Streets of Gold (20 page)

The radio was a blessing, and whereas in those days I felt it had been invented exclusively for the sake of the blind, I now realize it was a necessary ingredient in the mortar that held the myth together — one part radio, one part movies, and equal parts of ballyhoo and hullabaloo. Being the cheapest form of entertainment around, the radio was perfectly suited to the times. But more important, it provided us with hundreds of fictitious families who in turn were incorporated into the larger American family, the myth endlessly reflecting itself in a series of mirrors that threw back images of images. The Goldbergs, the Barbours, Easy Aces, Vic and Sade were all families in the strictest sense of the word, but if a family consists of
any
group of people whose idiosyncrasies, affectations, speech patterns, and personalities are intimately known, why then Jack Benny’s gang was a family, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto were a family, and so were The Green Hornet and Kato, and Major Bowes and all his amateurs, and the super-intellects on “Information, Please,” and the nuts in Allen’s Alley — Senator Claghorn and Mrs. Nussbaum, and boisterous Ajax Cassidy, and Titus Moody saying, “Howdy, bub,” each and every time. We were surrounded by families within families, and not all of them were suffering like the people who came to Mr. Anthony for radio advice each week. (“No names, please,” he always cautioned, and this was picked up at once and made an inside family joke on
other
radio shows, and then it filtered its way into the streets so that whenever anyone said, “Hello, Louie,” or “Hello, Jim,” the response was invariably, “No names, please.”)

Each week, we waited breathlessly for that Monday-night radio voice to tell us, “This is Cecil B. De Mille coming to you from Holllllywood.” We wondered along with Bob Hope just
who
Yehudi was, and fell off our chairs when Jerry Colonna replied, “Ask Yehudi’s cutie.” And when Hope said, “Who’s Yehudi’s cutie?” Colonna answered, “Ask Yehudi,” bringing the expected, “Yes, but who’s Yehudi?” — the whole hilarious nonsensical round delighting us. We knew George Burns would end his show with, “Say good night, Grade,” and we knew Baron Munchausen would say, “Vas you dere, Sharlie?” and yes, I
vas
dere, Sharlie, and I loved every minute of it. I had relatives all over Harlem, and all over the airwaves, and by extension all over the United States, because I knew we were all listening to that little box and, somehow, the sound waves miraculously being carried into all our homes were transforming the entire nation into a single giant living room.

In 1933, at seven o’clock every weekday night, the family thirty million Americans listened to was “Amos ’n’ Andy.” During the ensuing fifteen minutes of air time, telephone traffic dropped by fifty percent, movie theaters called off their scheduled performances and tuned their loudspeaker systems into NBC’s Red Network, and the nation’s more urgent business stopped dead while a pair of white men named Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll portrayed a gallery of Negro characters they themselves had invented — Amos, Andy, the Kingfish, Lightnin’, Brother Crawford, and the whole marvelous crowd at the Fresh Air Taxicab Company. “Those niggers are hot stuff,” my mother would say, and indeed they % were. I would go around the house after each show, quoting dialogue I had just heard and partially memorized, causing Tony to roll on the floor in laughter all over again.

“Say, s’cuse me for protrudin’, stranger,” I would say in Andy’s voice, “but ain’t you got a hold of my watch chain?”

“Your watch chain?” I would answer as the Kingfish. “Well, so I does. How you like dat? One of dese solid gold cuff links of mine musta hooked on your watch chain dere.”

Ah, yes.

In the thirties, we were well on the way to becoming one big happy family.

On the day they stole Dominick’s college ring and Luke’s watch (not to mention their trousers), I was in the tailor shop on First Avenue with my grandfather and Pino. It was November, and the streets outside were cold and deserted. The shop, as my grandfather described it to me, had a plate-glass window fronting on First Avenue, the legend
F. Di Lorenzo, Tailor
lettered on it in curving gold leaf. The wooden flooring of the shop window served as a seat for visitors to the shop (seven-year-old me, on this occasion), as well as a repository for a clutter of badly designed and poorly colored posters of men and women wearing the fashionable clothes of 1933, advertising “Dry Cleaning” and “Custom Tailoring” and “Expert Alterations.” There were also cardboard movie posters for most of the theaters in the neighborhood, the Cosmo, the Grand, the RKO Proctor’s, and even the Palace — familiarly called the Dump by everyone in the ghetto. And, in one corner of the window, the NRA-member poster, with its blue eagle clutching lightning bolts in one claw, and a gear wheel in the other, and the red-lettered legend WE DO OUR PART.

