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Descent from the Hill
By JIM PICARDI
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Jim Picardi
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-3580-8
Chapter One
November 18, 1989
I turned at my front door and saw a conflagration that surged amid trees, silhouetting the distant mountains. The dazzling panoply of constantly changing red and orange hues was gone too soon, but just when it seemed that the sun's color show was over, light flashed again within the trees, and burnt sienna swirls capped the mountaintops.
"Did you see that sunset?" I asked my wife as I entered the house.
"I did."
"Could be a good omen, you think?"
"I hope so." She cast her eyes toward the notepad, where I saw the same message I'd dismissed several times: Francisco Fuentes. Please call.
"He called again this morning."
I entered the living room and, without looking directly at her, asked if she'd gotten the mail.
"It's where I always put it-on your desk. Did you hear what I said? Are you listening to me?"
"Of course ... yes, of course I'm listening. And I'm going to call him."
"When?"
"After the funeral. Promise."
"He says he's Abdon Fuentes's son. Why are you ignoring him? You are ignoring him."
"I'm not ignoring him," I said.
"Is there something you're keeping from me?"
"Of course not."
"You knew his father well; you liked him. You said he was the best you worked with. Maybe he's sick-could have died. It could be important."
"I'll call him. Just let me get through this week ... the funeral, the homecoming. Did you forget about the homecoming?"
"How could I forget about that?"
"Just let me get through it all, and then I'll be prepared to call him."
"Prepared? Why do you have to be prepared? Why don't you just call him, Justin?"
"Trust me. I'll make the call." Good question. I thought, Why do I have to be prepared? I'm not prepared for tomorrow's funeral, but that's understandable. Death's finality jolts me. Its inescapable reality terrifies me. And it hurts too. No one is prepared for death.
Maybe it was the fifties that set me up for this reaction, that easy decade when anything was possible, when we worried little about being prepared. I didn't worry about that bomb nonsense and worried even less about the future. Maybe I'm getting my comeuppance.
But I do remember when I became obsessed with being prepared. It wasn't long after my arrival at a school we called the Hill, a liberal arts college steeped in tradition and tucked away in the pastoral environs of America's northeast. That's when three friends joined the story of my life and accompanied me on a journey that got me to this point in time: anticipating tomorrow's funeral, awaiting next week's homecoming, and working myself up to making that problematic phone call.
Chapter Two
September 1960 Freshmen lived in Revelation Hall, a building designed to resist the most aggressive ravages of volatile students. Its attractive stone exterior didn't prepare you for linoleum floors and cinder block walls devoid of photographs, paintings, or other decorations. Dormitory rooms had two bunk beds and two doors, each of which led to a study with two desks-an arrangement that provided four students with a livable, if cramped, complex.
I was not the first to arrive on that Saturday in September of 1960. Atop one bunk bed was a sizeable someone, curled in the fetal position and sound asleep. I heard shuffling in one of the study rooms, but before I reached the door to see who it was, the lump in the top bunk sat up and shouted at me.
"What the fuck! Can't a guy get some rest around here?"
I just stared at him as he nuzzled his head back into the hub of a pillow.
"What's his problem?" The voice came from behind me, and when I turned around, I saw a guy about six feet tall, slender, with reddish brown, wavy hair and tortoiseshell, horn-rimmed glasses. Quasi-preppie clothes.
"I have no idea," I said. "I'm not sure I want to know about his problem."
He extended his hand and smiled. "Nick Gensini."
"Justin Windsor," I said. "Glad to know you."
"What do you like to be called?"
"Well ... Justin, I guess." I thought, My name is Justin, and everyone calls me Justin. No one had ever asked me what I wanted to be called.
"Okay. My name's Nicholas, but I prefer to be called Nick."
"Nick it'll be." I relaxed, thinking we had finished with the formalities and could get on with unpacking and preparing for orientation.
"What are you?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"You know. Where are you and your family from?"
"Connecticut," I said. "Where are you from?"
"I was born in Brooklyn, but my mother and father came here from Italy. How about your parents?"
"Connecticut."
"Connecticut." He thought for a few seconds before responding. "I get it, so you're a blue blood. We have a few blue bloods back home, mostly in Brooklyn Heights. Italians and Jews ran most of them out of New York years ago. How about that! I get to live with a blue-blooded American. You prejudiced against Italians?"
"You're the only Italian I've ever met," I said with a smile. The conversation was pretty inane, so I asked if he had any brothers or sisters. Wrong question.
"I have an older sister, Theresa. She went to nun school in the woods on Long Island. You should've seen that place-looked like a prison. I think it really was a prison at one time. And those nuns-man, were they strange. Wore black outfits with white starched bibs that pushed right up against their fat chins. They could hardly move. All they did was stare. They hardly talked unless they were mumbling prayers. But my sister told me they yelled at her a lot when they got mad."
