The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (96 page)

When Aldo was about to open that book again, Gabriella rose from Mama's bench, took a hop, skip and jump to the chair, and pulled Aldo out of it. He came down to the deck floor on hands and knees, with a laughable crash.

She dropped beside him to make a violent face into his. Aldo, as though he drew a gun from a holster, put up a toothpick between his lips. On the softly vibrating floor, ringed around with the well-filled benches, they knelt confronting each other, eyes open wide. Just out of range, the ship's cat picked his way in and out the circle of feet, then, cradled in a pair of horny hands, disappeared upward.

It did not matter that the passengers on the warm
Pomona
deck had heads that were nodding or dreaming of home. It took only their legs from the knees down to listen like ears and watch like eyes—to wait dense and still as a ring of trees come near. The sailors softly beating the air with their paintbrushes, up in Second Class, could look down and see them too, over the signs "
Pittura Fresca
" hung on ropes festooning the stairs.

Aldo's and Gabriella's hands suddenly interlocked, and their arms were as immobilized as wings that failed. Gabriella drove her face into Aldo's warm shirt. She set her teeth into his sleeve. But when she pierced that sleeve she found his arm—rigid and wary, with a muscle that throbbed like a heart. She would have bitten a piece out of him then and there for the scare his arm gave her, but he moved like a spring and struck at her with his playful weapon, the toothpick between his teeth. In return she butted his chest, driving her head against the hard, hot rayon, while, still in the character of an airy bird, he pecked with his little beak that place on the back of the neck where women no longer feel. (Weren't all women made alike? she wondered:
she
could no longer feel there.) She screamed as if she could feel everything. But if she hadn't screamed so hard at Aldo yesterday, she wouldn't have had to bite him today. Now she knew
that
about Aldo.

The circle was still. Mama's own little feet might speak to them—there they rested, so well known. For a space Mama opened her eyes and contemplated her screaming daughter as she would the sunset behind her.

"Help! He's killing me!" howled Gabriella, but Mama dropped her eyes and was nodding Mrs. Arpista's way again.

Aldo buried his face in Gabriella's blouse, and she looked out over his head and presently smiled—not into any face in particular. Her smile was as rare as her silence, and as vulnerable—it was meant for everybody. A gap where a tooth was gone showed childishly.

And it lifted the soul—for a thing like crossing the ocean could depress it—to sit in the sun and contemplate among companions the weakness and the mystery of the flesh. Looking, dreaming, down at Gabriella, they felt something of an old, pure loneliness come back to them—like a bird sent out over the waters long ago, when they were young, perhaps from their same company. Only the long of memory, the brave and experienced of heart, could bear such a stirring, an awakening—first to have listened to that screaming, and in a flash to remember what it was.

Aldo climbed to his feet and set himself back in his chair, and Gabriella went back to her mother, but the
Pomona
, turning, sailed on to the south, down the coast of Europe—so near now that Father's vesper bell might almost be taken for a little goat bell on shore. The air colored, and a lighthouse put up its arm.

Even the morning sky told them they were in the Mediterranean now. They could see it glowing through the windows of church, while waiting for Father to come and start Mass. In the middle of the night before, they had slipped through the Gates of Gibraltar—even touched there, so it was said. While everybody was asleep, the two black passengers had been put off the boat.

"They're going to the Cape Verde Islands," Mrs. Arpista cried to Mrs. Serto two rows ahead. "They don't know nothing but French."

"
Poveretti!
" Mrs. Serto cried back, with the sympathy that comes too late. "And where were their wives,
i mori?
"

"My sweetheart and I are going to have a happy, happy Christmas," Poldy announced, rubbing his hands together. His straw-blond hair was thin enough to show a babylike scalp beneath.

"So you never seen your girl, eh?" remarked Mr. Fossetta, a small dark father of five, who sat just in front of him. AH the Serto table sat together in church—Mama thought it was nice. Today they made a little square around her. At her right, Poldy locked his teeth and gave a dazzling grin.

"We've never seen each other. But do we love each other? Oh boy!"

Mr. Fossetta made the abrupt gesture with which he turned away the fresh sardines at the table, and faced front again.

