America: Loved it and Left It

The Statistics are on the verge of becoming what demographers like to call meaningful. The Australian consulate is receiving over 10,000 inquiries a month from Americans interested in migrating to Australia. In 1970, there were 8000 a month. The actual rate of migration was about 3800 a year, but in 1971 close to 5500 Americans made the move. Over 22,000 moved to Canada and fewer, though no less significant numbers, moved to New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia. What is extraordinary is that many of those leaving are not radicals, exhausted or betrayed liberals nor young men determined not to face induction. They are hard-working, deeply conscientious and, most of all, fundamentally patriotic Americans. If these people think of themselves as nothing else, it is as members of President Nixon's Silent Majority. Charter members.

For some time now, Nick Caraturo has been planning to get himself and his family out of New York--Flushing, Long Island, to be precise--and settle someplace where his ten-year-old son can grow up safely. He and his wife didn't decide on Australia until she brought it up one evening as a joke and, before she knew what was happening, Nick went into the city to the consulate and picked up the booklets and pamphlets and application blanks and it was all set. Nick sold his thriving florist shop and went to work for somebody else. It was the first big step, one he took after a long period of figuring out inside himself something that had happened some time before.

"During the New York school strike in '68," he says, "the parents were called--I was called, in the morning--and told that they had broken into the school. And I went up there and I stood in front of the door. The Negro parents were in the school already, so I says to myself, 'Well, if they're in there, I'll make sure they don't come out.' The police arrived and they tried to calm everybody down. And this black"--Nick hesitates, looks at his wife, Gloria, and his mother-in-law, who are listening to him tell what happened, and then takes a small breath and says it--"bastard opened the door and says to me, 'Heh, heh, you white pig.' I took a tire iron and I wanted to smash his brains in, because there ain't nobody on the face of this earth can call me a pig. I'm as good as him, if not better. I work for a living. And I saw them parade their children into school as if to say, 'Now I'm better than you'; and I think that really hit me."

Nick's probity as he relates the violent instincts that seized him does not seem incongruous. His tone is measured and he chooses his words with such care that his thoughts are expressed in complete sentences with rare self-interruptions. He is 37 years old, a large, barrel-chested man, and likes to wear colorful shirts open at the neck and down a few buttons. Though hefty, he doesn't exude an unpleasant hairy-chested masculinity. He carries his weight well, moving with a balanced gait that makes his solid arms swing lightly, as if attached to his wide upper body by well-oiled ball bearings, the whole thing sitting on a smallish waist, borne with that measured looseness that implies agility and physical confidence. As he speaks, he is particularly careful to make his feelings clear, so that you come to see where and exactly how he is prejudiced, a thing he admits readily and candidly. Whenever he grows excited, or when the point he is making is particularly important to him, he has a tendency to stammer a bit, as if the effort of getting that one particular thought exactly right is gripping him somewhere inside, forcing him to push it out with almost visible physical effort. Nick Caraturo has worked it out of himself so that you can make no mistake about what you are hearing and, in hearing it, will really see him. There are only two things to grasp, really: the depth of his feeling and love for America and the reason he is leaving it forever and taking his family to Australia.

"What's happening in the United States," Nick says, "is that all our traditions, all our accepted customs are being torn down one at a time. Little by little. You can no longer believe in the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. This is what it's boiling down to, that George Washington didn't actually chop down the tree; the whole tale is fictitious."

Gloria, listening carefully, with just the barest suggestion of how much this actually upsets her, says, "Everything is becoming so literal." She is a school teacher and taught at P. S. 201, five minutes from home. In the years since 1957, when she was graduated from Queens College with a B. A., she has taught kindergarten, first and second grades. At 34, she has a soft, ageless appearance, with an almost chubby face that belies an intelligence and a quickness in her searching eyes; there is an air of acquiescence about her that, at first, makes it seem as if she lives to defer to whatever Nick says. Her years as a teacher have given her not so much a sense of deference as patience; she knows from her experience with children that the first thing she must do is be a good listener. The truth is that she lives only for her family--for her husband, Nick, her only child, Nick, Jr., and her widowed mother, Mrs. Ray Oskowsky. "I think," Gloria says simply, "the main reason we're leaving is for our son. I think if it was just the two of us, we'd stay and fight a little bit more."

"I'd stay," Nick interjects. It is the first suggestion of his fierce and genuine devotion to that personal vision of America that is being shattered. It is a many-faceted, cumulative effect that has now finally prompted him to cut all ties with his homeland. For a long time, the only thing Nick and Gloria wanted to do was get the hell out of New York. "We were thinking of Arizona, California--"

"The Southwest," Gloria says.

