The Einstein Express

The Einstein Express - novel in progress by Umberto Tosi, Chapters 1-7

2009-10-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER 1

“Feel the heft of it, sonny boy” Nicky’s father said. “That’s the feel of big money.” His father’s clear, self-assured, baritone voice cut through the din of the railway platform without his having to shout. The boy almost broke into a trot keeping up with his 6-foot-5-inch father’s long, always purposeful strides.

He had to reach out like a halfback taking a handoff to catch the fat roll of cash from his father’s large, quick hand. God forbid he would drop the ball. The wad, held together by an orange rubber band stretched taunt, seemed to double in size when it landed in the boy’s smaller, paler, long-fingered hands.

Not only could the boy feel the heft, he caught the scent of it – a faint potpourri of paper, linen, sweat, perfume, ash and that of his father’s black trench coat and hands. He would remember it always: the odor of well traveled, old bills, untraceable except by a dog who could sniff the wad and tell you through whose hands each C-note had passed, living or dead.

Nicky didn’t need a wad of anything to excite him. Keys of a piano excited him more. He loved the touch of them, and sought one out to play every chance he could, for his parents had yet to buy one for their new, bungalow house in Hollywood, and he missed it.

He'd tried to tell his mother this and she'd told him that the life of a musician was too hard and that he would have had to be a prodigy by age 4 to ever hope being a concert performer. Here he was already over the hill.

And his father: forget about it. Play piano as a hobby, or take up golf or both, but a man's life is to make money, son, and I'll show how. Only women and men who were “that way,” were artists.

But neither pianos nor money occupied him now, despite the wad handed to him by his father. In moments he’d be boarding the Union Pacific cross-country City of Los Angeles passenger train en-route to Chicago in the first, and longest leg of the 3,000-mile ride from Los Angeles to Boston.

Nicky warmed with anticipation of the trip in the way one smells the deliciousness of a great feast about to be served taking in that scent that combines every goodness of the food beyond the sum of every taste to come.

For three days and three nights, he and his mother and father would make their semi-annual trip home – once at Christmas and once in August. It was 1944. There was a war on, though finally, people were talking about it ending soon, maybe in the year just ahead, though some of its bloodiest months lay just ahead in both Europe and the Pacific.

“Pay attention,” said his father, cuffing him on the back of his head – just enough to scare him a little, but within the bounds of playfulness as his father defined it. “You've got enough money there to buy a new car, kid. You don't want to lose it. It's a responsibility. Learn!”

The wad’s faint odor mingled with that of the train, platform and scurrying passengers – a white sharpness of steam vapor, burnt carbon like once when he'd held a pencil over a cigarette lighter until it turned black, and the salty dankness of the platform pavement, dampened by a cold December drizzle and the footprints of hundreds of passengers.

Glistening rivulets refracted rainbows of light from the lamps as they ran from the curved roofs of the Pullman cars and down the yellow sides trimmed in red Union Pacific cars. The droplets beaded up on their wide windows blurring the figures inside the warm yellow glow of the train's interior. Nicky saw shadowy figures, putting suitcases on racks and settling into their seats.

Out on the platform were a mix of people, all intent in their own worlds: families with both suitcases and boxes tied in twine, salesmen carrying big black sample cases, couples holding hands, sailors, soldiers and Marines in uniform.   Fashionably dressed women walked towards the front cars that held the luxury suites and bedrooms, flaunting their furs stoles and fur-lined coats and sultry, dark, wide-brimmed hats with feathers like Ingrid Bergman might wear in a Hitchcock mystery. And Black people. More dark-skinned people than Nicky had seen anywhere, having spent most of his young life in the all white urban neighborhoods of Boston and Los Angeles. He watched them– men in uniform, old women in colorful dresses, mothers towing their kids skipping and yelling with the same glee he felt boarding the long train—all heading toward the rear cars, though, Nicky didn't know why.

Everyone – all the adults anyway – showed that semi-dazed, deep faraway concentration of people letting go of one place and reaching for another—everyone was going somewhere. Some to Chicago and beyond, some to other stops along the route that would snake through Arizona, New Mexico, a corner of Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Illinois.

But Nicky thought, not of their destination – Boston via Chicago – but of the train travel experience in and of itself.

He savored the adventure on board that lay ahead – of spending three days and nights on the train, encapsulated in its swaying reality, full of strangers-being-friends, cheerful porters and conductors. Servicemen on the way to war, or home for what might be a final leave, carrying their duffle bags stuffed full.

Children giggled and chattered pulling their parents by the hand to hasten boarding. Nicky looked them over to see which ones he’d end up talking with and roaming with back and forth through the long train from observation to baggage car and back as they traveled. “I swear,” his father had laughed on earlier train trips, “by the time we get to Chicago and Boston, you kids will have walked the entire 3000 miles.”

“Hey!” Nicky’s father snapped. “Don’t stare at the money. You’re holding ten thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. And I’ve got more just like it in my pocket, son. Real money. You could buy a house with that,” said he father, and in 1944 Los Angeles that was very true.

“Quick,” his father warned, “Stick that roll in your pocket before someone sees it.” The boy obliged, keeping one fist still around the wad and plunging it deep into the side pocket of his Navy blue pea jacket, keeping hold to be sure it didn’t fall out. His father kept striding along the platform towards the front of the train. They were almost even with two baggage cars being loaded with suitcases. Just beyond that he caught sight of the locomotive that would pull their 35-car train – filling to near capacity with holiday travelers who soon would be exiting the hills of   southern California to travel eastward into the cold winter desert of Arizona and beyond.

“Do you feel yourself standing up straighter, taking bigger steps with all that money in your pocket sonny boy? Your chest puffs out proud because you know you’re walking around with cash in your pocket -- lots of it. That’s what it’s like. You should always have cash in your pocket, sonny boy. It give you an edge over the other guy”

Nicky, nodded and said yes to his father. Partly, Nicky acted along to humor his father. But partly, he did stand taller and feel an extra bounce in his step. His scalp tingled and he struggled to keep from breaking into a nervous giggle that he knew his father would take wrongly. Any of that sissy stuff would provoke one of his father’s patented scowls. Next, he’d take back the bankroll forthwith -- a premature cessation of this father-son tutorial on the Art of Manhood.

That must be it. Why would his father have entrusted him with a roll of what had to be thousands of dollars otherwise than for this self-serving instructional drama on how his father expected him to be growing up as his heir? Nicky dreaded such lessons. Too often they ended up in embarrassment.

Inevitably Nicky would drop the fly ball his father hit to him, or answer the trick question wrong, or fail to keep up his guard against his father’s swift, long-armed, left hook and stunning slap to the face in “open-handed” boxing demonstrations.

Nicky feared those large, powerful, fast hands. His father was a man who projected himself with his hands as much as through his voice. The boy watched them for cues of what his father would do next, and for any threat coming his way.

These hands could swoop down and lift him high into the air, or just as swiftly ball into fists. There was no escaping him. He seemed able to reach across a room, or catch an impossible fly ball, sort things out, find him anywhere, fix a flat tire, flatten a wise guy, hands that expressed an absolute physical confidence beyond bravado.

Waiting for dinner, Nicky had often watched his father smash two walnuts together one-handed, then open and pick out morsels of nutmeat from broken shells as delicately as a bird pecking seeds. He’d pop them into his mouth almost seeming to catch them on the fly. Seeing his small son, he’d toss a piece of walnut for Nicky to try to catch with his open mouth.

“Marco, stop that!” Nicky’s mother would say if she saw this. “You’ll teach him bad manners,” she said, and turned to Nicky. “And you pick up the pieces you’re dropping on the rug. Now!”

He remembered his father’s knuckles pale to white on the creamy bone steering wheel of his black Oldsmobile sedan when another car cut them off in traffic. The boy knew well the storm of rage that gathered suddenly under the tall shock of his thick black hair and darkened his father’s Patrician features.

His father downshifted and pressed a polished, Florsheim wingtip shoe to the floor kicking the straight-8 La Salle forward with surprising alacrity for such a big sedan. Nicky’s small frame fell back against the passenger seat from the acceleration. “Fucker!” his father kept shouting while he floored the Olds and caught up with the truck.

He tailgated the car for several blocks honking his horn until it pulled over. His father sped by it, and gave the driver -- who looked to be a terrified teenage kid -- the finger, honked and continued on.

In his usual dreamy reverie, Nicky almost walked into a baggage wagon. He stopped and had to run around it to catch up with his father who kept striding forward. Finally they reached the black, clanking, hissing, massive steam locomotive --- an iron giant seeming to throb restlessly, as mechanics in stripped railroad caps cleaned off its massive drive shafts, thick as a man's leg, oiled bearings and pistons of shiny stainless steel.

This was a Union Pacific Challenger class locomotive, among the largest ever built, (and, though, Nicky didn't know then, among the last of its kind), all set to pull the 15-20-car Pullman passenger train eastwards through deserts, hills, mountain ranges and plains for two days and two nights all the way to Chicago. The City of Los Angeles Limited lived up to the name, being like a small, moving city on rails, wherein 150 or so passengers and staff would spend two days and nights together with all they needed for comfort onboard. Strangers would become part of an onboard fellowship, only to part and go their separate ways again upon reaching their respective destination, their faces and names erased from memory almost the instant after they disembarked.

Yet, all these lives would continue like having entangled briefly then spread out in all directions. Nicky kept a sense of all this, like a magnetic recording device, without any understanding of it all, and it played back in his consciousness many years later, as he tried vainly to analyzed them and discover meaning in long-shelved memories of that fateful train trip – transport himself back in time if he could and sort these memories from those of similar journeys of his child- and young adulthood.

“This monster weighs more than a million pounds,” his father said in a loud voice over the noise. Nicky caught his breath when he noticed that the height of the spoked drive wheels exceeded that of his father.

There were two sets of three of the giant drive wheels on the side facing them, same as on the other side. “This is what they call a 4-6-6-4 engine,” he father explained – four of those smaller steel wheels in front to guide the engine along the tracks, two sets of six drive wheels and,” his father pointed at the back wheels, “another set of four smaller wheels following to hold up the weight of this monster and keep it on track.”

Nicky’s father liked knowing and explaining technical details of everything – machinery, the human body and his ideas of the social order. “There’s an engine just like this one probably up north pulling a trainload of big, red, plump torpedo onions from Washington State across Montana and Wyoming towards Chicago, sonny boy,” his father laughed out loud. “Union Pacific railroad,” he said. “and it’s going to make us rich! You’ve got some of the cash advance right now in your pocket,” he added.

Nicky remembered overhearing his father on the phone, and then later talking to another man on the platform about the great torpedo onion deal. His father traded in food products for a living. He brokered deals between farmers and processing plants in California – mostly in the great Central Valley -- between canneries and wholesalers and selling under private labels to distribution chains in the Northeast – including one owned by his older brother and his father , Nicky’s grandfather.

The family firm had imported foods from Europe – mostly Italian specialties, olive oil, canned tomatoes and paste, cheeses, and pasta, When the outbreak of war cut Europe off, Nicky’s father moved out to California to hustle up similar products from the emerging food industry in the sunny, Golden State. But the war brought other complications.

Everything was rationed. Priority went to selling products to the armed forces quartermaster, and all the processors make killings charging higher prices than they had been able to set before the war. But then scarcity drove up prices of everything for consumers. Nicky’s father found himself in a boom-time environment of wildly speculative commodity markets.

And he was 4-F – officially due to a severe lung-scarring from pneumonia when he had been a child that showed up on an X-ray. Later it turned out to have been a fake X-ray that had found its way into his medical records. Nicky didn't know how, but y years later as a teenager facing the draft himself, he surmised some draft-dodging palm-greasing by his father.
Fortunes were being made, but Nicky heard his father complain of being only on the margins of this, able to collect only modest brokerage fees from the traders he represented. “You’ve got to be a principal,” he kept saying.

