Streets of Gold (12 page)

To Stella, cars were exciting. She watched them jangling by, she dreamed of riding in one (it was rumored that her Uncle Joe, Tess’s oldest brother and a gambler in Arizona, had bought one and, if he came east again this Christmas, might take her motoring), she bought all the paper-bound cheapbacks of jokes about the Ford car, and memorized them, and delighted her classmates by reeling them off one after another, with rapid-fire precision and nearly total recall. A label she saw pasted to the hood of one car — COME ON, BABY, HERe’s YOUR RATTLE — hinted at pleasures remote from the joys of motoring, promised delights she had not yet experienced except vicariously in the movie houses she frequented with her brother Luke every Saturday afternoon; Cristina and Dominick were still considered too young to spend hours in the dark watching what Francesco called, in the coined language of the immigrant,
garbagio
. The Italian word for “garbage” is
immondizie
, but in much the same way that Italian immigrants invented the word
baschetta
for “basket” (the choices in true Italian are either
paniere
or
cesta
), so did many other words come into half-breed existence. The funniest of these was probably minted by the earliest immigrants at a time when toilets were still in backyards and not in the hallways of the tenements. The Italian word for “toilet” is
gabinetto
. But those poor struggling souls who had to race out to the backyard to sit upon a makeshift wooden seat in a tar-paper shack learned the word “backhouse,” and immediately transmogrified it to,
bacausa
, instant Italian-English.

The movies were
garbagio
to Francesco, and it was with great reluctance that he shelled out the admission price of fifteen cents apiece to his daughter and son each Saturday. On the particular Saturday that Stella was supposedly exposed to the rapacious intent of Charlie Shoe, she and Luke saw a winner called
Hearts Adrift
, starring Mary Pickford —

“Yes, but what’s your real name, Miss Pickford?”

“Gladys Smith.”

“Would you spell that for me, please?”

 —
and
a Mack Sennett Keystone Kops two-reeler starring Ford Sterling and Mabel Normand,
and
the latest biweekly installment of the twenty-episode serial called
The Perils of Pauline
. Now here’s where a little second-guessing comes in, not that Stella’s story is to be doubted, you understand. (It had
better
be believed, or that poor hapless Chink suffered a southern Italian vendetta for no reason at all.) Such was the popularity of Pauline that, in addition to showing her continuing adventures on the screen once every two weeks, the episodes were also serialized in local newspapers, their appearance in print timed to coincide with the theater runs. But since Harlem wasn’t Forty-Second Street, and since the “chapters,” as Stella called the filmed episodes, sometimes reached the Cosmo on 116th Street several months after the fictionalized accounts appeared in the newspapers, it’s entirely possible that she had already read the episode she saw that day, and was conditioned to be excited by it, and therefore more susceptible to it than she otherwise might have been. It is a matter of record (go look it up) that on May 17, 1914, a full two months before Charlie Shoe reportedly lost his pigtailed head, the
New York American
ran a fictionalized account of what happened to Pauline when she went to visit New York’s Chinatown:

And later, in that same published episode:

Stella may not have read the episode when it appeared in the
American
, but that Saturday she
did
see the film upon which it was based, and you can bet your chopsticks the piano comper wasn’t playing “Pretty Parasol and Fan” while that collection of Chinese dope fiends were gleefully having their way with perky Pauline (whose hands were bleeding), who was saved from their clutches only by the timely intrusion of her stepbrother, Harry, who also happened to be her suitor. (Bit of incestuous suggestion there? I digress.) Stella watched the film with rising excitement — Luke corroborated this later, said she could hardly sit still when them Chinks was picking Pauline up off the floor. Brother and sister both came out of the theater into blinding daylight; the fantasies were behind them in the darkness, there remained only the reality of Harlem in July. They walked from 116th Street and Third Avenue to where they lived on the corner of 118th and First. Cristina was skipping rope with four little girls in front of her building. Young Dominick, already wearing eyeglasses at the age of seven, was sitting on the stoop watching the other children. (
All
of the Di Lorenzo family — with the exception of Tess and Cristina — wore eyeglasses. Stella wore hers under duress, feeling they spoiled her good looks, which they probably did. She had not worn her glasses to the movie that day.)

