Chapter 15
A YELLOW DIAMOND
Un Brillante Giallo
The Zanetti shoe repair cart served Carla Zanetti’s goal of keeping Ciro under her roof while turning a greater profit for her business. Ciro paraded their wares through the five boroughs, making repairs and selling new boots to the hundreds of workers recruited for the enormous construction projects—to erect bridges, train stations, and buildings.
Remo hitched the repair cart to his carriage, driving Ciro and Luigi to Astoria, Queens, before dawn. The streets of Manhattan were quiet, except for the clinking of the glass bottles on the carts delivering milk.
Ciro had to pay off Paboo, the local padrone, to park the cart on Steinway Plaza, but it was worth the freight. There was a perfect spot on the plaza for the cart, as it was a busy thoroughfare at the foot of the Hell’s Gate Bridge.
Luigi lifted the window flaps on the cart, while Ciro set up the repair table inside. The cart was painted forest green, with “Zanetti Shoe Repair” emblazoned across the side in white letters. Luigi opened the storage drawers under the counter and lifted out dozens of pairs of boots, repaired and tagged with customers’ names.
“Know where I can buy a diamond?” Luigi asked Ciro.
“What for?”
“What do you think, what for? For an engagement ring.”
“You’re gonna get married?”
“I’m older than you.”
“By a year,” Ciro said.
“It’s a long year.”
“Va bene.” Ciro laid his tools out on the repair table. “You go to Mingione’s in the diamond district in the Bowery.”
“How do you know?”
“Felicitá,” Ciro explained. "If there's a diamond for sale in Manhattan, she's tried it on.”
“Maybe they’ll sell us a couple of stones. We’ll have a double wedding. Pappina is a simple girl with simple tastes. Felicitá will probably want a big diamond.”
“She’d like one the size of a slab of torrone. But I’m not going to marry Felicitá.”
“Why not?”
“She wants to do better than a shoemaker,” Ciro said as he pulled a sole from a vamp to resew it.
“She’s got some crust. Her father sells grapes on a cart.”
“He sells a lot of grapes, Luigi. He’s a wealthy man.”
“He spits out the pits just like you and me.”
“A woman chooses a man she thinks she deserves. And then she sets out to change him to suit herself. I’m not enough for Felicitá. But,” he said, his face breaking into a wide grin, “she’s not enough for me, either.”
“I don’t know how you do it,” Luigi said. “I am lucky to have found one sweet girl who likes this face. You have found so many.”
Ciro thought of the girls he had known. It didn’t feel as though he had had an abundance of experiences. In fact, he worried that he had been too guarded with his feelings. He wondered if he would ever know what it was to be truly devoted to one woman. “What did you think of Enza?”
“The girl from the roof? She was nice.”
“Beautiful?”
“I’m not allowed to look,” Luigi said. “But when I did, I thought she was.”
“We’re here to pick up our boots.” A sturdily built Irishman leaned on the counter. “John Cassidy.”
“And I’m Kirk Johannsen.” A muscular blond, around Ciro’s age, joined him. “I got the retreads.”
Ciro looked through the finished bundles, finding the boots.
Cassidy examined his boots, impressed. “They look new.”
“Mine too,” Kirk said. “Not that I’ll be needing them.”
The men reached into their pockets to pay.
“Are you quitting the bridge?” Ciro asked.
“I joined the army,” Kirk said. “Gonna do my bit.”
Ciro and Luigi looked at one another. They would join if they could, but they weren’t American citizens. “Put your money away. This one is on us,” Ciro said.
“Thanks,” Kirk said. “You guys with accents can get in, too. If you sign up and serve, you get your citizenship when you return. Automatic. The army needs ten thousand recruits a week. Right now, they’re getting most of them from Puerto Rico.”
“We know we can lick the Germans in France,” John Cassidy added. “If I were young, you’d find me in the trenches of Cambrai. I’d be itching to go.”
John Cassidy looked at Ciro and then Luigi. It was as if his observation was a challenge to the young men to step up and engage in defense of the country that was doing so well by them. It was a look Ciro had seen before, established American to tender immigrant, like the passing glance from a government worker processing the permit for the cart, or the expression of the woman who sold him a standing-room ticket to the opera. There was a fleeting cold front, the slight judgment that said immigrants were a necessary fact of life, one that must be tolerated but never truly accepted. The only way to ever become a permanent part of America’s greatness would be to defend it.
