“We do well,” he told him. “Already I have savings. A few years more and I shall buy my own house.”
“Bravo,” said Caruso. “Let us drink to the land of opportunity.”
“But you, Signor Caruso,” his father added respectfully, “have brought honor to our name. You have raised us all.”
Like a tribal chief, Caruso acknowledged this tribute. “Let us raise our glasses, my friends, to the name of Caruso.”
During the meal, he spoke to each of the family in turn. He congratulated Giuseppe on helping his father, and Concetta on raising such a fine family. Anna, he saw at once, was the family’s second mother. Paolo admitted that he wanted to be a fireman, and when it came to Salvatore’s turn, he asked him about his school.
The Church of the Transfiguration stood between Mott and Mulberry streets, on the small rise overlooking the little park. When the Carusos had first arrived there, an Irish priest ministered to an Irish congregation in the main church, while an Italian priest conducted a service for the Italian congregation, in their own language, down in the crypt below. But since then, the Italians and their priest had moved upstairs, a signal that it was they who had taken charge of the area now. Beside the church was the school which the Caruso children attended.
“You must learn all you can,” the great man told Salvatore. “Too many of our southern Italians despise education. They say, ‘Why should a son know more than his father?’ But they are wrong. Work hard at school and you will get ahead in America. You understand?”
Salvatore had no love of school, so he was not pleased to hear this, but he bowed his head respectfully.
“And this young man,” Caruso turned to little Angelo, “do you learn things at school?”
Angelo might be dreamy, but he did well at school. In fact, he could already read better than his elder brothers. He also had a talent for drawing. He was too shy to say anything, so his mother informed the great man of these facts, while Salvatore, who couldn’t see that Angelo’s talents did him any good, made a conspiratorial face at Paolo. So he was a bit taken aback by the next question.
“And your brother Salvatore, is he kind to you?”
There was a pregnant silence. Then Angelo burst into life.
“No,” he cried loudly, “my brother is not kind to me.”
Paolo thought this was funny, but Caruso did not, and he rounded upon Salvatore.
“Shame on you.”
“Anna looks after Angelo,” his mother interceded, not wanting the great man to think that her youngest child was neglected. But though he nodded, Caruso’s attention remained on Salvatore.
“Your brother is a dreamer, Salvatore. He is not so strong as you. But who knows, he may be a thinker, a priest, a great artist. You are his big brother. You should protect him. Promise me you will be kind to your brother.”
At that moment, Salvatore was ready to give Angelo a beating, but all the same he felt himself go very red, and promise, “Yes, Signor Caruso.”
“Good.” From nowhere, the great man produced a chocolate and gave it to Salvatore. “This is for you only, Salvatore, so that you remember you have promised me to be kind to your brother.” He held out his hand, so that Salvatore had to shake it. “Ecco. He has promised.” He looked at them all, just as seriously as if he had signed a legal contract.
And Salvatore looked at little Angelo, whose eyes were now very round, and at the tenor, and at his family, and secretly cursed his fate. Now what was he going to do?
It did not take long for the news to travel. Within a day, the whole of Little Italy seemed to know that the Carusos had had a family meal with the great tenor. Giovanni Caruso was wise, though. When people said to him, “So the great Caruso is your relation?” he only laughed and said: “There are many Carusos. We are a tribe, not a family.” In this way, people were soon saying: “Giovanni Caruso does not admit that they are related, yet Caruso himself treats him like a brother. No smoke without fire.” By half denying the relationship, therefore, he made people suspect it existed. Even their landlord, seeing him in the street one day, stopped Giovanni with a smile and asked him to be sure to let him know if there was any little favor he could do him.
As for Salvatore, he felt obliged to be kind to little Angelo. To Paolo, of course, this was an opportunity for harmless fun. Hardly a day went by that he didn’t persecute Angelo by taking an apple away from him, or stealing one of his boots, and gleefully telling the little boy: “Don’t worry, your brother Salvatore will get it back for you.” Angelo had to fight him several times.
