Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

When we finished this engagement, we went on the road with a show called the “Atlantic City Review.” We were on the independent circuit. We lasted about 6 months on the road, but the one-night stands was too much for me. We were booked at the “Wm Fox” theatre at 107th Street and Lexington Ave but turned it down. We still took bookings around town, then I realized that our business was going out of style and we paid up our creditors and went out. My second son was born in 1926. Then I took a test for the Post Office dept. and was appointed a sub in Jan. 1927. Then came the stock market crash in 1929 and our list was frozen. That meant 8 yrs as a sub with puny wages. A job here and there in music really helped along. Finally I was made a regular letter carrier in 1937. I was appointed to Tremont P.O. I worked there two years and was transferred to Grand Central P.O. I worked there three (3) years and went to Wmsbridge P.O. in the Bronx. I worked here for 29-½ years and retired in 1963. A total of 36-½ years for Uncle Sam. I am retired two years so far and really like it.

During my younger years when I was in my 20’s I was a very good dancer. I gave exhibitions of Pat Rooney, Frisco, and a good imitation of the famous Charlie Chaplin. I now like to dab in art work, poetry and like to putter around my coin and stamp collection. My son is married and have three grandchildren, all boys.

This is my life.

Rebecca, to whom I was still married at the time, read my father’s “life” to me, and commented on his singularly beautiful handwriting. I began to cry. I cried because there was nothing in it I could use for the goddamn liner notes, and I cried because he had neglected to mention three significant things: that his first son was killed in Italy in the year 1943; that he himself had fought on the battlefields of Europe in 1918; or that he had spent two years of his life in a Catholic orphanage, where he and his older brother Nickie were sent when their father was killed in 1906. He was eight years old at the time.

Giacomo wets the bed.

The nuns do not like this. When one of the children wets his bed, they send him out to stand in the sun with the sheets over his head until the urine has dried. Giacomo doesn’t know why they do this to him. Wouldn’t it be simpler to wash the sheets and then hang them up to dry? He does not understand a lot of things about this place. Most of all, he does not understand why he is here.

The nuns terrify Giacomo. They are always dressed in black, the way the women were dressed in black when Papa went to sleep. Papa was inside the box in the parlor, but they would not open the cover to let him see. His mother said there had been an accident, un incidente , something with a trolley car, and that Papa had gone to sleep afterward, and the trolley car was why they could not open the box, they did not wish to disturb his sleep. They put the box in the ground. He wondered why they were letting his father sleep in the ground. Nickie said, “He’s dead, dope.”

There was talk in the kitchen. The uncles and aunts were talking in Italian to his mother. They could not send the girls away. Neither could they send the youngest child, Paolo, who was only four. They would have to send Giacomo and Nicolao. His mother explained it patiently afterward. There was not enough money. Even with help from the family, there was not enough money. He and Nicolao would have to go away for a little while. The nuns would take good care of them. They would be fed well. It would only be for a little while.

He does not want to hate the nuns, they are married to Jesus. But they make him stand with the sheets smelling of urine over his head, drying in the sun, and they beat him with a cat-o’-nine-tails when he can’t remember his Hail Marys or his Holy Marys Mother of God, or when he does not make his bed to suit them. His sheets always smell of urine. They do not change the sheets except on Fridays, and he wets the bed almost every night, and in the morning he stands in the sun until the sheets are dry, and then tries to make his bed look neat again, making it up with hospital corners the way the sisters have taught him, but though he pulls the sheets very tight and tucks them in all around, they are always wrinkled and yellow and smelling of urine, and his bed never looks like the other children’s beds, and the nuns are never satisfied, and they beat him because his bed is not right, and each time they beat him he remembers at night the beating that day, and becomes frightened, and wets the bed again, and still does not know why he is in this place. He does not even know where this place is . He was taken here in a bus. He got on the bus at Ninety-sixth Street, he said goodbye to his mother and his sisters and little Paulie, and then he and Nickie got on the bus with the nuns, and now he is here and he does not know where he is, and does not understand why. The other children in this place have no mothers and fathers. Why is he here in a place like this? He has a mother, her name is Serafina, she lives on One Hundred and Third Street, Two-Two-Seven East One Hundred and Third Street, Apartment Four-A, he knows it by heart in case he gets lost. He has a mother.

Sister Rosalinda calls him Pisciasotto , which means “Pisspants.”

“Buon giorno, Pisciasotto,” she says, and smiles.

“Buon giorno, Sorella.”

He despises her.

She tells him of the Devil. She tells him that anyone who wets the bed as often as he does, with no regard for the comfort or health of those around him, subjecting others to the stench of his waste and his filth, anyone who has so little control over his bodily functions, is a prime target for the Devil, who can see what transpires on earth even as the good Lord Jesus can see, and who will surely come for Giacomo in the middle of the night if he does not stop wetting the bed, will come for him and lean over the bed with his glittering red eyes and breathe upon Giacomo a breath as foul as the stink of Giacomo’s own waste, and clutch him into his hairy arms, his body cold and slimy though he comes from the depths of the inferno, clutch him to his chest and spirit him away to Hell, his giant black leathery wings flapping as they make the fearful descent to that place of doom where Giacomo will burn in eternal fires stinking of urine, and the Devil will laugh and claim him for his own. Giacomo is more afraid of Sister Rosalinda than he is of the Devil. Would the Devil make him stand in the sun with wet sheets over his head? Would the Devil beat him with a cat-o’-nine-tails in the small white room the sister shares with Sister Giustina, who limps?

One night, he has a good idea.

It makes him laugh just to think of it.

The other children have been taken out to the summerhouse behind the dormitory, where sometimes one or another of the sisters plays violin or flute for them, or tells a story of the horrors of Hell and the rewards of Heaven. This is Sister Rosalinda’s night, and he knows she will be talking about the Devil; she talks so much about the Devil that sometimes Giacomo thinks she is married to him instead of to Jesus. He has been denied the pleasure of sitting in the summerhouse; he is being punished. Last night, he wet the bed again, and this morning he could not stand in the sun to dry his sheets because it was raining. So he has been sent to bed early, to sleep on the wet sheets and dry them with his own body warmth — unless he happens to wet them again, which he will most surely do. But he has an idea, and the idea causes him to chuckle out loud. He wishes Nickie were here so he could tell him the idea, but his brother is out with the other children, listening to Sister Rosalinda telling about what it’s like to be with the Devil in Hell-you’d think she’d been there herself one time.