The King of Mulberry Street (6 page)

The first man still jabbered at me.

I didn't move.

Eventually the Italian man came back. “Go. Go to the other side. It's not safe to pull you up on the side with the ship. Understand?”

“I'll wait,” I said.

“For what?”

“Till the ship leaves.”

“Only first and second class were allowed to disembark. The rest of the passengers won't be processed for days.”

I had no idea what that meant.

“Did you hear me? The ship won't leave for three days, at the least.”

I whimpered.

“Stay put. I'll find someone who can swim.” His face disappeared again.

In a little while gasping breaths came from under the dock.

“Here,” I called out. “I'm here.”

An older man swam to me. He grabbed the pole, then cursed as he pulled his bleeding hand away. He carried the end of a rope between his teeth. He took it out and offered it to me.

I didn't let go of the pole. I couldn't. I was stuck.

The man grabbed my ear and twisted.

“Aiii!” I let go of the pole with one hand and clawed at him.

He looped the rope around my chest and gave a yank, and I was jerked away through the water. I spun; water went up my nose and down my throat. I was drowning. Then I was suddenly out in the air, swinging like a clump of seaweed on a hook. I landed in a heap on the hot dock.

Someone asked me in plain language who I was, but my eyes were closed against the bright sun and I wasn't sure I could open them. My bones ached from being in the cold water; my teeth chattered.

I could hear men talking, trying to guess how I'd gotten down there, who I was. That had to be my passenger ship—it was from Napoli, and my speech told them I was, too. And I had to be a boy from a good family with shoes like that. I must have fallen off the plank when the first-and second-class passengers disembarked. Someone would surely pay a reward for their saving me. They argued about who deserved the reward. Then they worried that instead of a reward, they'd get blamed for my winding up in the water. That ended that.

Someone wrapped a padded crate cloth around me and rubbed my back and arms and legs through the cloth. Gradually, warmth radiated from my middle. But I still wouldn't open my eyes. I wanted whoever was holding me to keep holding me.

He carried me, bumping through crowds. I took a peek. Everyone was rushing. They talked funny. And they carried canes and wore so many clothes—jackets and hats.
Even the men working the docks had on shirts under that beating sun.

He carried me into a brick building filled with people in nice clothes, packed together. Men in uniforms stood beside them, holding on to giant handcarts of baggage. He spoke to a man who called out strange things through his megaphone. Another man came running and took the megaphone and announced in plain language, “Who's missing a Napoletano boy?” He pointed at me.

“What a nightmare for his parents,” a woman said. “Take him back to the ship right away.”

A man touched the rip in my pants, the one I'd gotten my first day on the ship. It had grown so big, I could put my hand through it. “You're third class.” He wagged his head. Another man pulled me by the hand back to the dock and up onto the ship and left me there.

What? Just like that?

The crew was still unloading luggage, and no one seemed to have noticed me. I scrambled over by a mast, out of the way, and watched. The heat of the day slowly dried me. The drier I got, the better I felt. Life was looking up; I was back on a ship. A passenger ship. This might even be better than my cargo ship.

I wandered into a room with a bed and desk and many ledgers. One lay open, listing name after name. This was the record of passengers. I had to stay out of the way of whoever kept it.

I walked out quickly, my heart thumping, and went straight to a group of lifeboats along the side. I held on to the rail and looked down and tried to blend with the background.

Time passed, and no one came to chase me away.

The smell of food got me wandering again. I hadn't eaten since that squirt of cow's milk. A crew member glanced at me, then stopped his work to look again. I ran to the closest hatch and scooted down below deck.

I sank into a sea of people. Most were quiet, putting their energy into the struggle to breathe in this heat. Some grumbled that they weren't allowed up on deck. The only people left on the ship now were third-class passengers. A man said there were five hundred and twenty of them, all in a stench of vomit and feces.

Here in the dark, no one could see beyond arm's length. But there was bread with lard spread, salty and delicious. And all I really needed to do was stay on this ship.

