Murder In Matera
Page 23
Very funny, Vita thought, not awake enough to laugh.
The city’s Young Socialists held a big dance. The vaudeville team of Potash & Perlmutter played the Majestic, and the Famous Hawaiian Sisters sang and danced at the Academy of Music, followed by a Taffy Pulling Contest. So much life still going on as she lay dying, it almost didn’t seem right.
ON TUESDAY, ELECTION NIGHT, VITA COULD HEAR THE COMMOTION out on Bay Street as she lay there, semiconscious, the sound of wood being piled up, drifting in and out of her head. Celebrations erupted in the streets. The state would elect Republicans that year, but Hudson County would faithfully remain Democrat, filling the freeholder and assemblyman seats with old-school machine politicos.
Over at the Academy of Music, the election results were read from the stage and the news traveled like lightning down the street, igniting the bonfires as it struck. The boys piled the wood high that night, an effigy of the Republican losers up top. They lit a match, then hurled a jar of oil waste from the railroad cars onto the pile and watched the flames spread. The smoke made it hard to breathe.
Bonfires burned all over Jersey City. Like the one over on Cornelison Avenue, which got out of control and spread because of the strong wind that night. The fire department came and put it out and the police squad came to round up the kids who started it, but everyone—the twenty-five smoke-scented and soot-covered kids in the neighborhood—claimed they had nothing to do with it.
The bonfires were all over the city every year on election night. But none of them, not even the wildfires, were like the fire on Bay Street. That one was always the biggest. The firemen blamed it on all the Poles who lived in the neighborhood. Nobody could collect and hoard wood like those Polish kids, the Irish cops joked. As the flames climbed higher and the fire grew hotter, the merchants ran out in their aprons, their hoses in their hands to spray their windows. But every year it was the same thing. The fire was always too hot. The shop windows on Bay Street always cracked.
The fire department would come and put the bonfire out, leaving a big black hole in the middle of the street. But as soon as Hague’s men left, the kids would pull out more of their wood and spark it up again. And so it burned, as Vita lay dying, the orange glow falling on her windows, so much smoke it seemed the whole world were burning.
So much smoke that the smell lingered in Vita’s bedroom for days after, lingered almost as long as she did. It took her ten days to die, as long as that ship ride over to America.
Until just like that, her light went out. She would die in November, two days after Francesco’s birthday. It seemed so much in her life had happened in November. Her wedding anniversary. The murder. Francesco’s death. And now she would join him.
Poor Vita, killed by a sock full of rocks on a Jersey City street. Her life, her story, everything she had ever known about the world, gone in a beat. She could see that long life now, below her as she floated, as if on a magic carpet: the yellow fields where she had gleaned with her mother; the cobblestones of Via Cavour, where she had hung her laundry; the ginger-colored Chiesa Madre, where she was married; Francesco’s strong farmer hands taking her small hands into his; the girls working the farm in Ferrandina with those sweet little pears that would change her life; the jailhouse window in Bernalda where she looked up for a glimpse of her Ciccio; the small casket with her baby, Rocco, buried in the back of that church; the beautiful red rooftops of Pisticci and the birds flying over the Dirupo; those boys born one after another, running and playing with each other on the narrow streets; Grieco and the life he offered; the big house in Bernalda; the escape, the train to Naples pulling out of Metaponto with them on it, past tall cypress and toward mountains she could never have imagined; and the ride across that vast ocean, that long, terrible journey by ship, and her greatest tragedy and most awful secret, losing Nunzia. All of it about to be forgotten forever.
But Vita had survived it all. Somehow. Until now. Today in person, she thought, tomorrow in the grave. One last Italian proverb echoing through her head.
Author’s Note
Vita was illiterate, so she left no diaries or letters, only stories passed down through the generations. Miraculously, the six-hundred-page criminal file exists, and provided me with vivid details of what transpired more than a century ago. My historical re-creations are based on those pages, on archival materials, interviews with historians, residents, and experts on the time period, in addition to the work of those writers who came and researched before me. In Vita’s most intimate moments, I have used my own Gallitelli bones and blood to imagine how she would have acted and what she would have thought and said about the incredible events in her life.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the people of Bernalda, Pisticci, and Matera for their help and generosity, particularly Angelo Tataranno, Francesco Montemurro, Imma Marzovilli, Giuseppe Blotti, Evaristo Ippoliti, Dino D’Angella, and Antonio Salfi, without whom there would be no book. Thanks to Olga and Antonio Braico and their family, to Leonardo Fuina, Natasa Coen, Maria Xenia Doria, Mariana Giannone, Rosanna Pastore, Alessio Ippoliti, Maria Gallitelli, Maria Natale, Dorothy Zinn, Antonio Panetta, Ferdinando, Mariangela and Flavia Forte, Rosaria Fabrizio, Domenico Marzovilli, Virginia Braico, Matteo Calciano, Antonio Santamaria, Emanuela Campa, Vincenzo Puntillo, Damiano Scalcione, Rocco Romano, Leonardo Leone, Antonio Biscaglia, Cynthia Karalla, Judith Edge, Mariateresa Cascino, Mariapia Ebreo, Graziella Sisto, Ersilia Troiano, Amy Weideman, Dr. Giuseppe Vena, Rosella DeFilippo, Rosario Mauro, Mr. and Mrs. DiBello, and Rosalba Corrado Delvecchio for their incredible hospitality and guidance. Thanks also to Rosa Parisi, Angelo Musco, Carmen Vicinanza, Stefano Luconi, Michael and Vivian Forte, Lisa Bauso, Bessie Jamieson, Walter and Kathy Jamieson, Barry Moreno, Jeffrey Dosik, Tom Pitoniak, and Carla Mastropierro. Special thanks to Tony Muia, for his research, interpreting skills, and laughter. To Dolores Stapinski and John and Anita Apruzzese for translating. To my mother, Irene Vena Stapinski, for her neverending stories and enthusiasm. To Mary Beth Vena Mancuso and Jamie Vena Gotschall for their family research. To Jennifer Rudolph Walsh for lighting the fire. To Steve Reddicliffe for sending me back again. To Lisa DiMona for her faith and dedication, and to Nora Long for her early insights. To Julia Cheiffetz for her confidence and brilliant revisions. To Stan Stapinski and Paula Christen, for their terrific memories. To Lauren Spagnoletti, for inadvertently taking Grandma to meet the pope. And most of all, thanks to my husband, Wendell Jamieson, for his innumerable edits and for believing even when I didn’t and to my wonderful talented, noncriminal offspring, Paulina and Dean. I love you guys.
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About the Author
HELENE STAPINSKI is the author of Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, which recounts her family’s criminal history, and Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair with Music, which chronicles her years playing drums in a rock band in Manhattan. She has written extensively for The New York Times as well as for New York magazine, Salon, Travel & Leisure and dozens of other publications and essay collections. On the documentary based on Five-Finger Discount, she has worked as a producer and writer. Stapinski has been a radio newscaster in Alaska, has appeared on National Public Radio, was a featured performer with The Moth, has lectured at her alma mater, Columbia University, and has taught at Fordham University. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
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Baby Plays Around:
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Five-Finger Discount:
A Crooked Family History
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MURDER IN MATERA. Copyright © 2017 by Helene Stapinski. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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