Free The Last Days of Il Duce by Domenic Stansberry Page B

everyone. No one cares nothing about the old neighborhood anymore.”
    Micaeli’s sister had always liked to argue, and the argument Teresa Tollini was launching now had been going on since I was a kid. The Italians should stick close, stay in the neighborhood. It had seemed a vital argument twenty, thirty years before, the cause of much anguish and shouting as neighbor after neighbor loaded their cars, their trucks, and hauled off toward a better life. It seemed beside the point now. Mrs. Tollini brought it up anyway, directing it to her brother Micaeli, who had abandoned them like the rest.
    â€œThat’s not true. We still have our law office in town. And I walk the streets every day,” said Michael Jr. He smiled in that agreeable way he had, the good son following his father’s path even though the footsteps in front of him were too large and he wobbled as he went.
    â€œNo,” said Mrs. Tollini. “You don’t walk the streets. You drive the streets. You park beneath the building and when the day is over you drive home to Los Altos. That is not what I call living in the neighborhood. Like your father. When he’s not here, on his farm, he’s in that condominium in Sausalito.”
    â€œMore wine?” asked Vincenza Romano, the good wife.
    She headed toward Mrs. Tollini with the bottle, her goal to distract the conversation. Mrs. Tollini did not want to be distracted. Meanwhile Marie was talking to Helen Romano, Michael Jr.’s wife, and the two women tilted toward one another, laughing, a gay kind of laughter, and I was sure then that there had been nothing between Marie and Michael Jr. Or almost sure.
    â€œWe all make our mistakes,” said Ernesto Tollini.
    He was addressing his old buddy Micaeli. They slipped into Italian as they did whenever they talked of the old days. I caught enough to understand they were discussing Ettore Patrizi, the newspaper editor whose widow Angelica had died in a nursing home just the week before.
    â€œAngelica never got over what they did to her Ettore,” said Teresa Tollini. “They had no right.”
    â€œEttore was in love with Mussolini. Every column in his newspaper praised Il Duce, even after the war started. That’s why he ended up in jail.”
    â€œThose days everyone was in love with Mussolini. Churchill. Gandhi. Before the war, all the great men visited Il Duce’s estate in Rome. They were all impressed.”
    â€œBut they did not stay in love with him. Ettore did not have enough sense to sniff the wind.”
    â€œBah,” said Teresa Tollini. “ La Italia was an Italian newspaper. Who was Ettore supposed to write about? He helped bring Marconi to North Beach, remember? And Caruso, all the great Italian artists. The reason the government put him in jail was not because he was a fascist. It was Italian culture he was writing about. And Roosevelt did not want for us to be Italians anymore.”
    Micaeli slapped his hand on the table and his old judge’s voice boomed out.
    â€œEttore Patrizi was a fascist!”
    There was a bit of theater in the old man’s posture. Then, though, his eyes darted furtively at Marie, and she looked away from him, down at her plate. I did not know the meaning of this exchange, and thought that Marie was thinking about her own father, who had disappeared from North Beach before she was born. (There were rumors about him—an adventurer, an Italian loyalist, a drunk—but then there were rumors about everyone. The truth, Marie told me once, was that he had died during the Korean War. Then, after her mother’s death, Marie had been raised by her uncle on her mother’s side, and she had taken the uncle’s last name.)
    The room fell quiet. It had been years since I had heard a conversation like this and then only in whispers. Most of North Beach had been touched by the scandal, even my mother and father, who had been forced to sit before the