Boston a novel
In the house across the street lived Signor Prezzolini, who earned his
living by teaching the violin. When he gave lessons to his young pupils
it was not so pleasant, but sometimes he practiced for himself, and in
warm weather he would have his windows open, and what could be more
wonderful than to sit on your front porch in the twilight, and gaze up
at far-off mysterious stars, and listen to strains of ravishing beauty?
In those hours the little Brini boy’s life-destiny was determined;
he was only eight and a half years old, but he made up his mind one
evening, and announced it gravely, “I am going to be a violinist.”
Cornelia was moved to tell him something out of her own childhood. She
had lived next to the home of rich people, who gave many balls and
parties, and would have an orchestra to play. Cornelia’s mother would
put her to bed, and the child would creep to the window and listen.
Then a bold idea occurred to her, and she took a blanket and stole
downstairs, and into the neighbor’s garden, and crawled under a bush,
where she was safe from discovery; there she lay for hours, wrapped in
the blanket, listening in such ecstasy that even now she would shiver
as she remembered it.
Little Trando nestled closer to her, and put his sensitive hand into
hers. In between the playing, he begged for more stories about her
girlhood. She told him how she had believed in fairies, and would run
out into the garden in the early dawn, and hunt under the prettiest
flowers, trembling with the delicious hope that a fairy might be
hiding there, and what would she say if she met one. But here Bart,
the serious one, intervened; he did not approve of fairy-stories. “No
should tella children what is not true, Nonna. It plenty lovely t’ing
what is real, plenty miraculosa--how you say it, wonderfool. When you
teach somet’ing true, is usefool too, but fairy is lika diavolo, like
angioli, superstizione, no gooda for teach.”
IX
Cornelia had by now got hardened to her job. Her hands were skinny,
with whipcords standing out on the backs; her fingers were knobby at
the joints, and covered with tough calluses. Her shoulders were bowed
to meet the coils of rope upon which she sewed, and one shoulder
sagged lower than the other. But they did not ache, and she could work
peacefully, and have time for a bit of gossip with her neighbors, and
for long thoughts about the life she was living, and the people she had
come to know.
The circle of her acquaintance had been greatly widened by the strike,
which had the effect of bringing the workers together and breaking down
barriers of language and creed. Mrs. O’Dowd, Cornelia’s pious neighbor,
had been on strike, with her husband and several relatives, and they
had learned that the “wops” next door were also capable of loyalty, and
that their jabber of sounds might mean something of importance to Irish
aristocrats. Cornelia served as go-between, and got so well acquainted
that she ventured to hint perhaps the heavenly powers might find some
way to accept good works as a partial substitute for good doctrine.
That was contrary to Father O’Brien, of course, but even so, one might
think about it, and one might pray for the lost souls.
That was actually being done, Cornelia learned; it was Mrs. Lavatelli,
the neighbor on the other side, who was so much distressed by the
sight of three bambini who had never been baptized, that she made it a
practice to burn a candle before the image of the virgin every night
before she went to bed. And Cornelia said, surely that ought to be
enough. God was being properly reminded, and it must be assumed that
He, in His infinite wisdom, would take whatever steps were necessary.
There was naturally a great deal of curiosity among the neighbors as
to this mysterious Yankee lady who had lost her husband and home under
circumstances to which she never referred. They would come and call,
or avail themselves of opportunities to gossip over the back fence
while hanging out clothes or working at the vegetables. And Cornelia
would make use of her social training to divert the conversation, so
that presently the neighbors would be talking about their affairs, and
Cornelia would be learning something of the things for which she had
come here.
What struck her most frequently--and always on the funny-bone--was the
complete identity of spirit between these ladies of the back fence and
those of the “Back Bay.” If Cornelia had imagined that by evolving into
a runaway grandmother she was going to find freedom from conventions,
from the petty restrictions of collective femininity, then she had made
a great mistake, and wasted the sixty-first year of her life. For these
working women and wives of working men had their very strict notions of
what was proper, and they had the same system of government by gossip.
The only difference which Cornelia noticed between them and the “Sewing
Circle,” the body which had ruled the social destiny of Boston for two
generations, was that the ladies of the back fence did not lower their
voices when they came to the worst part of their stories; they had not
cultivated the use of the shoulders and the eyebrows as substitutes for
words in the circulation of slander.
The ladies of the back fence did not have so much money as the ladies
of the Back Bay, but they made up for it by having more children, and
they used these for conversational purposes in the same way. They would
tell the charming things the little ones had said, and just as in
Boston, it never occurred to them that this might bore the listener.
Also they would tell about the children’s ailments, and what the doctor
said, and whether or not the doctor knew what he was talking about.
Apparently the unsatisfactoriness of doctors, at the present stage of
their development, had been discovered by the poor as by the rich.
