The King of Mulberry Street

by Donna Jo Napoli

  We set aside two dollars and fifty cents for starting the next day. After paying our room and board, we had only ten cents left. And we owed Tin Pan Alley his share of the day's profits.

  But Thursday and Friday went fine. Just the usual annoyances—people who paid less than full price; a man who dropped his sandwich, then demanded another for free.

  In the next month, business grew so fast, it was like an eruption of Mount Vesuvio. It felt as though WallStreet had been doing nothing but waiting for our sandwiches.

  Part of what made it work was that Gaetano was a champion patroller. He spotted Tin Pan Alley's padrone every time, and whisked me and the cart away fast.

  And part of what made it work was that Tin Pan Alley listened, and he told us everything, and we learned. One day one of the men who had bought a sandwich going into work that morning came back and asked for a second at a reduced price. He offered fifteen cents. We settled on eighteen. He said he'd eaten the first one as his breakfast.

  That afternoon I dragged Gaetano with me to Mott Street to talk the Cassone grandma into making a potato and fried egg sandwich on a long loaf—with rosemary and pepper—specially for us the next morning. We paid her twenty-five cents. When we picked it up, the bread was jammed full. We figured most people couldn't eat even a quarter of such heavy stuff that early in the morning, so we cut it into six pieces to sell for twenty cents each. It was a gamble—but all we had to do was sell two of the six pieces to come out on top. We wound up selling them for twelve cents—but we sold out.

  We ordered two breakfast sandwiches from Old Lady Cassone for the next day. And more after that. And the next week, we added breakfast pastries to the cart. That was Gaetano's idea. For some crazy reason, people would say egg sandwiches were too rich, then they'd turn right around and buy cannoli stuffed with ricotta. They bought all of it. Pierano now sold us sandwiches cheaper— twenty-three cents each—because we bought so many.

  After the breakfast shift, Gaetano and I ran back to ParkStreet to get ready for the lunch crowd, which was much bigger.

  One noon, in midsummer, a man in a regular top hat and sporting a small, neat beard asked me if any of our sandwiches came without cheese. By this time I spoke half-decent English when it came to sandwiches. Gaetano was at my side. He understood well enough by then, too, and he muttered to me in Napoletano that the guy ought to learn how to pick out the cheese. The man wasn't Italian, and I doubt he understood a word of what Gaetano said, but he understood the tone. He went away without waiting for my answer. There was something about him. It wasn't just his way of walking or dressing or his beard or that look of being offended on his face—it was all of those things together. I made a guess about him.

  The next day I watched for the man. When I saw him come out of a building, I ran over. “What kind meat you want?” I asked in English.

  “Beef,” he said. “Just beef.”

  “Polish?” I asked.

  He looked alarmed. “Why do you say that? I'm not Polish.”

  “Polish beef—it is best,” I said.

  He hesitated. Then he said, “That's true.”

  “Come tomorrow,” I said. “But you got buy three sandwiches. That how we make—three at a time.” It wasn't true. But I figured I'd eat the fourth one.

  “I can buy three,” he said. “Friends will eat them.”

  When I went back to the cart, Tin Pan Alley whispered to me, “There's a Polish butcher on Baxter Street.”

  Surprised, I moved close to him so Gaetano couldn'thear us. “How'd you do that? How'd you guess what he wanted?”

  “Same way you did, probably.”

  So I learned that Gaetano had been wrong about Five Points; it wasn't only Italians. Just as Chinese were moving in to Mott Street, Poles were moving in, too—Jews. And Grandinetti had told me Five Points had been Irish before it was Italian.

  We sold a fair number of kosher sandwiches after that. Only, Tin Pan Alley didn't call them kosher. He called them pure beef, and our eyes locked in understanding when he'd hawk them that way.

  Every time I went to Baxter Street to pick up the beef, I passed doorways with mezuzahs. Even the butcher shop had a mezuzah. My fingers itched to touch them, but I never did. Then I'd run back to Grandinetti's, stopping at the bakery for loaves, and I'd pile the sandwiches high with beef and rings of red onion. Gaetano didn't give me any trouble about it, even though he found out pretty fast where I bought the beef. Business was business.

