Advice for Italian Boys (12 page)

For the first half-hour, Enzo and Nicolo read two or three magazines together, side by side on their stomachs on the floor. But then Enzo complained. “You’re too slow,” he said. He was the faster reader, and didn’t seem as interested as Nicolo was in puzzling out the more mysterious pictures.

Enzo took one of the fatter magazines and climbed with it up on to one of the high swivelling barber chairs.

After another half-hour of reading, Nicolo began to feel an ache in his stomach, as if he had eaten too much candy. His eyes felt raw with gazing on bras and panties and breasts and legs and hair. When he closed his eyes to rest them, he saw the same images against a spangled black background: women in all positions enticing the attention of the cartoon men and of himself, Nicolo, surely at best an unintended viewer.

He pulled himself up and returned the magazines in a jumble to the back of the cupboard from which they had fallen, hearing in the same moment the rhythm of familiar voices and the dull sound of approaching footsteps.

The bell above the front door of Massimo’s barbershop jangled sharply, once, twice. Nicolo slammed the cupboard door shut and slid in his stocking feet toward the front of the store. What had Enzo done with the magazine he had been reading? Nicolo looked and could see its outline pressing
against the striped pattern on the inside of Enzo’s T-shirt.

His parents and nonna noticed nothing unusual, it seemed; they were preoccupied by Marcella’s illness, and by the late hour and the need to get the three boys home and fed and to bed. Younger Enzo knew enough not to say a word about what his brothers had been reading, or perhaps his blissful hour in the pastel streets and homes and school grounds of Riverdale had displaced any memories of the pictures he had glimpsed in those other magazines; it was even possible that their seedy quality had escaped his notice. The magazine that had been stashed hurriedly inside older Enzo’s shirt found a permanent home rolled up inside the heat register in his bedroom, attached to the underside of the metal slats with two wide yellow rubber bands.

Massimo had acquired earlier that year a new fellow barber at the shop. Vito Greco, the cousin of a cousin, had been sent out from Italy when word reached Arduino of the loss of Guido Bianco at age forty-eight of a heart attack no more than twenty minutes after Friday evening dinner with his wife. (She had cooked his favourite meal: polenta baked in a slow oven with cheese, tomato sauce made from their own tomatoes, and slices of hard-boiled eggs, a salad of onions and bitter escarole from their garden, several slices of rosy melon and a few overripe black figs recently rescued from the predations of wasps and birds, a small post-prandial glass of wine sweet enough for the communion table and a handful of anise-flavoured biscotti;
when he drew his last, abruptly broken breath, Guido Bianco was sated, drowsy and contented.) Guido had been Massimo’s partner from the earliest days of the shop. The two of them, thin, young, confident, too green to know any better, opened Continental Barber in the first year after they arrived from Italy. Their business thrived from the start and both were able to send for their families the following year. Language had never been an impediment. Their clientele was so close to one hundred percent Italian immigrants that it was almost exclusively Italian and Italian-accented English that could be heard above the sound of snipping scissors and buzzing razors.

Guido was Massimo’s partner for over two decades. They spent close to seven thousand days working within two paces of each other, treading the same linoleum, swapping combs and scissors, razors, and rare bits of advice that were offered and accepted with mutual esteem. Massimo had the obdurate business sense that Guido lacked, and Guido had what Massimo did not, the gift of endless, fluid, ready conversation. Guido greeted everyone who entered the store with exuberant joy, strangers and friends. He teased and cajoled and bantered and debated, not just with his own customer in the chair before him but also with Massimo’s customer, and with whoever happened to be waiting in the L-shaped arrangement of seats at the front of the shop. Guido’s voice was the background music for the shop; it rolled and rumbled like that of an organ grinder, a percussive counterpoint to the cadence of the work that kept them on their feet, hands hovering above heads, from Monday mornings through Saturdays at five, filling the rare empty midafternoon half-hour, easing the passage of the many hours
when the two chairs were so busy that the next man sat down on a seat that was still warm from the buttocks of the last and Massimo and Guido sometimes sprang into action without even waiting for instructions. Guido’s effusiveness gave them energy, kept them in temper, and kept them moving; it provided the pacing and the tempo for the tending of head, beard, moustache, brow and even the furtive, coiling nasal hairs that were attacked and quelled quickly with a neat, curving swipe of the smallest of the shop’s assortment of electric clippers. Other shops installed radios or television sets that were always kept tuned to news or sports, but at Continental Barber the commentary, sports, news, near news, frank gossip and personal interest stories were almost all delivered and moderated by Guido. Their customers came as much for this as for the haircuts, of which there were in truth no more than four or five elemental variations. The men enjoyed the unstintingly convivial atmosphere of the store. They felt a kind of privilege, understanding that Guido’s rumbling eloquence, which had no apparent start or end, was provided entirely for their benefit. Even the youngest child of three or four in for his first haircut could see that Guido’s loquaciousness was sustained and reinforced by Massimo’s silence, which was broken only now and again by the briefest response, a “no” or a “sì” or the barest suggestion of a vowel-less syllable, seldom more, since only rarely was anything more needed.

