Dancing in the Dark by David Donnell Read Free Book Online

suggests that she can see Tom becoming extremely successful in business, she wants him to be a lawyer; for example she is convinced by the time Tom is in Grade 13 at Bloor Collegiate and thriving like a healthy plant that he should have a great career as a leading lawyer, a senator, even, maybe a member of government. She also sees him, for some obscure reason, as going into the steel business, perhaps in Hamilton. Mrs. Garrone has strange pictures of him in some of the different southern Ontario regions, and doing extremely well, making millions perhaps. Canada needs steel. There are opportunities. Most of the Anglo Canadians don’t know fettuccine or carpaccio about how to make good steel. Simple. Because they don’t have any traditions. This was, of course, because her brother, Hamilcar, had been in the steel business back in Italy, in Turin, as a matter of fact.
    But Tom, romping through high school and considering college, finally chooses Harvard, which is impressed with his range of extra-curricular activities, writing, ab-ex painting, well, he did a painting once, not a lot, music, he plays mouth organ but lies and says piano and violin, the violin having of course been his father’s (his father’s passion, almost vocation, and eventual destruction – not of the man, per se, but of his stomach, his sense of frustration, the great Latin word
frustrere
, the sense of sadness turning black and bopping Giuseppe often on the side of the head like an angry mother as he left for work on cold Toronto winter white snow-swept mornings in the great frozen northern metropolis with his black lunchpail and his great thick chunky Italian rye and mortadella – which means death of woman – and tomato and cheese sandwiches); what else? Tom includes farming, nature walks, and soil analysis, also claims to be interested inbecoming an ecological or more precisely pollenological expert on the history of the Scarborough Bluffs, that range of crumbling and rugged cliffs, bluffs, which slopes down from Scarborough at the east end of Toronto into the blue nothingness of Lake Ontario, where Tom sometimes sails with a friend, the son of a family whose father owns a construction equipment company but is rumoured to be
cosa nostra
. “Who isn’t?” says Tom’s friend bitterly, one afternoon as they eat their hamburgers out in the middle of blue Lake Ontario. “Who isn’t?”
    Giuseppe gives Tom 2 main gifts in life, besides love, of course, and besides his death, which hasn’t happened yet, and which, when it does happen, will become a dark spot on Tom’s computer screen in 4th year Harvard.
    The first of these 2 gifts is Giuseppe Amadeus’s dislike of music, his feeling that music betrayed him, the way some men are about women, perhaps; music had let him down like a faithless woman, a
Strega
, in a red dress skittering off along the cobbles leading north from the sunlit piazza cafes of the San Borasino in Rome; as a city, his father’s great love, the city itself, its greatness, its prestige, its history, its why not say it out loud here this afternoon in the bright sunlight, it’s absolute like a Papal decree immortality. And so the father, Giuseppe Amadeus Garrone, had given up music, although he was not that bad a violinist, he just couldn’t find very much in the way of gainful employment, being something of a village boy who had come to Rome from Tuscany in pursuit of love, amor, greatness, and perhaps even money, and had finally taken up the trade of a simple brick layer instead.
    The second of these two primary gifts that his father passes on to Thomas Eduardo Garrone, otherwise known as The Stick, because he was so thin, tall, and slim some said; but his mother Mama Garrone said, Like a stick, he’s so tall and thin. The second of these two primary gifts was his father’s passionate belief, especially after they had come to America, well, no, not exactly America, but as his father was fond of saying, “Christopher