At first Nicky thought of his school principal. But Nicky learned his father meant one who bought and sold directly instead of being a broker. This Christmas time, fortunes converged for his father. A blight killed off most of that year’s onion crop. At the same time, his father was able to make a deal on a huge storage warehouse of torpedo onions that a co-op in eastern Washington State had managed to harvest and hold before the blight hit.

The growers would divert it from an Army contract, using the blight as an excuse, and sell out to the highest bidder. It was black market, but nobody cared. Nicky’s father contacted his brother and a buyer in Chicago scraped up every cent he could and put a winning bid on the crop himself, promising immediate delivery east.

There were details to be worked out yet, but his father went ahead and paid for the accommodation, with largesse rare for this tight-fisted man. One of the details apparently involved Nicky’s father walking him forward along the train, ostensibly to view the giant steam locomotive.

Once there middle aged man in a gray fedora and tan trench coat stepped out of the clouds of white vapor. His reminded Nicky of a yam in that his body seemed irregular and thick making the coat fit awkwardly. The man stuck a fat, long cigar between yellowed teeth and shook his father’s hand. The man was shorter than his father and smoked a long cigar. “Benny,” said his father. “Meet my son.”

The man nodded at Nicky, who stuck out his hand joining in. The man's lips – which seemed too rosy for his pale, paunchy face – hinted a smile. Again he transferred the cigar from hand to mouth, chomped it down, took the boy's hand in his large, fleshy one and pumped it up and down. Nicky heard his father low chuckle.

The man let go. Nicky stepped back and resumed staring at the giant pistons, wheels, piping and gauges of the engines.
His father and Benny huddled and conversed that Nicky couldn’t understand over the hissing and chugging of the engine and the undulating murmur of the crowds on the Los Angeles Union Station platform. Nicky saw his father slip the man a roll of bills similar to the one he still held tightly in the pocket of his pea coat.

Then Nicky's father pulled a folded document of several pages from his inside coat pocket and handed it to the man. The man opened the document, stepped under one of the platform lights and examined it, page-by-page. After the las t page, he nodded his head.

“The quit claim deed and promissory note look in order,” he said, folded and placed the documents into his own coat. “I already paid off the growers' broker up in Spokane and you have what's left. I'll hold this 30 days to give you time to repay with the vigorish. After that I take possession. It's all in the agreement I already gave you yesterday,” Nicky heard the man say to his father, and wondered what it all meant. “See you later on the train,” said the man.

His father said nothing, only nodded.
“Okay. Let’s go son,” Nicky's father said after a few moments. He guided the boy gently back in the direction from which they had come.

“What you just saw there is called hypothecating,” he told Nicky. “You'll learn about that one day. It's a way of playing the game with other people's money. Remember that,” he said. “But don't say anything to your mother about this,” he told Nicky earnestly, clutching the back of his neck as one would a teammate, then patting his back.

“Hurry,” he added. “We’re in car 29, a ways back.” Nicky had hoped to be allowed up into the cab of the locomotive, but that seemed an impossibility as . He heard a conductor blow a whistle and call out the first “All aboard!”

CHAPTER 2

(The Einstein Express, by Umberto Tosi, continued)

     “I stink as a mother.” Sondra half laughed, half cried at Henry.
He furrowed his brow, topped by generous crop of thick, curly black hair that gave him a boyishly handsome look younger than his 40 years. “How can you say that?
     You love Nicky more than anything in the world. You're his mother, after all. ”
     It was the answer she wanted to hear, but some how, garnered from Henry it didn't seem to count. “I didn't say I didn't love him. I said I'm no good as a mother. I'm no good at anything around the house. The other day I tried to bake him a cake and it fell miserably.”
     “So what?” He squinted.
     That wasn't an answer she wanted. She pressed on. “It was from a ready mix. All I had to do was add water and put in the oven. The poor kid. I served a piece to him and he pushed it around with his fork trying to pick it up. 'Nice crumble-cake, Ma,' he tells me. Can you imagine that. He's so cute. He really meant it to make me feel okay. He wasn't being sarcastic. I broke up laughing. Then I cried. Then he picked up a spoon so he could eat his 'crumble cake,' and act like he loved it!”
     “Maybe he did love it,” Henry said. “Kids love cake. Then don't care if it falls to pieces or stands up. Did you give him milk with it? Gotta have milk with cake.”
   “Yes,” she said in a mousey voice.
   “See?” Enrico almost shouted. “You are a good mom. You gave him milk with his cake, didn't you?”
     “Don't be an ass,” she said. “You know what I mean.”
     “You're a diva, not a domestic. You weren't made to be a housewife. . You were born to sing on the stage with the power to hypnotize thousands of people and take them out of their miserable lives.”
    “Not lately,” she said. “I don't think I'll ever get that chance again, here, thousands of miles away from...
    “Well, you still sing, maybe not an opera house, but the audience loves you madly at the Florentine Gardens,” he said.
     “Bunch of drunks. I'm just a break in the dancing for them, a slow ballad or two before it’s back to the fox trot, samba and rhumba. Who ever thought I'd end up singing in a nightclub?” She said.
     “Don't knock it,” he said. “It's work. Who knows when some big movie producer will walk in and give you a part?”
    “All I get is Lorentz calling me names. I don't know how long he's going to let me sing there.”
     “Your husband envies you,” he said. “It's not up to him to 'let' you. This is the 20th century. He's always out of town anyway.”
      “You don't know him,” she said, fearfully. “He has friends. He can be rough.”
       “Nicky's proud of you. He gets all excited when he sees you sing at the club.”
      “That's another thing. If people back in Boston knew I was talking my son to a night club. That's why I can't just walk out of the marriage. He'll get a lawyer and take Nicky away from me. And his family in Boston will be behind him, 100 percent. You don't know the Farolis. They can be ruthless.”
      “It's not like you're leaving Nicky alone with some strangers, the way a lot of people working in the airplane factories for the war effort now have to do.'
   “It doesn't matter,” Sondra said. “I feel bad. I had to tell Nicky not to tell his father about the night club, but who knows, he'll probably say something without knowing – and it's a terrible spot to put a young boy into, yet, I can't help it,” she said, her eyes watering up.
     “Hey, are you crying now? Don't worry. Besides, they love Nicky at the club. The girls pamper him and feed him cookies and sandwiches and the bartenders give him Roy Rogers' on the house.” I wish my mother had been a diva,” he said, “instead of a miserable pissed off drudge for my drunken father. I would have been way better off growing up in a night club, or backstage someplace.”
      “Poor woman. Show some heart,” she said. “She was your mother. You only get one mother.”
      Sondra got up from the kitchen table nook where they sat and fetched two tumblers. She got ice and a bottle of seltzer water from the bungalow apartment's small refrigerator, and a bottle of Couvassier from a cupboard. She put ice in both glasses, poured the bourbon and sprayed some seltzer into his glass and the water only over ice into her glass, topped with a very small swig of the cognac. “for luck,” she said, toasting to him.
   “Salute,” he said, holding up his tumbler and clinking it against hers, “Chin, chin.”
    “Do you want something to eat?” She stepped back over to the refrigerator after she had taken a sip from her glass. “I don't have much, but here's some cheese, we can have with crackers.” She put a wedge of provolone on a small plate, got a small knife from the silverware drawer and brought it over to the table.
    He took her arm when she lay the dish down and he pulled her over onto his lap, kissing her neck, cheek and mouth. She breathed a sigh and kissed him back.
      “Well, if a man's lucky, he gets a lot of mamas in his lifetime,” he said, and kissed her softly on the lips again, keeping his large brown eyes wide open and staring into hers, so as not to miss a thing. His hand slid up her light blue cotton print dress and she parted her thighs ever so slightly and shifted her hips to say hello.
     “Oh stop it.” she said, stiffening, slapped his chiseled face with that Clark Gable. God the man was handsome, and he could sing like the devil himself. Why were the baritones , who usually played the villian, the good looking ones, while the tenors who she had to kiss on stage usually so dumpy?
       She slipped off his lap. “Somebody will come in. Nicky could be home from school any minute. ”
    Henry took a sip of his cognac, then drew a large swallow and set the glass down just a bit more loudly than necessary. “When do we stop this, Sondra? When do we get to be ourselves together and end the play acting? You're not happy with Lorentz. He's ruined your career and been running around on you forever. You're going to be a star again once we get the new opera company going and the curtain goes up on the season in a few months, whether he likes it or not....”
     “You don't understand, Henry,” she answered. She went to the sink and stared out the kitchen window at the small overgrown garden behind the bungalow. A few roses bravely tried to bloom in rambling bushes climbing up a trellis. It was hot, and in the afternoon, the apartment soon would no longer provide shelter, but become an oven.
    “Let's to the show.” she said. “Soon as Nicky' s gets home,”
    “I can't. I've got to pick up some supplies, and don't forget rehearsal tonight at 8. What's playing.”
   “Doesn't matter,” she answered. “It's air conditioned.”
    A loud slap of the screen door in back from the laundry room just off the kitchen announced Nicky's arrival from school. “Hi, Nicky,” Sondra greeted him with a hug followed by a kiss on the cheek. Nicky stood motionless, looking down at this scuffed, playground sneakers. He held a black, Lone Ranger lunch bucket and two books. “Well,” said Sondra, what do you say?
    “Hi mom,” he responded, softly and looked up at her with his dreamy big brown eyes, that everyone said were too gorgeous for a boy. He only glanced at Enrico before looking back at his sneakers.
   “Well,” said Sondra again. “Don't be rude. Look whose here.”
     “I know,” said Nicky. “I seen him.” He said this with the faintest hint of a glance back at the screen that suggested he'd been there looking at them before coming inside.
     Sondra's face reddened. “'Him' has got a name, Nicky,” she prodded the boy.
    “Hello, kid,” said Henry.
    Sondra, still blushing, prodded Nicky's upper arm again with her index finger.
    “Hello, Mr. Canelli,” the boy said. He put his empty lunch pail on the table, along with the books, turned and ran back out the screen door.
    “Where are you going, young man?” Sondra asked.
    “Out to play,” Nicky called back.
    “You come back here and put away these books,” Sondra yelled. But he was gone, and she got no answer.

1147 words...

CHAPTER 3

(The Einstein Express, by Umberto Tosi, continued)

“What took you so long?” Nicky's mother pulled him to her protectively as he and his father stepped inside their roomette on the sleeping car. She peeled off his pea jacket – despite his attempt to wiggle free and remove it by himself. “I thought you were going to miss the train! Didn't you hear the conductor yell 'all aboard?'” She looked crossly at her husband with eyebrows knitted in a show of worry.

He stepped closer to her so she had to look up to maintain eye contact. She put her hands on her hips. “Don't be so hysterical,” he said, with a laugh as if he meant it as a gentle tease. “The conductor calls 'all aboard' three times before the train actually departs,” he said. “I was showing Nicky the locomotive. It's the kind of thing a young man should know about,” he added.

“Oh, yes?” she inquired. “That and what else do you think he should know, Lorentz? Maybe you should get him to your 'friend,' Sugar up in Stockton a little better,” she fumed. Even Nicky knew she didn't mean candy.

Indeed Nicky had met Sugar, , on the first of two rare visits to Stockton, the San Joaquin Valley town 90 miles from San Francisco where his father conducted most of his food industry brokerage business when away on his lengthy road trips.

His mother had stopped in Stockton twice, with Nicky in tow, on her way to San Francisco where she had performed in a concert with a local tenor, and where she had auditioned for the San Francisco Opera, then under the direction of its founder, Gaetano Merola.

The maestro had offered her a place in the Opera chorus and a chance to attend the company's young performers program. Nicky's mother took umbrage at both, having already played lead roles and sung with major artists in Boston before coming to California with Nicky's father two years earlier on what was supposed to have been a temporary business assignment for him.

“I'm a soloist, not a singer in the chorus,” she told people, “I'm not a beginner.” To her sister on the phone from Boston, Nicky heard her say that the musical director – not Merola – had made advances and demanded certain “favors.” Nicky had only a vague notion of what that meant.