"And then," Nick goes on, "they had all that trouble in Watts, and I said, 'Well, that's it. I'm not going from the frying pan into the fire.' " Nick's frying pan is just over the horizon, across the Triborough Bridge, which takes him into Manhattan, where people are going out of their minds just getting from one day to the next and where the mayor, as far as Nick is concerned, "has those people so completely fooled." Nick knew it was going to get worse even before that one summer night when some of the restless and angry dwellers of East Harlem wandered down Manhattan's Third Avenue to let the folks downtown know that their sanctuary had insecure borders; they busted a few store windows, grabbed a few suits and a couple of TV sets out of a couple of storefronts and kicked over a lot of garbage cans. The police effectively contained that raid at 103rd Street, but for days after, rumors persisted about more such "invasions," but no one seemed to be doing anything about it. That kind of response was already painfully familiar to Nick; it was a symptom he understood.

"The people who made up the Constitution," he says, his hands framing something small but substantial, "had one thing in mind; and they keep changing the interpretation of that Constitution, until finally it's blown completely out of proportion. I mean, it's ... gone. It's of absolutely no value anymore. If they have a liberal on the Supreme Court, well, he interprets it as a liberal. You have a conservative, he interprets it as a conservative." He heaves a sigh of disgust. "And it's always appeasement, appeasement, appeasement. What the hell are they appeasing? Twelve percent of the population ... and they have to rule the country?

"I picked up the newspaper," Nick says, "when they had the Jersey riots. People were walking out of a store with a TV set. If it was me, I'd end up in jail so goddamn fast it'd make your head spin, but they--pictures and everything--they just walked away with it, and that's it. That was all. Nobody ever prosecuted them." It actually makes him grin, this crazy image of those happy-go-lucky looters, a picture that instantly froze itself into the sensibilities of millions of Americans. With his large face, a mustache and a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard, Nick's girth and stance make him quite unexpectedly look like a swarthy Peter Ustinov, but without Ustinov's puckish sparkle in the eyes. In Nick there is, instead, a directness and sincerity; nothing really lies hidden in the depths of his dark eyes. "You have to feel sorry for them," he says, grin gone, his tone mocking his own rhetoric, "pity them. Who felt sorry for us when we wanted something? There was nobody there." He looks around and then, with such calm that it is, at first, more of a self-description than the promise he intends, says, "I have fought with guns before and, if I have to, by God, I'll fight again. For now, I'll leave, until my boy is old enough to do his own thinking without anybody else thinking for him." It is a strange statement, almost. paradoxically reasonable, so when he adds, "If anybody's going to think for him, I'll think for him," the conclusion is that, ah, well, yes, this is what he means. It isn't. Much later he will come back to it. For the moment, however, the thing that hangs in the air almost palpably is his preparedness to fight. But alone. "I won't subject my family to it," he says. "Me, I don't care what happens to me. I can handle myself. I can handle a rifle, a pistol or a shotgun, if that's what they want. And my hands and my feet."

This constant reference to "them" has become a leitmotiv in the daily conversations of middle America. It means black people, all of them. When a city dweller says, "They are getting it all," he means that being an urban middle-class white American with a high school education means nothing anymore, or, rather, it means you are being disenfranchised because society--the irony being that if you think about it, you see that you are society--is "giving in" to every demand a black man makes. And when the demands are not met, it seems, at least to a man like Nick Caraturo, that what the black man wants is a fight. "It seems that way," Nick says with genuine reluctance. "They're blowing up everything. So, if that's what they want, I'll do it; but I'll leave my family in Australia." Much as he loves and is devoted to his wife, by "family" Nick means his son. "He's the only one I have," he says. "I mean, my wife can't have any more, and that's it, so he has to do. If I could have more, may be it would be a different story. I don't know." He thinks a moment and laughs, half to himself. "I might've left earlier.... If I have to, I'll leave them in Australia and I'll come back and fight." He cares that much, and even more. "I even had thought of joining a radical organization: the John Birch Society, or the Minutemen, or whatever it is. I mean, this is the way I feel."

At this point, either because her own views are much broader or because she knows Nick is not hopelessly narrow, Gloria makes a small gesture and says, "There are other reasons besides the Negro problem why we're going."

Nick nods agreement but is too deeply into it to forsake making at least one last point. "I can't see twenty-five percent of my taxes being used on welfare when the streets have to be cleaned. The parks are horrible. These people are around there, they can work; let them go out and clean the streets, pick the papers up in the park--anything. But they're paying them to do absolutely nothing.

"I worked hard all my life," he says earnestly, "and I can't see anybody else getting something for nothing when I worked. There were days when I wanted to go play football, on the high school team, or do track and field, and I had to work; I had to put my hours in, because if I didn't work, I didn't eat. Nobody ever handed me a damn thing on a silver platter. I don't have ten or twelve children and drawing two thousand a month from the city of New York. We had it rough. You had a piece of bread with olive oil for lunch. I can remember those days. This was when I was a kid, living in Brooklyn, in the late Thirties, and my father worked on the WPA and also in the florist's to make ends meet. I remember it; the old Europeans were too goddamn proud to get anything for nothing."

