Unto the Sons (62 page)

“Would you like to come with us to Turin?”

Joseph looked puzzled.

“I would like to show you our city,” the man explained, with a reassuring smile. “I would like to give you a tour of my plant, and have you stay in our home, and let you see how we live. Turin is a beautiful city, and I assume you’ve never been there. You might find it so much to your liking that you’ll never want to leave.”

“But,” Joseph interrupted, tentatively, “I’m being met by someone at the station in Paris.”

“Don’t worry,” the man said, “I’ll see that the railroad informs them of your change in plans, and later today we shall wire a fuller explanation and even try to reach them by telephone. And should you wish to resume your journey to Paris after seeing Turin, I will, of course, make the arrangements.…”

Joseph looked into the man’s face. The expression there seemed kindly and reasonable. Joseph understood the situation: He was being sought out to serve briefly, or perhaps continually, as this man’s substitute son. What still bewildered Joseph was whether this proposition represented a temptation or a blessing. To succeed as the substitute son of this wealthy man certainly meant opportunities beyond any that could be guaranteed elsewhere, and in an instant Joseph could imagine his grandfather Domenico, and even his mother, approving of this detour as a good omen. Joseph would remain in Italy. He would become the minion of a
gran signore
, with his financial future perhaps assured.

But as the man awaited a reply, Joseph began to shake his head, and then, in a strong voice that he hardly recognized as his own, he said: “I’m sorry, but my heart is set on going to America.”

“You may be making a grave mistake,” the man said, not concealing his disappointment. “I do think you should give it more thought.”

As Joseph stood in the aisle, facing the darkness beyond the tracks, he again felt the man’s hand on his arm. The train was swaying along a curved route as it entered the outskirts of Turin.

“Let me at least give you my card,” the man finally said. He removed his hand and reached for his wallet, then offered a white card to Joseph. “If you become disappointed in Paris, or change your mind about America, I trust that you will contact me.”

“Yes,” Joseph said, accepting the card, “I will.”

The man then turned toward the compartment and opened the door. His daughters had already stood and were reaching for their valises. Joseph stepped forward to help, but the man politely refused.

“The luggage is very light,” he said, “and our driver will be meeting us at the platform.”

The train had now come to a complete stop at the Turin station. The two young women bowed as they passed Joseph in the aisle, and the man shook his hand and wished him well. After they had left, Joseph returned to the compartment, which was now empty. He sat for a few moments, then stood again and watched from the aisle window as a tall man wearing livery and a gray peaked cap took the luggage and led the man and his two daughters away.

The rest of the trip was quiet and uneventful; Joseph slept most of the way. When the train pulled into Paris’s Gare de Lyon the next day, Joseph spotted Antonio waiting for him along the platform. Before getting off, Joseph took the man’s card, crumpled it, and left it on the floor of the compartment.

30.

T
he Paris that Gustave Flaubert had praised for its “amorous effluvium and intellectual emanations” was not the Paris that Antonio introduced to Joseph in the spring of 1920. The Paris that Joseph saw was scented by the perfume of strolling prostitutes, was overcrowded with war refugees and White Russians, and was debunked by poets and painters representing an avant-garde movement called Dadaism.

The Dadaists believed that nothing from the past was worth preserving—the Great War, and the psychic syndrome that fostered it, had poisoned everything; and as a symbol of the new movement’s rejection of traditional standards in art, the artist Marcel Duchamp in 1919 produced a print of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa wearing a moustache and goatee.

As if validating the Dadaists’ view of a world gone amok, the president of France was discovered early one morning in 1920 (two days after Joseph’s arrival in Paris) wandering barefoot through the countryside in his pajamas, having fallen out of the sleeping car of his train during the night; and this same individual—Paul Deschanel—would later be observed leaving an outdoor political gathering to embrace a tree, and still later to walk fully clothed into a lake. By summer’s end, France’s manic-depressive president had been replaced and institutionalized.

