Unto the Sons (64 page)

“Young man, are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” Joseph said, “I think I’m just a little nervous.”

“Nervous about what?” the man asked. There was curiosity as well as concern in his voice. Looking up from his desk, squinting, he carefully studied Joseph’s face. Joseph lowered his eyes. There was silence in the room for a few seconds.

“I’m worried about drowning,” Joseph lied, although he had often imagined this in his nightmares. “I’ve never been on a ship before.”

The man settled back in his chair. His inquiring frown softened and he smiled broadly, revealing two gold molars.

“Have no fear, young man,” he said. “Our ships are very safe. And by the way, where do you want to go?”

“Can you get me to the United States?” Joseph asked, tentatively.

“Maybe,” the man said. He reached through a stack of papers on his desk, found the one he was looking for, and read it briefly to himself.

“The English have just taken over some German ships, and they’ll be
using them for civilians,” he said. “The route will include New York. The ships will begin leaving next month, from Cherbourg. You know where Cherbourg is, don’t you?”

Joseph hesitated.

“Cherbourg is in northern France,” the man went on. “It’s a simple train ride from here. And I think I can arrange everything, including your passage and the visa.” He took a visa application form out of his desk and handed it to Joseph with a fountain pen.

“Here, fill this out,” he said, “and I’ll also need your application fee. Do you have forty francs, or fifty lire?”

Joseph did not reach for his money bag filled with lire, for he kept this secret from everyone except Antonio. Instead he removed from his jacket an envelope that held the francs he had saved from his nighttime job as Antonio’s classroom assistant. He believed he had barely enough to cover the cost of the fee. But in his eagerness to pay the man—Joseph was overjoyed that there had been no questions about age or sponsorship—he dropped the old and brittle envelope on the counselor’s desk, where it split open to reveal not only the francs, but also the cherished dollar that Joseph had been given years before by his father.

“American money!” the counselor cheerfully announced, snatching it in his fingers; and before Joseph could protest, the man had tucked it, and a fistful of francs, into his pocket.

“This will cover it,” he declared with a finality that discouraged further discussion. “And
quickly
, fill out the form,” he added. “We’re about to close the office.”

Joseph cheerlessly complied, then watched as the counselor examined his form and placed it in a desk drawer. The other counselor, who had been waiting at his desk, now joined his colleague and helped carry the many books and pamphlets from the desktop to the open drawer of a nearby filing cabinet.

“You should return here in about three weeks,” the counselor told Joseph. “By then we may have a report on our progress.”

Joseph nodded good-bye, left the building, passed through the gate, and received another casual salute from the Carabiniere.

The boulevard was now more crowded than before, the cafés were filled, and the sidewalks were entirely in shadows. It was shortly after six. As Joseph walked on, he wondered what he would say to Antonio, and he was still saddened by the loss of the souvenir from his father. But there was also a certain spring in his step, a vague sense of accomplishment he was aware of. In the course of the afternoon he believed that he had
moved closer to his final destination. And he also remembered that on the day he had been given the dollar, his father had told him that he should spend it one day on something wonderful. Joseph could think of nothing more appropriate than a visa to America.

31.

F
ortunately for Joseph, his cousin was not there when he returned to Damien’s at close to seven that evening. But later, before he and Antonio were about to go out to dinner, Joseph could no longer conceal what he had done. So he told Antonio of his visit to the embassy, and his hope of leaving France as soon as possible. Much to his relief, Antonio was not angry; on the contrary, he seemed pleased. “Tonight let’s eat at a café I know on the Left Bank where the Americans go,” he announced. “And later we can go listen to American Negro musicians play this new kind of music. It’s called jazz.”

Many years later, long after Joseph had established himself in the United States and all but forgotten his seven-month sojourn in France, he would realize from reading the reminiscences of famous journalists and novelists that he had resided in Paris during the postwar influx of many creative and influential young people from Europe and the United States. Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein had already settled there. Ernest Hemingway and other writers and artists would soon join them, along with university graduates and affluent exiles and other travelers along what the writer Malcolm Cowley would call the “longest gangplank in the world.”

