The day of the departure Maria was resolved not to cry. Not to fear. Only to smile and to hope. These cost no more than the other emotions and were far less messy. So she smiled all the way to the docks, at those they passed by on the way.
Maria smiled at young woman, a strolling musician, wearing a long black coat and top hat, and playing a small mandolin. The woman nodded to Maria and smiled back. They traveled on.
Maria smiled upon the macaroni factory along the street. She smiled at the long poles, some suspended high overhead like a simple trellis and others supported by sawhorses, as from all of them, the pasta hung like creamy fountains of fringe. She smiled at the men of the factory, who were coming and going, all of them shoeless and shirtless, wearing only the simplest of garments around their waist. A day or two before, she might have been too shy to smile at them, but now, she was on her way to a new life in America, and so she smiled. The men who noticed Maria smiled to her in return.
Maria smiled to the barefoot water-seller, a boy standing along the quay, in his yellow shirt and brown trousers rolled up to the calf; with his cluster of ten of terra cotta jugs, one for each finger, and a large rectangular basket suspended down his back, from its perch atop his bright green cap. He too, smiled.
So too, Maria exchanged smiles with the fan seller and the broom-boy, with his cluster of several dozens of whisk brooms slung over his back. So many things to see. So many people to smile with.
There was a small girl in a street corner, holding several pretty birds in her hands, to be sold. Nearby an elderly couple sharing an alfresco meal, she in her native Neapolitan costume of yellow long sleeved blouse and a red scarf wrapped as a stole and tucked into the waistband of her gray skirt; he in a cobalt jacket, white shirt and dark trousers. Maria smiled at them all and they all smiled in answer.
The stands of the white garbed oyster vendors, stood along the waterfront, with their tabletops overflowing with the oysters; and piled all round, their wooden buckets. Several of the oyster vendors smiled to Maria even before she smiled to them. And so it was with the teams of pescatori towing in their fishing lines like one half of a game of tug of war.
Maria was fortunate to have cousins in the port city. Many others who would be on the same journey had awaited the sailing in much less congenial surroundings, sleeping ten to a room in the steamship hotel. But one and all had to deal with the crowd of peddlers, scugnizzi, stray dogs, dock thieves and confidence men. The waterfront had a reputation. But it was not unlike the reputation of all busy waterfronts, the world over.
Looking around, Maria’s eyes took in the many fishing boats, many painted white, with others yellow orange or blue, all of them uniformly painted blue on the inside. She saw the mountains, the sea and the Castel Nuovo, the grand and mysterious Palazzo Donn'Anna, jutting out into the water, still noble in its crumbling state.
Looking back, Maria could see the cluster of ancient buildings on the Vomero hill above Naples—the sturdy walls of the ancient Castel Sant Elmo and the ivory arches of the Belvedere di San Martino. In that setting, they seemed so much like Noepoli, yet here, they looked over the gulf and commanded all of Naples. She felt as if she had never seen anything quite so perfect.
Tearful farewells were made to Giovanni and to Fiametta. And then, before she had time to think it, she was up the gangplank and on the steamer and had the earth of Italy beneath her feet no longer—and for how long?
In the preliminary examination by the steamship company representatives, examiners turned many away, mainly for reasons of health. But Maria had passed that examination without incident. Except that while in line she heard a snippet of conversation between two young men, about her age.
The better looking of the two said, “As for that old boss of ours who gave us so much grief, I have sent him a postcard. And what do you think the message was? ‘Better look this picture over carefully for you know the saying—See Naples and Die—in which case you haven't long to live.'" The other slapped the fellow on the back and answered, “Serves him right! And see if he tells anyone about it, since everyone would agree with what you said anyhow.”
The ship got underway. It slipped its moorings and fled from the shores of Italy, passing the Castel dell'Ovo, departing the magnificent Bay of Naples, passing between Ischia and Procida.
Just then, Maria felt something unfamiliar in her pocket. Reaching in, she found an envelope, sealed with wax and addressed with her name. She opened it carefully.
“My Maria, Already, too soon, I feel the lack of you. L'Italia farà da sè. Italy will take care of itself. But I must be inconsolable. You must go to America and I must go to South America. But this is for only an instant. Naples is ours and Naples is forever. Wait my love! Quella destinata per te, nessuno la prenderà. No one will take the one who is destined for you. True love waits. Rico.”
"How long of a wait, I wonder," thought Maria.
She could feel the movement of the ship under her feet. The ship was the S. S. Patria, an iron-hulled steamship with two decks. Not that Maria knew or cared, but the fact was that it had been built by the Vulcan Shipyard, in Stettin, Germany, in the year of her birth, 1882. With a displacement of 3,467 gross tons, the Patria was 352 feet long; 43 feet wide, with a compound single-screw engine. The ship’s profile showed three masts but only one funnel, as compared with the grand liners that had three or four funnels.
Her service speed was a leisurely 12 knots. The ship’s capacity was 1,196 passengers (of which only ninety-six were first class, the remaining 1,100 were second class or steerage).
The Patria had been built for the Hamburg-American Line, to sail under the German flag, and when built, it was christened the Rugia. In 1894, it was sold to Fabre Line, sailing under the French flag, and renamed the Patria, under which name it began regular Marseilles, Naples to New York service. The venerable ship would have only a few more years of service before it was scrapped in Marseilles, France in 1906.
Maria’s ticket was of the standard type; in Italian it read:
“I, W. P. SAUNDERS, hereby undertake, upon the following terms, to forward from Naples to New York in North-America, the emigrant named below for the sum of $50.00, which amount has been duly paid and includes all ordinary charges upon landing in America.
“The journey takes place from Naples by steamer steerage passage within 12 days after departing there, by Ocean steamer steerage passage, to New-York in North-America. From New-York the Emigrant will be forwarded, immediately after having passed the customs and complied with other formalities, by rail 3rd class to Pittsburgh.
“At the above mentioned fare the emigrant will be supplied with good and sufficient provisions and attendance from leaving Naples until arrival at place of landing in America, and care of effects not exceeding 10 cubic feet space by steamer and 150 Lbs weight by railway. Effects of children between 1 and 12 years are carried free at the rate of half of what has been before stated for effects to America, where no free conveyance of effects of children under 5 years is allowed.
“The emigrant is entitled to a check for such effects, as are not under his own care, and will receive or same consisting of packages and numbered 3606 a compensation not exceeding $25 adult, in the event of non-delivery of the effects on surrender of said check upon arrival at place of landing in America but no compensation will be allowed for loss or damage all effects caused by sea accident.
“Should the emigrant at arrival in foreign country be refused by the authorities to immigrate and if it cannot be proved that this prohibition has been caused by circumstances come to pass after this contract was made out. I do hereby agree to repay the emigrant for the passage and at my expense have him returned to Naples, Italy; like- wise his maintenance on his return and forwarding care of his baggage.
“Likewise do I agree to, if so required by the emigrant, to let all controversies about this contract's explication and the emigrants justice of compensation for non-fulfillment of the same to be decided by five arbiters, of whom the immigrant appoints two, I or in case I refuse, the government two, and the before said governor the fifth.
“If the emigrant has any reason for complaint of not being treated in accordance with the terms stipulated In this contract, a report thereof should be made to the nearest Consul as soon as circumstances admit.”
"Any reason for complaint!" thought Maria. "What wasn't there to complain about?"
The conditions in steerage were less than ideal. Maria found herself in a room with three other women, next to the steering equipment. The lower depths of the ship were dark, unsanitary, crowded. Who could describe the tiers of iron bunks, the hot stale air made worse by seasickness. The lavatories were cleaned and disinfected not once on the voyage, until the final day at sea.
There was precious little relief on the open deck that was cordoned off steerage passengers only. It was situated just behind the funnel; as a result, it was a little Vesuvius of a place, as soot and ash from the engines fell upon Maria and her fellow passengers there. It made Maria think of Pliny and his pillow.
The food was mostly unpalatable: soggy bread, indefinable vegetables.
On board the ship, hailing also from Potenza—were several countrymen if not kinsmen who found Maria, or she found them, before the first day was done. There was a man named Rocco di Gioro, age 41, who acted like a father figure on Maria’s behalf, intervening from time to time when some uncouth person looked at her sideways. Maria felt fortunate in his courtly ways and was reminded of the Padrone.
There was also a careworn woman named Maria Peloso, age 40, and her children, a handsome son Prospero who was ten and a shy little daughter Rosa, just five. Maria Peloso was on her way to meet up with her husband who had gone to America two years before, to make his way and arrange things until the family could join him. She looked forward to seeing him with great anticipation, but about America itself, she said to Maria,
"Chi lascia la strada vecchia per la nuova sa quel che lascia, ma non sa quel che trova." "Who leaves the old street for the new one, knows what he left but not what he'll find."
“Yes, who knows what I will find,” Maria mused. But she kept such thoughts to herself. And with that same smile she gave to the strangers in the crowd as she left Naples, she smiled again as the Patria moved steadily toward America.
“You look exactly like La Gioconda with that calm and beatific smile of yours,” Rocco di Gioro said to her one afternoon when they were all taking the air on the open deck.
“I have been thinking it myself,” said Maria Peloso. “The very same smile, come to life in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! Could old Leonardo have imagined such a thing?”
“And we will never guess what mysterious thoughts are behind that smile,” Rocco added.
“Not much to guess,” replied Maria. “The smile is my way of putting the best face on all that is happening. I could frown and fret, but I would still be here halfway between the Old World and the New World. So why not smile. Que Sera Sera. What will be, will be.”
As if to emphasize her remark, the Patria took a wave at a very unfortunate angle, righted itself, and continued in its heaving way toward the New World.
Then came the day of their arrival in silvery New York Harbor. It felt so much bigger than the harbor at Naples. The approach to the city was prefaced by the outstretched shorelines on both sides, as if they were arms reaching out to the ship, to invite her in to this place of shelter.
And then a familar figure--the robe, spikes and a torch. “Madonna Della Libera,” someone whispered near by.
"Yes," whispered Maria. “Our Lady of Liberty.”
The city's skyline was impossibly vast and high and complex. The double towers of the Ivins Syndicate’s Park Row Building, the tallest building in Manhattan, rose a dizzy 29 stories high, with 26 full floors and two, three-story cupolas. From the top of both cupolas flew gigantic American flags. The passengers looked, in awe of its height and mammoth proportions. It towered at least 15 to 20 stories over most of its neighbors.
But there were countless delights to be seen. To one side was the golden dome of the New York “World” Building. To the other, the spire of Trinity Church. Among and around them were lesser domes and insistent dormers, spiky flagpoles and lofty chimneys, and everywhere, soaring towers.
There was the stately squat tower of the Corbin Building with its elaborate terra-cotta columns, window surrounds and scalloped arches. It vied for attention with the glorified steeple of the Manhattan Life Insurance Building. Maria thought of the wonders of Naples and even the fabled heights of Vesuvius were surpassed by this fairyland.
Above all, a blue sky spread over the spires and domes of New York, cloudless and fair. So much bluer it seemed than the Italian sky. The air was warm, hot really, against Maria’s cheeks.
"So this is America," she said to the wind. It kissed her in return.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Seven - Ellis Island
Maria arrived at Ellis Island about a year and six months after the opening day of the new main building, which replaced an earlier one that had been destroyed by fire. On that first day, December 17, 1900, 2,251 immigrants were received. About the same number would be received along with Maria, the day she reached America.
They were transported from the Hudson River dock on a barge. There were no seats, no food, and no water. As she looked over the rail, Maria had her first view of Ellis Island.
“Ellis Island” she heard others near her say, as they pointed.
“A world of new beginnings,” Maria thought.
“È un mondo liberare; it’s a free world,” someone else said happily, in Italian, as if they had read her mind.
Maria had lost sight of Rocco di Gioro and Maria Peloso and her children in the crowds. While still aboard the Patria, they had promised to send one another word of how they were, once they had reached their destinations. With smiles and hugs she had bid the little Peloso children farewell. Now, she was alone in a vast group who were moving toward--who knew what?
As she looked at the building where they were going, she saw the long pier, the tall flagpole with the American flag, and the red brick complex of buildings trimmed with crisp white limestone and granite, the main one with four dome-topped towers, all of it vaguely ecclesiastical. Maria stared as the official looking building with large arched windows grew steadily, slowly larger. There were fishes on the tops of the towers; leaping fishes! Or were they waves? There were finials and flagpoles at the tops of the domes. There were big round globes at the corners of the building. It looked like something out of a dream.
It was exhilarating to be off the barge and on the dock. Maria’s sense was that people were glad to be there, but also frightened. Anxious about what would happen next. Few looked back to the towers of New York city. They looked forward, each one wearing identification or landing tag on their chests, each with an all-important number.
The people all seemed to have a renewed energy as they moved forward. It was a sense of people hurrying, carrying luggage, mostly large satchels, wicker hampers and bushel baskets, with pots and pans, other useful household items. More of the people had large duffle bags or sacks into which were placed all their belongings. The men wore what passed in every country as their one and only suit for important occasions, funerals and weddings. The women, too, wore their best dresses, aprons, kerchiefs. Like Maria, they had kept their good things hidden away until this day, when they wanted to look their best in honor of their arrival in their new country and to pass through the inspection station with as little fuss as possible.
One woman hurrying near her carried a kitchen chair. Another had a bundle so big and lumpy, Maria wondered if there were not one or two children hidden inside of it. But the woman held it with only one arm as if weighed no more than a few hens. Yet another carried her bag on her head so as not to be jostled by the crowd. Maria could sense that all of their baggage, like her own, was quite heavy, but no one seemed to be straining. These were strong, sturdy, and excited people. They spoke Italian and dozens of other languages Maria could not identify but their words were few and delivered in hushed undertones, except for, here or there, a mother who urged a bewildered looking child to stay close by.
The throng moved almost as one, as if choreographed. They carried Maria along as they neared the great building. She looked up and saw carved eagles and bundles of fruit in the stonework. The sculpted stone face of a man with ram’s ears stared down at her from one of the archways; or was it a woman? At first, Maria decided it looked like the face of the sixteen year old Statue of Liberty with her strong jaw, squared nose, deep set eyes and pouting mouth. Then again, it made her think of Lucia and Grazie and even of her fabulous knight, Jacuvill, back in Noepoli. Maria should have felt quite alone as she neared the immigration station. But she did not mind being alone; the stones were smiling upon her. Maria could not believe she was almost there.
A man in a smart uniform and cap—official in his bearing but not frightening; he had a friendly kind of a smile, she thought—kept pointing the crowd in the proper direction—to the right—between two uprights—made of stone on which stood columns holding up a porch roof. Everything looked tidy, organized, and orderly—except for a large ladder someone had left leaning to one side of the building, as if some kind of work was still underway or some cleaning project had gone unfinished.
Soon she found that she was standing in a line, single file. In front of her stood a man a head taller than herself with a full brown beard and a trim hat. His fine overcoat and shoes were a cut above most of the other men’s. The woman Maria took to be his wife, just in front of him, was shorter than Maria, and stout in her checkered skirt that swept to the floor and a dark long-sleeved blouse with pretty buttons down the front. These looked like people of substance, importance. Marie considered her own attire and wondered how she would look to the officials, by comparison.
Maria’s clothing was lighter and of a brighter hue than the others near her. A pale colored dress, between blue and lavender made up of very small checks that showed only up close. From a distance the dress looked as if it were a solid color. There was a squared-yoke on the blouse, trimmed with some bits of lace all around, and a white apron to match her white scarf on her head. It was all of the sort of stuff that made a girl feel happy and pretty. But here and now, she felt much less substantial. She realized that the quality of the fabric was poorer than she might have wished—the ruffled edge of lace, on the bodice of her blouse, which her mother had taken so carefully from an old chest and stitched there so daintily for this very moment in Maria’s journey, looked a flimsy in this place where, depending on one word from an official, she might be sent all the way back to Italy.
Behind her were two young men with very dark faces, and short cropped hair. Darker than any of the men of the fields of home ever became after laboring long through the hot summer. One had a large metal basin, as big as a small bathtub. Whatever for? The other had a plaid woolen blanket wrapped round his neck and shoulders like a shawl. They spoke not a word, so she could form no guess where they had come from. A girl about Maria’s age stood between them, but did not seem to be with them. She was as pale as the moon and wore a dress of some heavy paisley fabric with a stiffly starched apron and a large white scarf on her head. She clutched a small valise that shone with the evidence of much polish, as did her trim leather boots. Such boots!. Marie looked down at her own feet, in cloth shoes, no sturdier than slippers. What had she been thinking, to have dressed this way?
“Move ahead, please,” a voice somewhere in front of them called loudly.
The sound startled Maria but she did not understand. No matter. The others shuffled forward, as did Maria. Further behind her she saw another couple, these looking to her mind very American indeed. The man with a short white beard, the woman in a tailored wool traveling jacket. They spoke quietly to each other but were far enough behind Maria that she could hear not a word.
“Men to the right, if you please, and women to the left.” The same voice announced. “Nothing to fear, you will catch up with one another very soon.”
There was a silhouette over two gates, one of a man and the other of a woman, the people did as they were told, going to the proper gate, men to the right and women to the left, even though most of them did not know a word of English. Yet they all knew the excitement of the journey and the future filled with hope. Maria found herself between the woman in checks and the girl with the lovely boots.
“Pergunto-me como longo ele nos tomará? I wonder how long it will take us?” the girl behind her said to her but in a tongue Maria did not understand. Maria smiled at her and slowly shook her head.
“Non so; I do not know,” she replied, meaning she did not know what the other had asked.
“Eu não sei,” the girl nodded as she answered. She looked Maria in the eyes and then she did a strange and lovely thing. She stretched out her hand, and grasped Maria’s own, giving it an almost imperceptible squeeze. Maria squeezed her hand in return. They stood waiting, hand in hand, inching forward, joined by their common experience.
“Sisters?” a matronly looking woman in uniform asked them. She asked it in several more languages. “Hermanas? Schwestern? Irmãs? Sorelle?” At last the girls understood and shook their heads, no.
“Very well,” the woman said, “step forward one at a time.” She pointed to a sign with the same instructions in many languages. One of the phrases on it was in Italian; Maria read it, let go of the hand of her new friend regretfully, and did as she was told. Up a staircase with her belongings.
A woman in a starched white uniform was next. A nurse? Doctor? Maria was giving a quick but thorough physical examination. More notes. She seemed to be in reasonably good health. No anemia. No goiters. No varicose veins. Noted. The Ellis Island inspection process continued.
