Streets of Gold (8 page)

The kitchen was hung with the iceman’s blue work shirts, drying on a clothesline stretching from the wall behind the wood stove to the wall across the room, behind the washtub. It was in this tub that the family washed their clothes and also themselves, though not with the same frequency. A makeshift wooden cabinet had been constructed around the tub, serving as a countertop for scrub brushes and yellow laundry soap, drinking glasses, a blue enamel basin speckled with white. There were no toothbrushes; neither the Agnelli family nor Francesco had ever learned about brushing their teeth. A single brass faucet poured cold water into the tub, the plumbing exposed and bracketed to the wall. Wired to the cold-water pipe was a small mirror with a white wooden frame. A gas jet on the wall near the tub, one of four in the room, provided artificial illumination when it was needed. It was not needed on this bright July morning; sunshine was streaming through the two curtainless windows that opened on the backyard of the tenement. (I know every inch of that apartment. When I was growing up in Harlem, twenty-five years later, my grandfather lived in a similar railroad flat. Except for the by-then defunct gas fixtures, it had not changed a hell of a lot.) Francesco went out into the hallway to the toilet tucked between the two apartments on the floor, and shared by the Agnelli family and the people next door. Because of his erection, he urinated partially on the wall, partially on the toilet seat, partially on the floor, and then carefully wiped up wall, seat, and floor with a page of 
Il Progresso
, which he ripped from a nail on the door. He pulled the chain on the flush box suspended above the toilet, stared emptily and gloomily into the bowl for several seconds, his hand still on the chain pull, and then went back into the Agnelli kitchen.

Luisa was at the tub. She was wearing only a petticoat and washing her armpits with the bar of yellow laundry soap. Their conversation was entirely in Italian.

“Giovanni’s gone to work,” she said.

“Yes I know.”

“Ah? How did you know?”

“I passed through your room.”

“Ah,” she said. “Of course. And you noticed.” She glanced sidelong at Francesco, and then took a towel from a wooden rod nailed to the cabinet door. Studiously drying her armpits, she said, “I’m sending the children to my sister’s. She’ll feed them breakfast.”

“Why?” Francesco asked.

“It’s a holiday,” Luisa replied, and shrugged.

“Then I’ll go to Pino’s,” Francesco said. “He’ll give me breakfast there.” He paused. “So you can be free to enjoy the morning.”

“I’ll make breakfast for you,” she said.

“Thank you, but...”

“I’ll make breakfast.”

The two oldest Agnelli children burst into the kitchen, fully dressed and anxious to start for their aunt’s house, just down the block. Luisa gave the children a folded slip of paper upon which she’d scribbled a message to her sister, and kissed them both hastily. The oldest boy grinned at Francesco and said, “Goodbye, cocksucker.” In the other room, the baby began crying.

“He wants to be fed,” Luisa said, and again glanced sidelong at Francesco as she shooed the children out of the apartment. Francesco listened to them clattering noisily down the steps to the street. “Good,” Luisa said. “Now we’ll have some peace.” She smiled at Francesco, and went to fetch the baby.

Francesco stood near the door to the apartment. Was he really about to be seduced by this pig of a woman? Was this how he was to lose his virginity? The stirring in his groin was insistent. In another moment, he would be wearing his second flagpole of the morning. And in another moment, if he was not mistaken, Luisa would carry young Salvatore into the kitchen, where she would bare her breast to his ferociously demanding mouth. Given his own appetite of the moment, Francesco doubted he could resist shoving the tiny savior away from that bursting purple nipple and usurping the little nipper’s rightful place at the breakfast table. He argued with his hard-on, and made a wise decision.

He left the apartment and went to see Pino.

“My fellow Italian-Americans,” the man on the bandstand was saying, “it gives me great pleasure to be able to address you on this Independence Day in this great land of ours. Do not make any mistake about it. For whereas many of you have been on these shores for just a little while, it
is
a great land, and it is
our
land, yours and mine.”

The man was talking in Italian, and so Francesco understood every word.
Your
land, he thought. Not mine.
My
land is on the banks of the Ofanto.
My
land is Italy.

