Mrs. Fioria Carissimi, mother of the young Enzo Carissimi, whom everyone on the Hill affectionally called Big Soap, heard about the ruckus of the Jewish storekeeper and deaf Negro boy from two people. The first was from Vivana Agnello, president of the Volunteer Women’s Association of St. Aloysius Catholic Church in downtown Pottstown, where Fioria attended mass every morning. The group met twice a month in the church basement to sip coffee, gossip, and decide who in town needed what in the way of clothing. Vivana announced that the Jews had hidden the deaf child from the state to ransom money from the Negroes who wanted the boy hidden, then kept the money and called the cops anyway. She knew that for a fact, she said, because her husband was a foreman at the Enlevra Stove plant that made the stove that started the whole thing three years ago. The company gave the boy’s family $1,200 after one of their stoves blew up and killed the boy’s mother, making that little woolhead rich. Since his mother was dead, Negroes on the Hill took advantage of him and stole most of his money, spending it on fishing supplies and whiskey till one of them gave what was left to the Jews at the store to protect the boy from the state, which wanted him—then they turned him over anyway.
That sounded so stupid that it might be true, but then Vivana’s gossip had become useless after she condemned Eugenio Fabicelli for selling his bakery to a Jew named Malachi instead of to her cousin Guido, who wanted to buy it. “The Jew ran the business into the ground and skipped town,” she said. “So stupid, that Eugenio.”
That last remark, spoken in English, had caused some dissension among the normally staid St. Aloysius women partly because Eugenio’s younger sister, Pia, happened to be in the room at the time. Pia spoke little English, and while the remark did not register with her at the time, a later translation proved effective, for Pia withdrew from the group immediately. And since she worked as a cleaning lady in the mayor’s office, which doubled as the headquarters for the police, electric, and sanitation departments, as well as the hub of the usual skimming and scamming by the city fathers—one third of whom claimed to be direct descendants of the Mayflower passengers—there went half of the useful city news, including information about valuable real estate coming up for auction, land giveaways, parade permits, bank-auction sell-offs of useful farm tools, and other handy information, much of which was scrawled on crumpled notes that Pia filched from office garbage cans and crammed into her apron pocket to bring to the women’s meeting and share with the group, not to mention her secret recipe for pumpkin pie, which, after much badgering, she had finally promised to share. Gone. All of it. Because of one stupid comment.
Fioria took this news in stride. She had no interest in city news or Pia’s pumpkin pie recipe—in fact, she was the one person who knew that Pia’s pumpkin pie was actually more squash than pumpkin. Nor was Fioria a fastidious member of Vivana’s women’s group, for everyone knew Vivana got the job as president because her husband, Enrico, claimed to be a foreman at the Enlevra plant and even wore a shirt and tie to work each morning when he left the house, only to slip overalls over his fancy clothing at the plant to toil at the boiler like the rest of the immigrants. Fioria found Vivana’s insistence on speaking English and always trying to be so American slightly distasteful as she encouraged the other housewives to feed their children hamburgers and Cokes instead of arancini and ribollita. But then again, Vivana was from Genoa, where no one was happy, so what could you expect? By contrast, Pia was a fellow Sicilian who lived on the same Chicken Hill street as Fioria did. So while Fioria quietly continued going to the women’s volunteer group, she kept up relations with her good friend, and one afternoon less than a week after Dodo was sent to Pennhurst, she found herself in Pia’s kitchen watching the younger woman pound her secret ingredient—squash—into small bits to make her pumpkin pie.
It was after Pia popped one of her pies into the oven and the two women sat down to have coffee laced with canned milk, conversing in Italian about the incident at the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, that Pia dropped the bomb about Doc Roberts.
“The woman did nothing wrong, hiding the boy,” Pia said. “Is she still alive?”
Fioria shrugged. “She’s in a hospital in Reading. In a coma, they say, God willing that she’ll awaken,” she said, crossing herself.
“Does she have children?” Pia asked.
Fioria decided to step lightly. It was a sore point, for Pia, nine years younger, had not yet had any and had taken to visiting American doctors for cures, which Fioria discouraged. “No,” she said, “but that’s just a way to live longer, if you ask me. Children can be a headache.”
Pia seemed suddenly irritated, then blurted out, “Where can you hide a boy around here? There’s nothing around here but chicken wire and horse crap.”
