Streets of Gold

I

I’ve been blind since birth. This means that much of what I am about to tell you is based upon the subjective descriptions or faulty memories of others, blended with an empirical knowledge of my own — forty-eight years of touching, hearing, and smelling. But paintings, rooms with objects in them, lawns of bright green, crashing seascapes, contrails across the sky, the Empire State Building, women in lace, a Japanese fan, Rebecca’s eyes — I have never seen any of these things. They come to me secondhand.

I sometimes believe, and I have no foundation of fact upon which to base this premise, that all experience is secondhand, anyway. Even my grandfather’s arrival in America must have been colored beforehand by the things he had heard about this country, the things that had been described to him in Italy before he decided to come. Was he truly seeing the new land with his own eyes? Or was that first glimpse of the lady in the harbor — he has never mentioned her to me, I only assume that the first thing all arriving immigrants saw was the Statue of Liberty — was that initial sighting his own, or was there a sculptured image already in his head, chiseled there by Pietro Bardoni in his expensive American clothes, enthusiastically selling the land of opportunities where gold was in the streets to be picked up by any man willing to work, himself talced and splendored evidence of the riches to be mined.

The villagers of Fiormonte, in the fifth year of their misery since la fillossera struck the grape, must have listened in awe-struck wonder as Bardoni used his hands and his deep Italian baritone voice to describe New York, with its magnificent buildings and esplanades, food to be had for pennies a day (food!), and gold in the streets, gold to shovel up with your own two hands. He was speaking figuratively, of course. My grandfather later told me no one believed there was really gold in the streets, not gold to be mined, at least. The translation they made was that the streets were paved with gold; they had, some of them, been to Pompeii — or most certainly to Naples, which lay only 125 kilometers due west — and they knew of the treasures of ancient Rome, knew that the statues had been covered with gold leaf, knew that even common hairpins had been fashioned of gold, so why not streets paved with gold in a nation that surely rivaled the Roman Empire so far as riches were concerned? It was entirely conceivable. Besides, when a man is starving, he is willing to believe anything that costs him nothing.

Geography is not one of my strongest subjects. I have been to Italy many times, the last time in 1970, on a joint pilgrimage — to visit the town where my grandfather was born and to visit the grave where my brother is buried. I know that Italy is shaped like a boot; I have traced its outline often enough on Braille maps. And I know what a boot looks like. That is to say, I have lingeringly passed my hands over the configurations of a boot, and I have formed an image of it inside my head, tactile, reinforced by the rich scent of the leather and the tiny squeaking sounds it made when I tested the flexibility of this thing I held, this object to be cataloged in my brain file along with hundreds and thousands of other objects I had never seen — and will never see. The way to madness is entering the echo chamber that repeatedly resonates with doubt: is the image in my mind the true image? Or am I feeling the elephant’s trunk and believing it looks like a snake? And anyway, what does a snake look like? I believe I know. I am never quite sure. I am not quite sure of anything I describe because there is no basis for comparison, except in the fantasy catalog of my mind’s eye. I am not even sure what I myself look like.

Rebecca once told me, “You just miss looking dignified, Ike.”

And a woman I met in Los Angeles said, “You just miss looking shabby.”

Rebecca’s words were spoken in anger. The Los Angeles lady, I suppose, was putting me down — though God knows why she felt any need to denigrate a blind man, who would seem vulnerable enough to even the mildest form of attack and therefore hardly a worthy victim. We later went to bed together in a Malibu motel-cum-Chinese restaurant, where the aftertaste of moo goo gai pan blended with the scent of her perfumed breasts and the waves of the Pacific crashed in against the pilings and shook the room and shook the bed. She wore a tiny gold cross around her neck, a gift from a former lover; she would not take it off.

For the record (who’s counting?), my eyes are blue. I am told. But what is blue? Blue is the color of the sky. Yes, but what is blue? It is a cool color, Ah, yes, we are getting closer. The radiators in the apartment we lived in on 120th Street were usually cool if not downright frigid. Were the radiators blue? But sometimes they became sizzling hot, and red has been described to me as a hot color, so were the radiators red when they got hot? Rebecca has red hair and green eyes. Green is a cool color also. Are green and blue identical? If not, how do they differ? I know the smell of a banana, and I know the shape of it, but when it was described to me as yellow, I had no concept of yellow, could form no clear color image. The sun is yellow, I was told. But the sun is hot; doesn’t that make it red? No, yellow is a much cooler color. Oh. Then is it like blue? Impossible. The only color I know is black. I do not have to have that described to me. It sits behind my dead blue eyes.

My hair is blond. Yellow, they say. Like a banana. (Forget it.) I can only imagine that centuries back, a Milanese merchant (must have been a Milanese, don’t you think? It couldn’t have been a Viking) wandered down into southern Italy and displayed his silks and brocades to the gathered wide-eyed peasants, perhaps’ hawking a bit more than his cloth, Milanese privates securely and bulgingly contained in northern codpiece; the girls must have giggled. And one of them, dark-eyed, black-haired, heavily breasted, short and squat, perhaps later wandered off behind the grapes with this tall, handsome northern con man, where he lifted her skirts, yanked down her knickers, explored the black and hairy bush promised by her armpits, and probed with northern vigor the southern ripeness of her quim, thereupon planting within her a few thousand blond, blue-eyed (blind?) genes that blossomed centuries later in the form of yours truly, Dwight Jamison.

My maiden name is Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo.

Di Palermo means of Palermo or from Palermo, which is where my father’s ancestors worked and died. All except my father’s father, who came to America to dig out some of the gold in them thar streets, and ended up as a street cleaner instead, pushing his cart and shoveling up the golden nuggets dropped by horses pulling streetcars along First Avenue. Ironically, he was eventually run over by a streetcar. It was said he was drunk at the time, but a man who comes to shovel gold and ends up shoveling shit is entitled to a drink or two every now and then. I never met the man. He was killed long before I was born. The grandfather I speak of in these pages was my mother’s father. From my father’s father, I inherited only my name, identical to his, Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo. Or, if you prefer, Dwight Jamison.

My father’s name is Jimmy, actually Giacomo, which means James in Italian; are you getting the drift? Jamison, James’s son. That’s where I got the last name when I changed it legally in 1955. The first name I got from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who became President of these United States in 1953. The Dwight isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem at first blush. I have never been called Ignazio by anyone but my grandfather. As a child, I was called Iggie. When I first began playing piano professionally, I called myself Blind Ike. My father liked the final name I picked for myself, Dwight Jamison. When I told him I was planning to change my name, he came up with a long list of his own, each name carefully and beautifully hand lettered, even though he realized I would not be able to see his handiwork. He was no stranger to name changes. When he had his own band back in the twenties, thirties, and forties, he called himself Jimmy Palmer.

There is in America the persistent suspicion that if a person changes his name, he is most certainly a wanted desperado. And nowhere is there greater suspicion of, or outright animosity for, the name-changers than among those who steadfastly refuse to change their names. Meet a Lipschitz or a Mangiacavallo, a Schliephake or a Trzebiatowski who have stood by those hot ancestral guns, and they will immediately consider the name-changer a deserter at best or a traitor at worst. I say fuck you, Mr. Trzebiatowski. Better you should change it to Trevor. Or better you should mind your own business.

For reasons I can never fathom, the fact that I’ve changed my name is of more fascination to anyone who’s ever interviewed me (I am too modest to call myself famous, but whenever I play someplace, it’s a matter of at least some interest, and if you don’t know who I am, what can I tell you?) — a subject more infinitely fascinating than the fact that I’m a blind man who happens to be the best jazz pianist who ever lived, he said modestly and self-effacingly, and not without a touch of shabby dignity. No one ever asks me how it feels to be blind. I would be happy to tell them. I am an expert on being blind. But always, without fail, The Name.

“How did you happen upon the name Dwight Jamison?”

“Well, actually, I wanted to use another name, but someone already had it.”

“Ah, yes? What was the other name?”

“Groucho Marx.”

The faint uncertain smile (I can sense it, but not see it), the moment where the interviewer considers the possibility that this wop entertainer — talented, yes, but only a wop, and only an entertainer — may somehow be blessed with a sense of humor. But is it possible he really considered calling himself Groucho Marx?

“No, seriously, Ike, tell me” — the voice confidential now — “why did you decide on Dwight Jamison?”

“It had good texture. Like an augmented eleventh.”

“Oh. I see, I see. And what is your real name?”

“My real name has been Dwight Jamison since 1955. That’s a long, long time.”

“Yes, yes, of course, but what is your real name?” (Never “was,” notice. In America, you can never lose your real name. It “is” always your real name.) “What is your real name? The name you were born with?”

“Friend,” I say, “I was born with yellow hair and blue eyes that cannot see. Why is it of any interest to you that my real name was Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo?”

“Ah, yes, yes. Would you spell that for me, please?”

I changed my name because I no longer wished to belong to that great brotherhood of compaesani whose sole occupation seemed to be searching out names ending in vowels. (Old Bronx joke: What did Washington say when he was crossing the Delaware? “Fá ’no cazzo di freddo qui!” And what did his boatman reply? “Pure tu sei italiano?” Translated freely, Washington purportedly said, “Fucking-A cold around here,” and his boatman replied, “You’re Italian, too?”) My mother always told me I was a Yankee, her definition of Yankee being a third-generation American, her arithmetic bolstered by the undeniable fact that her mother (but not her father) was born here, and she herself was born here, and I was certainly born here, ergo Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo, third-generation Yankee Doodle Dandy. My mother was always quick to remind me that she was American. “I’m American, don’t forget.” How could I forget, Mama darling, when you told me three and four times a day? “I’m American, don’t forget.”

In Sicily, where I went to find my brother’s grave, your first son’s grave, Mom, the cab driver told me how good things were in Italy these days, and then he said to me, “America is here now.”

Maybe it is there.

One thing I’m sure of.

It isn’t here.

And maybe it never was.

The way my grandfather told it, Pietro Bardoni was always a braggart, a self-styled man of the world, a loudmouth, uno sbruffone. He had grown up with Bardoni, of course, and he knew him well; in a town with one main street and sixty-four houses built of stone and whitewashed stucco, it was virtually impossible not to have known everyone as soon as you were old enough to walk the cobbled streets. During the day, you worked in the vineyard. In the evening in the summer, you sat outside the town’s only bar, sat at round metal tables painted red and yellow and blue, the men smoking guinea stinkers (My grandfather always smoked those foul-smelling twisted little Italian cigars. When I was young, I used to ask him why he smoked those guinea stinkers all the time. He would reply, and I record his fractured English as best I can, “Attsa no guin’a stink, Ignazio. Attsa good see-gah.”) — smoking their good cigars in the awninged dusk and drinking grappa, a foul-tasting liqueur that is supposed to be good for the liver and also for removing paint from furniture, sat and smoked and talked about the grape and about the coming fall harvest.

Italy in those days — this was in the late 1880s before the grape blight — was the leading wine merchant to the world. It was only later, when the plant parasite phylloxera (“la fillossera,” my grandfather called it, and invariaby spat immediately afterward) destroyed most of the vineyards in southern Italy, that the French took virtual possession of the industry, and Bordeaux replaced Chianti as the most popular wine in Europe and abroad. La fillossera destroyed the crops and destroyed the economy as well; the land was the grape and the grape was the economy. But in the fall, when times were still good, the men would come home from the harvest and, without bathing first — there was no running water in Fiormonte, and the men bathed in well-drawn water in wooden tubs in the kitchens of their homes, and this was done in privacy, in the dark, Italian farmers unlike Scottish miners being very modest about such things as showing their privates to other members of the family, unless incest is their intent — without bathing first, the men would go to the bar, and sit outside under the blue-striped awning and talk about how good things were, and how blessed they were, and then caution each other about speaking of their good fortune aloud lest someone, God alone knew who, would put the Evil Eye on them.

When I was born blind, Mary the Barber ventured the opinion that the Evil Eye had been put on my mother when she was pregnant with me. Filomena the Midwife clucked her tongue and said No, it was my mother’s experience with the Chinaman thirteen years ago that had been the cause of the tragedy attending my birth. It was my Uncle Luke who first told me about the Chinaman, but my grandfather was the one who later related the story to me in detail. My grandfather told me everything. To my knowledge, he never lied to me. I loved my grandfather very much.

He would sit with the men of the town in the good days — oh, he was perhaps fourteen or fifteen at the time; he did not come to America until 1901, when things became really unbearable — and he would watch the girls go by in their long cotton dresses, and with the younger men of the town he would exchange secret desires, always careful never to impugn the reputation of anyone’s sister, because in southern Italy, that was — and is — ample reason for murder. And yet the talk was there, the talk always rendered harmless by distance; the girls they wanted to fuck lived in Rome or Venice or Milan, but never in Fiormonte — though the girls of Fiormonte paraded with eyes downcast like nuns, contradictorily ripe asses twitching provocatively. My grandfather was a very handsome man, to hear him tell it, with black hair and dark brown eyes and a nose he said had Sienese influence (I knew the shape of his nose, I explored its contours with my fingers many, many times; it was not unlike my own, hawklike and thin; it could very well have had its origin in Siena — there goes my Milanese cloth merchant theory), and tall in comparison to the other men of the village, five feet eight inches. His father and his grandfather before him had worked in the vineyards, and had he stayed in Italy, I would probably be working the vineyards now, though God knows what Fiormonte is like today. It may be bustling with machinery and factories, for all I know. It was not that way in 1970, when I went back to find my grandfather, and to find my roots.

I walked the cobbled streets, the same streets he had walked as a boy, and the August sun burned hot on my bare head, and I reached down to touch the cobbles. What you walk on in the street. Here. Put your hand. Touch. Feel. Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo, four years old, squats at the First Avenue curb outside his grandfather’s tailor shop and sticks his hand down between scabby knees — which bleed when he picks them, he is told, though he cannot see the blood, and can only feel it’s warm ooze; You are bleeding, they tell him, and they tell him the color of blood is red, it is what runs through your body and keeps you alive — reaches down, his hand guided by his grandfather’s fingers around his wrist, and touches the street. And feels. Feels with the four fingers of his right hand, the fingertips gingerly gliding over the surface of the smooth, rough stones, and then circumscribing the shape of one stone, it is like a box, it is like the box he keeps the toy soldiers in, it is the shape of a box, and feeling where the next stone joins it, and the next, and forming a pattern in his mind, and his grandfather says Do you see, Ignazio? Now do you see? I walked that town from one end of it to the other, trying to pick out the locations my grandfather had described, finding the bar at which Bardoni had first broached the subject of leaving for America, sat there in the cool encroaching dusk as my grandfather must have done after a day’s work, and smelled the familiar aroma of the guinea stinkers all around me, and heard the muted hum of the male conversation, and above that, like the strident shrieks of treetop birds, the women calling to each other from windows or balconies, and the counterpoint of peddlers hawking their produce in the streets, “Caterina, vieni qua! Pesche, bella pesche fresche, ciliegie, cocomero,” exactly as my grandfather had described it to me — or were these only the cadences and rhythms I had heard throughout all the days of my youth in East Harlem?

Brash young Bardoni had sat at a table here with my grandfather when they were still boys, boasting loudly of having fatto ’na bella chiavata in Naples, having inserted his doubtless heroically proportioned key into the lock of a Neapolitan streetwalker, while the other young men of the town, my grandfather included, listened goggle-eyed and prayed that San Maurizio, the patron saint of the town, would not be able to read their minds. In December of the year 1900, Bardoni walked my grandfather past this same café on Christmas Day, sunshine bright on cobbled streets, Bardoni dressed in natty American attire, striped shirt and celluloid collar, necktie asserted with a simple pin (Eliot’s been translated into Braille), and told him of the streets over there in America, with all that gold lying in them, and further told him that he would pay for my grandfather’s passage, and arrange to have a job and lodgings waiting for him when he got to America, and he would not have to worry about the language, there were plenty of Italians already there, they would help him with his English. All Bardoni wanted in return was a small portion of my grandfather’s weekly wages (twelve dollars and fifty cents a week! Bardoni told him) until the advances were paid off, and a smaller percentage of the wages after that until Bardoni’s modest commission had been earned, and then my grandfather would be on his own to make his fortune in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

“But I will return to Italy,” my grandfather said.

“Certo,” Bardoni said. “Of course.”

“When I have earned enough money.”

“Of course,” Bardoni said again. “Italia è la sua patria.”

It had been a barren Christmas Day in Fiormonte. I have tried hard to understand what life in that village must have been like, because I know for certain that the life transposed to Harlem, and later to the Bronx, and later to the town of Talmadge, Connecticut (where I spent more than thirteen years with Rebecca and the children), was firmly rooted in Fiormonte. The family, the nuclear family, consisted of my grandfather, his parents, his two sisters, and his younger brother. In musical terms, they were the primary functions of the key. The secondary functions were the aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived within a stone’s throw of my grandfather’s house. The compari and comari were the godfathers and godmothers (pronounced “goombahs” and “goomahs” even by my grandfather), and they combined with the compaesani to form the tertiary functions of the key; the compaesani were countrymen, compatriots, or even simply neighbors. Fiormonte enclosed and embraced this related and near-related brood, but was itself motherless and fatherless in the year 1900, Italy having been torn bloody and squalling from the loins of a land dominated as early as thirty years before by rival kings and struggling foreign forces. Unified by Garibaldi to become a single nation, it became that only in the minds and hearts of intellectuals and revolutionaries, the southern peasants knowing only Fiormonte and Naples, where until recently the uneasy seat of power had rested. They distrusted Rome, the new capital, in fact distrusted the entire north, suspecting (correctly) that the farmlands and vineyards were being unjustly taxed in favor of stronger industrial interests. There was no true fatherland as yet, there was no sense of the village being a part of the state as, for example, Seattle, Washington, is a necessary five chord in the chart of “America, the Beautiful.” The patria that Bardoni had mentioned to my grandfather was Fiormonte and, by extension, Naples. It was this that my grandfather was leaving.

He made his decision on Christmas Day, 1900.

He had been toying with the idea since November, when Bardoni returned in splendor, sporting patent leather shoes and tawny spats, diamond cuff links at his wrists, handlebar mustache meticulously curled and waxed. The economic system in Fiormonte, as elsewhere in the south of Italy, was based on a form of medieval serfdom in which the landowner, or padrone, permitted the peasant to work the land for him, the lion’s share of the crop going to the padrone. (We call it sharecropping here.) Those carnival barkers who came back to the villages to tout the joys of living in America were padroni in their own right; a new country, a different form of economic bondage. They would indeed pay for steerage transportation to the United States, they would indeed supply (and pay for) lodgings in New York, they would indeed guarantee employment, but the tithe had to be paid, the padrone was there in the streets of Manhattan as surely as he was there in the big stone house at the top of the hill in the village of Fiormonte.

My grandfather’s name was Francesco Di Lorenzo.

