The cab lurched off, then came to a quick, nauseating stop, since there was nowhere to go. Frank fell silent, and Pigeon Tony returned to the Total Cab Experience as Judy looked out the window. The driver took a left, going south on one of the number streets, and she watched as they left rush hour behind and the scenery changed. The view going crosstown on the number street was different from that on Broad Street, which was a wide, mainly commercial artery, and the single lane south afforded Judy a perspective of the city she hadn’t seen before.
Frank stayed quiet, Pigeon Tony looked drowsy, and the shops and businesses of Center City gave way to rowhouses. Those near the business district were four stories of colonial vintage, their mullioned windows bubbled with old glass, their bricks a soft melon color with a refined white line of mortar. The cab rattled along a few blocks south, passing gentrified houses on Rodman and Bainbridge Streets, which showed off new, modern picture windows and repointed brick. In a few short blocks, only three dollars on the meter, they were into South Philly, where the row-houses lost their top story.
Judy found it apt, somehow. The houses here were stripped-down, no-frills, working-class, but each was different in its own way. Though they all had a front door and single window on the first floor, with two windows on the second story like wide-open, honest eyes, and each façade had been lovingly customized by the homeowner. Some had plastic awnings, corrugated in orange and green, many adorned with the family’s initials, a script D or C. Some rowhouses sported flagstone stoops, some were of old-fashioned marble, and many were made of brick. Here and there wrought-iron railings had been added, and she saw one railing painted bright red to match the exterior molding. It struck Judy that these differences, whether her taste or not, contrasted with the sameness she had seen in the housing developments, strip malls, and Gap stores she’d driven past earlier the same day. It seemed so long ago now. She felt fatigue creep though her bones, and she still had so much to do.
It grew quiet in the cab except for the churning of the old meter, and Judy kept looking out the window as the sun dipped behind the buildings, leaving the sky a darker haze of clay-orange. The waning light filtered onto the rowhouses, emphasizing the redness of the brick in some and the rust-orange of others, setting the sandstone-hued brick, thin with skinny mortar lines, glowing in the twilight. Judy, who had been painting in oils for most of her adult life, saw the bricks as a gritty mosaic of amber, titian, and apricot, all the more beautiful because they housed people, and families, within.
The cab carried them along, and on each corner of South Philly would be a store, a grocery, a beauty parlor, bakery, a tavern, and all of them named after people. Sam and El’s. Juno’s. Yolanda’s. Esposito’s. There wasn’t a chain store of any type in sight. The names telegraphed the ethnicity of the owner and, by extension, of the neighborhood. Judy took note that the corner stores grew solidly more Italian as they got closer to Pigeon Tony’s house. Only two blocks away she began to feel a weight on her right arm and looked over.
It was her client, dozing on her shoulder, and he had just begun to snore, soft as a puppy.
BOOK TWO
With arms provided by the Agrarian Association or by some regimental stores, the blackshirts would ride to their destination in lorries. When they arrived they began by beating up any passer-by who did not take off his hat to the colours, or who was wearing a red tie, handkerchief, or shirt. If anyone protested or tried to defend himself, if a fascist was roughly treated or wounded, the “punishment” was intensified. They would rush to the buildings and . . . break down the doors, hurl furniture, books, or stores into the street, pour petrol over them, and in a few moments there would be a blaze. Anyone found on the premises would be severely beaten or killed. . . .
—ROSSI, The Rise of Italian Fascism (1983)
At the beginning of December, it is time to mate the birds. . . . All cocks and hens should be allowed to select their own mates. A widowhood cock or hen performs better when they are permitted to choose their mate. Isn’t a man or woman happier if they select their partner than those that are forced into “shotgun” marriages, etc.?
It is a fact that a cock or a hen will perform well in the races for many years. But if one of the pair is lost, the remaining bird never seems to do as well as it did with the old mate.
—JOSEPH ROTONDO, Rotondo on Racing Pigeons (1987)
Chapter 10
As he dozed, Pigeon Tony was remembering the first day he met his wife. He did not know the day exactly—he was never a precise man, but he did know the year because he wasn’t stupid either. He was seventeen years old, and the year was 1937. It was a Friday night, in the early spring, in May.
Pigeon Tony, then merely Tony Lucia, was living in the house of his father and mother, in a village outside the city of Veramo, in the mountainous Abruzzo province of Italy. Tony worked hard, helping his father in their olive groves and with the pigeons, spending all his time in the company of birds and old men, having no time, or finding no time, for the frivolities that consumed others. That he was shy was his own secret, or so he believed. That he was also undesirable was something he knew anybody could see.
Tony Lucia was little and skinny, too skinny, his mother said all the time, with his legs like lengths of twine with a knot where the knee would be. His wrists were as fine as a child’s. No matter what Tony ate, he never got heavier. No matter what Tony lifted, pulled, or carried, his arm muscles grew no bigger. He had flat feet, which hurt if he walked too far for too long. But that he was strong was beyond doubt; he was the only child of the Lucia family—his mother could bear no more—yet Tony could handle the chores of ten sons, and did.
When he first met his wife, he was doing one of these chores, hauling their pigeons by cart to a shipping for the race on Saturday. It would be a weekend of good flying weather, starting with a warm evening, now on the edge of darkness. Tomorrow would be the first race of the old bird season, and it had taken the day to travel north from Veramo to the city of Mascoli in the Marche province, where the birds would be released, the trip made slower because Tony was on his bad feet. Even so, out of kindness he led rather than drove their pony, an overweight, sway-backed brown creature with a brushy black mane and stiffness in his right hind. The beast pulled the cart gamely, and in back of the cart the pigeons cooed, called, and beat their wings in their wooden cages, sending pinfeathers into the air, transforming the assembly into a swirling cloud of dust.
The pigeons knew they were being shipped to race and anticipated the event as much as they felt fresh despair at having left their mates behind. The Lucias used the widowhood method of racing, leaving the captive hen at the loft, so that the cocks felt eager to fly home faster and so were agitated until they were finally released to be on their way. It didn’t help that the dirt road was a rocky one, winding through the hills of the region, and the pigeon cages, piled five on top of one another and tied up with twine, jostled right and left. The birds felt unstable in the creaky cart with the weary pony yanking them along, and Tony couldn’t blame them for that.
They all plodded ahead, with Tony barely noticing the terrain, even though he had never been in Marche before on his own. Abruzzo, on Marche’s southern border, was considered by the Marchegiani to be far less sophisticated than their province. And for their part, the Abruzzese had a popular saying: “It is better to have a dead man in your house than a Marchegiani at your door,” because the men of Marche had been used as tax collectors by the Romans, and so were universally hated.