Unto the Sons (71 page)

At least Devine fulfilled his pledge to complete the task before the arrival of the snow, and this was no simple matter—for, on the final day, a clumsy Italian fell from a ladder and broke his arm and a few ribs, provoking a work stoppage for more than an hour as he lay writhing in the dirt, his face in anguish, kicking his feet at those who tried to help him. Finally they were able to carry him away, but before he disappeared from view, he lifted his head up from the stretcher and, with his one good arm pointed toward the tree house, extended his outer fingers in a jabbing motion—an ugly gesture that Mrs. Mattison could only assume was representative of some primitive curse, for it prompted the other workmen to step back from the tree and cross themselves.

That night at dinner, having not yet been told of the accident, the doctor delivered a pleasant toast at dinner calling for a winter of warmth and happiness for Mary and her squirrels; and during the period of freezing
weather that followed, from late January through February and March, the doctor regularly inquired about the welfare of the squirrels, in a manner that was usually jestful but never lacking sincere interest. “Well, Madam Ambassador,” he might ask his wife after dinner, as they both sat sipping sherry by the fireplace, “what news from our friends in the trees and in our glacial greensward?”

Her replies were always cheerful, if never accurate. For, much to her great disappointment, none of the squirrels, insofar as she could tell, had yet entered the threshold of a single house, either on land or in a tree. During snowstorms she preferred to believe that some of them were surely inside somewhere, taking advantage of their shelters; but she could see nothing through the snow, and her view was guided by her desire. On clear days, however, although she watched hopefully for hours, she could see that the houses were as empty as if there were a kind of quarantine. She thought perhaps it had been a mistake in having the houses painted. The color might have repelled the squirrels; or, being the wise creatures they were, they might have known that the green-brown-painted houses were too easily seen by hawks. Or maybe the squirrels did not like the
smell
of the paint, which perhaps exuded a poisonous odor. At least Devine, if not the Italians, might have considered this before issuing the paint order.

But she said nothing about this to Devine, taking whatever comfort she could in the fact that the squirrels survived the winter in their own way, homeless by choice, healthy as ever; they were among the few self-sufficient and independent-minded creatures in Mattison’s Ambler. This observation, of course, she kept from the doctor, to whom she continued to convey cheerful observations of their compatibility within the “little castles” he had created. To tell him otherwise would no doubt disappoint him. All his effort for naught. He would not want to hear of it. And she would never tell him.

35.

A
mbler was definitely not what Joseph had imagined when he had dreamed of coming to America. This was very clear to him after his first winter in Dr. Mattison’s industrial community, a winter in which he inhaled
the foul air dominating the sky and became temporarily resigned to his lowly status in this place that was not at all what it had seemed when he first stepped off the train. The nine hundred Italian workers of Keasbey & Mattison were forced to live with their families within the shadows of the factories and the funneled flow of pollutants. The Italians occupied five narrow streets that sloped down from the rail tracks in parallel rows, each street lined with small stone dwellings, clapboard bungalows, and boardinghouses, one of the latter belonging to Joseph’s uncles Anthony and Gregory. The only other people who lived on that side of the tracks were the hundred black employees who resided in shacks to the south and west of the Italian quarter.

On the east side of the tracks, along wider avenues that led uphill toward Trinity Memorial Church and the castle, were the more spacious stone residences of the eight hundred other employees, the native-born white Americans or white immigrants from Europe. These people worked next to the Italians and blacks on the assembly lines, and might mingle with them socially in the factory yards during the five-minute rest periods; but when the whistles signaled the end of the shift, the released workers would drift off in two groups, each heading home in an opposite direction from the tracks.

