Excerpt

I wrote this letter thirty years ago. I wrote it in pencil in a jail cell in Goshen in the summer of 1913. I did not tell myself the truth that I knew. It is 1943. I am at a kitchen table in Middletown, and there is a war outside the window, and I am trying to set down the summer of 1913 correctly. It has taken thirty years to write the true one.

---

Nellie — Late May, 1913

The train from Middletown took forty minutes on a good day, which this was not. When I stepped onto the Maybrook platform the afternoon was already giving way to evening, and the sound of the place came at me before the smell, and the smell came before the sight.

I had been here six times before.

I smelled the creosote first — the ties still holding the heat of the day — then coal smoke, then peppers frying from the direction of the main street. Under it, from somewhere down the avenue, the sound of music and drinking that unfolds from certain kinds of places late on a Friday afternoon.

Hattie was beside me, empty-handed. For the first few visits I had read this as travelling light. The real reason: Hattie did not bring a bag to Maybrook because Hattie had not decided, on any given Friday morning, whether she was coming back.

I had come to understand her this way: from the things she did not say and the things she did not carry.

I saw the ten saloons as I descended from the platform to the street.

Ten saloons. I counted them on my second visit, because I was the kind of person who counted things, and I had arrived at ten before I reached the end of the block and understood I had not yet reached the end of the saloons. The Yellow Dog. The Green Turtle. The Cold Storage. Casey’s Broadway, which was neither Casey’s nor a Broadway in any sense I recognised. They ran the length of the main street and partway down the side streets, open at four in the afternoon, still open at four in the morning. Through the open doorways in the heat came the smell of damp sawdust — fresh laid on a Friday morning, already worked through by evening, dark now with the week. They were, I had come to understand, the actual civic structure of Maybrook — the place where secrets were passed, debts were created and settled, and the community’s opinions and decisions were formed.

The town ran along Tower Avenue for nearly a mile, the saloons running its length and the short cross-streets — Jewell Street, Spring Street, Broadway — feeding off it into the boarding houses. You could not see from one end of the avenue to the other.

At six o’clock the turntable ran. It was one hundred and ten feet across and it turned a full locomotive, and when it moved the whole avenue felt it through the soles of their boots.

Most of those five hundred men were not from Maybrook. They arrived on the morning train from Newburgh and left on the evening one, or they boarded in the rooming houses and sent money home to the places they had come from, which were sometimes Calabria and sometimes Campania and sometimes places I had never heard of, and the saloons were what they had instead of the places they had come from.

I have been watching men do this my whole life. In 1943 the money goes to different places, and the men go further, and the saloons are still there when they come back. Some of them.

We walked toward Mrs. Russo’s store — the corner where Nicoli and Testa spent their off days, and where Mrs. Russo’s coffee gave them a reason to stay. Mrs. Tessie Russo sold coffee and Italian cookies. Heavy salamis hung over the counter. Onions and peppers frying in the kitchen, the smell of it reaching the street. The Italians brought in squirrels and rabbits. Sometimes the Americans brought in venison.

I respected Mrs. Russo’s neutrality. She was a woman running a business in a town of five hundred men, and she had understood, probably years before I arrived, that neutrality was the only sustainable position. Enemies were too easily made and grudges held too long.

I did not ask Mrs. Russo about it. Mrs. Russo would not answer. I was not entitled to ask.

*  *  *

Nicoli was leaning against the front of the store when we came up the street, dressed better than the men beside him in the way he always was. A clean shirt, ironed pants, a jacket. To the Americans he could never be more than a laborer. The Americans called the original Chinese rail laborers Coolies. Now they called the Italians Dagos. Nicoli paid attention to his appearance. He understood what the Americans thought of Italians in Orange County in 1913. He pushed off the storefront when he saw Hattie.

Pasquale Testa was on the upturned crate he had decided was his personal throne. He had grease on his hands. He always had grease on his hands.

Beside him were two other men from the yard — Bruno and another whose name I had never caught, both present in the way that men are present when they are providing texture to a scene they have no particular role in.

I stopped in front of Testa. He looked up from his hands with the expression of a man who had been hoping for exactly this and was not certain he deserved it.

‘You still have the grease,’ I said.

‘Yes, all week.’

I took the rag from where it lay draped over the crate and started working at the back of his hand.

The graphite was deep in the creases of his knuckles and at the base of his thumb where the skin had been worked hard and was darker than the rest. It was not going to come out with one rag on one Friday afternoon. I kept working anyway.

He let me, watching with the slightly dazed quality of someone receiving a kindness they can’t comprehend. I had noticed this about him before. He did not understand being attended to. I didn’t know the history behind it. I suspected it was long.

Beside them, Bruno said something in Italian to the man whose name I didn’t know. They were amused by something. I caught a word — not enough to be certain, but enough to have a direction — and looked up in time to see that Hattie, six feet away in conversation with Nicoli, had caught the same word and filed it without appearing to.

