“Fitter’s Night” by Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller's “Fitter’s Night” could easily have been a novella as the story is loaded with yards and yards of backstory material. It features an Italian American jack-of-all-trades, Tony Calabrese, Ship Fitter First Class. As a civilian contractor with a Brooklyn Navy yard, he ran a crew that repaired Allied war ships returning from battle during World War II.
I came by the short story in an Arther Miller collection while having browsed for a copy of “The Crucible.” “Fitter’s Night” is packed with world War II-era New York City fantasia (think of the movie musical “On the Town”). I’ll admit the story labors under a slow start before Tony Calabrese’s arrival (a point where I would have begun the story).
Tony's middle-aged and married, with two kids and a “baloney on the side.” For most of his adult life he has sought passage into conditions or circumstances that would ease him into what he considered “The Good Life.” “It was like being Sinatra or Luciano, or even one of the neighborhood politicians who wore good suits all day and never bent over, kept two apartments, one for the family, the other for the baloney of the moment.”
Tony has just enough seniority and experience to delegate most of the tasks assigned to him, as he spends hours sleeping each shift holed up in the bowels of a ship, in a nook filled with cables. While he has not attained the lifestyle of a Sinatra or Luciano, he's achieved a certain equilibrium with the difficult, straining efforts of a working-class New York City resident. For a good portion of the story Tony reflects upon a fateful decision made in his youth that set the pace for a life of thankless drudgery.
He blames the woman who became his wife, Margaret.
Tony found himself ensnared in a complicated scenario involving a considerable inheritance from his maternal grandfather; compelled by the force of his family’s expectations for a respectable, working-class Italian American son, Tony started courting Margaret: “The daughter of a good Calabrian family down the block, a girl as pure as a dove, beautiful, sincere, whose reputation was being mangled every day Tony avoided talk of a marriage date…. Margaret alone could save Tony from the electric chair, which was waiting for him as sure as God had sent Jesus, for he was a boy who would lie as quickly as spit. The proof being his obvious attempt to hoodwink grandpa with a night on the town before any of the family to get to him with the true facts.” Miller paints the story with numerous scenes of amusing, overwrought immigrant family melodrama.
Tony finally acquiesces to his family's demands and marries Margaret. Readers will find the story does not shy away from a view of the tight knit cloistering space of intergenerational immigrants living in America. When Tony's grandfather finds out his grandson is not taking his procreative duties seriously, the grandfather parks himself on Tony's living room sofa until the deed is done.
In a climactic scene after Margaret delivers twins—far more than what Tony bargained for his inheritance—the charming scoundrel runs from the hospital to find and berate his grandfather. After confronting his grandfather, Tony realizes the promise of a generous inheritance, a chest full of Italian lira, had been swept away at the mercy of declining global currencies. Perhaps it was a just reward for man utterly lacking the “faith and full credit” of a would-be family patriarch.