Streets of Gold by Evan Hunter

playing it while the Irishmen faked along in less than spirited fashion. “
La Tarantella”
is a Neapolitan dance that presumably had its origins in the fitful gyrations of southern Italians “taken” by the tarantula spider. Attempting to expel the poison, the poor souls thus bitten by the hairy beast danced for days on end (or so legend holds), often to the point of complete exhaustion. A nice Italian idiom is “
aver la tarantola”
which literally means “to have the tarantula,” but which translates in the vernacular as “to be restless.” Those picnickers who got to their feet as the accordionist began “
La Tarantella”
and the sidemen hesitantly joined in really
did
seem to have the tarantula,
did
seem to have a hairy spider in their collective britches as they twisted and turned and rattled and rolled to the amazement of the Irish musicians and the calm acceptance of the accordionist, who kept whipping his dancing fingers over the blacks and whites, and squeezing the bellows against his belly, and dreaming of a time when he was back in Positano dancing this very same
Tarantella
up and down the steps carved into the steep rock walls of what was then a quiet fishing village.
    Into the midst of this snake pit on the bright green lawn, into this maelstrom of writhing bodies and sweating faces, there delicately walked an angel sent from heaven, side-stepping the frenzied dancers, a slight smile on her face, walking directly toward (no, it could not be true), walking in a dazzle of white, long white dress, white lace collar, white satin shoes, walking toward (he could not believe it), white teeth and hazel eyes, masses of brown hair tumbling about the oval of her face, she was smiling at (was it possible?), she was extending her hand, she stopped before him, she said in English, “Are you Francesco Di Lorenzo?”
    He was sure he’d understood the words, his grasp of English after all these months was surely not so tenuous that he could not hear his own name preceded by only two words in English, he was sure he had understood. But did angels address men who worked in the subway mud? He turned to Angelina for translation. His eyes were filled with panic.
    “She wants to know if you are Francesco Di Lorenzo,” Angelina said in Italian.
    “Sì,”
he said. “Yes,
Sì. Son’ io.
I are. Yes. Yes!”
    “I’m Teresa Giamboglio,” she said in English. “Our parents are
compaesani
.”
    My grandfather had met my grandmother.
     
    I’m not a writer, I don’t know any writer’s tricks. At the piano, I can modulate from C major to G major in a wink and without missing a beat. But this ain’t a piano. How do I modulate from 1901 to 1914 without jostling your eye? I know how to soothe your ear, man, I simply go from C major to A minor to D seventh to G major, and there I am. But thirteen years and four children later? Thirteen years of longing for a tiny Italian village on a mountaintop? (I can only span an
eleventh
comfortably on the keyboard.) Thirteen years. If I play it too slow, you’ll fall asleep. If I rush through it, I’ll lose you, it’ll go by too fast. I once scored a film for a movie producer who told me it didn’t matter what the hell anybody put up on the screen because the audience never understood it, anyway. “It goes by too fast for them,” he said. There’s something to that. You can’t turn back the pages of a film to find out what you missed. The image is there only for an instant, and then it’s gone, and the next image has replaced it.
    He wanted to go back, young Francesco. He was married in December of 1901, and his plan was to take Teresa back home within the year. But in October of 1902, Teresa gave birth to their first daughter, and the voyage home was postponed; you could not take an infant on an ocean trip in steerage, and besides, money was still scarce. My grandfather had quit his job on the subway a month after that fateful Fourth of July picnic, and had begun working as