  In the late afternoon we sold produce from Grandi-netti's. The Wall Street workers would buy a single carrot, two tomatoes, a handful of lettuce leaves. Our customers were happy with the vegetables. When I told Grandinetti, he said Germans and Irish and Swedes and all of them might know how to make money, but they had never known how to eat. Italians, now, Italians, they knew how to eat. He said, “That's how we'll change America.” Gaetano laughed, but Grandinetti was serious. It was his big dream—to teach America how to eat.

  It was summer, and everything grew. But we could lookahead and see that we'd better figure out new things to sell if we wanted to have customers in autumn. So we added candied almonds and other sweets.

  We learned, sometimes the hard way. Once we got rained out. We had bought an oilcloth and we kept it in the cart so we could cover everything at the first drop. But this rain lasted all through the lunch hour and all afternoon, and almost no one came out to buy. After that we scanned the sky before going into Pierano's.

  Another time a wheel broke off the front of our cart on the way to Wall Street and half the load fell in the gutter, ruined. So we began checking the cart.

  We brought leftovers home to Signora Esposito. At first the widow cooked bad. Her habits were stingy. Her white face wasn't powdered—it was floured. Flour cost less than powder. And her strong perfume covered the fact that she hardly ever washed, to save on water and soap. But once she learned to count on our rent, she bought better food and turned out to be a pretty good cook. She smiled sometimes. And she even started to use an iron to curl her hair when she went to church.

  The best thing about her was that I asked her never to make pork or horsemeat or shellfish, and she didn't say a word about it to Gaetano. I was so grateful, I bought her rhinestone clips for her hair. The funny thing was, on that same day Gaetano bought her a box of real talcum. I don't know what secret she was keeping for him.

  By late summer the cart was too full to keep racing off whenever Gaetano spotted the padrone. And it upset our customers. So we set up across the street, catty-corner to Tin Pan Alley. He hawked for us on his side, and I hawkedon the other. Gaetano still patrolled most of the time, but whenever he saw the padrone, all he had to do was signal Tin Pan Alley to play his triangle.

  Having all those customers made another change for us—a funny one, because what Gaetano had made up that day, telling Maurizio that our “boss” needed more kids, turned out to be true. Sometimes the orders came in such a rush that Gaetano had to quit patrolling and Tin Pan Alley had to cross the street and still the three of us couldn't fill them fast enough. We hired kids from Five Points to help. Usually Michele, Nicola, and Roberto. They were brothers about a year apart. They worked fast. But more important, they were honest. It was my job to count up the sums for each transaction—out loud, so customers knew they were getting a fair deal.

  All three of us came up with ideas. But somehow I was in charge. Maybe because Gaetano and Tin Pan Alley really didn't like each other. In any case, I was the boss. We never let on about that, of course. Whenever we'd hire a new kid for the day, I'd say something to Gaetano like, “You think the boss would take this one on?”

  And Gaetano would answer, “If he can clean up his face and hands good, I bet the boss'll say okay.”

  No one messed with us; this boss had gotten a grip on Gaetano, the most independent guy in the neighborhood, so he had to be a real terror.

  One day we hired an older boy to help out. He demanded twenty-five cents for working the lunch shift,
when the little boys were happy with only ten. But he spoke English and he looked clean, so we did it. The very next day he appeared on the same block as us with foursandwiches in his arms. He sold them for twenty cents each. The day after that, he came with twelve sandwiches.

  We lowered our price to fifteen cents a sandwich. Then ten. Then five. It meant we lost money, so much that we had to pay Signora Esposito in installments. She didn't ask why; she knew the code, too—don't ask. But we could afford to lose money for a while, and the other boy couldn't. He disappeared, and our prices went back up.

  Gaetano still wouldn't speak English no matter what. Once we stepped out of Five Points, I did the talking.

  Tin Pan Alley still played his triangle and whistled when we were off restocking the cart. He didn't have to, though. By this point we put as much as he needed in his cup at the end of the day to make eighty cents. He was a great hawker. He wore a smile all the time and was friendly with the customers.

