So the neighbors, out of kindness and self-preservation, brought them together, with conscience clear that both would make a good bargain.
The courtship was surprisingly young and innocent. Frank Corbo knew only the quick, cold whore’s flesh; he would come to a marriage bed fresh with love, with a boy’s eagerness. He pursued the mother of the three children as he would a young girl, making himself even more ridiculous in the eyes of the world. In the late afternoons he visited her as she sat before the tenement, guarding her playing and sleeping children. Sometimes he would take supper with them and leave before the children were put to bed. Finally one day he asked Lucia Santa to marry him.
She gave him an arch look, treating him like a young boy. She said, “Aren’t you ashamed to ask me, with a baby still in the carriage from my first husband?” And for the first time she saw that dark look of hate. He stammered out that he loved her children as he loved her. That even if she did not marry him he would give her money for the children. In fact, he made good money on the railroad and always brought the children ices and toys. He had sometimes even given her money to buy the children clothing. At first she had tried to refuse, but he had become angry and said, “What is it, you don’t wish to be friends with me? You think I’m like other men? I don’t care for money—” and started to tear up the dirty green bills. For some reason this had brought tears to her eyes. She had taken the money from him, and he had never presumed on his gifts. It was she who became impatient.
ONE SUNDAY IN spring, invited, Frank Corbo came to the midday meal, the feast of the week for Italian families. He brought with him a gallon of biting homemade Italian wine and a box of cream pastries, gnole and soffiati. He wore a shirt, a tie, a many-buttoned suit. He sat at table with children about him: shy, awkward, more timid than they.
The spaghetti was coated with Lucia Santa’s finest tomato sauce, the meatballs were beautifully round and peppered with garlic and fresh parsley. There was the dark green lettuce with olive oil and red wine vinegar, and then walnuts to eat with the wine. Everything had a bite to it of herbs and garlic and strong black pepper. They all stuffed themselves. Finally the children went down to the street to play. Lucia Santa should have kept them with her in the house to avoid scandal, but she did not.
And so in the golden afternoon with sunlight streaming through the long railroad flat, with the poor infant Vincenzo’s eyes shielded from sin by a conveniently placed pillow, they sealed their fate on the living room couch, the mother only slightly distracted by her children’s voices rising sweetly from the street below.
Ah, delight, delight, the taste of love. After so long an abstinence the animal odor was an aphrodisiac, a bell to ring in the coming joy; even now, so many years later, the memory was fresh. And in that act of love she had been the master.
The man so harsh, so strong against the world, had wept on her breast, and in the fast-fading sunlight she understood that in all his thirty-five years of life he had never received a caress with real tenderness. It was too much for him. He had changed afterwards. He had come too late to love, and he despised his weakness. But for that one afternoon she forgave him many things, not everything; and cared for him as she had never cared for her first husband.
There was very little trouble until his first child was born. His natural love for Gino became cancerous, murdering his love for wife and stepchildren, and he became evil.
But in the first year of marriage, in the trust of love, he told her of his childhood in Italy as the son of a poor tenant farmer. He had often been hungry, often cold, but what he could never forget was that his parents made him wear cast-off shoes which were too small. His feet became horribly deformed, as if every bone had been broken and then bound together in one grotesque lump. He showed her his feet as if to say, “I keep nothing from you; you needn’t marry a man with such feet.” She had laughed. But she did not laugh when she learned that he always bought twenty-dollar shoes, beautiful brown-grained leather. The act of a true madman.
His parents were a rarity in Italy, drunken peasants. They relied on him to work the farm and give them their bread. When he fell in love with a young girl of the village, the marriage was forbidden. He ran away and lived in the woods for a week. When they found him, he was little more than an animal. He was in shock and was committed to a mental institution. After a few months he was released, but he refused to return to his home. He emigrated to America, where in the densest city in the world he lived a life of the most extreme loneliness.
