Elizabeth Street

by Laurie Fabiano

  “I am so sorry the lieutenant is ill. This is my friend Signora LaManna, who is a doctor.”

  Adelina looked at Lucrezia sideways and said, “Thank you, but the doctor has been to see him. He will be fine if he rests.”

  In the uncomfortable moment that followed, Giovanna and Lucrezia stole glances at the large but modest apartment.

  “Adelina, who is there?” called Petrosino from the bedroom.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

  “Signora Siena.”

  Adelina walked into the bedroom and spoke to her husband. When she returned, she said, “He would like to see you for a minute.”

  Giovanna, nudging Lucrezia to go with her, walked inside.

  Lieutenant Petrosino was propped up on pillows. His face looked drawn, but in Giovanna’s quick assessment, she decided he would recover.

  “This is Dottore LaManna, my friend.”

  “It’s an honor, Dottore.”

  “Signora LaManna, Lieutenant.”

  “Signora Siena has told me all about you, Dottore. So I assume she brought you here to see if I will live.”

  Giovanna laughed. “Oh, you’ll live alright, but only if you are tied to this bed.”

  “I will tell you this confidentially: the one good thing about my illness is I think it made everyone feel guilty enough to allow the commissioner to expand the Italian Squad.”

  “Congratulations, Lieutenant!”

  “I’m not sure much will happen in my absence.”

  “You rest, Lieutenant. Even I am taking time off. I’m going to Scilla with my daughter in just one week. It has been a long time since I’ve seen my family.”

  “Good for you, signora! I suppose it was doctor’s orders,” he commented, winking at Lucrezia.

  “I can see what a perceptive detective you are,” answered Lucrezia, smiling.

  Saying good-bye to Adelina at the door, Giovanna could not help but notice that Adelina was carrying well and the pregnancy appeared healthy.

  Cedar Grove, New Jersey, 1973

  “‘Put money into one loaf of the bread and deliver to Rossi. Make the loaf darker than the others.’ Mamma! How much money do we have?”

  “Five or six dollars.”

  “I mean all the money!”

  “But, Pop, I only have one more year and then I’ll be a teacher.”

  “What can we do? You know what happened to little Marisa.”

  “I could talk to Lieutenant Petrosino.”

  “This is a private affair. Private business.”

  “This isn’t Sicily, Papa. Here the police are on our side. Lieutenant Petrosino, he’s Italian like we are.”

  “No! I told you! No!”

  The clicking of my grandmother’s knitting needles was bothering me, so I turned up the TV. It was Sunday afternoon, and I was watching an old black-and-white movie. A baker in the movie had decided not to pay extortion money after his daughter cried, and now the bad guys were breaking into his store. I cringed. It was a horrible scene. They had the guy tied to a chair and were cracking eggs over his head before they put him in a brick oven.

  “Does it go this way or that way?” asked my grandmother, turning around the paper on which I had drawn a peace sign.

  Without turning away from the TV, I flipped the peace sign right side up. “This way.”

  “Do you like the orange?”

  “Yes, I like it.” I tried not to show my exasperation at being interrupted again because she was doing me a favor by knitting a patch for my jeans.

  As politely as possible, I turned my attention back to the guy from McHale’s Navy who was playing an Italian cop.

  “That’s so loud,” complained Nanny.

  “You keep talking.”

  “Turn it down. What are you watching anyway?”

  “Some old movie about the Mafia.”

  “You shouldn’t watch that garbage.”

  “I know, I know…” I was familiar with my grandmother’s feelings about anything that was Mafia-related.

  I was relieved. The good guy in the oven was saved and the Italian cop was interrogating him as he was brought out.

  “Who did this to you?”

  “Lupo and two others.”

  “Are you sure it was Lupo?”

  The half-finished orange peace sign attached to Nanny’s needles dropped to the floor. My grandmother tentatively rose from the crushed velvet La-Z-Boy and walked toward the TV, stopping before she got too close. She leaned sideways to look at the picture, acting as if she got too near the television it could hurt her. Nanny watched and listened for a few moments before gasping in air and clasping her hand to her mouth. For a second she seemed rooted to the checkered linoleum.