If the aftereffects of the war were more pronounced in France than elsewhere, it was also true that France experienced more death and destruction than any other nation. One million four hundred thousand of its soldiers were killed—17.6 percent of its army, as compared with Austria’s 17.1 percent, Germany’s 15.1 percent, and Britain’s 13 percent. Of France’s three million injured soldiers, more than a third would be permanently disabled.

“When the war finally ended, it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives,” wrote the art critic Robert Hughes, more than half a century later. “Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: The dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial. One result of this was a hatred, among certain artists, of all forms of authority, all traditional modes. But the main result was a longing for a clean slate. If Verdun represented the climax of the patriotic, nationalist, law-abiding culture of the fathers, then the sons would be pacifists and internationalists. Some of them … wanted to create literal Utopias of reason and social justice, created (not merely
expressed
) by architecture and art. Others were less ambitious; they simply wanted to get out of the madness.”

The predominant impression that Joseph had during his seven-month stay in Paris was that it was a city of old men and young women; and what surprised him, initially, was how many of these young women seemed to know his cousin Antonio. From the afternoon he had been escorted
out of the rail terminal, and during the subsequent perambulations of the city, women approached Antonio in a familiar way and spoke words in French that seemed to make him blush. But he waved the women away and refused to interpret the words for Joseph.

Although Antonio was only twenty-six, Joseph now saw him as a much older man, a patriarchal figure rather than the cousin and confidant he had been in Maida. At Damien’s, where Antonio had arranged for his apprenticeship, Joseph was impressed with his cousin’s self-assurance in the presence of Monsieur Damien and the other veteran craftsmen, as well as the distinguished clientele who came in to be shown the bolts of now unrationed fabric from which would be cut looser, more leisurely postwar fashions. The clients included aristocratic émigrés from Lenin’s Russia; members of the Rothschild family and other leading bankers; and some of the important Allied ministers who were continuing to oversee the peace conference at Versailles.

During the previous summer the Allied ministers had issued harsh terms to the delegates of the defeated Germans, Austrians, and Bulgarians; and during the spring and summer of 1920 the ministers were behaving similarly toward the Hungarians and Turks. But when many of these same ministers entered Damien’s hall of mirrors to select their autumn wardrobes, the most decisive individual on the premises seemed to be Antonio. It was he who told them what to wear, and how to wear it.
They
had carved up Europe;
he
would cut their clothes.

The source of this decisiveness continued to amaze Joseph, for even the experience of the war years and achieving the rank of sergeant could not fully account for Antonio’s commanding personality and persuasiveness. But as the summer progressed, and Joseph continued to observe his cousin at work, during their tours of the city, and in the privacy of their apartment, he began to recognize in Antonio’s nature some of the qualities of their grandfather Domenico. Both men presumed to know what was best for those around them; and both conveyed, no matter where they were, a proprietary air—which in Antonio’s case was all the more impressive since he owned no property.

To watch Antonio greeting clients each day in the wide and crowded corridors of the shop—his prematurely graying dark hair slicked back with brilliantine; his lapel flower one of two that daily adorned his buttonhole; the elevated heels of his two-toned shoes under his longish trouser cuffs lifting him to the Napoleonic height of five feet, six inches—was to see a man who had traveled far from Maida, and was possibly en route to becoming the next director of the firm and heir apparent of the owning
family; and Monsieur Damien hardly discouraged that impression by inviting Antonio home frequently on weekends to dine with his wife and daughters.

But Antonio’s ambitions went beyond this. As he himself confided to Joseph, he wanted a business of his own, wished to see
his
name emblazoned above the portal and scrawled in gold lettering across the front windows. As much as Monsieur Damien paid him, Antonio considered himself underpaid, and his view was reinforced during the late summer when he was offered a contract at higher pay from a competing firm, Larsen’s. While pondering the offer, Antonio proclaimed to Joseph that he could probably gain a similar contract from the even more prestigious establishment of Kriegck & Company. Even under Antonio’s present arrangement at Damien’s, it was no secret that he was devoting some of his energies elsewhere; on three evenings a week, after Damien’s had closed its doors, Antonio supervised tailoring classes at a trade school not far from the École Ladaveze. Several of the students were unemployed Eastern Europeans who had entered Paris as war refugees; others were disabled French veterans wishing to learn a craft in which ambulatory limitations were of little importance. Joseph served as one of Antonio’s classroom assistants; the position earned him some welcome francs (he was unsalaried at Damien’s) but also meant that three nights a week he went to bed hungry.

