The King of Mulberry Street by Donna Jo Napoli Page B

our wrists to the bedpost at night.”
    I looked around. No one was watching this boy, so far as I could see. “Why don't you run away right now?”
    “Think you're so smart, do you? Where would I go? Anyway, I owe him money. And this is work. Decent work. There's no crime in being poor.”
    “That's the truth.” Everyone I'd ever known was poor. “But begging …” I didn't finish.
    “I make music. It's not the same as begging. I give people what they want to hear. What's the matter with you? You don't recognize ‘Daisy Bell’? The new song about the bicycle built for two?” He whistled the tune again. Someone dropped a coin in his cup. He whistled another tune. Another person dropped in a coin. He gave me a self-satisfied look. “That was ‘After the Ball Is Over.’ You don't know that one, either, do you? It's the most popular song from Tin Pan Alley.” His last three words were in English.
    “What's Tin Pan Alley?”
    “Twenty-eighth Street. Where they write the songs.”
    I shrugged. “I've never been there.”
    “So what,” he said in English. His mouth twitched. “I've never been there, either. But everyone knows the songs.”
    I shrugged again.
    He pressed his lips together. “It's okay. I wouldn't actually know about them myself if the woman downstairs didn't sing them half the night. You need money, huh? Tell you what. Give me those shoes to hold for you, and you can take my corner and play this triangle. As soon as you've gota dollar, I'll split the extra twenty cents with you, half and half.”
    That was how I learned that a dollar was one hundred cents. “No,” I said.
    “That's ten cents each.”
    “I can count.”
    “You'd get the money fast. They always give more to smaller boys. And you're clean. You'd be done by afternoon.”
    Me, clean? Nonna would be appalled at how filthy I'd gotten. “I won't take off my shoes.”
    “Then they won't give you nothing. You got to look poor.”
    “There's no way I'll beg.”
    His cheeks flushed. “You don't listen good.” He spat. “So what,” he said in English. “No one cares what you think.”
    “Which way Chatham Square?” I said jokingly, trying to make up.
    “Get out of here. You'd only get me in trouble with my
padrone
anyway.” He pointed. “Turn right at Park.” And he went back to playing his triangle.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    He turned his back on me and whistled that second tune.
    I walked the way he'd pointed. At every corner I asked, “Park?” After several blocks someone finally nodded yes. I looked at the street sign.
P-A-R-K
. That was how you spelled park. It was almost the same as how I'd have spelled those sounds in Italian. In the top right corner of the sign were the letters
S-T
. Could that be a word?
    I turned right. It wasn't long before I was passing all kinds of factories. They made silverware, jewelry, billiard tables. They made umbrellas, lightning rods, false teeth, paper, medicines, guns. I passed a piano factory and a carriage factory and one for ship propellers. I stood outside the windows and watched and listened. I heard so many languages, even one that sounded sort of like singing, out of the mouths of gaunt men wearing funny quilted jackets in a cigar factory. But no one spoke Italian.
    It didn't seem possible. I knew where Chatham Square was—I'd passed Mulberry Street to get here, so it was right at the bottom of the street where all the Italians lived. Where were the Italian workers?
    A boy stood on a corner with a tin cup on the ground. He played a small harp. I went up to him. “Where are the factories that Italians work in?”
    He turned his back to me. Red welts showed under the collar of his shirt. I stepped away in a hurry, praying his
padrone
hadn't seen me, that I hadn't gotten him in trouble.
    I hurried to Mulberry Street and went up the block, past the hanging sides of beef and pork in front of the butcher's, past the pharmacy, past the ratcatcher who stood by a wall, holding out a