The End (12 page)

She waited for the humiliation and incapacity of old age, but the curse had passed her by. A Hebrew had mistakenly stricken the posts of her door with lamb’s blood and the Lord had skipped her house. Against any part of her did not a dog move its tongue. Oh, well. Probably she would fall down the cellar stairs and smash her skull. The good fortune of her new life suggested that death, though soon, would be only a swift blackening of mind. Fine. When Nico died, she had believed she would be trapped forever in the past. Only she could no longer sympathize with the self who’d felt this way. She laughed at it. She laughed!

How about:
I laughed at myself, with scorn?

Midwinter. When all the autumn fruits have been consumed, and everything you eat is cooked or caked in salt, and all the world is dead. A pulpy something sweet would mean so much. Only a little. You find the medlars in the root cellar in a box of sawdust. Finally gone to mush. They were no good for anything before—he’d missed out. Too bad.

Now, about summing up: Not everything can be accomplished with a phrase. It would have been self-defeating and anyway impossible to condense into a few words all the refinements she had produced over forty years of study and practice in her trade. She had elaborated her methods from crude hand-me-downs (her grandmother’s tools were a root broth, heavily salted, and a bellows), to a precise, well-tried, and sterile science. The prospect that all her advances would evaporate at her death was a poison she tried to absorb stoically, with the help of a palliative phrase:
“All the daughters of musick shall be brought low,”
she said, but was dissatisfied. Her stoicism finally failed her, or she failed it, as more and more her pride prevailed and she began to change her view. Resignation wasn’t worth the effort; the right phrase existed but might take years to find; action, in this case showing someone what she knew while her brain still worked, was easier than inaction.

Therefore I shall seek an apprentice and heir, she said. But the
an
was misleading. There was only one person she wished to ask. She had long intended to pass all her wealth to one special girl, and if she was going to give away her expertise as well, she saw no one else to whom she’d rather give it. The wet human feelings this implied were repulsive enough that to keep herself from being made sick by them she screwed herself to her more selfish motives.

Envy, for example. For this particular girl and for no one else she felt the species of envy, rare except among the old, that expresses itself in the desire to be replaced by someone and consequently improved by him. Here she discovered herself on the farthest frontier of egoism, which was funny, because egoism was the very vice that the girl, in replacing her, would best have corrected.

This was not to say that the girl in question had no
I
or wasn’t, like the rest of us, in constant conversation with it, but rather that, in a trait Mrs. Marini had coveted since before the girl had lost her milk teeth and which she’d somehow maintained through her adolescence, she didn’t seem to know it was her
I
with whom she was speaking. Birds of prey, horses, snakes, bears, and elephants all give one this impression; dogs, bugs, fish, squirrels, chickens, and human beings, in general, do not.

Anyway, practically speaking, the choice as it currently appeared was to ask Lina, the Montaneros’ daughter from Eighteenth Street, or to drink the poison and be forgotten.

A phrase?

She was hale, flat chested, inward. All things, perhaps not coincidentally, that were less and less true of Mrs. Marini herself.

She was the elder of two girls, of whom there would have been many more and sons besides, no doubt, starvelings all, had Patrizia, the mother, not availed herself of Mrs. Marini’s counsel some decades ago. The younger, Antonietta, or Toni, had lately married and moved to California.

So long.

They knew better, her mother and Mrs. Marini both, than to trust in oaths like
I will return to pay visits, I am not lost to the deep.
America is the deep. Elsewise, why did you come? Lina, on the other hand, already twenty years old and beaten to the finish by her younger sister, faced dimming prospects of marriage. The parents had made a sloppy error to let Toni marry first, and Mrs. Marini told Patrizia so, who agreed; however, the father . . . the father—but over him Mrs. Marini preferred to pass without comment. Not that Lina seemed to mind or make any effort to vend herself. There are compromises we make in the authenticity of our expressions for the sake of attracting men to us, Mrs. Marini argued. Men did not notice Lina, but whose fault was that? One needn’t give oneself over to the licentious fashions of the day. One might simply train one’s bodiless hair in curls. Lina’s flannel skirts might keep her warm, but flannel did not describe the leg to the viewer, and she had many long years ahead to be warm.

