Island of Divine Music (3 page)

They squeezed through a narrow entryway and climbed to a cavernous room where they were herded by beefy, pink-faced men into something like a gigantic pen for goats. Rosari could see that the room was filled with pens in which people of various look and language were placed with their fellows, people with small, flat noses, with furry caps, with eyeglasses and skullcaps. Most all of them, like her family, were wrapped in black clothing and weariness while their eyes searched the high windows for the source of the little bars of light.

Lazaro tried to coach his wife on ways to look and act, but the
woman couldn’t sit still for a minute. She’d pace, her mouth moving as in speech, her hands gesturing to nobody, then sit again beside her daughter. A pale-skinned man with white-blond hair opened the gate to the pen and waved his arm, and the Italians grabbed their things and followed him, but as they walked a few of them were stopped by another man in a blue suit who examined their eyes with some sort of hook. Rosari was scared to death he’d look at her mother’s eyes and know she was touched, so she pulled on Eleonora’s hand and yanked her into the thick of the mob.

They stood in line after line. They were asked by men in suits to open their mouths, cough, run up a stairway, as they moved along. A few weak-legged people were led to another room, and Rosari supposed they were going to be shipped back as unfit for America. When Eleonora and Rosari were examined the mother laughed gaily, and the child heaved a sigh of praise to Santa Maria. Through gates, in more lines, with Lazaro before them producing papers, they proceeded, until they sat in a smaller room filled with people speaking a dozen languages with boisterous, triumphant inflections. At the end of one long day they left the castle of Ellis Island and floated across a greasy channel of water to New York.

They had been warned by the translator on the island, but Rosari knew that her softhearted father would be no match for any vultures waiting for them on the dock. The carrion-eaters slid out of the crowd and attached themselves to the immigrants, shouting personal questions at Lazaro in a strange sort of gobbledygook Italian dialect, seeming tremendously interested in her father’s background. A barber! What a beautiful occupation, but there is no
money for it here, I must tell you in all honesty. Nearly as dirty as Naples, New York had the added feature of a freezing wind which sailed up Rosari’s dress and made her dance under her burden as she followed her parents and the one particular shyster who’d seemed to lay claim to her family and discouraged a couple of others with his elbows. A barber! The man was huge and smelled of cigars and perfume and sweat. A barber in America gets paid nothing, even though his fingers are fast. I have a suggestion for you, Lorenzo.

Lazaro, her mother corrected the man. She seemed to be hanging on the man’s words.

If I told you I know how you could make more money in one month than you made in all of last year just by using your fast fingers for something different from cutting hair, what would you say?

Both her parents chirped excitedly like small children. The man’s strangled Italian seemed to Rosari a language of the new world, a tougher and more chaotic way of speaking to match the rough-and-tumble of America. In a matter of a few minutes this giant of a man, whose tongue made a kind of mechanical racket in the way it chopped Italian words and whose suit smelled a bit like the prostitutes in Naples, had arranged for jobs and an apartment for her parents, if they would only follow him. He tried to carry her mother’s burden, but she wouldn’t let him, so he grabbed Rosari’s. A horseless coach roared past, the first motorized carriage the family had ever seen, and as they gasped and exclaimed the man laughed. He laughed like a drunk and leaned close to her father, who smiled broadly. You won’t regret this, Lafcadio.

Lazaro, Eleonora said again. They pushed through the crowd.

Suddenly a woman yelled at them, a young woman who spoke their idiom as if she’d just stepped beside Eleonora to wash clothes in Reggio Calabria. Beside her was a stout Italian priest, and what the two of them said about the giant with the cigars made the serpent in the garden sound like an altar boy in comparison, but by the time Rosari had heard their accusations the giant had disappeared into the mob on the waterfront, and so had the bundle of possessions she’d been carrying.

The priest and the young woman led them to a filthy neighborhood full of desperate Irish, Poles, and Italians, some of them their fellow voyagers. Rosari thought of the women before the caves in Southern Italy as she stared at these women taking down frozen wash, trousers stiff as planks, between the brown walls of an alley. In the church there was a floor to sleep on, and as the new world was turning their fingers blue, and as they’d just lost one-third of everything they owned, they accepted the church’s generosity with many thanks.

