Elizabeth Street

by Laurie Fabiano

  “Wherever you want,” answered Lorenzo, smiling.

  Nunzio thought his head was going to burst trying to absorb it all. When Lorenzo asked about Giovanna, Nunzio realized that for the first time in his three-week voyage, he wasn’t thinking about her. He was too caught up in the sights, heights, and sounds of this strange city.

  More people passed speaking a foreign tongue.

  “Does no one speak English in America, Lorenzo?”

  Lorenzo laughed. “Even when we all speak English, our accents are so different we don’t know if we are speaking the same language. Language is not so important in this country. If you want to understand one another, you do.”

  “This way. We’ll walk up Broadway,” directed Lorenzo.

  Concetta and Domenico kept stealing glances at Nunzio, who only occasionally caught them because his head was spinning. A cherry tree was in bloom next to a church with a tall spire that Nunzio was scrutinizing.

  “It’s not a Catholic church,” Lorenzo said. “It’s an American church, Trinity, and people think it is very old.”

  A streetcar pulled by horses thundered toward them. Not bony horses like the ones in Calabria, but enormous ones that dwarfed the pedestrians. The streetcar carried more people than Nunzio could count—men and women pressed so close together that Nunzio imagined Father Clemente would be outraged. When the car passed, Nunzio had a full view of an even more amazing sight; it was a building taller than he imagined possible.

  Lorenzo looked back at Nunzio and smiled. “I knew you would have your head in the clouds.”

  “What is it? What is it called, Lorenzo?”

  “And I knew you would ask me about the buildings, so I found out their names. This one is called Park Row. They finished it last year, and they say it is the tallest. But this seems to me a big competition these Americans have. If they don’t stop, they’ll scratch the sun.”

  Teresa smiled at her husband and directed her pride at her children. “See how much your papa knows?” Lorenzo had told her all about Nunzio, how he was a maestro, and how he had gone to school in the north. She was nervous to meet him, embarrassed that she couldn’t read and write. But she was feeling less uncomfortable already; Nunzio had a nice smile, and she liked how he treated the children. Teresa was only fifteen when she married Lorenzo. She had never gone to school, but she had been in the country since she was a little girl, and this gave her the edge to maintain the balance of power in their marriage.

  Nunzio stopped in front of Park Row. Lorenzo tugged. “Brother, you will see the sights when I don’t have forty kilos hanging off my arm. Forza.”

  They walked through an area with large, wide buildings, not as tall as the others, but mammoth structures that were grouped together. Lorenzo would narrate when he saw Nunzio’s eyes lock onto something. “This is the city hall and the court.”

  Nunzio thought about Scilla’s small stone building near the chiazza where they brought the babies and where they recorded their marriages. In his mind, he saw Giovanna at his side as he signed the ledger recording their marriage before the sindaco. Diverted from this memory by the row of skyscrapers that loomed before him, he focused on the one that was bigger than the rest, which had a gold dome.

  “Is this the Jewish church?” Nunzio had heard that many Jews lived near the Italians.

  “No, a newspaper building. They all are. That one is the New York World building.”

  Nunzio sighed. “There must be a lot to write about.”

  Conversation about newspapers made Teresa insecure, so she pointed beyond the buildings toward the east. “Nunzio, guarda!”

  Nunzio had caught a few glimpses of the structure, but it was distant and too unbelievable. Within range of his scrutiny, he was forced to drop the trunk and marvel at the towers and suspension wires of the Brooklyn Bridge. Lorenzo knew that he had no choice but to stop and rest, and this was as good a place as any. Teresa smiled with a child’s pride that she was the first to point out the most spectacular of all the marvels to him.

  Nunzio stood in awe. Had Giovanna been there, she would have been convinced that such reverence proved that Nunzio saw God in the works of man. When they eventually picked up the trunk, it was as if a prayer had ended, and they continued on in silence. Nunzio glanced back at the bridge, and only then were his eyes able to take in the river, the ferries, the barges, and the bustle of waterfront activity.

