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the weekly pay check of fourteen dollars, more than Bardoni had promised but whittled down to ten dollars a week after repayment of the cost of passage, and Bardoni’s commission, and Bardoni’s “incidental expenses,” never satisfactorily defined. From that remaining ten dollars, Francesco paid two dollars and fifty cents a week to the iceman, sent five dollars home, and kept two-fifty for himself — which was not bad in the year 1901, when a good roast beef dinner with buttered beets and mashed potatoes, chocolate layer cake and coffee cost no more than thirty-five cents.
    Pino was less fortunate, and at the same time more fortunate. Because of his size, Bardoni felt certain Pino would be turned down for employment on the newly begun subway, and he was right. So he was sent to work in the garment district, where he earned seven dollars less per week than did Francesco, but where he worked aboveground and was able to see New York’s spring that April when it broke with a belated delicacy that took his breath away. It was Pino who arranged for their first date with two “American” girls who worked downtown with him on Thirty-fifth and Broadway.
    All that suckling in the Agnelli household, all those surprise visits by the clutching iceman must have stoked something of the old Mediterranean fire in Francesco’s youthful loins, but what was one to do in a strange land where the only contacts were Italians with virgin daughters, and where the girls he saw on his rare excursions outside the ghetto spoke a language he barely understood? When Pino told him he had arranged the date, Francesco could not believe him.
    “But what?” he said. “With two American girls?
Americans?
”
    “Yes, Americans,” Pino said, and that quick toothy smile flashed conspiratorially. They were both remembering Bardoni’s story of the keying in Naples, and anticipating a similar adventure; it was common knowledge that American girls fucked like rabbits.
    “And they said yes?” Francesco asked incredulously.
    “Yes, of
course
they said yes. Would I be telling you about them if they said no? Saturday night. Eight o’clock. They live together on Twelfth Street.”
    “Alone?” Francesco asked. He could not believe his ears.
    “Alone,” Pino affirmed, and nodded. The nod promised galaxies.
    “Do they speak Italian?” Francesco asked.
    “No. But
we
speak English,
non è vero?
”
    They were
not
speaking English on that Harlem rooftop where pigeons fluttered overhead in the April dusk; they never spoke English when they were alone together. They had, however, begun to feel their way around the language since their arrival, if only because they needed it to survive. Only the other day, underground, someone had shouted a command at Francesco, and had he hesitated an instant longer in obeying it, had there been the slightest gap between the shouted English warning and his immediate understanding of it, his head would have been crushed by a falling timber. I can only judge what my grandfather’s English was like in 1901 by what it was like in later years, after I arrived on the scene. What it was like was atrocious, even though my grandmother had been born in this country, and probably worked hard trying to teach him. But English to him, before he met Teresa Giamboglio, was only a temporary necessity. He was going back as soon as he’d saved enough money. A year was what he’d promised himself. A year was a long enough time for a man to burrow his way through the stinking earth. A year without the sun was a long enough time.
    He and Pino boarded the Second Avenue El at 119th Street, dressed in their Saturday-night finery, feeling very American, and immediately identifiable as grease-balls by every other passinger on the train. It was a beautiful balmy evening, the windows of the train wide open, the signs warning that fine and imprisonment would be the lot of any passenger foolish enough to try expectorating through them. Pino and