Cassidy and Johannsen took their boots and climbed the hill to the bridge, joining the workers who poured on to the plaza from the train platform below.
“Did you mean it?” Luigi asked.
“I’ve been lucky here,” Ciro said.
“So have I.”
“Do you believe in signs?” Ciro asked him.
“That depends. Does it require my own bloodshed?”
“Maybe.” Ciro looked at Luigi. “We’re pretty strong, we’re tough.” He shrugged. “We could take the Germans.”
The night sky over Astoria was speckled with a few small yellow stars that looked like chips of citrine. Luigi was fast asleep in his sleep roll, next to the cart. Ciro finished the last of the sweet sausage calzone packed in the food tin by Signora Zanetti. The boys planned to stay two weeks in Queens before Remo returned to take them back to Mulberry Street, hauling the cart behind them like plows on a tractor.
Ciro and Luigi closed down the cart after nightfall, when the final shift of the last crew from the bridge had departed for home. Ciro hooked the flaps shut and locked the entrance door; Luigi went to sleep as soon as he finished his supper.
Ciro leaned against the cart and wrote a letter. Writing did not come easily to him, perhaps because he did so little of it. Because Eduardo had been such a good student and a beautiful writer, both in penmanship and content, he’d handled any correspondence the boys had to do. Ciro had difficulty finding the right words.
Ciro was writing to Enza Ravanelli on Adams Street to explain that he wouldn’t be able to see her as soon as he had hoped. There was his obligation to the Zanettis, of course, his tireless work with the cart to earn his freedom from apprenticeship. But there were other concerns, as well, before Ciro could offer Enza what she needed. He still saw Felicitá, and they both had found it difficult to end what they had started.
There was also the war, the urge to finish what the English and French had begun and take back Europe for the good people, including his own on the mountaintops of northern Italy. Thoughts of becoming a soldier were never far from a young man’s mind. Luigi and Ciro wanted to “do their bit,” but they also wanted to stand up for something and flex their might.
Ciro didn’t know how to begin to tell Enza he was about to join the army. She had made her feelings regarding Ciro absolutely clear. When he went to her, it must be to surrender his heart, to pledge himself to her in total. By writing this letter, he had hoped to simply buy time. He was sure that with a few months at his disposal, the mist would lift, the road would become clear, and he would be able to offer to walk it with Enza.
The early December snow over Hoboken was not of the storybook kind, but rather big wet flakes that melted and caused leaks in roofs, improperly patched and hardly built to withstand the harsh winters. Enza placed buckets under the leaks on the top-floor storage room of the Meta Walker factory. She looked up, finding more rusty circles overhead. There aren’t enough buckets in Hoboken, she told herself as she took the metal stairs down to the main floor of the factory. If the water leak hit the electrical system where the girls worked, someone could be badly hurt.
Enza had been pulling double shifts since Laura and she decided to get out of Hoboken. When Enza was this exhausted, she felt the withering despair of defeat down to her bones. She was so depleted, she was beginning to doubt Laura’s grand schemes.
Perhaps it was the letter she’d received from Ciro Lazzari that contributed to her black mood. He was making excuses not to see her. He said his work would keep him in Queens for longer than he expected; it might be Christmas before he could visit. Their kiss on Columbus Day had meant something to her, but the meaning for him was not the same. Perhaps she had been too direct, a fault that had been brought to her attention before.
A letter from her father told her he would not see her this Christmas either. Marco was working on a highway crew in California, and could pick up overtime working through the holiday. Everything they did, every penny they saved for their future, was to be reunited with their family on their mountain. But at moments like these, Enza wondered if the time would ever come when the Ravanellis would be together again.
The weathered row houses of Hoboken, built of plywood covered with cheap tin roofs, leaked in the rain and were hot in the sun. Winters meant furnaces that didn’t work, frozen pipes, and the kind of conditions that forced people to give up before they even got started. Enza hiked to work through drifts of snow, because nobody bothered to shovel and plow tenement streets.
Year round, small packs of hungry children were left to wander the streets and beg. Occasionally, during school months, a truant officer would knock on doors and admonish parents that they were required by law to educate their children. But there was rarely a follow-up. The poor were left to fend for themselves.
