The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (98 page)

Old Papa, with his head cocked and in the voice of a liar, told the steward that once a little boy, long ago, was going away to America from Italy. Papa's left hand dived low and gave the air a pat. On such a big ship—and his right hand poked the whistle into the girth of the steward—the little boy might have been lost. But his papa said to him, "Never mind. Whenever you hear
this
"—and before the steward knew it, the old man had blown it again, "
Tweeeeet!
"—"Papa." All this had the old sleepy-head raising both fists in the air and shaking them together as if he denied every word of that tale. The whistle was blowing and everybody else was shouting.

Aldo Scampo moved out of his chair and started silently out of the room the way he had come; only his yellow, pointed crown was crumpled like the antlers of a deer where, as he rose up, he had had to clutch his head.

"No
gelati?
" many called sorrowfully after him through their laughter.

"Why did he think he had to come, anyway?" Gabriella shrieked as he staggered past her. "Who's Aldo Scampo?"

"You imagine the sea is high tonight? Not at all!" The voice of a visiting Father, who was down from above for Gala Night in
turistica,
was heard over the room as the dining-room door fell to. Laughter stopped. This sea was no match at all for what might have been sent them, bearing the season of the year in mind. Up to now there was no word for it but calm. Had due thanks been sent up? Father, an Irishman, appeared to be looking around him for an immediate errand boy. Still, it was a fact, he said: by the essence of their nature, which was frail, all human beings were probably doomed to be seasick. The middle of the deep was never the spot God's children would show wisdom to go wandering over for long. Upstairs, Father said, with another look around, it was taking an equivalent toll.

Mr. Ambrogio leaned over his fork, which waited with a bite of veal the shape of a little ship itself, and spoke as quietly as Father to the Serto table at large. "I think on this ship there are people lower than us. This morning, alone on my way, I have seen other steps going down." And staring down over his shoulder, between himself and Mama, he suddenly sent his hand, fork and all, in a plumb line toward the floor. Consternation rose around the table, led by Mama's cry.

"Am I in wrong place?" A little old man got up from the nearest table and tottering with the roll of the ship began to turn himself around in the aisle. "Why nobody tell me?" That little man always thought he was in the wrong place, on the wrong ship, going the wrong way for Foggia; it always took many to reassure him. But tonight his cone-shaped hat came down nearly over his eyes.

Mr. Fossetta pushed back his chair.

"Looka my hand," he said. He held it up squarely, a small dark hand still burnished with the grease of America, as the little lost man drew near and bent his face over it, standing in Mama's way. Everybody who was near enough to the Serto table watched the hand; a few stood up. Mr. Fossetta rolled his wrist like a magician; then, with the knife from his plate, began to count off the fingers.

"
Firsta
class...
Seconda
class...
Us.
"

But a finger was left, dangling below the knife. That was seen. Mr. Fossetta got to his feet, drew silence again, and started over, this time counting from the middle finger and in Italian. When he finished, he flicked both hands apart on the empty air.

"Now you believe?" he said, but his own face had gone desperately white. "Nobody below us but the fishes." And poor Mr. Fossetta departed the way Aldo had gone, only it was to unfeeling choruses of "Champagne!
Gelati!
" For here came out the trays, sparkling all over, radiating to every table. Jumping up, Poldy raised his glass. "To my wedding!" he cried to the room, then swallowed the champagne without a stop.

Mama first pulled him down, then rose herself with her own arms stretched empty, like a prophetess.

"Mama! It's Gala Night," said Gabriella, joining her hands and looking into her mother's face.

Mrs. Serto, with a tragic look for all, toppled upon her daughter. Gabriella, struggling up just in time, caught her beneath the arms and then bore her, leaning, from the dining room. As they passed table after table, people who were eating
gelati
rose spoon in hand, paper hats a-bob on their heads, to make way.

It was thought an anticlimax, showing lack of appreciation of the night's feelings, that Gabriella came straight back. The
frutti
was just appearing. Crowned a little nearer to the ears, as though by one last sweep of a failing hand, she took back her real place at the table, where she ate her own
gelati
and then her mother's, and drank both glasses of champagne.

