Gino bowed his head and Lucia Santa said, “Did you eat anything?” Gino nodded. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t look at her. He felt a physical fear that she would strike out at him in front of everyone. But her voice was completely normal. His mother dismissed him. “Go help Lorenzo talk to people, do what he tells you.” And then Gino was amazed to hear her saying to the women around her, in a voice heavy with satisfaction, “There are so many people, Vincenzo had so many friends.” It sickened him. None of these people knew Vinnie or cared about him.
His mother saw that look and understood it. The callow, arrogant contempt the young have for sham because they are ignorant of the terrible need for shields against the blows of fate. She let him go. He would learn.
Time became a shadow in that dark hall. Gino greeted newcomers and led them across the mirror-black floor to where his mother sat and Vinnie waited in his coffin. He saw Lucia Santa draw solace from the people who meant nothing to her or his dead brother. Zia Louche would have truly mourned her godson, but Zia Louche was dead. Even Octavia didn’t seem to care as much as he thought she would.
As if in a dream, Gino showed all these strangers where to sign the registry, where to put their contributions in the box on the wall. Then he turned them loose like pigeons to home their way across the black polished floor to relatives they had not seen since the last funeral.
For the first time in his life he played the role of a member of the family. He ushered people in and then ushered them out. He chatted, inquired after families, shook his head politely at their horror over the accident that had brought this tragedy, identifying himself, yes, he was the oldest son of the second husband, watching them classify him as the disgrazia. The Santinis could not hide their relief that they had not become allied to this family and this tragedy. Dr. Barbato came only for a few minutes, patted Gino on the shoulder with unexpected kindness, and for once did not look guilty or aloof. The Panettiere, more intimate than the others, almost one of the family (after all, he had been for a time the employer of the deceased), said to Gino, “Eh, was it an accident then? The poor boy, he was always so sad.” Gino didn’t answer.
Zia Teresina Coccalitti, that shark in human form, never said a word to anyone. She sat by Lucia Santa paralyzed with fright—as if death, being so close, must jealously discover the existence of her and her four sons, their cheating the home relief, their house packed with the sugar and flour and fats she was so sure would make her fortune some day.
Guido, the Panettiere’s son, was there in his Army uniform. He was one of the first soldiers picked in the peacetime draft, and home on his first leave. He seemed a true mourner. There were tears in his eyes when he bowed his head to kiss Lucia Santa’s cheek. Don Pasquale di Lucca came, out of consideration for Larry, to pay his respects, and no doubt the hundred-dollar bill in the contribution box was his, though like a true gentleman he put it in an envelope without a note. The enormous hall was now filled with people, the little children had fallen asleep in their chairs along the wall.
Near eleven o’clock, when people had stopped coming in, Larry took Gino by the arm and said, “Let’s go out for Coffee An. I told Guido to take over.”
They went out in just their jackets, down the street to a small luncheonette. Over the coffee, Larry said to Gino kindly, “Don’t worry about the old lady screamin’. She’ll forget it tomorrow. And listen, kid, me and Octavia are gonna help you carry the load. I’m givin’ fifty a month and she’s gonna give fifty.”
For a moment Gino didn’t know what in hell Larry was talking about. Then he saw that his world had turned around. His mother and sister and brother depended on him now. All the years had been spun away to bring him finally to what had always been waiting for him. He would go to work, sleep, there would be no shield between himself and his mother. He would be drawn into the family and its destiny. He could never run away again. And he was surprised by the acceptance, near relief, he felt, now that he understood. It was almost good news.
“I gotta get a job,” he said to Larry.
Larry nodded. “I set it up. You take Vinnie’s place in the railroad. You gonna keep going to school?”
Gino grinned. “Sure.”
Larry reached over and touched his arm. “You were always a good kid, Gino. But now you gotta straighten out a little, you know what I mean?”
Gino knew what he meant. That he had to think of the family. That he had to stop doing whatever he felt like doing. That he must please his mother more. That he must stop being a kid. He nodded. In a low voice he asked, “You think Vinnie really walked into that engine?”