Home to Mamma. It was just a matter of time. My mamma.

The officers allowed us to sleep on the top deck. Babies cried, men cursed.

I was too wound up to do anything but wander among them. I found a man and two boys wearing yarmulkes, but I couldn't understand them. So I hung around Napoletani and listened. They pointed at a statue in the harbor and fell to their knees in prayer. I thought often of Uncle Aure-lio and his speeches about
le possibilit
à.

The next day the quarantine station officers came on board. People had been warning one another about them. They checked for typhus, yellow fever, smallpox. The trick was to stand at attention, look alert, and, no matter what, not cough. I was grateful to know the trick. Some who didn't were taken off someplace. It was rumored that they went into observation far away, and if they got sicker, they
went into isolation somewhere even farther away. After that, who knew what became of them?

That second night, I took my shoes off and spread out my socks to air. I carefully tucked the cloth with the tassels inside one sock, and I used, instead, the corner of the padded crate cloth that I carried everywhere to rub the shoe leather soft, because it had dried hard again after being in the water. When I went to put my shoes back on, I couldn't find my socks.

My
tzitzit
—my tassels!

No!

I felt all over the floor around me. I ran through the clusters of people, looking everywhere. I tugged on women's skirts and asked for help. I looked and looked and looked.

No no no.

My grandfather's prayer shawl tassels were gone. America had thieves, like Napoli—but worse ones. Far worse.

I stared out over the buildings of New York and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyelids. Still the tears came. I brushed them away as fast as they fell.

Some of those buildings seemed as tall as Vesuvio. But they didn't make me feel uplifted, like the high building of my synagogue in Napoli. Instead, I felt tiny and weak.

I turned my back to them and looked at the statue the others had prayed to—the grand Statue of Liberty.

I didn't want liberty. I stood there snuffling. All I wanted was to go home.

When it was time to disembark, men put gold chains around their necks, then ties and vests and coats, and they combed their mustaches. Women pinned their hair and put on jackets and fancy shoes with big wooden heels and any number of rings. Even the children sprouted boots and coats. I was a
scugnizzo
compared to them. And I was the only one missing a label—they all had a big number three pinned to their jackets, for third class. I tucked my shirt in my pants and smoothed the front of it.

The men carried baggage in both hands. So did the women, unless they were carrying a child or two. Some had an infant strapped to their chest. Everyone clenched their health certificate in their teeth.

I held my padded cloth and tried to blend in. I had a plan. As we filed along, I was going to duck
into the cow house. It had worked last time—almost. All I needed was to stay on this ship until it left for home.

But when I opened the cow house door, the woman behind me shouted, and a man from Napoli pulled me back into the crowd. He said, “What? You want to go to England? America is better.” Stupid me, to think that because this ship had left from the port of Napoli, it would return there.

Now I needed another plan.

The crowd carried me along, deafened by boat horns blasting from every direction, down the plank, around crates and animals and wagons on the pier, into the customs building. When it was my turn, the officer simply waved me past, and again the crowd carried me, this time onto a barge, men going to one side, and women and children to the other. They piled the baggage between us.

In less than half an hour we were ferried across to Ellis Island, and our shipload of passengers merged with shiploads from all over the world. No one understood anyone else. We went into a giant building. I'd never seen a building with wood walls. In Napoli only shacks were made of wood, not homes, and certainly not official buildings. On the bottom floor was a baggage area. Everyone was told to place their belongings there, but no one wanted to. The official kept saying that they could fetch them after they'd passed through the registration room upstairs. Still, no one put anything down.

The official lost patience; he barked at us.

Everyone's eyes darted around. Then they opened their bundles and layered extra clothes onto already sweating bodies. Around their necks they hung picture lockets
and saint medals and keys to the homes they'd left behind. They loaded their pockets with bone fans and wood pipes and rolling pins and little bottles and all kinds of documents. A woman from Napoli took out needle and thread and sewed letters from her dead husband into the hem of her skirt. She said they were love letters. Some people locked their fingers around the handles of their suitcases and simply refused to give them up.