Many black American soldiers who had served in Europe were discharged in Paris, and they chose to remain with their French wives rather than accept repatriation on American troop ships that required their traveling alone. Couples could live cheaply and eat well in France if they had American money. The dollar would be worth fifty francs by the mid-twenties. While the sale of liquor was now outlawed in the United States, it flowed freely in Parisian cafés and jazz clubs. Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company, which was as much a meeting place for English-speaking residents as it was a lending library and book shop. The young composer Aaron Copland attended a new school for American
musicians at the Fontainebleau palace southeast of Paris. The already prominent French designer Gabrielle (“Coco”) Chanel, mourning her lover killed in an auto accident, would soon influence world fashion with her little black dress.

But if Joseph saw any of these achieving individuals during his time in Paris, he was never aware of it. While he was impressed by the innovations that surrounded him—the city’s underground trains and electric lighting, its many telephones and elevators, its buses and taxis, and the installation of cable wire to initiate radio broadcasts from the Eiffel Tower—he would remember France in 1920 mostly from the vantage point of the small apartment with Antonio and his job at Damien’s. And on a cold and blustery day in mid-December, after traveling by train to Cherbourg, he embraced Antonio on the pier and climbed the gangplank onto a huge German-made British ship bound for New York.

He had already written his family in Maida about his departure, and had also written his two uncles in America, requesting that they meet him at Ellis Island. In his pocket he carried his passport and visa. Antonio had accompanied him to the Italian embassy, and had gotten on well with the travel counselor. Indulging the man’s fondness for reminiscing, Antonio was able to learn that his
mafioso
uncle was no longer alive.

“He passed away last year in Chicago,” the counselor sadly acknowledged.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Antonio had replied. “May God rest his soul.”

Joseph then followed Antonio’s example in lowering his head in front of the counselor and assuming a demeanor of sympathy.

It took eight days to reach the United States. The ship encountered storms most of the way, and Joseph was so petrified and nauseated that he remembered little of the journey except the horror of being on board. He spent most of the time in his cabin, holding on to an iron bar above his bed as the ship pitched and churned choppily through the night, and then proceeded each day through heaving waters and under dark clouds and rain.

Despite his reliance on Saint Francis, to whom he prayed constantly, his dreams of drowning had been more persuasive than the conscious force of his faith. Indeed, on the fifth morning of the trip he was convinced that the ship was sinking, that he was seconds away from death; and in a state of despair he fell out of bed screaming and tumbled to his knees, and beseeched the saint to save him.

The ship seemed immobile. Its engines were silent. He heard the sounds of bubbles popping softly outside the porthole. For the first time since his departure from Maida Joseph felt shame in his decision to leave, which he now admitted was most likely forever. While it was true that his family’s economic problems could be alleviated only by money earned elsewhere, he saw himself as a deserter, a fugitive from family ties, an escapist from the hard times at home. He waited in his cabin, kneeling on the floor with his head pressed down on the cot, acknowledging that perhaps he deserved to die. He had forsaken his family, his widowed mother and ailing brother in his quest for self-betterment, a life in a land of opportunities and wealth.

The ship sailed quietly into New York Harbor after dawn on December 23, 1920, a morning so foggy that Joseph could not see the Statue of Liberty. The waters were calm, however, and he remained with the crowd on the upper deck, wearing his best suit under his overcoat, and also the gloves, scarf, and cap that Antonio had presented to him as a going-away gift at Cherbourg.

Despite his clothes he was extremely cold, and he huddled close to the people standing three deep along the rail. Many of the women, and even a few men, wore full-length fur coats. Joseph had never before seen men in fur, nor had he ever seen men drinking from flasks, as several were now doing. Some of the young women, their bobbed heads covered with turbans or small-brimmed hats, also drank from the silver containers that the men passed around. What most surprised him was the carefree manner in which the women put to their lips what seconds before had touched the lips of several men. Joseph was indeed entering the New World.

