Somewhere in the Stars Read online

  “What’s the matter, son?” Nick acted like he didn’t hear him. “Worried about your sidekick?”

  “Yeah, you know, the war.” Nick took one last drag and rubbed it out in a crowded ashtray. “Could I have a glass of water?”

  The bartender poured the water and placed a few ice cubes in it. “Where you from, son?” Nick sipped the water.

  “From North Beach.”

  “That’s where all the eye-talians live. Where your folks from?”

  “Sicily.”

  “I’ll bet you have some of those big family dinners every Sunday.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I used to live in New Orleans. Plenty of Sicilians there.”

  “To tell the truth, I don’t know much about Negroes, except for jazz.” Nick finished off the water. “Do you have family get togethers?”

  “Sometimes we have reunions in Louisiana.”

  “What do you eat?”

  The bartender smiled. “We have some helluva fine parties, let me tell you, with all that great food, that makes your mouth water just thinking about it. You know, one of those southern Bar B Qs.”

  “What’s that?”

  The bartender laughed. “You sure haven’t been around much, have you, son? It’s when you set a big grill with wood chips or charcoal, smoking and slowcooking pork. And some special, secret sauces to go with it.”

  “Oh, I get it but I never had that kind of food.”

  “You’ll have to get some real soon.”

  “You ever have caponata?”

  “Capo what?”

  “It is very good. You can trust me. Eggplant, onions, celery, tomatoes, capers, olives.” The bartender scratched his head. “My Mamma makes it.”

  “Well, son, if you say your mama cooks it, then I’ll have to try it some time.”

  “It’s special—a secret family recipe.”

  “I get it.” The bartender smiled broadly. Nick stood up on his toes to see what his cousin was up to. “Son!” Nick glanced back. “You said before that your folks were Sicilian.” He nodded. “I saw some terrible things down south when I was a child.” The bartender swiped the bar with a towel. “Let me tell you, lynching is not a pretty sight.” Nick winced. “But I’m not talkin’ about my people. They went after yours, too. Whether you is black or white, dangling from some danged lamppost is not something you ever want to come across. Watch out for yourself. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

  A customer called the bartender away, leaving Nick to sort things out, and when he came back, the bartender poured Nick a shot on the house, something he needed after the warning he just received. He drank it right down.

  “The set’s over. You’d better go help your friend. Looks like he’s soused.”

  Nick moved a few feet away, turned and called out: “I’ll bring a jar of caponata next time I come here.”

  The bartender shook his head. “Go take care of that boy.”

  As soon as they stepped outside, a cloudburst soaked their clothes, so now Paul was doubly soused without any awareness of either. The bus was out of the question and Nick got lucky, hailing a lone cab passing by on Sutter Street. The cabbie gave Paul the once-over but let them in because Nick acted halfway normal. They got back late so Nick figured he’d stash his cousin on the floor of his bedroom, so as not to burn up Ziu Francesco, an uncle he admired since he was a kid for turning a fruit stand into a bustling alimentari in the heart of North Beach. Paul leaned on his cousin’s shoulder the whole ride and sleepwalked out of the cab. Nick managed to lug him up the stairs, making it into the room without waking his parents. With many contorted moves, he coaxed Paul into dry boxer shorts and a white sleeveless undershirt and did the same for himself without his usual dexterity. Pellets of rain continued to hit Nick’s window, the sound pinging in his subconscious. It took time for him to relax and fall asleep.

  The pounding on the front door sounded so deafening in the dead of night that Nick thought that the San Andreas Fault was splitting. The door hadn’t opened fast enough, so down it crashed as men surged into the house, white profiles in sharp relief to their black fedoras and dark suits. Gaetano had grabbed his son’s old baseball bat from under the bed and raced downstairs, eyes bulging, nostrils flaring.

  Nick heard his father yelling, “Get the hella out of here,” while the ornate porcelain lamp smashed into slivers all over the floor. Nick and his mother now stood at the top of the stairs. Madonna!” Lucia screamed. “What are you doin’ to my husband?” His mother crossed herself, while one of the intruders wrestled with Gaetano, both knocking over a table. Nick flung himself down several steps at a time to the bottom but two burly men snagged him. He saw that it was hopeless as a six-foot-four agent flashed his FBI badge and hollered: “We have a Federal Warrant for the arrest of Gaetano Spataro!” Nick couldn’t grasp why his father was being arrested.

  Paul spilled out of the bedroom, still groggy from all the alcohol and squinted from the banister. He sidestepped around his aunt, gripping the banister all the way down. “What the hell you doin’?” he slurred to the head agent.

  “Get a hold of yourself, young man. We need to take Mr. Spataro in for questioning.”

  “What’s my father being charged with?” Nick demanded over the shoulders of the men blocking him.

  “Your father’s an enemy alien.” The head agent motioned to several other agents, who ransacked the house for radios, flashlights, cameras and binoculars. His mother looked on in horror, while Paul gaped in confusion. Nick wondered what the hell these men were thinking his family might do with these everyday items. After the search was complete, not one piece of furniture stood in its rightful place. The family trailed the posse out of the house and down the stoop, the rain a filmy mist on their faces as they watched an agent push Gaetano’s head under the roof of the black, Ford sedan.

