The End (17 page)

She glanced down at him as he wrapped his arms around his shoulders snugly and closed his black eyes.

She knew, for instance, that his desire to have a son was terrible. It was like a wraith that followed close behind him and that he could hear but never see (only she saw it). He would never admit that it was really there. He no longer wrote letters to his parents, having no children to report and no interest in describing himself. Excepting Donna Costanza, he was the only person she knew without a single relative in the United States. She was supposed to have made him one and had failed. She was probably also supposed to be ashamed of having failed, but she was only a little ashamed at feeling so unashamed of it. She thought she must be very cold. Sometimes she thought she should make a show of her regret and beat herself softly with a heavy spoon out of solidarity with him, but his feelings were genuine; she admired them; the wraith was a formidable creature; it remembered his ancestors and feared his death for him. It seemed right to her that he should be haunted this way and stupid that she should ever try to interfere with it by pretending to be haunted herself.

“If your father hadn’t kept you out so late, we might have left in the daylight,” Mrs. Marini shouted from the rear.

Enzo sat up. “We went there to work,” he told her.

“Don’t defend him. He’s—he’s a cannibal!”

“No, he is a farmer,” Enzo responded.

“We better find a quicker way to get out there,” Lina said. “She won’t ever leave now.”

“Well, that’s so,” Mrs. Marini said.

“Why shouldn’t she?” Enzo asked.

“Revenge,” Lina said.

“Hell hath no fury, and so on,” said Mrs. Marini.

In a cynical voice that was unlike him, Enzo said, “Why should he care? How will he know? Will she send him photos?”

“God will know,” said Lina.

“God will know,” Mrs. Marini repeated.

“That isn’t revenge. That’s just what-do-you-call.”

“Spite—,” Mrs. Marini said.

There was a hole in the floor of the car. Enzo had cut it with a hacksaw and planted the gearshift in it when he had replaced the transmission the month before. The hole was overwide for its purpose and exposed the interior, by a circuitous route through the undercarriage, to the open road.

Suddenly a shard of gravel shot up through the hole and rico cheted against two of the windows, cracking them.

Lina felt something formless and gratifying settle over her brain.

“Ooh!” Mrs. Marini shrieked. “What was that?”

“A stone!” Enzo said.

Lina watched the road. She had foreclosed the false hope of having a child. It wasn’t hard to do because it was false, and it was false because she had never cared very much to have a child, and she had never cared to have a child because there was a part of her that was supposed to be there and wasn’t (she didn’t miss it), but it was a hope because Enzo hoped for it, and she felt his feelings.

“I said, what was that?”

“A stone,” Enzo repeated.

“He said it was a stone,” Lina said.

The cracks in the windows weren’t serious, they were nicks. One of them was on the passenger side, the other in the windshield.

Then it came to Lina that the stone was sitting sort of proudly on the dash; and that it had struck her nose, high up near the eye, on the left side, where the others couldn’t see it, and a welt was growing, and she was slightly cross-eyed.

She picked up the stone. It was a kind of reward. She started to announce it to the others, but then she changed her mind and put it in her pocket.

Enzo stuffed his scarf and one of his gloves around the gap at the base of the gearshift, cursing the expense of replacing the glass once the cracks spread.

Mrs. Marini poked her face over the seat and jabbed her finger toward the hole in the floor while she shielded her eyes from it with her pocketbook. “We could have been killed! And all because you were too cheap to buy the collar for that thing!”

Lina blinked and blinked again. Her vision corrected itself.

They found the state highway, and she aimed the car at the setting moon.

As they entered the city, they approached a stop sign in front of a boarded-up dry goods store, where a woman sat on a valise on the curb. Her clothes enveloped her so heavily that at first it was impossible to see that she was carrying a baby behind her in a sling. She stood as they reached the stop, rattling a tin can and opening her mouth to let her thick tongue out. Then she smacked Enzo’s window with the can. The child was big and asleep, utterly unresponsive to its mother’s erratic movements. She did not produce any comprehensible words.

“Slattern!” Mrs. Marini said.

“Go away! You’ll break the glass,” Enzo said.

“Malingerer!” Mrs. Marini shouted, banging with her knuckles on the window.

Lina sped through the intersection. The momentum carried them to the crest of an incline. She shifted the transmission into neutral, and the car sailed down the Eleventh Avenue hill, into Elephant Park.

They saw Mrs. Marini to her door and went home.

Enzo had left the apartment windows open in the morning, and now all the rooms were cool and damp, but they left the windows as they were; it was the first spring night that year warm enough for sleeping in the fresh air. They took off their clothes and pulled back the linens of the bed and lay down. The mattress was new and hard. The starch in the sheets and pillow slips was fresh.

She was alone with him at last.

Soon after Lina was married, she had put on fifteen pounds. She had done it deliberately—with a boiled egg before bedtime and a sweet pastry from Rocco’s every afternoon—in an unsuccessful effort to become pregnant. She had been indifferent to eating for so long that she had wrecked her ovaries, it seemed. Donna Costanza said that was probably what she had done. “Or else you bought a faulty stag,” she chortled.

Anyway, Lina was pretty now. She really was. She had had the luck to collect her new weight where it was most in need: in her hips, backside, bust, fingers, and cheeks—which had always been depressed before but now were convex, as though the heads of two spoons were turned upside down.

Marriage had exposed her true figure, but this was only the most obvious of many unexpected changes, some of them quite abstruse, that it had brought about and that she herself didn’t notice until events made them self-evident.

