Elizabeth Street (10 page)

Giovanna smiled, caressed the girl’s face, and rolled over.

“Signora,” the girl was whispering. “Signora!”

Giovanna rolled back over and looked at her.

“I saved you a taste of the cream, signora.” The girl uncupped her hand, and there in the middle of her palm was a dab of pink frosting. “Here, signora,” she said, flicking the frosting onto her finger and holding it up to Giovanna’s mouth.

Giovanna’s first instinct was to shake her head no, but when she looked at the girl’s face, she compliantly licked her finger. The sweetness of the sugar and the girl’s gesture burned Giovanna’s throat.

“Happy New Year, signora,” whispered the girl, smiling.

When the
Lombardia
approached New York City’s harbor, everyone scrambled up the metal stairs and packed onto the deck, desperate to catch their first glimpse of their new home. There was a reverent hush as people watched and waited in anticipation. Slowly they saw New York seemingly rise from the sea. Prayers of thanks and animated voices rose in volume as each new detail revealed itself. Someone who had made the trip before pointed to a landmass covered in snow and shouted excitedly, “Itsa Brookalyn!” The message was passed and murmurs of, “Ah Brookalyn!” rippled through the crowd. Giovanna could make out spires on buildings and shivered at the memory of Nunzio’s descriptions of the architectural detail.

The
Lombardia
sailed closer to New York, and they all got a better look at the large shape holding a torch in the water. “Is that where Columbus is buried?” shouted a man on deck, trying to be heard over the jubilant shouts. “No,” thought Giovanna, remembering Maria Perrino’s mother, “that’s the whore.” The first cries of joy turned into thunderous cheers when the Statue of Liberty came into full view and she was recognized as the American Madonna. Or, in the eyes of those left behind in Italy, the American Scylla on the rock.

“Viva l’America!” was shouted, men waved their hats, women bounced and kissed the children in their arms, prayers were murmured, and tears swallowed.

Sailing forward, Giovanna’s eyes didn’t leave Liberty’s face. “You welcomed my Nunzio, but you didn’t protect him. You devoured him like the women said,” accused Giovanna, although her face bore none of the emotion that her heart felt.

She felt both excitement and paralyzing sadness at the idea of soon walking where Nunzio had walked and sleeping where Nunzio had slept. The boat turned into a dock away from the statue, but before Giovanna lost sight of Liberty’s face, she asked her, “And what plans do you have for me here in l’America?”

At the pier, the steerage passengers waited while the first- and second-class passengers were cleared through onboard customs and then disembarked. From the deck, the immigrants watched the happy reunions on the dock. They were only a few feet from l’America, but still an ordeal away. The people in steerage were boarded onto a barge that had pulled alongside the
Lombardia
. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they waited in anxious anticipation for the sound of the motor and the last leg of their journey. But nothing happened. Instead, torturous time passed while they stood rocking in the wakes of passing boats. Word filtered through the immigrants that Ellis Island was crowded.

“I told you l’America was filled up!” the man in Giovanna’s steerage compartment shouted to Luigi.

“
Boccalone!
We’ll be there soon,” reprimanded Luigi.

It wasn’t soon, but six hours later the barge pulled into the dock at Ellis Island. The mood was solemn as the immigrants stepped onto land to waiting crew members who pinned a paper number to each foreigner’s clothing. Giovanna looked at her “27” upside down and wondered if they had her age wrong, but then she noticed a child with “102.”

They entered a large redbrick building where they were instructed to leave their baggage. Giovanna hesitated but let go of her belongings when she saw the fear that she felt mirrored on the faces of the other immigrants as they parted with all that they had.

The crowd moved up a staircase into a huge hall that was divided into aisles by iron railings. They were no longer being prodded by the ship’s crew but by people in uniforms who filled one aisle at a time. Instructions shouted in many languages by exasperated and overworked immigration officials echoed throughout the great room, and nervous whispers were amplified in the cavernous hall. In an attempt to understand what was happening to them, the detainees whispered messages up and down the rows.

“There are men checking people and writing on them with blue chalk,” was the first message to reach Giovanna.
Writing on them? Didn’t they have paper?
In the aisle next to her, the line of communication broke down at a group of Poles sandwiched in among the Italians.

