Inside Giovanni’s glorious grocery, the world had lifted its skirt, and I could look at what I ultimately learned was eggplant, marveling at the beauty of the soft glossy fruit, at its obvious inedibility, its incomprehensible name; and there, too, I would enjoy the braggadocio of those wonderfully garish tins I’d seen Governali’s handsome halfback boy put up in a pile like letter blocks and towers for my towns.
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OLIO DI OLIVA
100% ITALIANO
IMPACCATO IN LUCCA
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MED. D’ORO ST. LOUIS 1904
GRAN PREMIO MILANO 1906
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ESPOSIZIONI INTERNAZIONALI TORINO 1911—GENOVA 1914
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A Few steps farther on (Oh-lee-oh, I sang, Oh-lee-vah), the sidewalk was no longer broken by the large oaks and elm trees whose roots undermined it, and you ran out of shade at precisely the moment it let your eyes up (to vocally envision Loo-cah—Mee-lann-oh—Tor-een-oh through vowels long as telescopes) and the street descended rather steeply toward a weedy set of Erie tracks (Jen-no-vah—Sent-Loo-eese) which determined, in traditional fashion, the better quarter of town. (Ess-poh-ziss-ee-oh-nee . . . Ess-poh-zits-ee-oh-nee? Inn-terr-nah-zee . . . nah-zee . . . oh-nah-lee.) Beyond them, as if the rails were a stream, the road rose up a hill which held the courthouse and its square, around which had gathered the grandest stores, the biggest bank, the most rococo movie house, an Episcopay-lee-an church like a fly at a feast, and a public library—on its steps an oddly styled stone lion with a gift horse’s doubtful mouth.
Not here, but back in the Crawl, which is what we called that ratty Erie RR cut because of the exasperating start/stop and shuddersome crawl of its freights, was my grandpa’s furniture store (conveniently near a siding I never saw used, although that was presumably why FEENEY’S FAMILY FURNITURE wasn’t ensconced on the square); and I would make a point of inspecting its displays when I walked by to see whether my father might be folded over in one of those decorator chairs they featured like something bloody spilled on the cloth; but even when he was in the window like a soul on sale, he never looked up, never saw me; his spirit was not in the game, and I was glad. It completed my anonymity. I was usually singing “Addio a Napoli” anyway.
For lunch I would stop at the Malt Mart and have one so thick the mixture rose more slowly than temperature through my straw. I’d also order a hamburger rare enough to bleed when I bit it, with quarter-inch rounds of pickle laid over it like tiles across a porch. I had to suck hard, softening a chunk of bun with the malt and chewing calmly as a cow. I studied the world from a point almost outside it, since I was now an image in the glass for all those people swimming busily past, and my only worry was that I might meet someone I knew. However, the risk was small; the Malt Mart’s countermen were changed as often as underwear, and the two girls were as plain and serviceable as one of the stools. My sort didn’t go there; the place was too square, though ‘square’ is not a word I would have used. I must remember that the memory always writes in an old man’s language. Then I purchased some of that solid chocolate they sold in rough hunks like stone from a quarry, and went off to watch Errol flash his Flynn in Captain Blood, or Leslie Howard fool France in the guise of a foppish fag. The movie melted in my eyes the way the chocolate melted sweetly in my mouth. And what could have been more wonderful than those innocent images, those black and white accounts of the lawless enemies of tyranny—among whom I was proud to count myself?