TONY: It just doesn’t ring true, Iggie, that’s all.
ME: Grandpa swears it happened.
TONY: Why didn’t McDonnell suspect that maybe Grandpa was the one who’d carved those initials into his pick?
ME: Because he was dumb.
TONY: He was smart enough to remember the story about Grandpa and Houlihan, and to...
ME: Halloran.
TONY: Halloran. He made that connection, didn’t he?
ME: Come on, Tony, a caterpillar could’ve made that connection. The man’s initials were carved into the pick! P.H. So McDonnell automatically...
TONY:... automatically went after Halloran and beat him senseless.
ME: Right.
TONY: I don’t believe it.
ME: Well, I do.
TONY: What if I told you that June of 1901 was the sunniest June in the history of New York City?
ME: Grandpa says it rained for twelve days and twelve nights. It went into the records, he says.
TONY: Have you checked the records?
ME: No, but. . .
TONY: Then how do you know Grandpa wasn’t lying?
ME: He never lies, you know that. Anyway, what’s the rain got to do with the story?
TONY: I’m only trying to show you that if part of the story is a lie, maybe all of it is a lie.
ME: It sounds like the truth. That’s good enough for me.
Which, in a way, is exactly how I feel about this narrative. If it sounds like the truth, that’s good enough for me. You go check the records, I’m too busy, and I’m too blind. I haven’t the faintest inkling whether June of 1901 was the wettest June on record or the sunniest. When you find out, let me know — though frankly, I don’t give a damn, If you’re willing to compromise, I’ll say it was the cloudiest June on record, how’s that? The floor of the subway tunnel was covered with mist, okay? The Spanish-American War took place in 1794, Pope John was a Protestant, we got out of Vietnam with honor, astronauts are lyric poets, and my mother is a whore. Who cares? The truth I’m trying to deliver has nothing to do with careful research meticulously sandwiched into a work of fiction to give it verisimilitude or clinical verity. The only truth I’m trying to convey is this: it’s a lie. All of it.
That’s the tragedy.
In contrast to the miserably wet June that year, the beginning of July was sunny and hot. The Fourth fell on a Thursday. Today, this would mean a four-day weekend, but in 1901, when men were working a six-day week, Independence Day was only a one-day respite from the almost daily grind. Francesco had been in America for the celebration of Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays (which meant nothing to him) and for Easter (which he had spent in the hospital recuperating from Halloran’s attack). The Fourth was special to him only in that it promised widespread celebrations on the order of La Festa di San Maurizio in Fiormonte.
One of those celebrations was sponsored by the local Republican Club, and was announced in the newspapers (including Il Progresso, the Italian-language newspaper read by all literate Italians in the ghetto) as:
Francesco awakened on the morning of the glorious Fourth to the sounds of the Agnelli children arguing in the room next door. He quickly checked under his pillow to make sure his shoes had not been spirited away and pissed into, and then glanced sleepily at the clock on the chair beside his bed. This was to be the most important day of his life, but he did not yet know it, nor would he come to know it for a long, long while.
I must get out, he thought, I must go back. He thought that every morning and every night, and yet he continued to work on the subway, and he continued to return to this dreary room in the apartment of the iceman and his family. There seemed little reason for Francesco to remain in America. He was more heavily in debt now than he had been on the day he’d arrived, and seriously doubted that he could ever repay all the money Bardoni had advanced to him. The weekly bite on his pay check had drastically reduced the amount of money he could send home to Fiormonte each week. He was weary most of the time; his bones ached from the labor he performed, his mind reeled from the babble of sound assaulting him most of his waking day. And now that Pino had defected, now that Pino had announced his intention to marry Angelina Trachetti and stay here in this barbaric land, where was there any sense in persisting? Was a man to be governed by his stomach alone? He would go back to Italy, he would return home. But each time he thought of returning, he was faced with new and seemingly insurmountable problems: where would he get the money for the return passage? Bardoni again? And how would the family survive in Fiormonte (where conditions were even « worse now) if he returned? Whatever pittance he sent them from America was more than he could earn at home. Ah, miseria, he thought, and got out of bed, and put on his pants and his shirt.
The oldest of the Agnelli children, who had been picking up English in the streets, said, “Hello, cock-sucker,” as Francesco went through the room with his shoes under his arm. The door at the end of that room led to the bedroom of the paterfamilias and his wife, Luisa. Francesco eased the door open gently. The iceman had already gone to work, no rest for the weary on this Fourth of July, with picnics and celebrations all over the vicinanza. Luisa was alone in the bedroom, asleep in the double bed, one arm curled behind her head, hairy armpit showing. The sheet was tangled around her ankles; her purple-tipped boobs and dense black crotch were fully exposed. For a wild and frightening moment, Francesco considered hopping into the rumpled bed with her, as the iceman had feared he would do all along. The room stank of sweat and semen and cunt; Giovanni had undoubtedly enjoyed ’na bella chiavata before heading out to cool the beer and soda pop of half the neighborhood. Francesco stood at the foot of the bed and silently contemplated Luisa’s breasts and crotch. She turned in her sleep, thighs opening to reveal a secret pink slit that seemed to wink lasciviously. Is she awake? he suddenly wondered. Is she flashing her pussy in invitation? And was surprised to discover he had an erection. He hurried out of the room. If Luisa was beginning to look good to him, it was most certainly time to go back to Italy. But how? Ah, miseria, he thought again, and went into the kitchen, and sat on the floor, and put on his shoes.
The kitchen was hung with the iceman’s blue work shirts, drying on a clothesline stretching from the wall behind the wood stove to the wall across the room, behind the washtub. It was in this tub that the family washed their clothes and also themselves, though not with the same frequency. A makeshift wooden cabinet had been constructed around the tub, serving as a countertop for scrub brushes and yellow laundry soap, drinking glasses, a blue enamel basin speckled with white. There were no toothbrushes; neither the Agnelli family nor Francesco had ever learned about brushing their teeth. A single brass faucet poured cold water into the tub, the plumbing exposed and bracketed to the wall. Wired to the cold-water pipe was a small mirror with a white wooden frame. A gas jet on the wall near the tub, one of four in the room, provided artificial illumination when it was needed. It was not needed on this bright July morning; sunshine was streaming through the two curtainless windows that opened on the backyard of the tenement. (I know every inch of that apartment. When I was growing up in Harlem, twenty-five years later, my grandfather lived in a similar railroad flat. Except for the by-then defunct gas fixtures, it had not changed a hell of a lot.) Francesco went out into the hallway to the toilet tucked between the two apartments on the floor, and shared by the Agnelli family and the people next door. Because of his erection, he urinated partially on the wall, partially on the toilet seat, partially on the floor, and then carefully wiped up wall, seat, and floor with a page of Il Progresso, which he ripped from a nail on the door. He pulled the chain on the flush box suspended above the toilet, stared emptily and gloomily into the bowl for several seconds, his hand still on the chain pull, and then went back into the Agnelli kitchen.