The bandstand was hung with red, white, and blue bunting. The man was wearing a straw boater and a walrus mustache, candy-striped shirt open at the throat, celluloid collar loosened, cuffs rolled back. The band behind him consisted of five pieces — piano, drums, trumpet, accordion, and alto saxophone. The musicians were wearing red uniforms with blue piping, white caps with blue patent leather peaks. On the face of the bass drum the words the SAM RYAN BAND were lettered in a semicircle. The sky behind the bandstand was as blue as my own blind eyes, streaked with wisps of cataract clouds that drifted out over the East River, vanishing as they went. The trees were in full leaf, a more resounding green than that of the emerald-bright lawn upon which the picnic guests were assembled before the bandstand. They were, these ghetto dwellers, dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes because this was a celebration, and in their homeland a celebration was a
festa
, and a
festa
was by definition religious, and you dressed up for God unless you wished him to smite you from the sky with his fist, or to spit into the milk of your mother’s obscenity. (How’s that, Papa?)

The clothing exhibited on that lawn was a patchwork fancy of style and color, old-world garb mixing with new, yellows and pinks and oranges and whites in silk and organdy and cotton and linen, long dresses fanned out upon blankets in turn spread upon the grass, women holding parasols aloft to keep the sun off their delicate olive complexions, men fanning themselves with straw skimmers and mopping their brows with handkerchiefs cut from worn-out shirts, hemstitched, slurping beer foam from their mustaches as the man on the bandstand (an alderman, whatever the hell
that
was) went on and on about the glories of being a part of this wonderful nation called the United States of America, where there was freedom and justice for all, provided you didn’t run afoul of an Irishman’s pick. After the speech, Sam Ryan and his grand aggravation played a few choruses of “America, the Beautiful” and then (out of deference to the audience, which consisted mostly of guineas from the surrounding side streets of Italian Harlem) played not “My Wild Irish Rose” or “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” but instead played a rousing mick rendition of “
‘O Sole Mio!”
followed by another all-time favorite (in Napoli, maybe) called “
Funiculì-Funiculà.”
Nobody sang along.

The beer barrels had been rolled out long before the alderman began his heart-rending speech about that old Statue of Liberty out there holding the torch of freedom aloft for all those tired, poor, and huddled masses, and everybody had a mug in his hand or tilted to his lips, and many of the picnickers who were not yet accustomed to American beer had had the foresight to bring along some good dago red made in the basements of countless rat-infested tenements. So the ladies and gentlemen tippled an assortment of sauce (no hard liquor anywhere, except behind Sam Ryan’s piano, in a pint bottle he swigged after each nerve-tingling number) and ate the sandwiches providently provided by the sponsors of this little outing, ham and cheese, or just plain ham, or just plain cheese on soggy rolls.

In those good old days of nineteen hundred aught one, contrary to today, when Republicans and Democrats alike give fund-raising dinners at a thousand dollars a plate, the vote of the common man was thought quite important, and both parties sought it avidly. Picnics and rallies were organized at the drop of a holiday, with free beer, sandwiches, ice cream, music, fun and frivolity for all, the only political hawking being in the form of buttons passed out for pinning to lapel or bosom, the equivalent of today’s bumper stickers. It was understood that none (or at least very few) of these noisy wops were as yet entitled to vote in America since they were not yet citizens and (in many cases) did not
intend
to become citizens. But even Hitler recognized the beauty of getting ’em while they’re young, and so the wise politicians of yesteryear handed out their little buttons with the Republican eagle on them (at this particular picnic) or the Democratic star (at a picnic some few blocks away), hoping to begin a painless form of education that would guarantee the casting of the right vote in the near or distant future. A penny saved is a penny earned, and it’s a wise man who knows his own father. Francesco took the button handed to him and promptly pinned it to Pino’s backside, where it was later discovered by Angelina, who burst into delighted laughter. Her amusement impressed Francesco not one whit. She was the cause of Pino’s defection, and Francesco wasn’t about to forgive her simply because she had a melodic laugh and beautiful white teeth and sparkling brown eyes, and
Madonna
, maybe he
should
have stayed in Luisa’s kitchen and sampled the cuisine!

