The Fortunate Pilgrim

  He lay back on his pillow. Vinnie watched him carefully. Gino had never acted this way before. “O.K.,” he said. “You hold the money.”

  Gino lay back on the pillow and said almost absently, “And I have to be the boss making the root beer. It’s my money.”

  This hurt Vinnie’s feelings. He was the older and it was his idea. He nearly said, “You and your five dollars can go to hell.” But instead he said, “O.K., you’ll be the boss. You want a bandage on your knee?”

  “Nah, it don’t hurt,” Gino said. “Let’s talk about how to make that root beer. And remember, don’t tell anybody I got hit by a car. I’ll just get a beating.”

  Vinnie said, “I’ll go get a paper and pencil to figure expenses.” He went into the kitchen and cleaned the table and washed the dishes. The mother had given strict orders that Gino was to clean up after eating supper. Then he got the pencil and pad from his schoolbag.

  When Vinnie got back to the front room it was almost dark, the last shreds of twilight. In the dimness he saw Gino’s relaxed hand on the blanket. The crumpled five-dollar bill was on the floor. Gino was sound asleep, his body completely inert, his eyes closed.

  But there were strange sounds coming from the bed. Vinnie went closer and saw that his brother was crying in his sleep, tears streaming down his face. Vinnie shook him to wake him out of the nightmare, but his brother kept sleeping, breathing easily and deeply. The sounds of crying stopped finally, leaving only his face and eyelashes wet. Vinnie waited for a while beside the bed in case his brother should wake up and want the five dollars back. Then he put the money in their secret hiding place in the wall.

  Vinnie sat on the window sill in the darkness. It was a very still night, too early in the spring for the people on the Avenue to stay down late. Even the railroad yards were quiet; there were no engines moving, no ringing of steel. Vinnie kept looking at the bed to make sure his brother was all right, and figuring where they could get the bottles for the root beer they would make. He knew that Gino would let him be the boss.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE SMOKY GRAY light of autumn made the city all lines and shadows. The bridge over Tenth Avenue was half obscured, as if it were over some bottomless gorge, not just two stories above a cobblestone street ruled with twin lines of steel. Underneath the bridge, from the direction of 29th Street, came a wagon, flat-bedded, drawn by a heavy brown horse. The wagon was loaded with thin crates made of splintery wood, the crates filled with purple wine-grapes.

  The wagon parked midway between 30th and 31st Streets. Driver and helper stacked twenty crates in front of one tenement. The driver leaned back and called up to the city sky, as if singing a note, “Ca-te-rin-a, your grapes are waiting for you.” Four stories up a window opened, children leaned out, men and women. Seconds later, as if they had flown down the stairs, people erupted from the tenement. A man walked around the cases, sniffing like a dog at the clusters between the slats. “They are good this year?” he asked the driver. The driver did not bother to answer. He held out his hand for money. The man paid.

  Meanwhile the wife posted two children as guards, while she and the other children each took a crate and carried them into the cellar. The father ripped a slat off a box, partially exposing its contents, and took out a great blue-black cluster of grapes to eat. When the children and wife came back from their load, they and the guards were each given a cluster. In front of each tenement this scene was repeated, the children eating pear-cluster blue-black grapes, the father leaning happily against his stack of crates while other men not so fortunate flocked around to wish him luck with his wine. They licked their lips, thinking of the great jugs, red-black, stacked against the walls of their cellars.

  Gino was envious of the other children, those fortunate ones whose fathers made wine. He stood beside Joey Bianco’s father, but Joey was too cheap to give him grapes and so was his father. Joey’s father was too cheap to open a box for sampling even for relatives and close friends.

  But now the Panettiere, fat and round, wearing his baker’s white hat, came to receive three towering stacks of crates in front of his shop. He opened two of the crates and handed out great clusters to all the children. Gino jumped in and got his share. The Panettiere said in his great booming voice, “Ragazzi, help carry and there will be pizza for all.” Like ants, the children swarmed over the three stacks of crates and they magically disappeared underground into the cellar. Gino was left without anything to carry.

