Streets of Gold (11 page)

Poking in Angelina’s jewelry box, holding earrings to her ears for Angelina’s approval, sampling Angelina’s powders, sniffing at her perfumes, asking the hundreds of questions she could not ask of her absentee mother, listening to Angelina as she told stories of Francesco’s and Pino’s youthful days in Fiormonte, Stella enjoyed the most cherished hours of her childhood in that apartment on Second Avenue. Angelina had become pregnant again in January, after having miscarried nine times, the last having been particularly tragic in that she’d lost the baby during her fifth month. She, too, must have enjoyed Stella’s visits in those final days of her pregnancy when, fearful of another miscarriage, she rarely ventured out of the apartment. It was on one of those visits that her time came.

Stella saw her clutch for her abdomen and heard her say, “Ooo,
sta zitto.
” The baby had been very active lately, each kick greeted with undisguised joy by Pino and Angelina — the child was alive, the prospective mother was healthy, this time all would go well. But this latest pang was something more than just another fetal kick; it was the beginning of labor. Angelina recognized it almost at once, and immediately sent Stella to fetch Filomena the Midwife. There were few telephones in Harlem in the year 1914. Umberto had one in the tailor shop, but telephones in the home were a luxury (they were
still
a luxury when I was growing up). Stella ran the six blocks to Filomena’s building, her skirts and pigtails flying, and raced up the four flights to Filomena’s apartment, and rapped on the door. There was no answer. She rapped again. A door across the hall opened, and an old man in his undershirt looked out at Stella.

“Where’s Filomena?” she asked. “Where’s the midwife?”

“Che cosa vuole?”
the old man said.

“Filomena, Filomena,” Stella said, and reverted impatiently to Italian. “
Dov’è Filomena? Dov’è la levatrice?”

What was he saying? The ice station? Mr. Agnelli’s ice station?

“Ma dove?”
she asked. “
Alla
First Avenue?”

“
Sì, sì,
First Avenue,” he replied. “
Forse è la. Con Giovanni.”

“Grazie,”
she called over her shoulder, and ran down the stairs to the street. She could not imagine why Filomena had gone personally to the ice station, since Giovanni made home deliveries daily, shoving his huge blocks of ice along in a cart, chipping off smaller cakes with his ice pick, seizing them with his tongs, and tossing them into a wooden tub, which he carried up to his customers. Had the old man misunderstood her? Had she not explained herself adequately in Italian?

The streets were crowded and noisy. This was three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in July. The weather was mild, and the citizens of East Harlem had come outdoors to enjoy the bright untarnished day. Strollers thronged the sidewalk spumoni stands, bought ices and pastry, chatted with each other, admired babies in carriages; peddlers pushed their carts and shouted

praise of their produce, the junkman’s wagon rolled by piled high with newspapers and scrap metal, “I buy old clothes, I buy old clothes”; children roller-skated past on the pavement, old women shouted “
Stat’ attento!”
and then returned to stoopside conversations; there was a sense of teeming life in those streets as Stella hurried to find the woman who would bring yet another life into the ghetto. On 119th Street, she waited for two trolley cars, passing from opposite directions, to rattle by, and then she ran across First Avenue to the ice station. Agnelli was nowhere in sight. She looked in the open yard where Agnelli’s coal, piled shining and black in wooden stalls, had already been delivered in anticipation of consumer demand in the months ahead. Then she walked around to the back of the icehouse itself, and climbed the steps to the wooden platform, debated opening the heavy metal door, and decided to try instead the small shacklike structure Agnelli used as an office.

The office was some twenty-five feet from the back of the ice house, and Stella ran to it as fast as she could, shouting, “Mr. Agnelli! Mr. Agnelli!” as she covered the short stretch of ground, and then threw open the office door, and saw first a calendar on the wall over a folding bed, and then Agnelli’s very hairy backside, and then realized that a pair of pale white legs were wrapped around that backside. Agnelli turned his head for a look at the intruder, peering over his shoulder while just below him Filomena the Midwife poked her head around a tangle of arms and legs and whispered a silent prayer of gratitude to the good Lord Jesus for having sent but a mere child to discover her in such an indelicate and compromising position, rather than Agnelli’s wife, Luisa, who was said to have a violent temper. Stella, for her part, stared first at Agnelli’s ass, and then at Filomena’s raised white legs (she had her high-buttoned shoes on, Stella noticed), and then realized that this was the man with whom her father had boarded when he first came to this country, this was Mr. Agnelli, the neighborhood’s respected iceman, what was he doing on top of Filomena, who at this moment should have been in Angelina’s kitchen, delivering a baby, instead of... instead of...