What Nick managed to build and acquire over the years stands as an impressive inventory of those tangible achievements that every American not only recognizes but learns to respect as the everyday hallmarks of middle-class success. To begin with, there's the house in Queens. Not too long ago, Queens was an attractive, quiet community, many of its streets lined with white clapboard houses dating back to the 19th Century. When construction began for the 1939 New York World's Fair, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge and many miles of connecting highways were built to ease and encourage visitors to Flushing Meadow, site of the fair. The thinking was that after the fair, all the new accesses to that part of New York would spur a boom. World War Two stopped that, and it was not until 1946 that the borough's steady and uninterrupted growth began. The Caraturos' neighborhood has long been white and middle class, made up of two-family houses. Nearby, there's a golf course and the cemetery that gave Nick so much of his business all the years he ran his large flower shop, Nick Caraturo, Florist, next door to his house.

Nick and his family live upstairs in the two-story house. Downstairs, there's a three-room apartment, where Gloria's mother and late father lived. Upstairs, there are three bedrooms, a large L-shaped living room, a dining area and a very modern kitchen outfitted with a dishwasher, a frost-free refrigerator, a washing machine-drier, a toaster, an iron, an electric knife, an electric can opener and a blender. In the bathroom there's an electric massager, and there are electric blankets on the beds. There is also a color-television set and a sophisticated stereo rig. The working fireplace and Gloria's piano are not necessarily part of this kind of list, but Nick is particularly proud that they own both. Until they were sold, there were three cars in the family: Gloria's mother had a late-model Le Mans, Nick and Gloria drove a 1964 Tempest. For business, Nick had a 1967 Chevrolet van.

Parting with the stereo rig hurt. "I hated to sell it," Nick says. Everything in the house has already been sold; most will be left right where it is when the Caraturos walk out the door for the last time. "I had built it up over the years," Nick explains. "Every two or three years you'd change the amplifier, change the tuner, change the speakers, you know." Nick and Gloria have lived in the house since it was built four and a half years ago.

Nick, Jr.'s room is typical of every American boy's sanctum sanctorum, its walls covered with photographs of baseball and football players, a large picture of an elephant captioned I Work for Peanuts, which his father gave him, and a map of the world marked to show where Nick, Sr., had been on his world cruise when he was in the U. S. Navy.

He joined in 1952. "I was eighteen years old and I was going in because I thought it was right. My father said to me, 'I don't want you to go! But if you're going to go, don't disgrace the name. Don't ever drag your name in the mud.' To me, this is what America should be. Not that you're proud that you have a boy who is in Canada to avoid the draft. This is pride?" Nick was in for four years, an aviation boatswain's mate, second class, working on aircraft carriers with catapult and arresting gear. And he saw the world. "Complete," as he puts it. "The only place I haven't been is South America, but other than that, I've been to every continent." Including Australia. "I was flying in a plane taking engine parts to Indonesia, and we had a problem in one of the engines, our number-three engine--the oil supercharger drained out--and we had to land in Australia for repairs." He spent 48 hours there.

His travels also took him all over Europe; there he had more time to see the sights, some of which made a profound impression on him. "You often read how people live," he explains, "but until you actually see it, you can't believe it. In school, as a child, I read about the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Colosseum. ... And you stand there, in the middle of it, and you say, 'Me, from Flushing, New York, I can stand here in a building that is five thousand years old.' You feel--I don't know--you feel ... small, compared to it. And then you find out that you really aren't small. You are as big as you want to be." Nick visited his mother's ancestral village of Nola, 20 miles outside Naples. "I'm the only one they'd seen in over fifty years from the family that came to America. I spent five days there with them and believe me, it was out of this world. These people are the real salt of the earth." Nick moves his body unconsciously as he recalls the warmth extended to him, how he was brought immediately back into the family's loving embrace. It was a strange sensation, in a way, because, as (continued on page 172)Loved it and Left It(continued from page 138) he explains, "I felt that I was an American with them." It was a feeling that stayed with him wherever he went. "I felt," he says, hoping it won't sound immoderate or cliché-ridden, "that I represented more an idea or a feeling--a promise--rather than a place. I tried not to behave like the Great American Slob, throwing money around, being boisterous. I traveled and I took advantage of those travels to educate myself a little."

