Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

“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.