This was also consistent.

Hattie’s Italian was not something I had had to assemble. It was visible, if you knew what to look for: the comprehension that arrived before it was supposed to, the slight adjustment of attention when the men spoke among themselves, the way her eyes moved when she caught something and was deciding whether to appear to have caught it. I had seen all of this on the second Friday and had understood that Hattie had Italian and was choosing, for her own reasons, not to display it. I had not asked about it directly. A direct question produced a superficial response rather than a real answer. I sought real answers. I had filed it the way I filed things: present, significant, explanation to be determined later.

I went back to the graphite, which was not going to yield.

*  *  *

Mrs. Russo set coffee down in front of Hattie without being asked.

They had moved inside as the light went golden — not because anyone had decided to move inside, but because the conversation had migrated toward the store’s doorway and then through it. Testa and I had found the two chairs near the window. Nicoli and Hattie were at the counter.

The store smelled of coffee and dried herbs and the onions and peppers from the kitchen. Mrs. Russo moved behind the counter with the efficiency of a woman who has done this work so long the motion has left her body.

She was perhaps fifty. Not a large woman, but broad-shouldered, with hands that had done work for decades and showed it. She had run this store since before the yard arrived — since when this was still a small junction town, before the switching terminal had changed everything. She had watched the hamlet of six houses become a village of five hundred in the space of a few years, and she had stayed, and she had kept the store. I know now what that takes. You learn it slowly, across enough years.

She looked at me once, when she brought the coffee — something between assessment and recognition.

I held the look for a moment. Mrs. Russo set down the coffee and went back to her work.

As usual, Testa was explaining something. He had a mind that organized itself around the concrete, and he explained it so you understood too. He was interested in the details and assumed you would be, too. I had discovered, to my own surprise, that I was.

‘The problem isn’t the weight,’ he said. ‘People always think it’s the weight. It’s the vibration. Metal gets tired. You put a thousand trains over the same joint, the metal remembers every one.’

‘Metal has a memory,’ I said.

‘Everything has a memory.’

I thought about this. Outside the window, the main street continued its Friday — the saloons audible, men passing with the unhurried gait of the end of a shift, a horse standing patient at a rail in front of the Yellow Dog. Everything here was new and everything carried the memory of what had been here before. The Hawkins horse farm had stood on this ground twenty years ago. The ground remembered the horses. The horses were gone. I understand this better now. The ground has more to remember now.

Then he asked: what do you do in Middletown.

Not as a pleasantry. In the tone he used for things he wanted to know.

I told him: I keep accounts for my father’s work. I told him about the aldermanic council, the cases that came before it, the methodology my father had taught me without meaning to — establish the facts, distinguish what is certain from what is likely, do not decorate. I told him I found this useful.

He said: it is the same as the metal. You find the fault in the reasoning before the reasoning fails.

I said: yes. That is exactly what it is.

He looked at me the way he looked at a joint that had been repaired correctly — not with warmth, exactly, but with a recognition that what was there was sound. I had not previously understood that being assessed for soundness by someone who knew what sound looked like was a form of being seen. I filed this observation without deciding what to do with it. I was not ready to do anything with it yet.

The light had moved while I was not watching it.

I turned from the window and found that Hattie was watching me.

Not Nicoli. Not the store. Her.

There was something in Hattie’s face that I filed without immediately naming. It would take me weeks to name it. By the time I had the name for it, I would be in a jail cell in Goshen, and naming it would not help with anything.

*  *  *

*  *  *

Hattie — Nellie’s reconstruction — Late May, 1913

She heard it in Italian, which was how she knew it was real.

I have not always been certain where observation ended and inference began.

Nicoli spoke to her in English. Living and working in America had produced a working fluency. He understood, with the intelligence of a man who had arrived somewhere without credentials and had to build his position from the ground up, that language was the most portable credential available to him. He was good at English. He spoke to her in English.

When he switched to Italian it was because what he wanted to say was meant to be remembered and to stay between them.

They were at the counter in Mrs. Russo’s store. Nellie and Testa were at the window. The coffee was good. Hattie had her hands around the cup and was watching the afternoon through the front window when Nicoli said, quietly, in Italian: there is something I need from you next Friday.

Her Italian was not taught, not studied. She had absorbed it the way children absorb what is simply in the air — a childhood immersion in a language spoken by people from different villages in different dialects who had arrived in the same neighbourhood and made something of each other. Before she was eight she had Italian the way she had English: as a thing she was inside rather than a thing she possessed.

Her mother had been born in Calabria. She had come to New York at nineteen, alone, which was not usual and which her mother had never explained and which Hattie had understood, by the time she was old enough to understand it, meant something about the circumstances of leaving. In New York she had married Hattie’s father, whose people were from Naples and who spoke a different Italian, and they had lived in the neighbourhood until Hattie was eight — vendors, neighbours above and below and through the walls, the church, the schoolyard where half the children switched between Italian and English and back without appearing to notice they were doing it.