“How was it?” Cristina asked.

“Good,” Luke replied, and then sat down beside Dominick, and watched the girls without interest.

“What was it about?” Dominick asked.

“Lots of things,” Luke said. He was a tall, skinny, shambling kid with unkempt hair, brown eyes magnified by thick, horn-rimmed glasses, one leg of his knickers falling to his ankle, shirt sticking out of the waistband. When Rebecca first met him, many years later, she said he looked as if he’d just got out of prison and was wearing the suit of clothes issued by the Department of Corrections. My memories of Luke are warmer. He was the soft-spoken man who pressed clothes in the back of my grandfather’s tailor shop, always inquisitive about what kind of day I’d had at school, what subjects I was studying, how I was getting along. I can remember his long fingers tousling my hair. My interest in music was first encouraged by Luke, who began studying violin at the age of seven (at Tess’s insistence) and who later dropped it in favor of playing the piano by ear. I now know that he was a hacker who played every song he knew in either C, G, or B flat. But there were times when I would stand alongside the upright in my grandfather’s house and listen to Luke banging those keys, and Christ, to me he was making celestial music. It was Luke who chased me through the apartment one Sunday, after I kidded him unmercifully about a girl he was reportedly dating. I ran and hid under the bed, and he tried to flush me out with the straw end of a broom. He was mad as hell. It was Luke, too, who once threw his cards into the air during a poker game and yelled at my grandfather, “What the hell do you know about cards?” and then turned to me and said, “He draws to a goddamn inside straight, and
fills
it!” I had no idea what he was talking about, but his voice was confidential, and I felt he was letting me in on the secrets of the universe. The last time I spoke to him was in 1950, shortly after I married Rebecca. His voice, as always, was tinged with a sadness that seemed to hint at specters unexorcised. “Hey, how goes it, Iggie?” he said on the telephone, and I could remember again those long, thin fingers in my hair, and the smell of the steam rising from the pressing machine. “How goes it, Iggie?” I forget why I called him.

He sat on the stoop for perhaps ten minutes that July day in 1914, watching the girls skipping rope (Stella joined them at one point) and telling Dominick about the Mack Sennett short and the
Perils of Pauline
chapter, dismissing the Mary Pickford film as “lousy.” Then he went upstairs to practice the violin. Dominick got off the stoop and walked over to the tailor shop to visit Umberto and Francesco, who was now a full-time partner and a fairly decent tailor. His rise to partial ownership was directly attributable to Pino, who still worked in the garment center, and who had brought to Francesco a large order for Salvation Army uniforms — a bonanza that guaranteed a basic income to the shop, a stipend that continued for all the years of my grandfather’s life. Long after Umberto was dead, long after my grandfather became sole owner of the shop, those Salvation Army orders were there waiting to be filled each month. I can remember fingering the metallic s’s and a’s my grandfather sewed onto the collar of each uniform. It was the Salvation Army that got him through the Depression. And it was Pino, through his firm downtown, who first brought the business to his friend, Francesco.

Stella, weary of double-ee-Dutch, went back to the stoop and sat on it, chin cupped in her hands, and watched her little sister skipping under the flailing ropes while the other girls chanted. She rose suddenly, smoothed her skirt, and for no apparent reason walked into the laundry shop of Charlie Shoe next door.

STELLA: I went in the laundry for lichee nuts. He has these lichee nuts he keeps on the counter, and when I bring in the shirts, or I go to pick up something, he always says take, and I grab a handful. That’s why I went in the shop, because all of a sudden, I was sitting on the stoop watching Cristina and the girls, and I got an urge for some lichee nuts and I knew Charlie would give me some because he always gives me some when I go in there. Also, my hand was bleeding, it started bleeding in the movies when I was biting my nails, and, I figured maybe Charlie had a bandage he could put on it or something. I didn’t come to the tailor shop because I didn’t want to bother Grandpa or you, Papa, and I didn’t want to get blood on any of the clothes. I know how fussy Mama is about touching any of the clothes in the shop.