The house he lived in was similar in construction, though not in size, to the one inhabited by Don Leonardo, the padrone of Fiormonte. Built of stone laboriously cleared from the vineyards, covered with mud allowed to dry and then whitewashed with a mixture of lime and water, it consisted of three rooms, the largest of which was the kitchen. A huge fireplace and hearth, the house’s only source of heat and of course the cooking center, dominated the kitchen. The other two rooms were bedrooms, one of them shared by the parents and baby brother of young Francesco — it is difficult to think of him, no less write of him, as anything but Grandpa. But Francesco he was in his youth, and indeed Francesco he remained until he had been in America for more than forty years, by which time everyone, including Grandma, called him Frank. When I was a boy, people were still calling him Francesco, though every now and then someone would call him Frank. I’m hardly the one to talk about anglicizing names, being a rat-fink turncoat deserter (Dwight Jamison, ma’am, I hope I am a big success!), but I have never been able to understand why we call Italy “Italy” and not “Italia,” or why we call Germany “Germany” rather than “Deutschland.” Who supplies the translation? Is there a central bureau in Germany that grants permission for the French people to call the fatherland “L’Allemagne”? I hate to raise problems; forgive me.

In any event, my grandfather eventually became Frank, and this curious metamorphosis is best revealed in the various documents my mother turned over to me when he died. A copy of his birth certificate had been requested for naturalization purposes in the early part of 1945, when the Germans were still clinging tenaciously to the northernmost portions of Italy. A duplicate certificate arrived from the south, mimeographed on a torn scrap of paper, the reverse side of which was a printed sheet of ration coupons for October of 1944 — pane, pasta, olio, zucchero, and generi vari, the staples of the Italian diet, and most certainly much better fare than my grandfather had enjoyed back in 1900. Comune di Fiormonte, it read, Provincia di Potenza. And on the reverse, the requested information, listing the birth date of Francesco Luigi Di Lorenzo as the seventh day of July, in the year 1880. In New York City, in the year 1901, a marriage certificate was issued to one Teresa Giamboglio (try that on your harmonica, Mr. Trzebiatowski) and the aforementioned gentleman of Potenza, except that this time his name was shortened to Francesco Di Lorenzo. His naturalization papers, dated the 27th day of April, 1945, state in ornate script lettering: Be it remembered that Franco Di Lorenzo then residing at 2335 First Avenue in the City of New York, State of New York, who previous to his naturalization was a subject of Italy, having applied to be admitted a citizen of the United States, and so on. Franco Di Lorenzo. And his death certificate (I can never think of that goddamn day last June without tears coming to my eyes) records that he died at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital in the intensive care unit after being there for less than nineteen hours. The time of his death was 11:50 A.M. on the morning of June 17, 1973. His age was recorded as 92 years, 11 months, and 10 days. His occupation was given as tailor. His name was recorded as Frank Di Lorenzo. Good old Grandpa. Yankee Doodle Dandy at last.

But Francesco he was in 1900, and it was he who shared the second bedroom with his sisters, Emilia and Maria, respectively fourteen and ten. Emilia snored, but he never told her this, lest it spoil the hours of pleasure her own reflection in the glass brought her. Her light snore filled the small room now. He put on his eyeglasses. It was shortly before dawn, and the paneless window high on the wall over Emilia’s bed, covered with a stretch of goathide rubbed to translucent thinness, admitted enough early light so that he could see the beds of both his sisters, and the carved wooden chest on the wall opposite, and the wooden chair beside his own bed, and beyond that the open door of the archway leading into the kitchen, brighter than the bedroom now because its larger windows faced east, toward Bari and the Adriatic. He was twenty years old, but he leaped out of bed with all the excitement of a five-year-old, and went immediately to the arch and looked into the kitchen. The presepio stood in one corner of the room. He went to it slowly, as though uncertain he had seen correctly (or, more properly, uncertain that what he had not seen was truly and validly not there to see), and then turned away in disappointment. Shivering, he went to the woodbox in the opposite corner and took from it the brush he had scavenged the night before. He lay this upon the grate in the old stone fireplace painted white and streaked with soot, and twisted under it a yellowed copy of the Corriere della Sera which his father had brought back from Naples two months ago, when he’d gone there looking for work.

Wood was scarce; well, everything was scarce. He carried three huge and treasured pine logs (but this was Christmas) to the grate and carefully placed them on the tinder to form a distantly related cousin to the presepio standing in the corner of the room, a skeletal isosceles pyramid with four shelves. The bottom shelf contained tiny wooden figures representing the Holy Family, which his cousin Renato had carved himself and brought as a gift three Christmases before, when times were better: Joseph and Mary and the infant Jesus, the Three Kings standing in the manger in adoration of the newborn Christ, shepherds and sheep and angels and a camel, all meticulously carved by Renato, who was excellent with his hands and could do such things. The three top shelves, reserved for gifts, were empty.

Francesco struck sparks from his flint into the nest of tinder, and then stood up and watched the spreading stain of fire on newsprint, heard the sharp crackling of the dried twigs, folded his arms across his narrow chest and stared at the flames as they grew like malevolent weeds around the pyramid of logs. His hair was black and curly, he had thick black eyebrows, and he wore rimless spectacles he had bought in the open market from the stall of Luisa Maggiore, about whom many rumors were spoken in the village — none of which he believed or repeated. He had picked and searched through the mountain of eyeglasses on her stand, until he had found a pair which he felt added a touch of distinction to his face without robbing it of its handsomeness. He had worn glasses since he was four years old, but his eyesight stubbornly refused to improve; even the glasses he had bought from Signora Maggiore two years ago were now too weak for his faltering vision. He could not see five feet ahead of him in the morning unless he fumbled first for his glasses on the wooden chair beside his bed, and put them on before throwing back the coverlet and setting his feet on the cold stone floor.

The room was warming.

No longer chilled, he gave recognition to the hunger that had been gnawing at his belly long before he woke. It was still barely light outside, the sun was just rising, he supposed it was close to five in the morning. December in southern Italy, from what my grandfather told me, is normally a dismal time of the year, rain drenching the roads and turning the tiniest patches of soil into quagmires. The sky was clear that Christmas Day, the sun came blushing through the mountaintops as though embarrassed by its absence of the past few weeks. He had been hungry when he’d gone to bed the night before, had tossed hungrily in fitful sleep, had awakened hungry, and was still hungry. But he knew that all the food in the house had been jealously hoarded for this day of days, and he did not know whether he was supposed to touch even a crust of hidden bread. He trembled again, not from the cold this time, but instead from a feeling of helpless anger and frustration — why la fillossera? If there was truly a God, why? Hugging his slender arms across his chest, he stood trembling in his flannel nightshirt before the blazing fire, and wondered if his father would shout at him for having used the wood so early in the morning, before anyone else was awake.

His mother had been saving a handful of chestnuts for roasting with the Christmas meal. They were in an earthenware jar outside the largest of the kitchen windows, eleven of them; he had longingly counted them. If he ate one of them with his early-morning porridge, would his mother realize there were only ten remaining when it came time to roast them?

Silently, thoughtfully, he went back into the bedroom to dress. Maria, the ten-year-old, was awake. “Francesco?” she said, and blinked at him.

“Yes,” he answered. “Turn your back.”

“Did he come?” She was referring to Father Baba, the Italian bearer of Christmas gifts, an old old man with long flowing robes and a white beard and a pack on his back, not unlike our own Santa Claus though rather scarecrowish in appearance, and certainly not rosy-cheeked or potbellied or jolly ho-ho-ho.

“Did he?” she asked, when Francesco did not answer.

“No,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

He tightened his belt, and went out into the kitchen, and put the pot of farinata onto the hook, and swung it in over the blazing fire, and debated once more the theft of the chestnut. Maria came padding into the room. She was not his favorite person in the world since she still wet the bed at the age of ten, and between Emilia’s snoring and Maria’s stench, it was difficult to get a good night’s sleep even if a man were not hungry all the time. The front of her gown clung limply to her now. Like a tiny galleon afloat on her own stale ocean, she flapped directly to the presepio and stared at it in disbelief.

“He didn’t come,” she said.

“I told you.”

“Why not?” she asked, and turned accusingly, as though he alone were responsible for the absence of gifts in the house this Christmas Day.

“Because we are poor,” he said flatly and cruelly, and then ladled hot porridge from the pot, and ate it without stealing the chestnut after all. Maria was crying behind him. He went to her. He gathered her into his arms, damp and smelling of her own urine, and’ he stroked her long black hair, and he whispered, “Non piangere, cara, do not cry. He will come next year. I promise.”

“Who are you to promise?” she asked.

“Why, your brother,” he said, and grinned.

“Vattene a Napoli,” she answered, and pushed him away, and went back into the bedroom.

He was not about to go to Naples, as his sister had advised. He was about to go to America. He had made up his mind the moment he decided not to steal the chestnut. He had never stolen anything in his life, and the very idea that he had even considered the theft appalled him. To steal from one’s own family! No. It was not right to be so hungry. He would go to America, and make his fortune, and come back next Christmas with expensive gifts, as he had promised Maria. The thought of leaving Fiormonte excited him, and simultaneously filled him with dread.

My sons today think nothing of hopping into the Volkswagen bus and driving it out to Denver for the weekend. All of my children have been to Europe at least four times, Andrew having made the trip alone when he was sixteen. He is now in Greece, on the island of Samos, living with a girl from Baltimore. They plan to head east, to India, in search of a guru. (No, Dad, you don’t understand. You don’t find the guru, he finds you. Yes, son, bullshit.) The last time he went to India, lovely, disease-ridden, impoverished, starvation-gripped paradise (no offense, Madame Gandhi), he came back covered with lice, and with an open sore the size of a half dollar just above the arch of his right foot. I rushed him to the doctor and was told if he’d stayed away another two weeks, the foot would have developed gangrene and he’d have lost it. He’d been gone for eight months, dropping a line every so often, but never including a return address. I don’t know what he was looking for. I don’t think he found it because he’s heading back there again, come September. Nor do I think it’s a guru he’s seeking.

My grandfather knew what he was looking for, all right. He was looking for work. He was looking for money. He was looking for survival for himself and his family. He walked out onto those sun-silvered streets of the village on Christmas morning, determined to find in himself the strength and the courage to make the move. It would only be for a year, he told himself (the way Andrew told me his forthcoming pilgrimage would only take a year, after which time he will have found where his head’s at, he said, and come back, and be ready to settle down and get some good work done). Francesco would send money home to Fiormonte to keep the family alive and well, meanwhile saving money for the return trip and for whatever enterprise the family decided to begin when he came home — for certainly they would be able to choose their own future and their own destiny once he came back to Fiormonte a rich man.

He did not go immediately to Bardoni; he was yet too fearful of making the final commitment. The streets of the town were empty, the sun burning off the early-morning mist. There was the aroma of smoke on the air, smoke coming from the chimney of his house, and from another house farther down the street, where another early riser doubtlessly had gone to the presepio in an almost identical kitchen and looked at its empty top three shelves in disappointment. He could see in the distance, growing wild in the hills into which the town was nestled, fields and fields of dry, thorny thistle. Signora Ruggiero was at the village well, drawing water. He passed her and touched his cap in greeting, and said, “Buon giorno, Signora, Buon Natale,” and she replied cheerlessly, “Buon Natale, Francesco,” and tugged at the rope holding the wooden bucket, and adjusted the black woolen shawl about her shoulders, black dress, black stockings, black hair, eyes so dark they appeared black, total limned blackness against the bright cold hard wintry light. The sun had risen over the hilltops now to stun the unsuspecting streets; it had been gone too long, there had been only damp and dismal grayness for a fortnight. He walked.

His closest friend in the village was a boy his own age named Giuseppe Battatore. Unusually short, even for Fiormonte, chubby if not actually obese (in the dear dead days, at least), Giuseppe had from the time he was three years old been nicknamed with the diminutive Giuseppino, later abbreviated to Pino. He had lost a great deal of weight in the past several years, but he had not grown an inch since he was twelve. Nor had his generally cheerful disposition been changed by the bad times that had befallen the village. Black-haired and brown-eyed (was there anyone in all Fiormonte who was not black-haired, brown-eyed, and olive-complexioned?), sporting a mustache he had begun growing at the age of eighteen, but which still looked sparse and patchy though he groomed it and fussed over it like a household pet, Pino had the characteristically bulbous nose of the region (so unlike my grandfather’s) and thickish lips with strong horselike teeth stained with tobacco from the guinea stinkers clamped between them day and night (it was my grandfather’s contention that Pino went to sleep with a cigar in his mouth), quick grin breaking with such suddenness that it insinuated slyness or craftiness or guile or lecherous intent, all of which characteristics were alien to gentle, soft-spoken Pino Battatore, my grandfather’s best friend. I knew Pino when I was a boy. He never spoke a harsh word to me — but then, hardly anyone ever speaks a harsh word to a blind person. That is a fact of life (may life, at any rate), and a rather nice one.

My grandfather talked earnestly to Pino that Christmas morning. They walked up the hill some distance from the house of the padrone, and sat with the gorse blowing wildly about them in the silver sunshine, and looked northward into the valley where the Ofanto rushed muddily to the sea. The Adriatic at its closest point was only seventy-five kilometers away, and they had both been to Barletta, of course, had even been to Bari, farther down on the eastern coast, and gazed across those waters to where they knew Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire began, but they had no notion of what those lands might be like. (They had seen foreign sailors in Bari once, but the Adriatic truly lacked any decent harbors, and such visits were rare.) Fiormonte was situated almost exactly midway between Naples and Bari, northwest of the arch in the Italian boot, due south of the spur in its heel. It was easier to get to Naples than to Bari because the roads were better, but the city itself cost more to visit, and besides, they always felt like farmers (which they were) when they got there. They talked now not of Canosa, the nearest town of any size, nor of Barletta on the coast, nor of the towns between there and Bari, nor even of the city of Naples, which was the largest city they had ever seen and certainly the most splendid. They talked of America. They talked of New York. Stultifyingly ignorant — neither of them could read or write their own language, but then again neither could ninety percent of the Italians in the south — blissfully naive, desperately hungry, soaringly optimistic, they talked of undertaking a month-long voyage that would begin in a horse-drawn cart in Fiormonte, take them west to the bustling port of Naples, where they would board a ship that would steam out into the Mediterranean (and here their limited knowledge of the world’s geography ended), through the Strait of Gibraltar, into the Atlantic, and across three thousand miles of ocean to a land more alien than any they might have imagined in their most fantastic dreams. The truth is they’d have been hopelessly lost even in Rome, only three hundred kilometers to the northwest, where the language would have fallen harshly on their ears, the food would have been too pallid for their coarser southern taste, the customs, the regional dress, the manners, and the mores all strange and frightening.

In less than an hour, they decided to go to America together and seek their fortunes.

It remained only to discuss financial arrangements with Pietro Bardoni.

For my grandfather, America in the year 1901 was a hole in the ground and a room in a tenement flat. The hole was to become New York’s subway system. The room was rented to him by an Italian family that had arrived five years earlier. My grandfather worked twelve hours a day, six and sometimes seven days a week. He left for work at five in the morning, and did not return to the building on 117th Street till seven at night. During those long winter months when he was learning the city and struggling with the language, and trying to make friends among the Italians already there, he rarely saw the sun. The room he rented was part of a cold-water flat, the last room in the railroad layout, its single window opening on an air shaft. There was a huge coal stove in the kitchen, but Luisa Agnelli did not bank its fires until she awakened at seven, long after my grandfather had left for work, at which time she would begin preparing her husband’s breakfast. Her husband was a bull of a man who had grown olives near Taormina, and who now owned the ice station on 120th Street and First Avenue. His name was Giovanni, and he suspected that my grandfather was trying to make time with his squat and ugly wife, even though she was constantly chaperoned by three squalling brats who slept in the room next to my grandfather’s, two of whom took delight in urinating into his shoes if he made the mistake of leaving them on the floor instead of sleeping with them under his pillow.

The neighborhood into which my grandfather moved was a ghetto in every sense of the word, though he never referred to it as such. To him it was la vicinanza, the neighborhood, nine blocks long and four blocks wide, unless one chose to include the short stretch of Pleasant Avenue, a decrepit slum today, but aptly and justly named for 1901, a wide, tree-lined esplanade with a commanding view of the East River. La vicinanza ran from 116th Street on the south to 125th Street on the north, and was bounded on the east by the river and on the west by Lexington Avenue. Beyond Lex were the Negroes; Francesco quickly learned to call them “niggers,” as part of the naturalization process, no doubt. The blacks were not to begin their own mass immigration northward till 1920, and in the following decade the population of Harlem (their Harlem) would rise by 115 percent. But they were there in 1901, too, and already they were niggers to someone who himself wasn’t even a second-class citizen but merely an alien with a work visa.

The ghetto was not too terribly strange to Francesco. The language he heard there day and night was the same Italian spoken by the peasants in Fiormonte and the urban dwellers of Naples; the food he ate was the same food he had eaten when times were good in Fiormonte, the area crammed to bursting with grocery stores selling pasta and cheeses and salamis and fresh olive oil; chicken on the leg to be had at the market on Pleasant Avenue, seven cents a pound, claws tied together, bird hung upside down on the white-tiled wall, throat slit, white feathered wings flapping and splattering blood, cleaned and plucked by the poultry man; fresh pork sausage from the salumeria on 118th and First, ten cents a pound; cannoli and cassatine and sfogliatelle from the pasticceria on the corner of 120th Street — there was much to eat in this golden land (though it was not so golden to Francesco, who worked in the darkness twelve hours a day), and all of it was prepared in the coarse southern Italian style, heavy on the garlic and spices, “bruta,” as it was once described to me by a saxophone player in a Roman nightclub. The sounds were familiar, the smells were familiar, even the signs on many of the stores were in Italian, as foreign to him as were the signs in English because he could read or write neither language. Except for the constant noise of the transportation facilities, which seemed to Francesco to express the tempo and the spirit and also the manners of the city — the jangling, rattling streetcars on First Avenue, the metallically clattering elevated trains rushing along ugly steel viaducts on Second and Third Avenues — he might have been living in a neighborhood in Naples.

The ordeal of the January Atlantic crossing was behind him, those terrible sick days in the hold of the ship with Pino cradling his head so that he would not suffocate in his own vomit, the cooking smells of the foreigners, the Russian Jews and Austro-Hungarians already aboard the ship when it steamed into the Bay of Naples, the babbling Spaniards they picked up in Málaga before they passed through the Strait, the handful of Portuguese in Lisbon, blankets hung from sweating steel bulkheads and overhead pipes, the sounds of mandolins and balalaikas, arguments in a dozen tongues, the fistfight between the small dark Spaniard who spit phlegm into every corner of the deck and the huge Russian peasant who would have killed him had not an officer of the ship come below with a billy and knocked the Russian senseless. The stench in steerage was overpowering. The passage was costing him twelve dollars, advanced by Bardoni, but for twelve dollars (sixty-two lire!) a man did not expect to be treated like an animal. At Ellis Island, he was penned according to nationality, examined like a horse or a mule, his mouth, his eyes, his nose, his rectum, heard English for the first time, questions fired in English, and stood with wide bewildered eyes while things were done to him or asked of him, commands accompanied by hand signals, thank God for Bardoni who was waiting for him and Pino when finally they were permitted to leave that terrifying place.

Bardoni had found lodgings for Pino with a bachelor who had been in America for only six months. Francesco was to live with Mr. and Mrs. Agnelli and their three children, in the back room of their apartment, for which he was to pay two dollars and fifty cents a week. He did not know at the time, and Bardoni did not tell him, that a dollar of what he paid was going directly into Bardoni’s pocket, or that the total monthly rent on the apartment was only seven dollars. Bardoni was a countryman, true, but he was not above collecting his rightful tithe, and Agnelli showed no open aversion to living rent-free at the expense of Francesco Di Lorenzo (who, anyway, was trying to fuck his wife, or so went his rationalization).