Fioria shrugged. She didn’t like to repeat rumors. “All I know is the police went to take him and the coloreds got mad and the poor woman somehow got in the middle of it. That’s what Doc Roberts told Father at mass.”
At the mention of Doc Roberts, Pia’s face reddened and she rose from the table. With her back to Fioria, she snatched her wooden spoon from the counter, scooped up some squash, and angrily dumped the contents into her mixing bowl.
“What’s bothering you?” Fioria asked.
“Nothing,” Pia said, mixing the pie filling furiously.
“Did you know her?”
“Who?”
“Chona. The Jewish woman.”
“I wouldn’t know her if she walked in here dressed like a moose and threw salt and olive oil all over the kitchen,” Pia said. She stared at the door even though the house was empty, then snapped hotly in Sicilian slang, “Mi farei controllare in manicomio prima di lasciare che il dottor Roberts mi mettesse le mani addosso. È un verme cattivo.” (But I’d check myself into the nuthouse before I let Doc Roberts put his fast hands on me again. He’s a nasty worm.)
Fioria received this information with shock and alarm. There was trouble in that. Pia’s husband, Matteo, was a plasterer, a nice, outgoing fellow except when it came to his wife, for Pia was a slender, pretty young thing.
Fioria changed the subject. “I’m too old for American doctors,” she said quickly. “Thank God I had my children in Italy. I never go to doctors here. It’s a quick way to die.”
Pia slammed the pie filling into the piecrust, placed the pie tin into the oven, and sat back down at the table again in a huff. Then she said softly to Fioria, “Keep quiet. If Matteo goes to prison, what happens to me?”
Fioria reached across the table and gently placed her hand on Pia’s shoulder. This assured Pia, for a good woman’s heart can hold secrets better than any vault, and Fioria was a good woman. But later that afternoon, while standing at her own stove preparing dinner for her husband and Enzo, Fioria had a sudden panic that rushed across her temples so fast that she had to sit down at the table and dip her fingers into the salt dish to nibble at the salt, which she did at times of extreme worry. This town is too small, she thought, and the kind of trouble Pia mentioned is very wide. She’d heard a rumor or two about Doc Roberts, but it was better to keep out of those things. Still, if Pia’s husband found out about Doc . . . she felt the hairs on her skin pricking and crossed herself, thinking of her son. Enzo knew Matteo well. In fact, Enzo knew everyone well. He was too softhearted. He would do anything for anyone. That was his problem.
She debated the subject in her head. If Matteo caused trouble, Enzo would follow and so would his buddy Fatty and, she thought with sudden clarity, so would la polizia, for they were never far from Fatty. That her son was thick with Chicken Hill’s most notorious Negro was something that gave her increasing worry. The boys had been best friends since childhood. When she and her husband arrived in Pottstown from Sicily twelve years ago, Enzo was twelve and spoke no English. But Fatty, who lived around the corner, spoke enough English for both. The Hill’s Italian immigrants generally stayed to themselves, but the children played without boundaries, and while most floated back into their tribes as they grew older, Enzo and Fatty had remained as tight as thieves. They were teammates on the high school football team and even took jobs in the same plant after graduation. And while her husband disapproved of Fatty, Fioria found him charming and funny, his crazy schemes amusing, like the time he welded every piece of junk he could find to an old ice wagon—spoons, ladles, cans, steel rods—and drove it around the Hill pulled by a mule, operating the whole thing as a taxicab. Even her husband burst out laughing when he saw it. And Fatty was handy. He could repair cars and trucks, was a good carpenter and an excellent welder, and taught Enzo all those things. And while Enzo had recently knocked out Fatty’s front tooth in some dispute, they rarely argued. Fatty had even gotten Enzo into the fire department—the first Italian ever. That was something.
But this was something else. Enzo had just procured a new job at the Dohler plant after some business with Fatty cost him his last one. He needed no trouble. She decided to speak to him about poking his nose in other people’s business.
It was already past 4 p.m., and the Dohler factory had already finished its shift, which meant Enzo was off work. She knew just where to find him.
She removed her apron, shut off her stove, left the house by the front door, marched past the tight row houses on her street, turned west at the intersection, cut through an empty lot full of tall weeds, turned onto the muddy trail toward Fatty’s jook joint, where her son stopped after work every day to drink beer and listen to jazz music and baseball games on the radio with the rest of the regulars, mostly young Negroes.
