Unfortunately, what should have been a gift came with a bill. Insults were hurled. Dom accused Mike of being ungrateful, and Mike accused Dom of stealing. Money had gone missing from the petty cash in 1932—where was it? Who took it? Why did it matter now? There had been an incident one evening where the bank bag didn’t make it to the night drop. What happened to the cash?
What had festered like a boil for years was lanced—true sentiments were exposed. Mike told Dom he was “a cut-rate manager who ran the place on the cheap,” while Dom called Mike “a big-hearted Charlie” who was wasteful down to the lavish soap-to-water ratio used in the buckets when the fleet of taxicabs was washed and waxed. Dom wasn’t flexible with fees and lost customers to competitors, while Mike, who was charming and a better negotiator, was muzzled by his older brother, a hardheaded know-it-all.
The grievances stacked up, one upon the other, like soggy layers of wedding pastries on a Venetian table. Then it got personal.
Mike took too much time off to play cards and frolic in Atlantic City while Dom stayed behind and covered for him. Dom was an old-fashioned off-the-boat Italian immigrant, while Mike was a flashy Ameri-gan who had forgotten his roots. Mike had taken loans from the business, built a grand home on Fitzwater with an above-ground pool, and lived extravagantly with a marble fountain in the front yard, while Dom never borrowed a penny, lived within his means, and made do with a birdbath that he filled with a watering can. There was tumult. But then it got worse.
The wives got involved.
Dom’s wife, Jo, and Mike’s wife, Nancy, were like sisters until they weren’t. Jo was a martyr: she cared for her father-in-law until his last breath and cooked and cleaned and hosted Sunday dinner for both families without complaint, while Nancy put on airs, wore a leopard coat with a red satin lining, and dreamed of a Main Line life with servants. Jo wore a cloth coat, sewed her own clothes and curtains while Nancy went to the dressmaker, ordered her draperies from Wanamaker’s, and drove a cobalt blue Packard.
As the business prospered, Jo saved, while Nancy spent. Jo’s simple gold wedding band remained on her hand, but Nancy traded up. The prongs on Nancy’s modest quarter-carat diamond engagement ring were stretched to accommodate the glitzy three-and-a-half-carat upgrade. The delicate gold chain around Nancy’s neck was replaced with one as thick as a strand of pappardelle, from which dangled a new medal more miraculous than a pope’s.
Jo kept to the old ways, holding on to the traditions of her Sicilian family. She was happy to stay home and take care of Nancy’s boys along with her own, while Nancy went out on the town wearing the latest Mr. John hat to soirees, where the closest thing to anything Italian, besides her, was the cut lace on the tablecloths. Nancy, ever the climber, walked all over good-natured Jo on her way to the top, leaving bruises behind. Dom stepped in to defend Jo, and Mike did the same for Nancy.
Dom and Mike were so furious with one another that they brought their battle into the street, making it public, which no Italian family had done since Romulus and Remus called the wolf Mama. Outsiders were happy to fuel the fight with gossip and innuendo, deepening the rift.
The truth grew spikes and became a wrecking ball, severing the families.
Every Italian knows that once the gravy is burned, there is no saving it. The only solution is to throw it out, all of it, every drop, along with the pot. Dominic and Mike threw one another away and did not look back.
A division within families was nothing new in South Philly. The neighborhood had at least two of everything, so it could accommodate any family schism. A family could split and survive, move into a new half of a two-family home, tithe in a different church, send their children to another parish school, and even get their haircuts at competing barbershops without running into each other on a regular basis. Life could go on as normal in a state of rage for years on end against one’s own blood family without repercussion.
Vincit qui patitur.*
Mike and Dom would live a street apart without acknowledging one other, and so would their wives. Their children, a small army of boys, were mystified by the break between the two heads of their households, but quickly learned to abandon their relationships with their cousins to appease their parents, as they lived within the fault lines, careful not to upset the ones whose approval they most craved. Years later, the vitriol flowed fresh into the hearts of new family members who married in, the young brides taking sides easily as part of their oath of loyalty and proof of love to their new husbands.
If you wanted in, you had to recognize the sin.
