At least there was no shortage of work. Maybe the war had made America nervous about aliens, Salvatore wasn’t sure, but the government had put quotas on immigration. Apart from a lot of black people who came up from the South, the flood of new immigrants into New York had turned to a trickle. Meanwhile, the city was booming. Wages were good, and rising.
The years had passed. By 1925, Salvatore’s cache of savings had grown enough for him to wonder whether, maybe, he could think about looking for a wife.
He was walking down Sixth Avenue on a cold day in December when he met Paolo. His brother was looking sharp, in a double-breasted overcoat and a derby hat. He might have been taken for a banker. Or a gangster. He was evidently surprised to see Salvatore, but he grinned.
“You chose the right place to meet, kid,” he said. “Come in and eat.” The Fronton occupied a basement a block to the west of Washington Square, by Sixth Avenue. Run by young Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns, it was one of the best speakeasies in town. Salvatore noticed that as soon as Paolo’s face appeared at the entrance, where visitors made themselves known through a peephole, the door was instantly opened, and Paolo was greeted by name.
The Fronton was a spacious cellar. The floor was mostly taken up by tables with white tablecloths. There was a bar along one side of the room, and pictures of the Wild West on the walls. The place was already filling up with the lunchtime crowd, and Salvatore noticed one or two well-known faces. But Paolo was given a table at once. They each ordered a steak, and in the meantime, they were served Irish whiskey. Salvatore remarked that Paolo looked well, and Paolo smiled, raising his glass.
“Let’s drink to Prohibition, brother. It’s been good to me.”
When the temperance movement had triumphed, and the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution banning the sale of “intoxicating liquors” went into effect in 1920, the face of America might have changed. But it sure as hell hadn’t stopped people drinking. The law was the law, but millions of people didn’t believe in it. Respectable restaurants would adopt subterfuges—a bowl of soup, for instance, might turn out to be liquor. And in cities like New York, there were the speakeasies—subject to police raids, but ever-present. And of course, as with every law that denies people something they are determined to have, Prohibition had created a huge and profitable market, where illicit supply could name its price. Bootlegger operators like Rothstein, Waxy Gordon, Frank Costello, Big Bill Dwyer and Lucky Luciano were making fortunes. Salvatore had wondered for a long time if his brother was involved in bootlegging. Now Paolo had as good as told him.
They chatted about the family. Paolo asked Salvatore about his love life, and then told him: “I can get you a real high-class girl, I mean one of the best. For free.” He grinned. “She owes us a debt. You want to try her?”
“I’ll think about it,” Salvatore said, but he had no desire to get mixed up with Paolo’s friends, and they both knew it. “Maybe I’ll find a nice girl and get married,” he added.
“Bene. Bene.” Paolo looked pleased. “You’ll invite me to your wedding?”
“Of course. How could my brother not be at my wedding?”
They talked about Angelo next, and how Uncle Luigi still wanted him to make more of his life.
“Maybe Uncle Luigi’s right, though,” said Paolo. “The kid could go to painting school or something. If you need money …”
Salvatore gazed at his brother, and felt a wave of affection. Behind the gangster—for that’s what his brother was—the old Paolo was still there. He wanted to do right by his family. He was trying to show his love, maybe receive love too. Salvatore reached over and squeezed his brother’s arm.
“You’re a good brother,” he said softly. “I’ll tell you if Angelo needs anything.”
They finished their steaks. Paolo ordered coffee.
“Can I ask you something?” Salvatore said.
“Sure.”
“Does it worry you, being on the wrong side of the law?”
Paolo paused before replying.
“Do you remember 1907, when Rossi lost all our father’s savings?”
“Of course I do.”
“And do you remember 1911, when Anna got killed in the factory?”
“How could I forget?”
“I remember too, Salvatore.” Paolo nodded, and suddenly a suppressed passion came into his voice. “I remember with anger. With bitterness. Because my family was poor, because they were ignorant, because they were losers, people dared to steal from them, to let them fry in fire traps.” He shrugged, furiously. “Why not? We were only Italians. Wops. Dagos. So I said to myself, I will not be a loser. I will do whatever it takes, but I will win.” He paused again, seemed to collect himself, then smiled. “Maybe I’ll get rich and marry and buy a big farm for us all. How about that, little brother?”
So then Salvatore understood his brother’s dream.
A party of four was just being seated at the table next to theirs. Salvatore glanced across. They were uptown people. There was a young man in his twenties, somewhat carelessly dressed, and a young woman, a typical flapper, he thought. By the look of it, the middle-aged couple with them were the parents of the young man. The father seemed like a Yankee Wall Street type, handsome and blue-eyed. The mother was wearing a pearl choker and a fur. She looked about nervously. Salvatore thought he’d seen her before. He tried to remember where.
“I just hope, Charles,” she said, “that there isn’t going to be a police raid. It would be so embarrassing.”
The young man laughed and told her not to worry, but she didn’t look too happy.
Then, to Salvatore’s surprise, Paolo leaned over toward their table.
“Forgive me, ma’am,” he said smoothly, in a voice Salvatore had never heard before, “but I think I can put your mind at rest.”