He took care of himself; he never became ill again. In his life of solitude and hard work he found safety. As long as he did not become emotionally entangled with other human beings, he was safe, as something immobile is to some degree safe from the dangers of motion. But this love which brought him back to life brought him back to danger, and perhaps it was this knowledge, animal-like, felt rather than known, that had made him so weak that Sunday afternoon.
Now, after twelve years of life together, the husband was as secretive with her as he had always been with other people.
SOMEONE HAD COME in the door. Someone was moving in the kitchen. But the footsteps went out again and down the stairs. For his own mysterious reasons, her husband had gone back into the street.
Night. Night. She wanted her husband in her bed. She wanted her older son in the house. She wanted everyone asleep in this safe tenement castle four stories above the ground, sealed against the world by brick and concrete and iron. She wanted everyone asleep, asleep in darkness, safe from life, so that she need no longer stand guard, could deliver herself up to oblivion.
She sighed. There was no recourse. Tomorrow she must quarrel with Frank to keep the janitor’s job. She must settle the Le Cinglata hash, the children’s clothes, the stove to boil the laundry soap. She listened to the breath of the sleeping children all around her—Lena in her bed, the three boys in the room separated from hers only by an archway, Octavia in the bedroom with its door open for air. She made her breath fall into their great rising and falling sighs, and then she was asleep.
OCTAVIA STRETCHED OUT on her narrow bed. She wore her rayon slip as a nightdress. The room was too small for any additional furniture except a tiny table and a chair, but it had a door she could close.
She was too hot and too young to sleep. She dreamed. She dreamed of her real father.
Oh, how she had loved him, and how angry she had been that he let himself be killed, left her alone with no one to love. At the end of each day she had met him in front of the tenement and kissed his dirty bearded face, its black stubble so hard it bruised her lips. She carried his empty lunch pail up the stairs and sometimes cajoled from him the wicked steel clawed baling hook of the longshoreman.
And then in the house she set his plate for dinner, jealously placing the fork with the straight tines, the sharpest knife, his small wineglass polished and flashing like a diamond. Fussing until the exasperated Lucia Santa smacked her away from the table so that food could be served. And Larry, sitting in his high chair, could never interfere.
Even now, so many years later, waiting for sleep, the thought like a cry, “Why weren’t you more careful?” Reproaching him for his sinful death, echoing her mother, who sometimes said, “He didn’t take care of his family. He didn’t take care of his money. He didn’t take care of his life. He was careless in everything.”
Her father’s death had brought the thin blue-eyed stranger with his slanting, uneven face. The second husband, the stepfather. Even as a child she had never liked him, accepted his gifts distrustfully, stood with Larry in hand, holding him, hiding behind the mother’s back, until he patiently found her. Once he had made a gesture of affection and she shrank away from his hand like an animal. Larry was the favorite until his own children came. He never liked Vincent for some reason, the lousy bastard—hateful, hateful.
But even now she could not blame her mother for marrying, could not hate her mother for bringing so much sorrow. She knew why her mother married this
evil man. She knew.
IT WAS ONE of the most terrible times of Lucia Santa’s life, and much of the distress that followed her husband’s death was the fault of friends, relatives, and neighbors.
They had, every one, kept after Lucia Santa to let the newborn infant, Vincent, be taken care of by a rich cousin, Filomena, in New Jersey. Just for a little while, until the mother regained her strength. “What a boon to that childless couple. And she can be trusted, Filomena, your own first cousin from Italy. The child would be safe. And the rich Filomena’s husband would then certainly consent to be godfather and assure the child’s future.” And how they had spoken in tones of most sorrowful pity, so tenderly, “And you, Lucia Santa, everyone worries about you. How meager you are. Not yet recovered from the birth. Still grieving over your beloved husband and torn to rags by lawyers over the settlement. You need a rest from care. Treat yourself well for your children’s sake. What if you should die?” Oh, no threat was too much for them. “Your children would perish or go into a home. They could not be sent to the grandparents in Italy. Guard your life, your children’s only shield.” And they went on and on. And the child would be back in a few months, no, a month, perhaps a few weeks. Who could tell? And Filomena would come Sundays, her husband drove a Forda. They would bring her to their beautiful home in Jersey to visit the baby Vincenzo. She would be an honored guest. Her other children would have a day in the country, in the fresh air. La la la la.
