Streets of Gold (14 page)

Now
that
was some war. That was a war you could follow with keen interest, even before America became involved in it. At times, Stella found it almost too exciting to bear. Now that the mundane events of her childhood were safely behind her — little everyday occurrences like walking in on the iceman and Filomena; or being in that kitchen when Angelina gushed out her life in the next room; or seeing Angelina laid out in a coffin in the front room of the Battatore apartment, Pino sobbing uncontrollably, a fresh burst of theatrical moans coming from the women in black whenever another relative entered the flower-bedecked room to pay respects; or watching Angelina’s coffin being lowered into the ground in the Long Island cemetery, the day clear and bright in contrast to the solemn ritual, the priest from Mount Carmel intoning his elegy in Italian; and then just a few days later the Chinaman trying to get into her pants (dirty old Chink!) — why, my goodness, it had been a tumultuous and terrifically exciting couple of weeks that seemed to summarize and encapsulize all the fun and adventure of growing up in a healthy, violent land that was beginning to test its muscle and gird its loins, stretch a bit, move out of its own childhood at just about the same time Stella moved out of hers. But
now
? Oh, good Lord, holy Jesus, Mary mother of God, here was a
war!
And
what
a war! Wow, you could follow that thing day by day in all the newspapers, and you could begin to take sides even before America itself began to take sides. You could study the maps and the battle lines as they shaped up, and wonder what it was like to be over there with bombs exploding all over the place and machine guns chattering and people screaming on the barbed wire and all. Wow!

During World War I, Stella’s imagination soared. Cold print translated itself in her mind to the most vivid pictures in full color, Germans slicing off the hands of Belgian babies and raping nuns, and the English doing their own dastardly deeds, like putting strychnine in the coffee they served to German prisoners of war — it was almost
impossible
to imagine
all
the things going on over there, but Stella sure tried. She began to menstruate at the age of twelve (in the south of Italy, they sometimes start at eight), and this, too, was terribly frightening and exciting, unprepared as she was (Tess was too involved with going “to business” to notice that her eldest daughter was developing tiny little breasts, or to realize that if winter came, spring could not be far behind), and here it was — a virgin spring indeed, bubbling up out of the wells of her womanhood and scaring her half out of her mind. She ran to her Aunt Bianca’s corset shop and told her she was bleeding to death like Angelina had, and Aunt Bianca calmed her (that dear, lovely, worldly woman) and introduced her to the mysteries of menstrual pads and the cycles of the moon. Stella must have felt enormously relieved when she left that shop, knowledgeable now, secure and somehow different. Being Stella, she probably felt more American as well, and undoubtedly walked a lot taller. For Christ’s sake, she must have felt like John Wayne! (Stella Di Lorenzo, today you are a man!)

She wasn’t John Wayne, nor was she even William S. Hart, his 1915 screen equivalent. She was just a little girl growing up, and the business of growing up was somehow connected in her mind to the ideal of growing up American. The ideal was, in many respects, pure and unsullied for her. It had a lot to do with the things she was being taught in the public schools of New York City, fantasies about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, or Paul Revere riding his midnight horse through the streets of New England, or Patrick Henry knowing not what course other men might take, but as for him, baby, give him liberty, or Nathan Hale regretting that he had but...
whack
, the Englishman pulled the stick, and the trap door opened, and old Nathan was left hanging there in midair, kicking and twitching without ever having got out his last few words. Pop history. Who the hell knows if half those guys ever said a third of the things attributed to them? Can anyone imagine, for example, Jesus Christ himself, sitting before his disciples and spewing forth, nonstop, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand”? (Maybe you had to be there.) Stella never quoted much from Jesus Christ, though she was learning her catechism three times a week at Mount Carmel on 115th Street in preparation for her First Holy Communion and her confirmation to follow. But she did quote a lot from the likes of John Paul Jones and Thomas Jefferson and Stephen Decatur and Abraham Lincoln. I got my first clue as to how she was taught when she recited two catch phrases that had been drummed into her head by Mrs. Pamela Frankel in the junior high school course on American History:

“Bull Run Number One, the Confederacy won.

“Bull Run Number Two, the Confederacy won, too.”

She quoted these to me when I was six years old and in the first grade. Nothing much had changed in New York City’s schools — I was being taught music appreciation the same way she’d been taught history. Until then, I had done most of my music appreciating in my grandfather’s house, listening to my uncle bang away at the piano, pecking out one-finger melodies, searching for chords (invariably cacophonous) with his left hand, playing all the popular songs of the day, stuff like “Love Letters in the Sand” and “Out of Nowhere” and “Sweet and Lovely” (his choices now seem significant), all great old tunes which I myself still play. But they weren’t teaching pop shlock when I was in elementary school, oh, no. For us little blind bastards, music appreciation was divided into twice-weekly sessions, one of them vocal, the other auditory, and both concentrating on stuff a little more profound than “Potatoes Are Cheaper.” In the vocal hour, we were separated into Bluebirds and Blackbirds (not an ethnic breakdown since there
were
no blacks at my school) and we sang things like “The Lord High Executioner” from
The Mikado
or “By the Bend of the River” in four-part harmony. I was a Blackbird, and I hated the singing sessions. But I did enjoy listening to the records played on the wind-up phonograph in our school auditorium, and I guess I also enjoyed the “lyrics” Miss Alice Goodbody (that was her name; apt or not, I shall never know) wrote for the various compositions in an attempt to drill them into our heads. I’m not sure which philosophy of education was operating; I’m positive it wasn’t John Dewey’s. The following examples won’t make much sense unless you know the melodies. If you
don’t
know the melodies, then there
is
something to be said for the way I was taught them (and maybe for the way my mother was taught about the Civil War). Maestro?

