She’d take me in.”

“Maybe. But even so, I don’t think you’d like Newark.”

“You know why this happened?”

“Why?”

“Because somebody put the Evil Eye on me.”

“Who told you that?”

“Aunt Victoria.”

“Aunt Victoria is a fool. There’s no such thing as the Evil Eye.”

“Mama sent me there because I was coughing, and she wanted to find out if somebody’d taken me by eyes, and Aunt Victoria dropped the oil in the water, and held the plate under my chin, and it made eyes.”

“That’s because oil and water don’t mix.”

“It don’t always make eyes, Grandpa.”

“No, only half the time.”

“Well, that’s what it was, anyway, Grandpa. The Evil Eye.”

“Ignazio, don’t talk like a greaseball, eh?”

“Miss Goodbody says ‘greaseball’ is a bad word.”

“Miss Goodbody is a Jew like Roosevelt. What does she know?”

“Are Jews bad, Grandpa?”

“Roosevelt is bad.”

“But I like Miss Goodbody.”

“That’s right, you should like your teacher.”

“Even if she’s a Jew?”

“There are good Jews and bad Jews. Roosevelt is a bad Jew.”

“Why?”

“Because he says bad things about Mussolini.”

“Is Mussolini good?”

“Mussolini is very good.”

“Then why does Miss Goodbody say bad things about him, too?”

“Because she’s a Jew.”

“Grandpa... was Jesus a Jew?”

“No.”

“Miss Goodbody says he was a Jew.”

“She’s lying.”

“He wasn’t?”

“He was Italian.”

That afternoon, I tried everything I knew on my grandfather. First I agreed with him that the only good people in the world were Italians, hoping this would soften him up enough to take me to Italy. I reminded him that in Fiormonte you could eat off the streets, whereas in Harlem you lived in peril of your very life, witness the brutal beating I had suffered at the hands of six hundred Ethiopian savages on Park Avenue that time, remember? My grandfather said that October was not a good time to be going to Fiormonte, and when I asked him why not October, he said, “April is better.” So I asked him to call Goomah Katie in Newark, New Jersey, and tell her he was bringing me there to stay with her, and explain to her that I was no trouble at all even though I was blind, I was just a quiet little kid who played nice piano, and I would be a definite asset to her household, and my grandfather said, “Goomah Katie doesn’t have a piano.”

I then suggested that he could perhaps talk to my mother and convince her either to get Vesuvio back from the ASPCA or else buy me another dog, and I even offered a sort of bribe by promising I’d go to the opera with him sometime if only he would talk to my mother. My grandfather said, “I don’t like to interfere in your mother’s house.” So I said it might be a good idea if he told my mother she was no longer welcome in his house if she didn’t get my dog back or get me another dog, and he said, “She’s always welcome in my house, Ignazio, the same as you.” I told him I was a poor little blind kid who needed something furry and loyal to love me, and he said, “You’re not poor and you’re not little, and your mother loves you more than Vesuvio ever could.” So then I hinted that my piano lessons might suffer if I didn’t have man’s best friend around to stroke and pet while I ran over the pieces in my head, and he said, “Professor Passaro doesn’t have a dog,” and finally I said, “Gee, Grandpa, I thought you loved me,” which was my last desperate stab at getting that damn dog back, or getting another dog, or getting out of the city, and my grandfather said, “I do love you, Ignazio. But a dog is a dog, and a family is a family.” I’m surprised he didn’t add, “And a good cigar is a smoke,” because he lit up one of his guinea stinkers at that point, perhaps to signal that the debate was over, and then he said, “Stay home, have a cup of hot chocolate, okay?”

So I decided to stay.

I used to hide a lot. Under the dining room table, or under the bed, or in the closet — I think it made me feel less blind. I’m not sure why that was true. I think an enclosed space, a tight small space, was somehow less threatening to me. I was hiding under my Uncle Luke’s bed on Christmas Day. In the kitchen, the women were doing the dishes, except for my Aunt Victoria, who was playing cards with the men in the dining room. I could hear their voices and the sound of Pino tuning his mandolin, and in the kitchen the rattle of dishes and the metallic clatter of utensils. I lay flat on my back under Luke’s bed, and listened.

“Does anybody want more coffee?” my grandmother asked.

“No, thank you, Mom,” Matty said.

“You deal,” my father said.

“Somebody’s light,” Dominick said.

“Me,” Luke said.

“Aunt Victoria? You in?”

“I’m in.”

Aunt Victoria was a chord I would not learn till years later, a D-flat dominant, augmented nine, augmented eleven — shrill, disssonant, sharp, and irritating. She was my grandmother’s other sister, a spinster, as hard and ungiving as Bianca was soft and generous. I didn’t like her. Nobody liked her. My mother said Aunt Victoria was the way she was because she was constipated. When Tony heard this, he suggested that we buy her a tin of Ex-Lax for Christmas. Tony and I both hated Ex-Lax. As a weekly routine in our house we were given one laxative or another each Saturday night before we went to bed. Ex-Lax or milk of magnesia or citrate of magnesia. They were all terrible. But being an American meant being regular.

“What do you say, Aunt Victoria? Can you open or not?”

“I pass.”

“I’ll open for a penny,” Luke said.

“Without me.”

“Cristie, are you bringing in that pastry?”

“Hold your horses.”

“Raise it a penny.”

“Out.”

“I’ll see you.”

“Cards.”

Pino began playing an Italian song. His son Tommy, who was twenty-one years old and reportedly as handsome as his mother had been beautiful, immediately began singing along with his father, and then my grandfather joined in, and the three of them together sang at the tops of their voices while the poker game continued around them. In the kitchen, the women talked above the noise of the game and the doubtful harmony of the singers. For Christmas, my brother Tony had given me a pair of woolen gloves to keep my hands warm when I went up to Passaro’s with him each Saturday, and my Uncle Luke had given me a black leather fleece-lined aviator’s helmet with goggles on it, and my grandfather had made me a brand-new mackinaw, and my parents had bought me electric trains with an engine that whistled, and I was thinking maybe I should get out from under the bed and go play with the trains my father had set up for me in the front room of Grandpa’s house, when all of a sudden I heard the sound of cards being slapped onto the tabletop, and my Uncle Luke yelled, “Son of a bitch!”

My grandfather and Pino stopped singing. Tommy’s voice hung in the silence for just an instant longer.

“Hey!” my grandfather said.

“She stays in the game when she hasn’t got anything, and ruins my draw!” Luke said.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?”

“I hate to play with goddamn women in the game.”

“I put in my money, didn’t I?” Aunt Victoria said, and then very calmy added, “I deal, I believe. If you don’t like playing with women, just drop out, sonny boy.”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“That’s obvious.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Take it how you want it.”

“What’d she mean by that crack?”

“Play cards, play cards,” my grandfather said.

“No, what’d she mean?”

“I meant that someone who’s thirty-two years of age should at least be engaged by now.”

“What business is it of yours?”

“Luke!” my grandmother called from the kitchen. “That’s your aunt you’re talking to.”

“What do I care who she is? Tell her to mind her own business.”

“Hey, come on, Luke...”

“You keep out of this, Doc!”

“Ah, now we’re getting to it!” Aunt Victoria said. “Do you hear how he talks to his own brother?”

“He’s my brother, I can talk to him any way I...”

“Certainly. You think I don’t know why?”

“Are we playing cards here, or what?” my father asked.

“It’s because you’re jealous of him,” Aunt Victoria said. “He’s the one who went to college, he’s the one who’s engaged already....”

“Come on, who’s dealing?” Matty said.

“You’re not fooling me, sonny boy,” Aunt Victoria said. “You think I don’t know what’s eating you? You think I was born yesterday?”

“Why the hell don’t you go home?” Luke said.

“Tessie, are you listening to this?” Aunt Victoria said.

“Luke, that’s your aunt!”

“So who asked her to come here?”

“I did!” my grandfather said, and suddenly everyone fell silent. “Is this a family?” he asked. “Is this a family on Christmas?” No one answered. “Victoria, you talk too much, you always did. Luke, apologize to your aunt.”

“What for?”

“Because she’s your aunt.”

“She can go straight to hell!” Luke said, and stormed out of the room and into his bedroom, where I was hiding under the bed. He slammed the door, went directly to the piano, and began playing loudly and angrily. In a moment, my grandfather came into the room and closed the door again behind him.

“Hey,” he said. “Stop the piano a minute. Listen to me.”

“Leave me alone, Pop.”

“Come on, what’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Just leave me alone, Pop, okay?”

“You want to go to college?” my grandfather said.

“No,” Luke answered. His hands stopped, the sound of the piano stopped.

“If you want to go to college, I’ll send you to college.”

“I’m thirty-two years old, Pop,” Luke said. His voice was very low. From where I lay under the bed I could barely hear him.

“So? Your brother is twenty-five.”

“He’s a lawyer already. Anyway, that ain’t it.”

“Then what?” my grandfather asked. “Tell me.”

“The hell with it.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s just...” Luke said, and hesitated. I held my breath in the silence. “Pop,” he said at last. “I don’t know where I’m going.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t want to be a presser, that’s for sure. I’m sorry, Pop, but...”

“All right. What do you want to be?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can be anything you like. In this country, you can be anything.”

“Sure,” Luke said. “Do you believe that, Pop?”

My grandfather did not answer. There was another long silence. Then my grandfather said, “What is it, figlio mio, what?”

“You think I don’t try to get girls?” Luke said suddenly and passionately. “Look at me, Pop. I’m a skinny marink, I’m cockeyed without my glasses; you think I don’t try?”

