Tillie and the Tailor

by Tillie

  On the streets, I talked to everyone. I knew the cooks and barmen and waiters at a number of restaurants. I talked to the help in luncheonettes, coffee bars, pastry shops, bakeries. I studied undertakers sitting idly in chairs at the curb outside the plate-glass fronts of funeral parlors. I found the rundown funeral parlor in Hanover Street where in 1927 the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were laid out in their coffins for public display. I knew a couple of uniformed Irish policemen who were on the take. (A stone’s throw from Uncle Dave’s was a police headquarters.)

  One pastry cook, a guy called Sarge, was always keen to bring the talk round to clandestine trips to Montreal to suck French cunts. The words were his; he never revealed who made the journeys, him or others he envied. A restaurant barman named Gino mentioned a nympho who liked to kneel under the counter and, while he served drinks, suck his cock. A Sicilian fisherman, big hands and red face, tottering with drink, told me with tears in his eyes of a narrow escape in a storm at sea for which he made a vow to the Virgin. ‘A vow,’ he kept saying, ‘a vow.’ I met a jailbird just out after a three-year stretch for robbery; to his badgering mates he swore on his mother that not once in those years did he masturbate. I came across derelicts and hoboes sleeping rough and rummies with broken noses and blood-encrusted wounds resting in a litter of empty half-pint bottles.

  Each had a story to tell, and, whether by ear or by eye, I listened to them all. One winter’s day, in the shelter of the ghetto wall, I came upon a wordless tale as old as America itself. Five or six drunks on a binge, thinly-dressed in faded lumber jackets, squatted on their haunches round a feeble fire. Their faces were dirty, their jet-black heads unruly and uncombed. Strewn around them were the usual empty bottles of cheap wine, some broken. As I neared, one of them, oblivious of my approach, teetered to a standing position. Hunched forward, he then launched into a little dance, circling over his own feet and at the same time emitting yelps and howls in time with his pounding laceless shoes.

  The performance did not last ten seconds before he dropped down again amid the others and let out an embarrassed little laugh. The others laughed too but it was abject, and you could feel about them an aura of ingrained submissiveness. I saw then that they were Penobscot Indians come south from the coast of Maine, probably unemployed, surely unemployable, rudderless in the city’s grinding mill.

  Seeing yet unseen, an insubstantial shadow, I had passed them and moved on, but despite the intervening years – a good fifty of them – something about that Indian shuffle won’t let go. Was the incident a mere alcohol-fuelled spectacle? Or for the dancer was it a moment of sudden clarity and an uncomfortable reminder of the broken men they were and of their race’s impending doom?

  x

  Up over the grocery store, hunched over my Olivetti, I was trying to put on paper some of what I saw and heard on the streets. I hoped the pages would at least serve as a simple record; I hoped one day this ore might yield a single nugget. I slaved to set down the way North Enders spoke as they wove their way unselfconsciously between half-learned English and the rhythms of this or that Italian dialect that was their mother tongue. I tried shaping the color of the streets into sketches. This was one of them:

  The players were drunk.

  It was the end of the last night of the feast of Saint Lucy – the straggling, dragging end – and the musicians wanted to go home. So poor Lucy, waiting in front of her house on the shoulders of six or eight men, got the feeblest of farewells, a Santa Lucia so slapdash that on several instruments it began as The Star-Spangled Banner.

  With that, we thought the national anthem – the close of the festivities – would also turn out a wishy-washy affair. But suddenly everyone was playing with brio, and the cymbals and the bass drum were filling the night air with elaborate embellishments. Before the music ended, before the players reached the uplifting land of the free and home of the brave, Lucy had disappeared in a rain of confetti, eased gingerly backward, into her house.

  Then the band broke up, all but a small knot who came up a side street playing another anthem – Faccetta nera, the fascist marching song of 1935. That was the year Mussolini made Romans of the little black faces of Abyssinia. That was the year Italy became an Empire and Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce’s son, famously described the conquest, the war, as magnificent sport. ‘One group of horsemen,’ wrote this airman and poet of death, ‘gave me the impression of a budding rose unfolding as the bombs fell in their midst and blew them up. It was exceptionally good fun.’