He began to feel better among the friendly and boisterous passengers on deck, a crowd that was gleeful and easily amused. They laughed when one older man’s homburg blew off his balding head and sailed into the sea, prompting him to shrug gallantly and smile. They applauded when one of the scavenger birds circling overhead caught in its beak a piece of bread that a passenger had tossed into the air. There was even more applause as the sun streamed through the clouds and the skyline of lower Manhattan came vaguely into view. At first glance Joseph thought he was sailing toward a cluster of cornstalks, dense and golden in the misty morning light. The land was fertile, overplanted, growing before his eyes. Everyone on deck was now concentrated upon it, as if seeing it for the first time, although Joseph was fairly sure that most of these passengers were Americans. He had heard a few older couples on deck speaking
French, but the great majority spoke English in the unaffected and slightly blunt way of those people he had seen in the Left Bank cafés and jazz clubs. He might have seen a few of these passengers before in Paris; he was quite sure of having seen the tall black-haired man who stood near him now, wearing a voluminous raccoon coat, facing the sea with his long shaggy-sleeved arms draped over the shoulders of the petite women in fur-trimmed leather coats and spike-heeled shoes with dark stockings. In Maida the sight of a man standing with his arms embracing two women simultaneously would have invited trouble from at least one aspiring or jealous suitor, but no one on deck appeared to be concerned, certainly not the women snuggled merrily within his grasp. One of them sipped from a silver flask. The other gazed through a pair of binoculars and pointed enthusiastically toward something that delighted her on shore.

The ship was now within a few thousand yards of a row of piers, its bow cutting through chunks of ice, driftwood, and debris. Barges and small steamers were moving slowly up ahead, along the edge of the riverfront, and so was a red-and-white ferryboat trailed by low-flying birds feeding on what was churned up behind the ferry’s stern. Beyond the shorefront, visible between the anchorages and a few seaport shacks, was a roadway being crossed by motor vehicles and horse-drawn wagons; and rising in the background were massive buildings of stone and steel. Some of them looked nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower, but so much bulkier and weightier it was a wonder they did not sink through the thin layer of the ground and disappear under the sea.

With its horn sounding, the boat edged into the slip, and Joseph could see gangs of stevedores standing on the pier below, and many people waiting on the deck of the anchorage. He had been told earlier that he could pass through customs and immigration here in Manhattan, together with the other cabin-class and first-class passengers; but since he had asked his uncles to meet him at Ellis Island, he had to board a ferry with the third-class passengers.

The ferryboat was waiting at the pier near where the big ship had set anchor. Blue-uniformed immigration authorities were assembled to direct the passengers. Instructions were called out in different languages, and after forming lines the passengers were taken aboard. These were people Joseph had not seen during the crossing; they were plainly dressed, in heavy wool coats and long scarves and with blankets wrapped around their shoulders. A few women carried babies; the men carried wooden boxes or leather valises or cloth bags in their ungloved hands. Some of the men were not much older than Joseph; these men were not accompanied
by women. They were sturdily built and ruddy-complected for the most part, and seemed clannish in the way they stood apart from the others as the ferry pushed off noisily through the pilings and headed back out to sea.

Joseph sat on a rear bench behind rows of couples and children, listening while they communicated loudly in French and in languages that he could not identify but thought might be Scandinavian or Slavic. He heard no Italian spoken, and not even English. There was none of the friendliness and frivolity that had existed earlier on the deck of the ocean liner, but mercifully the ferry took only fifteen minutes to cross the waters and approach an odd, almost arabesque red château with four domed towers and a big spike sticking up through each.

Uniformed officials speaking a variety of languages waited at the pier, and then escorted the arrivals, with all their trappings, into the four-domed building. Here, on Ellis Island, the immigrants would spend most of the day, standing on lines waiting to be interrogated by agents and physically examined by doctors. Joseph stood with the others, quite anxious as representatives of the United States Public Health Service took turns scrutinizing his eyes for signs of trachoma, his hair for lice, his neck, arms, and hands for sores, tumors, moles, or other possible indications of insalubriousness. Medical machines probed him for evidence of tuberculosis, heart deficiency, nervous disorders. Joseph had heard that newcomers sometimes failed these examinations, and were turned away back to the boats—deported from America, separated from fellow-traveling kinsmen. But on this day, Joseph and the other ferry passengers moved unchallenged from one medical station to the next; no one had the back of his coat chalked with white letters signifying possible ailments that required further examinations and possible deportation, his travel costs to be absorbed by the shipping company that had booked his passage.