Now. How could she deny them or herself or her children? Even Zia Louche nodded her warty head in agreement.
Only little Octavia began to weep, saying over and over again with childish despair, “They won’t give him back.” Everyone laughed at her fear. Her mother smiled and patted Octavia’s short black curls, ashamed now of her own reluctance.
“Only until I am well,” she told the little girl. “Then Vincenzo will come home.”
Later the mother was not able to understand how she had come to let the child go. True, the shock of her husband’s death and a midwife’s harshness at Vincenzo’s birth had left her weak. But this never excused her in her own mind. It was an act that gave her so much shame, made her despise herself so much that whenever she had a difficult decision to make, she recalled that one act, to make sure she would not be cowardly again.
And so little Vincent had gone away. The strange Aunt Filomena had come one noon when Octavia was in school, and when Octavia came home the crib was empty.
She had wept and screamed, and Lucia Santa had given one the left hand, two the right hand, fine, heavy slaps across the face, making her little daughter’s ears ring, saying, “Now, there is something to make you cry.” Her mother was glad to get rid of the baby. Octavia hated her. She was evil, like a stepmother.
But then came that terrible beautiful day that had made her love and trust her mother. Part of it she saw herself as a little girl, but the story had been told innumerable times, so that now it seemed to Octavia as if she had seen everything. For naturally it was told; it became a legend of the family, mentioned in an evening of gossip, spread out at the Christmas table over walnuts and wine.
The trouble started after only a week. Filomena did not come that first Sunday, there was no automobile to take Lucia Santa to visit her infant son. Only a telephone message to the candy store. Filomena would come the following week, and to show her good heart and regret there would be a money order for five dollars in the mail, a small peace offering.
Lucia Santa brooded that dark Sunday. She went to take counsel with her neighbors on the floors below. They reassured her, urged her not to think foolish things. But as the day wore on she became more and more somber.
Early Monday morning she said to Octavia, “Run. Go to 31st Street and get Zia Louche.” Octavia wailed, “I’ll be late for school.” Her mother replied, “Today you are not going to your beautiful school”—saying it with such menace that the girl flew from the house.
Zia Louche came, a shawl around her head, a blue wool-knitted jacket reaching to her knees. Lucia Santa served the ceremonial coffee, then said, “Zia Louche, I am going to see the little one. Care for the girl and Lorenzo. Do me this favor.” She paused. “Filomena did not come yesterday. Do you think I should go?”
In later years Lucia Santa always insisted that if Zia Louche had reassured her she would not have gone that day, and that for the honest answer she would always remain in the old woman’s debt. For Zia Louche, nodding her old crone’s head like a repentant witch, said, “I gave you bad advice, Signora. People are saying things I don’t like.” Lucia Santa begged her to speak out, but Zia Louche would not, because it was all gossip, nothing to be repeated to an anxious mother. One thing could be noted, though: the promise to send five dollars. The poor did well not to trust such charity. Best to go, set everyone’s mind at rest.
In the gay light of winter, the mother walked to the Weehawken Ferry at 42nd Street, and for the first time since coming from Italy, she rode water again. In Jersey, finding a streetcar, she showed a slip of paper with the address on it, and then walked many blocks until a friendly woman took her by the hand and guided her to the dwelling of Filomena.
Ah, what a pretty house it was for the devil to live in. It had a pointed roof, like nothing she had ever seen in Italy, as if it were a plaything, not to be used for people full grown. It was white and clean, with blue shutters and a closed-in porch. Lucia Santa was suddenly timid. People so well off would never practice treachery on a poor woman like herself. The breaking of the Sunday promise could be explained in many ways. Still, she knocked on the side of the porch. She went through the screen door and knocked on the door of the house. She knocked again and again.