“You’re a very handsome boy,” my grandfather said. “You take after my cousin Rodolfo in Fiormonte, may he rest in peace. He was very tall like you, and very handsome.”

“Yeah.”

“In Fiormonte, the girls would go crazy for you.”

“This ain’t Fiormonte, it’s Harlem. You know what they call me?”

“What?”

“Stretch. They call me Stretch.”

“So?”

“So how would you like to be called Stretch?”

“What does that mean, Stretch?”

“Well... skinny, I guess.”

“You know what they called me when I was young?”

“What?” Luke said.

“Ciuco. That means donkey. It means jackass.”

“Why’d they call you that?”

“I have big ears. Listen, you see your mother? She was a beauty, even more beautiful than Angelina, may she rest in peace, who was Pino’s wife. Do you think your mother cared about my ears?” My grandfather paused, and then said, “You want to go to college?”

“It’s too late, Pop,” Luke said.

“If you don’t want to work in the tailor shop, you don’t have to.”

“What would I do, Pop?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said.

From under the bed, I wanted to shout, “Tell him, Uncle Luke! Tell him you want to have a band! Tell him you asked my father for a job in the band! Please, Uncle Luke, tell him!”

Luke did not tell him. He simply said, again, “I don’t know.”

“All right, don’t worry,” my grandfather said. “You’ll find something. Something will please you. And you’ll find a woman, too, and she’ll love you, don’t worry. Now come in the other room. Make up with your aunt. She doesn’t realize.”

“Do you realize, Pop?”

“Maybe,” my grandfather answered. “Come,” he said. “It’s your family in there.”

They went out of the room, and I lay still arid thoughtful under the bed. Pino began playing his mandolin again, and soon there was laughter.

There are many different ways of approaching the same tune. I usually play it the way I feel it, but I try nonetheless to keep in mind the composer’s intent. I would never, for example, take the outrageous liberties Barbra Streisand took with “Happy Days Are Here Again,” however spectacular the result may have been. Nor would I rob any tune of its emotional content by imposing upon it a technical virtuosity that might be dazzling but essentially false to the mood. It’s one thing to know your tools; it’s quite another to use those tools so cold-bloodedly that they render the tune meaningless. There are thousands of tunes in my head, a veritable catalog of chord charts and melodies. Pick a tune, any tune (almost), and I will sit down at the piano and play it for you in all twelve keys. In fact, I don’t feel I really know a song unless I can play it in all twelve keys. To a jazz musician, that’s not a particularly impressive accomplishment. Once he knows the chart, he can transpose it to any key and tack on the melody in that new key. The melody is unimportant to the jazz musician. When you hear him say, “Oh, that’s a great tune,” he’s not referring to the melody. He is referring to the chord progression. He will, in fact, play the melody in the so-called head chorus only to orient the audience, and then will improvise entirely new melodies in the second chorus and each succeeding chorus. But I’ll immediately turn a deaf ear to those musicians who try to transmogrify a keyboard or a horn into a laboratory. At the piano, I could give you (though it would pain me) a fair demonstration of a coldly antiseptic atonal style, and you might even enjoy it, who knows? But music to me is something quite more than a sterile unraveling. For example, I would never play “Tina in the Closet” in the following manner:

It had been a sin to develop a hard-on while standing behind Tina, who was after all my Uncle Dominick’s sister-in-law. (I learned to call it a hard-on and not a hot iron at about the same time I learned it was a sin to have one.) It was a sin to throw away bread, according to my mother. She always kissed a crust of stale bread before throwing it into the garbage can. She still does. It was a sin not to eat what was on my plate while people in China were starving. It was a sin to make fun of anybody.

“Then why do they make fun of me in the street,” I asked, “and call me blind names and make believe they pinned something on my back, when they didn’t?”

“What blind names?” she asked.

“They call me Orbo the Kid.”

“What?” my mother asked. “What’s that supposed to mean? Who’s Orbo the Kid?”

“Orbo means blind.”

“Who told you that?”

“Grandpa.”

“What does he know, he’s a greaseball,” my mother said.

“Mama, orbo is an Italian word. Orbo. It means blind.”

“So what?” she said. “What’s wrong being called Orbo the Kid? It’s like Vinny the Mutt.”

“It’s different,” I said.

“How is it different?”

“Vinny works for Western Union, don’t he? And a guy who delivers telegrams is called a mutt, and that’s why he’s Vinny the Mutt.”

“So you’re blind, and orbo means blind, and you’re Orbo the Kid. I don’t see any difference at all.”

“You know who picks on me the most?”

“Who?”

“Rocco, who’s crippled.”

“Well,” my mother said.

“You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna call him Gimpy.”

“What for?”

“That means when you limp.”

“No,” my mother said, “don’t do that. That’s a sin, Iggie.”

My brother had started a collection of records he jealously guarded, running over to my grandfather’s house to play them in private on the big wind-up Victrola in the front room. I think if my mother knew Tony took Letitia up there with him every Friday afternoon, she would have considered that a sin, too. I kept bothering him to let me hear his records, and finally he told me why he couldn’t.

“Letitia says I shouldn’t let you hear them.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it’s personal.”

“What is?”

“Hearing the records.”

“Well, you let her hear the records, don’t you?”

“That’s right, that’s what’s personal.”

“Well, I’m your own brother,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“Blood is thicker than water,” I said, quoting my mother.

“Yeah, but this is different, Igg.”

If truth be known, I was more interested in hearing about all the things Tony and Letitia did together than I was in hearing his latest Count Basie single. Tony rarely talked about her anymore, though, and I could only imagine what was going on in my grandfather’s front room each Friday while the curved speaker blared Glen Gray and the Casa Loma. My fantasies were invariably the same. In them, Tony was standing behind Letitia and rubbing up against her while he reached around with both hands and unbuttoned her blouse button by button and then unclasped her brassiere, which I already knew how to do with brassieres that didn’t have girls inside them because I handled a lot of brassieres in my Aunt Bianca’s shop. Since his records were intimately linked with those Friday-afternoon sessions, Tony must have feared that if he let me listen to them I might catch a whiff of early-adolescent musk mixed in with the sound of Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.”

Or maybe he was afraid I’d disparage the music he loved so much. It occurs to me that this was a real danger at the time. Only once had I asked Passaro to get me the sheet music for a song I’d heard on the radio, during one of Benny Goodman’s Saturday-night broadcasts. The tune was “You Turned the Tables on Me.” Helen Ward sang it, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live, not because it’s a great tune but because of the storm it fomented. Passaro dismissed it as inconsequential, and in fact went so far as to say it was not music at all.

“It makes me sad,” he said, “to think you would even consider suggesting to me that I get a piece for you that could be played not only by an organ grinder, but possibly by his monkey as well.”

“Okay, Mr. Passaro,” I said.

“It makes me more than sad,” he said. “It grieves me, it hurts me here,” he said, and realized I couldn’t see what he was doing, and quickly added, “It pains me in my heart,” and struck his chest with his closed fist so that I could hear the grieving, painful, hollow thump, “to think that perhaps I’m wrong about you, Ignazio, perhaps you are not serious about the piano after all, perhaps you are not willing to sacrifice yourself to your destiny.”

“All right, Mr. Passaro,” I said.

“No, it’s not all right,” he said, his voice rising. He was pacing, his heels clicking along the parquet floor; I sat at the piano with my hands in my lap, and wished I’d never heard of Benny Goodman. “Not all right at all, Ignazio! For what have we been studying and practicing these past two years, more than two years? For what? So you can come to me with a request for trash, ask me to procure for you a piece of junk I would not allow in my house except to start a fire in the stove with! Am I a procurer of trash for you, of junk, am I a man who would insult my own integrity and be unfaithful to your promise as a musician by allowing you to...”

“All right, all right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“More than sorry is what you must be!” Passaro shouted. “I hear that junk, that trash, and it gives me pains in the chest,” he said. “The drums, ba-dohm, ba-dohm, ba-dohm, and the cornets making noise, and the saxophones, ah-waah, waah, waah! Never!” he shouted. “Giammai!” reverting to Italian, which he rarely did. “And the piano? Is that how to treat a piano? A piano? What is it they do with the piano? Is that what you wish to do with the piano, Ignazio? Do you wish to tinkle? Then go tinkle in the bathroom, not here, not where we study music! Do you want to play in Carnegie Hall, or do you want to play in the Paramount movie house downtown? Decide. Decide now. I have no time to waste with ungrateful people to whom I am devoting all of my energy and all of my years of musical experience. Decide, Ignazio!”

“I already decided,” I said.

“And what is your decision?”

“I want to play in Carnegie Hall.”

“Then never again ask me to...”

“I won’t, I promise.”

“Never.”

“I promise, really.”

“All right,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Did you practice this week? Or were you too busy listening to Benny Goodmans?”

“I practiced a lot.”

“How long?”

“Three hours every day.”

“Did you learn the Mozart?”

“Yes, Mr. Passaro.”

“All ten variations?”

“Yes, Mr. Passaro.”

“Clean? Or sloppy as usual?”

“Clean,” I said.

“Play them.”

The swing bands were, of course, as binding an ingredient in the mortar of the myth as were the radio and the movies and the comic strips and the jive talk already filtering its way into the streets (“That’s icky, Iggie”), all of them reinforcing the sense of unity of a nation that was coping with the more serious business of pulling itself slowly out of the pit. I might have been as captured by the new sound as my brother Tony, had it not been for Passaro. Nor am I talking about his aversion to swing. Any classical musician might have been put off by swing. I am talking about an idea he implanted in my head, an idea intricately bound up with a myth entirely alien to him, and in keeping with everything I believed to be American.

Passaro thought I was a musical genius.

