Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [25]
Oh, but how I wish you did not have to travel so far to get there! Nunzio, you must send less money and pay to take a cart, at least for the trip home. I can’t bear to think of you working so hard all day and having to walk home. I would do anything to take those steps for you.
At least I know that Lorenzo is giving you plenty of wine with dinner. I have not showed your drawing to anyone for fear they would say that America has made Nunzio soft in the head.
I did laugh, very hard, and then, of course, I tried to imagine how much pasta we could cook in such a pot.
Nunzio smiled, pleased with himself. After commenting on Nunzio’s letter, Giovanna usually would end with assurances that time was passing quickly, even though it didn’t feel that way, and they would soon be together in Scilla. But this letter did not follow its usual course. Nunzio could see the speed in Giovanna’s writing, and he reacted by sitting up on his elbows.
Nunzio, today I delivered a little girl. It was a difficult birth, and the baby’s lungs are infected. I don’t think she will live. I was frustrated during the delivery, because if I knew more I could have helped that child. I have always relied on my instincts, which have served me well, but today, as other days, I faced my ignorance. Until this moment, I thought that if I were to study further, it would be because Nunzio wanted me to. Now I share your dream, improbable as it may seem. Thank you, my dear Nunzio, for knowing what is in my heart even before I do. Sometimes I feel like you inhabit my soul.
“Brava, Giovanna, brava,” whispered Nunzio, running his hands across the page, caressing Giovanna in its surface. He wondered how he could feel such a connection with a woman an ocean away. Carmine had tried to bring him to the house of the puttane, and he had allowed himself to go through the door. A dark-haired woman approached him, but even with her breath on his face, he felt physically closer to Giovanna. He turned and left Carmine to his comforts; and now, he folded the letter, laid it on his chest, and fell into a satisfied sleep.
Nunzio became lead man for three crews because so many men had quit during the next phase of construction. The metal bottom of the tank sat on wooden stilts thirty-two inches above the concrete floor. The metal plates were being riveted from above—and below. The first time he crawled into the dark beneath the disc, he sympathized with his countrymen who had become miners. But within days, he was jealous of the miners, for while the miners had to endure the soot, he believed that at least they labored standing in the cool beneath the earth. Nunzio and his co-workers entered hell each time they slithered under the tank bottom. The August sun baked the iron and the noise from the hot rivets being pounded into the metal from above created an ear-piercing, broiling torture chamber.
Nunzio’s job was to crawl on his belly to the plate that was being riveted and position the anvil to take the blows and steady the tank bottom’s weight of two hundred tons. He felt like a worm. His mind flashed back to his fantasies of building the Flatiron Building. If he weren’t so miserable he would have laughed at the irony. He tried to cheer himself by imagining this project as one part of the web that was being spun throughout New York, spanning rivers, reaching into the sky, burrowing tunnels, and stretching in every direction. He tried even harder to convince himself that he was an important piece of this puzzle and not simply cheap Italian labor.
Meatball had a heart attack the first week they worked under the disc, but he survived. He was now helping to sell fruit on Mulberry Street at half his paltry laborer’s wage. In the late afternoons, when Carmine and Nunzio made it back to Mulberry Street, they would head for Meatball’s cart. The garage behind his fruit stand housed