Someone requested “
La Tarantella”
which caused Sam Ryan to stare in goggle-eyed bafflement at his saxophone player, who shrugged and turned to the accordionist, an Italian who had been hired especially for this ethnically oriented outing. The accordionist nodded that he knew the rune, and he began playing it while the Irishmen faked along in less than spirited fashion. “
La Tarantella”
is a Neapolitan dance that presumably had its origins in the fitful gyrations of southern Italians “taken” by the tarantula spider. Attempting to expel the poison, the poor souls thus bitten by the hairy beast danced for days on end (or so legend holds), often to the point of complete exhaustion. A nice Italian idiom is “
aver la tarantola”
which literally means “to have the tarantula,” but which translates in the vernacular as “to be restless.” Those picnickers who got to their feet as the accordionist began “
La Tarantella”
and the sidemen hesitantly joined in really
did
seem to have the tarantula,
did
seem to have a hairy spider in their collective britches as they twisted and turned and rattled and rolled to the amazement of the Irish musicians and the calm acceptance of the accordionist, who kept whipping his dancing fingers over the blacks and whites, and squeezing the bellows against his belly, and dreaming of a time when he was back in Positano dancing this very same
Tarantella
up and down the steps carved into the steep rock walls of what was then a quiet fishing village.

Into the midst of this snake pit on the bright green lawn, into this maelstrom of writhing bodies and sweating faces, there delicately walked an angel sent from heaven, side-stepping the frenzied dancers, a slight smile on her face, walking directly toward (no, it could not be true), walking in a dazzle of white, long white dress, white lace collar, white satin shoes, walking toward (he could not believe it), white teeth and hazel eyes, masses of brown hair tumbling about the oval of her face, she was smiling at (was it possible?), she was extending her hand, she stopped before him, she said in English, “Are you Francesco Di Lorenzo?”

He was sure he’d understood the words, his grasp of English after all these months was surely not so tenuous that he could not hear his own name preceded by only two words in English, he was sure he had understood. But did angels address men who worked in the subway mud? He turned to Angelina for translation. His eyes were filled with panic.

“She wants to know if you are Francesco Di Lorenzo,” Angelina said in Italian.

“Sì,”
he said. “Yes,
Sì. Son’ io.
I are. Yes. Yes!”

“I’m Teresa Giamboglio,” she said in English. “Our parents are
compaesani
.”

My grandfather had met my grandmother.

I’m not a writer, I don’t know any writer’s tricks. At the piano, I can modulate from C major to G major in a wink and without missing a beat. But this ain’t a piano. How do I modulate from 1901 to 1914 without jostling your eye? I know how to soothe your ear, man, I simply go from C major to A minor to D seventh to G major, and there I am. But thirteen years and four children later? Thirteen years of longing for a tiny Italian village on a mountaintop? (I can only span an
eleventh
comfortably on the keyboard.) Thirteen years. If I play it too slow, you’ll fall asleep. If I rush through it, I’ll lose you, it’ll go by too fast. I once scored a film for a movie producer who told me it didn’t matter what the hell anybody put up on the screen because the audience never understood it, anyway. “It goes by too fast for them,” he said. There’s something to that. You can’t turn back the pages of a film to find out what you missed. The image is there only for an instant, and then it’s gone, and the next image has replaced it.

He wanted to go back, young Francesco. He was married in December of 1901, and his plan was to take Teresa back home within the year. But in October of 1902, Teresa gave birth to their first daughter, and the voyage home was postponed; you could not take an infant on an ocean trip in steerage, and besides, money was still scarce. My grandfather had quit his job on the subway a month after that fateful Fourth of July picnic, and had begun working as an apprentice tailor to Teresa’s father, who owned a shop on First Avenue, between 118th and 119th Streets. When you talk about modulations, try moving gracefully from holding a pick to holding a needle. Teresa’s father had studied tailoring in Naples, following a family tradition that had begun with
his
grandfather. He was quite willing to take Francesco into his thriving little establishment — he had, after all, known Francesco’s father back in Fiormonte; they were
compaesani
. And besides, Francesco was soon to become his son-in-law, no? Yes. But Francesco, in the beginning at least, was a clumsy, fearful, inartistic, and just plain stupid tailor. Tailor?
What
tailor?