Few Italians seemed to mind this. Most of them, including Joseph’s uncles, did not come to Ambler seeking social acceptance and stability; they came to earn money and save it, and then either to repatriate to Italy or to move on to one of the congenial “Little Italys” that now existed in most major American cities. Whatever unflattering observations might be made in Ambler, no one could doubt that it was an ideal place for saving money. The work was steady, there was little to do but work, and the cost of living was half of what it would be if the workers were employed and residing in Philadelphia or towns closer to the city. Except for the daily newspaper, which was two cents everywhere, prices in Ambler were lower than elsewhere: a loaf of bread sold for eight cents; a pound of beef for sixteen; the town’s highest rentals, the mansions on Lindenwold Terrace, were less than seventy dollars per month. This meant that people tended not to move, be they mansion-dwellers or black asbestos laborers paying six dollars a month for a shack; and it also meant that Dr. Mattison, who charged low rates for coal, water, and firewood, was able to reinforce his employees’ dependence upon him while at the same time keeping their salaries lower than those in other industrial communities. Ambler’s workers were aware of this, but it was not their primary concern, for most of them thought that after they had saved sufficient sums
they would find a better life elsewhere. Years later many of these same workers, while still planning to move, would die in Ambler.

Joseph’s uncles paid twelve dollars a month for their three-story, eleven-room boardinghouse; and since they had six boarders each contributing four dollars a month for the use of three bedrooms—three night-shift workers slept during the day in beds that during the night were slept in by day-shift workers—the Rocchino brothers were operating at a profit. They were able to put away large portions of their factory salaries of approximately twenty-five dollars a week, exclusive of the overtime pay that was usually available when they had the energy for extra hours of labor.

One of the uncles, Anthony, had his young wife and child living with him; and soon another factory worker, not a relative but a native of Maida, was joined by his wife, who was an excellent cook. On Sundays she would prepare a meal for everyone in the house. During the rest of the week, however, the single men got their own meals, each storing a bag of food in the icebox marked with his initials. For a dollar a month, the women provided the men with once-a-week laundry service. In the winter afternoons of his first months in Ambler, Joseph would watch the eerie spectacle of men’s laundered pants dancing from the clothesline in the backyard—frozen stiff.

Joseph slept rent-free in a relatively spacious private room in the rear of the house on the ground floor, behind the kitchen. After stringing up a maroon curtain that concealed his cot, he used the room as his first American-based tailor shop. He placed a sign on the lawn announcing that alterations and repairs were done in the rear, with instructions to knock on the back door. Joseph’s uncles helped him construct a worktable against one wall, and gave him a secondhand sewing machine and a coal-heated iron, and enough needles and thread to inaugurate what they naively assumed would become a thriving enterprise.

But Joseph’s highest weekly income during the business’s first six months would be fourteen dollars, and he achieved this only once. Most weeks he earned less than ten dollars from the neighborhood Italians who brought in trousers, suits, or dresses to be altered or repaired, and who usually haggled over his prices—which, by Paris standards, he knew to be very modest. As time went on, his descending prices became modest by
Ambler
standards—but still, there were days and even weeks when not a single customer would come to his door. Joseph became depressed and lived with increasing anxiety; unable to send as much money as he had hoped back to his mother in Maida, he also knew that at this rate it would
be years before he had repaid the five-hundred-dollar debt to his uncles. Although they often made it clear that they did not need the money, their generosity only partly lessened his sense of responsibility and failure.

Joseph tried to show his gratitude in various ways. He served as the baby-sitter for his uncle’s infant daughter when the child’s mother was out shopping or visiting. He voluntarily applied his sewing abilities in replacing the torn and timeworn window curtains throughout the house with fabric he had bought on sale at the company store, near the front gate of the plant. He of course did all the pressing and mending of clothes for the entire household free of charge. This gesture required little time, however, for his fellow residents—and indeed the residents throughout the Italian neighborhood—seemingly cared far less about personal appearances in Ambler than they had when they lived in Italy.

