Streets of Gold by Evan Hunter Page B

mother must have visited that same shop as often as I did, and at the same age, but she never spoke of it fondly, nor do I think she particularly liked Aunt Bianca, who to me (though I’d never seen her, and could only smell the sweet soapy lilac scent of her and feel her delicate hands upon my face) was a lady of great mystery and intrigue, fashioning ladies’ brassieres as she did. My mother made similar family rounds, dropping in wherever she chose, always greeted warmly and lovingly, though she might have been there only hours before. And yet, the family did not seem to mean very much to her, their coarse southern Italian fell harshly upon her ears, their broken English rankled; she was American, Stella was.
    I don’t know why she was so drawn to Pino’s wife. Angelina was most certainly beautiful, but her good looks were undeniably Mediterranean, and she still spoke English with a marked accent. To Stella, though, she must have seemed more “American” than any member of her own family, with the possible exception of her mother. As concerns the relationship between Stella and Tess, as she was called more and more frequently by everyone in the neighborhood, there seems to be little doubt that it was lousy. To begin with, Tess worked in the tailor shop alongside her father and Francesco, which meant that she had little time for housewifely chores like cleaning or cooking. (My grandmother may have been the first liberated woman in the history of America, who the hell knows?) Stella grudgingly inherited the running of the household, except for the preparation of breakfast, which Tess handled for the entire family before heading off “to business.” Stella cleaned the four-room apartment, Stella prepared her own lunch as well as lunch for her brothers and sister when they came home from school at noon each day, Stella prepared dinner, Stella was the mother
her
mother should have been. (“My mother was a
lady
,” she would say to me, almost as often as she said, “I’m American, don’t forget.” The word “lady” was always delivered sarcastically, and I could sense the curl of the lip, the angry flash in her green eyes. Was it coincidence that I later married a green-eyed girl? Must have been. Who the hell can tell green from blue, anyway, and really, who cares?) In any case, it was Stella who ran off to school each morning, feeling very American, and who came back to the apartment each afternoon feeling very Italian because it was she who did the donkey work. And I suppose she jealously guarded those moments when she could visit Pino’s wife and become the inquiring bright child she had no opportunity to be at home.
    Poking in Angelina’s jewelry box, holding earrings to her ears for Angelina’s approval, sampling Angelina’s powders, sniffing at her perfumes, asking the hundreds of questions she could not ask of her absentee mother, listening to Angelina as she told stories of Francesco’s and Pino’s youthful days in Fiormonte, Stella enjoyed the most cherished hours of her childhood in that apartment on Second Avenue. Angelina had become pregnant again in January, after having miscarried nine times, the last having been particularly tragic in that she’d lost the baby during her fifth month. She, too, must have enjoyed Stella’s visits in those final days of her pregnancy when, fearful of another miscarriage, she rarely ventured out of the apartment. It was on one of those visits that her time came.
    Stella saw her clutch for her abdomen and heard her say, “Ooo,
sta zitto.
” The baby had been very active lately, each kick greeted with undisguised joy by Pino and Angelina — the child was alive, the prospective mother was healthy, this time all would go well. But this latest pang was something more than just another fetal kick; it was the beginning of labor. Angelina recognized it almost at once, and immediately sent Stella to fetch Filomena the Midwife. There were few telephones in Harlem in