Well, but Lina was not going to be moved by argument, as Mrs. Marini knew. Lina was not modest out of commitment to modesty, she was naturally, mulishly modest. Deliberation did not cause, precede, or otherwise clutter her deeds; this was what you admired her for. Her mind was not a chamber in which a crowd of lawyers competed to direct and obstruct her will; it was a forest, and deep inside, alone, in a cool pond, her
I
swam freely on its back and scrutinized the tangled canopy of thought overhead.

She did piecework in the overcoat shop behind the theater on Twenty-fourth Street. She was irregular in her attendance at mass, as the Sicilians were wont to be. She had finished school but didn’t read. She spoke good Ohio English and court Italian, as Mrs. Marini had coached her to do from her early girlhood over school-day suppers (the parents were at their dreary jobs; Mrs. Marini’s husband was newly dead). She had had only one unmitigated success in bending the girl to her will over the many years she’d auntied her: She had peeled the dialect right off Lina’s tongue. Lina was only an immigrant seamstress from the backward South who’d received all her education in this country, but were you to hear her over a radio, she could have passed for a Savoy. Hear how crisp and comprehensible? We say all the letters in the word because otherwise, why are the letters there? Jefferson, proving that Negroes could reason, had taught his slave to do calculus. Or so Mrs. Marini had heard tell. But she didn’t believe it. That was going too far.

To summarize, Carmelina Montanero was a work of art she had made. True, Mrs. Marini had failed to carry out her original ambition (Lina was not going to seduce the emperor), but a professional man or a merchant were still fair expectations. And anyhow, it must have been in the nature of an artist to consider his finished work a failure, inasmuch as his original idea looked amorously toward the prospect of its execution without admitting that the prospect itself was another idea, which the finished work, being composed of different stuff, had to consume in order to come into existence. Disappointment was the result of an idea’s attempt to miscegenate with the visible world. Even God experienced this, as all but the first two pages of the Old Testament attested. She supposed that an artist’s foremost joy was to see a real thing come into existence through his effort, and that it was in his starkest failures to carry out the program of his idea that he most felt the resistance of the visible world and knew that the thing he’d made had broken from its home in the mind and made it to dry land. Likewise, she may have gloated over Lina’s splendid Italian; but she never felt more tenderly toward her than on the days when Lina was so rumpled, poorly painted, remote, and unhappy that anyone could see Mrs. Marini had bungled her, and it was incredible anyone would ever volunteer to be her husband.

A pause to observe the sweet melancholy of discouragement. Of maybe having failed.

Okay. Nevertheless. Bungle or no. She must be vigilant. Left in the state of her own nature, Lina was likely to tighten all the strings Mrs. Marini had loosened in her and loosen all the ones she’d tightened.

Some women were unfit
not
to marry. That one who stood too close behind you at the bakery, humming, audibly sucking a cherry coughing lozenge; the stranger who asked you to hold her bag while she boarded the streetcar and as you handed it back began to chant the litany of relations to whom she’d given her money and her faith, only to be hunted and stripped and ridiculed by them—in other words, the women (there were men, but the men were incurables from the beginning) who did not seem convinced that you, another person, distinct from themselves, were quite there. On meeting these people she knew immediately, in a leap of intuition over science’s head, that they were spinsters—who might have been saved if only in their youths someone had imposed a man on what was at the time merely their contented self-dependence and wasn’t yet their brainsickness. She was well aware. She might have been one of their number, but marriage had cracked her in the necessary way.

6

S
he speculated and spied and picked and plotted. She was trying to find a way of carrying out her new ambition, that Lina should succeed her, without dooming her old ambition, that Lina should marry someone, but in each of her plots she at last foresaw the same mistake and threw them one by one wrathfully into the trash. The mistake was that if Lina should take over the business, she would become self-sustaining, and thus the last reliable lever that could still press marriage upon her—that she was penniless, and so was her family—would be removed. It was for this same reason that Lina didn’t know she stood to inherit Mrs. Marini’s house and money.

