Tillie and the Tailor Read online

  xxii

  The story deserves a footnote. My father had been an avid reader of The Nation, a weekly magazine that arrived at home in the post every Thursday. The magazine’s editors often celebrated the memory of the two anarchists close to the anniversary of the execution. My words were set down in the late winter, and I sent them off to The Nation. They wrote back immediately to say they wanted my piece for their issue commemorating the August executions. It was the first thing I had ever written and submitted to a national magazine. I was elated. But I said nothing about it to my father or mother.

  The months dragged by. On the Thursday that the piece was at last published, I contrived to visit home. The kitchen was full of people. It was plain that my father had summoned a following. When I came in the back door, unannounced, he pounced on me out of the crowd and chested me like a bulldozer into the adjoining dining-room, where with tears streaming down his face he hugged me and kissed me and gave me a kindly, affectionate nibble on the cheek, the ultimate southern Italian demonstration of overwhelming emotion and affection. The little bite was nothing less than the culmination of what we had experienced from birth, when our mothers, aunts, great aunts, older second cousins – the endless family – had nuzzled our faces or bottoms and announced that they were going to eat us up. Mi ti magno were the words in our Abruzzese dialect. That August evening, when my father ate me up in his uncontrollable burst of pride, is indelible in my memory. For every southern Italian, such acts – like bread itself – are no less than the staff of life.

  xxiii

  There is a second footnote to the story too. This one haunts me to this day. In a note at the end of another piece I soon after wrote for The Nation – it was about the Italian quarter of Boston – I asked its editors to say of me that I worked in a North End grocery. It was my way of cocking two fingers at all pretension. My American-born mother, who as the daughter of Abruzzese immigrants grew up on the lawless Upper Peninsula of Michigan and later moved to Springfield, Illinois, before one last migration east to the Boston suburbs, had the same pride in me as my father. But whereas my father’s emotions were sometimes theatrical, my mother’s were always tempered. She felt the same affection for me as my father, but a rod of scepticism and reticence ran through her, the result of an early life of Dickensian privation and cruelty. At the time in question, she slaved on an assembly line in a factory in Watertown, Massachusetts, that made sneakers and tennis shoes. Deprived of even an elementary education herself, she had worked in the best immigrant tradition to give her son and daughter a university education. And what had I done in my narrow selfish act, my callow arrogance? Told the world I was a grocer’s boy. My mother had wanted to take a copy of my article to work to show the other women what her son had achieved, what his education and her sacrifice, her triumph, had produced. But she couldn’t because I had chosen to demean myself in a way that humiliated her. The son she so measuredly doted on had handed her a tarnished crown.

  xxiv

  A couple of doors up the street from us, a step or two from Paul Revere’s house, was a hole-in-the-wall establishment, a greasy spoon take-out, whose mainstay, as far as I could determine, was a submarine sandwich stuffed with meatballs cooked in a tomato sauce.

  Inside the shop, a great cauldron of the stuff forever steamed away on a gas burner leaving the plate-glass window streaming. The place reeked of tomato sauce; the sandwiches themselves leaked tomato sauce. Truck drivers, nearby warehousemen, factory hands, barrow boys, and market traders from Faneuil Hall, all steady customers, flocked here in droves as the lunch hour approached. There may have been a counter to eat at, I hardly ever frequented the place myself so am not sure, but generally the subs were eaten off the premises. Policemen from the nearby station shuttled in and out too but what they trundled off with by way of food would almost certainly have been on the house. The proprietor was an Italian named Blondie – or, rather, nicknamed Blondie. I never found out his real name, but you could see at once the origin of the sobriquet. He was a good-looking, good-humored, barrel-chested man with a blond mane and hairy forearms that were also blond. The meatball subs, coffee, and bottled soft drinks were his stock-in-trade, but on the side Blondie also had going something profitable with the cops. If you lived in the neighborhood and wanted to avoid a parking ticket, you paid Blondie a few dollars a week and presto! you were never fined. The men in blue would come in for one of the leaky subs, and Blondie would slip them a weekly list which recorded the license-plate numbers of the subscribers to his and the cops’ little joint venture in private enterprise. At the same time he would also hand over their cut. I never saw any money change hands but once, soon after I first appeared on the scene and asked Uncle Dave about leaving a car of mine on the street, he told me to see Blondie about an arrangement. I did. Blondie, who knew I was working for Uncle Dave, gave me the once over and straightaway told me I didn’t earn enough to afford the fee. By which he meant my name would be recorded on the list gratis. Blondie was a generous man.

  xxv

  In the past, something untoward had happened between Uncle Dave and Blondie. I never asked, so never found out what. In my days of employment the two still had dealings, they had continued to maintain a certain mutual respect, but neither man directed a word to the other.

