While he slept fitfully, Violetta paced the floor and the field outside, sobbing and muttering to herself. Prosperine stuffed and roasted Selvi’s special chicken.
But he never ate that bird. By late afternoon, he awoke with stomach pains that made him scream. An hour later, he was shitting bloody stool. As night fell, he slept so quietly, they had to put a goose feather to his nose to see the breathing.
Somewhere in the nighttime, his thrashing began. Strings of blood and drool came out of his mouth. His stench was foul, his eyes wild. A few times, he tried to speak—to pray, perhaps—but his lips only made movement without sound. By the candlelight, his green eyes seemed lit with the suffering of his painted saints!
Toward the end, Violetta could not look. She cried and said they had done a terrible thing—a thing that would damn them both in the afterlife. “You were damned in this one!” Prosperine reminded her. “Remember the evil he did—the evil he would have kept doing if we hadn’t stopped him! We did what we had to do!” Still, the Monkey took no pleasure in Gallante Selvi’s dying and death. All during that night, water poured out of the sky and she wondered if the rain was the old witch’s tears.
Gallante Selvi stopped breathing in the hour before the sun. Prosperine washed the blood away from both ends of him and Violetta combed his hair, crying and kissing his yellow curls. She kept begging that poisoned devil to forgive her and, finally, Prosperine had to slap her and cover the body with Ciccolina’s quilt to make her stop.
The Monkey told Violetta that to sit and do nothing—to fail to go for priest or dottore—would cast suspicion. But Violetta was afraid to stay alone with him—afraid Selvi might come alive again and strangle her, or that his unholy soul would suck the air from her mouth. She stayed outside while Prosperine walked to the village.
In town, the Monkey knocked on the door of the more stupido of Pescara’s two dottori—the one whose errors had killed more patients. “Hurry, please, while he is still alive,” she said. Together they rushed to wake up Padre Pomposo.
Through all the examination and prayer that followed, Violetta wailed her sorrow—a diva’s performance, or else real tears, Prosperine never knew which. That lazy dottore made a poke here, a prod there. “Appendice,” he said. “The poor man died of burst appendice.” Then he went to the kitchen while the padre gave that son of a bitch the Rites of the Dead.
Padre Pomposo—that lover of pageantry and stravaganza—advised Violetta that she must arrange a funeral befitting the great religious artiste her beloved husband had been. With her permission, he said, he would contact Panetta, the impresario di pompe funebri, as soon as he returned to the village. Panetta would collect the body, prepare it, and transport it to the church where all of Pescara would come to mourn. Prosperine’s eyes tried to warn Violetta, “No, no!” They needed a fast burial. But Violetta’s eyes looked only at the priest, as if his foolish ceremonia could save her husband’s soul and hers. Padre Pomposo spoke on and on about holy music and special candles, a processione, perhaps, on Wednesday or Thursday morning, from the ocean where the genius had worked to the church where the High Mass would be celebrated.
Prosperine made her tongue click and shook her head in a futile attempt to capture the attenzione of her friend and accomplice. The padre looked at her, then back to Violetta. Perhaps, he said, if he could have a moment of privacy with the widow . . .
Then, a shock! A thing those murdering women had not planned on—the thing that ruined them! Banished by the priest from the room where the funeral arrangements were being made, Prosperine reentered the kitchen. At the table, that stupid dottore sat devouring the roasted chicken she had stuffed with bread and glass!
“Scusi, Signorina,” he told the Monkey, waving a half-gnawed leg. “I hope your pretty padrona won’t mind that I had a little something for my stomach in exchange for my troubles. Do you have, maybe, a bottle of vino to help wash down this bird?” In front of him was a pile of bones and a spoon. The bird’s carcass was half empty of the tainted stuffing!
Panetta the undertaker and his man came that afternoon to haul away the body. Violetta hugged Prosperine, sobbing, as the wagon drove away. That stupid dottore had not seemed sick when he left. He hadn’t eaten nearly as much of the ground glass as Gallante had. Perhaps things would be fine.