The San Francisco experience sharpened the pain of severance she'd felt in leaving home, family, friends, teachers and the budding fame she'd achieved in the flourishing classical music scene of Boston

She discovered opera a scarce commodity in 1940s California – with scant presence in Los Angeles, a fast growing city that then had no opera company of its own, despite all the great musicians who had fled Europe and lived in the movie capital. The San Francisco Opera had represented a hope of putting her musical career back on track, it being the only world-class grand opera company in the state at that time. The company made but a two-week guest run in Los Angeles each winter after it's regular fall season in San Francisco.

To be sure, there were musicians – classical and operatic – in Los Angeles at the time, many refugees from Nazism in Europe, including world famous performers who naturally took precedence in film work and any concerts that were given in the L.A. Area – this transplanted wealth of European talent left little room for budding newcomers like Sondra.

Nicky's mother stopped in Stockton on her way to back and forth to San Francisco each time, leaving the boy with his father, who made sure to make his displeasure known about it. But the visits proved adventures for Nicky as his father took him all over town – including a popular road-house lounge out on the Delta called Red's, where his father put him at a table while he went to the bar to talk business, and got the waitress, Sugar, to bring the boy a hamburger, a Roy Rogers and french fries.

Sugar's real name was Sue. She was blonde, in her 20s and reminded Nicky of Daisy Mae in the Lil'Abner comics in the Sunday funnies. The strip got to be one of Nicky's favorites, especially when his father read the captions aloud – mimicking the character's hillbilly accent preposterously, given his Bostonian accent with faint traces of Italian and Spanish from Buenos Aires where he was born.

Turned out to be a good thing that Nicky liked Sugar because his father soon slipped her some cash and told her to take care of the boy the rest of the evening while he left with a couple of the men from the bar. Nicky started to panic when his father left, but Sugar came to the booth, sat next to him, put an arm around him and asked him a lot of questions about what he liked, and told him she had a small daughter who stayed with her mother. Best of all she brought a cup of poker dice from the bar and offered to teach him the game later when she got off and said he could practice rolling them in the meantime.

Sue, AKA, Sugar didn't speak like a hillbilly, instead she had a soft, second-generation Oklahoma accent often heard in the California’s Central Valley that seemed exotic to Nicky. However, she like the comic strip bombshell who constantly chased the oblivious country-boy main character of the strip, was long-legged, curvy and wore short skirts and scoop-necked blouses that accentuated her physical assets.

She and her boyfriend Jonas hung out at Reds – locally kinown as “The Slough,” because of its location on the banks of one of the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta's larger sloughs found just to the west of Stockton.

Nicky's father, frequented Reds, along with other field brokers, growers, cannery engineers and floor bosses, and various salesmen of farm and food processing equipment. It was a place for making deals and picking up on local news about prices and crops, the adjacent Delta islands being some of the most productive farmland in the world for growing fruits and processing tomatoes.

The dim lighting, red leatherette booths, pool tables and sawdust on the floor made Red's cavernous, converted-barn interior seem cozy. Regulars played poker dice, banking big leather cups with their six cubes loudly down on a long mahogany bar facing a length of ceiling-high mirror framed in filigree wood, then bluffing back and forth as they peered under the overturned cups to read each hand.

A mix of country music and Sinatra, and swing played on the juke box, testament to the ethnic mix in the place – that unusual for the time, included Italians , Oakies, Arkies (as his father called them), with some Portuguese, Filipinos, a few Mexicans and an occasional Greek.

Everyone called Jonas “Salty,” due to his having spent years sailing the world as a merchant seaman until he accidently blew off a hand when a 50mm cannon he had loaded misfired and exploded during target practice. Such freighters, even tramp steamers of the kind Salty worked, had been outfitted with machine guns and small cannons when the war started, not that these offered much protection against German attack submarines and Japanese carrier-launched torpedo bombers.

Nicky tried not to stare at Salty's prehensile prosthetic left-handed stainless steel hook that he used to shake poker dice and light matches for his pipe. Salty had to be Popeye, thought Nicky.

The regulars at Reds started calling Sue, “Sugar” when she started going with Salty, and the nickname stuck. Sugar and Salt, explained Nicky's father when he walked the boy over to Salty's regular spot at the bar to introduce his son. “Why didn't you call her 'Pepper?'” Nicky asked. “Salt and pepper go together.”

Salty laughed and called over to Sugar. “The kid wants to know why I don't call you 'Pepper' instead of Sugar.”

She laughed back and drawled to Nicky, “Pepper's what he gets when he doesn't behave himself.”

Salty slapped his good hand on the bar and laughed harder.   “Hey baby, I like Pepper too – 'cause it's soooo hot!”

Salty drank at the bar until around 11 p.m., and then left for work. He drove a hay baler out in the fields that cut and packed alfalfa into big rectangular bales tied with wire. His clothes gave off the smokey pungency of fresh cut alpha on a warm night. Thorughout the summer he did all his work at night . The days were far too hot in the valley to work his giant machine. So what if he had a few beers, he said, he was out there running his combine all night and it was hard work enough.

“Just you watch for those high-tension lines,” Sugar would tell him – a running joke between them, though it was true that the baling machine towered high enough to touch those low-slung power lines out there. There was no sign of Nicky's father when Sugar got off her shift at midnight. She told him that his father had called saying he would be later and that she would take him to her house where he could sleep until his father picked him up. Nicky might have been scared, but he actually preferred going with Sugar then to spending the night alone with his father and his unpredictable temper.

Sugar lived in a small mobile home not far from Red's joint. She gave him chocolate milk, and one of her long tee shirts in which to sleep, letting him sleep in an upper bunk just like he did on the trains, which he liked a lot. The next morning early his father showed up and took him back to the house he had rented in town. He didn't remember that part, and just woke up later, disoriented, in his father's spare bedroom. He missed his mother.

It was just after sunrise. He walked into the kitchen. Sugar was there, making coffee, looking leggy and cute in a pink tee-shirt and panties, her blonde hair pinned up atop her head. “Well good morning, cutie,” she said to him in a slightly hoarse, whiskey voice.

Nicky's father swore him to secrecy about that night's sleeping arrangements. “Let's keep this strictly among men,” he said and winked, tossing Nicky's hair with one hand. He was used to keeping secrets – those of his mother's too. Nicky's mother arrived on the train from San Francisco that day at noon and stayed over. His father drove them both back to their apartment in Hollywood the next morning. By that time he was thinking about other things, and was off to school the following day.

He never figured out just what exactly had been the sleeping arrangements that night. But he saw even more of Sugar when his mother dropped him again at his father's on her way to San Francisco for a second visit two months later during his Easter break from school.

Salty's stool at Red's bar was draped in black. An open bottle of beer sat on the bar, and there was a bouquet of flowers left there by Sugar. Salty, indeed, had driven his hay baler into those high-tension lines and was no more. By now, Nicky's mother had learned enough about Sugar to erupt into a prolonged argument with his father.

“But honey,” he rationalized. “Nothing's happened between us. Sugar's still getting over her loss. It was terrible for her.”

“Oh, yes, Lorentz,” said Nicky's mother, “and you're there to console her.”

The smirk that accompanied his father's denial was the same as the one that came over his face on the train when his mother brought up Sugar again. Nicky suppressed a giggle, sensing some innuendo that he didn't get.

“Look, honey,” he said, “I told you. Nothing happened. Salty was a friend, and Sugar too. That's all.”

“Some friends you take our son around,” Nicky's mother huffed. “Go, go, why don't you. Go to the club car. I'm sure you can make more friends there,” she said.

Nicky's father didn't move. “Don't get sarcastic with me,” he said, his smirk replaced with a scowl. His mother stepped back reflexively.

Nicky wondered when his father was going to ask him to hand back the roll of hundred-dollar bills that now resided in the pocket of the pea coat now draped over his mother's arm.

As if picking up a signal from him, Nicky's mother sidestepped and hung Nicky's pea jacket on a brass hook on the back of the slim metal door to the roomette's tiny closet. Now it was out of his reach. He wanted to keep it longer, not that he had any idea of using the money. He liked just having it, like holding onto a new Superman comic book he hadn't yet read. He hoped his father would somehow forget it, but he figured that was unlikely.

“We’re leaving!” Nicky called out so loudly that his pre-teen voice cracked into an embarrassing squeak. He pretended to cough and clear his throat

“No, not yet.,” said his father.

“But I can see us moving. Look!.” Nicky pointed out the window.

“That’s the other train pulling out,” his father said. “See? If it were us, we’d be moving in the wrong direction – into the station instead of out of it.”

Nicky felt queasy as he adjusted to perceive the glowing lit windows of the train next to theirs on the platform in motion, but he could not rid himself of the sensation of moving himself.

His father glanced at the other train and smirked. “Relativity,” he said. “According to Einstein, everything moves relative to something else. The only constant is the speed of light. So you can say we are moving from the other train’s point of view.” His father liked quoting the scientific theories he would read about in magazines and newspapers. Nicky wasn’t sure what it meant precisely, but he knew who Einstein was.

CHAPTER 4

(The Einstein Express, by Umberto Tosi, continued)

The roomette wasn’t much larger than a walk-in wardrobe closet. A pair of upholstered bench seats faced each other by the window. At night these seats converted into a double bed, being the standard Pullman design. Above the seats, a large semi-cylindrical panel could be opened with a special key to turn it into an upper bunk with its own curtain. It could be reached by a set of portable stairs folded away under one of the seats during the daytime. Every inch of the roomette had its use, including a tiny corner sink where you could wash your hands.

Nicky’s parents would sleep in the Pullman bed and Nicky – to his delight – would sleep in the upper bunk and, chances were it would have a tiny window about the size of a cigar box, but with rounded corners, from which he’d be able to peer out into the darkness at the amazing array of stars above as the train would hurtle through the countryside’s dark night.

“I thought you were going to get us a compartment,” his mother said. “Then we’d have more room for the suitcases. You can afford it now.” The familiar dissatisfaction crept into her voice.

His father’s face darkened. “You think I’m made of money.”

“I think your made of stinginess,” Nicky heard his mother mutter under her breath, her back turned to his father while she folded a few items in the suitcase and shut it again, giving up on putting anything more away.

“What did you say?” His father asked sharply.

“Nothing,” she answered, and turned back to face him.

“Nothing, huh? I heard that,” he said, scowling.

She flinched ever so slightly, but Nicky could read it out of the corner of his eye. He sat by the window, looking out onto the platform and the last of the passengers hurrying to board the train. He picked up his mother's every emotional nuance, and aware of this, she would play to him sometimes in an undercover pantomime language known only to the two of them.

“Look. See what I have to put up with?” Her long-suffering feint of flinching said to him silently.

He would sink his head a little lower, seated by the window, and cast a sideways glance her way: “Poor, Ma. Being married to this man must be awful for you. Yet you suffer it for sake of the family – for sake of me.” That was supposed to be his silent return message, except he didn't articulate any words in his head, or even such thoughts. It was just an empathetic feeling conveyed back to her with the slight hunch of his shoulders and pout of his lower lip and ever-so-stealthy eye contact with her.

Those large expressive eyes of hers, that she used so tellingly onstage, and to flirt off stage as well, signaled back, “My boy. Just a little while, and it's going to be okay,”

Conscious of his father in the periphery, he submerged into guilt at his disloyalty. But just as quickly he did a Houdini escape from that knot and dropped into his personal fantasy world where he always headed when trouble between “them” brewed. He stared out the train window, imagining himself in a trench coat, still damp from the rain, with the microfilm diagrams of a super-secret Nazi weapon in his pocket, heading for the Swiss border, alone, the brim of his fedora turned down, his collar up.

“Papier.” said the conductor, sliding open the compartment door. A guard in an black SS uniform accompanied him and eyed Nicky with suspicion. Nicky produced his fake Swiss passport. “Was ist Ihr Grund für die Reise im Dritten Reich? ” (“What is your reason for traveling in the Third Reich?”)