  Now, on a North End street, a young man, a passerby, turned and shouted at the musicians in broken English that Mussolini was dead. The bandsmen returned stupid grins. We waited for them at the next corner, where we too took up the cry. Their grins were sheepish now, and Faccetta nera petered out as ingloriously as had Mussolini and Italian fascism itself.

  An old man came along and, indicating the straggle of bandsmen, cocked his thumb out of a closed fist toward his mouth. ‘Troppi bicchieri,’ he said. Too much to drink. And so they’d had.

  And so little Lucy had been aired and romanced and was now back in her godhouse for another year.

  xi

  On Mondays in winter, when customers were few and he had little to occupy him, Uncle Dave was always at ease and occasionally even expansive. So, on these days he’d often close the shop for an hour at twelve o’clock and take me – or from time to time Johnny and me – to lunch.

  We always went to Angie’s, a luncheonette just around the corner from North Square and the Paul Revere House. On these outings we always ate the same thing, and Dave always behaved in the same way. In his conversation – if you want to stretch matters and call his mumblings and ramblings conversation – he always made the same points, which were always expressed in the same smug fashion. This made our eating excursions entirely predictable, monotonous, and therefore enjoyably relaxing. Something about the everytime sameness of these lunches turned them into an event like storytelling round a fire. Repetition was all, and the time-worn sameness became the source of a nice, quiet, soothing, satisfaction.

  We always ordered soup. Two bowls or three, according. The soup always came in installments – first, a small plate of saltines, which you were meant to crumble into the soup, and, second, five or ten minutes later, the steaming bowls themselves. Always minestrone. But before any of that Dave always sank down behind the open pages of his newspaper. Why he wanted Johnny or me there I never understood. For company? What company? We seldom saw his face.

  He always started by sticking a hand out from behind the paper and groping like a blind man for the plate of crackers. Dave’s fingertips were always black with dirt that was embedded in the very skin. (The grime under his nails, the quantity and colour of it, was nobody’s business.) This was owed to the fact that Dave smoked a pipe, and his fingers were forever poking and prodding at the bowl, either stuffing it with tobacco or tamping down the coals or reaming out caked ash. He’d rap the bowl on the metal checkout counter by the cash register, then sweep the sooty ash away with a hand. His fingers were also always in the compartments of the cash drawer, scraping out change. I don’t suppose those compartments were ever cleaned.

  I had quickly noted from the very beginning that any time Dave approached the cold-cuts counter on the prowl for a nibble of processed cheese, Johnny would rush to cut it for him before the blackened fingers could leave an imprint on the loaf in question. It tickled me the way Johnny would machine-slice the cheese onto a fresh slip of waxed paper, then peel back the edges of this protective wrapping before handing it over. Dave was meant to grip the wrapper and eat the exposed cheese without touching it, just as you would a sandwich held in a paper napkin. But did he ever? No. He invariably held the packet in one hand while the other fished for a slice, folded it in two, and poked it into his mouth. On occasion, looking sheepish, Dave would gaze longingly at a whole boiled ham that lay in the tray of a slicing machine. Whereupon, in a twinkle, lightning Johnny – ever watchful – would b
eat Dave to it and trim him off a piece.

  Which is why from time to time, and always when those fingers crept towards the saltines, Johnny and I would exchange knowing looks and one of us would say, ‘Zi è zu’, to which the other would reply, ‘E zu è zi.’ This was our own shorthand Italian for ‘Uncle’s dirty’ and its liturgic-like response, ‘And dirty’s Uncle.’ At Angie’s, where from behind his newspaper Dave could not see our prestidigitation, we were always quick to arrange the plate of crackers so that the grubby fingers did not come into contact with our portion.

  ‘Heh, heh’ – this was Dave’s conversation now, always – ‘see that, Johnny. All those schmucks who went overboard on pharmaceuticals last week. I’ll bet a lot of them are tearing their hair out now. The stuff’s taken a nosedive.’

  I shouldn’t say always to all of it. It wasn’t always pharmaceuticals. The names of the products or companies whose stock took a dive changed from lunch to lunch.

