The Persimmon Tree

The tree dominates our yard, green, vital, limbs clawing above the grim, windowless, brick and cinderblock walls that enclose our house on three sides like a prison yard. A persimmon tree with shiny, two-tone leaves and fissured, rectangular bark that resembles alligator hide, planted by Vincenzo Coppola, my immigrant grandfather, long before I was born. Trees are rare things in Gowanus. On Carroll Street below Third Avenue, ours is the only house with a backyard tree. Johnny the Butcher has a pigeon coop; Joey DeSimone, his rose bushes; Honey, a wise guy, a circular blue swimming pool where I see him dunk Joey Heatherton. There are a few sickly sumac trees on the banks of the Gowanus. Gasping at the stench, we strip the leaves and slash ourselves with thin, whip-like branches. To see a tree, I have to walk six long, sloping blocks to Prospect Park.

My grandfather, a large and dour man, makes bad wine in the cellar. We have a peculiar relationship: He’d twist my cheek between his thumb and forefinger—“Come sie bello”—until I screamed; I’d hide rusty barrel hoops in his garden hoping he’d step on one. Somehow, he’d coax tomatoes, peppers, melons and squash from his tiny plot. Years later, under threat of a lawsuit brought a yuppie tenant I have this magical dirt analyzed by an environmental expert at Syracuse University. There’s enough lead and base metal to build a chemical weapon. The cost of hauling out and replacing the soil runs into tens of thousands of dollars. The rent barely covers the mortgage.

“Goddamn this canal,” I moan, “I’m screwed.”

“Probably not,” the scientist says, “all the yards in South Brooklyn are poisoned.”

Figs and grapes blossom in grandfather’s garden, but the persimmon tree is his pride and joy. As long as he lives—he’ll die of a heart attack working in his daughter’s Bensonhurst garden —the tree never bears fruit. Not once.  I’m his namesake and, sure enough, his obsession becomes mine.  Year after year, I’d wait for spring, watch the tree flower, but no pollination.  I discover persimmon trees are gender-specific. Judging by its skimpy stamens and overripe pistils, this was a girl tree, though, occasionally, it could switch sex like the morphodites (hermaphrodites) neighborhood mopes were always shouting about:

“What are you a fucking morphodite?

I hike up to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden on Washington Avenue, a dangerous place for a white Catholic school boy in the 1960s. I’m told that for a price a botanist will show up at our house with a ladder, and using what I imagine to be a giant bug sprayer, he’d attempt to pollinate our 60-foot tree. I can’t see this happening in my neighborhood. People already consider me odd. Besides, I don’t even know what a persimmon is. Then it turns out my grandmother had endured similar tribulations. Anna Falcone was a skilled, hardworking immigrant for whom the streets really were paved with gold. In one generation, she and her sister—a woman ugly as witch in a fairy tale—whom I only knew as “Zia” (Aunt), owned a seamstress shop, a grocery, a bar, two row houses—one I grew up in--an apartment building on Third Avenue and President Street and supposedly, a "palazzo" (palace) in Pagani, our ancestral hometown.

Her husband is the problem: either impotent, homosexual, or maybe a morphodite. The words in Neapolitan dialect are vague. Finocchio, for example, is fennel, but also “gay.” At the time, strapping, mascolino Vincenzo was living either in Argentina or Bahia, Brazil. A practical woman, Anna shed her husband, annulled her marriage and imported my grandfather like a sack of coffee beans. He wasn’t ambitious, but he got the job done. In ten years, he sired four daughters—Tessie, Rosanne, Frances, Lucy—and my father, Joe, born in 1924. Anna died when Joe was seventeen. I know my grandmother only as a faded signature on my father’s school records—I’d teach at the very high school he dropped out of—discovered in a dusty basement in Williamsburg. According to family legend, The Aunt, my grandmother’s business partner, demanded Vincenzo marry her. Of course, he refused. Don’t fairy tales always start this way? And the financial troubles that would haunt my family for the next sixty years began.