It’s a common feeling for blind musicians to believe they’re more talented than musicians who can see, but when this fallacy is reinforced by a teacher who’s beginning to believe you’re Busoni reincarnated, and telling your mother you’re going to burst upon the performing world in ten years (make it eight, make it six!) with such dynamic force that the reverberations will be felt and heard all over the world; and when you couple this with the only proposition in the American Dream that is still valid (but only if you’re free, white, and thirty-five), phrased for simplicity’s sake as “Anyone can become President of these United States!” — why, man, you have got to begin believing you are something special.

I was something special.

Me.

Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo.

I was already into stuff like Bact’s French and English Suites (not all the movements, but some of them), and his two-part inventions, and able to analyze them harmonically as I played them. I knew every chord on that keyboard (or thought I did until I began playing jazz), knew their primary, secondary, and tertiary functions, knew their patterns of progression and their categories of motion, knew modulation and transposition, and was improvising my own little tunes, upon which I was already writing variations. I was playing movements from Beethoven sonatas while working simultaneously on Chopin’s Opus 72, Number 1 in E Minor, and I was pounding my Czerny and my Hanon like crazy, and I was going to prove that in America all men are created equal, and even the blind grandson of a poor but humble tailor could rise to spectacular heights and achieve fame and fortune if only I ate my Wheaties and faithfully decoded Little Orphan Annie’s messages, and didn’t rub up against plump little girls in coat closets, which was a sin, and didn’t say “nigger” or “Jew,” which was un-American and probably also a sin, and practiced the piano hard, and stopped bringing Passaro requests for trash and junk, and just stuck to being what I was and what I was destined to become — a goddamn musical genius!

I’m now forty-eight years old, and I know I’m not a genius. I also know that even shleppers and shmucks are rewarded in this great land of ours. But then? Ah, then.

Where else but in America? I thought

Where else.

When the Muscular Action Federation to Intensify Anxiety came around to see my grandfather, I was in the shop telling him and my grandmother about two new pieces Passaro had given me. I was sitting in the window seat, as usual. The bell over the door tinkled, and a man said, “Mr. Di Lorenzo?”

“Yes?” my grandfather answered.

I turned toward the door. Whoever the man was, he had not closed the door behind him. He was standing just inside it, and a cold February wind was swirling into the shop.

“We’d like to talk to you, Mr. Di Lorenzo,” another man said.

“Close the door,” my grandfather said.

The men did not close the door. The one who had spoken first now said, “Mr. Di Lorenzo, we’ll make this short and sweet, okay? Your son-in-law tells us you ain’t interested in our proposition.”

“That’s right,” my grandfather said.

“What proposition?” my grandmother asked.

“Mr. Di Lorenzo, you’d better get interested, okay?”

“Why? So I can give you fifty percent of what I...”

“We’ll take forty.”

“No. I give you nothing.”

“Mr. Di Lorenzo, you wouldn’t believe the things that could happen to a tailor shop.”

“Are you Italian?” my grandfather asked.

“I was born right here in Harlem,” the man answered.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m Italian, yeah.”

“Then leave me alone.”

“This is nothing personal, Mr. Di Lorenzo.”

“To me, it’s personal,” my grandfather answered.

“It can get a lot more personal, believe me,” the other man said. “What do you say?”

“I say no.”

“We’ll be back, Mr. Di Lorenzo, okay?” the first one said.

“You can expect us,” the other one said, and they went out of the shop and closed the door.

“Tell me,” my grandmother said.

So he told her.

My Uncle Matt had come to him two weeks back and said he wanted to discuss a private matter. The way my grandfather reported the conversation, it had gone something like this:

“These guys I play cards with... you know the guys?”

“The crooks,” my grandfather said.

“Well, they ain’t bad guys, Pop. They gave back the stuff that time, didn’t they?”

“If they hadn’t taken it in the first place,” my grandfather said, “they wouldn’t have had to give it back.” “Well, they didn’t know it was Luke and Dom, you know how it is. Anyway, we were playing the other night, and... they had a sort of idea.”

“What idea?”

“They were thinking they might want to get in the dry-cleaning business, you know what I mean?”

“What for?”

“It’s a good business,” Matty said

“Who says?”

“Well, you ain’t exactly starving, are you, Pop?”

“I’m a tailor, that’s why I’m not starving.”

“Yeah, Pop, I know, but...”

“Tell them dry cleaning is a lousy business.”

“Well, they don’t think so, Pop. They really want to get in it, Pop.”

“So let them get in it,” my grandfather said.

“These guys, Pop, they had your business in mind.”

“They want to buy my business? Ma perchè? Sono pazzi questi tuoi amici?”

“Not buy.”

“Then what?”

“They want to come in with you, Pop.”

“Come in?”

“In the business. They want to be your partners.”

“I don’t need partners. I got a partner already. Tessie’s my partner. I don’t need no more partners.”

“Well, they think you do, Pop. Need some partners.”

“Tell them I don’t.”

“They want fifty percent.”

“I’ll give them fifty percent of shit,” my grandfather said.

“Pop... they could make trouble.”

“Let them make it.”

“You don’t know these guys.”

“No only you know them, Matty.”

“Look, they might be willing to talk, you know? Settle maybe for forty percent, or even thirty.”

“Of what?” my grandfather asked. “My life? This shop is my life. Tell them to go to hell, all of them.”

“Pop, you’re making a mistake.”

“They’re making the mistake,” my grandfather said. “These guys don’t fool around. They want something...”

“I came from the other side with nothing thirty-six years ago,” my grandfather said. “Senti? Nothing. I was twenty years old; I came with nothing, I found nothing. Now I have something. And I’m not giving fifty percent of it to anybody — or forty percent, or thirty percent, or anything. Tell them no. You hear me. Tell these cafoni that Di Lorenzo the tailor said no.”

My grandmother listened, and then said, “Give them what they want, Frank.”

“I’ll give them nothing,” he said.

“Frank...”

“Nothing.”

They came back the very next morning, a Sunday, and smashed the plate-glass window of the shop. When they called my grandfather on the telephone Monday morning, he told them the answer was still no. So on Monday night, they pried loose the boards my grandfather had nailed across the broken window, and they went into the shop with cans of paint, and spilled the paint all over the clothes hanging on the racks, and all over the Salvation Army uniforms he’d been cutting in the back of the shop, paint as red as blood. He told them no again. On Saturday night, a week after they had first visited his shop, they broke in again and slashed the pads on the pressing machine, and broke the treadle on the sewing machine, and put the blades of his big cutting shears between the floorboards and snapped them off, and shattered the face of the hanging wall clock, and ripped down the flowered curtain dividing the front of the shop from the back, and pinned a Salvation Army jacket to the counter with a knife sticking up just below the left breast pocket, where the heart was. When they called my grandfather again on Monday morning, he told them the answer was still no. He told them there was nothing left for them to do but cripple him or kill him, and if they did that there would be no more tailor. And if there was no more tailor, there was no more business. And forty percent of nothing was nothing. They left him alone after that. I guess they considered him small potatoes, a waste of their valuable time. In frustration, they beat up my Uncle Matt, and stopped playing cards with him, and made it impossible for him to get a medallion for his own cab, even though he’d been saving for one and had been assured a fix was in.

I tell this story not to illustrate the wisdom of my mother’s “There are good and bad in every kind.” I am not a press agent for the good wops in America, who know as well as I that most of the men in organized crime are bad wops. Nor do I have any desire to disprove the specious reasoning in the syllogism (1) All men are crooks; (2) Most crooks are Italians; (3) Therefore all Italians are crooks. I’ll leave that to the politicians massaging the voters in Italian ghettos. I’ll leave that to the men who compile the long lists of marvelous contributions Italians have made to American life, starting all the way back with Amerigo Vespucci, and continuing on upward through Cristoforo Colombo, and Frank Sinatra and Mario Puzo and, according to my father, Burt Lancaster. (“Burt Lancaster is Italian, did you know that, Ike?”) Dwight Jamison is Italian, did you know that, Pop? Who the hell cares what they are?

Nor does this anecdote have much to do with the care and feeding of the myth, except perhaps tangentially, since the myth was nurtured by the Eighteenth Amendment, which made it a crime for Americans to manufacture or to consume alcoholic beverages, thereby creating a nation of lawbreakers dedicated to the pursuit of booze and unifying us on a level somewhat removed from Ken Maynard’s horse. A side effect of prohibition was the emergence and spectacular rise of a gangster elite who supplied the booze drunk by the honest lawbreakers in the speaks. Those men went out of the whiskey and beer business in December of 1933, when the amendment was repealed. This was February of 1937, and that was all water under the bridge (so to speak), and who could blame those erstwhile distillers and distributors for seeking other business opportunities like the one my grandfather’s shop seemed to offer, and besides, that’s not the point at all, not even tangentially.

Well, then, Ike, you’re the one with the selective memory, you’re the one differentiating between the strong left-hand chords and the wispy sprinklings in the right hand. Why does this particular event (which happens to be true, but no matter) seem overwhelmingly important to the development of your theme, whereas Aunt Bianca’s corset shop got the ethereal “September in the Rain” treatment? Are you trying to demonstrate that your grandfather was a courageous man, which undoubtedly he was? Are you trying to indicate that his act of defiance was uncommonly risky in that it might just as easily have led to his untimely demise, causing him to wake up one dismal February morning with an ice pick sticking out of his ear? What are your motives, Ike baby?

Ulterior, I’m sure.

