CASA DI BELLO
THE banked fire of America’s Sabbath gave its quiet to Bowling Green
the day that Bertino landed in New York. It was not the New York he had
seen so often from the heights of Cardinali. The cloud-piercing houses
had always loomed in his dream pictures, but no returned exile had
ever told him that they filled the soul with this nameless dread. He
longed to be in Mulberry, which all travellers agreed was the next best
thing to being in Italy. With a goatskin box under one arm, a tawny
cotton umbrella pressed by the other, and his left hand clutching the
knotted ends of a kerchief holding more luggage, he set out from the
Barge Office. In the band of his narrow-brimmed black soft hat--the
precious adornment of festal days--stood a gray turkey feather, and
about his bare neck in sailor noose was tied a cravat of satin, green
as the myrtle of his native steeps. As he strode up Broadway, past old
Trinity and Wall Street, the heavy fall of his hobnailed boots started
the echoes of the New World’s financial centre.
A flock of fellow-pilgrims clattered by at high speed in care of a
guide, who charged five cents a head for piloting them safely to the
Italian colony. The hatless women, burdened with babies and heavy
sacks, struggled bravely to keep up with the men, who carried the
umbrellas. Bertino fell in behind, and soon they turned the corner of
Franklin Street. Here they got their first glimpse of Mulberry, which
lay clearly visible in the distance at the foot of a hill whose summit
is Broadway. Beneath the Bridge of Sighs, which spans the street at the
Tombs Prison, forming an arching frame for the picture, they could see
the pleasant lawn of Paradise Park. It was a bright afternoon, and the
broad patch of greensward gleamed like a great emerald down there in
the sunlight, and the low-roofed houses all around, with the sun’s fire
in their window panes, had a homelike countenance. This was not the
image their minds had wrought of Mulberry, where travellers said the
people were herded in pens that knew not the light of day. How strange
that no one had ever told them it was so cheerful and _bello_! But when
they reached the heart of the quarter they had no more thrills from
the contemplation of natural beauty. Here the air throbbed with the
_staccato_ cadence of south Italian _patois_. The signs over the shops
were no longer gibberish, and Bertino blessed the day that he, Armando,
and Marianna had paid the mountain pedagogue three liras to teach them
words of ordinary size.
[Illustration: Bertino’s arrival at Paradise Park.]
Mulberry was in its accustomed Sunday manner. Nearly all the shops
were closed, and their faces, so smiling on week days in scarlet
wreaths of dried peppers, clusters of varnished buffalo cheeses and
festoons of Bologna _salame_, now frowned in shabby black or dark-brown
shutters. Madre Chiara’s bower, evergreen on working days with chicory
and dandelion salad and Savoy cabbage, had vanished with its owner. No
gossip-hungry women, with primed ears, bent about the basket of the
garlic seller on China Hill, for she was out with everybody to-day in
her best clothes. The crippled beggar at the hydrant was not missing,
but he shivered in the May sunshine because Sara the Frier of Pepper
Pods was not there with her pail of fire. Another important brazier
was in Sunday retirement--that of old Cantolini the Gondolier, and in
consequence there floated on the air no suave odour of cooking pine
cones, whose seed the Napolitani of the Basso Porto so love to munch.
In the rear courts, where gamblers at _morra_ bawled and capered like
madmen, rows of pushcarts, their stubby shafts in the air, told of
a twenty-four-hour truce in the strategic fray waged between the
peddler army and the artful police. The narrow ribbon of sky between
the tall tenements had a Sunday look; it was not mottled with shirts
of many patches hung out to dry, and the iron fire escapes, stripped
of their week-day wash things in the general sprucing up, gave to the
eye here and there the colours of Italy. The dingy _caffès_, from whose
tenebrous depths tobacco smoke poured with the scent of viands, were
crowded with the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani of the
rural districts visiting Mulberry for an innocent spree.
