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.
Stella Di Lorenzo, daughter to Francesco and Tess, aged eleven years, nine months, and sixteen days, speaking of the event to her parents, and her grandfather, and Pino Battatore, and unknowingly and inadvertently to her brother Luke, who is listening in the bedroom adjacent to the kitchen.
STELLA: I went in the laundry for lichee nuts. He has these lichee nuts he keeps on the counter, and when I bring in the shirts, or I go to pick up something, he always says take, and I grab a handful. That’s why I went in the shop, because all of a sudden, I was sitting on the stoop watching Cristina and the girls, and I got an urge for some lichee nuts and I knew Charlie would give me some because he always gives me some when I go in there. Also, my hand was bleeding, it started bleeding in the movies when I was biting my nails, and, I figured maybe Charlie had a bandage he could put on it or something. I didn’t come to the tailor shop because I didn’t want to bother Grandpa or you, Papa, and I didn’t want to get blood on any of the clothes. I know how fussy Mama is about touching any of the clothes in the shop.
He looked kind of strange when he came out of the back. I think maybe he was smoking dope, they smoke dope a lot. His thing was open, his shirt, that silk Chinese thing he wears. The four top buttons were open. He said what did I want, and I told him did he have some lichee nuts? There wasn’t none on the counter, they’re usually on the counter. So he said no lichee nuts today, and I showed him that my hand was bleeding and did he have something I could wrap around it, and he said come in the back. I didn’t want to go in the back, but it was really bleeding, right near the cuticle. Also, I figured he really did have lichee nuts, they were in the back someplace, he once gave Mama a whole box of them when Uncle Joe was here last Christmas and she brought in a pile of his shirts. So I followed him through the curtain he’s got hanging behind the counter, and he told me to sit down he’d see if he had something for my finger.