The Immigrants Read Free Page A

certain complications that must have occurred de stroyed her ability to bear additional children. Now she knew only that the pain was over and that a fine, healthy child had been born.
    For the first three months of Daniel Lavette’s life, he was nursed in railroad camps while his father drove spikes and handled steel rails. Of all this, he was hap pily unaware. He was equally unaware of the day when his father first saw the hills of San Francisco and de cided that this was the place where he would live and be, and his first memories of his father and mother were of the flat on Howard Street that Joseph Lavette had moved into after he found a job on one of the fishing boats that went out of the wharf. The misery of Anna Lavette’s illness that came out of a confinement in a filthy boxcar was also prior to his consciousness. He was the only child.
    There would be no others.
    Joseph Lavette had saved forty-two dollars working on the railroad. The experience had turned him into a careful and thrifty man who lived with a nightmarish dread of ever again being penniless, and as the years passed, as he learned to deal with the English language, his life took on a single focus—to become the owner of a fishing boat, to be his own master and never again to be in the position of hopelessness, a leaf blown by the winds of chance.
    In 1897, when young Daniel was eight years old, al ready adept in
     
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    that strange, complex, and convoluted language called English—still a mystery to his mother—and already going to school and learning all sorts of incredible things about this place, this San Francisco, this California, his father had managed to save six hundred dollars.
    It had been no easy task. It meant scrimping and saving and going without anything but the barest necessities, and still it was only half of what he needed to buy the boat—not any boat, not one of the lateen-rigged sailing craft that most of the inde pendent Italian fishermen owned, but one of the new power-driven boats; and as far as Joseph was con cerned, it was either a power-driven boat or nothing. For this too was the manner and the ideology of the immigrant. The boat was not for him; the boat was for Daniel. Twice already his boss had allowed him to take the boy with him in the off season. His reward was young Daniel’s excitement and joy at being out in the bay, and he boasted about it to Anna.
    “And why must he be a fisherman?” she asked him. “He’s a smart boy. You know how smart he is.”
    “Meaning that I am a fool.”
    “No, no. But this is America, and there are other things. Maria Cassala told me that her boy will be an accountant one day. An accountant sits at a desk and wears clean clothes.”
    “I can’t argue with you,” Joseph said. “There are things you don’t understand—too many things.”
    Maria Cassala was a kind, openhearted young woman, a Sicilian who was married to a Neapolitan bricklayer named Anthony Cassala.
    They had been in San Francisco since 1885, or rather her husband had. Maria had married Anthony in 1892, the year she came to America from Sicily. She had met Anna while shop ping, and she had taken the frightened, frail young woman under her wing. To Anna, the Cassalas were a source of inspiration and wonder. They lived in their own house, a frame house on Folsom Street, which An thony Cassala had built—for the most part with his own hands.
     
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    One day Anna confided to Maria Joseph’s dream of owning his own powerboat. “He’s never content,” she said. “Nothing for today—only for tomorrow, and it will never be.”
    “Why will it never be?”
    “Because he needs five hundred dollars. In ten years more, we will not save another five hundred dollars.”
    “Then,” said Maria, “you send him to see my man, Tony. Tony will lend him the money.”
    “Why?”
    “Why? What a foolish question! Because Joseph is a good man.”
    “But how could we