“Okay,” my father said, and belched. “Now we made it to high school.” He placed a finger on the pathway leading to the front doors. “This is where you need to study hard so you can go to college. A lot of wise guys think they can get to the buried treasure without finishing high school. Then they end up breaking their backs instead of using their brains, like your Uncle Joe and Uncle Sally Boy.”
“Did Uncle Joe and Uncle Sally Boy finish high school?”
“Forget them.” He looked at me and smirked. “You don’t wanna be like them. You listen to me.”
My father often had negative things to say about his brothers. Rather than close relatives, I got the feeling that he thought of them as outsiders. He sometimes referred to them as cafones: uncultured, old-country peasants who hadn’t quite adapted to America as he had. For me, this was both confusing and unsettling. In my eyes, Big Joe and Sally Boy were hardworking, down-to-earth guys who had always been nice to me. Hearing my father talk about his brothers like they were inferior made me think I shouldn’t like them.
“Okay, skipper,” my father called out, cupping a hand around the side of his mouth. “Batten down the hatches; I sees me some rough weather ahead!”
He moved his finger along the dotted line, following the course of a fourth ship through the rough waves that he’d sketched in the Sea of Success. As he did this, he made a noise that sounded like howling wind. “Thar she blows!” he hollered, his finger approaching the next island. On it was a picture of a graduation cap and a diploma neatly rolled up and tied with a ribbon. Just above that, the word College was printed in big letters.
“College,” my father said. “Bingo. We made it.”
“We made it!” I blurted. I was swept up in my father’s excitement but had no idea what college was outside of a destination on the map.
“College is the place you go after you finish high school,” my father said, pointing to the diploma. “If you don’t go to college, you can’t get to the buried treasure.”
“Did you go to college?”
“Yeah, but I had to go at night. During the day I worked two or three jobs to help support the family. I had to study long, long hours in the library just so I could keep up. Reading, reading, always reading.” He snapped his fingers. “I read anything I could get my hands on. Sometimes I’d be reading and studying so hard, I’d fall asleep right there in the library. A coupla times the guard had to wake me up. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Caruso,’” he said, lowering his voice to a respectful tone, “‘but the library is closing now.’”
As I listened, I imagined my father sitting at a big desk stacked with books, grabbing them one by one and reading them as fast as he could. Then I pictured myself doing the same thing, only I was devouring the books, reading them twice as fast, flinging them over my shoulder after I finished each volume.