Unto the Sons (74 page)

After stepping down onto the platform at the Atlantic City station, Joseph followed the doctor’s directions to Guardacielo’s Seaside Hotel, a five-story red-brick onetime tenement building that Joseph later learned was a mile away from the nearest beach. The hotel was in the center of town, in a honky-tonk area with jazz clubs and black women strutting along the sidewalk, and a taxi stand where the drivers leaned against the
fenders of their parked vehicles, smoking cigarettes and soliciting business for the speakeasies less than two blocks away.

Entering a small terrazzo-floored lobby with a large painting of the Bay of Naples hanging on one wall next to a grandfather clock—it was now nearly ten p.m.—Joseph at first believed the room was unattended. But then he noticed a young man wearing a porter’s cap asleep in a wicker chair behind the waist-high front desk. Not without some perverse pleasure, Joseph banged the domed bell on the desk to arouse him from his slumber. The young man jumped up, eliciting apologies. He was no more than Joseph’s age, and had a sad long face with pimples, and sparse wisps of hair around his jaw and cheeks that suggested his premature desire for a beard.

“I’m looking for Signor Guardacielo,” Joseph said.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the porter said, “but he’s visiting his relatives in Italy.”

Joseph could picture him prancing in the
passeggiata
.

“Well, I was told to come here for a room,” Joseph said.

“Someone suggested us?” the porter asked, almost in disbelief.

“Yes, a Dr. Fabiani in Philadelphia.”

“Oh, that’s my uncle,” the porter said.

“Well,” Joseph said, resting his heavy suitcase on the floor, “do you
have
a room, a very
quiet
room?”

“The quietest rooms are on the fifth floor, and you can have your pick,” the porter said. “Nobody’s up there.”

As Joseph wrote his name in the registry, the porter locked the front door, reversed a cardboard sign on the knob stating that he would return soon, and, after taking the suitcase, led the way up a squeaky staircase to the top floor.

“This room I’ll show you first is the nicest and largest,” the clerk said, opening the door with some difficulty. The room light was so dim that Joseph could barely see the big bed in front of him, or the large window behind it with red damask draperies that seemed to match the coverlet on the bed.

“This will be fine,” Joseph said.

“Can I bring you something to eat or drink?” the porter asked. “I can get something from the jazz club next door and be back in a minute.”

“No, thank you,” Joseph said. After the five-story climb he wanted only to lie down. When the porter had gone, Joseph unpacked his suitcase, hung up his clothes, opened the window slightly, hoping to reduce the room’s musty smell, and got into bed. From the street he heard the
jingling of trolley bells, the cabmen’s catcalls at the promenading women, and the blaring of the musicians at the club next door. Even after closing the window he could not avoid the noise, although he lay still for a long time with pillows pressed over his face in an attempt to muffle the sounds. Finally he got up, dressed, and returned to the lobby, where it was doubly noisy, but where only after repeated poundings on the bell could he awaken the porter.

“I can’t
stand
it here!” Joseph complained, as the porter jumped up from his chair. “I can’t sleep in all this racket! Dr. Fabiani sent me here for peace and quiet, and …”

“He sent you
here
for that?” the porter asked, rubbing his eyes, and speaking in the same incredulous tone he had used earlier when Joseph had told him that this hotel had been recommended. “Well, I’m sorry,” the porter went on. “My uncle made a mistake. There is no peace and quiet here. For that you have to go somewhere else. You have to go to a place like Ocean City.”

Joseph shook his head slowly. What he wanted least now was more advice. But finally he asked, softly, “Where is that?”

“It’s near here,” he said. “You just get on one of those trolleys outside, and stay on till it stops. The last stop is Ocean City. It’s a place with lots of Protestant ministers and clams.”

Joseph had never met a Protestant minister, had never seen a clam, but early in the morning, after the porter had helped him get his ticket, Joseph was on a trolley heading southward along the Atlantic Coast, rolling along weed-strewn rusty tracks between a desert of white sand and swampy ponds so still that not even a bubble rippled on the surface. He remained on the trolley for more than an hour, looking out through the morning fog at the fishing boats and ocean waves that usually were on his left, but sometimes were behind him as the trolley veered inland through thickets and pine trees, passing small farmhouses and barns where people wearing overalls waved at the conductor. In a red peaked cap, he sat on a high metal stool behind an angular steering apparatus that he never seemed to steer; the trolley appeared to guide itself independently over the curving tracks, and soundlessly, too, except for some slight electrical sputterings when the little wheels rubbed against the rooftop wiring. Joseph sat near the back of the car. Up ahead were three other passengers, white-haired men wearing homburgs and overcoats, seated separately, reading newspapers.