Several young men were seated on crates sipping beers near a makeshift table out front next to a grill marked with a sign that read “Hamburgas 10 cents,” and they could see Fioria from two hundred yards as she approached, a tiny figure in a housedress marching toward them purposefully, her hands clasped behind her as she took the hill hard and fast, Italian-style, leaning forward. As Fioria approached, she saw from a hundred yards off the towering figure of her son. At twenty-four, Enzo was six feet six and built like a brick oven. He was one of the tallest men in Pottstown and hard to miss. He was seated on a crate hunched over a checkerboard on the jook’s front porch. Something about seeing her son’s hulking frame across from the much shorter, stockier Fatty made the blood rush to her face and she grew furious.
Neither Fatty nor Big Soap saw her coming, but the other young black men on the porch did, and they hastily spilled off their crates, shoving beers underneath the porch, extinguishing cigarettes, straightening their collars, and hissing, “Soap! Soap! Your ma’s coming.”
But too late. By the time Big Soap heard them and turned his head, he saw his mother’s finger pointed directly at his nose. He was so tall that, even seated, he was taller than she was, so her finger was pointed up at his nostril.
Fioria hissed at him in Italian. “You are headed for trouble,” she said.
“What?”
“What happened at the store?” she demanded.
“What store?”
“You stay out of it,” she insisted.
“Stay out of what?”
“Out of what happened at the store.”
Big Soap glanced at Fatty, who sat in silence, then rolled his eyes good-naturedly. Big Soap was embarrassed. But since he and his mother were the only ones who spoke Italian, he decided to play it off, speaking calmly in Italian, “What did I do, Mama?”
“Don’t get smart! The police were up there! Were you up there?”
“Up where?”
“Do I look stupid? What happened?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The nuthouse! You wanna go there?”
“What nuthouse? I just came from work!”
From there, Fioria lost her temper and would not remember the following day, nor the next, what was said. But for the young men watching, the torrent of Italian from the mother, followed by Big Soap’s stumbling response, was pure entertainment, and they filled the air with snorts and muffled chuckles, all save Fatty, who carefully stepped off the porch and stood next to Rusty, the two of them watching, spellbound, as mother and son went at it.
“You keep away from the police or you’ll be in the nuthouse, too!” Fioria said.
“They can’t take me to the nuthouse if I’m at work,” Big Soap said.
“Who said you were at work? Did the police know you were at work? Who wants to talk about their work to the police? You just lost one job and now you’re gonna lose another. Why? Because of talking to the police! Don’t talk to the police. Ever!”
“Who said I was talking to the police?”
“Don’t mock me!” She pointed to Fatty, then turned back to Big Soap and rattled off in Italian: “Fatty’s got fifteen jobs. You got one. You think jobs grow on trees? Keep outta trouble or you won’t have a job! The police sent the colored child to the nuthouse! You’re next, the way you’re talking! And keep off that doctor. Medici americani! Ciarlatani con mani veloci. Una pillola per tutti. (American doctors! Quacks with fast hands. A pill for everything.) You can’t trust them. I should tell your father.” And on it went.
Rusty leaned over to Fatty. “Fatty, what’d Soap do?”
“Whatever he did,” Fatty said frowning, “he ain’t gonna do it no more.”
Watching Miss Fioria rant, Fatty grew worried. Miss Fioria lived at the bottom of the Hill close to Main, just one street above Paper. Paper, who did her washing from a sink that faced the main road, was a megaphone. She basically lived in her outdoor flower garden when she wasn’t washing clothes or breaking some poor railroad porter’s heart. Her house was like the guardhouse to Chicken Hill. She saw every person or item that came up the Hill. That meant Paper saw Miss Fioria headed for his joint, because there was nothing past the weedy lot but his jook, which meant this news would spread in minutes. In fact, he thought, it had already spread by now.
He sighed, watching Miss Fioria rail at Big Soap. Fatty liked Miss Fioria. She was good people—a second mother even. She’d whacked him a few times with her belt when he was a kid while serving punishment on Big Soap—and both of them had deserved it. But she was white. And white folks moving around his jook on Pigs Alley brought the cops. And cops wrecked the economy. They could come right this moment and bust him for selling hamburgers and Coca-Cola during the day if they felt like it. And if it was Billy O’Connell, what’s to stop O’Connell from digging around and finding his moonshine buried in the woods, not to mention a few other tangible goods that he’d hidden back there, including an eight-hundred-horse-power table grinder he’d procured from the Dohler plant the year before and a couple of other items he’d “found” in some of the nearby manufacturing plants, to be sold later.
