by Tillie
lxvii
That morning she had let me sleep. She got dressed without a sound and vanished. Under a sprig of rosemary she had left a note. These two simple lines:
‘I’ve never known anything like this. That’s what I was trying to tell you all last night.’
lxviii
I have said that Dave reprimanded any customer found in breach of the rules. What annoyed him most was when a customer wheeled a trolley to the cash register and began emptying its contents higgledy-piggledy onto the counter. That created more work for him and slowed down the whole operation. At Uncle Dave’s the object was to keep things moving, moving smooth, and moving fast. In his precisely worked out scheme there was simply no room for higgledy-piggledy.
It was Frankie’s job to bring order out of a jumbled trolley. He did so by rapidly surveying what lay snarled and tangled there and without hesitation would dip both hands in and quickly pluck out everything of a single kind. These items did not go onto the counter but into a waiting cardboard box placed on the counter. In this way, he would begin a recitation for Dave: ten large tomatoes, six paste, eight kidney beans, one gallon bleach, and so forth and so on. There were no bar codes and electronic readers in those days. Dave knew the price of everything and would instantly multiply the ten large tomatoes by the unit price and ring up a figure on the register. This had to be done quickly, this had to run smoothly, or he would have been out of business in a week. Frankie was a master hand. All the bulky or heavy items came out first, assuring that a box got properly packed.
This was conveyor-belt technology without the belt and without the technology. It was lightning-fast co-ordination between the combined hands and brains of Frankie and Dave. By the time the customer had shelled out the cash, Frankie had slid the box down the zinc counter, and one of the schoolboys took over from there.
There were no ands, ifs, or buts. Dave did not brook any interference with procedure. Innocently break the rule once and you got a verbal slap on the wrist. Usually no one offended twice. But to deliberately thwart him when you had been warned, to offend and then re-offend, was treated more as high crime than misdemeanor. And the penalty for high crime was instant banishment.
So what happens one fine Friday morning. A member of Italian-American suburban society – the very cream of Italian-American suburban society – does the unthinkable. She touches the contents of her basket. Worse, she actually shoves Frankie’s big, bony hands aside and begins hauling each item out for herself. Picture this now. This behavior is so outrageous that the whole cash register-checkout department cannot believe their eyes. Up comes one heavy gallon tin of olive oil, followed by one minuscule tin of tomato paste, followed by a wedge of parmigiano. She rummages around at the bottom, picks up, drops, and picks up again one of those little tins of anchovies with the key to open it fixed to the can. Our usual whirlwind at the front of the shop has wound down, isn’t even a slow-motion hum. The woman has immaculate tanned hands and sports a perfect manicure. She’s wearing expensive rings and jangling bangles. For an unexpected moment or two Dave is so taken aback he is both speechless and amused.
Not Frankie. He gets a leg and a hip in between the woman and her basket. Now Dave refreshes the woman on standard procedure, the rules. Not yet is he reading her the riot act.
But the woman, more stupid than high-muck-a-muck, has not taken in one word of the law that Dave is laying down. Nor does she seem to want Frankie’s hands interfering with her groceries. So she outflanks him and, in contravention of all that is sacred and immutable under Uncle Dave’s roof, is once more back to her higgledy-piggling.
Now Dave has had it. Now Dave is steaming.
Leaning over the counter to stop her, to prize her from her shopping, to separate her from his trolley, he takes her by the wrists. He is not violent, he is simply firm.
‘Madame,’ he says. ‘Madame.’
By this time the whole shop is eyes and ears. Johnny and I stand stock-still in disbelief, gawking. Nothing like this has ever happened before. No one has ever dared go so far.
‘Madame, you’re banned,’ says Dave. ‘Get out. There’s the door.’
Huff, she makes her way to the open door, turns, points an arm behind her in the direction of the street, and says, ‘Wait till my husband hears of this.’ Then stalks off.
