The Immigrants

The

IMMIGRANTS

Copyright © 1994, 2001 by Howard Fast. Copyright renewed. Reprinted by arrangement with the Howard Fast Literary Trust.

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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

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Originally published in 1977 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fast, Howard

The immigrants / Howard Fast.

p. cm.

1. Italian Americans—Fiction. 2. Chinese Americans—Fiction. 3. Irish Americans—Fiction. 4. Immigrant families—Fiction. 5. Immigrants— Fiction. 6. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3511.A784I4 2010

813’.52—dc22

2009042092

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Bette

Contents

The Immigrants … … … … … … … … … … … . .1

Fisherman’s Wharf … … … … … … … … … … . .31

Russian Hill … … … … … … … … … … … … .95

Sons and Daughters… … … … … … … … … … .173

The Vintage … … … … … … … … … … … …265

The Wind … … … … … … … … … … … … .357

The Whirlwind … … … … … … … … … … …405

the ImmIgrants

The immigrants were without any deep con sciousness of the role they were playing. They did not dream of history or see themselves as a part of history. They partook of a mythology of the place to which they were going, but of the fact of the place they knew little indeed. Misery absorbed them. Nausea absorbed them. The agony of their stomachs absorbed them. In the pitching, shifting, fetid cabin occupied by eight human beings, four of them adult, four of them children, mea suring eight feet by eight feet, stinking of a mixture of body odor and vomit, unventilated, they were absorbed by the various degrees of their misery—and this misery appeared to them to go on for an eternity.

On the small, cold, wind-and water-swept deck that was allotted to steerage passengers, there was some re lief from the closeness of the cabin, but the North At lantic in the month of December, in this year of 1888, provided small compensation for the breath of fresh air the deck granted. The deck was wet and icy cold and awash whenever the weather worsened. And the weather was not good during that passage.

Most of the time Anna Lavette spent in her bunk. A dark, good-looking girl in her early twenties, she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy. She had been born and raised in the tiny fishing village of Albenga, in the north of Italy on the Ligurian Sea. Her husband, Joseph, was a distant cousin, not by blood but by the intri cate network of Italian family connection. The Lavettes were a family of fishermen, part Italian, part French, part of them in San Remo, part in Marseille. Joseph had grown up in Marseille, a fisherman from the age of ten.

Now, twenty-five years old, he was large, strong, im mune to

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H o w a r d F a s t

seasickness, built like a bull, cheerful, and hopeful. His marriage to Anna had been arranged when they were both children, and he saw her for the first time only ten months before, when their marriage took place. He was delighted with his good luck—a wife who was pleasant to look at, round and delicious to embrace, cheerful, and obviously equally pleased with the man chosen as her husband. She welcomed his body as he did hers, and their lovemaking satisfied both of them. If she spoke no French, his own Italian was ample, and she found his French accent attractive. She was also possessed of imagination, and when he told her that his son—he never for a moment considered that it might be a daughter—must be born in America, she agreed.

So they became part of that vast wash of mankind who were the immigrants, a flow of nations across the Atlantic and into another world. They had been at sea for sixteen days. For the past five days, Anna had lain in her frank, flushed and feverish, without privacy, without air, her cheerfulness turning into hopelessness, fearing more for her unborn child than for her own life, vomiting out the will to live—with the single gratifica tion that she had married a man who was patient and gentle, who sat beside her for endless hours, wiping her hot brow with a wet cloth, building pictures of what their life would be in the golden land of America.

“No,” she said to him once. “No, Joseph, I will die here.”

“I will not permit it,” he said flatly. “You are my wife. You will honor and obey me and get well.”

“I am so miserable.”

She did not die, and a day came when the pitching and lurching of the ship ended, and then he picked her up in his arms and carried her up to the deck. She was thin and wasted, but when she saw the sun and the sky and the smooth water of New York Harbor, she knew that she would live and that she wanted to live.

They stood on the deck as the ancient, rusty ship that had been their

t H e I m m I g r a n t s

5

home and ark for seventeen days wore into El is Island—shoulder to shoulder, cheek to jowl. Everyone was on the deck, the old and the young, screaming children, weeping babies, the silent, the terri fied, the sick, the hopeful, nationalities and tongues in a flux of sound and tears and laughter. The great lady of hope welcomed them, and this they had been waiting to see. The Eighth Wonder of the World.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” In five tongues the statistics floated over the babble of sound.
She is a hundred and fifty-two feet high, and she weighs two
hundred and twenty-five tons. Yes, you can stand up there in the torch at the
very end of the arm.
Across the water, there was the mass of buildings on the battery, but the lady of liberty was something else.

Then at the immigration station, crowded with more people than it was ever meant to hold, Lady Liberty was laughing at them. They were herded to gether like cattle, and they whimpered in fear at the mysteries. The smallpox inoculation was a mys tery. The hours of waiting were another mystery. There were Turks, and no one spoke Turkish; there were Greeks, and no one spoke Greek. With Italian, it was another matter. An immigration officer spoke Italian fluently, and he asked Joseph how much money he had.