At the end of World II, The Aunt dispatched my grandfather to Pagani, 20 miles southeast of Naples, to collect back rent on the properties she now owned, a considerable sum. In effect, the money was frozen by Mussolini for a decade. I’d hear the story a thousand times growing up.  Vincenzo stayed and stayed, didn’t bother answering her letters. After eight months, he returned and announced the money, down to the last lira, was gone. He’d dared spurn her marriage proposal, now he’d pissed away her money? Her revenge was worthy of  a Medici. She disinherited Vincenzo, his offspring, my brothers and me. forever, and then went a step further: all the property, the businesses, the five-story apartment building, went to wily Mariuchella, a distant cousin brought from Italy years before as The Aunt’s maid. My parents, my three brothers and I spend the next 13 years crowded into a three-room flat above a candy store. (She charges us $35 dollars a month.) My mom had to do the laundry in the sink, pour buckets of water on rambunctious teenagers hanging out on the stoop so I could study. Next door, The Aunt lives in the corner apartment with a library, a piano and dining room. Gloria has to bring her bowls of spaghetti in tribute. Her adopted son, known in the neighborhood as “Professor Beans,” piles pasta on his plate, leaving my mother—pregnant with me—hungry. He says he has to feed his brain,

When Vincenzo passes away, we move around the corner to 474 Carroll Street, the persimmon tree in the backyard. On spring evenings, I’d lie beneath its thick branches, counting the airliners flying overhead, imagining other places, other people, other worlds.  

                                                            ***

In the spring of ’81, I’m among the reporters Newsweek dispatches to Rome to cover the papal assassination attempt, a very convoluted story. A Turk, a neo-fascist, perhaps unwittingly, is working for the Bulgarians who, in turn, are employed by the Soviets who want Pope John Paul II liquidated because he’d supported Lech Walenska and the Polish unions movement. I wind up in the bowels of the Italian legal system, in Tuscany with a Mossad agent who guides me to Ankara, Turkey. There, I interview Ugur Mumcu, a fearless journalist who’d be assassinated for his revelations. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-ugur-mumcu-1481231.html

My world had definitely opened up.  Aunt Tessie, one of Vincenzo’s daughters, happens to be in Rome that spring. In her 60s and feisty, Tessie speaks fluent Italian. I call her from my office near the Spanish Steps, rent a car and on a bright Sunday morning we’re off to Pagani to visit relatives we’d never met or barely knew existed. Pagani is no Tuscany. The streets are dirty, there’s  barbed wire strung on balconies. Shouting teenage punks hang out on the corners or buzz around on motorbikes looking to steal purses and gold chains.  It feels like home. Two of our octogenarian relatives: a woman medical doctor and her husband, Aeneas Falcone, a French teacher (a dubious professional choice in a town whose name literally translates as “Heathens”), live in an ancient apartment, one wall bisected by a gaping crack that looks like a lightning bolt—earthquake damage.  But the surprise, the real surprise comes when we walk across town to visit the Coppolas.

Of course, word had spread. Our relatives have gone out and no doubt blown a week’s budget to prepare a sumptuous Sunday dinner for us. Eighteen of them and more arriving by the minute. One very handsome guy is almost a double of my blond-haired brother Thomas—mystery solved. After a while, the room literally begins to buzz.  People are staring. A few are pointing at me.

“Vincenzo Coppola e qui ! Vincenzo Coppola e venuto! “ (Vincent Coppola is here!)

People begin to hug and embrace me, some with tears in their eyes. A man tells me my grandfather paid for his operation when he was a boy. “And now I can walk.” Another says Vincenzo gave him tuition for hairdressing school. He put food on another cousin’s table...and another and another. A man assures me my grandfather tried to get him legal papers so he could emigrate to the United States. It didn’t work out, but it’s okay. He never forgot. None of them ever forgot.

I was his namesake.

