Tillie and the Tailor Read online

  Tillie and the Tailor

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

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  Copyright

  Tillie and the Tailor

  Norman Thomas di Giovanni

  To Pietro and Carmine in memory of our Thompsonville days.

  i

  As to whether this is fact or fiction, I no longer know or care. I want it to be strictly factual, I want every word to be what really happened, what really took place, and not a made-up story with this or that added or subtracted. But the events described here unfolded so long ago – and the people depicted in these pages lived so long ago – that I suppose this is really a memoir. Which means that time, another word for memory, may have infused or contaminated my story with a fictional touch or two. It doesn’t matter; either way the essential tale is the same.

  In 1957 or thereabouts, I hived off from my parents’ home in suburban Boston to make a life for myself in the city, some eight or ten miles away. I was in my mid-twenties. Nothing guided or drove me except a desire to simplify my day-to-day activity, concentrate my responsibilities, and set out on my own. I wanted to write, but that is a journey, not a destination. All I needed was a roof over my head, a very cheap one, and some makeshift means to earn a few dollars to pay my way.

  In Boston’s North End, its Little Italy, a corner of town I’d known all my life, I found a cold-water flat – that is, unheated rooms – in a tenement only a stone’s throw from the famous Paul Revere House. I was drawn to this part of Boston because I always knew I’d be writing about Italian subjects. That is, about the Italians I was familiar with – the southern Italian immigrants I had been born and grown up among. My place was a sixth-floor unfurnished walk-up at the back of the building, with accommodation that consisted of a bathroom, a largish kitchen, and a fair-sized bedroom. I quickly furnished the last with handouts from friends. More precisely, I installed a bed and a big round-topped table. At the time – let me make it clear – I was a fond disciple of the illustrious warden of Walden Pond. Simplicity was all. Bed and table, not even a chair. On the table, almost within reach, sat my prize Olivetti, a stylish turquoise-blue Lettera 22. To type, I pulled the table close and sat on the edge of the bed.

  A deep sink was fixed to a wall in the other room, the supposed kitchen. Otherwise, the whole flat was stripped bare. No stove, no shelves, bare. This empty kitchen space was a useless luxury. To me it served only as the entrance to the flat. But I gradually fitted it out, as became necessary, with half a dozen or so discarded wooden olive-oil crates that I stacked one on top of another. These were my bookshelves.

  Oh, yes, there was one other important furnishing. An electric blanket. To sit typing I hauled it up over my back and shoulders, half poncho, half tent.

  ii

  Now I needed a job. What better place to start looking for one than on the doorstep?

  The ground floor of my tenement was inhabited by a grocer’s. The shop was very long and relatively narrow. It was, in today’s terms, more or less the equivalent of one supermarket aisle. There was a checkout counter and cash register by the door. Part of the right-hand wall was taken up by a cold-cuts cabinet, slicing machines, and scales. The rest of the area was lined with shelves heavily laden with tinned tomatoes in large cans; tomato paste in small; beans, red, white, kidney, the works; tuna fish; fruit salads; soups; anchovies; peaches, cling and freestone; chick peas; olive oil in gallon containers; jars of mayonnaise, jellies, and jams. Then there was what seemed every cut of pasta known to man. Spaghetti, spaghettini, vermicelli, and linguine. Perciatelli, bucatini, tagliatelle, and capellini. Rigatoni, ziti, penne, ditali, fusilli. It was dizzying. And then the main variants, rigati and lisce, according to whether the cut was grooved or smooth. (When I was a kid, some of these cuts had been named for female members of the House of Savoy, but we came from a long line of Garibaldi republicans and would have starved before my father allowed Yolanda or Mafalda to join our table.) There were also the myriad cuts designed for soups and minestre – the farfalle and orzo and tubetti and a profusion of shells. Each type of pasta had its specific purpose and each its fervent and vociferous partisans. If one household swore by linguine, another swore by rigatoni, and each swore at the other’s ignorance in the subtleties and nuances of these serious matters. Take the famous dish, penne arrabiate, for example. How many people know that for perfection the penne must be smooth, ungrooved? There was one cut, common enough in Italy but unknown in pious eastern Massachusetts. Strozzapreti. It is a long, ropy pasta, good – as its name says – for strangling priests. Had it been available, my anticlerical father would have eaten nothing else. At Uncle Dave’s there were also soap powders galore and myriad cleaning agents. The shop, in short, catered to the kitchens and tables and stomachs of a people quaintly known the length and breadth of the United States as Italian-Americans.