The break didn’t seem to bother Dom and Mike, even though they were the only two men in the world who remembered the port of Naples on the cloudy morning of April 29, 1901. Domenico, twelve years old, and Michele, eleven, stood together aboard the ship that would bring them to America, to their father, who had emigrated to Philadelphia to work in the Naval Shipyard as a welder. Their mother had died suddenly of a fever, and no relative in Avellino had enough room to take them in or the resources to provide for them, so their father sent their passage.
The boys mourned their mother desperately. They were grief-stricken and frightened. Clinging to one another, they held hands (which they had not done since they were three and four years old) on the deck of the Argentinia as they bid arrivederci to their home, without any idea what lay ahead. Only Dom would know that Mike wept in his arms, and only Mike would know that Dom whispered “Non ti lascero mai.” Dom may have promised to never leave his brother but all of that was forgotten years later, when one brother was certain the other was cheating him over a parcel of land whose value was negligible and which neither would have wanted had their father not left it behind, callously favoring one son over the other, or perhaps for another reason entirely.
Their father, Domenico Michele Palazzini, was a talented ironworker but also a gambler, turning everything in his life into a contest he could bet on. He took particular pleasure in pitting one son against the other. Without the tender influence of his wife, he was a bully, and his sons knew that the only way to survive was to please him.
After the old man’s death, the gold ruled, and the Palazzini brothers became loyal subjects. Dom didn’t want to talk about their father, and Mike wanted to become him. Their kingdom, including their booming taxi business and their modest real estate holdings, was now divided in two, like the pot in a high-low game of lowball poker.
The brothers learned that half of something wonderful is just half, but their animosity was so deep, neither cared about what had been lost. They would live a street apart from one another, close enough for Mike to catch the scent of Jo’s gravy on Sunday and Dom to hear Mike’s hi-fi playing Sinatra in the wee hours, yet far enough apart to allow their anger to fuel their ambition to outdo the other and win. Sixteen long years had come and gone, but the wound was fresh.
Alea iacta est.*
Act I
A young man married is a young man that’s married.
—All’s Well That Ends Well
1
May 2, 1949
Philadelphia
Elsa Palazzini moved through the Ninth Street Market hastily, past the fishmonger, the farmer, the baker, the butcher, and the fruit vendor. The merchants’ banter with the delivery boys filled the air, drowned out occasionally by the thuds of wooden merchandise boxes as they hit the ground, the squeaks of the rubber wheels on the trucks as they nosed in behind the stands to make deliveries, and the deafening crash of an avalanche of ice as it was poured into a metal bin. Out front, deals were made sotto voce, vendor to customer, with only their body language giving away the terms.
The sun was not yet up; the only light in the open-air market came from the headlights on the trucks and the bare bulbs that dangled underneath the red-striped awnings. Elsa pushed through until she found the peddler selling fresh flowers. An overnight rain had left a cool mist in the air. She shivered and buttoned her jacket.
A lone bulb on a wire swayed lazily back and forth in the breeze, throw
ing streaks of light on the display of gray buckets filled with fresh flowers. Elsa surveyed the selection of purple lilacs, yellow daffodils, pink peonies, puffs of blue hydrangea, and bunches of daisies until she found what she was looking for.
She lifted a cluster of baby roses tied with a string from a bucket jammed full of them. The fresh, icy water ran down her hand as she examined it. She put it back, choosing another, and another, until she found a bunch whose petals were closed so tightly the buds resembled pink flames.
“May Day celebration?” the peddler asked as he wrapped the flowers in waxed paper.
Elsa nodded.
“I ran out of white roses yesterday. Our Lady of Good Counsel decided all white this year.”
Elsa smiled at him. “Luck is with me. All my girls are wearing pink. Except the queen and the statue of the Blessed Lady. And I’ve already made those crowns with white roses.” Her accent, a combination of her native Polish and proper English, along with her willowy stature and innate elegance, gave Elsa an aristocratic air.
“The Queen of Heaven comes first,” he said.
“Of course.” Elsa unsnapped her change purse and fished for seventy-five cents. As she paid for the flowers, a woman joined them.
