When I was small, an obstreperous only child, my father worked downtown. One day, he brought me all the way from Queens to Lower Manhattan, where he worked. It was one of those “Bring Your Child to the Office” deals. He was undoubtedly grateful by lunchtime.
My father always ate in either Little Italy or Chinatown. That day, he needed to pick up an eyeglass prescription. The place, at the eastern end of Canal Street, was Cohen’s Optical.
There was someone ahead of him: an elderly man. I had never seen anyone who looked like this guy. The man, wider than he was tall, wore baggy clothing and looked as if he had spent a lifetime doing manual labor. I remember that his fingers were enormous. The desk clerk asked his name. In a voice that emerged like the one Marlon Brando later used in The Godfather, he breathed out, “Venteicinque.”
The man looked as if a sculptor had formed him, roughly, out of clay. Every bit of him was oversized, and none of it was “artful.”
I now remember that the man could not produce a signature; the clerk asked him to leave his “mark.”
My father’s expression changed. Even though I kept asking him what was wrong, I did not get an explanation until we were well outside the store. My father whispered that “Venteicinque” meant 25 in Italian. I said, “That’s not a name; that’s a number.” He said the man before him on line had grown up as a peasant on an estate. The landowner would give each of his worker families a house that had a number on the door. The workers earned no wages. They weren’t even entitled to names. Their name was the number on the front of their house.
Naturally, at five years old, I understood none of this. Later, in junior high school, when I read A Tale of Two Cities, I learned that, in many parts of Europe, landowners held the power of life and death over their workers. The peasants earned no money and could be hunted down if they sought to leave the estate.
My paternal grandfather’s family were ambitious commoners; my grandmother’s owned land. I often wondered if a battle went on within my father’s psyche, and if it ever ceased.
Kathryn Nocerino