Then her father had found work in Middletown, New York, in a factory that made wool, and they had moved. And her mother had made a decision.

She had announced it on the train. No more Italian. In Middletown they were American. In the city the Italian had been invisible because everyone had it; in a small American town it would make them visible in ways that cost something. Her mother said it plainly, because she always said difficult things plainly, and Hattie understood.

The Italian had stopped. They had not spoken it in the house again. When her mother’s sister came to visit from the city, they spoke English, which her aunt spoke imperfectly and with enormous effort, as a courtesy to a decision she did not understand.

But eight years is a long time to be inside something. You do not lose what you carry in your body before you are eight. It goes somewhere else and waits.

*  *  *

When the men in the yard spoke among themselves, Hattie heard Calabrian consonants — her mother’s Italian, the Italian from the church on Mulberry Street, the Italian that had surrounded her in the first eight years of her life before her mother decided they were going to be American. It was not a translation. It was a recognition. The language she had been told she didn’t have anymore reaching up through eight years of silence and saying: I know this.

Nicoli had understood this from the third Friday, when she had reacted a half-second too quickly to something the men said among themselves. He had looked at her with the expression of someone who has just confirmed a hypothesis, and she had looked back with the expression of a woman who had decided to let him confirm it.

He had not addressed her Italian directly. He had begun, occasionally, to say things to her in Italian — close things, things where it was important to choose your language carefully. Bit by bit, he confirmed what he already knew.

Nicoli did not correct her. He saw what she was. She was sixteen, married to a man in Middletown she had left and not-married in any sense that held, twice over the line that respectable Middletown drew around women, carrying the Italian her mother had tried to leave behind, and he did not flinch and he did not tell her who to be. He simply asked her things directly. She said yes or she said no.

What he had asked her, on an earlier Friday, was about the Italian.

Not directly. He had said something in Italian to Testa about a detail of a job, a term from the yard, and then turned to her and asked: do you know this word. The way you might ask anyone. Not a test. Genuinely asking.

She had said: yes. In Italian.

He had waited. He did not make an expression. He did not perform surprise or pleasure. He simply waited, in the way of someone who has opened a door and is giving you time to decide whether to walk through it.

She had told him: Mulberry Street. Her mother. The train to Middletown, and the decision her mother had announced on that train, and the Italian that had stopped being spoken and had not been spoken since.

He had listened the way he listened to everything she said: as though what she was saying was information worth having. Not as a story to be responded to. As a fact about a person he was interested in knowing accurately.

When she finished he said, in Italian: it does not go away, the thing that is in you before you are eight.

He said it as a fact, not a consolation. She received it as a fact. This was the quality she had not encountered before and would not encounter again for a long time: the willingness to say a true thing plainly, without softening it into comfort or hardening it into judgment. He named what was true and left it there for her to do with as she chose.

She had not said anything. She had put her hands around the coffee cup and looked at the steam. The dried herbs hung near the ceiling — bundles of oregano, something she could not name — and she was aware of them without thinking about them, the way she was aware of the yard. Through the window: the coupling of cars, the bang and shudder of it, the whole street not pausing because it never did. She understood that something had just been established between them that she had not been looking for and was not going to be able to unfind.

*  *  *

There is something I need from you next Friday, he said, in Italian.

She waited.

There will be trouble with a man named Mazzo. I need you to be there. I need you to be seen.

She knew Mazzo. She had seen the nod that was not a nod, had watched Nicoli’s jaw do the thing it did when Mazzo crossed the street. She felt the tension of what was between them without knowing its cause, and she had decided the cause was not relevant. The tension was.

She looked at him across the counter.

She looked at Nellie, who was at the window with Testa, who was explaining something with his hands. Nellie wore the expression she wore when she was learning something she hadn’t expected to find interesting. She did not know about the jaw. She did not know about the revolver.

She knew that Nellie would come with her next Friday if she asked. She did not examine whether this made Nellie a tool. She did not examine whether she was walking into something dangerous and bringing Nellie with her.

She turned the cup in her hands. The coffee was still warm. From across the store, Testa’s voice: something about vibration, about what metal remembered.

She turned back to Nicoli. She stayed.

Her staying was the answer. No word was spoken. Not yes, not no. Just the staying. She understood her commitment even though she committed to nothing specific. The thing about committing to nothing specific is that it lets you believe you have committed to nothing at all. She was sixteen and in love and had developed a high tolerance for imprecision.

Later, in the cell in Goshen, she would understand that staying was the commitment. The wordless answer was as binding as any contract, more binding, because you could not later claim you had not understood what you were agreeing to. You understood. You stayed.

But that was later. On this Friday, she turned back to Nicoli and felt the warmth of the coffee cup through her palms.

‘Next Friday, then,’ she said. She said it in English and felt it in Italian and both of them knew exactly what it meant.