“Very pretty,” the customer commented as the peddler handed Elsa the roses.
“Thank you. This is the best stand for fresh flowers.” Elsa winked at the peddler.
“Then maybe you can help me. I don’t know whether to choose the peonies or the daffodils.”
“What is the occasion?”
“A wedding.”
“Why not both? And add the laurel leaves.” Elsa pointed to the bundles of waxy green leaves gathered with string.
“That would be lovely. I don’t know what the ladies at the temple would say.”
“What temple do you attend?”
“B’Nai Abraham,” the woman answered. “Do you know it?”
“On Lombard Street?” Elsa heard the tap of her husband’s horn and waved to him before turning back to the woman. “Mazel tov to the bride and groom. Shalom.”
“Shalom.” The lady watched after Elsa curiously.
By the time Elsa reached the car, Dominic Palazzini III had jumped out and opened the bright yellow taxi door for her. He was tall, like his wife, and matinee-idol handsome, with dark hair and eyes, a patrician nose like the movie star Robert Taylor, and expressive dark eyebrows. Elsa kissed him on the cheek. “Did they have what you needed?”
“Exactly what I needed.”
Dominic helped her into the front seat of the cab. “You only get what you want if you get here early,” he said as he closed the door behind her.
Dominic climbed into the driver’s seat. Elsa scooted next to her husband. She laced her arm through his. “Let’s take a drive on the river,” he said. “We’ll have the road to ourselves.”
Elsa checked her wristwatch. “The baby is getting up soon.”
“Ma’s there.”
“I don’t like to miss the morning.”
“You don’t like to miss anything, Elsa.”
Elsa smiled and placed her head on her husband’s shoulder as they headed toward home.
* * *
A few blocks away, a low fog the color of pink champagne floated over Montrose Street.
The south side of Philadelphia glistened. The dingy row houses had the patina of seashells, as the blouse factory’s gray entrance turned to polished silver in the morning light. The open trenches that scarred the street where the city had recently dug deep to install pipes weren’t gulleys of mud but moats, ancient rivers to protect the kingdom the city planners had named Bella Vista.
Nicky Castone tucked his lunch bag under his arm as he stood on the steps of 810 Montrose Street, where he had lived with his uncle Dom and aunt Jo and their sons since he was five years old. His first cigarette of the day dangling from his mouth, he closed the brass buttons on his uniform jacket with his free hand. The fresh menthol in the Lucky Strike stung his throat, filled his lungs, and woke him up. A storage tube hung from his shoulder on a wide leather strap. He adjusted it to tilt to the side, like a rifle.
Nicky not only noticed the sun as it rose over the neighborhood but reveled in its serene splendor. He saw beauty in the world, even when there wasn’t any. A certain kind of light, he figured, was like a veil on a bride at the altar of an arranged marriage: it obscured any defect while presenting mystery as potential. There was nothing wrong with that.
The air filled with the sweet scents of basil, lemon, and fresh earth. The Spatuzza boys, Nicky’s farmer cousins on his mother’s side from across the river in Jersey, had made their annual delivery during the night, dropping off the essentials for spring planting. The bounty was displayed on the porch steps like statues in a Roman atrium. There were pots filled with tomato plants, and urns holding fig trees, lemon trees, and boxwood topiaries. Crates of budding vegetable plants were arranged around wooden flats spiked with shoots of green herbs. It looked like Aunt Jo had ordered a sample of every plant that grew on the Eastern Seaboard. Their tags fluttered in the breeze like petals. Their official names written in Latin conjured memories of serving high mass as an altar boy: Nasturtium Gloria. Aster laevis. Specularia perfoliata.
As Nicky navigated his way through the dense foliage, he marveled at the Spatuzzas’ aesthetics. Italians make anything artful, including the delivery of manure.
Soon, under Aunt Jo’s supervision, the backyard, the rooftop, and the patches of earth that anchored the front porch would be planted. In a few weeks there would be mille fiori, explosions of color as flowers bloomed along the walkway. Come August the harvest from the garden would fill their al fresco table with Italian peppers, arugula, fennel, and cucumbers. Nicky could taste the zucchini blossoms already.