Jane Austen is reputed to have said, “I write about love and money. What else is there to write about?” Maybe that’s all there is to write about in England, lady. This is America. I played the head chorus back there in 1901, when my grandfather came to these shores, but that was only to identify the tune. This is the second chorus, this is where you have to start paying attention. I’m transposing and improvising at the same time. And in America, we have transposed the word love to mean sex, we have transposed the word money to mean power, and power means violence, and sex and violence often mean the same damn thing. Those nice guys who smashed my grandfather’s window and spilled paint on the clothes and ripped up the pressing machine and broke the sewing machine (and later Matty’s head) were just learning to be American, that’s all, and were perhaps more foresighted than all the rest of us who were learning to be American at the same time. If they had been true forerunners, of course, true innovators, true seminal figures, they’d have taken the next logical step, thereby distilling sex and violence into its purest native essence. For reasons known only to themselves, however, they stopped short of buggery.

Richard Palumbo didn’t.

We moved to the Bronx in April of 1937, three weeks after Richard Palumbo buggered Basilio Silese in the locker room of the Boys’ Club on 110th Street.

Coincidentally, my father was appointed a regular at about the same time Richard decided to broaden the scope of his sexual activity; I’m not sure which of the two events motivated the move to the Bronx. I rather suspect it was the buggery, which my brother Tony was obliged to report in detail to my mother when we got back to the apartment on 120th Street. I did not know until then that my brother’s nose was bleeding, or that his left eye was swollen and partially closed. I had sat on a bench in the locker room throughout the entire terrifying experience, still dripping wet from the swimming pool, a towel draped over my lap, listening to sounds; jerking my head from left to right, trying to understand what was happening, knowing only that it was something unspeakably horrible, and realizing suddenly that my brother Tony had become involved. Now, in the kitchen of our apartment on 120th Street, I listened to my mother’s terse interrogation and Tony’s reluctant responses, and began to piece together the story and became frightened all over again.

“What happened?” my mother said,

“Nothing,” Tony answered.

“Nothing? Your nose is bleeding, look at your eye, what happened?”

“I had a fight.”

“Where?”

“At the Boys’ Club.”

“Who with?”

“Richard Palumbo.”

“Why?”

“Forget it, Mom,” Tony said.

“What happened, Iggie?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Somebody better start knowing,” my mother said. “What happened, Tony?”

“I told you. I had a fight. Now that’s it, Mom, so let’s forget it, okay?”

“Why’d you have a fight?”

“How do I know why?”

“Iggie?”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

“Where at the Boys’ Club?”

“In the locker room,” Tony said.

“I thought you and Richard Palumbo were friends.”

“We are.”

“Then why’d you have a fight with him?”

“I don’t know why. We just had a fight, that’s all.”

“When was this?”

“After we came out of the water.”

We have been swimming for close to an hour. We come to the club every Saturday, carrying woolen swim trunks and towels with us. We change in the locker room and then spend an hour in the pool, after which we dry ourselves and dress again and go home. Even in the summer months, my brother takes me to the Boys’ Club to swim because the public pool in Jefferson Park is too crowded. A man blows a whistle at the deep end of the pool, near the diving board, when it is time for us to come out of the water. That means our hour is up, and they’ll now let another batch of kids into the pool. In the summer months, they let us swim as long as we want because not so many kids are there. But this is April.

“You came out of the water...”

“We came out of the water, and we went into the locker room, and a fight started, and that’s it. I got homework to do, Mom. If you don’t mind...”

“Your homework can wait. You went in the locker room, and then what?”

“I told you.”

“You didn’t tell me!”

“We went in the locker room, and the guys started fooling around, and a fight started between me and Richard. That’s what happened. Okay? Can I go do my homework now?”

“Fooling around how?” my mother asked.

“Just fooling around. The way we always do.”

“How?”

I can hear the slap of wet feet against the tiled floor of the locker room. My brother, who always dresses much faster than I, has gone to the office to find out when we have to renew our membership cards. My locker door is open, the smell of contained sweat assails my nostrils a foot from the bench upon which I sit drying myself. There is laughter in the echoing room, and shouted obscenities, and bellowed lines from popular songs. Someone yells, “Hey, Basilio, watch your ass!”

“Look, Mom, there’s a lot of fooling around goes on in a locker room.”

“This is the first I’m hearing about it,” my mother said. “What kind of fooling around?”

“Like they hide your clothes sometimes, or they tie your shoelaces in knots, or rub chewing gum in your hair... like that.”

“Very nice,” my mother said. “Is that what Richard did?”

“No.”

“Then what did he do?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why did you have a fight?”

I know the sound of a wet towel being snapped, and I also know the feel of that fiery lash against my backside. Being blind saves me from most childhood cruelties, but occasionally someone will whip his towel at me from behind, without realizing I am his target, and then immediately apologize — Gee, Iggie, I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was you.”

Basilio Silese is the target today.

“He was giving Basilio the towel.”

“What do you mean?”

“Richard. He was hitting Basilio with the wet towel.”

“Hitting him?”

“His ass.”

“His what?”

“His behind, I’m sorry.”

“I still don’t understand you.”

“Mom, he was snapping the towel at him. Like a whip, like cracking a whip at his behind. And I came in, I was up in the office, and I told him to stop, and he wouldn’t, so I hit him.”

“Why did you butt in?”

“He was... hurting Basilio.”

I hear only the snap of the towel each time it connects with Basilio’s flesh. He screams and tries to run away but Richard, whose voice I now recognize, keeps crooning, “Watch your ass, Basilio,” and whick, the towel snaps out yet another time, and Basilio shrieks again, and there is the sound of bare feet slapping on the tiles as he tries to escape. There are more boys after him now, I hear towels snapping at him wherever I turn my head. I am becoming frightened. “Watch your ass, Basilio!” and whick, and another shriek of pain, and the sound of running feet, someone slipping to the tile floor, “Watch your ass, Basilio!” and someone shouting, “Richard has a hard-on!” and then all of them chanting the words into the echoing room, “Richard has a hard-on, Richard has a hard-on,” and then sudden silence.

“He was hurting him with the towel?” my mother said.

“Yes.”

“So you hit him, is that right?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“You’re lying, Tony.”

“I’m telling you the God’s honest truth, may I drop dead on the floor if I’m lying.”

Basilio is struggling. The locker room is ominously still except for the grunts that come from the floor not six feet from where I am sitting. “Hold still, you fuckin’ pansy!” Richard says, and Basilio murmurs, “Please, please don’t,” and someone says, “Give it to him, Richie.” Silence. A single sharp penetrating scream shatters the brittle stillness, and then there is the sound of labored breathing and another sound like the whimper of a wounded animal. From the jar end of the room my brother Tony yells, “Hey, what are you doing there?” No one answers. I hear Basilio sobbing. I hear Richard’s harsh rhythmic breathing. “Get off him,” Tony says. His sneakers are hitting the tiled floor as he runs toward the bench. “Get off him!” he shrieks.

“How was he hurting him?” my mother asked

“I told you. With the towel.”

“What was he doing to Basilio?”

“He was hitting him with the towel.”

“And that’s why you butt in?”

“Yes.”

“Tony, why are you lying to me?”

“I’m not,” Tony said, and began crying. “I’m not, Mom, I swear.”

“What happened? Tell me everything that happened.”

“He was giving it to Basilio in the ass,” Tony said in a rush, and then he must have thrown himself into my mother’s arms because his next words were muffled.

My manager, a man named Mark Aronowitz (who doesn’t call too often these days), is fond of describing business deals in sexual terms.

“Look, Ike, the offer is fifteen hundred a week, and that’s it. I can tell you they’ll go to three grand, but what’s the sense of jerking ourselves off?”

Or: “I know the Cleveland gig is a drag, you think I don’t know it? But it’s only for a week; am I asking you to marry the fucking joint?”

Or: “Don’t tell him it’s firm yet. Drummers are a dime a dozen. Feel around a little, decide whether you want to get in bed with him.”

Or (most frequently): “We’ve been screwed, Ike. Here’s the story....”

I sometimes try to imagine where Basilio Silese went from that day in the Boys’ Club locker room. Is he now a hopeless faggot wearing lavender satin gowns and mincing about in high-heeled slippers? Or has he gone the opposite route, screwing every female he can get his hands on in order to prove his own asshole is inviolate? It’s tough enough being a “man” in this country; Basilio certainly didn’t need a snotnosed thirteen-year-old locker-room stud seeding premature doubts before an audience of two dozen sighted kids and one blind bastard breathlessly listening to every grunt and moan. And what of Richard Palumbo? Did he ever consider his assault homosexual? Probably not. He was the man, you see, the bold attacker, the conquering hero till my brother Tony declared him villain of the piece. He was Richard Palumbo of the Mount-ees rather than Basilio Silese of the Mount-ed. He had cautioned, “Watch your ass, Basilio,” and in America that’s fair enough warning because if you don’t watch your ass, someone’s going to lay claim to it. “We’ve been screwed, Ike. Here’s the story...”

I still think back with horror upon what happened in that locker room thirty-seven years ago — thirty-seven years! And I know that Richard Palumbo’s assault upon Basilio Silese’s backside is linked in memory to my own innocent (Stop claiming it was so innocent! You got a hot iron, didn’t you? And a Russian one at that!) rubbing up against Tina, my aunt’s plump little sister. I don’t know much about writing, but I do know how to play the piano, and there are some tunes I won’t touch. Come to me with a request for “I Don’t Know Why,” and I’ll turn you down cold, and not only because it’s a lousy tune. For me it conjures Poe Park in the Bronx, where Tony took me just before he got sent overseas, telling me he’d fix me up with a girl, and indeed finding a big-breasted sixteen-year-old for me, who kept saying over and over again, “It’s amazing, it’s truly amazing, I never before realized a blind person could dance,” while leading me around the packed dance floor girdling the band shell, her guiding hand firm in the small of my back as we avoided collision after collision, Bobby Sherwood blowing the tune on his horn, and singing the lyrics in a lulling monotone. I sat on a bench with her later, and she said, “Take off your glasses, I want to see what a blind person’s eyes look like.” I got off the bench, and stumbled through the crowd, groping, until I reached the Grand Concourse and found the lamppost Tony had told me to wait by, in case we got separated.

