New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [319]
But Caruso never forgot the poor home in Naples he came from. He liked to eat down in Little Italy, and recently, he’d come to dine in the restaurant where Uncle Luigi worked, and Uncle Luigi had asked him if he might present his family the next time Caruso came, and the great man had said certainly, because that was his noble character. He was having his midday meal there today.
Salvatore had just got Angelo downstairs when his brother said he had to go pee-pee. With a cry of frustration, Salvatore took him to the door of the backyard, so that he could go out to the latrines. “Hurry,” he told him, while he waited irritably by the door. After a few moments, Angelo came out. “Hurry,” he cried again.
Then he’d cried out once more. Too late.
Despite the fact that the communal latrines were there, the people above the yard continually threw their refuse out of the window to be cleaned up later. The journey to and from the latrines was always perilous, therefore. Everybody knew to look up when they moved through the yard. Everybody except Angelo.
The sheet of dirty water from above came from a pail someone had used while mopping the floor. It was black. Little Angelo looked up just in time to get the contents full in the face. He fell down. His shirt was soaked and filthy. For a moment he sat in a black puddle, too shocked to speak. Then he began to wail.
“Stupido! Idiot!” screamed Salvatore. “Look at your shirt. You disgrace us.” He seized his little brother by the hair and dragged him weeping along the corridor and out into the street, where the family greeted him with cries of vexation.
His father threw up his hands, and started to blame Salvatore. But Salvatore started shouting that it wasn’t fair. Was it his fault his brother couldn’t tie up his shoes or look out for himself when he went to the latrines? His father made an impatient gesture, but he didn’t disagree. Meanwhile, his mother had taken Angelo inside.
“Let him stay at home,” Salvatore complained, “instead of disgracing us.” But in a few minutes, looking contrite, his little brother was back again, his head scrubbed and wearing a shirt that was clean, though much older than the first. Then they all set off up Mulberry Street.
The Italian streets were almost as crowded as the nearby Jewish quarter, but there were differences. Small trees gave shade along some of them. Here and there, a handsome Catholic church, sometimes with a walled churchyard, would break up the line of houses. Each street, moreover, had its particular character. People from the Neapolitan region mostly lived on Mulberry, the Calabrians on Mott, the Sicilians on Elizabeth, with each major town taking a particular section. They re-created their homeland as best they could.
Not that Concetta ever felt at home. How could she, when all the life she’d known before had been in the warm Italian south? They might have been poor, but they had their land, their village, the ancient beauty of the Mediterranean shore and the mountains. All she had here was the roar and clatter of narrow streets, set on the edge of an endless, untamed wilderness. This place called itself a city, yet where were the piazzas, the places to sit and talk, and be seen? Where was its center?
True, at the bottom of Mulberry Street, where the city authorities had finally pulled down a group of tenements so foul that they rivaled the neighboring Five Points, there was now a small park, overlooked by the Church of the Transfiguration. People went there, yes, but it didn’t feel like a proper Italian space.
“Everything here is ugliness,” she would sigh.
As for the crowded house, with its narrow staircase, its flickering gaslight, peeling wallpaper