The tomato, the essential ingredient of any Palazzini dish, would multiply by the bushel on the roof garden. Close to the sun, they would grow red, plump, and sweet as they ripened. Eventually the women would pick them and place them in wooden baskets, which the men would haul down to the basement kitchen. There, the entire family was put to work as the tomatoes were cleaned, crushed, and canned, preserving enough jars of sauce to last through the long, gray Pennsylvania winter.
Nicky crossed the street to the garage, unlocked the rolling gate beneath the red tin sign: The Palazzini Cab Company and Western Union Telegraph Office, and pushed it off to the side. He lifted the iron staff from its hiding place over the door, hooked the loop, and unfurled the awning out over the sidewalk. Nicky reached up and gently smoothed the fabric, which had been patched in places, worn thin where the rain had beaten the supports and the elements had faded the stripes, once military bright.
He remembered when the canopy was new. Eight years later, the war was won, and everything had changed. There was the big stuff: families reconfigured, men lost forever, others’ futures uncertain. There were the small things, too, such as the welcome return of silk stockings and sugar. Some aspects of life on the home front had ended, including the government bond drives that brought beloved entertainers like Jimmy Durante to places like Palumbo’s in Philly to raise money for the cause. There would be no more sacrifice in victory, no need to collect scraps of metal to drop off at Army Surplus to make wheel spokes and bombs. It was all over.
When the boys had left for the war, Montrose Street had exhibited patriotic polish and pride. Flags were displayed on every building, and storefront windows were dressed with photographs of the soldiers whose families lived in the neighborhood. The Palazzinis’ awning, a blaze of red, with bold stripes of blue on a field of spotless white, looked like the flag. By the time Nicky returned, those hues had faded to gray and mauve and beige, the colors of the old men and the women who stood by them. Nicky talked to Uncle Dom about replacing the canopy, but he had gotten nowhere. “Does it keep you dry when it rains?” Dom had barked. “Canvas is expensive.” Uncle Dom put a price on beauty, and no matter the cost, it was always too high.
Ni
cky wished that Dom were more like his estranged uncle Mike, who did care about appearances. The awning on Pronto Taxi was replaced every year, whether it needed it or not. The red, white, and green stripes remained pristine, in snow, rain, and sun. There were extras, too: the flap that faced the street was embroidered with a cursive P in snazzy gold thread, and the poles that anchored the canopy to the sidewalk were made of polished brass.
Uncle Mike was as smooth as a Mariano Fortuny bed jacket. He wore Italian-cut suits, silk ties, and oxblood loafers while Uncle Dom dressed like an undertaker, regardless of the occasion. Dom owned one black wool suit and one black serge, and paired both with plain white cotton dress shirts and a black tie. His dress shoes, black leather lace-ups, hadn’t changed since the flapper era.
When Uncle Mike entered a room, women tingled as they got a brisk whiff of exotic patchouli and Sen-Sen. When Uncle Dom entered a room, he brought a different bouquet entirely. He reeked of Fels-Naptha soap, Listerine mouthwash, and the occasional trace of bleach.
Nicky was only twelve years old when he was no longer allowed to speak to Uncle Mike, Aunt Nancy, and their sons, Richard, Michael, and Anthony, whom their father had nicknamed Ricky, Micky, and Tricky. Nicky missed his cousins, but out of respect to Jo and Dom, he never mentioned how much.
Inside the garage, Nicky inspected the fleet of cabs that he had washed the night before. Even in the morning gloom, they gleamed like butterscotch candy under the work lights. Dominic III had already picked up No. 1, so there remained three yellow cabs in their spaces. No. 2 was driven by Gio. No. 3 was driven by Nino.
Nicky drove No. 4. He gave his yellow cab a pat as he passed it on the way to the stairs. The jewel of the operation, a glistening black 1947 Buick Roadmaster four-door sedan, covered with a beige chamois cloth, was tucked in the alcove. The sedan was the formal patent leather shoe in the fleet of casual loafers. Nicky adjusted the cloth before making his way up the steps to the dispatch office, an aluminum box with a window giving a clear view of the garage below.