New York - The Novel

only five cents, no matter where one went. Sometimes he and Angelo would ride out into the growing suburbs just to say they’d been there.
    Salvatore would also take Angelo to a ball game. With Babe Ruth playing for the Yankees, baseball in New York was exciting. Thanks to Paolo, who’d somehow got them tickets, they’d also gone up to the Polo Grounds to see Jack Dempsey fight Luis Firpo, El Toro Salvaje de las Pampas. Thathad been an event to remember, with Dempsey knocked clean out of the ring before he came back to win.
    But Angelo’s favorite outing was going to the movies. The movies weren’t expensive. They’d watch the Keystone Kops, and Charlie Chaplin, who’d settled in America and switched from stage to screen. They’d see D. W. Griffith’s great stories over and over. From the moment that the organist started to play, Angelo’s face would become rapt. He also had an amazing memory, and he could name every movie his favorite stars had performed in, and facts about their performances and lives in the way that other kids could remember baseball scores. He followed the careers of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish with special devotion.
    These stars, however, seemed to be the only women in Angelo’s life. Salvatore liked going out with girls, and one day he wanted to marry, but not until he’d saved up some money. In the meantime, once a week, he’d make a visit to the old Tenderloin District, around Broadway in the Thirties. There were plenty of prostitutes in Little Italy, but he preferred to keep this part of his life private. Uncle Luigi knew what he did, and always cautioned him to be careful. “Do you know,” he told him, “they made it so difficult for our troops to get rubbers in the war that nearly three-quarters of our boys caught something?” He even told him where he could buy the rarer latex ones. Salvatore took precautions. As he told his uncle, with a shrug: “Whores cost money, but it’s better than going crazy.”
    Salvatore wasn’t sure why Angelo had so little contact with women. Perhaps he was too shy. Salvatore wondered if he ought to do something about it, but Uncle Luigi advised him to leave well alone.
    What worried Uncle Luigi was not Angelo’s leisure, but his work. When Salvatore had become a bricklayer, Angelo had quietly joined him, and whether or not it was thanks to the weights he still worked out with, he had grown into quite a wiry young man, so he could handle the physical labor without difficulty.
    “But he shouldn’t be laying bricks,” Uncle Luigi would protest. “He has talent.” Uncle Luigi might have abandoned his foolish dream that Angelo should be an architect, but there were other things the young man could be: a house painter, a decorator, something at least where he could use the gifts God gave him. It seemed, though, that Angelo preferred to work with his brother. Yet he’d never stopped drawing. Salvatore might go out to a bar after supper, but Angelo would stay at the kitchen table, occasionallyreading a book, but usually drawing. And at these times, his young face would take on a look of concentrated intensity. Sometimes, coming home early, Salvatore had entered the room and stood for several minutes beside Angelo while he was drawing before Angelo even noticed that he was there. Uncle Luigi had taken some of the drawings, framed them and sold them to customers at the restaurant. But his attempts to persuade Angelo to take orders for pictures from customers had so far gotten nowhere. “I get paid for laying bricks,” he told his uncle with a smile, “and then I can draw what I like.”
    At least there was no shortage of work. Maybe the war had made America nervous about aliens, Salvatore wasn’t sure, but the government had put quotas on immigration. Apart from a lot of black people who came up from the South, the flood of new immigrants into New York had turned to a trickle. Meanwhile, the city was booming. Wages were good, and rising.
    The years had passed. By 1925, Salvatore’s cache of savings had grown enough for him to wonder whether, maybe, he could think about looking for a wife.

    He was walking down Sixth Avenue on a cold day in December when he met Paolo. His brother was looking sharp, in a double-breasted overcoat and a derby hat. He might have been taken for a banker. Or a gangster. He was evidently surprised to see Salvatore, but he grinned.
    “You chose the right place to meet, kid,” he said. “Come in and eat.”