Tillie and the Tailor Read online

  The market was a complete affair. We sold meat, fish, poultry, fruit, and vegetables. Slabs and carcasses of beef, veal, pork, and lamb hung from hooks in the cold locker, which reeked of chilled blood and turned your breath into a cloud. We made our own pork sausages, and at Thanksgiving worked late nights dressing hundreds of turkeys. The staff was fairly large. The owner was one of two or three butchers. There was his son as well, a clarinetist and successful dance-band leader on the side, and sometimes the owner’s wife. There was the delivery boy. Two women, who sat at slant-topped desks, took telephone orders and when it was slack scrubbed the beer and cold-cut chest inside and out. Then there was an older schoolmate of mine, Tony Giorgio, who filled orders and kept the shelves stacked. He’d been instrumental in putting in the word that got me my job. Then me, as I said – Tony’s assistant – on that bottom rung.

  Tony showed me the ropes, and quickly my range expanded. He and I would sit in the cellar and repack potatoes from hundred-pound burlap sacks into brown paper bags that held a peck. We’d open a number of these flat-bottomed bags, stand them on the floor, and then fill them to what we estimated was seven and a half pounds. Then the bags got weighed on scales that dangled between us. We’d add or subtract a potato or two to get it right. Before long you got it perfect more times than not. The same with onions, which came in orange mesh sacks of fifty pounds.

  For recreation we’d test our strength by bending over a full onion sack and lifting it with our teeth. More fun were our potato fights. Any bad potatoes that we discarded – and, when we were in full spate, not a few good ones too – we cached in nooks and crannies round the cellar. Then we’d hide in the maze of narrow aisles and corridors, each starting from an opposite corner. Any time we caught a glimpse of each other we’d fire a potato. Our games got hilarious as we leapt out to create a target and then ducked. Of course, we always cocked an ear in case the boss came down to the toilet or got wondering where we were. We had to be careful about the tell-tale trail of smashed missiles too.

  Sometimes in the winter Tony would stick a long iron tube into the open furnace door and piss into the roaring flames. The fire would hiss and cloud up yellow and make a stench. It was an act carried out like a crazy dare.

  I champed at the bit, longing to graduate and to be allowed to circulate among the customers, to wield the feather duster amongst the tins, to turn labels full front, to replenish the gaps in the shelves. For this, you had to know by rote where each of hundreds of items was displayed and where these same goods were to be found in the cellar. I did. I don’t remember ever getting the green light to do these tasks. I think I just sparked initiative and one day took it on myself. Tony gave me a wink of approval, and the others barely noticed my advancement.

  In summer four or five large fans whirred from the ceiling to combat the stifling heat. Damp sawdust blanketed the floor. Out on the wide sidewalk graduated rows of wire containers brimmed with fruit and vegetables. The flies got fearsome as the season progressed, and maybe once a week, if we got a minute or two when no customers were about, a team of us would stand elbow to elbow in a far corner while someone else held the screen door open at the front of the shop and the phalanx would move forward flapping white aprons in the air to force the fly population, a thick black cloud, out onto the street. To shield the place from the sun, we had large awnings on two sides that we cranked down each morning and up each night. That was another of the jobs I coveted; it gave passers-by a chance to see what a man you were.

  We were all Italians at the Gasbarri Market. We were neighbors, we knew one another, we knew every customer. Once, as a tot, my father took me there after hours to see a black bear that had been shot in the Maine woods and was hanging upside down from butchers’ hooks, ready to be skinned. A gaping crowd had gathered. I remember approaching gingerly, then sticking myself between the bear’s front paws and giving the hairy creature a hug.

  At the outset, I’d pushed and pushed Tony about the job, desperate for it. One Friday he told me he’d let me know the next day. The next day was an eternity away but when it finally came the answer was yes, I could start on Monday. That intervening Sunday was an ordeal; it lasted five eternities. I lolled all afternoon on my mother’s bed, pestering her, restless, sighing, and close to tears. Why, I wanted to know, why had time on that day conspired to stand still?