He looked kind of strange when he came out of the back. I think maybe he was smoking dope, they smoke dope a lot. His thing was open, his shirt, that silk Chinese thing he wears. The four top buttons were open. He said what did I want, and I told him did he have some lichee nuts? There wasn’t none on the counter, they’re usually on the counter. So he said no lichee nuts today, and I showed him that my hand was bleeding and did he have something I could wrap around it, and he said come in the back. I didn’t want to go in the back, but it was really bleeding, right near the cuticle. Also, I figured he really did have lichee nuts, they were in the back someplace, he once gave Mama a whole box of them when Uncle Joe was here last Christmas and she brought in a pile of his shirts. So I followed him through the curtain he’s got hanging behind the counter, and he told me to sit down he’d see if he had something for my finger.

What he’s got in the back of the store, it’s this small room with this folding bed against one wall, and over the bed he’s got pictures hung up of Mary Pickford and the two Gish sisters, and that lady who was in
Charity
, I forget her name, he’s got their pictures tacked to the wall. And along the back wall, he’s got these tubs where he washes the shirts and things, and he’s got an ironing board set up where he does the ironing, and them shirts and things are piled on the floor, the dirty shirts. The ones he’s already washed he’s got on a table like the one Aunt Bianca has in her kitchen, with a white enamel top, he’s got the clean stuff on that, ready to be ironed. And on the other wall, across from where the bed was, he’s got shelves with soap on them, and also boxes of lichee nuts, and food and tea and stuff, and a little wooden icebox and one of them small gas stoves like the one Grandpa used to have near the toilet in the tailor shop, where he used to make coffee on it before he got that new one. Like that. What he did was say I should sit on the bed, so I sat down and looked at the pictures he had tacked on the wall — oh, and there was also a Chinese calendar with a picture of a Chinese lady on it and Chinese writing on it, even the days were written in Chinese.

He went to the shelves on the other side of the % room, and he said what was my name, and I told him it was Stella Di Lorenzo, and he said Stella, Stella, saying it over to himself like it was a new English word he wanted to learn instead of somebody’s name. He had his back to me all this time, he was looking around the shelves there for I guess a bandage because what he brought over to the bed was it must have been an old sheet, I think it was an old sheet that maybe got ripped when he was washing it, that must’ve been what. So he stood in front of the bed and he tore the sheet up into strips, and he said how did I hurt myself and I said I was chewing my nails in the movies and he said okay, he was going to fix my finger up and then he would get me some lichee nuts. I was sweating, it was very hot back there. I said what a hot day it was, and how it must be great on a day like this to work in the ice station like Mr. Agnelli does, where he’s got all that ice stacked up in blocks, you know, in the icehouse, and if he feels like it he can go in there and hide with all the ice and nobody’d know where he was or nothing. Charlie just nodded sort of dumb, I don’t think he understood anything I was saying. He sat alongside me on the bed and took my finger in his hand and went tch-tch, you know, shaking his head and looking at where it was cut.

He didn’t do anything, not then, he just wrapped up the finger and then he tore the bandage, like up the middle, and wrapped the ends around my finger and tied a knot, and then he smiled and said okay, Stella? and I said yeah, that’s nice, Charlie, thank you very much, and he said I was a brave little girl, and he went to get the lichee nuts. Then he came back with this whole box of them, with a picture of a Chinese girl on the cover, and he opened the box and told me to go ahead and take as many as I liked, and he sat down on the bed again next to me. And he said he had a little daughter like me back in Canting or wherever, I don’t know, it was some Chinese name, I guess it’s a town. And he asked me did I go to school, and he didn’t do nothing, not yet, he just said did I like lichee nuts, and he said his daughter liked lichee nuts and in China you could also eat them fresh, that they were delicious fresh, and I said well, I like them this way, too, and he said how old are you, Stella?