Unto the Sons (39 page)

The oval quarry, which resembled an ancient amphitheater, was more than a hundred feet deep, and three times as wide; its interior walls were rimmed with jagged, rocky tiers smoothed into a corkscrew path wide enough to accommodate the two lanes of traffic coming and going at all hours of the workday. Crews of Italians gathered along the tiers with their horse-drawn cranes and cables, waiting for Herlihy’s demolition team to finish their job before moving down the winding trail to begin hoisting the rubble of rocks in wagons and hauling it away toward the building sites.

No Italian was on Herlihy’s demolition team. He could not entrust such precise and perilous chores to the limited competence of the Italians, he had said in essence to Dr. Mattison, insisting that he be aided only by the men he could understand and trust. Herlihy’s team consisted of two other Irish veterans of the American Civil War and three sturdy blond Swedes who had once worked in a gristmill. The sixth member of his team, the slow-footed Dutchman named Faust who had been the victim of the earlier accident and who now worked in the company store, had not been replaced.

In the evenings the explosives and cannon were transported through the woods and stored in a stone barn that Herlihy had converted into his arsenal. There he also kept his hunting rifles and a still for making corn whiskey. The barn was off-limits to everyone except Herlihy’s men and the hook-armed Faust, who had long been his closest friend and most frequent drinking companion. Lobianco had often warned the Italians never to walk within fifty yards of the barn, saying that if Herlihy considered
them trespassers he might toss a stick of dynamite at them, or fire at them with a gun.

But one day during Gaetano’s third month on the job, Lobianco assigned one of his anarchist friends, a man named Nicola Bosio, to lead the young workers to the quarry. Lobianco was beginning to phase himself out as a
padrone
and was spending more time in Philadelphia; and he believed that Bosio, who had been running the boardinghouse where Gaetano and many of the other newly arrived workers were staying, was a man he could rely upon to maintain discipline and settle any quarrels within the group. Nicola Bosio was also his brother-in-law, as Bosio’s serene and fair-skinned sister was Lobianco’s wife. But there was no physical resemblance between brother and sister; Bosio was an intense, dark-complected man with owlish eyes and a slight facial tic. Two years of being hunted by the Naples police had merely confirmed his antisocial sense of himself, and during his five months in America he had lived quietly within the boardinghouse, where he earned his keep as the cook and custodian and at night added to his earnings by beating the tenants at cards. He was a shrewd cardplayer. No matter what he held in his hands, his eyebrows arched in apparent satisfaction and even his tic seemed to be held in check.

After constant urging by Lobianco, Bosio finally agreed to cease living in habitual seclusion in the boardinghouse and to venture outdoors to see something of the American countryside; and his first step in this direction, although he had yet to learn a word of English, was to serve as the substitute
padrone
, and rise at dawn to the piercing sound of Dr. Mattison’s watchtower whistle and accompany Gaetano and the other workmen to the quarry.

At thirty years of age, Bosio was more than a decade older than some of the new recruits; and as Bosio assumed a commanding posture at the head of the line, Gaetano and the others fell in step behind him, saying nothing during the first week when he took the wrong path through the woods on four out of six mornings and added at least ten minutes to the one-mile hike.

During the day, as Herlihy’s men bombarded the western wall, Bosio stood observing from the upper tier with Gaetano and the others, although he lent them no assistance when it came time to hoist the rocks onto the wagons. Being an anarchist who advocated the overthrow of the ruling order did not imply his interest in joining the ranks of workers who got their hands dirty on the job. In his temporary position as
padrone,
which he soon began to relish, Bosio left the manual labor to his minions; and when the steam whistle signaled that the day’s work was done, he nodded silently and knowingly at his men and led them back toward the boardinghouse, one evening choosing a path that soon brought them dangerously close to Herlihy’s barn.

Some of his men hesitated, drifting back but saying nothing, while Gaetano and the others marched behind the nonchalant Bosio, who was whistling an aria from
Così Fan Tutte
and paying no heed to the craggy-featured man who suddenly emerged from behind a tree holding a long-barreled pistol.

“Hey, dago!” Herlihy yelled. “Get yourself and these other dagos out of here fast, or I’ll shoot you all dead!”