The air over Hoboken was choked with clouds of heavy smoke from the factories, and the constant stoking of ovens burning cheap wood for heat. Enza longed to see the sky in the daytime, but the clutter of roofs and the low-hanging industrial smoke created a dismal canopy. At night the stars were obscured by the same haze, making it impossible for Enza to follow the patterns of the night sky as she had in Schilpario.
Sometimes Enza broke down as black thoughts consumed her, worries about her father, anxieties about her job, and fear for how she would ever survive the trip home to Italy. She tried to pray through the despair but found no peace, not even in church, which had always given her comfort. This wasn’t how it used to be.
The only joy Enza knew was her paycheck, the portion saved to make the move into Manhattan, and the satisfaction that came from the money order sent to Mama in the envelope each week. She still relished the return letters each week confirming the arrival of the money, and filled with news written by each of her brothers and sisters:
I am taking care of your garden. Love, Alma.
I have fallen in love with Pietro Calva. Love, Eliana.
Don’t believe Eliana. Pietro Calva doesn’t love Eliana. Love, Alma.
We bought a new horse. We named him Enzo after you. Your brother, Battista.
I found the most truffles on the cliff. Battista took one to Bergamo. It brought 200 lire! I miss you, your brother Vittorio.
The small bits of news were like spoonfuls of honey for her hungry heart.
We cleared stones from the land. Everyone helped. Battista and Vittorio cut down a birch tree and made planks for the windowsills. Eliana sewed the curtains. Alma helped me dig the garden. I am watching every lira. I love you, Mama.
Enza could withstand anything, knowing that she was making her mother’s life easier. She was thinking of her when she climbed the ladder to the supply room above the machines. She was busy loading her apron with spools of tickets to pin to the finished blouses when she felt hands against her back. She was thrown against the wall, her hands pinned behind her.
Enza cried out for help, but the drone of the sewing machines below drowned out her calls. Feeling a man’s hands moving up her legs and under her skirt, she tried to kick from behind, but lost her footing. She landed on the floor, her face hitting the uneven planks of wood. She felt the warm ooze of blood down her face.
“Dago bitch. Now you’ll talk to me,” she heard Joe Neal growl in her ear. Enza pulled her hands out of Neal’s grasp, flipped herself over, and buckled her knees, kicking him. He lunged at her and, as she rolled over to crawl to the ladder, pinned her again.
“Mai!” she shouted in Italian. “Never!” she repeated in English.
Months of being ridiculed, shamed, and humiliated by Joe Neal created a fury within her, and with the full force of her body, she threw him off. She saw the momentary flash of anger in his eyes before he threw himself back on top of her. His full weight crushed her, and the feel of his body against her own disgusted her. Enza heard her underskirt rip as she twisted to get away, but she could not.
“Let her go, Joe Neal!” a voice thundered from behind.
Enza saw Laura on the top rung of the ladder, brandishing a large pair of scissors from the cutting-room table. “I said, let her go. I’ll plunge these scissors into your back. Move away from her!”
He rolled off.
“Keep your distance. Stay over there.” Laura pointed with the blades of the scissors as he cowered in the corner.
“Come on, Enza. Come down the ladder. You stay there, Joe. And I mean, stay there,” Laura said to him.
Enza stood, reeling from the assault. She took the hem of her apron and held it to the cut on her face. She made it to the ladder, where she fell into Laura’s arms. Laura helped her down the ladder, step by step, to the waiting arms of her fellow operators, who had gathered at the foot of the ladder.
“Come down out of there, Joe,” Laura demanded.
He climbed down the ladder.
“Now get out of here.”
The operators protected Enza and hissed as he passed.
Laura stood in the break room. The young women of the night shift filled the room and spilled out into the factory.
“Can everyone hear me?” Laura raised her voice. “Keep your work scissors in your apron pocket. From now on, you travel in pairs to the ladies’ room, and take your lunch in groups of three or more. If you are threatened, you must speak up. We all tolerate the comments and whistles, but if anyone puts their hands on you—you are within your rights to strike back. We let them know we have the scissors, and we let them know we will use them.”
The operators, most of them teenagers, all foreign born, often didn’t speak English. They fared better at this factory than most because of the sheer numbers of Italians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Greeks, and Jewish girls who had learned to watch out for one another. They trusted Laura to protect them, and to do right by them.