  “Turn it off!” she shouted, before storming up the den stairs into the kitchen. I heard her continue up the second set of stairs leading to the bedrooms.

  My grandmother was not beyond throwing a fit, but this seemed odd. I was torn between wanting to finish watching the movie—now the baker’s daughter was being attacked in a dark hallway—and my curiosity about why my grandmother was acting so weird. It didn’t occur to me to be concerned; Nanny wasn’t the kind of person who evoked worry or sympathy. Even at the worst of times, she was strong and eerily detached. Eventually, curiosity and guilt won out.

  Nanny was in my room sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Did you turn that off?” demanded Nanny without looking at me.

  “Yes,” I lied. “What’s the matter? I’m sorry if it was too loud.”

  “I told you not to watch that garbage.”

  “Nanny, not all Mafia stuff is garbage. You act like the Mafia’s not real or something.”

  “Don’t tell me! I know what’s real and what’s not!”

  “Why are you screaming?”

  “Because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Go do your homework!”

  “I did it already. What’s the big deal? It’s a dumb old Mafia movie!”

  “It’s not the Mafia, it’s the Black Hand!”

  “Same thing.”

  “See! You know nothing!”

  “They just said it! The movie’s based on a true story, a cop named Petrosino fighting the Mafia.”

  “They killed him.”

  “Who?”

  “The policeman, Petrosino.”

  “Did you see the movie?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know he gets killed?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “How do you know he gets killed, Nanny?”

  That night, I left Nanny with my sister and went to the local pizza parlor parking lot to hang out with my friends. I had decided not to tell anyone, but that lasted about fifteen minutes.

  “I’m telling you, Thea, my grandmother was kidnapped.”

  “That’s so cool,” Thea marveled.

  “I don’t think she thought it was cool. She was only four.”

  “How did they get her back?”

  “I’m not sure. I think they paid a ransom or something. She didn’t tell me much.”

  “Was it, like, Al Capone?”

  “No, it was the Black Hand. They came before the Mafia.”

  “You gotta get her to tell you more.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  A few months later, my mother was stunned at my enthusiasm for attending the family reunion picnic. She kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye. It baffled me that my mother knew so little about the kidnapping. “That’s so long ago. What do you care?”

  Unlike my grandmother, who was stonewalling me, my mother honestly didn’t have the information and didn’t seem interested. But for me, it had become an obsession. I replayed scenes from the past, looking for clues. There was the obvious—Nanny yelling to get the strangers out of the house when my friends came to visit—but I needed to know more to be able to make sense of it all. For the first time, I truly tried to understand the tangled web of my fam
ily. It wasn’t easy. Nanny and Nonno were cousins as well as husband and wife, and they weren’t the only ones. Our family tree had so many diagonal lines it looked like it was covered in netting. I missed Nonno every day, but now I felt desperate for him.

  There wasn’t a hamburger or hot dog in sight at the family picnic. Trays of lasagna, eggplant parmigiana, swordfish, clams on the half shell, steamed mussels, calamari salads, veal rollatini, stuffed artichokes, and more covered the redwood picnic tables. The tuna casserole and noodle salad brought by the few cousins who had married non-Italians were politely put on a separate picnic table and went untouched.

  I decided that Uncle Cakey, Nanny’s younger brother, would be my best source. Nanny’s older brother, Clement, and sister, Frances, were both dead. Aunt Mary lived in Wildwood and wouldn’t be coming, and Aunt Etta was a lot younger than Nanny, so I figured she didn’t know much.

  Uncle Cakey was immediately drafted for a game of bocce, so I had to wait. When the game and bickering about whose ball was closer ended, I brought Uncle Cakey a glass of wine and steered him far away from my grandmother.

  “So, Uncle Cakey, were you born when Nanny was kidnapped?”

  “You know about that?”

  I tried to sound nonchalant. “Yeah, of course.”