Bosio, understanding not a word, whirled around. Seeing the gun, his dark eyes began to twitch, widened, then narrowed brutishly. The square shoulders of his squat figure, clad in a white shirt buttoned at the neck, tensed, and his forehead was moist beneath the peak of his black cap. He dug his heels firmly into the ground and placed his hands on his hips. Behind him, Gaetano and the other young men, stunned that they would be facing a gun so soon after their arrival in America, frantically whispered to Bosio in Italian that they should flee at once. But Bosio cursed them, ordered them to stand fast, while he stared menacingly over the barrel of the gun into Herlihy’s face, hard into his eyes. Bosio’s twitching stopped, his whole countenance became composed, and his persistent stare challenged the gunman.

Herlihy’s pistol clicked. Bosio did not move. Herlihy spat at Bosio, again threatened and cursed him, but the immutable Bosio only looked unblinkingly into Herlihy’s eyes. One minute passed, then another. Herlihy kept his finger on the trigger, but he did not shoot, and soon his gaze drifted away from the seemingly crazed Italian in front of him to Gaetano and the others gathered behind Bosio. Expressions of concern spread along their faces, but they, too, were refusing to move and were saying nothing. After a few more moments of tense silence, Herlihy let out an exasperated sigh. “Dumb fucking dagos,” he said aloud to himself, shaking his head.

The silence continued. Finally Herlihy lowered his gun and turned around, avoiding further eye contact with Bosio. Herlihy entered the barn and slammed the door behind him. The tic came back to Bosio’s cheek, but his eyes softened as he faced his men. Repressing a smile, Bosio then led Gaetano and the others back toward the boardinghouse.

Being a member of a group Herlihy disliked sufficiently to keep them off his demolition team was very agreeable to Gaetano, for whom the deafening job—to say nothing of the back-breaking task of hauling rocks—hardly represented what he had in mind when he had left home for America. What he wanted was something creative—such as an apprenticeship to one of the skilled artisans Dr. Mattison had brought over from Italy to carve the finials and other stone ornaments that would adorn his residence and the nearby Gothic mansions scheduled to rise along Ambler’s most exclusive street, Lindenwold Terrace.

On a late-summer day more than a year after his arrival, during a thunderstorm and continuing rain that interrupted all work in the quarry, Gaetano left his friends in the boardinghouse and followed the path that led to the railroad terminal, across from which was the Keasbey & Mattison headquarters. It was a temporary building, a rambling frame structure surrounded by many shacks and tented enclosures scattered along the grounds where a huge stone foundation was already in place for the company’s four-story office and emporium. Had it not been raining, the area would have been busy with carpenters, stonemasons, and loading crews; but the only people on duty now were those who could do their work indoors.

Gaetano finally found the room where the architects and engineers were gathered, and, after wiping the mud and leaves from his shoes and removing his rain cloak and cap, he approached a portly, bearded, white-moustached Italian who appeared to hold some position of authority. The man was speaking Italian in an almost magisterial tone to two younger men, both of whom sat on tall stools next to a drawing board on which were large sketches of conical turrets and finials that Gaetano assumed would grace the buildings of Ambler in the near future.

“Excuse me,” Gaetano said to the older man, who turned away from the other two, “could you tell me how I might apply to become an apprentice to the artisans who will be making the beautiful buildings for Dr. Mattison?”

The man turned toward Gaetano and with a bemused smile asked, “How do you
know
that they will be beautiful when they are not yet even begun?”

“Sir, it is the opinion of my
padrone
, Signor Lobianco, and he is a very wise man. He told me that the artisans brought from Italy are the finest in all of Europe.”

“Signor Lobianco
is
wise,” the man said, nodding cordially and
stroking his Vandyke beard. “They are indeed the best in all of Europe. And I am their master.”