Massimo and Guido both cut hair, but only Guido gave shaves, and he administered them the old-fashioned way, with scalding hot terry-cloth towels applied first and then shaving cream made from bar soap frothed lavishly in an
earthenware bowl and applied with an ancient badger-hair brush. The shaves were administered with a Pearlx-handled straight razor that Guido sharpened on a carborundum hone and polished on a leather-and-linen strop that hung ready to hand from a swivelling hook on the wall.

Massimo had a trick he liked to play, when—and this happened rarely, so there was no risk that the joke would grow stale—Guido accidentally nicked a customer’s neck with the razor’s sharp blade, the smallest over- or under-calculation, from which a tiny, glistening bead of blood would emerge with Guido’s reflection trembling in it, carmine, upside-down. The customer would blanch and sit tremblingly still, or jump from the chair and launch into real or jocular curses, depending on his temperament. “Go, go get the poor guy a glass of water,” Massimo would cry out to the other customers—his one, his only joke. “We got to check him out to see if maybe the water leaks out through the hole.”

Guido’s loss was more than a setback for Massimo. It called into question the future of Continental Barber itself, which had always been just the two of them. Guido had built the plywood counters and cabinets, fitted and painted the sliding cabinet doors with white enamel paint that had yellowed only slightly over the years, cut, placed and glued the pale blue melamine countertop, and bent and nailed in place the grooved metal band that edged the countertops. Massimo and Guido had chosen and laid the tiles, and had selected and paid for the two swivelling chairs with their red vinyl upholstery and nickel levers and knobs that moved them up and down and back and forward, as well as the electric red-white-and-blue striped barbershop pole that rotated
out front and the lighted sign over the door. There was nothing in the store that Massimo had done alone or without Guido’s counsel.

Three desolate weeks passed, during which the regular customers continued to come, although there were some who had to be turned away because there were too many for Massimo to handle alone and those who made it into the chair could get their usual trims and haircuts but no shaves. The shop had no jokes or music or teasing on offer, only the small, tragic percussion of a single pair of steel scissors snipping in the vast white noise of Massimo’s disconsolate sighs. In the late afternoon of the third Saturday, Massimo finished the last customer an hour late, shook his head, switched off the lights and the sign and the pole, turned the faded red
OPEN
sign around on its chain to display the blue
CLOSED
side, went home and told Paola that maybe it was time for him to close out the lease. For a hundred and fifty dollars a week he could rent a chair instead at Joe’s Custom Hairstyling four blocks down and across the street. None of his sons would become barbers; there was no good reason to preserve the business that he and Guido had built up.

Guido’s widow Gianna was called on the phone and she came right over, pulling her black cardigan close across her chest with her left hand on which Guido’s gold wedding band spun loose at the base of her fourth finger, inside her own, closest to her heart. She was adamantly against this proposal.

“I couldn’t stand it, to see Continental gone,” she told Massimo, her eyes dark and wet. She twisted her hands together. “It would’ve killed Guido to’ve known it would just close like that if he went. And you know what he thinks
of Joe’s. A clip joint, that’s what he always called it. You’ve heard him yourself. A clip joint. He wouldn’t’ve wanted to see you there. You know he wouldn’t’ve.”