“Business: Ich vertrete ein Kugellager Unternehmen.” Nicky answers. (“Business. I'm in ball bearings.” )

Nicky, of course is imagining his character speaks German and seven other languages, so everything comes out perfectly even though he's thinking it in English.

=============== ============

CHAPTER 5

(The Einstein Express, by Umberto Tosi, continued)

Nicky's father glanced over his shoulder, opened the roomette's door and looked out, peering up and down the corridor. A fat woman squeezed by and he stepped back in. “I've got to go up to the club car for a few minutes and meet a guy,” he said to Nicky's mother. Then looked at Nicky, “Come on. You can go with me. I'll buy you a Roy Rogers,”

“Meet some blonde, you mean,” his mother said, just loud enough for her husband to hear it.

“Come on, Sondra, that's enough!” he retorted. “I'm taking Nicky?

“That didn't stop you before.”

“Enough!” his father raised his voice to that level that made Nicky's stomach tighten into a ball.

His mother stood her ground, obviously feeling safer in the public environment of the train than at home, when his anger would have shut her down forthwith. “I want him to stay here with me,” Nicky's mother said, putting out a hand to stop the boy if he made for the door. “You go yourself.

“I'm meeting Ginzberg. You know him,” said Nicky's father. “He can come see the train and have some peanuts. Come on, Nicky. Get your jacket.”

Nicky's mother, moved a step putting herself between his father and where the she had hung the pea jacket. She gave a little shudder. “I thought you hated Ginzberg. You said he cheated you. Now you want to bring Nicky along to meet with him? Make up your mind. ”

“That was a misunderstanding.” His father scowled. “Don't get smart with me, Sondra,” he said,

“What's he doing on the train?” Nicky's mother asked. “You called him all sorts of names, and in front of the boy,” she nagged.

Nicky remembered several of those “sorts of names” and one in particular that he didn't fully understand.
(I’m not sure that ‘feeling perverse’ is the right phrase to use, it makes Nicky too consciously aware… maybe introduce some Catholic guilt… ‘Nicky felt that nervous bunching in his stomach like when the nuns would point their accusing fingers him when he remembered several of those ‘sorts of names’’…

Someone tapped on the door to the compartment and his father opened it a crack. “Speak of the devil,” his father said, peering out at none other than Ginsberg’s broad, grinning face.

“Lorentz,” said Ginsberg, who had a rather light tenor voice that didn't seem to go with his bulk. His father opened the door wider.

“Yes. Hi. How are you?” said his father, as if it had been a long while since they saw each other, and not on the platform up by the locomotive just minutes earlier. Nicky's mother cleared her throat. His father opened the door wider and gestured inside. “I'd invite you in but as you can see it's tight quarters,”

“Like a submarine,” Ginzberg laughed. He had been injured while serving as a Merchant marine during the war when his ship had been torpedoed by a German submarine. Nicky's father said he had a metal plate in his head. Nicky strained for a view of it, hoping for some robotic visage. But he saw nothing but a shock of wavy salt-and-pepper hair when Ginzberg took off his gray, felt, snap-brim fedora and gave Nicky's mother a nod and a smile.

He had large, soft eyes, like a fawn, that contrasted with the toughness of his chiseled, broad-nosed face and curly salt-and-pepper hair. He blinked at her; the corners of his full lips turned slightly upwards in pleasure.

“You know my wife, Sondra,” said Nicky's father, gesturing at her.

“Yes. Thank you. Pleasure to see you, Madam” he said. “Won't you join us for a drink in the club car?”

“Yes, nice to see you too, Saul” said Sondra. “You two go ahead. I'll see you later. I want to get us settled here first.”

Nicky's father smirked slightly at Saul Ginzberg's goo-goo eyes. He liked that other men found his wife attractive, that they could covet but not have what was his. Perhaps in reflection of his father's pride, Nicky liked that his mother was considered pretty, and that both men and women took notice.

She didn't look like a “Mom.” In fact, she looked like a film star, with her waves of thick, red hair cascading to her shoulders, framing her even-featured face and dreamy, deep brown eyes, high cheekbones and sensuous lips. On stage, she sang with a lyrical, exquisitely placed soprano voice and perfect diction.

Off stage, her voice sounded clear and full and slightly playful. It carried. She would joke about having trouble keeping a secret because her “bel canto” operatic training caused her to be understood by people across a room even when she spoke very softly.

Adding to her allure, Sondra dressed “to the nines,” as friends like to say, always in the latest fashions and in the most flattering attire – no thanks to Nicky's tightwad father, Nicky knew, and his father's parsimony made the incident with the roll of cash on the platform all the more puzzling to him.

Sandra's lavish, chic wardrobe came courtesy of her elder sister Joanna, a seamstress who operated her own design and alteration shop in Boston's North End.

Her older sister, Joanna prided herself as a designer and seamstress who made Paris knockoffs to order for an affluent clientele in Boston. She had lived with Nicky's parents in Hollywood a year earlier and worked in the studios as a top assistant to Adrian - the famous Hollywood costume designer who dressed Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Irene Dunne and other screen stars of the era, and who had designed the costumes for the Wizard of Oz.

Nicky's mother called her sister “the Mozart of couture,” a title Joanna waved away modestly. Joanna could take one look at a fashion magazine select the materials, cut the patterns and sew together an ensemble accurately, right down to the last buttonhole in no time, and have it drape elegantly on her sister , a perfect fit. She took the same take with her clients, but she especially relished in designing clothing her sister, whom she called the star of the family, their homegrown operatic diva.

“Sandra is the talented one,” Joanna would say laughing without even a touch of envy. “She's got the glamor.”.

“Joanna is the real star. She's the strong one. I'm weak. She always stuck up for me in the schoolyard when the kids used to call me 'guinea wop' and 'dago,' and try to pull off my earrings.” Sondra would answer, coyly, making her voice small and closing their symbiotic loop.

“A couple of times, they the bastards did,” Joanna would answer, “and ripped her earlobes – blood all over the place.”

“And you ran after them and beat them up,” said Nicky's mother, repeating the legend, “even the boys. She could knock down any boy in the school.” And looking at his tall, stern-looking and wiry aunt, Nicky believed her.

Joanna's original designs looked even more stylish then the knockoffs. Had she been in the right place and time, and more enterprising, she could have put over her own line of high fashion easily—all she lacked was a bit of luck. But she wasn't ambitious, just loved her work and her one daughter from a brief marriage to a soldier killed in the war.

Sandra's close relationship with her sister Joanna went back to a childhood spent in poverty. During those lean years, the elder of the two took care of Sondra and their three younger brothers after the death of their father while their mother labored long hours in a shoe factor. The brothers stayed just as close, as did cousins and aunts, forming a mutually supportive tribe that Nicky's always saw as a safe nest from which he had come and would always call home. The warmth of that closely knit family – simmered all day long like a rich, spicy and welcoming ragu – a sharp contrast with his father’s cool, cultured patrician clan across town, whose four elegant but ceaselessly competitive brothers kept the family tightly wrapped shut.

Sandra wore Joanna's clothes with flair – props for her role as a diva that, in turn, hid a woeful lack of confidence that   fed a never-ended hunger to be loved. For Nicky, however, the act was the reality. He saw his mother like those glamor queens of the screen, especially now onboard this luxurious sleeping car as she he undid the large deco buttons down the front of her chic, figure flattering, princess-style black wool, knee length coat with its chestnut fur collar – “muskrat, not mink,” she let people know – lined with silky dark purple rayon that always looked cool.
(to the uneducated about fur this seems like a ‘cheap’ coat.. muskrat..rat… and rayon… not silk…)

Setting her coat aside, Sondra revealed a   bold pink-and-white on green daisy print dress – another one of Joanna’s colorful designer creations.. Nicky had seen her wearing this in the Fred Harvey restaurant where they had a late lunch in Union Station before boarding the train. He noticed other women admiring its linen-weave rayon material and commenting on the dress as they waited for a table. It was wartime and the government had put a freeze on all cotton and woolen material for uniforms. Fine styles were difficult to come by, even metals for its side zipper, and bone for its large buttons were in scare supply.– Nicky watched as his mother enjoyed this envious talk about her suit’s shirtwaist style with rounded collar and cuffed sleeves ending in a self-belt that accentuated a sleak mid-calf skirt calf, all crowned with matching fabric that gathered at the back for a head scarf,.

Sandra flashed her patented pinup smile. She knew just how. She addicted herself to movies, and Nicky knew it too.   Twice a week when his father was out of town, she dragged little Nicky along with her to double features in ornate deco movie palaces on Hollywood Boulevard. Like most Italian-American parents of her generation, she didn't think it right to hire babysitters even if she could find one.

She favored romantic melodramas interminable to Nicky – those star turns by Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant. With his Nonetheless, he welcomed the chance to get out of their small apartment, stay up late, and nibble contently on popcorn, soda and bon bons.

No matter how tedious Nicky found the first-run tear-jerker, he could count on some relief – comic and otherwise – in the second feature, often a “B” action, gangster, musicals, western or film noir. Sondra's addiction to the movies kept her from leaving early no matter how bad the second feature. Besides, often they stayed to get a glimpse of one of her many friends among the Italian-language theater veterans in Hollywood who made a modest living playing bit parts in studio-made films.

In kindergarten Nicky used to brag “my mommie looks like a movie star,” and he wasn't far off. “You look like Rita Hayworth and you sing better,” he had heard her best friend, Renata Valli say to her on several occasions as they would enjoy cups of espresso and almond biscotti together in the kitchen. Indeed, the 1941 hit musical You'll Never Get Rich with Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire secured the Hayworth look and Nicky's mother sported a Hayworth-esque, relaxed, henna-dyed shoulder-length hairstyle. “The movie people should give you a break,” Renata would add You could sing blues and ballads – Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rogers and Hart. I've heard you at the night club. Opera is beautiful but you can do that on the side.”

His mother would look at her friend, then shake her head and look down at the formica table, stir her demitasse and say, “I'm no good at pushing myself.”

Renata retained the canniness and passion of her native Naples accentuated by having grown up in New York where she had played a lot in the Italian language theaters that flourished there up until the war broke out. She spoke with a rich-voice that added allure to her dark-eyed, sultry Anna Magnani-looks. The studios kept her busy playing bit parts, mostly in peasant Italian and Mexican mama roles, and called for her to affect broken English even though she spoke the language clearly with only a slight Italian accent.

----------------------------------------- -

The Pullman car gave a barely perceptible lurch and Nicky saw out the window that their train was, at last, really pulling out this time. No matter that he'd ridden trains often, the boy always expected something more dramatic from that giant steam locomotive whose pistons he imagined now belching steam and beginning to turn those huge drive wheels.

It surprised him that, back in this comfortable car, they heard no sound other than the muffled metal clanking and slight groans of the car itself and that the train commence so momentous a trip with such apparent tentativeness. Pulling away more now, the platform disappeared into the black night, but still they were not moving fast enough for the car to sway yet.

But they were underway, no longer in the space-time of people on the platform, in the cavernous Union Station or the city around it. Rolling down the tracks, Einstein would have noted that – imperceptibly, but in fact – they inhabited their own space-time frame-of-reference yet.

In this space-time through which they began their journey, Nicky sensed something was different about this journey than all the other train trips he'd taken in his young life. His mother seemed different. On this trip she seemed energized in the same way Nicky had seen when she had been singing in performance. Now, just like on stage when the music transported her to heavenly heights she seemed somehow transfigured. She had started a journey of her own.

   ########

CHAPTER 6

(The Einstein Express, by Umberto Tosi, continued)

John Pressaggio, or Johnny Prez, as he was better known from when he recorded Jambalaya Jump, Marika de Mango, Burning in Babylon, Geese Fly South and his other, now-obscure, edgy Jazz Age rages, kept glancing at the redhead sitting with her back slightly turned away from him sipping coffee at the end of the parlor car opposite himself.