There was a bell over the door of the shop, and it tinkled whenever anyone came in. The numerals 2319 were lettered onto the glass of the entrance door in the same gold leaf that spelled out my grandfather’s name and occupation. A sewing machine was just inside this front door, to the left as you came in, facing the long counter upon which my grandfather cut cloth and behind which he did most of his hand stitching. Running at a right angle to the counter was a double tier of clothing rods upon which were hung suits, trousers, dresses, skirts, overcoats, sweaters, all the garments left to be repaired or cleaned or pressed, each bearing a paper ticket pinned to the sleeve or the hem. A flowered curtain behind the counter covered the doorway to the back room, where my Uncle Luke ran the pressing machine. Whenever he was pressing, great billowing clouds of steam poured from between the padded jaws of the machine and seeped into the front of the shop. There was always the smell of steam in that shop. In the wintertime, it was particularly reassuring.

My mother has told me that my grandfather’s hair was already white in 1933, entirely white, giving him an older look than his fifty-three years. He was undoubtedly wearing thick-lensed eyeglasses with black frames, and his customary work costume — black trousers and white shirt, over which he wore an unbuttoned, chalk-dusted, black cardigan sweater, a tape measure draped over his shoulders. The big cutting shears that were almost an extension of his right hand were surely on the countertop within easy reach. Pino was sitting at the sewing machine, putting buttons on Salvation Army uniforms. He had lost his job shortly after the Crash, and now worked alongside my grandfather in the shop which was largely sustained by the Salvation Army uniform orders he himself had first brought to his friend. In 1933, he was described to me as a dapper little man with a neatly cropped black mustache, customarily and meticulously dressed in a pin-striped suit, an anachronistic celluloid collar on his shirt, an emerald stickpin holding his tie to his shirt.

The only sounds in the shop were the ticking of the big, brass-pendulumed clock on the wall opposite the clothing racks, and the clanging of the radiators, and the incessant clicking of Pino’s thimble and needle. The smells were those of the twisted De Nobili cigars both men were smoking, and the individual human scents (which I knew by heart) of my grandfather and Pino, and a subtler aroma that is difficult to describe unless you have spent a considerable amount of time in a tailor shop. It is the elusive aroma of clothes. A lot of clothes. Clothes of different fabrics and different textures and different weights, but nonetheless giving off a different collective aroma at different times of the year. In November, with the wind rattling the plate-glass window of the shop, the clothes gave off the scent of hidden corners. I sniffed in the aromas, I listened to the sounds.

“Grandpa,” I said, because this had become a running gag between us, and I never tired of it, “why do you smoke those guinea stinkers?”

“Who says they’re guinea stinkers?” my grandfather said.

“Everybody.”

“Che ha detto?”
Pino asked.

My grandfather said, “
Ha chiamato questi
‘guinea stinkers.’ ”

“Why do you call them guinea stinkers?” my grandfather asked me.

“Because they stink.”

“What?” Pino said. “You’re wrong, Ignazio. It does not stink. It smells nice.”

“That’s no guinea stinker,” my grandfather said expectedly, delighting me. “That’s a
good
see-gah.” He puffed on it deliberately and ceremoniously, raising a giant smelly cloud of smoke. “This suit is for you,” he said, and rustled a paper pattern. “On Christmas Day, you’ll be the best-dressed kid in Harlem.”

“I know,” I said, and grinned.

“In Fiormonte, on Christmas... Pino, do you remember
il Natale a Fiormonte
?”

“Sì, certo,”
Pino said.

“Some one of these days, Ignazio,” my grandfather said, “I’m gonna take you home to the other side. I’ll show you my home, okay? You want to come to Fiormonte with Grandpa?”

“Sure.”

“From where I lived, Ignazio, you could see the river, no? And before la
fillossera
.”