Since Damien’s closed at eight and the school (which was fifteen minutes away by bus) began at eight-fifteen and ended at midnight, there was insufficient time for Joseph and Antonio to eat
and
rise at dawn on the following day, which was required because Antonio had been entrusted by Monsieur Damien with a key to the shop so he could receive the fabric deliveries, which were usually at six-thirty. But on nonschool evenings, Antonio saw to it that Joseph was treated to a full, if inexpensive, meal. Antonio of course selected the restaurants and did all the ordering.

Italian restaurants were avoided in favor of French bistros and cafés during Joseph’s first two months in Paris; Antonio insisted that the patronage of such places would hasten Joseph’s familiarity with the local language and the customs of Parisians. But despite Antonio’s diligent correcting of Joseph’s faulty pronunciation, and Joseph’s continued study of French language books, he lacked Antonio’s facility with French; or perhaps he lacked Antonio’s sincere desire to master it. Instinctively, if not yet declaratively, Joseph knew that he would not remain long in Paris. It was clear that Antonio belonged there, that he had found the place that suited his temperament, his style, his craving for excitement. But for
Joseph, the French capital was merely a way station to America. Until he became seventeen in early October, Joseph was of course resigned to his status as Antonio’s ward, a role that at least saved him from being sent back to Maida. But with Antonio so protective and controlling, albeit necessarily, given Joseph’s dependence in Paris, Joseph soon felt trapped and claustrophobic in ways he had not even felt in Maida.

When Sebastian had gone off to war, Joseph had become accustomed to having a bedroom to himself; and while this changed with Sebastian’s return, the latter’s incapacities negated the manner in which he had formerly tried to give orders as Joseph’s older brother. Their grandfather Domenico, who suddenly seemed older and withdrawn after Sebastian’s tragedy, also declined as a guiding force in the household during Joseph’s final year at home. But now in Paris, probably the world’s most liberal and libertine city—one that seemed to absorb the sounds of the noisy Bolsheviks in the boulevards advocating insurrection, and overlook the lesbian bars and bordellos that lined the side streets—Joseph found himself confined with his commanding cousin five flights above the tailor shop to which he was apprenticed without pay, while getting a minimum of sleep each night on a small cot in a one-room apartment that was triple-locked to keep out the prying, alcoholic Basque superintendent.

Antonio had fortified the security after catching the superintendent on three occasions trying to pick the lock—while the superintendent feebly justified himself each time with claims that he had smelled smoke and thought a fire might be smoldering within. Whatever misgivings Antonio did not have about the superintendent, he had for the other tenant on the sixth floor—the soft-stepping, taciturn Algerian woman who, wearing dark glasses, came and went along the squeaky staircase at odd hours, and rarely remained overnight in her apartment more than twice a month. Antonio believed, without a shred of evidence, that she was an espionage agent involved in schemes to overthrow the French government. More plausibly he felt ill disposed toward her because, contrary to his hopes, she did not become a dead martyr to her cause and leave her apartment vacant for him to take over and make available to Joseph.

Although neither of them complained about it, by midsummer both Antonio and Joseph were feeling cramped in the close quarters of the apartment, three-fourths of which was tacitly monopolized by Antonio, while the corner alcove was Joseph’s dominion. A six-foot-high freestanding mahogany-framed mirror, borrowed from Damien’s storage room, sectioned off Joseph’s corner from the rest of the room. Behind the mirror was his cot. His suitcase, laid flat on the floor and draped with a
piece of damask material, served as an end table, while his wardrobe hung heavily from a clothes tree that had two pegs missing, causing the pole to tilt against the wall.