The change in Larry’s face was frightening. Still heavily handsome, the flesh in his face had become the color and weight of bronze, and now that bronze seemed to smoke over with some poisonous rage.
“That’s a lot of shit. Now I straightened that engineer and fireman out. If you hear anybody, anybody, being smart, just let me know and I’ll straighten them out.” He waited a moment. “And don’t you tell anybody what happened when I talked to Lefty Fay.” The rage faded from his face; his skin became lighter. “If the old lady ever asks anything, swear on the cross it was an accident.”
Gino nodded.
They started walking back to the funeral parlor. Larry held Gino’s arm and said, “Don’t worry too much, kid. In a couple of years I’ll be in the big money, what with the war and all, and then I’ll bail the family out and you can do what you want.” He smiled. “I was like you once.”
Under the black awning they found Octavia waiting for them, shivering with cold. She asked shrilly, “Where did you two go? Mom is terribly nervous—she thinks Gino left.”
“Oh, Christ,” Larry said. “I’ll talk to Ma. You stay in the parlor, Gino.”
Gino felt the now-familiar physical fear and realized he must have looked frightened. Larry was protecting him. He was bewildered by the terror that swept over him.
In a few minutes Larry came back smiling and said, “Octavia just making a big deal out of nothing, like she always does. The old lady wants to make sure we’re here when they close up.”
People were filtering out. The undertaker appeared and, as a blood relative of death, he helped Larry and Gino speed the mourners on their way, until finally only those closest to the family remained. The huge funeral parlor empty, Gino could hear the chairs behind the small archway being scraped back as his mother and her friends prepared to leave the coffin. The long night was over. There was a strange silence in the other room, and Gino thought about walking home ahead of the others to avoid his mother. This one day he feared her as he had never feared anything in his life.
THE TERRIFYING SHRIEK caught Gino completely by surprise, freezing him with horror. It was followed by another scream that broke into a wail of anguish and his mother’s voice crying out, “Vincenzo, Vincenzo,” with such pitiful grief that Gino wanted to fly out the door and away where he could never hear her. The undertaker, perfectly calm, as if he had been waiting for just this, and as if he understood Gino’s thoughts, put a restraining hand on his shoulder.
Suddenly the archway was filled with black—four women coiling and twining around each other like snakes. Octavia, Louisa and Zia Teresina were trying to drag Lucia Santa through the archway, the struggle in terrible earnest.
They had tried words and caresses beside the coffin, but to no avail. They had tried to recall Lucia Santa to her duties as the mother of five other children, and she had dug her nails into her dead son’s coffin. Now the three women had no pity on her. They would not let her stay. They would not let her drive herself mad with grief. They were merciless. Octavia had one arm and shoulder. Louisa dragged on the other arm but with less force, so that Lucia Santa’s heavy body slewed around to one side. Zia Teresina clutched Lucia Santa cruelly by the neck and breasts and was dragging her forward along the mirror-black floor.
But the mother, like some stubborn animal, huddled up her heavy body in one resistant heap and could not be budged furt
her. She did not protest. She did not wail again. Her black hat and veil fell sideways, raffishly, on her head. Her face was swollen, obstinate, and inhuman with almost bestial anguish. And yet she had never been more terrible, unconquerable, as if this world of death must smash into bits and vanish before her imperious grief.
The three women stood away from her. Louisa burst into tears. Octavia covered her face with her hands, then called out in a muted voice, “Larry, Gino, help us.”
They crossed the floor and stood with the women around the mother. Gino did not dare touch her. Lucia Santa raised her head. She spoke to Gino: “Don’t leave your brother alone,” she said. “Don’t let him stay by himself tonight. He was never brave. He was too good to be brave.”
Gino bowed his head in assent.
“You never obey me,” she said.
Gino said very low, “I’ll stay all night. I promise.” He forced himself to reach out and straighten her hat, very quickly, the first time in his life he had done such a thing for her. His mother reached up slowly to touch her veiled hat and took it off. She carried it in her hand as she walked to the door, as if she could not bear to shield her face, as if now, her head uncovered, she could face life again, its unreversible injustice, its inevitable defeat.
