Streets of Gold (6 page)

And then Francesco understands. The man has carved a letter into the wood, the letter P, and after this he gouges out a small dot, a period, and then begins to carve the letter H, meticulously digging out each vertical bar, and then the crossbar, and then uses the point of the knife to gouge out another period. Rising, standing erect again, he closes the knife and puts it back into his pocket. Then he brings the pick close to his mouth and blows into the carved letters, sending fine minuscule splinters flying, and then passes his hand over the letters caressingly, and looks at Francesco, and grins.

“P.H. Patrick Halloran.
My
name,
my
initials, and
my
damn pick.”

The Irishman continues to grin. Is there some humor here that Francesco is missing because of his scant understanding of English? There are so many words in English which sound the same, but mean different things. Is “pick” one of those words, and has he missed the entire thrust of the conversation from the very beginning? But no. “Dago” he understands, and “fucking” he understands, and yet he has heard these men jokingly calling themselves big fucking micks, which he knows is derogatory, so perhaps fucking dago was meant in the same way, perhaps a joke was intended, after all; perhaps the man was only being friendly, is that a possibility? He misses so many nuances because he does not understand; the subtleties of this land are overwhelming. But if it was all a joke, if the man is smiling now because a joke was intended, then why did he put his mark on a pick belonging to the company? Francesco knows it is the man’s mark, he knows he is not mistaken about that because now that he has seen the letters gouged into the wood, the word “initials” makes sense to him, it is almost identical to the Italian word
iniziali
. Is it possible that the man was only trying to introduce himself? Trying to tell Francesco his name? Carving his initials into the wood handle to facilitate communication? This appears ridiculous to Francesco, but so many things in this new country seem foolish to him. Would the man have damaged a pick belonging to the company merely to have his name be known? Does he not know the company rules? Does he not realize... and here a new fear seizes Francesco. This is the pick that was assigned to him this morning. A workman was responsible for his own tools, and had to pay for any damage done to them through his own negligence. Would he now have to pay for the damage this man has done to the pick handle by carving his initials into it?

“You have damaged my pick,” he says. They are back again to the question of possession, though now Francesco is not so sure he wishes to claim this damaged pick.

“I shouldn’t worry about it,” the man says.

“It is the pick I used all morning. The company will...”

“No, my friend, you’re mistaken.
I’ve
been using this pick all morning.
You
were using the one over there.”

Francesco follows the man’s casual head gesture, squints into the gloom, and suddenly understands. A I pick with a broken handle is lying half-submerged in the mud. The man’s pick, broken in use. By claiming Francesco’s pick, he is simultaneously willing to him the pick with the broken handle, so that the cost of replacing it will come from
Francesco’s
pay and not his own.

“No,” Francesco says.

“No, is it? Ah, but yes.
This
one is mine, and
that
 one is...”

He leaps upon the man before he realizes what he is doing. He has not been angry until this moment, but now a fury boils within him, and he gives no thought to the consequences of his sudden action. He knows only that the man is stealing from him, and by extension stealing from the family in Fiormonte. He seizes the handle of the pick, tries to wrest it away, but the man merely swings it around, with Francesco still clinging to it, pulling Francesco off his feet and dragging him sprawling into the mud, his eyeglasses falling from his face.

“Ladro!”
Francesco screams in Italian. “Thief!” And gets blindly to his feet. And springs for the man’s throat. The first scream goes unnoticed in the general din, but he continues to shriek “
Ladro! Ladro! Ladro!”
as his mud-covered hands struggle for a grip around the other man’s throat. The man hits Francesco in the chest with the end of the pick handle, knocking him down again. The screams have finally attracted the other workers, most of them Italians who understand the meaning of the word that comes piercingly from Francesco’s mouth in strident repetition: “
Ladro! Ladro! Ladro!”
He gets to his feet again, and again charges the other man. The man throws the pick aside, I bunches his fists, and begins to beat Francesco senseless, methodically breaking first his nose and then his jaw, pounding at both eyes until the lids are swollen and bleeding, splitting his lips, knocking out four of his teeth, and then kicking him repeatedly in the chest after he has fallen unconscious into the mud. The other men do nothing. It is the foreman who at last comes over, and says, gently, “Come on, Pat, there’s no sense killing the little wop, now is there?”