Respectfully silent, since he could think of nothing appropriate to say, Gaetano then became self-conscious as the older man, taking a step back, began in a casual but obvious way to study him from head to toe. Gaetano felt his feet cold and damp within his soggy socks, and the wet soles of his high-buttoned Italian shoes, and he was aware that his Cristiani-made trousers, which he had put on in place of his work pants before coming here, were more than an inch too short in the cuffs—he had grown taller since leaving Italy. At the boardinghouse he had also changed to his one clean shirt, although he had no idea what importance might be attached to this by the man who was now scrutinizing him. Did not the artisans and their apprentices don coarse attire while working outdoors, and become as soiled and sweaty as the people who worked in the quarry? But the master artisan whose eyes were now on him did appear to be a man of a certain vanity: he wore a pearl stickpin through the blue tie knotted within the hard rounded collar of his white shirt; and extending a bit below the waist of his brown trousers, and across his slight paunch, was a gray waistcoat with a watch chain looped through it. In one pocket of the waistcoat were several pencils, each with a small metal cap on the point to prevent the lead from smudging the material.

“And what is your name?” he said finally, and pleasantly enough.

“Gaetano Talese.”

The man seemed suddenly curious.

“Are you any relation to my old friend Domenico Talese?”

“You mean the Domenico Talese of
Maida?
”

“Yes,” the man said. “We were once in the seminary together.”

Gaetano paused before going on, feeling uneasy about the conversation. It was possible that the man was aware of Gaetano’s difficulties with his father and his abrupt departure from home. But chancing that there was only a remote possibility that the man could know about any of this, Gaetano decided to give the impression that he was on the best of terms with his father.

“I am his first son,” Gaetano announced, with feigned pride.

“Bravo,” said the man. “Your father was a most religious man, much more than myself. I left the seminary when I was about your age. After that, the closest I came to God was as a stone craftsman working sometimes on ecclesiastical buildings.

“My surname, by the way, is Maniscalco, and as it happens, we do
need additional apprentices around here. Let me speak with your Signor Lobianco and see if we cannot arrange your working with us.”

Mr. Maniscalco shook his hand, and in a loud voice he announced: “Gaetano, this may be your lucky day!”

To this, Gaetano could only nod and say, “Yes.”

It was also his eighteenth birthday.

During the next three years as one of Mr. Maniscalco’s apprentices, and in subsequent years when he functioned as a full-fledged artisan with an apprentice of his own, Gaetano dwelled in a world of corbeled arches and crenellated molding, of steeply peaked Gothic rooftops transected by Baroque curvilinear gables and shadowed by spindly finials of Saracenic influence. Domineering as Dr. Mattison was in so many ways, he was remarkably lenient toward Maniscalco’s crew, allowing them to impose their own creative impulses upon the architectural concepts that strictly adhered to Gothic principles.

While these deviations offended the senior architects from Philadelphia and New York who had originally been commissioned, and who later ceased to work for Dr. Mattison when their protests went unheeded, the doctor himself clearly approved of the eclectic embellishments that the Italians molded and mounted, chiseled and carved into the tops and sides of the large, widely spaced rows of stone buildings. As more and more buildings went up, more and more liberties were taken by the Italians, who, perhaps unintentionally but unmistakably, were reproducing what many of them had seen as younger men growing up in the villages and towns of their native land—a land built by conquerors who were in turn conquered but who invariably left behind with their dust some remnant of their architecture; and it was the random re-creation of these varied architectural styles that was apparent in the workmanship of the rooftops and façades, the dormers, the buttresses, the pilasters, the portals, and the balustrades of Ambler’s new buildings at the turn of the century.

When Gaetano stood on a scaffold with his pointed hammers and chisels, refining the carving that spanned the main arch of a porte cochère, he was guided less by the architect’s Gothic drawing than by what he remembered as a boy playing around the arch of the Norman wall that spanned the entrance into Maida. Others systematically diluted through the recollections of their villages the architect’s Gothic purity by introducing elements of the Baroque or Ionian, Romanesque or Byzantine; and the fact Dr. Mattison liked what he saw was all that mattered. His partner,
Henry Keasbey, went into semi-retirement on turning forty-two, in 1892; he moved to the south of France with his wife, whose health had rapidly and inexplicably deteriorated not long after she had joined her husband in the colonial house he had rented in Ambler while awaiting the completion of their mansion. With Mr. Keasbey departed from the asbestos-manufacturing center that he largely owned—and from which he would continue to receive profits that were due him as its major stockholder—Dr. Mattison was free not only to decide how the community would look, and how the asbestos business would be run, but also to govern unofficially the political and economic affairs of the increasing number of citizens who had moved into the area in the wake of the land boom that had been unceasing ever since the Philadelphia company had relocated to the village.