Death of a New American--A Novel

by Mariah Fredericks

“And … who is it, doing the dress?” His fingers came to rest on the pocket where he kept his notebook.

  “You’ll know after the wedding. Come along, Mr. Behan.”

  12

  Finding any one man on Mulberry Street was not going to be easy. Doing anything on Mulberry Street was not easy, as it was not so much a street as a throng of humanity, horses, and wagons. To make your way through, you were often obliged to step from pavement to cobblestone and back again when the path was blocked by café dwellers, vegetable stalls, barrels of wine, or a fistfight. Some might have called it Little Italy, but they would have been wrong. Mulberry Street was Neapolitans. Sicilians resided on Elizabeth Street, Calabrians and Puglians on Mott. Nearby was the Church of the Most Precious Blood, which held the statue of San Gennaro, which was paraded through the street during the festival. It was also the place Anna had almost not been confirmed in the Catholic faith, losing her battle only when Maria refused to eat for three days.

  Ducking his head under a row of dresses hanging from an awning, Behan muttered, “Sweet Christ. Are we still in America?”

  Then, planting his feet, he said, “All right, Miss Prescott. You go ask one of these nice fellows where you can find Signor Moretti.”

  I could have been mistaken, but I thought I saw at least two men frown at the mention of the name. Or possibly because they heard a voice that was not Italian, something that aroused suspicion on these streets.

  “Mr. Behan, would you do me a favor and stay where you are?”

  “While you go where?”

  “… Shopping.”

  With more confidence than I felt, I made my way over to the wooden bins of vegetables that lined the street. If the man Sandro worked for made his wealth in vegetables, this seemed one place to start. There was little storage space in these apartments and shopping was a daily job. Women with shawls on their shoulders and baskets on their arms picked expertly through the produce, examining onions, peppers, potatoes—and eggplants. A few of them glanced at me as I approached, raising eyebrows at one another. I had no basket. They spoke rapidly—and exclusively—in Italian. When I reached for an onion, they subtly shifted to close ranks, protecting their right to first choice. I stepped back in a show of respect. And because I had to.

  I had learned a little Italian from those dinners at Anna’s. I knew at least how to be polite to older women. And so I tried, “Scusatemi, signore.”

  One woman in a vivid yellow shawl pulled an amused face at her friend who picked up, then rejected a pepper. Me, she didn’t bother to inspect.

  How to say I was looking for someone? What was the word for looking? Maria was always losing things. Theresa would snap, “Guarda!” as she pointed to drawers and tables. To which Maria would answer, “Guardando, guardando…”

  “Guardando per Sandro Ardito.”

  This got a swift shake of the head, either “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand.” I repeated, “Sandro Ardito.” Then looked pathetic. “Per favore…”

  The first woman was growing bored and the second woman would not be distracted from her peppers. I would have to tell them more about Sandro—or the man he worked for. The word for work I knew from listening to Anna. Snatching up a long, slender eggplant, I held it up and said, “Sandro Ardito, lavora per un uomo…”

  There was a burst of laughter from both women. Puzzled, I said, “Guardando per un uomo…”

  The women just laughed harder, loudly enough to attract the attention of the vegetable seller, who inquired in Italian. The second woman gasped, “Sta cercando un uomo…”

  She fingered the eggplant and I saw my mistake. My blush was immediate. The grocer clucked something—probably a comment about the size—and the women started laughing again.

  Then, taking pity, he said to me, “Che uomo?”

  “Si, che uomo?” echoed the woman in the yellow shawl. I had her goodwill now. I had made a fool of myself and livened her day.

  “Sandro Ardito?”

  I did my best to look lovelorn, clutching my hand to my breast in the universal sign of supplication. The two women looked meaningfully at each other. Finally, the grocer nodded down the block and said, “Banca Stabile.”

  “Grazie,” I said. “Grazie…”

  He nodded genially, another silly girl in love. As I stepped back into the street, the yellow-shawled woman held up a thick, purple eggplant half the length of her arm and crowed, “Sandro Ardito!”