                                                            ***

Back in Brooklyn, I’m told a wise guy has bought the house next door—it had once belonged to The Aunt—as a gift for his aging mother. A neighborhood woman, she was bored living in his enormous Long Island mansion. She missed the Gowanus. All her friends live here. This is a ground-up restoration, no expense spared, though I suspect he got a break on labor.  Highly skilled workers and carpenters are there for months, disassembling the place brick by brick, then painstakingly installing imported marble and tile, a state-of the art kitchen, central air. What had been a dank cellar becomes a finished basement. The man is meticulous: an African-American craftsman arrives from the South to hand-carve the bannister on the winding staircase. The exterior, a modernist take on a classic Brownstone with enormous oval glass windows set like eyes in the façade. James Caan—who else?—arrives to donate the bronze lion’s head knocker staring balefully through wrought iron bars onto the sidewalk. In the backyard, a gazebo sprouts and our rusty chain-link fence is replaced by a tall brick wall, its top as sinuous as a sine curve. The house is beautiful as a Venetian palace, so outstanding on our ragtag street, it stops traffic. My mother tells  me dubious “telephone workers” and “gas company guys” are constantly trying to get into our cellar, no doubt to install wiretaps. She chases them away.

                                                            ***

In the mid-80s our family literally blows apart. My brother Thomas is in Milan hoping to work as a fashion model. Jo-Ann, a friend from Our Lady of Peace elementary school, tagged along, as did the millions of unknown viral particles replicating in his blood. Two years later, he’s dying of AIDS, his chiseled body and handsome features so disfigured by purple Kaposis Sarcoma lesions I cannot recognize him. Life is so random: Jo-Ann becomes Madonna’s make-up artist. My brother Joe is shooting heroin, an addiction that continues to this day. My father Joe has full-blown emphysema. My other sibling is in the hole to gangsters for tens of thousands of dollars in gambling debts. I leave my job at Newsweek and stumble into a disastrous second marriage. Gloria tries to care for all of us. The hoarseness she dismisses as stress, a precursor to the throat cancer that will soon kill her. She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life. After she suffers through a failed operation to save her vocal cords, I sit helpless watching her gasp and choke as fluid flows into her lungs. (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html)

 I’d make my way to the backyard to sit among the rose bushes I’d planted in Thomas’s memory. Many years after Vincenzo’s passing, the ugly cinderblock back walls are now covered in lush green moss like an enclosed English garden. The Persimmon towers above all, branches thick with glistening leaves overhanging the adjoining yards a like a canopy. One day when I arrive, the house is deathly silent. Gloria is at a doctor’s appointment. My father, a shadow of the tough-as-nails longshoreman I’d so loved and feared, sits drowsing on the living room couch, an oxygen mask covering the lower half of his face. The machine hisses and gurgles, a sound I’ve come to hate. I walk through the kitchen, pull open the back door and walk into the yard.

I stand there astonished.

 All that is left of the a persimmon tree is a blunt, blackened stump, its amputated lower branches like arms reaching to the heavens in shame and supplications. Everything, save for a carpet of rotting leaves is gone. Thomas’s rose garden has been crushed by falling branches. I feel tears streaming down my checks and then I see red. I charge back inside.

“Dad, what's  happened!  Who did this to our tree!  Who the fuck did this?”

He looks at me. I notice he’s crying behind the mask.  “The lady next door complained the leaves were falling in her yard.”

“Falling in her yard, so you cut Grandpa’s tree down?”

“I wouldn’t do that.  Honey sent a crew of guys with chainsaws.  I couldn’t stop them.” In the past, my father would have sent them running, wiseguys or no.

I stand there enraged, and suddenly, impotent.   A certain old lady picks up her phone and complains about dead leaves in her yard. It probably happens a thousand time a day in America, but not in Gowanus. Her wish is somebody’s command.  And 75 years of family history—my grandfather, my brother Thomas and his Easter rabbits and ducks, the July 4^th barbecues,  rose bushes and tomato plants, our  joys and tragedies, vanishes.