That afternoon the Saale steamed from Genoa Bay with Bertino a steerage passenger. Some time after the ship had swung from her quay Armando and Marianna looked from the studio window over the cypress fringe toward the gap in the mountains that shows the sails of ships but conceals the Mediterranean’s waves. Presently a black bar of smoke moving lazily across the aperture told them that he was on his way.
Near the window a block of Carrara marble glistened pure and white in the sunlight. Armando wondered what manner of being he should release from it—a President, a money king, or a great American beauty?
CHAPTER II
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.
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.