The End (21 page)

Boyhood was contempt for the rule and the rule giver, knowing that your every slouching step was surveilled. Lies, capricious and glib. Running flat out. “Someday soon, old man, I’ll knock you down.”

Carmelina, the boy’s mother, had left them sometime between noon and four o’clock on the afternoon of August 8, 1946, when the boy was nine years old.

When Ciccio had finished the eighth grade (this was two years ago), Patrizia had offered to take him off Enzo’s hands and put him to work full-time on the farm. Enzo had arranged for an apprenticeship with the laborer’s union—Ciccio could have passed for sixteen at the time—but unluckily the union now wanted a birth certificate proving the minimum age had been attained, and Ciccio’s career was forestalled. Why not send him to the farm, where he spent much of the summer anyhow and could be of use? Enzo didn’t like it, that was why. He had given the boy his name, Mazzone. You see? He had bought, he wasn’t renting. They would have to put him in a high school.

He preferred to send the boy to the public vocational school up the road, but Mrs. Marini said that was a half measure and he should go instead to a gymnasium downtown that had been started in the 1880s by a group of Jesuit priests from Munich, who incidentally had bought their shoes from her husband. Ciccio should learn languages and theology, not cabinetmaking. And she would pay for it.

Enzo mistrusted the school’s intentions. Specifically, would they try to turn Ciccio into a missionary? Most of the priests who taught at the school were born in Europe, which confirmed Enzo’s notion that their aim was to remove boys from their natural home and throw them to the four winds; while for Mrs. Marini it only confirmed that the instruction there would not be very stupid. Neither of them cared to ask the boy’s opinion. He would go where they told him. Except where chores were concerned, he was a suggestible person (all the more reason, in Enzo’s mind, to keep the Church away from him). They wouldn’t let him in anyway, Enzo didn’t think, nor should they. This kind of schooling was not for the likes of the sons of him, but for the middle class.

Mrs. Marini scheduled an interview. The three of them rode the trolley into the city, the boy holding a strap in the ceiling while his two elders sat on the bouncing wooden bench arguing over whether he could pass the exam, although neither of them knew on what he would be examined. Ciccio, slick and mirthful, only whistled through his teeth until she shushed him; he was bothering the other patrons.

The examination, so-called, consisted of a five-minute chat in Latin with an old French Canadian monk, who pronounced Ciccio “unacceptable,” followed by two hours of timed drills on the football field. At the end of the afternoon, they offered to let Ciccio go to the school, starting the fall term, so long as he made it through the four weeks of double-session practices in August.

“Is this a school or a stable?” Mrs. Marini demanded of the head-master, a trim and fresh-faced American priest of Irish parents, who had allowed the lime that marked the grid of the football field to color the hem of his cassock. He tried to feed her some nonsense about training the whole boy, but she was supremely uneager to hear it.

She struggled to control her distress. Her original enthusiasm for sending Ciccio to the school was like a pot of milk that had just been too abruptly boiled and in which clots had formed—however, they were only clots, she decided, and might be strained away. Therefore, while the priest intoned his response, she pretended that she suddenly heard a curious buzzing in her inner ear. She gazed vaguely at the solemn oak beams of the ceiling as though she were about to let her head fall back and go to sleep. Thus she convinced herself that she couldn’t properly hear him and avoided learning anything that would have made her change her mind.

What the priest said brought Enzo halfway around. The school wasn’t so fancy as he’d assumed. He meant it wasn’t all prayers and incense, they weren’t going to castrate Ciccio for the choir.

On the way home, Ciccio was silent. He looked down at his large duck feet glumly.

“What’s wrong with your face?” Mrs. Marini asked.

When addressing her (but never his father) he could still sometimes come out with the sincere eruption of a boy’s gelatinous feelings, at which it was difficult for her to keep from laughing, since he was so big. “I’m sort of afraid of those guys,” he said, blinking.

“Who guys, precisely?” she said.

“The priests.”

That sealed it. Enzo was sold right there.

They were three in a row, seated, on the trolley bench. Mrs. Marini sat between the man and the boy. Enzo twisted himself across her lap, pointing at him. “You are going to go to that school,” Enzo said, with equal emphasis on each word.

