“But my family will be here,” Pino had said to him long ago, and he remembered those words now, and realized that his family, the family of Francesco Di Lorenzo, was here. There was no family in Fiormonte; his mother and father were dead, Maria was dead, Emilia had left for Torino with her husband, who hoped to find work in the steel mills. The family was here. He had a beautiful, gentle wife whom he loved and cherished, and for whom he would work hard all the days of his life; he had a seventeen-year-old daughter who was engaged to be married; and a twenty-year-old daughter who was sure to marry soon herself, once she found the right boy, she was fussy, Stella, he liked that about her, she was not easy to please, his Stella, his star; and Domenico, such a smart boy, studying so hard at a very difficult high school in the Bronx, a ninety average, that was very good, they said, a ninety; and Luca, so tall, so gentle, who played the violin and piano beautifully, just like his cousin Rodolfo in Fiormonte... But no, Rodolfo had been killed in the war, Rodolfo was dead. The family was here.
Fiormonte had been the family, but now the family was here.
He sat up and looked at Pino, and Pino abruptly stopped singing.
“È qui,” he said to his friend. “La famiglia è qui.”
“Cosa?” Pino asked.
Francesco watched his daughter as she went to the bandstand and began talking to the drummer, who kept playing all the while she chatted and smiled at him. On the dance floor, his other daughter, his angel Cristina, danced in the arms of a man who not ten minutes before had called him “Papa.” Francesco was forty-two years old. For the longest time he had been twenty-four, and had dreamed of going home. He was now forty-two, and knew he would never go home again, never return to Italy, never.
The family was here. He was the head of the family, and the family was here. Home was here.
He suddenly covered Pino’s hand with his own and squeezed it very hard.
II
They stood on line outside the free employment agency, four thousand men every day of the week, six thousand on Mondays, when presumably the chances of finding work were higher. There was not much talking on the line. Most of the men knew they would not get a job, but they were still trying, their hopelessness was not yet total. They waited in the bitter cold for two hours, sometimes three, and then a thousand of them were led inside, following each other up the long flight of steps to the huge open room with desks and telephones and men with megaphones. They filled out forms — name, address, age, education, religion, color. And then they waited for the phones to ring. A ringing phone meant a job offer. One of the megaphone men would answer a phone, and then call out a job — “Man needed to shovel snow, forty cents an hour” — and there would be a rush to the desk, and the job-seekers would be warned again to stay in line behind the rope, and another phone would ring, and a megaphone man would announce, “Skilled mechanic, seventy-five cents an hour, might be a full day’s work,” and another rush to the desk, and another warning. Each of the men knew if he didn’t get a job in the hour allotted to him upstairs, he would have to leave and come back the next day, and fill out the form again, and wait another sixty minutes for that phone to ring. If nothing came during that length of time, they would all be herded out of the big room again, and another thousand men who’d been waiting on line outside the building would be led upstairs to listen for those ringing telephones that meant someone had a job offer for them. Two hundred, three hundred men found temporary work each day. Most found nothing. They would wander over to the park afterward, and sit on benches and stare at their shoes. It was better than going home.
I was blind, and I did not see those long lines’ outside the employment bureaus and the soup kitchens. I did not know that men in shabby overcoats and caps stood on street corners selling apples for five cents apiece. I did not see the mob of depositors outside the bank on 116th Street, clamoring to withdraw lifelong savings, storming the big brass doors after they were closed. My grandmother Tess lost three thousand dollars when they shut down that bank. The Hooverville shacks that sprang up overnight along the shores of the Hudson were described to me by my mother, but I never saw them. Dust storms and floods, natural disasters that perversely aggravated the nation’s miseries, were something I heard about only on the radio or in the Movietone newsreels whenever my mother took me to the pictures, but I could neither see nor visualize events of such enormity. An angry mob of unemployed veterans marching on Washington and demanding World War I bonuses was a spectacle I could not have conjured in my wildest imaginings.
This was the winter of our despair, but I did not realize it. I was part of something far more exciting.
I was in on the creation of a myth.
In 1932, a month short of my sixth birthday, I began attending the Blind School, as it was called by fourteen of its pupils, including me. Actually, it was a standard New York City elementary school, except that it also had a class of fourteen blind kids. The school I should have gone to, had I been able to see, was P.S. 80 on 120th Street near First Avenue. But P.S. 80, like most of the other schools in the city, simply wasn’t equipped to teach the sightless, and so we were bused from surrounding neighborhoods to 104th Street and Third Avenue, where a classroom with a specially trained teacher and suitable equipment had been set up in the old brick building there (since torn down, I understand). We rarely had contact with the sighted kids in the school, except for joint activities like assembly programs and school plays. For the most part, the fourteen of us were isolated in a virtual one-room schoolhouse, with the ages of the pupils ranging from five to eleven. Miss Goodbody taught all our subjects, and referred to us aloud all the time as “My dear little darlings.” This was not condescending; she adored children, and all the kids at the school, sighted or blind, were her dear little darlings. But we referred to ourselves as “little blind bastards.” Some of us were less blind than others, of course, but none of us could see worth a damn, and the appellation seemed appropriate — even if it did try to disguise self-pity with arrogance.
We were cruel to each other sometimes.
We were blind, but we were children.
Despite the loving care of Miss Goodbody, we remained convinced that we were misfits, a freakish band of outsiders isolated in a classroom at the end of the hall, or being marched to assembly or play in a chattering sightless unit, the corridors around us going mysteriously still as we passed through. Unlike Orphan Annie’s countless legions, we wore the badges of our secret society without pride or passion. Little blind bastards, we were... and ashamed of it, I suppose. Ashamed because we felt if only we’d been better (Christ knows where; in the womb?), we wouldn’t have been born blind. We could not accept the possibility that our parents, those sources of sustenance, comfort, and support, had done anything to deserve the likes of us, and so we figured we ourselves were somehow to blame. And no matter how hard Miss Goodbody tried to engender a feeling of self-worth in us, we always came away with a single inescapable fact: we were blind. We were not as good as other people. We were inferior products. Why was anyone bothering with us at all? Why didn’t they simply throw us into the nearest incinerator?