He was scarcely aware of the financial panic on Wall Street the following month. Such things had nothing to do with the poor folk on the Lower East Side. Then Uncle Luigi came by and said that one of the banchiste who dined frequently at the restaurant had lost a lot of money, his own and his clients’. “I hope your Signor Rossi is all right,” he had said. “Signor Rossi is far too clever to make any mistakes,” Giovanni Caruso had answered. But later that day Salvatore had seen his father looking worried.
Two days later, his father went out to see the banchista. When he returned, his face was ashen. He went up on the roof to talk alone to Concetta, and Salvatore heard his mother scream. When the family was all together in the little apartment that evening, Giovanni broke it to them.
“Signor Rossi has lost everything. All his clients’ money. It is very complicated, and many others are in the same situation, but our savings are gone. We must start again.”
“It’s a lie,” cried their mother. “Money can’t disappear like that. He has stolen it.”
“No, Concetta, I assure you. Rossi has lost most of his own money as well. He told me, he hardly knows how he will eat.”
“You believe him? Don’t you see, Giovanni, what he is doing? He will wait a while, then he will disappear with all the money. He is laughing at you, Giovanni, behind your back.”
“You do not understand these things, Concetta. Signor Rossi is a man of honor.”
“Honor? You men are fools. Any woman can see what he is doing.”
Salvatore had never heard his mother speak to his father with such disrespect. He wondered what would happen. But his father chose to ignore it, the business was too terrible already to worry about anything else.
“Paolo and Salvatore must go to work now,” their father said quietly. “It is time for them to help us, as Anna does. There is plenty of work. Maria and Angelo will stay in school for the present. In a few years, we shall recover, and there will be better times.”
For Salvatore, the change of circumstances was a distinct improvement. He didn’t have to go to school, and he was exempt, therefore, from the great Caruso’s instruction that he should study. And he and Paolo were so busy out in the streets that it was easy enough to be nice to little Angelo when he saw him. They found plenty of ways to earn money in the streets, but mostly he and Paolo plied their trade as bootblacks. They would go across to Greenwich Village and shine the shoes of Italian men who were lunching there. They found an Italian enterprise where they were allowed to enter the office and shine the boots of the men who worked there. Working together, they would take turns to put on polish and shine, although even Paolo had to admit that Salvatore could get a better shine on any shoe than he could. “It must be something in your spit that I didn’t inherit,” he would say regretfully.
For his mother, the loss of their savings meant a change of regime. A sewing machine was installed in the best lit of their three small rooms, close to the window. There, she and Anna would take turns to do piecework by the hour. It paid poorly, but they could remain in the house, look after the smallest children and feed the family while they also worked. After her original outburst over Signor Rossi, Concetta had never said anything more about it, but Salvatore knew she could not be happy. One evening he heard his parents talking quietly up on the roof. His father’s voice was gentle, persuasive, though Salvatore could not hear exactly what he was saying. But he heard his mother’s words
.
“No more children, Giovanni. Not like this. I beg you.”
He understood what his mother meant.
It was toward the end of the year, and he was walking down Mulberry Street with his father, when Uncle Luigi suddenly came running out of his restaurant after them. They must come at once, he told them. The great Caruso was eating inside and wanted to speak to them.
Caruso greeted them warmly, and he asked after all the family. “You’ll give my respects to your wife,” he told Giovanni, who promised he would. Were they doing well? he asked.
“Assolutamente,” Giovanni assured him. “Everything goes well.”
“Bene. Bene,” said Caruso. “And are you being kind to your brother?” he demanded, turning to Salvatore.
“Yes,” Salvatore promised, he was.
“And you are studying hard at school?”
“He studies as never before,” his father cut in, before Salvatore could reply. Salvatore saw his Uncle Luigi stare in surprise, but Caruso was not looking that way, so he did not observe it. Instead, he drew an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Giovanni.
“Two tickets to the opera, for you and your wife.” He beamed. “You will come?”