Even Nunzi, standing along the curb, comes to see what’s taking place. The rest of us, as if having just witnessed an impromptu street fight, break up slowly, heads shaking, and start back to work. Frankie has whisked clean the counter, dumping everything into the shopping basket, and has ordered one of the boys to put it all back on the shelves. Dave, nerves jangling, seeking approval, shoots a look at Johnny. Johnny gives him a little nod that says he’s done the right thing.
And then it happens. A wildman is suddenly in the doorway. He does not come in. He stands there, almost reeling, gripping the door jamb, perhaps to control himself, perhaps to give himself time to think. We all see it, see him. He has a shock of lank gray hair hanging down over his forehead, a sharp chin, flaming eyes. He is getting ready to say something but he cannot get the words out.
I see Nunzi’s head over the man’s shoulders. Fearing something, Johnny and I fly from behind our counter. And then, screeched out, dragged out at full volume, comes a word I had never before heard and hope never to hear again. The word drips venom.
‘C h r i s t – k i l – l e r.’
I can still see the man’s vicious teeth, clenched fist, lips curled back like a rabid dog, his ready-to-pounce attitude. But he couldn’t pounce. Frankie was there, chesting him out onto the sidewalk, and from behind Nunzi tugged at his raised arm. Even Johnny and I had moved up, blocking footballers, forming a phalanx to give Dave protection.
Surely Uncle Dave was about to faint, I thought. He’d gone colorless and had half collapsed onto the counter. Everything he most feared had just taken place. Everything that he and his immigrant father before him, in long North End careers, had gone to painstaking lengths to avoid or at least had learned to shut out or to will away. That daily round of looking over the shoulder, catching oneself, and then refusing to believe that anything untoward could possibly happen. Those three checks taped to the inside of his plate-glass window at Christmas I now saw were but the puny effort, the doomed hope, of a decent man to keep a beast at bay.
But on that Friday morning it was homo homini lupus yet again. Two thousand years of ignorance, hatred, and opprobrium had converged and come to stare Dave Pollen in the eye. It could not have been put more succinctly than this, which is how Gyorgy Tabori once summed it up: ‘You are reminded by other people you’re a Jew.’
lxix
My appetite for Sacco and Vanzetti grew. Not far from the North End, in a printing works housed in an old granite warehouse on Milk Street, sat Aldino Felicani, who had been one of the founders of the two anarchists’ defense committee back in the early Twenties. One day I walked into his ground-floor office to meet him. A long, long friendship ensued.
Felicani was well on in years. A crusading anarchist, his life still revolved around two historical moments. The Sacco-Vanzetti case and the anti-fascist movement of the Thirties and Forties. In short, he lived largely in the past.
Three floors above his office, I was eventually to discover, was a room and a half so stuffed and crammed with papers that its door could not be wedged open. Piles and piles and piles. Stacks rose from the floor at least to waist height and had crept even higher around the walls. Floor to ceiling bookshelves down one side had long since been crammed, jammed, and overstuffed. Under this mass and turmoil of paper lay two entire desks and a table, hidden, invisible, utterly enveloped and overwhelmed. Nor was there any clear floor space to maneuver about.
For decades, locked in the past, Felicani had been unable to throw anything away. Even the area around the door to the room itself was blocked shoulder high with paper stacks that leaned and threatened to topple and did topple and got hastily and haphazardly re-b
uilt and then went on to spread outward like a pouring of treacle.
Months and months passed before I earned Felicani’s trust enough to be allowed to clap eyes on this chaos. The old man had simply lacked the energy, physical or emotional, to revisit the past and extract what was of value from this lode. There were mounds of local newspapers and magazines and helter-skelter files of anarchist periodicals from around the globe. There were reams of advertising material, none of it ever opened, from manufacturers of paper and ink and type and envelopes and printing presses. But scattered and dispersed among this mountain of paper was the entire proceedings, every single scrap, concerning the seven or more year defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. There was every leaf that the prolific defense team ever published. More, buried among it all, were hundreds of the two anarchists’ handwritten prison letters and all of Vanzetti’s holograph manuscripts. A whole cache of this rescued correspondence turned up at the bottom of an old barrel with wooden staves much like the barrels used for the fish Vanzetti once peddled. But all that, as they say, is a horse of another hue.
