Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [23]
TAYLOR, WOOD & CO., BALTIMORE was printed on a sign above the building housing an office. This was good. Nothing makeshift; it meant they planned on being around a while. Nunzio looked at the barren land and imagined the tank they would build there. Carmine said he heard it was to be a giant cylinder. Nunzio thought of building curves, not angles, and was intrigued. Approaching the office, he instinctively straightened up.
The men entered one by one. An Italian translator stood next to a balding man in a suit. Nunzio had never seen a man wear a suit at a job site. The translator addressed Nunzio.
“Come si chiama?” asked the translator.
“Nunzio Pontillo. I speak the English, sir.”
The man in the suit looked up. “What’s your experience?”
Nunzio rattled off a progression of jobs, some true and others not, that took him from laborer to skilled mason. He had learned they didn’t check, and he had also learned not to say he was an engineer.
The boss looked approvingly at his tool bag. “You start tomorrow as a laborer. If you work out, you’ll be on this job at least six months, could be longer.”
“Grazie. No, thank you…”
“Sign up over there,” interrupted the translator.
Carmine was put on a “reserve line”—if no one better came along, he would be hired. Nunzio waited in the shade of one of the few trees and watched. It was July, and the sun was high at noon. He knew Carmine was on the verge of cursing them for keeping him waiting in the scorching heat, so Nunzio shot him an occasional look that said, “Behave.” At two in the afternoon, when the line had dwindled, Carmine was pulled from the reserve and signed up.
They were halfway back to Little Italy before Carmine calmed down. “They take all of those jerks right away and they don’t take me? Stronzi. They are all stronzi.”
Nunzio ignored him. “Carmine, let’s celebrate. When we get to Mulberry Street, we’ll eat clams.” Nunzio was not usually so extravagant. Buying clams on the half shell from a pushcart was standard fare for some men, but it was an unnecessary expenditure for one with big plans.
That night, lying in bed, Nunzio wrote to Giovanna in triumph. In all of Giovanna’s letters to Nunzio, she found a thousand ways to tell him not to worry and not to be disappointed at how long it was taking them to achieve their goals. Nunzio saw through every line. He knew when Giovanna was trying to be strong, although he was sure that no one else could pick up on this because Giovanna’s voice and body spoke with such conviction. But Nunzio could see what others could not, like the tiny flutter beneath Giovanna’s left eye. When she was suppressing emotion, Nunzio saw that twitch in Giovanna’s letters, but tonight, he imagined her reading his good news with a smile creeping across her face. She might even allow herself an open grin before she ran off to church to give thanks.
Unable to sleep because he was so happy, Nunzio got up and wrote Giovanna another letter, this time drawing what he imagined the tank would look like. And maybe because he was delirious or because he again wanted to imagine Giovanna’s laugh, he did a second drawing of the tank. This time it was situated on Scilla’s north coast and looked like a pasta pot.
They were building two tanks, one at a time. Nunzio couldn’t understand why they weren’t being built at the same time, and although he asked as politely as possible, he got a stinging rebuke from the foreman and a raised eyebrow from the supervisor. The first task was to dig a circular hole 10 feet deep and 192 feet in diameter. When the ground was excavated, they were to lay the concrete floor on which the tank would rest. The month of July was spent mixing and laying concrete in three-foot-square sections to cover the floor area.
Nunzio was lead man in a crew that included Carmine, “Pretty Boy,” “Meatball,” and “Nospeakada.” He liked to imagine