Poldy reached in his breast pocket and produced his papers. He prodded under the elastic band that held them all together to take out a snapshot, and passed this up to Mr. Fossetta. The first time he'd tried to pass that was in the middle of the movie while the lights blinked on for them to change the reel.

"Yes, a happy, happy Christmas," said Poldy. "Pass that. Why
wouldn't
we be happy, we'll be married then. I'm taking the brides-maids' dresses, besides the bride's I told you about, and her mother's dress too, in store boxes. Her aunt in Chicago, that's who gave me the address in the first place—she knows everything! The names and the sizes. Everything is going to fit. Wait! I'll show you something else—the ticket I bought for my wife to come back to the U.S.A. on. Guess who we're going to live with? Her aunt."

Everybody took a chance to yawn or look out the window, but Mama inclined her head at Poldy going through his papers and said, "Sweetest thing in the world, Christmas, second to love." She suddenly looked to the other side of her. "You paying attention, Gabriella?"

Gabriella had been examining her bruises, old and new. She shook her head; under the kerchief it was burgeoning with curlers. Here came the snapshot on its way from the row ahead.

"Take that bride," said Mama.

"Hey, she's little!" said Gabriella. "You can't hardly see her."

Old Papa put his head in the door, gave Gabriella his red eye, and vanished. He was only passing by, the ship's cat in his arms, with no intention in the world of coming in, but he looked in.

Poldy reached across Mama as though she were nothing but a man. That golden-haired wrist with its yellow-gold watch was under Gabriella's nose, and those golden-haired fingers snatched the picture from her and Mama's hands and stuck it at Mr. Ambrogio, behind.

"Wait, wait! There went who I love best in world," said Mama. "Little bride. Was that nice?"

"We haven't got all day," said Poldy. "Gee, I can't find her ticket anywhere. Don't worry, folks, I'll show it to you at breakfast."

"She knows how to pose," said Mr. Ambrogio politely. He was a widower of long standing.

"All right, pass it."

At that moment, who but Aldo Scampo elected to come to church! Just in time, as he dropped to his knee by the last chair in the row, to be greeted with Poldy's bride stuck under his nose.

"Curlers!" hissed Mama in Gabriella's ear. She gave Gabriella's cheek one of her incredibly quick little slaps—it looked for all the world like only a pat, belonging to no time and place but pure motherhood.

There Aldo studied the bride from his knees, sighting down his blue chin before breakfast.

"O.K., O.K., partner!" said Poldy, his hand on the reach again, as Father came bustling in with fresh paint on his skirts, and there was quiet except for two noisy, almost simultaneous smacks: Poldy kissing his bride and snapping her back under the elastic band.

"You stay after Mass and confess sloth, you hear?" whispered Mama.

Gabriella and Aldo were looking along the rows of rolled-down eyelids at each other. They put out exactly simultaneous tongues.

By nine o'clock, Gabriella and Aldo were strolling up on deck; so was everybody. Aldo pushed out his lips and offered Gabriella a kiss.

"Oh, look what I found," said Mrs. Serto from behind them, causing them to jump apart as if she'd exploded something. She had opened a little gold locket. Now she held out, cupped in her pink palm, a ragged little photograph, oval and pearl-colored, snatched from its frame. "Who but my Gabriella as a baby?"

Gabriella seized it, where Mama bent over it smiling as at a little foundling, and tucked it inside her blouse.

"No longer a child now, Gabriella," announced Mama to the sky.

"Somebody told me," Aldo said, "it's nifty up front."

"
Cielo azzurro!
" said Mama. "Go 'head.
Pellegrini, pellegrini
everywhere, beautiful day like this!"

Three priests strolled by, their skirts gaily blowing, and as Joe Monteoliveto ran their gamut, juggling ping-pong balls, Mama held Gabriella fast for a moment and whispered, "Not the prize Arpistas may think—he leaves the boat at Palermo."

"Keep my purse," was all Gabriella said.