Don’t ask me to play “I Don’t Know Why.” My fingers lock on the keyboard, and I can’t get through the first bar. And I guess if you ask me to play “Tina in the Closet,” another old favorite, I won’t play it as the passionate, enclosed, excruciatingly ecstatic awakening it was, but will play it exactly as I did earlier — as a takeoff on a tune, a facetiously scientific, emotionless rendering. Why? I don’t know why, but I do know why: because of what Richard Palumbo did.

If you’re still alive, Richard, and if by now you realize you’re dealing with Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo, and not Dwight Jamison, and if you further realize that it was my dear dead brother Tony who punched you in the mouth that day, I’m going to tell you that I also link his death to you and what you did. You’re a time machine, Richard. I climb into you climbing into Basilio, and I’m transported backward to my own excitement that day with Tina and am embarrassed by it, and then somebody wrenches the control switch and I’m propelled forward to the year 1943, and my brother Tony is now a full-fledged hero in the greatest homosexual enterprise ever invented, and he is killed, he is screwed, he is fucked in the ass at the age of nineteen years, six months, and six days.

Thanks for the memories, Richard.

The woman downstairs is named Stella Locchi. To differentiate her from Stella Di Palermo, who is my mother, the women on 217th Street call her Stella the Baker, which is her husband’s occupation. My mother becomes Stella the Mailman. I don’t think she likes this too much. In Harlem, where the name Mary was as common as the name Sarah on the Lower East Side, there had been a Mary the Street Cleaner, and a Mary the Barber, and a Mary the Electric Company, and a Mary the Mutt (who had married Vinny the Mutt), and a plethora of other Marys, including Mary the Virgin, who was not la Madonna but instead a spinster lady of eighty-seven, who lived alone in a room behind Carlo Fiaci’s candy store, and who was labeled with her own occupation rather than that of any kin, all of whom had predeceased her. But Stella was a very special name; there had not been a single other Stella in all the streets of the vicinanza, none that my mother knew, at least, and it irks her now to have to share her stardom with a Stella who owns the building we are living in, and from whose husband we buy our daily bread on White Plains Avenue. If my mother had known her prospective landlady would be a Stella, she would not have taken the apartment, even though it was close to the Santa Lucia School for the Blind.

Mrs. Locchi pointed this out to my mother the Saturday we went to see the apartment.

“I notice the little boy is blind,” she said. “There’s a blind school on Paulding Avenue, you know. It’s very good. He could walk there. Can he walk places by himself?”

“Yes, he can walk places by himself,” my mother said. I think her tone was lost on Stella the Baker, whose name and husband’s occupation we did not yet know; my mother can be as subtle as a pit viper when she so chooses. “He can also play the piano very nicely, and is being trained for Carnegie Hall,” she added, putting away the stiletto and bringing out the machete.

“My, my,” Mrs. Locchi said.

“I hope you don’t mind hearing the piano,” my mother said. “He practices sometimes three, four hours a day.”

“I love the piano,” Mrs. Locchi said. “My own son, Gerardo, plays the clarinet, and he’s only seven. He’s not blind, of course.”

“So few people are,” my mother answered.

“Your hubby is a mailman, is that right, Mrs. Di Palermo?”

“He’s a letter carrier,” my mother said, which probably sounded more American to her.

“There’s a post office on Gun Hill Road,” Mrs. Locchi said. “I’m not trying to push you into taking the apartment, but he could walk to work every morning. The Williamsbridge post office. Right on Gun Hill Road.”

“Well, right now, my husband is working as a regular at the Tremont station,” my mother said.

“But he could get a transfer, couldn’t he?” Mrs. Locchi asked.

“Yes, maybe.”

“How old are you, young man?” Mrs. Locchi said.

“Me?” I said.

“No, your brother here.”

“I’ll be thirteen in June,” Tony said.

“My, my, you’re big for your age,” Mrs. Locchi said. “What grade are you in?”

“I’ll be starting high school in September.”

“Oh, that’s too bad, because there’s a junior high right across the street. You could have walked right across the street to school each morning. Not that the high school is very far, either. Evander Childs. That’s on Gun Hill Road, a few blocks from the post office. Most of the kids on the block walk there, too.”

“How much is the apartment?” my mother asked.

“We’re asking thirty-five a month.”

“We’re paying twenty-six now.”

“Yes, but that’s Harlem,” Mrs. Locchi said. “Up the street, they’re asking forty dollars for only three rooms. This is five rooms when you count the sun porch, which you could use as a bedroom for one of the boys. Thirty-five a month isn’t a lot for this apartment. You go ask around, you’ll see.”

“It is convenient, I suppose,” my mother said.

“And there are plenty of kids on the block,” Mrs. Locchi said. “All ages. You sons will have plenty of kids to play with. It’s a nice neighborhood.”

“It seems very nice,” my mother said.

“Very quiet,” Mrs. Locchi said.

“Yes.”

“And no niggers,” she said.

“Negroes,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said, and patted me on the head, startling me half out of my wits because I hadn’t sensed her hand coming at me. “So you’re going to play at Carnegie Hall when you grow up. Isn’t that nice,” she said.

“Well, let me talk it over with my husband,” my mother said.

“I don’t want to rush you,” Mrs. Locchi said, “but a woman was here looking at the apartment just before you, and she said she’d call me back at seven tonight.”

“My husband works half a day Saturday,” my mother said. “I’ll call you early this afternoon.”

“If you’d like to leave a small deposit with me now, you can talk it over with your hubby, and then if you decide against it, I’ll return the money.”

“How much of a deposit?” my mother asked.

“Whatever you like,” Mrs. Locchi said. “Five dollars? I’ll tell you the truth, the woman who wants the apartment is German. I prefer an Italian family. You’re Italian, aren’t you?”

“I was born here,” my mother said, bridling.

“Oh, me, too,” Mrs. Locchi said, never once realizing how close she had come to blowing the deal.

Santa Lucia’s was indeed within walking distance, and after Tony had taken me there once or twice, I learned the route by heart, and got there and back without mishap every weekday morning and afternoon. There was one wide avenue, and also three side streets to cross before I got to the school. I sometimes had to wait a long time, especially in the winter, for someone to help me across the streets, but that didn’t bother me. I just busied myself playing piano inside my head, my books and my cane tucked under my arms, my hands nestled in the pockets of my mackinaw, my fingers moving against the felt linings. There were lots of pieces to play in my pockets. I had been playing piano for five years by then, the last almost-three of them under Passaro’s tutelage, and I was firmly convinced that I was a prodigy for whom nothing was too difficult. Preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier? Duck soup for eleven-year-old Ignazio Di Palermo. A Chopin etude, a Mozart sonata, a Debussy prelude, a Ravel pavanne, I had them all in my pockets and under my fingers. I was hot stuff.

Santa Lucia’s was a lot different from the Blind School in New York. At Santa Lucia’s, all the kids were either blind or only partially sighted, and this created a sense of unity that had been totally lacking in Manhattan, where fourteen of us were isolated from the sighted community and made to feel (though not through any fault of Miss Goodbody, bless her heart) like outcasts. There’s a certain similarity between being blind and being black, and I first felt its full impact in the forties, when I began playing jazz. It was then that I realized how dumb those kids on Park Avenue had been. They’d never once understood they were only beating up another nigger. My thinking has changed since the forties. Forget being blind; I now realize we’re all niggers. But back in 1937, during my first week at Santa Lucia’s, conditioned as I was by the Blind School, I tried some of the boastful cruelty that had proved so effective against the little blind bastards in Manhattan.

Fortified by Passaro’s promises, I immediately told my classmates that I was studying to be a concert pianist, and that pretty soon I’d be playing at Carnegie Hall. (You think I’m blind, don’t you? Heh-heh. You’re the ones who are blind. I’m going to play at Carnegie Hall.) The kids told me they thought that was great. Puzzled, I told them I was a musical genius, for Christ’s sake! So the kids asked our teacher if they could hear me play sometime, and Sister Margarita arranged for me to give a recital in the school auditorium. After the recital, all the kids came up and told me I was marvelous, and asked how long it had taken to learn to play that way, and one kid — a girl named Susan Koenig, who had the voice of an angel — held my hand in her own and gently patted it, and said she had never heard anything so beautiful in her life. I had played Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (which I announced as “Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia,” to make it sound even more impressive), and I was about to tell her that whereas perhaps I had made a few errors in the exceedingly difficult (in fact, ball-breaking, even to pianists who’ve been playing for half a lifetime) presto agitato movement, I had nonetheless tried it in public, even though I was still working on it — when one of the nuns came over. She introduced herself as Sister Monique and said she had never been able to overcome the first movement’s doubling effect in the right-hand octave, and that somehow the triplets always overwhelmed the melody, and she would be grateful to me if one day I showed her how I’d managed to achieve just the proper touch. I was a trifle flabbergasted. What was this place, anyway — a family?

