Streets of Gold (5 page)

Anyway, those two horny young wops had no plans for the evening’s entertainment other than to take the ladies to dinner and to bed. The circus was in town, and they might have gone there or to any one of the vaudeville theaters along Broadway, but the boys had a different sort of entertainment in mind, and besides they didn’t want the evening to cost too much. They got off the el at Fourteenth Street, and Pino reached into his pocket and took out the slip of paper upon which one of the girls — my grandfather told me her name was Kasha, but that sounds impossible to me — had scribbled the address. More and more of the city’s gas lamps were being replaced by electric lights, especially in the downtown areas, and there was a new lamppost on the corner, and they stood under its glow, the Saturday-night city murmuring about them, a cool breeze blowing in off the river to the east, and they scrutinized Kasha’s handwriting, and agreed upon what it meant, and walked downtown to Twelfth Street, and then over to Avenue A. The ghetto they entered was not unlike the one from which they had come — except that it was Jewish. (I have often toyed with the idea that Pino and my grandfather walked past the dry-goods store owned and operated by Rebecca’s grandfather. The notion is far-fetched. But it persists, even now.)

The girls, as it turned out, did not live alone. Had Pino not automatically assumed that anyone who wasn’t Italian was automatically American, he might have realized that
no
Jewish girl in the city of New York in the year 1901 lived alone. The girls were cousins. Kasha and Natalia. They had been in America for six months. They lived with Kasha’s mother, father, grandfather, two brothers, a police dog who almost caused my grandfather to wet his pants, and a canary (my grandfather assumed it was a canary; the cage was covered for the night). More frightening than the police dog was Kasha’s grandfather, a stooped and wrinkled tyrant who had lived through far too many pogroms to enjoy the enemy camp in his own parlor. He kept yelling in Yiddish all the while Pino and Francesco were in the house. Kasha’s mother kept trying to calm him down, telling him in her own brand of English that this was America, this was different, they were nice boys, look how nice, see the flowers, what’s the matter with you, Papa? In reply, Papa spat twice on the extended forefinger and middle finger of his right hand. Francesco knew a curse when he saw one; not for nothing had he been born in southern Italy. Kasha’s father sat silently in a brown stuffed chair and busied himself with his Yiddish newspaper. The police dog was growling, fangs bared. Francesco’s knees were shaking. The apartment smelled of the cooking smells in the hold of the ship that had taken him across the Atlantic. In another moment, he was going to be violently ill. Kasha’s younger brothers sat anticipating the event with tiny mean smiles on their faces. Her mother saved the day, shooing the girls and their beaux out of the apartment in the nick of time. There was a strange piece of metal screwed to the doorjamb (a mezuzah, of course, though Francesco did not know what it was), and Kasha kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them to it the moment they stepped into the hallway.

Francesco had decided Kasha would be his girl for the night. He had made this decision without first consulting Pino, and he had done so because he had already abandoned whatever fantasies he may have had of his date being a blond, blue-eyed, narrow-waisted American girl. He was now willing to settle for someone who at least looked Italian. Kasha had black hair, brown eyes, and a chunky figure; he might have been back home in Fiormonte. Pino’s girl, Natalia, was tall and skinny, and had a habit of covering her mouth with her hand whenever she laughed, possibly because her teeth were bad. They must have made quite a pair that night, tiny fat Pino (he had regained a lot of weight since his arrival in America) and lanky Natalia with her hazel eyes and fight-brown hair, hand flashing up to cover her giggle whenever anyone said anything even remotely comical. I normally despise attempts at recording dialect, possibly because it translates so badly into Braille, and I promise this will be the only time I’ll try to capture the sound of immigrant speech. (“You have never kept a promise in your life,” Rebecca once said to me.) But it seems to me the conversation among those four budding young Americans on that April night would lose most of its flavor and all its poignancy if it were rendered in any way other than it must have sounded. Bear with me, bear with them; they were trying.

“Whatsa matta you gran’pa?” Francesco asked. “He’sa craze?”

“He’s ah
kahker,
” Kasha answered, using the Yiddish slang for “old man.”

“Caga?”
Francesco asked, and tried not to laugh.
Caga
was Italian slang for shit.

