New York - The Novel

successful
banchista
. He knew how to invest, and dozens of families had been grateful to put their savings in his hands. Each month, Giovanni Caruso would add a little more to the savings he had placed with Signor Rossi, and each month Rossi would give him a brief account of how his little fortune was growing. “Be patient,” he would counsel. “If you invest wisely in this country, you will prosper.”
    The family walked proudly up the street. Giovanni with his grown-up son, then Concetta with little Angelo, Anna with Maria, while Salvatore and Paolo brought up the rear, talking and laughing as usual.
    The little restaurant was not yet crowded. In the middle, Uncle Luigi, with a napkin over his arm, was serving beside a large table at which a single man was sitting. He was a thickset, Neapolitan fellow, not unlike their father, but in his eyes there was a special gleam. As they entered, and Uncle Luigi gestured for them to approach, the man at the table beamed at them and, opening his arms expansively, invited them to sit at table with him.
    “Welcome,” he cried, “the family of Caruso.”
    Salvatore would never forget that meal. He had never seen so much food in his life.
    Not that the food in the Italian quarter was bad. Even his mother would grudgingly admit that, in America, you ate more meat than you did in the Mezzogiorno, and pasta too. No thick peasant bread, either. In America, you ate light white bread, like the rich.
    But of course, the great tenor, who was paid thousands of dollars a week, could have all the food he wanted, and soon the table was groaning with Italian pasta, American
bistecca
, a huge bowl of salad, jugs of olive oil, piles of olives, bottles of Chianti—and Lacryma Christi also, from the base of Vesuvius, in honor of the Naples region—baskets of breads, plates of salami and cheeses … And over it all, a wonderful, rich smell of tomato, pepper and oil.
“Mangia
, eat,” he urged, as he pushed the foodtoward them, and he insisted that a
bistecca
be placed in front of every child. It seemed to Salvatore that he was in heaven.
    From the great Caruso, also, there exuded an aura of warmth and generosity that seemed to fill the whole room. “Italy in America,” he remarked to Giovanni Caruso with a grin, “it’s even better than Italy in Italy.” He patted his growing stomach. “This is where we Italians come to grow fat.” For indeed, even in the stinking tenements of the Lower East Side, the thin immigrants from the Mezzogiorno would nearly always put on weight after a year or two.
    To Concetta Caruso, he was charming. He knew her village, even one of her relations. Soon, she was beaming. As for Giovanni Caruso, who knew very well the tenor’s legendary generosity, he was anxious to make sure that Caruso should not think they had come there looking for charity.
    “We do well,” he told him. “Already I have savings. A few years more and I shall buy my own house.”
    “Bravo,” said Caruso. “Let us drink to the land of opportunity.”
    “But you, Signor Caruso,” his father added respectfully, “have brought honor to our name. You have raised us all.”
    Like a tribal chief, Caruso acknowledged this tribute. “Let us raise our glasses, my friends, to the name of Caruso.”
    During the meal, he spoke to each of the family in turn. He congratulated Giuseppe on helping his father, and Concetta on raising such a fine family. Anna, he saw at once, was the family’s second mother. Paolo admitted that he wanted to be a fireman, and when it came to Salvatore’s turn, he asked him about his school.
    The Church of the Transfiguration stood between Mott and Mulberry streets, on the small rise overlooking the little park. When the Carusos had first arrived there, an Irish priest ministered to an Irish congregation in the main church, while an Italian priest conducted a service for the Italian congregation, in their own language, down in the crypt below. But since then, the Italians and their priest had moved upstairs, a signal that it was they who had taken charge of the area now. Beside the church was the school which the Caruso children attended.
    “You must learn all you can,” the great man told Salvatore. “Too many of our southern Italians despise education. They say, ‘Why should a son know more than his father?’ But they are wrong. Work hard at school and you will get ahead in America. You understand?”
    Salvatore had no love of school, so he was not