The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [60]
Vinnie sat on the window sill in the darkness. It was a very still night, too early in the spring for the people on the Avenue to stay down late. Even the railroad yards were quiet; there were no engines moving, no ringing of steel. Vinnie kept looking at the bed to make sure his brother was all right, and figuring where they could get the bottles for the root beer they would make. He knew that Gino would let him be the boss.
CHAPTER 9
THE SMOKY GRAY light of autumn made the city all lines and shadows. The bridge over Tenth Avenue was half obscured, as if it were over some bottomless gorge, not just two stories above a cobblestone street ruled with twin lines of steel. Underneath the bridge, from the direction of 29th Street, came a wagon, flat-bedded, drawn by a heavy brown horse. The wagon was loaded with thin crates made of splintery wood, the crates filled with purple wine-grapes.
The wagon parked midway between 30th and 31st Streets. Driver and helper stacked twenty crates in front of one tenement. The driver leaned back and called up to the city sky, as if singing a note, “Ca-te-rin-a, your grapes are waiting for you.” Four stories up a window opened, children leaned out, men and women. Seconds later, as if they had flown down the stairs, people erupted from the tenement. A man walked around the cases, sniffing like a dog at the clusters between the slats. “They are good this year?” he asked the driver. The driver did not bother to answer. He held out his hand for money. The man paid.
Meanwhile the wife posted two children as guards, while she and the other children each took a crate and carried them into the cellar. The father ripped a slat off a box, partially exposing its contents, and took out a great blue-black cluster of grapes to eat. When the children and wife came back from their load, they and the guards were each given a cluster. In front of each tenement this scene was repeated, the children eating pear-cluster blue-black grapes, the father leaning happily against his stack of crates while other men not so fortunate flocked around to wish him luck with his wine. They licked their lips, thinking of the great jugs, red-black, stacked against the walls of their cellars.
Gino was envious of the other children, those fortunate ones whose fathers made wine. He stood beside Joey Bianco’s father, but Joey was too cheap to give him grapes and so was his father. Joey’s father was too cheap to open a box for sampling even for relatives and close friends.
But now the Panettiere, fat and round, wearing his baker’s white hat, came to receive three towering stacks of crates in front of his shop. He opened two of the crates and handed out great clusters to all the children. Gino jumped in and got his share. The Panettiere said in his great booming voice, “Ragazzi, help carry and there will be pizza for all.” Like ants, the children swarmed over the three stacks of crates and they magically disappeared underground into the cellar. Gino was left without anything to carry.
The Panettiere looked at him reprovingly, “Ah, Gino, figlio mio, what will become of you? Work eludes you, try how you may. You must learn now; those who do not work do not eat. Away.”
The Panettiere started to turn but the angry look in the young boy’s eyes stopped him. “Ah,” he said. “It’s not your fault. You just do not move quickly toward work. If there had been one left you would have carried it, eh?” When Gino nodded, the Panettiere motioned him into the shop. By the time the other children had come up from the cellar to get their reward, Gino was already out on the Avenue eating his pizza, the hot tomato sauce cutting the sweet juice of the grape from his mouth and palate.
In the falling dusk the children,