The old lady—as though she were the waiter's own mother, or the V.M., thought Gabriella—finally accepted his bowl of fruit, and Gabriella was allotted, from her fork, a little brown-skinned pear.

It was this old lady who remained last at the Serto table. When the others excused themselves, she was still dropping grapes into her mouth,
like a goddess sacrificing a few extra tribes. Scarcely an eyelid flickered from above.

Upstairs in the public room, when the three-piece band began playing "Deep in the Heart of Texas" to start the dancing, an unexpected trio of newcomers turned themselves loose on the girls. Two looked like, and were, the radio operator and the man who brought the bouillon around the deck in the mornings; another, who had the mothers guessing at first, was placed as the
turistica
hairdresser, seen daily, after all, smoking in his doorway. Then Mr. Ambrogio, who had softly perfumed himself again since dinner, with the thin little widow from Rome, went arrowing bravely down the floor; she was the usually distracted mother of those divine, but sometimes bad, little children.

Gabriella stood in the door, in her blue dress mounted with ruffles from which the little pleats had still not quite shaken out—and suddenly she was asked to dance by Joe Monteoliveto. Maria-Pia was out of it too, then; there was no one who could not fall by the wayside tonight, and have a stranger appear in his place. Joe wore on his head a pink stack like a name-day cake, with a cherry on top. Gabriella gave him her hand. Out on the floor, under the stroke of the riding ship, they began circling together as easily as if they had sailed many a time across the sea, and were used to the waves and the way to dance over them.

Tonight was Gala Night, that was the reason—and partners were not real partners, the sea not the sea Mama had had in mind, and paper lanterns masked the lights that climbed and fell over their heads; and there was no colliding with the world. The band went into "Japanese Sandman," and as Gabriella went swinging in the arms of Joe Monteoliveto the whole round of the room, a gentle breath of wonder started after her, too soft to be accusation, too perishable to be hope. Dancing, poor Mrs. Serto's daughter was filled with grace.

The whole company—mothers banked around the walls, card players trapped at the tables, and the shadowy old—all looked her way.
In-disposti
or not, of course they knew what was in front of their eyes. Once more, slipping the way it liked to do through one of life's weak moments, illusion had got in, and they were glad to see it. How many days had they been on the water!

The mothers gently cocked their heads from side to side in time, the old men re-lit their tobacco and poured out a little
vino.
That great, unrewarding, indestructible daughter of Mrs. Serto, round as an onion, and tonight deserted, unadvised, unprompted, and unrestrained in her blue, went dancing around this unlikely floor as lightly as an angel.

Whenever she turned, she whirled, and her ruffles followed—and the music too had to catch up. It began to seem to the general eye that she might be turning around faster inside than out. For an unmarried girl, it was danger. Some radiant pin through the body had set her spinning like that tonight, and given her the power—not the same thing as permission, but what was like a memory of how to do it—to be happy all by herself. Their own poor daughters, trudging uphill and down as the ship tilted them, would have to bide their time until Gabriella learned her lesson.

When La Zingara arrived, and took Joe Monteoliveto away in the middle of a waltz, Gabriella spread both arms and went on dancing by herself. Lighter than ever on her toes, as the band swung faster and louder into a new chorus of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart," and the very sides of the room began tapping and humming, she began whirling around in place in the middle of the floor.

Arms wide, toes in, four, six, ten, a dozen turns she went, and kept whirling, and at the end, as the cymbal crashed, she stopped. The ruffles ran the other way once, and fell into their pleats. The
Pomona
rose and fell, like a sigh on the breast, but Gabriella held her place—not falling: smiling, intact, a Leaning Tower. A shout of joy went up—even from those that the spectacle of an ungrasped, spinning girl was bound to have made feel worse. "Bravo!" shouted Father Madden, standing dangerously on a chair.

It was the stunt Gabriella was famous for in the St. Cecilia Sodality.

Whistles with toy balloons attached arrived on a dining-room tray, and were blown in every direction. For a moment Papa was missed. He would have enjoyed this!

"May I have the pleasure of the next?" Mr. Ambrogio asked Gabriella, moving a saffron handkerchief over his brow above dilated eyes.