  He looked at me skeptically but answered. “I was born when they had your grandmother.”

  One of the old cousins walked by. “Dominick, my great-niece here wants to know about when they took Lena.”

  Dominick looked older than Uncle Cakey but was taller. He pulled up a folding chair.

  “Yeah? Who’s your mother?”

  “Josie. I’m Angelina’s granddaughter Anna.”

  “You look like her.”

  Cousin Dominick squeezed my face and gave me a kiss. “How old are you?”

  “I’m sixteen…I saw this old movie about a cop named Petrosino.”

  “Oh, yeah, Petrosino, I knew him. I wanted to be a policeman.”

  “Did he help when my grandmother was kidnapped?”

  “No, he was dead by then. I still remember his funeral. It didn’t matter that he was Italian—everyone came. I had a friend who worked for him. Detective Forseti, Fachetti—something like that.”

  “So what exactly was the Black Hand?”

  “Thugs. Black rats. You know they even tried to get money out of Caruso when he came to New York. My friend the detective got them that time.”

  “So was he the one that got Nanny back?”

  “No, your great-grandmother got her back. I helped her, you know. She was smart, your great-grandmother. And strong. I loved Zia Giovanna. My father, Lorenzo, didn’t live long like she did, but my mother, Teresa, God rest her soul, had eleven children and died at ninety-two.”

  “How did Big Nanny get her back?”

  “Does your grandmother know you’re asking all these questions?”

  I lied. “Sure. But what does it matter?”

  “Because you don’t talk about it, that’s all. Cakey, did you tell her about how people would wait around the block for our ice cream in Hoboken? If you want to hear old stories, that’s what you should know.”

  “See this muscle?” Uncle Cakey jumped into the conversation by flexing his biceps. “The longshoremen didn’t have muscles like this! We had to lift barrels of ice and rock salt. Even your grandmother had muscles from carrying the cream and condensed milk.”

  “Lena!” Cousin Dominick called Nanny. “Tell your granddaughter about our ice cream.”

  Nanny walked over, effectively ending my investigation. Within minutes Uncle Cakey was recounting in detail how they made the lemon ice.

  “You cut the tits off the lemons…the barrels would go into rock salt…”

  “Remember Mamma would say, ‘Don’t let Uncle Lorenzo buy the lemons! He’s an artist. He always picks the lemons that look good, not the ones with the thin skins that you need.’”

  Nanny actually chuckled at the memory, but I began to tune out. I was plotting my next move, because although I’d gotten a few answers, I ended up with more questions.

  PART SEVEN

  SCILLA, ITALY AUGUST–DECEMBER 1908

  TWENTY-THREE

  Returning from the mountains, Angelina jumped down from her grandfather’s shoulders and ran through the door of her grandparents’ house in Scilla.

  “Domenico, she’ll soon bleat like a goat!” chided Concetta.

  “My American granddaughter needs fresh milk!” he said proudly, leaving the milk and cheese on the table. Domenico was enraptured with Angelina. Her complexion and hair were far darker than anyone in the family, and he treated her like an exotic jewel.

  Giovanna and Angelina had arrived in Scilla three weeks before. For the final leg of their journey, Cousin Pasquale had picked them up by boat from Reggio. As they sailed north past the beach of Marina Grande, turning the corner around the castle into the Chianalea, Giovanna had to stop herself from diving in and swimming to her parents, who waited on the dock.

  Giovanna’s initial euphoria over being back in Scilla was replaced by torrents of tears. Her mother’s presence allowed her to be a vulnerable child, and she didn’t leave her side. Days later, when the sobbing stopped, melancholy set in. Everywhere she looked evoked memories, and always those memories included Nunzio. Her sadness was complicated by the guilt she felt for only thinking of Nunzio. It was days before it occurred to her that Rocco, too, came from Scilla. She forced herself to walk to the address where he said he grew up. The tiny stone house stared back at her, as foreign and impenetrable as her husband.