The Caraturo side of the family came to America in the 1880s. "My grandfather on my father's side was the first Caraturo born here," Nick says. It was he who started the family in the florist trade. He opened a shop in Brooklyn, on Withers Street, where it still stands, now run by Nick's uncle. His mother's father came over in 1902 . "He was a stonecutter from Naples and he made tombstones. He owned a candy store in England for three years, and then he came to America and he got married. My mother was born in 1905, in Brooklyn. We retained a lot of the customs, like language. I mean, the Italian language was always spoken in our house, yet my grandmother could speak Yiddish and Polish as well as--if not better than--she spoke Italian. So we knew all of each other's traditions. This was on Withers, between Union and Lorimer. It's an old Italian neighborhood, where they have the feast every year of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. I was baptized in that church. I've been back and the neighborhood hasn't changed much. The people took pride in knowing that a house was theirs. Rather than move out, they renovated, fixed it up; I won't say it brings a neighborhood up, but it prevents it from going down. They had pride in it, they had pride in themselves. And this is the thing I mean: They don't want anything for nothing. That's the way they are. Whether they be Italian, Polish or Irish, Jewish--anything."

In 1946, Nick's father decided to open his own flower shop in Flushing. Nick was 12 at the time. "When my father opened in October 1946, we were in the hole about thirty thousand dollars." The family had already left Brooklyn and moved to Queens in 1938 or 1939, Nick isn't quite sure. "When my father bought the house in Flushing, he bought it from the bank, Queens County Savings Bank; he paid thirty-two hundred dollars for it. He put two hundred dollars down and wanted a mortgage for three thousand. They gave him the mortgage. The day he signed for the title to the house, he lost his job. He went to the bank and told them, 'Now, look, I can't take the house. I lost my job.' They told him, 'Mr. Caraturo, you take the house, live in the house, don't pay us the mortgage until you get a job'--I think he paid something like twenty-eight dollars a month, and they told him, 'Even if it takes a year, don't worry.' So he then landed a job at Dugan Brothers, as a part-time driver at night, tractor trailers. So at that time, he opened a little greenhouse in Flushing, where my grandfather had the monument yard, and I would say I was about five years old, and when he opened that little greenhouse, it cost him a hundred and fifty dollars to build it. I'll never forget it. He built the little greenhouse in 1939 or 1940--this was on the opposite side of the cemetery, where Francis Lewis High School is now--and that's how we started." When Nick's father opened his own shop, Nick's life was permanently affected, as if some judgment had been passed that he accepted then and that he would come to understand and live by as the years passed. "From 1946 on, I couldn't do a damn thing but work there. As long as the sun was high, we worked. When it got dark, we stopped."

Gloria's family is Polish-Russian. "My parents were from Russia," her mother explains. "Oskowsky is a Polish name. We've always lived together in two-family homes. Actually, we've always lived together, from the day Gloria got married. My husband was born in Poland but came here as a young boy and went to school here. He was a tailor in the Garment District." She pauses to smile, a little wistful, a little proud. "He would've loved to have talked to you on political things, or anything like that. He was just that type. A very smart person on political ideas. He would have had a lot to say to you. Even more than Nick said to you." Despite this unfulfillable promise, from Gloria's and her mother's sketchy descriptions of his life, David Oskowsky seems never to have given much thought to the way he lived in the U. S. He lived here and there, vacationing with his wife in one place or another and doing his work with what seems now to have been a modest acceptance of his circumstances. He was 14 years old when he came, and seems never to have made any comparisons with the life he left behind in Poland. What his wife remembers of him is that "his favorite way of reading was the Times; he's always read the better paper. He thought the News was junk. He said if anybody can read, why can't they read the Times? He was a quiet person, a very reserved type of person." The image is vague, a suggestion of smallness--his widow is short--something patient and temperate coming out, yet a firmness about those basic intangibles that immigrants, particularly Jewish immigrants, have nurtured for centuries. He did come with nothing, he did have a trade and he did better himself. His only child, Gloria, was graduated from Queens College and became a teacher. Not only that but she then took an additional 30 credits, which, save for writing a thesis, completed the requirements for a master's degree. She married a devoted, personable, hard-working man and gave birth to one son, the only child she would ever have. Whatever the man's reservations, David Oskowsky had seen the establishment of a solid family base, something to come home to knowing it would receive him with familial warmth and the comforts America bestowed on all who worked hard and long.

Nick Caraturo, Florist, grew until it was grossing $40,000 to $50,000 a year. Every morning at five, Nick would rise and drive to the city markets to buy flowers. He would return by seven and go upstairs to have a cup of coffee while Gloria got ready to leave for school. By eight she would be gone and "I'd go down to the store and all the flowers would have to be cut, cleaned and put in water and arranged in the icebox. After that, I'd go outside, water the greenhouses"--there was approximately 3500 square feet of greenhouse space, where Nick grew geraniums, begonias, coleus, salvia, chrysanthemums, hyacinths, tulips. "We grew almost all our pot plants ourselves; the annuals, perennials. And vegetable plants. It was a hard proposition. Anyway, then I'd fill orders for the day, and I'd deliver them. By that time, it would be about five o'clock. I'd go upstairs and I'd eat, then I'd come back down and work in the store until nine or ten."