He wanted to intervene, but he knew better. Instead, his mind clicked through solutions. How to get back to normal? Nate was recovering from his drunk, probably back to normal in a day or two. Check. Nate’s wife, Addie, was incommunicado, staying at the hospital in Reading where Miss Chona was. Check. Poor Dodo was gone. In the nuthouse at Pennhurst. He’d been there two weeks. Maybe Nate and Addie will give up on him and let their precious all-solution Good Lord take care of him. Check. Doc Roberts would want to keep things quiet with the white folks anyway. Check. No problem. This will all blow over. Let Miss Fioria yell and then let this settle. Wasn’t it reasonable to expect this stuff would just blow over?
To Fatty’s relief, Miss Fioria finished her rant, turned, and began her march down Pigs Alley. Then to his dismay, she turned suddenly and marched up to him, pointing a tiny finger and speaking in a thick Italian accent. “You should be ashamed, Fatty.”
Fatty offered a “who me?” smile and spread his arms. “Miss Fioria, we wasn’t arou—”
“Trouble trouble trouble!” Fioria said. “The poor lady is sick because-a . . .” Then she stopped and peered at him quizzically, and said, “What’s a-wrong with your mouth?”
“My mouth?”
“Your tooth-a. What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I got a new one.”
“Show me.”
Fatty opened his mouth. The tiny woman stepped closer and peered inside, examining the wooden tooth, grabbing his chin, and moving his head from side to side before dropping her hands and saying, “You oughta get your money back.”
Behind him, Fatty heard several men laugh, but Miss Fioria saw nothing funny. She was staring at him with her hands on her hips.
“What happened at the store?” she demanded.
“I don’t know. I heard Miss Chona fell dow—”
And she was off again, ranting in a spurt of Italian: “Ti porterò a casa e ti laverò la bocca con sapone di liscivia se hai intenzione di darmi un sacchetto di gomiti, okay? Cucinavo il cibo e vivevo prima che i tuoi primi denti crescessero.” (I will take you home and wash your mouth with lye soap if you’re gonna hand me a bag of elbows, okay? I was cooking food and living before your first teeth grew in.) Then she went back to English, ending with “Don’t talk this-a-way and that-a-way to me! Miss-a-Chona this and Miss-a-Chona that . . . what happened there?”
For the first time, Fatty realized that he didn’t really know quite what had happened at the store. He hadn’t been there. He was in Philadelphia getting his tooth replaced and running his cousin’s stupid dry cleaner’s. But with Miss Fioria staring at him, he realized that he had to put it together anyway. Miss Fioria knew Bernice, who lived next door to the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. If she marched up to his sister’s house and asked her what happened, that would be trouble, because Bernice was sanctified, saved to the Lord, which meant she was unpredictable. Bernice hated his jook joint. What’s more, Bernice had helped Miss Chona hide Dodo from the state, letting him play in the yard with her children when they sent that Negro looking for him. That would make Bernice an accomplice. And the state man was a Negro, too. He’d been told that. Who had blabbed? Either way, Miss Fioria going to Bernice would add gas to the fire. It had all started with Nate’s dragging the Jews into it.
With Miss Fioria staring at him, Fatty offered up what he knew. “Dodo’s mother died.”
“Who’s Dodo?”
“That’s the boy. Dodo’s his name—”
“Wait a minute,” Fioria said. She nodded to her son, and Big Soap sighed and stepped over. She needed a translator.
She nodded at Fatty. “Go,” she said. Fatty spoke while Big Soap translated.
“Dodo’s Thelma’s boy . . .”
And thus, Fatty Davis, the last person to care about anyone but himself, found himself recounting what he knew. That three years ago a colored lady named Thelma Herring, Addie’s sister, who lived on the Hill, had an Enlevra stove, made in one of Pottstown’s factories. And the stove blew up. Why it blew up, nobody knows. But the day it blew up was a day every colored on the Hill remembered. Thelma’s boy Dodo—whose real name was Holly Herring—was standing near the stove when it blew up. And somehow it affected his eyes and his ears. “He got blind and deaf for a while,” Fatty said. “His eyes came back. But his ears did not.”
“And the stove did not kill his mother?”
