Presence: Stories

  He found himself in the engine room and looked up through the barrel-like darkness, up and up through the belly of the ship. There was, he knew, a cable passage where he could lie down. Somebody he could barely see high above in the darkness was showering sparks from a welding arc being held too far from the steel, but he pulled up his collar and climbed ladders, moved along the catwalks until he came to a low door which he opened, went into a hole lined with electric cables, and lay down with his hands clasped under his head. The welding buzz was all he could hear now. Footsteps would sound on the steel catwalks and give good warning.

  Not tired, he closed his eyes to screw the government. Even here in the dark he was making money every minute—every second. With this week’s check he would probably have nearly two thousand in his account and a hundred and twenty or so in the account Margaret knew about. Jesus, what a dumb woman! Dumb, dumb, dumb. But a good mother, that’s for sure. But why not? With only two kids, what else she got to do? He would never sleep with her again and could barely remember the sight of her body. In fact, for the thousandth time in his life, he realized that he had never seen his wife naked, which was as it should be. You could fill a lake with the tears she had shed these fifteen years—an ocean. Good.

  He stoked his anger at his wife, the resentment that held his life together. It was his cause, his agony, and his delight to let his mind go and imagine what she must feel, not being touched for eleven—no, twelve, yes, it was twelve last spring—years. This spring it would be thirteen, then fourteen, then twenty, and into her grave without his hand on her. Never, never would he give in. On the bed, when he did sleep at home, with his back to her, he stretched into good sleep, and sometimes her wordless sobs behind him were like soft rain on the roof that made him snug. She had asked for it. He had warned her at the time. He might look funny, but Tony Calabrese was not funny for real. To allow himself to break, to put his hand on her ever again, he would have to forgive what she had done to him. And now, lying in the cable passage with his eyes closed, he went over what she had done, and as always happened when he reached for these memories, the darling face of the baloney formed in his darkness, Patty Moran, with genuine red hair, breasts without a crease under them, and lips pink as lipstick. Oh, Jesus! He shook his head in the dark. And where was she now? He did not dare hate his grandfather; the old man was like a storm or an animal that did only what it was supposed to do. He let himself remember what had become for him like a movie whose end he knew and dreaded to see once more, and yet wanted to. It was the only time in his life that had not been random, when each day that had passed in those few months had changed his position and finally sealed him up forever.

  From the day he was born, it seemed to him, his mother had kept warning him to watch out for Grampa. If he stole, hit, lied, tore good pants, got in cop trouble, the same promise was made—if Grampa ever came to America he would settle each and every one of Tony’s crimes in a daylong, maybe weeklong beating combined with an authoritative spiritual thundering that would straighten out Tony for the rest of his life. For Grampa was gigantic, a sport in the diminutive family, a throwback to some giants of old whose wit and ferocity had made them lords in Calabria, chiefs among the rocks, commanders of fishing boats, capos of the mines. Even Tony’s cowed father relied on the absent, never-seen old man for authority and spent every free hour away from work on the BMT tracks playing checkers with his cronies, rather than chastise his sons. Grampa would come one day and settle them all, straighten them out, and besides, if he did come, he would bring his money. He owned fishing boats, the star of the whole family, a rich man who had made it, astoundingly, without ever leaving Calabria, which meant again that he was wily and merciless, brave and just.

  The part that was usually hard to remember was hard to remember again, and Tony opened his eyes in the cable passage until, yes, he remembered. How he had ever gotten mixed up with Margaret in the first place, a mewly girl, big-eyed but otherwise blanketed bodily, bodiless, shy, and frightened. It was because he had just come out of the Tombs, and this time Mama was not to be fooled with. She was a fury now as he walked into the tenement, unwilling to listen to the old promises or to be distracted by all his oaths of innocence and frame-up. And this time fate began to step in, that invisible presence entered Tony’s life, the Story; his tight time began, when nothing was any longer random and every day changed what he was and what he had to do.

  A letter had arrived that nobody could read. They sat around the table, Mama and Papa and Aunt Celia from next door, and Frank and Salvatore, his married cousins. Tony slowly traced the Italian script, speaking it aloud so that Papa could mouth the words and penetrate the underlying thought, which was unbelievable, a marvel that chilled them all. Grampa had sold his holdings, now that Grandma was dead, and was sailing for America for a visit, or, if he approved, to stay the rest of his life.

  The cable passage seemed to illuminate with the lightning flashes of the preparations for the arrival—the house scrubbed, walls painted, furniture shined, chairs fixed, and the blackmail begun. Mama, seeing the face of her son and the hope and avidity in his eyes, sat him down in the kitchen. I am going to tell Grampa everything what you done, Tony. Everything. Unless you do what I say. You marry Margaret.