Mamma's voice called, “
Tesoro? Tesoro mio?
”

I whirled around and watched a boy run to the fat, short woman who had stolen Mamma's voice, stolen Mamma's name for me—treasure. She said, “Grab hold of my skirt and don't let go, no matter what.”

That was what Mamma would say to me. My heart raced. I had to bite my hand to keep from screaming.

I threw my padded crate cloth onto the baggage pile and joined the crowd on the stairs. Everyone was talking and telling everyone else to hush so they could figure out what was going on. I stayed close to Napoletani. If they understood anything and repeated it, I would understand, too.

At the top of the stairs doctors checked fingernails and the backs of legs. They opened collars and felt necks. Women shuddered, their faces tight with fear, for they'd never been touched like that before. The doctors made everyone take off hats and kerchiefs, and they parted hair to inspect scalps. Men with pompadours were yelled at, as though they were trying to hide something in their puffed-up hair. Then the doctors took out metal hooks—like the kind people used to button their shoes—and looked inside lower eyelids. All that took only seconds.

Children screamed constantly. Doctors wanted to make sure any child over two years old was healthy enough to walk alone, but the children clung to their mothers. So the doctors ripped them away and walked off several paces with them, then set them down to go shrieking back.

I watched everything closely. Watch and learn and fit in—that was what Mamma said.

Almost everyone was pushed on into the giant registration room. But now and then the doctors made a mark with colored chalk on a person's clothes. The mark was always a letter; I saw
S
,
B
,
X
,
C
,
H
,
L
,
E
,
K
,
F
,
G
,
N
. Sometimes there were two letters,
Ft
,
Pg
,
CT
,
Sc
, or sometimes an X inside a circle. All the letters meant something bad, because they were written on people a doctor had spent extra time with. A man took off his coat and turned it inside out to hide the mark on his lapel.

The doctor who inspected me took five seconds. He touched the scabs on my arms from the barnacles on the piling pole at the dock and said something to me in English. I stood at attention, without coughing—I remembered the trick. Then he said something to the woman behind me and she shrugged. Two women in white uniforms—nurses— came up. One pulled me to the side. She did things with her hands, sticking up one finger, then five, then three, or forming an O with her thumb and index finger. The other woman mimicked her. Then the nurse turned to me and made a shape with her hand. She waited. I looked at her. The other nurse mimicked the shape. They both looked at me. And I got it; I made the shape. The first nurse took me through several shapes. Then she drew shapes on a piece of paper and I had to copy them. She smiled at me and patted
me on the back and pointed for me to go join the lines in the registration room.

I'd passed another test. Though what it meant was beyond me. I got in line and looked back at the nurses. They were still watching me, with suspicious eyes now. So I moved ahead through the line, out of their sight, till I found two men speaking Napoletano. I stood behind them and looked up at their faces as though I knew them. After a while I snuck a glance back; the nurses were testing someone else. I heard a man say they were testing for idiocy. So they'd thought I was an idiot.

This was the first time in my life I'd ever stood in a real line. Napoletani waited for things in clusters. But here, there were three strict lines. I was in the one on the left. I couldn't see the front, so I kept my ears open and I looked out the side windows at the Statue of Liberty. She was green in this light, and her torch was bright gold. A barge pulled in with more people. Where would they all fit? I looked at the floor. It was tiled, like any floor in Napoli. But it was dirty. Why was everyone coming to a place where people worked in wood buildings with dirty floors?

The lines moved slowly, but finally I could see an inspector at the head of each one. The inspector for my line questioned everyone in English. When they answered in another language, he called over a man in uniform who could speak every language in the world. The men in front of me called him a translator. Everyone handed over documents and pulled money out of pockets and hems of coats. The inspector asked questions and handed it all back, including the money.