The jewelry shops were open and doing a lively trade. Young men bought
wedding rings and tried them on the fingers of their promised wives,
while faint-hearted bachelors, at the same counter, parted with their
hard-earned coin for little silver-tipped horns against the evil eye.
At the door a brawny flower woman in spickest gingham held a basket of
dahlias fresh, mingled with carnations and asters that had lost the
bloom of first youth. It was a sure vantage ground for her traffic.
The mating couples, proud in their ownership of the wedlock band,
stopped at the basket, every one, and close-fisted indeed was the
future husband who did not hand a posy to his bride elect.
As the wondering Bertino passed, bearded men in the rôle of newsboys
bellowed their wares in his ears: “_Il Progresso! L’Araldo! L’Italiano
in America! Due soldi!_” Literature got scant nourishment, but
tobacco-selling throve, and the man without a lengthy rat-tail cigar
in his mouth was marked among his fellows. They were all in their
smartest clothes. Starched shirts were too numerous to give their
wearers distinction, and not a few of the clean-shaved necks fretted
within stiff collars. Here and there dark-skinned young sparks with
red neckties puffed cigarettes and showed fine in apparel that smacked
of Bowery show-windows. Scarcely a woman was there from whose ears
did not hang long pendants of gold, nor a feminine head that did not
gleam in oily smoothness. Shawls woven in the gaudy hues and fantastic
patterns of Italian looms splashed the throng with colour, and a few of
those large-rayed combs that Apennine maidens love to wear glinted in
the sunshine of Paradise Park. Much courting went forward on the park
benches, the fond ones caring not an atom for the stare of colder eyes,
but retaining their entwined pose in sweet oblivion to the rest of
Mulberry.
The company in charge of the five-cent guide followed their leader into
a broad alley, and Bertino was left alone in the concourse, at loss
whither to turn. Not a soul gave the least heed to him. Those whom he
asked to point him to 342 Mulberry Street, his uncle’s abode, passed
on shaking their heads and mumbling something in broad Sicilian or
Neapolitan which the young Genovese did not understand. Some sighed
as they made the sign of not knowing, as though that number were the
darkest of mysteries. At length a gleam of light came over one face.
“I know,” said the man, a young fellow decked in Sunday corduroy. “It
is Casa Di Bello.”
“Yes; Giorgio Di Bello is the name of my uncle.”
“Your uncle? Santa Maria, signore! Let me carry your trunk.”
But Bertino only hugged the goatskin closer, the tales of Mulberry
sharks current in every mountain hamlet of Italy being vivid in his
mind.
“I’ll show you the house, anyway,” said the man of knowledge, and
Bertino followed.
The sidewalk was too narrow for the buzzing stream. The asphalted
roadway had become the grand promenade, and there the panorama of
Italia’s types unrolled: black men of Messina, with the hair and skin
of Persia, exiled from Etna’s slopes mayhap by the glowing lavas that
burn up olive grove and vineyard; red, flat-nosed men and fair-haired
women of Lombardy, driven perchance from their fertile plains by the
ruin that rides grimly on the freshets of the Po, but brought oftener
by the tax collector; cowherds and clodbreakers of the Roman Campagna,
whose clear-toned dialect found an antiphonal note in the patter of the
gaunt but often brawny sons of fever-plagued Maremma. Here and there
in the moving throng strutted a labour _padrone_, out to salute and be
saluted with lifted hat by all who prized his favour. One and all they
uncovered as he passed--sturdy dwarfs from Calabria and the Basilicata,
mere pegs from the heel and the toe of the Boot; limpid-eyed
mountaineers from the Abruzzi, bronzed fags of half-African Sicily,
riffraff of the Neapolitan slums; America-mad fishermen of the Adriatic
and Tyrrhene, deserters of a coinless Arcadia to become hod-slaves with
a bank account.
Slowly but volubly the clans of toil moved by, unheeded by a little
mother whose life was given for the moment to shining the heavy gold
rings in her baby’s ears.