She suggested instead that he give Vito a try—this young cousin of a cousin of a cousin she had heard about back home in Arduino. Vito was up to date, she said, on all the newest styles, and he was single and restless in his late twenties. An engagement had fallen through suddenly for unexplained reasons; the girl had been lovely apparently, and pure as the snow and from a good family and willing, and Vito was, as a result of this event and the fact that the girl had several brothers, anxious to get away. And so it was arranged. Vito’s papers were expedited by younger Enzo, who was able to convince the immigration officials that Vito’s unique tonsorial skills were not otherwise available in Canada. Trained in Milan, the fashion capital of the world, he said, stretching the truth by a few hundred kilometres. Several months later, as promised, Vito arrived at the store—very tall, very thin, his stomach carried forward like a young girl’s, his Adam’s apple prominent like a half-swallowed stone in his throat, his long black hair combed back and formed into ridges and furrows with gel, shadow-jawed, all quick dark angles—on a Friday in February (the darkest, wettest, coldest month) at nine-thirty in the morning, delivered to the glass front door of the barbershop by Gianna, who had offered him a bed and his meals until he could get on his feet. She had no children and had hopes that Vito might help diminish the emptiness of her house in a way that seemed otherwise entirely beyond her.

Vito lived up to Enzo’s sales pitch. He was a skilful, meticulous barber. He had learned the craft in one of the
alleys that reach out like the ribs of a fan from the harbour in Naples, where he had gone on his own at age sixteen to apprentice. He had started sweeping thick piles of hair from the floor made of yellow-veined, cracked marble—women of the neighbourhood would come and ask for a few fistfuls of the sweepings, to sprinkle around their tomato plants to discourage the city’s feral cats—becoming next a soaper, wetting and soaping customers’ cheeks and necks for a senior barber to shave, and so on up through the strata from insignificant to second barber. Vito brought with him to Continental Barber his own long-bladed scissors, which he sharpened himself with a palm-sized whetstone, and a burnished aluminum comb for flat-top styles.

He proved to have the knack of it. He could smooth tight curls and mould them into sleek, shiny pompadours. He could contain the thickest head of hair into a formal, tidy shape, with properly squared-off sides and back. He adopted Guido’s abandoned straight razor and delivered shaves with surgical exactitude. But Vito was brusque with the customers, showing no inclination to engage with them or get to know them. He limited his attention strictly to the hair and whiskers that sprouted above their necks. He had no small talk or thoughts or opinions that he cared to share. Massimo thought at first that Vito was getting used to a new place, and then that he might be bored by the shop and its clientele and possibilities. He noticed that Vito’s eyes seemed always to be darting toward the window, to the sidewalk and road outside where people and cars passed.

The only time Vito became animated was when the shop was visited by the sales representatives who peddled sham
poos, conditioners, oils and soaps. Vito invited them in, all of them, offered them small glasses from the collection of bottles of bitter grappa and sweet anisette that he had installed in a cupboard under the sink at the back of the shop, tested creams and lotions and salves on the skin on the underside of his wrist, rolled up his sleeve and tried out multi-headed electric razors and super-sharp shears on the dark hair of his forearm or on his own thick, black moustache. Massimo and Guido had always turned the travelling sales reps politely away, declining even the samples they offered at no cost and no obligation. Both of them had been suspicious of anything that purported to be free and they had stayed loyal over the years to the original companies that had helped them start out by providing easy credit terms and lots of advice. Massimo worried too about the fact that the bylaw governing barbershops, which Paola had read closely and had summarized for him, expressly prohibited serving food or drink on the premises. However, he kept this concern to himself.

“Be patient with him,” Nonna counselled Massimo at the dinner table at the end of Vito’s first week. “
Nessuno nasce maestro.
” Everyone has to learn.