  At six the next morning I was outside the shop waiting for the boss to show up with the keys. He said nothing and let me start in on the bottles. Then, a while later, he approached and told me that it was all right after this if I didn’t arrive before eight.

  On the Saturday night at the end of my first week everyone got handed the customary envelope. I was last in line. Looking me up and down, the boss motioned me to the cash register, rang it open, and handed me a dollar bill. Never before had I earned any money. I raced home with it deep and safe at the bottom of my pocket. Rushing to my mother, I gave her the greenback, holding it out in both hands. It was for her. And then I burst into tears and cried my eyes out. I’d hoped there would have been more.

  I never mentioned any of my budding career to Uncle Dave. I did not tell him that what had interrupted those early halcyon days was a solid decade of schooling, culminating – and mercifully ending – with four years at a midwestern university. The past is mere prologue. Uncle Dave had taken me on. I was here in the North End now, happily in pursuit of my old vocation of supplying provisions to working-class Italian immigrants – a stomach-oriented people – and their American-born offspring.

  vii

  At Uncle Dave’s, efficiency counted for everything. The shop was small and space tight. On Fridays and Saturdays, from the first hour to the last, the floor turned into a bustling knot and tumult of customers. Given the place’s limited dimensions, either the operation functioned according to strict rules and procedures or it would have quickly turned into bedlam.

  That Dave held sway with an iron hand was clear from the day I started work. But it quickly became obvious to me that his rules and procedures, which covered the smallest detail, were flawless. Tried, tested, and honed to perfection, their logic was immediate and unmistakable. Since nothing laid down or exacted by him was arbitrary, chafing, complaining, or questioning on the part of the staff was never necessary. As for the customers, alas, disputes occasionally arose, and Dave would be put on trial.

  In his organizational acumen and attention to detail, Dave reminded me of my father, a man who used to plot much of his workday along similar lines. One might say that Uncle Dave’s operation was a marvel of military precision. I won’t. Early in life, my father, a principled refugee from Mussolini’s Italy, taught me to look askance on all things military. Why extol military precision when military precision – and imprecision – kills people and lays waste the works of man? Let me say, rather, that Uncle Dave’s emporium functioned with impeccable human precision.

  Uncle Dave’s, in fact, was a measured little universe. It consisted of three elements. There was the physical plant itself, the building, its adjuncts, its extensions, which I have so far described only in part; then the help, whose number increased after school and as the week progressed; and then the customers.

  The staff looked after its own, guiding its green members by self-evident example. The customers learned the ropes in equal measure by themselves and by the staff’s firm instruction. Uncle Dave intervened only when matters strayed from the straight and narrow, which they seldom – but occasionally – did.

  Dave’s whole operation greatly overspilled the small area allotted to shoppers that I have pictured. Out back ran a series of rooms, one behind the other, which at some point branched off into a parallel row, with certain of the individual spaces in the two rows interconnecting. Is that a newfangled definition of a labyrinth? If so, that is exactly what Uncle Dave’s back rooms were – a maze of storerooms, a complicated warren not unlike the streets of the North End itself. It took me a good week or two before I could extricate myself from t
hese half-lit compartments and out onto the main floor without a false turn. Only the very end room contained a window. It looked out onto nothing and was heavily barred against thieves. To memorize the inventory of these back rooms took a much longer time.

  The rooms were packed tight with rotating stock. For the sake of efficiency, fast-moving items like pasta and tinned tomatoes were kept in the big room nearest the customers. Also kept here for quick recovery were the empty cardboard boxes into which we packed the customers’ shopping.

  We also made use of the space outdoors in front of the shop. Through some architectural anomaly, our building’s floors above street level jutted out over the sidewalk. This created a small portico of our frontage, which Uncle Dave lost no time in taking advantage of. Bulky items like toilet paper and paper towels and cases of tonic oozed out here, where they were safe from rain or snow. Of course, at night these goods had to be brought indoors.