“_Eccola, signore_,” said the man in corduroy, pausing before a house
that faced St. Patrick’s graveyard. “This is Casa Di Bello, the finest
domicile in the colony.”
It was an old-style brick dwelling of two stories and attic on the
northern fringe of Mulberry--the only house in the street whose front
was not gridironed with fire escapes. The low stoop, iron railing,
and massive dadoes, the Ionian door columns of hard wood, the domed
vestibule and generous width, marked it a rare survivor of the
building era that passed with the stagecoach and the Knickerbocker--a
well-preserved ghost of the quarter’s bygone fashion and respectability.
Bertino looked up and read in bold text upon a well-polished brass
doorplate the assuring name, “Di Bello.”
“_Grazie mille_,” he said to his guide. “I am too poor to make you a
present. _Grazie mille._”
The other made off with a long face, but protesting that he had not
expected a present for such a small service.
Heartened by the nearness of a friend, Bertino gave the heavy bell
handle a stout pull. Decorously and without undue promptness the
broad-panelled oak swung narrowly, and the mountaineer looked into the
stern complacency of his aunt Carolina’s eyes. He was too young to
remember this smug dame of closing forty, who had gone from Cardinali
twelve years before to become _perpetua_[A] in the Mulberry parish
rectory. That peaceful career she had forsaken, for reasons of which we
may learn; but the eight years of churchdom were still in her head. Nor
had she ever lost the outward badge. She was rotund and well-coloured,
monastic of mien, and sleek as a cathedral rat.
“Who are you?” she asked, scanning the lad from his hobnailed soles to
the turkey feather in his hat.
“I am Bertino Manconi, nephew of Signor Giorgio Di Bello,” he answered
proudly, unabashed by her poignant stare. “Are you Angelica the cook?”
[Footnote A: A priest’s housekeeper.]
When her breath came free she said: “But it was to-morrow--Monday.” His
arrival one day ahead of the appointed time shocked her rubric sense
of order and ignored her ritual of coming events. “And you come to the
door like a Sicilian, baggage in hand and----”
“Ha! Welcome to my house!” cried a hearty voice at the head of the
stairs. “A hundred welcomes, _caro_ nephew! But what a stupendous
height! Step aside, my sister, and bid the giant enter. How is this? At
the parish house did they teach you to make friends wait outside? Well,
it is not so at Casa Di Bello. So you are a day ahead? Well, so much
the better. Ah, what a fine voyage you must have had!”
It was no longer a voice on the upper floor, but the form and substance
of a bush-headed, chubby man of dawning fifty, whose prodigious King
Humbert mustache quaked as he puffed down the staircase as best his
short legs would permit. He threw himself upon Bertino, who had to
stoop a little to receive a resonant salutation on each cheek. Then
Carolina bestowed a pair of stony kisses, first remarking with wooden
seemliness, “Welcome, my nephew.”
At the same moment Angelica the cook, a mite of a crone with a Roman
nose, carried a steaming soup into the dining room, set it on the
table, and called out in the shrillest Genovese:
“_Ecco, signori_; the _minestrone_ is served, and the most beautiful
_minestrone_ I have made since the Feast of the Mother.”
After his three weeks of steerage fare Bertino fell upon the dinner
with a zest that delighted his uncle, but dismayed Carolina, and caused
the rims of Angelica’s eyes to spread until they were as round as the O
of Giotto.
“Well, did you stop to pick up any gold in the street?” asked Signor
Di Bello, winking at his sister, and sprinkling grated Parmesan over a
ragout of green peppers. “I suppose you have your valise filled with
it.”
“_Ma che!_” said Bertino, holding up his plate and looking wise. “Do
you think I am such a fool? I don’t expect to pick up money; but shall
I tell you something? Well, it is this: In this country I shall soon
make enough money to fill that valise.”
The others dropped their knives and forks and regarded him with
amazement.
“By the egg of Columbus!” exclaimed Signor Di Bello. “Are you not to
work in my shop?”
