Deacon King Kong(58)
On the other hand, what was life all about? Family. Love. That woman was concerned about her father. She was loyal to family. He understood that feeling. It said a lot about her.
He’d talked to her briefly before he left. The Governor had fallen asleep on his couch after their conversation, and Elefante went to the door to let himself out. She was coming up the stairs to check on her father and caught him. He’d guessed she heard him leaving and wanted to make sure her father was okay. That’s what he would have done. Check that her father was breathing, maybe make sure the stranger wasn’t some goombah from years past who showed up wanting to even things. That said a lot about her too. She was shy, but clearly not that shy, and not stupid. And not afraid.
They’d met in the hallway by the front door. They’d talked maybe twenty minutes. She was immediately open and candid. He was someone her father trusted. So she trusted him.
“I can handle things,” she said when he asked her about running the bagel shop on her own. He had joked about her tearing into the room, mop first, holding the bucket and using the mop as a spear. She laughed and said, “Oh, that. My poppa cleans like a kindergartner.”
“Well, he’s worked hard enough.”
“Yes, but he leaves his place a mess, and he falls asleep so easily.”
“My feet fall asleep when I’m running for the bus.”
She laughed again, and opened up more, and in the ensuing chat showed that behind the gentle veneer lay qualities more like those of her father, lighthearted, funny, but with a firmness and cleverness he found alluring. They chatted easily together. She knew he was there for important business. She knew their fathers had been close friends. Yet he still sensed a tentativeness. He probed her gently. That was his job, he thought bitterly, as a goddamned smuggler working with lowlife drug dealers like Joe Peck and murderers like Vic Gorvino: to sense weakness in others. Standing there, he felt her probing him as well. He felt her size him up and squeeze him—gently—for information. Try as he might, he couldn’t block it, couldn’t prevent her from seeing the part that most never saw, that while he was firm and tight on the surface, all business, maybe a little too Italian in his manner and speech, beneath it he bore the heavy sense of responsibility for his mother and those he cared about with kindness that was safer to hide. He was the man her father trusted. But why him? Why not a cousin or an uncle? Or at least a fellow Irishman? Why an Italian? In those twenty minutes the war between the races, the Italians versus the Irish, was waged, the two representatives of the black souls of Europe, left in the dust by the English, the French, the Germans, and later in America by the big boys in Manhattan, the Jews who forgot they were Jews, the Irish who forgot they were Irish, the Anglos who forgot they were human, who got together to make money in their big power meetings about the future, paving over the nobodies in the Bronx and Brooklyn by building highways that gutted their neighborhoods, leaving them to suffer at the hands of whoever came along, the big boys who forgot the war and the pogroms and the lives of the people who survived World War I and World War II sacrificing blood and guts for their America, so they could work with the banks and the city and state to slap expressways in the middle of thriving neighborhoods and send the powerless suckers who believed in the American dream scrambling to the suburbs because they, the big boys, wanted a bigger percentage. He felt it, or thought he felt it, as they stood by the front door. There was a connection: a man whose father was dead and a woman whose father was about to die, a sense of wanting to belong, standing in the warm vestibule, she in her farm-girl dress, with a job that paid taxes and drew no cops, no Joe Pecks, no complicated phone calls from complicated people trying to pick your pocket with one hand while saluting the flag with the other, and he feeling a sense of belonging he hadn’t felt in years.
She laughed easily, asking questions, the shyness gone now, while he nodded silently. She talked the entire twenty minutes, which seemed to pass in seconds, and all the while he felt like shouting, “I’m the seal on the beach. If you only knew me.” But instead he was light and firm, halfheartedly trying to block her questions by pretending to be aloof and distrustful. She saw through it all, he could tell. She saw him clearly. He felt naked. She wanted to know why he was there. She wanted to know everything.
But she could never know.
That was part of the arrangement. He had agreed to the Governor’s harebrained scheme, of course. In part because he loved his father. The parts of his father that he knew ran deepest were all about trust. Any man his father trusted had to be a loving, good man. There was no doubt. Guido Elefante had never backed out on his word with a man he trusted. Neither did his father care what others thought of him. Poppa loved his mother, no doubt because Momma was anything but the typical Brooklyn Italian housewife like so many on his block, the women who chatted about nothing, tossing cannolis around, filing obediently into mass at St. Andrew’s every morning praying for their husband’s redemption and, by extension, their own, complaining about the niggers and the spics taking over the neighborhood while their husbands ran liquor and shot anyone who opened their mouth wrong about their gambling operations and horse-racing fixes and their running roughshod over the coloreds. His mother didn’t care about the coloreds. She saw them just as people. She cared about plants, and digging for them in the empty lots around their neighborhood—plants, she insisted, that had kept her husband alive long after most expected him to be gone. And as for their son, she never asked questions of Thomas; she respected Elefante when he was but a boy because she understood, instinctively, that her son would be different from most of the Italians in the neighborhood, had to be different just like she and her husband had to be different to survive. She never made apologies for her family. The Elefantes were what they were. That was all there was to it. Poppa had welcomed the Governor into his world. And so Elefante did as well. They were partners now. That was decided.