The Coming of Fabrizze: A Novel (Black Squirrel Books) Read online

  THE COMING OF FABRIZZE

  THE COMING OF

  FABRIZZE

  BY RAYMOND DECAPITE

  FOREWORD BY TONY ARDIZZONE

  Black Squirrel Books

  Kent, Ohio

  BLACK SQUIRREL BOOKS

  The Black Squirrel Books imprint includes new nonfiction

  for the general reader as well as reprints of valuable studies of Ohio

  and its people, including historical writings, literary studies,

  biographies, and literature.

  © 2010 BY RAYMOND DECAPITE

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2009045843

  ISBN 978-1-60635-028-7

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published by David McKay Company, Inc., 1960.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeCapite, Raymond.

  The coming of Fabrizze / by Raymond DeCapite;

  foreword by Tony Ardizzone.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York : D. McKay Co., 1960.

  ISBN 978-1-60635-028-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)∞

  1. Immigrants—Fiction.

  2. Italian Americans—Fiction.

  3. Railroad construction workers—Fiction.

  4. Working class—Fiction.

  5. Cleveland (Ohio)-Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3554.E17748c66 2010

  813’.54—dc22

  2009045843

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

  14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

  “I was watching for you.”

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  FOREWORD

  IF you agree that one of the truest delights of reading fiction involves the encounter of an engaging narrative voice—a style that rings in your head with an arresting melody and compels you to continue to turn a book’s pages when the matters of life call you away—then you’ll absolutely love Raymond DeCapite’s novel The Coming of Fabrizze. Even after half a century—The Coming of Fabrizze was first published in 1960—this absolute gem of a novel remains fresh. The story of a community of Italian immigrants who settle on the South Side of Cleveland during the 1920s and put their hands to work laying track for the mighty railroad heading west, DeCapite’s debut novel is a book for the ear, a joyous celebration of voices, a sweet American hymn. Rendered largely through crisp declarative sentences and the rhythmic dialogue of its many colorful characters, The Coming of Fabrizze is an ethnic classic, the story of Italian immigrants who came to these shores and built America.

  The novel focuses on a single young man, who eventually becomes a community organizer and leader, Fabrizze. Named Cennino by his father, the young man yearns to go west and tails the older Augustine, a bird of passage who returns to his village in the mountains of Abruzzi (now Abruzzo) after eight years of hard labor in America. Here, the mythic father accepts the young man and anoints him with a new and powerful name.

  It was true. Now and then Augustine heard that soft dancing footfall. He would turn in the cobbled street. The young man had withdrawn into a doorway. Suddenly he stepped forth. His golden hair held the sun and his blue eyes were big with wonder.

  “Why is it you follow me?” said Augustine, startled by the shining look of him.

  “I like to be with you.”

  “You’re mixing it up. I’m not your father.”

  “He went away. He wrote a letter about a wild horse.”

  “I heard about that horse,” said Augustine.

  “He said he woke one morning and the horse was pounding outside the door. He jumped on and rode away.”

  “He left you here to starve,” said Augustine.

  “We were starving when he was here.”

  “At least you have the truth of it,” said Augustine. “And I don’t like this name he gave you. It’s for a boy and not a man. It’s better if you answer only to Fabrizze. Say it for me.”

  “Fabrizze.”

  “It’s Fa-breets-eh!” said Augustine. “The stroke of an axe.”

  “Fabrizze!”

  “Fabrizze!”

  “Fabrizze!”

  Though some may believe that most or all Italian immigrants left their native land with the hope of settling in the New World, only a fraction actually did; indeed, from 1907 to 1911 seventy-three out of every one hundred Italians who arrived in the United States returned to Italy. Caught between two worlds, these became known as “birds of passage.” Even though three-quarters of all Italian immigrants were farmers or worked for a share of the crops grown on another’s land, most immigrants who came to America didn’t want to farm in the New World since farming implied a firm commitment to place that the immigrants were not willing to make. Instead they headed to the cities, where jobs were plentiful. They left their wives and families behind, sending money home whenever they could.

  Augustine takes Fabrizze with him to the New World and helps him get a job on the railroad. Though later on Augustine returns to his beloved Italy (in response to a friend pointing out that Augustine comes and goes, comes and goes, and asking him where it will all end, Augustine sadly gazes down at the weight of his work shoes and responds, “The end of it? In the end I’ll have no home at all.”), Fabrizze burns with energy and ambition and rushes headlong into America’s bright promise.

  Home was the red rooming house on Harrison Street. Fabrizze and Augustine shared room and bed on the seventh floor. They shared everything else with some fifty other immigrants packed together for warmth in the New World

  “What smells and dialects!” said Augustine.

  No doors were closed in the day. People wandered through the halls. Long into the summer night there was talk running from window to open window. Augustine had the curious feeling that if something happened to one of them it would happen to all of them. He soon decided it was already happening.

