Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

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.