Mulberry Street）

It was Monday, April 15, 1946, and the sky was still dark. I remember that morning so clearly because it was the first time I ever saw Fedele Costanzo. It was also the morning my father needed three tries to get the stove lit. The coal was damp, and the smoke crept out from under the curtain of the back room until I couldn't stop coughing. Upstairs, my mother cursed in Taishanese and told me to quit hiding behind the ironing board. I was seven that year, just tall enough for half my head to show over the edge of the ironing board. Sun Wah Laundry sat at the south end of Mott Street. The storefront was narrow, with two Chinese characters painted in red on the glass and a line of English underneath. Sun Wah Laundry. The front third of the shop belonged to the counter and the ironing board. Behind a cloth curtain was the little bed where I slept, and farther back, the drying room. My father, my mother and my sister lived in one small room upstairs. The narrow staircase ran up beside the curtain, past wires hung full of other people's shirts that stayed damp all year round. The shop always smelled of starch and lye mixed with coal smoke. When I was little, I thought every morning in the world smelled like that. Years after I left Mott Street, I walked past an old-style laundry and caught that smell of starch. I stood at the door a long while before I could move on. My sister Vivian was already behind the counter. She was seventeen, two months from finishing high school, and every morning before class she took in laundry for my father for an hour. She wore her hair pulled back tight, her textbook open at her elbow, checking the laundry tickets in the tin box while she memorized English words. When the bell over the door rang, the sky outside had barely turned gray. The man who came in was young and tall, with wide shoulders, wearing an old coat washed nearly white and buttoned all the way to his chin. His face was thin, and there was a bruise on his cheekbone that hadn't finished healing. It was drizzling outside. One shoulder of his coat was dark with rain, and his wet hair lay plastered to his forehead, but he never lifted a hand to wipe it. He didn't look at the price list on the wall, and he didn't look at me. He walked straight to the counter, took a paper bundle out of his coat and set it down in front of my sister. The paper fell open around a white shirt. Across the front and down the cuffs spread a wide stain of blood, already dried black. Behind the ironing board, I held my breath. He spoke English slowly, with the sound of Elizabeth Street in it. "I'll pick it up tomorrow," he said. "Don't ask." My sister looked down at the shirt for two, maybe three seconds. Then she raised her head and looked at him. Just once. I've thought about that look many times since, about what was in it. All my seven-year-old eyes could see was that her face was calm, far too calm to be my sister's. She asked nothing. She drew a laundry ticket from the tin box, wrote a few Chinese characters on it with a brush, tore it in half and handed him one half. Then she tied the other half to the collar of the shirt with a piece of string. He studied the characters on the ticket, clearly unable to read a single one. He folded the half ticket once, folded it again, slipped it into the inside pocket of his coat, and pressed his hand flat against the pocket. He didn't say thank you. He turned and pushed the door open, and the bell rang behind him. The moment the door shut, the floorboards upstairs creaked, and my mother leaned over the top of the stairs, her voice dropped low in Taishanese. "That's the Costanzo boy from Elizabeth Street. The one who went to prison." That was how I learned who he was. Elizabeth Street was only two blocks from ours, and it was all Sicilians, people who talked like they were fighting. On their feast days the whole street smelled of fried dough. The Costanzo son had been taken away three years earlier. Even the Chinese on our street had heard people say he killed a man. It was many years before I understood why, that morning, he picked a Chinese laundry of all places. Because on that whole street, ours was the only family that wouldn't ask. That same morning, Fedele went to the West Side docks. I wasn't there for this part. What I'm telling is Gennaro's version, which he told at least twenty times in his life. Every time he told it, Fogarty's words came out a little uglier. I'll stay as close as I can to the earliest telling. In those days the docks on Manhattan's West Side belonged to the Irish. From Greenwich Village all the way up to Hell's Kitchen, nine out of ten of the hiring bosses, the union men and the bar owners carried Irish names. An Italian who wanted to eat there ate at the pleasure of the Irish. The hiring was called the shape-up. Before dawn, hundreds of men gathered at the pier entrance and stood in a half-circle, waiting for the hiring boss to come out and choose. A man who was picked stepped forward for a brass check, a piece of metal the size of a quarter with a number stamped on it. That check was his only way through the gate for a day's work. The men who weren't picked drifted to the bar next door to wait for the noon round. Gennaro said there was fog on the river that morning, so thick you couldn't see the far shore. All you heard were the tugboats dragging their whistles through it, one blast after another. Hundreds of men stood packed together, some smoking, some stamping their feet against the cold, and hardly anyone spoke. The man running the shape-up that morning was Tom Fogarty. Gennaro said Fogarty was in his forties, not tall but thick through the neck, with a flat cap pulled down low. He stood in front of the half-circle with a fistful of brass checks. His eyes went from face to face the way a man picks over fish at the market. Fedele had come in a hurry and stood at the outer edge of the half-circle, Gennaro on his left and Placido on his right. Fogarty picked him first. "You." Fogarty jerked his chin. "The tall one. Come here." Heads turned in the half-circle. Fedele stepped forward, and Fogarty laid a brass check in his palm and even gave it a pat. Gennaro said that for a moment he was actually glad, thinking Fedele had gotten lucky his first time back in the shape-up. Then Fogarty took the check back. He pinched it between two fingers, walked a few steps to the edge of the pier and tossed it. The brass flashed once in the morning light and dropped into the river without a sound. Fogarty turned around and shouted at the hundreds of men. "The West Side doesn't feed jailbirds." For a second the half-circle was silent. Then somebody laughed out loud, and the laughter spread, ring after ring, from the front row all the way to the back. Gennaro wanted to rush him right there. He was twenty-one that year and had fought in the war, and since coming home from Italy nothing frightened him anymore. It was Fedele who clamped a hand around his arm. Gennaro said that hand gripped him until his bones ached. Fedele never said a word. He just looked at Fogarty, looked at him for a long moment. Then he turned and led Gennaro and Placido back out of the half-circle, into the crowd of men nobody had picked. All that morning, Fogarty went on picking his men and never once looked their way again. Every time Gennaro told this part, he swore. He said that to this day, he couldn't understand why Fedele didn't swing. I worked it out later. Fedele knew that was exactly what Fogarty was waiting for. On our side of town, it was full daylight. My father called from the back room for my sister to change the soaking water before school. She called back that she would, carried the bloodstained shirt into the back room and took down a separate tin basin. My father had a rule. Before any piece of clothing went into the water, you turned out the pockets first. Money a customer left behind went back to him, and so did any scrap of paper, and so did everything else. A man who washed clothes, my father said, kept his hands clean. I followed her in and stood by the door. My sister went by the rule. She turned back the front of the shirt, slid her hand into the left breast pocket, and her hand stopped. What she drew out was a piece of paper folded over several times, one edge stained with blood that had dried to brown. I thought she would open it. She didn't. She stood beside the basin with the paper pinched in her fingers, listening for movement upstairs, then listening for anyone coming into the front of the shop. Then she walked back to the counter and slid the paper into her textbook, deep among the last few pages. As she closed the book, she caught me watching her. She didn't say a word. She only raised a finger to her lips. I nodded. Then she went back to the basin and poured in a scoop of cold water. The water slowly turned a pale red while she pressed the shirt under and weighted it down with a brick so it couldn't float back up. That was the first secret I ever kept for my sister. Back then, I thought it was only a piece of paper.