  “They dream and dream,” he told Fabrizze. “I had supper with Penza on the second floor. The man who works with us. I was telling him how bad it is here in America. He put his finger on his lips. He doesn’t want to hear about it. He has two shirts. He wears one and washes the other. He has a hole in his shoe. But in a few years he’ll send for a wife. ‘Look at this place,’ I said. He put the finger on his lips. He has a window in the room. He looks out and it’s good. There’s a boy next door who plays the harmonica. The music is good. ‘Wake up,’ I said. He put the finger on his lips.”

  “I understand it,” said Fabrizze. “Something is in the air. It makes you want to run. It’s exciting.”

  “It’s garlic and codfish,” said Augustine.

  The immigrants soon follow the charismatic Fabrizze as he rises through the ranks. A supervisor puts him in charge of the men on his crew for a day or two, and under Fabrizze’s direction the men work so hard and well that soon Fabrizze is put in charge of maintenance and track repair. He rewards Augustine by giving him a pleasant job as day watchman, then works so diligently he is promoted again. Everyone decides that Fabrizze is in need of a wife, and what ensues is a delightful episode about introductions and courtships, culminating with Fabrizze’s marriage to a woman named Grace. Fabrizze is put in charge of hiring, and soon a long line of Italian immigrants appears outside Fabrizze’s house. Characteristically, he invites each man inside for a glass of wine
, hiring as many as the railroad can bear.

  Fabrizze also sends his money back to Abruzzi to enable others to come to Cleveland, where, he assures them, a job on the railroad will be waiting for them. He helps others in the community find wives and husbands. Fabrizze and Grace’s grandfather, Mendone, go down into Fabrizze’s basement and begin making wine.

  Jugs were hidden everywhere. Fabrizze and Mendone filled strange black bottles with a blend so imaginative that neither of them could remember the ingredients. They boiled the corks and drove them in and buried the black bottles under the basement floor. They drank a toast from the first barrel. Something was lacking in there. They went on tasting and mixing. Deep into the night Grace heard the bubbling and pouring and whispering.

  “Must you lose sleep with this wine?” she said.

  “Wine, wine,” said Mendone, frying sausages in it.

  “Wine warms you in the winter,” said Fabrizze. “Wine cools you in the summer.”

  “Wine helps the digestion,” said Mendone. “Wine enriches the blood. Wine is good for the skin.”

  “Wine puts a certain light in the eyes,” said Fabrizze.

  “Is it good for the lungs?” said Grace. “The baby cries out when I take him in the fresh air.”

  “Wine keeps the teeth clean,” said Mendone.

  “And it loosens the tongue,” said Grace.

  “But then it relieves the heart,” said Fabrizze.

  “And fills our pockets,” said Mendone.

  Fabrizze and Mendone then open a store filled with sausages and cheeses, olives and horse beans, wild onions and sleeping snails. In the store window they hang a picture of Augustine, taken when he was young. As even more profits mount more money is sent back to Italy, which in turn allows more immigrants to make the passage to the New World. In this way The Coming of Fabrizze is both a social history as well as a testament to the ethnic muscle and sweat that not only built but also shaped the character and soul of America.

  Fabrizze’s financial interests turn, inevitably, to the stock market. Given the novel’s time period—the 1920s—you can well imagine what happens next as the charismatic leader of this thriving Italian community agrees to collect funds from everyone and then invests everything in the stock market, making everyone, at least on paper, rich. There are plans to use the money to build houses for more immigrants and thereby expand the community. In the end, after the Wall Street crash of 1929, rather than taking everyone down with him, Fabrizze sacrifices everything he and Grace own so that others in the community might not suffer as badly. Like the hardworking father who is killed in a construction site accident on Good Friday in Pietro di Donato’s brilliant Christ in Concrete, Fabrizze sacrifices himself so that others—his family—might benefit. He then disappears, and those left behind begin to tell stories about him and say that the day he will return will be “like a feast day.” They say that when Fabrizze comes back he’ll bring the band from the church, and in celebration they’ll string lights up and down the street and make a festa.

  Born in Cleveland in 1924, DeCapite served in the United States Coast Guard between 1942-1945 and later earned a bachelor’s degree and a master of arts degree from Case Western Reserve University. The Coming of Fabrizze was praised by The New York Times as “a modern folk tale filled with love, laughter and the joy of life.… Reading these merry pages is something like eating a dinner of the very best spaghetti and meat sauce with plenty of Chianti and a string orchestra nearby playing ‘Santa Lucia.’” The New York Herald Tribune wrote of the novel, “The wine flows incessantly. The music never stops. You can all but smell the sausage and onion frying right out there on the printed page.” Kirkus Reviews reported, “What distinguishes this almost mythic tale of an immigrant—who succeeds by virtue of hard work and honesty—from other diaspora narratives is not only its good-natured tone, but its poetic language,” and goes on to praise the novel’s “amazing ear for the lyrical patterns of everyday speech.” The novelist John Fante called DeCapite “a writer of exquisite talents.” In 1962 The Coming of Fabrizze was awarded the prestigious Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature. DeCapite has also been the recipient of the Ohioana Award and the Cleveland Critics’ Circle Award, and his work has inspired his son Michael not only to become a writer but also to found his own publishing company, Sparkle Street of San Francisco.

