Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

“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 .)