  Margaret was a year older than Tony. Somehow, he could not imagine how, now that he knew her, he had come to rest on her stoop from time to time, mainly when just out of jail, when momentarily the strain of bargaining for life and a spot was too much, those moments when, like madness, a vision of respectability overwhelmed him with a quick longing for the clean and untroubled existence. She was like a nervous pony at his approach, and easy to calm. It was the time he was driving booze trucks over the Canadian border for Harry Ox, the last of the twenties, and out of jail it was sweet to spend a half hour staring at the street with Margaret, like a clam thrown up by the moiling sea for a moment. He had been in his first gunfight near Albany and was scared. And this was the first time he had said he would like to take her to the movies. In all the years he had known her, the thought had never crossed his mind to make a date. Home that night, he already heard his mother talking about Margaret’s family. The skein was folding over him, and he did not resist. He did not decide either. He let it come without touching it, let it drape over him like a net. They were engaged, and nobody had used the word, even, but whenever he saw Margaret she acted as though she had been waiting for him, as though he had been missing, and he let it happen, walked a certain way with her in the street, touching her elbow with his fingertips, and never took her into the joints, and watched his language. Benign were the smiles in her house the few times he appeared, but he could never stay long for the boredom, the thickness of the plot to strangle his life.

  His life was Patty Moran by this time. Once across her threshold over Ox’s saloon, everything he saw nearly blinded him. He had started out with her at three o’clock in the morning in the back of Ox’s borrowed Buick, her ankle ripping the corded rope off the back of the front seat, and the expanse of her thigh across the space between the back and front seats was painted in cream across his brain forever. He walked around the neighborhood dazed, a wire going from the back of his head to her hard soft belly. She was not even Harry Ox’s girl but a disposable one among several, and Tony started out knowing that and each day climbed an agonizing stairway to a vision of her dearness, almost but not quite imagining her marriageable. The thought of other men with her was enough to bring his fist down on a table even if he was sitting alone. His nose had not yet been broken; he was small but quick-looking, sturdy, and black-eyed. She finally convinced him there was nobody else, she adored his face, his body, his stolen jokes. And in the same two or three months he was taking Margaret to the movies. He even kissed her now and then. Why? Why! Grampa was coming as soon as he could clear up his affairs, and what had begun with Margaret as a purposeless yet pleasant pastime had taken on leverage in that it kept Mama pleased and quiet and w
ould guarantee his respectability in Grampa’s eyes—long enough, anyway, to get his inheritance.

  No word of inheritance was written in the old man’s letters, but it was first imagined, then somehow confirmed, that Tony would get it. And when he did it was off-to-Buffalo, him and the baloney, maybe even get married someplace where nobody knew her and they’d make out seriously together. And best of all, Mama knew nothing of the baloney. Nowadays she was treating Tony like the head of the house. He had taken a job longshore, was good as gold, and sat home many an evening, listening to the tock-tick.

  The final letter came. Tony read it alone in the bathroom first and announced that Grampa was coming on the tenth, although the letter said the ninth. On the morning of the ninth, Tony said he had to get dressed up because, instead of working, he was going to scout around for a good present for Grampa’s arrival tomorrow. Congratulated, kissed, waved off, he rounded the block to Ox’s and borrowed three hundred dollars and took a cab to the Manhattan pier.

  The man in truth was gigantic. Tony’s first glimpse was this green-suited, oddly young old man, a thick black tie at his throat, a black fedora held by a porter beside him, while down the gangway he himself was carrying on his back a small but heavy trunk. Tony understood at once—the money was in the trunk. On the pier Tony tipped the porter for carrying the furry hat, and kissed his six-foot grandfather once he had set the trunk down. Tony shook his hand and felt the power in it, hard as a banister. The old man took one handle of the trunk and Tony the other, and in the cab Tony made his proposal. Before rushing home, why not let him show New York?

  Fine. But first Tony wanted to Americanize the clothes; people would get the wrong impression, seeing such a green immigrant suit and the heavy brogans. Grampa allowed it, standing there ravished by the bills Tony peeled off for the new suit, new shoes, and an American tie. Now they toured the town, sinking deeper and deeper into it as Tony graded the joints from the middle-class ones uptown to his hangouts near Canal Street, until the old man was kissing his grandson two and three times an hour and stood up cheering the Minsky girls who bent over the runway toward his upturned face. Tony, at four in the morning, carried the trunk up the stairs of the tenement on his own back, feeling the dead weight inside; then back down and carried Grampa on his back and laid him in his own bed and himself on the floor. He had all he could do to keep from rushing over to Patty Moran to tell her he was in like Flynn, the old man loved him like a son, and they might begin by opening a joint together someplace, like in Queens. But he kept discipline and slept quickly, his face under the old man’s hand hanging over the edge of the mattress.

  In the cable passage, staring at the dark, he could not clearly recall his wedding, any more than he had been able to an hour after the ceremony. It was something he was doing and not doing. Grampa had emerged from the bedroom with Tony under his armpit; and seeing her father, Mama’s face lengthened out as though God or the dead had walked in, especially since she had just finished getting dressed up to meet his boat. The shouting and crying and kissing lasted until afternoon, Grampa’s pleasure with his manly grandson gathering the complicated force of a new mission in his life, a proof of his own grandeur at being able to hand on a patrimony to a good man of his blood, a man of style besides.