Well... fucking. Stella knew the word, she had seen it scribbled on tenement walls and fences, she had heard it whispered not so softly by boys at school, but she had never seen the word so vigorously demonstrated, and she had also never seen Mr. Agnelli’s ass.

“Che vuole?”
Agnelli shouted, without skipping a beat.

“Basta, basta,”
Filomena said, and untangled herself with dignity, pulling up her bloomers and pulling down her petticoat and skirt. “What do you want, Stella?” she asked. Her shirtwaist was still open, she had apparently forgotten that the four top buttons were unbuttoned and that two pear-shaped breasts were staring at Stella, who stared right back at them speechlessly. Agnelli pulled up his britches, and went outside to check his coal.

“Well, what is it, child?” Filomena said. She glanced down curiously at her own breasts, sighed, and began buttoning her shirtwaist.

“Angelina,” Stella said.

“What of Angelina?”

“The baby,” Stella said.

Filomena was on her feet instantly. “Come,” she said, and took Stella’s hand. “And remember, you saw nothing. Else God will strike you dead.”

The only person God struck dead that day was Angelina Battatore.

It’s difficult to believe, in this day and age of sterile antiseptic hospital deliveries, that 679 women died of puerperal disease during the year 1914, or that 6,617 babies were stillborn. In 1926, I myself was delivered in a bedroom of our Harlem apartment by a woman named Josefina, my grandmother’s cousin, who, in addition to teaching English to new immigrants,
and
working for the Republican Club,
and
writing songs (all of which were terrible),
and
concocting an ointment called Aunt Josie’s Salve (which was actually sold in some Harlem drugstores and which was reputed to possess curative powers for anything from boils to carbuncles), was a midwife in her spare time. My mother survived. I was born blind. Some you win, some you lose.

Angelina lost on that July day in 1914.

She lost after a monumental struggle that lasted for twelve hours and finally required the assistance of the neighborhood doctor, one Bartolo Mastroiani, who arrived at the Battatore apartment at a little past 3 A.M. on Sunday morning to find Angelina bleeding profusely and the baby’s umbilical cord wrapped around its own throat, threatening strangulation each time Angelina struggled to squeeze the infant from her loins. Filomena the Midwife was utterly discomposed; the doctor unceremoniously pushed her out into the kitchen, where she joined some two dozen neighborhood ladies, all of whom were certain that someone had put the Evil Eye on Angelina. Mastroiani got to work.

He worked in a tiny bedroom with a single window opening on an air shaft, a naked light bulb hanging over the blood-soaked bed, the moaning in the kitchen assuming dirgelike proportions, Angelina shrieking in pain and pouring torrents of fresh blood from her torn uterus as he probed to unravel the unseen noose around the baby’s throat, the baby struggling to be born and struggling against strangulation, Angelina contracting steadily and involuntarily while her life spurted out onto the bedclothes and onto the doctor’s hands, awash in a pool of her own blood and sweat. He had studied medicine in Siena, had thought he’d become a surgeon, had practiced tying knots inside a matchbox, using only the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, working blind inside that confining space just as he now worked to free the stubborn cord around the baby’s neck, hot blood spurting onto his hands, the walls of Angelina’s womb closing and opening in convulsion around his fingers. The cord refused to unravel. In desperation, he cut it and tied both ends with string. The baby’s triumphant cry shocked the kitchen women into silence. Angelina died six minutes later while Mastroiani was still working with clamps and sponges, fighting the impossible tide of blood — he had been a doctor for thirty-seven years and had never seen so much blood in his life. Later, he would go into the hall toilet to vomit.

Stella was in the kitchen with those wailing women. Stella heard the Evil Eye talk, and Stella heard the baby’s victorious cry, and then waited while silence screamed as loudly as had the newborn child, silence bellowed in that kitchen, silence shrieked behind the closed door of the bedroom. And then the doctor came out, wiping his bloodstained hands on a white towel, and he shook his head, and the silence persisted for perhaps ten seconds more, and then the women began to wail again, and Stella saw the doctor go unsteadily into the hall, and heard him throwing up in the toilet outside. Someone went to get Pino. In those days, the mysteries of birth were thought best unseen by men, and he had been sitting in Francesco’s kitchen (Tess, of course, was in the Battatore apartment with the rest of the women), nervously drinking wine while Francesco told him that everything would be all right, women sometimes had a very difficult time with their first baby, Tess had been in labor for six hours with Stella, everything would be fine. When Pino learned that everything had not been so fine, he fell unconscious to the floor, and Francesco took him in his arms, and wiped the sweat from his forehead, and began to weep for his friend.

