The World in My Kitchen

by Colette Rossant

  Thomas was born on November 24, 1965, on Thanksgiving Day. Three months later, I was hired by Hofstra University to teach French to third-year students.

  The place where we were living was now too small for our growing family, so Jimmy and I decided to look for a house. One day a real estate agent I knew called and said that she had a house that she thought I would like. She could not accompany us to see it, so she handed me the key and an address, saying, “Here, take the key and go and see the house. Return the key next week.”

  That weekend, Jimmy and I went downtown to Sullivan Street below Houston Street to take a look. It was a wide town house, with four stories and an immense garden. I stood in awe of the living room, which was an enormous room with twelve-foot high ceilings and two fireplaces. I could imagine myself sitting in front of a roaring fire reading my favorite novel. For Jimmy, it was a dream: an enormous space with high ceilings and lots of light. We returned several times. I loved the house. I saw the garden’s potential and thought that my 4 young children would love it. But the house had no heat and no kitchen, and the rest of the house was a wreck. However, we were determined to buy it. “Don’t worry,” Jimmy said. “Toothless and I will make it work.”

  Toothless was the nickname we had given to a jack-of-all-trades we had met a few summers before. For two summers in a row, we had rented an old farmhouse in Hunterdon County, New Jersey for a month. Whenever anything went wrong in the house, which was every other day, we would call our landlord’s ex-husband. His name was Bob, but we called him “Toothless” because he didn’t have any front teeth. Toothless had served in the merchant marines and was very clever at fixing things without spending a great deal of money. We had become good friends (he adored my cooking), so when in 1967 we moved to a rental house on Nineteenth Street, he agreed to help us fix up the place. He built a kitchen and painted the house with Jimmy. So when Jimmy called him with a promise of a steady job for a few months, plus my cooking, he agreed to come and help rebuild the new house, which we had finally bought after months of negotiation.

  I was now very busy packing, I needed good live-in help. This is when Gladys came into our lives. Gladys came from the South. She was a young, plump woman, about twenty-eight years old, and full of joy and laughter. My children loved her, especially Marianne. Gladys would spend hours combing her hair and telling her stories about her boyfriends. I was content that my children were happy and that I had time now to explore our new neighborhood.

  Sullivan Street, our part of Sullivan Street that is, began at Houston Street and went all the way to Broome Street. Houston Street is a large avenue that starts at the East River and crosses Manhattan up to the Avenue of the Americas, just below Bleecker Street to the end at the West Side highway. Houston Street divided the neighborhood in two. South of Houston was the Italian working class, and north of Houston was where established urban professionals lived—in the MacDougal/Sullivan Gardens concealed behind rows of 1920s Federal-style town houses.

  Our street, along with Thompson Street and West Broadway, was part of an Italian enclave that included a block and a half of MacDougal Street. My intimacy with the neighborhood began even as lawyers were preparing the closing of our house. I walked down Sullivan Street and Thompson Street, looking at the few stores that existed and observing my soon-to-be neighbors. The street was all Italian and mostly elderly. The younger generations had long ago moved to Brooklyn, or Queens, or the outer suburbs. There were also a few Portuguese families living in two or three buildings near Thompson Street. On Sullivan Street, between Houston and Prince, was a latticini, Italian for a milk and cheese store. The aroma of freshly made mozzarella and smoked mozzarella wafted through the street. As a new arrival and with the idea that I should become known to the people on the street, every night I would bring a fresh mozzarella home for our dinner. Joe, the owner, also sold and grated Parmesan cheese, olive oil, olives, ricotta, and a few staples. Next door to Joe’s was a candy store usually filled with Italian teenagers chatting, or sipping sodas, or doing nothing; at least this is how it seemed to me. Bruno’s Bakery was next door. The bakery sold every Italian pastry I had tasted in Italy, plus Italian bread and crackers. Opposite the bakery was the enormous, yet undistinguished front of the parish Church of St. Anthony. The church, run by the Franciscan Friars, had a gray granite façade done in a style that Jimmy called Italianate Grotesque.

