Free Streets of Gold by Evan Hunter Page A

entirely in Italian.
    “Giovanni’s gone to work,” she said.
    “Yes I know.”
    “Ah? How did you know?”
    “I passed through your room.”
    “Ah,” she said. “Of course. And you noticed.” She glanced sidelong at Francesco, and then took a towel from a wooden rod nailed to the cabinet door. Studiously drying her armpits, she said, “I’m sending the children to my sister’s. She’ll feed them breakfast.”
    “Why?” Francesco asked.
    “It’s a holiday,” Luisa replied, and shrugged.
    “Then I’ll go to Pino’s,” Francesco said. “He’ll give me breakfast there.” He paused. “So you can be free to enjoy the morning.”
    “I’ll make breakfast for you,” she said.
    “Thank you, but...”
    “I’ll make breakfast.”
    The two oldest Agnelli children burst into the kitchen, fully dressed and anxious to start for their aunt’s house, just down the block. Luisa gave the children a folded slip of paper upon which she’d scribbled a message to her sister, and kissed them both hastily. The oldest boy grinned at Francesco and said, “Goodbye, cocksucker.” In the other room, the baby began crying.
    “He wants to be fed,” Luisa said, and again glanced sidelong at Francesco as she shooed the children out of the apartment. Francesco listened to them clattering noisily down the steps to the street. “Good,” Luisa said. “Now we’ll have some peace.” She smiled at Francesco, and went to fetch the baby.
    Francesco stood near the door to the apartment. Was he really about to be seduced by this pig of a woman? Was this how he was to lose his virginity? The stirring in his groin was insistent. In another moment, he would be wearing his second flagpole of the morning. And in another moment, if he was not mistaken, Luisa would carry young Salvatore into the kitchen, where she would bare her breast to his ferociously demanding mouth. Given his own appetite of the moment, Francesco doubted he could resist shoving the tiny savior away from that bursting purple nipple and usurping the little nipper’s rightful place at the breakfast table. He argued with his hard-on, and made a wise decision.
    He left the apartment and went to see Pino.
     
    “My fellow Italian-Americans,” the man on the bandstand was saying, “it gives me great pleasure to be able to address you on this Independence Day in this great land of ours. Do not make any mistake about it. For whereas many of you have been on these shores for just a little while, it
is
a great land, and it is
our
land, yours and mine.”
    The man was talking in Italian, and so Francesco understood every word.
Your
land, he thought. Not mine.
My
land is on the banks of the Ofanto.
My
land is Italy.
    The bandstand was hung with red, white, and blue bunting. The man was wearing a straw boater and a walrus mustache, candy-striped shirt open at the throat, celluloid collar loosened, cuffs rolled back. The band behind him consisted of five pieces — piano, drums, trumpet, accordion, and alto saxophone. The musicians were wearing red uniforms with blue piping, white caps with blue patent leather peaks. On the face of the bass drum the words the SAM RYAN BAND were lettered in a semicircle. The sky behind the bandstand was as blue as my own blind eyes, streaked with wisps of cataract clouds that drifted out over the East River, vanishing as they went. The trees were in full leaf, a more resounding green than that of the emerald-bright lawn upon which the picnic guests were assembled before the bandstand. They were, these ghetto dwellers, dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes because this was a celebration, and in their homeland a celebration was a
festa
, and a
festa
was by definition religious, and you dressed up for God unless you wished him to smite you from the sky with his fist, or to spit into the milk of your mother’s obscenity. (How’s that, Papa?)
    The clothing exhibited on that lawn was a patchwork fancy of style and color, old-world garb