  A few blocks away down North Street the area turned dingy and shabby and slid into dilapidation. Thriving shops here petered out, and what took over were boarded-up fronts. Dave rented space in two or three such vacant shops, each of which consisted really of a single enormous room. Here we emptied trailer trucks of their shipments of such fast-moving Italian imports as canned tomatoes and olive oil. Hundreds and hundreds of cases of them would be stacked here, and to take the tight tiers right to the ceiling we used the cases themselves to build a stairway. From these adjunct storerooms, as necessary, we hauled cases back the hundred-or-so yards to the shop on hand trucks. In rain or snow or slush or on frozen, rutted streets, negotiating the rough cobbles was tricky. The doors to these storerooms were heavily defended with two or three huge padlocks each. None of us was ever sent here alone to unload the big delivery trucks or to retrieve goods. Our schoolboy helpers were always accompanied by an adult, usually Frankie, and, later, when Dave knew he could trust me, me. Early on, I tagged along with Frankie, who unlocked and locked up afterwards with a big bunch of keys. On our return Dave always asked if we’d made sure to lock up properly. Many months passed before you-can’t-be-too-careful Dave trusted me with the keys and the locking up when he sent me out with one of the young lads.

  The neighborhood was full of small-time crooks and petty gangsters. Dave’s fear was that any of us might be prey to the temptation of a fiver from one of these malefactors to not notice ten or twelve cases go missing. Or be bribed to leave the locks undone for a major haul in the dead of night. Maybe Dave had good reason to think the way he did. I was a newcomer, but he’d been around the North End for years. His immigrant father before him had been a grocer here too. I can only confirm that on my watch, during my time, nothing untoward ever took place, and none of us was ever approached to abet a crime.

  I have touched on the staff’s work. In the main, from Monday to Thursday, it consisted of stocking the shelves and keeping the place tidy. Johnny ran the cold-cuts and cheese counter, with an assistant on Fridays and Saturdays. Sometimes that assistant would be Arthur, Uncle Dave’s brother-in-law. Arthur’s wife and Dave’s wife were sisters. Arthur and Dave were as alike as soft white limestone and parmigiano.

  The school lads stocked shelves, ran small errands, swept the floors, and washed down the sidewalk. Frankie Marotta, who was in charge of the shelf-stocking and storerooms, was their overseer. A cheerful, good-natured bachelor in his forties, he suffered from a severe limp that made me think he must have had polio as a child. A Neapolitan, Frankie had his people’s sunny, chipper disposition. We all wore protective long, white aprons in the shop. Sometimes I’d see Frankie out on Hanover Street on a Sunday, dressed in a suit and tie and with the broad-brimmed pearl-grey soft hats the well-dressed North Ender of those days wore. It was a shock to see him outside his apron. There was a kind of sinister dash about these men that made them all look like hoods or gangsters. Including Frankie on those Sundays.

  On the busy last two days of the work week, everything changed, everybody shifted in his duties. Dave and only Dave manned the cash register. He was the cash register; that didn’t change. He also kept a general eye on everyone else’s comings and goings, but in no heavy way and more out of curiosity. When he sometimes took a break or once in a blue moon a week’s holiday, Arthur took over. Johnny was the only other person trusted to ring up a sale. On the busy days, the rest of us – until many months later when I got promoted to cheese and cold cuts – simply kept the customers flowing smoothly, ushering them in, through, and out. We were not allowed to stock shelves on a Friday or Saturday except in the rare event of a great lull. Otherwise, we constantly rushed and dashed from one end of the shop to the other, bringing out empty boxes, supplying a full case of tomatoes or of rigatoni rigati to this or that customer buying in bulk. Frankie never left the checkout counter by Dave’s elbow. He emptied the shoppers’ wheeled baskets, his big hands flailing in the hodgepodge. His work was precise and minutely ordered – all tins of beans or chick peas or whatever of the same kind were laid out together so that Dave could take them in at a single glance and quickly tot them up on the keys of the register. If the customer tried to get a hand in or tried to help Frankie, this was a serious no-no and he or she got a stiff reprimand. No customer ever tried it twice.