The long passage through the depths of the ship, that was too narrow for Mrs. Serto and Gabriella to walk without colliding, seemed made for Gabriella and Aldo. True, it was close with the smell of the sour wine the crew drank. In the deepest part, the engines pounding just within that open door made a human being seem to go in momentary danger of being shaken asunder. It sounded here a little like the Niagara Falls at home, but she had never paid much attention to
them.
Yet with all the deafening, Gabriella felt as if she and Aldo were walking side by side in some still, lonely, even high place never seen before now, with mountains above, valleys below, and sky. The old man in the red knit cap who slept all day on top of that box was asleep where he always was, but now as if he floated, with no box underneath him at all, in some spell. Even the grandfather clock, even the map, when these came into sight, looked faceless, part of a landscape. And the remembered sign, so beautifully penned, on the bulletin board—"Lost, a golden brooch for the tie, with initials F. A."—it shone at them like a star.

By steep stairs at the end, they came out on an altogether new deck, where the air was bright and stiff as an open eye. It was white and narrowing, set about with mysterious shapes of iron wound with chains. No passenger was in sight. Leaning into the very beak ahead, with her back to them, a
cameriera
was drying her hair; when she let it loose from the towel it blew behind her straight as an arm. A sailor, seated cross-legged on an eminence like a drum, with one foot bare, the blackened toes fanned out like a circus clown's, sewed with all his might on a sock with a full shape to it. All was still. No—as close as a voice that was speaking to them now, the
Pomona
was parting the water.

"Wait—a—minute," said Aldo still looking, with his hands on his hips.

So this was where Miss Crosby came with her book. Still as a mouse, she was sitting on the floor close to the rail, drawn up with the book on her knees.

"Don't bother her, and maybe she won't bother us," said Gabriella. "That's how
I
treat people."

Aldo came back, reached in his hand, and took the picture away from Gabriella, then sat down cross-legged on this barely slanting floor to see what he'd got.

At last he hit his leg a slap. He said, "They took one of me the same age! They had me dressed up like a little St. John the Baptist. Can you beat 'em?"

Gabriella had been standing behind him, where she could see anew. Suddenly she grasped a length of the hem of her skirt and blindfolded him with it. Aldo threw up both hands, the hand with the snapshot releasing it to the milky sea. The uncovered part of his face expressed solemnity. Like all blindfolded persons, he was holding his breath. Gabriella couldn't see his face; hers above it waited with eyes tight-shut.

A moment went by, and she jumped away; that was all that had come to her to do. Aldo promptly wheeled himself around, one leg flailing the deck, and caught her by the ankle and threw her.

She came down headlong; her fall, like a single clap of thunder, was followed by that burst of expectancy in the air that can almost be heard too. The
cameriera
bound down her hair, and the sailor put on his sock; as if they'd been together a long time, they disappeared together through the door, down the stairs.

Neither Gabriella nor Aldo stirred. They lay, a little apart, like the victims of a passing wind. Presently Aldo, moving one finger at a time, began to thump on the calf of Gabriella's leg—1, 2, 3, 4—while she lay as before, with her back to him. Intermittently the 1, 2, 3, 4 kept up, then it slowed and fell away. Gradually the sounds of the dividing sea came back to Gabriella's ear, as though a seashell were once more held lifted.

She turned her head and opened her eyes onto Aldo's clay-colored shoe, hung loose on his sockless foot. Far away now was his hand, gaping cavelike in sleep beside her forgotten leg. Past the pink buttress of his jaw rose the little fountain, not playing now, where his mouth stood open to the sky. He lay there sound asleep over the Mediterranean Sea.

Gabriella stayed as she was, caught in an element as languorous as it was strange, like a mermaid who has been netted into a fisherman's boat, only to find that the fisherman is dreaming. Where no eye oversaw them, the sea lifted and dropped them both, mindless as a cradle, up and down.

Even when La Zingara clattered out on deck, with a spectacled youth at her heels, and, seeing Aldo, gave the sharp laugh of experience, Aldo only shut his lips, like a reader who has just licked his finger to turn a page. But Gabriella sat up and caught her hair and her skirt, seeing those horn-rims: that young man was marked for the priesthood.

With the pop of corks being drawn from wine bottles, La Zingara kicked off her shoes. Then she began dancing in her polished, bare feet over the deck. ("Practicing," she had replied with her knifelike smile when the mothers wondered where she went all day—furiously watching an actress rob the church.) She made the horn-rimmed young man be her partner; to dance like La Zingara meant having someone to catch you. In a few turns they had bounded to the other side of the deck.