Ugly Luisa’s only saving graces were a pair of large, purple-nippled breasts, one or the other of which she whipped out of her dress whenever her newborn son gave the slightest sign of needing sustenance or pacification. She was being neither seductive nor exhibitionistic. It was not unusual for the women of the neighborhood to nurse their children on trolley cars, or rocking on the stoops of their buildings, or chatting in their kitchens with cousins or aunts or goombahs or goomahs, junior sucking merrily away while the peaches were dipped in the wine. Luisa watched little Salvatore (for that was the darling’s name, Salvatore, the Savior) as though he might explode into the kitchen if she did not stick an enormous boob into his mouth the moment he opened it. With alarming alacrity and frequency, she would slip one hand into the yoke neck of her dress, yank out a breast, and shove its nipple into the little Savior’s puckered mouth. Between her infant and her husband, Luisa was kept busy; Giovanni had the habit of coming home from the ice station to compromise his lovely wife at the most unexpected hours, grabbing her from behind, both hands clutching at those prized beauties, her brewer’s-horse ass wriggling against him in protest. There seems to have been some question as to who was doing exactly what to whom. Was my grandfather truly trying to get Luisa in the hay (his eyes were weak, but certainly not that weak) or was Giovanni trying to entice Francesco into making an open move, which he could then revenge in the Sicilian manner, by cutting off Francesco’s balls and his own guilt-ridden, rent-free existence into the bargain?

Who knows?

My grandfather resisted all temptations. He was too busy down in the subway. He would refer to the Interborough Rapid Transit in later years as “my subway.” Until I was ten years old, I actually believed he owned the goddamn thing, and wondered why I was not allowed to ride it without paying a fare. Now that I am forty-eight, I realize it was his subway. He built it. Or at least that part of it between the Brooklyn Bridge and Fifty-ninth Street. At the time, he felt no pride in its construction. He was digging a tunnel through the earth with no conception of where that tunnel would eventually lead. Even a mole, as blind as I, has a sense of direction; Francesco had none. He knew that a train would eventually run through this muddy hole, but he had never been farther uptown than 125th Street, nor farther downtown than City Hall Park, where he was dropped into the bowels of Manhattan each morning. West Farms, Bowling Green, Borough Hall, Atlantic Avenue, distant rumored destinations of the underground octopus, were names that meant nothing to him. Francesco blindly poked his shovel and his pick into the dripping earth, fearful that the city’s streets would fall in upon him, workman’s boots firmly planted in ankle-deep mud, which was at least something he knew from the old country. Hearing but only vaguely understanding the words of the Irish foreman, unable to answer him in his own tongue, he was rendered deaf and dumb as well, laboring at a muscle-wrenching job that made no sense except for the weekly pay check of fourteen dollars, more than Bardoni had promised but whittled down to ten dollars a week after repayment of the cost of passage, and Bardoni’s commission, and Bardoni’s “incidental expenses,” never satisfactorily defined. From that remaining ten dollars, Francesco paid two dollars and fifty cents a week to the iceman, sent five dollars home, and kept two-fifty for himself — which was not bad in the year 1901, when a good roast beef dinner with buttered beets and mashed potatoes, chocolate layer cake and coffee cost no more than thirty-five cents.

Pino was less fortunate, and at the same time more fortunate. Because of his size, Bardoni felt certain Pino would be turned down for employment on the newly begun subway, and he was right. So he was sent to work in the garment district, where he earned seven dollars less per week than did Francesco, but where he worked aboveground and was able to see New York’s spring that April when it broke with a belated delicacy that took his breath away. It was Pino who arranged for their first date with two “American” girls who worked downtown with him on Thirty-fifth and Broadway.

All that suckling in the Agnelli household, all those surprise visits by the clutching iceman must have stoked something of the old Mediterranean fire in Francesco’s youthful loins, but what was one to do in a strange land where the only contacts were Italians with virgin daughters, and where the girls he saw on his rare excursions outside the ghetto spoke a language he barely understood? When Pino told him he had arranged the date, Francesco could not believe him.

“But what?” he said. “With two American girls? Americans?”

“Yes, Americans,” Pino said, and that quick toothy smile flashed conspiratorially. They were both remembering Bardoni’s story of the keying in Naples, and anticipating a similar adventure; it was common knowledge that American girls fucked like rabbits.

“And they said yes?” Francesco asked incredulously.

“Yes, of course they said yes. Would I be telling you about them if they said no? Saturday night. Eight o’clock. They live together on Twelfth Street.”

“Alone?” Francesco asked. He could not believe his ears.

“Alone,” Pino affirmed, and nodded. The nod promised galaxies.

“Do they speak Italian?” Francesco asked.

“No. But we speak English, non è vero?”

They were not speaking English on that Harlem rooftop where pigeons fluttered overhead in the April dusk; they never spoke English when they were alone together. They had, however, begun to feel their way around the language since their arrival, if only because they needed it to survive. Only the other day, underground, someone had shouted a command at Francesco, and had he hesitated an instant longer in obeying it, had there been the slightest gap between the shouted English warning and his immediate understanding of it, his head would have been crushed by a falling timber. I can only judge what my grandfather’s English was like in 1901 by what it was like in later years, after I arrived on the scene. What it was like was atrocious, even though my grandmother had been born in this country, and probably worked hard trying to teach him. But English to him, before he met Teresa Giamboglio, was only a temporary necessity. He was going back as soon as he’d saved enough money. A year was what he’d promised himself. A year was a long enough time for a man to burrow his way through the stinking earth. A year without the sun was a long enough time.

He and Pino boarded the Second Avenue El at 119th Street, dressed in their Saturday-night finery, feeling very American, and immediately identifiable as grease-balls by every other passinger on the train. It was a beautiful balmy evening, the windows of the train wide open, the signs warning that fine and imprisonment would be the lot of any passenger foolish enough to try expectorating through them. Pino and Francesco sat on the cane seats side by side, each carrying identical corsages they had purchased in the flower shop on Third Avenue, each sitting stiffly in unaccustomed collar and tie, each wearing a straw boater rakishly tilted. Pino kept nervously stroking and patting his sparse mustache. Neither of the two talked very much on that trip downtown. Their heads were filled with images of dainty American underthings, petticoats, and corsets, lisle stockings and perfumed silk garters — oh, this was going to be ’na bella chiavata.

They had planned to take the girls to a restaurant suggested by the bachelor with whom Pino lived, inexpensive, with excellent food and wonderful service, where they were to be sure to ask for a waiter named Arturo, who spoke Italian. They had no plans for after dinner. Motion pictures had not yet burst upon the American scene — that was to happen two years later, with the introduction of The Great Train Robbery, an eleven-minute opus that changed the entertainment habits of the world. (I must tell you that I have heard nearly every motion picture ever made. I love the movies, and I have visualized scenes Pauline Kael has never dreamt of in her universe. I once went to the Museum of Modern Art to “see” a silent film because I wanted to imagine the whole damn thing just by listening to the piano underscoring. It was an exhilarating experience, even though the piano player must have studied under my grandfather’s Irish foreman.)

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?

And then Francesco understands. The man has carved a letter into the wood, the letter P, and after this he gouges out a small dot, a period, and then begins to carve the letter H, meticulously digging out each vertical bar, and then the crossbar, and then uses the point of the knife to gouge out another period. Rising, standing erect again, he closes the knife and puts it back into his pocket. Then he brings the pick close to his mouth and blows into the carved letters, sending fine minuscule splinters flying, and then passes his hand over the letters caressingly, and looks at Francesco, and grins.

“P.H. Patrick Halloran. My name, my initials, and my damn pick.”

The Irishman continues to grin. Is there some humor here that Francesco is missing because of his scant understanding of English? There are so many words in English which sound the same, but mean different things. Is “pick” one of those words, and has he missed the entire thrust of the conversation from the very beginning? But no. “Dago” he understands, and “fucking” he understands, and yet he has heard these men jokingly calling themselves big fucking micks, which he knows is derogatory, so perhaps fucking dago was meant in the same way, perhaps a joke was intended, after all; perhaps the man was only being friendly, is that a possibility? He misses so many nuances because he does not understand; the subtleties of this land are overwhelming. But if it was all a joke, if the man is smiling now because a joke was intended, then why did he put his mark on a pick belonging to the company? Francesco knows it is the man’s mark, he knows he is not mistaken about that because now that he has seen the letters gouged into the wood, the word “initials” makes sense to him, it is almost identical to the Italian word iniziali. Is it possible that the man was only trying to introduce himself? Trying to tell Francesco his name? Carving his initials into the wood handle to facilitate communication? This appears ridiculous to Francesco, but so many things in this new country seem foolish to him. Would the man have damaged a pick belonging to the company merely to have his name be known? Does he not know the company rules? Does he not realize... and here a new fear seizes Francesco. This is the pick that was assigned to him this morning. A workman was responsible for his own tools, and had to pay for any damage done to them through his own negligence. Would he now have to pay for the damage this man has done to the pick handle by carving his initials into it?

“You have damaged my pick,” he says. They are back again to the question of possession, though now Francesco is not so sure he wishes to claim this damaged pick.

“I shouldn’t worry about it,” the man says.

“It is the pick I used all morning. The company will...”

“No, my friend, you’re mistaken. I’ve been using this pick all morning. You were using the one over there.”

Francesco follows the man’s casual head gesture, squints into the gloom, and suddenly understands. A I pick with a broken handle is lying half-submerged in the mud. The man’s pick, broken in use. By claiming Francesco’s pick, he is simultaneously willing to him the pick with the broken handle, so that the cost of replacing it will come from Francesco’s pay and not his own.

“No,” Francesco says.

“No, is it? Ah, but yes. This one is mine, and that one is...”

He leaps upon the man before he realizes what he is doing. He has not been angry until this moment, but now a fury boils within him, and he gives no thought to the consequences of his sudden action. He knows only that the man is stealing from him, and by extension stealing from the family in Fiormonte. He seizes the handle of the pick, tries to wrest it away, but the man merely swings it around, with Francesco still clinging to it, pulling Francesco off his feet and dragging him sprawling into the mud, his eyeglasses falling from his face.

“Ladro!” Francesco screams in Italian. “Thief!” And gets blindly to his feet. And springs for the man’s throat. The first scream goes unnoticed in the general din, but he continues to shriek “Ladro! Ladro! Ladro!” as his mud-covered hands struggle for a grip around the other man’s throat. The man hits Francesco in the chest with the end of the pick handle, knocking him down again. The screams have finally attracted the other workers, most of them Italians who understand the meaning of the word that comes piercingly from Francesco’s mouth in strident repetition: “Ladro! Ladro! Ladro!” He gets to his feet again, and again charges the other man. The man throws the pick aside, I bunches his fists, and begins to beat Francesco senseless, methodically breaking first his nose and then his jaw, pounding at both eyes until the lids are swollen and bleeding, splitting his lips, knocking out four of his teeth, and then kicking him repeatedly in the chest after he has fallen unconscious into the mud. The other men do nothing. It is the foreman who at last comes over, and says, gently, “Come on, Pat, there’s no sense killing the little wop, now is there?”

My grandfather paid dearly for his encounter with Pat Halloran, and to his dying day he was to hate the Irish with undiminished passion. The broken pick handle cost him a dollar and a half, which was deducted from his weekly pay check. His hospital bill — they taped his broken ribs, applied poultices to his eyes, set and taped his broken nose, and took three stitches in his upper lip — came to twenty-four dollars and thirty-eight cents. The dentist who made his bridgework and supplied him with four false teeth charged him seventeen dollars. He lost two weeks’ work at fourteen dollars a week, and did not return to the tunnel until the beginning of May. To honor his debts, he was forced to borrow money from Bardoni (at interest, of course), and it was Bardoni who suggested that there were men in Harlem who would be happy to take care of Halloran for a slight fee. My grandfather said he wished to have nothing to do with such men; he would take care of Halloran himself, in his own good time.

He did, finally, in the month of June — in a way that was entirely satisfactory and supremely ironic.

But before that, Pino Battatore fell in love.

I don’t wish to create the impression that nothing else was happening in America during that May of 1901. But according to my grandfather, at least, Pino’s love affair with the neighborhood’s undisputed beauty was far more fascinating to that band of wops in Harlem’s side streets than were the politics, or economics, or quaint folkways and customs of a nation they did not consider their own. The Spanish-American War, for example, had not been their war, and the subsequent Filipino uprising against our military government, a struggle that had been raging for two years by the time my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island, was of little if any interest to them. Their letters home concerned the basic necessities of life, and not the trappings of power. They were not impressed with America’s good and noble reason for declaring war against Spain (To Free Cuba from the Foreign Oppressor), nor did they understand the subsequent insurrection in the Philippines. (They did not even know where the Philippines were!)

Even those Italians who had been here before the war with Spain started were incapable of reading the English-language newspapers and had no idea that William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (who, like me, was blind — though his blackout didn’t commence till 1889, when he was forty-two years old) had virtually started the war in tandem by publishing in their competing newspapers atrocity stories about the Spaniards’ cruel colonial rule. Americans (but not immigrants) had told themselves, and eventually came to believe, that the United States was genuinely concerned over the fate and destiny of all those sweaty cane cutters and raggedy-assed fishermen somewhere down there off the coast of Florida. So the war with Spain began, and we threw millions and millions of dollars into it (three hundred million of them), not to mention more than five thousand young lives, and Hearst and Pulitzer sold lots of newspapers, and the ginzoes in East Harlem went right on eating their pasta and sending their money home. Eventually, we won the war. We always win our wars, even when we lose them. And finally, we managed to put down the insurrection as well, when Brigadier General Frederick Funston boldly raided Aguinaldo’s camp and captured him in March — just before my grandfather had his teeth knocked out by Mr. Halloran of the disputed pick. Aguinaldo took an oath of loyalty to these here United States, and announced to his followers that the uprising was over. Another brilliant triumph for America, and Pino Battatore couldn’t have cared less. Pino was in love. While near-hysterical praise rang out for Funston in the streets of New York, Pino’s own rhapsodic paeans were reserved solely for one Angelina Trachetti, whom my grandfather in later years described as “la bellezza delle bellezze,” the beauty of beauties.

Angelina was five feet four inches tall, with jet-black hair and brown eyes, and a narrow waist and large firm breasts — “una bella figura,” my grandfather said. She was nineteen years old, and had come with her parents from the Abruzzi two years earlier. Her working knowledge of English was good, and she was blessed with a wonderful sense of humor (somewhat ribald at times, according to Grandpa) and a fine culinary hand. She had been sought after by countless young Italians of heroic stature and discriminating eye, and the miracle of it all was that she had chosen Pino. There was but one thing that could be said against her, and this was the cause of the only argument my grandfather ever had with Pino: she did not wish to return to Italy.

“What do you mean?” Francesco asked. “She wants to stay here?”

They were strolling along Pleasant Avenue on a mild May evening, the sounds of the ghetto everywhere around them, so much like Fiormonte; even the East River reminded Francesco of the river back home, the memory jostled only by the incessant hooting of the tugboats. The Ofanto now would be swelled with spring floods, the valley would be lush and verdant...

“Here? In America?”

“Yes,” Pino said.

“You won’t take her home to Italy?”

“No.”

“To Fiormonte?”

“No.”

“You’ll stay here?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand,” Francesco said.

He understood, all right. He didn’t understand it on the deeper psychological level, the breakdown of the adolescent gang and all that Freudian jazz, but he understood it in exactly the same way that I did, years later, when my brother Tony wouldn’t let me hear his record collection, and I considered him a traitor and a deserter and a ratfink bastard. Only the costumes and the geography and the languages change — the rest is eternally the same. They were both wearing striped shirts, those young men who had known each other from birth, the high-throated necks open and lacking the usual celluloid collars, the sleeves rolled up, braces showing under their vests and holding up their black trousers. They stomped along Pleasant Avenue with the gait of peasants, which they were, and my grandfather tried to control his anger at Pino’s defection, while Pino tried to explain his deep and abiding love for Angelina — but no, my grandfather would have none of it, the betrayal was twofold: to friend and to country.

I have heard my grandfather in towering rages, especially when he was railing against his first-born son, my Uncle Luke, who invariably lost his own hereditary temper during poker games. I do not believe he was shouting at Pino that night. I think his voice must have been very low, injured, perhaps a trifle petulant. The song he hummed forlornly was “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine,” a lousy tune for a jazz solo, the essentially white chart starting with B-flat major and going to E-flat major, and a bit anachronistic for May of 1901, perhaps, when one considers that it was not published till 1929 — but Grandpa was always just a bit ahead of the times. He was a little bit ahead of Pino just then, anger having fired his stride so that he was four paces in front of his friend before he realized he was carrying on a solitary monologue. He stopped dead on the sidewalk and turned to Pino and summed it all up, summed up the whole fucking adolescent severance of boyhood ties, maybe even summed up the entire human condition in three short words: “What about me?”

“You?” Pino said. “But what does this have to do with you, Francesco?”

“You said we’d go back to Italy together, you said we’d go back rich, we’d take care of our families...”

“But my family will be here,” Pino said with dignity.

“And what about your family there?”

“I’ll continue to send them money.”

“Ah, Pino,” my grandfather said, and sighed, and looked out over the river. A solitary silent tug was moving slowly downstream. He kept his eyes on the boat. He did not want to look again at Pino, not that night, for fear that he would burst into tears and reveal that his dreams of twinship had been shattered. Those daring explorers who had sailed three thousand miles across the Atlantic in search of treasure would not return due a due to the homeland, would not relate their adventures together, one interrupting the other in his excitement, words overlapping, augmenting and expanding upon each story the other told, the townspeople at their feet, mouths agape, as Pino and Francesco exhibited riches beyond imagination — Pino and Francesco, the Weber and Fields of Fiormonte. Now it would be Francesco alone.

In the neighborhood, opinion held the match to be ill-fated. To begin with, Pino was an ugly runt and Angelina was a beauty. But more important than that, no one had any real faith in this American concept of romantic love. In Italy, a man did not choose his own bride; she was chosen for him. Picking one’s own wife was considered revolutionary, and don’t think poor Angelina didn’t get a lot of static about it from her father, who preferred that she marry the proprietor of the latteria on First Avenue and 120th — a man who, like himself, was from the Abruzzi. Her father finally acquiesced, perhaps because she was a strong-willed girl who argued with him in English, rather than Italian, thereby frustrating his ability to counterattack effectively. But even though the American concept of amore was at last grudgingly accepted, Pino and Angelina were never left alone together. They were always shadowed by an “accompagnatrice,” usually one of Angelina’s aunts or older cousins, or, on some occasions, her godmother, a fearsome lady of substantial bosom and sharp eye, who was known to have shouted across First Avenue, “Pino, non toccare!” when Pino in all innocence tried to remove a coal cinder from Angelina’s eye, the strident “Don’t touch!” being the equivalent in those days of a bellowed “Rape!” Given Beauty and the Beast, then, given too this stupid unworkable foreign idea about “falling in love” (ridiculed by Papa Trachetti, but subtly supported by Mama, who kind of liked the notion), and given the strict supervision of a gaggle of fat ladies watching every move and censoring so much as a covert glance — how could this thing succeed?