  Blondie would stick his head over Dave’s threshold, never set a foot inside, and with Dave only three steps distant by the cash register, Blondie would call out to Johnny, yards away behind the cold-cut counter, and the conversation – if you could call it that – would go something like this: ‘Tell Dave I need a case of tomatoes.’ Whereupon Dave would turn to Johnny and say, ‘Ask him if he needs it right away.’ Johnny would ask. Blondie would reply, to Johnny, in the affirmative. Johnny would repeat it to Dave. Then, even before Blondie had withdrawn, Dave would bark out angrily to Frankie or me, ‘You heard him. What are you waiting for? Get a case of tomatoes to Blondie on the double.’

  From time to time, when Blondie felt it was time to even up with Dave – that is, pay the bill – the blond mane would come over the threshold. Never a foot inside the door. And if Johnny were busy with a customer, Dave would call for Johnny’s attention and then cast a nod toward the doorway.

  Once he had Johnny’s eye, Blondie would say, ‘Tell Dave to write out my bill.’

  Then Johnny to Dave: ‘He wants his bill.’

  Then Dave to Johnny: ‘Tell him he’ll have it tomorrow.’

  Neither ready to compromise, each stood firm on a high pedestal of principle, yet, being realistic, they knew they needed each other. In short, theirs was the ideal, the ne plus ultra, of a working inimical relationship.

  xxvi

  One frosty morning, Dave sent me up to Blondie’s on a bill-delivering errand. The streets were full of ice and slush and nobody was about. At loose ends, Blondie treated me to a meatball sandwich and an episode from his career as a young fisherman.

  We had a pretty good catch [he said], but it got so cold we were forced to put into shore. It must have been way below zero. It was a Sunday morning, and we were pulling into Kittery Point, Maine. I was up on the bow standing watch alongside an old-timer as we made our way into harbor. I was annoyed as hell. Here we were pulling into a small town with nothing doing and maybe we’d be stuck here for days.

  I grumbled out my feelings. Just then the old man cocks an ear. Church bells were ringing. ‘Have no fear, Giuà,’ he said, and he quoted a Sicilian proverb.

  ‘Where bells sound whores will be found.’

  We were in town four days, a crew of sixteen, with nine of us single men, and we got laid every night.

  xxvii

  There was another man to whom I owed a small – or maybe large – debt of gratitude.

  I speak of Nunzi, who lived in my building on the floor above Dave’s. His name was Nunzio, but southern Italians will always clip a final vowel, and so Nunzi was the moniker we all knew him by. Long before I worked at Dave’s, his face was familiar to me. He often
stood at the curb outside the shop holding forth to passersby. Both his looks and his dress immediately caught your attention. Nunzi had high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and a jutting bony chin. The chin and the cheeks were always covered in a grizzled stubble. He talked tough, with authority, in a guttural, cigarette-damaged voice. He had a sinister tinge about him, and somehow he always struck me as a man to steer clear of.

  As for his clothes, he forever wore elegant gray-striped trousers and a jacket with tails. Of course. As I came to find out, Nunzi, my second-floor neighbor, earned his living as an undertaker’s assistant.