  The Panettiere looked at him reprovingly, “Ah, Gino, figlio mio, what will become of you? Work eludes you, try how you may. You must learn now; those who do not work do not eat. Away.”

  The Panettiere started to turn but the angry look in the young boy’s eyes stopped him. “Ah,” he said. “It’s not your fault. You just do not move quickly toward work. If there had been one left you would have carried it, eh?” When Gino nodded, the Panettiere motioned him into the shop. By the time the other children had come up from the cellar to get their reward, Gino was already out on the Avenue eating his pizza, the hot tomato sauce cutting the sweet juice of the grape from his mouth and palate.

  In the falling dusk the children, their mouths purple with grape and red with tomato sauce, ran screaming up and down the Avenue, raced up and down the steps of the bridge like howling demons, danced in the steam of the locomotive passing underneath, and reappeared in a shower of sparks. The stone city towered above them black with winter. It was their last frenzy before being called from windows to flee the falling night. They piled empty crates in the gutter, and one of the older boys set a match to the paper around the pile to make a bonfire. Tenth Avenue burst into beacons of orange light, and around them the children made a great circle. The calls from mothers leaning out of windows echoed throughout the cold twilight canyon streets, long and drawn out, shepherds down a mountainside.

  Lucia Santa, like God behind a cloud, watched from her window on the top floor of 358 Tenth Avenue, her elbows resting on an unsheeted pillow. She regarded her children and the others eating grapes running over the bridge, halved in the light of orange bonfires, shredded into fluttering shadows by the chilly, windy autumn night. The cold was coming early this year. The summer, blessed season of rest for city people, had come to an end.

  Now school would begin. There must be white shirts for the children, trousers mended and pressed. Shoes must be worn instead of sneakers patched with tape. Hair must be cut and combed. Winter’s gloves, always lost, must be bought; hats and coats. The stove must be put up in the living room next to the kitchen; it must be checked and kept filled. Money must be put aside for winter tribute to the doctor. In the back of her mind Lucia Santa thought of saving money by having Sal steal coal from the railroad yards. But Salvatore was too timid; he didn’t enjoy it. With Gino it was no longer possible. He was getting too big; he could be treated like a criminal. This Lucia Santa thought out with the cunning of the poor.

  Now in the orange light she could see a small boy go out a little way from the sidewalk into the gutter and then run and jump over the bonfire. Gino. Determined to ruin his clothing. Then an even smaller boy tried it, and this one landed on the edge of the fire, setting up a shower of sparks. When Lucia Santa saw Gino back off for a second try she said aloud, “Mannaggia Gesù Crist.#8221; She ran down the corridor of rooms to the kitchen, grabbed the black Tackeril and rushed down the stairs. Octavia looked up from the book she was reading.

  As Lucia Santa burst out of the tenement door, Gino was sailing over the bonfire for the third time. In mid-air he saw his mother, then hit the ground, and tried to twist away. The thin black club caught him on the ribs, sharp and stinging. He let out a howl to satisfy his mother and ran up to the house. Then the mother saw Sal sailing over the fire, and when he ran past her, his trousers smelled burnt. She gave him time to duck before she swung the Tackeril but caught him flush just the same. Sal wailed and ran into the house after Gino. By the time Lucia Santa had climbed the stairs they had taken off their jacke
ts and caps and hidden under the beds. They would be quiet, at least for a half hour. A time of day had come to an end, a season, a piece of the fabric of her life.

  “Put your book away,” the mother said. “Help with the children.” Octavia sighed and put away her book. She always helped on Sunday night, in atonement for her Sabbath day of rest. She always felt a special kind of peace on Sunday night.

  Octavia took down the drying clothes over the bathtub, cleaned the tub, and ran hot water into it. Then she went into her room and called under the bed. “Come on out, you two.” Gino and Sal crawled out. Sal said, “Is Mamma still mad?” Octavia said sternly, “No, but if you don’t behave she will be. Now no fighting in the tub, or you’ll both get killed.”

  In the kitchen Lucia Santa prepared supper. Vinnie had come home from the movies and was helping her set the table. He would take his bath later.

