“Vhere is det you from?” Kasha asked.
“Fiormonte. Attsa cloze by Napoli.”
“Whatsa you home place?” Pino asked Natalia, and she giggled.
In such a manner did they manage to communicate, or to believe they were communicating, all evening long. The girls would not go to the restaurant that had been recommended to Pino because it was not kosher. (It suddenly occurs to me that the word “kosher” may have stuck in my grandfather’s head, causing him to have recalled incorrectly the name of the girl who was his date. Every time I eat kasha knishes, I think of her. I wonder if she’s still alive, I wonder what she’d have thought of Rebecca — my grandfather was wild about Rebecca — and I wonder what her real name was. Yes, but what’s your real name, Ike?) My grandfather ate blintzes for the first time in his life that night — “Wassa like cannelloni, you know, Ignazio?” — and learned all about the milchedig and flayshedig, though I can’t imagine how Kasha could possibly have explained the Jewish dietary laws in her broken tongue, or how he could have understood them with his tin ear. At ten o’clock, they took the girls home.
“Denks,” Kasha said. “Ve hed a nize time.”
“Denks,” Natalia said, and giggled.
“Buona notte,” Pino said.
Francesco bowed from the waist, and said, “I’m enjoy verra much.”
On Monday morning, in the tunnel he was digging under Manhattan, he almost got killed.
There were four thousand Italians like my grandfather working on the New York subway. For the most part, they replaced the Irish and Polish immigrants, who had arrived years before and who were moving up to better jobs. But some of those earlier immigrants stayed on as laborers, either because they were indifferent to the possibilities of a fuller life in America, or simply because they were unintelligent, lazy, or incompetent. With characteristic territorial possessiveness, though, they resented the Italians coming in to do “their” jobs, suspecting the dagos of working for cheaper wages (which they were not), and fearful they’d eventually replace them entirely. The situation then was not unlike the white-black contretemps today. It always gets down to bread and the size of a man’s cock. The Italians were stealing jobs, and were reputed to be great lovers besides. (You couldn’t prove that by my grandfather, who was still a virgin at the age of twenty.) The Poles and Irishmen who worked side by side with these smelly wops were fearful, resentful, suspicious, and prejudiced. The wops were clannish, spoke an incomprehensible language, brought strange food to work in their lunch-boxes, laughed at private jokes, and even, for Christ’s sake, sang while they worked! The tunnel itself compounded the volatile nature of the mix.
I have since learned that the building of the New York subways utilized a method known as “cut and cover,” meaning that first a trench was dug, and wooden plankings were laid down over it while the men continued to work belowground. But my grandfather’s description of the tunnel made it sound like a mine shaft deep in the bowels of the earth (which it most certainly wasn’t), and it is his description that lingers in my mind. Despite the facts, then — the subway’s deepest point is 180 feet below the surface, at 191st Street, and my grandfather never got that far uptown — I shall describe that hole in the ground as it appeared to him, and as he subsequently described it to me.
The mud was sometimes knee deep, the ceiling of the vault dripping, the shoring timbers in constant creaking danger of collapse, the noise level shattering, jackhammers and drills pounding and stuttering, steel carts rumbling on rickety makeshift tracks, hauling dirt dearly paid for shovelful by shovelful, laborers sweating and coughing and belching and farting, foremen shouting orders in the lamplit gloom, half a dozen different languages and dialects creating a harsher din than that of a thousand picks striking sparks from granite. There were many fistfights, sometimes three and four a day, that might not have occurred had the men been working aboveground in the bright sunshine. But the tunnel was a tight, crowded, restricting place, and a closed crowd is a dangerous crowd because it cannot explode outward and can only turn upon itself.
Francesco was thinking only of home when it happened.
He was thinking that in April the wintry muddy waters of the Ofanto in the valley below rushed clear and sweet with torrents from the mountaintops. The banks rolling gently to the riverside would be covered with buttercups and violets, lavender and...
The voice that sounded beside him was intrusive. It brought him back to the dark reality of the tunnel; it made him conscious of the pick handle irritating the fresh blisters on his palms; it drowned the murmur of the river, allowed the reverberating noise of the tunnel to come crashing in again. The voice was Irish. I shall make no attempt (see, Rebecca?) to try for the brogue, or to counterfeit Francesco’s labored English. In the end, the men understood each other. On a level more basic than language, they finally understood each other.
“What are you doing there?” the Irishman said.
“I’m working,” Francesco answered.
“You know what I’m talking about, you fucking dago. What are you doing there with my pick?”
“This is not your pick.”
He looks at the pick. It is surely his own pick. The handle is stained with mud and sweat, and the water from his blisters, and the blood from his hands. It is his pick. It is not the Irishman’s.
“It is my pick.”
Actually, the argument is academic. It is neither Francesco’s pick nor the Irishman’s. The pick belongs to the Belmont-McDonald syndicate, the subway’s contractors. Each morning the workmen’s tools are issued to them, and each night they must be returned. They are not debating actual possession, they are merely attempting to ascertain which of them has the right to work with this tool, this pick, this day. But the pick has not been out of Francesco’s hands since seven o’clock this morning, he knows it is the one he has been working with all day long. So what is the matter with this Irishman? Is he crazy?
“It’s your pick, is it, dummy? And what are those initials then on it?”
He does not understand the word “initials.” What is initials? He looks at the handle of the pick again.
“I don’t understand.”
“No capish, huh, dago? Give me the pick.”
Francesco hands the pick to the Irishman unresistingly. He knows there has been some misunderstanding here, and he feels certain it will be cleared up the moment the Irishman can feel the pick in his own two hands. He watches as the Irishman carefully examines the handle of the pick, reddish-blond hairs curling on the back of each thick finger, hair running from the knuckles to the wrists, turns the handle over and over again in his hands, searching, eyes squinched, what is he looking for, this man? The eyes are blue. They glance up momentarily from the scrutiny of the pick, look directly into Francesco’s eyes, piercingly and accusingly, and then wrinkle in something resembling humorous response, but not quite, the mouth echoing the expression, the lips thinly pulling back, no teeth revealed, a narrow smile of eyes and mouth that strikes sudden terror into Francesco’s heart. He knows now that there will be trouble. The man is twice his size. He contemplates kicking him in the groin immediately, here and now, this instant, strike first and at once — before it is too late.
The Irishman is taking a knife from his pocket.
The lamps flicker on the steel blade as he pulls it with his fingernails from the narrow trench in the bone handle. The blade is perhaps four inches long, honed razor sharp, glittering with pinprick points of reflected light. Francesco is certain the Irishman intends to stab him, but he does not know why. Is it because of “initials”? Unconsciously, he backs against the wall of the tunnel. Muddy water drips from above onto his head and shoulders. He feels naked. He feels the way he felt at Ellis Island when the doctor poked his finger into his rectum, rubber glove slippery with jelly. He is very afraid he will soil himself. The Irishman squats on his haunches, laying the pick across his knees, tilting the handle toward the light. With the blade of the knife, he scrapes an area free of caked mud, up near the head of the handle, where the curved metal bar is fitted snugly onto it. Then, slowly and deliberately, he begins digging into the wood with the tip of the knife. Francesco cannot yet fathom what he is doing. His fear has dissipated somewhat, he is beginning to realize he was wrong about the Irishman’s intent; he does not plan to cut him. But what is he doing to the handle of the pick?