Ciccio breathed deeply, once, and let the air out.

“It will make you important,” she said consolingly.

Enzo had never intended in the first place to let Mrs. Marini foot the bill; he paid it out of his savings. What did he ever need to buy for himself? Buttons. Aspirin. But by the time Ciccio was starting his third year at the school, Enzo was unsure it was doing him any good. Enzo wanted them to teach a class in not being so eager to please, and how to keep your mouth shut if you don’t have anything to say. Instead it was algebra and the writings of the saints.

Rather than paying the tuition, Mrs. Marini made him his uniforms. It was Enzo’s idea. He considered it an imposition to suggest she use cash to buy them. And she was pleased to make them herself until she realized that Ciccio would outgrow everything but the socks almost as soon as he put it on. (No, she did not make the socks.) In the notebook she kept of his changing measurements, she had recorded an increase of four jacket sizes in the space of a single school year. His inseam was like a stock in which she should have invested. He was six feet two inches and wore size thirteen shoes.

Regarding the present day, it was her need to finish yet another blazer that had made her tell the fib after supper that she had an appointment for six o’clock; in fact, it was for eleven thirty that night. She had only said that so they would go away and let her get the blazer done before starting her next job, which was of a different kind and required different parts of her brain. As much as possible, she did one thing at a time. And she could not sew with anybody else around. She wondered why that should be.

As soon as they left, she nailed herself to the seat in her sewing room. The radio played. It was Wagner, whom she despised. But she must not get up. She must finish.

She drank coffee from a thermos, dribbling some on her chin and dabbing at it with a bit of satin that would remain hidden on the inside of a sleeve of the jacket.

Her arches tortured her. She would have kicked off her shoes, but the floor was strewn with straight pins that would have stuck her bare feet, and she always stayed true to the first article of a seamstress’s discipline, taught to her at the convent in Lazio when she was eight years old: You must never clean the floor until the work is done. There will always be another pin.

The dog that lived at the corner of her street bayed and bayed unremittingly.

She must finish.

Her eyes crossed with fatigue. Her glasses slid down her nose when her foot pumped the treadle. The work was beneath her gifts. She might have simply paid for a new blazer and cut out the tag, but it would have humiliated Vincenzo if he should ever find out.

The dog went on ruing its sins and begging forgiveness of the grass, of the trees, of the chain fence at which it flung itself resoundingly when cars passed, of the houses, and of the multifarious and brilliant smells that fill up the universe of a dog.

Wheedle, wheedle, wheedle,
went the shaft of the machine as the thread was jabbed through the fabric by the power of her smarting leg. She wanted to comfort the poor, lonesome dog and also to hang it. “Yes, hang it,” she said, laying the side of her skull on the cool gabardine for a moment, only a moment now, and slept.

When she awoke the windows were dark. Her face lay in her hair, which she had pulled off and folded in her sleep, mistaking it for a pillow. The only sound was a persistent knocking at the breezeway door. She listened for the bay of the dog, but there was no bay.

Someone had come for the dog! A poisoner! Death! (Or else it had been run over by one of the cars whose tires it nipped when it ran loose, thinking the car was an impudent sheep.) And now it was coming for her, too, Death! The Reaper!

“Murder!” she cried, but not too loudly, in case she had misunderstood. She fluffed her hair and put it back on.

The breezeway door squealed as it came open.

“What did you say?” a voice inquired.

“Murder?” she said again, under her breath.

“I’m coming into the house now,” it announced, female, throaty.

Mrs. Marini held the seat of the chair tightly.

A woman’s plump and sunburned face appeared in the sewing-room doorway. It was Federica, her assistant, the wife of a friend of Vincenzo’s.

“Say, why didn’t you come to the door?” she asked.

Mrs. Marini saw no reason to dissimulate. “I thought you were my death coming for me,” she said.

“I’m late. Rossie woke up screaming out his brains.”

“Pavor nocturnus,”
Mrs. Marini said. “It’ll go away when his testicles mature.”

“We had to dunk his head in the bathtub.”