  The Coming of Fabrizze puts Raymond DeCapite squarely in the company of the very best Italian American writers: Pietro di Donato, John Fante, Jerre Mangione, and Helen Barolini. Indeed, as Fabrizze himself might suggest, we might drop the qualifying adjective and list DeCapite as among the best American writers of his time.

  Delight in the story. Allow yourself to be charmed by the characters. Read favorite passages aloud to family and friends. The Coming of Fabrizze is a classic.

  Tony Ardizzone

  THE COMING OF FABRIZZE

  I

  SWEET was the welcome for Augustine. Surely it carried an expression of love and longing for America. All his friends followed his mother and nephew down the mountain to meet him in the sunlight. His mother wept. The watchful men saved their smiles until he came to them. Women with eyes like jewels were moving in to squeeze his hand. Several of them held babies up to be admired and then they slipped away behind their men. An old woman called down a greeting from the edge of the village square. Suddenly everyone was shouting his name. Augustine would remember the sound of it ringing through the mountains of Italy.

  “Eight years, eight years,” he used to say. “I worked like a horse for eight long years. I swore to come home and tell the truth about America. And then what happened? One kiss from the village and I surrendered on the spot.”

  So it was that peace came to him in the year after the First War ended. And yet he gave no peace to the village of Rivisondoli. It seemed that the one kiss turned him into a lover of America. By the time that he left home again he had enriched the local myth in a way that stamped him a man of high imaginative power. Friends would send for him to hear his glowing account of life in the New World. It was like a song. His voice grew ever stronger with it. His brown eyes would close and his nostrils dilate at the sudden overwhelming fragrance of his “lost bride, America.” It was said that Augustine had three varying accounts of his rise to power in America. There were two more accounts, quite as thrilling, of his rise to power over two charming widows right in Rivisondoli.

  No one remarked on the fact that his hands were swollen with work. At home Augustine would put his hands on the kitchen table and gaze in silence at his mother.

  “Please, Augustine, please,” said Rosa. “Must we look at your hands again tonight? Put them away. I understand that you worked. A man lives and he works.”

  The truth is, Augustine had lived in America as though in a cocoon. He worked for the railroad and hoarded his money. Room and laundry cost him eight dollars a month. He spent about thirty cents a week for food and so his diet never changed. He paid five cents for a bag of white beans, or lentils, and then bought three pounds of the cut odds and ends of spaghetti for nine cents. The grocery clerk was fascinated by him.

  “What is it this week?” the clerk would say, in Italian. “Is it the beans again?”

  “The lentils,” said Augustine. “Are you really an Italian? It’s a long way from home, eh?”

  The clerk was filling the bag.

  “Wait, wait,” said Augustine. “I was thinking here. Let it be the beans then. Do you mind?”

  The clerk emptied the bag and started with beans.

  “Wait, wait,” said Augustine. He mopped his brow as though on the verge of panic. “Be kind enough to change to the lentils. How sorry I am. Really, I don’t know what’s happening to me. It’s the living alone that does it. You said beans, my boy, and I found myself saying beans just to show my affection for you. But I settled on the lentils before I came in. I must make my own decision.”

  Sympathizing, the clerk threw in an extra handful.

  August
ine cooked the lentils and spaghetti in a fine tomato sauce seasoned with garlic and parsley and basil leaf. Five days he ate from the same pot, and with the same crazed appetite. When he reached bottom a wild exultant cry would escape him and bring the landlady flying up the stairs to his room.

  “How you frightened me!” said Josephine. “What does it mean, Augustine, what does it mean?”

  “It’s of no importance,” said Augustine. “A thing that comes out now and then. Don’t upset yourself, my dear.”

  “Give me warning,” said Josephine, piteously. “Let me prepare myself a little. It freezes me to the bone. And my sister almost choked on a piece of beef.”

  “A piece of beef,” said Augustine.

  “What can I tell you?” said Josephine. “It’s like a terrible thing is loose to devour us all. Will it happen again?”

  “Toward the end of the week,” said Augustine.

  Josephine thought about it.

  “Perhaps you should find a wife,” she said. “How about the butcher’s daughter? She has uncommon strength and beauty. You can take hold of such a girl. Let me arrange it. She’ll be tickled to have you.”

  “Very nice, very nice,” said Augustine. “But I can’t afford a wife. You forget the people back home.”

  “But they expect too much of you,” said Josephine. “Are you to sacrifice your life for them?”

  “I am in chains,” said Augustine, huskily. And here he put his hand to his throat and began to choke himself.

  “Poor soul,” said Josephine.

  Augustine had let it be known everywhere that he was the sole support of his mother and his nephew. Thus he was overwhelmed with food and drink when he made his round of visits in the neighborhood. At least once a week he turned up for supper at the house of his railroad foreman Rossi.

  “Take a glass of wine with me,” Rossi would say. “We were just going to have supper. A glass of wine.”