Francesco, along with the rest of the neighborhood, hoped that it would not. Eventually, Pino would come to his senses and realize that this girl who did not wish to return to Italy was certainly not the girl for him. In the meantime, Francesco plotted his revenge against Halloran. While Pino and Angelina talked of whom they would invite to the wedding and the reception, Francesco plotted his revenge. While Pino and Angelina talked of what furniture they would need, and where they would buy it, and where they would live, and how many children they would have, Francesco plotted his revenge. His furtive scheming may have been a form of displacement, a way of venting all the frustration, anger, and disappointment he could not express to Pino. Who the hell knows? I’m a blind man. I can only visualize that morning of June the twelfth as my grandfather gleefully described it to me many years later.

It is raining.

It has been raining for twelve days and twelve nights; this June of 1901 will go down in the records as one of the wettest in the history of New York. The tunnel in which the men work is a veritable quagmire, but to Francesco it is resplendent with the sweet sunshine of revenge. He has planned carefully. In his native Italy, he could neither read nor write, but he has been diligently practicing English ever since his encounter with Halloran; or to be more exact, he has been laboriously tracing and retracing two letters of the alphabet — P and H.

He has rejected Bardoni’s idea of hiring two Harlem hoods to bash in Halloran’s skull, but he is not so foolhardy as to believe that he can handle Halloran by himself. The turn-of-the-century equivalent of Charles Atlas as a ninety-seven-pound weakling who got sand kicked in his face throughout all the days of my boyhood, my grandfather is no match (and he knows it) for a brute like Halloran. What is needed to defeat him is another brute, a similar brute, perhaps an identical brute. Francesco has carefully studied his fellow workers in the subway tunnel (while nightly pursuing his handwriting exercises at home — P and H, P and H) and has decided that the only true match for Patrick Halloran is a total clod of an Irish mick named Sean McDonnell. (Spare me your letters, offended Irishmen of the world; to a blind man you’re all the same — wops, spies, kikes, micks, polacks, niggers; when you’ve not seen one slum you’ve not seen them all. And in any case, I am American to the core, a product of this great democratic nation. And that’s what this whole fucking thing is about.)

McDonnell is a beast of burden. He is six feet four inches tall, and he weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. He speaks English with such a thick brogue that even his own countrymen can barely understand him. He is fifty-two years old, partially balding, with tiny black pig’s eyes beneath a lowering brow, a bulbous nose he clears by seizing it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, holding the calloused palm away as daintily as though he is lifting a demitasse, and then snorting snot into the mud. He has a huge beer-barrel belly as hard as concrete, and is often daring the other men to punch him as hard as they can in the gut. He laughs a great deal, but seemingly without humor, the laughter unprovoked by incident or event; he finds life either terribly comical or utterly mystifying. Because he is so stupid, he often cannot tell the difference between a well-intentioned compliment and an insult, and is quick to answer any supposed affront with his fists. He is a perfect foil for Francesco’s plot.

The lunch hour comes at twelve noon. The foreman blows his whistle into the tunnel, and the men drop their picks, grab for their lunch pails, and begin to disperse. Even when the weather is good, they drift from their work areas to eat in other parts of the tunnel, the theory being that a change is as good as a rest. But this week in particular, when the mud is everywhere underfoot, they search out niches in the rock walls, higher stretches of ground, overturned wheelbarrows, the insides of carts, anything upon which they can spread their sandwiches and coffee safe from the slime. Francesco waits until all the men have wandered off, and then he moves swiftly to where McDonnell has dropped his pick — he has been watching McDonnell all morning, and knows exactly which pick is his. He lifts it from the mud, wipes the handle clean with the sleeve of his shirt, and takes a penknife from his pocket. Quickly, he carves the initials P.H. into the handle, and then drops the pick back into the mud. The explosion comes shortly after lunch.

“What’s this?” McDonnell says.

Francesco, working some distance away, continues chopping at the solid rock wall of the tunnel. There is a sense of rising excitement in him, coupled with an uneasy foreboding. Suppose this backfires? But no, it cannot.

“What in holy bloody hell is this?” McDonnell bellows.

There is not a man in the tunnel who does not know of Francesco’s run-in with Halloran two months back. With great relish they tell and retell the story of how Halloran carved his initials into the little wop’s pick handle and then traded his own broken pick for the undamaged one. McDonnell is a notch above a moron, but he has heard the story, too, and what he sees staring up at him now from the handle of his pick are the initials P.H.

“Where’s Halloran?” he shouts.

He does not ask Halloran for an explanation; he never asks anyone for an explanation. He knows only that Halloran has equated him with the puny wop and is trying to pull the same trick a second time. Francesco watches as McDonnell seizes Halloran by the throat and batters his head against the rock wall of the tunnel. He watches as McDonnell, one hand still clutched around Halloran’s throat, repeatedly punches him in the face, closing both his eyes and breaking his jaw and splintering his teeth. He watches as McDonnell picks up the other man effortlessly, holds him over his head for an instant, and then hurls him some ten feet through the air to collide with the opposite wall of the tunnel. Then he watches as McDonnell takes the pick and with its P.H. initials, breaks the handle over his knee, and drops the halves on Halloran’s bloodied chest

“It wan’t comical,” he says to Halloran, but Halloran does not hear him. Halloran is unconscious and bleeding and broken, and will in fact be taken to the hospital, not to report back to work till the middle of August, by which time Francesco will have left the subway-building business for good. In the meantime, he looks at Halloran lying in the mud, and he watches as the men begin to gather around him, and there is a tight grim smile on his mouth; he is from the south of Italy, and revenge is nowhere sweeter.

A conversation between my brother Tony and me, many years later. Tony is seventeen, I am fifteen. We are sitting on the front stoop of our house in the Bronx. Ten minutes earlier, I’d made casual reference to our grandfather’s tale of revenge, which we’d both heard many times. Tony suddenly expresses a skepticism I can only link with his present anger at Grandpa. Tony wants to join the Air Corps; Grandpa has asked, “Why? So you can go bomb Italy?” But Grandpa has prevailed, and my mother has refused to sign the permission papers for enlistment. Tony blames Grandpa for this, and now refuses to believe a story he has accepted as gospel since he was five.

TONY: It just doesn’t ring true, Iggie, that’s all.

ME: Grandpa swears it happened.

TONY: Why didn’t McDonnell suspect that maybe Grandpa was the one who’d carved those initials into his pick?

ME: Because he was dumb.

TONY: He was smart enough to remember the story about Grandpa and Houlihan, and to...

ME: Halloran.

TONY: Halloran. He made that connection, didn’t he?

ME: Come on, Tony, a caterpillar could’ve made that connection. The man’s initials were carved into the pick! P.H. So McDonnell automatically...

TONY:... automatically went after Halloran and beat him senseless.

ME: Right.

TONY: I don’t believe it.

ME: Well, I do.

TONY: What if I told you that June of 1901 was the sunniest June in the history of New York City?

ME: Grandpa says it rained for twelve days and twelve nights. It went into the records, he says.

TONY: Have you checked the records?

ME: No, but. . .

TONY: Then how do you know Grandpa wasn’t lying?

ME: He never lies, you know that. Anyway, what’s the rain got to do with the story?

TONY: I’m only trying to show you that if part of the story is a lie, maybe all of it is a lie.

ME: It sounds like the truth. That’s good enough for me.

Which, in a way, is exactly how I feel about this narrative. If it sounds like the truth, that’s good enough for me. You go check the records, I’m too busy, and I’m too blind. I haven’t the faintest inkling whether June of 1901 was the wettest June on record or the sunniest. When you find out, let me know — though frankly, I don’t give a damn, If you’re willing to compromise, I’ll say it was the cloudiest June on record, how’s that? The floor of the subway tunnel was covered with mist, okay? The Spanish-American War took place in 1794, Pope John was a Protestant, we got out of Vietnam with honor, astronauts are lyric poets, and my mother is a whore. Who cares? The truth I’m trying to deliver has nothing to do with careful research meticulously sandwiched into a work of fiction to give it verisimilitude or clinical verity. The only truth I’m trying to convey is this: it’s a lie. All of it.

That’s the tragedy.

In contrast to the miserably wet June that year, the beginning of July was sunny and hot. The Fourth fell on a Thursday. Today, this would mean a four-day weekend, but in 1901, when men were working a six-day week, Independence Day was only a one-day respite from the almost daily grind. Francesco had been in America for the celebration of Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays (which meant nothing to him) and for Easter (which he had spent in the hospital recuperating from Halloran’s attack). The Fourth was special to him only in that it promised widespread celebrations on the order of La Festa di San Maurizio in Fiormonte.

One of those celebrations was sponsored by the local Republican Club, and was announced in the newspapers (including Il Progresso, the Italian-language newspaper read by all literate Italians in the ghetto) as:

Francesco awakened on the morning of the glorious Fourth to the sounds of the Agnelli children arguing in the room next door. He quickly checked under his pillow to make sure his shoes had not been spirited away and pissed into, and then glanced sleepily at the clock on the chair beside his bed. This was to be the most important day of his life, but he did not yet know it, nor would he come to know it for a long, long while.

I must get out, he thought, I must go back. He thought that every morning and every night, and yet he continued to work on the subway, and he continued to return to this dreary room in the apartment of the iceman and his family. There seemed little reason for Francesco to remain in America. He was more heavily in debt now than he had been on the day he’d arrived, and seriously doubted that he could ever repay all the money Bardoni had advanced to him. The weekly bite on his pay check had drastically reduced the amount of money he could send home to Fiormonte each week. He was weary most of the time; his bones ached from the labor he performed, his mind reeled from the babble of sound assaulting him most of his waking day. And now that Pino had defected, now that Pino had announced his intention to marry Angelina Trachetti and stay here in this barbaric land, where was there any sense in persisting? Was a man to be governed by his stomach alone? He would go back to Italy, he would return home. But each time he thought of returning, he was faced with new and seemingly insurmountable problems: where would he get the money for the return passage? Bardoni again? And how would the family survive in Fiormonte (where conditions were even « worse now) if he returned? Whatever pittance he sent them from America was more than he could earn at home. Ah, miseria, he thought, and got out of bed, and put on his pants and his shirt.

The oldest of the Agnelli children, who had been picking up English in the streets, said, “Hello, cock-sucker,” as Francesco went through the room with his shoes under his arm. The door at the end of that room led to the bedroom of the paterfamilias and his wife, Luisa. Francesco eased the door open gently. The iceman had already gone to work, no rest for the weary on this Fourth of July, with picnics and celebrations all over the vicinanza. Luisa was alone in the bedroom, asleep in the double bed, one arm curled behind her head, hairy armpit showing. The sheet was tangled around her ankles; her purple-tipped boobs and dense black crotch were fully exposed. For a wild and frightening moment, Francesco considered hopping into the rumpled bed with her, as the iceman had feared he would do all along. The room stank of sweat and semen and cunt; Giovanni had undoubtedly enjoyed ’na bella chiavata before heading out to cool the beer and soda pop of half the neighborhood. Francesco stood at the foot of the bed and silently contemplated Luisa’s breasts and crotch. She turned in her sleep, thighs opening to reveal a secret pink slit that seemed to wink lasciviously. Is she awake? he suddenly wondered. Is she flashing her pussy in invitation? And was surprised to discover he had an erection. He hurried out of the room. If Luisa was beginning to look good to him, it was most certainly time to go back to Italy. But how? Ah, miseria, he thought again, and went into the kitchen, and sat on the floor, and put on his shoes.

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?

Old Umberto would show him how to trace a pattern onto a bolt of cloth, and Francesco would either break the chalk, or tear the pattern, or trace it onto a tweed instead of a covert — impossible. He was terrified of a pair of scissors; he opened them as though prying apart the jaws of a crocodile. Invariably, his hand slipped and he cut the cloth wrong. But even when his hand was steady, his eye was inaccurate, and one trouser leg would turn out to be longer than the other, a dress would be cut on the bias, a sleeve would not quite make a complete circle around a customer’s arm. And his stitches! Very patiently one day (keeping his rage in check, reminding himself that this clumsy oafish dolt of a grape farmer was now married to his youngest daughter, his single most prized possession before she’d been spirited away by this ditch-digging greenhorn), Umberto told Francesco that with stitches such as these, spaced as they were, wildly crisscrossing the cloth as they did, with stitches like yours, Francesco, it would do better for you to pursue a career in the chicken market on Pleasant Avenue, where the task is to divest the bird of its plumage rather than to adorn it, to create a thing of beauty, a garment for a customer of this tailor shop to wear with pride! Madonna mia, do you have sausages for fingers? (My daughter could have married a lawyer, he thought, but did not say.)

Teresa Giamboglio Di Lorenzo could indeed have married a lawyer. She was some sweet lady, my grandmother. Not as beautiful as Angelina, the pride of the neighborhood and the recent bride of Pino Battatore (who’d married her the month before Francesco tied the knot with Teresa), she was nonetheless strikingly tall for a girl of Neapolitan heritage, and she carried herself with the dignity of a queen. She could silence an argumentative customer in her father’s shop with a single hazel-eyed stiletto thrust that might just as easily have stopped a charging tiger. She spoke English fluently, of course, having been born in America, and she was aware that the Italian both her father and her new husband spoke was a bastardized version of the true Italian language, the Florentine. Her father had hand-tailored all her clothes from the day she was born, and she was still the most elegantly dressed young lady in the ghetto, coiffing her long chestnut brown hair herself, following the styles prescribed in the fashion magazines she avidly read each month — Vogue, Delineator, McCall’s, and The Designer. She was quick-witted, short-tempered, and sharp-tongued, but I never heard her raise her voice in anger to my grandfather as long as she lived. Whenever she spoke to him, her voice lowered to an intimate, barely audible level; even in the midst of a crowd (and there were some huge crowds around my grandfather’s table when I was growing up), one got the feeling that she and Francesco were alone together, oblivious of others, a self-contained, self-sustaining unit. I loved her almost as much as I loved him. And I’m glad she didn’t marry a lawyer.

My grandfather once told me, in his scattered tongue, that for the longest time he would look into the mirror each morning and think he was twenty-four. Intellectually, of course, he knew he was no longer twenty-four. But the mirror image looked back at him, and although he was really twenty-five, or twenty-seven, or thirty, he thought of himself as twenty-four. Until suddenly he was thirty-four. I don’t know why he fixed on twenty-four as the start of his temporary amnesia concerning the aging process. I suspect it was because he already had two children by then, with another on the way, and perhaps he recognized that raising a family in this new land was a threat to his dream of returning to the old country. Whenever he told me stories of those years following his marriage to Teresa, he would invariably begin by saying, “When I wassa twenna-four, Ignazio.” It was some time before I realized that the event he was describing might have taken place anytime during a ten-year span.

When he wassa twenna-four, for example, the wine barrel broke in the front room. The owner of the tenement in which the Di Lorenzos lived refused to allow my grandfather space in the basement for the making of wine unless he paid an additional two dollars a month rent. Francesco flatly refused. He had finally paid off his debt to Pietro Bardoni, and he’d be damned if he was going to pay another tithe to another bandit. He set aside an area of the front room overlooking First Avenue, and it was there that he pressed his grapes, and set up his wine barrels, and allowed his wine to ferment without any two-dollar-a-month surcharge. When he was twenty-four, then (1905? 1906?), he was sitting in the kitchen of the apartment on First Avenue, playing la morra with Pino, and Rafaelo the butcher, and Giovanni the iceman, when the catastrophe happened with the wine barrel in the front room.

The Italian word for “to play” is giocare, followed by the preposition a, as in giocare a scacchi (literally “to play at chess”). When I was a kid and heard the men saying, “Giochiamo a morra,” I thought they were saying, “We’re playing amore,” and wondered why the Italian word for “love” was used to label what I considered a particularly vicious little game.

La morra is similar to choosing up sides by tossing fingers from a closed fist, except that it does not operate on the odds-or-evens principle. Not unlike a game played in France (the basis of a novel titled La Loi, which resonates with all sorts of Mediterranean undertones), the idea is to call out a number aloud while simultaneously showing anywhere from no fingers (a clenched fist) to five fingers. Your opponent similarly shouts a number and throws some fingers, and the winner of that round is the man who calls the number exactly matching the total number of fingers showing. “Morra!” is what you shout if the number you’re calling is zero. If you shout “Morra!” and both you and your opponent throw clenched fists, you are again a winner. After a number of elimination rounds, the two men who’ve won up to that point square off, shout their prognostications, toss their fingers or fists, and eventually there’s a single grand winner. This man is called bossa, an Italian bastardization of the word “boss.” He promptly appoints a partner, usually his closest friend, and the partner is called sotto bossa, or “underboss.” There is naturally a lot of yelling during the actual competition, which sometimes lasts for hours, but eventually there’s a boss, and he chooses his underboss, and then the real fun begins.

The fun involves a five-gallon jug of wine. The boss, by dint of his having eliminated all competition in fair and strenuous play, is boss of nothing but the wine. It is he who determines who will be allowed to drink the wine. If he wants to drink all the wine himself, that is his right and his privilege. If he wishes to share the jug only with his underboss, that too is his prerogative. If he wants to give the entire jug to some shlepper who is a perennial loser, and who will gratefully accept glass after glass of strong red wine until he’s consumed the full five gallons and fallen flat on his face, the boss can do that as well. The boss has absolute power concerning that jug of wine.

On the day of the catastrophe (when Francesco was twenty-four), he beat all the men at la morra and became bossa.

“Pino,” he said, “would you like to be sotto bossa?”

“I would consider it a great honor,” Pino said, and grinned.

“In that case, Pino, we will need a pitcher of wine and some glasses, please.”

Pino went to where the five-gallon jug was standing on a chair near the kitchen table, and he poured a pitcher full to the brim and brought it back to the table together with four glasses. Francesco filled two of the glasses as the other men watched.

“Pino?” he said, and offered him one of the glasses. “I drink to our homeland,” he said, and raised his glass.

“Salute,” Pino said, and both men drank.

“Ahhh,” Francesco said. “Excellent wine.”

“Excellent,” Pino said.

The other men watched. They were very thirsty after nearly forty minutes of throwing fingers and fists and shouting numbers.

“I think our homeland deserves more than one toast,” Francesco said.

“I think so, too.”

“Should we have another drink, sotto bossa?”

“Yes, bossa.”

“Do you think it is fitting that we should have another drink while these men, who I’m sure are thirsty, sit and watch us?”

“Whatever you wish, bossa.”

“I think it is fitting,” Francesco said, and poured two more glassfuls of wine. “Pino?” He raised his glass. “I drink to the beautiful village of Fiormonte in the province of Potenza, and I drink to the good health of our families and friends there.”

“Salute,” Pino said, and both men again drank.

“Ahhh,” Francesco said. “Beautiful wine.”

“Splendid,” Pino said.

“But I feel we do a discourtesy to our homeland if you and I are the only ones drinking and toasting. We should have more than two drinkers, don’t you agree, Pino?”

“I agree,” Pino said. “If that is your wish, bossa.”

“That is my wish.” Francesco turned to the butcher. “Rafaelo,” he said, “would you care for a glass of wine?”

“Well, that is entirely up to you, Francesco. You are the bossa.” The butcher licked his lips. He could taste the wine, but he did not wish to appear overly eager, lest the boss change his mind.

