Claudio’s dreams were all about money and doing better than Papa. He fled across the ocean to a land where no one knew him, no one expected something from him just because he was Felice Fiorillo’s oldest son—and what did he do? He bought himself a bay and a black horse and started hauling goods in a wagon, just like Papa. But before you knew it, it wasn’t just one wagon, it was four. And a stable on Fourth Avenue to house the horses he picked up, one or two at a time when he had the cash. Driving all over New York, bringing the stone, the wood, the bricks that were building the city, he met people, he talked them up, he imagined the possibilities. Anything with a dollar sign in its future, Claudio latched on to, cut himself into the deal. That was why he bought the decaying place he and Paolo named the Palace of Dreams. But Claudio was shrewd. He knew he didn’t have the patience to run it once he’d created it, so he made a three-way deal—Claudio, Paolo and Willie Rupert, who owned a brewery.
The Palace was a dump in the beginning, but a dump in the right place, close to the factories and the rail line. Claudio and Paolo cleaned it up, hauling away the debris in Claudio’s wagons, bringing in furniture and fixtures that Claudio was able to trade for—a chandelier to hang over the bar, even an old piano. Willie’s brewery provided the beer. Paolo did the books and managed the place. He was usually at the Palace every evening after he finished work as a union secretary with the IWW.
Before long, they started getting customers—the men coming off their shifts at Ward Leonard and Pioneer Watch-works, the conductors and engineers from the New Haven and Hartford Railroad, Claudio’s business associates from around the city. As the whistles blew, you could hear them.
“Stop by the Palace for a round.”
“Meet me at the Palace.”
“Comin’ to the Palace tonight, lad?”
They came for a couple of drinks and a card game, just like the men in Venticano had made their way to Auteri’s every night. They unwound, looking for a little time for themselves before they plodded home. They left some of their worries on the table; they left a few dollars, too. Soon, like everything Claudio touched, it was a success.
Chapter 12
The Blouse Factory
NOT LONG AFTER WE’D ARRIVED in Mount Vernon, Claudio got us jobs at the blouse factory over on the South Side. Claudio’s businesses were expanding, but with our three additional mouths to feed, plus his own growing family, his resentment at having to support us was mounting. It had all started with Claudio’s wife. I was out sweeping the front stoop when our ignorant neighbor across the street, Carmella Polito, leaned out her window to shake her dust mop.
“Eh, enjoy what you’re doing now, because it won’t be long,” she called.
I pretended not to hear her, but she went on anyway.
“Just you wait. That wife of your brother’s ain’t gonna stay quiet about you girls not bringing any money into the house. He’s gonna make you go to work.”
The know-it-all slammed her window shut when I continued to ignore her, but I didn’t forget what she’d said. A couple of weeks later, I walked past Claudio and Angelina’s bedroom one evening and heard them fighting. Angelina’s voice was rapid, complaining. Once or twice she said my name. Claudio was gruff and irritable. Finally, he silenced her with an explosive and exasperated, “Va bene! Okay, okay, I’ll see what I can do. But I don’t think there’s much of a market for anything those nuns taught them.” I tiptoed quickly down the hall before he opened the door.
Within a couple of days he’d made the rounds of those who owed him favors and came up with three seats behind the sewing machines on John Molloy’s shift at the blouse factory. Tilly, Pip and I were to start right away.
It was not what my mother had imagined for us when she sent us to America. Claudio’s descriptions of his success in his letters to her had ignored the tough, gritty work that had produced that success. For Claudio, our jobs at the factory were the equivalent of the pick and shovel that had been thrust into his hands when he’d first set foot on American soil.
We had trouble from the first day. I had never sewn on a machine before. Zia Pasqualina and, later, the nuns in Sorrento, had taught me fine hand-stitching, embroidery, elegant work for objects of quality. In America, they didn’t know about such things. You looked at the American girls on the streets; their clothes had none of the finer details. The rich ones, they went to the immigrant dressmakers, schooled like us in convents. But those factory-made clothes! We were sewing women’s blouses. Fifty of us in a room, the din of the machines unbearable, the dust, the unending piles of fabric arriving constantly from the cutters, the squabbles between girls from different neighborhoods, the ever-watchful eyes of Molloy. This was not the life my mother had imagined for us.