  On Sundays, Jimmy and I would enjoy a slow walk down Sullivan Street to take in the scene. The church was filled with couples in their best Sunday clothes. Women in long, black, silk dresses, with old-fashioned hats perched on their teased hair. The younger women were more stylish and wore bright colored dresses. No women were wearing slacks. After mass, the women gathered in groups of two or three outside the church, chatting while their husbands in shiny electric blue or pale gray suits stood on the other side of the street in groups in front of Bruno’s Bakery. They all carried boxes of pastries. I imagined that the boxes were filled with cannoli, stuffed with a thick sweet cream or babas soaked in rum, for their Sunday meal.

  On the corner of Sullivan and Prince streets, this pattern was repeated, but this time by only men who were Portuguese. The rest of the week the St. Anthony Church was closed, except for Bingo Night on Thursday, which took place in the church’s basement. Near the church were a group of small stores, one selling homemade sausages, another dealing in haberdashery. An uninviting café with tables, chairs, and a bar was also nearby. Eventually, I would learn that what I took to be a café was actually a social club called the Saxon Knights.

  Toward the corner at Prince Street was a butcher shop. What was extraordinary about this butcher shop was that the butcher was a woman. Catherine Carnevari was big, tall, and very strong. I often saw Catherine carrying in a whole side of beef as if it were a bouquet of roses. The store was large with white tiles covering the walls and floor. There were always three or four older women sitting on chairs near a table covered with newspapers, chatting about the neighborhood, their kids, or the latest love triangle. After we moved, I soon joined the women and sat on a chair listening to their chatter. I learned that Catherine was married to a sanitation man half her size, that he was afraid of her, and that she, they whispered when she was not listening, beat him quite often, especially when he came home drunk. Five years later, he died under mysterious circumstances. The whole neighborhood went to the funeral, including myself. Catherine looked even larger dressed all in black. Later that year, to the chagrin of all the women in the neighborhood, Catherine sold the store to a French man who turned it into a pastry shop and café.

  At the corner of Prince and Sullivan Streets was a large luncheonette, Vinnie’s Coffee Shop. The luncheonette was run by Vinnie and Maria, his mother, who did all the cooking. The white Formica tables were turning dirty yellow with age. At lunch, Vinnie’s was full of men and women from the surrounding blocks eating Maria’s famous meatball sandwich drowned in her spicy tomato sauce or spaghetti marinara along with cold beer.

  In front of our house, which was in the middle of the block, stood De Pauli’s grocery store. Just before we moved in, I started to go to De Pauli’s to buy sandwiches for our lunch when Vinnie’s was too crowded. I loved the store, which had been founded by Willy De Pauli’s grandfather at the turn of the century. Willy was a tall, thin, slightly balding man with a mournful expression on his face. He never really smiled, but he was the nicest man in my new neighborhood. The store was generous, fitted with wood-paneled walls and countless storage cabinets with wood-framed glass doors, filled with hundreds of different types of pasta. Willy sold sandwiches filled with thin slices of mortadella, ham, or cheese on puffy Italian bread. Women would come in, buy a pound of pasta for dinner, and would say to Willy, “I want 5-22-74-5.” I wondered what these numbers were. Once we moved in and I felt more secure about my standing with him, I asked Willy what these numbers were for. His answer was, “Not for you. Don’t ask! They gamble.” And this was all I could get out of him.
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br />   Next to De Pauli was Freddie’s luncheonette and a Chinese laundry. The laundry was run by a young couple, the Wongs, who had two young children. Thomas, when he was a two-and-half-year-old toddler, befriended them, and I frequently asked them to come and play with him. They often sat on our stoop to play, refusing to come into our house. Tina, the little girl, was beautiful. Thomas, I was sure, had a crush on her. And so for the following three years, until he went to kindergarten, Thomas could be found sitting on our stoop with the other kids, playing with toy cars or stoop ball.

