Streets of Gold (7 page)

Francesco, along with the rest of the neighborhood, hoped that it would not. Eventually, Pino would come to his senses and realize that this girl who did not wish to return to Italy was certainly not the girl for him. In the meantime, Francesco plotted his revenge against Halloran. While Pino and Angelina talked of whom they would invite to the wedding and the reception, Francesco plotted his revenge. While Pino and Angelina talked of what furniture they would need, and where they would buy it, and where they would live, and how many children they would have, Francesco plotted his revenge. His furtive scheming may have been a form of displacement, a way of venting all the frustration, anger, and disappointment he could not express to Pino. Who the hell knows? I’m a blind man. I can only visualize that morning of June the twelfth as my grandfather gleefully described it to me many years later.

It is raining.

It has been raining for twelve days and twelve nights; this June of 1901 will go down in the records as one of the wettest in the history of New York. The tunnel in which the men work is a veritable quagmire, but to Francesco it is resplendent with the sweet sunshine of revenge. He has planned carefully. In his native Italy, he could neither read nor write, but he has been diligently practicing English ever since his encounter with Halloran; or to be more exact, he has been laboriously tracing and retracing two letters of the alphabet — P and H.

He has rejected Bardoni’s idea of hiring two Harlem hoods to bash in Halloran’s skull, but he is not so foolhardy as to believe that he can handle Halloran by himself. The turn-of-the-century equivalent of Charles Atlas as a ninety-seven-pound weakling who got sand kicked in his face throughout all the days of my boyhood, my grandfather is no match (and he knows it) for a brute like Halloran. What is needed to defeat him is another brute, a similar brute, perhaps an identical brute. Francesco has carefully studied his fellow workers in the subway tunnel (while nightly pursuing his handwriting exercises at home — P and H, P and H) and has decided that the only true match for Patrick Halloran is a total clod of an Irish mick named Sean McDonnell. (Spare me your letters, offended Irishmen of the world; to a blind man you’re all the same — wops, spies, kikes, micks, polacks, niggers; when you’ve not seen one slum you’ve not seen them all. And in any case, I am American to the core, a product of this great democratic nation. And that’s what this whole fucking thing is
about
.)

McDonnell is a beast of burden. He is six feet four inches tall, and he weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. He speaks English with such a thick brogue that even his own countrymen can barely understand him. He is fifty-two years old, partially balding, with tiny black pig’s eyes beneath a lowering brow, a bulbous nose he clears by seizing it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, holding the calloused palm away as daintily as though he is lifting a demitasse, and then snorting snot into the mud. He has a huge beer-barrel belly as hard as concrete, and is often daring the other men to punch him as hard as they can in the gut. He laughs a great deal, but seemingly without humor, the laughter unprovoked by incident or event; he finds life either terribly comical or utterly mystifying. Because he is so stupid, he often cannot tell the difference between a well-intentioned compliment and an insult, and is quick to answer any supposed affront with his fists. He is a perfect foil for Francesco’s plot.

The lunch hour comes at twelve noon. The foreman blows his whistle into the tunnel, and the men drop their picks, grab for their lunch pails, and begin to disperse. Even when the weather is good, they drift from their work areas to eat in other parts of the tunnel, the theory being that a change is as good as a rest. But this week in particular, when the mud is everywhere underfoot, they search out niches in the rock walls, higher stretches of ground, overturned wheelbarrows, the insides of carts, anything upon which they can spread their sandwiches and coffee safe from the slime. Francesco waits until all the men have wandered off, and then he moves swiftly to where McDonnell has dropped his pick — he has been watching McDonnell all morning, and knows exactly which pick is his. He lifts it from the mud, wipes the handle clean with the sleeve of his shirt, and takes a penknife from his pocket. Quickly, he carves the initials P.H. into the handle, and then drops the pick back into the mud. The explosion comes shortly after lunch.

“What’s this?” McDonnell says.