She sat in one of the stuffed, dark red love seats that lined each side of the car facing inward, but turned towards an end table where the porter had placed her coffee. Brass lamps with parchment-colored shades on each of the end tables spaced every two or three seats apart further occluded his vision, and provided cover for him as well. The a large reddish-brown shiny shoulder bag accented light pistachio worsted wool suit which she topped off with a matching demur beret-style hat with a single, swept back partridge feather. He did remember her penchant for snappy attire, even years ago.

He had noticed of her right away when he had entered the car from the rear of where she sat. Not wanting her to see him staring if she turned around, he switched his gaze to the frost-edged windows. The car's friendly warmth failed to insulate his spirits from the gray-pink, predawn cold outside.

From time-to-time he glimpsed the train's rear cars on the long curves of the rocky mountainous passage. Behind it the tracks caught the glint of a setting full moon. The sight heightened his sense of journey, detached from the world at war, where ignorant armies clashed by night, he remembered the verse, and visualized how the tracks connected in a continent-wide steel web extending to every city in the country, probably in North America.

What if the train stood still relative to everything else moving? The tracks would race by beneath the parlor the train spinning its wheels, and along with everyone riding it, he would not be able to tell the difference. The locomotive would have to work just to turn its drive wheels and keep the train in its place as the world turned under it in a mad, erratic way that precisely matched the route of the tracks. Maybe the tracks

Indra's Net, he thought, lacing all reality together, with its infinite number of gems holding the strands together, and you can see all the gems reflected in each gem. Can I see everyone in whoever I see on this train? Does anyone see the universe in me? Anha could, and I could see worlds in her earnest, wide-set, large, blue-violet eyes

Anha would laugh at him for intellectualizing the obvious. “You cannot capture Indra's Net in your clever word-net, darling, but your music sings it sometime, darling,” she would say in her fatalistic, Eastern-European accented way. Now he recalled her melancholy reference to the interconnectedness of love and loss, as part of all else, and would tell her that the thought proved no consolation.

He fell back into the abyss trying to reach her now. The American web of steel tracks did not connect to where she had gone, if, indeed, she still inhabited this world at all. But he felt sure she would have told him that, come to him in a dream and told him if she were dead. He wanted to dream of her, and she did appear often, but only in fleeting form that he would pursue in vain.

He dreaded dreaming of her at the same time, for the message she might bring in that way a mother dreads the arrival of a telegram that might inform her of a son killed in battle. Such things happened every day. He no longer felt that uniqueness, that feeling of invincible specialness in which he had traveled a troubled world no longer seemed able to protect him – not since Anha left him.

Yet, had she come with him to London that day, and not left for Vilne – she always referred to the Lithuanian capital by its Yiddish name – he doubted they would be together now living in Hollywood – a place whose film culture she abhorred. Plus, they had broken up. But they had broken up before that, and resumed their passionate relationship.

Their breakups had been psychological, mostly, but sometimes defined by her going off someplace, ostensibly to concertize, for she remained a brilliant cellist. “Don't think I'm going to give up my career to cater to you, my boy genius, the way my foolish friend has done for Ezra – by whom she meant Ezra Pound – from whom they had broken off as his sympathy for Mussolini became unavoidably apparent. They no longer visited Pound at Rapallo after 1933 and she had ceased even writing to Olga Rudge, Anha's one-time violinist mentor.

Those days belonged in a dream, another universe, a plane of existence different from anything now, and bereft of their old magic for him, as was the Paris that Allied forces had only liberated months earlier.

In this winter of 1944, six months after the Normandy invasion, the war seemed all but over, with the defeat of the Axis all but a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless it dragged on endlessly in Europe through this dark winter, and people here and there had begun to speculate about some new German super-weapons turning the tide once again.

God, he missed that prewar world, those days, every one up until the end. Everything happens at once and persists eternally, like the railroad tracks, even though his train only passed over a small portion of track at any one time – in its own time time, and even that time varied depending on where he was on the train. On this same plane, he and Anha still played naked in clear, warm mineral water bubbling in a grotto on the estate of Francesca Farnini near the Adriatic coast in Northern Italy.

“Why does she look at you that way?” Anha teased and pushed him apart from her.

“Like this?” He looked back had Anha in mock flirtation, then floated himself against her body, slipping his arms around her. They were like mating dolphins. She started to answer, but kissed him instead. They kissed for a long time, slithering sensuously and effortlessly buoyant in the heavy mineral water.

They kissed like like they talked, danced, walked, read together, with directness, nothing hidden, everything laid bare and offered. They had, like most people together a long time, a continuity of consciousness.

From when they met, she exhibited a consistence of grace that showed in all she did – deliberate and centered, giving her tremendous poise and the impression of strength that transcended her. In the grotto that day, they seemed to connect even more seamlessly than ever before, sensing their parting soon. They floated in erotic trance like that without sense of time, lost in each other, their lips together, tongues tasting tongues, bodies intermingling, parts interlocking in effortless familiar coupling, waves of orgasm rising and washing through them like those lapping on the edges of the natural stone basin in which they floated, echoing softly.

Anha's passion always took him by surprise, even though he sensed it all the time beneath her business-like demeanor and chic, manish attire that reminded him of Katherine Hepburn, even though Anha's diminutiveness did not.

They dried off with huge, fluffy towels embroidered modestly in one quarter with the Farnini crest. Francesca, relaxing on a chaise lawn next to the grotto scarcely looked up from an Italian newspaper she held. “I'm going to miss you two lovebirds,” she cooed.

“We're going to miss you too, Francesca, and each other,” Prez answered.

“Then you should stay,” Francesca said. “The critic of the Osservatore, here praises your piano recital last night to high heaven,” she laughed. “I'll hold another musicale here at the Castello,” she added.

“You've done so much already,” Anha said. “Sponsoring the concert, being our host.... and...”

“Oh, it is you who have done wonderful things for me,” said Francesca. “Come here Prez, I want un abbraccio, forte, liquido, delicioso, per favore, cara mia.” She held open her arms. He smiled, and sat next to her sideways on the chaise lawn.

“I'm still wet,” he demurred, and patted Francisca bare, well tanned leg. But then he leaned over and kissed Francesca on her cheeks and fully on mouth.

Francesca's driver took them north to Milan to catch their trains. In the back of the Rolls Royce limo, they kept the windows down and bathed in the warm light of green vineyards and farms of the Po Valley in late spring.

Even with the political tensions of 1939, it was a season when many northern Europeans were planning summer trips south to Italy, heading to the coastal and lake towns and resorts. But Anha and Prez were going north.

Prez found it hard to talk as they rolled along in silence, and Anha didn't help. He could feel her accusatory stare, topping off her disappointment.

Finally, he said: “Everything will be fine, my Ahnanini, honey. The kiss meant nothing. You had your fling with Francesca last year. I've done nothing but flirt.”

“I hate it when you justify yourself,” Anha said. Like so many times, she blunted and turned his arguments around, reminding him of her dogged support over the good part of their decade together off and on. “Okay, I understand. You need to go directly to London. You don't snub John Cristy and Rudolph Bing even though few people have heard of this summer Glydenbourne thing. It's an honor for them to be putting on your opera. I can take care of my parents and meet you in August in time for your opening.”

Now she switched into her mothering mode – impossible to counter. He sunk into it. Before he knew it she had his signed confession. “I'll admit it,” he said. “I made advances on Francesca to pick a fight so that he would not be so painful to part now. But it didn't work. I know we agreed to part company for the summer for more reasons than one. We've had a hard time with each other in the past year. Our bodies converge but our emotions and ambitions pull us apart.”

“It's still a good idea to separate,” she said. “When we see each other again we'll be fresh and see what we shall see,” she said with a finality in her vice.

“And... “ he added. “Anha, I'm angry at you for being such a fool going to Lithuania now. Europe is a tinderbox about to go up. Your parents can get away from Vilnia on their own. They have your brother. We've sent money.”

“He's worthless, even if he is my brother,” Anha said. “And their idea of getting away is to go to Kiev where my aunt and uncle live. I have a British passport and I can get them to go with me on a ship west.”

“You'll have to go to Danzig to do that,” he told her. “Dangerous.”

They rode in silence for a few minutes. “Driver!” said Prez, suddenly. Turn at the junction for Venice, not Milan.” It's out of the way, but you can take a train from Mestre to Vienna and get to where you want to go. And we can spend one last day and night there,” he said, and kissed her.

Tears welled in her eyes. She kissed him back.

“We won't talk about any of this for 24 hours,” he said.

They took a suite facing the Grand Canal for more than he could afford, and left their room with its balcony, only for coffee on Piazza San Marco and dinner at a trattoria along the small canals. They kept the promise right up until they took the vaporetto back across from Venice to Mestre to catch their respective trains. He bit his lip now thinking of putting her on that express for Vienna with connections north. He should have gotten on with her, and the hell with the festival, he thought.

But there had been so many false alarms. He knew the worst would come, but not so soon – by August, Nazi Germany signing a nonaggression pact with Stalin's Soviet Union, in essence cutting off Anha's way east, followed by Hitler's invasion of Poland, September 1, and the outbreak of total was with the allies blocking her way west.

Still, Venice remained and all their halcyon days in Paris, Vienna, London and Weimar Berlin, in his consciousness as if they had happened in another universe – one he missed dearly now. Prez liked the eternalism of some of his fellow modernists, seeing that everything happens at once and persists eternally, like the railroad tracks, even though his train only passed over a small portion of track at any one time – in its own time time, and even that time varied depending on where he was on the train. Somehow this comforted him. Anha lived somewhere out along these tracks, or others, past, and perhaps presently and at a place where they could encounter ahead. Perhaps he would find out more in Washington, he told himself, after New York, when he visited the War Department.

He turned his gaze back to the present reality – or illusion of reality – in the parlor car. Only a few early risers sat in the long, observation car. He had slept only a few hours himself, and made his way there for coffee .The help had just come on morning shift as crisp as the passengers seemed wilted.

Johnny recognized the woman, but hesitated to walk over and say hello. He savored the solitude of the moment, and had enough complications for one trip. Besides, the woman had a “closed” sign hanging in her shop window. A gentleman would approach only if and when she turned flipped to “open.” He knew himself for a scoundrel on occasion, but always a gentleman.

He speculated on how the human brain could identify someone instantly, given but minute clues – the tilt of the head, curvature of neck, the flow of motion as she walked. All at once he recalled the seductive timbre of her laugh, the slight furrow of her brow when she asked if he loved her, the dark rose tint of her nipples, the graceful articulation of her toes, the pleasing proportions of thighs to waist and that she wore Chanel No. 5, and preferred little neck clams to cherrystones raw on the half shell. Yet he could not remember precisely how their brief affair had ended other than that he had left New York for Hollywood and lost touch.

He knew how it looked. Dashing American composer, back from Paris for the American premier of his opera, Tartuffe, seduces New England Conservatory singer. It happened before the start of the war in Europe, not long after Anha had left him in Paris and his anger at her remained fresh and not yet overlaid with sadness and fear that came with the sudden – but, face it, expected – German invasion of Poland. But there had been so many crises leading up to this, somehow he'd not believed the worst would happen.

He dropped cash onto the small round tray of the waiter who brought him the shot of scotch and small tumbler of seltzer. He nodded and said softly, “Keep the change,” to the waiter, a tall rangy, black man with a neatly clipped hair and a precise pencil mustache who looked displaced in his Pullman company uniform.

“Thank you, sir,” said the waiter as he set the glasses down on the thick plexiglass covering the top of the end table next to his red-velvet upholstered chair. Prez' small band of aficionados knew his songs, but musical scholars remembered him most of all for his Symphonie Tronique employing dozens of sound machines – mostly record players – from which various fragments of music – marching bands blaring – speaking, along with city and factory noises and guns firing, along with a full orchestra and chorus all in a dissonant ensemble that would make sense to future ears, but only to a few people then, and which set off a riot at it's Paris premiere in 1926.

