Elizabeth Street (31 page)

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1909

There was nothing else for her to pursue, so Giovanna watched Leo’s apartment from the corner of Hester and Mulberry day and night. She had become so accustomed to not seeing him that she nearly missed him when he stepped out of the door. Leo looked up and down the street before heading west away from Giovanna.

In three short blocks he was on Lafayette and then turned left to the Canal Street Station of the underground railway. Keeping her distance, she saw him descend the stairs to the uptown platform. Hundreds of people mobbed the station, and Giovanna was reminded that the big American Hudson-Fulton parade was scheduled at one o’clock on Fifth Avenue.

Fumbling for change, she got a ticket and waited at the opposite end of the platform. She didn’t think the man had noticed her, but cursing her height and size, she pulled her gray shawl tight and high around her in an effort to be less conspicuous.

In seconds, a train thundered into the station. Giovanna stiffened. She was so focused on her pursuit of Leo that until that moment she had forgotten that the only other time she had ridden the underground railway, she vowed fearfully never to do it again. She entered the car adjacent to Leo and remained standing where she could see him through the car window. The train went all the way to Rector Street before he exited. At street level, he checked his pocket watch and headed to Trinity Church.

Entering Trinity’s cemetery, Leo sat on a bench under an oak tree. Giovanna lingered at the outskirts of the graveyard, pretending to look at the church. The sky was blue and the day was warm. The next time she took a glance, another man, this one considerably better-dressed, sat beside Leo. His hands, noticeably untouched by labor, opened his newspaper in front of a face framed by groomed sideburns. In the same motion, the man laid an envelope on the bench between himself and Leo. Leo nonchalantly picked up the envelope and walked away.

He didn’t go far. He leapt up the steps of a tall building next to the cemetery. Through the glass doors Giovanna could see a long, narrow marble corridor with ornate carvings on the ceiling and Leo waiting at the rear bank of elevators. When he stepped into an open lift, Giovanna hurried into the building. The door to Leo’s elevator closed, and Giovanna watched the numbers light as the lift ascended.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” questioned a guard, eyeing her suspiciously.

The words were foreign, but Giovanna knew he wanted to know where the Italian woman was going. A board with names and numbers faced the elevator. Giovanna picked one with an “Esq.” at the end, like Signore DeCegli’s name. She pointed to the name on the board, smiling.

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Mr. Schmidt, the attorney. That would be the nineteenth floor.”

Giovanna smiled and continued to watch the numbers. The elevator stopped on the eleventh floor. She waited anxiously for the car to come back down. When the doors opened, a number of people streamed out, and Giovanna was about to get on when she saw Leo at the back of the car. He didn’t exit the elevator, and she didn’t enter. The doors closed again. This time it went down to a floor labeled “TP.” Another elevator opened and Giovanna entered, motioning down to the elevator operator. In seconds she was down a floor in time to see Leo exit the building’s back doors onto Trinity Place.

She didn’t follow immediately because when the elevator door opened, she thought Leo might have seen her face. She followed him down Trinity Place back to the Rector Place underground station, keeping farther behind than before. As Leo entered the uptown train, she stepped in the car behind him.

Was he trying to lose her? Or was he trying to avoid being followed? If someone was watching him, then they must also be watching her, and for the first time Giovanna was as afraid of what was behind her as what was in front of her.

On the train she could see Leo’s shoulder through the car window. Her ankles were swollen, and the veins in her legs were throbbing. Mercifully, Leo didn’t get out right away. He exited at Bryant Park, walked upstairs, and switched to the Sixth Avenue El.

The parade had already started. Throngs of people clogged the sidewalks. She had never seen such a large crowd in her life—this was a hundred times the size of a feast—in Scilla or New York. When they reached the last stop at Fifty-eighth Street, she saw the tops of floats half a block long squeezing down Fifth Avenue.

Trying not to be distracted by the pageantry, Giovanna followed Leo east to Fifth Avenue. The streets were so packed with exuberant crowds that Giovanna no longer had to worry about keeping her distance, but instead was trying desperately not to lose Leo in the multitude.

