The King of Mulberry Street (12 page)

“In Napoletano?”

“Well, sure. I spoke Napoletano.”

“What did he speak?”

“English.”

“How's your English?” asked Gaetano.

“Which way Chatham Square?” I said in English. I expected him to laugh.

He looked stricken. “Where'd you learn that? You go to school, huh? All the Italian kids in the Bronx go to school?”

“Those are the only English words I know.”

“You swear?”

What was he all worked up about? “Of course.”

“You better not be making fun of me.”

“I'm not.”

“Don't make fun of me ever.” Gaetano threw back his shoulders.

“I don't make fun of anyone,” I said quietly.

“If you're my friend, you don't make fun of me. Ever.”

“I won't. Ever.”

He looked around; then he turned back to me. “So that's all the English you know?”

“That's it.”

“Well, once you try to say other things, you'll see. Go outside Five Points and people laugh at how you talk.”

“How do you know? You don't go outside.”

“I hear the Five Points men complaining,” he said. “That's why they only work for other Italians.”

“They can't work in Chatham Square because they don't learn English?”

“That, and other things. Italians belong together anyway. Especially southern Italians.”

I scratched dirt off my arm. “Let me get this straight. Immigrants who aren't Italian, they learn English?”

“Yeah. You should hear the big, dumb Swedes speaking English in the factories in Chatham Square.”

“Dumb like a fox,” I said. “The Italians are the dumb ones. It's better to learn English and get any job you want.”

“What'd I tell you about being loyal?” said Gaetano. “Especially here, right now.”

“Why especially here?” I asked.

“Because of the Irish. Shut up, okay?” Gaetano stopped. “See that big building across Prince Street? That's Saint Patrick's Cathedral.”

The bells rang as we stood there. People came from the north and went through the central front door with the pointed arch over it. People came from behind us on Mulberry Street and went around to the side. Gaetano walked toward the side entrance.

“Why don't we go in the front door?” I asked.

“Because we're not Irish. Shut up. I mean it.”

We went down to the basement. Everyone crowded onto benches. I stared straight ahead at the neck of the woman in front of me. She reached a hand up under her black mantilla and a curl tumbled down. Her hair wasn't as dark as Mamma's. But that curl made my face prickle with pins and needles. She tucked it back under. It fell again.

A priest came in. Everyone stood. For the next hour the priest spoke in an Italian that I could mostly understand and a Latin that I loved listening to. We stood and sat and
kneeled and recited Latin. They passed around a basket. People put in coins. Not Gaetano.

The priest read a part of the Bible about Saint Paul working hard. Then he talked about the virtue of persisting against the odds. He talked about the opportunities that lay within reach for hard workers. He said Italians could never be faulted for not working hard. The people murmured agreement. He said the possibilities were endless for us—for every last one of us. I thought of Uncle Au-relio and his lectures on
le possibilit
à, Uncle Aurelio, who would be aghast to see me at a Catholic mass. My whole family would. I was.

I stood up to leave, but Gaetano yanked me back into my seat. “Stay still,” he hissed. “The gospel is the most important part.”

I looked at my hands and tried to close my ears to what was going on outside my head. It was my body in this church, not my heart and soul.

Afterward, I asked Gaetano, “Why go to this church if the Irish make you sit in the basement? Aren't there Italian churches?”

“Sure there are. But they're outside Five Points. Here there're only Irish churches—the Most Precious Blood Church and the Church of the Transfiguration and this one—Saint Patrick's. But Italians have to sit in the basement at the other churches, too. And the Transfiguration is on Mott Street; I hate Mott Street. Anyway, it's better than it used to be—they used to forbid the priests from using Italian.”

He pulled me into a building a block away. Adults
drank coffee and ate pastries. Kids ran around knocking into things. Gaetano stuffed a pastry in his mouth and filled a cup with coffee. I did the same. I didn't usually like coffee, but it was delicious at that moment. I hadn't had anything to eat since the ice cream Saturday afternoon.

“I've seen you here before,” said a woman in an Italian dialect as she approached Gaetano. “But without your little brother. Where's your mother?”