“Oh, yes; of course.”
“Then how do you expect to make so much money?”
There was no reason for it; but Bertino, oddly enough, yielded to a
sudden impulse to repress the truth. Cocking his eye first to the
ceiling and then on the tablecloth, he uttered a fib that concealed his
and Armando’s darling project for selling life-size busts in America.
The coffee served and the maraschino sipped, Signor Di Bello drew the
straw from a Virginia and settled for a smoke, while Aunt Carolina
showed Bertino to the room in the attic appointed for his use. She
unpacked his few belongings and placed them tidily in a small chest of
drawers, at the same time laying before him solemnly the parish-house
rules by which she governed Casa Di Bello. Had her brother below stairs
heard this, it is likely that he would have sent up many a guffaw with
his smoke rings, for by him these rules had received little honour save
in the steady nonobservance.
Carolina had never set her face against Bertino’s coming to the house,
and there was no method in the frosty greeting she had given him at
the door. It was merely that the sight of him, standing there, bag
and baggage, a whole day before the time, had staggered her orderly
being and drawn from her an instinctive protest. This all came of her
unruffled years as _perpetua_ of the rectory--that domain of peace and
even tenor, whose broad, clear windows she often regarded wistfully,
looking over the churchyard to Mott Street, from her sanctum on the
second floor.
A half decade had gone by since the Wednesday of Ashes when the brother
and sister patched up the quarrel that had separated them in their
poorer days and she returned to the air of laity. But the sacerdotal
brand would not wear off, nor did she wish it to. In the conduct of
the household her churchly notions had free scope enough, but applied
in censorship of her brother’s life they met with dreary contempt. To
no purpose did she preach when Mulberry buzzed with the latest story
of his gallantries, for his ready argument was always an eloquent “_Ma
che!_” and an unanswerable shrug of the shoulders. In vain did she wait
up, often from compline to prime, that she might shame him when he
came home aglow with bumpers of divers vintage. It was after a certain
rubicund night at the Caffè of the Three Gardens that he cut short her
usual sermon with a roaring manifesto against church and state and a
declaration of personal liberty for all time.
“Snakes of purgatory!” he had remarked in conclusion, one foot on the
staircase. “Am I not a man? If you want priests, go to the parish
house, where you belong. Once a priest always a priest.” With this
taunt, meant to be a parting one, he toddled up to bed, but, reaching
the landing, stopped and called back: “If you don’t leave me alone,
I’ll bring a wife here.”
From that time, which was two years before Bertino’s arrival, she gave
up her nocturnal vigils, and without let or hindrance the signore
feasted and drank with boon comrades, and cracked walnuts on his head
with an empty bottle--a feat for which he was justly renowned in all
the _caffès_ of the quarter. The lowering peril of a wife in the house
had set her to thinking as she had never thought before on this dire
possibility. Her brother’s nonconformity was a flaw in her sceptre,
but she knew that a wife meant the utter collapse of her sovereignty
in Casa Di Bello. Wherefore she resolved to abide by the lesser evil,
and bend her strength to warding off the greater. Thus it befell that
with the accession of Bertino to the family she was not ill content.
The coming of a man to the board imparted no misgiving. What her soul
dreaded and her wits had guarded against was the advent of a woman.
And she felicitated herself that no wife had succeeded in crossing the
threshold. To her ever-watchful eye, she fondly believed, was due the
blessing of her brother’s continuance in the path of bachelorhood,
despite the caps that were set for him on every bush. The first
families of the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani, along
with the flower of the Genovesi, the Milanesi, and the Torinesi, had
in turn put forth their famous beauties as candidates for his hand and
grocery store. But they all had been driven from the Rubicon, and at
present there was no pretender in the field. Had there been she would
have known it, as she knew of all the other marital campaigns, through
Angelica, who went to market daily and kept in touch with Sara the
Frier of Pepper Pods, Mulberry’s queen of gossips.