Streets of Gold (10 page)

“What, and pay two dollars?” Francesco said.

Smiling, Teresa said, in Italian, “
Ma sei pazzo, tu.”

“Let’s all have another drink,” Francesco said, and got to his feet. “Pino, I thought you were
sotto bossa
. Pour us some wine here.” He put his arm around Teresa’s waist. “Would you like a little wine,
cara mia?
”

“You’re crazy,” Teresa said, in English this time, but she was still smiling.

And when he was twenty-four (1907?), he came home from the tailor shop late one night, having worked till almost 4 A.M., and found his again-pregnant wife sitting in the kitchen with all the lights on, a bread knife on the table before her. She told him there had been odd knockings at the kitchen door, three knocks in a row, and when she called, “Who’s there?” no one answered, and there was silence. And then, a half hour later, there were three more knocks and again she called, “Who’s there?” and again there was no answer. And then, just before midnight, the same three knocks again, and this time, when she called, “Who’s there?” a voice whispered, “It is I, Regina,” and she knew it was Regina Russo, who had been killed by a horse-drawn cart on 116 Street four years ago before Teresa’s very eyes, and had reached out an imploring hand to Teresa even as the hoofs knocked her down to the cobblestones and the wheels crushed her flat.

Teresa had begun dabbling in the supernatural even before the birth of her second child, a boy she had named Luca in honor of her grandfather, and there were many occasions when Francesco would come home weary and hungry from the tailor shop only to find the neighborhood women clustered around the three-legged table in the kitchen, Teresa solemnly attempting to raise the dead, imploring them to knock once if their answer was yes, twice if it was no, the table wobbling beneath the trembling hands of the women, its legs sometimes banging against the floor in supposed response from the grave. Francesco considered all of this nonsense, and not for a moment did he believe that whoever had knocked on the door was Regina, who was after all dead and gone. But it worried him that Teresa had been alone in the apartment with the three children, and expecting another baby, when someone had knocked on the door and refused to answer. (He dismissed the whispered “It is I, Regina” as a figment of Teresa’s overactive imagination and her preoccupation with things supernatural.)

So he organized a group of men from the building, and each night they would take turns sitting in the hallway on one or another of the floors, and they did this for a week without result until finally on the very next night, when it was Francesco’s turn to guard the building, he saw a man coming up the stairs in the darkness, and he bunched his fists and waited as the man approached the landing. He could smell the odor of whiskey, he realized all at once that the man was stumbling, the man was drunk. He waited. The man approached the toilet set between the two apartments and then very politely knocked on the door of the toilet three times, and when he received no answer, entered and closed the door behind him. Francesco waited. Behind the door, he could hear the man urinating. Then he heard the flush chain being pulled, and the torrent of water spilling from the overhead wooden box. In the darkness, he smiled.

When the man came out, he took him by the elbow and led him down to the street and told him he was not to use the toilets in this building again, they were not public facilities, he was not to go knocking on toilet doors in the middle of the night, did the man understand that? The man was old, wearing only a threadbare suit in a very cold winter, grizzled, lice-infested, stewed to the gills and understanding only a portion of what Francesco said in his faulty English. But he nodded and thanked Francesco for the good advice, and went reeling along First Avenue, and then curled up in the doorway of the Chinese laundry and went to sleep. Teresa survived her pregnancy without any further nocturnal visits from girlhood chums already deceased.

And when he was twenty-four, on most Sundays they visited the home of Umberto, Teresa’s father, the patriarch of the family. They would begin arriving about noon, all of them: Teresa and her husband and the four children; and Teresa’s sister, Bianca, who had not yet begun her corset business, and who was accompanied by
her
husband, who later ran off to Italy and forced her to fend for herself; and Teresa’s other sister, Victoria, who was as yet unmarried but who was keeping steady company with a man who sold bridles, buggy whips, saddles, harnesses, and reins; and Teresa’s brother, Marco, who sometimes came in from Brooklyn with his wife and three children; and assorted neighborhood
compaesani
and tailor shop hangers-on, who usually dropped by after
la collazione
, the afternoon meal, generally served at two o’clock by Teresa’s mother and all her daughters.

