New York

  “I suppose if all the trusts had failed, Rose, then we should have failed too. But we were never really in trouble.” It seemed to comfort her so much that, after a while, he almost believed it himself.

  The first weekend in November, he took the Rolls-Royce out alone, for a fifty-mile drive. He thought of taking young Keller, too, but decided not to. If Rose had found out, it would only have annoyed her.

  If the panic of 1907 was to change the life of young Salvatore Caruso, it was a small event the month before that he always remembered.

  He had already dressed up. He was wearing the suit with long trousers that his older brother had worn before him. His white shirt was spotless. He might be going to his first communion. But to everyone, except his mother, at least, the meeting today was more important even than that. So he was anxious to complete the errand as quickly as possible.

  It had been his mother’s idea to send him to the priest’s house. Not their own parish priest, but the silver-haired old man who’d come to say Mass in their church the week before. And where did he live? In the Jewish quarter, of all places.

  It wasn’t far. You only had to cross the Bowery and you were in it—the Lower East Side’s tenth and thirteenth wards, which ran across to the river just below the old German quarter. Its poor streets—around Division and Hester streets, through Delancey, and all the way up to Houston—housed small factories, varnish shops, ironworks and tenements which, for a generation now, had been filled to overflowing with the Jews of Eastern Europe. On Rivington Street, however, near the river, was a Catholic church.

  Salvatore hadn’t enjoyed the old man’s sermon. It had been about Christ’s temptation in the desert, when Christ had gone up to a mountain and the devil had told him to jump off, so that God could save him. But rightly, the priest reminded them, Jesus had refused.

  “Why didn’t he jump?” Salvatore had whispered to Anna. After all, if Jesus could walk on water, why not fly? It seemed a grand idea. But not to the old priest.

  “Tempt not the Lord thy God!” he had cried, looking straight at Salvatore. God is all-powerful, he had explained, but He does not have to prove Himself. It is sacrilege—again he looked at Salvatore sternly—to challenge God to do anything. He does only what is necessary for His plan, which we do not understand. If He gives us poverty, if He gives us sickness, if He takes a loved one from us, that is part of His plan. We may ask for His help, but we must accept our fate. “Do not ask Him for more than you deserve. If God wanted man to fly, he would have given him wings. So do not try,” he told them firmly. “For that is the temptation of the devil.”

  Concetta Caruso had liked the sermon very much, and she had thanked the old priest afterward. They had talked. She had discovered that his mother came from the same village as her own. And that he had a liking for sugar-coated almonds.

  But why had she chosen that day of all days to send Salvatore to his house with a bag of sugared almonds? Who knew? It must have been fate.

  Salvatore hurried through the Jewish quarter as quickly as he could. Not that he was afraid, but he always felt uncomfortable over there. The men with their black coats and hats, their beards and their strange language seemed so different from everyone else. The boys were mostly so pale, and as for the ones with ringlets, he tried not to look at them. But they didn’t give him any trouble. He’d never had to fight them. Making his way through the crowded mass of pushcarts and stalls, he soon came to Rivington Street, and saw the Catholic church ahead.

  That was another strange thing about the Jews. They didn’t seem to have parish churches like the Christians. Even the larger synagogues were squat little buildings, squashed between tenements, without a churchyard or a priest’s house. Some were just announced by narrow doorways leading to single rooms; you might see three or four in a block. His mother did not approve of the Jews. She said they were heretics, and that God would punish them. But his father only shrugged.

  “Haven’t they been punished enough before they came here? There are no pogroms in America, Concetta, thank God. Basta. It is enough. Leave them be.”

  The priest seemed delighted with his mother’s gift, and told Salvatore to thank her.

  Salvatore was so anxious not to be late that he ran all the way back. Crossing the Bowery into the Italian quarter, he went three blocks before turning left into Mulberry Street, where his family lived. They were waiting in the street already, dressed up for the great occasion. His parents and Giuseppe, his brother Paolo, his face scrubbed. His older sister Anna was still doing little Maria’s hair.