  Papa nodded an uncertain assent, one eye glancing toward the trunk, but as evening came, Mama, Tony saw, was showing two thoughts in her tiny brown eyes, and after the third meal of the day, with the table cleaned off and the old man blinking drowsily, she laid two open hands on the table, smiled deferentially, and said Tony had been in and out of jails since he was twelve.

  Grampa woke up.

  Tony was hanging with bootleggers, refused until the last couple of months to hold a regular job, and now he was staying with an Irish whore when he had engaged himself to 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. The girl’s brothers were growing restive, her father had gotten the look of blood in his eye. 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 Grampa with a night on the town before any of the family could get to him with the true facts.

  It took twenty minutes to convince Grampa; he had had to stare at Tony for a long time, as though through a telescope that would not adjust. Tony downed his fury, defended his life, denied everything, promised everything, brought out the new alarm clock he had bought for the house out of his own money, and at last sat facing Grampa, dying in his chair as the old man leveled his judgment. Tony, you will marry this fine girl or none of my money goes to you. Not the fruit of my labor to a gangster, no, not to a criminal who will die young in the electric chair. Marry the girl and yes, definitely, I give you what I have.

  First days, then weeks—then was it months?—passed after the wedding, but the money failed to be mentioned again. Tony worked the piers dutifully now, and when he did see Patty Moran it was at odd hours only, on his way toward the shape-up or on days when it rained and deck work was called off. He would duck into the doorway next to Ox’s saloon and fly up the stairs and live for half an hour, then home again to wait; he dared not simply confront the old man with the question of his reward, knowing that he was being watched for deficiencies. On Sundays he walked like a husband with Margaret, spent the afternoons with the family, and acted happy. The old man was never again as close and trusting and comradely as on that first night off the boat, but neither was he hostile. He was watching, Tony saw, to make sure.

  And Tony would make him sure. The only problem was what to do in his apartment once he was alone with Margaret. He had never really hated her and he had never liked her. It was like being alone with an accident, that was all. He spoke to her rarely and quietly, listened to her gossip about the day’s events, and read his newspaper. He did not expect her to suddenly stand up in the movies and run out crying, some two months after the wedding, or expect to come home from work one spring evening and find Grampa sitting in the living room with Margaret, looking at him silently as he came through the door.

  You don’t touch your wife?

  Tony could not move from the threshold or lie, suddenly. The old man had short, bristly gray hair that stood up like wire, and he was back to his Italian brogans, a kick from which could make a mule inhale. Margaret dared only glance at Tony, but he saw now that the dove had her beak in his belly and was not going to let go.

  You think I’m mentally defective, Tony? A man with spit in the corners of his mouth? Cross-eyed? What do you think I am?

  The first new demonstration was, again, at the movies. Grampa sat behind them. After a few minutes Margaret turned her head to him and said, He don’t put his arm around me, see?

  Put your arm around her.

  Tony put his arm around her.

  Then after a few more minutes she turned to Grampa. He’s only touching the seat, see?

  Grampa took hold of Tony’s hand and laid it on Margaret’s shoulder.

  Again, one night, Grampa was waiting for him with Margaret. Okay—he was breaking into English now and then by this time—Okay, I’m going to sleep on the couch.

  Tony had never slept in bed with her. He was afraid of Grampa because he knew he could never bring himself to raise a hand to him, and he knew that Grampa could knock him around; but it was not the physical harm, it was the sin he had been committing over and over again of trying to con the old man, whose opinion of him was falling every day, until one day, he foresaw, Grampa would pack up and take the trunk back to Calabria and goodbye. Grampa was no longer astounded by New York, and he still owned his house in Italy, and Tony visualized that house, ready at all times for occupancy, and he was afraid.

  He went into the bedroom with Margaret. She sniveled on
the pillow beside him. It was still light outside, the early blue of a spring evening. Tony listened for a sound of Grampa through the closed door, but nothing came through. He reached and found her hip and slid up her nightgown. She was soft, too soft, but she was holding her breath. He stretched his neck and rested his mouth on her shoulder. She was breathing at the top of her chest, near her throat, not daring to lay her hand on him, her face upthrust as though praying. He smoothed her hip, waiting for his tension, and nothing was happening to him until—until she began to weep, not withdrawing herself but pressed against him, weeping. His hatred mounted on the disappointed, tattletale sound she was sending into the other room, and suddenly he felt himself hardening and he got to his knees before her, pushed her onto her back and saw her face in the dim light from the window, her eyes shut and spinning out gray teardrops. She opened her eyes then and looked terrified, as though she wanted to call it off and beg his pardon, and he covered her with a baring of his teeth, digging his face into the mattress as though rocks were falling on him from the sky.