  The place also did a brisk trade in soft drinks, which in the dialect of eastern Massachusetts are collectively called tonic. Big bottles in wooden crates. Orangeade, lemonade, ginger ale, cream soda, Moxie, Coke, Pepsi. During opening hours these were stacked on the sidewalk in front of the large plate-glass window, where an eye could be kept on them from the cash register inside.

  And oh, yes, again – in the neighborhood petty theft was rife.

  iii

  A word about the neighborhood. It was a colorful warren of streets and crooked alleys, teeming with southern Italians who lived in tall brick tenements many of whose façades were cluttered and disfigured by iron stairways and fire escapes. Hanover Street, the principal thoroughfare, led straight down to the old wharves, a number of them derelict and decaying. In fact, a good part of the North End was ringed by fishing and commercial wharves, so that it often smelled of the sea or stank of fish.

  Tawdry Hanover Street was lined with unfashionable shops but it also had some restaurants and bakeries and espresso bars in the old style, with marble flo
ors and counters. In them you could buy rich Sicilian pastries, rhum babas, cannoli filled with ricotta cheese, marzipan, sugared almonds. Nearby Salem Street was home to a string of grocers and fishmongers, and the curbside was lined with barrows and stalls selling mounds of fruit and vegetables. Here and there were the gaping holes of empty shops that served as night-time garages for the fleet of barrows. The activity was noisy and incessant, with files of shoppers maneuvering crab-wise among the wares displayed on the sidewalks or dodging the hand trucks that bumped and clattered over the cobbles.

  Throughout the summer street festivals were held almost every weekend in honor of various saints. Gaudy plaster statues draped in ribbons to which dollar bills were pinned made these saints, male and female, look as though they were outfitted in bizarre crinolines. A Saint Anthony one week, a Saint Joseph another, complete with halos and holding a baby Jesus in their arms, would be aired and paraded along the streets on the shoulders of a dozen or more men. Brass bands, the rival Roma and Napoli bands, competed alternate weekends in evening concerts, when Hanover Street – arched over with colored lights – would be closed to traffic. Now the barrows were everywhere, filled with crushed ice that bedded soft drinks and beer and luscious quahogs, thick-shelled clams, that were prized open for you on the spot and eaten with a squirt of lemon juice. There was lemon slush too, a kind of sorbet served in small paper cups. On these hot nights the crowds of locals and goggle-eyed tourists roamed and milled in the streets until the early hours. Sometimes too city politicians representing the North End wards found ways of inserting themselves into the throng, cashing in on a chance to shine in full view of the public without seeming to be soliciting votes. All slick suits, sharp ties, and wide smiles, they would bounce up on the bandstands like prizefighters climbing into the ring. These were occasions that demanded a carefully-plotted nonchalant appearance, a relaxed eagerness, and no vulgar speechifying but a simple, friendly round of handshakes and Italian-style back-thumping embraces.

  iv

  The thing about the neighborhood that tickled me most was its history. No, that’s not quite accurate. The North End’s history is the springboard of America’s history, a proposition too awesome and important – too intellectual, if you will – to elicit a mere tickle. What tickled was the juxtaposition, the ironic juxtaposition, of these pullulating Roman Catholic masses mainly from the Italian province of Avellino, near Naples, treading and trampling over the hallowed ground of sober old Boston, original Boston, puritan Boston, revolutionary Boston, holding aloft a blue-gowned Virgin Mary.