  The remaining block was filled with tenements. Then at the corner of Sullivan and Spring streets was an Italian restaurant, the Napoli, run by three sisters. Napoli was the restaurant where you took your Sullivan Street parents for Sunday dinner if you had moved out to the suburbs. The Napoli had a rust-colored stucco façade and illuminated neon beer signs in the window. In front of the restaurant was a narrow bar packed with men with heavy gold chains hanging around their necks, drinking beer, and arguing in loud voices. In the back was a small dining room. By early evening, the restaurant was full. The daily menu was written on a blackboard, and no one asked for the written menu. (I had asked for a menu on my first visit and got a dirty look from the waitress. I never did it again.) You were expected to choose from the blackboard dishes that changed daily. Thursday was my favorite. On that day you could have a plate of tender, succulent tripe in a rich tomato sauce served with lots of hot garlic bread to mop up the sauce. The chicken was also good and so were the mussels on Fridays. My favorite vegetable was the sautéed escarole with thick slices of tender garlic.

  Thompson Street, around the corner, was very different. The street had very few stores. There was a Portuguese deli at the corner of Thompson and Prince Streets, a sausage store in the middle of the block, then at the corner of Thompson and Spring Streets was a shop front called The Village Community Problem Center. The people who ran it were trying to help the old Italian families who had battles with their landlords or young mothers whose children had problems either with the police or with school.

  But the great attraction of Thompson Street was Mary Finelli’s candy store. Mary was born and raised on Thompson Street. At four o’clock after school, her store would be filled with screaming children buying candies for a few pennies. Mary controlled the shouting with a tough teacher’s voice and had strict rules. You were not allowed to buy more than two candies. The children often tried going out of the store and coming back in to ask to buy two more. Mary was never fooled, and the children adored her.

  In the middle of the block on Prince Street between Thompson Street and West Broadway was the Vesuvio Bakery, run by a small man with slicked down black hair called Tony Dapolito. He looked like an Italian lover from movies of the 1930s. I was told by the real estate agent who had sold us the house that Tony Dapolito was the defacto Mayor of South Village, but his real power base was the territory between West Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Tony sold several different breads and crunchy bread-sticks. The best ones were hard dried toasts called pizzelli, which were used for dipping in soup or for absorbing hot Italian tomato sauce. I first experienced them at Napoli, where they were served with mussels marinara on Fridays. I wanted to be in Tony Dapolito’s good graces, so every afternoon on my way back from work, I bought these sublime toasts either peppered or plain, or some golden, crunchy bread sticks to take with me to work the next day.

  It was impossible for a young, struggling couple like Jimmy and I to carry a mortgage on the new house while paying for the rental on Nineteenth Street, not to mention paying Toothless and buying materials to redo the new house. So we decided to move into our Sullivan Street house immediately. I started to pack our household possessions. Naima and Toothless helped. I packed our clothes in large wardrobe boxes, and everyone, including the movers, laughed at me as I wrote “close” on each box. We moved into an empty house that had only a single toilet and one wash basin on the first floor. There was no kitchen, no bathroom. The radiators barely got warm from a frail steam-heating system whose boiler was in the next door neighbor’s house, the Brods, who had bought their house at the same time as we bought ours. Naturally, they wanted us to get a new heating system immediately. This was going to be expensive, but it had to be done. Therefore, our first priority was to find a real plumber. I also had other worries.

  “How do we live in this empty house with four children, the youngest only 18 months old?” I asked Jimmy. “I don’t think we can do it!”

  “Yes we can. We’ll put our bed in the living room and place the children’s mattresses on the floor next to us. We will buy a microwave oven to heat breakfast, an electric kettle for tea, paper plates and cups, and for dinner, we will go out and explore all the local restaurants. No problem; you will see.”

  I took two weeks off from Hofstra University to pack and organize the move. Within two days, we had moved, and then the problems really started.