“She's sick,” said Gaetano, speaking her dialect—just like he'd spoken the ice cream vendor's Genovese the day before.

“That's too bad.” She looked doubtful. “What's her name?”

Gaetano backed toward the door.

“Don't run off,” said the woman. She picked up two more pastries and handed us each one. “If your family joins, then when someone gets sick, we'll help out. And when someone dies, we'll pay the funeral costs. Tell your mother that.”

“I will,” said Gaetano.

“Or, better, let me tell her.” A little girl yanked on the woman's skirt. The woman picked her up without turning her eyes from us. “Where do you live?” One hand caressed the little girl's head. Mamma used to do that to me all the time. “I can bring your mother soup,” said the woman, her hand on the child's cheek.

“We have to go.” Gaetano put down his cup and took my hand. “We're late.”

“See you next week,” said the woman.

Gaetano pulled me outside and we ate our pastries. “Next week I'll go to a different one.”

“A different what?” I asked, forcing away the picture of the woman's hand on the child's cheek. “Are there always parties after church?”

“It's not a party—it's a meeting of a mutual aid society. There are lots of them around here. Don't they have them in the Bronx?”

I shrugged. “What dialect were you talking with her?”

“Milanese. It's from the north of Italy.”

“Do you speak every Italian dialect?” I asked.

“Nah. Only the useful ones. To tell the truth, I hardly speak Milanese at all. Just enough to keep out of trouble for sneaking in.”

“Why don't you go to a mutual aid society for people from Napoli?”

Gaetano laughed. “There aren't any. It costs fifty cents a month to be a member. None of the southern Italians can afford that. And the northerners wouldn't let us join theirs anyway, even if we had the money.”

“Why not?”

“They look down on us. And we don't care. Who needs them? Look. It's like this, Dom. You're Napoletano. I'm Napoletano. We're our own group. We stick together. But the next best guy is someone from the south—except for Sicilia. Don't ever trust a Siciliano. But the Calabresi aren't too bad. There's lots of them on Mulberry Street. And the ones from Basilicata—they're dirt poor and they know nothing, but they're okay. And then, after that, there's northern Italians. The Piemontesi and Lombardi. They live west of Broadway.”

“Then who?”

“No one. After the Italians, there's no one you can trust.”

“What else do these societies do beside help with funerals and take care of the sick?”

“Sometimes they get jobs for people. And if they can't find anything in New York, they'll pay your fare to the coal mines in Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Or, if you want to go farther, Colorado, or Wyoming, or Montana. But then you have to work with Slavs and Welshmen. Still, the mines will always hire Italians first.”

Tonino had a job in a coal mine. He must be off in one of those places. “That's what you should do when you're older, Gaetano, start a mutual aid society for southern Italians, not some stupid bank.”

“People who run mutual aid societies don't get rich. Bankers get rich.”

Everything he said came out like the gospel of that priest—like a truth no one could argue with. “How do you know everything, Gaetano?”

“I pay attention.”

“No one pays attention that well,” I said.

He grinned. “They would if they got paid for it.”

“You get paid for paying attention?”

“I see something someone would want to know—I hear something someone would want to know—and I sell the information.” Gaetano sat down on the steps of a building and stretched his legs in front of him, crossed at the ankles. He leaned his elbows back on a higher step.

“How can you figure out what someone would want to know?”

“People need information. All kinds of information. They pay me for the craziest things. You wouldn't believe it. And don't get any ideas about sticking around here and
stealing my job. You'd never survive. You don't understand anything you see.”

“Sticking around here is the last thing I want to do.” I sat beside him. Gaetano really did understand everything he saw. People wouldn't pay him for information if he couldn't be trusted. “Want another job, Gaetano?”

“Who's offering? You? You've got nothing to pay with.”

It killed me to say it—but what else did I have? “My shoes.”

Gaetano sat up. “What's the job?”

“Get me onto the ship that's down at the wharves. The Bolivia.”

“You want to go on a ship? Where?”

“Napoli.”

Gaetano stared at me. Then he gasped. “You're not from the Bronx at all. You're fresh off the boat, aren't you? You're really lost.” He slapped one fist into the other palm. “I should have known it.”