M
ario’s fiancée, Angela Trapasso, invited Nicolo’s mother and nonna to her wedding shower. The invitation arrived at the house in a pink and white envelope addressed to Filomena and Paola Pavone. Nicolo opened the envelope when he came in from work and he read the details aloud to his mother and Nonna. Nicolo had already mentioned Mario’s engagement to them, but this announcement and summons to a celebration made it official. Nonna studied the envelope and card carefully. She cannot read, really—she is
analfabeta;
she had no school after age eight or nine and almost none before then—but she has an abiding respect for formal
documenti,
for notices, bills, correspondence and announcements that come in substantial envelopes embel
lished by stamps and labels. She was able to work her way through the names
Mario
and
Angela,
her forefinger tracing the letters as a guide for her eyes. She smiled and made a sign with her thumb over the names, invoking fortune, averting any possible domestic sorrow.

“It is very kind of them to include us,” his mother said. “This Angela must be a thoughtful girl.” She was leaning over Nicolo’s shoulder to look at the invitation as she spoke and in her voice was slightly more than a shade of a suggestion, a reminder that if there were
one,
then it was very likely that there were other thoughtful girls out there. This was, however, offered lightly, not as advice exactly, but with a reticence that happened to be the exact size and shape of the advice unspoken, and at the same time his mother touched just as lightly the whorl of hair that sprang up from the centre of the crown of Nicolo’s head. He is, she knows it, they all know it, the child that most fills her heart.
I jirita de’ manu ’un su’ tutti guali
—even the fingers of her hands are not the same. Not that she loves him more than she loves the others. Her love has no divisions or measures. It is just that her love for him affects her more profoundly. She is weaker in it, tender sometimes almost to the point of tears toward this middle child, this son who seemed just now unruddered, incomplete, when compared to his brothers. Lorenzo with his job and house and wife and two children already. Vincenzo with his studies and achievements and honours and gleaming prospects; Vincenzo would do well, would marry well, there was no doubt, perhaps would even become a judge one day. She delighted in having Nicolo still under the roof of the family home, but she was also concerned about him. She
wondered from what direction the wind would come that would convey him forward. She was concerned about both Enzos too, but not so achingly. They seemed to her to have tougher shells, and in some way that she could not articulate, even to herself, less at stake. Most of all, she worried that Nicolo would end up alone. There was something in him that was sealed up, cautious, perhaps some lack of an understanding of his own worth, something that might hold him back from the kind of letting go or falling into trust that a relationship needed as a catalyst in order for it to kindle.

“Who will you invite to the wedding?” she asked, dipping in close to his ear, so close that she felt Nicolo shrug his shoulders in response.

She thought that she had spoken quietly enough so that only Nicolo could hear, but she saw from a small adjustment to the angle of Nonna’s head that she had heard the question too.

This was a subject on which the two women disagreed entirely. Nonna had somehow concluded that Nicolo’s path would take him alone into a different life, one far from the family, and that this fate would have to be submitted to. This seemed to Paola to be wilful if not cruel. Wilful since even to imagine it would make it more likely to happen. Cruel because the prediction struck at Paola’s greatest fear, that one of her children would be lost to her. She had had no brother or sister, and few relatives apart from her parents, both dead before they were forty. Massimo and her sons, even Nonna, were her family in the way that few people understood. They were not her second family or simply the family she had married into, they were all she had and would
ever have. She felt that Nicolo’s marriage to a girl close by, someone from one of the families of the neighbourhood, could be all that it would take to divert the possible course of Nicolo’s life away from Nonna’s prediction. This was one of the reasons Paola was dismayed at Nicolo’s decision to take a university course, foreseeing that this could expose him to possibilities that she might be unable to deflect. Although she had said nothing, she had begun to tidy away Nicolo’s textbook when he left it out, putting it in places in the house where it could not be easily found but could not exactly be said to have been mislaid.

At the bakery on Saturday morning Nicolo brought up the subject of whether he should invite someone to Mario’s wedding. He had thought that he might invite Carla from his psychology class. Frank and Paul had other ideas. They mentioned women they all knew, single or newly single women, women they had met at school or through work or in the neighbourhood. “Laura Bartucci.” “Rita Tassone.” “Tina Fiorino.” “
Lahoor-a,
” Frank said, using the Italian pronunciation. “She’s the one. She’s a nurse now. I wouldn’t mind being her patient. That hair, those big eyes, those, you know—” Frank mimed Laura’s upper figure with his hands. “Kind of quiet.”