Now Maria was in a huge room, 189 feet long and 102 feet wide with a 60-foot-high vaulted ceiling, with arched windows both below and high on the upper portions of the walls. It was built like a church, but instead of chapels and altars, the vast interior was filled with long benches and partitions made of white piping. A balcony ledge ran all round the upper floor of the building and here and there stood a man who watched the comings and goings of all the arrivals.
This was the Registry Room. The diagonal pattern of the red tile floor shone with the light of the big half-circle windows. Looking out through one of them, she could see the Statue of Liberty in the distance, still holding up her torch, but she looked as if she had turned away. The white tile on the walls went as high as her head. Everything gleamed and sparkled. Maria gazed up at the great chandelier, like a golden pendant with its pale alabaster globes, one huge encircled by eight smaller, so beautiful. Like a flower, an Ellis Island flower. Even overhead, the buff colored vaults of the ceiling were completely covered with a herringbone pattern shimmering tile.
As Maria admired the golden glow of the tile vaulting, she noticed one particular man at the railing high above her. His mouth moved, as if in a whisper. No one stood next to him. Was he talking to himself? She looked round the balcony. On the other side, another man stood nodding as if he had heard every word, then talked in the same way, as in a whisper. How very strange that here in America, one could converse in a whisper across such a vast room, where everything was made for order and freshness.
All around Maria were the others, arriving here in just this same way, with almost nothing but the hope for a better life. The room looked like a costume ball, with the many hued, multi-colored native costumes. Maria was among hundreds, maybe thousands of others, being asked important questions in a language that they couldn't understand. Examined for psychological and medical fitness. Maria was questioned as were they all. What were her financial resources? She showed them, produced from deep inside a hidden pocket. Ten dollars, and a train ticket to Pittsburgh? Noted down. What was her ability to find a productive life in the United States? Haltingly she explained. The official listened. Nodded. Repeated.
“You will live and work for your brother who runs a rooming house?” Maria nodded.
“The manifest says Box 137 Harmarville, Pennsylvania, correct?” Maria nodded again and it was noted down. “Are you an anarchist?" Maria shook her head. Another notation. These and so many more questions.
Maria’s papers were read and reread. They seemed to be in order. The ship's manifest or passenger list (filled out at the port of embarkation) was consulted. It contained Maria's name and her answers to numerous questions at the time of sailing. This document was read by the immigration inspectors as they cross examined Maria during the primary inspection. Time dragged on. Two, three hours. By now, long arching pools of afternoon light stretched across the red tile floor.
Throughout the long ordeal, Maria was treated courteously and respectfully. And then it was over. Maria was told she was free to begin her new life in America! After only a few short hours on Ellis Island! She was pointed toward a stairway, divided into thirds by railings.
“Take the side to the right, please,” an official pointed. Maria began to descend the stairs. Others were descending with her, to the right and left. And then, someone was told to go down the center section of the stairway. Maria heard tears and cries. She looked and saw a woman in a gorgeous Chianti colored jacket, ruffled lace at the neck, skirt of a golden hue embroidered with pink rosettes and a deep lace hem. There were the initials CT chalked on the jacket. Maria did not know it, but these stood for “Trachoma”. The woman was nearly doubled over in tears as she held out her hand to a man on the far left side of the staircase. He too, looked distraught, their arms reaching across the barrier of the railing.
These were the infamous Stairs of Separation. About two percent of the arriving immigrants were not as fortunate as Maria. Their papers were not in order or something about their health would keep them from entry in to the country. Perhaps the doctor had discerned some contagious disease that would endanger the public health. Maybe the legal inspector thought the immigrant might become a burden to society. The central lane and doorway were reserved for those who were refused entry, for reasons of health, or lack of money, or missing information.
So it was; by the time they reached the lowest step, the woman in the velvet jacket would be separated her loved one. They walked down the stairs together, with the railing between them. For now, it would be the last time they would see each other. Maria wondered if it would be or months, or forever? She felt the sting of tears in her own eyes, in sympathy for their plight. Just then, she reached the bottom of the stairs and went through the doorway and found herself being directed toward her next adventure—the trains.
When Maria arrived at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, speaking no English, she had pinned to her coat a piece of paper that had two words written on it--Pittsburgh and Harmarville. These were to show the train conductors. The hope was that she could manage to select the correct train from Ellis Island to Pittsburgh—which would get her most of the way to the end of her journey. Then, from Pittsburgh, she would take a much shorter ride up the Allegheny River Valley to the little community of Harmarville, where her brother and sister-in-law lived.
Maria showed the side of the card marked Pittsburgh to several official looking people, and they pointed her in the direction of the trains. She moved forward, along with the throngs who were moving as one into the foremost rail transportation nucleus for incoming immigrants. They had managed to pass beyond the symbolic welcome of the Statue of Liberty; they had endured the timely and confusing ordeal of being processed at Ellis Island by people they could scarcely understand.
Now these exhausted women, beleaguered men and anxious children would embark anew, on trains that would carry them into the heart of the nation.
One such train would take Maria across New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the gritty city of Pittsburgh. Her train had a section of seven cars set aside for the immigrants. It was packed full of curious people and an assortment of colorful baggage. Hundreds of them were making Pittsburgh their destination. Work was to be had there, in the mills and mines and factories. Some, like Maria, were going to meet up with family members who had gone on before them. Others were going on the glimmer of a hope that a job would be available when they arrived. Italians, Poles, Czechs, Russians and Slavs made up the majority of passengers on this particular train.
As Maria looked at her fellow passengers, she saw that the men were stocky, strong and seemed eager to set to work, to make their fortune, or at least, to provide for them and theirs in a way that would have been impossible back home. Almost universally they were dressed in black suits and more often than not wore soft caps on their heads. The women were clad demurely, in dark hued dresses with long sleeves and hems that swept the aisles, many with aprons over them, and nearly all of them wore a sciarpa, or sikmé seříznutí, a шарф or szalikiem or fular—in any language, in any color, print or cut, the head scarf, the babushka.
Many of the smaller boys were dressed in sailor suits, popular in those days, with double breasted buttons and neckerchiefs. The older boys were dressed like the men and it was not unusual that they wore ties at the necks of their shirts, like their fathers.
The girls were diminutives of the older women, in attire and demeanor. They all had baskets to bear under an arm, and many had bundles made of a bedspread or quilt to hoist and carry over both shoulders like an improvised backpack.
“Where were they all going?” Maria wondered. As well she might. Some were on their way to the coke ovens of Connellsville, where Frick’s hegemony held sway. Others were bound for the Carnegie steel mills, where tensions were running high in this era following the Homestead strike. Others were going on to places like Gary and Chicago. Some, and these were mostly the Scandinavians in the trains, were bound even farther, to farmlands in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. Maria was bound for Harmarville, which, until now, was a place utterly unknown to her except in those descriptions in her brother’s letters home.
Maria’s vision of it was a place not unlike the valley of the River Sinni she had left behind. In this she was only partially correct. What overlay the land in her familiar regions of Italy were centuries of traditions and a uniformity of culture that both enveloped and smothered the soul. In Harmarville, things were too new for that kind of tradition. The farthest back anyone would recall would be the time of Chief Guyasuta, the great leader of the Seneca’s, when the visitors of European origin met him in the 1700s.
Guyasuta had served as a scout for a young surveyor from the Virginia colony, who had been sent on a mission to Fort LeBoeuf. This surveyor, Washington by name, had enlisted the skill of Guyasuta, literally, to learn the lay of the land. It was in 1753 that the men had formed a respectful friendship as they traipsed through the woodland valleys of the great Allegheny River. This friendship was deepened when Washington and his fellow emissary Christopher Gist met with a mishap that could have ended both their mission and their lives.
Having completed their mission, Washington and Gist were returning to Virginia. While some of their native guides had insisted they wait, Major Washington insisted on travelling on in the biter cold weather. Logging 18 miles in one day, Washington was exhausted. The cold was relentless, the small streams were frozen and they could hardly get water to drink. At two in the morning they began again, and went as far as Murtheringtown, on Beaver Creek, under the same grueling conditions. The next day they traveled as far as the Allegheny River, where they built a raft. Gist's fingers became frostbitten in the process.
As they attempted to cross the Allegheny, Washington was thrown from the raft, whose pole had been hit by a mass of ice. As the story is sometimes told, it was Guyasuta who fished him out of the frigid water, or variously, gave aid to the men when they abandoned the raft and landed on Wainwright’s Island. It was December 29, 1753. Although she could not know it, Maria was headed for a place, just slightly upriver from the spot where Washington nearly drowned.
A squatter named Daniel Sweeney, considered the first setter of Harmarville, arrived in 1794. He tended his fields and lived in a rudimentary blockhouse near the Indian town at Harmarville. In 1798 he sold his claim to a man named Brewster, who in 1835 sold it to the Barton family who still owned the portion of the land called Barton’s Island. Other early settlers were named Enoch, Davis and Pillow.
And then there were the Dennys, whose farm encompassed much of Harmarville. Old General Ebenezer Denny had been a hero of the Revolution and the first mayor of Pittsburgh. His son Harmar Denny, for whom Harmar Township and Harmarville were named, had served as a US congressman.
The Dennys had operated a grist and sawmill on their place, but it had long since crumbled with age and disappeared from memory. The little Presbyterian Church they had helped to establish was still there, as were farm fields. But the Harmar Station and the nearby Harmar Coal Mine were the main features of interest to any new arrival from Europe. There along Guys Run, which had been named for Chief Guyasuta, could be found the company houses of the Harmar mine, and the mine itself.
Company housing was both the bane and the blessing of the mill or mine worker. On the one hand, company housing provided a place that was reasonably new, near the mine or mill, for the worker and his family to live. Some company housing truly was “model housing” and provide the latest in sanitation and cleanliness. However, some unscrupulous owners took advantage of workers, charging them more than what they would have to pay elsewhere for less in the way of comfort and cleanliness.
Better known examples of company housing included the town of Pullman Illinois where the homes of the 1880s provided running water, gas and garbage disposal. The company exercised complete control of their housing. Because they owned it, they set the rent and they screened and evicted tenants. With coal companies, "patch towns" sometimes complete with houses, schools, and churches, were built as close to the mine as possible. Then, the rents, as well as the cost of items from the company store were deducted from the miner’s pay. Often, as the song said, the miners owed their souls to the company store. Another coal song put it this way:
"Pick! Pick! Pick!
In the tunnel's endless gloom,
And every blow of our strong right arm
But helps to carve our tomb.”
The normal pattern was for mine companies to built better homes for supervisors and cheaper ones for the workers.
Some workers—and some would say the smart workers—found alternatives to company housing. These alternate choices consisted chiefly of renting a non-company home; the cost of doing this meant having three generations of extended family, or unrelated people, sharing in the cost. The other choice was becoming a boarder in a boarding house, but this was possible only if one were male and single.
Maria’s brother and his wife ran a big boarding house in Harmarville, where single male miners could live, if not in privacy, at least at some small remove from the omnipresent mine hierarchy. When they were not at their grueling subterranean work, they had a bed, and board and perhaps glimpse some sunshine and experience some quiet joy.
Maria had read about the boarding house in her brother's letters home. She knew from what he had told her that the house was not new by any stretch of the imagination, but rather a red brick building that had sat along the Freeport Road for more than a half century. The place had been built solidly enough but over the years had seen so many alterations that no one could quite describe what period or style it exemplified. The main unchanging features of the house were the crow-step gable ends which made the house look vaguely Dutch in inspiration, and stood out in contrast to the lower, less ambitious company row houses that stood near by it. All of them were perched on the edge of the north bank of the Allegheny River across from the town of Oakmont. They had been built close by the site where Jonathan Hulton and his family had run a ferry service for years, one of the few places one could cross the broad river in Allegheny County.
They were transported from the Hudson River dock on a barge. There were no seats, no food, and no water. As she looked over the rail, Maria had her first view of Ellis Island.
“Ellis Island” she heard others near her say, as they pointed.
“A world of new beginnings,” Maria thought.
“È un mondo liberare; it’s a free world,” someone else said happily, in Italian, as if they had read her mind.
Maria had lost sight of Rocco di Gioro and Maria Peloso and her children in the crowds. While still aboard the Patria, they had promised to send one another word of how they were, once they had reached their destinations. With smiles and hugs she had bid the little Peloso children farewell. Now, she was alone in a vast group who were moving toward--who knew what?
As she looked at the building where they were going, she saw the long pier, the tall flagpole with the American flag, and the red brick complex of buildings trimmed with crisp white limestone and granite, the main one with four dome-topped towers, all of it vaguely ecclesiastical. Maria stared as the official looking building with large arched windows grew steadily, slowly larger. There were fishes on the tops of the towers; leaping fishes! Or were they waves? There were finials and flagpoles at the tops of the domes. There were big round globes at the corners of the building. It looked like something out of a dream.
It was exhilarating to be off the barge and on the dock. Maria’s sense was that people were glad to be there, but also frightened. Anxious about what would happen next. Few looked back to the towers of New York city. They looked forward, each one wearing identification or landing tag on their chests, each with an all-important number.
The people all seemed to have a renewed energy as they moved forward. It was a sense of people hurrying, carrying luggage, mostly large satchels, wicker hampers and bushel baskets, with pots and pans, other useful household items. More of the people had large duffle bags or sacks into which were placed all their belongings. The men wore what passed in every country as their one and only suit for important occasions, funerals and weddings. The women, too, wore their best dresses, aprons, kerchiefs. Like Maria, they had kept their good things hidden away until this day, when they wanted to look their best in honor of their arrival in their new country and to pass through the inspection station with as little fuss as possible.
One woman hurrying near her carried a kitchen chair. Another had a bundle so big and lumpy, Maria wondered if there were not one or two children hidden inside of it. But the woman held it with only one arm as if weighed no more than a few hens. Yet another carried her bag on her head so as not to be jostled by the crowd. Maria could sense that all of their baggage, like her own, was quite heavy, but no one seemed to be straining. These were strong, sturdy, and excited people. They spoke Italian and dozens of other languages Maria could not identify but their words were few and delivered in hushed undertones, except for, here or there, a mother who urged a bewildered looking child to stay close by.
The throng moved almost as one, as if choreographed. They carried Maria along as they neared the great building. She looked up and saw carved eagles and bundles of fruit in the stonework. The sculpted stone face of a man with ram’s ears stared down at her from one of the archways; or was it a woman? At first, Maria decided it looked like the face of the sixteen year old Statue of Liberty with her strong jaw, squared nose, deep set eyes and pouting mouth. Then again, it made her think of Lucia and Grazie and even of her fabulous knight, Jacuvill, back in Noepoli. Maria should have felt quite alone as she neared the immigration station. But she did not mind being alone; the stones were smiling upon her. Maria could not believe she was almost there.
A man in a smart uniform and cap—official in his bearing but not frightening; he had a friendly kind of a smile, she thought—kept pointing the crowd in the proper direction—to the right—between two uprights—made of stone on which stood columns holding up a porch roof. Everything looked tidy, organized, and orderly—except for a large ladder someone had left leaning to one side of the building, as if some kind of work was still underway or some cleaning project had gone unfinished.
Soon she found that she was standing in a line, single file. In front of her stood a man a head taller than herself with a full brown beard and a trim hat. His fine overcoat and shoes were a cut above most of the other men’s. The woman Maria took to be his wife, just in front of him, was shorter than Maria, and stout in her checkered skirt that swept to the floor and a dark long-sleeved blouse with pretty buttons down the front. These looked like people of substance, importance. Marie considered her own attire and wondered how she would look to the officials, by comparison.
Maria’s clothing was lighter and of a brighter hue than the others near her. A pale colored dress, between blue and lavender made up of very small checks that showed only up close. From a distance the dress looked as if it were a solid color. There was a squared-yoke on the blouse, trimmed with some bits of lace all around, and a white apron to match her white scarf on her head. It was all of the sort of stuff that made a girl feel happy and pretty. But here and now, she felt much less substantial. She realized that the quality of the fabric was poorer than she might have wished—the ruffled edge of lace, on the bodice of her blouse, which her mother had taken so carefully from an old chest and stitched there so daintily for this very moment in Maria’s journey, looked a flimsy in this place where, depending on one word from an official, she might be sent all the way back to Italy.
Behind her were two young men with very dark faces, and short cropped hair. Darker than any of the men of the fields of home ever became after laboring long through the hot summer. One had a large metal basin, as big as a small bathtub. Whatever for? The other had a plaid woolen blanket wrapped round his neck and shoulders like a shawl. They spoke not a word, so she could form no guess where they had come from. A girl about Maria’s age stood between them, but did not seem to be with them. She was as pale as the moon and wore a dress of some heavy paisley fabric with a stiffly starched apron and a large white scarf on her head. She clutched a small valise that shone with the evidence of much polish, as did her trim leather boots. Such boots!. Marie looked down at her own feet, in cloth shoes, no sturdier than slippers. What had she been thinking, to have dressed this way?
“Move ahead, please,” a voice somewhere in front of them called loudly.
The sound startled Maria but she did not understand. No matter. The others shuffled forward, as did Maria. Further behind her she saw another couple, these looking to her mind very American indeed. The man with a short white beard, the woman in a tailored wool traveling jacket. They spoke quietly to each other but were far enough behind Maria that she could hear not a word.
“Men to the right, if you please, and women to the left.” The same voice announced. “Nothing to fear, you will catch up with one another very soon.”
There was a silhouette over two gates, one of a man and the other of a woman, the people did as they were told, going to the proper gate, men to the right and women to the left, even though most of them did not know a word of English. Yet they all knew the excitement of the journey and the future filled with hope. Maria found herself between the woman in checks and the girl with the lovely boots.
“Pergunto-me como longo ele nos tomará? I wonder how long it will take us?” the girl behind her said to her but in a tongue Maria did not understand. Maria smiled at her and slowly shook her head.
“Non so; I do not know,” she replied, meaning she did not know what the other had asked.
“Eu não sei,” the girl nodded as she answered. She looked Maria in the eyes and then she did a strange and lovely thing. She stretched out her hand, and grasped Maria’s own, giving it an almost imperceptible squeeze. Maria squeezed her hand in return. They stood waiting, hand in hand, inching forward, joined by their common experience.
“Sisters?” a matronly looking woman in uniform asked them. She asked it in several more languages. “Hermanas? Schwestern? Irmãs? Sorelle?” At last the girls understood and shook their heads, no.
“Very well,” the woman said, “step forward one at a time.” She pointed to a sign with the same instructions in many languages. One of the phrases on it was in Italian; Maria read it, let go of the hand of her new friend regretfully, and did as she was told. Up a staircase with her belongings.