  For here, among streets named Endicott and Richmond, Prince and Snow Hill, Hull and North Bennet, Fleet and Sheafe, were such emblematic treasures as Copps Hill Burying Ground (1660), the Paul Revere House (1680), the Moses Pierce-Hichborn House (1711), and Christ Church (1723).

  In that graveyard on the crown of a hill that tilts down towards the harbour, behind the thick iron palings, under crooked slate markers with staid ornamentation and handsomely carved scripts, were the remains of that dynasty of scholarly divines, the Mathers – Increase, Cotton, and Samuel.

  Of Paul Revere, the noted bell maker, every child knows by heart Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ever-stirring ‘one if by land and two if by sea’. Paul Revere was our boyhood hero, New England’s Davy Crockett, James Bowie, Patrick Henry, and Lone Ranger rolled into one.

  It was in the steeple of Christ Church, more commonly known as the Old North Church, that Captain Robert Newman hung the famous lanterns that were to guide the immortal Revere. ‘The British are coming!’ he shouted from his horse to one and all along the road to Lexington, and bang!, what happened next? Nearby Concord ‘fired the shot heard round the world’.

  Newman too lies buried in Copps Hill, and, as they aptly say, the rest is history. America, from that fateful day forth, has gone from strength to strength in making itself top-dog in a star-spangled career of firing shots here, there, and everywhere all round the globe. This is not an exercise in mindless irreverence. I am recalling serious historical facts. I have always admired Paul Revere for his taste in houses and for his revolutionary heroics. And, as I have pointed out, I lived but a stone’s throw from his place, where, from my rooftop, I easily looked down on his and on the Moses Pierce-Hichborn House, which filled the gap between us. That’s a bond, a solid connection. Paul Revere should not be blamed for subsequent trigger-happy America, just as we should not come down too hard on two of those three God-obeying Mathers for wishing to cleanse Salem of a handful of troublesome witches. Did not Cotton Mather, after all, nobly declare that he had set himself ‘to Countermine the whole Plot of the Devil against New-England’?

  Proper Boston soon enough outgrew the North End, going all brownstone in the reaches of the Back Bay, and the area slipped and slid into a long, slow, down-market decline. It is said that a thousand slaves and freedmen are interred in the Copps Hill site. The town’s first black community, known as New Guinea, once stood at the foot of the hill.

  An etymological aside. The word guinea was given to ‘a slave newly imported into the U.S. from Africa’. It went on to mean ‘a person noticeably foreign’ and, by extension, it became a slang word for an Italian. In this last case, my Webster’s warns, the term is usually used disparagingly. Indeed. In my North End days, no outsider dared call an Italian a wop, a dago, or a guinea to his face, though I heard more than one irate Italian call another Italian a dumb guinea in the same way one might call someone a greenhorn. Guinea, as an epithet applied to Italians, always ruffled my feathers. It defined you, belittled you, before you had a chance to define yourself. The word must be a localism. I never encountered it farther afield than Greater Boston.

  One group’s decline paves the way for another’s rise. The Irish thronged the North End after the infamous potato famines of the 1840s, only to be shat upon by the native Yankees. In turn came the Italians, the first of them Genoese, who were shat upon by the Irish. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Irish population began to wane, while the Italian grew. The next newcomers were Russian Jews. As their numbers increased, so did the Italians’. In an 1895 census, the North End counted, among others, 7,700 Italians, 6,200 Jews, and 6,800 Irish. The Jews started out as door-to-door peddlers, dry-goods merchants, tailors, and clothing retailers.

  As a small boy, on trips I made into the North End from the suburbs with my grandfather, I would glimpse some of these Jews in Cross or Blackstone Street. They stood alert under the sweltering shade of canvas awnings, waiting to lurch and pester passers-by with a lilting, guttural spiel. ‘Come inside, I’ve got just your size.’ Coats, suits, trousers, dresses festooned their shopfronts, brushing the heads of passers-by. Dragged along by the hand, I’d manage a wondrous squint inside.