Poldy, in the end, broke up the evening—he did not dance—by rushing in pretending to be Gene Autry on horseback and shooting an imaginary pistol at all the girls and all the boys and at all the lights in this room afloat in the night at sea.

It was as though they'd
forgotten
Palermo!

Everybody, at sun-up, crowded to the rail to turn one concerted gaze, full and ardent, on the first big black island rocks. They pointed fingers that trembled up at crags, into caves. They smiled on a man they had surprised in his frail little craft with the pomegranate-colored sail, far out in the early morning under the drop of some cliff. How fast now they were slipping through the silver light! Shafts of the clearing sun forked down from battlements higher than the ship was. The mist lifted and revealed something dim and green sliding near, something adored.

Smiling, they turned and admired one another. Everybody was dressed up for Palermo—not only the Sicilians, who would be reaching home. Gone were the shawls except on the oldest ladies—those were eternal. All about were the coats and hats of city streets; new stockings flashed in the light. Gone were the caps—there had been a felt hat on the grayest old grandfather since six o'clock in the morning.

Gabriella, though not specially in honor of Palermo, had got back into her blue. Only Aldo must still be untouched by where they were. Back in the canary sweatshirt, he was spread out in Miss Crosby's chair, not even looking when a passing cave was hailed as Giuliano's, and Joe Monteoliveto, with Maria-Pia pulling on his coattails, nearly fell overboard trying to see who was in it.

As they were being tugged into the harbor, it looked as though Palermo itself could wait no longer on the
Pomona.
One by one, bobbing out on the water's altered green, appeared tiny rowboats, and out of them presently came small, urgent cries. The boats worked their way nearer and nearer the ship, shirtsleeved arms shot up from them like flags, cries turned into names, and suddenly everywhere at once there was welcome. One boat was bringing thirteen, all fat, still unrecognized, one man in shirtsleeves rowing, the rest in a frenzy of waving.

"Enrico!"

"Achille!"

"Rosalia!"

"Massimiliano!"

The little old lady who had invited herself to the Serto table on Gala Night was all ready to disembark. She was the one with the limp. She made her way around deck like a wounded bird on the ground, opening her mouth now and then to scream "Fortunato!"

And suddenly she was answered from the water: "Pepi-i-ina!"

Mama, rushing to look out by first one side, then the other, was wildly excited. Her crisis last night had done her good. She was dressed as though for Sunday. She easily found
Signora
Pepina's relative for her—that was his boat. No, it was that one!

"Fortunato!"

"Fortunato! I see him!" Mrs. Serto could be heard above all the rest. "Fortunato and seven. Have no doubt. It is he."

"Why couldn't he wait? We'll get there soon enough," said Gabriella.

"He is the rower!" Mrs. Serto swung her purse in a wild arc; now her crucifix, having come unpinned once but discovered thus by Mr. Ambrogio, was pinned back all crooked.

"Francesco!"

"Pepi-i-ina!"

"Massimiliano!"

"But where is Achille?"

"He has had heart attack!" screamed Mama fearfully.

In the dock—now in plain view from shipboard—a fight was going on among those who had been patient enough to wait on shore; a big man in a straw hat who had got past the rope was struggling in the hands of the police. Here, crowded to the
Pomona's
landward side, the passengers could hear the warm, worldly sound of fisticuffs traveling across the last reach of water, the insults rolling and falling on solid ground.

"Francesco!"

"Assunta!"

"Achille, Achille, Achille!"

"Pepi-i-ina!"

"
Ecco, ecco
Pepina!" screamed Mama. "Must we tell you which one is she?"

In the background, by the flagpole, Maria-Pia Arpista and Joe Monteoliveto were trying to say good-by. Maria-Pia was weeping into a silk handkerchief, and Joe was so swallowed up in a winter suit—the one from whose sleeves he had nearly fallen out—as to look entirely different from last night.

"
Moto perpetuo.
" The little man who had never been sure where the boat was taking them smiled at Gabriella, stirring the air with his black-nailed finger. He remembered her.

Gabriella nodded to him. She set her shoulders and posed beside her mother, frowning out from under her Buffalo hat, facing the dock.