A woman in a starched white uniform was next. A nurse? Doctor? Maria was giving a quick but thorough physical examination. More notes. She seemed to be in reasonably good health. No anemia. No goiters. No varicose veins. Noted. The Ellis Island inspection process continued.
Now Maria was in a huge room, 189 feet long and 102 feet wide with a 60-foot-high vaulted ceiling, with arched windows both below and high on the upper portions of the walls. It was built like a church, but instead of chapels and altars, the vast interior was filled with long benches and partitions made of white piping. A balcony ledge ran all round the upper floor of the building and here and there stood a man who watched the comings and goings of all the arrivals.
This was the Registry Room. The diagonal pattern of the red tile floor shone with the light of the big half-circle windows. Looking out through one of them, she could see the Statue of Liberty in the distance, still holding up her torch, but she looked as if she had turned away. The white tile on the walls went as high as her head. Everything gleamed and sparkled. Maria gazed up at the great chandelier, like a golden pendant with its pale alabaster globes, one huge encircled by eight smaller, so beautiful. Like a flower, an Ellis Island flower. Even overhead, the buff colored vaults of the ceiling were completely covered with a herringbone pattern shimmering tile.
As Maria admired the golden glow of the tile vaulting, she noticed one particular man at the railing high above her. His mouth moved, as if in a whisper. No one stood next to him. Was he talking to himself? She looked round the balcony. On the other side, another man stood nodding as if he had heard every word, then talked in the same way, as in a whisper. How very strange that here in America, one could converse in a whisper across such a vast room, where everything was made for order and freshness.
All around Maria were the others, arriving here in just this same way, with almost nothing but the hope for a better life. The room looked like a costume ball, with the many hued, multi-colored native costumes. Maria was among hundreds, maybe thousands of others, being asked important questions in a language that they couldn't understand. Examined for psychological and medical fitness. Maria was questioned as were they all. What were her financial resources? She showed them, produced from deep inside a hidden pocket. Ten dollars, and a train ticket to Pittsburgh? Noted down. What was her ability to find a productive life in the United States? Haltingly she explained. The official listened. Nodded. Repeated.
“You will live and work for your brother who runs a rooming house?” Maria nodded.
“The manifest says Box 137 Harmarville, Pennsylvania, correct?” Maria nodded again and it was noted down. “Are you an anarchist?" Maria shook her head. Another notation. These and so many more questions.
Maria’s papers were read and reread. They seemed to be in order. The ship's manifest or passenger list (filled out at the port of embarkation) was consulted. It contained Maria's name and her answers to numerous questions at the time of sailing. This document was read by the immigration inspectors as they cross examined Maria during the primary inspection. Time dragged on. Two, three hours. By now, long arching pools of afternoon light stretched across the red tile floor.
Throughout the long ordeal, Maria was treated courteously and respectfully. And then it was over. Maria was told she was free to begin her new life in America! After only a few short hours on Ellis Island! She was pointed toward a stairway, divided into thirds by railings.
“Take the side to the right, please,” an official pointed. Maria began to descend the stairs. Others were descending with her, to the right and left. And then, someone was told to go down the center section of the stairway. Maria heard tears and cries. She looked and saw a woman in a gorgeous Chianti colored jacket, ruffled lace at the neck, skirt of a golden hue embroidered with pink rosettes and a deep lace hem. There were the initials CT chalked on the jacket. Maria did not know it, but these stood for “Trachoma”. The woman was nearly doubled over in tears as she held out her hand to a man on the far left side of the staircase. He too, looked distraught, their arms reaching across the barrier of the railing.
These were the infamous Stairs of Separation. About two percent of the arriving immigrants were not as fortunate as Maria. Their papers were not in order or something about their health would keep them from entry in to the country. Perhaps the doctor had discerned some contagious disease that would endanger the public health. Maybe the legal inspector thought the immigrant might become a burden to society. The central lane and doorway were reserved for those who were refused entry, for reasons of health, or lack of money, or missing information.
So it was; by the time they reached the lowest step, the woman in the velvet jacket would be separated her loved one. They walked down the stairs together, with the railing between them. For now, it would be the last time they would see each other. Maria wondered if it would be or months, or forever? She felt the sting of tears in her own eyes, in sympathy for their plight. Just then, she reached the bottom of the stairs and went through the doorway and found herself being directed toward her next adventure—the trains.
When Maria arrived at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, speaking no English, she had pinned to her coat a piece of paper that had two words written on it--Pittsburgh and Harmarville. These were to show the train conductors. The hope was that she could manage to select the correct train from Ellis Island to Pittsburgh—which would get her most of the way to the end of her journey. Then, from Pittsburgh, she would take a much shorter ride up the Allegheny River Valley to the little community of Harmarville, where her brother and sister-in-law lived.
Maria showed the side of the card marked Pittsburgh to several official looking people, and they pointed her in the direction of the trains. She moved forward, along with the throngs who were moving as one into the foremost rail transportation nucleus for incoming immigrants. They had managed to pass beyond the symbolic welcome of the Statue of Liberty; they had endured the timely and confusing ordeal of being processed at Ellis Island by people they could scarcely understand.
Now these exhausted women, beleaguered men and anxious children would embark anew, on trains that would carry them into the heart of the nation.
One such train would take Maria across New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the gritty city of Pittsburgh. Her train had a section of seven cars set aside for the immigrants. It was packed full of curious people and an assortment of colorful baggage. Hundreds of them were making Pittsburgh their destination. Work was to be had there, in the mills and mines and factories. Some, like Maria, were going to meet up with family members who had gone on before them. Others were going on the glimmer of a hope that a job would be available when they arrived. Italians, Poles, Czechs, Russians and Slavs made up the majority of passengers on this particular train.
As Maria looked at her fellow passengers, she saw that the men were stocky, strong and seemed eager to set to work, to make their fortune, or at least, to provide for them and theirs in a way that would have been impossible back home. Almost universally they were dressed in black suits and more often than not wore soft caps on their heads. The women were clad demurely, in dark hued dresses with long sleeves and hems that swept the aisles, many with aprons over them, and nearly all of them wore a sciarpa, or sikmé seříznutí, a шарф or szalikiem or fular—in any language, in any color, print or cut, the head scarf, the babushka.
Many of the smaller boys were dressed in sailor suits, popular in those days, with double breasted buttons and neckerchiefs. The older boys were dressed like the men and it was not unusual that they wore ties at the necks of their shirts, like their fathers.
The girls were diminutives of the older women, in attire and demeanor. They all had baskets to bear under an arm, and many had bundles made of a bedspread or quilt to hoist and carry over both shoulders like an improvised backpack.
“Where were they all going?” Maria wondered. As well she might. Some were on their way to the coke ovens of Connellsville, where Frick’s hegemony held sway. Others were bound for the Carnegie steel mills, where tensions were running high in this era following the Homestead strike. Others were going on to places like Gary and Chicago. Some, and these were mostly the Scandinavians in the trains, were bound even farther, to farmlands in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. Maria was bound for Harmarville, which, until now, was a place utterly unknown to her except in those descriptions in her brother’s letters home.
Maria’s vision of it was a place not unlike the valley of the River Sinni she had left behind. In this she was only partially correct. What overlay the land in her familiar regions of Italy were centuries of traditions and a uniformity of culture that both enveloped and smothered the soul. In Harmarville, things were too new for that kind of tradition. The farthest back anyone would recall would be the time of Chief Guyasuta, the great leader of the Seneca’s, when the visitors of European origin met him in the 1700s.
Guyasuta had served as a scout for a young surveyor from the Virginia colony, who had been sent on a mission to Fort LeBoeuf. This surveyor, Washington by name, had enlisted the skill of Guyasuta, literally, to learn the lay of the land. It was in 1753 that the men had formed a respectful friendship as they traipsed through the woodland valleys of the great Allegheny River. This friendship was deepened when Washington and his fellow emissary Christopher Gist met with a mishap that could have ended both their mission and their lives.
Having completed their mission, Washington and Gist were returning to Virginia. While some of their native guides had insisted they wait, Major Washington insisted on travelling on in the biter cold weather. Logging 18 miles in one day, Washington was exhausted. The cold was relentless, the small streams were frozen and they could hardly get water to drink. At two in the morning they began again, and went as far as Murtheringtown, on Beaver Creek, under the same grueling conditions. The next day they traveled as far as the Allegheny River, where they built a raft. Gist's fingers became frostbitten in the process.
As they attempted to cross the Allegheny, Washington was thrown from the raft, whose pole had been hit by a mass of ice. As the story is sometimes told, it was Guyasuta who fished him out of the frigid water, or variously, gave aid to the men when they abandoned the raft and landed on Wainwright’s Island. It was December 29, 1753. Although she could not know it, Maria was headed for a place, just slightly upriver from the spot where Washington nearly drowned.
A squatter named Daniel Sweeney, considered the first setter of Harmarville, arrived in 1794. He tended his fields and lived in a rudimentary blockhouse near the Indian town at Harmarville. In 1798 he sold his claim to a man named Brewster, who in 1835 sold it to the Barton family who still owned the portion of the land called Barton’s Island. Other early settlers were named Enoch, Davis and Pillow.
And then there were the Dennys, whose farm encompassed much of Harmarville. Old General Ebenezer Denny had been a hero of the Revolution and the first mayor of Pittsburgh. His son Harmar Denny, for whom Harmar Township and Harmarville were named, had served as a US congressman.
The Dennys had operated a grist and sawmill on their place, but it had long since crumbled with age and disappeared from memory. The little Presbyterian Church they had helped to establish was still there, as were farm fields. But the Harmar Station and the nearby Harmar Coal Mine were the main features of interest to any new arrival from Europe. There along Guys Run, which had been named for Chief Guyasuta, could be found the company houses of the Harmar mine, and the mine itself.
Company housing was both the bane and the blessing of the mill or mine worker. On the one hand, company housing provided a place that was reasonably new, near the mine or mill, for the worker and his family to live. Some company housing truly was “model housing” and provide the latest in sanitation and cleanliness. However, some unscrupulous owners took advantage of workers, charging them more than what they would have to pay elsewhere for less in the way of comfort and cleanliness.
Better known examples of company housing included the town of Pullman Illinois where the homes of the 1880s provided running water, gas and garbage disposal. The company exercised complete control of their housing. Because they owned it, they set the rent and they screened and evicted tenants. With coal companies, "patch towns" sometimes complete with houses, schools, and churches, were built as close to the mine as possible. Then, the rents, as well as the cost of items from the company store were deducted from the miner’s pay. Often, as the song said, the miners owed their souls to the company store. Another coal song put it this way:
"Pick! Pick! Pick!
In the tunnel's endless gloom,
And every blow of our strong right arm
But helps to carve our tomb.”
The normal pattern was for mine companies to built better homes for supervisors and cheaper ones for the workers.
Some workers—and some would say the smart workers—found alternatives to company housing. These alternate choices consisted chiefly of renting a non-company home; the cost of doing this meant having three generations of extended family, or unrelated people, sharing in the cost. The other choice was becoming a boarder in a boarding house, but this was possible only if one were male and single.
Maria’s brother and his wife ran a big boarding house in Harmarville, where single male miners could live, if not in privacy, at least at some small remove from the omnipresent mine hierarchy. When they were not at their grueling subterranean work, they had a bed, and board and perhaps glimpse some sunshine and experience some quiet joy.
Maria had read about the boarding house in her brother's letters home. She knew from what he had told her that the house was not new by any stretch of the imagination, but rather a red brick building that had sat along the Freeport Road for more than a half century. The place had been built solidly enough but over the years had seen so many alterations that no one could quite describe what period or style it exemplified. The main unchanging features of the house were the crow-step gable ends which made the house look vaguely Dutch in inspiration, and stood out in contrast to the lower, less ambitious company row houses that stood near by it. All of them were perched on the edge of the north bank of the Allegheny River across from the town of Oakmont. They had been built close by the site where Jonathan Hulton and his family had run a ferry service for years, one of the few places one could cross the broad river in Allegheny County.
Eight - Along the Allegheny
The card in her hand was Maria’s only guide to her future. On the one side, Pittsburgh on the other Harmarville. She managed to sleep for a portion of the train ride westward; when she awoke she was in Pennsylvania. The train made its way through the mountains of the Allegheny and past the odd sounding names of the towns. At every stop, the place name would ring out. Johnstown. Altoona.
There was a stir of excitement in the air when they went round the “Horseshoe Bend” a pair of words that were spoken aloud, often enough before they got there, that Maria knew something unusual was about to happen. Indeed, it did, as the long train made its way round the engineering wonder and both the big engine out in front and the caboose at the back of the train could be seen out her window. Eventually, the train came into the station, a huge building with impressive spaces and lots of people hurrying as if they did this every day. The impression Maria had of the place was dark and gritty. The clothes the people wore were also dark and gritty, whether the people looked poor or prosperous. It seemed as if they wanted to somehow blend into the sooty air all around them. But Maria did not have time to linger over the scene. The other side of her card was beckoning. So she found someone in uniform, showed him the word “Harmarville” and gave him a questioning look.
“This way,” the man said. He was stern looking but even so, acted in a way that made Maria feel as if she could trust him. He walked down one long platform and then took her to another, amid the steam and clanking sounds and the rushing, gray and black and dark brown garbed people, the trunks and suitcases, the frantic activity. Maria hurried to keep up with him. He led her to a place with a few benches, indicated to her to sit down, and then took out his watch.
“Stay here till this time,” he said, first gesturing to the bench, and then pointing to the watch. He moved the hands, one hour, two hours and a half. Then he pointed to a clock suspended from a wall nearby. “Understand?” Maria nodded.
“Okay, then you get on the train over there,” he pointed to the nearest platform. “Do you understand?”
Maria nodded, indicated with her hand, one finger, second finger, half a finger and then pointed to the platform.
“Yes! Good! Right!” the man said. “You are going to do just fine. Good luck!” And with that he gave a sort of a nod, and was off to other duties.
Maria whiled away the two hours by watching the people who came and went. At one point the train on the platform where her train would eventually appear departed. A big of a pang in her heart made her wonder if she had missed what should have been, in fact, her train. But the man had been so clear and so kind. She tried to shake away her own doubts. People came and went and she strained to her some word or two in her own language but she could not, everyone was speaking English, or so it sounded to her. A mother nearby dandled a small girl on her knee, but they soon stood and greeted a fine looking man who hugged the woman and hoisted the child on his shoulders and off they went.
The hours passed and then about fifteen minutes before she was to board it, the next train arrived. Maria watched the people getting off. No one walked slowly, they all hurried along.
“This is a place of hurry and purpose,” she said to herself. “I will have to be like this too.”
As the appointed hour drew nearer, she saw people making their way to the train. So Maria gathered up her belongings and went toward it as well. She found a uniformed man near where they were boarding, and showed him the card: “Harmarville”. She gave him a questioning look.
“Yes,” the man nodded, “hop aboard.” As she climbed up the steps into the train car, some light fell through the big glass enclosure of the train shed and through even the windows opposite in the car itself and for a moment—an instant only—the intense brightness penetrated the surrounding gloom. It seemed like a good omen to Maria, as the ray of light fell upon her.
She found a seat and settled in. The car was not crowded. Nor would it fill much more before it left the station, with not much of a warning. Again, Maria felt a pang of concern—was she on the right train? Too late now to know for certain.
The train shed was so long that it seemed they would never get on their way in earnest, but they did. There was more sunshine, outside. In fact the light and the heat were stronger than she had expected when she had been waiting in the station. The train moved out of the city at a slow pace, and because the main part of the city was behind her, Maria did not see the place where the tall buildings stood in a cluster by The Point, where the Allegheny and Monongahela converged to form the Ohio River.
The train was going through a down-at-the-heels part of the city, where all of the buildings looked as if they had been made of some tar-like substance. Streaked with soot and grime, they looked tawdry in the bright sunlight.
Before long the train crossed the river—the Allegheny—and was on its north bank. Being a local, the train came to the first of many stops.
“Millvale!” the conductor called out as he walked through the car. Maria saw factories and smoke stacks and the dark gray river and steep hillsides with houses perched up and down them. Here and there were churches, each one very different from the other, with oddly shaped domes and towers. After a short stop, the train continued on.
“Sharpsburg!” the conductor called as the train inched past an impressive cathedral, or so it seemed, and into another district of warehouses and factories. There was not much to admire out of the window. Again, the train moved onward.
“Aspinwall!” the conductor cried. Here, too, the place looked dismal in the sunlight, but perhaps less so than the places they had passed up till now. The train started up again, and before long was passing two very grand looking buildings near the water’s edge, with huge arched windows—both made of pale yellow brick and trimmed with stone. Other than the churches, these were the first places of any claim to distinction Maria had seen.
Soon the landscape changed. The train was skirting a small hamlet, but not stopping there. Maria saw a sign that read “Hoboken” and looked down at the card she still clutched in her hand. No, they both began with “H” but the words were quite different. The train was following the Allegheny River bank, and bent to the left as it drew into a narrow space between the water on her right and high precipitous cliffs on her left. This was an odd landscape, with rocky outcroppings and some indication that rocks had fallen down on to the track and had been pushed aside from time to time. Maria looked up at the cliffs and prayed that none of the huge boulders would suddenly break free and come careening down upon the train, which seemed very small in comparison. The train chugged onward.
Maria could see a town across the river, clustered between the big hills over there and amid the trees. They passed the backs of a long row of identical narrow brick houses, pushed together like an accordion’s bellows. There was washing hanging out and people were going about there household tasks as indifferent to the passing train as if it had not been there. The sheer cliffs gave way, and as they did Maria saw a group of large black buildings, more like overgrown sheds, and high in the air, what looked like a rickety train track that angled upward to a spindly tower. She wondered, as the train continued onward what in the world it could possibly be.
Now, the land opened up. On her right, there was an island in the river, with many trees and Maria could see small hovels, houses perhaps but they looked as if they were made of some flimsy stuff. There were clothes drying on lines near some of these. She could see children running and dogs at their heels.
On her left, the hills were far back, now and beyond the road that paralleled the train tracks was a broad field in which men were busily at work, tending, hoeing, what looked to be vegetable crops. It made Maria think of her father and the men of her village back home, and she felt the tears as then fell involuntarily down her cheeks. Maria sighed as she saw the men, bent over their work in the hot sunshine. The train had slowed and then stopped and was beginning to move forward once more.
Maria could not take her eyes off this scene. This little space of flat land between the distant hills and the river. The place was not very large but compared to the compressed atmosphere of the higher, towering cliffs and hills that she had seen so far, it seemed a relief to see more land and sky.