“Pino?” Francesco said. “What do you think? A glass of wine for the butcher?”

Pino considered the question gravely and solemnly. At last, he said, “Bossa, he has to work tomorrow.”

“That’s true,” Francesco said. “You’ll cut the meat badly, Rafaelo.”

“Bossa, tomorrow’s tomorrow,” Rafaelo said quickly. “And today is Sunday.”

“I think he’s thirsty,” Francesco said, and winked at Pino.

“I think they’re both thirsty,” Pino said.

“So let’s you and me have another drink,” Francesco said. He poured the glasses full again, raised his in toast, and said, “To Victor Emmanuel.”

“Are you drinking to the king without us?” Rafaelo said, appalled.

“To Victor Emmanuel,” Pino said, and drained his glass.

“Ahhh,” Francesco said. “Delicious.” He looked at the other men critically, as though estimating their capacity for alcohol, and measuring their thirst, and judging whether or not they were good and decent men, and hard workers, and religious besides. A smile broke on his face. He turned to Pino. “Now, please,” he said, “fill the glasses for our friends, and we will finish the wine together.”

Agnelli the iceman let out a sigh of relief. “I like it when you’re the bossa,” he said.

“Ah? And why?” Francesco asked.

“Because you have a soft heart,” Agnelli said.

“A soft head, I think,” Francesco said, and lifted his glass. “This time we drink to Italy together.”

Solemnly, the other men raised their glasses. “To Italy,” they said.

“To home,” Francesco said.

“Francesco!” Teresa yelled, and came running into the kitchen, her white apron covered with what Francesco first thought to be blood.

“Oh, Madonna mia!” he shouted, and leaped to his feet. “Che successe?”

“The barrel!”

“What barrel?”

“One of the barrels!”

“What? What?”

“It’s broken!”

“What do you mean? What is she talking about?” he asked Pino, who was as bewildered as he.

“Of wine!” Teresa said. “In the front room!”

“San Giacino di California!” Francesco shouted. “Andiamo!” he yelled to the other men, and ran out of the kitchen with the three of them behind him. The woman from downstairs knocked on the kitchen door, and when Teresa let her in she frantically told her there was wine on her ceiling, and it was dripping all over her bed. Teresa sighed. Francesco ran back into the kitchen, barefooted, his trouser legs rolled up, his feet stained a bright purple. He went immediately to the table and yanked the tablecloth from it.

“My tablecloth!” Teresa shouted.

“There’s wine all over the house!” he shouted back gleefully, and was gone.

“It’s dripping on my bed,” the lady from downstairs said.

“Yes,” Teresa said, looking somewhat distracted.

“We’ll drown in wine,” the lady said.

“Francesco will take care of it,” Teresa said.

In the other rooms, the men were shouting, and laughing, and swearing. Teresa, her hand to her mouth, stood beside the lady from downstairs, and listened.

“Catch it there!”

“I got it!”

“Mannaggia!”

“A calamity!”

“There!”

Pino and Francesco backed into the kitchen on their hands and knees, followed by the iceman and the butcher, all the men clutching wine-drenched towels and sheets and pillowcases, trying to stem the flood of wine as it ran through the rooms, sopping it up, slapping down makeshift dikes. “To your right, Giovanni!” and the iceman threw down his sodden sheet and yelled, “Got him!” and Teresa shouted, “My linens! Look at my linens!” and Francesco turned over his shoulder and saw the lady from downstairs, and said, “Buon giorno, signora,” and she answered with her eyes wide and her mouth open, “Buon giorno,” and Rafaelo the butcher clucked his tongue and said, “What a sin!” and the lady from downstairs said, softly, “It’s dripping on my bed,” and Francesco said, “Get some peaches, and we’ll dip them,” and burst out laughing again. They built a barricade of linens across the kitchen doorway, and finally stopped the flow of wine from the rest of the apartment. Sitting on the floor, dripping purple, laughing as though they had just been through some terrible battle together and had emerged victoriously, they heard Teresa say, “Why don’t you make your wine in the cellar, like other men?”

“What, and pay two dollars?” Francesco said.

Smiling, Teresa said, in Italian, “Ma sei pazzo, tu.”

“Let’s all have another drink,” Francesco said, and got to his feet. “Pino, I thought you were sotto bossa. Pour us some wine here.” He put his arm around Teresa’s waist. “Would you like a little wine, cara mia?”

“You’re crazy,” Teresa said, in English this time, but she was still smiling.

And when he was twenty-four (1907?), he came home from the tailor shop late one night, having worked till almost 4 A.M., and found his again-pregnant wife sitting in the kitchen with all the lights on, a bread knife on the table before her. She told him there had been odd knockings at the kitchen door, three knocks in a row, and when she called, “Who’s there?” no one answered, and there was silence. And then, a half hour later, there were three more knocks and again she called, “Who’s there?” and again there was no answer. And then, just before midnight, the same three knocks again, and this time, when she called, “Who’s there?” a voice whispered, “It is I, Regina,” and she knew it was Regina Russo, who had been killed by a horse-drawn cart on 116 Street four years ago before Teresa’s very eyes, and had reached out an imploring hand to Teresa even as the hoofs knocked her down to the cobblestones and the wheels crushed her flat.

Teresa had begun dabbling in the supernatural even before the birth of her second child, a boy she had named Luca in honor of her grandfather, and there were many occasions when Francesco would come home weary and hungry from the tailor shop only to find the neighborhood women clustered around the three-legged table in the kitchen, Teresa solemnly attempting to raise the dead, imploring them to knock once if their answer was yes, twice if it was no, the table wobbling beneath the trembling hands of the women, its legs sometimes banging against the floor in supposed response from the grave. Francesco considered all of this nonsense, and not for a moment did he believe that whoever had knocked on the door was Regina, who was after all dead and gone. But it worried him that Teresa had been alone in the apartment with the three children, and expecting another baby, when someone had knocked on the door and refused to answer. (He dismissed the whispered “It is I, Regina” as a figment of Teresa’s overactive imagination and her preoccupation with things supernatural.)

So he organized a group of men from the building, and each night they would take turns sitting in the hallway on one or another of the floors, and they did this for a week without result until finally on the very next night, when it was Francesco’s turn to guard the building, he saw a man coming up the stairs in the darkness, and he bunched his fists and waited as the man approached the landing. He could smell the odor of whiskey, he realized all at once that the man was stumbling, the man was drunk. He waited. The man approached the toilet set between the two apartments and then very politely knocked on the door of the toilet three times, and when he received no answer, entered and closed the door behind him. Francesco waited. Behind the door, he could hear the man urinating. Then he heard the flush chain being pulled, and the torrent of water spilling from the overhead wooden box. In the darkness, he smiled.

When the man came out, he took him by the elbow and led him down to the street and told him he was not to use the toilets in this building again, they were not public facilities, he was not to go knocking on toilet doors in the middle of the night, did the man understand that? The man was old, wearing only a threadbare suit in a very cold winter, grizzled, lice-infested, stewed to the gills and understanding only a portion of what Francesco said in his faulty English. But he nodded and thanked Francesco for the good advice, and went reeling along First Avenue, and then curled up in the doorway of the Chinese laundry and went to sleep. Teresa survived her pregnancy without any further nocturnal visits from girlhood chums already deceased.

And when he was twenty-four, on most Sundays they visited the home of Umberto, Teresa’s father, the patriarch of the family. They would begin arriving about noon, all of them: Teresa and her husband and the four children; and Teresa’s sister, Bianca, who had not yet begun her corset business, and who was accompanied by her husband, who later ran off to Italy and forced her to fend for herself; and Teresa’s other sister, Victoria, who was as yet unmarried but who was keeping steady company with a man who sold bridles, buggy whips, saddles, harnesses, and reins; and Teresa’s brother, Marco, who sometimes came in from Brooklyn with his wife and three children; and assorted neighborhood compaesani and tailor shop hangers-on, who usually dropped by after la collazione, the afternoon meal, generally served at two o’clock by Teresa’s mother and all her daughters.

That Sunday meal was a feast; there are no other human beings on earth (not even Frenchmen) who can sit down for so long at a table, or eat so much at one sitting. It began with an antipasto — pimentos and anchovies and capers and black olives and green olives in a little oil and garlic — served with crusty white bread Umberto himself cut into long slices from a huge round loaf. While the men at the table were dipping their bread into the oil and garlic left on their antipasto plates, the women were bustling about in the kitchen, taking the big pot of pasta off the stove — spaghetti or linguine or perciatelli or tonellini — straining off the starchy water, and then putting the pasta into a bowl, the bottom of which had been covered with bright red tomato sauce, ladling more sauce onto the slippery, steaming al dente mound, bringing it to the table with an accompanying sauce-boat brimming and hot. “Somebody mix the pasta,” Teresa’s mother would call from the kitchen. And while Umberto himself tossed the spaghetti or macaroni with a pair of forks, and added more sauce to it, the women would bring in more bowls, filled with sausages and meatballs and braciòle, thin slices of beef stuffed with capers and oregano and rolled, and either threaded or held together with toothpicks. And then the women themselves would sit down to join the others, and Umberto would pour the wine for those closest to him, and then pass it to either Francesco or his other son-in-law, or his son Marco, but rarely to the buggy-whip salesman who planned to marry Victoria. There was celery on the table, and more olives, green and black, and there was always a salad of arugala, or chicory and lettuce, or dandelion, which was delicious and bitter and served with a dressing of olive oil and vinegar. And when the pasta course was finished, the women would clear the plates, and the men would pour more wine, and from the kitchen would come platters full of chicken or roast beef or sometimes both, roasted potatoes with gravy, and a vegetable — usually fresh peas or spinach or string beans prepared in the American manner, or zucchini cooked the Neapolitan way — and they would sit and eat this main course while filling each other in on the events of the week and the gossip of the neighborhood, and the latest news from the other side (they almost always referred to it as “the other side,” as though the Atlantic Ocean were a mere puddle separating America from Italy), and then they would rest awhile, and drink some more wine. And then Umberto would go into the kitchen and take from the icebox the pastry he had bought on First Avenue, and usually Teresa’s mother had made a peach or strawberry shortcake with whipped cream, and they would spread the sweets on the table, and only later serve rich black coffee in demitasse cups, a lemon peel in the saucer, a little anisette to pour into the coffee for those who craved it. There would be a bowl of fruit on the table, too, apples and oranges and bananas and, when they were in season, cherries or peaches or plums or sometimes a whole watermelon split in half and sliced, and there would also be a wooden bowl of nuts, filberts and almonds and Brazil nuts and pecans, and hot from the stove would come a tray of roasted chestnuts, marked with crosses on their skins before they were set in the oven, the skins curling outward now to show the browned meat inside — there was much to eat in that decade when my grandfather was twenty-four.

Later, the men would break out the guinea stinkers, and the women would go into the kitchen to do the dishes and to straighten up, and still later they would come in to wipe off the table, leaving only the bowl of fruit and the bowl of nuts (“If anyone wants it, it’s here”), and then all of them, men and women alike, would sit down to play cards, settemezzo, or briscola, or hearts (a new American game), or scopa, betting their pennies as though they were hundred-dollar chips, forming kitties for future outings to Coney Island or the beach, while the children chased each other through the house or crawled under the dining room table or whispered to each other dirty stories they had heard at school. My grandfather’s children, all of them presumably born when he was twenty-four, had come in fairly rapid succession, or at least as rapid as one could expect, given the nine-month pregnancy span of the human female. Teresa had given birth to Stella (October 1, 1902), Luca (August 24, 1903), Cristina (January 29, 1905), and Domenico (May 17, 1907), and while she was producing all these new Americans, my grandfather was learning how to hold a pair of scissors, thread a needle, and make stitches that looked like those of a true tailor. He was twenty-four years old and he still wanted to go home to Fiormonte. But each time he was ready to make the trip, another baby arrived. And more expenses. And more ties to this country that was not his — by the time Domenico was born, for example, Stella was in kindergarten at the school on Pleasant Avenue and speaking English like President Teddy Roosevelt himself. And then one morning, Francesco looked into the mirror as usual, and began lathering his face preparatory to shaving, and the person who looked back at him was no longer twenty-four. He was thirty-four, and the year was 1914, and Francesco put down his shaving brush and leaned closer to the mirror and looked into his own eyes for a very long time, staring, staring, afraid that if he so much as blinked, another ten years would go by and he would not know where they’d gone or how he had missed their passing.

In July of the year 1914 (modulation all finished), my mother Stella, Italian for star, Stella my mother, Stella the All-American Girl (“I’m American, don’t forget”), Stella by starlight, or sunlight, or the light of the silvery moon, Stella nonetheless, my mother (take a bow, Mom) Stella (enough already) was not quite twelve years old when two events of particular significance happened one after the other. Now I really don’t know whether either of those events was traumatic, and caused her to become the kind of woman she grew up to be. (Rebecca hated her, and always described her as “a paranoid nut.”) I can only surmise that they must have been terrifying to an eleven-year-old girl who, by all accounts (her own and my grandfather’s), was imaginative, sensitive, inquisitive, extremely intelligent (and American, don’t forget).

For an American, who had learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance proudly every weekday morning at school, Stella was surrounded by more Italians than she could shake a stick at. Her classmates, of course, were all Italians, except for two Irish girls and a Jewish boy who had somehow wandered into the wrong ghetto. But in addition to her daily encounters with children who, like herself, were the sons and daughters of immigrants who could barely speak English, there was the family as well. The family was (in Stella’s own words, oft-repeated) “a bunch of real ginzoes.” She was living with her parents and her brothers and sisters on 118th Street and First Avenue, above the grocery store on the corner, just three doors away from the tailor shop. Within a six-block radius, north or south, east or west, there were perhaps four dozen aunts, uncles, cousins, goombahs and goomahs who were considered part of “the family,” the family being her mother’s since Francesco’s relatives were all on the other side. I don’t think my mother quite appreciated their proximity, or the fact that she was eagerly welcomed into their homes.

When I was growing up, I looked forward to each loving pat or hug, knowing that I could walk four blocks to my Aunt Cristina’s, where she would offer me some fresh-squeezed lemonade, or turn the corner to my Aunt Bianca’s corset shop, where she would tell me all about dainty ladies’ under things. Bianca was a great-aunt, actually my grandmother’s sister; her shop was on 116th Street, between First and Second Avenues, and she was known in the neighborhood as “The Corset Lady.” My mother must have visited that same shop as often as I did, and at the same age, but she never spoke of it fondly, nor do I think she particularly liked Aunt Bianca, who to me (though I’d never seen her, and could only smell the sweet soapy lilac scent of her and feel her delicate hands upon my face) was a lady of great mystery and intrigue, fashioning ladies’ brassieres as she did. My mother made similar family rounds, dropping in wherever she chose, always greeted warmly and lovingly, though she might have been there only hours before. And yet, the family did not seem to mean very much to her, their coarse southern Italian fell harshly upon her ears, their broken English rankled; she was American, Stella was.

I don’t know why she was so drawn to Pino’s wife. Angelina was most certainly beautiful, but her good looks were undeniably Mediterranean, and she still spoke English with a marked accent. To Stella, though, she must have seemed more “American” than any member of her own family, with the possible exception of her mother. As concerns the relationship between Stella and Tess, as she was called more and more frequently by everyone in the neighborhood, there seems to be little doubt that it was lousy. To begin with, Tess worked in the tailor shop alongside her father and Francesco, which meant that she had little time for housewifely chores like cleaning or cooking. (My grandmother may have been the first liberated woman in the history of America, who the hell knows?) Stella grudgingly inherited the running of the household, except for the preparation of breakfast, which Tess handled for the entire family before heading off “to business.” Stella cleaned the four-room apartment, Stella prepared her own lunch as well as lunch for her brothers and sister when they came home from school at noon each day, Stella prepared dinner, Stella was the mother her mother should have been. (“My mother was a lady,” she would say to me, almost as often as she said, “I’m American, don’t forget.” The word “lady” was always delivered sarcastically, and I could sense the curl of the lip, the angry flash in her green eyes. Was it coincidence that I later married a green-eyed girl? Must have been. Who the hell can tell green from blue, anyway, and really, who cares?) In any case, it was Stella who ran off to school each morning, feeling very American, and who came back to the apartment each afternoon feeling very Italian because it was she who did the donkey work. And I suppose she jealously guarded those moments when she could visit Pino’s wife and become the inquiring bright child she had no opportunity to be at home.

Poking in Angelina’s jewelry box, holding earrings to her ears for Angelina’s approval, sampling Angelina’s powders, sniffing at her perfumes, asking the hundreds of questions she could not ask of her absentee mother, listening to Angelina as she told stories of Francesco’s and Pino’s youthful days in Fiormonte, Stella enjoyed the most cherished hours of her childhood in that apartment on Second Avenue. Angelina had become pregnant again in January, after having miscarried nine times, the last having been particularly tragic in that she’d lost the baby during her fifth month. She, too, must have enjoyed Stella’s visits in those final days of her pregnancy when, fearful of another miscarriage, she rarely ventured out of the apartment. It was on one of those visits that her time came.

Stella saw her clutch for her abdomen and heard her say, “Ooo, sta zitto.” The baby had been very active lately, each kick greeted with undisguised joy by Pino and Angelina — the child was alive, the prospective mother was healthy, this time all would go well. But this latest pang was something more than just another fetal kick; it was the beginning of labor. Angelina recognized it almost at once, and immediately sent Stella to fetch Filomena the Midwife. There were few telephones in Harlem in the year 1914. Umberto had one in the tailor shop, but telephones in the home were a luxury (they were still a luxury when I was growing up). Stella ran the six blocks to Filomena’s building, her skirts and pigtails flying, and raced up the four flights to Filomena’s apartment, and rapped on the door. There was no answer. She rapped again. A door across the hall opened, and an old man in his undershirt looked out at Stella.

“Where’s Filomena?” she asked. “Where’s the midwife?”

“Che cosa vuole?” the old man said.

“Filomena, Filomena,” Stella said, and reverted impatiently to Italian. “Dov’è Filomena? Dov’è la levatrice?”

“Non lo so. Hai provato il frigorifero?”

“Che?”

“Il frigorifero. Di Giovanni Agnelli.”

What was he saying? The ice station? Mr. Agnelli’s ice station?

“Ma dove?” she asked. “Alla First Avenue?”

“Sì, sì, First Avenue,” he replied. “Forse è la. Con Giovanni.”

“Grazie,” she called over her shoulder, and ran down the stairs to the street. She could not imagine why Filomena had gone personally to the ice station, since Giovanni made home deliveries daily, shoving his huge blocks of ice along in a cart, chipping off smaller cakes with his ice pick, seizing them with his tongs, and tossing them into a wooden tub, which he carried up to his customers. Had the old man misunderstood her? Had she not explained herself adequately in Italian?