The stillness was frightening; as if the house were deserted. Lucia Santa went weak with fear. Then, inside the house, her baby began to wail, and she was ashamed of her terrible, ridiculous suspicion. Patience. The baby’s wailing turned to shrieks of terror. Her mind went blank. She pushed against the door and went into the hallway and up the stairs, tracing those shrieks to a bedroom.
How pretty the room was; the prettiest room Vincenzo would ever have. It was all in blue, with blue curtains, a blue crib, a white stuffed toy horse standing on a little blue bureau. And in that beautiful room her son lay in his own piss. No one to change him, no one to quiet his shrieks of terror.
Lucia Santa took him in her arms. When she felt the lump of flesh warm and soaked in its own urine, when she saw the wrinkled rose face and the jet-black infant hair, she was filled with a savage, exultant joy, a knowledge that only her death could loosen this child from her. She stared around the pretty room with the dumb anger of an animal, noting all its assurances of permanency. Then she opened a bureau drawer and found some clothing to dress the baby. As she did so, Filomena came bursting into the room.
Then, then what a drama was played. Lucia Santa accused the other of heartlessness. To leave an infant alone! Filomena protested. She had only gone to help her husband open the grocery store. She had been gone fifteen minutes—no, ten. What a terrible, unlucky chance. But had not Lucia Santa herself sometimes left her infant alone? Poor people could not be as careful as they wished (how Lucia Santa sneered when Filomena included herself among the poor); their babies must be left to cry.
The mother was blind to reason, blind with an agonizing, hopeless rage, and could not say what she felt. When her child was left crying at home, it was flesh and blood of its own that came to the rescue. But what could a baby think if left alone and only a strange face appeared? But Lucia Santa said simply, “No, it’s easy to see that since this is not your own blood you don’t care to put yourself out. Go help in the store. I will bring my baby home.”
Filomena lost her temper. Shrew that she was, she shouted, “What of our bargain, then? How would I appear to my friends, that I can’t be trusted with your child? And what of all this I have bought, money thrown into air?” Then, slyly, “And we both know, more was meant than said.”
“What? What?” Luci
a Santa demanded. Then it all came out.
There had been a cruel plot to do a kindness. The neighbors had all assured Filomena that, given time, the helpless widow, forced to work for her children’s bread, would gradually relinquish all claims to her infant son and let Filomena adopt the baby. They were deviously cautious, but made it understood that Lucia Santa even hoped for such good fortune. Nothing could be said outright, of course. There were delicate feelings to consider. Lucia Santa cut all this short with wild laughter.
Filomena played another tune. Look at the new clothes, this pretty room. He would be the only child. He would have everything, a happy childhood, the university, become a lawyer, a doctor, even a professor. Things that Lucia Santa could never hope to give. What was she? She had no money. She would eat dirt with her bread her whole life long.
Lucia Santa listened, stunned, horrified. When Filomena said, “Come, you understood why I would send you money every week,” the mother drew back her head like a snake and spat with full force into the older woman’s face. Then, child in her arms, she fled from the house. Filomena ran after her, screaming curses.
That was the end of the story as it was told—with laughter, now. But Octavia always remembered more clearly the part never told: her mother’s arriving home with the baby Vincent in her arms.
She entered the house feverish with cold, her coat wrapped around the sleeping infant, her sallow skin black with the blood of anger, rage, despair. She was trembling. Zia Louche said, “Come. Coffee waits. Sit down. Octavia, the cups.”
Baby Vincent began to cry. Lucia Santa tried to soothe him, but his shrieks grew greater and greater. The mother, furious with guilt, made a dramatic gesture, as if to hurl the infant away; then she said to Zia Louche, “Here, take him.” The old crone began to coo to the baby in a cracked voice.