She damned her father to hell, and felt the rightness of this deeply, and would have said it to his face if she had gone to see him again—which she refused to do—before he left for Siracusa that summer.

She was cheerful, attentive, direct, nervous only regarding her hair, which was too fine to hold a permanent wave and was prone to knots and wrinkling. Her signature on a check was compact, loop-less, leftward slanting, distinctive but illegible. Her command of the cursive
z
s was poor, so that no two of them were identical, the first always improved upon by the second, which pleased her.

The overcoat shop went under. These days she did piecework at home—draperies—for a Jew in Fort Saint Clair. She didn’t have to work at the kitchen table, at least, as her mother used to do among the corsets that she would sell to a wholesaler downtown. Instead there was a spare bedroom where Enzo had built dummy rods in all the walls so that she could hang the drapes and see what she was doing. Earlier, he had stenciled the walls with a design that was supposed to be a toy locomotive but looked more like a steaming pot on trivets. The single window looked out on the creek and the trolley stop across the bridge, so she could watch for him coming home. She could also see Bastianazzo’s from here, and the men going in for newspapers and coffee. There was no one to talk to in the little room, so she listened to the radio. She had never been alone very often before, and now when she went among other people she felt simultaneously relaxed and invigorated by the contrast with the way she spent her days. Her own income was modest, but Enzo was foreman now, and, anyway, having no children they could afford to eat well and sometimes go to a concert. They were in good stars to have any income at all these days, as Enzo said.

Doors open before you on their own once you have found your true figure, her mother said. She said it in a gesture: They were at the farm a couple of years before her father betrayed them. Her mother brushed her hands down Lina’s rounded sides with pleasure as Lina was leaving, and then, although no wind could be heard, the storm door blew open spookily. Her mother pointed at it and said, “See what you can do?” Donna Costanza, on the other hand, was more indelicate and said to her while they were walking in the crowd at the Assumption feast, “You’re more striking now that you’re someone’s meat.”

Lina’s digestion was magnificent. If she wanted, she could eat fresh curds and then a grapefruit and go ride the trolley.

This, while her Enzo’s intestines rebelled against nuts, ice cream, even apple skins. When they went to a show, he bought her a lemonade and a chocolate bar from the concessioner, but nothing for sale there sat well with his stomach, so he smoked throughout the picture to blunt his hunger and bit the heel of his hand with pity at the climax and shouted.

On their way home, at Bastianazzo’s, where they would stop, he drank a demitasse of baking-soda water along with his coffee. She loved him. His suffering and shame (he had little schooling, and the accent of his English was inept, and he desired a son with every breath; he was thirty-three) were almost invisible and therefore were to her mysterious, perhaps infinite, and he approached, wanting her and no one else.

She was not a woman in a dream anymore. She was no longer Carmelina, daughter of Montanero, waiting to be the wife of someone and the mother of someone. Her name was Carmelina Mazzone. She was the wife of that man there, Mazzone, Vincenzo. She was definite, like letters on a page. And her mother looked at her as if to say, You are all turned out now, you are completed.

The eyes of others didn’t pass over her face obliviously, like before; they stopped, as if caught.

As when a gust blew open her overcoat while she was carrying a heavy bag across a bridge, and the blouse beneath the coat was thin, and her hardened nipples showed through the fabric . . .

Someone loitering on the bridge, looking down at the current, glances up and sees when she passes behind him. His helpless eyes are caught. He is tall, extraordinarily white of face, impeccably shaven. He wears a dark worsted-wool coat, a small red book poking out of the pocket.

She is carrying an onion sack on her back, and he takes notice of this. Snow falls. What a day to be out of doors in a coat that won’t stay closed.

She passes him, and his poor eyes are snagged, his neck slightly twisted behind him. She was always hypothetical before to him, a faceless notion, but now she’s real, present, irrefragable, distinct. He watches her go. He may elect to follow her.

He does not know her name. But she is right there. There is no missing or mistaking or misgiving.

How it thrills him to think of another person at last, and not of himself. To begin a sentence with
She.
To be awake.

There. A woman with a sack on her back.

She crosses the street. Her coat has come open again. Catch her while she catches you. She won’t last.

Before too long Lina would become yet another person, with another name, of her own devising—similar to the current, married one, essentially a translation, more in line with the names of the people among whom she would find herself. However, she was not among them yet, and in the meantime she had every reason to believe that Carmelina Mazzone was permanent. She had no cause to suspect that all of this was only an interlude.

The man on the bridge watches her ascending the hill. She is stooped by the weight of an enormous sack on her back, so touchingly like a mule, like an enduring animal that slowly carries on its back a burden as large as itself.

It would be impossibly sweet and satisfying to follow her. The sweetness of saying “she” is the intimation of somebody else, of something else that’s really out there being real, that isn’t an idea or a ghost but a person, definite, completed.

But he’s watching her now. He can’t not. And while he watches her, he is turning her back into an idea, so he must act fast. She has already begun to disappear.

Mrs. Marini proposed to make Lina an apprentice in her business. Lina decided she would do it so long as Enzo didn’t disapprove. He did disapprove, however. He believed it would curse their children, it being unclear only to him that they could never have any children. He was rather innocent. He had even believed that Mrs. Marini still made her living off the interest from her husband’s shoes. Still, he was within his rights, and Lina turned her down. They might have been rich. Instead she was stuck with her drapes.

That was in November of the year 1936. It was the winter Pierangellini, the madman, was found at the dump in a crypt of newspapers. The coroner’s determination of the cause of death was celebrated: He had eaten the head of a broom.