That Sunday meal was a feast; there are no other human beings on earth (not even Frenchmen) who can sit down for so long at a table, or eat so much at one sitting. It began with an antipasto — pimentos and anchovies and capers and black olives and green olives in a little oil and garlic — served with crusty white bread Umberto himself cut into long slices from a huge round loaf. While the men at the table were dipping their bread into the oil and garlic left on their antipasto plates, the women were bustling about in the kitchen, taking the big pot of pasta off the stove — spaghetti or linguine or
perciatelli
or
tonellini
— straining off the starchy water, and then putting the pasta into a bowl, the bottom of which had been covered with bright red tomato sauce, ladling more sauce onto the slippery, steaming
al dente
mound, bringing it to the table with an accompanying sauce-boat brimming and hot. “Somebody mix the pasta,” Teresa’s mother would call from the kitchen. And while Umberto himself tossed the spaghetti or macaroni with a pair of forks, and added more sauce to it, the women would bring in more bowls, filled with sausages and meatballs and
braciòle
, thin slices of beef stuffed with capers and oregano and rolled, and either threaded or held together with toothpicks. And then the women themselves would sit down to join the others, and Umberto would pour the wine for those closest to him, and then pass it to either Francesco or his other son-in-law, or his son Marco, but rarely to the buggy-whip salesman who planned to marry Victoria. There was celery on the table, and more olives, green and black, and there was always a salad of
arugala
, or chicory and lettuce, or dandelion, which was delicious and bitter and served with a dressing of olive oil and vinegar. And when the pasta course was finished, the women would clear the plates, and the men would pour more wine, and from the kitchen would come platters full of chicken or roast beef or sometimes both, roasted potatoes with gravy, and a vegetable — usually fresh peas or spinach or string beans prepared in the American manner, or zucchini cooked the Neapolitan way — and they would sit and eat this main course while filling each other in on the events of the week and the gossip of the neighborhood, and the latest news from the other side (they almost always referred to it as “the other side,” as though the Atlantic Ocean were a mere puddle separating America from Italy), and then they would rest awhile, and drink some more wine. And then Umberto would go into the kitchen and take from the icebox the pastry he had bought on First Avenue, and usually Teresa’s mother had made a peach or strawberry shortcake with whipped cream, and they would spread the sweets on the table, and only later serve rich black coffee in demitasse cups, a lemon peel in the saucer, a little anisette to pour into the coffee for those who craved it. There would be a bowl of fruit on the table, too, apples and oranges and bananas and, when they were in season, cherries or peaches or plums or sometimes a whole watermelon split in half and sliced, and there would also be a wooden bowl of nuts, filberts and almonds and Brazil nuts and pecans, and hot from the stove would come a tray of roasted chestnuts, marked with crosses on their skins before they were set in the oven, the skins curling outward now to show the browned meat inside — there was much to eat in that decade when my grandfather was twenty-four.

Later, the men would break out the guinea stinkers, and the women would go into the kitchen to do the dishes and to straighten up, and still later they would come in to wipe off the table, leaving only the bowl of fruit and the bowl of nuts (“If anyone wants it, it’s here”), and then all of them, men and women alike, would sit down to play cards,
settemezzo
, or
briscola
, or hearts (a new American game), or
scopa
, betting their pennies as though they were hundred-dollar chips, forming kitties for future outings to Coney Island or the beach, while the children chased each other through the house or crawled under the dining room table or whispered to each other dirty stories they had heard at school. My grandfather’s children, all of them presumably born when he was twenty-four, had come in fairly rapid succession, or at least as rapid as one could expect, given the nine-month pregnancy span of the human female. Teresa had given birth to Stella (October 1, 1902), Luca (August 24, 1903), Cristina (January 29, 1905), and Domenico (May 17, 1907), and while she was producing all these new Americans, my grandfather was learning how to hold a pair of scissors, thread a needle, and make stitches that looked like those of a true tailor. He was twenty-four years old and he still wanted to go home to Fiormonte. But each time he was ready to make the trip, another baby arrived. And more expenses. And more ties to this country that was not his — by the time Domenico was born, for example, Stella was in kindergarten at the school on Pleasant Avenue and speaking English like President Teddy Roosevelt himself. And then one morning, Francesco looked into the mirror as usual, and began lathering his face preparatory to shaving, and the person who looked back at him was no longer twenty-four. He was
thirty
-four, and the year was 1914, and Francesco put down his shaving brush and leaned closer to the mirror and looked into his own eyes for a very long time, staring, staring, afraid that if he so much as blinked, another ten years would go by and he would not know where they’d gone or how he had missed their passing.