  We never worked on Saturday, the Sabbath. The rest of New York, it seemed, worked six days a week, but not us.

  Gaetano didn't complain. He missed his old job of being information man for the neighborhood, so on weekends he eavesdropped and scouted to his heart's content. Weekends were fun time—that was what he said.

  Tin Pan Alley didn't complain, either, because he never complained.

  I spent Saturday at the wharves, looking at ships. I'd be on one soon enough.

  And Sundays, well, I never set foot in a church again, even though Gaetano and Signora Esposito scolded me. I lay on my bed with my pillow over my head and let them blabber. When they finally left for church, I'd go out for an adventure.

  Sometimes I stopped in at Catholic mutual aid societies to snatch a few pastries. And during saint festivals I walked happily through the crowds. People sold all sorts of crazy things. But Riccardo, a guy who made girls swoon, sold the very craziest thing. He wore a dark suit, but from his pockets colored ribbons sprouted in profusion. He'd lean toward a woman, who would put her nose to his neck, then drop a coin in his hand. At every festa Riccardo sold sniffs of himself.

  But mostly I spent my Sundays walking around the island of Manhattan alone. The air was fresh and my stomach was full. Had Mamma gotten an office job yet? If she had, everyone in my family had a full stomach. That was good. That way they wouldn't be so sad all the time from missing me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Pietro

  One lunch shift a big ham of a hand clutched the neck of Tin Pan Alley's shirt.

  “Hey,” I shouted, looking up.

  His padrone! He dragged him off. Tin Pan Alley didn't make a squeak.

  “Shut up,” Gaetano whispered in my ear. “If you make a scene, Tin Pan Alley will pay worse for it. And anyway, you'll embarrass him.”

  I watched while they disappeared around a corner. Tin Pan Alley didn't look back. My stomach turned. “You think it'll be bad?”

  Gaetano just looked at me.

  The next morning Tin Pan Alley told us his padrone had beaten him for doing something without permission and demanded he bring in two dollars a day from then on. He said Tin Pan Alley could makethat much easy working at our cart. He never guessed Tin Pan Alley was getting a third of our profits—all saved in a wooden box back in the bedroom at Signora Esposito's. Tin Pan Alley laughed at that. But when a customer yanked on his shirtsleeve later to get his attention, I saw him wince.

  So when the breakfast shift was over, I said, “Pull up your shirt.” His open wounds made me gasp. Even Gae-tano, who had never said a friendly word to Tin Pan Alley, was so furious, I thought the pulsing in his temples would burst.

  That night after supper I sat on my bed in our room and said, “We have to help him escape.”

  “You're such a mook.” Gaetano paced around the small floor. “It might even be illegal.” He opened the window higher. “Maybe it would be a kind of kidnapping.” He punched his right fist into his left palm. “No one has ever crossed a padrone and gotten away with it.” He paced some more. Then he stopped and looked away. I wondered how much he really disliked Tin Pan Alley, and how much that dislike was behind his words now. When he finally looked back at me, he said, “But there's always a first time. Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Saint Patrick's.”

  We walked to the cathedral and waited by the side door until Padre Bruno, the Italian priest, made his rounds through the benches that served as pews, checking to see that the basement was empty before blowing out all the candles.

  “Father,” said Gaetano, “if there was a boy who livedwith a padrone and if the padrone beat the boy savagely and if that boy should happen to run away, would the church take him in?”

  Padre Bruno smoothed his hands over the front of his surplice. “If there were such a boy, then there would be hundreds of such boys. If a church took one in, it would have to take all in. No church could do that.” He straightened his sleeves. “And it shouldn't do it, for God, in His almighty wisdom, would take care of such a boy, if there were such a one. God has a plan for such a boy.”

  “God has a plan?” Gaetano bristled. “Do you really believe there's a divine plan in this boy's being beaten?”

  “Yes,” said Padre Bruno. “He'll come through it stronger.” Even I could tell he was lying.

  Gaetano looked away. When he looked back, his face had turned soft. “Please, Father, could we take clothes from the poor bin? We're not asking for charity for ourselves.” He shook his head, and I shook mine, too. I didn't believe Padre Bruno was a charitable sort. “No,” said Gaetano, “we want to help a family clothe their child's corpse.”