  I laughed, then put my hand on my heart in a sudden surge of gratitude for things that went beyond eggplant or a nod down the street. Things such as welcome, humor, generosity. And yes, eggplant and peppers, too.

  As I passed by Michael Behan, he started to move toward me, but I shook my head. A woman whose ardor has become the day’s street comedy did not need another man’s company. I kept moving and prayed he wouldn’t follow. The story of the eggplant seemed to be making its way down the block. As I wandered, craning to see above shoulders, dodging children, stepping over manure, and evading the animals who left it, I could sense smiles and nudges in the crowd.

  There were many banks on Mulberry Street, so many that it was sometimes called the Italian Wall Street. People in the neighborhood often kept their jewelry, papers, and other precious items in their vaults. The banche held other things precious to the community—telegraphs to wire home, money exchanges, even wine—and people often gathered there to gossip, making it an informal employment and real-estate agency. Who needed a job done? Who was moving out? Who needed a piano? Who was selling a piano?

  I was almost at the corner when I saw him, the man I had seen on the train.

  Sandro Ardito.

  He was standing on the street, relaxed, foot set on a crate, elbow resting on his knee. He was chatting with another young man in Italian, so immersed in that conversation I was able to get quite close. His friend noticed me first, nodding to indicate they weren’t alone. Sandro looked up.

  And ran.

  Or rather he tried to run. The crowd that had followed my progress from eggplant to inamorato had gleefully anticipated this reaction and blocked his path. Sandro found himself confounded by a solid wall of people who wanted to see how it all turned out. I was pushed forward by a stout-armed woman. Tripping slightly on my skirts, I took his arm and led him away from our audience, holding his arm tight to make sure he didn’t run.

  “I just want to talk to you,” I said.

  “You’re Anna’s friend,” he said.

  “Yes. We met on the train this morning.”

  “So? Anybody can be on a train.”

  “But you ran,” I said. “Why?”

  “I guess I was in a big, big hurry,” he said sarcastically. We were away from the watching crowd now and he worked himself free of my grasp. A year younger than Anna, his speech was more “American” than hers. He wasn’t much taller than I was, although his thick black hair made him seem a bit taller. His face was still moonlike, but the baby fat had gone with regular work, and he was now stocky rather than fat. He stood, hands in his pockets, knee jiggling; the motor was still running.

  “I was a friend of Sofia Bernardi’s.”

  “I don’t know a Sofia Bernardi.” He looked relieved, as if he genuinely didn’t recognize the name.

  “She was supposed to be on that train this morning.”

  “Sure. Like a thousand other people. I gotta go.”

  He started walking back to the wagon.

  “Don’t you want to know why she wasn’t on the train?”

  “Why should I be curious about a woman I never met?”

  “Then you won’t care if she’s dead.”

  Sandro stopped. Then turned, his face drawn and tight, his jaw set. “What?”

  “The woman you were going to meet. Someone killed her. They cut her throat.”

  He went pale, the word “Dio” escaped his lips.

  “You wouldn’t be frightened if you really didn’t know anything about it.”

  He was so sti
ll that for a moment, I thought he had forgotten I was even there. Then in a burst of panic, he leapt past me and started running down the block—smart enough, this time, to run in the opposite direction of the crowd. I was so startled, I did nothing for a crucial few seconds. Then I gathered up my skirts and followed, shouting, “Sandro, wait!”

  Skirts, skirts, skirts … I cursed skirts as I ran down the street. Every stride forward, the heavy cloth swung back between my legs and threatened to trip me. Sandro was increasing the distance between us. I thought to call for help, claim that he had stolen from me, or even committed an indecency. But that could end very badly in this neighborhood, and I didn’t want Sandro beaten senseless.

  Stopping, I took fistfuls of my skirts and growled in frustration. A few men smiled in amusement. An elderly gentleman patted me on the shoulder and said something consoling in Italian. I didn’t understand the exact meaning, but the implication was that it was a large ocean with plenty of fish.

  That reminded me that there was a fish waiting, an Irish one who was unhappy in foreign waters. I made my way back to the spot where I had left Michael Behan.