  Thomas was crawling all over the place. The floor was not the best place for him. Toothless had removed the linoleum that was covering the stairway, exposing the nails. While he removed the nails on the three flights of stairs, we had to watch Thomas like hawks. Gladys could do little else but keep an eye on him. Then we had to teach him how to go down the steps, getting him to sit on the first step, then slide down on his bottom, just in case he escaped us. Finally, he succeeded, and with great peals of laughter, he reached the lowest floor.

  The next problem was washing ourselves and our four children. The three girls went to school every day and could not look like dirty urchins. How do you wash kids with no hot water, no shower, and no bathroom?

  I made a list of all our friends who lived within a ten-block radius and begged. Could we impose on them, once a week, all six of us to come and take showers? I was delighted by their responses. They all came to the rescue. So on Mondays, we bathed at Elisabeth Fonseca’s house; on Tuesdays we bathed at the Ghents; Wednesdays were bad because no one could have us; but on Thursdays and Fridays, we went to our neighbor, Mrs. Brod’s, apartment, and on the weekends, to my in-laws. After one month, I was afraid that I had used all my friends’ good will and started to apologize profusely. They all told me not to worry. Soon, we found a plumber who promised that within a month the top floor bathroom would be finished.

  Having established a routine for the children and us, after my two weeks’ leave, I was ready to go back to teaching. The morning I was to return to work, I got up very quietly. Since we were all sleeping in one room, I decided I would have a coffee across the street at Freddie’s luncheonette.

  As I entered, I looked around. I was astonished by the crowd at the counter. I was the only woman in the place; most of the men looked as if they were construction workers, and there were two policemen in uniform. They were all drinking beer or hard liquor and wine. Freddie’s was a bar, not a luncheonette! Freddie, I assumed it was Freddie himself behind the bar, was short, plump, with very thick glasses. He looked at me and said in a very polite, but gruff voice, “What you want?”

  “Could I have a cup of coffee and an English muffin?”

  “I haven’t served a cup of coffee in twenty years! Who are you? Where do you live?”

  “Across the street, 114, in the big house.”

  Suddenly, one of the men drinking called to me: “Have a drink…on me…come on beautiful, have a drink.”

  I was about to leave when Freddie took my side and said: “Leave the lady alone.”

  All the men suddenly kept quiet and looked sheepishly at Freddie.

  “Today, I can’t give you any coffee, lady, but tell me what you want every day and at what time. It will be here for you.”

  “I go to work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Could I have coffee and an English muffin?”

  “You got it!” Freddie said with a grimace that was a smile.

  And so three times a week, at six o’clock in the morning, my coffee and English muffin would be waiting for me. The men at the counter now gree
ted me with a warm “Hi.” Freddie never allowed them to be rude or familiar with me.

  A few days later, wanting to thank him for his kindness, I entered his luncheonette in the early afternoon. To my surprise, the scene had radically changed. The counter was packed with women drinking soda or juices. Freddie’s wife, Marie, was now behind the counter chatting with the women. The opposite of Freddie, Marie was a tall, plump woman with grayish hair and a sweet smile. Every afternoon, just before school let out, the women would gather in the luncheonette while Marie would hold court, giving advice on numerous subjects from a pasta recipe to what to do when your daughter was dating someone you did not like because he was not Italian. Some of the women, I also learned, were widows or older women whose husbands were playing “Bocci,” the Italian ball game in special bars on MacDougal Street or sipping espresso at their social club. The luncheonette was a sort of social club for the women who had nowhere else to go. Marie had two children, a son and a daughter. The daughter was married and lived across the street from the luncheonette. Their son, Andy, was a problem, I had heard from sitting in the butcher store. He took drugs and was often drunk. Often, one could see him walking down Sullivan Street, muttering to himself while the old ladies would shake their heads in disgust. Years later, when both Marie and Freddie died and the luncheonette was sold to become a beauty salon, the old ladies lost their meeting place. Some died; others left the street to join their children in Queens, and a few elected the beauty salon as their new meeting place because the salon was run by a beautiful, young Italian woman, Pat, who knew everyone on the street. Years later, Pat and I became good friends, and when she decided to move her beauty salon two doors down, Jimmy designed it for her.