Meanwhile, one afternoon Felicani announced that a particular exhibition of paintings was shortly to be put on public display at the venerable Museum of Fine Arts, and he suggested that we do something about it. I agreed, and we set to work. He phoned a couple of old friends and standbys, then got in touch with some sympathetic newspapermen. While upstairs the presses rolled and shook the whole ancient building, Felicani’s son Anteo brought us down the proofsheet of a handbill. The next week, to greet the show’s opening, we went into action.
The we, in addition to Felicani and me, were the standbys. One was Mike Flaherty, an old Irish socialist and staunch defender of Sacco and Vanzetti. The other was Miss Catherine Huntington, a quiet, soft-spoken Brahmin, who lived on Beacon Hill and who – along with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Katherine Anne Porter – was one of the sisterhood who decades earlier had taken up the banner to clear the two anarchists’ names.
I chronicled what our action consisted of, and the result later appeared in a quarterly called Dissent. Felicani himself provided me with the title, ‘The Missing Masterpiece’, and here’s what I wrote:
The late Alvan T. Fuller, businessman and twice Governor of Massachusetts, collected paintings. It is told that in his lifetime Fuller was a very generous man. Earlier this year some fifty of his best pictures hung in a memorial exhibit in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
The museum visitor may have read this about Fuller in the exhibit’s catalog:
It is rarely given to one man in a lifetime … to pursue three careers and to make each of them so large and lasting a contribution to his community … In all three [Fuller] won the distinction: in business, in politics and, not least, in collecting art … His presence in Congress for four years and his two terms as Governor of Massachusetts from 1925 to 1929 exemplified public stewardship of a high order, marked as they were by his forcefulness and independence …
But on to the collection. There was one Rembrandt, a Gainsborough, a Reynolds, a luminous Turner, and several Romneys. In another room were five Renoirs, small and second-rate, a Pissarro, a Monet, a Degas. Best were some Sargent exercises – ‘copies’ after Dutch masters. The one original Sargent was a murky oil; the one Augustus John, plainly bad. Also hanging were two stiff Canalettos and four large, coarsely executed Hubert Robert pastorals. And that was about it.
Did the pictures reflect money without imagination? Perhaps. They felt safe and in the end were disappointing – especially after the fine catalog and the tasteful modern posters pasted in every Boston subway station. Somehow, though, the disappointment was to be expected, and here is why.
Sadly, flagrantly missing from among the collection was any indication of Alvan T. Fuller’s greatest masterpiece, his own true handiwork – the execution in 1927 of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Their faces – Sacco’s long-nosed, smooth-skinned, and young; Vanzetti’s haggard, hook-nosed, with the bushy mustache; both of them hollow from their prison hunger strikes – these faces were missing, were what killed the truth and quality of the Fuller exhibit. But of course it was to be guessed beforehand that this masterpiece would not be represented there.
And there were some in Boston who had surmised it, for at ten o’clock on the morning the Fuller exhibit was officially opened, three men and a woman stood at the front entrance to the museum distributing leaflets. On one side of the leaflet was printed – startling white against a black background – the death masks of the two anarchists. ‘REMEMBER!’ the leaflet read, MURDERED AUG. 23, 1927.’ Above that, ‘Sacco and Vanzetti belong here’; and at the bottom, ‘Be sure to include this picture among the masterpieces of Alvan Tufts Fuller, now on exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts.’ On the reverse side was the celebrated statement of Vanzetti’s that begins, ‘If it had not been for this thing I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men.’