  Only to find that I had lost not one but two men. The reporter was nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  It was a long ride back to the Benchley house. The train was crowded with people headed home, all of whom seemed to have had a very bad day. Weary, I clung to the strap. A seat was out of the question; chivalry was quite dead underground. One self-described middle-aged man had written to the papers complaining of “skylarking, gum-chewing girls … who could better afford to stand” than he. “I harden my heart against femininity in general,” he said, “and ‘fresh girls’ in particular.” Right now, I was not feeling remotely fresh.

  Questions swirled around and around in my head, occasionally catching on a detail or brief insight, only to spin off into further confusion. Had Sofia come to the city to meet Sandro Ardito? Certainly the chauffeur thought so, and a girl hoping to be a mother, stuck in the country far from her own people, might answer a newspaper ad. But the ad—and Sandro’s reaction to the news of her death—implied that they had met before. Was he the reason she had come to the city over the past few months? It seemed likely. But a lover would have wept at the news of her death, begged to know details. Sandro had simply run. His shock at hearing she was dead probably meant he hadn’t killed her. But his terror indicated he knew who had.

  How would he know that? None of the answers I came to were comforting.

  It was dusk when I got off the train at Fiftieth Street, the air warm and pleasant as the sun went down. I could hear the bells of St. Patrick’s calling the faithful to evening prayer. As I neared the Benchley house, my stomach reminded me I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. But food was not what called to me. Bed seemed a marvelous, wondrous thing. I would go straight upstairs and fall upon it. Possibly I would not even remove my shoes. First I would hide the pamphlet Anna had given me. I didn’t want—was it What Every Girl Should Know? Every Wife? The Well-Kept Woman? No, that had to be wrong. Whatever it was, I didn’t want it falling out of my coat pocket.

  I opened the back door to raised voices. For a moment, I stood, taking in the sight of Elsie on one side of the kitchen table, Bernadette on the other side, while Mrs. Mueller peeled potatoes into the sink.

  “The sheets are your job!” Bernadette shouted.

  “Ironing them is my job,” returned Elsie. “Washing them is yours.”

  “That’s not what Mrs. Benchley said—”

  “It is so!”

  Probably, I thought, they were both right. Mrs. Benchley could well have said one thing to Bernadette and another to Elsie.

  “Good evening,” I said, and shut the door.

  “What are you doing here?” Bernadette demanded, ready for a fresh assault.

  “I work here,” I said tiredly. “Elsie, for today, could you manage the sheets? I’ll take it up with Mrs. Benchley when I go back to Pleasant Meadows.”

  “Missus will tell you she’s supposed to do washing and ironing,” insisted Bernadette, jerking her head toward Elsie. Dear God, I thought, you’ve gotten your way, be gracious about it.

  “She might,” I said, heading toward the stairs. “And then forget she said it. This time, we’ll have witnesses.”

  I could sense Bernadette and Elsie exchanging puzzled looks over the table. I went upstairs to my room. Taking off my coat, I remembered the pamphlet. I took it out of my pocket and sat on the bed.

  The title, What Every Mother Should Know: How Six Little Children Were Taught the Truth and the author’s name were clearly stamped on the front. Despite the gentle title, I felt apprehensive, as if I were holding something obscene. I turned to the front page. And read:

  Every parent knows that at one day their little boy or girl will have matured into the possessor of the powers of procreating yet they fail to teach the child how to care for, or how to regard these powers they possess.

  Mrs. Benchley to a T, I thought, encouraged. From the introduction, we progressed to flowers, not the botanical item, but a family named Mr. and Mrs. Buttercup and their children. The Buttercups resided in the petals of Butterfly House. When the Buttercup children expressed interest in how they came to be, their parents explained that the “pollen” of the father, which was stored in the father’s “stamen,” must get into the mother’s pistil in order to reach her seeds. Unless Louise had done botany at school, she was going to find this more bewildering than helpful.

  We then moved on to frogs and the story of the Toad family.