  Their walk had taken them up Park Row, but now Lorenzo led them left onto Mott Street. The English letters on signs turned into Chinese characters. Nunzio knew many different people lived in New York, but he hadn’t expected them to have their own cities. He imagined that China didn’t look much different than life on this street; pigs and hens hung in store windows, people ate with sticks in restaurants, and baskets of clothes were piled to the ceiling in cellar laundries. Nunzio saw a shop with small bottles of every color and shape arranged neatly on shelves over barrels brimming with herbs. He knew Giovanna’s eyes would burn bright if she saw such a place and he envisioned her rubbing the herbs between her fingers, smelling them, and concocting recipes for new poultices and salves.

  Two Chinese men in Western dress walked toward them, but when they passed, Nunzio saw that long braids fell from their felt hats. He wondered how you decide to wear the Western suit but keep your hair in a long tail. What would change about him in this l’America? Nunzio thought of the Calabrians who returned home but thereafter were called Americani. There was no time to figure out the answers to these and other questions; he was trying too hard to navigate the strange streets. He simply had to take it all in and have faith that the curious would soon explain itself.

  A Chinese peddler, balancing a large wicker basket on a long stick, walked beside them. Nunzio was sure that whatever the teetering basket held would soon fall on his head, and he tugged Lorenzo farther away. They followed the stone path that Lorenzo had called a sidewalk, but many streets, including this one, were also paved in stones, and it made the noise around them deafening. The sounds of wagon wheels, boxes being dragged, water splashing from pots—all were amplified with no dirt to absorb them. There was such a rhythm to the noise and motion of the street that Nunzio’s closest comparison was Scilla’s Feast of Saint Rocco. Life in this New York was a parade without an order of march.

  “Lorenzo, is every day like this?” shouted Nunzio.

  “It’s quiet today because it is Sunday.”

  For the first time, Nunzio felt exhausted.

  “Ah, we are on Elizabeth Street,” exclaimed Lorenzo.

  The Chinese characters changed to Italian words. Even from the signs, he could tell that much of the dialect was Sicilian.

  This street was not paved with stones. Dust and dried manure swirled through the air with each breeze. Some pushcarts, stripped of their inventory, lined the road.

  Responding to Nunzio’s glances, Lorenzo said, “On weekdays, there are so many sellers it’s difficult to walk. It can be a good living. This block here”—Lorenzo nodded—“is where all the fish peddlers live. Elizabeth Street is mainly Sicilians. There are more Calabrians on Mulberry Street, but we found a better apartment here.” Since marrying a girl from Puglia, Lorenzo crossed lines more easily.

  “Here we are. Home. Elizabeth Street, 176.”

  They entered a narrow, dark hall and climbed three flights. The children ran up the stairs ahead. If it weren’t for the strong and familiar smells on each landing, and the laughing and arguing that characterized Sunday dinner echoing in the halls, Nunzio would have thought they had entered a cave. Lorenzo pushed open one of two doors on the third floor. They entered an apartment with not much more light than the hallway.

  “We moved in last week,” said Lorenzo nervously. By the expression on Nunzio’s face, Lorenzo knew that Nunzio’s reaction was similar to his own when he first saw the houses of l’America.

  Nunzio walked between the three small rooms thinking, “How do you get outside? Is the only way out really down those
narrow stairs?” Looking for an escape, he ducked his head under the fabric hanging on a string in front of the window. Raising the curtain, he leaned his body on the sill and was startled by all the people looking back at him. Hundreds of people were leaning out their windows above and beneath him, across the street, and up the block. The tenement dwellers stared at the newcomer, and Nunzio nodded awkwardly. A man smoked a cigar; a woman called to her children; but mostly, they leaned forward, watching the seething street with their elbows resting on pillows or burlap sacks. “So, this is how you go outside in l’America,” thought Nunzio. He had heard descriptions of New York apartments, but like everything thus far about l’America, until you saw it, you wouldn’t believe it, and even then it was hard to comprehend.

  Upon arriving, Teresa immediately set about preparing a meal in the cramped kitchen. “I was only a child, but I remember the food on that ship.”

  Teresa had done most of the cooking before going to meet Nunzio at the Battery. Sunday dinner was always extravagant—they had meat and salad—but today she had prepared all of her specialties with Lorenzo’s blessing. The children lifted the cloth to pick at the pasticcini, but Teresa slapped their hands and shooed them into the hall to play. Lorenzo poured Nunzio a glass of wine and explained that he had traded a few things for a soft mattress to put in the kitchen for Nunzio’s bed.