  “At last,” said his father, as Salvatore arrived, “we can go.”

  “But where is Angelo?” cried his mother, while his father made a sign of impatience. “Anna, where is Angelo?” As the eldest daughter, expected to help her mother, Anna was in charge of Angelo most of the time.

  “Mama, I’m doing Maria’s hair,” said Anna plaintively.

  “Salvatore will find him,” said his mother. “Quickly, Toto, get your brother Angelo.”

  “We did not know it,” his father liked to say, “but when we arrived at Ellis Island, Angelo was already one of the family.” He’d been born eight months later. Angelo was six now, though still the baby of the family. They all loved the little boy, but his father couldn’t help being impatient with him sometimes. He was small for his age and rather frail. And he was so dreamy. “He’s like his Uncle Luigi,” Giovanni Caruso would sigh. Anna used to defend Angelo. “He is sensitive and clever,” she would declare. But it didn’t impress anyone much.

  Salvatore ran into the house. It was a typical tenement house of the Lower East Side. Originally it had been a five-story row house with steps up to the door. But long ago, the owner had realized that he could double the small rents he received by a simple expedient. Building out as cheaply as possible into the small yard behind, he had been able, for no great outlay, to double his rentable space. And since both the owners of the house next door and of the house in the next street that backed onto his had done the same thing, the only ventilation for the back part of the house now came from two sources: a narrow air shaft between this house and the one beside it, and the tiny yard remaining at the very back, where a pair of latrines served the needs of all the tenant families.

  When their cousins had first shown them the place, the day after they’d come through Ellis Island, Giovanni and Concetta Caruso had been disgusted. Soon they discovered they were lucky. They had three rooms on the top floor, at the front. True, you had to climb up the stinking stairwell to get there, but there was fresh air from the street, and you could go onto the roof above, where the washing was hung out to dry.

  Angelo was standing in the back room when Salvatore burst in. He had his shirt on, but he had not tucked it in. And he was looking down at his feet miserably.

  “You’re six years old and you still can’t tie up your bootlaces?” Salvatore cried impatiently.

  “I was trying.”

  “Keep still.” He’d have dragged his little brother down the stairs as he was, but Angelo would have been sure to trip. Hurriedly, he started to tie them for him. “You know who we’re going to see?” he asked.

  “No, I’ve forgotten.”

  “Idiot! We’re going to see the greatest Italian in the world.”

  He did not say the greatest Italian who ever lived. That was Columbus. After him, for northern Italians, came Garibaldi, the Patriot, the unifier of Italy, who’d only died a quarter-century ago. But for the southern Italians of New York, there was only one great hero, a living hero too, who had come to dwell among them.

  “Caruso,” Salvatore cried. “The great Caruso, who shares our own name. We are going to see Caruso! How can you forget?”

  To their father, Enrico Caruso was a god. In America, the opera might be the preserve of the rich, but the Italian community followed the career of the great tenor and his performances as closely as they would have followed that of a great general and his battles.

  ??
?He has sung all over the world,” their father would say. “Naples, Milan, London, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, San Francisco … He has sung with Melba. Now he sings with Geraldine Farrar. Toscanini conducts him. And what did the great Puccini himself say, when he first heard Caruso sing? ‘Who sent you to me? God Himself?’” Not just Italian, but born in Naples, and he even shared their name. “We are related,” his father declared, though when Salvatore asked him to explain the relationship, his father had only shrugged, as if the question were foolish, and answered: “Who could know such a thing?”

  And they were going to meet him today.

  It was thanks to Uncle Luigi. He had found work in a restaurant nearby. Not a grand one—this, after all, was the poor Italian quarter. The richer, northern Italians, the doctors, the businessmen, the men of education who looked down upon their fellow countrymen from the south—regarded them as animals almost—they lived in other parts of town—Greenwich Village was favored—and they had fine restaurants over there.