"He was working seven days a week," Gloria picks up. "I was working five days a week teaching, and then on Saturday and Sunday I'd help him, and on holidays, of course. It was his business that kept us going, so on my Christmas holidays I was helping in the store, and on Easter holidays. So, virtually, we were both working seven days a week and making loads of money." She says the word loads with a slight lift in her voice, a small feminine emphasis to show that even for her, modest and reserved as she is, it was definitely a lot of money. "But never any time to enjoy it. Never any space, never any relaxation. It was just a matter of buying things with the money--"

Nick has been listening and interrupts. "Material things. What good are material things? You know, if you can't enjoy them, they have no value." Nick's boat, for example, a 16-foot fiberglass runabout. "We could hardly use it."

"We used it only one summer," Gloria says.

"Yeah," Nick says. "I had another one before that, for about three years, and at that time I decided, the hell with everybody! I closed the store on a Wednesday and I took off all day Wednesday during July and August. But that was the only way I could actually enjoy the boat. This was '67 and '68; '69 I sold the business, because we had decided to get out ... and I had bought another boat a little before that and I didn't have time to enjoy it. One day a week, and the water was as bad as the highways. You had to leave early in the morning to get out there, then you had to be in early to beat the traffic on the road. I said, 'That's it! I'm beating my head on a wall now!' "

"You see," Gloria points out quietly, "he's giving you the ideal situation when he says he took off on Wednesdays, but he didn't tell you that if he had gotten funeral work or orders on Tuesday for Wednesday, he couldn't take off. It worked out when he did take off on Wednesday and people called for an order and he wasn't in, they were quite perturbed."

Nick bursts out, "They were annoyed because I took time off to relax!"

Certainly, by itself this was just one small nagging detail. Yet on a larger scale, it was part of that cumulative effect, life accelerating as if propelled by its own relentless determination not simply to evolve but to uproot, shake up. Wherever Nick looked, he could feel it happening. "This neighborhood," he explains about the Pomonok area of Flushing where they live, "it was old"--he qualifies that--"forty years old ... people had bought houses here, lived here and died here. They had a different outlook than their children. Their children are more liberal, they aren't as conscious of custom or tradition, and that caused a change in the neighborhood. And then, of course, the liberal attitudes of people themselves; the introduction of the pill caused a more liberal attitude among women and you find they were able to be more promiscuous because of it and they would lose all discretion, they wouldn't be as discreet about certain things. Whether this is good or bad, I don't know." The words custom and tradition mean more to Nick than he can say. To embrace their substance means to be able to remember who he and what you are, no matter when; it means you never forget--never give in to shame and pretend it wasn't that way--where you came from. It means your survival counts for something and your having survived should count with everybody else, too. It is all, finally, the stuff of memories, a mixture of folk humor and nostalgia that never quite frees itself of certain harsh realities. Such as summers in Brooklyn when Nick was a kid. "It was hot," he says undramatically. "It was dirty. Our vacation was to sleep out on the fire escape."

What is happening, Nick believes, is that Americans are losing their sense of self. "They're losing their identity, as individuals." And what's tearing us apart, he says, is "the drive for material things. I think the advertising has keyed us up to own a new car every year, own a new TV set every year; your old clothes are outmoded; if you use this one particular tooth paste, your teeth will always be white and all the girls will flock around you; if you use an after-shave lotion, it's appealing.... It's all sex-oriented. To me, there's nothing wrong with sex. I enjoy it. I think it's the greatest thing that ever happened to man, but they're all keyed for you to spend money. So you work more, to spend more. But are you really enjoying it?"

"You're not," Gloria says.

Nick ponders this a moment and then gives a little smile. "I was told by my wife, by friends of mine, that I was born a hundred years too late. The easy life I really don't enjoy. I'm an outdoorsman. I enjoy every sport. My wife enjoys them a bit, as long as the air is comfortable; it can be cool, but not too hot, and clean. Then she's fine. In New York this summer, she was in the house sixteen days straight because the air outside is horrible. I've seen her walk outside, be outside about five minutes, and tears were running out of her eyes. She wasn't crying, just the air was so goddamn bad, and it made her tear, that's all. So she had the air conditioners on and she stayed in the house, and that was it. We have four air conditioner--that is, four upstairs--and two downstairs. I smoke, but my wife doesn't, and her lungs were as bad as mine, only because of the pollution in the air. When I have to go out fishing and they tell me I can't bring the fish home to eat them because the water is polluted, where's the sport? Where's the enjoyment? The enjoyment is going out, catching a fish, 'then bringing him home and eating him; this is the full enjoyment . What pleasure is it to land a fish that you can't eat? What the hell is it, then? The waters are so damn polluted...." He shakes his head. "The last good day of fishing I had was about three years ago, when we went up to the east branch of the Ausable on the Fourth of July."