Then, the scene changed once more, as the train squeezed past a point where yet another high cliff formed an almost impassable barrier between itself and the river. It was as if the train itself had to narrow down to fit through. So, this little place where the vegetable fields grew, thought Maria, is guarded on each side by high cliffs—and surrounded by a natural amphitheater of hills. It seemed to Maria a place apart from the crowd and noise of the cities and towns she had seen so far in the valley of the Allegheny.
But the place was now behind her and again she was traveling through a kind of warehouse and factory district. Theses buildings were placed further apart and there were only here and there houses on the far side of the road. The conductor came through the train and shouted out, “Cheswick!” and then stopped by Maria’s seat.
“Why didn’t you get off the train at Harmarville?” the conductor said to her. Maria blinked, not knowing what he was saying except that the one word sounded right, sounded like the place written on her card. She shrugged, and shook her head.
“Back there!” the man pointed, “Harmarville. We passed it at the last stop. Why didn’t you get off the train?”
“Harmarville?” Maria repeated.
“That way!” the conductor pointed again. “Back that way!” The train by now was slowing down and coming to the next small station. Through repeated words and gestures the conductor made it plain to Maria that she had gone too far. He gathered up her belongings, and indicated to her that she had to leave the train. Once she followed him and did as he directed, he pointed back toward the valley of the vegetable gardens.
“You will have to walk, back, now,” the conductor told her, making a little sign like a person's walking with the fingers of his right hand. “Walk. Back. There.”
“All aboard!” he then yelled much louder and with that the train lurched forward, leaving Maria on the small platform under the sign that read “Cheswick.”
Maria stood on the platform until the train disappeared. Then she picked up her things and began to slowly make her way along the road back in the direction from which she had so recently come. She walked slowly, along the dusty road, in the mid-afternoon heat, and looked about her at what was to be seen. There was an old stone building nearby and not far away she could see a small church.
Maria did not know it, but the land she walked past was part of the Borland farm, from which the Borland family sold vegetables down river to Pittsburgh. Over toward the river, she could see some fine looking houses, with big porches that stood tall amid shade trees. They suggested an era recently passed, before the dust and noise of the trains had impinged on the placid riverside setting.
There were some industrial buildings. One had the words “Penwick Distillery” painted on its side. It was a large brick building. There were some smaller factories, a few scattered houses, and a fair amount of wagon traffic going to and fro on the road she followed. The hills rose to the right of her, beyond the farms and houses. More hills rose to the left of her, on the far side of the riverbank.
Maria took it all in, but her main concern was finding her way back to the place where, by now, she should have been. As she continued along, several of the men who were working in the nearest field called out to her. Maria had no idea what they were saying at first, but then she noticed they were speaking not English, but Italian.
"Chi la sono la giovane donna? E dove lei va"? “Who are you young lady? And where are you going?”
Maria’s first instinct was to ignore the men and keep on walking. But the day was hot and her burden was heavy and they did not seem to be ruffians. Their questions to her were posed respectfully enough.
“I need to find out where I am and how I can get to the home of my brother,” thought Maria. So she turned to them and told her a shortened version of her travels. So she told them, “I am from Neopoli and have come to live with my brother and his wife in Harmarville.”
One of the men who was a bit younger than the rest answered, “Did you walk all the way?” He and Maria both laughed and so did the men with them.
Maria shook her head. “I got off the train at the wrong place,” was her eventual reply. One of the other men, about Maria’s father’s age then said, “Sono venuto anche da Neopoli; I also come from Neopoli.”
Soon they learned that they knew of each other’s families and the men assured her that they would take her to her brother’s house as soon as their work ended. They pressed her to wait with them, showing her a place where a few trees stood at a corner of the field. There, in the shade, they gave her cold spring water to drink and an apple to eat.
The men whistled or sang as they continued their work. These were songs of home. Maria recognized them and with some, she sang along in her head and in her heart. The cool shade, the cold water, the crisp apple, the comforting songs, all combined to create a dream like atmosphere. If she closed her eyes, Maria thought she could almost see the familiar sights of home, to go along with the familiar songs of home. She closed her eyes. She traced the outlines of far away hills and fields.
And before long, Maria was asleep.
“Hello, Maria!” a voice softly called to her. Maria stirred. Then opened her eyes. Standing before her was, the young man who had first asked if she had walked all the way from Neopoli. “While we have been working, you have been sleeping!” He said, and then laughed heartily.
“Yes.” Maria answered, “but my heart was awake.”
"How can your heart be awake while the rest of you is asleep?” he chided gently. “You are asleep or you are awake, one or the other, but not both.”
“You are probably right,” Maria answered. “But many a time my foot has fallen asleep while the rest of me is awake. Why shouldn’t it be the other way around. Why can’t a person be asleep, but her heart is still awake?”
“You have funny ideas but I like thinking about them,” the young man held out a hand to Maria. “Here, let me help you up from there. We are about to leave the field and head for home. You may come along with us. I will carry your things, and you will find the going is a lot easier that way.”
Maria accepted the hand and was soon on her feet. The other men called to them, “Come on, let’s go! See, it is getting late.”
They all started back toward Harmarville, and as they went they talked among themselves. The young man introduced himself as Giovanni Contadino, whose family came from Sinise. Two of the other men were his relatives, cousins Bruno Contadino and Vince Contadino—they too had family back in the old country, as they called it.
“We write to them and send money, and they write back and say send more,” said Bruno and they all laughed.
“It is better here than there,” said Vince, “but only if we stick together.”
The oldest of the group, a man in his forties at least, was Francesco Basso, who nodded in agreement and said, “The people around here who are not from Italy don’t understand us. That is alright as long as we understand one another.”
“Plus we do the work no one else wants to do,” said Vince. “Like working in the mines. And working in the mills.”
“But you are working in the fields, like at home,” said Maria.
“Yes, the Borlands are good people, and they figured out pretty fast that we understood about growing vegetables—it has worked out better for us than we thought it would,” Giovanni explained. “No dark hole in the ground for us. No fiery furnace for us. We are out in the open air and can see the sky.”
“And no organizers and anarchists to stir the pot,” said Francesco.
Maria looked at him, puzzled.
“They come in from outside, and make all kinds of trouble, and give the rest of us a bad name,” Giovanni said. “Like that fellow Berkman, who took a crack at old Frick in his office. He says he is for the working man to have things better. But he is just out for himself, and things got worse once he did that.”
“But as long as we do good work and let our employers know we are glad to be doing it,” said Francesco, “it is almost as good as at home.”
“Your brother is a smart one, too,” said Giovanni. “He works in the mine but he also has the boarding house. So the people come and live there and pay him and he doesn’t have to give everything he has to the big bosses, or the company store.”
They had by this time passed the narrow place Maria had noticed on the train, and were in the large flat bottom land around that was given over to gardens. It was the place that Maria had admired from the train. Up close it was every bit as special as from the train windows.
"Is this part of the Borland farm, as well?” she asked.
“No,” said Giovanni, “This part belongs to the Armstrong family and they let us grow our own crops and then give them some as rent and keep some for our own use or to sell. Another good family.”
“And you all have gardens here?” Maria asked.
“Yes and lots of the miners do, too,” Vince said.
“And what’s that, way over there?” Maria asked, pointing to the black shed-like buildings with the angled track that attached to the spindly tower.
“The mine, of course,” said Francesco. “That is the Harmar Mine. Where they mine the coal. They bring it up in small cars like train cars but not so big. That thing is the coal tipple.”
"Coal tipple," Maria repeated. Maria thought the word sounded odd but she filed it away. So many new things to learn. They walked along and came to a bridge over a small stream. Then up a small rise and the men announced, “Here you are, Maria; your new home!”
They took off their hats and gave a sort of courtly bow. As they were doing that, a face appeared at the window and a voice called out, “You there, do you have nothing better to do than pose in the streets? Move along! Muoversi Avanti! Move along!”
The men laughed and then Francesco called out, “Marigia, close your mouth and open your eyes! Don’t you know your own family?”
“Family? Bah!” came the reply from the window, “What good for nothings you farmers are! What are you talking about?”
“Here is Maria Fucci, sister of your husband Giacomo, all the way from Neopoli,” sang out Giovanni. “We have brought her to you.”
A great deal of fussing noises were heard from inside the house, snatches of words that sounded like “buono per niente!” fell upon their ears, though none of them were clear enough to be sure of, which Maria felt sure was a good thing. Then the door was thrown open abruptly, and Marigia Fucci emerged, wearing a faded housedress and worn apron, sturdy shoes and her hair tied up with some small piece of cloth.
“'Meglio tardi che mai.' Better late than never. Don’t stand there in the street, like some poor orphan, Maria, come inside at once!” Marigia said, reaching out a hand for Maria and pulling her through the doorway. The men looked at one another and shrugged and then followed along behind, with Maria’s baggage.
“Wipe your feet! Pulire i suoi piedi!” Marigia cried out. “This floor has just been washed. I need no garden soil in my house!” The men did more than that, taking off their boots and leaving them beside the threshold. Marigia stared at their bare, dirty feet and made a sound like the ticking of a clock, shook her head till the rag holding up her hair went flopping to and fro like rabbits' ears.
“How did you come to be with these dull farmers?” Marigia asked Maria. The story of the missed station was soon told and then—and only then—did Marigia offer the men some cold water and tell Maria to sit down at the kitchen table. The men accepted the water, drank it and then moved toward the door as if to leave.
“I must thank you—all of you—for the help you have given me in finding my way.” Said Maria, "And for your kind welcome to me, also. You are my first new friends in America.”
The men all smiled sheepishly, and having said that she was more than welcome, made their departure, pulling on their boots outside on the front stoop.
Once the men had gone, Marigia said, “Here, Maria, stand up and let me look at you.” Maria who was as dead tired as she had ever been in her life, obeyed nonetheless and rose to her feet.
“Turn around,” Marigia instructed. “Yes. Good. Sit down.”
Maria again did as she was bidden.
“You are a good strong girl,” Marigia announced. “A bit small for your age but with hard work and time that will improve I have no doubt. 'Chi la dura la vince.' 'He who perseveres wins at last.' It is good that you left Italy and came here. 'L'Italia farà da sé.' 'Italy will take care of itself.' There, I do not think your prospects would have been very bright. But in this place all is new and there is much to do. I think you will do well here.”
This little speech seemed fine in its way to Maria but it was not exactly what one might call being welcomed with open arms, at least to her mind.
“Here,” said Marigia, “I will show you the place. Come along!” And with that they embarked on a tour of the boarding house, which had a confusing arrangement of rooms, some large and some small, some not really rooms at all with no windows, but all of them had beds galore, and in many of them, men were sleeping.
“These are the ones who work nights,” Marigia said in a loud whisper. “They sleep in the day. If they pay for their bed for all the time then they have it for all the time but if they pay less then they share it with the men who work in the day, and sleep in the night. It is a good arrangement since it saves them money and it makes us more.”
“You don’t charge the same for one man who has his own bed and two men who share a bed?” Maria inquired.
“No that would not get us anywhere,” Marigia answered. “I can see you have no head for business. We charge the men who share the beds half and half of that, on top. So with one bed we get the same as if two and a half men were sleeping in it, not two.”
“Oh. I see. And do you have any half-men here?” Maria asked, picturing in her mind’s eye a horribly wounded man who had lost both of his legs.
“Don’t be silly, child!” Marigia scolded. “Whatever put such an idea in your head? Half-men! You have let your travels go to your brain! Where do you see half-men, I ask you!”
They had gone up one stairway and down another and found themselves in the back of the same hallway that gave on to the front door.
"Over here," said Marigia, "is the parlor. Not to be used except for reading the papers and quiet conversation. If any of the men have visitors they must not go upstairs but talk here. Not many of them have visitors. And over here," she said with a sweep of the arm, "is the dining room. The men sit where they are told. The ones who pay the most have the best seats, and then the next and so on. If they are up on their rent then they get the best seats, that is. If not it is below the salt, down there at the other end where they have to wait till the food is passed to them. I leave it to the men to sort out any difficulties if they are not pleased when the platters and bowls reach the foot of the table.”
“Why?” said Maria.
“It is safer that way, plus we live in a democracy, where every man must make his own way.”
“And where do you and my brother sit at meals, then?” Maria asked.
“Not in here. We sit at the table in the kitchen. It is our own little sanctuary of peace away from the noise and fuss of this room. The men know they are not permitted in the kitchen, no matter what. A strict house rule.”
The two women returned to the kitchen and sat down at that very table. While they were still speaking there came a sort of pounding sound in the distance. Then it got louder and louder. The large house began to vibrate, to actually move as the sound got stronger. It seemed as if some sort of cataclysmic disaster was about to befall the women seated there in the kitchen. What could it be? An earthquake? A tornado? The end of the world?
Then Maria heard a shrill whistle.
“It is only a train,” Marigia shrugged, as the noise reached its greatest intensity. Indeed, it was one of sixteen trains that passed close by the back of the boarding house every day but Sunday when there were only four trains. The rail line sat somewhat lower than the house, along the Allegheny. But even so it was not much more than thirty feet from where the women were.
Maria sensed the table and floor and her chair shaking. Then the old building swayed a bit, the tumblers on the shelves shook and sounded like small bells ringing, the pots and pans on the rack overhead rattled and clanked. Then, more whistling as the sound began to subside. The train continued on its way. The rattling and tinkling and pounding and shaking grew less and less. Maria wondered how the men who slept in the day slept through such a racket. What an unfortunate place to have a room in which one tried to get some rest. The thought of it made Maria wonder why her brother and sister-in-law had chosen such a spot for their boarding house business. It would certainly take her some getting used to.
Immediately, another noise came, another kind of pounding or stomping, and then a door to the back of the house flew open and in came none other than her brother,
“So Maria you are here at last!” Giacomo announced. “We almost gave up hope of ever seeing you. But here you are a sight for sore eyes. And just arrived from the look of it.”
Maria said, “Not just arrived, Giacomo. Marigia has been showing me the house.”
“Good, good,” answered Giacomo, “and what do you think of it?”
“It is very large and filled with lots of boarders,” Maria said.
“Yes, too large for one person to care for; that is why you have come to live with us and help to keep up the place,” interjected Marigia.
Maria nodded but her eyes flashed in Marigia’s direction. “Yes,” Maria said quietly, “I have come to make a new life in a new world.”
Giacomo looked from the wife to the sister and back again. This was going to be a challenge to be sure, having two women in one house. It was like having two cats and one mouse or two dogs and one bone. At that very moment Giacomo decided that he was going to leave the whole situation alone. Let Marigia handle it. No need for him to become entwined in the middle of the battle of wills that was sure to emerge before long.
"So what news do you have of the old home place?" Giacomo asked Maria, thinking that a change of subject might be in order. Marie told Giacomo about their parents and how things were when she had left them. Then she added, “I will want to write to them soon; since I promised that I would do so.”
“I am sure they will want to know you arrived all in one piece,” Giacomo said.
“Yes, but that can wait. Now we have work to do if there is going to be supper for these men,” said Marigia. “Maria, put on an apron and let’s get busy!”
That is exactly what Maria did and for the next several hours the time was spent in cooking and setting the table and serving the food and cleaning up afterward.
The men were a noisy and fast-taking bunch. On this first night the men were all sort of a blur to Maria, and the work was so demanding that she did not even begin to put together the names and the faces. But some of them did make an impression on her for good or bad.
There was Basilio Bello, certainly the most handsome of the men at the table, with dark wavy hair and a big moustache, who sort of lorded it over the rest of them, as a natural born leader. There was a grizzled older fellow named Aldo Saggiolingua who said very little but when he did speak it was as if everyone strained in to hear what his wise tongue had to say. More than once a bold fellow called Cesare Civetta tried to flirt with Maria, and at one point said to the entire group, “Well our fortune has improved now that we have Maria to look at instead of Marigia!”
All of them laughed and nodded their heads, which made Maria blush and hope that Marigia had not heard what he said as she retreated to the kitchen.
“What’s all that noise about?” Marigia asked Maria with a stern look.
“Somebody made a joke and they were all laughing,” Maria replied, which was as much of the truth as she felt she could tell.
“Not a rude joke, I hope?” Marigia said. “I will not have crude language in the house! I have strict rules about it!”
“No it was very tame,” said Maria, who then returned to the dining room with more of the meal.
“Ah here is our angle of mercy back to take good care of us!” said a tough looking fellow called Ilario Forte, who nonetheless had kindly eyes.
“Hooray!” they all shouted. Then stopped abruptly when they saw Marigia at the door from the kitchen, her arms akimbo, her brow furrowed.
“You are nothing but a bunch of hooligans!” Marigia said. “If you keep up like this Maria will stay in the kitchen and I will serve the meal!”
“Lord have mercy upon us,” said Leone Dellaminiera under his breath.
“Yes, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” said Maso Istigatore. “If she keeps Maria holed up in the kitchen there will be trouble to pay from me!”
“And me,” said Ruvino Avventato, who stood up on his char and held up his knife like he was posing for the Statue of Liberty. "I will set her free from the dragon in the dungeon!” He pointed the knife in the direction of Marigia who had by this time retreated to her domain.
“Stop being so foolhardy!” Basillo chided him. “Or we will feed you to the river gods. Do you want to bring down the wrath of our landlady upon us?”
Ruvino climbed down from his chair quickly, with a sheepish look on his face.
Maria had witnessed it all and was still blushing terribly.
“Don’t worry little one,” Ilario whispered to her. “They will settle down now. I will have a talk with them when you are in the kitchen. I know they will listen because you bring a bit of joy into this drab place.”
It was late into the evening before Marigia decreed that the work was finished.
And then it was time for bed. Maria realized that Marigia and Giacomo had never told her where she was to sleep. And sometime during the evening, her things had disappeared from where the farmers had left them. That corner of the kitchen was empty. Maria was suddenly tired and frustrated and a bit angry.
“What happened to my things?” Maria asked her brother, who was seated in a corner of the kitchen smoking a pipe.
“In your room,” Giacomo answered, with a kind of a sideways nod, indicating a door through which Maria had not yet passed.
“This way?” she asked him.
“Yes, just there,” he said, not stirring from his place.
Maria went through the doorway to find herself in a kind of a storeroom. There were large containers of staples, bins of potatoes, and the like and over in one corner, a narrow bed, a wooden chair, and a washstand. The corner was tidy. The bed had a quilt on it and a pillow. But it was one small corner of a small room that most people would call a pantry or larder.
There was only one small window, but the darkness outside was complete. Maria noticed that her baggage was also in the room, as Giacomo had indicated.
Maria felt hopelessness taking hold of her, all at once. She sat down on the bed, completely exhausted.