  Nick stood on the sidewalk barefoot in his underwear, while Paul leaned against his cousin, Lucia kneeling alone on the sidewalk, her hands raised to the predawn sky. Their neighbors peeked through the blinds and saw what had only been rumored in North Beach. At that moment Nick realized why his family home had been invaded—the contrast in their olive complexions was all the reason they needed. As the unmarked cars sped away, the wind chilled the air in the San Francisco Bay and they retreated inside, as the fog spread its cover around the town.

  Lucia went into the kitchen to brew some coffee, while Nick and Paul straightened up the dining room. It wasn’t long before they sat at the table, sipping some caffè Americanu.

  “Chi facemu ora, Nicolo?”

  “I don’t know Mamma.”

  “It’s a damn shame, them haulin’ Ziu Gaetano away like that,” Paul said.

  “Just because we’re at war don’t mean the FBI got a right to arrest him.”

  “You don’t think I’m angry, too. I’m never gonna forget this!”

  “We will be mischinu in North Beach,” Lucia cried out.

  “Mamma, we have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “People will talka.”

  “We’ll get a lawyer. He’ll fix everything. Va beni?”

  “Figghiu miu!” Lucia kissed Nick and wiped her tears away with her palm.

  “Yeah, cuginu, get a good mouthpiece.”

  Nick knew things were not going to be that simple freeing his father. It would be difficult finding a lawyer who knew had to handle a case like this, and besides, there wouldn’t be much money to go around, since the fishing boat disappeared, just like his father. Nick felt that things didn’t add up—there was a hysteria building up with the Japs. Not that anyone didn’t have a right to be scared after all those sailors were killed in Pearl Harbor, but why pick on his father? He was an honest, hard working Sicilianu, someone who loved his family, even America, despite its stranu ways. And Mamma was so ashamed that the Feds arrested Papà, muttering ‘Not to say nothin’ to nobody’ and ‘Not a word outside nostra casa’.

  The more Nick thought about his fath
er’s arrest though, the angrier he got, recalling all the ‘just kidding’ slights and actual skirmishes he had with the so-called real Americans while growing up. His job was to get his father out, and then he would deal with the war. A few days later, his mother received a brief call from her husband, letting her know that Papà would be held indefinitely but he didn’t understand why.

  Several weeks had passed when Nick came back from his after-school job at his uncle’s alimentari and found his mother rocking back and forth in her chair.

  “Mamma, what’s the matter?”

  “Papà no comin’ back. Twenty years we been married!” She clasped her hands, her eyes red and wet. He saw a letter in her lap.

  “Let me read the letter. You must be mixing up the English.” She handed it to Nick, who studied the writing for any key words of condemnation for his father.

  “Papà has been moved to another Immigration Service facility on Angel Island.” Nick looked up from the letter. “Sounds like a detention center to me.” Lucia let out a cry. “Mi dispiaci, Mamma.” Nick ran his eyes over the letter again. “Says that Gaetano Spataro is on a list to be relocated to Fort Missoula, Montana, until further notice. It’s got the seal of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Geez, they’re going to lock him up in a military prison.”

  “My poor husband.” Lucia crossed herself. “Why they doa this thing to him?” she shouted as she rose from the chair. Nick grabbed his mother who was about to faint. He placed her on the couch, while he paced in front of her.

  “Wacky things happening in this town,” Nick said. But his mother was far away now, gazing at the rose medallion on the ceiling. Nick eyes watered up as he looked at a family picture on the wall above his mother’s head. All three of them were smiling, as they posed in front of Gaetano’s new purse seiner docked at Fisherman’s Wharf. Nick knelt down next to his mother. “We’ll see Papà before you know it. Don’t you worry, Mamma.”

  Arcuri’s office looked like a mess but Nick didn’t have much of a choice. The lawyer motioned for Nick to sit and jotted down the details of the arrest on a yellow legal pad. After ascertaining important biographical details of Gaetano Spataro, he peered over his reading glasses.

  “Kid, I have worked on many immigration cases and none of them are ever easy, but this is in another ball park.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “What does …”

  “This war is making the government short on reason. The Defense Department is sure that Tojo is going to hit the coast of California with everything they got, sooner or later.”

  “But what does this have to do with my father? He’s no enemy alien. He loves this country.”

  “That doesn’t make him a legal citizen. It doesn’t look good for your pop.”

  “Why not?”

  “He won’t be facing a judge in civilian court. It’s called an Enemy Alien Hearing. Heard about it from a judge friend of mine. Two military officers and two professional citizens. No counsel will be allowed in at these Justice Department Detention Camps.” The lawyer stood up and looked out the window at the swift, dark gray clouds. “All I can do is send in a testimonial to his trustworthiness”—Arcuri turned to Nick—“and hope it persuades the hearing board to release your father.”

  “Once you do that, everything will be fine, right?” Nick jutted his chin out. “My father is well-respected in North Beach, you know.”

  “I get the picture, Nick, but the folks deciding your father’s fate have heads as hard as a Louisville slugger.”

