Evan Hunter: Streets of Gold

Who knows?

My grandfather resisted all temptations. He was too busy down in the subway. He would refer to the Interborough Rapid Transit in later years as “my subway.” Until I was ten years old, I actually believed he owned the goddamn thing, and wondered why I was not allowed to ride it without paying a fare. Now that I am forty-eight, I realize it was his subway. He built it. Or at least that part of it between the Brooklyn Bridge and Fifty-ninth Street. At the time, he felt no pride in its construction. He was digging a tunnel through the earth with no conception of where that tunnel would eventually lead. Even a mole, as blind as I, has a sense of direction; Francesco had none. He knew that a train would eventually run through this muddy hole, but he had never been farther uptown than 125th Street, nor farther downtown than City Hall Park, where he was dropped into the bowels of Manhattan each morning. West Farms, Bowling Green, Borough Hall, Atlantic Avenue, distant rumored destinations of the underground octopus, were names that meant nothing to him. Francesco blindly poked his shovel and his pick into the dripping earth, fearful that the city’s streets would fall in upon him, workman’s boots firmly planted in ankle-deep mud, which was at least something he knew from the old country. Hearing but only vaguely understanding the words of the Irish foreman, unable to answer him in his own tongue, he was rendered deaf and dumb as well, laboring at a muscle-wrenching job that made no sense except for the weekly pay check of fourteen dollars, more than Bardoni had promised but whittled down to ten dollars a week after repayment of the cost of passage, and Bardoni’s commission, and Bardoni’s “incidental expenses,” never satisfactorily defined. From that remaining ten dollars, Francesco paid two dollars and fifty cents a week to the iceman, sent five dollars home, and kept two-fifty for himself — which was not bad in the year 1901, when a good roast beef dinner with buttered beets and mashed potatoes, chocolate layer cake and coffee cost no more than thirty-five cents.

Pino was less fortunate, and at the same time more fortunate. Because of his size, Bardoni felt certain Pino would be turned down for employment on the newly begun subway, and he was right. So he was sent to work in the garment district, where he earned seven dollars less per week than did Francesco, but where he worked aboveground and was able to see New York’s spring that April when it broke with a belated delicacy that took his breath away. It was Pino who arranged for their first date with two “American” girls who worked downtown with him on Thirty-fifth and Broadway.

All that suckling in the Agnelli household, all those surprise visits by the clutching iceman must have stoked something of the old Mediterranean fire in Francesco’s youthful loins, but what was one to do in a strange land where the only contacts were Italians with virgin daughters, and where the girls he saw on his rare excursions outside the ghetto spoke a language he barely understood? When Pino told him he had arranged the date, Francesco could not believe him.

“But what?” he said. “With two American girls? Americans? ”

“Yes, Americans,” Pino said, and that quick toothy smile flashed conspiratorially. They were both remembering Bardoni’s story of the keying in Naples, and anticipating a similar adventure; it was common knowledge that American girls fucked like rabbits.

“And they said yes?” Francesco asked incredulously.

“Yes, of course they said yes. Would I be telling you about them if they said no? Saturday night. Eight o’clock. They live together on Twelfth Street.”

“Alone?” Francesco asked. He could not believe his ears.

“Alone,” Pino affirmed, and nodded. The nod promised galaxies.

“Do they speak Italian?” Francesco asked.

“No. But we speak English, non è vero? ”

They were not speaking English on that Harlem rooftop where pigeons fluttered overhead in the April dusk; they never spoke English when they were alone together. They had, however, begun to feel their way around the language since their arrival, if only because they needed it to survive. Only the other day, underground, someone had shouted a command at Francesco, and had he hesitated an instant longer in obeying it, had there been the slightest gap between the shouted English warning and his immediate understanding of it, his head would have been crushed by a falling timber. I can only judge what my grandfather’s English was like in 1901 by what it was like in later years, after I arrived on the scene. What it was like was atrocious, even though my grandmother had been born in this country, and probably worked hard trying to teach him. But English to him, before he met Teresa Giamboglio, was only a temporary necessity. He was going back as soon as he’d saved enough money. A year was what he’d promised himself. A year was a long enough time for a man to burrow his way through the stinking earth. A year without the sun was a long enough time.

He and Pino boarded the Second Avenue El at 119th Street, dressed in their Saturday-night finery, feeling very American, and immediately identifiable as grease-balls by every other passinger on the train. It was a beautiful balmy evening, the windows of the train wide open, the signs warning that fine and imprisonment would be the lot of any passenger foolish enough to try expectorating through them. Pino and Francesco sat on the cane seats side by side, each carrying identical corsages they had purchased in the flower shop on Third Avenue, each sitting stiffly in unaccustomed collar and tie, each wearing a straw boater rakishly tilted. Pino kept nervously stroking and patting his sparse mustache. Neither of the two talked very much on that trip downtown. Their heads were filled with images of dainty American underthings, petticoats, and corsets, lisle stockings and perfumed silk garters — oh, this was going to be ’na bella chiavata .

They had planned to take the girls to a restaurant suggested by the bachelor with whom Pino lived, inexpensive, with excellent food and wonderful service, where they were to be sure to ask for a waiter named Arturo, who spoke Italian. They had no plans for after dinner. Motion pictures had not yet burst upon the American scene — that was to happen two years later, with the introduction of The Great Train Robbery , an eleven-minute opus that changed the entertainment habits of the world. (I must tell you that I have heard nearly every motion picture ever made. I love the movies, and I have visualized scenes Pauline Kael has never dreamt of in her universe. I once went to the Museum of Modern Art to “see” a silent film because I wanted to imagine the whole damn thing just by listening to the piano underscoring. It was an exhilarating experience, even though the piano player must have studied under my grandfather’s Irish foreman.)

Anyway, those two horny young wops had no plans for the evening’s entertainment other than to take the ladies to dinner and to bed. The circus was in town, and they might have gone there or to any one of the vaudeville theaters along Broadway, but the boys had a different sort of entertainment in mind, and besides they didn’t want the evening to cost too much. They got off the el at Fourteenth Street, and Pino reached into his pocket and took out the slip of paper upon which one of the girls — my grandfather told me her name was Kasha, but that sounds impossible to me — had scribbled the address. More and more of the city’s gas lamps were being replaced by electric lights, especially in the downtown areas, and there was a new lamppost on the corner, and they stood under its glow, the Saturday-night city murmuring about them, a cool breeze blowing in off the river to the east, and they scrutinized Kasha’s handwriting, and agreed upon what it meant, and walked downtown to Twelfth Street, and then over to Avenue A. The ghetto they entered was not unlike the one from which they had come — except that it was Jewish. (I have often toyed with the idea that Pino and my grandfather walked past the dry-goods store owned and operated by Rebecca’s grandfather. The notion is far-fetched. But it persists, even now.)