“Maria!” she heard Marigia call, and then her sister-in-law came into the room. “Here you are. I wondered what happened to you. I think you made a fair start of things today but of course once you get to know the routine you will be quicker about everything. You had better get some sleep and be ready when I ring the bell at 5:30 so you can help with the breakfast.” With that, Marigia closed the door, plunging the room into complete darkness.
Maria let her eyes become accustomed to the dark and then was able to move about as she needed in order to take off her clothes and put on her nightgown. She rummaged to find something that would help her relax and found at last the small package that the Padrone had handed to her on their last visit together. She thought of him and his kindness and wondered if perhaps she had made a mistake coming to America. Maria longed to open the gift, but in this darkness, what good would it do? She would have to wait till morning. She thought of Lucia and Grazie and longed to see their kindly, calm faces. She composed the image of them in her minds eye. This was beginning to comfort her but then she thought of Tanio and the spring and his poetry and the tears began to fall down her cheek.
And so ended Maria’s first day in her new home along the Allegheny River.
There was a stir of excitement in the air when they went round the “Horseshoe Bend” a pair of words that were spoken aloud, often enough before they got there, that Maria knew something unusual was about to happen. Indeed, it did, as the long train made its way round the engineering wonder and both the big engine out in front and the caboose at the back of the train could be seen out her window. Eventually, the train came into the station, a huge building with impressive spaces and lots of people hurrying as if they did this every day. The impression Maria had of the place was dark and gritty. The clothes the people wore were also dark and gritty, whether the people looked poor or prosperous. It seemed as if they wanted to somehow blend into the sooty air all around them. But Maria did not have time to linger over the scene. The other side of her card was beckoning. So she found someone in uniform, showed him the word “Harmarville” and gave him a questioning look.
“This way,” the man said. He was stern looking but even so, acted in a way that made Maria feel as if she could trust him. He walked down one long platform and then took her to another, amid the steam and clanking sounds and the rushing, gray and black and dark brown garbed people, the trunks and suitcases, the frantic activity. Maria hurried to keep up with him. He led her to a place with a few benches, indicated to her to sit down, and then took out his watch.
“Stay here till this time,” he said, first gesturing to the bench, and then pointing to the watch. He moved the hands, one hour, two hours and a half. Then he pointed to a clock suspended from a wall nearby. “Understand?” Maria nodded.
“Okay, then you get on the train over there,” he pointed to the nearest platform. “Do you understand?”
Maria nodded, indicated with her hand, one finger, second finger, half a finger and then pointed to the platform.
“Yes! Good! Right!” the man said. “You are going to do just fine. Good luck!” And with that he gave a sort of a nod, and was off to other duties.
Maria whiled away the two hours by watching the people who came and went. At one point the train on the platform where her train would eventually appear departed. A big of a pang in her heart made her wonder if she had missed what should have been, in fact, her train. But the man had been so clear and so kind. She tried to shake away her own doubts. People came and went and she strained to her some word or two in her own language but she could not, everyone was speaking English, or so it sounded to her. A mother nearby dandled a small girl on her knee, but they soon stood and greeted a fine looking man who hugged the woman and hoisted the child on his shoulders and off they went.
The hours passed and then about fifteen minutes before she was to board it, the next train arrived. Maria watched the people getting off. No one walked slowly, they all hurried along.
“This is a place of hurry and purpose,” she said to herself. “I will have to be like this too.”
As the appointed hour drew nearer, she saw people making their way to the train. So Maria gathered up her belongings and went toward it as well. She found a uniformed man near where they were boarding, and showed him the card: “Harmarville”. She gave him a questioning look.
“Yes,” the man nodded, “hop aboard.” As she climbed up the steps into the train car, some light fell through the big glass enclosure of the train shed and through even the windows opposite in the car itself and for a moment—an instant only—the intense brightness penetrated the surrounding gloom. It seemed like a good omen to Maria, as the ray of light fell upon her.
She found a seat and settled in. The car was not crowded. Nor would it fill much more before it left the station, with not much of a warning. Again, Maria felt a pang of concern—was she on the right train? Too late now to know for certain.
The train shed was so long that it seemed they would never get on their way in earnest, but they did. There was more sunshine, outside. In fact the light and the heat were stronger than she had expected when she had been waiting in the station. The train moved out of the city at a slow pace, and because the main part of the city was behind her, Maria did not see the place where the tall buildings stood in a cluster by The Point, where the Allegheny and Monongahela converged to form the Ohio River.
The train was going through a down-at-the-heels part of the city, where all of the buildings looked as if they had been made of some tar-like substance. Streaked with soot and grime, they looked tawdry in the bright sunlight.
Before long the train crossed the river—the Allegheny—and was on its north bank. Being a local, the train came to the first of many stops.
“Millvale!” the conductor called out as he walked through the car. Maria saw factories and smoke stacks and the dark gray river and steep hillsides with houses perched up and down them. Here and there were churches, each one very different from the other, with oddly shaped domes and towers. After a short stop, the train continued on.
“Sharpsburg!” the conductor called as the train inched past an impressive cathedral, or so it seemed, and into another district of warehouses and factories. There was not much to admire out of the window. Again, the train moved onward.
“Aspinwall!” the conductor cried. Here, too, the place looked dismal in the sunlight, but perhaps less so than the places they had passed up till now. The train started up again, and before long was passing two very grand looking buildings near the water’s edge, with huge arched windows—both made of pale yellow brick and trimmed with stone. Other than the churches, these were the first places of any claim to distinction Maria had seen.
Soon the landscape changed. The train was skirting a small hamlet, but not stopping there. Maria saw a sign that read “Hoboken” and looked down at the card she still clutched in her hand. No, they both began with “H” but the words were quite different. The train was following the Allegheny River bank, and bent to the left as it drew into a narrow space between the water on her right and high precipitous cliffs on her left. This was an odd landscape, with rocky outcroppings and some indication that rocks had fallen down on to the track and had been pushed aside from time to time. Maria looked up at the cliffs and prayed that none of the huge boulders would suddenly break free and come careening down upon the train, which seemed very small in comparison. The train chugged onward.
Maria could see a town across the river, clustered between the big hills over there and amid the trees. They passed the backs of a long row of identical narrow brick houses, pushed together like an accordion’s bellows. There was washing hanging out and people were going about there household tasks as indifferent to the passing train as if it had not been there. The sheer cliffs gave way, and as they did Maria saw a group of large black buildings, more like overgrown sheds, and high in the air, what looked like a rickety train track that angled upward to a spindly tower. She wondered, as the train continued onward what in the world it could possibly be.
Now, the land opened up. On her right, there was an island in the river, with many trees and Maria could see small hovels, houses perhaps but they looked as if they were made of some flimsy stuff. There were clothes drying on lines near some of these. She could see children running and dogs at their heels.
On her left, the hills were far back, now and beyond the road that paralleled the train tracks was a broad field in which men were busily at work, tending, hoeing, what looked to be vegetable crops. It made Maria think of her father and the men of her village back home, and she felt the tears as then fell involuntarily down her cheeks. Maria sighed as she saw the men, bent over their work in the hot sunshine. The train had slowed and then stopped and was beginning to move forward once more.
Maria could not take her eyes off this scene. This little space of flat land between the distant hills and the river. The place was not very large but compared to the compressed atmosphere of the higher, towering cliffs and hills that she had seen so far, it seemed a relief to see more land and sky.
Then, the scene changed once more, as the train squeezed past a point where yet another high cliff formed an almost impassable barrier between itself and the river. It was as if the train itself had to narrow down to fit through. So, this little place where the vegetable fields grew, thought Maria, is guarded on each side by high cliffs—and surrounded by a natural amphitheater of hills. It seemed to Maria a place apart from the crowd and noise of the cities and towns she had seen so far in the valley of the Allegheny.
But the place was now behind her and again she was traveling through a kind of warehouse and factory district. Theses buildings were placed further apart and there were only here and there houses on the far side of the road. The conductor came through the train and shouted out, “Cheswick!” and then stopped by Maria’s seat.
“Why didn’t you get off the train at Harmarville?” the conductor said to her. Maria blinked, not knowing what he was saying except that the one word sounded right, sounded like the place written on her card. She shrugged, and shook her head.
“Back there!” the man pointed, “Harmarville. We passed it at the last stop. Why didn’t you get off the train?”
“Harmarville?” Maria repeated.
“That way!” the conductor pointed again. “Back that way!” The train by now was slowing down and coming to the next small station. Through repeated words and gestures the conductor made it plain to Maria that she had gone too far. He gathered up her belongings, and indicated to her that she had to leave the train. Once she followed him and did as he directed, he pointed back toward the valley of the vegetable gardens.
“You will have to walk, back, now,” the conductor told her, making a little sign like a person's walking with the fingers of his right hand. “Walk. Back. There.”
“All aboard!” he then yelled much louder and with that the train lurched forward, leaving Maria on the small platform under the sign that read “Cheswick.”
Maria stood on the platform until the train disappeared. Then she picked up her things and began to slowly make her way along the road back in the direction from which she had so recently come. She walked slowly, along the dusty road, in the mid-afternoon heat, and looked about her at what was to be seen. There was an old stone building nearby and not far away she could see a small church.
Maria did not know it, but the land she walked past was part of the Borland farm, from which the Borland family sold vegetables down river to Pittsburgh. Over toward the river, she could see some fine looking houses, with big porches that stood tall amid shade trees. They suggested an era recently passed, before the dust and noise of the trains had impinged on the placid riverside setting.
There were some industrial buildings. One had the words “Penwick Distillery” painted on its side. It was a large brick building. There were some smaller factories, a few scattered houses, and a fair amount of wagon traffic going to and fro on the road she followed. The hills rose to the right of her, beyond the farms and houses. More hills rose to the left of her, on the far side of the riverbank.
Maria took it all in, but her main concern was finding her way back to the place where, by now, she should have been. As she continued along, several of the men who were working in the nearest field called out to her. Maria had no idea what they were saying at first, but then she noticed they were speaking not English, but Italian.
"Chi la sono la giovane donna? E dove lei va"? “Who are you young lady? And where are you going?”
Maria’s first instinct was to ignore the men and keep on walking. But the day was hot and her burden was heavy and they did not seem to be ruffians. Their questions to her were posed respectfully enough.
“I need to find out where I am and how I can get to the home of my brother,” thought Maria. So she turned to them and told her a shortened version of her travels. So she told them, “I am from Neopoli and have come to live with my brother and his wife in Harmarville.”
One of the men who was a bit younger than the rest answered, “Did you walk all the way?” He and Maria both laughed and so did the men with them.
Maria shook her head. “I got off the train at the wrong place,” was her eventual reply. One of the other men, about Maria’s father’s age then said, “Sono venuto anche da Neopoli; I also come from Neopoli.”
Soon they learned that they knew of each other’s families and the men assured her that they would take her to her brother’s house as soon as their work ended. They pressed her to wait with them, showing her a place where a few trees stood at a corner of the field. There, in the shade, they gave her cold spring water to drink and an apple to eat.
The men whistled or sang as they continued their work. These were songs of home. Maria recognized them and with some, she sang along in her head and in her heart. The cool shade, the cold water, the crisp apple, the comforting songs, all combined to create a dream like atmosphere. If she closed her eyes, Maria thought she could almost see the familiar sights of home, to go along with the familiar songs of home. She closed her eyes. She traced the outlines of far away hills and fields.
And before long, Maria was asleep.
“Hello, Maria!” a voice softly called to her. Maria stirred. Then opened her eyes. Standing before her was, the young man who had first asked if she had walked all the way from Neopoli. “While we have been working, you have been sleeping!” He said, and then laughed heartily.
“Yes.” Maria answered, “but my heart was awake.”
"How can your heart be awake while the rest of you is asleep?” he chided gently. “You are asleep or you are awake, one or the other, but not both.”
“You are probably right,” Maria answered. “But many a time my foot has fallen asleep while the rest of me is awake. Why shouldn’t it be the other way around. Why can’t a person be asleep, but her heart is still awake?”
“You have funny ideas but I like thinking about them,” the young man held out a hand to Maria. “Here, let me help you up from there. We are about to leave the field and head for home. You may come along with us. I will carry your things, and you will find the going is a lot easier that way.”
Maria accepted the hand and was soon on her feet. The other men called to them, “Come on, let’s go! See, it is getting late.”
They all started back toward Harmarville, and as they went they talked among themselves. The young man introduced himself as Giovanni Contadino, whose family came from Sinise. Two of the other men were his relatives, cousins Bruno Contadino and Vince Contadino—they too had family back in the old country, as they called it.
“We write to them and send money, and they write back and say send more,” said Bruno and they all laughed.
“It is better here than there,” said Vince, “but only if we stick together.”
The oldest of the group, a man in his forties at least, was Francesco Basso, who nodded in agreement and said, “The people around here who are not from Italy don’t understand us. That is alright as long as we understand one another.”
“Plus we do the work no one else wants to do,” said Vince. “Like working in the mines. And working in the mills.”
“But you are working in the fields, like at home,” said Maria.
“Yes, the Borlands are good people, and they figured out pretty fast that we understood about growing vegetables—it has worked out better for us than we thought it would,” Giovanni explained. “No dark hole in the ground for us. No fiery furnace for us. We are out in the open air and can see the sky.”
“And no organizers and anarchists to stir the pot,” said Francesco.
Maria looked at him, puzzled.
“They come in from outside, and make all kinds of trouble, and give the rest of us a bad name,” Giovanni said. “Like that fellow Berkman, who took a crack at old Frick in his office. He says he is for the working man to have things better. But he is just out for himself, and things got worse once he did that.”
“But as long as we do good work and let our employers know we are glad to be doing it,” said Francesco, “it is almost as good as at home.”
“Your brother is a smart one, too,” said Giovanni. “He works in the mine but he also has the boarding house. So the people come and live there and pay him and he doesn’t have to give everything he has to the big bosses, or the company store.”
They had by this time passed the narrow place Maria had noticed on the train, and were in the large flat bottom land around that was given over to gardens. It was the place that Maria had admired from the train. Up close it was every bit as special as from the train windows.
"Is this part of the Borland farm, as well?” she asked.
“No,” said Giovanni, “This part belongs to the Armstrong family and they let us grow our own crops and then give them some as rent and keep some for our own use or to sell. Another good family.”
“And you all have gardens here?” Maria asked.
“Yes and lots of the miners do, too,” Vince said.
“And what’s that, way over there?” Maria asked, pointing to the black shed-like buildings with the angled track that attached to the spindly tower.
“The mine, of course,” said Francesco. “That is the Harmar Mine. Where they mine the coal. They bring it up in small cars like train cars but not so big. That thing is the coal tipple.”
"Coal tipple," Maria repeated. Maria thought the word sounded odd but she filed it away. So many new things to learn. They walked along and came to a bridge over a small stream. Then up a small rise and the men announced, “Here you are, Maria; your new home!”
They took off their hats and gave a sort of courtly bow. As they were doing that, a face appeared at the window and a voice called out, “You there, do you have nothing better to do than pose in the streets? Move along! Muoversi Avanti! Move along!”
The men laughed and then Francesco called out, “Marigia, close your mouth and open your eyes! Don’t you know your own family?”
“Family? Bah!” came the reply from the window, “What good for nothings you farmers are! What are you talking about?”
“Here is Maria Fucci, sister of your husband Giacomo, all the way from Neopoli,” sang out Giovanni. “We have brought her to you.”
A great deal of fussing noises were heard from inside the house, snatches of words that sounded like “buono per niente!” fell upon their ears, though none of them were clear enough to be sure of, which Maria felt sure was a good thing. Then the door was thrown open abruptly, and Marigia Fucci emerged, wearing a faded housedress and worn apron, sturdy shoes and her hair tied up with some small piece of cloth.
“'Meglio tardi che mai.' Better late than never. Don’t stand there in the street, like some poor orphan, Maria, come inside at once!” Marigia said, reaching out a hand for Maria and pulling her through the doorway. The men looked at one another and shrugged and then followed along behind, with Maria’s baggage.
“Wipe your feet! Pulire i suoi piedi!” Marigia cried out. “This floor has just been washed. I need no garden soil in my house!” The men did more than that, taking off their boots and leaving them beside the threshold. Marigia stared at their bare, dirty feet and made a sound like the ticking of a clock, shook her head till the rag holding up her hair went flopping to and fro like rabbits' ears.
“How did you come to be with these dull farmers?” Marigia asked Maria. The story of the missed station was soon told and then—and only then—did Marigia offer the men some cold water and tell Maria to sit down at the kitchen table. The men accepted the water, drank it and then moved toward the door as if to leave.
“I must thank you—all of you—for the help you have given me in finding my way.” Said Maria, "And for your kind welcome to me, also. You are my first new friends in America.”
The men all smiled sheepishly, and having said that she was more than welcome, made their departure, pulling on their boots outside on the front stoop.
Once the men had gone, Marigia said, “Here, Maria, stand up and let me look at you.” Maria who was as dead tired as she had ever been in her life, obeyed nonetheless and rose to her feet.
“Turn around,” Marigia instructed. “Yes. Good. Sit down.”
Maria again did as she was bidden.
“You are a good strong girl,” Marigia announced. “A bit small for your age but with hard work and time that will improve I have no doubt. 'Chi la dura la vince.' 'He who perseveres wins at last.' It is good that you left Italy and came here. 'L'Italia farà da sé.' 'Italy will take care of itself.' There, I do not think your prospects would have been very bright. But in this place all is new and there is much to do. I think you will do well here.”
This little speech seemed fine in its way to Maria but it was not exactly what one might call being welcomed with open arms, at least to her mind.
“Here,” said Marigia, “I will show you the place. Come along!” And with that they embarked on a tour of the boarding house, which had a confusing arrangement of rooms, some large and some small, some not really rooms at all with no windows, but all of them had beds galore, and in many of them, men were sleeping.
“These are the ones who work nights,” Marigia said in a loud whisper. “They sleep in the day. If they pay for their bed for all the time then they have it for all the time but if they pay less then they share it with the men who work in the day, and sleep in the night. It is a good arrangement since it saves them money and it makes us more.”
“You don’t charge the same for one man who has his own bed and two men who share a bed?” Maria inquired.
“No that would not get us anywhere,” Marigia answered. “I can see you have no head for business. We charge the men who share the beds half and half of that, on top. So with one bed we get the same as if two and a half men were sleeping in it, not two.”
“Oh. I see. And do you have any half-men here?” Maria asked, picturing in her mind’s eye a horribly wounded man who had lost both of his legs.
“Don’t be silly, child!” Marigia scolded. “Whatever put such an idea in your head? Half-men! You have let your travels go to your brain! Where do you see half-men, I ask you!”
They had gone up one stairway and down another and found themselves in the back of the same hallway that gave on to the front door.
