The End (22 page)

“May I scratch my knee?” she simpered.

“Which one, child?” Federica asked, shaking the water from her hands.

The girl pointed, and then she let out a shriek of laughter; she snorted and spat through her tight lips. It was the laugh of abject silliness that an older child sometimes makes when she plays with a younger one; after which, when Mother shows her contempt, the child wonders why when she used to be smaller and used to laugh in the same way, Mother had smiled and used nice words. The laugh wasn’t uncommon in here right at this juncture, when the legs were exposed but nothing had been done to cause the client pain. The idea was to show the girl the fawning mother’s face, although it might embarrass one to pretend.

Federica reached under the cloth and scratched and patted down the leg of the girl, breathing deeply, slowly, and audibly, as Mrs. Marini had trained her to do.

The girl wore an inexpressive half smirk, and Mrs. Marini indicated with her eyes that Federica should stall until the smirk abated.

Finally, Federica sat down on a stool between the stirrups. “How do you feel?” she asked. “Do we get you something to drink?”

“Thank you, no,” said the girl.

Mrs. Marini continued to slowly rub the papery skin of the side of her hand on the girl’s hairless arm. “Now you’re going to feel a pinch, and you might want to bear down, but I want you to think of the pinch as a fist you can open up if you please,” she said, demonstrating in the air with her knotty hand.

Federica stooped, peering, and inserted a dilating rod with a stab, like a teacher indicating a pupil with her chalk.

The girl hissed.

“If you want to curse, dear, why, that’s fine. Nobody will hear you.”

“Thank you, no,” said the girl with composure.

“Or count, or say a rhyme.”

“No. Thank you.”

“Or cry, if you like,” said Federica, repeating the stab with a thicker rod.

“No,” she said, from the back of her throat.

“That’s very good,” Federica said. “What a good, good girl you are.”

Years ago, Mrs. Marini had worn a nurse’s costume. It fit her poorly, so she had adjusted it. Nico said it made her look like an iceberg. To be addressed as Nurse when she had for many years allowed her clients to call her Madam Doctor was the cost of a modest advance in her method and a significant new source of referred clients. It was also a penance for a septic case she might have prevented if she had spoken more carefully.

The girl had ratted her out to a tokologist at the Lutheran hospital, who had then tracked her down at Nico’s store. Nico attended the register while they talked in the workshop. The doctor knew all about her practice, as did his colleagues, but he had never had occasion to clean up a mess of hers before, which, ironically, had led him to seek this meeting.

“I was struck dumb when she told me you were responsible,” he said. “But while I was performing the therapeutic, I recovered a foreign object. That was when I concluded she was lying to me. I suppose she was too proud to say she had tried it herself and failed.”

“What did she look like?”

The doctor gave a precise depiction, which she recognized immediately.

“She thought my fee too high,” Mrs. Marini said.

“And you turned her out?”

“Of course not. I asked her what she could afford. And that was my error, that word,
afford.
I engaged her shame, and she walked off. What was the object?”

“A pencil tip.”

She made a little smile.

“It appears your record is better than mine, which I find difficult to believe, but there it is. You couldn’t possibly duplicate the sterility of a professional office, for example.”

“All of you were so surprised about germs.” In the air, she drew a broad circle around the doctor’s head to include the whole of the medical profession. “One does not need a theory of invisible animals to know it is repugnant to eat with a dirty fork.”

He proposed an exchange. He was interested in what she knew. She would “assist” him in his surgery with the cases for which he was able to get hospital approval. Most often a father or husband had purchased a determination that the woman’s life was threatened. Mrs. Marini learned a little about a topical anesthetic treatment and a slower, less painful means of cervical dilation.

When they parted ways, he gave her an assembly of elegant steel tools.

“I already own all these,” she said.

“Anyway, they’re spares.
Curette
derives from the Latin for ‘to take care of.’”

“I
know,
” she said, exasperated, and shook his hand.

10

A
letter arrived in October. Enzo read it through in a glance. Then he read it over more slowly, while an invisible figure behind him wrapped its thick arm around his throat, crushing his windpipe, so that he felt the swell of blood in the eyes and the expulsive twisting of the stomach muscles and the strange jubilation of a man who is being strangled.

It was late on a Sunday night after he and the boy had come home from a weekend of fourteen-hour days harvesting the grapes on his mother-in-law’s farm, which once again the bank was threatening to take from her. Before he found the letter, he had sent the boy to bed, but he himself couldn’t sleep and had lain down on the cruddy floor of the kitchen, screwing one leg over the other so that the vertebrae snapped, and smoking in the dark while the moon came in.

He felt he ought to clean the house, but he didn’t have the talent for it. Mildew thrived in his dishrags and left an odor on the water glasses. A pale film, strewn with hairs, accreted to the toilet rim. It was a house, for all the world, a clapboarded three-bedroom with dormers gaping out of either half of its face; the address painted on the porch post was 123. But to him it was less a house than a building. Furniture rambled from room to room. The boy shouldn’t have had to live like that, but slovenliness in a household was like contempt between married people, profoundly sinking its roots long before it sprouted.

He got up from the floor and sat at the kitchen table, playing cards awhile by himself and meditating with his nose on a glass of well water from the farm. Then he drank it down. Black ten on a red jack. The motor of the icebox burned natural gas to keep his water cold. All the unusable cards in his hand reappeared, one after another, and he was beaten. It was the lack of aces that did him in. His fingers were stained from the grapes.

Then he went out to look in the mailbox at the curb, having neglected to check it since the week before.

