They called him Sonny when he lived in Harlem. I grew up in Harlem, he always told people, and they looked at him as if wondering whether or not he had traces of Negro blood flowing in his veins, whereupon he always felt compelled to explain that there were three Harlems. You see, there is Negro Harlem and there is Italian Harlem and there is Puerto Rican Harlem. They are all very different and they are all identical, they are all bug-ridden and rat-infested, those are the three Harlems. But that of course was a mature judgment, a qualified appraisal by a man who was now thirty-nine years old, and not the way he had seen it as a boy. There were no rats in Harlem for Sonny Constantine — he still did not know why they had called him Sonny, he supposed there was a Sonny in every Italian-American family that ever existed. Or perhaps Al Jolson was hot at the time of his boyhood, perhaps any kid became a Sonny Boy and then a Sonny all because of Al Jolson singing through his goddamn nose like a Harvard man, perhaps that was it. But there were no rats in Harlem — well, once a mouse was in the toilet bowl, but only a mouse. It scared hell out of his mother, she came running, out of the bathroom with her dress raised and her bloomers down, her behind showing, he wanted to look, but didn't dare, yelling to his father that there was a mouse in the bowl. So his father just flushed the toilet, naturally, goodbye mouse, out to sea where all good mice eventually go. His sister was terrified. He had called her a baby and a dope and a silly jerk, and then had listened to her crying in her room, really in his parents' bedroom because that was where she slept on a little cot against the wall near the window that looked down on 118th Street four stories below.
There were no rats in Harlem for him, there were no street gangs, there were no rumbles, there was only a placid ghetto — terrible word — a neighborhood, a haven surrounded by relatives, you could not throw a stone without hitting a relative. If your mother wasn't home, you dropped in on Aunt Tessie, and she gave you cookies and milk, or you went around to see Grandpa in the grocery store where he worked for a man he had known in Naples, or maybe you ran into Uncle Mike driving his truck for the furniture company. It was said that Uncle Mike knew gangsters, and that the time the social club was held up and they stole Uncle Danny's ring and Uncle Sal's watch, it was Mike who got on his Neapolitan high horse and went off some place into the mysterious underworld where they talked of Petie Red Shirt and Legs Diamond and got the goddamn jewelry back the very next morning; he was a tough guy Uncle Mike, he could break your head with a glance. His sister loved Uncle Mike, she would almost wet her pants every time he stopped by. There was an argument once, Arthur couldn't even remember what it was all about, Mike taking out some girl from the bakery, and Tessie getting all upset and coming to see her sister, Arthur's mother, and her having a big argument with Mike and calling him everything under the sun while his father stood by and listened patiently and Arthur remembered how simply he had flushed the mouse down the toilet, so very simply, pull, flush, and out to sea without a whimper.
Christmases, they all got together, Christmases then, but not anymore, blame it on urban renewal, blame it on the decentralization of the family, the speedier means of communication and transportation, there were no more Christmases once his grandparents died. The family died when they died, it shriveled outward from the center, everybody just disappeared, where the hell were they all now? Dead or living in California, which is the same as being dead. He had dropped in to see Aunt Tessie and Uncle Mike when he was out in Hollywood, and Mike who had known gangsters, Mike who had threatened to break heads unless his brothers'-in-law jewelry was returned at once, immediately if not sooner, Mike was a tired old man, bald, his muscles turned to flab, this was the man who used to move furniture and mountains and fearsome gangs. They sat in the living room of the Tarzana development house and had nothing much to say to each other, how is your mother, tell her to write, did you go to Aunt Louise's funeral, and Arthur had wanted to say, "Don't you remember Christmas at Grandpa's house, don't you remember?" But Uncle Mike was an old man, you see, and Aunt Tessie limped, and there was nothing to say to either of them, there was only strong Italian coffee to sip and Italian pastry to nibble, he had not remembered it as being so sweet. Boy, what his grandfather used to buy for Christmas, boy the way that house sang, that crumby apartment on First Avenue, it must have been a crumby apartment and there probably were rats in the walls. He certainly could remember cockroaches in his own house whenever they turned on the kitchen light, an army in hurried retreat. "Step on them, Sonny," his mother would yell, "get them, get them!" a game each night, the scurrying mob, and then they would all disappear into cracks and crannies, gone like the mouse flushed out to sea, except they would return again. "Where do they go?" he once asked his father, and his father replied, "Home."
Home.
There was everybody there on Christmas and his grandfather welcomed one and all, not only the family but also everybody he knew from the grocery store, the nice old man who wore thick glasses, Alonzo, Alfonso, something like that, who had the idiot son who would come in alongside his father like a ghost and sit there quietly and perhaps sip a little red wine his grandfather poured. And the men would talk about the old country and about Mussolini and about how beautiful Rome was at Christmastime, and Arthur would listen, standing between his grandfather's knees, with his grandfather's strong hands on his shoulders, and the women would be bustling about in the kitchen, Grandma fretting and fussing, and the girls — her two daughters and later Danny's wife, and then Sal's wife — all would be busy with the preparations in the kitchen, and the Christmas gifts would be piled to the ceiling under the Christmas tree, and Grandpa would keep pouring wine for all the relatives and friends who kept dropping in from all over Harlem, all over the world it seemed, Buon Natale, Buon Natale, the wine being poured and the smell of tomato sauce in the kitchen. God, there were things to eat, things Grandpa used to get in the grocery store, all imported, great provolone and salami, and fresh macaroni and bread, and Aunt Louise would make the pimientos, she would roast the peppers over the gas jet until they turned black, he always thought she was burning them, but no then she would scrap off all the black part and reveal the sweet orange-red meat, and then she fixed them with oil and garlic, oh God. She sent him pimientos in a jar every month, once a month like clockwork, the last day of the month, until she finally died, always the pimientos in a jar because once he helped her with the grammar in one of her song lyrics, just helped her put it in order, that was all, pimientos for life, a great title.