"Over here," said Marigia, "is the parlor. Not to be used except for reading the papers and quiet conversation. If any of the men have visitors they must not go upstairs but talk here. Not many of them have visitors. And over here," she said with a sweep of the arm, "is the dining room. The men sit where they are told. The ones who pay the most have the best seats, and then the next and so on. If they are up on their rent then they get the best seats, that is. If not it is below the salt, down there at the other end where they have to wait till the food is passed to them. I leave it to the men to sort out any difficulties if they are not pleased when the platters and bowls reach the foot of the table.”
“Why?” said Maria.
“It is safer that way, plus we live in a democracy, where every man must make his own way.”
“And where do you and my brother sit at meals, then?” Maria asked.
“Not in here. We sit at the table in the kitchen. It is our own little sanctuary of peace away from the noise and fuss of this room. The men know they are not permitted in the kitchen, no matter what. A strict house rule.”
The two women returned to the kitchen and sat down at that very table. While they were still speaking there came a sort of pounding sound in the distance. Then it got louder and louder. The large house began to vibrate, to actually move as the sound got stronger. It seemed as if some sort of cataclysmic disaster was about to befall the women seated there in the kitchen. What could it be? An earthquake? A tornado? The end of the world?
Then Maria heard a shrill whistle.
“It is only a train,” Marigia shrugged, as the noise reached its greatest intensity. Indeed, it was one of sixteen trains that passed close by the back of the boarding house every day but Sunday when there were only four trains. The rail line sat somewhat lower than the house, along the Allegheny. But even so it was not much more than thirty feet from where the women were.
Maria sensed the table and floor and her chair shaking. Then the old building swayed a bit, the tumblers on the shelves shook and sounded like small bells ringing, the pots and pans on the rack overhead rattled and clanked. Then, more whistling as the sound began to subside. The train continued on its way. The rattling and tinkling and pounding and shaking grew less and less. Maria wondered how the men who slept in the day slept through such a racket. What an unfortunate place to have a room in which one tried to get some rest. The thought of it made Maria wonder why her brother and sister-in-law had chosen such a spot for their boarding house business. It would certainly take her some getting used to.
Immediately, another noise came, another kind of pounding or stomping, and then a door to the back of the house flew open and in came none other than her brother,
“So Maria you are here at last!” Giacomo announced. “We almost gave up hope of ever seeing you. But here you are a sight for sore eyes. And just arrived from the look of it.”
Maria said, “Not just arrived, Giacomo. Marigia has been showing me the house.”
“Good, good,” answered Giacomo, “and what do you think of it?”
“It is very large and filled with lots of boarders,” Maria said.
“Yes, too large for one person to care for; that is why you have come to live with us and help to keep up the place,” interjected Marigia.
Maria nodded but her eyes flashed in Marigia’s direction. “Yes,” Maria said quietly, “I have come to make a new life in a new world.”
Giacomo looked from the wife to the sister and back again. This was going to be a challenge to be sure, having two women in one house. It was like having two cats and one mouse or two dogs and one bone. At that very moment Giacomo decided that he was going to leave the whole situation alone. Let Marigia handle it. No need for him to become entwined in the middle of the battle of wills that was sure to emerge before long.
"So what news do you have of the old home place?" Giacomo asked Maria, thinking that a change of subject might be in order. Marie told Giacomo about their parents and how things were when she had left them. Then she added, “I will want to write to them soon; since I promised that I would do so.”
“I am sure they will want to know you arrived all in one piece,” Giacomo said.
“Yes, but that can wait. Now we have work to do if there is going to be supper for these men,” said Marigia. “Maria, put on an apron and let’s get busy!”
That is exactly what Maria did and for the next several hours the time was spent in cooking and setting the table and serving the food and cleaning up afterward.
The men were a noisy and fast-taking bunch. On this first night the men were all sort of a blur to Maria, and the work was so demanding that she did not even begin to put together the names and the faces. But some of them did make an impression on her for good or bad.
There was Basilio Bello, certainly the most handsome of the men at the table, with dark wavy hair and a big moustache, who sort of lorded it over the rest of them, as a natural born leader. There was a grizzled older fellow named Aldo Saggiolingua who said very little but when he did speak it was as if everyone strained in to hear what his wise tongue had to say. More than once a bold fellow called Cesare Civetta tried to flirt with Maria, and at one point said to the entire group, “Well our fortune has improved now that we have Maria to look at instead of Marigia!”
All of them laughed and nodded their heads, which made Maria blush and hope that Marigia had not heard what he said as she retreated to the kitchen.
“What’s all that noise about?” Marigia asked Maria with a stern look.
“Somebody made a joke and they were all laughing,” Maria replied, which was as much of the truth as she felt she could tell.
“Not a rude joke, I hope?” Marigia said. “I will not have crude language in the house! I have strict rules about it!”
“No it was very tame,” said Maria, who then returned to the dining room with more of the meal.
“Ah here is our angle of mercy back to take good care of us!” said a tough looking fellow called Ilario Forte, who nonetheless had kindly eyes.
“Hooray!” they all shouted. Then stopped abruptly when they saw Marigia at the door from the kitchen, her arms akimbo, her brow furrowed.
“You are nothing but a bunch of hooligans!” Marigia said. “If you keep up like this Maria will stay in the kitchen and I will serve the meal!”
“Lord have mercy upon us,” said Leone Dellaminiera under his breath.
“Yes, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” said Maso Istigatore. “If she keeps Maria holed up in the kitchen there will be trouble to pay from me!”
“And me,” said Ruvino Avventato, who stood up on his char and held up his knife like he was posing for the Statue of Liberty. "I will set her free from the dragon in the dungeon!” He pointed the knife in the direction of Marigia who had by this time retreated to her domain.
“Stop being so foolhardy!” Basillo chided him. “Or we will feed you to the river gods. Do you want to bring down the wrath of our landlady upon us?”
Ruvino climbed down from his chair quickly, with a sheepish look on his face.
Maria had witnessed it all and was still blushing terribly.
“Don’t worry little one,” Ilario whispered to her. “They will settle down now. I will have a talk with them when you are in the kitchen. I know they will listen because you bring a bit of joy into this drab place.”
It was late into the evening before Marigia decreed that the work was finished.
And then it was time for bed. Maria realized that Marigia and Giacomo had never told her where she was to sleep. And sometime during the evening, her things had disappeared from where the farmers had left them. That corner of the kitchen was empty. Maria was suddenly tired and frustrated and a bit angry.
“What happened to my things?” Maria asked her brother, who was seated in a corner of the kitchen smoking a pipe.
“In your room,” Giacomo answered, with a kind of a sideways nod, indicating a door through which Maria had not yet passed.
“This way?” she asked him.
“Yes, just there,” he said, not stirring from his place.
Maria went through the doorway to find herself in a kind of a storeroom. There were large containers of staples, bins of potatoes, and the like and over in one corner, a narrow bed, a wooden chair, and a washstand. The corner was tidy. The bed had a quilt on it and a pillow. But it was one small corner of a small room that most people would call a pantry or larder.
There was only one small window, but the darkness outside was complete. Maria noticed that her baggage was also in the room, as Giacomo had indicated.
Maria felt hopelessness taking hold of her, all at once. She sat down on the bed, completely exhausted.
“Maria!” she heard Marigia call, and then her sister-in-law came into the room. “Here you are. I wondered what happened to you. I think you made a fair start of things today but of course once you get to know the routine you will be quicker about everything. You had better get some sleep and be ready when I ring the bell at 5:30 so you can help with the breakfast.” With that, Marigia closed the door, plunging the room into complete darkness.
Maria let her eyes become accustomed to the dark and then was able to move about as she needed in order to take off her clothes and put on her nightgown. She rummaged to find something that would help her relax and found at last the small package that the Padrone had handed to her on their last visit together. She thought of him and his kindness and wondered if perhaps she had made a mistake coming to America. Maria longed to open the gift, but in this darkness, what good would it do? She would have to wait till morning. She thought of Lucia and Grazie and longed to see their kindly, calm faces. She composed the image of them in her minds eye. This was beginning to comfort her but then she thought of Tanio and the spring and his poetry and the tears began to fall down her cheek.
And so ended Maria’s first day in her new home along the Allegheny River.
Nine - Getting to Know America
The next morning came all too soon, and Maria, though she longed to open the present from the Padrone, did not do so. There simply was no time when she could open it in privacy. That morning, and every morning, Marigia awakened her with a brisk, “Time to get up!” and then set Maria to work. And work she did, all the day. And every day. By the time she went to bed, it was dark in her little corner of the storeroom. So the present waited for the day when Maria could be sure that she could open it alone and then put it in a place where she alone knew about it.
In the meantime, there was work and more work. It was not an easy life. But Maria found satisfaction in the cleaning and cooking, and the compliments that the borders gave her on her serving and her kindnesses.
Gradually, she became accustomed to the new pattern of living and it was not as challenging as at first. She was learning English—not as fast as she wanted to learn it, but quickly enough to get by in basic conversations with the people who did not speak Italian.
Maria’s new world was both larger and smaller than in Italy. There, the hills and fields around Neopoli had beckoned and nurtured her from childhood onward. Here, her circuit of familiarity went as the river flowed. Upriver was the valley of farmland that she had so admired—which she could catch glimpses of if she walked but a short distance in that direction. Not that Maria had much time to walk even a short distance from the house. That garden area was part of Harmarville proper, and then beyond lay Acmetonia and Cheswick of her mistaken train destination the day of her arrival. That was as far upriver that Maria had been. Beyond that and still, along the river, were places that she had only heard people speak of—Springdale, New Kensington, Tarentum, Brackenridge, Lower Burrell.
Downriver there was Hoboken and Aspinwall and then Sharpsburg. Maria soon traveled in that direction because the nearest parish church was at Sharpsburg. If she could be spared she would go there to mass. But this was not a regular Sunday habit, since Marigia had many Sundays in which Maria could not be spared. Maria knew that beyond Sharpsburg were Etna and Millvale and further still Pittsburgh, but those places she never visited in her first months of her time in America.
One Sunday a month after she had arrived, Maria was able to go to mass. And several of the borders were going so she traveled to and from Sharpsburg with them. Basilio and Aldo. Also with them were several new arrivals to the boarding house, a young man called Sam Valicenti and his cousin Alphonse Sinise.
Sam Valicenti was immediately interesting to Maria. He was a fine looking fellow, with short dark brown hair and light brown eyes that were almost hazel. A strong oval face held features that seemed to change with each mood or word. He had a mostly serious way about him but when he smiled it was such a fine smile. On the way to the church, they all talked about the places they were passing. Hoboken was a small place, strung along the river like most of these river towns. A few shops along the main road—a grocer, a tailor, a funeral parlor. Signs advertizing a dentist a doctor and a barber were also to be seen. But mostly it was an unassuming place, with wood framed houses, some perched on the uphill side of Freeport Road and others clustered down in the hollows toward the riverbanks. Down there, were also two different steel businesses, one called Blaw Steel Co. and the Knox Welded and Pressed Steel Co.
As they left Hoboken and went toward Aspinwall, they passed the Allegheny County Workhouse. It was a huge stone walled prison facility very imposing and frightening looking. To Maria it was the nearest thing she had seen in the new world that would compare with the castles of the old world, complete with guard towers on the corners and a walkway on the top of the wall.“
“And up over the hill is the Workhouse Farm,” said Basilio. “It is a big place and if you are going to have to work while you are in prison, not a bad place.”
Maria wondered how Basilio knew so much about it but she kept her thoughts to herself. Soon they were passing Ross Grove, a grove of trees popular with the locals for picnicking and strolling, and then the new waterworks buildings, with the big arched windows, which Maria recalled having seen from the train on her arrival day.
Thereafter came Aspinwall, a new suburb designed for prosperous families. The man who had the idea of it had gone all the way to New York City to interest Mrs. Annie Aspinwall, a direct descendant of James Ross, Sr., in the idea. She invested the money that proved to spark the development. Now, more than six hundred families were living in the planned town, with charming houses that Maria admired as they passed by. Some were big frame houses with deep porches. Others were made of the characteristic Western Pennsylvania yellow brick.
St Mary’s Church was an impressive place, begun by German settlers in the 1850s. Down the years the church grew and by this time they were in their second building—the first having been destroyed in a disastrous fire in 1866. The mass being in Latin, it did not matter that some of the congregation still used German as their first language and others, Italian. The familiar sights and sounds, the sharing of the Eucharist and the chanting of the choir all made Maria feel connected both to the worshipers around her and to her family so very far away in Neopoli.
On the way home, Maria and Sam and Alphonse They found that their towns were very near one another. They talked about the things they missed from home, and the people. Sam seemed determined that he would make something of himself in the world. Alphonse, though, was more introspective and talked about when he would go back to Italy.
“I am only here for as long as I have to be,” he said with quiet determination. “My home is back in Cersossmo.”
“I know how you feel,” Maria said. “Sometimes I miss home so much that it hurts. On those nights, I cry myself to sleep.
"You must not feel that way," said Sam. "It is still too soon to know what good things you may find here in America. You may turn out to make your fortune here."
"That is so," agreed Basilio. "You could be the next Carnegie. Time along will tell."
"I cannot wait for time to tell," Alphonse said. He held his hand up in a way that said determination, at least to Maria. "I want to go home. If I could go home now, I would go. As soon as I have money for my passage home, I am going. I will not look over my shoulder with regret."
"You have every right to go home," Maria said to him. "But you will be missed here."
Alphonse looked at her as if he had never thought of such a thing. "Thank you," he said quietly. The rest of the return trip was accomplished in a somber mood. Perpahs because of this conversation or perhaps simply because all too soon the morning away was over and it was back to the boarding house and work, work, work.
From the back of the big boarding house, Maria could look across the wide, deep, imposing Allegheny and see Hulton and Oakmont, really two parts of the same riverside community. Hulton was named for the family who ran the ferry from over there to right at their doorstep, or at least just at the end of their back yard. If you had a reason to cross the river, the Hulton ferry was the way to go. Nor really a ferry, it was a rowboat for passengers and a flatboat for those with lots of goods to move from one bank to the other. Maria did not like crossing the river; she never thought of it as a friendly river. It was too dark and deep and fast moving for fondness. But she found the passing river traffic of interest. Barges of coal, paddle-wheelers of all sizes, smaller craft. Every so often a houseboat.
Out the front windows, there was both much and little to see. Not much in the way of scenery, since the high, rocky cliffs drew very close to the front of the house. Indeed they were only separated from the house by the street, some called it Freeport Road and some called it Pittsburgh Street—it was known as both in this stretch of Harmar Township. In Maria’s imagination the cliffs were always at the point of coming down on the house in the middle of the night. This never happened in reality. But the hillside was notorious for rockslides. Large chunks of rock did from time to time fall downward and land in Freeport Road, making traffic along the road impossible. Then, gangs of prisoners from the nearby Workhouse at Hoboken were brought to chip away at the rocks till they were of manageable size and could be carted away.
The boardinghouse was practically in the street and so when people walked by or wagons wheeled by there was a lot of racket and if one wanted to pass the time by watching the passing parade, it was entertaining. Not that Maria had much time to stop and watch and be entertained.
Maria slowly got to know the area because from time to time she would be sent on errands here or there. Once she had to take the rowboat across the river to get some medicine from Olix Darity, the pharmacist at Hulton. She clung for dear life to the sides of the gunnels as they crossed. It was a strange enterprise as the man who ferried her across rowed as if they were going upstream and would land at Barton's Island.
"They tried a witch over they, many years ago," the ferryman told her. "Back when it was Brewster's Island. Judge Brewster let the woman get away and he had to scoot out of there because of the ruckus. Went all the way to Texas."
Maria tried to picture a witchcraft trial and ended up thinking that the island was even more frightening that it had appeared up till now.
"Brewster sold to Barton and from what I know the Barton family still owns it now. 'Course the rivermen all call it Twelve Mile Island since that's how far upstream it is from The Point."
He pulled hard till more than midway across the river and then made for the opposite shore as fast as he could. The same technique was used in reverse on the return trip.
The Oakmont public library opened the same year Maria arrived in America but she had little desire to risk her life in the rowboat to borrow books that were printed in a language still so foreign to her.
Maria was also sent to the Armstrong Brothers Store at Acmetonia for provisions or to buy fresh produce from James McRoberts, one of the farmers at Harmarville. Once, she was sent with a note to Harry Pierce the hotel keeper Acmetonia, the note turning out to be an overdue rent notice for one of her brother and sister-in-law’s borders who had moved to Pierce’s place without paying his rent.
It was a long three mile walk up to Acmetonia, but Maria did not mind it, since it got her away from the endless housework at the boarding house and out into the open air. She did not lollygag but she strolled in such a way that she enjoyed every step of the walk—about an hour there and an hour back. The birds were thick in the trees and she listened to their chatter. The red cardinals with their “Birdie! Birdie! Birdie!”and their trilled “Good Cheer!” Even Rico couldn't hold a candle to these charming and brilliant red beauties, Maria thought. Then there were the blue jays with their “Jay! Jay!” and hawk-like cries. Most of all she enjoyed hearing the mocking birds who gave an exuberant concert by borrowing all the other bird’s songs and making them their own.
Along the way she saw several of her farmer friends, those rescuers of her first day. Giovanni Contadino stopped his work and came across the field to greet her.
“How goes it for you, Maria?” he asked.
She told him about her first several weeks at the boarding house and her impressions, good and bad, of the people there.
Giovanni shook his head when he heard about her room, “That isn’t right,” he said. “Everyone needs a place to really get away. You have to share yours with the jars and brooms.”
“I am used to it now,” Maria confessed. “But at first I was very unhappy.”
“What changed your mind?” Giovanni asked, flashing his brightest smile.
“I decided that I was here and I was going to make the best of it,” Maria said. “Usually, when I make up my mind to think a certain way, it helps things go along better.”
And did it help?”
“Yes,” Maria answered truthfully.
“So here is a question I have for you,” Giovanni said quietly. “If I were to come by and ask you to go for a walk sometime would you say yes?”
“We are walking now,” Maria said.
“We are,” he replied. “And I like it very much.”
“So do I,” said Maria.
“Good,” answered Giovanni. “I will keep that in mind when I come to the door of the boarding house and ask for another walk. But now I must get back to work. Ciao, Maria!”
Giovanni fairly bounded back to his work, leaping the rows of vegetables like hurdles in a race. Maria watched till he turned and took off his cap and waved in her direction. She waved back and then continued on her walk to Acmetonia.