  When Gino and Sal came out their winter underwear was waiting for them, with its long legs and arms. From some forgotten hiding place their schoolbags appeared, battered but usable. Also waiting for them were meatball sandwiches and glasses of cream soda, for their mother refused to serve milk with food cooked in tomato sauce.

  After supper Octavia gave them all a lecture—Sal, Gino, and Vinnie. It was familiar. “Now,” she said, “none of you kids are stupid. I want to see good report cards this term, and in conduct, too. Vinnie, you did all right last year, but you have to do better now you’re in second term high. You want to go to C.C.N.Y., don’t you? If your marks are good enough you can go free.” There could never be any question of paying for college. Vinnie would be lucky if he didn’t have to go to work right after high school. But Octavia had her own plans and her own money on this score. Vinnie would go to college, to C.C.N.Y. She would take care of the family. It was this that had made her at last give up any ideas of teaching.

  She went on. “Gino, if you get conduct marks like last term, I’ll put you in the hospital, I’ll beat you black and blue. And your school work could be a lot better. Now behave, or you’ll wind up in reform school and disgrace the whole family.” She was laying it on too thick; Gino had never behaved badly enough to go to reform school, he never failed in conduct, and never got any D’s.

  She had her audience. Even Baby Aileen sat up in her crib and climbed out to sit on a chair by the table. Octavia reached over and put the baby on her lap. “Sal,” she said, “you did all right last term. But now school will get harder for you. I’ll help with your homework, so don’t worry. I’m nearly as good a teacher as the ones in school,” she said with almost a little girl’s bragging pride. “One thing. I want everybody upstairs from the street when I come from work. By that time it will be dark and there’s no reason for you to be out anyway. Anybody not in this house by six o’clock will get the hell knocked out of them. And no card playing or fooling around until the homework is done and I check it. And you, Vinnie, Gino, Sal, take a night each helping your mother with the dishes. Give her a break.”

  She gave one last warning, blood-chilling in its simplicity and sincerity, delivered without any flourish or preamble. “If you don’t get promoted, if you get left back, I’ll kill you.” Aileen moved uneasily in her lap. “Nobody is going to disgrace this family name, and you’re not growing up ignorant guineas to live on Tenth Avenue the rest of your life.”

  Lucia Santa broke in, irritated by her daughter’s phrase. “Bastanza. Enough. They’re not going to a war, after all.” Then, to the kids, “But remember this, mascalzoni that you are. I would give anything to have gone to school, to be able to read and write. Only the sons of the rich went to school in Italy. At your age I was chasing goats and digging vegetables and shoveling manure. I killed chickens and washed dishes and cleaned houses. School to me would have been like movie pictures. If your father could have gone to school he would have had better work, and—who knows—might not have become ill. So: know your good fortune, or you will be taught how lucky you are with the Tackeril.

  Sal was wide-eyed. Gino and Vinnie were composed, though a little impressed. Sal said in a scared voice, “But, Ma, what if I can’t learn, what if I’m not smart enough? That ain’t my fault.” He was so serious that the two women smiled.

  Octavia said gently, “Don’t worry, everybody in this family is smart enough to pass. You just do your best. I’ll help you, and I was the smartest girl in my graduating class from high school.”

  Vinnie and Gino said, “Ha, ha,” together, lured by her gentle, sad tone into teasing her. Octavia’s great dark eyes flashed, but she smiled and said to Lucia Santa, “Well, I was, wasn’t I, Ma?” This wistfulness for some glory unknown to them did more to persuade the children than any of her threats, except the one to kill them if they got left back. That threat they did not doubt for a moment.

  Lucia Santa watched her daughter. She remembered how Octavia had loved to go to school, and it was this that made Lucia Santa tolerate such American airs, making education so important. She distrusted high ambition, high aims. For, the greater the reward, it followed, the greater the risks. You could become helpless in a shattering defeat. Better a modest safety. But Lucia Santa paid this deference to her daughter.