The trolley now left the pineland and was dipping toward a rickety
timber bridge no wider than the trolley tracks that extended for two miles across the bay, supported by hundreds of vertical poles that rose up crookedly from the marshland and the choppy waters. Joseph closed his eyes and prayed as he glimpsed the trolley gliding over the tracks suspended thirty feet above the water, and he kept his eyes closed for ten minutes as he heard the high-pitched clicking hollowness and smelled the boggy breezes of the bay rising up through the car.

“Asbury Avenue,” he heard the conductor call out, and when Joseph opened his eyes he saw that the trolley had passed beyond the bay, and noticed the American flags flying from the porches of white bayfront houses and from the masts of the taller ships anchored along the docks. Moving smoothly across the island, the trolley soon stopped at an intersection of a wide paved street. It was lined with shops and had a bank on the corner. This was the island’s business district, as Joseph would later learn, named in honor of a Methodist missionary, Francis Asbury.

“Wesley Avenue,” the conductor said next, and Joseph soon saw the town’s principal residential block, named for the founder of Methodism. It was a tree-lined street with large Victorian residences, so white, so different from the dark Gothic mansions of Dr. Mattison’s Ambler. Joseph, staring out the window, failed to notice that the three other passengers had just left the car; and not knowing what to ask the driver in English to find out whether he, too, should get off, Joseph sat with uncertainty as the trolley continued across town. It now moved past blocks where most of the homes had boarded-up windows, where no motor vehicles or pedestrians could be seen on the streets, and where the neighborhood’s single traffic light was covered with a canvas hood.

“Boardwalk, final stop,” the conductor called up. The trolley came to a halt in front of the silhouette of an elevated wooden promenade with silvery railings etched across an open sky. Joseph heard the conductor pulling down on a lever and saw him turn around to announce: “This car will start back to Atlantic City in ten minutes.”

Joseph nodded, as if he understood. The conductor stepped down and stood in front of the trolley, smoking a cigarette he had lit before leaving the car. Joseph reached for his suitcase and exited from the side door. Briefly he glanced down the tracks in the direction of the midtown streets he had passed. He could see a few motorcars and tiny figures walking in the distance. Then he stepped onto the sand-covered sidewalk and headed in the opposite direction, toward the sounds of the sea. Holding on to the cold iron railing with one hand, and his suitcase with the other,
he made his way up the ramp to a deserted boardwalk that seemed to stretch endlessly above the sand and surf, without a soul in sight, without any living creatures except the sea gulls circling overhead.

The nearness of the sea, which had always intimidated him, somehow now did not. He was soothed by the steady sounds of the breaking waves, was refreshed by the misty spray that shot up through the boards as the ocean smashed against the pilings below. For some reason he felt he had finally arrived at a place where he wanted to be.

37.

T
he Italy that Joseph had left behind was about to succumb to the rhetorical flair and Fascist political policies of a strong-willed Milan newspaper publisher and onetime schoolmaster, Benito Mussolini. At thirty-nine Mussolini was stocky and prematurely balding, and bothered by acute stomach pains that he mollified only slightly by bloating himself daily with glasses of milk. He rarely complained of his ailment, however, and in public he presented himself as a man of vigorous health and inner contentment, of intellectual acuity and statesmanlike vision. He was a tennis player, a jogger, and a steeplechase rider. He spoke German and French, and could recite poetry in five languages. Though merely five feet, six inches, he seemed much taller because of his erect posture, his broad shoulders and massive chest, and the fact that when speaking behind a lectern he stood on a box. His dark penetrating eyes, jutting jaw, and stern brow projected a sense of fearlessness that often prompted people to compare him to a Roman warrior—a comparison that pleased him, for he did indeed see himself as historically linked to the ancient era of Italian grandeur. It was a grandeur he intended to restore.

