What he’s got in the back of the store, it’s this small room with this folding bed against one wall, and over the bed he’s got pictures hung up of Mary Pickford and the two Gish sisters, and that lady who was in Charity, I forget her name, he’s got their pictures tacked to the wall. And along the back wall, he’s got these tubs where he washes the shirts and things, and he’s got an ironing board set up where he does the ironing, and them shirts and things are piled on the floor, the dirty shirts. The ones he’s already washed he’s got on a table like the one Aunt Bianca has in her kitchen, with a white enamel top, he’s got the clean stuff on that, ready to be ironed. And on the other wall, across from where the bed was, he’s got shelves with soap on them, and also boxes of lichee nuts, and food and tea and stuff, and a little wooden icebox and one of them small gas stoves like the one Grandpa used to have near the toilet in the tailor shop, where he used to make coffee on it before he got that new one. Like that. What he did was say I should sit on the bed, so I sat down and looked at the pictures he had tacked on the wall — oh, and there was also a Chinese calendar with a picture of a Chinese lady on it and Chinese writing on it, even the days were written in Chinese.
He went to the shelves on the other side of the % room, and he said what was my name, and I told him it was Stella Di Lorenzo, and he said Stella, Stella, saying it over to himself like it was a new English word he wanted to learn instead of somebody’s name. He had his back to me all this time, he was looking around the shelves there for I guess a bandage because what he brought over to the bed was it must have been an old sheet, I think it was an old sheet that maybe got ripped when he was washing it, that must’ve been what. So he stood in front of the bed and he tore the sheet up into strips, and he said how did I hurt myself and I said I was chewing my nails in the movies and he said okay, he was going to fix my finger up and then he would get me some lichee nuts. I was sweating, it was very hot back there. I said what a hot day it was, and how it must be great on a day like this to work in the ice station like Mr. Agnelli does, where he’s got all that ice stacked up in blocks, you know, in the icehouse, and if he feels like it he can go in there and hide with all the ice and nobody’d know where he was or nothing. Charlie just nodded sort of dumb, I don’t think he understood anything I was saying. He sat alongside me on the bed and took my finger in his hand and went tch-tch, you know, shaking his head and looking at where it was cut.
He didn’t do anything, not then, he just wrapped up the finger and then he tore the bandage, like up the middle, and wrapped the ends around my finger and tied a knot, and then he smiled and said okay, Stella? and I said yeah, that’s nice, Charlie, thank you very much, and he said I was a brave little girl, and he went to get the lichee nuts. Then he came back with this whole box of them, with a picture of a Chinese girl on the cover, and he opened the box and told me to go ahead and take as many as I liked, and he sat down on the bed again next to me. And he said he had a little daughter like me back in Canting or wherever, I don’t know, it was some Chinese name, I guess it’s a town. And he asked me did I go to school, and he didn’t do nothing, not yet, he just said did I like lichee nuts, and he said his daughter liked lichee nuts and in China you could also eat them fresh, that they were delicious fresh, and I said well, I like them this way, too, and he said how old are you, Stella?
I told him I was eleven going on twelve, I would be twelve in October, and he said I was a big girl for my age, that in China the girls are smaller, but that in China when a girl was twelve years old, she was already married, that his wife had wrote to him last week saying she thought his daughter would be getting married soon. He was telling me all this in his funny way of talking, I could hardly understand anything he said, I think he must have been smoking dope because he really had this very stupid look on his face, I can’t describe it, it was just stupid-looking. So I said wouldn’t he like to have some of the lichee nuts, too, and he said no, he didn’t care for none and then he put his hand on my knee and said I was a nice little girl. I didn’t think it was nothing, his putting his hand on my knee, because he had a little girl my own age back home in China, and this wasn’t like a stranger or nothing, this was Charlie in his shop, even though I know they smoke a lot of dope. I didn’t think nothing of it until he put his hand under my skirt, and then I tried to get up off the bed, and slipped and fell, and he picked me up off the floor, and said shhh, shhh, don’t be afraid, and put me on the bed and put his hand on my eyes, just put his hand on my eyes and when I looked again he had no pants on and I saw his heinie and everything and I got scared I would have a baby like Angelina, so I ran out of there and came upstairs and when Mama found me crying in the toilet and wanted to know what happened I couldn’t tell her but I feel better now.
Stella Di Palermo, wife of Jimmy Di Palermo, mother of Anthony and Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo, talking to her youngest son in the year 1939 while the radio is telling of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Iggie is at the kitchen table eating chocolate pudding with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. He is thirteen years old. His older brother is fifteen and has not yet come home from school — Evander Childs on Gun Hill Road. In 1942, Tony will be drafted into the Army. In 1943, he will be killed in Italy. Stella is thirty-seven years old, a bit thick in the middle, a few gray streaks already beginning to show in her brown hair. (Her father’s hair has been completely white since 1932). She is at the sink, washing red peppers which she will then roast over the open gas jet, later scraping off the black to produce miraculously succulent slices which she will serve cold with a little oil and garlic. For some reason, she has begun talking about that July Saturday in the year 1914. Perhaps the broadcast of Hitler’s invasion has stimulated it. Iggie hardly listens to her. The war news is very exciting. He visualizes tanks and armored cars rumbling across the Polish landscape.
STELLA: They didn’t believe me, none of them. They were my own family except for my father’s friend Pino. He was there, too, and my grandfather, may he rest in peace, and I told them what happened with that lousy Chinaman downstairs in his shop, and none of them believed me. Am I a liar or something, have I ever lied to you, Iggie? That they shouldn’t believe me? My own family, and I was telling them what that man did to me, and I could see my mother didn’t believe it — well, she was a lady, you know, I guess she never dreamt in her entire life that anything like that could happen. That was for movies and books, you know, some Chinese dope fiend fooling around with her daughter. My grandfather yelled at her in Italian — you never met him, Iggie, he died before you were born, may he rest in peace. I was his darling, he liked me better than any of the other kids, even Cristina who was very pretty when she was a girl; it was my grandfather who took up for me. He said to my mother in Italian, what do you think she’s doing, making this whole thing up? She just came from downstairs, you found her crying in the toilet, you think she could invent a thing like this? My mother said Charlie seems like such a nice man, I can’t believe he would do something like this, and my father said Stella, are you sure you’re telling us the truth? You didn’t make this up, did you, because this is very serious.