“I don’t know about Laura,” Paul said. “I ran into her a while back. She’s got kind of heavy lately. You know how that happens? She’s on the way to getting a big butt. Remember, her mother’s big too. That’s what she’ll end up like, guaranteed. They always take after the mother, that’s what you have to watch for. Rita’s more fun, anyway. Not too serious. She’s a legal secretary downtown. Someone like us has to grab her before one of those downtown guys gets her.”

Mario didn’t join in the discussion. His hands were busy, restlessly contorting a small rectangle of paper, the wrapper from a trio of sugar lumps, into a twisted red and white strand. “This stuff going on at the law school—what does your brother have to say about it?” he asked suddenly, changing the subject. He turned to look at Nicolo. His voice had taken on an odd tone.

Nicolo was startled. “What do you mean?”

“I saw something in the newspaper last night. A short article, you know, buried on page five or something like that,” Mario said. “It said that a couple of the students out at the law school are in some kind of trouble, were caught putting down fake grades on their resumés. They’re supposed to have given themselves As instead of Bs or Cs, something like that. And it said there are rumours other students might have been doing it too but haven’t been caught yet. There’s some kind of investigation going on about it. I just wondered, you know, if Enzo had mentioned it.”

“It can’t be Enzo’s class,” Nicolo said. “They haven’t even got any marks yet. The first-year students don’t write their exams until April.” However, a tentacle of concern began to probe at something in the recesses of Nicolo’s mind, a memory from an early morning back at the beginning of December, the sky still dark outside, cold pressing hard against the windows of the house, of coming across Enzo sitting at the kitchen table, studying in that way he had, wholly absorbed, his hands sheltering his brow, under the bright light that hung from the kitchen ceiling—for an exam or important test, it must have been, for that level of intensity. Something must have been at stake. Enzo, who left nothing to chance,
reviewed every possible detail before his exams. He tried to remember how Enzo had been behaving lately, but they had been keeping different hours, and it had been several days since they had spoken.

Nicolo looked for Enzo when he arrived home, but Enzo had gone out and his mother wasn’t sure where he had gone and didn’t know when he would be back. Nicolo had a few free hours before he was due to meet up with friends for a basketball game and he decided to see if he could track Enzo down. He tried the local library first, since that’s where Enzo went to study, and found his brother in a study carrel on the second floor, near the collection of bound federal and provincial legislation, peering into the screen of his computer and tapping slowly on the keyboard.

“Hey,” Nicolo said.

“Hey,” Enzo echoed, glancing up. His expression of surprise at seeing Nicolo transformed almost instantly into anxiety. He half-rose from his chair. “Is everybody okay? Ma?”

“No, no, everything’s fine. I needed to find a book for my course and I thought, why not check to see if you were here and wanted to go for a coffee with me.”

Enzo glanced at Nicolo’s empty hands. “Didn’t you find your book? And don’t you have a game?”

“It’s not until later. Come on. I can get the book anytime. Can’t you spare half an hour to spend with your own brother?” He knocked Enzo’s shoulder lightly with his fist.

“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” Enzo said. He sat down and turned his back to Nicolo, fixed his eyes on the glowing screen of his laptop. “I’ll probably be home for dinner tonight, though. Okay?”

“Come on,” Nicolo urged. “I need to ask you about something.” It seemed to him that Enzo was being unnecessarily difficult.

“You can ask me here.”

“No. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You know.” Nicolo tipped his head to indicate the people who were sitting in chairs and other carrels nearby. One or two of them glanced back, signalling early-stage irritation and an implied suggestion that the two of them take their whispered conversation farther away.

“Oh.” Enzo hesitated, but then he reached to snap his computer shut. He unplugged the electric cord and coiled it neatly into a figure-eight secured at its middle with two taut wraps of the cord. He put the computer into his briefcase, zipped the case closed and followed Nicolo downstairs, out the front doors and into the café next door to the library.