  Nunzio’s family, including his mother, Zia Marianna, all lived within a few feet of her own mother’s house, and his family was with them each day. Angelina particularly liked playing with the children of Nunzio’s sister, Fortunata. The girls treated her like a porcelain doll and giggled when Angelina spoke in an Italian that had been bastardized by English. Fortunata’s twelve-year-old boy, Antonio, took Angelina fishing and taught her to swim. Antonio looked so much like his Uncle Nunzio that at first Giovanna found it unnerving; he didn’t have Nunzio’s red hair, but he had his handsome face and tall, thin build. He also had his uncle’s curiosity. After a while, Giovanna not only took comfort in the boy’s presence but fantasized that Antonio would marry Angelina and her grandchildren would have Nunzio’s blood.

  “How beautiful, Nonna!” squealed Angelina, running her fingers over the embroidered flowers on the white dress.

  “Let’s try it on,” said Concetta, slipping the dress over her granddaughter’s head. “There. You’re going to be the prettiest girl at the feast!”

  “Will there really be fire in the sky, Nonna? That’s what Nonno said.”

  “For once your Nonno isn’t telling stories!”

  “Thank you, Mamma,” whispered Giovanna to her mother. There were times in New York that Giovanna thought she would never see another proper Feast of Saint Rocco, the patron saint of Scilla. But tonight she would walk in the procession with her daughter, and, as usual, her father would be one of the men to shoulder the statue of Saint Rocco through the streets.

  “Look at Nonno!” pointed Angelina, giggling. Her grandfather came down the stairs in his blue shirt and red neck scarf.

  “You’re getting too old to carry the statue, Domenico,” chided Concetta.

  “Too old! Who carries our granddaughter each day on his shoulders?!” he said, tickling Angelina.

  At the church, Domenico went with the men to retrieve the ten-foot statue for the procession. It was to be carried, as it had been for more than a hundred years, from the church, through the streets of Scilla, borne on an ornate litter atop the shoulders of twenty men. The band of the City of Scilla, dressed in uniforms with sashes across their chests, followed the statue and all the men of the Saint Rocco Society. Behind the band walked the population of Scilla.

  “Antonio, why does Saint Rocco point to his knee?” Angelina asked her cousin, who walked beside her.

  �
��Shhh, Angelina.”

  “Where did you get that cap?” she whispered, ignoring him.

  “Your mother gave it to me. Now be quiet,” reprimanded Antonio.

  “Okay, but how much farther?”

  “Soon we will be at the chiazza, and you will see the fireworks,” assured Antonio.

  Angelina was half asleep on her mother’s shoulder when they finally reached the chiazza, but with the first explosion she was wide awake. Giovanna watched the reflection of the fireworks and the wonder in her daughter’s eyes. It was the first time during this trip to Scilla that she was creating a memory instead of evoking one.

  “The boat’s coming in, Angelina. Let’s see if they caught the last of the swordfish,” said Domenico to his granddaughter.

  It was difficult for Domenico to no longer be able to fish. He kept hoping that the pains in his arms and legs that kept him from sailing would go away, but when the second swordfish season without him at sea came and went, he realized that this was the curse of old age.

  From the front door of the Costa home to where the boats docked was less than twenty feet. Angelina watched the boat that looked like a strange insect rowing back to shore.

  “Nonno, why is the man up in the air?”

  “To look for the swordfish. He calls to the others when he sees one. They are smart, these fish, and they feel you coming. You must sneak up on them. The man at the front, he throws the spear on the caller’s direction.”

  The boat neared the dock, and the man on the pole waved. Angelina realized it wasn’t a man at all, but Antonio. The person holding the spear was Antonio’s father, Giuseppe, and his other two sons, Salvatore and Franco, were at the oars. Angelina jumped up and down and waved.

  From the door to the house, Giovanna watched with a smile on her face, pleased that Angelina and Antonio genuinely liked each other.

  Within thirty feet of the shore, Giuseppe called, answering Domenico’s unasked question. “Nothing, Domenico. We netted a few fluke, that’s all.”