  But Caruso never forgot the poor home in Naples he came from. He liked to eat down in Little Italy, and recently, he’d come to dine in the restaurant where Uncle Luigi worked, and Uncle Luigi had asked him if he might present his family the next time Caruso came, and the great man had said certainly, because that was his noble character. He was having his midday meal there today.

  Salvatore had just got Angelo downstairs when his brother said he had to go pee-pee. With a cry of frustration, Salvatore took him to the door of the backyard, so that he could go out to the latrines. “Hurry,” he told him, while he waited irritably by the door. After a few moments, Angelo came out. “Hurry,” he cried again.

  Then he’d cried out once more. Too late.

  Despite the fact that the communal latrines were there, the people above the yard continually threw their refuse out of the window to be cleaned up later. The journey to and from the latrines was always perilous, therefore. Everybody knew to look up when they moved through the yard. Everybody except Angelo.

  The sheet of dirty water from above came from a pail someone had used while mopping the floor. It was black. Little Angelo looked up just in time to get the contents full in the face. He fell down. His shirt was soaked and filthy. For a moment he sat in a black puddle, too shocked to speak. Then he began to wail.

  “Stupido! Idiot!” screamed Salvatore. “Look at your shirt. You disgrace us.” He seized his little brother by the hair and dragged him weeping along the corridor and out into the street, where the family greeted him with cries of vexation.

  His father threw up his hands, and started to blame Salvatore. But Salvatore started shouting that it wasn’t fair. Was it his fault his brother couldn’t tie up his shoes or look out for himself when he went to the latrines? His father made an impatient gesture, but he didn’t disagree. Meanwhile, his mother had taken Angelo inside.

  “Let him stay at home,” Salvatore complained, “instead of disgracing us.” But in a few minutes, looking contrite, his little brother was back again, his head scrubbed and wearing a shirt that was clean, though much older than the first. Then they all set off up Mulberry Street.

  The Italian streets were almost as crowded as the nearby Jewish quarter, but there were differences. Small trees gave shade along some of them. Here and there, a handsome Catholic church, sometimes with a walled churchyard, would break up the line of houses. Each street, moreover, had its particular character. People from the Neapolitan region mostly lived on Mulberry, the Calabrians on Mott, the Sicilians on Elizabeth, with each major town taking a particular section. They re-created their homeland as best they could.

  Not that Concetta ever felt at home. How could she, when all the life she’d known before had been in the warm Italian south? They might have been poor, but they had their land, their village, the ancient beauty of the Mediterranean shore and the mountains. All she had here was the roar and clatter of narrow streets, set on the edge of an endless, untamed wilderness. This place called itself a city, yet where were the piazzas, the places to sit and talk, and be seen? Where was its center?

  True, at the bottom of Mulberry Street, where the city authorities had finally pulled down a group of tenements so foul that they rivaled the neighboring Five Points, there was now a small park, overlooked by the Church of the Transfiguration. People went there, yes, but it didn’t feel like a proper Italian space.

  “Everything here is ugliness,” she would sigh.

  As for the crowded house, with its narrow staircase, its flickering gaslight, peeling wallpaper and stink, her spirits sank every time she entered it. Whenever she could, she would go up on the roof, where the women from the nearby houses liked to meet and gossip. Sometimes she’d sit and darn clothes, or make tomato paste. In summer, she slept up there with the smaller children, while Giuseppe and Anna slept out on the fire escape. Anything to escape the airless little tenement rooms.

  But if America was terrible, it gave you money. A generation ago, strong Irish newcomers had labored on the building sites, dug the canals, built railways and cleaned the streets. But many of those Irish families had moved on. They were policemen, firemen, even professional men now. It was the turn of the new Italian arrivals to take on the heavy work now. It was not well paid—only black people were paid less—but Giovanni Caruso and his son Giuseppe were strong and worked hard. And with Anna taking in piecework too, the family was still able, like most Italian families, to save something. Every month, Giovanni Caruso went to the Stabile Bank on the corner of Mulberry and Grand streets and sent dollars back to his sisters in Italy. He was also able to put away a little for himself. In a few years, he hoped to have enough saved to open a small business, or buy a house, maybe. That was a dream that would make the long years of hardship worthwhile. Meanwhile, to please his wife, he had even kept Paolo and Salvatore in school—although thirteen-year-old Paolo was quite old enough, he reminded her, to be earning his living.