  Sometimes we passed on the stairway, coming and going, when I would be the recipient of a reluctant grunt of recognition. The same if our paths crossed in front of Dave’s while I was at work. Once, when I first moved in, he offered me advice about a stove to heat my rooms. The undertaker he worked for must have owned our tenement, because another of Nunzi’s jobs was to collect the rent. Once a month I dropped off the paltry sum at his door. He’d leave me standing there for a minute to go and fetch a receipt. I don’t recall on these occasions his ever having uttered a word of thanks – or any other word. Let us say, then, that my relationship with Nunzi never strayed beyond a first-grunt basis.

  xxviii

  On Fridays and Saturdays, the main shopping days, the streets around Dave’s became snarled with traffic. Cars parked bumper to bumper on both sides of North Street, leaving but a single lane down the middle for vehicles to negotiate. And it was in that lane that cars stopped, coming from either direction, to load their purchases, boxes of which Frankie or the kids would hump out to them. The driver would stand beside an open back door as Frankie squeezed sideways between bumpers and out into the fray. There would be a great honking of horns from all sides, and on a bad day the snarl turned into meltdown and North Street went into paralysis.

  Sometimes a cop on the way to Blondie’s would make a half-hearted effort to disentangle the throng of vehicles. I saw one young lieutenant try it to little avail on a couple of occasions and after that just slip past, head down, looking the other way. Sometimes Frankie himself would limp down to the corner and try to reason with drivers to back up or pull forward a foot or two so as to ease the situation. Often, competing with the horns, there was shouting and hollering, swearing and cursing. Pedestrians, weighed down with shopping, would stop and gawk. When it was really pandemonium some of us would pop out for a look ourselves. Dave, peering through the window, might utter one of his dry heh-hehs.

  On one of these hectic Fridays, sun blazing so as to further enflame tempers, I slipped out to assist Frankie, who was marooned in the thick of a knot of cars. Nunzi stood nearby at the curb, resplendent in his stripes and tails, the silent observer taking it all in. I inched forward, sometimes having to dance sideways to dodge bumpers or an open door. But the tangle was such that it was like wading in muck.

  Suddenly I found myself alongside a car whose irate driver was fuming and seething. He had a woman passenger in the front seat, probably his wife, and her temperature seemed to be rising too. It was plain that he was a man in a hurry, stymied, going nowhere, and that he was not amused. But for some reason I was.

  To catch his attention, I brought my fisted hand down hard on his front fender, stuck my head in the wife’s open window, and told him – all cheek – that it might help matters if he stopped his forward crawl and instead made an effort to inch back.

  That did it. He was out of the car faster than the speed of light and making a lunge for my throat. His action, the unexpected attack, set me flaring in turn. At once I was trying to meet him halfway across his car, ready to deliver the first blow.

  From behind, two arms grabbed me by the wrist, and I was yanked back. At the same time, a familiar voice – half imploring, half commanding – blasted into my ear.

  ‘Don’t hit him, don’t hit him. He’s a cop.’

  My savior was Nunzi. He hauled and steered me safely back to the curb. The policeman, in civilian clothes, was as ruffled as I was. Avoiding eye contact with me, he climbed muttering into his car, the traffic opened up, and off he lurched in the direction of the station house.

  He was a captain, Nunzi told me seconds later, when we were both back on the curb. And then came the undertaker’s wise and kindly counsel: ‘Never hit a cop.’

  xxix

  Along Hanover Street, a shopkeeper’s lament:

  ‘A guy comes in and says, “Gimme some of them paper things for the nose.” He’s forty years old. He couldn’t say, “Please gimme a pocket-sized package of tissues?”’

  A pause, accompanied by much shaking of the head.

  ‘I’m telling you, people talk like shit these days.’

  xxx

  Sundays in the summer whole families took the ninety-mile trip by sea to Provincetown. On the boat a little orchestra played, and the passengers sang with aching nostalgia of the bay of Naples, which none of them had ever seen, and threw themselves about in manic tarantellas, dancing off the bite, it seemed, of not one but a whole nest of spiders.

  Out of baskets and brown shopping bags came an endless array of food, much of it elaborately prepared. Antipastos, pasta, roast meats or chicken, salads, cheeses, fruit, pastries. Conversations rose to a cacophony, and – to all appearances – everyone was in the throes of utter bliss. Why not? They were doing what transplanted southern Italians do best. They were openly expressing their Italianness and, what was still more comforting, they were expressing it in the company of other Italians. This was what happiness is about – the freedom to let down your hair and be yourself. And, especially for an Italian, to be yourself with a horde of your own kind.