“Of course.” Giovanni Caruso stumbled to convey his thanks.
They had walked a little way down the street after this interview when his father turned to Salvatore.
“I could not tell him about our misfortune, Toto,” he said awkwardly. “I could not let him know you were no longer in school.”
“I know, Papa,” said Salvatore.
“I am a Caruso too. I could not make a brutta figura.” A loss of face. Italian pride. Salvatore understood. He even dared to squeeze his father’s hand.
“You were right, Papa,” he said.
On the day that she was to go to the opera, however, his mother said she did not feel well.
“Take one of the children with you,” she told her husband. “Anna can go.” But his father, after thinking for a minute, said that since Salvatore was with him when Caruso gave the tickets, it was he who should go.
How proudly Salvatore walked beside his father as they approached the opera house on Broadway that evening. The big square-faced building that took up the whole block between Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets looked to Salvatore like a department store. But there was no doubt about the elegance of the people in evening dress who were entering it. He even noticed a silver Rolls-Royce gliding to rest near its entrance.
Salvatore hadn’t been to this part of town before. He knew the busy streets of the Financial District and the waterfront, but he seldom had any reason to go north of Greenwich Village. At the bottom of Fifth Avenue, he had seen elegant ladies go in and out of their houses, but the sight of such crowds of people in evening dress was new to him.
As they went inside, Salvatore gasped. The vast auditorium with its mighty chandelier was like a celestial palace. A massive curtain of gold damask hung across the stage, and on the huge curved proscenium, he saw the names of great composers. Beethoven he’d heard of, Wagner he hadn’t. But there, for all to see, was the name to make every Italian swell with pride: Verdi. And it was Verdi’s Aida that was being performed tonight.
He soon realized that Caruso, sensibly, had not given them expensive seats, where everyone would be in evening dress. They were both in suits and clean shirts, of course—his father had even put on a tie—but as they made their way through the throng, Salvatore couldn’t help noticing that the patrons of the opera were looking at them strangely. When he blacked the boots of the rich businessmen by day, they were friendly enough. But now that he was invading their home territory, several of the men gave him and his father cold glances. A woman quickly pulled her gown away, lest it be contaminated by their touch, while her husband muttered, “Damn Italian wops.”
“They like our opera, Toto, just not us,” his father remarked sadly.
When they found their seats, they could see that their neighbors were simple Italians like themselves, perhaps also the recipients of Caruso’s generosity. His father began to chat to them, but Salvatore was thinking about the way the rich people had looked at them. And he continued to brood about it until the curtain went up.
The plot of Aida was easy to follow, especially, he thought to himself wryly, if you were Italian and could understand the words. The Princess Aida, a captured slave in Egypt; her lover, the hero Radames. The love triangle completed by the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh. But with what grandeur Verdi handled the simple theme! What majestic marches, what haunting scenes. With his magnificent voice, thrilling as any tenor, rich as any baritone, Caruso the hero had the audience enthralled. As for the production, the Metropolitan Opera had provided a new staging that season, of unrivaled magnificence. As Salvatore responded to the music and drank in the scene, he sensed that all the splendor of his native Mediterranean, from Italy to Africa, was here. He felt profoundly stirred.
But perhaps the most moving moment for the boy came at the end, when the hero, condemned to death, is walled up in a huge tomb. The dark walls, dimly lit by stage lights, towered above him, hard and immutable, closed as fate. And then, suddenly, he discovers that his lover Aida, whom he thought had betrayed him, has hidden in there, choosing to share his fate. It was then, as the two lovers began their final, haunting duet in the darkness, that Salvatore glanced at his father.
Giovanni Caruso’s face was tilted up. It was quite an ordinary face—broad and dark, the face of a working man from the Mezzogiorno. Yet seen in profile, it seemed to the boy that it was as fine as that of any Roman noble. And in the faint light, Salvatore could see that his father’s face, though perfectly still, was wet with tears.
He would have been most astonished to know that, in her box, a fashionable lady named Rose Vandyck Master had already risen to retire, before the opera’s end.
