The Apprentice Lover Read Free

certain she would prevail in the general war. My father, too, had becalmed himself and sunk back into his old, submissive role. The next morning, he apologized at the breakfast table for hitting me. “Don’t take it personal,” he had said, over hash andeggs in a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue, near the hotel. “I kind of lost my temper last night, but I didn’t mean anything by it.” My father had indeed meant it, but this was no time to insist on truth-telling. He wanted to make up with me before my departure, and so did my mother. To separate on bad terms in these circumstances would have been horrific for everyone.
    After a silent taxi ride along Eighth Avenue, we got off near the docks, overlooking the Hudson. My father, peering warily around at the street bums, helped me find a porter, and I disappeared into the crowd at Pier 49 after the briefest of good-byes—a peck on my mother’s cheek, and a firm handshake from my father. (The hard calluses on his hand reminded me that his working life mattered to him more than anything that happened at home. He could be almost Napoleonic at work: directing large numbers of men and machines into action, attracting admiration, even adulation, from his employees.)
    The Genovese , as my father had noted from dockside, was “not exactly the Queen Mary .” It was “kind of crummy” as ocean liners went. This, in fact, would be its final transatlantic voyage, sailing from New York to Genoa in eight days. Nobody had troubled to scrape and repaint the hull in many years, and the general state of neglect showed. But I hardly cared. To get away was luxury enough.
    On the aft deck, a small figure in the excited company of passengers, I pressed to the cold railing and waved the white handkerchief my father had stuffed into my pocket when he saw my tears. (“You’re gonna do fine, Alex,” he had whispered in my ear. “Everything is gonna be beautiful over there. You got a way about you I never had.” He didn’t really know how I would do, but he guessed it was his role, as father, to reassure me. But I knew, and he knew, that I was setting forth into a huge blank space—a world far from anything he or I had known.)
    My parents, Vito and Margarita, who had loomed so large through my past two decades, dwindled as the strip of rubbery water between myself and them lengthened, stretched to a point of unbearable tension, then snapped. My stomach hardened, my intestines braiding themselves in knots, as I kept waving (pointlessly, since they couldn’t see me now) and the boat passed the Statue of Liberty, which had welcomed my grand-parents only five decades before. (“I can’t tell you what she meant to me, that lady,” my grandfather always said. “There’s no words. After weeks at sea, she stood there like a giant. Everybody went down on their knees in the rain, on the wet deck, on their goddamn knees.”)
    It seemed ungrateful of me to reverse the journey my grandparents had made with such difficulty. My mother’s parents, who were dead, had come from Liguria in 1908. My father’s, who were still very much alive, set out from Naples in 1919. I had heard the story so many times from my paternal grandfather, about how packed the ship had been, with people taking turns sleeping in the tiny bunks, and everyone lice-ridden, sea-sick, and worse. They had abandoned their families—poor, illiterate, well-meaning people—and made their way across a vast, threatening sea. “It was bad weather all the way, and the weak ones died,” he told me. He, of course (and that was the point of the story) was not among the weak ones.
    If anything, my grandfather—Alessandro Massolini—was the strongest man I have ever known—a figure who dominated his only son, Vito, who had never really found his own way. Indeed, his stint in the Second World War had been the only period of his life