I had headaches by the end of the day. My shoulders and neck were in knots. My fingertips felt numb. Sometimes, in the afternoons, when the sun came through the dirt-caked windows and beat on my back, when the drone of the machines filled my ears so that I couldn’t hear even my own daydreams, when Molloy was at the other end of the room with his clipboard—I allowed myself a few minutes of escape, pressed my head against the enameled black metal of my Singer and closed my eyes.
I thought about being someplace else. Sometimes it was back in Venticano, working with Giuseppina in the garden, the earth clinging to my hands, getting under my fingernails. I pulled up a carrot, its feathery greens brushing my bare arm. I rinsed the carrot in the metal water bucket and bit into it, tasting the soil and the sun, tasting Italy.
Or I thought about Saturday nights—the one just past or the one to come—and dancing at the Hillcrest Hotel with Roberto Scarpa. His sister Antonietta worked the machine next to mine and she was the one who’d told Tilly and Pip and me about the dances. I had to beg Claudio for weeks to take us, pleading with him as if he were Papa, reminding him that this was America now. If he could send us to work in a factory like the American girls, then he could let us dance like the American girls on Saturday night! He finally gave in, but full of rules and orders about how we were to behave and who we could associate with. He took us there around eight and then hung out on the porch smoking with his friends, poking his head inside every now and then to make sure we were still there and hadn’t sneaked out with some boy he didn’t approve of. If he only knew!
“Where’s Giulia?” he barked one night to Tilly when he stepped in to make his hourly check and I was nowhere to be seen among the swirling skirts and tapping feet.
“She’s gone to the toilet.” She gave her well-rehearsed reply, for once not fumbling in anticipation of his rage should he realize she was covering for me. She took a deep breath when he apparently believed her and went back to his friends. But she came scurrying to the small parlor, where I was sitting in deep conversation with Roberto, who was holding my hand and whispering in my ear.
“Claudio’s looking for you!” she hissed. “You’d better get back soon or he won’t let us come next week!”
I rolled my eyes at Roberto to let him know how miffed I was by the interruption. “Okay, okay, I’ll be there in a minute,” I said and shooed her back to the dance floor. I turned back to Roberto. “She’s right, you know. Claudio’s very strict. I don’t want to provoke him.” I got up off the sofa, but continued to hold his hand. I squeezed it and whispered, “I don’t want to lose the opportunity to be with you.”
I meant what I said. But I also didn’t want him to think I was going to be easy. I sat with him in the back parlor, but you wouldn’t catch me like some of the girls I knew from the factory. They went out with men alone; they didn’t just meet them at dances. They didn’t live with their families. They had no protection. Claudio’s vigilance irritated me, but because the men knew he was my brother, they didn’t try anything.
Roberto and I walked separately to the dance floor and I stopped to talk with his sister, who had introduced us. Antonietta had talked incessantly about Roberto at work. He was the oldest of her brothers, the tallest, the handsomest. I had
n’t believed her until I saw him for myself. He was blond, with long arms and legs and powerful hands. When he danced with me (and by then, I was the only one he danced with), I felt the strength of his grip around my waist. I saw my hand disappear inside his. I’d always been small for my age. Even then, at sixteen, I still wore a child’s-size shoe and glove.
People watched us when we danced. Roberto was so big that everyone gave him room. But despite his size, he was very graceful.
Dancing at the Hillcrest was different from dancing at Cucino’s. People were more watchful—of others and of themselves. They cared more about what other people thought than we had dancing in the dirt in our bare feet. In Mount Vernon, all the girls spent hours during the week talking about what they’d wear, who they hoped to dance with. We then spent more hours Saturday evening getting ready, borrowing from one another, coaxing our hair into the styles we saw in the magazines that got passed around at lunchtime, trying to find some happy medium in the way we were dressed so that we’d be allowed out of the house but still look stylish. So much energy went into these preparations! It made Tilly giddy and brought nervous shrieks even to Pip’s serious countenance.