“Kahker, kahker,”
Kasha corrected. “He’s
ahn alter kahker.”

Pino, who now realized Kasha was talking about shit, burst out laughing, and then immediately sobered and tried to elevate the conversation to a more dignified plane. “Theesa two boys,” he said. “They tweensa?”

“Tweensa?” Kasha asked, puzzled.

“Gemelli,”
Pino said. “Tweensa. Tweensa, you know?”

“I don’t know vot it minus ‘tweensa.’ ”

“Tvintz, I tink is vot,” Natalia said, and giggled and covered her mouth.

“Oh,
tvintz!
No, they nut no tvintz. The vun has ett, en’ dudder has nine.”

“I gotta one sist hassa ten,” Francesco said. “An’ dada one forty.”

“Four-
teen,”
Pino corrected.

“
Sì, quattordici
. Attsa home. Dada side.”

“Vhere is det you from?” Kasha asked.

“Fiormonte. Attsa cloze by Napoli.”

“Whatsa
you
home place?” Pino asked Natalia, and she giggled.

In such a manner did they manage to communicate, or to
believe
they were communicating, all evening long. The girls would not go to the restaurant that had been recommended to Pino because it was not kosher. (It suddenly occurs to me that the word “kosher” may have stuck in my grandfather’s head, causing him to have recalled incorrectly the name of the girl who was his date. Every time I eat kasha knishes, I think of her. I wonder if she’s still alive, I wonder what she’d have thought of Rebecca — my grandfather was wild about Rebecca — and I wonder what her real name was. Yes, but what’s your
real
name, Ike?) My grandfather ate blintzes for the first time in his life that night — “Wassa like
cannelloni
, you know, Ignazio?” — and learned all about the
milchedig
and
flayshedig
, though I can’t imagine how Kasha could possibly have explained the Jewish dietary laws in her broken tongue, or how he could have understood them with his tin ear. At ten o’clock, they took the girls home.

“Denks,” Kasha said. “Ve hed a nize time.”

“Denks,” Natalia said, and giggled.

“Buona notte,”
Pino said.

Francesco bowed from the waist, and said, “I’m enjoy verra much.”

On Monday morning, in the tunnel he was digging under Manhattan, he almost got killed.

There were four thousand Italians like my grandfather working on the New York subway. For the most part, they replaced the Irish and Polish immigrants, who had arrived years before and who were moving up to better jobs. But some of those earlier immigrants stayed on as laborers, either because they were indifferent to the possibilities of a fuller life in America, or simply because they were unintelligent, lazy, or incompetent. With characteristic territorial possessiveness, though, they resented the Italians coming in to do “their” jobs, suspecting the dagos of working for cheaper wages (which they were not), and fearful they’d eventually replace them entirely. The situation then was not unlike the white-black contretemps today. It always gets down to bread and the size of a man’s cock. The Italians were stealing jobs, and were reputed to be great lovers besides. (You couldn’t prove that by my grandfather, who was still a virgin at the age of twenty.) The Poles and Irishmen who worked side by side with these smelly wops were fearful, resentful, suspicious, and prejudiced. The wops were clannish, spoke an incomprehensible language, brought strange food to work in their lunch-boxes, laughed at private jokes, and even, for Christ’s sake,
sang
while they worked! The tunnel itself compounded the volatile nature of the mix.

I have since learned that the building of the New York subways utilized a method known as “cut and cover,” meaning that first a trench was dug, and wooden plankings were laid down over it while the men continued to work belowground. But my grandfather’s description of the tunnel made it sound like a mine shaft deep in the bowels of the earth (which it most certainly wasn’t), and it is his description that lingers in my mind. Despite the facts, then — the subway’s deepest point is 180 feet below the surface, at 191st Street, and my grandfather never got that far uptown — I shall describe that hole in the ground as it appeared to him, and as he subsequently described it to me.

