By Kenneth Uva
“Hey, Joey, we’re playin stickball on Dean Street, c’mon,” Tony proclaimed loud enough to be heard by all the kids playing in the street. It was also heard by the older guys hanging around, and the old ladies sitting in front of their houses in folding chairs. Dressed in mourning black most of the time, the ladies watched the goings on in their small corner of East New York. They judged and were ready to report any breaches of any of the codes lived by the residents of their villages in Italy. These codes, now transplanted to Brooklyn, did not deviate much from what they brought from the old country.
“I don’t wanna play on Dean Street. Let’s go round the corner. It’s better there,” was Joey’s reply.
The reason that it was better around the corner was that Dean Street was where the Amato family lived and Joey was tired of the teenage daughters, Mary and Carmella, always asking Joey and his brothers to help them with something or run an errand.
The patriarch of Amato clan was Antonio, known as “the General.” He was well-established in his East New York neighborhood by the time Joey’s mother and father arrived from the Puglia region of Italy in 1907. Joey’s family, the Gallos, was related to the Amatos through Joey’s mother, whose aunt Regina was married to the General. The link of the families though blood was augmented by the fact that the General owned the building where the Gallos lived, thus the dual link of family (blood) and money.
Antonio and Regina had four children. The oldest, Antonio, Jr. was also known as “Junior.” His younger brother Jimmy was a meek, quiet type, unusual in that tough neighborhood. Mary and Carmella were known for looking down on the other neighborhood kids for not having nice clothes or for the status of not being the General’s daughter.
In addition to owning several small buildings of between three and six apartments, the main source of the Amato fortune was the Amato Funeral Home. Despite the low income of the neighborhood, the fact that people died regardless of the demographics assured a steady income.
The General, along with a few of the other more prosperous of the recent immigrants from area around Bari, Italy, contributed money, ideas, and physical labor into building Saint Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church. The church was built in the early 1900s to meet the needs of the growing Italian population of the neighborhood in an era when the Catholic churches reflected the ethnic makeup of the area. The older nearby church, Blessed Sacrament, was built by the Germans who preceded the Italians in populating that area of Brooklyn before Brooklyn was consolidated into Greater New York. In contrast to the stark, tan brick interior of Blessed Sacrament, Saint Anthony was designed in a faux Baroque design, light blue and white interior with reproductions of Renaissance paintings on the sides of the altar and painted wooden saints, with graphic wounds, and one of Saint Lucy holding a plate containing her eyes, representing an account of her torture by eye gouging. The gruesome stories of the Christian martyrs in the time of the Roman Empire make for disturbing reading to say the least.
The Amatos were definitely the most prominent family in the neighborhood. They had a great influence on what was considered proper behavior. The General and his associates connected with the church determined who would be allowed to sell their wares and food at the annual St. Anthony’s Day feast. They had the pull to have the city close the street adjacent to the school yard so the various merchants could set up their booths. The main attraction was the food—zeppoli, sausage and peppers, pasta (“macaroni”) with sauce (“gravy”) that most often resulted in the neighborhood women saying that they made all of that better at home. Dining out, even on the street where they lived, was not a popular activity for people with limited financial resources and a narrow view of what was good to eat.
While the official memory of the era was that Italian-Americans were loyal to the United States, there was still a major connection to the homeland. When Mussolini’s army conquered Ethiopia as part of the dictator’s plan to extend Italy’s dominance in parts of Africa, there was a great deal of support for this aggression in the neighborhood. The General, with others, organized a parade to commemorate Italy’s victory. Along with the church sponsored marching band, an African-American man who worked in the funeral home was seated in a coffin with a sign around his neck reading “Qui giance Abyssinia” (“Here lays Ethiopia”).
When Joey was a few years older and in the Navy in the South Pacific, he received a letter from his sister Christina. The General and the church arranged for a dance for the Italian POWs. The tone of the letter was that this was a great thing, so nice that the church did something for these young prisoners. Joey was outraged that he and so many of the neighborhood boys were fighting the enemy and the enemy solders were being entertained by the church and the neighborhood girls. Later, Joey told his son Brian that he was so mad about this and realized how stupid his sister was for not realizing how this news would be received by the boys serving overseas.
Along with Joey in the navy, his brothers Al and Pete were in the army. Al was a combat infantryman in Europe. He saw heavy combat and returned carrying those experiences with him for the rest of his life. It was hard to get him to talk about the war, leaving to the imagination what he saw and, possibly, what he did in his fight against the Germans in France and Belgium. Pete was an Army Air Corps mechanic repairing fighter planes at various training bases in the South. Junior Amato escaped the draft since he was married, a father, and a bit older than the average draftee. Jimmy was declared unfit for military service for reasons not known by the Gallo family.