But that greedy fool was sick by the time the wagon had returned to the village! Sick for the rest of that day, too, and through the night. When he moved his bowels the next morning, he screamed from the pain of it. His wife carried his business outside and studied it in the sunlight. The bloody cacca floating inside the chamber pot glittered and told on Selvi’s widow and her murdering friend!
The dottore and his wife carried their smelly evidence to the magistrato and, together, the three visited Panetta the undertaker. Then the four went to the church to cut open Gallante Selvi’s stomaco.
It was Prosperine’s father who told all this to her, as he stood in his apron at Ciccolina’s doorway. His hair was dusty from macaroni flour, his eyes jumped with fear for his estranged daughter. Panetta the undertaker’s wife was Papa’s cugina. She had run to the macaroni shop and tipped him off and Papa had beaten his mule half to death to get to Prosperine before the polizia arrived. “Take this, whatever you have done, and run away,” he said. He put two fistfuls of coins into his daughter’s upturned apron, then hugged her hard enough to break her bones. That was the last she ever saw of her papa, but ever since, she had been comforted by her memory of him standing there in Ciccolina’s doorway. He had felt a father’s love for her all along, and even before his arms had let go of her that day, she had forgiven him for having sold her away.
They ran! Through the woods and then down to the docks—ran to those fishermen who had lusted after Violetta. They employed the charms of the beautiful one and the money of the ugly one and got away from Pescara. They did what they had to do. It was the only way.
From boat to boat, down the coast, they traveled. Prosperine had never before been out of Pescara, but now they sailed past Bari and Brindisi, and across the stretto at Messina. And that was how Prosperine became siciliana—she had gone there to hide from murder!
For a while, the two women lived in Catania, lost among the workers on a wealthy man’s olive farm. They were safe there until the farmer’s capomastro became curious about what was beneath Violetta’s skirts and his suspicious wife began questioning where two young signorini had traveled from and why. On the same night of that jealous wife’s interrogazione, Prosperine and Violetta stole money and escaped again, this time by train to Palermo.
Those were terrible months in that busy city where people came and went. Violetta found work as a servant at a busy inn, and Prosperine toiled as a laundress there. Although the Monkey could hide in the back with the hot water and soiled linens, Violetta was obliged to serve meals to travelers. Her heart stopped a little each time the door of the inn opened. Prosperine, too, was afraid—forever mistaking people in the streets for traveling Pescarans! Women and men and bambini all seemed to look at her with familiar faces—with eyes that knew what she had done. She was homesick. She longed to see the Adriatico, the Pescaran square, her papa, her sisters Anna and Teodolina. But a bigger part of her longed to be safe—to buy safety for herself and her friend Violetta. They could not be caught! They had to get further away!
One of Violetta’s regular supper customers was a fine and proper legale. On nights when the inn was quiet, he invited her to sit with him and talk and join him in a cognac. He was well traveled, this gentleman; three times, he told her, he had visited la ‘Merica. And it warmed his heart to think of the number of poor siciliani he had helped sail to that Land of Dreams.
Had he ever aided any poor souls, Violetta asked cautiously, who were, perhaps, in trouble with the law?
The legale leaned closer to the murderous widow and whispered si, he had from time to time assisted fellow citizens whose criminal records had needed a little whitewashing. He had a friend, he
said, an ufficiale di passaporti. Together they sometimes made the dead come alive again, equipping them with traveling papers besides! They asked no questions of prospective emigrants, he said, except the one question they needed to know: how much was a fugitiva able to pay?
In the weeks that followed, Violetta began to grant her friend the legale certain favors. In exchange, he sent secret word back to a certain Pescaran macaroni-maker that the two fugitives were alive and well and needed money. Then they waited and waited—almost a year, long enough so that Prosperine was sure her father had disowned her for the shame she had brought on his head.