  Nick gazed down at his hands, squeezing them, when a hard rain began to fall outside the wide office window, streaking the gold letters of Arcuri’s name.

  “Ascolta! Your father belonged to the Ex-Combattenti, the Federation of Italian War Veterans in America, according to what you told me. That’s the tip of the bat and I am afraid Gaetano is going to get hit in the head with it during the hearing.”

  Nick shot up. “Why is my father the fall guy?”

  “I’ll do my best, kid.” Arcuri shook Nick’s hand and walked him out the door. The door cracked shut, its sound bouncing off the terrazzo floor of the hallway. When he stepped onto the pavement, an abrupt burst of rain flowed into the street gutters, forcing the flotsam of North Beach down the hill all the way to the wharf like a line drive, the detritus floating with the current under the Golden Gate Bridge.

  II

  Nick met his first Jewish friend at the Legion of Honor Museum in Lincoln Park, after his longest bike ride from North Beach. He wanted to distance himself from the spot where the Feds snatched his father away. Gaetano’s absence changed the family conversation, pitching from melancholy to cacophony. He felt like Giufà the fool from the Sicilian folk tales his mother used to read to him. Just as the Spataros started to live well in America, now all he wanted to do was run away from home and not face his mother crying, not deal with having Papà gone as if Gaetano era mortu—not even a stone marker in a cemetery for his family to pay their respects on a Sunday. His father disappeared on a night Nick would never forget. After skipping mass, he pedaled with a sea breeze pressing against his face, which brought him to a new place where he could lose himself.

  The building was solid with a horizontal line of fluted columns in the style of Beaux Arts that Nick had read about, but to him it didn’t appear to be a French palace set in California but rather a faraway Egyptian temple waiting for him to climb his way up. He wandered around the European paintings for awhile with no specific artist in mind, then sat on a bench and looked up in surprise at Fra Angelico’s The Meeting of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, a painter whom his Jesuit English teacher raved about in class. Nick was pleased that an Italian did the work and no one was about to take it away. From the corner of his eye he saw that there was another guy sitting at the other end, sketching profiles with a graphic pencil. Nick slid over about half way to get a better look and liked what he saw but didn’t comment. Someone might be watching them and he didn’t want to be taken for a queer. He could hear his friends from North Beach razzing him for being a finocchio. Nick thought chi minchia, what the fuck, and spoke up.

  “You some kind of artist?”

  “Nah, just copying from the experts,” the young man said without looking up.

  “Anyway, you’re good at it.” The young man kept working. “I bet you could do comic strips, like The Phantom or Prince Valiant.”

  Nathan jerked his head up, eyes sparkling. “I’d sure get my kicks out of that. On the up and up, I’d love to be good enough to do woodcuts someday. Even better, a wordless novel like Lynd Ward’s.”

  “Never heard of him!”

  “You’re missing out on something. Get a copy of God’s Man from the library. Each page comes alive without a single word, telling this swell story.”

  “Sounds hep.”

  “You a hep cat?”

  “Love jazz—swing style.”

  The young man continued sketching, while Nick scrutinized the painting. A few minutes later, the young man turned to Nick. “What’s your name anyway?”

  “Nicolo Spataro, but you can call me Nick.”

  They shook hands. “I’m Nathan Fein. Nate for short. So what are you doing here, Nick? Homework assignment?”

  “Art’s in my blood—I’m Italian.”

  Nathan chuckled.

  “You laughing at me? Got enough problems with my friends ragging me for coming here.”

  “I’m not laughing because you’re Italian. Come on, I’m Jewish.” He shaded in some background and then looked up again. “My pop’s from Germany. Warned me about talking to strangers.”

  Nick laughed. “Just like my mom. They worry a lot about that stuff.”

  “They mean well but we’re not kiddos anymore. You got any brothers or sisters?”

  “Nah, only child.”

  “An Italian family!”

  “That’s why my friends think I’m a little pazzu.” Nathan had a blank look. “Crazy. What about you?�
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  “Pazzu!” Nathan laughed and Nick joined in.

  “You’re a bit of joker. Like my cousin Paul, but smarter.” Nick’s eyes widened. “But don’t tell him I said that.”

  “Mums the word.”

  “So, any brothers, sisters?”

  “Got a kid sister, Deborah. She’s sixteen and cute but a pain in the butt.” Nathan closed his pad. “You know, I’ve been sketching all morning. Wanna get a Coke in the cafeteria?”

  “Sure.”

  As they moved along the line, they picked up a bunch of cupcakes and some soda, paid and bolted to eat outside since the weather was mild for January. Nathan placed the tray on the table and they wolfed down the food. Nick thought what a great park to be in—grass and trees all around contrasted by the city skyline. He recalled all those views coming in on his bike—the green sea that changes to blue or gray depending on the day, Sausalito’s wooded hillside, evergreen and deciduous, and the Golden Gate Bridge not gold at all but that distinctive orange. Like all the evolving colors he rode by, Nick discovered a new friend who was different, yet seemed much like him. Maybe it was their Mediterranean looks or just two Americani in some random moment.

  “I think we made a mistake mixing coke with cupcakes. Should have been milk, Nate.”