Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

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:

She fell beside the door. Strong arms seized her. For an instant she felt that she was saved. But she looked up into the lowering face of a man with tilted mustachios. From the wide, thick lips came threats and curses. From the passageway came the crashing of doors. She let herself be lifted...

And later, in that same published episode:

In the Joss House of the Golden Screens, the two Chinamen, dazed with opium, set of purpose, were arguing with a trembling priest. The door fell open and a white woman — with bleeding hands — fell at their feet. “Ha, she has come back!” cried one of the Chinese in his own tongue. There was the sound of steps in the outer passage. They lifted Pauline. They dragged her back. The priest hurried to the outer door and locked it.

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.