In July of the year 1914 (modulation all finished), my mother Stella, Italian for star, Stella my mother, Stella the All-American Girl (“I’m American, don’t forget”), Stella by starlight, or sunlight, or the light of the silvery moon, Stella nonetheless, my mother (take a bow, Mom) Stella (enough already) was not quite twelve years old when two events of particular significance happened one after the other. Now I really don’t know whether either of those events was traumatic, and caused her to become the kind of woman she grew up to be. (Rebecca hated her, and always described her as “a paranoid nut.”) I can only surmise that they must have been terrifying to an eleven-year-old girl who, by all accounts (her own and my grandfather’s), was imaginative, sensitive, inquisitive, extremely intelligent (
and
American, don’t forget).

For an American, who had learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance proudly every weekday morning at school, Stella was surrounded by more Italians than she could shake a stick at. Her classmates, of course, were all Italians, except for two Irish girls and a Jewish boy who had somehow wandered into the wrong ghetto. But in addition to her daily encounters with children who, like herself, were the sons and daughters of immigrants who could barely speak English, there was the family as well. The family was (in Stella’s own words, oft-repeated) “a bunch of real ginzoes.” She was living with her parents and her brothers and sisters on 118th Street and First Avenue, above the grocery store on the corner, just three doors away from the tailor shop. Within a six-block radius, north or south, east or west, there were perhaps four dozen aunts, uncles, cousins, goombahs and goomahs who were considered part of “the family,” the family being her mother’s since Francesco’s relatives were all on the other side. I don’t think my mother quite appreciated their proximity, or the fact that she was eagerly welcomed into their homes.

When
I
was growing up, I looked forward to each loving pat or hug, knowing that I could walk four blocks to my Aunt Cristina’s, where she would offer me some fresh-squeezed lemonade, or turn the corner to my Aunt Bianca’s corset shop, where she would tell me all about dainty ladies’ under things. Bianca was a great-aunt, actually my grandmother’s sister; her shop was on 116th Street, between First and Second Avenues, and she was known in the neighborhood as “The Corset Lady.” My mother must have visited that same shop as often as I did, and at the same age, but she never spoke of it fondly, nor do I think she particularly liked Aunt Bianca, who to me (though I’d never seen her, and could only smell the sweet soapy lilac scent of her and feel her delicate hands upon my face) was a lady of great mystery and intrigue, fashioning ladies’ brassieres as she did. My mother made similar family rounds, dropping in wherever she chose, always greeted warmly and lovingly, though she might have been there only hours before. And yet, the family did not seem to mean very much to her, their coarse southern Italian fell harshly upon her ears, their broken English rankled; she was American, Stella was.

I don’t know why she was so drawn to Pino’s wife. Angelina was most certainly beautiful, but her good looks were undeniably Mediterranean, and she still spoke English with a marked accent. To Stella, though, she must have seemed more “American” than any member of her own family, with the possible exception of her mother. As concerns the relationship between Stella and Tess, as she was called more and more frequently by everyone in the neighborhood, there seems to be little doubt that it was lousy. To begin with, Tess worked in the tailor shop alongside her father and Francesco, which meant that she had little time for housewifely chores like cleaning or cooking. (My grandmother may have been the first liberated woman in the history of America, who the hell knows?) Stella grudgingly inherited the running of the household, except for the preparation of breakfast, which Tess handled for the entire family before heading off “to business.” Stella cleaned the four-room apartment, Stella prepared her own lunch as well as lunch for her brothers and sister when they came home from school at noon each day, Stella prepared dinner, Stella was the mother
her
mother should have been. (“My mother was a
lady
,” she would say to me, almost as often as she said, “I’m American, don’t forget.” The word “lady” was always delivered sarcastically, and I could sense the curl of the lip, the angry flash in her green eyes. Was it coincidence that I later married a green-eyed girl? Must have been. Who the hell can tell green from blue, anyway, and really, who cares?) In any case, it was Stella who ran off to school each morning, feeling very American, and who came back to the apartment each afternoon feeling very Italian because it was she who did the donkey work. And I suppose she jealously guarded those moments when she could visit Pino’s wife and become the inquiring bright child she had no opportunity to be at home.