bank sells off the less profitable one, the upscale Alessandro’s, and leaves Salvo with a hefty mortgage for the bustling Antonio’s by the railroad. He makes lots of pizza to please the crowds and hopes in a few years to perhaps turn a profit.
Harry doesn’t have a choice after that. The Attavianos need his help if they’re going to make it. Harry goes to work with Salvo in his one remaining restaurant.
That’s the good news.
The bad news: Harry goes to work with Salvo in his one remaining restaurant.
It isn’t that Harry is a slow learner. It’s that he can’t find a role for himself in the many-spoked wheel that is the smooth operation of a family business. He tries ordering supplies, but gets bored. He tries maintaining the equipment. Tedium. Writing advertising copy isn’t for him—too facile. Neither is placing ads in the local newspaper (too pushy) or coming up with ideas to draw more people in (really too pushy). He isn’t adept at running the weekly management meetings and has no idea how to solve the many petty but constant problems that crop up in a workplace with twenty-two employees and seventy-seven suppliers. He certainly doesn’t want to learn how to cook. Counting money at the end of the night makes him ornery. Walking to the bank, making deposits, paying the bills, calling in accounts—all grate on him.
A tense year passes. And another.
One fateful day in 1908, Angela comes to Salvo in confusion. She says she ran into the bank manager walking his dog on the Common, and the man told her that despite a dozen notices there has not been a mortgage payment in over three months and Antonio’s is five minutes away from going into default.
Salvo and Gina go to the bank to clear up the mistake because they know, know, that Harry has been making deposits and telling Salvo everything is running like warm milk from morning cows. It’s an oversight. It must be.
But apparently, as the meticulous bank records show, the flowing warm milk doesn’t entail paying the mortgage.
The truth turns out to be worse than Salvo and Gina fear. How often does that happen? They are in the back office combing over the books, with Harry once again conveniently not around, when Margaret, their seating hostess, comes in to inform them she has been underpaid for the previous week. She patiently explains that for the past six months, Harry has been doubling her salary, until last week, with no explanation, he went back to paying her the woefully inadequate original wage.
“The problem is, you see, we got quite used to the new salary and thought it was for keeps,” Margaret says. “My husband and I moved to a larger home, we went to Ohio to visit his mother, took a few weeks for ourselves, and now with Christmas coming up … I’m sorry but we just can’t afford a cut in pay.”
Gina and Salvo sit like blackened statues. As she sits now in her dimly lit parlor room across from a stunned Ben as she recounts it. She doesn’t want to recount it. She wishes there were music instead. She wishes she could forget, talk about something else, never speak of it again, never think of it again, like the Bread and Roses strike, like Angela. Why does it all keep coming back up like disagreeable food?
“Margaret,” Gina says in an even voice, keeping her squeezing hand on Salvo, who is the master of raised voices, “you didn’t get a cut in pay. You got an unauthorized and unapproved bonus, and the reason it stopped is because there is no extra money.”
An unhappy Margaret, too broke to quit, says before walking out, “You’re going to have a mutiny on your hands. Because all of us who are not family have been getting extra money. And it’s Christmas for everybody, not just me. What are you going to do, not pay your staff extra on Christmas?”
Gina and Salvo sit, pods of salt.
“Don’t say a word, Salvo,” says Gina when Margaret leaves.
“I’m going to kill him.”
“I told you not to say a word.”
“One way or another he better make this right, or I swear on our mother …”
“Salvo!”
Gina, afraid for both men she loves, runs out looking for Harry. She finds him on a bench in the back of City Hall, handsome, absent-minded, detached yet affectionate, wrapped in a huge overcoat, serenely eating his lunch in the cold, immersed in his reading.
With the book still open, as if he doesn’t want her to bother him too much during his daily break, he tells her that, yes, he has been feeling bad for the people who work for them because they are having so much trouble making ends meet and they never have any extra for birthdays, a wedding, a vacation, a new house. One woman’s mother is sick and the doctor’s bills are large, one man’s boat has sprung a leak and the baker’s uncle died and the funeral expenses were a quarter of his annual salary. The dishwasher is having an unexpected third baby …
Harry tells Gina all this and then leans back against the bench, glancing down into his tome as if there is no need for further discussion. They needed extra so he gave them extra, that’s all there is to it.
“Harry,” Gina asks quietly, “you paid them out of what money?”
“Out of the money we make every night.”
“But that’s our operating money.”
“Okay. Labor is part of the operating budget.”
“But you already paid them a regular salary, yes? You paid them a fair wage for their labor?”
“How can it be a fair wage when Eddie’s uncle needed to be buried?”
Gina clamps her hands on her chest as if she is having a heart attack. “Because you have been overpaying the payroll, we don’t have enough to cover our mortgage. The note the bank holds against our restaurant is the one fixed capital expense we absolutely must pay.”
“Labor is the one fixed capital expense we must pay.”
“No, Harry. We can fire everyone and run the restaurant with just the family working for nothing, but if we don’t pay the mortgage, there will be no restaurant to run.”
“You’re placing people below institutions, Gia,” he says. “Always a mistake and unlike you. I thought you and I were sewn of the same cloth. The bank can wait for its money. The people can’t.”
“Harry, the bank has waited for its money. Over three months. Now we owe them not just next month’s payment, but the last quarter besides. And we need to pay it in the next twenty days.”
“So let’s pay it.”
“We don’t have it. Had you loaned our employees the money instead of simply giving it to them, the bank could see those loans as an asset, but as it stands …”
“We’ll have to get it.” Harry is unconcerned. “It’ll be fine. The bank will wait.”
“They won’t wait. They’ll take Salvo’s restaurant!”
“No, they won’t. That’s just to scare you. I know how this works. I’ll go talk to them. Just … let me finish my lunch and this one chapter.” He shows her the book he’s reading: Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities. “Look what he writes, it’s brilliant! ‘Politics is business. That’s what’s the matter with politics. That’s what’s the matter with everything—art, literature, religion, journalism, law, medicine—they’re all business. Make politics a sport, as they do in England, or a profession, as they do in Germany.’” Harry clucks in deep approval. “Isn’t he something?”
Gina has nothing to say.
“Just let me finish this chapter and then we’ll go.”
Harry goes to the bank. He goes with a barely contained Salvo and an overstrung Gina, who sits in the corner chair in Cassidy’s office and wants to break her fingers as she listens.
Ervin