  ‘Pay attention to me, not the cans,’ Dave would chastise in a rage of impatience. ‘Frankie can look after the cans, you watch me and make sure I don’t make mistakes. Here, here.’ He’d jab a finger at the numerals that popped up on the register each time he played the keys.

  Once a box – or several – was packed, one of the kids at Frankie’s elbow would rush the groceries outside to a waiting parked car. The whole day was an endless race, a mad dash, and you must have covered the length of the floor and back scores of times. It was exhilarating, but by closing hour you were limp.

  viii

  From the start, I worked on Mondays and Fridays, and for those two days’ effort I earned enough to pay the month’s rent on the flat upstairs. The job had a useful perk as well. Thanks to Uncle Dave’s generosity and acumen – the combination of which might be called cunning – he announced that I was welcome to free cheese and cold cuts to make myself sandwiches for lunch. And not just for the days I worked but for the whole week.

  ‘Go down to Biaggi’s,’ he said, pointing to the baker’s down North Street, ‘get your bread or rolls and then Johnny will slice your salame or mortadella or whatever you want.’

  As an offer, it couldn’t have been plainer or straighter. What Dave was telling me, in effect, was that there was no need for me to pilfer food. With one stroke – and this is what I judged to be cunning – he not only gained my thanks and admiration and loyalty but he also made me applaud his foresight. Looking after your staff, never a wrong move, pays dividends.

  So at noon each day I would slip down to Biaggi’s, buy a couple of fat crusty rolls, and hand them to Johnny. He would take a knife, slice open the rolls, and stuff them to overflowing. There was a complete range of cheeses and charcuterie to choose from.

  ‘You want anything on it?’ Johnnie asked the first time I opted for boiled ham.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Some people like mayonnaise with their ham.’

  He could read the puzzled expression on my face that said and where the hell am I going to get mayonnaise? Or was it the slightly different helpless look of am I supposed to buy a whole jar of mayonnaise for just two sandwiches?

  Johnny lifted his chin in the direction of the shelf with the quart jars of mayonnaise. His eyes said come on, stupid, bring me the mayonnaise.

  So from then on, whenever I wanted it, mayonnaise was there at his elbow, at the ready. Later, he’d offer a pickle or two or a roasted red pepper or a hot pickled chilli. Alongside my mayo, he kept an array of jars in the little back-up freezing locker by his side. For his own use. Or for Frankie’s. Or for Uncle Dave’s.

  ix

  On the days I wasn’t at Dave’s I spent a good deal of time prowling the North End streets, what wa
s still left – or still accessible – of the old waterfront, and adjoining areas all the way from North Station to the Custom House tower. I wasn’t looking for anything; I was just looking.

  At the time, seedy Scollay Square was still intact, but all the second-hand bookshops had long since disappeared to make way for the overhead highway. An aerial ribbon of tarmac, steel, and concrete, it acted like a ghetto wall to seal off and enclose the North End. And then one day, not far from my flat, they began knocking down a row of ancient houses along Richmond Street. This was the first stage of creating the maw of the expanded East Boston tunnel. In the ensuing weeks, I combed and studied every one of these abandoned places, inside and out, before the wrecker’s ball took over and pulverized their brick into red-dust oblivion. In one I found a horse collar with brass bells. In another, old-fashioned labels in an art nouveau style for a cut of pasta. I suppose I was trying to catch a last glimpse of anything that remained from a bygone era – enormous signs advertising Cut Price Boots & Shoes or Fish & Oysters or maybe even the Hotel Italy sign that once stood in North Square.