Well, not quite. But pretty close to one. Santa Lucia’s had been started in 1906 in a four-room apartment in the West Farms section of the Bronx. The man who’d founded it had been blind himself, a devout Catholic who chose to name it after Santa Lucia of Syracuse, the patron saint of anyone afflicted with ophthalmia and other diseases of the eye. There are patron saints for everything and everyone, of course, but Lucy’s story is sort of interesting if you’ve got a minute. Apparently some young swain was so stricken by her gorgeous’ peepers that he told her he was unable to sleep at night, and unable to concentrate on what he was doing during the day. Taking her cue from Christ himself (“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out”), Lucy did just that, and sent both beautiful orbs to the young man, together with a message that read (according to usually well-informed sources), “Now you have what you desired, so leave me in peace!” The man became a Christian on the spot; Lord knows what he’d been before. And God, ever merciful, later returned Lucy’s eyes and her vision to her while she was at prayer.

In the early days, Santa Lucia’s had accepted only “legally blind children of the Catholic faith,” and had taught them through the sixth grade. But after the death of the founder in 1928, the trustees moved the school to its present location and expanded not only its physical plant but its restrictive entrance requirements as well. When I started there, it was still being administered by nuns, but it was fully accredited by the Regents of the State of New York, and it accepted any legally blind boy or girl over three years of age, regardless of race, creed, or color. That was nice. It fit perfectly into what I thought America was supposed to be. Santa Lucia’s, too, had recently become a six-six school, which meant that once I had completed my elementary-school education (I entered the sixth grade in September of 1937), I could continue my secondary education there for the next six years, without having to look around for another school. I loved Santa Lucia’s, but it took me four months to get my father to come to school and meet the nuns who were teaching me. When he finally did come, he stood silently by my side, and held my hand, and let them do all the talking. His hand was sweating.

For me, everything was beginning to fall into place, and everything seemed right. “If you think this is something, you shoulda seen Mamaroneck,” Tony said, but to me the Bronx was perfect. I loved the school, I loved the new neighborhood, and I especially loved a little girl across the street, with whom I went to the movies every Saturday, after my piano lesson. Her name was Michelle Dulac, and her father taught French at the junior high school. Tony would take me to my piano lesson, the ride to Passaro’s consuming a half hour of my brother’s burning time, and then he would wait impatiently in the other room while I played Chopin for the next hour, and then he would hurry me home again on the Third Avenue El, impatiently tapping his feet, scarcely able to speak. When we got back to the house at one or a little bit after, he would bolt down a sandwich and swallow a glass of milk in a long single gulp and dash out of the house again, running for the elevated station on 219th Street and White Plains Avenue. His destination? The fair Letitia, whose loss he mourned for a full eight months, his record collection growing in direct proportion to his grief. He never got to play his records for her anymore, because my grandmother took Saturdays off from the tailor shop, and the front room of her house was no longer as sacrosanct as it had been on those long Friday afternoons of yore. But neither did he play them for me. (To an Italian, even a third-generation American Italian, a vow is a vow.) My parents had given him a record player for his birthday-in June, and now that he had his own room, he would go in there and lock the door, and all I heard through the thick wooden panels were the forbidden muffled sounds of the pounding drums and the screaming trumpets and the moaning saxophones, and occasionally the sound of a thirteen-year-old crying.

My mother adored Michelle Dulac — naturally.

“Bonjour, Michelle,” she would say. “Comment allez-vous aujourd’hui?”

“Très bien, merci, et vous, Madame Di Palermo?”

“Comme ci, comme ça,” my mother would reply, beaming, and then, because Michelle and I were on our way to the movies, she would add, “Vite, vite, nous manquerons le match de football!”

At the movies, Michelle and I sat in the children’s section and watched (she watched, I listened to) six cartoons, two chapters, a newsreel, and two feature films starring the motion picture families of the various studios, and these blended in my mind to become one big movie family which in turn became a part of our family, the great American family that seemed to be proliferating wildly and uncontrollably and excitingly, the democratic experiment on the very edge of proving itself valid and enduring, the impurities burning off in the crucible of hard times easing, the residual mettle hardening into something glowing and impervious.

In the evenings, or on long summer afternoons when I’d finished my practicing or my homework, I went over to Michelle’s and she read to me aloud from her vast collection of comic books, introducing a whole new batch of families to add to those already surrounding me, comforting me, nourishing me. None of the neighborhood kids considered our relationship serious, possibly because a blind person isn’t expected to have a “girl friend” in the accepted sense, especially when he’s only eleven and the girl is three months younger. (Tony knew better.) Too, since I couldn’t play football or baseball or handball except with the kids at Santa Lucia’s (and those athletic contests were full-scale riots, believe me), the other kids on the block thought it perfectly reasonable for me to have a girl for a fast friend, and readily accepted the fact that blind Iggie spent a lot of time on the floppy old couch in the Dulac living room, the windows behind us open to the sounds of the street and the shouts of the other children, Michelle reading aloud the ballooned dialogue of the comic book heroes and heroines, and describing the action in the drawings.

Outside, we heard the bells of the Good Humor truck, and the voices of the women calling to each other in English or Italian.

The first girl I ever kissed was Michelle Dulac.

I kissed her on a January day in 1940, after two years and nine months of movies and comic books. She had a collection as high as the ceiling. It occurs to me that if she still owns it, it must be worth a fortune. But why would she still own it? Superman and the brood he spawned died with the rest of the family, even though their mummified corpses are still around.

The first breast I ever touched was Michelle Dulac’s.

I touched it in the back seat of her father’s Pontiac coming home from Orchard Beach on the Fourth of July that same year. We were both thirteen, we were both wearing damp bathing suits. Michelle said she was a little chilly, and draped a blanket over us, covering us to our chins. In the front seat, Mr. and Mrs. Dulac were talking to each other in French. The rain that had forced us to leave the beach was drumming on the roof of the automobile. The blanket was sandy. My hand hovered an inch above Michelle’s right breast for perhaps twenty minutes, the fingers spread and suspended between the blanket and the top of her bathing suit, the entire hand paralyzed. When I finally mustered the courage to touch her (would she scream?), I attacked her hapless budding tit with a ferocity I normally reserved for the third movement of Bact’s Italian Concerto. Mixing styles and techniques, I played arpeggios up and down that tiny perfect slope, tapped two-fingered trills on the scant nipple, shifted to the bass clef and executed a pianistically perfect series of descending triplets from her left collarbone to her left breast, and then attempted a swift, smooth glissando to her belly button. She grabbed my wrist.

“Careful,” she murmured, and her father up front said, “What, Michelle?” and she said, “Truck up ahead,” and he said, “I see it,” and still clutching my wrist, she brought my hand back up to her breasts again. We were both panting when we pulled up in front of her house on 217th Street.

“Are we home already?” Michelle asked breathlessly.

“Home sweet home,” her father said.

Under the blanket, Michelle was frantically retying the straps of her bathing suit, which she had loosened to allow me greater finger dexterity, musical genius that I was. I was meanwhile trying to figure how I could get out of the automobile without exposing the grotesque bulge in my trunks.

“It’s still raining,” her mother said. “Why don’t you kids stay in the car till it stops? Or shall I get you an umbrella?”

“No, we’ll stay in the car,” Michelle said.

We stayed in the car, or the equivalent of the car, for the next thirteen months. I felt her up constantly. Every chance I got, I felt her up. I felt her up in her living room and in her kitchen and once in her bedroom when her parents were away for the evening. I felt her up riding behind her on the rack of her bicycle, and I felt her up in Bronx Park under the trees and sitting on benches and lying on the grass; I felt her up incessantly. I felt her up in the Loews Post and the Laconia and the Melba and the Wakefield, and I felt her up on the Grand Concourse in the Loews Paradise, and in Mount Vernon at both the Embassy and the Biltmore, while the voices of my vast American family flooded warmly and approvingly from the theater speakers. I felt her up against the schoolyard fence and against the clapboard shingles of Mr. Locchi’s house while my mother entertained the ladies of her sewing club upstairs, and I felt her up in more driveways and behind more hedges than anyone on the block or in the entire Bronx even knew existed. From July of 1940, when I was still thirteen, to the day she moved away in the fall of 1941, when I was almost fifteen, I deliriously stroked, squeezed, kneaded, patted, probed, and poked those perfect pubescent peaks as they metamorphosed with her own advancing adolescence into beautiful, bountiful, bouncing, bursting... I get carried away even now.

“Je t’aime, je t’adore, qu’est-ce que tu veux encore?” Michelle would ask in metered breathlessness, but each time I demonstrated what more I desired, each time my hand wandered down to the hem of her skirt, her own hand would dart out with all the terrible swiftness of The Flash, and her fingers would grip my wrist with the viselike strength of Sheena of the Jungle. “No, baby,” she would say, “not now.” Not now meant never. Only once did I manage to steal my hand onto the soft silken secret of her panties, and then for just an electric instant before those swift descending fingers closed again upon my wrist and snatched my hand away.

In August of 1941, her father took a job teaching at a Queens high school. We said our good-byes one early September midnight, locked in embrace on the lawn behind the house of an old ginzo we called “The Paintbrush” because of his walrus mustache, the crickets and katydids racketing in the bushes, my hands desperately clutching those prized departing possessions.

“I love you,” she whispered. “I’ll always love you, Iggie.”

“Oh, and I love you, Michelle. Oh, God, how I love you.”

She moved out of my life forever the very next day.

She remains the most beautiful woman I have ever known.

My brother Tony was seventeen years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He immediately asked my mother for permission to enlist in the Air Corps. My mother talked it over with my father, and then my grandfather, and then got back to Tony with an unequivocal “No.”

“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.