Each poor immigrant girl had a plan in place to survive. Some had brothers or fathers for protection, others, young husbands; but for all of them, the first line of defense was their scissors. The girls gathered and talked strategy: Imogene May Haegelin drafted a letter to management explaining the perils of the night shift; Patte Rackliffe vowed to bring her fiancé and his friends to the factory; Alanna Murphy’s brother knew “some people”; Julia Rachel’s father was a boxer; Lena Gjonaj’s brother-in-law was a cop; and Orea Koontz was a good shot, who owned a pistol and vowed to use it on Joe Neal or any other man who approached her with evil intent.
The operators were bound together by what they were running from—poverty in all its forms, despair, hunger, decimated families—as well as what they hoped to gain. Their imaginations were filled with American treasures: painted houses, boxes of chocolates, bottles of soda pop, white sand beaches, Ferris wheels, rumble seats, silk stockings, and the words a better life.
Better meant American. Better meant safe, clean, honest, and true. Dreams of every size and description lulled them into restful sleep at night and fueled them through their backbreaking days.
At the end of their shifts, the girls took magnets and pulled stickpins from the cracks in the factory floor, saving every pin, and therefore every penny, for management. Sometimes the silver pins shimmered in the cracks like buried treasure, and the girls imagined there might be something more beneath the wide planks of old wood, something more just for them.
The cut over Enza’s eye was not deep, but it angled above her eyebrow like an apostrophe. Laura entered with the first-aid kit from the office.
“That’s it. I had the office send for Mr. Walker. He’s on his way. They told him everything.” Laura threw open the metal kit and poured rubbing alcohol on a square of gauze.
“Was he angry?” Enza asked.
“It’s the middle of the night. He wasn’t happy.” Laura reached over the sink to swab Enza’s wound. “This is going to hurt.”
“I’ll do it.” Enza said. She took the gauze and dabbed the cut.
“Why don’t you cry? You’ll feel better.”
“I’m not sad.”
“But he hurt you.”
“No, you came in time. He’s been after me for months. I’m lucky you were there,” Enza said, but there was no mistaking the anger in her voice. “How soon can we get out of here?”
“We can leave right now, if you have enough money saved. Do you think you can get by? Because if you can, now is the moment. We just got paid, so I’m flush. I’ll resign the minute Mr. Walker gets here. I’ll need an hour or so to go home and pack. We can get a short-term room at the Y and hunt for jobs from there. We’ll split everything right down the middle, fair and square,” Laura promised. “Go home and pack. I’ll meet you on the sidewalk in front of three-eighteen Adams Street by eleven a.m. Does that give you enough time?”
“Yes!” Tears sprang to Enza’s eyes.
“Now you cry?” Laura said in disbelief.
“Happy tears,” Enza said, wiping them on her handkerchief. She decided, for the first time in six years, to take her last paycheck from the factory to provide a foothold for her new life instead of sending it home to the mountain. This was the day she had learned her value. She would be worth nothing if she continued to take the abuse in the factory and on Adams Street. The old ways were finished, and not for one moment would she miss them.
As Enza walked back to Adams Street, the haze over Hoboken hung like a bolt of thick charcoal wool in the early light of morning. She saw a group of street urchins, hungry, barefoot, covered in the ash-gray desperation of poverty, playing in the streets with an old rusty tin drum, which they rolled down the street with sticks.
There were times when she stopped and bought bread for the children, or sweet rolls, or hot pretzels. This morning, Enza stopped at the corner and bought a large sack of oranges. They were expensive, but Enza wanted to do something special, since she wouldn’t be here on Christmas. Enza waved to the children. They ran to her, gathering around her like pigeons pecking for crumbs, extending their open hands.
On this gray winter morning, on the brown street, the only flashes of color came from the oranges, bright and full like the sun itself.
As she handed out the fruit, Enza imagined that these young faces were her own brothers and sisters. She saw Eliana in a girl with a torn brown apron, Vittorio in the tallest boy of the group, who went barefoot even in the cold, and finally Stella, in the little girl with the black curly hair, left in her sister’s care, although the older girl couldn’t be more than eight years old. Enza fought back tears when she thought about her baby sister, and how the little girls who wandered the streets of Hoboken were reminiscent of Stella’s spirit. They were unlucky, and so was Stella.
