Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [22]
The trio would make their way home just in time for Teresa’s feast. The children would collapse into chairs as Lorenzo rubbed the paint off his hands with turpentine. The music of the mandolin player—whose family ate one hour earlier—filled the exhausted silence. By the time Teresa piled the table with nuts, fruit, and pasticcini, they would have revived and would all be talking at once. When the meal ended, Lorenzo would smoke his pipe with his children on his knees before leaving for the cafe. “The Goat”—Nunzio wasn’t the only one who noticed that Lorenzo ran like a goat—would try and persuade Nunzio to go with him, but Lorenzo knew that Nunzio would opt for his solitary walk instead.
After Sunday dinner Nunzio would walk up to Twenty-third Street and stand at the intersection of Fifth Avenue to assess what work had been completed since the previous Sunday. These men, how lucky they were! They were building the most marvelous building in the entire world. They had shaped it like a triangle, and it was going higher than Nunzio could have ever imagined before stepping foot on the Battery. But this building was different from the others. It had poetry. Its shape mimicked the crossing of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and it played with your eye. This was a masterpiece. And the way it was being built! This building was not held up by its walls, but by the steel of its interior. Nunzio marveled that the exterior of the building was like skin; it merely served to cover the interior structure. The middle of the building was covered in its facade first. Nunzio wondered whether they did this for any engineering reasons or if it was just to prove to the world that they could. He yearned to work on such a building.
SIX
“Giovanna must be praying for me,” Nunzio thought on his last day at the warehouse job. Carmine had gotten a tip that they were looking for laborers for a project in Brooklyn that could keep them employed for a year or more. Nunzio had already calculated what he could save and had determined that he could return to Giovanna at the end of the year with enough money to move north so she could study.
“It’s a tank to hold the gas for the lights,” said Carmine, knowing that this explanation would appeal to Nunzio—the job might not be building a skyscraper, but it was about progress. “They’re hiring tomorrow morning. But it’s even farther north than here; we’ll be dead before we get there,” pronounced Carmine dramatically.
Nunzio picked up Carmine at three in the morning from Mulberry Street for the three-hour walk to Wythe Avenue and North Twelfth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“Brutte Americane waters!” cursed Carmine, as they followed the river south to the Brooklyn Bridge. “With no current, we could swim there in half the time.”
Nunzio looked at the stocky, bald man from the mountains and thought, current or not, he’d sink like a stone. But Carmine’s comment stoked his yearning for the turquoise waters of Scilla. They walked past another bridge being built that, if finished, would cut their walk in half. Nunzio studied the construction and could tell that this structure would not be as grand as the Brooklyn Bridge. Still, he’d love to work on it, and if that wasn’t possible, he simply wished it would open quickly and lessen his commute—were he lucky enough to get this job.
They weren’t dead, but they were exhausted by the time they reached Wythe and North Twelfth. There was already a line, but not a long one. Joining the line, Nunzio shifted the weight of his canvas bag holding his chisels, level, trowels, and hammer, which he brought in case the foreman wanted them to start right away.
Carmine gave Nunzio a disapproving look. “For me, no job, no tools. They give me a job, I bring my tools,” he blustered.
Nunzio suspected Carmine’s bravado had more to do with laziness than