Or...

Or...

Or...

One of my
mother’s
favorites, which I’m sure she never was taught in school, and which I’m equally sure must have set my grandfather’s teeth on edge each time she recited it, had no musical accompaniment; it was sheer soaring poetry:

Understand, please, that Stella was simultaneously learning two seemingly contradictory things about America. In school, where all the pupils were the sons and daughters of immigrants (a fact appreciated and exploited by her teachers), she was being taught that America was a nation with a proud history of its own, nonetheless willing to welcome to its shores foreigners from many different lands (witness your own greenhorn parents, little darlings) who would eventually be absorbed into the mainstream, enriching the country and being enriched by it in turn. That’s not a bad concept. That is, in fact, a damn fine concept. At the same time, in the ghetto, Stella was learning that the melting pot had hardly yet begun to boil. Charlie Shoe (who’d hastily moved to San Francisco) was a Chink. So was the man who’d taken over his laundry. They were both Chinks. In school, Stella could be told from dawn till sundown that Charlie was an American, or at least in the process of becoming an American, but you couldn’t convince her that the man who’d reached under her dress was anything but a Chink. Nor did her terminology (and the stereotyped ideas
shaped
by it) have anything to do with her supposedly traumatic experience. The people who lived west of Lexington Avenue were “niggers” and a mysterious menace, and her feelings about them had nothing to do with the sanctity of her bloomers. (Or maybe so, come to think of it.) The bearded man who came around once a week taking orders for dry goods was “the Jew.” Stella called him this to his face. He would knock on the door, and she would open it and yell, “Mama, it’s the Jew.” I don’t think she ever knew his name. He was simply the Jew. The German family on the fourth floor were
i tedeschi,
the Germans. Her father (she knew this, she probably taunted him deliberately with the derogatory reference in her epic poem on the noblest Roman) was a wop, a dago, a greaser, a greaseball and a spaghetti bender — but he was not an American.

In Stella’s mind, though (and
this
is what’s amazing), there was no conflict between what she learned in school and what she learned in the ghetto. For her it was extremely simple. The ideal was for everybody to be American. To be American was to be good, noble, pure, proud, brave, and capable of saying things like “Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!” To be American meant studying French in junior high school. To be American meant lighting giant bonfires in the street on Election Day or roasting mickies in the empty lot on First Avenue and 121st Street. To be American meant being thrilled on the Fourth of July (tingling even down
there
) when you heard the band in Jefferson Park playing John Philip Sousa. To be American meant having a handsome suntanned uncle who was a gambler in Arizona and who spoke English with a drawl, and who did actually take you for a ride in his flivver when he came to visit at Christmastime in the year 1915. Unless you were all these things, and did all these things, and felt all these things, and understood all these things, you weren’t American. What you had to do
then
was try very hard to get into this magic red-white-and-blue club, presided over by young Stella herself, who decided, unilaterally, on the entrance requirements.

Speaking English was, of course, the first and foremost of the initiation tests. Anybody who did not speak English as purely as Stella was automatically disqualified, maybe for life. (My mother still says “He don’t want any,” and pronounces “boil” as “berl,” but she never says “ain’t,” which simply ain’t American, by her standards.) But young Stella also took into account a person’s appearance, whether or not one dressed according to the fashion dictates of the magazines Tess still slavishly subscribed to, or looked instead like somebody “fresh off the boat.” If English was spoken well enough to please her, if clothes passed muster, she watched for other things — not for nothing was she the high priestess. Did a person, for example, know who had starred in
Judith of Bethulia
and who had directed the film? Did the aspiring American know the lyrics to “Take Me to the Midnight Cake Walk Ball”? How many Ford jokes were in his repertoire? Did he know all the current comic-strip favorites, was he capable of differentiating between the work of Clare Briggs, for example, and Tad Dorgan? Was Hans the blond one in
The Captain and the Kids
? Or was it Fritz? Could the applicant speak French? (Her own French was limited to what she’d learned in one year at junior high school before the program was dropped as premature for children at that level. She learned quite useful sentences like “
Vite, vite, nous manquerons le match de football!”
) Oddly, if someone could speak fluent Italian or German or Yiddish, this didn’t make him an American. Only speaking French as well as she did (
Je suis américaine, n’oubliez pas
) qualified the petitioner for entrance.

She had a dream, Stella. When she was fifteen, she dreamed that everyone would one day be American — like her. No greenhorns anywhere in the streets of her golden city. Everybody talking English like mad (when they weren’t talking French), everybody going to the movies every Saturday, and riding in Ford cars, and dressing like the people in
Vogue,
and making wisecracks all the time, and roasting mickies. America the beautiful.

I had a dream for America, too.

It was similar to my mother’s except for one vital difference.

But neither of us ever realized our separate dreams.

In April of 1917, when President Wilson and the Congress declared war against those Huns who were doing all sorts of atrocious things that simply incensed a devout American like Stella, she cheered her brains out and marched up the middle of 116th Street with four hundred other young American teenagers like herself, chanting dire warnings and predictions to Kaiser Bill, who probably didn’t hear her. She was fifteen, going on sixteen. The next few years of her life passed in a near delirium of excitement. Where the war had earlier been a remote fantasy translated from newspaper reports, it now became immediate. Everywhere around her, there was the activity of a nation gearing up to save the world for democracy.