“Get your souvenir programs here!” shouted a man, holding a sack like a newsboy. Leo flipped him a nickel and, rolling the program under his arm, headed downtown at Fifth Avenue, parallel with the parade.

To get through the crowd, Giovanna walked on the innermost portion of the sidewalk, but between her height and the immense size of the floats, she was able to see an old ship manned by people in costume sail down the street. On its side was painted
HALF MOON
. Teams of horses pulled the floats, and each horse was covered in a red blanket stitched with an
H
and an
F
.

“We’ve got the line of march. Learn about the floats!” shouted a barker who blocked Giovanna’s path.

Maneuvering around him only led her into a gang of kids on the corner holding up crates, yelling, “Get yer own grandstand here, only fifteen cents. Keeps yuh three feet off the sidewalk!”

In between the floats marched bands from every nation, and men, puffed chests adorned by sashes, walked in formation behind their flags. Sometimes the music of one band stepped on the toes of another, and the crowd reacted to the clash of cultures by sticking their fingers in their ears.

Leo checked his pocket watch, slowed, and turned to view the parade. Giovanna reacted by stopping abruptly, and someone pushed into her from behind, unleashing a string of angry words. The words were foreign, but the meaning clear. Mumbling “Excuse me” in heavily accented English, she pressed into the crowd, watching the parade with one eye and Leo with the other.

Walking more slowly, she became aware of the dampness in her shoes. The pain in her feet was such that she knew the moisture was blood.

A passing float elicited cheers and hats were raised in salute. Giovanna recognized the figure that was part of this tableau—he was the white-haired first president of America who was in Mary’s schoolbooks. He stood on a building’s balcony, and below, on what was made to resemble an old street, people waved flags.

Leo continued down Fifth Avenue, picking up his pace, and Giovanna struggled to keep up. As they neared Forty-second Street, the crowd became so dense it was nearly impossible to get through. Large columns lined the streets, and a massive grandstand faced the festivities. Leo bullied his way through the throng toward the grandstand, and Giovanna followed in his wake. When he reached it, he hovered there. Giovanna stopped at a safe distance and immediately heard complaints. She played dumb and smiled, excusing herself in Italian.

“Look! That’s probably why she pushed her way to the front. There’s an eye-talian float.”

Hearing the unmistakable “eye-talian,” Giovanna took a second look at the approaching float, which was preceded by an Italian band. A man dressed as Garibaldi stood in front of a small house and a sign that read
STATEN ISLAND
.

The entire section of the grandstand near where Leo stood erupted into cheers. If the standing ovation they gave the float was not proof enough that these dignitaries were Italian, their red, white, and green sashes confirmed it. Following the float, men from the Italian societies marched with crossed American and Italian flags, and the grandstand cheers grew even more thunderous. An older man with a sash across his chest, graying hair, and a pockmarked face strode past Leo. A split second later she saw the man with the sash holding the envelope that had been left at the bench in Trinity’s cemetery. Leo was already moving out of the crowd.

She hustled to catch up but was caught in a surge of Italians leaving the grandstand. Bounced from body to body, Giovanna could feel him escaping. She tried to cut under the grandstand but was stopped by a policeman who held her there until a group of dignitaries passed. She nearly tripped free when the policeman lifted his arm, but there were no straight lines of pedestrian traffic anymore; people were crisscrossing the side streets and sidewalks, and after nearly six hours of following him, she could no longer see any part of Leo.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1909

After wrapping her bleeding and swollen feet in chamomile-soaked rags, Giovanna put on an old pair of Rocco’s boots, the only shoes that would fit. Once again, she tucked the gun into her ballooning waistband.

Giovanna bought a paper in front of 111 Broadway, the building that yesterday Leo had entered and then exited out the back. The newsstand didn’t have Italian papers, so she bought the one with the most pictures of the parade, thinking she would save it for Angelina. Near the same time as yesterday’s exchange, she sat on a bench diagonally across from the one under the oak tree where the man had sat with Leo. A leaf fluttered onto Giovanna’s shoulder, and she almost jumped out of her skin. Looking up, she realized that the trees were changing color and that she hadn’t noticed—she was spending all her time looking, but not seeing.

