Sacred Time

T
hat winter of 1953, stenciled glass-wax decorations appeared on nearly every window in the Bronx, and Uncle Malcolm was sent to jail for stealing stamps and office equipment from his last new job.

My parents were so busy fretting over Aunt Floria—who looked like a widow because she was married to Uncle Malcolm—that they got impatient whenever I told them how much I wanted a stencil kit. “Not now, Anthony,” they'd say, and they wouldn't even glance at the commercial of the girl and her mother who opened their kit, pulled out stencils of comets and bells and Christmas trees that were cut from thick transparent paper. While the mother held a stencil against the window, the girl soaked a sponge in pink glass wax, dabbed it against the stencil, and they both smiled at the comets and snowflakes they'd created.

“All the other kids got stencil kits,” I lied on the drive to Aunt Floria's.

Fordham Road was slick, and my father was steering cautiously in the icy rain that pelted our Studebaker. “Floria is my sister, after all,” he said.

My mother tapped one painted fingernail against the St. Christopher medal that was glued to the dashboard. “Maybe you need to figure out who the hell your real family is, Victor.”

“And what is not real about my sister?”

“Don't tempt me. Please.”

“We already got glass wax for cleaning windows,” I reminded her as we passed beneath the Third Avenue El. “So we only need to buy a stencil kit.”

“Quit skutching, Anthony.”

“Kevin has a stencil kit.”

“Kevin always has everything you're trying to get. And when I check with Mustache Sheila, it's not true.” My mother was always making up names that fit people just right, like the three Sheilas in our neighborhood, Pineapple Sheila, Bossy Sheila, and Mustache Sheila. Pineapple Sheila was Jewish; Bossy Sheila was Irish; and Mustache Sheila was Irish
and
Kevin O'Dea's mother.

“But all the kids have stencil kits.”

“Basta!
You know I detest it when you skutch. It's always the same. First you try getting what you want by being charming. Then you skutch.”

I slid close to the wing window behind her, propped myself on the armrest to be tall. Inside my left mitten was Frogman, green and hard, and I curled my fingers around him. Frogman was a prize from a box of cereal I hated, but Kevin had finally traded Frogman for my two favorite baseball cards, Phil Rizzuto and Yogi Berra.

Kevin lived in the building across from ours on Creston Avenue, next to the back wall of the Paradise, where movies were air-conditioned and movie matrons shined their flashlights into your face if you talked. Summer evenings, when it was too hot and sticky to be anywhere else, our families would be at the Paradise, no matter what was playing as long as it wasn't banned by the Legion of Decency. At church, their movie chart was tacked to the wall of the vestibule: A-1 was morally suitable for all audiences; A-2 was morally suitable for all, with reservations; B was partially condemned; and C was condemned. Though we took pledges against condemned movies—not just to stay away from them, but also to boycott theaters that had shown them—Father Bonneducci still screamed from the pulpit that it was a mortal sin to see a condemned movie, and I could hear his voice inside my head whenever I passed the Ascot and tried not to glance at the posters of the condemned movies. Next door to the Ascot was a Hebrew school, and I wondered if the rabbi screamed at the boys about not looking at the posters. I liked the Swedish posters. Especially
Summer with Monika.

I wished we had enough money to go to the movies every day, but at least Kevin and I could stand in the polished recess by the ornate ticket booth of the Paradise and feel the cold air, and retell the plots of our all-time favorite movies:
It Came from Outer Space; Invaders from Mars;
and, most of all,
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.
We'd roar like the beast—“uuuughhh”—as it burst from the ocean near Baffin Island with its huge lizard teeth and lizard arms—“uuuughhh”—getting ready to squash Wall Street and the Ferris wheel at Coney Island. One day the movie matron came out and yelled, “Scat, you noisy kids, or I'll call your mother.”

Some afternoons we'd spread Kevin's old quilt on his roof, and we'd spy on communists who might walk down Creston Avenue. So far we hadn't seen any, but we knew how to spot communists because they were mean and wore red uniforms. That's why they were called reds. They carried Jell-O boxes so they could find each other and trade secrets about the bomb. While Kevin and I waited, we'd read our Tarzan and Bugs Bunny comic books, or we'd scrape with Popsicle sticks at the tar along the seams where it bubbled in the heat. Some tar would get on our skin, our clothes, but we'd pretend we were getting a tan at Orchard Beach, even though we could see the Empire State Building from up here.

“I was talking about helping Floria too much while Malcolm is Elsewhere,” my mother was telling my father. Elsewhere meant anything from jail, to England, to being on the run. Elsewhere meant never staying in one place for long because you're moving outside the law.

My father stubbed out his cigarette. “And who decides what too much help is?”

“You think you're just like Jesus walking on water. You think you can do anything without getting your feet wet.”

“Feet? Jesus?”

“Well, let me tell you that Jesus got his feet wet. Plenty wet.”