The other difference between Cucino’s and the Hillcrest, like everything else in America, was how big these dances were. At Cucino’s, we were maybe a dozen, and all of us had grown up together. Here, the ballroom was a crush of people—fifty, a hundred sometimes. So many strangers. People came up from the city, from the Bronx mostly, because of the Hillcrest’s reputation. The musicians were the best. Paolo Serafini played the piano. Claudio said it was a way for him to pick up a few extra dollars every week, since he was never going to get rich working for “that union.” But the way Paolo played, you could hear that it wasn’t just for the money. He knew all the popular songs. Claudio said he even wrote songs himself, but I’d never heard him play them at the dances. What he did play was wonderful dance music, music that had people moving and laughing and clapping their hands. The ballroom at the Hillcrest on Saturday nights was a blur of color, a haze of voices, a release of all that weariness and longing from the week before. What would we have done without those dances? Nothing to relieve the chill of my sister-in-law’s house, the loneliness of my new life, the tedium of broadcloth that faced me every day.
I felt a kick abruptly interrupt my thoughts, a warning from Tilly, who sat at the machine behind me, that Molloy was on his way back here. We had, each of us, already been caught dozing at our tables. Molloy cautioned us not to do it again. So we took turns, one watching out and warning while the others slept.
We had other troubles with Molloy, as well. Getting to work on time was a struggle. There was no peace in my brother’s household in the morning. Claudio and Angelina’s babies clamored from hunger and dampness. Pip and Tilly and I groped for clothing, for the hairbrush, for coffee. Still in his bed, Claudio muttered at the noise, exhausted from a day at work and a night at the Palace. He stayed hidden until we were all gone and the boys were fed and dry. Pip would snatch the broom, Tilly washed the dishes, I chopped the onions and the garlic for that night’s marinara and sliced bread and provolone for us to take to work.
One early November morning, I poured some olive oil into Angelina’s heavy pot. It was good quality oil, thick and green. Claudio got it from the DiDonato family, the ones with the importing business. Back then, Americans didn’t know what olive oil was. I got the onions started, then ran out to pluck some basilico. It was almost finished, all scrawny and leggy. Any night soon we’d have a frost. But even in the intensity of summer, this basil hadn’t grown. I hadn’t been in Mount Vernon long enough to figure out if it was Angelina or America. But this was not a garden I knew. When I had stood in the middle of Giuseppina’s garden, I found myself in a fresco, like the one imbedded in the wall of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. All around me was color: the red tomatoes and peppers, the purple eggplants and fava beans, six different shades of green—zucchini, broccoli rabe, basilico, artichoke, escarole, fagiolini. Perhaps it was the sun, which was so different from the sun in America. I asked myself, isn’t it the same? How can the light, the warmth, be so alien to me? In Italy, the sun released, set free the growing things, splurged itself in unrelenting generosity. In America, the sun was wan, stingy, exacting. It was no wonder these basil plants had to stretch themselves, strain for their meager ration.
I pulled my sweater tighter around me against the cold morning and raced back to my onions. Tilly had, thankfully, finished washing up and was crushing and straining the tomatoes.
“Be careful that no seeds get through. You know how bitter they’ll make the gravy and I don’t want to listen to Claudio complain after I’ve had a long day at work.”
“Maybe you want to strain, to make sure it’s perfect?” There was an edge to Tilly’s voice. As sweet as she was, she didn’t like to take direction from me. But they all knew I was the better cook. Giuseppina had taught me. In my mother’s house, Pasqualina had hoarded her skills, unwilling to share Papa’s appreciation for a well-cooked meal. And my mother believed there were better things to learn than how to cook.
Of course, here in America, Pip and Tilly had no Pasqualina to bury her arms in flour and eggs every Saturday morning to make the pasta. In fact the three of us were Angelina’s Pasqualina. The sisters of her husband, given refuge, a roof, in exchange for our domestic services.