“I already said it, Miss Fioria. No.”
“Did the stove company pay her for the accident?”
Fatty looked incredulous. “Do a dog know it’s Christmas?”
Big Soap translated and Miss Fioria chuckled. “So she did not die?”
“No,” Fatty said. “But she wasn’t the same after. She got sick this year and died, that’s all. Nobody got paid nothing. Dodo’s aunt and uncle took him in. He didn’t want to go to school ’cause he couldn’t hear nothing. The state wanted to send him to a special school, so his aunt and uncle asked Miss Chona to hold him till they could get the money to send him down South. They got family down there that’ll look out for him.”
“You sure?”
“Miss Fioria, would I lie to you?”
“You better not,” she said, shaking a fist, palm up.
Fatty chuckled, for he could see Miss Fioria was cooling.
“Why’d the doctor come?” she asked. “Was the boy sick?”
“I don’t know. Doc Roberts mostly don’t treat the colored.”
“How’d the doctor know the boy was up here? I live here and I didn’t know he was up here.”
“They was keeping it quiet.”
“How’d the doctor find out?”
“Somebody told it, I reckon.”
“Is that how the fight started in the store?” she asked.
For the first time, Fatty looked puzzled. “There wasn’t no fight in there.”
Fioria was firm. “There was a fight. That’s how the Jewish lady got hurt.”
“She didn’t get hurt in no fight. Honest to God.”
“What happened to her then?”
“Well . . . she fell out . . . kind’a . . . I don’t know. They found her with her clothes . . . kind’a tore off her.”
“She fell out and got her clothes tore up on her own?”
“I don’t rightly know, Miss Fioria.”
Fioria peered around at the young men standing about. She had known most of them since childhood, some for more than a decade. Some of them had been in her living room doing odd jobs, others had eaten her pasta, for after she served her husband and son, if she saw a hungry child pass by, she couldn’t help herself. There was something about a starving child that pulled every string in Fioria Carissimi, who grew up in a small Sicilian village near Palermo where a dinner of rice with olive oil and real meat was something that happened once a year at Christmas. She just couldn’t stand it. Her dark gaze fell on Rusty, who was nervously smoking a cigarette. She pointed at him.
“Were you there?”
“I . . . seen some of it, Miss Fioria.”
“And?”
“Well, Miss Addie got there before I did.”
Fioria fired off a string of Italian and Big Soap rolled his eyes. “Rusty, would you talk straight before she kills somebody here.”
Rusty spread his arms to explain. “What I seen, when I come in, was Miss Chona lying on the floor with her dress . . . well, Addie was fixing up her dress and clothes. Like they was rumpled up. You know, like somebody had tried to pull ’em off her.”
“Was the doctor there?”
Rusty swallowed and was silent a moment. “You mean Doc Roberts?”
“Was he there or not?”
“He was running out when I come in. He come back five minutes later with the cops.”
“What about the boy?”
“Dodo was there,” Rusty said. “Surely was. He was upset. He yelled some things about Doc Roberts as the cops was chasing him.” And here, Rusty paled and said, “Miss Fioria, I ain’t really see nothing. Honest to God. The only person who really seen something was Addie. She’s up in Reading at the hospital with Miss Chona. You can ask her what she seen. I reckon the only person who seen what went on between Doc and Miss Chona was Doc and Miss Chona.”
“The boy was there,” Fioria said. “Did anybody ask him?”
“He’s deaf and dumb,” Fatty said.
Fiona frowned when the translation came, and then spoke to Fatty in English, directly. “Deaf,” she said in English, pointing to her own ears. “Pero dumb . . . ?” She pointed at Rusty, Big Soap, and Fatty, counting as she pointed, saying in English, “One, two, three.” Then to the rest of the young men standing about, she waved a finger as if to say “Careful. I’m watching you.” She then turned to Fatty, said a few more words in Italian, then marched down the hill.
They watched her leave. Fatty asked Big Soap, “What’s that last thing she said?”
“Nothing. She said we’re in trouble.”
“Don’t jive me, Soap. I know how to say trouble in Italian. Guaio. I remember that word from when she was warming our asses with a switch in the old days. I didn’t hear that in none of her words. Was she doggin’ me some other way?”
“No.”
“So what’d she say then?”
“She said God is watching what we do.”
Fatty sighed. “I’d rather have Him holding me to charge than her.”