Inspiring me with tales of Great Musicians He Had Known, firing my ambition (“You will win all the prizes, you will perform in Carnegie Hall!”), he pushed me into the Beethoven C-Minor because he honestly believed I would win all the awards. Then, as now, there were prestigious young musicians’ prizes being offered all over the country — Eastern Seaboard, West Coast, and points between. Like a farmer who had fattened a hog, Passaro was anxious to exhibit his livestock and cop a blue ribbon, and push he did, oh, how he pushed! And I, in turn, missing my brother tremendously, fearful he would be sent overseas at any moment, accepted each new Passaro prod gratefully, and stilled my anxieties by spending hours at the keyboard. “That’s nice, Iggie,” my mother would say. “Play that part again.” I played that part again. And again. And again, and again, and again. And the months passed painlessly.

I can never truly understand motivation. Cause and effect have always been mysteries to me, except at the piano. I still don’t know whether the Rachmaninoff concert had anything at all to do with my later decision to move into jazz. Passaro obtained the tickets three months in advance, and had shpieled nothing but Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninoff all through August, September, and October. I don’t know whether it rained for twelve days and twelve nights in June of 1901, when my grandfather was digging his subway, but I do know what the weather was like on November 7, 1942, because I vas dere, Sharlie. It was cloudy but mild most of the day. In fact, the temperature was hovering in the low fifties when we entered the concert hall which (Passaro kept telling me) would one day resound with cheers for me, Ignazio Di Palermo, supreme virtuoso. The hall was packed. I am blind, and I do not like crowds. Passaro guided me through the throng, his hand firm on my elbow. This annoyed me. He should have known better than to be shoving me through the goddamn crowd. Our seats were in the balcony, we took the elevator up, there were excited voices everywhere around me, people bumping into me. Passaro’s guiding fingers pushed at my elbow, we found our row, “Excuse me, excuse me,” Passaro said, pulling me behind him now as we moved past knees and more knees, searching for our seats.

“There are chairs on the stage,” Passaro whispered to me. “Wooden chairs. There must be more than a hundred of them. Folding chairs, Iggie. Every seat in the house is filled. Oh, Iggie, can you feel this? Can you feel the excitement?”

There was indeed a hum in the air, an almost tangible sense of expectation, tinglingly electric. Passaro read to me from the program. Rachmaninoff was to play his own transcriptions of the Prelude, Gavotte, and Gigue from Bact’s Partita in G Major, followed by Beethoven’s Opus 31, Number 2, and then a Chopin program, including the C-Minor Polonaise (I remembered the first time I had ever heard it, when Passaro reached across me on that January day in 1935, and I remembered him asking if I thought I could play it in three months’ time), and then Rachmaninoff’s own Etudes-Tableaux (“You yourself will compose one day,” Passaro whispered to me), and finally a selection of Liszt pieces. The audience fell silent all at once, the absence of sound shocking after the incessant hum that had preceded it. “Here he comes,” Passaro whispered into my ear, and then, with the precision of a single pistol shot, the audience broke into applause. “He’s crossing to the piano,” Passaro whispered. “He’s sitting,” and the applause stopped as abruptly as it had begun, its brief thunder replaced by a stillness now laden with the agony of anticipation.

Rachmaninoff began playing.

The concert was disappointing for both of us, on different levels and in different ways. All the way back to Tremont Avenue, Passaro could not stop talking about how badly Rachmaninoff had played.

“Ah, yes, it is all there still, of course, he is a master, he is a giant, there is no one today who understands the mechanics of the keyboard the way he does, nessuno, and he is sixty-nine years old, remember! Did you hear the way he handled the pianissimi — a whisper, a caress, a touch of balmy air. And the fortissimi! Did you hear, Iggie? He does not pound, he is strong, there is force and power, but he does not pound, do you understand now why I tell you ‘Don’t pound,’ eh?

“But what? Is that Bach he played, or is it Rachmaninoff? How dare he add counterpoint to the Prelude? A giant, yes, but what was Bach, a midget? There is a style to Bach that cannot be tampered with, I don’t care about pianistic effectiveness, is this a circus sideshow? This is Bach, and he does not need contrapuntal embroidery, nor does he need what Rachmaninoff did with the Gavotte, those harmonies and figurations, what were those? Those were unforgivable lapses of taste. Beethoven, all right, I can understand. He has never played a Beethoven sonata well in his life. Good phrasing, enormous charm, but no feeling, and what is Beethoven if not feeling? The Adagio movement, especially, did you hear it? Why, why, why did he play it allegretto? He made it sound like a Field nocturne; what is the matter with that man?

“Speed, speed, all was speed, he was running a foot race. Even the Chopin was played too rapidly, although, yes, I hope you noticed the way he played the F-Sharp Nocturne, did you hear those lovely, lovely details, yes, that was good, that was magnificent, that is the Rachmaninoff I took you to hear. But the Polonaise? Too fast. And the F-Minor Ballade? Why did he choose to turn its beautiful theme into a sickening little waltz, and then accentuate it on the off beat when it entered again later, in the bass? The Scherzo? Too fast. Chopin did not intend it to be played so fast, that was not his meaning. The Liszt, of course, well, what can one say about Rachmaninoff’s Liszt? His Liszt has always been magic, and today, yes, I suppose, yes, perhaps. Perhaps there and in the Chopin nocturne, you heard the real Rachmaninoff. But the rest? Ah, forgive me, Iggie, eh? I wanted more for you. I wanted you to hear more.”

As for me, I’d heard more than enough.

In fact, I didn’t know what Passaro was talking about. I had been overwhelmed by Rachmaninoff’s mastery of the instrument, his dazzling speed, the brilliance of the tones he coaxed, whipped, snapped, teased, demanded from the piano, the soaring giddiness of his invention, the breadth and depth of his interpretations. Stunned and speechless, I’d sat through the entire performance scarcely breathing for fear he would somehow miss the trapeze, falter in the midst of his aerial keyboard acrobatics and tumble to the sawdust below.

When we left Carnegie Hall, I was crushed.

For despite Passaro’s wild promises of prizes to be won and accolades to follow, I knew for certain on that dismal November day that I would never in a million years be able to play the way that man up there on the concert stage had played.

On the sixth day of July in the year 1943, four days before General Patton’s Seventh Army invaded the island of Sicily, my brother Tony wrote a letter to my grandfather. It was a very brief letter, and it was written entirely in Italian, which Tony had tried to learn at Evander Childs High School.

Roughly translated, my brother had written:

My grandmother called the day they received the letter. I answered the telephone, and she told me first that they’d heard from Tony, and then she read the letter to me in Italian, and then translated it. She told me his Italian wasn’t really too bad, and she wondered why he had apologized for it. Then she asked me how the piano was coming along, and finally told me to put my mother on. That was on July 12, six days after my brother had mailed the letter. We later figured it had been posted from North Africa, where Patton’s invasion force was massed for the strike at what Winston Churchill called the “soft underbelly” of Europe.

Eight days later, on the twentieth, my brother was killed in the vicinity of Porto Empedocle, on the western coast of Sicily. The War Department telegram arrived on the twenty-first, and a letter from Tony’s lieutenant, a man named Arthur G. Rowles, arrived two weeks later. There wasn’t much Rowles could say. He wrote that my brother had fought bravely and well. He reported that he had been killed by an Italian soldier who, in the midst of what appeared to be a headlong, disorganized retreat, had suddenly whirled, raised his rifle, and fired blindly and erratically at the advancing squad. Only one of his bullets struck home, the one that killed Tony — “instantly and mercifully, he did not suffer,” the lieutenant wrote. Why the Italian had not surrendered, as his comrades were doing everywhere around him, was a mystery to the lieutenant. He wrote, too, that a heavy artillery attack, German or American, began almost the moment my brother fell to the ground. The man who had slain him threw his rifle down and began running up the road to Porto Empedocle as it erupted in blossoms of earth and boulders and hot flying shrapnel. He was still running, still on his feet, apparently unscathed, as he disappeared into the dust.

We did not tell my grandfather that an Italian had killed Tony.

I went into his room.

It was raining. The rain lashed the room’s single window, which opened on a potholed driveway that ran steeply from the street to the small porch outside the kitchen. We usually came in through the kitchen door, Tony and I.

I sat on his bed.

I listened to the rain in the gutters and the drainpipes and against the windowpanes. There was undirected anger in my grief. I was angry at General Patton, who had sent my brother into combat. I was angry at my grandfather, who had refused to let Tony fly, and angry at my mother, who had steadfastly upheld his greaseball decision. And I was angry at Tony, for letting himself get killed. What the hell was the matter with him, getting killed like that? And I began to cry again.

I played his records because I was angry and grief-stricken. I played them in defiance of his privacy and his secrecy, played them in a futile attempt to find him again, to share with him something he had loved, to make his records and therefore himself an ineradicable part of me. I found them on the shelves above the record player my parents had given him for his thirteenth birthday. I selected one at random, put it on the turntable, and turned the volume control up full. When my mother heard the music blaring, she came into the room.

“Iggie?” she said. Her voice was tremulous. She had not stopped crying since the telegram arrived. “What are you doing, baby?” she asked, and sat beside me, and gently passed her hand over my forehead, brushing back my hair.

“Listening,” I said.

I listened all that night. There were 347 records in his collection. He had taken very good care of them, but he had also played them often and they were badly worn. The sound sputtered and crackled from the speaker, the needle caught in tired grooves and endlessly repeated notes or full measures, skipped over hairline cracks, skimmed the shellacked surfaces of the 78s. I had heard some of the tunes before, on the radio. But the others, the ones I had not heard...

You can believe this or not. I have known jazz musicians for the better part of my life, I have played with them and rapped with them, and suffered with them, and I can tell you that my experience was not unique. Anyway, I don’t care what you think; this is the way it happened. I could not read the labels on the records, and to me the ten-inch disks all felt the same. I recognized some of the tunes, but I did not know who was playing them. I kept pulling the records from the shelves and removing them from their protective sleeves and putting them on the turntable haphazardly, mixing swing with ragtime with boogie-woogie with Dixieland with barrelhouse with stride with blues, big bands and small ensembles, vocalists and soloists, a hopeless melange of chronology and style.