Giovanna advanced far enough down the line to glimpse an inspector in a navy blue uniform outlined in braided trim holding a piece of blue chalk in his hands. From the moment someone reached the head of the line, the man scrutinized that person. Giovanna watched him order a mother carrying an older baby to put the child down and make him walk. The mother set the boy on the floor. He stared at the shiny, black knee-high boots in front of him and screamed. His nervous mother swatted his bottom, forcing him forward.

When each immigrant reached the inspector, after walking a closely observed ten feet, the inspector thumped on the foreigner’s chest, picked up their arms, lifting their sleeves to look at their skin, and then inspected their fingernails. Giovanna looked at her own fingernails. Would they not let you into l’America if you were dirty? The pungent body odors in the room convinced Giovanna that cleanliness couldn’t be the reason for checking fingernails. The smells were so strong that Giovanna was taking long breaths with her face nearly imbedded in the basil plant of the man in front of her. Various plants were clutched like gold throughout the hall, and Giovanna busied herself by identifying them.

After banging on their chests, the man in blue listened to their breathing. A few of the immigrants tried to talk to the inspectors, but the inspectors ignored them or put their fingers to their lips. For a line that moved so slowly, it all happened quickly; Giovanna counted no more than six or seven seconds for each person.

The immigrant was then guided forward a few feet to another man with shiny buttons who snapped back the immigrant’s eyelid and took a look. Sometimes he scrawled an
E
on their clothes. Numbered and possibly “lettered,” they moved on to an area that Giovanna couldn’t see from her place on line.

When Giovanna reached what she had thought was the front of the line, she realized it snaked around and she was nowhere near being examined. She was in a maze, never knowing what the next corner would bring and searching for an elusive and uncertain exit. Her head moving like a searchlight, she saw her young friend from the boat and waved. She barely recognized the girl, who was twice her size from wearing countless layers. Instead of leaving her luggage, her mother had dressed herself and the children in all the clothes that they had brought with them. The girl, her face shiny from sweat, smiled and waved back at Giovanna.

A voice and an arm prodded Giovanna farther. From this vantage point, she could see the step after the exam, and she froze in fear. The inspectors spoke to you, and they expected you to speak back. Her hand rose to her throat; she had heard rumor of the examinations, but no one had ever told her you must speak. Here, too, they held blue chalk, and she saw an X marked onto a man’s lapel.

Giovanna was flushed and sweating. She cleared her throat and tried to say,
“Buon giorno
.” Hot raspy air was all that emerged from her lips. So what if she didn’t get into this l’America? What difference did it make? Although she asked herself the question, she knew the answer. When her parents first suggested going to New York, after her initial shock, she realized that that was what she wanted. She needed to kneel at the place where Nunzio was buried.

With her panic rising, she prayed to Nunzio and to the Madonna to give her speech. She prayed to the whore in the harbor, and she prayed to Saint Rocco. Her pounding heart reminded her that the physical was first, and she was sure to be marked if she didn’t calm down. She instructed herself as if she was coaching a laboring mother to concentrate. Focusing on Nunzio’s face, she imagined tracing the outline of his jaw with her finger, playing with the flesh of his earlobe, lingering in the warmth behind his ear, and then following his hairline down the nape of his neck. It was working; her body and breathing were returning to normal. Her finger had circled round Nunzio’s head and was touching the end of his eyelashes when she was pushed toward the first inspector.

She met the eyes of the inspector while he watched her walk. Within seconds of reaching him, he had thumped and listened to her chest and checked her skin and hands. His hand went up and a uniformed woman took the pins from Giovanna’s hair, releasing her long dark chestnut braids, which had been wrapped around her head. The woman’s fingers moved like lightning, pulling apart the braids and checking Giovanna’s head and scalp before motioning her forward. Out of their clutches, Giovanna braided and repinned her hair, feeling as if she had been disrobed in public.

Her relief at making it through that part of the exam was nullified by the sight of the officer snapping back the eyelid of the woman in front of her with a buttonhook. Giovanna responded by forcing her mind back into focus and letting her finger go from Nunzio’s lashes to his brow. So strong was Giovanna’s concentration that she didn’t even flinch when the cold hook brought her eyeball to eyeball with the inspector.