The surfaces of the neighborhood were plated with frost. The grass cracked underfoot, and the air smelled of nothing but cold and the absence of plant life. Everything was lusterless and tinny.

In the mailbox he found a bill from the fire-insurance company and a letter, corrugated as though it had been rained on.

The letter bore an Italian airmail stamp, and when he opened it under the streetlight he discovered to his astonishment that it was from his father—whose last letter had reached him six years ago, not long after the war, a letter, like many others, that Enzo had not answered. The present letter announced that his father would leave Naples for New York on the thirtieth of September, would spend a week with his niece in Yonkers, and would then make his way to the address on this envelope. It was hoped that the receiver of the letter might know where he might locate his only living son, Mazzone, Vincenzo, who had once sent him mail from this address. He would wire with the specifics of his arrival once he reached New York.

His father’s name was Francesco. The boy, being a firstborn, had had to be named for him, but they called him by the diminutive, Ciccio, and his name at school was Frank.

Three weeks passed and still Enzo received no further word. He feared his father’s ship had sunk while he also hoped for that very thing.

On the twenty-sixth of October, he returned from work to find, inside his storm door, a telegram including the Yonkers, New York, phone number of the niece, his cousin. Enzo had never heard of her; she must have been born after he left. His feet itched inside the threadbare socks he wore, which failed to soak up his sweat, and there was mortar clumped in his hair. Did he call the number? Yes, he did.

A woman answered briskly and put his father on the line.

The engine room of the ship on which his father had been traveling had caught fire in the mid-Atlantic. It was towed back eastward to the Azores, he said. While there, he had eaten exceptionally well and cheaply. The fruit was of the highest quality; however, the wine was rancid. He had then taken the only available United States- bound liner, headed for New Orleans, where on his arrival he found the stench of the city was so foul that he ate nothing for two days but stale salt crackers. Finally, he had taken a train to New York.

He whispered over the line that Enzo’s cousin was obese and unwelcoming. He was keen to get out of New York as quickly as possible.

The conversation was clipped, respectful, bureaucratic. Enzo had trouble understanding his father’s dialect and spoke it haltingly. He had not talked with a blood relation in twenty-four years.

His father said evenly, “I probably won’t recognize your face. I want you to wear the yellow scarf your mother made you.”

“I lost it,” Enzo said. He had thrown it away he couldn’t remember when.

“Very well. Borrow a yellow scarf. I’ll be in the backmost car.”

Enzo informed him that he was separated from his wife, who lived in Pittsburgh, in the adjoining state of Pennsylvania. Also, he reminded him about the boy and the boy’s name.

His father said he certainly did not need to be reminded, as Enzo’s very brief letter announcing the splendid news of the birth of the boy, albeit two years after the fact, was the last they had heard from him.

But about his brothers? Enzo inquired.

No, no. His brothers were quite well. They were employed by the state in the northern city of Bergamo—one was an officer of the national police, the other drove a mail truck. Unfortunately, they were so distant that Enzo’s father saw them just twice a year, at Christmas and the summer holidays.

“I only indicated they were dead to state my case with more force,” he explained. “I assumed it was you who had died. After all, I received no response to my letters of September 1939, November 1940, December 1945, and March 1946.”

There was a crack on the line, which began faintly to pick up a radio station playing Caribbean dance music. The effort of declaiming all of the syllables of all of the dates at once had taxed his father’s breath. Enzo heard the air filling the old man’s lungs again and took the opportunity to slam the receiver down on the carriage.

The telephone table stood just inside the front entrance of his house, underneath the banister of a staircase that led to the three bedrooms on the upper story. Above the telephone, a calendar dangled on an old curtain hook that was strung through one of the spindles of the banister. He had been given the calendar by a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses: a blond lady of thirty-five who visited him on his front porch, together with her husband, who wore a synthetic brown suit and held the hand of a boy toddler dressed in just the same fashion as he. The father and the boy stood behind the mother, grimly staring Enzo down while the woman explained to him that soon, very soon, his house and all the people therein and all the material wealth he had saved would be destroyed by the Lord his God.

The calendar page that was now showing depicted four brown-skinned people bent obliviously over a bean field while a volcano erupted in the background. However, it was the page for July.

Enzo looked at the stairs and climbed them, dodging Ciccio’s textbooks and the rank pads of his football uniform, which obstructed the steps.

He drew a bath and peeled off his clothes and got in, soaping and rinsing himself expeditiously, shaving his face and combing the mortar out of his hair underneath the water. Carmelina used to whet his razor for him, but now he did it himself.

He tied on his bathrobe and looked into the boy’s room, where Ciccio lay on the floor reading a color comic book, on which the ash of his cigarette had fallen. On the writing desk, the teeth of the secondhand typewriter that Enzo had bought for him, and that he had to be forced by threats and beating to use, were jammed together, so that all of them pointed toward the opening that exposed the paper but none of them reached it, like a mob trying to shove its way onto a bus.

“Get your goddamn books off my stairs,” Enzo said with fatigue.

“All right,” Ciccio said, turning a page, intent while he read the pictures.

Enzo said, “Do like I say: I want you to put some Brilliantone in the utility sink and fill in the water and wash off all that padding you put inside the football clothes.”

Before the boy could answer him, Enzo closed the door and descended the stairs, taking each step more slowly than the last. His tongue was swollen as though a bee had stung it.

Did he ring the number again, incautious, while he sweated through his robe and the calendar pages ruffled in the wind from the open window down the hall? Yes.