Francesco, working some distance away, continues chopping at the solid rock wall of the tunnel. There is a sense of rising excitement in him, coupled with an uneasy foreboding. Suppose this backfires? But no, it cannot.

“What in holy bloody hell is
this
?” McDonnell bellows.

There is not a man in the tunnel who does not know of Francesco’s run-in with Halloran two months back. With great relish they tell and retell the story of how Halloran carved his initials into the little wop’s pick handle and then traded his own broken pick for the undamaged one. McDonnell is a notch above a moron, but he has heard the story, too, and what he sees staring up at him now from the handle of his pick are the initials P.H.

“Where’s Halloran?” he shouts.

He does not ask Halloran for an explanation; he never asks anyone for an explanation. He knows only that Halloran has equated him with the puny wop and is trying to pull the same trick a second time. Francesco watches as McDonnell seizes Halloran by the throat and batters his head against the rock wall of the tunnel. He watches as McDonnell, one hand still clutched around Halloran’s throat, repeatedly punches him in the face, closing both his eyes and breaking his jaw and splintering his teeth. He watches as McDonnell picks up the other man effortlessly, holds him over his head for an instant, and then hurls him some ten feet through the air to collide with the opposite wall of the tunnel. Then he watches as McDonnell takes the pick and with its P.H. initials, breaks the handle over his knee, and drops the halves on Halloran’s bloodied chest

“It wan’t comical,” he says to Halloran, but Halloran does not hear him. Halloran is unconscious and bleeding and broken, and will in fact be taken to the hospital, not to report back to work till the middle of August, by which time Francesco will have left the subway-building business for good. In the meantime, he looks at Halloran lying in the mud, and he watches as the men begin to gather around him, and there is a tight grim smile on his mouth; he is from the south of Italy, and revenge is nowhere sweeter.

A conversation between my brother Tony and me, many years later. Tony is seventeen, I am fifteen. We are sitting on the front stoop of our house in the Bronx. Ten minutes earlier, I’d made casual reference to our grandfather’s tale of revenge, which we’d both heard many times. Tony suddenly expresses a skepticism I can only link with his present anger at Grandpa. Tony wants to join the Air Corps; Grandpa has asked, “Why? So you can go bomb Italy?” But Grandpa has prevailed, and my mother has refused to sign the permission papers for enlistment. Tony blames Grandpa for this, and now refuses to believe a story he has accepted as gospel since he was five.

TONY: It just doesn’t ring true, Iggie, that’s all.

ME: Grandpa swears it happened.

TONY: Why didn’t McDonnell suspect that maybe
Grandpa
was the one who’d carved those initials into his pick?

ME: Because he was dumb.

TONY: He was smart enough to remember the story about Grandpa and Houlihan, and to...

ME: Halloran.

TONY: Halloran. He made
that
connection, didn’t he?

ME: Come on, Tony, a caterpillar could’ve made
that
connection. The man’s initials were carved into the pick! P.H. So McDonnell automatically...

TONY:... automatically went after Halloran and beat him senseless.

ME: Right.

TONY: I don’t believe it.

ME: Well, I do.

TONY: What if I told you that June of 1901 was the sunniest June in the history of New York City?

ME: Grandpa says it rained for twelve days and twelve nights. It went into the records, he says.

TONY: Have you checked the records?

ME: No, but. . .

TONY: Then how do you know Grandpa wasn’t lying?

ME: He never lies, you know that. Anyway, what’s the rain got to do with the story?

TONY: I’m only trying to show you that if
part
of the story is a lie, maybe
all
of it is a lie.

ME: It sounds like the truth. That’s good enough for me.