“History is nothing but a succession of dominant elites,” he once said, paraphrasing an Italian sociology professor whose lectures he had audited in Switzerland in 1904 during his wandering days as a student and social activist. Now, in 1922, having supported himself in the intervening years mainly as a dissatisfied schoolmaster and an even more dissatisfied editorial writer, Mussolini was ready to stage a political coup and elevate himself into the ranks of dominant elites. He was convinced that now more than ever Italy was in need of a dissatisfied man like himself.

Chaos and political corruption prevailed throughout the nation. Strikes and lockouts, arson and riots interrupted industrial production in urban areas; and in the countryside, thousands of tenant farmers refused to harvest their proprietors’ shares until the government abided by its land-reform promises made years earlier, when it had rallied farm workers’ support during the dark days of World War I. But the large landholders, backed by their powerful friends in government, stalled corrective legislation while concurrently accusing the reformists of being Bolsheviks determined to turn Catholic Italy into a state of godless Communism.

Such an eventuality seemed likely to devout Catholics among the bourgeoisie and the working classes, elements already alarmed by the sight of their streets and squares constantly invaded by a procession of sullen men waving red flags and advocating insurrection. The Vatican was also concerned, and, hoping to overcome leftist candidates at the ballot box, priests for the first time in a half-century did not discourage parishioners from voting—although the Pope continued officially to ignore the political existence of Italy’s parliament and its king. The quarrel between the Italian government and the papacy dated back to the mid-nineteenth-century Risorgimento, when such excommunicants as Victor Emmanuel II, grandfather of the present monarch, while unifying Italy, occupied Rome and the Vatican territories, and confiscated vast ecclesiastical landholdings throughout Rome and up through northeastern Italy almost to Venice.

But in the early 1920s, the Church could channel its political influence through a newly created Catholic party, which was a forerunner of the Christian Democratic Party. Supporting the party’s anti-Communist position, though in a manner deplored by the Church, were groups of right-wing agitators and military veterans’ associations. They tossed rocks and grenades at the red-flagged demonstrators and fired bullets into factories taken over by striking workers. Many right-wing attackers were on the payroll of factory owners, and they received weapons and ammunition from their friends in the police departments and from troops still on active duty. Loyal soldiers and veterans shared a particular grievance against the strikers and militant pacifists, who were assumed to have been shirkers or deserters in the army, and most likely to have participated in the civilian antiwar protests that saw many soldiers, returning to the home front with injuries, being spat upon and even assaulted by unpatriotic local mobs and alien Reds.

Amid such civil discord, transportation and other public services were unreliable in most of the nation. Trolleys regularly broke down. Train schedules were meaningless. The mail was delivered infrequently, if
at all. Everywhere there were reports of increased theft, unsolved murders. The pessimism among peasants was such that charity workers noted in their dialect a conspicuous absence of the future tense. And yet in the overpopulated south, where there were spreading signs of famine, the government raised taxes to help underwrite industrial modernization in the north. The government also sought funds to defray its wartime debts to its allies as well as to absorb the continuing costs of its virtually worthless colonial expansionism before World War I in the deserts of Libya.

In such villages as Maida, which had been on the barter system for years—and where such property owners as eighty-four-year-old Domenico Talese operated their farms exclusively for the welfare of relatives and friends, most of whom worked gratis in the soil for the privilege of eating—there was no money in circulation except that sent from emigrants working abroad. More and more young southern men dreamed of sailing to America, including Joseph’s younger brother Nicola, who was sixteen; but the restrictive 1921 immigration policy in the United States reduced by eighty percent the number of incoming Italians. There were already close to four million Italians in the country, far more than most native-born Americans desired. In opinion polls reflecting native-born American preferences in new neighbors, Italians ranked near the bottom. They were seen as clannish, uncouth, instinctively criminal. The most publicized immigrants in the United States during the early 1920s were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had been found guilty of robbery and murder in a jury trial of disputed justice in New England—and branded, to a greater or less degree, as anarchists; they were now in prison, awaiting execution. The American prohibition law that was imposed upon the nation primarily by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant zealots of sobriety—a law that went into effect in 1920 and was not repealed until 1933—lent credibility to the image of typically wine-drinking Italians, who were by nature lawless; and the American press, by making antiheroes of such bootlegging gangsters as Alfonso (“Scarface”) Capone, heightened the notoriety attached to many people with Italian names.