The more he spoke, the more Andrew felt like an American.
The man’s English was atrocious.
At one point, Andrew burst out laughing, and then — when he realized Manfredi was about to take offense — immediately explained why the comment had been so comical.
Manfredi had been explaining that the goods could move freely in or out of any number of Italian seaports...
“Ma non la Sicilia, eh? Too difficult now Sicilia. Other ports, naturalmente. We have much ports, Italia...”
Andrew was thinking his mother should be here listening to this greaseball...
... explaining now that most ports in Italy were available to them for their purposes, which translated as controlled by them, which he would not say aloud either in Italian or in his impoverished English, and then uttering the words that caused Andrew to explode in laughter.
“We come in, we do what to do, eh? And then we just pass away.”
The laughter burst from Andrew’s mouth like a cannon shot. Manfredi was so startled he almost dropped his foul-smelling cigar. Rearing back as if fired upon, his eyes and his mouth opening wide in surprise, he realized in an instant that he was being laughed at, and he was on the narrow edge of displaying some fine Sicilian rage when Andrew quickly said, “Let me explain, Signor Manfredi,” and then managed to control himself long enough to define the American euphemism. The definition immediately tickled the Sicilian’s funny bone, causing him to burst into laughter as well, which allowed Andrew to join him before he busted.
“Pass away, Dio mio,” Manfredi said, drying his eyes, still laughing. He signaled to the waiter for refills, but the waiter was now staring into the German girl’s blouse and impressing her with his command of English, greater than Manfredi’s to be sure, but nothing to write home about, either. The girl seemed overwhelmed by the pimply kid’s Italian charm. Andrew felt more and more American.
Manfredi was telling him that all next week he would show him the various ports...
“Better more than one port, eh?”
... that would be offloading the product from the East...
Refusing to say either “China” or “Asia”...
... which should be arriving in Italy sometime late in May. He was hoping the southern product...
Refusing to say either “Colombian” or “South American”...
... would be arriving in Italy at about the same time so that they could begin their work here.
The way this came out in his hopeless English was, “They come Italia, the ship, we lift one, two, immediatamente...”
And we just pass away, Andrew thought, and almost burst out laughing again.
That night, long after he and Manfredi had parted company, Andrew walked the streets of Milan and tried to find something in common with these elegantly dressed men and beautiful women who moved by on the soft spring night trailing hushed foreign voices behind them. Even the Italian they spoke seemed different from the language he’d heard when infrequent visitors from distant provinces in Italy dropped by smoking stogies as foul as Manfredi’s and stinking up his mother’s drapes. Her face said I’m American, what are you doing in my house?
These people were foreigners to him.
This country was alien and strange to him.
He recognized in Italy a place of beauty and grace, a gentle land of soft light and rolling hills, but nowhere could he find any real connection to himself, nowhere could he discover those much touted “roots” Americans were incessantly seeking all over the world. He wondered again why anyone born in America should have to seek his roots elsewhere. That was the irony of it. Americans swarming all over the globe searching for identities denied them in their native land.
He bought a gelato on a cone at a stand in one of the arcades, and was stepping out onto the ancient cobblestoned street again when he almost collided with a tall man whose eyes were as blue as his own.
“Mi scusi, signore, mi scusi,” the man said.
“Sorry, my fault,” Andrew said.
They did a little sidestepping jig around each other, each apologetic and smiling, and as the man rejoined his companion, Andrew heard him softly explain, “Americano.”
Yes, he thought.
The girls were sweaty and tall and the boys were sweaty and short. This was a fact of life when you were twelve and had just done forty minutes of gymnastics in Morningside Park. Mollie and her best friend, Winona Weingarten, called the seventh-grade boys “Munchkins” — sometimes, and cruelly, even when they were within earshot. Boys and girls alike were, wearing the blue-shorts, blue-sweatshirt gym uniform with the white Hanover crest over the left breast. Mollie was wearing the sneakers she’d finally found the day she and her mother and Aunt Heather had gone shopping together. Winona was wearing identical sneakers. The seventh-grade boys called the girls “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” in retaliation for the Munchkin label and also because they did look very much alike, both of them tall and slender with long blond hair tucked now under identical billed caps, and also because they talked some kind of dumb secret language only the two of them understood.
The girls were straggling a bit behind the other kids, talking that language now. The language was called “Frankendrac,” named for Frankenstein and Dracula because it was supposed to sound like a Baltic mix of German and Slavic even though it was an entirely new language with a vocabulary the girls had invented themselves when they’d first met at Hanover at the age of five. The girls would not have revealed the structure of their language even if threatened with torture or rape. The rapid-fire mélange sounded like gibberish to anyone else, but made total sense to both of them. At Hanover, you had to study two foreign languages; Frankendrac was their third. Enjoying the bright sunshine on this last Friday in April, the first truly glorious spring day they’d had so far, the girls ambled behind the others, chatting like a pair of foreigners in their native tongue.
This was not a day for physical exertion — which they both deplored, anyway, despite Miss Margolin’s total obsession with fitness, fitness, fitness. Nor was it a day for contemplating a return to the classroom after half an hour of jumping up and down. What they both would have preferred doing was walking up to Rosa’s on a Hundred-Tenth and Amsterdam, buying some sweets, and then strolling along lazily while they savored every luscious bite. Instead, there’d be a mad scramble in the locker room to change out of gym uniform and back into the de rigueur pleated watch skirt and white blouse before rushing off to their next class, which happened to be French, and much easier than the language they’d invented.
Empty crack vials lay strewn along the sides of the park path.
“They look like those little perfume samples they give away,” Mollie said in Frankendrac.
And to her utter astonishment, Winona said, “Ich kenner-nit vetter thenner giu.”
Which translated into English meant, “I can’t wait to try it.”
She had been counting the days since he’d left for Italy, counting the days till his return, and she wondered now what her response would be if Andrew again suggested, sometime in the future, that she accompany him on a trip someplace. She could not have gone this time, in any event; she was a teacher and the last week in April was not a school holiday. The first week in April might have been another story. Passover started at sundown on Monday, and then Good Friday fell in the same week, followed by Easter Sunday — she might have been able to make a good case for taking off those extra few days in the middle of the week. A good case with the school, anyway. What she would have told Michael was quite another matter. But the very idea of a week alone with...