  “The kitchen is not so bad, Nunzio. In fact, in the winter, you may find your niece and nephew joining you,” Lorenzo warned. “Later tonight, Luigi and Pasqualina DiFranco will come by to pay their respects…”

  Lorenzo kept talking, but Nunzio wasn’t listening. He was looking at Teresa’s table with as much reverence as he had the Brooklyn Bridge. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen so much food. He was ravenous.

  Domenico watched his uncle’s eyes follow his mother’s every move. He snatched a meatball and secretly handed it to Nunzio. Nunzio took a breath to protest, but then winked at Domenico and took the meatball.

  Lorenzo was chatting nervously, and Nunzio surmised it was because he was avoiding asking a question. Correctly guessing the cause of Lorenzo’s angst, Nunzio said, “Lorenzo, your parents are well.” He continued, and Lorenzo’s shoulders relaxed. “If there was more food, that would be better for everyone. But your mother still sews like no one else in the village, and if there is a fish to catch, your father will catch it.”

  Lorenzo’s face radiated relief. “And Giovanna, is there no child?”

  It was Nunzio’s turn to be pensive. “I wait for a letter. I wait.”

  Teresa ordered everyone to the table, and her pride was evident. Her ink black hair was swept back in a bun, and although her plain face still looked young, she had the weary but confident bearing of an older Italian woman. Teresa stopped fluttering while Lorenzo said a prayer and continued serving when he finished. She refused every entreaty to sit down and instead concentrated on keeping Nunzio’s plate full—something that hadn’t been possible for many years.

  FIVE

  Lorenzo laid brick in the spring, summer, and fall, and, if he was lucky, sold sweet potatoes in the winter. During the first of his eight years in New York, Lorenzo had had such a difficult time finding work that he had even considered listening to the lies of the padroni and going off to lay track for a railroad or to work in a mine. He knew he would be cheated, but at least he would be working.

  In the end, what kept him from indentured servitude was Teresa, who was wise in the ways of finding a job. Teresa made the rounds with Lorenzo to the barbershops, cafes, and markets to chat and listen to rumors of work. Before long, Lorenzo was on the laborer circuit and rarely spent more than a day or two between jobs.

  Nunzio now benefited from his brother-in-law’s experience. Lorenzo wrote down the addresses of three places where he could look for work. At the first location, after having trouble finding the place and waiting in line for five hours, he was told he was too late, all the jobs were filled. He cursed himself for getting lost, and the next day woke at three in the morning to ensure he would be at the next site well before six.

  After again waiting for hours, he was told they already had too many Italians on the job. A small boy with a pimply face and hands much older than his years explained when he saw Nunzio’s puzzled expression, “They think if there’s a lot of one kind, the unions will get you.” Nunzio had no idea what the kid meant.

  On the third day, he hiked down to the Brooklyn Bridge long before the sun came up and walked across to where they were building a waterfront warehouse. There were already three men in line, all Italian, and each had heard a different story concerning how many men were to be hired. Lines were a new experience for the Italians, but they caught on quickly to this American phenomenon. The men had queued up in front of a misshapen small shack made out of scrap wood. It stood alone on a lot strewn with rubble, which had the beginnings of a foundation. They watched in silence as a short, fat man with ruddy skin placed a plank across two crates in front of the shack, making a table for himself. One by one, workers and foremen arrived at the site carrying trowels, buckets, and tins of food. It was hours before the fat man called them forward.

  “Hey, this wop says he’s an engineer!” yelled the hiring boss to the foreman. “And he speaks English.”

  The tall, thin foreman sauntered over. “So, you’re an engineer.”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Nunzio proudly, “I studied in Rome.”

  “So, I bet you built that there Col-es-see-um.” The hiring boss laughed heartily at the foreman’s joke.

  Nunzio ignored them. “I know how to build. I work hard.”

  “You eye-talians haven’t built anything that isn’t falling down. This is America, wop-boy, and you don’t ‘build’ here—you carry brick.” He turned to the hiring boss. “Hire ’im, but keep your eye on ’im. I don’t trust no English-speaking eye-talian with red hair.”