One by one, she placed an orange in every outstretched pair of hands, a small sign of hope in a place where there had been none for so long, the children couldn’t remember what it felt like to receive a treat. Elated, the children shouted, “Grazie mille,” a million thanks, for one small thing, one bright, sweet orange apiece. They would eat the pulp, the juice, and the peel.
As she packed, Enza felt the full weight of having spent an irreplaceable stretch of her youth in a place undeserving of it. The bandage over her eye tugged at her skin, but she was already thinking of the scar she’d carry, the marker that signaled the end of her old life and the start of a new one. Enza refolded her clothes neatly, arranging them in her satchel. She flipped the top of the duffel and buttoned it, pulled on her sweater and then her coat.
The basement door swung open, surprising Enza and filling her with a dread she knew she had felt for the last time. She smiled to herself.
Signora Buffa stood at the top of the stairs. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m leaving your house, Signora.” Enza climbed the stairs and pushed past her.
“No, you’re not! You can’t!” Signora barked.
“My debt to you is paid in full. I prepared every meal, scrubbed every dish, washed, hung, pressed, and folded every article of clothing for three households and for you for six years,” Enza said calmly.
“Make my lunch,” Signora sneered.
“Make your own lunch, Signora.”
“Enza, I am warning you, I will report you!”
“I already have my papers. You can’t compromise them.”
“You ungrateful girl—”
“Maybe. But there’s plenty of that to go around here.” Enza went through the kitchen to the living room, buttoning her coat with one hand as she went.
“What do you mean? Answer me!” Signora sounded weak and pathetic. “I said, answer me.”
Enza realized her father was right: a bully backs down when you stand up to her.
Enza heard the footsteps of Dora, Jenny, and Gina on the stairs behind her. They lined up like train cars, Gina carrying her infant, Dora balancing her toddler on her hip, Jenny tightening the belt on her robe, long past the appropriate hour to be wearing one.
“She’s leaving us!” Anna moaned.
“You can’t go!” Dora sneered.
“The diapers!” Gina groused. “Who will do the diapers?”
“You were to bake bread today,” Gina complained. “Where are you going?”
“None of your business.” Enza turned to Anna. “Signora, you live in a tenement, and yet you behave like the entitled rich. You have airs of privilege without the pedigree or education that define them. You’ve indulged your sons, and to your surprise, they married shrews—”
Gina lunged forward. “Who are you calling names?”
Enza held up her hand, and Gina stepped back. Enza continued, leveling her gaze upon Anna: “You’ve earned an old age of misery. Your daughters-in-law are lazy.” She turned to the women of the house. “You breed children in this house like animals, and expect me to cook, clean, and pick up after all of them. Now it’s your turn,” she said as she pushed the front door open.
“You get back here right now, Enza,” Signora Buffa shouted.
Enza walked through the door. “You’re a drunk, and it’s no wonder your husband stays in West Virginia.”
“He’s working! You ungrateful girl!”
“You kick a dog long enough, and eventually it will bite. I would say thank you, but for all these years I have never heard you utter the words. So let me say this to you for the last time, Signora: ‘Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl.’ How does that make you feel, Signora? Ah. Now you know.” Enza looked up at the others. "Now you all know.”
Enza walked out on to the porch, leaving her life of indentured servitude behind, the awful women, the howling babies, the filthy cribs, the stagnant baby bottles, mounds of dirty diapers, the dank, dark basement, and the broken cot.
Laura Heery beamed as Enza skimmed down the stairs with her duffel. Soon the porch behind her filled with the Buffa women, who called out to Enza and over one another in high-pitched squawks:
Puttana!
Strega!
Pazza!
Porca i miserable!
Doors opened up and down Adams Street as prying eyes peeked out. Neighbor women hung out the windows, turning toward the caterwauling at number 318. Still others took seats on their stoops, ingesting the theatrics with relish, happy for once that the misery visited upon this street was not their own.
Enza felt the first delicious rush of freedom. Good, kind Laura looped her arm through Enza’s, carrying her suitcase and hatbox with the other.
The Buffa women continued to call the girls names from the porch as the two friends walked proudly together up the block in lockstep. As the neighbors joined in the taunts, Enza and Laura deflected their curses. They held their heads high, and kept moving, as the insults fell around them like grounded arrows, missing their marks.
As they made the turn off Adams Street onto the Grand Concourse, finally free, they smiled, broke into a run, and didn’t stop until they had reached the ferry landing and boarded the boat for the quick ride across the river to Manhattan.