My grandfather paid dearly for his encounter with Pat Halloran, and to his dying day he was to hate the Irish with undiminished passion. The broken pick handle cost him a dollar and a half, which was deducted from his weekly pay check. His hospital bill — they taped his broken ribs, applied poultices to his eyes, set and taped his broken nose, and took three stitches in his upper lip — came to twenty-four dollars and thirty-eight cents. The dentist who made his bridgework and supplied him with four false teeth charged him seventeen dollars. He lost two weeks’ work at fourteen dollars a week, and did not return to the tunnel until the beginning of May. To honor his debts, he was forced to borrow money from Bardoni (at interest, of course), and it was Bardoni who suggested that there were men in Harlem who would be happy to take care of Halloran for a slight fee. My grandfather said he wished to have nothing to do with such men; he would take care of Halloran himself, in his own good time.

He did, finally, in the month of June — in a way that was entirely satisfactory and supremely ironic.

But before that, Pino Battatore fell in love.

I don’t wish to create the impression that nothing else was happening in America during that May of 1901. But according to my grandfather, at least, Pino’s love affair with the neighborhood’s undisputed beauty was far more fascinating to that band of wops in Harlem’s side streets than were the politics, or economics, or quaint folkways and customs of a nation they did not consider their own. The Spanish-American War, for example, had not been their war, and the subsequent Filipino uprising against our military government, a struggle that had been raging for two years by the time my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island, was of little if any interest to them. Their letters home concerned the basic necessities of life, and not the trappings of power. They were not impressed with America’s good and noble reason for declaring war against Spain (To Free Cuba from the Foreign Oppressor), nor did they understand the subsequent insurrection in the Philippines. (They did not even know where the Philippines
were!
)

Even those Italians who had been here before the war with Spain started were incapable of reading the English-language newspapers and had no idea that William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (who, like me, was blind — though
his
blackout didn’t commence till 1889, when he was forty-two years old) had virtually started the war in tandem by publishing in their competing newspapers atrocity stories about the Spaniards’ cruel colonial rule. Americans (but not immigrants) had told themselves, and eventually came to believe, that the United States was genuinely concerned over the fate and destiny of all those sweaty cane cutters and raggedy-assed fishermen somewhere down there off the coast of Florida. So the war with Spain began, and we threw millions and millions of dollars into it (three
hundred
million of them), not to mention more than five thousand young lives, and Hearst and Pulitzer sold lots of newspapers, and the ginzoes in East Harlem went right on eating their pasta and sending their money home. Eventually, we won the war. We always win our wars, even when we lose them. And finally, we managed to put down the insurrection as well, when Brigadier General Frederick Funston boldly raided Aguinaldo’s camp and captured him in March — just before my grandfather had his teeth knocked out by Mr. Halloran of the disputed pick. Aguinaldo took an oath of loyalty to these here United States, and announced to his followers that the uprising was over. Another brilliant triumph for America, and Pino Battatore couldn’t have cared less. Pino was in love. While near-hysterical praise rang out for Funston in the streets of New York, Pino’s own rhapsodic paeans were reserved solely for one Angelina Trachetti, whom my grandfather in later years described as “
la bellezza delle bellezze,”
the beauty of beauties.

Angelina was five feet four inches tall, with jet-black hair and brown eyes, and a narrow waist and large firm breasts — “
una bella figura,”
my grandfather said. She was nineteen years old, and had come with her parents from the Abruzzi two years earlier. Her working knowledge of English was good, and she was blessed with a wonderful sense of humor (somewhat ribald at times, according to Grandpa) and a fine culinary hand. She had been sought after by countless young Italians of heroic stature and discriminating eye, and the miracle of it all was that she had chosen Pino. There was but one thing that could be said against her, and this was the cause of the only argument my grandfather ever had with Pino: she did not wish to return to Italy.

“What do you mean?” Francesco asked. “She wants to stay
here
?”

They were strolling along Pleasant Avenue on a mild May evening, the sounds of the ghetto everywhere around them, so much like Fiormonte; even the East River reminded Francesco of the river back home, the memory jostled only by the incessant hooting of the tugboats. The Ofanto now would be swelled with spring floods, the valley would be lush and verdant...

“Here?
In America?”