Before the garrulous Nicholas Gensini could tell me more, we heard someone stirring around in the other study room and went in through the hallway entrance to check it out. A heavyset guy with dark, curly hair and black, horn-rimmed glasses perched on a moderate-sized, aquiline nose busily arranged his belongings. He turned and saw us, and then he walked toward us with an outstretched hand and a confident smile.
"Marc Goldstein-glad to meet you." We pulled up chairs, told him our names, and talked about our plans for the future. Nick would join me in premed studies, and Marc would go for a degree in political science. The giant in the upper bunk snoozed on and was oblivious to our conversation, which continued until we adjourned to the Hall of Commons for dinner.
When we got back, our mystery mate was up and around, probably hungry but unwilling to say so. He certainly couldn't have expected us to risk our gonads by warning him that he was going to sleep through dinner.
"Chuck Mitchell, guys. Guess you're my roommates for the next year, hey?"
He was at least six feet four and had pomaded a thick mound of hair into a trendy pompadour that stayed upright for hours. He wasn't at all hostile that evening and told us little about himself other than that he planned to go out for football, ice hockey, and lacrosse.
"Goldstein? Gensini? What the fuck is this, the United Nations?" Chuck smiled, pleased with his quip.
Like all living things, humans adapt, migrate, or die. Marc's parents, Franz and Enid Goldstein, were German Jews who, like all Jews in early-1930s' Germany, were not given the option to adapt. So when Franz realized that what his brother and sisters insisted couldn't happen was about to happen, he and his wife migrated.
"People do what they have to do," Marc told me the night I asked him about his family.
"At least they got out," I said. "But how?" I really wanted to know. I'd never had a real conversation with a Jew before, and I was horrified and fascinated by the Holocaust.
"They got to Switzerland with the meager remnants of their lives-I don't remember exactly how. Anyway, they found out there that the German-Jewish Club of New York had arranged for their immigration to the United States. When they got to New York, the Club got them work and a place to stay-very basic, but livable."
"What kind of job did your dad do?"
"He worked on Wall Street," Marc said.
"That's amazing."
A smile lingered right at the edge of a laugh. "As a runner, shuttling sales slips between brokers who were impatient with his poor English. He quit and went to work in the garment district, and then he set type at the New York Post Telegram and became friends with a Jewish refugee named Ariel Ringold. It was Ariel who convinced him they should save money and start a scrap metal business."
"The enterprising sort."
"Perhaps-it may be a genetic thing." Marc grinned a while as I impatiently awaited the rest of the story. "But Ariel obsessed about reports of Jews displaced and persecuted all over Europe. When Aufbau-the official publication of the German-Jewish Club-ran a story about the death camps, my father and Ariel felt they had to help finance the relief effort and established their scrap metal business in the Bronx."
Franz and Ariel, I learned, not only helped the relief effort-they also created substance and wealth from imagination, and they metamorphosed from impoverished refugees to fairly prosperous entrepreneurs.
"They realized the great American dream," I said.
"I guess you could look at it that way. But my parents eventually learned that none of their family members had survived the Holocaust, and my father got seriously depressed."
"I guess they couldn't do a whole lot for depression back then."
"He had therapy with a Freudian psychoanalyst who gave him sedatives for his anxieties, but that was about it."
Like most psychiatric patients, Marc's father never finished therapy; he simply stopped going.
"It's complicated, Justin. More than one issue caused my father's depression. His business became a mixed blessing."
"I don't get it. Sounds like he did real well."
"It's late. Let's call it a night."
Clearly there were details Marc wasn't going to discuss-too painful? too delicate?-and the hour had nothing to do with it. Still, he struck me as the kind of guy who enthusiastically engaged the future and, unlike his parents, would never let himself be trapped by the past.
Nick and Chuck hitchhiked 150 miles to Peerson, a women's college well known for high academic standards and loose women. On their return to our room, we got the details. Nick histrionically described a Mississippi magnolia who attracted him with her awe-inspiring looks and melting accent. We got a head to toe description, and at the end of it, rolled eyes and a sigh.
Chuck kept it simple. "Her name is Carolyn. She's nice, very pretty. Comes from Boston. I had a good time with her. And she's a Christian." He smiled at Marc, who just smiled back.
During the next few weeks, football consumed Chuck's weekends and left no time for socializing. Nick wasn't about to hitchhike 150 miles by himself, so he put his Mississippi magnolia on the back burner and turned to local social gatherings to meet "townies"-high school girls with ordinary interests and little or none in higher education. When he brought a date to campus, we found that superficiality and lack of sophistication were not unattractive to Nick if the girls were also endowed with breasts hard to miss and virtue hard to detect. The more encounters he had, the more we had to listen to details of his conquests.
