Read Streets of Gold for Free Online Page A

Francesco sat on the cane seats side by side, each carrying identical corsages they had purchased in the flower shop on Third Avenue, each sitting stiffly in unaccustomed collar and tie, each wearing a straw boater rakishly tilted. Pino kept nervously stroking and patting his sparse mustache. Neither of the two talked very much on that trip downtown. Their heads were filled with images of dainty American underthings, petticoats, and corsets, lisle stockings and perfumed silk garters — oh, this was going to be
’na bella chiavata
.
    They had planned to take the girls to a restaurant suggested by the bachelor with whom Pino lived, inexpensive, with excellent food and wonderful service, where they were to be sure to ask for a waiter named Arturo, who spoke Italian. They had no plans for after dinner. Motion pictures had not yet burst upon the American scene — that was to happen two years later, with the introduction of
The Great Train Robbery
, an eleven-minute opus that changed the entertainment habits of the world. (I must tell you that I have heard nearly every motion picture ever made. I love the movies, and I have visualized scenes Pauline Kael has never dreamt of in her universe. I once went to the Museum of Modern Art to “see” a silent film because I wanted to imagine the whole damn thing just by listening to the piano underscoring. It was an exhilarating experience, even though the piano player must have studied under my grandfather’s Irish foreman.)
    Anyway, those two horny young wops had no plans for the evening’s entertainment other than to take the ladies to dinner and to bed. The circus was in town, and they might have gone there or to any one of the vaudeville theaters along Broadway, but the boys had a different sort of entertainment in mind, and besides they didn’t want the evening to cost too much. They got off the el at Fourteenth Street, and Pino reached into his pocket and took out the slip of paper upon which one of the girls — my grandfather told me her name was Kasha, but that sounds impossible to me — had scribbled the address. More and more of the city’s gas lamps were being replaced by electric lights, especially in the downtown areas, and there was a new lamppost on the corner, and they stood under its glow, the Saturday-night city murmuring about them, a cool breeze blowing in off the river to the east, and they scrutinized Kasha’s handwriting, and agreed upon what it meant, and walked downtown to Twelfth Street, and then over to Avenue A. The ghetto they entered was not unlike the one from which they had come — except that it was Jewish. (I have often toyed with the idea that Pino and my grandfather walked past the dry-goods store owned and operated by Rebecca’s grandfather. The notion is far-fetched. But it persists, even now.)
    The girls, as it turned out, did not live alone. Had Pino not automatically assumed that anyone who wasn’t Italian was automatically American, he might have realized that
no
Jewish girl in the city of New York in the year 1901 lived alone. The girls were cousins. Kasha and Natalia. They had been in America for six months. They lived with Kasha’s mother, father, grandfather, two brothers, a police dog who almost caused my grandfather to wet his pants, and a canary (my grandfather assumed it was a canary; the cage was covered for the night). More frightening than the police dog was Kasha’s grandfather, a stooped and wrinkled tyrant who had lived through far too many pogroms to enjoy the enemy camp in his own parlor. He kept yelling in Yiddish all the while Pino and Francesco were in the house. Kasha’s mother kept trying to calm him down, telling him in her own brand of English that this was America, this was different, they were nice boys, look how nice, see the flowers, what’s the matter with you, Papa? In reply, Papa spat twice on the extended forefinger and middle finger of his right hand. Francesco knew a curse when he saw one; not for