“Seven hundred and twenty French francs.”

“Which is French money,” said the immigration man, “and what good is French money in America?”

“Mother of God!” whispered Anna.

Warm and friendly, the immigration man took them aside. They were both relieved after their sudden twinge of terror. Here was a friendly face, a friendly soul, and their own tongue.

“You don’t mean that our money is worthless?” Jo seph pleaded.

“Of course not. But you must have dollars, American money.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” He explained the matter to Anna.

“Women,” he said to the immigration inspector. “And she’s carrying. She was sick on the passage.”

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H o w a r d F a s t

“Of course, of course.” The inspector’s name was Carso.

“
Paisano
,” he said warmly, ignoring Joseph’s French accent, and Joseph replied, “
Paisano.
” Men understand these things. Carso had a friend whose name was Franco, and Joseph hefted the bundle that contained all their worldly goods, and with an arm around Anna’s waist, he followed Carso out of the crowd.

Franco was a small, sharp-eyed, long-nosed man, with a furtive air and a mournful manner. He made it plain that he suffered; he suffered doing favors for soft hearted idiots like Carso. Who needed French francs? Who wanted them? Why did Carso insist upon making his life so difficult? Finally, he weakened and gave Jo seph sixty dollars for his seven hundred and twenty francs—about one third of what they would have brought in an honest exchange.

So the Lavettes, Joseph and Anna, the immigrants, came to America.

At the end of five weeks, the sixty dollars was gone. Joseph learned that he had been cheated, and he also learned that there was nothing he could do about it. He learned that the process of being cheated, put upon, robbed, bamboozled was an intricate part of the exis tence in America of two immigrants who spoke no En glish and had neither relatives nor friends. The questions in his wife’s dark, pain-filled eyes were unspoken, but nonetheless clear. “Look at me with my swollen belly. I’ll bring him forth in a coal cellar. That’s his inheri tance.” They had paid seven dollars for a month’s rent in advance for half of a coal cellar on Rivington Street. Light came in from two dirty windows, high on the wall. Anna cleaned and cleaned, but there is no way to clean a coal cellar. From dawn until sunset, Joseph offered his body, his intelligence, his great strength.

First, at the dockside on the East River, he offered himself as a fish erman. There were no jobs. It was winter, a cold, icy winter,

t H e I m m I g r a n t s

7

and only the largest boats were going out. For every job on the big boats, there were ten men laid off out of the small boats, and they spoke English. He of fered himself in dumb, impotent silence. One day, he found a construction site with an Italian foreman. He threw away his pride and pleaded. “No use,
paisano
. Come back next week, the week after.”

Anna persuaded him, with much argument, to spend two dollars for a heavy jacket. They had to see a doc tor, and each time cost them a dollar. At the docks, Joseph met an Italian named Mateo, and Mateo told him that he, Mateo, could find him a job as a deck hand on an excursion boat. No one told Joseph that the excursion boats did not function during the winter. To get the job, to assure it, Mateo would have to have ten dollars in advance. They would meet then at the Bat tery. At the Battery, Joseph waited five hours in the freezing cold, and then, heartsick, filled with the mortification of the decent man who has been cruelly tricked, he returned to Anna.

The cellar was always cold. At night, they huddled together like two lost children, the great hulk of a man robbed of his manliness, the woman robbed of her joy and cheerfulness and youth, Joseph embracing her swollen body and wiping away her tears. He knew that she must eat well; they came from a land of sunlight and warm winds, where food was life and joy and tradi tion; but as their few dollars dwindled, they ate only bread and pasta and salt fish, counting out pennies. Soon the pennies would be gone. What then?

Afterward, Joseph would say that they owed their lives and their child’s life to Frank Mancini. When he said that, Anna’s lips would tighten and her eyes would harden, and Joseph would shrug and say something to the effect of that being the difference between the way a man and a woman looked at things.

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H o w a r d F a s t

Frank Mancini was an elegant gentleman. He wore a black Homburg and a black overcoat with a collar of fine dark mink. He had a scarf of white silk, and his pointed shoes were polished to a glitter. He came into the wretched cellar place where Joseph and Anna lived as if he were entering a palace, took off his hat, bowed to them, informed them that his name was Frank Man cini—in impeccable Italian—and that he had been given their address by Rocco Cantala, who was the foreman at the construction site where Joseph had asked for a job.

To all of this, the Lavettes listened with amazement. This was the first person to set foot in their place, and a person of such elegance and bearing made them speech less. They simply stared.

“I am a labor contractor,” he announced.

Still, they stared and waited.

“Forgive me. I have been thirty years in America, and I forget that there are other places and other ways. I forget that the world is not America. I will ask you whether you have ever heard of the Atchison Rail road?”

Joseph was wondering whether it would be proper and polite to suggest that Mr. Mancini remove his coat. It was very cold in the cellar. He wore the jacket that he had purchased, and Anna wore three layers of cotton under her sweater. He decided that in any case it would be presumptuous of him.

“The Atchison Railroad?”

Joseph and Anna shook their heads.