Streets of Gold Read Online Free PDF Page B

when finally they were permitted to leave that terrifying place.
    Bardoni had found lodgings for Pino with a bachelor who had been in America for only six months. Francesco was to live with Mr. and Mrs. Agnelli and their three children, in the back room of their apartment, for which he was to pay two dollars and fifty cents a week. He did not know at the time, and Bardoni did not tell him, that a dollar of what he paid was going directly into Bardoni’s pocket, or that the total
monthly
rent on the apartment was only seven dollars. Bardoni was a countryman, true, but he was not above collecting his rightful tithe, and Agnelli showed no open aversion to living rent-free at the expense of Francesco Di Lorenzo (who, anyway, was trying to fuck his wife, or so went his rationalization).
    Ugly Luisa’s only saving graces were a pair of large, purple-nippled breasts, one or the other of which she whipped out of her dress whenever her newborn son gave the slightest sign of needing sustenance or pacification. She was being neither seductive nor exhibitionistic. It was not unusual for the women of the neighborhood to nurse their children on trolley cars, or rocking on the stoops of their buildings, or chatting in their kitchens with cousins or aunts or goombahs or goomahs, junior sucking merrily away while the peaches were dipped in the wine. Luisa watched little Salvatore (for that was the darling’s name, Salvatore, the Savior) as though he might explode into the kitchen if she did not stick an enormous boob into his mouth the moment he opened it. With alarming alacrity and frequency, she would slip one hand into the yoke neck of her dress, yank out a breast, and shove its nipple into the little Savior’s puckered mouth. Between her infant and her husband, Luisa was kept busy; Giovanni had the habit of coming home from the ice station to compromise his lovely wife at the most unexpected hours, grabbing her from behind, both hands clutching at those prized beauties, her brewer’s-horse ass wriggling against him in protest. There seems to have been some question as to who was doing exactly what to whom. Was my grandfather truly trying to get Luisa in the hay (his eyes were weak, but certainly not
that
weak) or was Giovanni trying to entice Francesco into making an open move, which he could then revenge in the Sicilian manner, by cutting off Francesco’s balls and his own guilt-ridden, rent-free existence into the bargain?
    Who knows?
    My grandfather resisted all temptations. He was too busy down in the subway. He would refer to the Interborough Rapid Transit in later years as “my subway.” Until I was ten years old, I actually believed he
owned
the goddamn thing, and wondered why I was not allowed to ride it without paying a fare. Now that I am forty-eight, I realize it
was
his subway. He built it. Or at least that part of it between the Brooklyn Bridge and Fifty-ninth Street. At the time, he felt no pride in its construction. He was digging a tunnel through the earth with no conception of where that tunnel would eventually lead. Even a mole, as blind as I, has a sense of direction; Francesco had none. He knew that a train would eventually run through this muddy hole, but he had never been farther uptown than 125th Street, nor farther downtown than City Hall Park, where he was dropped into the bowels of Manhattan each morning. West Farms, Bowling Green, Borough Hall, Atlantic Avenue, distant rumored destinations of the underground octopus, were names that meant nothing to him. Francesco blindly poked his shovel and his pick into the dripping earth, fearful that the city’s streets would fall in upon him, workman’s boots firmly planted in ankle-deep mud, which was at least
something
he knew from the old country. Hearing but only vaguely understanding the words of the Irish foreman, unable to answer him in his own tongue, he was rendered deaf and dumb as well, laboring at a muscle-wrenching job that made no sense except for