Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

The girls, as it turned out, did not live alone. Had Pino not automatically assumed that anyone who wasn’t Italian was automatically American, he might have realized that no Jewish girl in the city of New York in the year 1901 lived alone. The girls were cousins. Kasha and Natalia. They had been in America for six months. They lived with Kasha’s mother, father, grandfather, two brothers, a police dog who almost caused my grandfather to wet his pants, and a canary (my grandfather assumed it was a canary; the cage was covered for the night). More frightening than the police dog was Kasha’s grandfather, a stooped and wrinkled tyrant who had lived through far too many pogroms to enjoy the enemy camp in his own parlor. He kept yelling in Yiddish all the while Pino and Francesco were in the house. Kasha’s mother kept trying to calm him down, telling him in her own brand of English that this was America, this was different, they were nice boys, look how nice, see the flowers, what’s the matter with you, Papa? In reply, Papa spat twice on the extended forefinger and middle finger of his right hand. Francesco knew a curse when he saw one; not for nothing had he been born in southern Italy. Kasha’s father sat silently in a brown stuffed chair and busied himself with his Yiddish newspaper. The police dog was growling, fangs bared. Francesco’s knees were shaking. The apartment smelled of the cooking smells in the hold of the ship that had taken him across the Atlantic. In another moment, he was going to be violently ill. Kasha’s younger brothers sat anticipating the event with tiny mean smiles on their faces. Her mother saved the day, shooing the girls and their beaux out of the apartment in the nick of time. There was a strange piece of metal screwed to the doorjamb (a mezuzah, of course, though Francesco did not know what it was), and Kasha kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them to it the moment they stepped into the hallway.

Francesco had decided Kasha would be his girl for the night. He had made this decision without first consulting Pino, and he had done so because he had already abandoned whatever fantasies he may have had of his date being a blond, blue-eyed, narrow-waisted American girl. He was now willing to settle for someone who at least looked Italian. Kasha had black hair, brown eyes, and a chunky figure; he might have been back home in Fiormonte. Pino’s girl, Natalia, was tall and skinny, and had a habit of covering her mouth with her hand whenever she laughed, possibly because her teeth were bad. They must have made quite a pair that night, tiny fat Pino (he had regained a lot of weight since his arrival in America) and lanky Natalia with her hazel eyes and fight-brown hair, hand flashing up to cover her giggle whenever anyone said anything even remotely comical. I normally despise attempts at recording dialect, possibly because it translates so badly into Braille, and I promise this will be the only time I’ll try to capture the sound of immigrant speech. (“You have never kept a promise in your life,” Rebecca once said to me.) But it seems to me the conversation among those four budding young Americans on that April night would lose most of its flavor and all its poignancy if it were rendered in any way other than it must have sounded. Bear with me, bear with them; they were trying.

“Whatsa matta you gran’pa?” Francesco asked. “He’sa craze?”

“He’s ah kahker, ” Kasha answered, using the Yiddish slang for “old man.”

“Caga?” Francesco asked, and tried not to laugh. Caga was Italian slang for shit.

“Kahker, kahker,” Kasha corrected. “He’s ahn alter kahker.”

Pino, who now realized Kasha was talking about shit, burst out laughing, and then immediately sobered and tried to elevate the conversation to a more dignified plane. “Theesa two boys,” he said. “They tweensa?”

“Tweensa?” Kasha asked, puzzled.

“Gemelli,” Pino said. “Tweensa. Tweensa, you know?”

“I don’t know vot it minus ‘tweensa.’ ”

“Tvintz, I tink is vot,” Natalia said, and giggled and covered her mouth.

“Oh, tvintz! No, they nut no tvintz. The vun has ett, en’ dudder has nine.”

“I gotta one sist hassa ten,” Francesco said. “An’ dada one forty.”

“Four- teen,” Pino corrected.

“ Sì, quattordici . Attsa home. Dada side.”

“Vhere is det you from?” Kasha asked.

“Fiormonte. Attsa cloze by Napoli.”

“Whatsa you home place?” Pino asked Natalia, and she giggled.

In such a manner did they manage to communicate, or to believe they were communicating, all evening long. The girls would not go to the restaurant that had been recommended to Pino because it was not kosher. (It suddenly occurs to me that the word “kosher” may have stuck in my grandfather’s head, causing him to have recalled incorrectly the name of the girl who was his date. Every time I eat kasha knishes, I think of her. I wonder if she’s still alive, I wonder what she’d have thought of Rebecca — my grandfather was wild about Rebecca — and I wonder what her real name was. Yes, but what’s your real name, Ike?) My grandfather ate blintzes for the first time in his life that night — “Wassa like cannelloni , you know, Ignazio?” — and learned all about the milchedig and flayshedig , though I can’t imagine how Kasha could possibly have explained the Jewish dietary laws in her broken tongue, or how he could have understood them with his tin ear. At ten o’clock, they took the girls home.

“Denks,” Kasha said. “Ve hed a nize time.”

“Denks,” Natalia said, and giggled.

“Buona notte,” Pino said.

Francesco bowed from the waist, and said, “I’m enjoy verra much.”

On Monday morning, in the tunnel he was digging under Manhattan, he almost got killed.

There were four thousand Italians like my grandfather working on the New York subway. For the most part, they replaced the Irish and Polish immigrants, who had arrived years before and who were moving up to better jobs. But some of those earlier immigrants stayed on as laborers, either because they were indifferent to the possibilities of a fuller life in America, or simply because they were unintelligent, lazy, or incompetent. With characteristic territorial possessiveness, though, they resented the Italians coming in to do “their” jobs, suspecting the dagos of working for cheaper wages (which they were not), and fearful they’d eventually replace them entirely. The situation then was not unlike the white-black contretemps today. It always gets down to bread and the size of a man’s cock. The Italians were stealing jobs, and were reputed to be great lovers besides. (You couldn’t prove that by my grandfather, who was still a virgin at the age of twenty.) The Poles and Irishmen who worked side by side with these smelly wops were fearful, resentful, suspicious, and prejudiced. The wops were clannish, spoke an incomprehensible language, brought strange food to work in their lunch-boxes, laughed at private jokes, and even, for Christ’s sake, sang while they worked! The tunnel itself compounded the volatile nature of the mix.

I have since learned that the building of the New York subways utilized a method known as “cut and cover,” meaning that first a trench was dug, and wooden plankings were laid down over it while the men continued to work belowground. But my grandfather’s description of the tunnel made it sound like a mine shaft deep in the bowels of the earth (which it most certainly wasn’t), and it is his description that lingers in my mind. Despite the facts, then — the subway’s deepest point is 180 feet below the surface, at 191st Street, and my grandfather never got that far uptown — I shall describe that hole in the ground as it appeared to him, and as he subsequently described it to me.