  Johnny, or I, would make a suitable sound by way of replying. Dave would then mumble on, chuckling to himself, munch on a cracker, grope for another. On a good day his eagle eye would spot another down-spinning stock, and, before crowing its name to us, he’d always preface the finding with his dry, ‘Heh, heh!’

  It was schadenfreude, pure and simple, and he loved it. Uncle Dave did not play the stock market, but all he ever read of that newspaper, always, every lunch, was the stock market pages – that mass of boring fine print and minuscule fractions that could give you a nauseous headache.

  ‘Remember what I told you last week, Johnny? Heh, heh! Didn’t I say you had to be meshuggeneh to invest in African goldmines?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Johnny would always put in.

  ‘That’s right, Dave,’ I would always add. ‘I remember your saying that too. Last Monday.’

  By the time Dave put the paper down our bowls would be empty, always, and his minestrone would have gone cold.

  xii

  North Enders, men and women of all ages, were much given to gambling. It was an addiction. It was the spice of otherwise dreary lives. On the streets a lot of the talk was about personal experiences of betting, wagering, staking a chance. Here is a monologue overheard on Hanover Street, a woman speaking:

  ‘No, Mary, listen. This will kill you. Yesterday when I went to see my Frankie in the hospital I had a hundred dollars with me. But I figured I needed two hundred more so instead of going to the bank to take it out – I was so anxious to see my husband – I says to Firpo, I says, “Firpo, I need two hundred dollars. I haven’t got time to go to the bank to take it out, will you give me two hundred and I’ll pay you back later?” So Firpo gives me the two hundred and I go to the hospital, Room 203. Well, the bill came to two hundred and twenty dollars, so that left me with eighty dollars. Now listen to this. When I got back I played every number. I played 1-0-0, the money I already had; 2-0-3, Frankie’s room number; 2-2-0, the amount of the bill; 0-8-0, the dollars I had after I paid the bill. And even – while I was crossing the street when I got back I saw Firpo, he said to me, “You owe two hundred and fifteen with the interest,” I said, “Up yours, Firpo, I only had the money not even one hour and I was just going to the bank now to take it out” (of course, he was just kidding me) – well, I even played 2-1-5. But you know what I did, Mary? I forgot to play the two hundred Firpo shylocked me. So what number has to come out last night? That’s right. 2-0-0. Can you beat that? Isn’t that something?’

  xiii

  Dave spied me one day exchanging words with a guy on the street. I was not at work on this occasion and had literally bumped into the man just outside the shop on my way home. It wasn’t a conversation. I don’t think between us we spoke more than a dozen words before parting. But he was the jailbird fresh out of state prison whom I had met a week or so earlier.

  Dave bolted from the cash register and rushed to collar me. How did I know this guy? How long had I known him? What were we talking about?

  Uncle Dave was in a state, agitated, his words cutting and harsh. He’d flown off the handle, put two and two together, and come up with sixteen. It was a regular police interrogation – and just as unpleasant. Yet I didn’t react. I couldn’t. It was plain what he was up against, and I knew the root of his fears. In the North End, Dave was beleaguered, a man forever looking over his shoulder, and I could not help feeling sorry for him. No, not exactly sorry. I respected him, I saw his predicament, and I did not want to add to his burden.

  He had nothing to worry about, I told him. I was careful not to sink into heavy explanation nor to be lightly dismissive. I then followed him back inside and, to Dave’s face, called Johnny over and quietly recounted what had just taken place. Johnny tut-tutted him, as I knew he would. By this simple measure, plus Johnny’s two-cents’ worth, Dave was reassured.

  Here was a man who, a couple of weeks before Christmas, taped three checks to the inside of the plate-glass window at the front of the shop so that every passerby could see and read them. They were laid out in a row, not one above the other. In his clear, legible hand Dave made it known to all the North End that he was contributing, equally, even-handedly, impartially, the sum of fifty dollars each to a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jewish charity. In that order.