Salvatore observed with amazement. He had never seen his brother like this before. The Paolo he had known since his childhood, who still spoke with the hint of an Italian accent, had suddenly disappeared. In his place was an elegant man who sounded like an uptown lawyer.
“Oh,” said the lady, looking pleased, “I’d be so glad if you would.”
“Well,” Paolo smiled, “there are two reasons. The first is that, if the police were going to raid this establishment, I would already know about it. The second is that, two tables behind you, is the mayor of New York.”
Her husband looked at the table in question, gave a huge grin to Paolo and burst out laughing. For there indeed was none other than James J. Walker, the charming Irish mayor of New York, who did as he pleased in all matters, including wine, women and song.
With a smile to the lady, and a respectful nod toward the mayor, Paolo rose to leave.
“Would you really know if the place was going to be raided?” Salvatore asked as they came out onto the sidewalk.
“Course I would, kid. The cops are all taken care of—Lucky Luciano pays the police over $10,000 a week.” He chuckled. “That lady had some nice pearls, whoever she was.”
“Actually,” said Salvatore, “I just realized. I know her.”
“Well,” said Rose to Charlie, “when you take us out to lunch, it’s always an adventure.” This wasn’t a compliment. And because he knew that, Charlie laughed.
The last time he’d taken his parents out, it was to the Algonquin Hotel. They had quite enjoyed that. After all, it was not even a block from Fifth Avenue, on West Forty-fourth Street. The Harvard Club was just a few doors down, and, better yet, the New York Yacht Club, that nexus of his mother’s summer at Newport, had its magnificent city clubhouse almost beside it. “Why,” as his mother declared, “I must have been within yards of this hotel a hundred times, and never thought to look inside.”
The great feature of the Algonquin was the big table at which, every day, the literary luminaries of the city met together. He’d pointed out the writers Benchley and Sherwood, the critic Dorothy Parker, and Ross, who’d just started his New Yorker magazine that year. Rose
was especially pleased about seeing Ross. People were starting to talk about the New Yorker.
As Charlie glanced around the speakeasy, he wondered if there was anyone, apart from the mayor, that he could point out to his mother. “That’s Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poetess,” he said, indicating a strikingly beautiful woman sitting in one corner. “She won a Pulitzer Prize.” He was tempted, but decided not to add that she liked to sleep with interesting people of either sex. He had enough trouble with his mother as it was.
Rose Master didn’t approve of Charlie’s desire to be a writer. He understood. “You can buy pictures, but people like us don’t paint them, dear,” she’d once told him when he was a boy, and it was almost the same with writing. A professor could write history of course; a gentleman of leisure might write a memoir. During the war, one of the distinguished Washburn family had even been a war correspondent for The Times of London. That was different. But to live in lodgings in Greenwich Village, make undesirable friends, and hang about Tin Pan Alley, trying to write plays and songs, was a shocking waste of a life for a young man with everything to live for. When he confessed that he’d like to write like Eugene O’Neill, she’d been appalled. “But he’s a drunk,” she protested. “And his friends are communists.”
Charlie also suspected that his mother’s fear was not only that he’d permanently adopt a bohemian lifestyle, but that he wouldn’t be able to make a decent living.
Strangely enough, his father had been his secret ally. William had given him a job in his office, but the work was very light, and as long as he turned up for a few hours each day, his father didn’t seem to mind.
“Making money’s quite boring, really,” William had said. “I have more fun with my car.”
Though this was probably true, Charlie reckoned that his father must be making a fortune, on top of the fortune he’d inherited.
Most people they knew seemed to be doing well. For although, at the Great War’s end, there had been the usual post-war recession, it hadn’t lasted long. And once it was past, in New York at least, the Roaring Twenties had begun.
It was an amazing time to be a New Yorker. Europe, devastated by the war, was still on its knees. The British Empire was severely weakened. London was still a great financial center, but New York was now richer and more powerful. All over America, helped by anti-trust legislation and other safeguards, modest enterprises had blossomed. American industries and cities were booming. But New York was the financial center through which this new wealth flowed. Wall Street men bought into the newly created wealth, traded its stocks and prices soared. Brokers get rich when stocks are traded. Speculators get richer still. William Master speculated, but his main business was the brokerage house, which he pretty much owned these days.
If his father was so accommodating toward his literary ambitions, Charlie shrewdly guessed that behind this lay two calculations. First, that William reckoned it was wiser to keep a genial eye on his son than provoke a quarrel. Second, that the family now had so much money that it didn’t matter anyway.
And Charlie was happy. He loved the Village, with its intimate atmosphere, its theaters, its writers and artists. He took the modest salary his father paid him, and never asked for anything more. He showed up at the house for social gatherings if his mother wanted, and when he did, he was charming to her guests, who found him witty and amusing. If he’d written some songs for the music publishers in Tin Pan Alley, they thought it was delightful. They promised to come to his play, when it was performed. “Young people are leading such exciting lives, these days,” they said.
Which brought him to Peaches. His parents hadn’t met Peaches before, and his mother was eyeing her, cautiously.
