Homeland Elegies(30)
It took me a moment to realize he was addressing me. “What’s that?”
“Staten Island, that’s where you were born, not Wisconsin. Isn’t that right?” He was staring at me now, his blank look less a provocation than an acknowledgment of betrayal—whether his or mine, I couldn’t tell. What to say? How to explain that I’d been worried he had the wrong idea about me and I lied to let him know I was not the enemy he worried I might be? Was there really no way to convey this simple truth through the thicket of mistrust that had so quickly grown between us? If there was I didn’t see it. So I lied again.
“Oh, no. That’s wrong. It’s a long story.”
My response didn’t seem to surprise him: “You know you can always get that taken care of. All you have to do is take your birth certificate in.”
“Was never a problem for me before, sir. But thank you.”
I heard my combative tone; I hadn’t intended it. He looked away, his tongue lodged against the inside of his cheek, fighting—I thought—the urge to allow, even encourage, an escalation. “Okay,” he said finally, patting the door frame with his palm. “Hope everything works out with the car. Have a good day.”
*
It was a Sunday. Though the tow service was running, the repair shop was closed. The driver told me someone would look at it in the morning and call with an estimate. If it was just the gasket, it would be fixed by Monday afternoon—assuming, of course, I hadn’t driven the car for very long with a blown gasket. “Because if not, and if you’ve been letting the fuel mix in with the coolant or the oil for any length of time”—he paused and studied me, as if trying to divine whether I was the sort of person who might do a thing that stupid—“well, in that case, all bets’d be off.”
The shop was in North Scranton, too far from the downtown hotel where the tow driver suggested I might want to get a room. I called a taxi. The route into the center of town took me through an outlying region of industrial lots, empty warehouses, acres of bare fenced-in asphalt; past curbs crumbling into the streets and roadside grass left to grow to knee height. The roads themselves were worn, pitted with holes, the fading yellow lanes and crosswalks barely insinuated by the disappearing paint. Signs of municipal neglect were everywhere, and an unusually abundant profusion of utility poles and sagging black lines defined all manner of helter-skelter perspectives through which to see the widespread disrepair. We drove past a series of impossibly long buildings, three tall stories of brick covered with rows and rows of broken windows. The cabbie noticed my interest and explained what I was looking at was once the great Scranton Lace Company. He was an older man with a pear-shaped face, thick along the bottom. He wore a faded cabbie cap, and the name on the taxi tag affixed to the back of his headrest read: MARK. “See, we didn’t live too far from here when I was growing up,” he said, sliding open the plastic window on the barrier between us so he could be heard better. “There was lots of Italians in these parts, on the other side of the river we just passed.”
“You’re Italian?”
“My grandparents all came over from the old country.” He slowed and pointed at a street to our right: “When I was a kid, we’d ride our bikes over this way. You’d hit this road, and it was so busy back then. Like its own city over here. Three shifts going in and out every day ’cept Sunday. Hundred times as much traffic as there is now. That factory was running twenty-four hours, six days a week, making tablecloths, curtains, napkins, anything with lace. They had a bowling alley in there, if you can believe it.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. My uncle Jimmy had a girl he was seeing who worked there. One time she snuck me and my cousin in, and we went bowling! Four lanes, if you can believe it! I remember those long looms, the rollers turning. Ladies spinning, twisting yarn, their fingers moving on those machines like they were playing the piano. They didn’t just make lace there. In the war, they made parachutes, tarps for the troops. That was before my time. I don’t know how many people they had working in there. Must have been ten thousand. I mean, look how big it is. In the morning, they’d pour out into the bars along this way here.” He was pointing at a row of boarded-up two-story buildings on his left. “One shift’s drinking Jameson, the new one’s finishing their eggs and bacon on their way in to start the day. Hard to imagine it, with everything looking so dead around here now. But trust me, it wasn’t always like this, if you can believe it.”
“How long ago was this?”
“You know—sixties, seventies.”
With what was left of Scranton Lace behind us, we turned onto a road lined with businesses—a deli, a copy shop, a storefront fitness center—still solvent, though perhaps not by much. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like it was all some walk in the park back then. You know, being Italian in these parts wasn’t easy. Wasn’t easy anywhere, but especially not here. Germans, Scotch-Irish—they hated us. Called us cockroaches. When you think about it, weird thing is we were here before a lot of them even showed up. Working the mills, mines, but see, we didn’t know how to get ahead. It wasn’t our system. Unions, city councils, whatnot. All we knew about getting our needs taken care of was Cosa Nostra. For some folks, that was enough.”
“Mafia strong around here?”