Dancing in the Dark by David Donnell Read Free Book Online Page A

Columbus, who was ours and who will always be ours, and Italian, so, therefore he’s ours, he’s not George Washington’s, George Washington made the Revolution, but Christopher discovered America, he’s notThomas Jefferson’s, after whom Tom is named, he’s ours, an Italian, like us, a wop, a dago, a good dago, a great el woppo with a big nose,” Tom’s father had an enormous nose, a real schnauzzo; but, as his father was also fond of saying, “Columbus didn’t really discover what we now call America anyway,” and therefore, as he would point out, holding up the big blue and white with fine yellow and red lines map of North America, “what difference does it make if we’re here, in Toronto, where the majority of the good restaurants and tailor shops and small building companies are Italian anyway, or, for example,” he would beat the table with the big baguette of crusty Calabrese bread they cut slices from on the breadboard in the middle of the table, “if we’re down here in New York, where your cousin Sal and his wife live and those
battaschardi
they’ve got for children; or, for example,” he would move his big square-bottomed wine glass around the table like a Columbian compass, “if we live over here where the boy’s (the boy was Tom of course) uncle Giambattista lives in New Jersey with that huge fat ugly woman from Lombardy who tricked him into marrying her just because she was 6 months in the family way and her father owns a hardware business and wanted very much, especially when his daughter couldn’t do the family dishes any more because she was as I’ve said 6 months, not 6 weeks, but 6 months,
apregnento
. Ah. What difference, eh, this is all America.”
    And his father, all 6’2” of him with flat sloping chest, the big long arms and that wide sloping but outwards belly sitting there in the kitchen with its bright yellow lights on Grace Street and Tom had been God, Jesus, how old at that time, he must have been 4 or 5 at the most and his father would sigh with pleasure with relief with relaxation at the good spaghetti and vitello that his mother had prepared and fold up the map and put it away and consider the object lesson taught and the matter in general more or less closed and committed to passionate belief.
    So Tom had this considerable sense of family, Italian past, close-knit neighbourhood, leafy maple & ash trees background, much more so than he had a very clear concept of anything Canadian.
    Of course a lot of different things affected Tom’s development and therefore could be called the “groundwork” of the kaleidoscope of events thathappened to him as late as 1978. School, reading Jean-Paul Sartre without wearing tinted glasses, a little trouble at customs one year to do with some hash brownies. Nothing serious.
    But probably the biggest thing underlying Tom’s sense of ascent and fear of descent, his vestige of volatility from being at the top of the CN Tower, was his affection for his family and their life, and the enormous influence of his grandfather, Albertini’s father, who can’t be discussed here for various reasons, who spoke to Giuseppe Amadeus the
III
, and implored him to give his first son a new name, which is why Giuseppe had called Tom “Tomaszo,” just to make a difference in the Garrone family lineage.
    Light-hearted and sombre by turns, high school leads to college, and Tom’s first change of city (since Orillia) is going to be Boston. Boston means Cambridge, Mass., where he has been accepted by Harvard.
    Previously, going down to the Canadian East Coast for summer holidays or out to B.C., he has always taken trains. Canadian trains. Those 1940s pale imitations of the first great trains of the Canadian north. No longer kept up. No longer a big investment of government or private industry. He has always taken trains. Written a couple of stories about trains as a matter of fact, unpublished, he remembers, in Grade 12 or maybe 11. Sometime back then.