The undertaker offered to bring Gino a cot and apologized for having to lock the street door, showing Gino a bell he could ring in the registry if he wanted to get out. He himself slept in a room directly above. Gino kept nodding his head to show he understood until the man disappeared through an interior doorway.
Alone in the dark funeral parlor, knowing his dead brother’s coffined body hid just behind the small archway, Gino felt safe as he had not felt since before his brother died. He arranged wooden folding chairs in a row to serve as a couch and rolled up his coat for a pillow. Lying so, smoking, one arm against the cool wall, he tried to think of how his world had changed.
He thought of the things he had learned. Larry was really a gangster and people were afraid he would kill them. How dopey that was. Larry had never even punched his kid brothers. And Lefty Fay was a jerk saying Vinnie had walked into the engine—Vinnie was so timid he had stopped sitting on the window sill. And his mother crying and hollering and making all that trouble. Drowsily he let his mind tell what he truly felt, that her grief was excessive, that she made a ceremony of death. And then he remembered his own tears on the stoop. But he had been weeping for Vinnie as a small boy, when they had played together and sat on the star-bright window sill at night. Gradually it came to him that there was so little pity for the dead in grief. That it was a wailing for something lost, by only a very few, and so ceremony must be made of death, to hide what all must know to be true: that the death of a human being means so very little.
Poor Vinnie? Who grieved for him? He had become a whining, unhappy young man whom no one wanted to be with. Even his mother was sometimes impatient with him. She had wept for the many different little Vincents that had come before. As I did, Gino thought. I never cared for him after. Larry didn’t. Even Octavia didn’t really care. But Larry’s wife had cared, for some reason Louisa had cared. And old Zia Louche would have wept. Just before he fell asleep, Gino wanted to go through the archway and look at his brother’s dead face, to force himself to feel more pain, but he was too tired. His cigarette dropped to the glittering black floor, its tiny red ember like a coal in hell. Sleeping, he huddled on his row of chairs, cold against the paneled wall. He tried to struggle away from sleep, not knowing he had let out a cry that woke the undertaker in the room above.
It was not true. He had never killed his brother. He held his mother’s coat before her face, but his arms were so terribly tired. Her accusing eyes bore him back, and seeking some sort of mercy, he whispered, “I cried on the stoop down the street, see my face is still wet.” But his mother only sneered and said, “It’s just another one of your tricks. Animale—animale—animale—”
And she was smiling at him. The dazzling smile of a young woman. Gino almost fell into the trap that would have destroyed them both. He almost spoke about the day he had stood in front of the tenement, waiting for her to bring his father home. But slyly, cunningly, he bowed his head. As she had not accused him in life, he would not accuse her in his dreams. Trembling, he promised to become another Vinnie, work in the railroad, marry, live in the tenements along the Avenue, wait at trolley stops with a child in his arms, chain himself in the known, lightless world he had been born in.
CHAPTER 23
THE OLD WOMEN of Tenth Avenue circled in the summer night and incanted the woes of the family Angeluzzi-Corbo.
At first they all cried out in sympathy, “Ah, what a terrible life! Poor Lucia Santa—her first husband dead, the second destroyed for life, and now a grown son, already a breadwinner, struck down. What tragedy, what misfortunes. Maledictions on God, His world, and all His mysterious saints and fates.”
Their heads wagged in agreement. But another woman—no stranger to misfortune, respected for her hard life—nodded a gray head and then said, True, true, and yet she has a grown daughter, a forelady—intelligent, married to a sober man. She has masculine children who would do credit to any mother. Lorenzo, married, giver of grandchildren, making his fortune in the bakery union; Gino, now a good dutiful boy, a head of the family that made you think of Italy with his hard work on the railroad and never in trouble with the police. Salvatore, who won medals in school and would surely be a professor. Lena, an Italian daughter of the old school, a worker in the home, ever obedient, ever dutiful. Look how they all respected Lucia Santa. The two married ones still gave money; Gino brought his pay envelope home unopened.