The streets were crowded and noisy. This was three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in July. The weather was mild, and the citizens of East Harlem had come outdoors to enjoy the bright untarnished day. Strollers thronged the sidewalk spumoni stands, bought ices and pastry, chatted with each other, admired babies in carriages; peddlers pushed their carts and shouted

praise of their produce, the junkman’s wagon rolled by piled high with newspapers and scrap metal, “I buy old clothes, I buy old clothes”; children roller-skated past on the pavement, old women shouted “Stat’ attento!” and then returned to stoopside conversations; there was a sense of teeming life in those streets as Stella hurried to find the woman who would bring yet another life into the ghetto. On 119th Street, she waited for two trolley cars, passing from opposite directions, to rattle by, and then she ran across First Avenue to the ice station. Agnelli was nowhere in sight. She looked in the open yard where Agnelli’s coal, piled shining and black in wooden stalls, had already been delivered in anticipation of consumer demand in the months ahead. Then she walked around to the back of the icehouse itself, and climbed the steps to the wooden platform, debated opening the heavy metal door, and decided to try instead the small shacklike structure Agnelli used as an office.

The office was some twenty-five feet from the back of the ice house, and Stella ran to it as fast as she could, shouting, “Mr. Agnelli! Mr. Agnelli!” as she covered the short stretch of ground, and then threw open the office door, and saw first a calendar on the wall over a folding bed, and then Agnelli’s very hairy backside, and then realized that a pair of pale white legs were wrapped around that backside. Agnelli turned his head for a look at the intruder, peering over his shoulder while just below him Filomena the Midwife poked her head around a tangle of arms and legs and whispered a silent prayer of gratitude to the good Lord Jesus for having sent but a mere child to discover her in such an indelicate and compromising position, rather than Agnelli’s wife, Luisa, who was said to have a violent temper. Stella, for her part, stared first at Agnelli’s ass, and then at Filomena’s raised white legs (she had her high-buttoned shoes on, Stella noticed), and then realized that this was the man with whom her father had boarded when he first came to this country, this was Mr. Agnelli, the neighborhood’s respected iceman, what was he doing on top of Filomena, who at this moment should have been in Angelina’s kitchen, delivering a baby, instead of... instead of...

Well... fucking. Stella knew the word, she had seen it scribbled on tenement walls and fences, she had heard it whispered not so softly by boys at school, but she had never seen the word so vigorously demonstrated, and she had also never seen Mr. Agnelli’s ass.

“Che vuole?” Agnelli shouted, without skipping a beat.

“Basta, basta,” Filomena said, and untangled herself with dignity, pulling up her bloomers and pulling down her petticoat and skirt. “What do you want, Stella?” she asked. Her shirtwaist was still open, she had apparently forgotten that the four top buttons were unbuttoned and that two pear-shaped breasts were staring at Stella, who stared right back at them speechlessly. Agnelli pulled up his britches, and went outside to check his coal.

“Well, what is it, child?” Filomena said. She glanced down curiously at her own breasts, sighed, and began buttoning her shirtwaist.

“Angelina,” Stella said.

“What of Angelina?”

“The baby,” Stella said.

Filomena was on her feet instantly. “Come,” she said, and took Stella’s hand. “And remember, you saw nothing. Else God will strike you dead.”

The only person God struck dead that day was Angelina Battatore.

It’s difficult to believe, in this day and age of sterile antiseptic hospital deliveries, that 679 women died of puerperal disease during the year 1914, or that 6,617 babies were stillborn. In 1926, I myself was delivered in a bedroom of our Harlem apartment by a woman named Josefina, my grandmother’s cousin, who, in addition to teaching English to new immigrants, and working for the Republican Club, and writing songs (all of which were terrible), and concocting an ointment called Aunt Josie’s Salve (which was actually sold in some Harlem drugstores and which was reputed to possess curative powers for anything from boils to carbuncles), was a midwife in her spare time. My mother survived. I was born blind. Some you win, some you lose.

Angelina lost on that July day in 1914.

She lost after a monumental struggle that lasted for twelve hours and finally required the assistance of the neighborhood doctor, one Bartolo Mastroiani, who arrived at the Battatore apartment at a little past 3 A.M. on Sunday morning to find Angelina bleeding profusely and the baby’s umbilical cord wrapped around its own throat, threatening strangulation each time Angelina struggled to squeeze the infant from her loins. Filomena the Midwife was utterly discomposed; the doctor unceremoniously pushed her out into the kitchen, where she joined some two dozen neighborhood ladies, all of whom were certain that someone had put the Evil Eye on Angelina. Mastroiani got to work.

He worked in a tiny bedroom with a single window opening on an air shaft, a naked light bulb hanging over the blood-soaked bed, the moaning in the kitchen assuming dirgelike proportions, Angelina shrieking in pain and pouring torrents of fresh blood from her torn uterus as he probed to unravel the unseen noose around the baby’s throat, the baby struggling to be born and struggling against strangulation, Angelina contracting steadily and involuntarily while her life spurted out onto the bedclothes and onto the doctor’s hands, awash in a pool of her own blood and sweat. He had studied medicine in Siena, had thought he’d become a surgeon, had practiced tying knots inside a matchbox, using only the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, working blind inside that confining space just as he now worked to free the stubborn cord around the baby’s neck, hot blood spurting onto his hands, the walls of Angelina’s womb closing and opening in convulsion around his fingers. The cord refused to unravel. In desperation, he cut it and tied both ends with string. The baby’s triumphant cry shocked the kitchen women into silence. Angelina died six minutes later while Mastroiani was still working with clamps and sponges, fighting the impossible tide of blood — he had been a doctor for thirty-seven years and had never seen so much blood in his life. Later, he would go into the hall toilet to vomit.

Stella was in the kitchen with those wailing women. Stella heard the Evil Eye talk, and Stella heard the baby’s victorious cry, and then waited while silence screamed as loudly as had the newborn child, silence bellowed in that kitchen, silence shrieked behind the closed door of the bedroom. And then the doctor came out, wiping his bloodstained hands on a white towel, and he shook his head, and the silence persisted for perhaps ten seconds more, and then the women began to wail again, and Stella saw the doctor go unsteadily into the hall, and heard him throwing up in the toilet outside. Someone went to get Pino. In those days, the mysteries of birth were thought best unseen by men, and he had been sitting in Francesco’s kitchen (Tess, of course, was in the Battatore apartment with the rest of the women), nervously drinking wine while Francesco told him that everything would be all right, women sometimes had a very difficult time with their first baby, Tess had been in labor for six hours with Stella, everything would be fine. When Pino learned that everything had not been so fine, he fell unconscious to the floor, and Francesco took him in his arms, and wiped the sweat from his forehead, and began to weep for his friend.

Three days after the funeral of Angelina Battatore, the Chinaman made his pass at Stella — if legend and eleven-year-old girls are to be believed.

The Chinaman — Stay, all ye Oriental Americans. In July of 1914, the guy who did the neighborhood laundry was called “The Chinaman,” or better yet, “The Chink.” The Chinaman, then (or the Chink, if you prefer), was a man named Chon Tsu, the T-s-u being exceedingly difficult to pronounce unless you are yourself of Chinese extraction, in which case you would speak it as though it were a cross between “Sue” and “She.” In the neighborhood, they called him Charlie Shoe. Charlie was thirty-eight years old, a short, slender man who still wore a pigtail and clothes he had brought from his native province of Kwang-tung, meaning that he looked as though he were wearing pajamas and bed slippers in the streets of Italian Harlem. He had been in America for two years, having been one of those fortunate Orientals who’d smuggled himself into this gloriously democratic land after the Exclusion Act of 1882.

Charlie worked eighteen hours a day in his laundry shop just downstairs from where Stella and the entire Di Lorenzo brood lived, his establishment being a two-by-four cubbyhole wedged between the grocery store on the corner and the salumeria on the other side, the tailor shop being the next in line on First Avenue. It is doubtful that he even knew Stella existed before that afternoon in July.

There was, of course, a steady stream of customers in Charlie’s laundry, but to him all white people looked the same, and besides, they smelled bad. Charlie had a wife and four children in Canton, and he sent them most of his earnings, living at a bare subsistence level in the back of his shop, where he washed the clothes and ironed them and then wrapped them in thin brown paper, slipping an identifying pink ticket under the white string, Chinese calligraphy and bold Arabic numerals, no tickee no shirtee.

He did not speak English at all well, his vocabulary consisting of a scant hundred or so words, and he always looked harried and somewhat bewildered, and sounded rude or irritated because his words were monosyllabic to begin with, and delivered with a clipped Chinese accent usually accompanied by a frown that seemed to denote impatience but actually was a direct facial translation of utter confusion. He wasn’t such a happy man, Charlie Shoe. There were very few Chinese women in America in the year, 1914, and the Chinese like to fuck the same as anyone else, witness the population problem in Mao’s thriving little commune over there. As inscrutable as Charlie may have appeared to the parade of wops who marched in and out of his shop with their dirty laundry, chances are he occasionally entertained the wildest fantasies of a sex life denied to him here in America. Have you ever seen any of those Far Eastern pornographic line drawings, tinted in the most delicate shades, and advertising the Oriental tool as one of truly remarkable dimensions — or at least so Rebecca described it to me, and mentioned in passing that the Chinese dong put my own meager weapon to shame. But what white woman in her right mind would even have entertained the thought of bedding down with a hairless, yellow-skinned, slant-eyed runt like poor Charlie Shoe?

Stella maybe.

I have no desire to probe too deeply into the fantasies of an eleven-year-old girl, especially when she happened to grow up to be my mother. I can only imagine what the sight of Agnelli and Filomena interlocked in interruptus did to fire the imagination of someone already hooked on the sloppy romances that were pouring out of the Hollywood dream factory and inundating the neighborhood playhouses. I have little or no respect for the theory that fiction triggers real events. But I cannot discount the fact that my mother was always a movie buff, and that her addiction started sometime in 1912 or ’13, when films began to influence American life in a very important way. As a matter of fact, the two most significant changes in Harlem since the arrival of Francesco in 1901 and the initiation of Stella into the mysteries of tickle-and-grab in 1914 were the appearance of the automobile and the ascendance of the motion picture. It’s difficult to estimate how many people in New York owned a tin lizzie, but there were nearly four million of the flivvers on the nation’s roads, and it’s safe to assume at least a goodly portion of them were clattering along the cobbled streets of the country’s largest city. Where horses had once clopped upon and crapped upon the streets of New York, making it difficult to find the gold beneath all that manure, Henry Ford’s new contrivance now rattled and clanked around every corner, adding to the general din that had so disturbed Francesco upon his arrival. New York was never a quiet place, but the advent and subsequent popularity of the automobile did little to restore my grandfather’s sense of tranquility.

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 Di Lorenzo, daughter to Francesco and Tess, aged eleven years, nine months, and sixteen days, speaking of the event to her parents, and her grandfather, and Pino Battatore, and unknowingly and inadvertently to her brother Luke, who is listening in the bedroom adjacent to the kitchen.

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?

I told him I was eleven going on twelve, I would be twelve in October, and he said I was a big girl for my age, that in China the girls are smaller, but that in China when a girl was twelve years old, she was already married, that his wife had wrote to him last week saying she thought his daughter would be getting married soon. He was telling me all this in his funny way of talking, I could hardly understand anything he said, I think he must have been smoking dope because he really had this very stupid look on his face, I can’t describe it, it was just stupid-looking. So I said wouldn’t he like to have some of the lichee nuts, too, and he said no, he didn’t care for none and then he put his hand on my knee and said I was a nice little girl. I didn’t think it was nothing, his putting his hand on my knee, because he had a little girl my own age back home in China, and this wasn’t like a stranger or nothing, this was Charlie in his shop, even though I know they smoke a lot of dope. I didn’t think nothing of it until he put his hand under my skirt, and then I tried to get up off the bed, and slipped and fell, and he picked me up off the floor, and said shhh, shhh, don’t be afraid, and put me on the bed and put his hand on my eyes, just put his hand on my eyes and when I looked again he had no pants on and I saw his heinie and everything and I got scared I would have a baby like Angelina, so I ran out of there and came upstairs and when Mama found me crying in the toilet and wanted to know what happened I couldn’t tell her but I feel better now.

Stella Di Palermo, wife of Jimmy Di Palermo, mother of Anthony and Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo, talking to her youngest son in the year 1939 while the radio is telling of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Iggie is at the kitchen table eating chocolate pudding with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. He is thirteen years old. His older brother is fifteen and has not yet come home from school — Evander Childs on Gun Hill Road. In 1942, Tony will be drafted into the Army. In 1943, he will be killed in Italy. Stella is thirty-seven years old, a bit thick in the middle, a few gray streaks already beginning to show in her brown hair. (Her father’s hair has been completely white since 1932). She is at the sink, washing red peppers which she will then roast over the open gas jet, later scraping off the black to produce miraculously succulent slices which she will serve cold with a little oil and garlic. For some reason, she has begun talking about that July Saturday in the year 1914. Perhaps the broadcast of Hitler’s invasion has stimulated it. Iggie hardly listens to her. The war news is very exciting. He visualizes tanks and armored cars rumbling across the Polish landscape.

STELLA: They didn’t believe me, none of them. They were my own family except for my father’s friend Pino. He was there, too, and my grandfather, may he rest in peace, and I told them what happened with that lousy Chinaman downstairs in his shop, and none of them believed me. Am I a liar or something, have I ever lied to you, Iggie? That they shouldn’t believe me? My own family, and I was telling them what that man did to me, and I could see my mother didn’t believe it — well, she was a lady, you know, I guess she never dreamt in her entire life that anything like that could happen. That was for movies and books, you know, some Chinese dope fiend fooling around with her daughter. My grandfather yelled at her in Italian — you never met him, Iggie, he died before you were born, may he rest in peace. I was his darling, he liked me better than any of the other kids, even Cristina who was very pretty when she was a girl; it was my grandfather who took up for me. He said to my mother in Italian, what do you think she’s doing, making this whole thing up? She just came from downstairs, you found her crying in the toilet, you think she could invent a thing like this? My mother said Charlie seems like such a nice man, I can’t believe he would do something like this, and my father said Stella, are you sure you’re telling us the truth? You didn’t make this up, did you, because this is very serious.

I said I didn’t make it up, I saw him naked. You should have seen him, Iggie, he was the hairiest thing. I always thought Chinks were supposed to be practically hairless like albinos, isn’t that true? Well, who knows? And those dirty pictures he had on the wall over the bed. He had this one picture of a dark-haired woman with her blouse unbuttoned, four buttons of her blouse, the top four buttons. I don’t know what she was supposed to be, maybe one of those Chinese concubines, you know, like in The Good Earth; that was a really good movie. I also read the book, don’t forget. They have six or seven wives, those Chinamen, you’d think it would be against the law. I don’t think Charlie Shoe had more than one wife, but those pictures on the wall were of concubines or maybe Chinese actresses. All I can remember is the one who had her blouse open and showing everything, and practically naked except for high-button shoes.

It was a good thing I had the presence of mind to get out of there. I was only eleven, Iggie, well, almost twelve, and there he was babbling some kind of crazy English, I’m American, don’t forget, I was speaking English from the day I was born, so how was I supposed to understand what he was saying. I was lucky, I’ll tell you. Lying to me about his daughter, I’ll bet he didn’t even have a daughter, that was just his way of getting around me, you know? Putting me off my guard. He was doped up, Iggie, I’m sure of that, I don’t want you ever, if anybody ever offers you anything, a cigarette, anything, I don’t want you to touch it, do you hear me? You just say no, I’m sorry, I don’t smoke, or tell them your father’s a cop, make up any kind of story, but don’t touch anything. I read in the Journal-American the other day that there’s a lot of marijuana going around the city, that’s how they get you, they could take you to China for all you know.

Maybe he would have done that to me, that’s possible when you think of it. How would you like your mother to be dressed like a Chink in Hong Kong someplace or Shanghai and Paul Muni comes in with his slanty eyes and says here’s your dope, Stella, smoke all your pipe like a nice little girl. How do I know even those lichee nuts weren’t doped up, he was feeding me enough of them. He could have gone to jail for fifty years, do you know that? Fooling around with a little girl? That’s very serious, Iggie, they would’ve thrown away the key. Don’t you ever fool around with any young girls, you hear me? I mean, when you grow up. What happened with Tina in the closet when we were still living in Harlem don’t mean nothing, you were both little kids. But don’t you ever touch no little girls, he could have ruined my life, that man. And for what? So he could put his hand under my skirt? I don’t know what he expected to find under there, I was only eleven. But of course, who knows where it would have stopped?

They had Dr. Mastroiani come up to examine me — that was my mother’s idea, naturally, because she didn’t believe her own daughter, she’d rather believe that nice little Chink downstairs — and Dr. Mastroiani didn’t find nothing because he hadn’t done nothing to me, of course, not that way. You don’t know about these things yet, thank God, but it could have been very serious, he could have, well, penetrated me which Dr. Mastroiani said he didn’t do, and which of course I knew he didn’t do. All he done was put his hand on my leg and under my skirt, which was plenty. And then he put his hand over my eyes, and I think he warned me not to tell anybody about this because God would strike me dead. I guess that was why he put his hand over my eyes, that was like Chinese for you didn’t see nothing, Stella. I’ll bet that was it. Sure.

When you were born, you know, everybody said it was the Evil Eye, that when the Chinaman put his hand over my eyes like that it was some kind of curse, a Chinese curse, and that’s what happened when you were born, though if that was the case, why didn’t it happen to Tony? He was my firstborn, right? Anyway, I don’t believe in that greaseball stuff. I’m American, don’t forget.

After the doctor got finished with me, the priest came upstairs, and I told him what had happened and he made me swear to God on the crucifix that I was telling the truth, and then I guess my mother finally believed me, and she looked at my father, and my father nodded, and then all the men went in the front room, my father and my grandfather and Pino, and then they went to get some other men — Mr. Bardoni who was also from Fiormonte, and Mr. Agnelli from the ice station, though I don’t know why they bothered to call him, he was probably in his office behind the icehouse, who knows where he was? And also my cousin Ralphie, do you remember Ralphie, Iggie? He used to play accordion, he was a very good musician, you should get in touch with him now that you’re doing so good with the piano. They all of them went downstairs to see the Chinaman, and what happened served him right.

Francesco Di Lorenzo, father to Stella, grandfather to Ike, in the intensive care unit of Bronx-Lebanon Hospital on the morning of June 17, 1973. He is ninety-two years, eleven months and ten days old. He will die at 11:50 A.M. Ike has been alone in the room with him since ten minutes to ten the night before. His grandfather is in a semicomatose state, and much of his speech is incoherent. Ike, too, has been talking. Together and separately, they are trying to understand something. They do not always hear each other because sometimes they are talking simultaneously. But now, as his grandfather tells his version of what happened with the Chinese laundryman, Ike is silent.

FRANCESCO: He lives like a pig, this China man, come un porco vero, capisci, Ignazio? We go down, we come in the store, he say hello, hello, I say what you do my daughter? He’s sweat, Ignazio, he’s work in the back when we come inside, he look at us, he does no understand. I say my daughter, my daughter, what you do? And Ralphie, he’s big man, he takes the China man, he throws him in back through the curtain, and we go in. This is my daughter, no? I must believe, no? She swears to the priest, she puts her hand on the cross and she swears this China man he does things to her. But in the back, where is the bed? No bed, Ignazio. On the floor is a straw... come si dice? Mat? Mattress? Come vuol’ dire? No bed. Only this skinny straw on the floor near where he irons the clothes. And Stella, she says there’s movie pictures on the wall, pictures of girls, but where? No pictures on the wall. And a calendar where? No calendar with a Chinese lady, no thing like that. So where she gets this in her head? She makes it up? Or he hides everything when she runs away? He hides the bed, he hides the pictures, he hides the calendar? Ralphie says what you do to Stella? He says I bandage her finger. Ralphie says I give you finger, and push him against the wall, and the China man he’s very scare, he looks at me, he looks at Pino and Giovanni and my father-law. I say aspetta, wait a minute, Ralph.