She had one further misgiving about making the girl her apprentice. It was that Lina was a child. She lacked the natural cruelty that a conversance with the marital act encouraged one to refine.

Anyway, Mrs. Marini was short for this world. She was sick of sitting around. Her brain had a rash from scratching. It was sometimes necessary to commence doing before the plan of action was drawn. One must lay one’s faith in one’s native power of striking a thing, of whacking it with all one’s force the moment instinct says go. And. And, and, and, the plan existed, it must have, but in a dark corner of her undermind, where it was wisely protecting itself from her.

She went out into the street in search of Lina. It was a Thursday.

She aimed herself through the postwork commerce that clogged Eleventh Avenue, in which the city was opening a trench, half a mile long, for the fitting of sewer pipe. She peeked down into the moat as she made her precipitate way. Behind a single-file team of jackasses, a man down there was plowing up the clay and rocks.

Otherwise, she hardly observed. She was equal to motion plus thought. When the gears of the intellect began to click, sensation was a waste of time, and time did not pertain to her. She was attentive only that she not pay too close attention to what she was going to propose. The crucial elements of her plan must not make each other’s acquaintance up in the conscious mind until the latest possible moment, when they must be thrown together in a fit of resolve, as when, making a dough for pastry, one combines the ice water and the shortened flour with a few quick turns of the cold hand.

The sun went down. She kicked perhaps unnecessarily at a pigeon that kept an annoying pace a foot in front of her. She might have gone first to Eighteenth Street and called for Lina at home, but Umberto was out of work once more, the father, and therefore was certainly holed up in the house awaiting an audience for his grief, while his women, just two now, thanks to him, were at this hour in the street going pushcart to pushcart looking for the cheapest lemon, or else in somebody’s kitchen helping put up the last of the beans. A peasant woman is never alone.

She raked the streets, peeking in certain likely windows, not finding them.

She should have said a peasant woman is never solitary, because others are always with her. To be alone is to have no thoughts to keep one company. She herself, conversely, was quite unalone.

“What will become of that girl is so sad to ask, so you’d better meddle some more—I mean, fix everything,” said Nico from his moldering place.

“You shut up,” she said. She knew it was not really him because Nico was never sarcastic. It was only her own brain generating phantasmal senators to impede the exercise of her imperial rights. The style was wrong but the tone of voice was flawless.

“You’re all mealy-mouthed pitiation and no pity, Costanza. You don’t want to assist anybody. You have been unfitting that child for female kindliness since I exited the scene. Witch. You only want to ready her for witchdom. Twenty is so many years to have. You can’t be serious! See how you conduct yourself, with the lies and the twist ings. Twenty is the bloom of youth, hag. You don’t want to make her rich; you want to erect a monument to yourself. You don’t want her to get married; you—”

“Who will marry her? Give me his name!”

The girl wasn’t in any of the back gardens along Vermilion Avenue, nor in the church.

“You don’t want her to get married. You don’t want some bumpkin digging up your treasure. You only suspect that you ought to desire her benefit above your own, but you’re completely insincere. If you make her a witch, like yourself, all the boys will know and no one will call for her. This is your plan. And, by the way, you won’t be any good at it, the witching instruction. You’ll hector her and embarrass her. It won’t be like teaching somebody to read a newspaper in your boudoir. There will be the matter of your conscious subjects lying there. But I know what you’ll do. You’ll just give them some gas.”

“You are so wicked!” she said.

“No, you are!”

“What entitles you of all people to dress yourself up as my conscience?”

“Introspect and you will observe your incapacity to do a genuine kindness,” he said.

“Stop abusing me, Nicolo!”

But it wasn’t really him, as she had already decided. It was never really him. She might have her silly hopes, but in all honesty if the ghost of the true Nico should ever visit her, she wondered if she could bear to speak with it without ruining all the gains of her later years and turning back into her former, wretched self. There were certain things she dearly longed to say to him—things that had come to her only while she was pushing the gelatinous food between his teeth during his last days, while his kidneys were failing and after his mind was already destroyed—but they could only be said in the past.