It was as if they’d returned to the ship, crowded as they were on the floor with the other immigrant families, and Rosari could feel the rocking motion of the ocean as she lay down. She heard the hissed tones of strange tongues as she drifted in and out of sleep. Her mother paced among the pews and peered out the windows of the door. At times she returned to her husband and child, and Rosari could hear her chastise Lazaro for not accepting the great opportunity offered them by the giant on the waterfront. Before her weary father could get a word in edgewise from his spot on the floor, her mother would be off again, pacing among the sleepers,
gesticulating as if in the middle of a heated conversation with herself. Once Rosari woke and found her mother kneeling before a statue of the Virgin, and in the morning, as her father and another
paisan
spoke in hushed tones about breakfast, Eleonora stood above Rosari, rocking back and forth as if still aboard the ship, hugging her elbows, and staring with those singed eyes in the direction of a stained-glass window.

Rosari found Italian children to play with on the streets of New York, as well as kids who spoke English and other languages. They communicated through gestures and guesses and a kind of onomatopoeia which bespoke the explosive noises of the new world. They threw snowballs at the noisy motorcars and followed the horse-drawn produce wagons, hoping to snag an apple. They made kissing sounds and pointed at their body parts, grabbed and hit and chased each other whenever they weren’t sitting stiff as frozen laundry in the classroom, and occasionally shared a cigarette one of them had stolen from a parent. Among these children she sloughed the end of her name and started referring to herself as Rose, or Rosie.

She read the news sheet she found in front of an Italian bakery, and she tried to read the English primer and newspapers. By the time her parents had found work at sewing machines in the garment district and moved into an apartment with two other families, Rosari was able to read a few hundred words in the new language.

Her mother lasted only two days as a seamstress. The other wives asked her and Rosari to care for the
bambini
in the apartment, an infant named Guido, two toddlers, and four other children aged
between three and seven, but the job fell to the girl because her mother kept pacing and leaving the building to walk the snowy streets, ostensibly to hawk oysters with a fishmonger named Piero Balducci.

By spring her mother was a zombie again, sitting most of the day at a table in the noisy apartment, and Rosari was kept out of school to care for the little ones as well as to make sure Eleonora didn’t do something harmful to herself or others. Her mother sat still hours on end, but she was known to smack her forehead against the wall, and once she gouged the palm of her hand on purpose with the butcher knife. Her father came home late evenings through slush, cold and weary, his hands barely able to move, and complained to his catatonic wife. He was not a tailor, and neither were the other men in the factory, he said. He just pushed the legs of pantaloons under a machine all day and handed them to the next guy, who sewed cuffs onto them and passed the work to still another guy, and his ears were ringing from the machines, and his lungs were full of catarrh from the cold, and he was sick to death of New York. Rosari was certain that all of these problems were her fault, all the result of a letter she’d written for a man who, in her evening reveries, had broken out of the jail cell in Naples, was currently hiding in a lifeboat on an America-bound freighter, and would come strolling down Mulberry Street some spring day and invite her to sit with him at a sidewalk table for an espresso.

One morning the mother was gone. Lazaro went to work and Rosari cooked for the
bambini
and asked the other mothers, who
sold matches and sweet potatoes in the neighborhood, to look for Eleonora while they were on the streets. Word came that evening that she’d run off with Balducci the fishmonger, but by a kind of fire-escape telegraph from building to building Balducci’s wife let them know that this was hogwash.

Lazaro left his job to search, once again, for his wife. He and Rosari walked the island of Manhattan and described her to the foodmongers and flower girls on the corners. They cried and wore the soles of their shoes to paper on the streets and asked each other why God would do this sort of thing to them, to Eleonora, to people who had done nothing to deserve misfortune. A week after the disappearance, they came home and knew by the face of the baby’s mother that she’d been found.