Because, Ignazio, tell me the true. If there is no bed and no pictures and no calendar, then maybe also there was no touch, eh? Maybe Stella don’t lie, I don’t think she lie, but maybe she think it happen what did not happen. So I sit down with the China man, and I say was my daughter here? My Stella? And he says yes.

And I say what you do to her, mister?

And he says I bandage her finger.

You touch her? I say. You put hand under her dress? You cover her eye?

He says no. He shake his head. He says no again.

Ralphie says you a no-good lying bast, and he hit the man.

Then everybody is hit him, me too. And we go upstairs.

Ignazio, I don’t know. I get very sick in my heart. I think, what is this America? A man’s daughter is no safe two doors away? And to beat a poor man like myself? When maybe he is tell the true, but she swears on the cross? I decide to go home. This time I go home. This time I take Pino and his baby with me, there is no thing here for them, not no more, this time we go. I am thirta-four years old, it is enough. I promise you, Ignazio, this time I go home because I have been no more I wish to have this terrible things that happen, where in Italy, no, it does not, I will go home. I will tell Tessie, I will tell you grandma, I will say no, Tessie, we go home, you hear me, Tessie, I take you home now, I leave here, this place, we go home now, we go.

Grandpa, you might have made it. You just might have made it. If only the whole damn world hadn’t decided to go to war the following week.

It is to be remembered, by those who choose to ponder the ironies of alliances, that Italy was on the side of God (our side) in World War I. Japan was, too. And so was Russia, that dear good friend with whom we joined hands in a common cause again, less than thirty years later. War may be hell, and stupid besides, but that’s not the point of this book, so let’s not belabor the obvious. My grandfather recognized it as idiotic from the very beginning; as far as he was concerned, the world was conspiring to keep him from going home. When Italy entered the war in 1915, he shook his head in disgust and spat on the sidewalk outside the tailor shop.

But if Stella was undeniably American to begin with, she became even more so during World War I. It’s easy for a girl entering puberty to become excited about all sorts of things, but war is the biggest thing going for pubescent girls and boys of all ages in any age, and World War I was the hugest spectacle that had come along in a long while, certainly the most extravagant (and onliest) since Stella’s birth. For Stella, everything following World War I was simply old hat. Word War II? So what? (Until she lost her eldest son in it, which senseless murder she justified with the words “He died for America.” You poor stupid woman, he died for nothing. And he was killed by a fucking wop; how did that sit with you, Mom? Did it make you feel even more American and less Italian?) Korea? Bush-league antics, and besides, they were killing Chinks, which served them right. Vietnam? Who ever heard of Vietnam before everybody started making such a stink about it? As wars go, Stella lived through the very best of them,

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.

The people running the war didn’t have to try very hard to sell it; anti-German feelings were running high long before the formal declaration of hostilities, and patriotic fervor was almost hysterical. But nonetheless, they did have a product on their hands which was, by definition, lethal. And they decided they had better do something to make the product seem a trifle more palatable. The reasoning must have gone something like this: We are sending a lot of our boys over there to die on foreign soil because we want to make the world safe for democracy, which is an inspiring cause, to be sure, but mightn’t someone (most likely a woman) ask a possibly embarrassing question such as “If my son goes over there to France and gets killed in a trench over there filled with poison gas and German bayonets, why then he will no longer be in this world, and how will it matter that he made it safe for democracy?” Now the way to avoid this question is to develop some sort of sales talk, some sort of pitch, native-born and inspired in concept, which we can shpiel at anyone out there who is likely to ask any questions about what this war is all about.

What we’ll do is we’ll organize bond rallies, so people will concentrate on buying bonds instead of on dying sons, put out these little Liberty Books, you know, where they can stick twenty-five-cent stamps in them, “Lick a Stamp and Lick the Kaiser,” get some of our movie folk out there to push the bonds, maybe Doug Fairbanks wearing boxing gloves lettered with “Victory” on one glove and “Liberty Bonds” on the other, and have him knock out some Kaiser we can get from Central Casting, get them away from the prime question, you see, which is “Why are you sending our sons to be killed?” And we’ll get old Herbert Hoover here, who’s our Food Administrator, to ask for voluntary sacrifices on the part of all the people, ask them to hold off eating bread or other wheat products on Mondays and Wednesdays, and pork on Thursdays and Saturdays, and any other kind of meat on Tuesdays — did we leave a day out? Idea is to get them thinking about their own sacrifices, you see, maybe even grumbling about them a bit, so they won’t be able to think of their sons getting legs blown off or being sliced up the middle by some German bayonet. Get them involved here, you see, do you get the overall idea?

Stella had no trouble getting the overall idea because, in her case, it had something going for it that did not apply to the vast majority of Americans. Since most of the men immediately surrounding her — her father, her brothers, her uncles, cousins, and goombahs — were either too young or too old or not even American citizens, they were not required to go to Europe to have their brains blown out. They were safe. So what better way to enjoy a war? Not only did Stella have all those socks and sweaters to knit, not only did she have the thrill of seeing her favorite movie stars right there in New York City pushing the sale of war bonds, not only did she herself proudly collect eight hundred and thirty-seven peach pits which she weighed on the grocer’s scale downstairs (having been informed that it took seven pounds of pits to make a filter for one gas mask), she also was secure in the knowledge that nobody near and dear to her was going to be killed. War was fun.

The only person near and dear to her (though he wasn’t near, and, certainly not dear to her in the years between 1917 and 1919) who might have been killed was a stranger named Jimmy Di Palermo, my father-to-be. While Stella was collecting her peach pits for a filter, my father was throwing away his mask because the fucking thing didn’t work, anyway — not against mustard gas.

Giacomo Roberto Di Palermo was born on East 103rd Street in the year 1898. When America entered the war, he was nineteen years old. In June of 1917, he walked over to P.S. 121 and registered for the draft. By August of the following year, he was getting shot at in France.

My father rarely talked about the war. Even when I was a kid, and he took my brother and me to pictures like Dawn Patrol and What Price Glory?, even then, walking home to our apartment on 120th Street, he refused to answer any of our questions about the war. “What was it really like, Daddy?” we would ask. And he would say, “Oh, it was okay.”

Maybe it was okay. Maybe he’d lived through worse things than World War I.

In 1965, when one of my last record albums was being prepared for release, I was asked by the man compiling the liner notes to write something about the background of my parents, the idea being to show how they had influenced the music I make. (I think he had heard someplace that my father used to play drums.) I asked my father to jot down a few details, which I planned to edit before sending them on. This is what he wrote, on lined paper:

Rebecca, to whom I was still married at the time, read my father’s “life” to me, and commented on his singularly beautiful handwriting. I began to cry. I cried because there was nothing in it I could use for the goddamn liner notes, and I cried because he had neglected to mention three significant things: that his first son was killed in Italy in the year 1943; that he himself had fought on the battlefields of Europe in 1918; or that he had spent two years of his life in a Catholic orphanage, where he and his older brother Nickie were sent when their father was killed in 1906. He was eight years old at the time.

Giacomo wets the bed.

The nuns do not like this. When one of the children wets his bed, they send him out to stand in the sun with the sheets over his head until the urine has dried. Giacomo doesn’t know why they do this to him. Wouldn’t it be simpler to wash the sheets and then hang them up to dry? He does not understand a lot of things about this place. Most of all, he does not understand why he is here.

The nuns terrify Giacomo. They are always dressed in black, the way the women were dressed in black when Papa went to sleep. Papa was inside the box in the parlor, but they would not open the cover to let him see. His mother said there had been an accident, un incidente, something with a trolley car, and that Papa had gone to sleep afterward, and the trolley car was why they could not open the box, they did not wish to disturb his sleep. They put the box in the ground. He wondered why they were letting his father sleep in the ground. Nickie said, “He’s dead, dope.”

There was talk in the kitchen. The uncles and aunts were talking in Italian to his mother. They could not send the girls away. Neither could they send the youngest child, Paolo, who was only four. They would have to send Giacomo and Nicolao. His mother explained it patiently afterward. There was not enough money. Even with help from the family, there was not enough money. He and Nicolao would have to go away for a little while. The nuns would take good care of them. They would be fed well. It would only be for a little while.

He does not want to hate the nuns, they are married to Jesus. But they make him stand with the sheets smelling of urine over his head, drying in the sun, and they beat him with a cat-o’-nine-tails when he can’t remember his Hail Marys or his Holy Marys Mother of God, or when he does not make his bed to suit them. His sheets always smell of urine. They do not change the sheets except on Fridays, and he wets the bed almost every night, and in the morning he stands in the sun until the sheets are dry, and then tries to make his bed look neat again, making it up with hospital corners the way the sisters have taught him, but though he pulls the sheets very tight and tucks them in all around, they are always wrinkled and yellow and smelling of urine, and his bed never looks like the other children’s beds, and the nuns are never satisfied, and they beat him because his bed is not right, and each time they beat him he remembers at night the beating that day, and becomes frightened, and wets the bed again, and still does not know why he is in this place. He does not even know where this place is. He was taken here in a bus. He got on the bus at Ninety-sixth Street, he said goodbye to his mother and his sisters and little Paulie, and then he and Nickie got on the bus with the nuns, and now he is here and he does not know where he is, and does not understand why. The other children in this place have no mothers and fathers. Why is he here in a place like this? He has a mother, her name is Serafina, she lives on One Hundred and Third Street, Two-Two-Seven East One Hundred and Third Street, Apartment Four-A, he knows it by heart in case he gets lost. He has a mother.

Sister Rosalinda calls him Pisciasotto, which means “Pisspants.”

“Buon giorno, Pisciasotto,” she says, and smiles.

“Buon giorno, Sorella.”

He despises her.

She tells him of the Devil. She tells him that anyone who wets the bed as often as he does, with no regard for the comfort or health of those around him, subjecting others to the stench of his waste and his filth, anyone who has so little control over his bodily functions, is a prime target for the Devil, who can see what transpires on earth even as the good Lord Jesus can see, and who will surely come for Giacomo in the middle of the night if he does not stop wetting the bed, will come for him and lean over the bed with his glittering red eyes and breathe upon Giacomo a breath as foul as the stink of Giacomo’s own waste, and clutch him into his hairy arms, his body cold and slimy though he comes from the depths of the inferno, clutch him to his chest and spirit him away to Hell, his giant black leathery wings flapping as they make the fearful descent to that place of doom where Giacomo will burn in eternal fires stinking of urine, and the Devil will laugh and claim him for his own. Giacomo is more afraid of Sister Rosalinda than he is of the Devil. Would the Devil make him stand in the sun with wet sheets over his head? Would the Devil beat him with a cat-o’-nine-tails in the small white room the sister shares with Sister Giustina, who limps?

One night, he has a good idea.

It makes him laugh just to think of it.

The other children have been taken out to the summerhouse behind the dormitory, where sometimes one or another of the sisters plays violin or flute for them, or tells a story of the horrors of Hell and the rewards of Heaven. This is Sister Rosalinda’s night, and he knows she will be talking about the Devil; she talks so much about the Devil that sometimes Giacomo thinks she is married to him instead of to Jesus. He has been denied the pleasure of sitting in the summerhouse; he is being punished. Last night, he wet the bed again, and this morning he could not stand in the sun to dry his sheets because it was raining. So he has been sent to bed early, to sleep on the wet sheets and dry them with his own body warmth — unless he happens to wet them again, which he will most surely do. But he has an idea, and the idea causes him to chuckle out loud. He wishes Nickie were here so he could tell him the idea, but his brother is out with the other children, listening to Sister Rosalinda telling about what it’s like to be with the Devil in Hell-you’d think she’d been there herself one time.

He creeps out of bed, oh, this is a good idea.

He steals through the empty dormitory, past the beds lined up in a row, the washstand and basin beside each bed, the toothbrushes in glasses, the night light burning in the corridor outside. There is a nun sitting on a straight-backed chair at the end of the hall, engrossed in saying her beads, why are they always fingering their beads and mumbling to themselves? She does not notice him as he stealthily opens the screen door at the end of the hall and slips outside. The air is clean and fresh, he knows he is in the country someplace, but he does not know where, maybe as far away as the Bronx, maybe that is where they’ve sent him. He can hear crickets in the bushes, and can see fireflies flitting through the trees. He once caught a firefly and pulled off the part that glowed and stuck it to his finger like a ring, and Sister Giustina limped over to him and said that he would be punished for hurting one of God’s creatures, and she took him to the room she shared with Sister Rosalinda, and they beat him again that afternoon, even though he had not wet the bed the night before, and of course he wet the bed again after the beating. Why had God made such tempting creatures as fireflies, whose lights could be pulled off and made into rings? He had never seen a firefly before he came to this place, and no one had warned him that it was one of God’s creatures. Didn’t Sister Giustina slap mosquitoes dead, and were they not also God’s creatures? Or did Sister Rosalinda later punish her in the small white room they shared? He had once spied Sister Rosalinda whipping herself with the same cat-o’-nine-tails she used on him, her habit lowered to her waist, flailing the leather thongs of the whip over her left shoulder, her bare white back covered with welts. Had Sister Rosalinda wet the bed the night before? He did not understand nuns.

He can hear her voice in the darkness as he crawls across the lawn, still wet from the day’s rain. She is telling the children that in Hell there is no recourse, there is no one to turn to because the Devil presides and he is thoroughly evil and without mercy, and his assistants are as fiendish as he, and the people suffering in Hell are evil, too, which is why they were sent there in the first place, and wherever one turns there is only evil to be encountered in the flames, and one can expect no succor from those who have fallen from God’s grace and who fear not the Lord and who have in their hearts no remorse for their evil deeds; he creeps closer.

The summerhouse is an octagonal-shaped building constructed entirely of wood, latticework covering the base, a screened wooden platform lined on all eight sides with benches upon which the children sit, columns supporting the roof. Giacomo crawls under the lattice and under the platform and covers his mouth with his hand to suppress a giggle. His initial idea has been to let out a moan from the depths of Hell, frightening and delighting the other children. But now that he is actually under the platform, he notices that there is a space between two of the boards, and he can see one of Sister Rosalinda’s black shoes and the hem of her habit, and he has a better idea that suddenly comes to him from the text of her story and almost causes him to wet his pants with glee right there under the summerhouse. Sister Rosalinda is expanding upon her theme by telling the children that just as there is no recourse in Hell for those who are evil, so it is on earth for those who will not follow the teachings of the Lord Jesus. The Devil will seek out the sinners, he will reach up from the subterranean depths (oh, this is such a good idea, much better than the first), will reach out with his hairy hand to claim them as his own, seize them in his powerful taloned fingers...

It is here that Giacomo reaches up through the space in the boards, reaches up from the subterranean depths beneath the summerhouse, and clutches Sister Rosalinda’s ankle in his powerful taloned fingers.

My father was, and still is, an inveterate joker.

He tells the story with enormous relish, even though he insists Sister Rosalinda almost had a heart attack, and even though he was to regret his prank for the remainder of his stay at the orphanage — eighteen months and four days of a living Hell without mercy or recourse, just as the good sister had promised. She steadfastly maintained, incidentally, that after the hand reached up to grab her from below — and she let out a yell that must have alerted even Saint Peter up there at the pearlies, screaming, “Il Diavolo, il Diavolo!” while the children scattered and stumbled and shrieked in echo, “Il Diavolo, il Diavolo!” one of them crashing through the screen in his haste to get away from this infernal creature who had reached up to grab one of God’s many wives (if he could grab a nun, who on earth was safe?) — she swore on a stack of Bibles, that smiling religious bitch who made my father’s life miserable, swore that the imprint of the Devil’s hand remained on her flesh for weeks after the episode, bright red against the lily white of her virgin fields. Nickie told my father he was stupid for trying to buck the system. (“Don’t buck the system,” my Uncle Nick always said. “You try and buck the system, the system busts your head.”)

My father hadn’t been trying to buck the system. He was going for a laugh. I don’t know when he began protecting himself with humor, maybe it was way back then when he was standing in the hot sun breathing in the stink of his own piss. I do know that he uses it the way other men might use anger or brute strength or guile. If things are getting a bit too serious (or even if they aren’t), my father immediately tells a joke. Whenever I telephone him, he will answer my call (or anybody’s call) in one of two ways: (1) He will disguise his voice and say, “Police Headquarters, Sergeant Clancy speaking,” or “This is the Aquarium, did you want some fish?” or “Department of Sanitation, keep it clean,” or (in a high falsetto) “This is Stella Di Palermo, how do you do?” (2) If he answers in his own voice, he will invariably say, “Your nickel start talking,” or “This one is on you,” or sometimes, abruptly, and impatiently, and in mock anger, like a busy executive at General Motors called to the phone during an urgent meeting, “Yes, what is it?” (This one still gets a laugh from me, though» he’s done it perhaps ten thousand times.) He can calm a tense moment at the dinner table, and there were plenty of those between Rebecca and me, by suddenly tossing in a pun from left field, usually way off target but sometimes genuinely funny. I don’t think I’ve ever had a serious conversation with him in my life.

When I called to tell him I’d left Rebecca, he answered the phone and snapped in his General Motors manner, “Yes, what is it?” I told him Rebecca and I were through. There was a long silence on the phone. Then he said, “Just a minute, I’ll get your mother.” Only months later did he say, “Ike, sometimes things work out for the best in life.” That’s the closest we’ve ever come to exchanging confidences. He used to talk to my brother Tony a lot. I can remember him and Tony having long conversations in the kitchen of our Bronx apartment. I never knew what they were talking about, and I thought at the time that I was too young to share such intimacies, that when I got older — like Tony — maybe my father and I could talk together the way they did. It never happened. (Once, and God forgive me for ever having thought this, I figured he didn’t talk to me because I was blind.) The comic routines became more and more frequent after Tony was killed. He never mentions Tony now; it is as though his first son never existed. Except sometimes, when he turns away from the television and, forgetting for a moment, says to me, “Watch this guy, Tony, he’s a riot,” without knowing he has used his dead son’s name, without realizing that each time he makes such a slip it brings sudden, unbidden tears to my eyes.

You fucking wop who killed him, I wish you the plague!

As best I can piece this together, my father worked as an errand boy in a delicatessen only after he was released from the orphanage. By that time, his older sister Liliana had a steady job with the telephone company, and my grandmother figured she could safely afford to take her sons home. And, again filling in the gaps, I think he was drafted into the Army sometime after the jobs in the transit authority’s repair shop and the laundry, and after the apprenticeship with the florist. In brief, he was working in the “business of embroidery and crochet beading” while simultaneously playing “weddings, socials, baptisms, block parties, at most of the ballrooms in and around New York” when he met my mother. And I estimate this to be in August of 1922, long after the armistice had been signed and the country was attempting a return to normalcy.

Now make of this what you will, analysts of the world.

