Bardoni had found lodgings for Pino with a bachelor who had been in America for only six months. Francesco was to live with Mr. and Mrs. Agnelli and their three children, in the back room of their apartment, for which he was to pay two dollars and fifty cents a week. He did not know at the time, and Bardoni did not tell him, that a dollar of what he paid was going directly into Bardoni’s pocket, or that the total monthly rent on the apartment was only seven dollars. Bardoni was a countryman, true, but he was not above collecting his rightful tithe, and Agnelli showed no open aversion to living rent-free at the expense of Francesco Di Lorenzo (who, anyway, was trying to fuck his wife, or so went his rationalization).
Ugly Luisa’s only saving graces were a pair of large, purple-nippled breasts, one or the other of which she whipped out of her dress whenever her newborn son gave the slightest sign of needing sustenance or pacification. She was being neither seductive nor exhibitionistic. It was not unusual for the women of the neighborhood to nurse their children on trolley cars, or rocking on the stoops of their buildings, or chatting in their kitchens with cousins or aunts or goombahs or goomahs, junior sucking merrily away while the peaches were dipped in the wine. Luisa watched little Salvatore (for that was the darling’s name, Salvatore, the Savior) as though he might explode into the kitchen if she did not stick an enormous boob into his mouth the moment he opened it. With alarming alacrity and frequency, she would slip one hand into the yoke neck of her dress, yank out a breast, and shove its nipple into the little Savior’s puckered mouth. Between her infant and her husband, Luisa was kept busy; Giovanni had the habit of coming home from the ice station to compromise his lovely wife at the most unexpected hours, grabbing her from behind, both hands clutching at those prized beauties, her brewer’s-horse ass wriggling against him in protest. There seems to have been some question as to who was doing exactly what to whom. Was my grandfather truly trying to get Luisa in the hay (his eyes were weak, but certainly not that weak) or was Giovanni trying to entice Francesco into making an open move, which he could then revenge in the Sicilian manner, by cutting off Francesco’s balls and his own guilt-ridden, rent-free existence into the bargain?
Who knows?
My grandfather resisted all temptations. He was too busy down in the subway. He would refer to the Interborough Rapid Transit in later years as “my subway.” Until I was ten years old, I actually believed he owned the goddamn thing, and wondered why I was not allowed to ride it without paying a fare. Now that I am forty-eight, I realize it was his subway. He built it. Or at least that part of it between the Brooklyn Bridge and Fifty-ninth Street. At the time, he felt no pride in its construction. He was digging a tunnel through the earth with no conception of where that tunnel would eventually lead. Even a mole, as blind as I, has a sense of direction; Francesco had none. He knew that a train would eventually run through this muddy hole, but he had never been farther uptown than 125th Street, nor farther downtown than City Hall Park, where he was dropped into the bowels of Manhattan each morning. West Farms, Bowling Green, Borough Hall, Atlantic Avenue, distant rumored destinations of the underground octopus, were names that meant nothing to him. Francesco blindly poked his shovel and his pick into the dripping earth, fearful that the city’s streets would fall in upon him, workman’s boots firmly planted in ankle-deep mud, which was at least something he knew from the old country. Hearing but only vaguely understanding the words of the Irish foreman, unable to answer him in his own tongue, he was rendered deaf and dumb as well, laboring at a muscle-wrenching job that made no sense except for the weekly pay check of fourteen dollars, more than Bardoni had promised but whittled down to ten dollars a week after repayment of the cost of passage, and Bardoni’s commission, and Bardoni’s “incidental expenses,” never satisfactorily defined. From that remaining ten dollars, Francesco paid two dollars and fifty cents a week to the iceman, sent five dollars home, and kept two-fifty for himself — which was not bad in the year 1901, when a good roast beef dinner with buttered beets and mashed potatoes, chocolate layer cake and coffee cost no more than thirty-five cents.
Pino was less fortunate, and at the same time more fortunate. Because of his size, Bardoni felt certain Pino would be turned down for employment on the newly begun subway, and he was right. So he was sent to work in the garment district, where he earned seven dollars less per week than did Francesco, but where he worked aboveground and was able to see New York’s spring that April when it broke with a belated delicacy that took his breath away. It was Pino who arranged for their first date with two “American” girls who worked downtown with him on Thirty-fifth and Broadway.
All that suckling in the Agnelli household, all those surprise visits by the clutching iceman must have stoked something of the old Mediterranean fire in Francesco’s youthful loins, but what was one to do in a strange land where the only contacts were Italians with virgin daughters, and where the girls he saw on his rare excursions outside the ghetto spoke a language he barely understood? When Pino told him he had arranged the date, Francesco could not believe him.
“But what?” he said. “With two American girls? Americans?”
“Yes, Americans,” Pino said, and that quick toothy smile flashed conspiratorially. They were both remembering Bardoni’s story of the keying in Naples, and anticipating a similar adventure; it was common knowledge that American girls fucked like rabbits.
“And they said yes?” Francesco asked incredulously.
“Yes, of course they said yes. Would I be telling you about them if they said no? Saturday night. Eight o’clock. They live together on Twelfth Street.”
“Alone?” Francesco asked. He could not believe his ears.
“Alone,” Pino affirmed, and nodded. The nod promised galaxies.
“Do they speak Italian?” Francesco asked.
“No. But we speak English, non è vero?”
They were not speaking English on that Harlem rooftop where pigeons fluttered overhead in the April dusk; they never spoke English when they were alone together. They had, however, begun to feel their way around the language since their arrival, if only because they needed it to survive. Only the other day, underground, someone had shouted a command at Francesco, and had he hesitated an instant longer in obeying it, had there been the slightest gap between the shouted English warning and his immediate understanding of it, his head would have been crushed by a falling timber. I can only judge what my grandfather’s English was like in 1901 by what it was like in later years, after I arrived on the scene. What it was like was atrocious, even though my grandmother had been born in this country, and probably worked hard trying to teach him. But English to him, before he met Teresa Giamboglio, was only a temporary necessity. He was going back as soon as he’d saved enough money. A year was what he’d promised himself. A year was a long enough time for a man to burrow his way through the stinking earth. A year without the sun was a long enough time.