Djelloul Marbrook

I used to sit next to my stepfather in his office doing my homework, answering the phone and occasionally making a call for him. I looked forward to this afternoon ritual at 215 East 19th Street in Manhattan.
It was our daily moment of companionability. He would use his big sterling silver fountain pen to sign checks, I would use an antique green Oliver typewriter, sometimes for homework, sometimes to bang out a poem.

When my stepfather was done with office work he would read Dante in the original Italian, or Shakespeare or Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam. He had very little formal education, but he was a prodigious autodidact, and it had served him well. We were surrounded not only by big showcases filled with tiger and polar bear rugs, the heads snarling through the glass, but by buildings he owned in the neighborhood. Taxidermy was my stepfather’s trade, but his money was based in real estate and his success in his unassailable and much appreciated integrity.

One day he put down his glasses and said, Call that suit and tell him I’m gonna break his face. I was used to him expecting me to read his mind, and most of the time I could. But this time I was stumped. I had never heard lawyers wearing expensive clothes called suits before. You know, the son of a bitch with the hair, he said. Yes, I knew the son of a bitch with the hair. He had filed a suit in behalf of a tenant who had done a great deal of damage to an apartment and then pretended it was that way when he moved in, something I personally knew to be untrue, since I helped maintain the apartments. Oh yeah, I know who you mean, I said. But then there was that part about breaking his face. I’ll tell him thank you for the letter and we’ll refer it to Frank. Frank was the family lawyer. My stepfather looked rather fondly at his little consiglieri and said, Yeah, something like that.

Now that I’m an old man I rather enjoy contemplating how much I don’t know. But as a younger man I pretended to know a great deal, and one of the things I pretended to know was a good suit. But the truth is I can’t tell an off-the-rack suit from a Brioni. Oh maybe if I took my glasses off and studied the material and the seams up close I could tell, but I’m not one of those people who can size up your suits and shoes at a glance. I’m told many men and women can, and they scare me. But I don’t think they ever scared my stepfather. He knew those suits were empty. He wasn’t a bit impressed.

(Photo: My stepfather, Dominick J. Guccione, in his taxidermy studio).

—DM