"The neighborhood is changing," Gloria says, bringing it home once more. "Pomonok has always been integrated but had been more of a Jewish section. In later years, we were getting more Greek people, more Italians, more Spanish"--which in New York inevitably means Puerto Ricans. "We were getting more non-English-speaking children. And it wasn't so much of a problem with the children in the kindergarten; but with their parents, there was this lack of communication, so that I couldn't really get to speak to them as readily as I could with, of course, the English-speaking parents." Not that these changes had ever produced any kind of violence. "There was no problem as far as the blacks and whites getting along together," Gloria says, "until this strike that we had." It was in the autumn of 1968, the result of bitter differences between the United Federation of Teachers and Mayor Lindsay over the question of decentralization. The strike lasted, on and off, for 36 of the term's first 48 days. "The thing was that the blacks felt that the teachers were closing the school and thus discriminating against them, whereas the strike was not because of them. And the community was completely divided. It was just terrible." The trouble that finally erupted had been brewing for a long time, brought about by changes that Gloria could see happening, even though they hadn't touched her personally. "I had the kindergarten." she explains, "and there were no bused-in children for the kindergarten"--Nick, listening, starts to nod slowly but emphatically, because now, as far a s he is concerned, we are getting to the heart of the matter--"but in terms of the upper school grades, things were changing, because we had busing from South Jamaica. The upper-grade teachers would tell me that there was a division in the class between the children coming from South Jamaica and children living here; not so much a division of black and white but that the children from South Jamaica sort of felt apart--were apart--because the parents of the children in Pomonok were very much upset about having those children bused in, and of course the kids picked it up from their parents." The strike, then, when it came, simply brought all the hidden resentments out into the open, resentments that Gloria, spending so much of her time with the children, saw as having been nurtured by the parents. "What was happening"--during the strike--"was that the black teachers and their followers were breaking into the schools and opening them up, sort of wildcat. It divided the community very badly. And it took many months--if ever--to heal the wounds between people that had been friends--"

For years," Nick finishes for her.

"It was very sad," Gloria continues, "that blacks and whites alike who had been friends and living together, and their children playing together, were very badly divided. I think the black militants in the area aroused the nonmilitant blacks and sort of intimidated them into dividing themselves away, even though they may not have wanted to. This is the impression that we got. Blacks had been friends with whites for years and now they were just looking the other way. It was a terrible time and, as I say, I don't know if this was ever quite completely healed."

If there was a moment in time that Nick knows meant the beginning of everything he feels is happening now--happening to his neighborhood as an isolated example of something gripping the whole country--at was the construction in 1952 of a lower-middle-income integrated housing project. "That's when it started," he says with certainty. "They built that in 1952, the year I went in the Navy, and I think it changed the neighborhood, because we started having problems with teenagers: fights, dope, gambling."

Gloria, who has been listening intently, looks at Nick and asks, "Could this just have been the general trend of the city?"

"I don't think so," he says.

"Because," she goes on, "if you're talking about the integration causing the problems...." She stops and then says, "Is that what you think it is?"

"Yes," Nick says without hesitation. "Well, I'm prejudiced as it is...."

"Well ..." Gloria goes on to explain what she was driving at, "about a mile up from us, there was a large Negro section that had been there for years and ye--" Her emphatic tone is suddenly picked up by Nick.

"Fifty, sixty years," he says pointedly, unexpected animation giving him a particularly earnest expression. "They were the old squatters. And they built homes--they lived there--and they never bothered a soul." The word hangs in the air for a small moment, the irony of its implication dwarfed by what Nick says next. "I went to high school with Godfrey Cambridge; he and I went to Flushing High School together, and there was never any problem about him being a Negro and I was white. It was unheard of as far as we were concerned. We only became aware of i t through the NAACP, CORE and all the other organizations. Now, I don't feel that New York ever had a problem until these organizations started to come into prominence, because, as I say, New Yorkers are people that blend in, they have been exposed to all nationalities, all races all creeds, and there was never any problem until they started with the equality in schools for this and that and the other thing. I think their approach to it was wrong. If they would have started the integration a t the lowest possible level, in the kindergartens only--just there--why, in twelve years those children would be graduating from high school and you would have gradually integrated all the schools. But no: They had to drive a point, with two of them going to Ole Miss and two of them going to this high school; these people have built up a resentment over the years, and you can't change it overnight. It took a hundred and fifty years to build it into them; you can't destroy it in one year. It's going to take two, three, four generations to change it. And now, when they've started using force to change it--that's not for me."

What Nick believes fervently is that people should retain the right to change the course and quality of their own lives and the lives of their children. This seems no longer possible, not even when it comes to God. "The decision was wrong," Gloria says about the Supreme Court ruling regarding prayers in schools. "I think it was almost a reaffirmation of the kind of apathy that was coming--or that had already come. I didn't see anything wrong with moral or religious feeling in the school."