Mr. Pierce was somewhat indignant when he read the note about the boarder who had absconded without paying his rent, and swore that he would throw the man out. He scribbled a few lines on the note for Maria to take back to Marigia and then she set off on her homeward walk.
There were farmers in the fields but she did not see Giovanni on return walk. When she drew near to the boarding house, there was some kind of excitement going on in front of it. A crowd had gathered and there was a lot of yelling going on. Not angry yelling, but rather frightened sounds.
Maria found Basilio Bello in the crowd and asked what the matter was.
“Stay here and do not go inside, something has happened,” Basilio said.
“What is it?” Maria insisted.
“A young man has hanged himself,” Basilio answered. “In the attic. He must have secured a piece of rope from somewhere. And then climbed a ladder to a high beam in the attic. And tied the rope to the timber and adjusted a noose around his neck and stepped off the ladder into eternity.”
“How awful,” Maria whispered under her breath.
“The body was found swinging from the beam.” Basilio told her, “he was found by a friend who had gone looking for him. No cause is known for the young man's act.”
Maria stood there in the street and looked around for faces she recognized. Aldo and Cesare were there. Leone Dellaminiera and Maso Istigatore, as well.
Marigia and Giacomo were talking to a man in uniform, a police man or someone from the police force at the mine? She could hear Marigia saying, “The door to the attic is kept locked at all times! I have a strict rule about it. I don’t know how anyone could have gotten up there.”
Scanning the crowd further, Maria realized that Ruvino was missing; also missing were two of the new borders Sam and Alphonse, who had not lived there more than a week. She wondered if it might be one or the other of them. Turning to ask Basilio who the victim was, she discovered that he had gone.
She could hear Marigia talking at the top of her voice again, “Maybe that silly girl left the door unlocked,” she was saying. “I don’t know when she will be back to ask her. I sent her to Acmetonia on an errand.”
”I am over here, Marigia,” Maria said, drawing closer. “I have just returned.”
“Maria! Did you leave the attic door unlocked?” Marigia demanded.
“I have never been up to the attic,” Maria said truthfully. “And you yourself keep all the keys on that big ring.” Maria pointed to it. All that she said was true.
"You spiteful child!” Marigia snapped back. “How could you say such a thing! And when I am sheltering you under my very roof, too! Ingrate!” She raved on like this for some time, as some of the boards tried to calm her down. Marigia only pushed them away. “See, this is how I am repaid for my care and generosity!”
Maria could not believe what she was hearing. But she would listen no longer. She fled from the flow of mean-spirited invective and ran toward the house. As she did, she nearly collided with the men who were carrying out the dead man on a makeshift stretcher formed from some bedclothes. His face had been covered by those tending to this gruesome task, and the arms had been folded on the chest, under the sheet. But one had fallen to the side.
Maria saw the hand as it was suspended there, limp and pale. With a shock of recognition, she realized it belonged to Alphonse Sinise. She searched the faces of the men who were carrying the body—Sam was among them. She caught Sam’s eyes—they told the whole story. It was Alphonse, who would never go home to Italy again.
“Oh no!” Maria said to him.
“Hush for now, Maria,” Sam said. “We will talk when we are able. But let things rest for now.”
The small procession continued onward, Maria watched them go. The white sheet. The limp hand. The broad back of Sam and the others who were carrying Alphonse. In the background, Maria could still hear Marigia shrieking, this time in wails and unintelligible phrases. Once she thought she heard her say, “The house will be haunted!” and then catch herself. Yes, thought Maria, that will not be good for business. Who wants to stay under a roof where a man killed himself in despair? Maria went into the house and found that was still and quiet. No one was stirring although some of the night shift men were surely sleeping. But those who were awake were all still outside in the crowd and commotion.
Maria went back to the storeroom and closed the door. She then pushed a big bin of potatoes against it, to assure herself some privacy. Then, she went to find the package from the Padrone. There it was. She sat down on the bed and before opening it said to herself, “This is the only thing I can do. Alphonse is gone. Marigia is going crazy. But here—there is peace.”
Maria thought back to the farewell tea with the Padrone when he had handed her this small package. Here it was in her hand, still wrapped in the silk scarf, still tied with a golden ribbon.
Maria remembered every word he had said to her as he gave it to her:
“This you must take with you to America, and open it when you have arrived there safely. Promise me that and promise that you will let us know in letters how things go with you.”
"I must start writing these letters," Maria chided herself, as she recalled what the Padrone had said and what she had so readily promised. "I will do so, when I write to say that I have arrived and to say thank you for whatever this present may be," she resolved. And only then did she begin to unwrap the gift.
The scarf itself was a thing of wonder and beauty, silk and soft and designed in such a way that depending on how it was folded certain colors came to the fore. There were gold and blues and just a hint of a deep red, if you held it just so. But to hold it differently allowed the blues to become the major note and the gold and reds to be more subtle.
"Oh, this is a treasure," Maria thought as she placed it around her shoulders, like a shawl.
Once the silk scarf was removed, she saw that underneath was what appeared to be a small box, made of finely chased silver. "This is too fine a present," Maria thought. Certainly there was nothing in the boarding house that would approach its beauty; nor, Maria pondered, in her own home in Noepoli, either. She noticed a small latch on the front of the box and carefully undid it and then lifted up the box's lid, to find that it wasn't a box after all. It was a silver frame; a silver frame, with the center hinge making the top and the bottom of what she had at first thought was a box. But now, she found, it was meant to stand on a table or shelf, with the hinge in the middle. The left side was chased in silver; but on the right side was a small portrait of a young woman.
"It is a portrait of me," Maria mused. "Wearing the scarf in which it was presented to me. How lovely and how very odd, since I have never posed for a portrait."
A note had been tucked into the frame, and had fallen into Maria's lap as she opened it. She turned her attention to it and read as follows:
My Dear Maria,
Here is a small memento of the place of your birth and the people here who will always love you. The scarf was a favorite of my dear wife, and the portrait of her reminds me of you. It was done as a study when the large painting in my library was also made. If you look closely you will see that she is wearing the scarf in the portrait. I have and will always cherish the painting in the library, as a reminder of you as well as of my dear lady. But I thought you should have these other reminders of the connection between us that no ocean can separate. May you enjoy them both wherever life may lead, and may you ever count me as your friend.
In fondness,
Guiseppe Rinaldi
Maria sat there in her small room for some time, thinking about the Padrone and the choice she had made to come to America. She thought of his kindness in sending with her this treasure of his heart. She also thought about the strange events of this day that went from the running of the errand and the walk with Giovanni to the horror of Alphonso’s death, to the shrewish behavior of Marigia, to the solemn look on Sam’s face. It was a memorable day, in many ways.
“I will always remember it so,” Maria thought as she felt the softness of the scarf around her shoulders. As she did, there was a soft knocking at the door of the storeroom.
“Maria are you there?” a whispered voice called.
“Who is it?” Maria answered, though she felt certain she knew who it was.
“Sam,” the voice replied. “I would like to talk with you if you are willing?”
“Oh, yes, Sam.” Maria said. “One moment...” Maria put the photo and the note away and then pushed aside the potato bin. Opening the door, she saw Sam looking at her with a kindness and a tenderness that seemed almost heaven-sent.
Sam took one look at Maria, wrapped in the beautiful shawl, with the wonderful colors bringing out her own fine features and he held his breath a and then said in a whisper,
"Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare la donna mia..." "So kind and so honest my lady appears to me.”
Maria could not believe her ears. These were the very words that she had imagined the bold knight Jacuvill saying to her. Sam’s words took her back to her childhood daydreams of Jacuvill. She remembered that she would see coming across the valley—a dashing, heroic figure of the “dintorini”. He would know where to find her, he would rescue her from whatever the danger might be.
It was as if, all of the sudden, the reason for coming to America became clear. At least, Maria dared to hope so. She could not bring herself to tell Sam what she was thinking. In fact, it seemed very wrong for her to be thinking anything other than a compassion for him on the loss of Alphonse. She did, nonetheless reach out her hand to his.
“I am so sorry about Alphonse,” she said, as she looked into his hazel eyes. “Words cannot say how sad it makes me that what happened has happened.”
Sam nodded his head slowly. “I want to tell you what I know, but only if you want to hear about it,” he said softly. “I am not going to tell anyone else. They can speculate all they want to. The police know and they are very understanding. From their point of view the matter is closed. But as someone who loved him like a brother, I have to tell someone I can trust. Someone with a heart as well as a mind. I thought of you at once Maria. But if you do not want to know, say so, and I will not speak about it.”
This speech tumbled out rapidly and yet Maria sensed that she had heard it before, and she answered Sam saying, “Yes, I want to hear what you can tell me. I think I need to hear it, for your sake and for my sake. And to honor Alphonse, also.”
“We cannot stay here,” Sam said. “They will all be coming inside soon,”
His words brought Maria back to the moment. She said, “And Marigia will be looking for me to start up the supper.”
“Not tonight, Maria,” Sam said. “I told her she was so mean to you that I am going to take you for a walk so you can cool off and her as well. She has plenty of energy, she might as well use it for something useful and make the supper. The rest of the men backed me up. Basilio told her that if she raised her voice to you unnecessarily again she would be the next one swaying from the rafters.”
Maria looked at Sam, startled. “How that must have hurt you,” she said.
“No, it did not. In fact I wish I had said it myself. Marigia looked at the rest of us and saw that we were all in ernest about it. She gave a bit of a protest but I shut her up. I said that what I have to say to you is more important than any help in the kitchen tonight. And that maybe—just maybe—you will be willing to help her again, starting tomorrow. But only if I can convince you not to go on strike or leave this place. That shut her up, fast.”
“Me, on strike!” Maria said. “how in the world could I go on strike?”
“You have more say so than you realize,” Sam told her. “With all of us behind you. I told her that if you refuse to come back to work that we were all leaving this place for another boarding house.”
“You did?” Maria said in wonderment.
“I did. And they all agreed with me. To a man. You should have seen her face. I stopped looking when her chin reached the roadbed.”
With that, Maria laughed and realized that this was her chance to have some time away from the drudgery. She also wanted to hear what Sam had to say about the tragedy that had just befallen him and all of them. And she also simply wanted to be with Sam.
‘Let us go, then,” she said to Sam, “Maybe I will hear about it later, but no matter.”
So out the door they went, with more than a few pairs of eyes watching them. Marigia and Giacomo gave her stern looks but not stern enough to stop her. They followed Freeport Road in the direction of the famous fields but only as far as Guys Run, a small stream that emptied into the Allegheny River just where the land flattened out a bit.
“Let’s go this way,” Sam said. So they walked along Guys Run on the old dirt road that followed its course, putting the river behind them. There were scraggly sumac bushes growing along the way, with their clusters of long narrow leaves. A small flock of Evening Grosbeaks were foraging among the ripening sumac bobs, their yellow feathers flashing against the greenery.
Away from the river, it was as if fifty, one hundred and more years fell away. They were in an area of scrub but not far on either side were woods, filled with old trees that were young before the first Europeans came this way. Sam found a sassafras leaf, and picked it and crushed it in his hand for Maria to smell. The aroma was fresh and appealing. Somewhere near by a mocking bird was giving one of its recitals.
“It is strange, Maria said, “that all of this is here, not more than a few steps from the traffic on Freeport Road and on the river.”
“Yes,” Sam agreed. “It is noisy and busy there, and peaceful all of the sudden here. I think that is was Adolpho was seeking. Peacefulness.”
“He chose a terrible way to find it,” Maria said.
Sam nodded. “You know, he never wanted to come to America. His attitude was against it from the very start. There was no work for him at home. He had to do something. But he used to say he would have happily become a beggar in Italy before leaving it behind.” Sam kicked a loose stone on the path, and it went flying ahead of them
“So why did he come here?” Maria asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe he thought he would change his mind once he got here. He had heard the stories we all hear. You can scoop up gold from the side of the road. Everyone is a millionaire before a year is past. But he did not believe them any more than I did.” Sam turned around and looked at the sky. “If I had not told the family I was coming to America, I don’t think he would have come on his own. That is why I am blaming myself.”
“Oh, Sam,” Maria said, “You must never do that. He was sad—distraught. I don’t think anyone would have been able to stop him. If they did, today, he would have tried it again, another day.”
“Yes, you are right,” Sam agreed, nodding his head slowly. “The fact is, he told me on the boat that he would go overboard before we got to New York. But then he got sick, and was in his bed the whole way across. Weak as a kitten. I thought it was God protecting him from the dark waters of the Atlantic.”
"It was,” Maria agreed.
“Then we got to America and all of the sudden he was well again. Not strong, but not sick. He went through the medical inspection at Ellis Island without any concern from the examiners. And then we were on our way here. And he was very quiet watching the land pass before our eyes outside the windows. We had gone a long way before he turned to me and told me that with every mile, his homeland was becoming more of a lost dream and less of a reality.”
Maria nodded. This untamed area boasted a profusion of plants that were new to Maria’s eyes: blue curls, butterfly weed, and black cohosh, doll's eyes, goat's beard, pink milkweed and white wood aster. Here and there could also be seen jack-in-the-pulpit, spreading Jacob's ladder, brown-eyed Susan, wild geranium, and blazing star.
They had by now turned off the winding road alongside the stream, and were climbing a tall hill, that rose to the left side of it. She wanted to ask Sam where they were and where they were going, but she did not want to interrupt him as he talked about Adolpho.
“I knew how he was feeling,” Sam continued. “I was feeling the same way. I think we all feel it when we go so far from home. Except maybe scoundrels and thieves."
The path grew steeper as they went upward. Sam offered Maria his arm, and the climbed side by side. It occured to Maria at that moment that she had walked in the old country with her first love and she had climbed a volcano with Rico. Now, where would this walk with Sam lead?
In the meantime, there was work and more work. It was not an easy life. But Maria found satisfaction in the cleaning and cooking, and the compliments that the borders gave her on her serving and her kindnesses.
Gradually, she became accustomed to the new pattern of living and it was not as challenging as at first. She was learning English—not as fast as she wanted to learn it, but quickly enough to get by in basic conversations with the people who did not speak Italian.
Maria’s new world was both larger and smaller than in Italy. There, the hills and fields around Neopoli had beckoned and nurtured her from childhood onward. Here, her circuit of familiarity went as the river flowed. Upriver was the valley of farmland that she had so admired—which she could catch glimpses of if she walked but a short distance in that direction. Not that Maria had much time to walk even a short distance from the house. That garden area was part of Harmarville proper, and then beyond lay Acmetonia and Cheswick of her mistaken train destination the day of her arrival. That was as far upriver that Maria had been. Beyond that and still, along the river, were places that she had only heard people speak of—Springdale, New Kensington, Tarentum, Brackenridge, Lower Burrell.
Downriver there was Hoboken and Aspinwall and then Sharpsburg. Maria soon traveled in that direction because the nearest parish church was at Sharpsburg. If she could be spared she would go there to mass. But this was not a regular Sunday habit, since Marigia had many Sundays in which Maria could not be spared. Maria knew that beyond Sharpsburg were Etna and Millvale and further still Pittsburgh, but those places she never visited in her first months of her time in America.
One Sunday a month after she had arrived, Maria was able to go to mass. And several of the borders were going so she traveled to and from Sharpsburg with them. Basilio and Aldo. Also with them were several new arrivals to the boarding house, a young man called Sam Valicenti and his cousin Alphonse Sinise.
Sam Valicenti was immediately interesting to Maria. He was a fine looking fellow, with short dark brown hair and light brown eyes that were almost hazel. A strong oval face held features that seemed to change with each mood or word. He had a mostly serious way about him but when he smiled it was such a fine smile. On the way to the church, they all talked about the places they were passing. Hoboken was a small place, strung along the river like most of these river towns. A few shops along the main road—a grocer, a tailor, a funeral parlor. Signs advertizing a dentist a doctor and a barber were also to be seen. But mostly it was an unassuming place, with wood framed houses, some perched on the uphill side of Freeport Road and others clustered down in the hollows toward the riverbanks. Down there, were also two different steel businesses, one called Blaw Steel Co. and the Knox Welded and Pressed Steel Co.
As they left Hoboken and went toward Aspinwall, they passed the Allegheny County Workhouse. It was a huge stone walled prison facility very imposing and frightening looking. To Maria it was the nearest thing she had seen in the new world that would compare with the castles of the old world, complete with guard towers on the corners and a walkway on the top of the wall.“
“And up over the hill is the Workhouse Farm,” said Basilio. “It is a big place and if you are going to have to work while you are in prison, not a bad place.”
Maria wondered how Basilio knew so much about it but she kept her thoughts to herself. Soon they were passing Ross Grove, a grove of trees popular with the locals for picnicking and strolling, and then the new waterworks buildings, with the big arched windows, which Maria recalled having seen from the train on her arrival day.
Thereafter came Aspinwall, a new suburb designed for prosperous families. The man who had the idea of it had gone all the way to New York City to interest Mrs. Annie Aspinwall, a direct descendant of James Ross, Sr., in the idea. She invested the money that proved to spark the development. Now, more than six hundred families were living in the planned town, with charming houses that Maria admired as they passed by. Some were big frame houses with deep porches. Others were made of the characteristic Western Pennsylvania yellow brick.
St Mary’s Church was an impressive place, begun by German settlers in the 1850s. Down the years the church grew and by this time they were in their second building—the first having been destroyed in a disastrous fire in 1866. The mass being in Latin, it did not matter that some of the congregation still used German as their first language and others, Italian. The familiar sights and sounds, the sharing of the Eucharist and the chanting of the choir all made Maria feel connected both to the worshipers around her and to her family so very far away in Neopoli.
On the way home, Maria and Sam and Alphonse They found that their towns were very near one another. They talked about the things they missed from home, and the people. Sam seemed determined that he would make something of himself in the world. Alphonse, though, was more introspective and talked about when he would go back to Italy.
“I am only here for as long as I have to be,” he said with quiet determination. “My home is back in Cersossmo.”
“I know how you feel,” Maria said. “Sometimes I miss home so much that it hurts. On those nights, I cry myself to sleep.
"You must not feel that way," said Sam. "It is still too soon to know what good things you may find here in America. You may turn out to make your fortune here."
"That is so," agreed Basilio. "You could be the next Carnegie. Time along will tell."
"I cannot wait for time to tell," Alphonse said. He held his hand up in a way that said determination, at least to Maria. "I want to go home. If I could go home now, I would go. As soon as I have money for my passage home, I am going. I will not look over my shoulder with regret."
"You have every right to go home," Maria said to him. "But you will be missed here."
Alphonse looked at her as if he had never thought of such a thing. "Thank you," he said quietly. The rest of the return trip was accomplished in a somber mood. Perpahs because of this conversation or perhaps simply because all too soon the morning away was over and it was back to the boarding house and work, work, work.