  Halfway across Massachusetts Bay they took over the ship. Those who had come aboard shy and reserved, almost uncurious – ashamed, they called it, by which they meant bashful – were to be found down in the engine room. There, armed with the national genius for cooking, they worked their overbearing generosity on the vessel’s crew.

  Italians being Italians, so many of them, and all at the same time!

  I wrote a sketch of one particular trip, when the popular Italian radio announcer who fathered these excursions was urging a certain male passenger to dance. The prodding was well-intentioned but perhaps a bit too vigorous, and the man took a swing. A fight broke out. Alfredo, the announcer, who had a shape like a ripe Bartlett pear and wore a white suit and a flowing bow tie like old European bohemians, became the victim of his own vanity. Believing his person and his honor suddenly imperiled, he went the color of his suit. Anguish marked his whole body. But he was not about to relinquish his highly-developed sense of self-preservation. Would no one come to his aid? Would they not all come forward to put a stop to the vulgar episode?

  Nobody moved. Alfredo felt betrayed but what he feared most was to make a bad showing, a brutta figura, among all those whose eyes were on him. At last, with as much distaste as if he were about to plunge into cold water, he threw a few blows and in return got his glasses knocked off.

  That was all. The fracas was stopped and he was saved, though not before his mistress had performed her role. (They said she was his mistress.) Primped and painted, in frilly skirts and spiky heels, she leaped with an ear-piercing scream to Alfredo’s side. It had been an effort, because she’d had to break out of the clutches of the dozen arms that held her back while comforting things were shouted into her ears. The windmill of arms pursued and once again gripped her; now, secure in their grasp, the woman was free to weep, then to faint.

  It ended with nobody claiming to know what had happened and soon, with the appropriate accompanying gestures and bravado, Alfredo assured his woman it had been a nothing. Better natures prevailed; sunny spirits quickly returned. Again they remembered the boat trip.

  They called Provincetown, at the end of Cape Cod’s bare and bended arm, Providenza-sul-Mare. Providence-by-the-Sea.

  ‘The other Providence,’ one man was careful to explain, ‘is Providenza-Rhode Island-Mass.’

>   xxxi

  In an apartment on the floor below me, at the rear, lived two young sisters with their mother and father. Except for the younger girl, Louise, the rest were a mostly invisible bunch. Of the father, a slim, tallish man with a red face, I sometimes caught a glimpse in the early evening as he wambled off to work. He was a waiter and, plagued with a scuttling gait, one shoulder lower than the other, he seemed always on the verge of lateness. I never asked his name. He dressed in a waiter’s black, with black shoes and a thin black string of a bow tie. I never spoke to him, never saw him speaking to anyone else, never ran into him on our stairway. Maybe once a week, evanescent, shadow-like, I’d catch sight of him rounding the corner on the street below chasing the clock.

  Louise was fourteen. Bouncy and boisterous, she was street wise and had the mouth of a sewer. Something about her manner and her face defied description, defied pinning down. Was Louise almost pretty or almost ugly? You couldn’t tell. Coming and going on the street below, she flirted with one or two of the lads who worked at Dave’s after school, classmates of hers, seeming to lead them on and then cutting them dead as she suddenly tore off. It was from them that I picked up a scarce few bits of information.

  The other sister, Gladys, was a stunner. Already at sixteen she was a woman in everything but age. I saw her close enough to look into her face but twice, both times in our dim stairwell as she shot by, looking through me, looking past me. She was a delicious blonde, and for a while she set my imagination on fire. Of the mother I never caught a glimmer. The boys told me she was Swedish. None of them had ever seen her either. From my bedroom window at the back I frequently heard the two sisters screaming and swearing at each other. The sheer promise of what might ensue drew me to my blind. I would peer down, keeping my face out of sight, but all I ever saw was a pair of curtains ballooning in the hot summer breeze. Where was the mother? Where was this Swedish cipher? I ached to catch sight of her, willing and wishing her into view, when she might dampen the two girls’ mouths, admonish them, pull them apart, give me the moment I longed for when it would be revealed whence Gladys’s beauty derived.