“What a very pretty ring, my dear,” she said, at last.
Peaches was wearing a short dress and a smart coat with a fur-trimmed shawl collar, which she’d opened when she sat down. Her hair was bobbed, under a cloche hat. Her lips were dark red. While the waiter was getting their drinks, she’d taken out a cigarette holder, put a cigarette in it, and taken a long draw, blowing the smoke politely over Rose’s head. The ring was an elegant little art deco piece, a pair of garnets set in white-gold filigree. The garnets matched her lips.
“It was made by a friend,” she said. “He’s the bee’s knees.”
Rose didn’t like the flappers. She thought their haircuts made them look like boys, and their dresses were much too short. Before the war, the Gibson Girl look, the trim blouses and skirts that places like the Triangle Factory had catered to, had suggested a new female freedom. And the end of the war had brought them a very real freedom: the right to vote. But to Rose, freedom meant responsibility, yet the flappers seemed to think they could be free with their morals as well. They smoked and danced the charleston; many of them quite certainly made free love. And they seemed to be everywhere you looked.
She wasn’t surprised that Charlie had taken up with a flapper, but, as usual, she was disappointed in him.
“Where do you come from?” she asked the girl. A simple enough question.
“London.” She looked bored. Charlie for some reason seemed to think this very funny. “Paris too,” she added. “Then Washington.”
“Did you like Washington?” Rose asked coldly.
“It was dull.”
“And where did you meet Charles?”
“In a speakeasy. He was half cut.”
“I was plastered,” said Charlie with a grin.
“But I could see he was no kluck,” Peaches added, obligingly.
“I’m just a flypaper,” Charlie said.
“Stick around.”
How Rose hated the way these young people talked. She’d heard it all before, of course. They thought they were so clever. It had also dawned on her that Peaches had not lived in either London or Paris, or even Washington probably, and that this was just her way of letting them know she had no intention of answering any questions if she didn’t feel like it.
“You work in the city?” Rose asked.
“In the music business.”
William Master stepped in now. He liked Broadway musicals. He’d been at the opening of Kaufman’s The Cocoanuts just the week before—the Marx Brothers were the stars. He asked Peaches if she’d seen it, and was favored with a smile. “It’s good,” she acknowledged.
“Think it’ll run?”
“Yes. Then it’ll tour. The Gershwins have a premiere later this month, too.”
“I know. Tip-Toes. We have seats. Do you and Charlie want to join us?”
This provoked another smile.
“We’ll come,” said Charlie. “When Father went to the Rhapsody in Blue concert last year,” he told Peaches, “he said it was the most beautiful piece of music he’d ever heard.”
“That’s good.” She turned to William. “I could use another drink.”
“You like to drink?” remarked Rose.
“She always carries some hooch with her,” said Charlie cheerfully.
Rose glanced at the little handbag Peaches had been carrying. It was too small to hold more than some lipstick and powder. Peaches laughed.
“Not there,” she said. She stood, and pulled up her short skirt. Halfway up her thigh was a garter. And above that, tucked into the top of her stocking, a silver hip flask. “Here,” she said.
Rose stared. She noticed that her husband was also gazing at the girl’s thigh, without disapproval.
“Well, dear, I’m glad it’s somewhere convenient.”
Only when they were on their way home afterward did Rose express her true feelings to her husband. “It’s time,” she said firmly, “that you gave Charlie some work to do.”
It was at the start of the following June that Salvatore took Angelo to Coney Island. Anyone who’d last visited the place half a century earlier, when it was a seaside village, would have been astonished to see it now. First came a carousel, next a roller coaster, then vaudeville houses and amusement parks. By the end of the nineteenth century
, more than a hundred thousand visitors might go there on a summer day. You could even take the subway to Coney Island now.
The day was warm. Angelo was enchanted with the place. They strolled along the boardwalk past the Brighton Beach Hotel, then along Oriental Boulevard. They had sundaes at an ice-cream parlor. Salvatore encouraged Angelo to look at the pretty girls bathing in the sea.
They were standing near the garish lights of the Luna Amusement Park when he noticed the two young women. They looked as if they might be Italian, but he wasn’t sure. One of them was too tall for his taste, but the other caught his attention. The light sunburn on her face suggested she might come from a farm. She was wearing a cotton dress. Her breasts were not large, but full, and her legs were nice, a little plump. He liked that. Her brown hair was swept back in a bun, and her eyes were kind.
He walked over casually with Angelo, and paused beside them, as if wondering whether to go in. The girl glanced at him and smiled, but not in a flirtatious way. She turned back to her companion.
“Well,” she said in Italian, “if you won’t go on the roller coaster, do you want to go in here?”
Salvatore smiled. Then he addressed her in Italian.
“My brother’s afraid of the roller coaster,” he lied.
“My cousin’s the same.”
“Maybe if we all four go together, that will give them courage.”
The girl gave him a quick look, decided he was respectable, and turned to her cousin, who shrugged.
“Andiamo,” said the girl. “My name is Teresa,” she added.
“Salvatore. You’re Italian?”