Five good children. True, no husband, but considering some husbands on Tenth Avenue, this might not be a real misfortune. At least Lucia Santa had now only a small family. Even poor Vincenzo, dead, had never brought disgrazia to his family. He had been ill and fallen beneath a railroad engine. It was an accident. And he had been buried in holy ground. Poor Vincenzo, born under an unlucky star, had met a destiny prepared for him at the beginning of time.
So the balance was struck. Many women had suffered as much or more. Husbands had been killed on the job, infants born misshapen, children had died from harmless colds, small injuries. There was not a woman in the circle who had not buried at least one child.
And look at those misfortunes Lucia Santa had escaped. Daughters pregnant without a husband in sight for miles around; sons who became jailbirds of the finest feather or found a way to rest their disobedient legs in the electric chair. Drunken, gambling, whoremastering husbands.
No, no. Lucia Santa had been fortunate to escape for so long a period of time that measure of sorrow due her station in life. All her children were strong, healthy, handsome, the world was before them. Soon she would reap the rewards of all her travail. So, courage. America was not Italy. In America you could escape your destiny. Sons grew tall and worked in an office with collars and ties, away from the wind and earth. Daughters learned to read and write, and wore shoes and silk stockings, instead of slaughtering the bloody pig and carrying wood on their backs to save the strength of valuable donkeys.
Had not misfortune entered once even into heaven? Who could escape sorrow? Who could pass through life without weeping? Only the dead do not suffer. Ah, the happy, happy dead. The old women clasped their hands to give thanksgiving for the day they would leave this earth, this unhappy vale of tears. Yes, yes, the happy dead who suffered no more.
Their eyes flashed fire; energy and power radiated from their black-clad, lumpy bodies. They devoured everything that happened on the Avenue as they spoke. They hurled curses like thunderbolts at children headed for mischief. They sucked greedily on ridged paper cups of chilling lemon ice and took great bites of smoking hot pizzas, dipping brown invincible teeth deep into the lava of hot tomato sauce and running rivers of cheese to the hidden yeasty dough. Ready to murder anyone who stood in the way of so much as a crust of bread for themselves or their children,
implacable enemies of death. They were alive. The stones of the city, steel and glass, the blue-slate sidewalks, the cobblestoned streets, would all turn to dust and they would be alive.
CHAPTER 24
CAN A DEVIL turn into an angel? The Panettiere, the mad barber, Dr. Barbato, and even the cunning Zia Teresina Coccalitti marveled at the change in Gino Corbo. It was true: disaster made a boy into a man, for now Gino slaved like a peasant in the railroad, gobbling up overtime and bringing his envelope home unopened to his mother.
Lucia Santa was so pleased that she gave Gino twice the spending money she had given Vinnie, swearing to Octavia that it was only just because Vinnie had always stolen his overtime. “See,” the mother said to Octavia on her Friday night visits, “Gino was always a good boy.” And Octavia had to agree, because despite his working at night and even overtime on Sunday, Gino was finishing his last term of high school and would graduate in January. He was even making the honor roll for the first time. This especially delighted Lucia Santa. “Wasn’t I right?” she asked Octavia. “It is the playing in the street that tires a child’s brain, not honest work.”
Octavia, still shaken by Vinnie’s death, was amazed and puzzled at how quickly her mother seemed to recover. She was quieter, more permissive with Sal and Lena but otherwise the same. Only once did she betray emotion. One night, when they were talking of Vinnie as a little boy, Lucia Santa said with bitter self-reproach, “If I had left him with Filomena in Jersey, he would be alive.” Relinquishing one of her proudest memories, and yet she still lived each day with the eager trust of a believer in good fortune.
And why not? Never had the world treated the family of Angeluzzi-Corbo so well. Gino made a fortune in the railroad. Sal was brilliant in high school and would surely go to college. Lena was equally brilliant and would be a schoolteacher. Both worked now in the panetteria selling bread after school, earning good wages, which made Lucia Santa gloat with Octavia over the bank books on Friday nights. Lucia Santa could only control her dangerous optimism by reminding herself that in a few short months, right before Christmas, the Panettiere’s son, Guido, would finish his year of Army service and take Sal and Lena’s place in the bakery. She could not count on this flood forever.