New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [348]
Salvatore wasn’t sure why Angelo had so little contact with women. Perhaps he was too shy. Salvatore wondered if he ought to do something about it, but Uncle Luigi advised him to leave well alone.
What worried Uncle Luigi was not Angelo’s leisure, but his work. When Salvatore had become a bricklayer, Angelo had quietly joined him, and whether or not it was thanks to the weights he still worked out with, he had grown into quite a wiry young man, so he could handle the physical labor without difficulty.
“But he shouldn’t be laying bricks,” Uncle Luigi would protest. “He has talent.” Uncle Luigi might have abandoned his foolish dream that Angelo should be an architect, but there were other things the young man could be: a house painter, a decorator, something at least where he could use the gifts God gave him. It seemed, though, that Angelo preferred to work with his brother. Yet he’d never stopped drawing. Salvatore might go out to a bar after supper, but Angelo would stay at the kitchen table, occasionally reading a book, but usually drawing. And at these times, his young face would take on a look of concentrated intensity. Sometimes, coming home early, Salvatore had entered the room and stood for several minutes beside Angelo while he was drawing before Angelo even noticed that he was there. Uncle Luigi had taken some of the drawings, framed them and sold them to customers at the restaurant. But his attempts to persuade Angelo to take orders for pictures from customers had so far gotten nowhere. “I get paid for laying bricks,” he told his uncle with a smile, “and then I can draw what I like.”
At least there was no shortage of work. Maybe the war had made America nervous about aliens, Salvatore wasn’t sure, but the government had put quotas on immigration. Apart from a lot of black people who came up from the South, the flood of new immigrants into New York had turned to a trickle. Meanwhile, the city was booming. Wages were good, and rising.
The years had passed. By 1925, Salvatore’s cache of savings had grown enough for him to wonder whether, maybe, he could think about looking for a wife.
He was walking down Sixth Avenue on a cold day in December when he met Paolo. His brother was looking sharp, in a double-breasted overcoat and a derby hat. He might have been taken for a banker. Or a gangster. He was evidently surprised to see Salvatore, but he grinned.
“You chose the right place to meet, kid,” he said. “Come in and eat.” The Fronton occupied a basement a block to the west of Washington Square, by Sixth Avenue. Run by young Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns, it was one of the best speakeasies in town. Salvatore noticed that as soon as Paolo’s face appeared at the entrance, where visitors made themselves known through a peephole, the door was instantly opened, and Paolo was greeted by name.
The Fronton was a spacious cellar. The floor was mostly taken up by tables with white tablecloths. There was a bar along one side of the room, and pictures of the Wild West on the walls. The place was already filling up with the lunchtime crowd, and Salvatore noticed one or two well-known faces. But Paolo was given a table at once. They each ordered a steak, and in the meantime, they were served Irish whiskey. Salvatore remarked that Paolo looked well, and Paolo smiled, raising his glass.
“Let’s drink to Prohibition, brother. It’s been good to me.”
When the temperance movement had triumphed, and the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution banning the sale of “intoxicating liquors” went into effect in 1920, the face of America might have changed. But it sure as hell hadn’t stopped people drinking. The law was the law, but millions of people didn’t believe in it. Respectable restaurants would adopt subterfuges—a bowl of soup, for instance, might turn out to be liquor. And in cities like New York, there were the speakeasies—subject to police raids, but ever-present.