Feet wet. Wet feet. Feet cold. Cold car.
Our car was so freezing cold, I could barely smell the leftover trays of veal scaloppine and eggplant rissoles next to me on the backseat. They were from the golden anniversary my father had catered, and he'd covered them with white towels that had the name of his business, Festa Liguria, stamped on them.

“What am I
not
understanding here about wet feet?” he asked.

“Forget it.”

“No, no. Educate me. Me and the boy. We both may learn something from you that we've missed at mass.”

I stared past our Palisades Park decal at the White Castle, gray now in the rain, where the twelve-cent hamburgers were as thin as Uncle Malcolm's playing cards; and as I thought of him being Elsewhere again, I pictured him
running, his lanky body tilted into the wind, one of his hands holding on to the green accordion he's strapped to his chest, the other to his ginger-colored hat.

“I find it enlightening, Leonora, how you only quote the Bible to point out my shortcomings. Somehow I doubt the Bible was written for that purpose.”

My mother jiggled two cigarettes from her pack of Pall Malls, lit them both, and stuck one between my father's lips. “It means…whenever you help Floria, you deprive your own.”

“And are you my own then?” Though he grinned at her as if trying to joke her out of her mood, his voice was harsh. “Are you then,
mia cara?”

She snatched a folded newspaper page from her purse. “If you're like that, I'll do my crossword puzzle.”

She couldn't sit still, my mother. Invariably, one crossed leg would bounce, or her hands would fidget for something to move. That's why she was too skinny, Aunt Floria had said to my father at my seventh birthday party a few weeks ago.

“I wonder if that's why Leonora can't hold your babies. Thank God she carried Anthony almost full-term.”

I'd seen my mother hold plenty of babies and carry them around, but when I told Aunt Floria so, my mother came up behind her.

Eyes wet, she yelled, “Dropping a double litter does not make you superior.”

But Aunt Floria yelled right back. “My twins are not a litter. At least I'm not starving my body to fit into a size six.”

“That's the truth, for sure. If you quit eating macaroni for a year, you wouldn't get
down
to a size sixteen.”

My aunt reached back and turned her black collar inside out. “I want you to check this label. Fourteen, Leonora. And I did
not
sew this dress. I bought it at Alexander's. Size—”

Quickly, my father turned on WNEW. “Listen…Frank Sinat—”

“Size fourteen. See?”

“You just sewed in a smaller size tag.”

“Alexander's keeps getting bigger,” I said, “just like—”

“Anthony—” My mother looked startled. “Don't you—”

“You told me Alexander's keeps getting bigger, just like Aunt Floria.”

“I said nothing like that,” my mother lied. “Floria—”

But my aunt was running up the stairs of my grandparents' house, and my mother was chasing after her.

“Floria, please—”

My grandfather reached into his pocket. “How about a peppermint, Antonio?” Just like the nuns at school who could whisk holy cards and erasers from their sleeves, my grandfather could produce whatever I might need from his pockets: rubber bands, money for paper candy or Nik-L-Nips, cat's-eye marbles, a whistle, peppermints, kite string. As a boy in Italy, he'd won a kite flying championship. Riptide Grandma complained that his pockets were always stretched out of shape, and the one thing he'd get angry about was when she cleaned them out.

I slipped his peppermint into my mouth. “The Alexander people keep knocking down apartment buildings to make their store even bigger.”

“At home in Italy, people preserve old buildings instead of knocking them down.”

“What if the Alexander people knock over the monkey bars in the playground?”

“In St. James Park? They're not allowed to build there.”

“Promise?” I followed him into his music room below the stairs to the second floor. It smelled good in here from when it used to be a closet. On the floor lay wood specks that bugs had chewed from the beams.

“Promise. That park belongs to the city. Which means it belongs to you.”

“Really?”

“To you and every child who plays there.”

The window to the alley was on one wall of the music room, and on the other walls my grandfather had mounted candle-shaped lamps from his job at the salvage yard and a small picture of himself as a boy with a kite.

“I think it's funny when Americans talk about their historical buildings.” He started cleaning a record with a folded undershirt. “Eighty years, Antonio? A hundred? Two hundred?”

Though he was a big man, the voice that came from his neck sounded little, as if it had to fight its way out, and I was sure that's why he loved opera so much, those big voices that came through the woven fabric in front of his golden-brown Victrola.

“In Liguria, we talk about thousands of years.” His fingers curled a bit toward his palm, and he motioned with that hand as if asking me to come closer, to go way, way back with him, maybe a thousand years. “When I was a boy in Nozarego, a little younger than you, I helped my father in his vineyard that had belonged to his father and his father's father and so on…centuries of Amedeos, Antonio, before your time and mine.”

“I almost got squashed at Alexander's.”

He sat down on the wider of the two chairs.
“Oh Dio.
How did that happen?”