Guided into the next line without an
E
on her clothing, Giovanna began to notice once again what was happening around her. An older man, who was slightly stooped, was surreptitiously trying to wipe a chalked
B
from his sleeve by brushing against a pillar and quickly patting at his arm with his other hand.

The inspectors who asked questions were again in view, and Giovanna tried once more to concentrate, except she wasn’t as successful and kept lapsing into prayers. She could see the paper the inspectors held and realized it was the answers to the questions asked by the ship’s crew before they sailed. Her father had answered the questions for her and explained her silence as modesty. Desperately she tried to recall the queries so she could practice the words in reply. As the questions came to her, she recited the answers in her head. “‘Twenty-nine.’ Please, Madonna, I beseech you. I must feel the dirt between my fingers where Nunzio’s body lies. ‘Twelve dollars.’ Make my voice heard. ‘Widow.’”

A Russian family in front of Giovanna stepped forward. The same inspector, who had just been speaking another tongue, spoke to this family in their language. “How smart these Americans are,” flashed through Giovanna’s mind between prayers. “Please, Madonna, I will light many candles in devotion and thanks. ‘I come from Scilla, Calabria.’” Or was the answer, “Scilla, Italy”? To the last question on the form, “Who paid for your transport?” Giovanna decided to keep it simple and say, “My family paid my fare of twenty-eight dollars,” and not tell of villagers contributing to the cause.

Giovanna jumped when the inspector looked at her and shouted,
“Avanti!”

“Italian too!” she managed to marvel, walking forward. “Perhaps this is a dream, and as in a dream, I will speak.”

“
Nome
?” quizzed the inspector.

Giovanna pushed the air from her stomach and moved her lips forward to form the first sound of her name. It happened so slowly that Giovanna could feel the air travel up her throat and her muscles reshape her lips. Her mind blocked out the noise in the hall, and all she heard was deafening silence before the air escaped her mouth.

“Gi-o-vanna Pontillo.”

Both Giovanna’s and the inspector’s heads jerked back at the force of the sound. It wasn’t loud; it was strong and deep as if it had been buried and gaining strength.

“Your mother’s name?” With this next question, Giovanna was assured that he, too, had heard her voice. The inspector then glanced at Giovanna’s letter from Lorenzo and at her hands. She wondered if her shaking hands would be reason to pull her from the line, but he only asked to see her money. Giovanna took the satin pouch that was tied to her waist and opened it to display her small fortune of twelve dollars in lira.

“You can keep moving.”

Giovanna tucked the precious pouch into the folds of her dress, and when out of sight of the inspector, she grabbed at her throat and massaged her cheeks in wonder and appreciation. As she made the sign of the cross, her prayers of thanks rushed forth.

In her quiet exultation, she could hear the next person being questioned. It was a young man traveling alone who had impatiently shifted from one foot to the other for the past four hours, punctuating his movements with sighs of exasperation and curses of complaint. His behavior stood in stark contrast to the bewildered and compliant demeanor of most of the immigrants.

The inspector had finished the twenty-nine questions from the ship manifest and asked the restless man another: “Would you wash stairs from the top down or the bottom up?”

“I did not come to America to wash stairs!” he answered indignantly.

The inspector tried to hide a smile. “Move on.”

Five hours after she entered the great hall, Giovanna could see what looked to be the last step—a series of desks where inspectors reviewed and stamped the papers. Behind the desks were three staircases, all marked with different words. People were gathered in front of the staircases, many saying good-bye to one another.

After a few minutes of shuffling along in line, Giovanna approached one of the desks. The inspector took Giovanna’s papers from her hand. He looked at them and yelled over to the next desk, “Martin, is Scilla north or south?”

“When in doubt, it’s the south.”

“I don’t know why we have to mark them as two races anyway. They’re all eye-talians,” complained the inspector.

“It’s only eye-talians these days,” answered Martin.

The men frightened Giovanna. Had she come this far for there to be a problem?

“At least this one reads and writes.”

The inspector handed Giovanna a pen and indicated she should sign on the line. He then handed Giovanna her papers and motioned for her to go to the staircase marked
NEW YORK DETAINED
.

“God, she’s big. But good-looking,” Martin called over when Giovanna strode past the desk. “Wonder how she got through alone.”