Streets of Gold (28 page)

“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?”

“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.