Pietro Bachi, Italian gentleman and graduate of the University of Padua, grouchily nurtured all opportunities open to him in Boston as a private tutor, though they were scarce and disagreeable. He had tried to obtain another university position after his dismissal from Harvard. “There may be room for a plain teacher of French or German,” the dean of one new college in Philadelphia said, laughing, “but Italian! My friend, we do not expect our boys to turn out opera singers.” Colleges up and down the Atlantic anticipated as few opera singers. And governing academic boards were quite occupied enough (thank you, Mr. Bakey) managing Greek and Latin to consider instruction in an unnecessary, unseemly, papist, vulgar living language.
Fortunately, a moderate demand materialized in certain quarters of Boston by the end of the war. A few Yankee merchants were anxious to open ports with as many language skills as they could purchase. Also, a new class of prominent families, enriched by wartime profits and profiteering, desired above all else that their daughters be cultured. Some thought it wise that young ladies obtain basic Italian in addition to French in the event that it might seem worthwhile to send them to Rome when their time came to travel (a recent fashion among blossoming Boston beauties). So Pietro Bachi, his Harvard post unceremoniously stripped from him, remained on the lookout for enterprising merchants and pampered damsels. The latter required frequent replenishment, for the singing, drawing, and dancing masters held far too much appeal to them for Bachi to lay permanent claim to the young ladies’ hour-and-a-quarter pouches of time.
This life appalled Pietro Bachi.
It was not the lessons that tormented him so much as having to ask for his fees. The americani of Boston had built themselves a Carthage, a land stuffed with money but void of culture, destined to vanish without a trace of its existence. What had Plato said of the citizens of Argigentum? These people build as if they were immortal and eat as if they were to die instantly.
Some twenty-five years earlier, in the beautiful countryside of Sicily, Pietro Batalo, like many Italians before him, had fallen in love with a perilous woman. Her family was of opposite political entrenchment from the Batalos, who fought vigorously against papal control of the state. When the woman felt Pietro had wronged her, her family was only too happy to arrange for his excommunication and banishment. After a series of adventures with various armies, Pietro and his brother, a merchant, who desired freedom from the destructive political and religious landscape, changed their name to Bachi and fled across the ocean. In 1843, Pietro found a Boston that was a quaint town of friendly faces, different from what would emerge by 1865, when nativists were seeing their fear of foreigners’ rapid multiplication realized, and windows filled with the reminder FOREIGNERS NEED NOT APPLY. Bachi had been welcomed into Harvard College, and for a time he, like young Professor Henry Longfellow, had even boarded in a lovely section of Brattle Street. Then Pietro Bachi found passion unlike any he had known in the love of an Irish maiden. And she became his wife. But she found supplementary passions shortly after marrying the instructor. She left him, as Bachi’s students said, with only his shirtsleeves in his trunk and her hearty keenness for drink in his throat. There began the steep and steady decline in the heart of Pietro Bachi…
“I understand she is, well, shall we say…” His interlocutor dug for a delicate word as he hurried after Bachi:”… difficult.”
“She is difficult?” Bachi did not stop descending the stairs. “Ha! She does not believe I am Italian,” Bachi said. “She says I do not look like an Italian!”
The young girl appeared at the top of the stairs and sulkily watched her father wobble after the diminutive instructor.
“Oh, I’m sure the child does not mean what she says,” he was declaiming as gravely as possible.
“I did so mean it!” the little girl screeched from her mezzanine stage at the stair landing, leaning so far against the walnut banister that it looked as if she might fall onto Pietro Bachi’s knitted hat. “He does not look at all like one, Father! He is far too short!”
“Arabella!” the man shouted, then turned back with an earnest yellow-stained smile—as though he washed his mouth with gold—to the shimmering candlelit vestibule. “I say, wait a moment more, dear sir! Let us take this occasion to review your fee, shall we, Signor Bachi?” he suggested, eyebrow pulled back tight as a trembling arrow waiting on its bow.
Bachi turned to him for a moment, his face burning, his grip tightening on his satchel as he tried to subdue his temper. The webbed lines had multiplied across his face over the last few years, and each small setback made him doubt the worth of his existence. “Amari Cani!” was all Bachi said. Arabella stared down confusedly. He had not taught her enough to understand that his pun on americani–Italian for “Americans”—would translate into English as “bitter dogs.”
The horsecar at this hour, bound inward, packed people in like cattle headed for the abattoir. Serving Boston and its suburbs, the horsecars were enclosed two-ton compartments lined with enough places to hold around fifteen passengers. They were set with iron wheels on flat tracks and pulled by a pair of horses. Those who had managed to secure seats watched with detached interest as three dozen others, Bachi among them, struggled to fold into themselves, knuckling and bumping into one another as they reached for the leather straps hanging from the roof. By the time the conductor had pushed through to collect the fares, the platform outside was already filled with people waiting for the next car. Two drunkards in the middle of the overheated, unventilated compartment gave off a smell like an ash heap, and struggled to sing in harmony a song with words they did not know. Bachi curved his hand to his mouth and, seeing that nobody was watching, breathed into it and momentarily widened his nostrils.
After arriving at his street, Bachi plunged down from the sidewalk into a basement complex of shadows in a tenement called Half Moon Place, happily expectant of the solitude that awaited him. But sitting on the last step down were, out of place without armchairs, James Russell Lowell and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“A penny for your thoughts, signore.” Lowell wore a charming smile as he grabbed Bachi’s hand.
“That would be filching a copper from you, Professore,” Bachi said, his hand hanging limp as a wet rag in Lowell’s clutch. “Lost your way to Cambridge?”
He eyed Holmes suspiciously, but he sounded more surprised at their visit than he looked.
“Not at all,” said Lowell as he took off his hat, showing his high white forehead. “And aren’t you acquainted with Dr. Holmes? We’d both like to have a few words, if you would.”
Bachi frowned and pushed open his apartment door to the clanking welcome of pots hung on pegs directly behind the door. It was a subterranean room with a square of daylight dripping down from one half-window that found its way above the street. A musty odor rose up from clothes hanging at all corners that never quite dried in the dampness, imprinting Bachi’s suits with defeated wrinkles. As Lowell rearranged the pots on the door in order to hang his hat, Bachi casually slipped a pile of papers from his desk into his satchel. Holmes did his best to compliment the cracked decor.
Bachi then put up a kettle of water on the hob of the chimney grate. “Your business, gentlemen?” he asked curtly.
“We’ve come to request your help, Signer Bachi,” said Lowell.
Wry amusement crept across Bachi’s face as he poured out the tea, and he grew cheerier. “What will you take with this?” He motioned to his sideboard. There were a half-dozen dirty tumblers and three decanters. They were labeled RUM, GIN, and WHISKEY.