Victor, pt. 3

After Victor Salarino's tour of duty was finished, he went home to New York. He'd been gone for four years. What he found shocked him considerably.

The home he and his mother had shared with her family was filled with another gang of Italians. There was no trace of the Salarinos. He stared for a minute at the name on the door, unsure of what to do. There was a group of boys playing baseball in the street. "Excuse me," he asked one of them. "But do you know where Mrs. Salarino lives?"

The kid looked up at Vic, tall and lanky as he was in his military uniform. He was embarrassed, and looked back down. "They moved," he shrugged.

"Do you know where?"

The boy stared hard at the ground. He didn't know what to say. Finally, he muttered: "The store."

"The store?"

"Mmhmm."

"What store?"

"The STORE!" he insisted.

"They live in the store?"

The boy pointed down the street. It wasn't until then Victor noticed that there, on the corner where Ward's Dry Goods used to be, was a new sign, reading "Salarino's Department and Package Store."

He could hardly believe his eyes.

***

Victor lost one of his brothers, Anthony, when a U-boat sunk the troop ship he was on. His other brother, Silvo, had been wounded mere months after he enlisted when he took a bullet to his hip that shattered the joint. He was sent home.

There wasn't much Silvo could do at first but sit with his mother and worry. Mrs. Salarino read the papers every morning and evening, fretting over every report of casualties. She worked through the day in a factory by the water that had been converted into a production facility for aircraft instruments. Silvo sat at home most days, sitting on the steps and watching people walk by.

One day, though, a gentleman arrived asking for Mr. Salarini. Silvo introduced himself as Mr. Salarini, but he quickly discovered the man was looking for his father. Silvo told him that his father had gone to Europe before the Depression set in and had never returned. They had not heard from him in more than twelve years. The man said he was a lawyer from J. Barnes and Holden named Carlton.

"Are you the man of this house?" Carlton asked.

Silvo answered that his mother was still alive, but he was the oldest son still around.

"I think you'll like what I have to say," Carlton said. He went on to explain. "Before your father left the country, he owned half of the Confluence Catholic Beverage Company. Today, he owns the entire business."

Carlton said the other owner had died, God rest his soul, and that the company was therefore transferred in full ownership to the Salarino family.

Silvo knew he and his mother could not run a wine-making business back in Confluence. And the lawyer guessed he might feel that way.

"I have a proposition for you, son, if you're up for it. One of our clients is interested in buying the company from you." He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a calling card. "This is the price he'd be willing to pay."

Silvo nearly lost his balance. He had to stare at the card and count the zeroes twice to make sure it was the number he thought it was. Carlton laughed. "You'd be surprised how well the wine-making business was during the dry years. Your father was smart to have invested as he did, when he did. It didn't hurt that he went into business with a man who had no relatives or children. What do you think, son? Will you sell?"

Carlton paused, and Silvo suddenly felt uncomfortable. Something didn't feel right to him, but he wasn't sure what. He slowly tried to put his thoughts together. "This is quite a sum of money, Mr. Carlton," he said. "But an offer this large could surely benefit from more careful consideration and negotiation."

The smile quickly faded from the lawyer's face. "I'm sure you'd like to take more time, Mr. Salarino. Just know my client's offer has an expiration date."

Silvo wasn't much of a businessman by that point, but he still had an uncanny knack for sensing when he needed to turn an opportunity this way. For a second he panicked--he'd just dismissed Mr. Carlton's, and the thought of all those zeroes walking down the street with him made him feel weak--but soon enough he collected himself and put his head together with a Jewish friend he'd served with who had studied business and law.

Eventually the two worked out a counter offer for Carlton to consider. The sum of money was greater, but in return for the extra revenue, Mr. Carlton's client would make an investment in a new Salarino enterprise, and in return would control ten percent of the company. Silvo went on to buy out his uncle's general store, taking it over and moving the business to a better location and changing it from a general to a department store.

I'm sure that most of this explanation must seem silly to you now, especially if you've been to a shopping mall and seen the gigantic Salarino's department stores anchoring one end or another. Still, it's fascinating that what is now an international company with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue began when Silvo bargained his way out of a wine making business and opened a modest department store in New York.

This was the store Victor Salarino came home to find his family operating when he returned from his military service. Silvo and Mrs. Salarino lived upstairs, on the third floor of the building, and soon Vic joined them. He took up the business, helping Silvo organize the books, streamline ordering, and push merchandise. The influx of Italian-Americans produced plenty of loyal customers to pounce upon the Salarino's imported Italian suits, and soon they began carrying women's fashion as well. Eventually, Victor realized they needed to expand, and with the help of a few additional investors, they opened a second shop, and then a third, and then a fourth. Today, there are more than 600 stores worldwide.

Vic enjoyed running the business, but he also enjoyed being a young bachelor in New York. He had a little bit of money, and he made no efforts to hide that fact. He'd never had much money, in fact, and he didn't know at first how to handle himself.