This earned him mention in histories of the period and high praise from fellow modernists, including Ezra Pound and fellow composer George Antheil. But like Antheil, Prez – having pushed modernism to what he felt like its outer limits – turned to jazz and other more melodic expression marrying it with new dissonances, much in the manner of Gershwin, but with that Stravinsky influence that permeated new music, in any case.

Unlike Gershwin, however, Prez never rose to popularity on Broadway, or even in London, and stuck to more classical compositions and performances. He became a pariah among modernists in Paris by the 1930s. With Fascism on the rise – and the coming of war that few seemed to see – he left Paris for London, and then returned to America in relative obscurity, even his jazz hits forgotten. On this journey home, he lost fame, a good deal of fortune and Anha.

He had all but decided to walk over an say hello, when a tall, angular man in dark slacks and a maroon sweater entered the car and stopped in front of Sondra. They talked, softly at first, then more animatedly. “I couldn't sleep,” he could make out Sondra as saying, over the noise of the train.

The man glanced up and down the car and gave Prez a dark look to which he returned a level stare before turning away to stare out a window. The man waived away a porter who came up to ask him for an order. The man talked loudly enough so that Prez could make out some of his words.

“This is stupid. Come back to the room,” the man said.

Sondra nodded no and turned away.

“Give it to me now. It's not yours,” the man said. He reached at her purse and she pulled it away. Just in that moment she caught sight of Prez with a disbelieving look as he glanced her way.. Her eyes widened, then averted, which Prez took a a signal not to approach. Ill disposed to involvement, Prez turned back again to stare out the window opposite his chair. He thought to leave but didn't want to call attention to himself, and besides his curiosity compelled him to linger. The pearly diffused morning light now outshone the yellowish interior light of the car.

Outside, the semi-desert landscape gave way to dark clumps of conifers that caused shadows to intersperse the increasing daylight. And the snow came down heavier now, in wet clumps instead of flakes.

Prez could feel the passing scene's chill deeply inside himself despite the cozy warmth of the car. It made him want to escape the stuffy interior air, stale with smoked cigarettes and spilled beer: find a vestibule, open a window and breathe in that wild coldness for a while.

Out there he could hear the symphony of winter with mountains, rocks, trees, snow, wind and sky playing together to dark crescendos transcending the squabbles of people on the train passing through it. He heard even the train itself taking part, whistle sounding in the cold morning air, like a soloist in a concerto.

“You're coming back with me now!” The man shouted. “I know you have that money, and it's not for you to waste. I gave it to Nicky to hold and the minute my back is turned.”

“How could you take that money for our house and use it that way, for some crazy deal of yours?” She answered back,in a trembling tone, not shouting, but the precise operatic placement of her voice allowed it to carry well across the car.

“Stupid? You know nothing. You live in a dream world. That's the kind of deal that puts food on your table... “

The train entered a tunnel and the interior lights flickered. Prez took a moment to adjust to the dimness. Something happened between the two at the far end that he couldn't make out and he heard the car door slide open and the sound of the open tracks between the cars as the man left. His eyes more used to the dim light now, he could see her rise from her chair, and start towards the door, but lose her balance as the train hit another curve and swayed more wildly. She half fell back and sat back down.

She leaned over from her chair to pick her little hat off the floor. She regarded it a moment, and tried to smooth the little feather where he had broken in two. Then she plopped the hat down on her lap. He noticed she no longer had the shoulder bag.

=====================

Chapter 7
Einstein Express by Umberto Tosi

Nicky didn't dream of a train crash while he slept on the train. That nightmare recurred frequently at home. He would see a steam locomotive crossing a trestle above him in a mountain canyon jump its tracks and plunge downward taking its baggage and passenger cars with it. Sometimes it would be in slow motion. He would try to run but stumble over rocks and branches. It would crash all around him. Then he would wake up, or he would be killed in the dream and wake up, or awaken into another dream. In a variation, he would be on a train speeding out of control with a madman as its engineer and he would yell at the conductors but they would smile blankly and do nothing until the train derailed and flipped over.

He loved climbing into the upper bunk to sleep, tucked in by his mother standing on a stepladder to reach him. But he dreaded falling asleep for fear of his train crash dream. Instead he listened to the reassuring clatter and hums of the real train that made him forget his fear and fall to sleep, and the train wreck dream never came. But he did dream of black-uniformed Nazi SS men pursuing him with machine guns, swastikas and skulls on their coal helmets, and being unable to run fast with his feet mired in mud. That dream recurred often as well.

They wanted to pull out his fingernails with needle-nosed pliers but they would never actually catch him before he woke up in a cold sweat. He just experienced the helplessness and fear of fleeing them. Maybe that was hell – the fear, since without a body how could one experience physical pain?

Sometimes his pursuers would be crazed surgeons in hospital masks and a giant black cat that scratched him across his stomach where he had been cut open to remove a ruptured appendix the result of a misdiagnosis of “intestinal flu,” that had resulted in peritonitis and emergency surgery.

He had overheard often from his father that he would have had little chance of surviving without massive doses of sulfa drugs, that his father pointed out with some irony had been developed by German chemists in the 1930. (Sir Arthur Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but methods of mass production for the miracle drug were not worked out until around 1942 and early doses were diverted to battlefield medical use.

His father also seemed fond repeating leading edge scientific and medical news he'd gleaned from newspapers and magazine. He used his periodic updates to remind everyone that he'd wanted to be a medical doctor when he was younger, but had to quit school and work as a salesmen because of the Depression. Then he would launch into his description of being on the road in New England in the dead of winter selling to mom-and-pop stores, lining the inside of his jacket with newspapers to keep out the cold and earning $6 a week. Nicky caught the inference. His father had to forego his dreams by age 18 when Nicky was born. “Don't get married young, have kids and ruin your life,” his father would admonish often, as if the point were not clear enough.

His father didn't talk about how being a father and having a child had pushed him down on the draft lists and kept him out of the Army though the few years leading up to the war and a couple of years into it. But now he had gotten his draft card stamped 4-F which put him permanently out of harm's way. “I'm patriotic,” he'd say, having working as a welder building P-38s at Lockheed's plant in Burbank, “but I'm a pacifist. How can I see the Germans as an enemy when they invented the drug that saved my son's life,” he would announce in logic even Nicky could see was convoluted.

Well, thought Nicky, even though I ruined my parents' life by being born, at least I kept pop from being drafted and having his butt blown off overseas someplace. But what was the use? Now, for sure, they're going to burn in hell.

A monsignor from the archbishop's office had just visited his parochial school class to lecture on that very consequence of divorce – “a mortal sin, and cause for automatic excommunication,” he warned wide-eyed 6th-graders. Archbishop Fulton Sheen boomed the same hellfire from his weekly network radio broadcasts. Even after the nuns explained it, Nicky continued to envision “excommunication” as an execution – probably by decapitation, but sometimes he envisioned his parents burning at the stake.

He would surely burn with them someday for having giggled at the vision as it popped into his head and for having wished his father would just stay away permanently and let him alone to live with his mother. How did “souls” writhe in pain without bodies? He wondered about that, but God made all things possible. It didn't occur to him until later in his growing up to question the whole notion of an infinitely good God countenancing a horrors of hell even for the worst of sinners.

But Bishop Sheen dire threats of mortal sin, excommunication and eternal hellfire didn't seem to deter his parents fighting and threatening divorce and now, in the weeks leading up to their trip, his mother actually having seen a lawyer – as he overheard her confiding on the phone to her sister in Boston. Later her heard even worse: her whispering to Henry. “This is our last trip together. I've got to go with him. I want to see Ma. She's getting older. If we're still in love when I get back, we'll know it's real.” It sounded to Nicky like one of those Bette Davis tear-jerker lines. The last think Nicky wanted would be to trade that jerk for his father, who was bad enough. Maybe Henry would be manageable.

He didn't say anything to his parents about going to hell. He never thought about it directly, but he sensed his parent's distance from the Catholic Church, which they attended rarely, usually Easter, or for weddings or funerals. Their apostasy aside, they enrolled him in Catholic School, under the rubric of every other unthinking parental strategy they followed – because “it will be good for the boy.”

His father had deemed Nicky's previous, miserable, homesick year in a military school as “good for the boy” too, despite his own studied avoidance of wartime military service. Joining the Jehovah Witnesses for a short time apparently was “good for the father,” as he had heard it could result in conscientious objector status should his draft number come up.

The compartment was nearly pitch dark now after his mother had turned off the lights and stepped into the adjoining bedroom of the suite. Nicky had feigned sleep until she left, then looked about him, too excited to doze off. He discovered a small glass porthole just above his bunk.

The rain clouds had thinned enough for him to make out a sky illuminated my more stars than he ever saw in the city. He stared up fascinated that these stars existed overhead even when he could not see them, night after night. He'd learned of these stars from the Hollywood Planetarium show, demonstrating the vastness of space, in which each star burned hot – most hotter than the sun – but none could be said to house hell where his parents supposedly would go once they divorced.

Nicky heard them faintly through the thin door separating the compartments, arguing as usual, but he only understood enough to know the subject was money. No surprise there except that this time he knew it involved the wad of cash his father had given into his hands when they boarded the train. Sondra discovered it in his jacket pocket before he'd had to chance to return it. Mothers always find everything their children leave in pockets.

Continuing to feign sleep, he heard his father step quietly into the dark compartment. Nicky cracked an eye just enough to see him fish for the money in the jacket. He tried all the pockets then turned the jacket inside out and shook it vigorously. Nicky imagined his father doing that to him. He closed his eyes and fought not to give himself away as he breathing shortened and his heart thumped. Finally, his father slipped through away through the connecting door. Nicky heard murmurs giving way to loud arguing. Doors slammed. A porter checked in about something, probably to see if they wanted the beds opened. More door slamming. Then quiet.

Beaver Cleaver's Evil Twin

2009-09-06T00:55:00.000-07:00

We were kids growing up in a white, middle class American neighborhood that happened to be Hollywood, California. To us, the glamor of the silver screen seemed another world. Considering the way Hollywood sentimentalized us relentlessly in movies and would soon in television entertainment, we -- the real kids who lived in the Los Angeles district of Hollywood, could well have come from another planet.
Me, 1948

We were in that sense, the evil twins of those saccharin screen kids played by the likes of Margaret O'Brien and other child stars of the 1940s. By our own lights, we weren't a bad kids -- not spawn of the devil - but full of the devil nonetheless,
pranksters who fought a running guerrilla war with parents and other adults who we somehow knew we must resist.

Some of us did have parents who worked in the studios, but as grips, extras, office assistants, and even some who played character roles occasionally. But living in the movie capital of the world held no special magic for us. Only the movies themselves retained their magic -- for good or ill -- as they did for everyone everywhere.

The large screen and the small screens beginning to invade households, showed us heroes and villains, lovers and brutes, fools and wise guys, vamps, dolls, dames, long-suffering mothers and everything as it might be but seldom was in real life. But it seemed as real as a rainstorm in the darkened theater where my mother took me often twice a week and I went along on Saturday for the 15-cent four hour kiddie matinee at the neighborhood bijou.

The two Hollywoods just didn't fit together, and it seemed usually that our real world was the one that didn't measure up. Maybe we became tricksters intuitively to even the scales.

Life -- aside from the drudgery of school, was about getting out of the house or apartment, out of sight and earshot of our parents. Those were days when kids were told to go out and play.

I did like books - which marked me as a wierdo -- but there was no TV, no video games to keep any kid inside, and even radio dramas and comedies only were broadcast at night. Daytime one only heard soap operas. Having to listen to soap operas when I was home sick -- to pass the time -- seemed worse that any flu or even the chicken pox.

Don't think it was innocently Beaver-ish, however. Home lives were usually less than ideal. Adults and their fights, fears, depressions, delusions, and what seemed arbitrary rules were to be avoided.