  Nunzio twirled his sandwich, which was harpooned on a wire, toasting it over the flame. Six laborers, all paesani, ringed the fire, eating their lunch. Nunzio never thought he’d think of Sicilians, Abruzzese, and Napolitans as paesani, but here in this country they were all Italian. In his most recent letter to Giovanna, he wrote of the irony that, in America, Italy was more united than in Italy.

  Two-Toed Nick opened his flask of wine. “Nunzio, where you go after this joba?”

  “Joba.” “The job.” The word was always said with such reverence that Nunzio envisioned it as a satin-coated deity. He had been on this job eight weeks, and it was coming to an end. “I don’t know. But I want a big one so I lose no days and return to Scilla.”

  “You Calabresi, always thinking you’re going home.”

  “Sicilians are so different?” Nunzio nodded to another man at the fire. “Saint Carmine told me he counts the days on his bedroom wall.”

  Two-Toed Nick looked offended. “Saint Carmine is not Siciliano. He’s Napolitano. And besides,” he said with a smile, “he’s not right in the head.”

  “Don’t tell that story.” Carmine didn’t move as he spoke and continued puffing on his cigar.

  “Nunzio, didn’t you ever wonder why they call him Saint Carmine? It’s certainly not because he worships at a certain house on Mulberry Street.”

  The laughter started.

  “It’s not funny,” protested Carmine, who got up in a dramatic huff and pretended to go back to work.

  Two-Toed Nick took Carmine’s exit as permission to continue.

  “Like I said, Saint Carmine is Napolitano and every few years the Napolitanos have to deal with Vesuvius coughing up hot lava. One time the lava, it was coming straight for Carmine’s village. Carmine went to the church, and he ripped the statue of Saint Gennaro from the altar and carried it halfway up the mountain. Then he takes Saint Gennaro, and he puts him down in the path of the lava.”

  Two-Toed Nick stood to reenact the story, shaking his finger and mimicking Carmine’s gruff voice. “Carmine says, ‘Saint Gennaro, we pray to you, we give you a
big festival, we give you money. Now, you do your job—make this lava go away from our village.’ Then Carmine, he stood and waited as the hot rock flowed. The lava, it headed straight for Saint Gennaro and Carmine’s village. Carmine, he sees the saint is doing nothing, and he goes pazzo. He starts throwing rocks at the statue screaming, ‘You dirty bum! You freeloader!’ Carmine keeps throwing those rocks as he’s running for his life down the mountain.”

  The men, despite having heard the story before, cried from laughing so hard. Nunzio, who kept trying to catch his breath, laughed hardest and at the same time debated whether to write Giovanna to tell her this story. He knew she would let loose the throaty laugh that he loved, but he could also imagine her crossing herself, filled with guilt for laughing when a saint was involved.

  When Nunzio caught his breath and ended his silent debate, he asked, “And what of the village? Cos’è successo?”

  “Who knows? Carmine, he kept running right onto a boat and came here!”

  The men collapsed again into laughter as the foreman walked by. “Hey, you gang-o-dagos, enough lounging around. Get your sorry garlic asses back to work.”

  Nunzio had started on the job as a laborer. He mixed mortar and loaded wheelbarrows with piles of bricks, delivering them to the bricklayers. He hadn’t done such mind-numbing, backbreaking work since he was a child.

  The foreman who had hired Nunzio called him to his “office,” the misshapen wood shanty. “So, hotshot, you can drive a wheelbarrow. Now we’re gonna see if you can lay brick.” The foreman stood up, and Nunzio almost smiled, not because he was being “promoted,” but because the man so lived up to his nickname. Carmine called him “Linguine con Pomodoro” because he was tall and thin with red splotches all over his white skin. Linguine con Pomodoro handed him pointing and bricklaying trowels. “Borrow these today; tomorrow you bring your own.”

  Nunzio had spent two weeks watching the fluid movements of the bricklayers, so it didn’t take him long to master the bricklayer’s art. He stayed out of Linguine con Pomodoro’s eyesight until he could dip his trowel and ice the brick like a seasoned artisan. He missed the freedom of movement he’d had as a laborer, but he loved climbing the scaffolding and working high off the ground. This warehouse was only six stories, but that was three stories higher than most of the buildings in Scilla.