Joseph noticed this soon after his arrival in Ambler. As he stood one afternoon in front of the house awaiting his uncles’ return from the factory, he spotted them in the near distance strolling down the dirt road with other Italian workmen, all of them wearing overalls and carrying lunch boxes; and he remembered how impressed he had been by the sight of these same two uncles in Maida as he watched them in the early-evening
passeggiata
, both wearing white shirts and ties, and carnations in the lapels of their double-breasted suits, their feet in two-toned shoes, and their wide-brimmed fedoras sportively tilted to one side—they surely must have been the envy of those Maida men too timid to venture overseas, and they clearly were the recipients of demure smiles from the ladies on the flowered balconies, to whom emigrants were pioneers. And yet here in Ambler, although his uncles were prospering by the measure of any man in Maida, they returned home with sagging shoulders, their faces covered with layers of white asbestos dust. Had it not been for their familiar stride, Joseph would hardly have recognized them.

It was of course unreasonable to make comparisons between how they looked after a hard day’s work in a factory and how they had looked during a jaunty outing in the town square of Maida. Still, during the Sunday
passeggiata
in Ambler, while the women were at Mass, Joseph had observed that there was a total absence of the well-dressed males who abounded in the squares of southern Italy, those strutting poseurs eager to project an impressive
bella figura
. Here in Ambler they walked humbly, and in dreary attire—dark peaked caps, shirts without cravats, rumpled trousers, unshined shoes, coarse woolen sweaters usually black in color—worn not in mourning but rather to blend in with the soot-filled sky that darkened more deeply as each of a dozen Philadelphia & Reading Railroad
locomotives came and went between dawn and dusk in the Ambler station. Here in Ambler’s Italian quarter there were no clean cobblestone walkways, no flowered balconies basking in a soft twilight sun, no greenleaved vegetable gardens untinted by black specks of coal and the white dust of asbestos. Here people were awakened not by the crowing of cocks but by the rasping whistle from the factory; and yet these were the sounds by which Ambler’s people prospered. For Joseph, however, the whistles were signals that he must move on. Ambler was no place for a tailor.

But first he must learn English; and although the southern Italian dialects still prevailed in the neighborhood, it was Dr. Mattison’s intention that all newcomers be English-speaking as soon as possible, and he provided language instruction free of charge to workers who would attend classes at the Italian church on Wednesday and Sunday nights. Joseph registered under his uncles’ surname, and during one of these sessions in early 1922 the instructor introduced a special visitor to the class, Dr. Mattison’s superintendent, William Devine. With the instructor serving as interpreter, Devine announced that part-time jobs in construction work were now available to individuals wishing to earn extra money during their off-hours from the factory. The new row of residences going up on Church Street demanded more unskilled laborers at once, Mr. Devine said, energetic men who could help haul timber beams to the carpenters and push wheelbarrows filled with stones to the masons; and for such jobs, the starting pay was fifty cents per hour. Anyone interested was to appear for an interview on the following day, between noon and one o’clock, at the north gate of the castle.

As Mr. Devine waved good-bye, leaving application forms on the instructor’s desk, Joseph quickly calculated that by devoting only four hours daily to such activities he could add twelve dollars to his weekly income
and
complete whatever tailoring jobs came his way. He believed he could arrange for one of the women to be at home to answer his door when he was away; and when he returned to the boardinghouse that evening, both women unhesitatingly agreed to cooperate. His uncles, however, argued against his doing hard labor. He was too slightly built for such work, they said, and he was foolish to risk his health in order to make payments on a loan that, as they had often said earlier, they were in no hurry to collect.

Joseph again thanked them, but emphasized that it was the urgent needs of his mother that now compelled him. He told them that in her most recent letter she admitted to being burdened with debts she was too proud to acknowledge to anyone but him—debts resulting largely from
the mounting medical costs of the bedridden Sebastian. Not wanting him to be confined to a distant military hospital, she was caring for Sebastian permanently at home, along with Joseph’s three younger siblings; but the expense of the doctor’s visits and the medicines prescribed was more than she could continue to afford. Now Joseph insisted to Anthony and Gregory that it was his responsibility, and his alone as the nominal head of his family, to contribute every dollar possible during this difficult period. And in a lighter vein, he reassured his uncles that a few hours of arduous work and daily sweat outdoors would, instead of diminishing his health, probably enhance it.