  The mother said gravely to her children, “Yes, your sister could have been a schoolteacher if it had not been for your father.” She saw Gino looking directly into her eyes, intent. “Yes,” she said, speaking to him. “If your father had done his duty, supported his family, Octavia could have stopped work. But he never thought of anyone else, and you, figlio de puttana that you are, take after him. Tonight you jump over the fire. You spoil your good clothes and make your little brother a bad example. Now I have to buy new pants for school. Animale that you are. You never think of anyone. But I warn you—”

  Octavia broke in quickly, “All right, Ma, that’s something else. The big thing is that they know how important school is to their life. If you learn something at school you can be somebody. Otherwise you’ll be just a slob down on the docks or in the railroad like Larry.”

  When the children were in bed the mother became very busy ironing the wash for the next week, sewing up holes in clothing. She had a basket piled so high that she had only to reach out without stooping. Octavia propped her book against the big sugar bowl. There was absolute quiet, except for the creak of bedsprings from the bedroom whenever one of the children turned over restlessly in sleep. The women were in perfect ease and contentment, chiefs of an obedient tribe. Everything was running smoothly; they were both in rapport—the daughter a faithful but powerful underling; the mother undisputed chief, but showing her respect and admiration for a clever and faithful daughter’s help. It was never said, but the father’s banishment had relieved them of a great deal of tension and worry. They were almost happy he was gone, and their rule now absolute.

  The mother rose to put coffee on the fire, for Octavia in her book would forget about everything. The mother wondered, What could be in these books that stunned her daughter into some magic oblivion? It was something she would never know, and if she had been younger she would have felt some envy or regret. But she was a busy woman with important work to be done for many years and could not make herself unhappy over pleasures of which she did not know the taste. She had enough regrets about pleasures whose taste she had known. But there was nothing to be done about that, either. She grimaced from the steam and her thoughts.

  She had to go down to the other end of the hall to get the milk from the icebox again, and some good Italian peppered ham to tempt Octavia, who was getting too thin. Lucia Santa heard someone coming slowly up the steps, but whoever it was could only be on the second floor. She left the door of the apartment open, to get a little air from the ironing. Anyway, no one could go past their door to the icebox and bureau and then up the roof and escape. She sat at the table with her daughter, both of them drinking coffee, eating the prosciutto and coarse bread. They could both hear the steps coming up close, and then the shawled head of Zia Louche rose slowly and cautiously over
the last step of the stairs and the old lady hobbled into the apartment, cursing terribly in Italian.

  They were too intimate with her to give the usual greetings of formal courtesy. Lucia Santa rose to set another cup and slice more bread, though she knew the old dame never ate before other people. Octavia said pleasantly in Italian and with respect, “How are you feeling, Zia Louche?”

  The old woman made a gesture of angry impatience, the gesture of a person who waits for a death that is in the present and therefore finds such a question not polite, in poor taste. They sat in silence.

  “Work, work,” Lucia Santa said. “This school, what miracles they make over it. The children must dress like the President himself, and I must wash and iron like a slave.”

  Zia Louche said, “Eh, eh,” and made another impatient gesture as if to brush away all people who expected life to run smooth. She took off her shabby black coat and then the long knitted sweater with its buttons down to her knees.

  Under those gimlet eyes Octavia felt she could no longer read; it would not be respectful. She rose and began to iron slowly. The mother reached out and closed the book, which was lying open on the table, so the daughter could not look down at it and read while ironing. Then Octavia was aware that she was being accorded the rare honor of a direct address from Zia Louche.

  “Young lady of mine,” Zia Louche said, with the rough familiarity of the old, “your handsome brother, has he appeared at all today?”

  “No, Zia Louche,” Octavia replied demurely. If anyone else had used this tone with her she would have spat in her face, especially the smug fat matrons, those guineas who always spoke to young girls with voices filled with sly pity because they had never tasted the pleasures of a marriage bed.

  “And you, Lucia Santa?” Zia Louche asked. When the mother shook her head the old woman continued sharply, “Then you have no concern for this beautiful son of yours, a boy of seventeen years, in a country like this? You have no fears for him?” Octavia saw her mother’s face contort in a frown of anxiety.