“What’s up?” Enzo asked once they had made their way through the queue, picked up their cardboard cups of coffee and found seats outside at one of the café’s small tables in a sheltered spot that was only slightly warmed by a thin latewinter sun. He fidgeted. He rolled his shoulders, rattled his plastic stir-stick against the inside of his cup, shifted on his chair and squeezed his cup.

“What were you working on just now?” Nicolo asked. It was difficult to read Enzo’s demeanour. He wasn’t sure how to start a conversation about a news article he hadn’t read about troubles that probably had nothing to do with Enzo.

“Nothing. Things. Studying.”

“How’s it going at school?”

“What do you mean, how’s it going? It’s going fine.”

“We haven’t had much time to talk lately.”

“You know, you’re making me nervous. Enzo came and found me like this a few years ago, and that’s when he told me about Mima being pregnant. He wanted me to help him break the news to Ma and Pop.”

Nicolo stirred another packet of sugar into his cup and then raised it and took a sip. The coffee tasted like syrup. He looked down and saw that his hands had created a pile of empty sugar packages, six at least. He set the coffee down again and cracked his knuckles—an old habit, one that his mother had bribed him out of the summer he was sixteen by promising him a new pair of hockey skates. Paola had not been able to break one of Enzo’s habits, which he was engaged in now, tugging at the long hair above his brow.

“I wanted to ask you about this thing that’s going on out at the law school,” Nicolo said, feeling as if he was plunging into cold water. He ripped open another sachet of sugar and dumped it into his cup.

Enzo had not yet tasted his own coffee. His hands were raised in a teepee above his cup. He pushed his lips forward and knit his fingers together. “What about it?” he asked, breathing steadily over his entangled knuckles.

“I heard that some of the students had been caught changing their marks on resumés, or something like that. I heard it second hand, though. It’s probably just one of those rumours.”

Enzo didn’t answer.

“And I heard that there might be others.” Nicolo experienced an odd sensation of dislocation, an almost physical shift
in the ground under their table. He wrapped his hands tightly around his cup. He had never been his younger brother’s confessor or adviser.

Enzo still didn’t say anything. He dropped his forehead onto his fingertips and massaged his brow into deep folds. Nicolo noticed for the first time that his younger brother’s hair had begun to recede, and he felt a small bolt of pity and concern.

“Well?” Nicolo said at last. “What’s going on? You can’t be involved in this, if it’s even happening. You haven’t had any grades yet.”

It took a long while for Enzo to speak, and when he finally did, his words came out in a rush. “First-year students do write exams in the middle of December, but the Christmas exams don’t count for anything. They’re supposed to be for practice only, to get you ready for the real exams in April, the ones that count, so you can get a feel for the way they work. You have to find the issues in the problems, and then pick them apart; that’s even more important than solving them. There’s a way of doing them, and it takes a while to get the hang of it. But then, the way it happens is, if you decide to apply for a summer job at a law firm after first year, the firms always ask you for your December grades. That’s all they have to go on, they say. It’s unfair, because the December tests are not supposed to mean anything. There are lots of people who don’t do very well and then go on to graduate at the top of their year.

“A group of us were talking about it in class a few weeks ago and the prof asked if we had considered how easy it would be to subvert what the firms are doing. All we had to
do, she said, was make a pact that we would give straight As or whatever marks we agreed on to the firms and this would send a message that we don’t think it’s right to insist on seeing marks that aren’t intended to have any meaning and in fact
don’t
mean anything. Because it isn’t right, what they’re doing; it isn’t fair. Then some of us got to talking about it afterward, after the class, and we agreed that there wouldn’t be any risk because the law school doesn’t give transcripts and they don’t give out the grades; they won’t even confirm or deny them. What you report is supposed to be based on the honour system, I guess. But I’ve heard that the truth of it is the honour system has been broken for years and the marks are often misreported and everyone knows it, even the administration knows it, but no one has ever done anything about it. They just let it go on.”