  For all the business smarts I had, I was a mook about how this sort of thing worked. I didn't get why Gaetano was suddenly lying. It turned out to be a perfect lie, though, because then Padre Bruno gave us an old sheet as well. For the corpse.

  Walking home, Gaetano told me he wouldn't go to Saint Patrick's Cathedral anymore. He said, “A priest without faith is like a turd on a cushion. And that church is Padre Bruno's cushion.”

  The next morning, after the breakfast shift, we told Tin Pan Alley the plan.

  “I can't run off.”

  “He beats you,” said Gaetano.

  “My padrone paid for me to come over from Napoli,” said Tin Pan Alley. “I owe him.”

  “How much did the ticket cost?” I asked.

  “I don't know.”

  “Well, I'll find out,” I said. “In the meantime, you'll come live with us. When you've earned enough, you can pay your padrone back, if you want.”

  Tin Pan Alley's eyes darted around, as though he expected his padrone to come swooping down. “Where do you sleep?”

  “What? You think we live worse than you?” Gaetano's voice shook. “Here we're ready to help, and you're insulting us.”

  “I just want to know,” said Tin Pan Alley.

  “We never lived as bad as you, even when Dom slept in a barrel,” said Gaetano. “Don't you get it? You're a slave. We're free, you mook.”

  “I'm not a slave! You take that back.”

  “We have a room,” I said, moving between them. “Real beds. And there's an extra one.” A bubble of laughter burst from me in realization. “It's just been sitting there, for you.”

  “What if my padrone finds me? He'll beat me so bad, I won't be able to walk for days. He's done it to others.”

  “See these clothes?” I said. “They're yours. You'll look different.”

  “Clothes change nothing,” said Tin Pan Alley.

  “We could get you girl clothes,” I said, my words coming fast. “Your padrone would never recognize you.”

  Tin Pan Alley practically gagged.

  “You're nuts.” Gaetano made a go-away gesture at me. “Look, Tin Pan Alley, it's not that hard,” he said. “You'll just have to stay off the streets till you grow enough that he can't recognize you.”

  “Signora Esposito can cut his hair,” I said. “That'll make him look diffe
rent.”

  “You've got the worst ideas, Dom, do you know that?” Gaetano made that go-away gesture at me again, bigger this time. He turned to Tin Pan Alley. “I've got a barber friend. He'll cut your hair good.”

  “And we'll feed you,” I said. “Signora Esposito cooks a lot. After a few weeks, you'll have so much flesh on your bones, he'll never guess it's you.”

  “What if he comes up while I'm walking away with you now?”

  I looked at Gaetano. He shook out the sheet. In an instant, Tin Pan Alley understood. He climbed into the cart and curled up on his side and we covered him entirely. Then we pushed him back to Grandinetti's.

  “This is my friend Tin Pan Alley. Please, can he go in your storeroom and change clothes?” I asked.

  Grandinetti was busy, so he waved us through the doorway. But a few seconds later, he came into the back to get another bushel of tomatoes. Tin Pan Alley's shirt was off. When Grandinetti saw the marks on Tin Pan Alley's back, he sucked in air through his teeth. He shook his head and went back out to his customer.

  After the customer left, I asked Grandinetti, “Can he spend the day here, in your store, helping out?”

  Grandinetti put his palm to his forehead and sighed. Iremembered how he'd once told Gaetano and me he'd never get mixed up with a padrone.

  He came into the storeroom, rubbed his hands with his towel, and said to Tin Pan Alley, “I'm Francesco. What's your real name, boy?”

  The question took me by surprise. Tin Pan Alley had become his real name to me, just as Dom had become my real name in a way. I waited, holding my breath.

  “Pietro.”

  “Pietro?” Grandinetti got a funny look on his face. He reached into a box, broke off a bunch of grapes, and handed them to Pietro. “You're going to have to eat a lot, if you want that flat belly to become round like the Church of San Pietro in Roma.”

  Gaetano and Grandinetti and I laughed. Pietro stood there a second. Then he smiled and stuffed the whole bunch of grapes in his mouth, stems and all.