"Can you actually talk about anything but premarital sex?" Marc once asked him.
"I never talk about premarital sex, guys," he said. "I have no intentions of marrying any of them."
Unabashed inebriation was commonplace in the dormitory and at local bars where being carded wasn't a concern. Students drank because it was cool, and those who drank unto oblivion were respected for their ability to not hold their liquor. We called it "flailing," and the more a guy flailed, the more respect he gained from those who engaged in the same self-destructive behavior. Nick routinely got stinking drunk. He spent most of his party time in oblivion and most of his mornings retching or badly hungover.
"My father chose the Hill, and in my house, you do what Vincent Gensini tells you to." Nick and I were in the dormitory after dinner. "I preferred a large city university. Being out here in the wilderness isn't for me."
"Wilderness? This isn't exactly wilderness," I said.
"It sure is. I felt safe in the city-lots of people and no vicious animals."
I stared at him. He'd probably had a few, but he wasn't drunk. "What are you talking about?"
"They could be watching us right now."
"Oh, c'mon, Nick. Get real. There are no vicious animals around here, and if there are, believe me, they're a whole lot less vicious than the likes of man." I changed the subject. "Tell me about your father. Does he make all your decisions for you?"
"Just about. He dragged me off to Italy as soon as I graduated from high school. Just the two of us. What an experience."
His father hailed from Neri, a small village near Rome where there was no local industry capable of supporting a vibrant lifestyle for its inhabitants. Vincent Gensini had therefore emigrated in quest of a better life in America. Family members who remained behind were not exactly pillars of rural gentry.
"Cousin Gian Carlo owns a café that's a front for a numbers racket he runs with his two sons. And then there's my cousin Ana-a woman of dubious virtue, very sexy in a trashy but intriguing way. Not to mention uncles, aunts, grand-this and great-that-so many family members I can't remember all their names."
But he most definitely remembered his Aunt Celeste, who lived in Rome but visited Neri often and was respected-even feared-as a family matriarch. She obviously intrigued Nick, who went on about her "penetrating" gaze.
"It's her eyes," he said. "She stared at me a lot. Made me uncomfortable. There's something about those eyes-strange as hell."
The Gensini family thrived on gossip but never gossiped about Aunt Celeste.
"I think they're afraid of her," he said. "Not my father-he and Celeste are tight. Real tight. They took a business trip to Switzerland. Didn't invite me to go with them."
"Your father has a business in Switzerland?"
"I don't have a clue. He just said there were business matters they needed to tend to. He never goes into details. Hell, Justin, he never tells me anything about his personal life, and I don't ask any questions. He just goes on about things like Italian supremacy in religion, music, art, and women-in a general way, of course. He's always talking about Italy. If it's such a great place, why the hell did he leave?"
"Good question. Why did he leave?"
Nick didn't answer and thought for a while. "You know, Justin, I don't really like my father. He's not someone you'd enjoy spending a lot of time with."
"That's pretty harsh," I said.
"He's not your father. You couldn't possibly understand."
"Maybe so, but we can always find something to not like about our parents. Mine are elitist bigots. They say the Holocaust never happened. 'Jewish propaganda, Justin. Don't believe a word of it.'"
"That's pretty bad," Nick said.
"See what I mean?"
"Uh-huh, but you'll see what I mean when you meet Vincent Gensini."
"Can't wait." When he saw my smile, Nick seemed to relax.
Chapter Three
Our first house-party weekend was more than I expected. Beer flowed, music blasted, and nobody got much sleep. The festive spirit prompted even socially challenged nerds to let down their guard and relax under the influence of a few drinks.
Chuck and Carolyn danced the joint-dislocating Frug and necked.
Marc and his date, a former high school classmate, didn't integrate with the party atmosphere well, but Nick and his magnolia miss, Connie, danced and flailed.
My date was generic. Everything about her was generic, even her name, which I can't even recall. Nothing as racy as, say, Donna. We didn't click, although my attitude toward women didn't help matters. It had deteriorated appallingly after Emily Abigail Adams broke my heart when she left me for a horse-before I ever showed up at the Hill.
At the time I became obsessed with the nubile Emily, I knew virtually nothing about a woman's body and the parts we didn't share in common, though I often fantasized about naked women. I had once scrutinized a calendar photo of Marilyn Monroe unclothed. Her smile entranced me, but not as much as those upright breasts and perky nipples. I tried to imagine what I'd see if she spread her legs, but the image I came up with was innocently inaccurate. I wondered, What would Emily look like naked?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Descent from the Hill by JIM PICARDI Copyright © 2010 by Jim Picardi. Excerpted by permission.
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