Three days after the funeral of Angelina Battatore, the Chinaman made his pass at Stella — if legend and eleven-year-old girls are to be believed.

The Chinaman — Stay, all ye Oriental Americans. In July of 1914, the guy who did the neighborhood laundry
was
called “The Chinaman,” or better yet, “The Chink.” The Chinaman, then (or the Chink, if you prefer), was a man named Chon Tsu, the T-s-u being exceedingly difficult to pronounce unless you are yourself of Chinese extraction, in which case you would speak it as though it were a cross between “Sue” and “She.” In the neighborhood, they called him Charlie Shoe. Charlie was thirty-eight years old, a short, slender man who still wore a pigtail and clothes he had brought from his native province of Kwang-tung, meaning that he looked as though he were wearing pajamas and bed slippers in the streets of Italian Harlem. He had been in America for two years, having been one of those fortunate Orientals who’d smuggled himself into this gloriously democratic land after the Exclusion Act of 1882.

Charlie worked eighteen hours a day in his laundry shop just downstairs from where Stella and the entire Di Lorenzo brood lived, his establishment being a two-by-four cubbyhole wedged between the grocery store on the corner and the
salumeria
on the other side, the tailor shop being the next in line on First Avenue. It is doubtful that he even knew Stella existed before that afternoon in July.

There was, of course, a steady stream of customers in Charlie’s laundry, but to him all white people looked the same, and besides, they smelled bad. Charlie had a wife and four children in Canton, and he sent them most of his earnings, living at a bare subsistence level in the back of his shop, where he washed the clothes and ironed them and then wrapped them in thin brown paper, slipping an identifying pink ticket under the white string, Chinese calligraphy and bold Arabic numerals, no tickee no shirtee.

He did not speak English at all well, his vocabulary consisting of a scant hundred or so words, and he always looked harried and somewhat bewildered, and sounded rude or irritated because his words were monosyllabic to begin with, and delivered with a clipped Chinese accent usually accompanied by a frown that seemed to denote impatience but actually was a direct facial translation of utter confusion. He wasn’t such a happy man, Charlie Shoe. There were very few Chinese women in America in the year, 1914, and the Chinese like to fuck the same as anyone else, witness the population problem in Mao’s thriving little commune over there. As inscrutable as Charlie may have appeared to the parade of wops who marched in and out of his shop with their dirty laundry, chances are he occasionally entertained the wildest fantasies of a sex life denied to him here in America. Have you ever seen any of those Far Eastern pornographic line drawings, tinted in the most delicate shades, and advertising the Oriental tool as one of truly remarkable dimensions — or at least so Rebecca described it to me, and mentioned in passing that the Chinese dong put my own meager weapon to shame. But what white woman in her right mind would even have entertained the thought of bedding down with a hairless, yellow-skinned, slant-eyed runt like poor Charlie Shoe?

Stella maybe.

I have no desire to probe too deeply into the fantasies of an eleven-year-old girl, especially when she happened to grow up to be my mother. I can only imagine what the sight of Agnelli and Filomena interlocked in interruptus did to fire the imagination of someone already hooked on the sloppy romances that were pouring out of the Hollywood dream factory and inundating the neighborhood playhouses. I have little or no respect for the theory that fiction triggers real events. But I cannot discount the fact that my mother was always a movie buff, and that her addiction started sometime in 1912 or ’13, when films began to influence American life in a very important way. As a matter of fact, the two most significant changes in Harlem since the arrival of Francesco in 1901 and the initiation of Stella into the mysteries of tickle-and-grab in 1914 were the appearance of the automobile and the ascendance of the motion picture. It’s difficult to estimate how many people in New York owned a tin lizzie, but there were nearly four million of the flivvers on the nation’s roads, and it’s safe to assume at least a goodly portion of them were clattering along the cobbled streets of the country’s largest city. Where horses had once clopped upon and crapped upon the streets of New York, making it difficult to find the gold beneath all that manure, Henry Ford’s new contrivance now rattled and clanked around every corner, adding to the general din that had so disturbed Francesco upon his arrival. New York was
never
a quiet place, but the advent and subsequent popularity of the automobile did little to restore my grandfather’s sense of tranquility.