“Why? How could you have known?”

He flushed. “If you had a mother, she'd have come storming down here by now.” His temples pulsed. His jaw tightened.

“Is your mother really sick, like you told that woman?”

“That's none of your business.”

“Do you have a mother?” I asked.

“Shut up. I mean it. Don't ever ask about my family.”

I raised my hands in surrender, to calm him down. Then I leaned toward him. “Get me onto that ship and these shoes are yours.”

“I don't go down to the wharves. You know that.” Gae-tano shook his head at me now. “You're alone. You don't
even have a
padrone
. Now I get it. The way you act so much older than you are. That's all it takes—a few days alone, and you grow up just like that. What else could you do? I've seen it before. Kids like you, acting so big.”

“You don't have to talk to anyone in English out there,” I said. “Just come with me to the wharves—come and listen and watch. Figure out a way to get me on the ship. Please. I want to go home.”

Gaetano looked away. I knew by now that that was what he did when he was trying to make up his mind. I squeezed my hands together.

He turned back to me. “I'm not promising a thing. But I'll see what I can find out. When's this ship sailing?”

“I don't know, but it's got to be soon.”

“Meet you back here at suppertime.” He got up and walked down Mulberry. “And don't follow me,” he called over his shoulder.

So I went the other way, up Mulberry. No one talked to me. No one looked at me.

Mulberry ran into another street at an angle. If I kept going in the same general direction, there was no way I could get lost. The only thing I needed to know was where to angle off on the way back. I counted the number of streets I crossed. At the fifth corner, my street angled again. Well, okay, I could keep track of that. At the fifth corner, this street angled, too. That was easy to remember—five and five. I was at the edge of a park.

The street sign said PARK, with the little letters A-V- E in the upper right corner. I knew
park
. It was the one word of English I could read. And suddenly I made the connection—the Italian word
parco
and the English word
park
—they must mean the same thing. English wasn't such a hard language, after all.

Could this possibly be the same Park Street that ran into Chatham Square? Just in case it wasn't, I counted blocks again. I walked along looking around at the tall buildings, the passing carriages, the people. Stores were closed and shuttered, but I looked at the carvings in the stone over doorways and the huge, feathered hats that the ladies wore. Most of the women held on to the arm of a man. One woman strode by me with a frilly white blouse and a skirt with a wide waistband. Two rows of buttons ran down the front of her blouse. She wasn't pretty, but she caught the eye. Mamma would have been beautiful in those clothes.

I lost count of the blocks somewhere after twenty, because I looked up and my breath was taken away. A giant building loomed ahead. There were three levels of windows. I walked along one side counting the cupolas. Behind the building was a large train shed. Oh, it was a railway station.

I went inside. Men in white straw hats with black bands around the center and broad brims stood in groups. Some carried canes, though they weren't old. They wore ties and vests under their jackets and spoke English.

But then I saw men with curly black hair and mustaches and bow ties. They spoke Napoletano and they bought tickets to Bronxville. Eight cents for a twenty-minute ride. They complained about the high fare, but that was what it cost to visit the relatives on Sunday.

I went out to the train platforms. A gleaming steam engine pulled in. I watched people and trains for hours. When I got too hungry to stay still, I left, passing an area
where they kept baggage. A penny to check your belongings overnight.

A penny for this, a penny for that. Life in New York was measured out in pennies.

It was hours yet till suppertime. So I let myself wander. After all, I could say “park” and anyone could point me back to the right road.

Within a couple of blocks I wound up on a broad street. I followed it a long way and came to the countryside. Look at that. Manhattan wasn't such a big place after all. I'd walked the whole length of it. Where there was country, there were farms—and where there were farms, there was food.

A family sprawled on tablecloths spread out on the grass, finishing a meal. The smell of strange spices hung in the air. Fancy food. And these people looked fancy—not at all like farmers. They wore their Sunday best.

I hid behind a tree and watched. A few children took handfuls of leftovers and ran toward a pond. Three huge waterbirds, white things with long necks, swam at the edge. They looked toward the children expectantly. One of them got out of the water and waddled up.