“Don’t worry. I was asleep myself,” she said, stretching her arms luxuriantly and closing the sewing-room door behind herself. She would have to go at the infernal jacket again tomorrow.

“She won’t be here for another half hour,” Mrs. Marini said, looking at her wristwatch.

Federica started the water boiling (for tea; they sterilized chemically) and ran down the cellar stairs to prepare the instruments.

She was a stout lady of forty-five, a mother of six, and a former client. Smoking had abraded her voice, but otherwise her manner was clean and healthful. She was the kind of woman whom other women find it easy to like because, although she was vain, her vanity was hapless: She had acquired the wrinkles of a much older woman by sleeping uncovered in the sun, and she stripped her coarse and wavy hair and dyed it a bright yellow that it was perfectly impossible to believe someone of her complexion could naturally produce.

She had a strange habit of putting her best foot backward. She scolded the children fiercely in public but doted on them and played all their games cheerfully at home. When first introduced, she would look a person up and down, icily judging their looks and class and Were they well bronzed? and say, “Pleasure to know you,” in a tone devoid of pleasure. But then she quickly melted (even too quickly, in Mrs. Marini’s judgment) and used familiar address with everyone. Her English was wretched. Her Italian was worse; dialect had polluted it irreparably. The Lord was punishing Mrs. Marini for having expected ever more refined company by putting her into friendly association with commoner and commoner persons.

The girl didn’t arrive until past one o’clock. She had no discernible accent. She claimed she was a homemaker from Van Buren Heights, although a girl from that neighborhood would never have skulked around here. She looked seventeen. Her brother-in-law, as she clumsily identified him, stayed in the kitchen while the women descended into the basement.

Mrs. Marini had always intended to have brighter lights installed in the dreary stairwell. The open maw of the cellar probably frightened the girls, who rarely believed her when she assured them of how little danger they were in—to an experienced hand, the procedure was straightforward, and in an emergency she could consult with one Dr. Snead of Eastpark; however, she had had no emergencies in many years. Fright was always to be avoided, leading invariably, as it did, to a rigid cervix that submitted only painfully to dilation.

Many years ago, under her direction, Nico had pasted the walls with pale blue silk paper that gave the procedure room, which necessarily had no windows, a lighter affect. She used electric fans to keep it dry in the summer. The cushions on the table were thick and comfortable.

They gave the girl a pair of sterilized rayon hose and underpants from which the crotch was cut away, and arrayed their tools on the linen of the instrument table with their backs turned to her while she undressed.

Mrs. Marini fit the girl’s feet into the stirrups and firmly patted at her arm. She did not ask the girl any more questions about herself, having done all her preliminary questioning two nights before. The girl must not have occasion to tell any more inconsequential lies. Lying was the enemy of the physical relaxation that was central to her method. She was convinced that the majority of the injuries inflicted by otherwise competent physicians were caused by their (male) insensibility to the extreme effect that extreme emotions could have on a girl’s body. Mrs. Marini herself was a vicious judge of everyone, but she had trained herself to hold her judgment in abeyance and even to feel motherly, though the client might in fact be a despicable little harlot.

Whereas the doctors were ashamed, Mrs. Marini was proud, of her skills, manual and emotional; and the feelings of the practitioner never failed to be directly communicated—yes, through the hand—to the subject. Empathy was only another shiny tool, like the speculum, for opening up and evacuating.

The girl’s makeup was fresh and too carefully painted: She had darkened the rings under her eyes in an effort to age herself and had covered her legs with pancake and drawn a line of eyebrow pencil from her heels to the backs of her knees to imitate the seam of a nylon stocking. All this the surgical hose had wrecked by smearing.

Federica scrubbed and scrubbed her hands while Mrs. Marini hung a sanitized pillowcase over each of the girl’s legs.

“Now, if you feel your feet falling to sleep, dear,” Mrs. Marini said, “then you let me know.”

“Do I push?” the girl asked. Her name, she said, was Sophie.

“You must not push,” Federica commanded, turning from the sink.

“You don’t have to do anything at all, dear,” Mrs. Marini said. “Let yourself be limp. You are in a bathtub. The water is just the temperature that you like.”