Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

“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...