Like clockwork, the businessman entered the cemetery with a paper under his arm, and Giovanna snapped back to attention. He strode directly toward the same bench, but it was taken. Without skipping a step, he continued on to the next bench, which was directly opposite Giovanna.

Giovanna jerked the newspaper in front of her face in surprise and embarrassment. It hardly mattered, because within a few moments she could see that, unlike yesterday, he was not on the lookout for anything and that droopy-eyed Leo was not in sight.

Although she didn’t exactly blend in, at least there were other women in the park. Giovanna knew that it was unacceptable for unescorted ladies to eat in restaurants, which explained why so many office workers were eating lunch in the cemetery. Clusters of women sat on the grass, leaning against gravestones and chatting.

The man with the sideburns concentrated on his reading, turning the pages slowly. A steady stream of people walked through the cemetery heading to a grave that was covered in flowers. Leaning to one side, she tried to get a look at the name on the grave, squinting to make out the letters. Someone moved and she saw the inscription,
ROBERT FULTON
. It was impossible to escape this Fulton. If only Angelina was so easy to find.

Precisely twenty-five minutes later, the man stood up to leave. Giovanna put her paper in the netted shopping bag she’d brought along and followed him. While the man might not have noticed her, many of the office workers out for a lunchtime stroll on Broadway raised an eyebrow at her appearance. Rocco’s worn boots didn’t help. She did her best not to make eye contact with anyone as she walked in the man’s path north on Broadway to Chambers Street. He turned left, away from City Hall, and entered a storefront painted red, white, and blue. Giovanna crossed the street and took the pencil and book that Domenico had given her from her bag and recorded the words on the sign:
ELECT GAYNOR MAYOR AND TAMMANY HEADQUARTERS
.

Although those words meant nothing, the gaiety of the signs, the colors, and the lack of merchandise communicated to Giovanna that it had something to do with voting. She had been in the country long enough to know that Americans treated elections like a holiday, or a party, and even “the eye-talians” were welcome. At similar storefronts in the Italian district, they were always being invited inside. Giovanna fixed the stray hair that was cascading out of her pins and tugged at her skirt, pulling it lower to cover Rocco’s boots, before crossing the street and entering the storefront.

“Can I help you?” asked a young man in suspenders behind a counter.

The man from the church cemetery sat at a desk in one of the offices beyond the counter. A handmade sign with his name was tacked to the door.

“
Voto
,” mumbled Giovanna. Looking past the young man, she tried to memorize the name on the sign.

“You’re a woman. You can’t vote. You want your husband to vote?”

Giovanna shrugged.

“Does anybody in here speak eye-talian?” shouted the young man over his shoulder.

“No, send her to the precinct on Mulberry Street.”

“Lady, here,” said the young man, taking a flyer depicting a proud portrait of William Gaynor. “Go here. They’ll help you.” He wrote a Mulberry Street address.

Once outside, Giovanna took the little black book and wrote down “Edwin Reese,” the name outside the man’s door.

Heading to the Battery, she saw throngs of people and a brass band lined up along the bulkhead. Everyone was facing the water and waving American flags. She passed the El to get a closer view. People were looking up, and there was an air of anticipation among the crowd. She followed the pointing fingers and shouts until she saw a speck in the sky grow larger; when the wings became visible, she heard it as well. A flying machine headed toward the Scylla in the harbor. Uproarious cheers greeted the aeroplane, and the crowd thrust signs with portraits of two men, labeled
WRIGHT
and
CURTISS,
into the air.

The aeroplane circled Lady Liberty, looking like a fly the statue would soon swat with her upraised arm if it got any closer to her face. Many in the crowd stood with their jaws agape at the spectacle; little children jumped up and down, and a number of people couldn’t contain their tears of excitement. The crowd, swept up in the moment, began to sing with the band, “America, America, God shed his grace on thee, and…”