  Like Mrs. Buttercup, Mrs. Toad has within her body a little nest where little seeds or eggs have been kept and have been growing, and now that the time has come when they need awakening to a new life, they need life from the Father Frog just as the buttercup needed pollen from the stamen. Mr. Toad (or Frog), too, is stirred by this new and wonderful life giving desire within him, and when Mrs. Toad (or Frog) feels the eggs are to be expelled, he comes very close to her, and in order to fertilize every egg before it goes into the water, he holds her fast behind the arm, and as they are expelled he pours over them his life giving fluid, which enters every tiny egg and gives it life—a new life.

  “Comes very close to her” and arm holding did not quite capture the experience as I understood it. By that measure, I might well have been fertilized when Michael Behan grabbed my arm this afternoon.

  I turned a few pages, thinking perhaps in the next section, we might move on to actual people. But no, the next section was birds. We learned about the spiny anteater, the kangaroo, flying squirrels, and finally, Mrs. Pussy Cat. In the last chapter, human children were taught about their own bodies.

  They were shown charts of the human figure (both sexes) and all parts of the body were named in the same way as parts of the flower were named. Parts of the organs of reproduction were called by their names in telling of the works each part performed. No special stress was laid on the naming of these parts, but simply, casually, as one would speak of the various parts of the eye, or any other organ.

  At no point did Mrs. Sanger name these parts, much less explain how they might be used in the process of reproduction. I had to stop myself from strangling the papers in frustration. Why was there so much timidity in discussing the act that had brought every single person on the planet into being? I pushed the pamphlet into a drawer and wondered if this had been an elaborate joke on Anna’s part. Stamens and pistils! What on earth had stamens and pistils to do with the urges that made men seek out women? I thought of the people on Mulberry Street, the women laughing, the grocer with his half smile, the woman who matter-of-factly shoved me toward Sandro. They all seemed so … easy with this part of life. They thought it natural, not something to be turned into a lecture on the life cycle of the anteater.

  Also, I fumed, folding my arms, there was no discussion whatsoever of the feminine side of things. Maybe women weren’t plagued by the animal instincts of men. But to say that they—we—had no und
erstanding or appreciation of those instincts or urges or physical … feelings, well, that was also inaccurate.

  A little while later, Elsie knocked on the door to tell me supper was ready. I said I wasn’t hungry. A short time after that, there was a second, harder knock on the door.

  “Honestly, I’m not hungry,” I called.

  The door opened. Bernadette put her head in. “It’s that man for you.”

  I went downstairs, avoiding the gaze of the three women, and saw Michael Behan waiting in the back alley.

  As I shut the door, he said, “I don’t think Bernadette cares for you very much.”

  “She doesn’t care for anyone very much. Where did you go?”

  “I believe you left me, Miss Prescott. Walked right past me without so much as a ‘Wait here, I’ll be back in five minutes.’ What was I supposed to think?”

  It was true—but not the whole truth. I waited.

  “Besides, I had an appointment.”

  “With whom?”

  “You’ll see.” He looked me up and down. “Can you do something with your hair? It’s—” He waved his hand uncertainly.

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re having dinner.”

  “I’m not having dinner with you, Mr. Behan.”

  “Well, that’s true, because I’ve got enough money for one meal and Officer Sullivan will be the one to enjoy it. Still, I thought you might like to hear what he has to say.”

  “Is this the man who gives you the Black Hand stories?”

  “It is.”

  “Wait five minutes.” I opened the door, then turned back to ask, “Where are we eating?”

  “Keens Steakhouse. The gentleman is partial to their whiskey and mutton chops. And it’s four minutes now.”

  I’m not sure whether I took three minutes or six, but as I raced back down the stairs, I admired my own speed; it wasn’t every woman who could refresh her hair and day-worn clothes to something presentable in the time I had been given. There had been a recent trend away from an entire change of clothes from day to night; instead the transformation was achieved with jewelry, hairstyle, or other accessories. In my case, miracles had been worked with a quick wash, a change to my navy suit jacket, which was nicely snug at the waist, and my better hat, a trim little thing, shallow, gray felt, with a light-blue band and a feather in the back. I confess, I was half hoping for a compliment, but all I got was a brief look of surprise before he said, “All right, let’s go.”