I chopped the basil and threw it together with the tomatoes into the pot. I jumped back as the contents of the pot flashed and sizzled, sending up a hot red spray. I didn’t want to have to change my blouse. A flick or two with my spoon and I set the pot on the back burner for Angelina to watch during the day.
I raced upstairs to wash and run a brush through my hair.
“Hurry up! We’re going to be late again and Molloy will be furious! He’ll go right to Claudio, too. Why can’t you ever be ready when it’s time to leave?”
Pip and Tilly waited for me in the front hall. I slipped in the last hairpin on my way down the stairs, the soles of my boots slapping urgently against the wood as Claudio grumbled in annoyance. Coat and hat, a last glance in the mirror by the door, and we were off—coffee and tomato and warm stove left behind in Angelina’s kitchen, a ten-block walk ahead of us, Molloy and his clock waiting.
I hated that walk. I hated the dim early morning light and the chill that put an ache in my toes. I hated leaving the familiar streets of the neighborhood. We walked down to the corner, past Our Lady of Victory and the tenements on the other side. Then the houses started to dwindle as we approached the New Haven Railroad line. Because there was no bridge at the bottom of this street, we had to turn left down by the tracks and walk east to the bridge at Fourth Avenue. On the other side of the tracks, we had to walk two blocks west again and then another three blocks south to the factory.
Sometimes we walked with a couple of other girls from the neighborhood and then it was not so bad. We joked along the way about Molloy or talked about the dance, or even stopped to look in the window of the Tabu dress shop on the corner. But this morning we were so late that Annunziata and Carmen hadn’t waited for us and we were trudging alone, our steps quickening to a run when we passed the clock in the window of Ruggierio’s Shoe Repair.
“We can’t be late again. Molloy said—”
“I know what Molloy said. Don’t talk. Keep moving.”
Just then we heard the screech of the five-to-seven whistle. From this side of the tracks we wouldn’t make it in five minutes.
Tilly, Pip and I looked at one another and agreed without speaking to take our shortcut. Instead of turning toward the Fourth Avenue bridge, we wriggled through the fencing and raced down the rocky slope toward the railroad tracks. We had done this many times before. Milkweed and the shriveled blossoms of goldenrod and thistle caught and clung to our skirts and sleeves. My boots skidded on the crumbled dirt and gravel, and I slid the rest of the way down on my backside. Tilly and Pip reached the bottom ahead of me and started over the tracks.
We were a few blocks west of the station, where the tracks branched out five across. I brushed myself off and followed them.
I was almost across the third track when I stumbled, falling to my knees as I tripped over the hem of my skirt. Va Napoli, I muttered to myself as I heard it rip. Something else to mend, as if there weren’t enough of Claudio’s shirts and my nephews’ overalls in the basket that waited for me every night. I pulled myself to my feet. My hands stung from where they’d slammed against the gravel bed and my chin felt wet and raw. I knew Molloy would send me to the washroom to clean my bloody face—and dock my pay before he’d let me near his blouses. For the second time that morning, I brushed myself off and started off. But I couldn’t move. My left foot remained rooted to the ground, like an unfamiliar weight at the end of my leg when I tried to lift it and take a step. I raised my skirt.
My boot heel had become wedged in the space between the ties, clutched by the resin-soaked wood. A chill climbed its frantic way up my back. My hand reached without thought for Giuseppina’s medal around my neck. Then I pulled at the boot with all my strength and will, but it wouldn’t budge. I tried wriggling my foot as if I were about to dance. I was so distracted, so consumed by my entrapment, that I didn’t notice Tilly and Pip, who’d already made it to the other side and begun to scramble up the embankment. Suddenly, I heard Pip’s voice, but not in the scolding tone she used when I lagged behind and she was nervous about Molloy’s clock.
“Giulia! Giulia!” she shrieked, a knife edge of hysteria, a bow drawn across a tightly strung violin. “The train! The train!”
Across the Table Page 33