Furthermore, he'd never had much luck with women. At least, not serious women. He was just a greasy Italian kid who sold cotton candy at Ebbetts Field before he left for the war. Money, however, seemed to help Victor with his pursuits. He could buy his way into classier joints, pay for real drinks instead of watered down junk, and pick up girls in his convertible.

The game, as Vic played it, was relatively simple: stake out a place where the women were good looking, find a girl who looked new, and impress her with the best smoke and mirrors that growing up in New York and having a little bit of money can buy. It worked most of the time. And the girls! Every day, it seemed, there was another busload of them dropped off in the middle of Times Square, all of them doe-eyed and lost and clueless about the city that threatened to swallow them whole.

And this, dear friends, is what Victor Salarino was doing one night many, many years ago when he found his way to the Washington Square Hotel, where he found one of the classiest looking girls he'd ever seen sitting alone--alone!--in the lobby, a girl by the name of Marilyn Edisto Coolidge.

How One Knows that it's July

The cicadas are waking me up in the mornings these days. I've stopped making a full pot of coffee, because by the time I'm awake and downstairs to drink it, the temperature outside has already pounded the top of my mercury thermometer on the deck, and slurping down a furnace--even a caffeinated furnace--is too much for me to bear.

I'll have a cup or two at the office, or so I tell myself. Jan O'Brien, the lovely woman who works at the post office counter below my little workshop, always has the coffee ready when I come by. I will pick up lunch for Jan once or twice a month (which really only entails walking over to Mary's and bringing it back to her), and somehow, that's enough for her to call it even in terms of providing me with coffee every morning, rain or shine. (Or sleet or gloom of night.)

Except for July, that is. This single month of the year is Jan's vacation time, the four weeks where she allows herself time off to go and travel the world. Jan's sister covers for her. She doesn't make me coffee.

I've known Jan for a good while now, certainly long before I resurrected the Confluence Spectator and began renting the second floor office above her counter. As a fresh out of college boy who was living pretty far away from his parents, I'd send letters home. My parents never liked talking on the phone. Dad usually managed a few words before he passed the phone to Mom. "Here's your mother" became our version of goodbye.

And of course I wrote letters to other friends, too, friends from college, my old professors, and people I'd met when I did a backpacking trip through the Green Mountains. I would hand write the letters, fold them carefully, and carry them in the back pocket of my blue jeans to the post office.

"Hello, sweetheart!" Jan would say every time I walked in. She said this the first time I walked in, decades ago. She said it to me the same way last week.

She sits on a stool behind the counter, taking envelopes, selling stamps, and chatting with anyone who walks in. She is, silver hair, wire frame glasses, glass bead jewelry and all, the spitting image of an anachronism. This is how Jan O'Brien appeared to me when I first met her, and this is how she looks today. Hello sweetheart, and then it's headfirst into whatever happens to be going on. She is not a gossip, nor is she a tattle. She is simply interested and interesting.

Jan has been around the world more times than I will ever travel in my lifetime. From her own telling it, she sat behind the post office counter long enough, watching with interest as packages arrived from all over the world, each one bearing a stamp or a marking from far away continents, and eventually enough was enough. She began saving her money--and her vacation time--and then she shoved off.

First, it was Ireland, home for Jan's ancestors and home to many of her dreams. Then to Bolivia. Then a string of visits to Asia: Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, and Korea. She has a fascinating story of crossing the DMZ and entering quite illegally into North Korea. Then hopscotching the Atlantic, back and forth, Chile and France, Venezuela and South Africa, Argentina and Israel.

The particular spring I began renting the office upstairs, Jan was preparing for a trip to Greece. Hello sweetheart, fine how are you, and then began a lovely back and forth of what she was learning from the guidebooks she'd purchased. Over coffee, she would tell me of the things she would like to see. A few weeks later, we began a primer on speaking Greek. She wanted the full immersion experience, and that meant speaking--even primitively--the language.

It was quite the vicarious experience, I'd say, hearing Jan's voice grow eager as each month passed, hearing her gain command of the new words she'd learned, seeing the small ways she prepared herself.

And then, July 1st, she was gone. Always July 1. There is something startling and yet utterly familiar about it. Every year I'll walk into the post office and feel a pit of fear jolt my stomach when I do not hear "Hello, sweetheart!" ring out. I try to hide my disappointment at her sister's perfectly polite "good morning."

This year Jan is off to Sweden. I asked her to bring me back collapsible furniture or meatballs--which ever is easier. The language lessons were quite funny after I showed her a video of the Swedish chef from the Muppet Show.

Even as I write this now from my second floor office and its view of Main Street, the children running with push-up ice cream pops, their mothers strolling slowly behind, it still feels too quiet, too different for my comfort. I am jealous of Jan, I envy her as she boards her trans-Atlantic flight, and yet I cannot help but wonder if this is the same feeling she gets every time I don't show up for work, off on my own trips to visit family or friends in far away towns.

Probably not. But this is how life is, how work and offices make for strange neighbors. How, come July, I have to make my own coffee and suffer three weeks of "good mornings." This is how one knows it's July. And how easy it is to feel excited for August.