Rumors from the Lost World Read Free Page B

gets puffy with anger. She snaps open her purse and digs in it, as though searching for the cigarettes she no longer smokes.
    What could we do? her mother says to her, staring at chipped china, drip-drying in a wire drain next to the sink. New Orleans was a military center. Soldiers all over the place, Army hospitals on the lakefront, Nazi subs at the mouth of the river. We were supposed to roll bandages, knit socks and sweaters, save tinfoil and coat hangars, old license plates. There was the rationing, the blackouts. We didn’t know we had any rights. Olsen and Gasper had official business, they said. “Why do you have a radio but no transmitter?” Olsen said. “Where’s your transmitter? You have a short-wave?”
    â€œWe listen to Beethoven,” I said, “but you wouldn’t know him, would you?”
    â€œHe’s a dago. Who else would you listen to?”
    â€œBeethoven?” Gasper furrowed his brows. “He’s not Italian, is he? Verdi, that’s your man. You listen to him, sweetheart?”
    â€œAnd Caruso. We listen to Caruso. You wouldn’t know him, either. You’re stupid.”
    My mother squeezed my knee with a large-veined hand. “Just be quiet.”
    â€œWhat are these questions, Mother?” my father asked in his heavy English, his long big-boned face twitching a little, his downtumed nose engraving sadness onto his features. He required me strictly to be home by ten, allowed chaperoned dates only, and suspected my volunteer work at the USO. He forbade me to attend late-evening get-togethers, especially dances for servicemen. He didn’t trust soldiers with his baby, and the more I argued the darker his face became, like the skin of an eggplant. “I have every right in the world to go to that dance,” I had been screaming, almost in tears, when the two men knocked.
    Outside it started to rain, a sudden gale from the gulf. Winds thirty miles an hour, the tops of big oaks waving like people adrift in lifeboats. It was better than Beethoven, those storms. Before the war, I’d sit by the window, lights out, the night turning off and on, sheets of rain plinking the glass, the ballgame droning on the radio for my brother’s benefit, sheet-lightning punctuated by shouts of victory or disgust. When the war came, he got sent off to the European theater, where he met one of his heroes, a pitcher from Mississippi.
    â€œLook, Mister,” Gasper told my father, who was running his watch-chain through his fingers like rosary beads, “we’re fighting fascism. You should be glad we’re vigilant.”
    â€œYeah, right,” Emily says, retrieving one of her own father’s butts from the ashtray and breaking it apart.
    Fascism? For all I knew, Olsen was a fascist. He was certainly dressed for it in his wrinkled, shiny black suit. He pulled out a cigarette, without permission to smoke, tapped it in his palm, and struck his match. “What’s a little discomfort, a little annoyance, compared to freedom?” he said. “You all don’t know how good you have it. Suppose you were still over there in that stinkhole? You think you’d get a place like this to feel at home in? You think you’d get all that good Spam to eat when there wasn’t enough meat to go around?”
    My father studied the jiggling glint of his watch-chain.
    He had the shakes. When he was little, I found out later, his parents spoke of innocent men dragged by dead of night to stakes in the scorched uplands of Sicily, where predators and insects and the sun would kill them. In America, it was rumored that the government relocated people into prisons in the desert, that Italians were never safe from a beating or the kind of grilling that convinces you you’re guilty.
    â€œIf it’s not our country, too,” I said, “then what’s my brother doing over there? Why don’t you send him home? He’s fighting for