One day a young sailor came to the inn. He asked to see the laundress and was brought out back to her scrubbing tubs. Without speaking a word, he took out fotografia, holding it before himself and looking back and forth, back and forth, from the Monkey’s face to the likeness in his hand. Prosperine’s hands shook the water in the tub while she washed and waited. She thought, of course, that he was agente di polizia, but he was not. Here stood her sister Teodolina’s new husband. Her younger sister had married and it was her own brother-in-law who stood before her! The sailor handed her a leather purse. Inside was money from her father, the amount the legale needed for passage and counterfeit passports, and for the fugitives’ sponsorship once they got to America, plus a little more. Prosperine’s father had sold his macaroni shop—had sacrificed his livelihood for the daughter he had first rented away to an old witch, and then to her brute of a godson.
“And so, Tempesta, I became Prosperine Tucci, a girl five years my junior who had died of consunzione and whose mother had been sister to those stinking Iaccoi brothers—those goddamned plumbers who tricked you. They made a nice profit from their lies, Tempesta, and made you a fool as well. And here we sit, you and me, each a curse for the other.”
I reached over and grabbed her wrist. “What is your real name then, eh?” I said. “If Prosperine is a name stolen from a dead girl?”
“Bought, not stolen,” she said. “Paid for with a father’s sacrifice. My other name doesn’t matter. I am myself, Tempesta—the woman who watches what you do. That’s all you need to know.”
“And are you planning to feed me glass to tear up my insides? Stab me some night with your butcher knife?”
“I have no wish to watch another man die—to be twice damned,” she said. “Gallante Selvi was the devil himself. You’re only a bully and a fool. Keep your hands off her and you’ll be safe from me.”
She stood, teetering, and then made her way to the bathroom. That one who had never drunk spirits in my house before had, that night, drunk nearly half of the jug. Now, from behind the door, I heard that witch turn her wine back to water. I heard her moan, too, and wondered if she had begun to sober herself—to realize that she had told too much.
When she came out again, I stood in front of her, blocking her way to her room. “Your friend,” I said. “Violetta D’Annunzio. What became of her?”
Fear crossed the Monkey’s face and left just as quickly. “Eh? Violetta? She stayed . . . stayed in Palermo. . . . She changed her mind and married that legale.”
“Eh?”
“He fell in love with her and turned her into a gentlewoman. Now she’s happy.”
“Happy to be dead?” I said.
“Eh?”
“Before, you told me she died. You said she was buried in the Old Country.”
The fear and confusion in her eyes spoke louder than her words. “She is buried there. I said she was happy before she died. . . . Maybe I misspoke, but that’s what I meant.”
“Ah,” I said. “And has her second husband maintained good health?”
The Monkey’s eyes could not look at me. “The legale? He was grief-stricken, poor man.”
“Si?”
“Si, si. He wrote to me with the sad news when I lived with the plumbers. Influenza is what took her, poor thing. She had a sad life.”
“Before, you said your father’s money had paid for ‘our’ escape. Did Violetta come to this country or not?”
“I said ‘my’ escape.”
“You said ‘our’ escape. Nostro. I heard the word come out of your mouth.”
“You heard wrong then,” she said. “Mia, no nostra. You must have potatoes in your ears.”
Now she looked at me and I looked at her. We stood there, watching each other, neither of us looking away. That’s when I saw the Monkey’s lip tremble. And then, in the other room, the baby cried.
I held her gaze ten, fifteen seconds more. “You’d better go,” I finally said. “Your friend Violetta needs you.”
Her drunken, frightened eyes jumped from my face to the bedroom door, then back again. “My friend Violetta is buried in Palermo,” she said—a little too loudly. “I just told you. It is a sin to mock the souls of the dead.”
I took her arm and whispered some advice into her ear. “You’re a fine one,” I said, “to talk to me about sins against the dead!”
40
Sheffer was late, as usual. Why was one o’clock always 1:10 or 1:15 with that woman? Why was 11 A.M. always 11:20, with some excuse attached?
Okay, cool your jets, Birdsey, I told myself. You bite her head off as soon as she walks in the door, you won’t get what you need.
Get him tested. . . . Keep my name out of it.
Drinkwater’s phone call had kept me up all night. Just my brother’s paranoid delusions—right, Sheffer? He’s “perfectly safe” all right. Except for one minor detail: he might be infected. Someone down here at this fucking place might have given him AIDS.