“Yes,” Pino said.

“You won’t take her home to Italy?”

“No.”

“To Fiormonte?”

“No.”

“You’ll stay here?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand,” Francesco said.

He understood, all right. He didn’t understand it on the deeper psychological level, the breakdown of the adolescent gang and all that Freudian jazz, but he understood it in exactly the same way that I did, years later, when my brother Tony wouldn’t let me hear his record collection, and I considered him a traitor and a deserter and a ratfink bastard. Only the costumes and the geography and the languages change — the rest is eternally the same. They were both wearing striped shirts, those young men who had known each other from birth, the high-throated necks open and lacking the usual celluloid collars, the sleeves rolled up, braces showing under their vests and holding up their black trousers. They stomped along Pleasant Avenue with the gait of peasants, which they were, and my grandfather tried to control his anger at Pino’s defection, while Pino tried to explain his deep and abiding love for Angelina — but no, my grandfather would have none of it, the betrayal was twofold: to friend
and
to country.

I have heard my grandfather in towering rages, especially when he was railing against his first-born son, my Uncle Luke, who invariably lost his own hereditary temper during poker games. I do not believe he was shouting at Pino that night. I think his voice must have been very low, injured, perhaps a trifle petulant. The song he hummed forlornly was “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine,” a lousy tune for a jazz solo, the essentially white chart starting with B-flat major and going to E-flat major, and a bit anachronistic for May of 1901, perhaps, when one considers that it was not published till 1929 — but Grandpa was always just a bit ahead of the times. He was a little bit ahead of Pino just then, anger having fired his stride so that he was four paces in front of his friend before he realized he was carrying on a solitary monologue. He stopped dead on the sidewalk and turned to Pino and summed it all up, summed up the whole fucking adolescent severance of boyhood ties, maybe even summed up the entire human condition in three short words: “What about me?”

“You?” Pino said. “But what does this have to do with
you
, Francesco?”

“You said we’d go back to Italy together, you said we’d go back rich, we’d take care of our families...”

“But my family will be
here
,” Pino said with dignity.

“And what about your family
there
?”

“I’ll continue to send them money.”

“Ah, Pino,” my grandfather said, and sighed, and looked out over the river. A solitary silent tug was moving slowly downstream. He kept his eyes on the boat. He did not want to look again at Pino, not that night, for fear that he would burst into tears and reveal that his dreams of twinship had been shattered. Those daring explorers who had sailed three thousand miles across the Atlantic in search of treasure would
not
return
due a due
to the homeland, would not relate their adventures together, one interrupting the other in his excitement, words overlapping, augmenting and expanding upon each story the other told, the townspeople at their feet, mouths agape, as Pino and Francesco exhibited riches beyond imagination — Pino and Francesco, the Weber and Fields of Fiormonte. Now it would be Francesco alone.

In the neighborhood, opinion held the match to be ill-fated. To begin with, Pino was an ugly runt and Angelina was a beauty. But more important than that, no one had any real faith in this American concept of romantic love. In Italy, a man did not choose his own bride; she was chosen for him. Picking one’s own wife was considered revolutionary, and don’t think poor Angelina didn’t get a lot of static about it from her father, who preferred that she marry the proprietor of the
latteria
on First Avenue and 120th — a man who, like himself, was from the Abruzzi. Her father finally acquiesced, perhaps because she was a strong-willed girl who argued with him in English, rather than Italian, thereby frustrating his ability to counterattack effectively. But even though the American concept of
amore
was at last grudgingly accepted, Pino and Angelina were never left alone together. They were always shadowed by an “
accompagnatrice,”
usually one of Angelina’s aunts or older cousins, or, on some occasions, her godmother, a fearsome lady of substantial bosom and sharp eye, who was known to have shouted across First Avenue, “
Pino, non toccare!”
when Pino in all innocence tried to remove a coal cinder from Angelina’s eye, the strident “Don’t touch!” being the equivalent in those days of a bellowed “Rape!” Given Beauty and the Beast, then, given too this stupid unworkable foreign idea about “falling in love” (ridiculed by Papa Trachetti, but subtly supported by Mama, who kind of liked the notion), and given the strict supervision of a gaggle of fat ladies watching every move and censoring so much as a covert glance — how
could
this thing succeed?