Father and daughter trudged to the morgue, but only Lazaro was shown the corpse, which had been found naked in the Hudson by the fishermen who supplied Balducci. Never seeing made it impossible for the girl to believe, even after the bleak funeral the church arranged for indigents, even after the river of tears shed by her father and her neighbors. Her mother was merely wandering somewhere, making men’s heads turn, stooping over sick children in such beauty as the romances could never describe. Even as an old woman, sitting among the cherry trees behind her California bungalow seventy years later, she would see the breeze toss their blossoms and picture her mother dancing on the snowy deck of the ship, her beautiful mother letting her know, in this way, that she was right: that she had never died.

W
ithout much discussion, the family of two decided it was time to leave again, to look for another new beginning. This time they took to the rails and crossed the North American continent, the swollen rivers and ocean-like prairies, the jagged mountains and frosted deserts. There were Italians working in San Francisco, where it never snowed. There were factories needing men, women, and children with fast hands and strong backs, and rumors of little island neighborhoods where their countrymen sat on the sidewalks and spoke their idiom.

Her father wheezed and slumped over their belongings during most of the journey, a man folding into himself as if preparing for his own death, while she observed the passing world with a certain detachment and imagined her heart encased in the ice of North America. Lazaro seemed too weak to walk on the hilly streets of San Francisco, but somehow they both found work in a leather tannery their first week in California among dozens of other Italians. A year and a half into this miserable job, when Rose had just turned fifteen, they joined a strike, and father and daughter stood among their countrymen while a cavalry of mounted police trotted toward them. After the first screams and deadly blows the crowd scattered, and Rose tried to pull her father along, but he fell and wouldn’t get up and told her to leave him there. She knew that his broken heart was no longer strong enough for America, and that the horses would soon crush him, and she cried with impatience,
Papa, get up!
Then she saw a man coming to help, and she thought he was Gratiano,
the criminal of her childhood reveries, stooping to support her father. A dark-eyed and agile man, tall and angular in an old-country-style coat and fedora, threw Lazaro over his shoulder and ran as if delivering potatoes to a king. Rosari struggled to keep up with him, the man she would marry later that year, a peasant newly arrived from Calabria named Giuseppe Verbicaro, the man she would have seven children with; and as she ran a sudden breeze came off the bay and tossed her hair loose from its braid, and a sudden heat melted the ice around her heart, and the sound of the horses’ hooves faded away, and her lungs filled with the sweet and mischievous air of the new world.

Giuseppe

F
or most of her life, for nearly one hundred years, Rosari referred to 1906 as the year of three catastrophes: the Great San Francisco Earthquake, her father’s surrender to catarrh, and her marriage to Giuseppe Verbicaro.

Giuseppe would love and abandon and confound her for fifty years. On the day he rescued her father from the riot police, he carried her heart off as well. He looked a lot like Gratiano the criminal, but there was something forever impenetrable about the man. There was about him the
baciagalupe,
the kiss of the wolf. He was lean and hungry and ferocious as a wolf, but he was loving and gentle, too, when he wanted to be. Who could predict Giuseppe? He was a volcano sleeping one moment, erupting the next.

Unlike her father the barber, unlike herself, Giuseppe had no education and few words. Printed words were like ants on a tablecloth, numbers something you grabbed with the tips of your fingers. He was twice her age when they met, an old wolf prowling strange, foggy hills for food or women, who knew? He worked the leather tannery and he carried towers of baggage and shined shoes
in hotels for the rich, and she thought he knew only three or four words in English and maybe only fifty in Italian. In a breadline, the week they met, he was barely able to say, Stew, please.

They married in the courthouse when she was five months pregnant, and lived with her father, who wheezed under his blanket. Their first child, a boy named Giuseppe, was stillborn, and they all wept for two days until the earth split in pieces under their feet, and the city caught fire.

The earthquake made their beds skate and block the door. Rosari, Lazaro, and the Benedetti family, who shared the room, howled as the building swayed like a ship with the escape hatch blocked. By the time they made it outside, Telegraph Hill was on fire.