Which, in a way, is exactly how I feel about this narrative. If it
sounds
like the truth, that’s good enough for me.
You
go check the records, I’m too busy, and I’m too blind. I haven’t the faintest inkling whether June of 1901 was the wettest June on record or the sunniest. When you find out, let me know — though frankly, I don’t give a damn, If you’re willing to compromise, I’ll say it was the
cloudiest
June on record, how’s that? The floor of the subway tunnel was covered with
mist
, okay? The Spanish-American War took place in 1794, Pope John was a Protestant, we got out of Vietnam with honor, astronauts are lyric poets, and my mother is a whore. Who cares? The truth I’m trying to deliver has nothing to do with careful research meticulously sandwiched into a work of fiction to give it verisimilitude or clinical verity. The
only
truth I’m trying to convey is this: it’s a lie.
All
of it.

That’s the tragedy.

In contrast to the miserably wet June that year, the beginning of July was sunny and hot. The Fourth fell on a Thursday. Today, this would mean a four-day weekend, but in 1901, when men were working a six-day week, Independence Day was only a one-day respite from the almost daily grind. Francesco had been in America for the celebration of Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays (which meant nothing to him) and for Easter (which he had spent in the hospital recuperating from Halloran’s attack). The Fourth was special to him only in that it promised widespread celebrations on the order of
La Festa di San Maurizio
in Fiormonte.

One of those celebrations was sponsored by the local Republican Club, and was announced in the newspapers (including 
Il Progresso
, the Italian-language newspaper read by all literate Italians in the ghetto) as:

Francesco awakened on the morning of the glorious Fourth to the sounds of the Agnelli children arguing in the room next door. He quickly checked under his pillow to make sure his shoes had not been spirited away and pissed into, and then glanced sleepily at the clock on the chair beside his bed. This was to be the most important day of his life, but he did not yet know it, nor would he come to know it for a long, long while.

I must get out,
he thought,
I must go back
. He thought that every morning and every night, and yet he continued to work on the subway, and he continued to return to this dreary room in the apartment of the iceman and his family. There seemed little reason for Francesco to remain in America. He was more heavily in debt now than he had been on the day he’d arrived, and seriously doubted that he could ever repay all the money Bardoni had advanced to him. The weekly bite on his pay check had drastically reduced the amount of money he could send home to Fiormonte each week. He was weary most of the time; his bones ached from the labor he performed, his mind reeled from the babble of sound assaulting him most of his waking day. And now that Pino had defected, now that Pino had announced his intention to marry Angelina Trachetti and stay here in this barbaric land, where was there any sense in persisting? Was a man to be governed by his stomach alone? He would go back to Italy, he would return home. But each time he thought of returning, he was faced with new and seemingly insurmountable problems: where would he get the money for the return passage? Bardoni again? And how would the family survive in Fiormonte (where conditions were even « worse now) if he returned? Whatever pittance he sent them from America was more than he could earn at home.
Ah, miseria,
he thought, and got out of bed, and put on his pants and his shirt.

The oldest of the Agnelli children, who had been picking up English in the streets, said, “Hello, cock-sucker,” as Francesco went through the room with his shoes under his arm. The door at the end of that room led to the bedroom of the
paterfamilias
and his wife, Luisa. Francesco eased the door open gently. The iceman had already gone to work, no rest for the weary on this Fourth of July, with picnics and celebrations all over the
vicinanza
. Luisa was alone in the bedroom, asleep in the double bed, one arm curled behind her head, hairy armpit showing. The sheet was tangled around her ankles; her purple-tipped boobs and dense black crotch were fully exposed. For a wild and frightening moment, Francesco considered hopping into the rumpled bed with her, as the iceman had feared he would do all along. The room stank of sweat and semen and cunt; Giovanni had undoubtedly enjoyed 
’na bella chiavata
before heading out to cool the beer and soda pop of half the neighborhood. Francesco stood at the foot of the bed and silently contemplated Luisa’s breasts and crotch. She turned in her sleep, thighs opening to reveal a secret pink slit that seemed to wink lasciviously. Is she awake? he suddenly wondered. Is she flashing her pussy in invitation? And was surprised to discover he had an erection. He hurried out of the room. If Luisa was beginning to look good to him, it was most certainly time to go back to Italy. But how?
Ah, miseria,
he thought again, and went into the kitchen, and sat on the floor, and put on his shoes.