When the war ended, the Gallo brothers returned to the neighborhood. Older and more confident due to their service in the victorious war effort, they felt less like the poor cousins but not yet equal in the feudal order to the Amato clan.
By the time the Gallo boys came back, the General had died. Junior now was in charge of the funeral home. Jimmy did some of the paper work but never acted like a boss even though, technically, he was part owner. Mary and Carmella were dating, trying to find men good enough to merge with the Amato dynasty.
In the years shortly after World War II, the Gallo brothers all married and no longer lived in the building owned by the Amatos, although their mother still did. So, there was not yet a complete break from the ties that had, for four decades, bound the Gallos to the Amatos. The Amato clan certainly thought the ties continued.
Joey was married to Betty, who he had met in high school. She was also from the neighborhood and also Italian American. When Betty’s mother died, her father did not use the services of the Amato Funeral Home. Years before, during the Great Depression, the owner of the Lombardi Funeral Home had loaned Betty’s father money when he was having a tough time with his furniture business. “Mr. Lombardi did me a big favor twenty years ago. I repay him by having Momma’s funeral at his funeral parlor. That is the honorable thing to do.”
Apparently, the Amatos, especially, the sisters Mary and Carmella, did not consider this honorable at all. “Wha s’amatter, they too good for us? After all we did for the Gallos?” The fact that it wasn’t the Gallos but Joey’s father in law, who made that decision, didn’t matter a bit. They carried a grudge forever.
Mary and Carmella married and had children in the years after the war. None seemed to reach the high status that the Amato clan was used to. There was some spotty education that they didn’t talk about. There were no prestigious jobs or careers or they would have bragged about that. Yet, they still tried to find ways to be able to look down on the Gallo family.
At a family function that was extensive enough for the Amatos to be invited, Betty told her son Brian that Mary and Carmella always try to find something bad about the Gallos. “They are very frustrated about their lives and their husbands and children. They will try to get something about the Gallos that they could use against us,” Betty explained. “If they ask you anything about your job, just say it is good, you like it.” Brian, who by this time was a lawyer in the early stages of his career and had never met the “Amato girls” so he had no idea of the underlying plot in this family gathering. He took heed of this mother’s warnings, not wanting to give the Amatos ammunition to use against his family. He turned to his sister Jessica who was sitting next to him. “I never even met these people and somehow I feel I am in the middle of a battle between the Medici and the Borgias.”
Sure enough both Mary and Carmella approached Brian. “You are Joey’s son, right? Mary asked. Carmella chimed in, “You’re the lawyer?” “Yes, I’m a lawyer,” Brian replied. The next question was the inevitable one of what kind of law do you practice. Brian explained that he worked for a company in Manhattan and handled things like contracts and claims. “I guess you would like to do something better,” Mary said, obviously insinuating that Brian was unhappy in his job. Since Brian was clued into what was going on, he responded: “I am really happy with where I am and what I’m doing. I supervise five other attorneys. My company does business in every state and has offices in all the major cities. I get to deal with matters and with people from all over the country. It’s a great job and look forward to going to work every day.”
Brian did not love his job but realized that this wasn’t a situation that called for a complicated discussion involving the business atmosphere, the corporate culture and the day to day stress he had to deal with. He knew that any slightly negative inference would be rebroadcast, as “Joey’s son, the lawyer, doesn’t like his job and wants to find another one.”
As years went on, the Amatos became less and less important in the lives of the Gallos. Some member of the Gallo family would invite the Amatos to major family functions such as weddings and some did not. Joey and Betty did not invite them to the weddings of Brian or Jessica and, in fact, Brian heard nothing about that clan until much later when he visited Joey, now retired. “Junior had his driver take him here last week. He said that his son Michael was in trouble with the mob and they need five thousand dollars or they will kill him. He said he would give me a note. Can you write one?” Brian said he could do that but did his father really want to lend Junior money? After all, Junior was not his brother. Brian realized that Joey wanted to show that after all the years of the Amatos acting superior to the Gallos, for all their pretensions and airs, an Amato is coming to him in order to save his son’s ass. “It’s not the money,” Joey said. “I have plenty but they can’t raise five thousand between the whole bunch.” Brian drafted the note; Junior signed it, and received the money.
Two years later, Junior died. Joey contacted Michael and asked to be repaid. “There is no money. Guys we owed took over the funeral home. Sorry, Joey.”
So that was that, after decades of being the richest family in the neighborhood, looking down on others, acting as the local nobility long after they had the resources to do so, the house of Amato was broke and powerless. The entire estate could not yield five thousand dollars to honor a debt made in order to save one of their lives.
Like the Ambersons, the Amatos received their comeuppance.