"If you don't want to pray," Nick observes, "no one asked you to pray. It's up to you."

"Why," Gloria demands, "should they tell the parents who want it that they cannot have it?"

"If they do that," Nick adds, "then they have to take In God We Trust off of all the coins, all the bills; in the courts, they'd have to do the same thing, eliminate God from everything. You can't swear on a Bible anymore--the oath. If you're going to be consistent, you have to do it all the way." He frowns darkly. "They bend the law to suit either you or I, they have this flexibility so that it isn't worth a damn. Everything now is being torn down, so that you no longer believe in it, and what's happening is people are no longer believing in America. The prayers in school, the equality, women's lib--you can run the gamut--everything that we were ever taught to believe in is being torn down. The war in Vietnam: I agree, we don't belong there; but we're there. Did we belong in Korea? We didn't belong in Korea, yet you didn't have any of the feelings then that you have now. We don't belong in Vietnam, but, by God, if you're there, do a good job, be proud of yourself, have your family proud of you, do the best job you can possibly do, and maybe it'll be over sooner. Who knows?"

"To come down to the simplest level," Gloria says, "my son parked his bicycle in front of the house to come and get a drink of water and when he went back it was stolen." She pauses to see if she has made the connection clear, that what she and Nick are talking about is all the same thing, because when the country as a whole is falling apart, it's not at all shocking to experience disregard for the law right in front of your home. "It's knowing that what belongs to you in front of your own house is not safe. Which is kind of frightening."

Even more terrifying was the discovery during the past year that ten- and eleven-year-olds in the neighborhood were being stopped and offered a wide variety of narcotics. It never happened to Nick, Jr., but it did happen to the older children of people Nick and Gloria knew well. "Luckily," Gloria says, "their mother was aware of what was happening and she sent them down to the Phoenix House.

"I've seen thirteen-year-old main-liners," Nick observes, and then can only shake his head.

"It made no difference if they were poor or rich, or black or white," Gloria explains almost innocently. "It was just--everywhere. That's what frightens me: While the drug problem was supposedly confined to the uneducated, illiterate or semiliterate, those who didn't know any better, then you could say that these people have 'problems' and if they were 'educated' to the use of ... so forth and so on. But once it reached Great Neck and the parents were saying, 'Oh, no, not my children,' and then it was in Bayside.... And what all these kids wanted was a place to go, and there was no place; their parents had a lot of money to give them, for new cars, but no money for drug centers; this is kind of sick. There's something wrong." She pauses and then adds, "It was so obvious; you couldn't hide it any longer."

When homes in the neighborhood began being broken into--whether or not it was being done by junkies looking for fix money was never determined--and Nick had to drive his mother down to Florida, Gloria slept with a loaded gun under her bed. "A loaded shotgun," Nick says. "She knows how to use it."

"With the handle--would you call it the handle?--sticking out so I could just roll over and pick it up." Gloria smiles wanly, as if to suggest that even having the gun inches away did not necessarily make her feel better.

For Nick, on the other hand, owning and handling guns is a big part of his life. "I belong to a club, the College Point Rod and Gun Club, where I can fire indoors, once a week in the evenings." Nick owns an impressive range of weapons: a Mannlicher .30-06, a long-range .22-250, a 7mm Magnum, a 6mm Remington, three shotguns, three pistols, an antique rifle and several more. At the club, he was allowed to fire only a pistol or a .22 rifle. "We tried to have rifle ranges built indoors," he recalls, "but the ordinances of the city of New York--it's a joke! It's an abomination. And then they have the long-arm registration of guns. I don't think they have the right to know how many rifles I have, or shotguns. All of my firearms are legal, every one of them is registered. What they could do, they could register me as an owner of firearms, but to know exactly what I have, I don't like it. Because any time they want, they can walk into my house and say, 'Mr. Caraturo, you own this, this, this, this and this' "--he is running a finger down an imaginary list--"and that's it. And that's what happened in Germany, that's what happened in Russia, that's what happened in Italy: They knew exactly who had the firearms and exactly what they had. Nobody is allowed to disarm me. No one. I have committed no crimes in my life; I do a little hunting and whatever I kill, I eat. I do target shooting, because the precision of it appeals to me." As far as registration preventing another Kennedy assassination, Nick thinks it's all a pipe dream. "All legal sportsmen register their guns. I'm a life member of the National Rifle Association and"--he hesitates once again, knowing all this has been said and heard before, but he believes it firmly--"the day that they can get all the criminals to register their guns, then mine should be registered also. But if they take them away from all the sportsmen, all the clubs, the organizations, the criminals are still going to have them."

