He and Pino boarded the Second Avenue El at 119th Street, dressed in their Saturday-night finery, feeling very American, and immediately identifiable as grease-balls by every other passinger on the train. It was a beautiful balmy evening, the windows of the train wide open, the signs warning that fine and imprisonment would be the lot of any passenger foolish enough to try expectorating through them. Pino and Francesco sat on the cane seats side by side, each carrying identical corsages they had purchased in the flower shop on Third Avenue, each sitting stiffly in unaccustomed collar and tie, each wearing a straw boater rakishly tilted. Pino kept nervously stroking and patting his sparse mustache. Neither of the two talked very much on that trip downtown. Their heads were filled with images of dainty American underthings, petticoats, and corsets, lisle stockings and perfumed silk garters — oh, this was going to be ’na bella chiavata.
They had planned to take the girls to a restaurant suggested by the bachelor with whom Pino lived, inexpensive, with excellent food and wonderful service, where they were to be sure to ask for a waiter named Arturo, who spoke Italian. They had no plans for after dinner. Motion pictures had not yet burst upon the American scene — that was to happen two years later, with the introduction of The Great Train Robbery, an eleven-minute opus that changed the entertainment habits of the world. (I must tell you that I have heard nearly every motion picture ever made. I love the movies, and I have visualized scenes Pauline Kael has never dreamt of in her universe. I once went to the Museum of Modern Art to “see” a silent film because I wanted to imagine the whole damn thing just by listening to the piano underscoring. It was an exhilarating experience, even though the piano player must have studied under my grandfather’s Irish foreman.)
Anyway, those two horny young wops had no plans for the evening’s entertainment other than to take the ladies to dinner and to bed. The circus was in town, and they might have gone there or to any one of the vaudeville theaters along Broadway, but the boys had a different sort of entertainment in mind, and besides they didn’t want the evening to cost too much. They got off the el at Fourteenth Street, and Pino reached into his pocket and took out the slip of paper upon which one of the girls — my grandfather told me her name was Kasha, but that sounds impossible to me — had scribbled the address. More and more of the city’s gas lamps were being replaced by electric lights, especially in the downtown areas, and there was a new lamppost on the corner, and they stood under its glow, the Saturday-night city murmuring about them, a cool breeze blowing in off the river to the east, and they scrutinized Kasha’s handwriting, and agreed upon what it meant, and walked downtown to Twelfth Street, and then over to Avenue A. The ghetto they entered was not unlike the one from which they had come — except that it was Jewish. (I have often toyed with the idea that Pino and my grandfather walked past the dry-goods store owned and operated by Rebecca’s grandfather. The notion is far-fetched. But it persists, even now.)
The girls, as it turned out, did not live alone. Had Pino not automatically assumed that anyone who wasn’t Italian was automatically American, he might have realized that no Jewish girl in the city of New York in the year 1901 lived alone. The girls were cousins. Kasha and Natalia. They had been in America for six months. They lived with Kasha’s mother, father, grandfather, two brothers, a police dog who almost caused my grandfather to wet his pants, and a canary (my grandfather assumed it was a canary; the cage was covered for the night). More frightening than the police dog was Kasha’s grandfather, a stooped and wrinkled tyrant who had lived through far too many pogroms to enjoy the enemy camp in his own parlor. He kept yelling in Yiddish all the while Pino and Francesco were in the house. Kasha’s mother kept trying to calm him down, telling him in her own brand of English that this was America, this was different, they were nice boys, look how nice, see the flowers, what’s the matter with you, Papa? In reply, Papa spat twice on the extended forefinger and middle finger of his right hand. Francesco knew a curse when he saw one; not for nothing had he been born in southern Italy. Kasha’s father sat silently in a brown stuffed chair and busied himself with his Yiddish newspaper. The police dog was growling, fangs bared. Francesco’s knees were shaking. The apartment smelled of the cooking smells in the hold of the ship that had taken him across the Atlantic. In another moment, he was going to be violently ill. Kasha’s younger brothers sat anticipating the event with tiny mean smiles on their faces. Her mother saved the day, shooing the girls and their beaux out of the apartment in the nick of time. There was a strange piece of metal screwed to the doorjamb (a mezuzah, of course, though Francesco did not know what it was), and Kasha kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them to it the moment they stepped into the hallway.
Francesco had decided Kasha would be his girl for the night. He had made this decision without first consulting Pino, and he had done so because he had already abandoned whatever fantasies he may have had of his date being a blond, blue-eyed, narrow-waisted American girl. He was now willing to settle for someone who at least looked Italian. Kasha had black hair, brown eyes, and a chunky figure; he might have been back home in Fiormonte. Pino’s girl, Natalia, was tall and skinny, and had a habit of covering her mouth with her hand whenever she laughed, possibly because her teeth were bad. They must have made quite a pair that night, tiny fat Pino (he had regained a lot of weight since his arrival in America) and lanky Natalia with her hazel eyes and fight-brown hair, hand flashing up to cover her giggle whenever anyone said anything even remotely comical. I normally despise attempts at recording dialect, possibly because it translates so badly into Braille, and I promise this will be the only time I’ll try to capture the sound of immigrant speech. (“You have never kept a promise in your life,” Rebecca once said to me.) But it seems to me the conversation among those four budding young Americans on that April night would lose most of its flavor and all its poignancy if it were rendered in any way other than it must have sounded. Bear with me, bear with them; they were trying.
“Whatsa matta you gran’pa?” Francesco asked. “He’sa craze?”
“He’s ah kahker,” Kasha answered, using the Yiddish slang for “old man.”
“Caga?” Francesco asked, and tried not to laugh. Caga was Italian slang for shit.
“Kahker, kahker,” Kasha corrected. “He’s ahn alter kahker.”
Pino, who now realized Kasha was talking about shit, burst out laughing, and then immediately sobered and tried to elevate the conversation to a more dignified plane. “Theesa two boys,” he said. “They tweensa?”
“Tweensa?” Kasha asked, puzzled.
“Gemelli,” Pino said. “Tweensa. Tweensa, you know?”
“I don’t know vot it minus ‘tweensa.’ ”
“Tvintz, I tink is vot,” Natalia said, and giggled and covered her mouth.
“Oh, tvintz! No, they nut no tvintz. The vun has ett, en’ dudder has nine.”
“I gotta one sist hassa ten,” Francesco said. “An’ dada one forty.”
“Four-teen,” Pino corrected.
“Sì, quattordici. Attsa home. Dada side.”