Streets of Gold (9 page)

Old Umberto would show him how to trace a pattern onto a bolt of cloth, and Francesco would either break the chalk, or tear the pattern, or trace it onto a tweed instead of a covert — impossible. He was terrified of a pair of scissors; he opened them as though prying apart the jaws of a crocodile. Invariably, his hand slipped and he cut the cloth wrong. But even when his hand was steady, his eye was inaccurate, and one trouser leg would turn out to be longer than the other, a dress would be cut on the bias, a sleeve would not quite make a complete circle around a customer’s arm. And his stitches! Very patiently one day (keeping his rage in check, reminding himself that this clumsy oafish dolt of a grape farmer was now married to his youngest daughter, his single most prized possession before she’d been spirited away by this ditch-digging greenhorn), Umberto told Francesco that with stitches such as these, spaced as they were, wildly crisscrossing the cloth as they did, with stitches like yours, Francesco, it would do better for you to pursue a career in the chicken market on Pleasant Avenue, where the task is to divest the bird of its plumage rather than to adorn it, to create a thing of beauty, a garment for a customer of this tailor shop to wear with pride!
Madonna mia
, do you have sausages for fingers? (My daughter could have married a
lawyer
, he thought, but did not say.)

Teresa Giamboglio Di Lorenzo could indeed have married a lawyer. She was some sweet lady, my grandmother. Not as beautiful as Angelina, the pride of the neighborhood and the recent bride of Pino Battatore (who’d married her the month before Francesco tied the knot with Teresa), she was nonetheless strikingly tall for a girl of Neapolitan heritage, and she carried herself with the dignity of a queen. She could silence an argumentative customer in her father’s shop with a single hazel-eyed stiletto thrust that might just as easily have stopped a charging tiger. She spoke English fluently, of course, having been born in America, and she was aware that the Italian both her father and her new husband spoke was a bastardized version of the
true
Italian language, the Florentine. Her father had hand-tailored all her clothes from the day she was born, and she was still the most elegantly dressed young lady in the ghetto, coiffing her long chestnut brown hair herself, following the styles prescribed in the fashion magazines she avidly read each month —
Vogue, Delineator, McCall’s
, and
The Designer
. She was quick-witted, short-tempered, and sharp-tongued, but I never heard her raise her voice in anger to my grandfather as long as she lived. Whenever she spoke to him, her voice lowered to an intimate, barely audible level; even in the midst of a crowd (and there were some huge crowds around my grandfather’s table when I was growing up), one got the feeling that she and Francesco were alone together, oblivious of others, a self-contained, self-sustaining unit. I loved her almost as much as I loved him. And I’m glad she didn’t marry a lawyer.

My grandfather once told me, in his scattered tongue, that for the longest time he would look into the mirror each morning and think he was twenty-four. Intellectually, of course, he knew he was no longer twenty-four. But the mirror image looked back at him, and although he was really twenty-five, or twenty-seven, or thirty, he thought of himself as twenty-four. Until suddenly he was
thirty
-four. I don’t know why he fixed on twenty-four as the start of his temporary amnesia concerning the aging process. I suspect it was because he already had two children by then, with another on the way, and perhaps he recognized that raising a family in this new land was a threat to his dream of returning to the old country. Whenever he told me stories of those years following his marriage to Teresa, he would invariably begin by saying, “When I wassa twenna-four, Ignazio.” It was some time before I realized that the event he was describing might have taken place anytime during a ten-year span.

When he wassa twenna-four, for example, the wine barrel broke in the front room. The owner of the tenement in which the Di Lorenzos lived refused to allow my grandfather space in the basement for the making of wine unless he paid an additional two dollars a month rent. Francesco flatly refused. He had finally paid off his debt to Pietro Bardoni, and he’d be damned if he was going to pay another tithe to another bandit. He set aside an area of the front room overlooking First Avenue, and it was there that he pressed his grapes, and set up his wine barrels, and allowed his wine to ferment without any two-dollar-a-month surcharge. When he was twenty-four, then (1905? 1906?), he was sitting in the kitchen of the apartment on First Avenue, playing
la morra
with Pino, and Rafaelo the butcher, and Giovanni the iceman, when the catastrophe happened with the wine barrel in the front room.

