New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [318]
“But where is Angelo?” cried his mother, while his father made a sign of impatience. “Anna, where is Angelo?” As the eldest daughter, expected to help her mother, Anna was in charge of Angelo most of the time.
“Mama, I’m doing Maria’s hair,” said Anna plaintively.
“Salvatore will find him,” said his mother. “Quickly, Toto, get your brother Angelo.”
“We did not know it,” his father liked to say, “but when we arrived at Ellis Island, Angelo was already one of the family.” He’d been born eight months later. Angelo was six now, though still the baby of the family. They all loved the little boy, but his father couldn’t help being impatient with him sometimes. He was small for his age and rather frail. And he was so dreamy. “He’s like his Uncle Luigi,” Giovanni Caruso would sigh. Anna used to defend Angelo. “He is sensitive and clever,” she would declare. But it didn’t impress anyone much.
Salvatore ran into the house. It was a typical tenement house of the Lower East Side. Originally it had been a five-story row house with steps up to the door. But long ago, the owner had realized that he could double the small rents he received by a simple expedient. Building out as cheaply as possible into the small yard behind, he had been able, for no great outlay, to double his rentable space. And since both the owners of the house next door and of the house in the next street that backed onto his had done the same thing, the only ventilation for the back part of the house now came from two sources: a narrow air shaft between this house and the one beside it, and the tiny yard remaining at the very back, where a pair of latrines served the needs of all the tenant families.
When their cousins had first shown them the place, the day after they’d come through Ellis Island, Giovanni and Concetta Caruso had been disgusted. Soon they discovered they were lucky. They had three rooms on the top floor, at the front. True, you had to climb up the stinking stairwell to get there, but there was fresh air from the street, and you could go onto the roof above, where the washing was hung out to dry.
Angelo was standing in the back room when Salvatore burst in. He had his shirt on, but he had not tucked it in. And he was looking down at his feet miserably.
“You’re six years old and you still can’t tie up your bootlaces?” Salvatore cried impatiently.
“I was trying.”
“Keep still.” He’d have dragged his little brother down the stairs as he was, but Angelo would have been sure to trip. Hurriedly, he started to tie them for him. “You know who we’re going to see?” he asked.
“No, I’ve forgotten.”
“Idiot! We’re going to see the greatest Italian in the world.”
He did not say the greatest Italian who ever lived. That was Columbus. After him, for northern Italians, came Garibaldi, the Patriot, the unifier of Italy, who’d only died a quarter-century ago. But for the southern Italians of New York, there was only one great hero, a living hero too, who had come to dwell among them.
“Caruso,” Salvatore cried. “The great Caruso, who shares our own name. We are going to see Caruso! How can you forget?”
To their father, Enrico Caruso was a god. In America, the opera might be the preserve of the rich, but the Italian community followed the career of the great tenor and his performances as closely as they would have followed that of a great general and his battles.
“He has sung all over the world,” their father would say. “Naples, Milan, London, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, San Francisco … He has sung with Melba. Now he sings with Geraldine Farrar. Toscanini conducts him. And what did the great Puccini himself say, when he first heard Caruso sing? ‘Who sent you to me? God Himself?’” Not just Italian, but born in Naples, and he even shared their name. “We are related,” his father declared, though when Salvatore asked him to explain the relationship, his father had only shrugged, as if the question were foolish, and answered: “Who could know such a thing?”
And they were going to meet him today.
It was thanks to Uncle Luigi.