  I did not know these were Jews and, if I had, what would that have meant to me? The only shops my grandfather took me into sold things to eat. We did not venture into places that sold things to wear. In my child’s mind, perhaps that’s what set these shops and these shopkeepers apart. They were unfamiliar.

  Unfamiliar too was the way these old-time Jews dressed and spoke. Something about that stuck and intrigued me. Ever after, it was Yiddish speakers like these who were my idea of a real Jew, not those one came across in later years – the intellectual German, the sophisticated Hungarian, the peripatetic Sephardi.

  So much for history, local color, street life. I was down on my doorstep job-hunting.

  v

  ‘Are you Uncle Dave?’

  I spoke to the man lounging in the grocer’s doorway. The name was in letters on the plate-glass window. It was a Monday morning, there were no shoppers, and in the dim interior another man was hunched over some cardboard cases, transferring tins to shelves with both hands.

  ‘Some call me Uncle Slave. Heh, heh!’ He gave a dry laugh, obviously enjoying his own words, then looked to see whether the man bent over the boxes was going to laugh along with him.

  I was not addressing an Italian. An Italian wo
uld have taken his time to sum me up and been in no hurry to reply. Uncle Dave had a self-congratulatory twinkle in his eye. He was middle-aged, wore glasses, had a bit of a paunch and wavy white hair that was trimmed short.

  I told him my business and that I was renting rooms on the top floor. Did he know of anyone in the neighborhood in need of part-time help?

  ‘Come in,’ he said, intrigued.

  The man stacking the shelves straightened up and gave me the once-over.

  ‘This is Frankie,’ Uncle Dave said. ‘Frankie, can we use another hand?’

  Frankie stuttered a yes, dropping the two big tins he had in his grip, and limped forward smiling. Out came a big bony hand to take one of mine. I now noticed another man behind the cold-cuts counter. He was waving a rag about, cleaning one of the slicing machines.

  ‘He’s Johnny,’ Dave said.

  And that was my job interview. Short and sweet. I started work at once.

  vi

  Uncle Dave didn’t know it, but I was no newcomer to this field of endeavor, no greenhorn. I had experience, qualifications. I’d had training. This was an enterprise I felt cut out for.

  My very first job, at the ripe age of nine or ten, had been at Gasbarri Market, in Thompsonville, the Italian ghetto where I grew up in the Boston suburbs. For a year or more, I worked there after school every day, all day on Saturdays, and full-time for one or two whole summers.

  As was only proper, I started on the bottom rung. My brief was the empties. Returnable empty bottles, that is. Beer bottles of all kinds and sizes; tonic bottles, ditto. In those days, customers paid a deposit on bottles. When they were brought back, the customer was reimbursed two cents for some and five cents for others. All these returns needed sorting and crating. As the bottles came in, they were plunked down in helter-skelter rows out of sight in the wide passageway that led from the walk-in refrigerator and butcher’s blocks to the rear door and cellar stairs. I’d arrive afternoons and clear the place. The cases of empties, tall-sided rattling wooden affairs, went down a long chute into the cellar, where I stacked them to the ceiling in a strict orderly fashion, in a designated space, according to brands and sizes. Narragansett, Ballantines Ale, Croft Ale, Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Maybe once or twice a year, finding the cellar glutted, we’d all pitch in and fill our delivery truck with these empties – there’d be hundreds of cases – and see them off to a depot in Boston. But most times we simply made exchanges with the beer or soft-drink firms when they brought fresh supplies. The cellar was pretty much my precinct. I always loved it after the empties were gone and I had myself a great vacant space in which to begin all over again. But the greatest portion of the cellar was a stockroom, where goods gradually made their way upstairs, tins to shelves, beers and ales to the lower compartment of a long refrigerated chest.