The Italian word for “to play” is
giocare
, followed by the preposition
a,
as in
giocare a scacchi
(literally “to play at chess”). When I was a kid and heard the men saying, “
Giochiamo a morra,”
I thought they were saying, “We’re playing
amore
,” and wondered why the Italian word for “love” was used to label what I considered a particularly vicious little game.

La morra
is similar to choosing up sides by tossing fingers from a closed fist, except that it does not operate on the odds-or-evens principle. Not unlike a game played in France (the basis of a novel titled
La Loi
, which resonates with all sorts of Mediterranean undertones), the idea is to call out a number aloud while simultaneously showing anywhere from no fingers (a clenched fist) to five fingers. Your opponent similarly shouts a number and throws some fingers, and the winner of that round is the man who calls the number exactly matching the total number of fingers showing. “
Morra!”
is what you shout if the number you’re calling is zero. If you shout “
Morra!”
and both you and your opponent throw clenched fists, you are again a winner. After a number of elimination rounds, the two men who’ve won up to that point square off, shout their prognostications, toss their fingers or fists, and eventually there’s a single grand winner. This man is called
bossa
, an Italian bastardization of the word “boss.” He promptly appoints a partner, usually his closest friend, and the partner is called
sotto bossa
, or “underboss.” There is naturally a lot of yelling during the actual competition, which sometimes lasts for hours, but eventually there’s a boss, and he chooses his underboss, and then the real fun begins.

The fun involves a five-gallon jug of wine. The boss, by dint of his having eliminated all competition in fair and strenuous play, is boss of nothing but the wine. It is he who determines who will be allowed to drink the wine. If he wants to drink all the wine himself, that is his right and his privilege. If he wishes to share the jug only with his underboss, that too is his prerogative. If he wants to give the entire jug to some
shlepper
who is a perennial loser, and who will gratefully accept glass after glass of strong red wine until he’s consumed the full five gallons and fallen flat on his face, the boss can do that as well. The boss has absolute power concerning that jug of wine.

On the day of the catastrophe (when Francesco was twenty-four), he beat all the men at
la morra
and became
bossa
.

“Pino,” he said, “would you like to be
sotto bossa
?”

“I would consider it a great honor,” Pino said, and grinned.

“In that case, Pino, we will need a pitcher of wine and some glasses, please.”

Pino went to where the five-gallon jug was standing on a chair near the kitchen table, and he poured a pitcher full to the brim and brought it back to the table together with four glasses. Francesco filled two of the glasses as the other men watched.

“Pino?” he said, and offered him one of the glasses. “I drink to our homeland,” he said, and raised his glass.

“Salute,”
Pino said, and both men drank.

“Ahhh,” Francesco said. “Excellent wine.”

“Excellent,” Pino said.

The other men watched. They were very thirsty after nearly forty minutes of throwing fingers and fists and shouting numbers.

“I think our homeland deserves more than one toast,” Francesco said.

“I think so, too.”

“Should we have another drink,
sotto bossa
?”

“Yes,
bossa
.”

“Do you think it is fitting that we should have another drink while these men, who I’m sure are thirsty, sit and watch us?”

“Whatever you wish,
bossa.
”

“I think it is fitting,” Francesco said, and poured two more glassfuls of wine. “Pino?” He raised his glass. “I drink to the beautiful village of Fiormonte in the province of Potenza, and I drink to the good health of our families and friends there.”

“Salute,”
Pino said, and both men again drank.

“Ahhh,” Francesco said. “Beautiful wine.”

“Splendid,” Pino said.

“But I feel we do a discourtesy to our homeland if you and I are the only ones drinking and toasting. We should have more than two drinkers, don’t you agree, Pino?”

“I agree,” Pino said. “If that is your wish,
bossa
.”

“That is my wish.” Francesco turned to the butcher. “Rafaelo,” he said, “would you care for a glass of wine?”

“Well, that is entirely up to you, Francesco. You are the
bossa
.” The butcher licked his lips. He could taste the wine, but he did not wish to appear overly eager, lest the boss change his mind.