I called my mother into the room. It was three o’clock in the morning. She had been lying awake, I realized, because she came to me instantly.

“Who’s this?” I asked, and handed her the record I had just heard.

“Just a minute,” she said. “Let me put on a light.”

I heard the click of the floor lamp alongside Tony’s bed.

“Let me see,” my mother said, and took the record from my hand. “Art Tatum,” she said. She pronounced his name “Tattum.”

“Are there any more of his?” I asked.

“What?”

“On the shelf.”

“Iggie, it’s late. Can’t you...?”

“Mom, please. Are there any more records by him?”

“Just a minute,” she said. I heard her rummaging around. “Iggie, I need my glasses,” she said.

I waited. When she came back, she said, “Tony loved these records.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you like them, Iggie?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Tch,” she said, and in that single meeting of tongue with gum ridge, she came to terms with my brother’s death. The click that resonated into the silence of Tony’s room was desolate and forlorn; it echoed a Neapolitan acceptance of the inevitability of fate. As she looked through the records on his shelves, she spoke to me and to herself in disconnected phrases and sentences separated by long silences and the crackle of the stiff paper sleeves on my brother’s records. “Uncle Dominick used to take him to Yankee Stadium,” or “Seven pounds, six ounces; a very big baby,” or “Always good to you,” or “Do you remember when he sat on Pino’s cigar?” or “Loved that girl so much,” or “Lou Gehrig, it was,” or as she searched, “Tattum, Tattum,” and finally, “He died for America, Igg.”

She handed me the records she had found.

“Can you listen to them in the morning?” she asked. “Your father has to go to work. You’re keeping him up, Iggie.”

“I’ll play them very low,” I said.

“Did you love him, Igg?”

“I loved him,” I said.

“He’s dead.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“He’s dead,” she said, and went out of the room.

I listened to Tatum.

And first I thought That’s it. That’s how I want to play.

And then I thought I can do that. I can play that.

I listened again. I played the records again and again. And I became more and more convinced that I could do it, I could actually do it. I sat trembling with discovery, each brimming chord, each gliding arpeggio absorbed by my very skin, penetrating, vibrating within me as though some secret unborn self were augmenting the sound, the music threatening to explode from my dead eyes and my shaking hands, lift off the top of my skull, flow ceilingward in a dizzying fireworks display of sharps and flats and triplets and thirty-second notes. I must have made my decision at once, long before I’d heard all the Tatum records, long before I’d run them through the machine a second, third, and fourth time; I probably had made the decision even before I’d called my mother into the room to identify this man who was playing piano as I’d never heard it played before. It was that sudden, it was that simple, I make no apologies. It happened that way. I heard jazz for the first time in my life, played by a giant, on my instrument, and I v knew at once that this was the way the piano was meant to be played, and this was the way I was going to play it from that moment on.

Stultifyingly ignorant — I could read in Braille only the language of classical music, and had no concept of this new language — blissfully naive as to its complexity, desperately hungry to get to the piano and try it, try to play it, waiting for my father’s alarm to go off at a quarter to five, soaringly optimistic, knowing that once I got my hands on the keyboard, the music would leap magically from my fingers, I lay on my brother’s bed and stared sightlessly at the ceiling and contemplated a journey to a land more alien than any I might have imagined in my most fantastic dreams.

As my grandfather had done in 1900, I decided firmly and irrevocably to chance the voyage.

It remained only to discuss the matter with Federico Passaro.

He listened in silence to the records I had brought with me.

He listened while Tatum played “Rosetta” and “St. Louis Blues” and “Moonglow” and part of “Begin the Beguine,” and then he abruptly lifted the needle from the player.

“Yes?” he said. “You wanted me to listen. I listened.”

I took a deep breath. “I want to play like that,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like what you just heard.”

“What is that?” he said. “Jazz.”

“Ah, yes. Jazz.”

“It’s what I want to play.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “For fun? For amusement?”

“Mr. Passaro...”

“Well, I can see no real harm in it,” he said, surprising me; I had expected a tantrum similar to the one I’d provoked with my request for “You Turned the Tables on Me.” But Passaro actually chuckled, and then said, “In fact, the man has good technique. Has he had classical training?”

“I don’t know anything about him.”

“What is he playing in the bass clef? Tenths? They sound like tenths to me. And not open tenths, either. You may find the stretch difficult. Well, try it, I don’t think it can hurt you.”

“I’ve already tried it,” I said.

“Ah? And can you reach those chords?”

“I have to stretch for them, you’re right.”

“Well, that won’t hurt you. His arpeggios are very clean, too; he must have had classical training. I’m not familiar with all the chords he played in the twelve-bar piece. What were those chords?”

“I don’t know.”

“They seem to utilize many notes outside the mode. Well, no matter. If you want to fool around with this for your own amusement, I have no...”

“All the time, Mr. Passaro.”

“Eh?”

“I want to play it all the time?”

“What do you mean, all the time?”

“That’s what I want to play.”

The room went silent.

“Let me understand you,” Passaro said.

“I want you to teach me to play the way he plays,” I said. “Art Tattum. That’s his name. That’s how I want to play.”

“Iggie, this is a bad joke,” Passaro said, and chuckled again. “I’m a very patient man, you know that by now, we’ve been together for more than seven years, very patient. But this is a bad joke. Are you finished with it? If so, I’d like to...”

“Mr. Passaro, can you teach me to play what he’s playing?”

“No,” Passaro said, his voice suddenly sharp. “Of course not! What are you saying?”

“I don’t want to play this way anymore.”

“What way?”

“This way,” I said, and my hands moved out to the keyboard, and I ran through the first four bars of a Chopin scherzo, and then abruptly pulled back my hands and quietly said, “That way, Mr. Passaro.”

“That way,” he said, “is the only way I teach.”

“Well,” I said.

His voice softened again. “What is it?” he asked gently, and sat beside me on the piano bench. “Ah, Iggie, I’ve been stupid. Forgive me. Your recent loss, your brother, I know the grief you must.... forgive me, please. Go home. Please. I’ll see you next Saturday, do the exercises I gave you, get your hands back in shape, have you practiced much, I’m sure you haven’t. Come back next week. Forgive me for being inconsiderate. I get so involved sometimes, I... forgive me.”

“Mr. Passaro,” I said, “I don’t want to come back next week unless you can teach me to play like Tattum.”

I felt Passaro stiffen beside me. He was silent for several moments, and then he rose, and moved away from the bench and the piano, and began pacing the floor.

“No,” he said. “I won’t allow this to happen. No. No, Iggie, I’m sorry. No. You can’t do this. I will not permit it. It’s been too long. No. I’ve given you... I’ve invested... I’ve... no. Enough! You’ll go home, you’ll do your exercises, and next week we’ll pick up again on the Moussorgsky. There’s a lot to be done. They are already holding auditions for many of the prizes. If we...”

“Mr. Passaro, I don’t...”

“Stop it!” he shouted. “Do you want to kill me? Stop it, please, stop saying this... these... please, Iggie.”

“I don’t care about prizes, Mr. Passaro. I don’t want any prizes, I want to play like Tattum.”

“Tattum, Tattum, quello sfaccime, che c’importa Tattum? He’s a piano player; you’re an artist! I’ve made you an artist! You came to me with talent, and I took it, and shaped it, and put in your hands what’s in my own hands. You’re destroying me. Do you want to destroy me, Iggie?”

“No, Mr. Passaro, but...”

“I thought you loved music. I thought my own love for music . ..”

“I do love music!”

“Then stop talking about trash!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Passaro.”

He fell silent. When he spoke again, he had controlled his anger, and his voice was intimately low.

“Iggie,” he said, “how many pupils do you think... how many do I have like you? How many do you think?”

“Mr. Passaro...”

“One. In twenty years, one. I have no others like you. I’ve never had another like you. I may never have another as long as I live. I’ve never lied to you, Iggie. Never. I said you’d win prizes, and you will. I said you’d play in Carnegie Hall...”

“I don’t want to play in Carnegie Hall.”

And then he exploded.

He called me an ingrate, he called me a fool, he called me an immature child, he told me I was truly blind if I was ready to throw away a brilliant career as a concert pianist. He told me he was not mistaken about my future, he would not have lavished such attention on me if for a moment, for a single moment, he had thought he was mistaken. And for what? Were all those hours of patient instruction to be wasted? Did I think it was a simple matter to teach a blind person? He had given me more time and more energy than he’d given all his other pupils together, and now this. He reviled my decision, he spit upon my decision, he told me I would come to regret it, he promised I would be back on my knees begging him to teach me again, and he told me by then it would be too late, my repertoire would be gone, I would have squandered precious hours on the playing of trash, my opportunity will have vanished, my promise will have corroded, my future will have been flushed down the toilet like shit.

“So go!” he shouted, “Leave me! And good luck to you!”

It was a curse.

In the back room of my grandfather’s tailor shop, I told him of my decision. He listened carefully. He was sixty-three years old, and he had been in this country for forty-two years, and I think he still found many of its ways baffling and incomprehensible.

He was pensively silent for a long time.

Perhaps he was thinking if only he had sent Luke to college, perhaps he was thinking if only he had allowed Tony to join the Air Corps, perhaps he was thinking that here in this America you could not expect the young to follow in the footsteps of their elders, you had to let them go, you had to let them run, you had to set them free.

In his broken English, he said, “Go play you jazza. And buona fortuna, Ignazio.”

It was a blessing.