  Dave was a careful man, wary, meticulous, scrupulously correct – someone straitjacketed, alas, by circumstances beyond his control and by the unfair weight of centuries. I wish it had occurred to him that, had I been in cahoots with a hoodlum or criminal, the last place I would have rendezvoused with such a person was outside Uncle Dave’s front window.

  xiv

  At the foot of Hanover Street was a Coast Guard station. A few years before I moved to the North End, coast guardsmen on their way home at night were being beaten and robbed by local hoodlums. Before the police could get to first base in solving the crimes, certain racketeers made an investigation of their own, found the culprits, and sent them to the hospital with cracked skulls or broken arms or both. No coast guardsman was ever troubled again.

  The hoodlums, guilty of fouling their own nest, were dealt rough justice. North Enders in those heady days had a live and let live philosophy, which they put into words as ‘You be a gentleman, I’ll be a gentleman.’ Of crimes of violence – armed robbery and assault – the neighborhood was free. The small-time gangsters and racketeers who lived there saw to that.

  xv

  At the outset of this story, I mentioned that I was a fond disciple of the Yankee philosopher of Walden Pond. I meant, of course, Henry David Thoreau, America’s home-grown anarchist, a man who condemned obedience as slavery and wrote that the true foundation of liberty is disobedience. Pure anarchist reasoning – as is so much else that Thoreau has to teach us. My attraction to such thinking stems, in part, from an early reading of his books. Equally, it stems from my acquaintance, while in high school, with a circle of working-class Italian anarchists who lived near us in the Boston suburbs.

  Like Thoreau, these people – to a man and woman – thought for themselves and stepped to the beat of a different drummer. Their origins were quite humble; they were scarcely educated; all had been born Roman Catholics, but by the alchemy of reading and reasoning they had freed themselves from the bondage of religion. They were admirable people, selfless, generous, and dedicated to unpopular social causes. Many of them had fled oppression in their native Italy, only to suffer oppression for their beliefs and activities during the decades of America’s labor wars in the early twentieth-century and in their principled and militant opposition to the First World War. A number had escaped the draft by changing their names and moving to Mexico, only to be branded slackers on their return. Fearless, unshrinking, and with great pride, they openly referred to themselves as sovversivi and refrattari – that is, as revolutionaries and resisters of militarism.

  After work and on weekends they met socially in their modest premises, which they called a circle and not a club. They referred to themselves as the group. There was always a big round table to one
side that was layered in anarchist publications from all over the world. You were free to take whatever you could use. There was a myriad of pamphlets and leaflets in English and Italian and French by Malatesta and Kropotkin and George Woodcock and Rudolph Rocker. There was no end of material on the anarchist heroes of the Spanish Civil War. The place had a bar but no bartender. You took a bottle of beer and chalked a tick beside your name on a blackboard and paid up whenever you felt like it. Their literature they referred to as propaganda, by which they meant – purely and simply – the spreading of ideas. Making propaganda against war, against profits, against not the ruling class but what they more properly regarded as the controlling class – such activity had been their meat and drink.

  They named their sons Libero and Ribelle, Ateo and Spartaco, and their daughters Aurora and Caira – the ça ira cry of the French Revolution. In their obituaries they always stressed the cremation of the dead as a deliberate expression of contempt for the Roman Catholic Church. Their experience of the clergy was as an oppressor who unfailingly takes the side of the rich against the poor. Religion as it had been foisted on them was but a means of controlling people by keeping them in darkness and ignorance. This is why the old-time Italian anarchist liked nothing better than to confront religion with rational argument; this is why he found nothing more satisfying than an encounter with a priest.

  ‘I’m not against the priests because they believe in Jesus Christ,’ one of the group once told me; ‘I’m against them because they don’t believe in Jesus Christ.’ Ill or injured, when taken to hospital the Italian anarchist would lie there in wait for a priest to come calling. One anarchist liked to recount that when a priest showed up he’d say to him, ‘Any time you want to see me – as a man – you come in. As a priest, stay out.’ No priest ever returned. Another told me he was brought to the hospital unconscious. They had asked his daughter his religion and she told them none. He was there fifteen days, fifteen disappointing days, and no priest came. One morning, as the doctor was making his rounds, the old man said, ‘Doctor, tell me, don’t you have any priests in this hospital?’