It was the following spring that Salvatore had his only quarrel with his brother Paolo. It happened when they were on their usual rounds in a crowded office, shining shoes.
It was amazing how fast people seemed to forget the financial panic of the previous fall. Business had been good. The men in the office were obviously making money, and if they were in a good mood, they might even give the boys a dollar tip before they left. On this occasion, after they’d finished half a dozen shoes and been paid, one of the men, who was busy on the telephone, stretched out his hand and gave Salvatore a dollar just as they were going out of the door. They had just reached the elevator when Salvatore looked at it and realized that it wasn’t a dollar. It was five. He showed it to Paolo.
It was surely a mistake, and quite an easy one to make. The dollar bill had a bald eagle and portraits of Lincoln and Grant on its face; the five-dollar bill had a running deer. But they were the same size, and the man had been busy on the telephone.
“I guess we’d better tell him,” said Salvatore.
“Are you crazy?” Paolo stared down at him contemptuously.
Paolo had only been a little taller than Salvatore until recently. But in the last year he had suddenly started to grow so fast that he was already nearly as tall as their father. “Giuseppe never grew like that,” their mother declared. “Maybe it’s America makes him grow so big.” She didn’t seem to be pleased about Paolo’s sudden new height. And maybe Paolo wasn’t either, because his mood appeared to change. He and Salvatore were companions in everything they did, but he didn’t seem to joke the way he always had before. And sometimes, when they walked down the street together, Salvatore would look up and realize that he had no idea what his brother was thinking.
Salvatore didn’t think it was so crazy. Five dollars was a huge sum of money. The man had surely made a mistake. Taking his money seemed dishonest.
“He made a mistake. It feels like stealing.”
“That’s his problem. How were we to know he didn’t mean to give us five?”
“He’ll be mad when he realizes,” Salvatore countered, “and then he’ll hate us.
Anyway, he’s always been good to us. If we show him the five dollars, maybe he’ll be pleased, and let us keep it.”
“You don’t understand anything, do you?” Paolo hissed. He was starting to look really angry. At that moment the elevator arrived, and he pushed Salvatore inside and made a sign to him to keep silent. Only when they had left the building and were on the sidewalk outside did he turn on him.
“Do you know what he’ll think if we show him the five dollars? He’ll despise us. This is New York, Toto, not a convent. You take everything you can get.” Seeing that Salvatore wasn’t convinced, he took him by the shoulder and shook him. “What do you think those men do in that office all day? They trade. They buy and sell. If you make a mistake, you pay. If you win, you get rich. Those are the rules. You won’t take the money? You look like a loser.”
“Papa says it’s important that people trust you,” Salvatore said obstinately.
“Papa? What does he know? Papa trusted Signor Rossi, who took all our money. Our father’s an idiot. A loser. Don’t you know that?”
Salvatore stared at his brother in amazement. He had never heard anyone speak about their father in such a way. Paolo’s face had contorted into a scowl. It made him look ugly.
“Don’t say such a thing,” he cried.
When they got back that evening, they placed all their money on the table for their mother, as usual. Paolo had changed the five-dollar bill into singles, but she was still surprised at the amount. “You earned this? You did not steal?” she asked suspiciously.
“I would never steal,” said Salvatore, which satisfied her.
But in the months that followed, though some of Paolo’s good humor returned, it seemed to Salvatore that a secret rift had opened between himself and his brother. They never spoke of it.
It was his sister Anna to whom he drew closer. If she’d seemed bossy to him before, now that he was older and working, the age difference between them seemed less. He could see how much she did with their mother in the house, too, and he tried to help her. During part of the day, the two youngest children were at school, but when they came home it was Anna who usually looked after them and prepared the evening meal while her mother worked. In particular, she would try to keep Angelo away from his father, who couldn’t help being irritated by his youngest son’s dreamy ways. Little Maria was easier to deal with. Round faced and bright-eyed, she had become the family pet.