My best friend's Dad didn't wear cardigan sweaters and unlike Ward was known to smack mom around after a few beers. My father was away on the road most of the time, and when he came home, nothing but fights which I'd avoid by heading out the back door and getting my bicycle.

Out there I'd go around the block and find my usual friends -- a half-dozen neighborhood kids -- five boys and a girl we liked because she was what was then called a "Tomboy." I dressed and looked like Beaver Cleaver a decade before "Leave It to Beaver" debuted on TV in 1957 and terminally sentimentalized the kind of "Beav" I had been in real life. .

This 1948 model Beav looked all wide-eyed and innocent for the growups, but. when alone, fancied himself cryptic -- a character out of Edgar Allen Poe -- a schemer who wished he could be The Invisible Man real life around his parents and other adults, except maybe at Christmas and my birthday so I could get presents.

This "Beav-Cleave" doppleganger had a father he feared and was happiest when away on business, which was at least half of the time. His mother was no June Cleaver either -- depressed and frustrated, thwarted from following the musical career she's started on the East Coast, felt alienated in Los Angeles, constantly struggling to make ends meet with the tiny, inadequate allowance my father would leave her before taking off in his big, fat, black Oldsmobile 98 for weeks at a time.

The evil "Beav" had a best friend named Bobby, a shy,, skinny, beanpole whose father owned a local grocery store. Bobby had an older brother, a mom and dad who did not seem on the edge of divorce. (I was only to learn later of their strife behind their respectable church-going exterior.) The lived in a normal, house with a yard, a dog and a fat, calico Persian cat, instead of the apartment where i lived and slept in a pull-down Murphy bed in the front room.

People would think if anything, I with the foreign-sounding name and being the smaller one, would have been "the bad influence," initiating mischief . Bob had a normal name everyone could pronounce.

But he wasn't popular. He was an outcast like myself at our grammar school class. That associated with the odd-ball, Boston-Italian boy who talked funny, with soft "r's"  He was my pal because he was six-feet tall in the fifth grade and looked upon as something of a freak himself. And, of the two of us, he was the one who most often came up with dares and urged us on to the next level of trouble.

We didn't stay after school and play kick ball. We didn't get invited to birthday parties at local miniature golf courses. But like other kids in that day, we spent most of our free time outside playing, unless we were sick.

Bobby and I rode our fat-tired, stripped down, bicycles all over Hollywood, and out to Santa Monica beach, through Beverly Hills and up into the Hollywood Hills, and along a still- glamorous, clean, upscale Hollywood Boulevard lined with palm trees, department stores and big first-run movie palaces like the Pantages, the Egyptian and, of course, The Chinese.

We often rode our bikes up to Hollywood Blvd. to goof around, shoplift candy from the Woolworth's, have a malted milk or banana split at the counter and maybe take in a movie for 15 cents apiece.

Sometimes we locked our bikes and went into the Broadway Hollywood, then a posh, 12-story department store on the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine.  Our mothers often shopped for dresses and shoes there, instead of Sears where they bought our corduroys, khakis, cotton shirts, sneakers and jeans for school.

I hated Sears with a passion, because the company would put up billboards reading "First to Sears and Then to School," early in August that reminded me that we had less than one month left to our enjoy the dolce vita of summer vacation. I still feel nauseated in remembering the slogan.

The only good thing in our boyish minds about the big Sears store, then on Santa Monica Boulevard where the Big Red Pacific Electric trolley cars ran, was the special "Rite-Fit Shoe Vision" machine in the children's shoe department. It was Sears exclusive -- a four-foot-high metal stand that looked something like a gum vending machine.

There was a step in front and a hole big enough for me to slide in my feet while standing up against it. At that point I could look down into a flat glass shaded by a black plastic cowling. I'd press a large button next to the cowling and hear a buzzing.

The glass would light up and there, in dark gray against a glowing, sickly green background I could see the skeletal bones of my feet through the tops of my shoes!

Parents could peek in to make sure they were getting the right fit -- with room to grow -- on shoes they were about to buy. But I always ran to it to see "my skeleton" through the old sneakers I was wearing, and so did the swarms of other kids drawn to the machine and ignored by clerks busy selling to their parents and other paying customers.

The button only activated was obviously was an X-ray for a few moments. But like the other kids, I'd just push the button over and over as I gazed down at my toe-bones in fascination. Once, on one of the rare occasions one of the Sears staff walked over to shoo us off the shoe-viewer, I asked him if the x-ray machine could make people sick -- having seen the 1943 bio-pic "Madame Curie," with Greer Garson in which the heroine dies of cancer having discovered radium without realizing the side-effects.

"Not at all, son," I remember this pasty-faced, clerk answering me as if he knew what he was talking about. "It's perfectly safe radiation, not an X-ray. It's a fluoroscope!" It wasn't till several years later than I found out that a fluoroscope is just another kind of x-ray machine.

Not even the super-dooper see-through shoe-skeleton machine could draw Bobby and I to Sears when we were on our own. Besides, we favored the then, genteel glamour of Hollywood Boulevard to the blue-collar Sears. We could pretend to be movie stars.

Sometimes we'd go to the Mayflower Coffee Shop on the boulevard. There was a donut-making machine constantly running behind the plate glass of the coffee shop's front window. It was worth watching for a long time to see how long we could resist the temptation to go inside and buy some of them.

Next we headed to the Broadway Hollywood department store.

We took elevators and escalators to the top floor and slipped into a storage area behind the glassware department. With a little exploring, we found what we sought - -- a stairway to the roof.

We sneaked out onto the roof, from where we could see the whole city, and on some days that yellow-gray stuff people had started calling "smog," because they thought it came from a blend of local fog with sludge-pot smoke used to protect citrus groves in the nearby San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys (Now, of course, all suburbs).

The Broadway Hollywood was one of those Belle Epoch-style buildings with ornate facade and ledges that curved outward from the roof.

The Beav and Bob used to crawl out on the lip of those ledges, lay on our stomachs with our heads hanging over so that we could see people and cars far beneath us moving about on the boulevard.

We would work up a lot of saliva and spit and giggle seeing if there was any reaction from the unwitting shoppers walking on the sidewalk below who may have thought they felt a raindrop, oddly on a perfectly sunny Southern California day.  Sometimes we spit gum or little pieces of hard candy.

One time, Bobby stood up, teetering right on the edge, unzipped his corduroys and pulled out his boy-thing. "What are you doing?" I yelled. "You're going to fall off. Your going to get us in big trouble. He paid no attention and began to pee in a long arc out over the edge, his yellow stream dispersing into a spray of vaporous drops that fell below on the unsuspecting pedestrians.  At one point, a breeze blew the stream a bit sideways as it flew out into space and back at us. I started laughing. So did he, causing his hosing to go even more awry.

We kept laughing like hell and he almost lost his balance. I tried to reach out to grab his pant-leg but almost went over myself.

I kept looking nervously at the roof door, worried some Broadway guard or other employee would burst through it and discover us in flagrante dilicto.

i gazed below again but didn't see anyone opening an umbrella or seeming to react, except one old man to paused a second and seemed to look up right at me.  I pulled in my head like an alarmed turtle.

After a while, we quietly slipped back down from the roof and took an elevator back to the street level.

I noticed that Bobby had some droplets of wet on one leg of his trousers.  I grabbed sample bottles of perfume and sprayed him as we walked past the cosmetic department and he retaliated in kind, until we got dirty looks from a very pretty clerk there.

Off we went on our bicycle, little disheveled devils smelling like Chanel No. 5, and Lilac perfumes. We repeated our Broadway adventure several times until it became too risky because the clerks started to recognize us and wonder what we were doing there alone.
Besides, it got boring after a while. We moved on to other mischievous pastimes.   (What anti-social, nasty little buggers we were!!!)

Indolently we rode our fat-tire Schwins for miles along the right side of streets next to parked cars. And as we rode, we'd reach over every once in a while to slap a side view mirror out of line so the driver would have to re-adjust it when he or she returned to their autos.

As an adult, I've  often wondered if some boy is spitting or pissing on me from tall buildings when I walk downtown.  Sometime a feel a raindrop, and look up, seeing nothing but blue sky and the sides of the buildings that don't have ledges anymore. I wonder.

Sunday in Boston With Gnocchi

2009-08-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

In my pale blue, cotton flannel pajamas and cotton socks, I could ice skate the polished hardwood floors, around the sides of the oriental rugs. It was very early, but I didn’t pay attention to clocks. I only remember that my grandmother’s large third floor flat on a bluff overlooking a frozen Mystic River in Somerville, Massachusetts was quiet, with winter sun slanting under pulled shades and between drapes, and it seemed magical.

I could skate my stocking feet along the side of the runner down the hall past the bedrooms of my mother and aunt Nina, her elder sister who really ran the family, not my grandmother.

But my grandmother – Nonna Rosa, we called her – had been out of bed already for hours. The hallway led to bathrooms on one side, and past sliding double doors that opened into a dining room, that was closed at the moment. At the far end of the long hallway, was a swinging door that led into Nonna’s large, generous kitchen.

I could see the light under the door and I knew Nonna was up and already cooking for the big Sunday, Alessandrini family dinner, with which I was already familiar…I pushed the swinging door open and walked through to see my Nonna chopping onions on a big wooden block. She looked up at me and beamed, and greeted me in Italian. I answered in Italian, which somehow, I could speak, but don’t remember how.

Today, I remember this as in a dream in which one suddenly speaks in a foreign tongue he’d never heard before…I didn’t speak Italian to my parents, only English. It was as if my fluency in Italian was a secret I shared only with my grandmother, who spoke, actually, in the playful, modulated dialect of her native Rome…

She put the chopped onions into a large, black, cast iron skillet atop the stove and sautéed it in olive oil. I wandered out onto a glassed in sun porch that led off from the kitchen and looked out onto the towering, green-painted iron of the Mystic River bridge with ships passing underneath looking like toys,

A hinged storm window opened onto a small section of roof that covered the downstairs sun deck…the small area was littered with crusts of stale, white Italian bread. The work of my Nonna who loved feeding the blackbirds and sparrows to endured the winter here each year.

I found more bread on a table and threw it out the window to help in the feeding. “Poveracci, poor things, had hava tough time all-a winter,” she would say in her broken English and tossed them pieces of bread. The birds would show up almost immediately.

I was too young to realize that her affinity with wintering birds stemmed form more than a few hard cold winters she’d endured working at a Boston shoe factory supporting four kids, during the just-past, Great Depression, lucking to have any job at all. Things were better now – a little.

As i remember everyone saying, "There's a war on." I wasn't sure what that really meant except that it was something all the adult took very seriously with grim, sometimes frightened, often scared looks on their faces. It also meant a couple of uncles now were gone away and showed up on holidays wearing khaki uniforms with brass buttons and some medals.

Mostly it meant one of my uncles who was in the service, gave me a toy "Flying Tiger" tiny fighter plane with a snarly pointy toothed face painted on its nose, giving it a comic ferocity. It became my favorite toy and i “flew” it everywhere, by holding it up and making propeller noises with my mouth…The little plan was there where I’d left it the day before, on a window sill.

I picked it up and flew it along the windows, silhouetted in early morning sun as it began to rise, I put it in diving mode, swooping along the linoleum and strafed my grandmother’s fuzzy slippers.

Then, buzzing with my pursed lips, I climbed to high altitude along he side of the stove. It was a gigantic cooking stove with one half in black cast iron with a furnace to burn wood or coal, a flat top with flat round tops that could be lifted off with a special long-handled tool that fitted a slot in the round stove top unit, to reveal flames leaving inside…A wide, metal smoke stack ran from the back of the stove up through the ceiling. The other half was a more conventional gas stove with four burners and an oven.

The experience hangs dreamlike and vivid, preserved perfectly in my consciousness from scores of years past. The stove, the quiet of the kitchen the delicious smells of herbs, fresh garlic, sauted garlic and onions blending and filling the warm kitchen as the slanting morning sunlight brightened, fullfiling the promise the coming Sunday celebration.