The front door of the shop flew open, the bell tinkled. I smelled my Uncle Luke’s aftershave and my Uncle Dominick’s b.o.

“What’s the matter?” my grandfather said immediately.

“They took our pants!” Luke shouted.

“What?”

“Our pants!” Dominick said.

“
Who
took your pants?”

“They came in the club, Pop,” Luke said in a rush, “and they took all our rings and watches, and then they made us take off our pants so we couldn’t chase them.”

“
Who
took your pants?” my grandfather said patiently.

“They took my class
ring
,” Dominick said. “Why are you so worried about my
pants
?”

“Some gangsters.”

“What gangsters?”

“We don’t know. They had guns.”

“From la
vicinanza
?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “I never seen them before, did you, Doc?” he asked his brother.

He had begun calling him “Doc” as soon as Dominick entered Fordham University, from which he’d been graduated in June of 1929, shortly before the Crash. In 1933, when I was seven years old, Dominick had just begun his third year of law school. Years later, when my parents first took Tony and me to the World’s Fair, my mother spotted the trylon and perisphere and immediately said, “There’s Luke and Dominick.” She never called him “Doc.” In fact, no one in the family ever did, except Luke.

“You got some pants for us, Pop?” he asked.

“Where am I going to get pants for you?”

“This is a
tailor
shop,” Luke said. “You mean to tell me you ain’t got pants for us?”

“In the back,” my grandfather said. “The ones near the sink. The ones I use for patches. Don’t touch no customer’s clothes!” he shouted to them as they went through the curtain. “
Che pensa?”
he asked Pino.

“Non è buono,”
Pino replied. “
È quasi come Sicilia.”

“Sì,”
my grandfather said, and then suddenly turned to the curtain and shouted. “What is this,
Sicily
? Where some bums come in the club and steal from you?”

“What are you hollering at
us
for, Pop?” Luke yelled back.

“Because you let it happen.”

“They had guns,” Dominick said.

“Hurry up, put on your pants,” my grandfather said.

“What’s the hurry? They got away already.”

“I want you to get your brother-in-law.”

Luke came out of the back room. “You mean Matty?” he asked.

“At the taxi stand. Go.”

“What for, Pop?” Dominick asked, coming out of the back room.

“He plays cards with thieves,” my grandfather said.

The bell over the door tinkled. The scent of soap and lilac pierced the stench of cigar smoke — my Aunt Bianca.

“Good evening, Frank,” she said.

“Hello, Bianca,” my grandfather said wearily.

“Their pants were robbed, Aunt Bianca,” I said.

“Hello, Iggie,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. “Where’s your Grandma?”

“Home,” my grandfather said. “Cooking.”

Luke opened the door and was starting out of the shop when Aunt Bianca said, “What do you mean, your pants were robbed?”

“That’s right, Aunt Bianca,” he said, and ran out of the shop.

“You, too?” she asked Dominick.

“Yeah,” Dominick said.

“A college boy like you?”

Dominick shrugged. “They had guns,” he said.

“The broken record,” my grandfather said.

“They
did
, Pop.”

“What kind of guns?” I asked.

“Big ones, Iggie.”

“Did they have masks on?”

“No, no masks.”

“Then why don’t you know who they are?” my grandfather asked.

“I never saw them before,” Dominick answered. “I don’t know if you ever noticed, Pop, but I don’t usually hang around with crooks.”

“I have to see Tessie about doing the table,” Bianca said.

“No more table,” my grandfather said flatly.

“I have a widow who wants to talk to her husband.”

“Not in my kitchen!”

“Then where?”

“Do it in your corset shop.”

“My shop doesn’t have a three-legged table. I’ll talk to Tessie about it. Good evening, Frank.” She opened the door, the bell tinkled. She turned back, and said, “You look very handsome today, Iggie.”

“Thank you, Aunt Bianca.”

“Don’t take him by eyes,” my grandfather said.

“Come give your aunt a big kiss.”

I found her immediately. She pulled me into her arms and into her bosom, and bent to kiss me on the cheek, and then patted me on the head, and I suffocated ecstatically on lilac and soap. “Tell your mother to come to the shop once in a while, it won’t kill her,” she said.