From the back of the big boarding house, Maria could look across the wide, deep, imposing Allegheny and see Hulton and Oakmont, really two parts of the same riverside community. Hulton was named for the family who ran the ferry from over there to right at their doorstep, or at least just at the end of their back yard. If you had a reason to cross the river, the Hulton ferry was the way to go. Nor really a ferry, it was a rowboat for passengers and a flatboat for those with lots of goods to move from one bank to the other. Maria did not like crossing the river; she never thought of it as a friendly river. It was too dark and deep and fast moving for fondness. But she found the passing river traffic of interest. Barges of coal, paddle-wheelers of all sizes, smaller craft. Every so often a houseboat.
Out the front windows, there was both much and little to see. Not much in the way of scenery, since the high, rocky cliffs drew very close to the front of the house. Indeed they were only separated from the house by the street, some called it Freeport Road and some called it Pittsburgh Street—it was known as both in this stretch of Harmar Township. In Maria’s imagination the cliffs were always at the point of coming down on the house in the middle of the night. This never happened in reality. But the hillside was notorious for rockslides. Large chunks of rock did from time to time fall downward and land in Freeport Road, making traffic along the road impossible. Then, gangs of prisoners from the nearby Workhouse at Hoboken were brought to chip away at the rocks till they were of manageable size and could be carted away.
The boardinghouse was practically in the street and so when people walked by or wagons wheeled by there was a lot of racket and if one wanted to pass the time by watching the passing parade, it was entertaining. Not that Maria had much time to stop and watch and be entertained.
Maria slowly got to know the area because from time to time she would be sent on errands here or there. Once she had to take the rowboat across the river to get some medicine from Olix Darity, the pharmacist at Hulton. She clung for dear life to the sides of the gunnels as they crossed. It was a strange enterprise as the man who ferried her across rowed as if they were going upstream and would land at Barton's Island.
"They tried a witch over they, many years ago," the ferryman told her. "Back when it was Brewster's Island. Judge Brewster let the woman get away and he had to scoot out of there because of the ruckus. Went all the way to Texas."
Maria tried to picture a witchcraft trial and ended up thinking that the island was even more frightening that it had appeared up till now.
"Brewster sold to Barton and from what I know the Barton family still owns it now. 'Course the rivermen all call it Twelve Mile Island since that's how far upstream it is from The Point."
He pulled hard till more than midway across the river and then made for the opposite shore as fast as he could. The same technique was used in reverse on the return trip.
The Oakmont public library opened the same year Maria arrived in America but she had little desire to risk her life in the rowboat to borrow books that were printed in a language still so foreign to her.
Maria was also sent to the Armstrong Brothers Store at Acmetonia for provisions or to buy fresh produce from James McRoberts, one of the farmers at Harmarville. Once, she was sent with a note to Harry Pierce the hotel keeper Acmetonia, the note turning out to be an overdue rent notice for one of her brother and sister-in-law’s borders who had moved to Pierce’s place without paying his rent.
It was a long three mile walk up to Acmetonia, but Maria did not mind it, since it got her away from the endless housework at the boarding house and out into the open air. She did not lollygag but she strolled in such a way that she enjoyed every step of the walk—about an hour there and an hour back. The birds were thick in the trees and she listened to their chatter. The red cardinals with their “Birdie! Birdie! Birdie!”and their trilled “Good Cheer!” Even Rico couldn't hold a candle to these charming and brilliant red beauties, Maria thought. Then there were the blue jays with their “Jay! Jay!” and hawk-like cries. Most of all she enjoyed hearing the mocking birds who gave an exuberant concert by borrowing all the other bird’s songs and making them their own.
Along the way she saw several of her farmer friends, those rescuers of her first day. Giovanni Contadino stopped his work and came across the field to greet her.
“How goes it for you, Maria?” he asked.
She told him about her first several weeks at the boarding house and her impressions, good and bad, of the people there.
Giovanni shook his head when he heard about her room, “That isn’t right,” he said. “Everyone needs a place to really get away. You have to share yours with the jars and brooms.”
“I am used to it now,” Maria confessed. “But at first I was very unhappy.”
“What changed your mind?” Giovanni asked, flashing his brightest smile.
“I decided that I was here and I was going to make the best of it,” Maria said. “Usually, when I make up my mind to think a certain way, it helps things go along better.”
And did it help?”
“Yes,” Maria answered truthfully.
“So here is a question I have for you,” Giovanni said quietly. “If I were to come by and ask you to go for a walk sometime would you say yes?”
“We are walking now,” Maria said.
“We are,” he replied. “And I like it very much.”
“So do I,” said Maria.
“Good,” answered Giovanni. “I will keep that in mind when I come to the door of the boarding house and ask for another walk. But now I must get back to work. Ciao, Maria!”
Giovanni fairly bounded back to his work, leaping the rows of vegetables like hurdles in a race. Maria watched till he turned and took off his cap and waved in her direction. She waved back and then continued on her walk to Acmetonia.
Mr. Pierce was somewhat indignant when he read the note about the boarder who had absconded without paying his rent, and swore that he would throw the man out. He scribbled a few lines on the note for Maria to take back to Marigia and then she set off on her homeward walk.
There were farmers in the fields but she did not see Giovanni on return walk. When she drew near to the boarding house, there was some kind of excitement going on in front of it. A crowd had gathered and there was a lot of yelling going on. Not angry yelling, but rather frightened sounds.
Maria found Basilio Bello in the crowd and asked what the matter was.
“Stay here and do not go inside, something has happened,” Basilio said.
“What is it?” Maria insisted.
“A young man has hanged himself,” Basilio answered. “In the attic. He must have secured a piece of rope from somewhere. And then climbed a ladder to a high beam in the attic. And tied the rope to the timber and adjusted a noose around his neck and stepped off the ladder into eternity.”
“How awful,” Maria whispered under her breath.
“The body was found swinging from the beam.” Basilio told her, “he was found by a friend who had gone looking for him. No cause is known for the young man's act.”
Maria stood there in the street and looked around for faces she recognized. Aldo and Cesare were there. Leone Dellaminiera and Maso Istigatore, as well.
Marigia and Giacomo were talking to a man in uniform, a police man or someone from the police force at the mine? She could hear Marigia saying, “The door to the attic is kept locked at all times! I have a strict rule about it. I don’t know how anyone could have gotten up there.”
Scanning the crowd further, Maria realized that Ruvino was missing; also missing were two of the new borders Sam and Alphonse, who had not lived there more than a week. She wondered if it might be one or the other of them. Turning to ask Basilio who the victim was, she discovered that he had gone.
She could hear Marigia talking at the top of her voice again, “Maybe that silly girl left the door unlocked,” she was saying. “I don’t know when she will be back to ask her. I sent her to Acmetonia on an errand.”
”I am over here, Marigia,” Maria said, drawing closer. “I have just returned.”
“Maria! Did you leave the attic door unlocked?” Marigia demanded.
“I have never been up to the attic,” Maria said truthfully. “And you yourself keep all the keys on that big ring.” Maria pointed to it. All that she said was true.
"You spiteful child!” Marigia snapped back. “How could you say such a thing! And when I am sheltering you under my very roof, too! Ingrate!” She raved on like this for some time, as some of the boards tried to calm her down. Marigia only pushed them away. “See, this is how I am repaid for my care and generosity!”
Maria could not believe what she was hearing. But she would listen no longer. She fled from the flow of mean-spirited invective and ran toward the house. As she did, she nearly collided with the men who were carrying out the dead man on a makeshift stretcher formed from some bedclothes. His face had been covered by those tending to this gruesome task, and the arms had been folded on the chest, under the sheet. But one had fallen to the side.
Maria saw the hand as it was suspended there, limp and pale. With a shock of recognition, she realized it belonged to Alphonse Sinise. She searched the faces of the men who were carrying the body—Sam was among them. She caught Sam’s eyes—they told the whole story. It was Alphonse, who would never go home to Italy again.
“Oh no!” Maria said to him.
“Hush for now, Maria,” Sam said. “We will talk when we are able. But let things rest for now.”
The small procession continued onward, Maria watched them go. The white sheet. The limp hand. The broad back of Sam and the others who were carrying Alphonse. In the background, Maria could still hear Marigia shrieking, this time in wails and unintelligible phrases. Once she thought she heard her say, “The house will be haunted!” and then catch herself. Yes, thought Maria, that will not be good for business. Who wants to stay under a roof where a man killed himself in despair? Maria went into the house and found that was still and quiet. No one was stirring although some of the night shift men were surely sleeping. But those who were awake were all still outside in the crowd and commotion.
Maria went back to the storeroom and closed the door. She then pushed a big bin of potatoes against it, to assure herself some privacy. Then, she went to find the package from the Padrone. There it was. She sat down on the bed and before opening it said to herself, “This is the only thing I can do. Alphonse is gone. Marigia is going crazy. But here—there is peace.”
Maria thought back to the farewell tea with the Padrone when he had handed her this small package. Here it was in her hand, still wrapped in the silk scarf, still tied with a golden ribbon.
Maria remembered every word he had said to her as he gave it to her:
“This you must take with you to America, and open it when you have arrived there safely. Promise me that and promise that you will let us know in letters how things go with you.”
"I must start writing these letters," Maria chided herself, as she recalled what the Padrone had said and what she had so readily promised. "I will do so, when I write to say that I have arrived and to say thank you for whatever this present may be," she resolved. And only then did she begin to unwrap the gift.
The scarf itself was a thing of wonder and beauty, silk and soft and designed in such a way that depending on how it was folded certain colors came to the fore. There were gold and blues and just a hint of a deep red, if you held it just so. But to hold it differently allowed the blues to become the major note and the gold and reds to be more subtle.
"Oh, this is a treasure," Maria thought as she placed it around her shoulders, like a shawl.
Once the silk scarf was removed, she saw that underneath was what appeared to be a small box, made of finely chased silver. "This is too fine a present," Maria thought. Certainly there was nothing in the boarding house that would approach its beauty; nor, Maria pondered, in her own home in Noepoli, either. She noticed a small latch on the front of the box and carefully undid it and then lifted up the box's lid, to find that it wasn't a box after all. It was a silver frame; a silver frame, with the center hinge making the top and the bottom of what she had at first thought was a box. But now, she found, it was meant to stand on a table or shelf, with the hinge in the middle. The left side was chased in silver; but on the right side was a small portrait of a young woman.
"It is a portrait of me," Maria mused. "Wearing the scarf in which it was presented to me. How lovely and how very odd, since I have never posed for a portrait."
A note had been tucked into the frame, and had fallen into Maria's lap as she opened it. She turned her attention to it and read as follows:
My Dear Maria,
Here is a small memento of the place of your birth and the people here who will always love you. The scarf was a favorite of my dear wife, and the portrait of her reminds me of you. It was done as a study when the large painting in my library was also made. If you look closely you will see that she is wearing the scarf in the portrait. I have and will always cherish the painting in the library, as a reminder of you as well as of my dear lady. But I thought you should have these other reminders of the connection between us that no ocean can separate. May you enjoy them both wherever life may lead, and may you ever count me as your friend.
In fondness,
Guiseppe Rinaldi
Maria sat there in her small room for some time, thinking about the Padrone and the choice she had made to come to America. She thought of his kindness in sending with her this treasure of his heart. She also thought about the strange events of this day that went from the running of the errand and the walk with Giovanni to the horror of Alphonso’s death, to the shrewish behavior of Marigia, to the solemn look on Sam’s face. It was a memorable day, in many ways.
“I will always remember it so,” Maria thought as she felt the softness of the scarf around her shoulders. As she did, there was a soft knocking at the door of the storeroom.
“Maria are you there?” a whispered voice called.
“Who is it?” Maria answered, though she felt certain she knew who it was.
“Sam,” the voice replied. “I would like to talk with you if you are willing?”
“Oh, yes, Sam.” Maria said. “One moment...” Maria put the photo and the note away and then pushed aside the potato bin. Opening the door, she saw Sam looking at her with a kindness and a tenderness that seemed almost heaven-sent.
Sam took one look at Maria, wrapped in the beautiful shawl, with the wonderful colors bringing out her own fine features and he held his breath a and then said in a whisper,
"Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare la donna mia..." "So kind and so honest my lady appears to me.”
Maria could not believe her ears. These were the very words that she had imagined the bold knight Jacuvill saying to her. Sam’s words took her back to her childhood daydreams of Jacuvill. She remembered that she would see coming across the valley—a dashing, heroic figure of the “dintorini”. He would know where to find her, he would rescue her from whatever the danger might be.
It was as if, all of the sudden, the reason for coming to America became clear. At least, Maria dared to hope so. She could not bring herself to tell Sam what she was thinking. In fact, it seemed very wrong for her to be thinking anything other than a compassion for him on the loss of Alphonse. She did, nonetheless reach out her hand to his.
“I am so sorry about Alphonse,” she said, as she looked into his hazel eyes. “Words cannot say how sad it makes me that what happened has happened.”
Sam nodded his head slowly. “I want to tell you what I know, but only if you want to hear about it,” he said softly. “I am not going to tell anyone else. They can speculate all they want to. The police know and they are very understanding. From their point of view the matter is closed. But as someone who loved him like a brother, I have to tell someone I can trust. Someone with a heart as well as a mind. I thought of you at once Maria. But if you do not want to know, say so, and I will not speak about it.”
This speech tumbled out rapidly and yet Maria sensed that she had heard it before, and she answered Sam saying, “Yes, I want to hear what you can tell me. I think I need to hear it, for your sake and for my sake. And to honor Alphonse, also.”
“We cannot stay here,” Sam said. “They will all be coming inside soon,”
His words brought Maria back to the moment. She said, “And Marigia will be looking for me to start up the supper.”
“Not tonight, Maria,” Sam said. “I told her she was so mean to you that I am going to take you for a walk so you can cool off and her as well. She has plenty of energy, she might as well use it for something useful and make the supper. The rest of the men backed me up. Basilio told her that if she raised her voice to you unnecessarily again she would be the next one swaying from the rafters.”
Maria looked at Sam, startled. “How that must have hurt you,” she said.
“No, it did not. In fact I wish I had said it myself. Marigia looked at the rest of us and saw that we were all in ernest about it. She gave a bit of a protest but I shut her up. I said that what I have to say to you is more important than any help in the kitchen tonight. And that maybe—just maybe—you will be willing to help her again, starting tomorrow. But only if I can convince you not to go on strike or leave this place. That shut her up, fast.”
“Me, on strike!” Maria said. “how in the world could I go on strike?”
“You have more say so than you realize,” Sam told her. “With all of us behind you. I told her that if you refuse to come back to work that we were all leaving this place for another boarding house.”
“You did?” Maria said in wonderment.
“I did. And they all agreed with me. To a man. You should have seen her face. I stopped looking when her chin reached the roadbed.”
With that, Maria laughed and realized that this was her chance to have some time away from the drudgery. She also wanted to hear what Sam had to say about the tragedy that had just befallen him and all of them. And she also simply wanted to be with Sam.
‘Let us go, then,” she said to Sam, “Maybe I will hear about it later, but no matter.”
So out the door they went, with more than a few pairs of eyes watching them. Marigia and Giacomo gave her stern looks but not stern enough to stop her. They followed Freeport Road in the direction of the famous fields but only as far as Guys Run, a small stream that emptied into the Allegheny River just where the land flattened out a bit.
“Let’s go this way,” Sam said. So they walked along Guys Run on the old dirt road that followed its course, putting the river behind them. There were scraggly sumac bushes growing along the way, with their clusters of long narrow leaves. A small flock of Evening Grosbeaks were foraging among the ripening sumac bobs, their yellow feathers flashing against the greenery.
Away from the river, it was as if fifty, one hundred and more years fell away. They were in an area of scrub but not far on either side were woods, filled with old trees that were young before the first Europeans came this way. Sam found a sassafras leaf, and picked it and crushed it in his hand for Maria to smell. The aroma was fresh and appealing. Somewhere near by a mocking bird was giving one of its recitals.
“It is strange, Maria said, “that all of this is here, not more than a few steps from the traffic on Freeport Road and on the river.”
“Yes,” Sam agreed. “It is noisy and busy there, and peaceful all of the sudden here. I think that is was Adolpho was seeking. Peacefulness.”
“He chose a terrible way to find it,” Maria said.
Sam nodded. “You know, he never wanted to come to America. His attitude was against it from the very start. There was no work for him at home. He had to do something. But he used to say he would have happily become a beggar in Italy before leaving it behind.” Sam kicked a loose stone on the path, and it went flying ahead of them
“So why did he come here?” Maria asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe he thought he would change his mind once he got here. He had heard the stories we all hear. You can scoop up gold from the side of the road. Everyone is a millionaire before a year is past. But he did not believe them any more than I did.” Sam turned around and looked at the sky. “If I had not told the family I was coming to America, I don’t think he would have come on his own. That is why I am blaming myself.”
“Oh, Sam,” Maria said, “You must never do that. He was sad—distraught. I don’t think anyone would have been able to stop him. If they did, today, he would have tried it again, another day.”
“Yes, you are right,” Sam agreed, nodding his head slowly. “The fact is, he told me on the boat that he would go overboard before we got to New York. But then he got sick, and was in his bed the whole way across. Weak as a kitten. I thought it was God protecting him from the dark waters of the Atlantic.”
"It was,” Maria agreed.
“Then we got to America and all of the sudden he was well again. Not strong, but not sick. He went through the medical inspection at Ellis Island without any concern from the examiners. And then we were on our way here. And he was very quiet watching the land pass before our eyes outside the windows. We had gone a long way before he turned to me and told me that with every mile, his homeland was becoming more of a lost dream and less of a reality.”
Maria nodded. This untamed area boasted a profusion of plants that were new to Maria’s eyes: blue curls, butterfly weed, and black cohosh, doll's eyes, goat's beard, pink milkweed and white wood aster. Here and there could also be seen jack-in-the-pulpit, spreading Jacob's ladder, brown-eyed Susan, wild geranium, and blazing star.
They had by now turned off the winding road alongside the stream, and were climbing a tall hill, that rose to the left side of it. She wanted to ask Sam where they were and where they were going, but she did not want to interrupt him as he talked about Adolpho.
“I knew how he was feeling,” Sam continued. “I was feeling the same way. I think we all feel it when we go so far from home. Except maybe scoundrels and thieves."
The path grew steeper as they went upward. Sam offered Maria his arm, and the climbed side by side. It occured to Maria at that moment that she had walked in the old country with her first love and she had climbed a volcano with Rico. Now, where would this walk with Sam lead?
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