I’ll take care of him for you, Ma. I promise. You can go now, Ma. . . .
Face it, Birdsey: you were asleep at the wheel. You let them lull you. Cut back your visits, stopped calling to check on him. . . . And when you did visit, you only half-listened to his horror stories: how they were poisoning him, programming him, coming into his cell in the middle of the night. . . . Oh Jesus, don’t let him have HIV on top of everything else. Don’t let that test be positive. . . .
I knew one thing: I was getting him examined independently, whether they liked it or not. I didn’t trust any of these clowns anymore. I wasn’t taking anyone’s word.
Okay, chill out. Think about something else. . . . I reached over, snagged the newspaper on Sheffer’s desk.
POST–GULF WAR OIL PRICES DROPPING. . . . How can we kill people for the sake of cheap oil, Dominick? How can we justify that? . . . king beating: tapes show l.a.p.d. “levity.” . . . He’s safe here, Dominick. Unit Two’s the best. Sheffer had said it so often, so convincingly, that I’d bought the line. And now look what had happened.
What might have happened, I reminded myself. His test could come back negative.
I saw my sorry-ass reflection in Sheffer’s computer monitor. Saw, whether I liked it or not, my grandfather. . . . Why the hell had I picked up Domenico’s history the night before—read the one goddamned thing guaranteed to extend my insomnia—make me feel even worse? . . . A painter vomits and shits himself to death, a rabbit gets hacked in half and doubles itself. . . . So your wife and her friend were fugitives, Old Man? My grandmother was a murderer? Is that what’s wrong with us?
And what about his other suspicion—that Ma was really the Irishman’s daughter? If that was true, then Domenico wasn’t even my grandfather, right? Mine or Thomas’s. We beat the rap. . . . Only it didn’t wash. How could she have given birth to twins with different fathers? If I wasn’t his grandson, why had I grown to look like those sepia-tinted pictures of him—those pictures Ma had gone back into the burning house to save?
One thing was coming clear: the reason why he’d treated Ma like crap. “Rabbit-face,” “cracked jug”: if you disowned your own daughter—convinced yourself she was somebody else’s—then you could make her your personal whipping girl, right? Punish her for her mother’s sins. . . . Right, Old Man? Was that why you went down to that store where she worked and made her eat a cigarette? Shoved her face into a plate
of fried eggs? . . . My guess was that “Papa” had shoved his daughter around plenty. He’d beaten his wife, hadn’t he? His own mother back in Sicily? Why would he have spared a harelipped daughter he didn’t even claim?
No wonder Ma was afraid of her own shadow. No wonder she’d never been able to stand up to Ray. . . . She’d let history repeat itself when she married Ray Birdsey, that much was clear. I tell you one thing, buddy boy! If you were my flesh and blood . . . No kid of mine would ever . . . That prick had spent a lifetime disclaiming us.
BOMBING OF IRAQ “NEAR-APOCALYPTIC.” “A United Nations report says the U.S.–led allied bombing campaign had wrought ‘near-apocalyptic’ results upon the infrastructure of what had been, until January of 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society. Now, most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has been relegated to a preindustrial age, but with all the disabilities of postindustrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology. In terms of human casualties . . .”
Desert Storm, Rodney King: the front page told the same old story, over and over and over. Might made right—whoever had the “smart” bombs, the billy clubs. . . . Duck and cover, Thomas! You want mercy? Forget about God. God’s a picture from the five-and-ten hanging up on Ma’s bedroom wall. Pray to the oppressor, man. . . . I’m sorry, Ray. I won’t do it again. I’m sorry. . . . The never-ending soundtrack from Hollyhock Avenue. The both of them over there—my mother, my brother—crying and begging the tyrant for mercy. . . . HEAVY RAINS EXPECTED THROUGH WEEKEND. . . .
Well, I tell you what, Ma: I may have been asleep at the wheel for the past couple of months, but I’m wide awake now. I’m getting him out of here if I have to drive up to Hartford and pound on the governor’s front door. If I have to torch this fucking place.