The mud was sometimes knee deep, the ceiling of the vault dripping, the shoring timbers in constant creaking danger of collapse, the noise level shattering, jackhammers and drills pounding and stuttering, steel carts rumbling on rickety makeshift tracks, hauling dirt dearly paid for shovelful by shovelful, laborers sweating and coughing and belching and farting, foremen shouting orders in the lamplit gloom, half a dozen different languages and dialects creating a harsher din than that of a thousand picks striking sparks from granite. There were many fistfights, sometimes three and four a day, that might not have occurred had the men been working aboveground in the bright sunshine. But the tunnel was a tight, crowded, restricting place, and a closed crowd is a dangerous crowd because it cannot explode outward and can only turn upon itself.

Francesco was thinking only of home when it happened.

He was thinking that in April the wintry muddy waters of the Ofanto in the valley below rushed clear and sweet with torrents from the mountaintops. The banks rolling gently to the riverside would be covered with buttercups and violets, lavender and...

The voice that sounded beside him was intrusive. It brought him back to the dark reality of the tunnel; it made him conscious of the pick handle irritating the fresh blisters on his palms; it drowned the murmur of the river, allowed the reverberating noise of the tunnel to come crashing in again. The voice was Irish. I shall make no attempt (see, Rebecca?) to try for the brogue, or to counterfeit Francesco’s labored English. In the end, the men understood each other. On a level more basic than language, they finally understood each other.

“What are you doing there?” the Irishman said.

“I’m working,” Francesco answered.

“You know what I’m talking about, you fucking dago. What are you doing there with
my
pick?”

“This is not your pick.”

He looks at the pick. It is surely his own pick. The handle is stained with mud and sweat, and the water from his blisters, and the blood from his hands. It is his pick. It is not the Irishman’s.

“It is my pick.”

Actually, the argument is academic. It is neither Francesco’s pick
nor
the Irishman’s. The pick belongs to the Belmont-McDonald syndicate, the subway’s contractors. Each morning the workmen’s tools are issued to them, and each night they must be returned. They are not debating actual possession, they are merely attempting to ascertain which of them has the right to work with this tool, this pick, this day. But the pick has not been out of Francesco’s hands since seven o’clock this morning, he
knows
it is the one he has been working with all day long. So what is the matter with this Irishman? Is he crazy?

“It’s your pick, is it, dummy? And what are those initials then on it?”

He does not understand the word “initials.” What is initials? He looks at the handle of the pick again.

“I don’t understand.”

“No capish, huh, dago? Give me the pick.”

Francesco hands the pick to the Irishman unresistingly. He knows there has been some misunderstanding here, and he feels certain it will be cleared up the moment the Irishman can
feel
the pick in his own two hands. He watches as the Irishman carefully examines the handle of the pick, reddish-blond hairs curling on the back of each thick finger, hair running from the knuckles to the wrists, turns the handle over and over again in his hands, searching, eyes squinched, what is he looking for, this man? The eyes are blue. They glance up momentarily from the scrutiny of the pick, look directly into Francesco’s eyes, piercingly and accusingly, and then wrinkle in something resembling humorous response, but not quite, the mouth echoing the expression, the lips thinly pulling back, no teeth revealed, a narrow smile of eyes and mouth that strikes sudden terror into Francesco’s heart. He knows now that there will be trouble. The man is twice his size. He contemplates kicking him in the groin immediately, here and now, this instant, strike first and at once — before it is too late.

The Irishman is taking a knife from his pocket.

The lamps flicker on the steel blade as he pulls it with his fingernails from the narrow trench in the bone handle. The blade is perhaps four inches long, honed razor sharp, glittering with pinprick points of reflected light. Francesco is certain the Irishman intends to stab him, but he does not know why. Is it because of “initials”? Unconsciously, he backs against the wall of the tunnel. Muddy water drips from above onto his head and shoulders. He feels naked. He feels the way he felt at Ellis Island when the doctor poked his finger into his rectum, rubber glove slippery with jelly. He is very afraid he will soil himself. The Irishman squats on his haunches, laying the pick across his knees, tilting the handle toward the light. With the blade of the knife, he scrapes an area free of caked mud, up near the head of the handle, where the curved metal bar is fitted snugly onto it. Then, slowly and deliberately, he begins digging into the wood with the tip of the knife. Francesco cannot yet fathom what he is doing. His fear has dissipated somewhat, he is beginning to realize he was wrong about the Irishman’s intent; he does not plan to cut him. But what is he doing to the handle of the pick?