The first band my father formed was called Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Five. Even given the enormous popularity of Griffitt’s film The Birth of a Nation, which had opened in Los Angeles at Clune’s Auditorium in February of 1915 and had gone on from there to play to enormous crowds at theaters all over the country, a film that vividly depicted sheeted and hooded Ku Klux Klansmen riding the night; and given the resurgence of the Klan in the years immediately following the war (its membership would total four cotton-pickin’ million by 1924!); and tossing in the arrest on May 5, 1920 (shortly before my father formed his band), of two immigrants named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on charges of felony murder, and the attendant publicity given the case when it was discovered that both these ginzoes were anarchists and draft dodgers besides, which might very well have caused my father to pick the Anglicized nom d’orchestre Jimmy Palmer, and to further shield his true identity by hiding his face as well as his Italian background; even taking into account my father’s penchant for disguises (his Charlie Chaplin imitation was a pip, he says), does it not seem passing x strange that he would choose as the costumes for himself and his musicians (are you ready?) white sheets and hoods? I am not for one moment suggesting that standing in the sun for close to two years, with a piss-laden sheet over his head, warps the personality and causes paranoia. I am only stating a simple fact. My father’s band was called Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Five and they wore long white sheets with sleeves sewn into them, and they wore white peaked hoods with stitched eye holes, and they wore these costumes winter, spring, and fall, and also during the hottest summer in years — which was when my Aunt Cristina got engaged to the man who would become my Uncle Matt.

Stella didn’t know which one of the Phantom Five was Jimmy Palmer; they all looked the same under those hoods with their eyes peering out of the holes like dopes. Also, was the name of the band strictly correct English? Since there were only five musicians, shouldn’t they have called themselves Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Four? Stella suspected, too, that the reason they were wearing those disguises was that they were lousy and afraid they’d be lynched in the streets afterward if anybody recognized them. She was, to tell the truth, altogether bored by Cristina’s engagement party. She had been kissed and hugged by distant cousins and aunts and uncles and goombahs and goomahs she didn’t know existed, some of them from places as far away as Red Bank, New Jersey, and if another smelly greaseball with a walrus mustache pressed his sweaty cheek to hers, she would scream. She had been told that maybe Uncle Joe would be coming in from Arizona for the party, but at the last minute, he couldn’t make it. Her sister had boasted that her fiancé Matt had connections, and would be able to supply beer for the party (prohibition having been in full force for almost two years now), but as usual Matt had failed to make good on his promise. The only beverages were soda pop, and some hooch certain to cause blindness or baldness, plus the ever-present dago red, still being fermented in basements all over Harlem, just as though the Volstead Act hadn’t been passed at all. Her father was ossified by eight o’clock. It was the first time she’d ever seen him that way. He kept telling everyone what a pity it was, che peccato, that Umberto, Tess’s father and Cristina’s grandfather, the man who had taught him his trade, had passed away two years ago and could not be here to enjoy the joyous occasion of Cristina’s engagement to this fine young man, Matteo Diamante (already known as Matty Diamond in the streets, years before Legs Diamond achieved renown as a gangster). And then he said it was also a shame that none of the family back in Fiormonte could be here, either, and seemed to recall quite suddenly that a great many members of the Di Lorenzo family were now dead, his father having passed away in 1916, and his mother the following year, and then his youngest sister, Maria, who had asked him why there were no gifts on Christmas morning in the year 1900, and he had promised her there would be gifts the following year, but had never returned, and now she was dead of malaria, none of them here to share this festive occasion — and he began to cry, which Stella thought extremely sloppy and very old-fashioned.

Her sister’s fiancé was a darkly handsome young man who affected the speech and mannerisms of some of the gangster types he knew only casually, and who was enormously flattered to have been dubbed Matty Diamond, which seemed to have class and swagger and a touch of notoriety besides. Actually, he was an honest cab driver, who went to confession every week, and he’d probably have fainted dead away if anyone so much as suggested that he assist in the commission of a crime. But it was hinted in Harlem nonetheless that he had “connections,” and these mysterious connections were supposed to be capable of performing services such as providing beer for his engagement party, which they hadn’t. He was crazy about Cristina, and insanely jealous as well. He was drinking the bathtub gin, and was almost as drunk as Francesco.

Stella, at twenty, loved her sister dearly and wished her nothing but the best of luck, but she did think seventeen was a little young to be getting engaged, especially when the man in question was six years Cristie’s senior, and reputed to have lost two toes to frostbite during the war. (He certainly danced as though he had two missing toes.) She herself had been offered proposals of marriage by two different men in the past year, one of whom was a second cousin, naturally turned down since she didn’t want to have idiot children. The other was a rookie policeman named Artie Regan, whom she’d met at her father’s tailor shop, where he always seemed to be dropping in to pass the time of day with Pino and Papa until she got wise to the fact that he was really coming by to catch a glimpse of her. She had dated him on and off for more than six months until she realized he was serious. Her father had never shown anything but the coldest courtesy to Regan, and she knew that if she even mentioned that Regan “wanted her,” her father would take to the streets with a meat cleaver. An Irishman? The memory of the southern Italian is long, long, long. So she’d said so long to Artie, who really was a very nice and gentle sort of person for an Irish cop, and had decided she’d take her time finding the right man, even if Cristie was in such a hurry to get herself engaged to a fellow with only eight toes.

On the night of her sister’s engagement party, Stella was wearing a red-beaded dress with black fringe and plunging V neck, breasts bound in the flapper style, stockings rolled below her rouged knees, red satin slippers. She had had her hair shingle-bobbed two months before, in the current vogue, and she was wearing golden hoop earrings and carrying a black-beaded bag with red fringe. A package of Sweet Caporal cigarettes was inside the bag. She wouldn’t have dreamt of smoking in her father’s presence, or even in public, but whenever she was in the bathroom alone, she puffed away like a steam engine. (She once caught Cristie smoking, and swatted her, telling her she was too young.) Dancing with her brother Luke to the miserable music Mr. Jimmy Palmer and his five specters were making, she felt sophisticated and chic and svelte and gorgeous and desirable, and she had no idea that Jimmy Palmer himself, watching her through the holes in his hood while banging away at his drums, was thinking the exact same thing. Her chubby brother Dominick came waltzing out onto the floor in a wise-aleck, fifteen-year-old solo imitation of his older sister and brother, and Luke kicked out at him playfully with one long leg, and Jimmy Palmer watched Stella’s backside as she bumped it in disdain at the younger boy, and saw, as Luke turned her in his direction, the creamy white expanse of throat above the V-necked yoke of the red dress, and not bad gams either, altogether a very spiffy dish.

God knows what music he was playing in those days, or how he could possibly concentrate on it while simultaneously watching Stella through the holes in his hood. He was not to form his own Dixieland band until 1924, following an already well-established trend. But jazz had found its way from New Orleans to Chicago in 1917, and men like King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton were beginning to be imitated in black Harlem and elsewhere in New York as well. Chances are, though, that my father’s band was more influenced by Paul Whiteman, who called himself the King of Jazz, but who played the sort of music I don’t even like to think about, much less dwell upon. The Phantom Five undoubtedly played a great many fox trots, tangos, and two-steps, the craze for such lunatic dances as the bunny hug, the turkey trot, the kangaroo, the snake, the grizzly bear, the crab, and a veritable zooful of others having all but vanished during the war. And possibly, just possibly, one or another of his musicians might occasionally have tried a lick in emulation of what they considered to be real nigger funk, but their stuff was mired, man, it had to be. I heard many of my father’s subsequent bands when I was growing up, and I would say that Stella’s assessment of the Phantom Five in 1922 was probably accurate: they were lousy. (My father claims, however, that Mike Riley, the trumpet player who coauthored “The Music Goes ‘Round and ‘Round,” a resounding hit that all but smothered the airwaves in 1935, had played in one of his early bands. I guess it’s true. My father has a way of hitching his wagon to any passing star. He claims, for example, that James Cagney grew up in his neighborhood. “Oh sure, I knew Jimmy when we were kids.” I am his most recently passing star.) Whatever he was playing in that hot and smelly hall on 116th Street, he played it without benefit of sheet music; my father never learned to read a note of music, and could not tell a single paradiddle from a double.

He made his move during a ten-minute break. Munching a ham and cheese sandwich on a soggy roll, his hood tucked into the white cord sash at his waist, he two-stepped over to Matty Diamond, who was said to have connections and who had recommended the Phantom Five to the girl’s father. Matty was standing at the makeshift bar, wooden planks set up on horses and covered with a long white tablecloth, in deep and serious conversation with his future father-in-law. Both men were pissed to the gills. Francesco had a glass of red wine in his hand. Through a pair of twisted straws, Matty was sipping homemade gin from a soda pop bottle.

“How’s it going, Matt?” Jimmy asked.

“Fine, who’s that?” Matty said, and turned away from the bar.

“Me. Jimmy Palmer. Music okay?”

“Beautiful,” Matty said, and put his arm around Jimmy. “That is some beautiful music you fellows are making. Where’d you learn to play that way, huh?”

“Oh, I been playing drums a long time now.”

“Well, it certainly shows, the way you play them things,” Matty said. “Papa,” he said, and turned to Francesco, “I want you to meet Jimmy Palmer, he’s the leader of the band there.”

“Piacere,” Francesco said, and held out his hand. The ensuing handshake was a bit awkward in that the hand Francesco extended was the one holding the glass of wine.

“Nice to meet you,” Jimmy said.

“Conosce ‘La Tarantella’?” Francesco asked.

“Oh, sure, would you like to hear that?” Jimmy said.

“He likes all that greaseball music,” Matty whispered.

“Well, we like to play to suit everybody,” Jimmy said. “Say, who’s the...?”

“Why do you fellows wear them things, them costumes?” Matty asked.

“Just an idea,” Jimmy said, and smiled.

“It’s a good idea,” Matty said. “It makes you look very good, them costumes.”

“Thank you. Matty, I was wondering if you knew...”

“Listen, I think maybe you ought to figure on overtime,” Matty said. “Papa, I think maybe the band ought to stay past twelve, don’t you think?”

“Cosa?” Francesco said, and belched.

“How much you fellows charge for overtime?” Matty said.

“Well, overtime’s more expensive,” Jimmy said.

“Sure, how much, don’t worry about it.”

“We get six dollars a man for overtime.”

“That’s an hour? Six dollars an hour?”

“That’s right.”

“What does that come to for all of you fellows?”

“Thirty dollars. It’d cost you more with a union band.”

“Oh, sure. Papa, they want thirty dollars more if they play after midnight.”

“Cosa?” Francesco said.

“It’s okay,” Matty said. “Don’t worry about it, Jimmy.”

“Who’s the girl in the red dress, would you know?” Jimmy asked.

“Who?”

“Over there.”

“What girl?”

“In the red dress.”

“The girl in the red dress?”

“Over there. The beaded dress.”

“Oh, yes,” Matty said.

“Who is she, would you know?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, who?”

“That’s my sister-in-law. My future sister-in-law. Stella.”

“What’sa matta my Stella?” Francesco asked.

“Nothing, Papa. This man here wanted to know her name.”

“Stella,” Francesco said, and nodded in agreement. Stella was most certainly his daughter’s name.

“Well, I’ll see you around, huh?” Jimmy said, and put on his hood, and walked over to where Stella was talking to her sister. “Hi, Stella,” he said. “How do you like the music?”

Stella turned to look at him. She had green eyes. He did not know any girls with green eyes.

“The music is absolutely the cat’s meow,” she said sarcastically, but her tone was lost on him. He was drowning in her eyes.

“Glad you like it,” he said. “I’m Jimmy Palmer. It’s my band.”

“You’ve got some band there, Jimmy Palmer,” Stella said. “All you need now is some horses, and you could go out burning crosses on niggers’ lawns.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jimmy said, missing the allusion to Birth of a Nation, which Stella had seen four times. “You know any horses can play saxophone?”

Stella laughed and looked at him more closely. Or, rather, looked at this hooded and sheeted person, brown eyes showing in the holes of the hood, some two or three inches taller than she was, a nice voice, he seemed to speak English very good. “Jimmy Palmer,” she said. “Is that an Italian name?”

“That’s the name I use,” he said.

“Use for what?”

“For when I’m playing. We play all over the city,” he said.

“What’s your real name?”

“Jimmy Di Palermo.”

“Are you from the other side, or were you born here?”

“Here,” he said. “On a Hun’ Third Street.”

“I was born here, too,” Stella said, and smiled.

“You got any requests or anything?” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, I got one request,” Stella said.

“What’s that? We’ll play it in the next set.”

“It’s not a song,” Stella said.

“What is it, then?”

“Why’n you take off that thing on your head and let a person see what you look like? That’s my request.”

“Sure,” he said, and took off the hood.

He was not a bad-looking fellow. His eyes, as she already knew, were brown. He had a longish, thin nose, not unlike her father’s, black hair combed back straight from his forehead sort of like Valentino’s, though of course he wasn’t half so handsome. He had a nice smile and good teeth. She wondered what he was wearing under that sheet. He probably dressed like a greenhorn.

“Il fait très chaud aujourd’hui,” she remarked, and much to her surprise, he answered, “Oh, beaucoup, beaucoup, mam’selle,” and she said craftily, “Do you know what that means?”

“Oh, yes, I picked up a little French when I was over there.”

“In the war, do you mean?”

“Yes, I was with the 107th Infantry Regiment, 27th Division, and I picked up a little French.”

“We must have a talk sometimes,” Stella said.

“Comme vous voulez,” Jimmy said, which he had picked up from a little French hooker he had picked up. “Are you sure there’s no request you’d like to hear? We can play almost anything.”

“I don’t suppose you know my favorite song,” Stella said.

“What song is that, Stella?”

“It’s ‘The Sheik of Araby.’ ”

“Oh, yes,” Jimmy said, “we can play that. My piano player has the sheet music. Lots of people think that that particular song was written for Valentino, for the piano players to play in the movie houses, you know, when they’re showing the picture. But that’s not true, Stella. Actually, it’s from a Broadway show. There was a show last year called Make It Snappy. That’s what The Sheik of Araby’ is from. It’s printed right on the sheet music.”

“I didn’t know that,” Stella said.

“Yes, it’s true.”

“I do love the song, though.”

“We’ll play it for you in the next set.”

“That’ll be the berries,” she said.

“I do a lot of cymbal work in it, makes it sound more like the desert. Stella?” he said.

“Yes?”

“I don’t know whether we’ll be playing overtime or not, that hasn’t been worked out yet, Matty’s still talking it over with your father. But even if we do play overtime, we’ll probably be finished along around one o’clock, maybe one-fifteen by the time I get the drums packed and pay the guys...”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering, I know it’ll be kind of late, but I thought you might like to take a ride over to the West Side, there’s some nice jazz clubs there with nigger musicians, it’s a lot of fun and perfectly safe, otherwise I wouldn’t even be asking you.”

“Oh, do you have a car?” she asked casually.

“No, but my trumpet player has one, and him and his girl’ll be running over there afterwards — she’s the little blond girl sitting there near the bandstand, the one with the green beaded dress, do you see her?”

“Yes, she seems very nice,” Stella said.

“Oh, she is, a very nice girl, they’re keeping steady company, they expect to get married sometime next year. We made that dress for her.”

“What do you mean? Who did?”

“Me and my mother. We have this crochet beading and embroidery business, I make all the designs, and we’ve got these girls for us who do the work. That’s a very spiffy dress you’re wearing yourself, Stella, I meant to compliment you on it.”

“It was in Vanity Fair.”

“I’m sure of that, it’s very swanky.”

“Though it’s just a copy.”

“It’s a very good copy, though. And the color is beautiful with your eyes and hair. You have very pretty eyes, Stella.”

“And you’ve got a very pretty line,” she said, and smiled.

“No, that’s no line. I saw those eyes and I couldn’t believe you were an Italian girl, I’ve never seen eyes like that on any Italian girl I know.”

“Well, I’m American, don’t forget,” Stella said, bridling for just an instant.

“Oh, naturally, can’t I tell that? I’m only saying those are really beautiful eyes, and I’m not trying to be fresh, I honestly mean it.”

“Well, thank you,” Stella said, and didn’t know what to do with her suddenly really beautiful eyes, so she lowered them.

“So what do you think? Would you like to come along with us when we go over there?”

“Well, I would have to ask my father,” Stella said, and glanced at Francesco, who was sitting at a table with Pino, his head on his folded arms. Pino was singing “Pesce Fritt’ e Baccalà” at the top of his lungs. His eight-year-old son, Tommy sat stiffly beside his father, looking terribly embarrassed. “Or my mother,” Stella amended.

“Well, could you ask her? We’ll only stay an hour or so. You could ask your sister and Matty to come along, too, if you like. There’s plenty of room in the car, it’s a Pierce-Arrow.”

“A Pierce-Arrow,” Stella said, “I’m sure my mother will say okay.”

“Au ’voir, then,” Jimmy said, and went back to the bandstand.

As the Phantom Five played “The Sheik of Araby,” which had not been written for Rudolph Valentino, but instead for a Broadway show called Make It Snappy, and as Pino Battatore sang another chorus of the song they had learned together in Fiormonte, Francesco sat at the table with his head on his folded arms and tried to understand why he’d been crying just a short while ago. He had cried when news of his father’s death first reached him, and he had cried again when his mother died, and again when his sister Emilia had written to tell him of Maria’s illness and subsequent death; he had thought he’d cried for all of them when it was necessary to cry, and appropriate to cry, and timely to cry. But tonight, at his daughter’s engagement party, his darling angel Cristina, who was to marry a fine and handsome boy, he had cried again, and he could not understand why. And so he listened to Pino’s rasping off-key voice beside him, and heard Tommy pleading with his father to be still, and off at the other end of the room the Phantom Five went into another chorus of “The Sheik of Araby,” with Jimmy Palmer doing a lot of cymbal work to simulate the mood of the desert — and suddenly Francesco knew.

“But my family will be here,” Pino had said to him long ago, and he remembered those words now, and realized that his family, the family of Francesco Di Lorenzo, was here. There was no family in Fiormonte; his mother and father were dead, Maria was dead, Emilia had left for Torino with her husband, who hoped to find work in the steel mills. The family was here. He had a beautiful, gentle wife whom he loved and cherished, and for whom he would work hard all the days of his life; he had a seventeen-year-old daughter who was engaged to be married; and a twenty-year-old daughter who was sure to marry soon herself, once she found the right boy, she was fussy, Stella, he liked that about her, she was not easy to please, his Stella, his star; and Domenico, such a smart boy, studying so hard at a very difficult high school in the Bronx, a ninety average, that was very good, they said, a ninety; and Luca, so tall, so gentle, who played the violin and piano beautifully, just like his cousin Rodolfo in Fiormonte... But no, Rodolfo had been killed in the war, Rodolfo was dead. The family was here.

Fiormonte had been the family, but now the family was here.

He sat up and looked at Pino, and Pino abruptly stopped singing.

“È qui,” he said to his friend. “La famiglia è qui.”

“Cosa?” Pino asked.

Francesco watched his daughter as she went to the bandstand and began talking to the drummer, who kept playing all the while she chatted and smiled at him. On the dance floor, his other daughter, his angel Cristina, danced in the arms of a man who not ten minutes before had called him “Papa.” Francesco was forty-two years old. For the longest time he had been twenty-four, and had dreamed of going home. He was now forty-two, and knew he would never go home again, never return to Italy, never.

The family was here. He was the head of the family, and the family was here. Home was here.

He suddenly covered Pino’s hand with his own and squeezed it very hard.