  Another few years. Especially with the help of Signor Rossi.

  Like everyone else in Little Italy, Signor Rossi had come there because he had to. But he was a prominente, a man of distinction. “My father was a lawyer,” he would say with a shrug, “and but for his untimely death before my education was completed, I’d be living in a fine house in Naples.” Nonetheless, Signor Rossi was a kindly man with knowledge. Above all, he spoke good English.

  Even after six years in New York, Giovanni Caruso spoke only the most broken English. Concetta spoke none at all. Most of their neighbors, their friends, even their cousins who had come to America long before them, were in the same situation. They had re-created Italy, as best they could, in their own quarter; but the great American world outside was still strange to them. So if help was needed in negotiating with the city authorities, or understanding the meaning of a contract, Signor Rossi could explain things like a notary. He was always dressed in a well-tailored suit; he had a quiet presence that reassured doubtful Americans, and he was glad to speak to people on your behalf. For these services he would never take any payment. But if he came into any little grocery, or needed work done in his house, the money he offered was always refused with a smile. His business, however, was to help you look after your savings.

  “Money in the bank is good, my friend,” he would explain, “but money that grows is better. The Americans make their money grow, so why shouldn’t we share in their good fortune?” Over the years, Signor Rossi had become quite a successful banchista. He knew how to invest, and dozens of families had been grateful to put their savings in his hands. Each month, Giovanni Caruso would add a little more to the savings he had placed with Signor Rossi, and each month Rossi would give him a brief account of how his little fortune was growing. “Be patient,” he would counsel. “If you invest wisely in this country, you will prosper.”

  The family walked proudly up the street. Giovanni with his grown-up son, then Concetta with little Angelo, Anna with Maria, while Salvatore and Paolo brought up the rear, talking and laughing as usua
l.

  The little restaurant was not yet crowded. In the middle, Uncle Luigi, with a napkin over his arm, was serving beside a large table at which a single man was sitting. He was a thickset, Neapolitan fellow, not unlike their father, but in his eyes there was a special gleam. As they entered, and Uncle Luigi gestured for them to approach, the man at the table beamed at them and, opening his arms expansively, invited them to sit at table with him.

  “Welcome,” he cried, “the family of Caruso.”

  Salvatore would never forget that meal. He had never seen so much food in his life.

  Not that the food in the Italian quarter was bad. Even his mother would grudgingly admit that, in America, you ate more meat than you did in the Mezzogiorno, and pasta too. No thick peasant bread, either. In America, you ate light white bread, like the rich.

  But of course, the great tenor, who was paid thousands of dollars a week, could have all the food he wanted, and soon the table was groaning with Italian pasta, American bistecca, a huge bowl of salad, jugs of olive oil, piles of olives, bottles of Chianti—and Lacryma Christi also, from the base of Vesuvius, in honor of the Naples region—baskets of breads, plates of salami and cheeses … And over it all, a wonderful, rich smell of tomato, pepper and oil. “Mangia, eat,” he urged, as he pushed the food toward them, and he insisted that a bistecca be placed in front of every child. It seemed to Salvatore that he was in heaven.

  From the great Caruso, also, there exuded an aura of warmth and generosity that seemed to fill the whole room. “Italy in America,” he remarked to Giovanni Caruso with a grin, “it’s even better than Italy in Italy.” He patted his growing stomach. “This is where we Italians come to grow fat.” For indeed, even in the stinking tenements of the Lower East Side, the thin immigrants from the Mezzogiorno would nearly always put on weight after a year or two.

  To Concetta Caruso, he was charming. He knew her village, even one of her relations. Soon, she was beaming. As for Giovanni Caruso, who knew very well the tenor’s legendary generosity, he was anxious to make sure that Caruso should not think they had come there looking for charity.