It seemed a ritual that had come down to us thorugh the ages, from grandmas past and would always be held. Yet I didn't know that our many-course, feast that would be served, 2 p.m. to a dozen or so family members and friends, laughing, exchanging stories, teasing and enjoying music of their own making represented an era coming to a close as this close-knit, extended family with grow more and more affluent in the coming postwar period and spread out into suburbs and across the continent, thinning their connections accordingly.

My grandmother now was rolling out dough on a large table…stopping every few moments to check things on the stove. Instead of flattening out the dough as she usually did to make noodles, she rolled the dough lengthwise into long cylindrical tubes.

Then she cut the tubes into fat, little, equal, inch-long pieces. These were to be her fabled gnocchi. My job was to make a dent in each doughy gnocchi. This produced a little indentation as the gnocchi. When the gnocchi were dried, cooked and served, these little indentations would catch sauce and ground meat of the ragout sauce, along with the grated Parmesan cheese that would be sprinkled on each dish as it is served.

I remember making those dents as one of the happiest times of my life. Maybe my five-year-old finger wasn’t exactly sanitized, but the gnocchi would be boiled anyway. And they were plump, sweet, delightful when she served them covered with the robust, aromatic tomato sauce she sautéed and simmered for hours with pork, and beef and that tasted like you thought you'd dreamed it, and that I've tried to duplicate for decades and still only approached. Then sprinkle well with freshly grated Reggiano Parmiggiano cheese -- something you could never buy in anything but well-aged golden wedges sliced from the wheel by an Italian deli clerk in those days.

Cat a la Carte

2009-08-21T18:57:00.000-07:00

In spite of naming me after my grandfather, and reminding me constantly that I the first-born of my generation on both sides of my parents' extended Italian families in Boston, I felt like an exotic from the earliest days I could remember. Not that I knew what the word meant botanically. I just knew I wasn’t a native plant, not in my family. and not in the gardens and sidewalks beyond our front door where our elegantly curved residential street led into broad Commonwealth Avenue where the trolley ran to downtown Boston.

I had no rationale for this feeling of apartness. No feeling of hostility from anyone. But I was the only child in each household where I found myself. Few couples were having children in that period since I had been born at the end of the Great Depression and ran about as a tot at the World War II broke out all over the world and became everyone’s preoccupation.

Besides, back then, children weren’t considered something of a breed all their own, little savages, not so much human, but cute little, human-like creatures all their own to be kept in place until ready for adulthood. Disney had made three of its first classic animated films – Snow White, Bambi and Pinocchio – plus Mickey cartoons, but hadn’t turned childhood into a multibillion-dollar industry yet.

There was no Dr. Spock to guide parents – struggling out of the Depression anyway – and we were Catholic in name, but not every Sunday, barely into the New Testament and certainly not into the tight-lipped sternness of the Old Testament about anything. Being Catholic signified identity, not so much Revelation. Being Italians who considered themselves of the high-culture, secular, worldly variety, both my father’s affluent family and my mother’s more artistic family looked at priests largely as social climbers not to be trusted much, and religiosity a hallmark of the toiling masses of “caffoni,” those half-literate country folk who made up the majority of fellow Italians who had made it to the land of the free and lived in places like South Boston and Jersey.

I wasn’t aware of any of this, of course, until many years later in retrospect. But looking back on these two families --- Tosi and Alessandrini, each patrician in its own way, one austere and affluent, the other warm and individualistic – I realize that despite their strained relations and contrasting attitudes about money – they had the one thing in common of considering themselves elite. They were different and raised me as “different,” and I felt different even from them.

Other accidents of history contributed to this rarified family atmosphere that I naively considered normal and universal at the time. It was a good time to be a child, really – though in some ways neglected. One didn’t “raise” children anymore than one “raised” lawns. At least that was the ethos of these two diverging, distinct Italian families, neither one of which was cozy with the other.

Being this little interplanetary visitor, it fell to me to play the expected role of prankster to indulgent grandparents, aunts, uncles – mercilessly – in the process, getting away with murder from my too-young parents knowing they hesitated to come down hard on this adorable little bratty puppy who make their elders laugh and shake their heads.

The Tosi house at 3 Wallingford Road in Brighton near Boston College, a large, two-story urban, red brick New England townhouse, housed a live-in maid and cook named Anna, a tiny, energetic, hunchback woman who had been devoted to my grandmother Luisa Tosi for many years back before I was born.

She blended right in with witches good and bad of my fairy tales and, at age four, i remember having nothing else to do sometimes, i trailed her around the place talking and singing nonsensical songs while she went about her chores and i mimicked my grandmother giving her instructions in half-English, half-Italian to see if i could get her to crack up irreverently.

Poor old Anna put up with my pranks as well as my noise and general misbehavior. My grandmother's beloved black cat, Nero, would trot up and meow for a treat whenever Anna opened the refrigerator door. Anna wasn't supposed to be feeding Nero treats all the time, but I was on her side. Why not, I remember thinking, put Nero inside the refrigerator for a while so he could partake of as many treats as he wanted, especially a nice piece of leftover baked Boston Scrod that happened to be on the bottom shelf.

When Anna went down to the laundry room in the cellar, i cracked the refrigerator door, summoning Nero. I uncovered the backed Scrod, shiny white, sprinkled with bits of parsley, herbs and garlic, buttery and lemony, picked off a piece of the fillet to lure Nero in closer, then let the cat get up on its hind legs to have another bite.

Nero was a large, shorthair, cat with green eyes and a shiny coat, almost too heavy for my little four-year-old self to lift. But from this position it was easy to give him a little encouraging lift into the large bottom shelf space of the refrigerator while he purred and licked at the fish fillet. One step back and i swung the big door shut silently. Click. Oh, did that light stay on when the door closed? I didn't know. No matter, I'd heard that cats could see in the dark.

Now i wandered around the house, looking at the big grandfather clock in the hallway, pondering whether or not to open the glass door, get up on my tiptoes and change the time on it. Instead, i think i went upstairs several times to slide down the fat, curving tubular mahogany banister.

Through the sliding polished wooden doors of the conservatory at the front of the first floor, I could hear my grandmother, Luisa, playing the baby grand and coaching her last student of the day -- a reedy tenor - through his scales and exercises.

The young, rotund student came out, carrying his music in a brief case, took his coat and hat from a rack in the atrium and exited the front door, silently, seemingly lost in his lesson. Then my grandmother emerged, cane in hand, giving me a glance and that smile that made me want to do a little gig in front of her.

I followed her back to the kitchen, watching her severely arthritic limp. And how she worked her polished wooden cane work, and imitating her gait slightly, not in mockery, but being the Grand Old Diva myself.

I fixated on her swaying, dark silky dress, her ornate beads, rings, silver and gold bracelets and her gray hair pulled into a large bun atop her head, like the great ladies in those 19th century photos, exposing the richly olive skin on the back of her neck. I puzzled at her thick, almost opaque silk stockings and her polished, lace up shoes, one medium heel longer than the other to compensate for the list caused by an old back and hip injury sustained, i had heard, in an onstage accident during rehearsal at the Teatro Colon opera house in Buenos Aires, mysterious land of gauchos where my father had been born that i liked to gaze at on the big globe in my grandfather's stud

I caught the beguiling musky lavender scent of her perfume, and she pulled me along like a siren does a sailor with her always placed, rich, mezzo voice that seemed to turn her everyday talking in to recitative between opera arias. She and Anna didn't look or act like anyone else I saw, and seem to me even now as much storybook incarnations as real.

"Ai, beng, beng, ti sento li, birrichino," she'd say in semi-Bolognese dialect, hearing me behind her, ("Ah ha, I hear you back there, little dickens...”)

Each weekday afternoon at this time, she would go to the kitchen, wash her hands in the utility sink next to the pantry, and summon Anna to organize preparations for dinner. I came through the swinging kitchen door and sidled into the pantry for a good view of the proceeding. I'd half forgotten about the cat.

Then pandemonium! My grandmother opened the refrigerator door for a look at the fish and other provisions. Out shot Nero like a jet-black cannon ball, screeching, sending half the contents of the refrigerator clattering out onto the floor with him.

My grandmother's full-throated, window-rattling scream blended with the Anna's shrill, hair-raising screech. I counter-pointed them with my own factory-whistle squeal, and hysterical high-pitched laughter as a ran away a step behind the cat. Neither my grandmother with her limp nor the hunchbacked Anna, of course could ever catch either one of us.

My father was on a sales trip up in Maine and my mother was out buying clothes downtown with her sister. It was left to my grandfather, Umberto, after whom I was named, to call me on the carpet in his study when he returned at 5 on the dot from his Back Bay, Tosi Trading Company office.

"Birrichino," he stared out, as i stood there in the mellow light next to the big globe. He lit a cigar and as always gave me the cigar ring to put on my finger as he shook out the kitchen match and dropped it into the massive amber-glass ashtray on his dark wooden desk. He smiled, and petted Nero, curled up purring on his lap. "I should give you a big spanking," he said.

I wasn't sure I knew what a spanking was, except what I’d see every Sunday in the final panel of the Katzenjammer Kids comic strip on the front page of the Sunday funnies that he would read to me. It showed either the Katzejammer Kids or their arch-enemy, Rollo, yelling as the guardian, the rotund, bearded Captain, puts them over his knee and smacks them soundly.

It always seemed some strange Sunday funnies ritual, performed by Germans or Dutch, or mainly those white bread people that everyone around me growing up almost exclusively with Italians and a few Jews, called simply, "Americans," or "gli Americani."

(Even though everyone was pro-American, patriotic and supportive of the WWII effort, with two of my uncles and several cousins overseas in the military.). Nobody used hyphenated ethnic designations back then. You were Irish, Italian, Mexican, black, Polish, Greek, Jew... or, in less polite company the appropriate pejorative term.

Instead of a spanking, I learned about metabolism. Cats, people and other mammals breath air, my grandfather told me. Our lungs take the oxygen from the air.

“What is oxygen?” I asked.

“Part of the air,” he said and breathed in deeply. I followed suit, filling my small chest. Then in breathed out and I copied him. We breathed in and out for a while in unison. He cracked a smile.

“Look. If Nero had to stay in the refrigerator for too long, he would use up all the air. He could die,” he said seriously. “The same thing could happen to you if you ever got inside one. So, my little birricchino, you must promise never to put another cat in a refrigerator, or a dog, or get I one yourself. Promise?”

I pictured a dead furry, frozen black Nero inside the refrigerator. “But the kitty didn’t die.” I said.

“No, but,” he switched to Italian, “non e una cosa bella, un gatto ghiacciato,” he laughed. (“A frozen cat isn’t a pretty thing,”)

Little Nino laughed at the thought.That's the way I remember the witty, elegant, gentile old man. My mother had another take, also laughing, privately, I overheard her more than once offering that my grandmother, Luisa, had hired and kept on Anna, not just because of her dilligence, but because she held no attraction for the old rue's roving eye. My mother should have know, having attested fairly often of having to step lively to keep from his pinching her on the ass when nobody was looking.

After his mini-lecture, I followed my grandfather upstairs and messed about while he washed up and changed for dinner. My grandmother actually rang a real, brass dinner bell when it was ready. "A tavola, a tovala," she would call out and you better stop what you were doing and come right to the table in the dining room, set with cloth napkins, silver and good china, with candles lit and a large, crystal bowl of fresh fruit in the middle that would provide us the normal weekday dessert with a plate of provolone and maybe asagio cheeses.

First came a clear chicken or beef minestrone with pastina, then the main courses. Then the fruit and cheeses washed down with a moderately decent dry wine, more often red than white. And along with my glass of milk, i would get a wine glass, filled with cool water, topped off by just enough of the wine to color it, make it slightly bitter and give it the bouquet of the wine. They never said grace, being too secular for that.

My mother showed up and joined us and the adults discussed news of the day, telling me occasionally, to finish my vegetables and not noticing that i was flicking bits of chicken down under the table, where Nero prowled like a panther.