“Pino?” Francesco said. “What do you think? A glass of wine for the butcher?”

Pino considered the question gravely and solemnly. At last, he said, “
Bossa
, he has to work tomorrow.”

“That’s true,” Francesco said. “You’ll cut the meat badly, Rafaelo.”

“
Bossa
, tomorrow’s tomorrow,” Rafaelo said quickly. “And today is Sunday.”

“I think he’s thirsty,” Francesco said, and winked at Pino.

“I think they’re
both
thirsty,” Pino said.

“So let’s you and me have another drink,” Francesco said. He poured the glasses full again, raised his in toast, and said, “To Victor Emmanuel.”

“Are you drinking to the king without
us
?” Rafaelo said, appalled.

“To Victor Emmanuel,” Pino said, and drained his glass.

“Ahhh,” Francesco said. “Delicious.” He looked at the other men critically, as though estimating their capacity for alcohol, and measuring their thirst, and judging whether or not they were good and decent men, and hard workers, and religious besides. A smile broke on his face. He turned to Pino. “Now, please,” he said, “fill the glasses for our friends, and we will finish the wine together.”

Agnelli the iceman let out a sigh of relief. “I like it when you’re the
bossa
,” he said.

“Ah? And why?” Francesco asked.

“Because you have a soft heart,” Agnelli said.

“A soft
head
, I think,” Francesco said, and lifted his glass. “This time we drink to Italy together.”

Solemnly, the other men raised their glasses. “To Italy,” they said.

“To home,” Francesco said.

“Francesco!” Teresa yelled, and came running into the kitchen, her white apron covered with what Francesco first thought to be blood.

“Oh,
Madonna mia!
” he shouted, and leaped to his feet. “
Che successe?”

“The barrel!”

“What barrel?”

“One of the barrels!”

“What? What?”

“It’s broken!”

“What do you mean? What is she talking about?” he asked Pino, who was as bewildered as he.

“Of
wine!
” Teresa said. “In the front room!”

“San Giacino di California!”
Francesco shouted. “
Andiamo!”
he yelled to the other men, and ran out of the kitchen with the three of them behind him. The woman from downstairs knocked on the kitchen door, and when Teresa let her in she frantically told her there was wine on her ceiling, and it was dripping all over her bed. Teresa sighed. Francesco ran back into the kitchen, barefooted, his trouser legs rolled up, his feet stained a bright purple. He went immediately to the table and yanked the tablecloth from it.

“My tablecloth!” Teresa shouted.

“There’s wine all over the house!” he shouted back gleefully, and was gone.

“It’s dripping on my bed,” the lady from downstairs said.

“Yes,” Teresa said, looking somewhat distracted.

“We’ll drown in wine,” the lady said.

“Francesco will take care of it,” Teresa said.

In the other rooms, the men were shouting, and laughing, and swearing. Teresa, her hand to her mouth, stood beside the lady from downstairs, and listened.

“Catch it there!”

“I got it!”

“A calamity!”

“There!”

Pino and Francesco backed into the kitchen on their hands and knees, followed by the iceman and the butcher, all the men clutching wine-drenched towels and sheets and pillowcases, trying to stem the flood of wine as it ran through the rooms, sopping it up, slapping down makeshift dikes. “To your right, Giovanni!” and the iceman threw down his sodden sheet and yelled, “
Got
him!” and Teresa shouted, “My linens! Look at my linens!” and Francesco turned over his shoulder and saw the lady from downstairs, and said, “
Buon giorno, signora,”
and she answered with her eyes wide and her mouth open, “
Buon giorno,”
and Rafaelo the butcher clucked his tongue and said, “What a sin!” and the lady from downstairs said, softly, “It’s dripping on my bed,” and Francesco said, “Get some peaches, and we’ll dip them,” and burst out laughing again. They built a barricade of linens across the kitchen doorway, and finally stopped the flow of wine from the rest of the apartment. Sitting on the floor, dripping purple, laughing as though they had just been through some terrible battle together and had emerged victoriously, they heard Teresa say, “Why don’t you make your wine in the cellar, like other men?”