This is part of that logic, that expression of common sense Nick Caraturo has always understood and respected. It should apply to everything; it seems now to apply to nothing. The whole feeling of urban life and the attitude of people who should be enforcing the law and seeing to it that decent people get their fair shake, all of it has metamorphosed so that a man like Nick Caraturo, who has worked hard all his life and has never asked anyone for any kind of handout, is being threatened from all sides by people who refuse to live by the rules. "They're pushing their ideas on politics, on socioeconomic conditions, and they aren't doing it in a normal manner. For instance, the SDS and the Weathermen; I mean, these people want to fool with guns, dynamite.... If I had one of them here, I would actually beat him into a pulp, because there's absolutely no reason in the world to blow up buildings, have people endangered--for what? Granted that the United States was built on revolution and contrary to law--breaking the law--but we have a workable system and they're tearing it down. They're imposing fears on people that they have no right to do. People are afraid to go to work; they don't know if their building will be blown up. I mean, is this fair to everyone? I don't think they have the right."

Nick Caraturo used to know and be able to see where everything had come from, where it was at any given moment and--almost more important than anything else, because it offered the average citizen an internal, spiritual sense of security--where it was all going. All that seems gone, torn to shreds and burned in the fires of too many riots, too many protests, too many demonstrations. As for demonstrators, political or otherwise, he says, "I'll meet any one of them anywhere in the world on a track field, on a pistol range or rifle range, and let's see how good they are." It is, finally, the ultimate expression of the American ethic; this was the justice that made America great. "They want to fool with dynamite," Nick says. "It isn't anything to fool around with. I know. I reload my own ammunition. I strive for accuracy. And I think there are a lot of people that feel the same way I do: If they want to prove that they're superior, I'll do it on any field in the world, in any sport they want. They want to go in the ring and box, I'll box them in the ring. I'd rather have it that way, where it's completely organized, an individual against an individual, and we'll go on the field and do it that way. Any way they want to do it. But I won't have anybody behind my neck!"

After this, there is nothing left to say. It is late and there are only a few days left. Outside, away from Gloria and her mother, Nick looks up at the metallic orange-dark night of the city sky. He and Gloria have lain awake so many nights wondering aloud whether their decision was right. Every time they think of their son, they know it is absolutely right. "I'll come back and fight, if I have to," Nick says quietly, "but my kid--I don't want that for him." He grows even more reflective and then says, "I grew up with my prejudices. You know: 'Nigger bastard,' 'Jew bastard,' but I don't want any of that for him. I want him to grow up clean, so I figure the only way is to get out where he won't be getting all that kind of stuff all the time."

• • •

The day before their departure, a van came to pick up the things being shipped to Australia. There wasn't much: some glasses Gloria had bought Nick shortly after they were married, two vases of Nick's that had been handed down from grandfather to father to son, a mirror belonging to Gloria's mother, Nick, Jr.'s Sting-Ray bicycle 'and his baseball cards, and all of Nick's guns. Watching the things go, Gloria looks around at the furniture that is staying because the new owner of the house bought it all, and says, "When we sold our car and canceled the insurance, and we started getting rid of things, we found that we lived comfortably without so many things; it was a very strange feeling and it made us realize even more that we didn't need these things to be happy." The strange perspective lent them by their impending departure made them suddenly see their closest friends in a new and somewhat distressing light. "Before we decided to go, life was not happy, but- w e didn't know why," Gloria explains, "until we started realizing all these things, and then we looked at our friends and we saw our friends were under tensions that we had never realized, because we had never realized that we were under these tensions. Most of our close friends are very sad that we're leaving. And we aren't sad at all. It's a very peculiar feeling. We're thrilled that we're going, yet they're very unhappy to be losing us. And that feeling, to know we're going to be missed-- And yet we've got such a clear feeling that this is the right thing to do and it's such a good thing."

As for the rest of America and the rigors of their existence, Nick says, "How many slobs would fight it? They just trudge along. They have the blinders on."

"I think," Gloria says guardedly, "people are just--dumb. They're beaten; they just give in."

"They're completely gone," Nick says, "and they just go trudging along. I'm not. I'm not going to trudge along carrying somebody else on my back."

Eight close friends in three cars took the Caraturos to Kennedy airport on a Friday in September. Nick went off with one of them to have one last drink. There wasn't a damn thing left to talk about--Nick had faced this sad truth too many times in the past weeks to try to revive fallen spirits and flagging conversations; he and Gloria were thinking Australia and their friends were living America--so they just had a drink and stared out the big windows and watched the ungainly-looking jumbo jets glide slowly in over the tops of buildings. Nick's cousin suddenly appeared and yelled, "Come on! The plane's going to leave!" Nick ran to where his hand baggage was, grabbed it and started off after the rest of his family. Something made him stop and turn around. There were his closest and dearest friends in the whole world watching him go. They were all crying. He dropped his bags and rushed back to where they stood, enfolding each in one last embrace. Then he turned, retrieved his things and rushed onto the plane.

"That was it," he said a few days later. " I closed the book. As far as I was concerned, that ended the United States for me."