There was the same experimenting with unorthodox remedies, and the
same talk about results--Cornelia might as well have been back in the
nursery with her daughter Clara Scatterbridge.
And then clothes. There were fashion magazines passed from hand to
hand, and when Mrs. O’Dowd’s younger sister made herself a party dress,
she cut it upon a pattern you would have seen at the Friday evening
dances of the socially elect. The material here was sleazy, but that
did not enter into the conversation, because nobody knew it was so.
And then ancestors! Strange as it might seem, the ladies of the back
fence talked about family, and who was who, and why. To be sure, they
could not go so far back; they had no family-trees and colleges of
heraldry, no pages of genealogy in the _Evening Transcript_ every
Wednesday. But there were so many more families, that it made an equal
supply of conversational material. Strange as it might seem, there was
the same amount of hostility and the same amount of pride in the family
talk. Cornelia never met any woman so low that she could not find some
other women to look down on; she never found any woman so high that she
was not eager to know a Yankee lady, and to repeat to her neighbors
what the Yankee lady had said.
X
Also Cornelia got to know Vanzetti, with the intimacy inevitable in the
crowded homes of the poor. She knew him standing in front of a little
cracked mirror, tying his cravat and singing songs of his old home.
She knew him teaching songs to the children, and learning American
songs they brought home from school. She knew him keeping watch in
the kitchen, to make sure that Alfonsina did not have to carry coal
or wood. She knew him sitting up long after the rest had gone to bed,
reading by the light of an oil lamp, his brow furrowed in thought. At
such times he would be lost to her and to all the world; she, who had
always taken comfort for granted, was awed by the spectacle of a man
who robbed himself of sleep to get knowledge.
He taught her some Italian, and she taught him English. She explained
that mystery, so difficult of comprehension to an Italian, that it
is possible for certain consonants to follow each other without a
vowel between. One said “a great big house”; one did not have to say
“a greata bigga house.” She explained the simple idioms, one after
another. One did not say, “I no can”; one said, “I cannot.” Vanzetti
wrote this down, and presently had made such progress that he would
stop in the middle: “I no--cannot.” She labored to teach him the
mystery of the sound “th”; showing him how the tongue was placed, stuck
out a little, and pressed against the lower part of the upper teeth.
The children were fascinated by that; they had learned to make the
sound, but without knowing how they did it. They would watch Bart’s
efforts; he got so that he would stick his tongue out, but alas, he
could not always time it right, and he would stick it out and then pull
it in and make the wrong sound! The children laughed merrily--such
pleasure it gave them, to find themselves superior to the grown-ups!
But that was all right with Bart--it was his dream that the children
would be superior in all things.
Once or twice a month he would disappear for a day or two. The
irregular character of his work made this possible--and anyhow, there
was no job that could hold him when it was announced in “La Cronaca
Sovversiva” that Galleani was going to lecture on the effects of the
war upon the revolutionary movement in Italy, or Carlo Tresca upon
syndicalist versus individualist anarchism. Vanzetti would come back
brimming over with arguments, and news from the “Gruppo Autonomo di
East Boston,” as the Galleani followers called themselves. He and Brini
would have vociferous arguments, and later Vanzetti would explain to
Cornelia what it was about. Or perhaps there would be a “picanic” in
a neighboring town, and Vanzetti would get a bundle of literature to
“distriboot.” Or there would be a strike in the shoe factories of
Lynn, and he would compose an appeal, and take it round among the
anarchistas, and collect fifty cents from one and a quarter from the
next, and in a couple of days would have twenty dollars to be forwarded
by postal order.
Little by little Cornelia was coming to understand his doctrine.
He would pick out passages from the paper and explain them to her,
and answer her questions and objections. It was one of those high
perfectionist doctrines, which assume in human beings a quantity of
virtue which few as yet possess. Those who succeed in living up to
this doctrine are sublime; but those who fail may break their necks.
Might there not be persons using Vanzetti’s lofty phrases as a pretext
for evading duties, or as a means of preying upon their fellows? So
Cornelia asked, and the other answered that this might happen, but
there could be no progress without some risk, and neither men nor women
could learn to swim unless they entered the water.
He was determined to read English, and from one of his trips he brought
back a book called “The Conquest of Bread,” by P. Kropotkin. Cornelia,
with her woman’s wit, did not fail to divine that there were two
people going to be educated out of that book! Curiously enough, it
was not until later that she connected its author with a very famous
scientist from Russia, whose visit to Boston had made a great stir in
intellectual circles some eight years previously. A high-up nobleman
escaped from exile in Siberia, Kropotkin had been a social lion. A
Harvard professor who was in the next year to become president of the
university--than which there is no higher station in the world--had
introduced him for a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute. How
could it have occurred to Cornelia that this learned foreigner with
the bushy gray whiskers whom she had met among the most exalted of the
Brahmins, could be the author of a tract recommending the overthrow of