The perspicacity, the downright clairvoyance of those four who who distributed the leaflets: they had guessed correctly that the masterpiece would be missing. By the front door of the museum, they stood in the gray cold until shooed off the property by museum guards, who threatened arrest. But they took their places at the edge of the street, where they were interviewed by newspapermen, tape-recorded for radio broadcast, and filmed for TV. They had with them the original Sacco and Vanzetti death masks, cast in stark white plaster. One of them, Aldino Felicani, a Boston printer, anarchist, and close friend of the two men, said to the papers, ‘We have been told this is in poor taste, since the exhibition honors Governor Fuller, who is dead. But,’ Felicani pointed out, holding up the death masks of his two friends, ‘we respectfully say that these two persons are also dead, and they were murdered.’
The Boston Globe carried the story in two columns on its front page: ‘Art Museum Police Rout Sacco-Vanzetti Pickets’. The sympathetic account began, ‘The ghosts of a “good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler” – anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed for murder in 1927 – came back as they often do to haunt Boston today.’ So after more than thirty-two years – a generation – Sacco and Vanzetti are still front-page news in the city that put them to death. The United Press sent the story through New England towns. The next day there were some two dozen lines on the art page of the New York Times with the story of the protest.
The four picketers stood with their leaflets, their vision, and their sense of justice to tell some who did not know and to remind others who had forgotten that Alvan T. Fuller’s life was not quite the ‘useful and creative one’ described in the museum catalog. Their presence with the missing masterpiece in hand told a great deal about that public career of Fuller’s, ‘marked … by his forcefulness and independence …’
When Fuller died in a moving picture theatre a year ago, the papers carried the news in full headlines. But the bold subheadlines said nothing of Fuller’s business, nothing of his collection of paintings. The subheads in both the Globe and the Herald talked of Sacco and Vanzetti. What was Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s career was also Fuller’s career. But what was the anarchists’ triumph – in Vanzetti’s words, their ‘work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man’ – was the Governor’s nemesis. His name will live only as the names of Sacco and Vanzetti live.
lxx
That New Haven morning she had let me sleep. I didn’t hear her get up. She left a note, signing it with just her initial. P.
lxxi
Two small but significant events followed upon the Friday morning incident. The commotion along North Street had been such that our whole block had been roused, and for half an hour afterwards neighbors and passersby mingled on the sidewalk in front of our door. More than once among the crowd I caught the word shame – vergogna – spoken in Italian, as a condemnation of what had taken place.
Frankie’s older brother, the kurva’s shop manager, crossed the street to inquire if Dave was okay. He stood on
the curb, hands in his front pockets under his apron, speaking into Frankie’s ear. Once or twice he lifted his gaze to the plate-glass window, where Dave was visible behind the cash register. It was the first time I had seen the brother venture to our side of North Street.
And then, barely a minute later, Blondie bustled up, long-faced, plainly alarmed. This time, breaking through the knot of onlookers, he actually came three or four steps through the door.
‘Ask Dave if he’s all right,’ he said to Johnny.
And Dave, not waiting for Johnny to ask: ‘Johnny, tell him I’m okay.’
Johnny said nothing but pumped his head up and down so that Blondie might know that Dave was okay.
Back to work on the Monday, I still felt weighed down. Unpressured Mondays were usually carefree days. On this one, however, a pall hung over everything. Dave was still shaken, and I was to misjudge just how much.
I felt ashamed of what had taken place. Italian blood ran in my veins too. I’d made inquiries about that word and was informed that the epithet was far from unknown. It was still a cudgel.
I wanted desperately to say something to Dave. To say that, like him, neither was I a Catholic; that not every Italian was; that in Italy my family too had had to watch their backs. I wanted to reach out to him, to show solidarity. Equally, I wanted to distance myself from the Friday morning beast.
But our best-laid plans, as Burns said. I’d cornered Dave at the front of the shop when for some reason or other we happened to be alone in the place. But he never let me get beyond a single sentence. As soon as he got the drift of what I was telling him – what I was trying to tell him – he balked. He reared up. He simply could not handle it. Wheeling round in fear, he looked to see if we’d been overheard.