The End (32 page)

“Let me ask you something else,” the priest said.

Ciccio said, “All right, Father.”

“What are we making you read all this stuff for, do you think?”

“When you say
for,
I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“Here is what I mean. I’ll tell you. Sometimes when I’m eating an ice cream, I don’t care whether it’s a real ice cream, or whether I’m really tasting it,” the priest said. “But sometimes I care very much. Now, I am a Catholic, you remember, and I believe some pleasures are better than others. And I believe I can cultivate some desires and starve out others. So, supposing I had to choose between the great pleasure of tasting an ice cream with a brain gone smooth, empty of thought, and the great pleasure of, er . . . knowing that I don’t know what an ice cream is, or what taste is, and feeling the desire to know—id est, the dreadful reaching out of my consciousness toward the force that governs the world outside it—which of these desires ought I to cultivate?”

“That’s some riddle you guys made up to catch Jews in the Inquisition.”

“A, B, both A and B, neither A nor B?”

“Do you want to see my horns, Father?”

“Put another way, one might ask, Is it better to feel or to think?”

“That’s easy!” Ciccio said. “To feel.”

17

T
he voice on the line was male, croaking, forthright, unquestionably Palermitano, stentorian, and sad. In the background, Lina heard someone raking gravel.

The man said, “You’re selling a bicycle.”

“Yes, go on.”

“I have the correct number for the woman that’s selling a bicycle?”

“All I do is answer the phone,” Lina said.

“From this point, the transaction proceeds how, I don’t know.”

“You have a conversation face-to-face.”

“We are who?”

“You, the person for whom you wish to buy the bicycle, the friend of mine who’s selling.”

“I don’t get it. What are you doing picking up her phone? What kind of an operation is this? You’re her, aren’t you—I mean, it’s your own bicycle, isn’t it.”

Evidently he was an outsider of the neighborhood, the accent notwithstanding. No one that lived here would have needed to ask if the bicycle was hers. “I’ll talk to my friend about a place and a time,” she said.

“We’re discussing dollars and cents at this meeting?”

“The price is fixed. Up for discussion is whether this bicycle is a good idea in this circumstance. If your friend has been in need of the bicycle longer than twelve weeks, I’m afraid my friend can’t help her.”

“I might say, ‘Don’t worry. I have no doubts this is the right bicycle. Let’s skip to the heart of the matter.’”

“I don’t think my friend is willing to sell her bicycle on those terms,” Lina said.

“A place and a time,” said the man.

“Call back in ten minutes and I’ll let you know.”

“It would be helpful if the place was West Side. There is a little park someplace. There is a little park, actually, on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Auglaize Street.”

“I’m writing this down.”

She hung up the phone and rang Mrs. Marini’s line.

Mrs. Marini said she could do it at ten a.m. the next day.

Lina hung up the phone, smoked a cigarette, knocked over her salt shaker, righted it, swept the salt into her hand; and the phone rang again.

“Tell me it’s better if I don’t attend this meeting myself,” said the man.

“Sir. I pick up the phone, then I put it back down. Do you understand?”

“Well, maybe I won’t come then myself, maybe. Maybe I’ll go do something else, if it’s all the same maybe to you, and let the girl talk to you on her own.”

“That’s as you please,” Lina said, positioning herself in front of the opened window so that when she threw the salt over her shoulder it landed outside in the grass. She asked how her friend would know his friend.

There were some benches around a broken-down fountain, he said. And the girl would have a schnauzer pup on a leash.

The next morning, for a diversion, Lina tagged along with Mrs. Marini on the trolley ride. Wisconsin Avenue was the principal thor oughfare of a neighborhood that had used to be called Old Marsh, or the Bottom Marsh, or the Bottoms. Twice, maybe three times, as a young girl, she’d overheard a very old person on the streetcar say he was getting off at “the Bottoms” or coming from there. It was a name from a lost era. Mrs. Marini was among the last who still called it by its succeeding name, The Hague. Lina herself had always known it as New Odessa, but that name wasn’t long for this world, either. When she and Mrs. Marini crossed Tooley Boulevard, they discovered that the windows of the shops on Auglaize Street were covered with pressboard, the Cyrillic neons were shut off, and they were heading into a part of town where neither of them would have agreed to go if they’d known better.

The girl wasn’t a girl. She was nearly forty. She wore a severely starched blue sundress and had tied a white mohair sweater around her shoulders. She had a pretty face, disfigured by acne scars. A plump woman about Lina’s age, an aunt, accompanied her. The aunt said they’d been led to believe that Lina’s friend was a colored woman. Lina replied that she’d assumed the girl herself was white. The tone of this exchange was of nonchalance, or at most of petty amusement, but it was insincere. The colored women were visibly disturbed to hear that such an immodest payment would be exacted from them. Mrs. Marini asked Lina and the aunt to excuse themselves briefly while she asked the woman a few private questions. Lina, the aunt, and the dog watched in silence, out of earshot, from the opposite lip of the fountain, which was webbed with cracks across its dry concrete basin and festooned with leaves, bird feces, and the splinters of a busted radio.

The streetcar home was a sweltering, flesh-on-flesh affair. A white woman made her son get out of his seat so that Mrs. Marini could sit down. Lina held on to a strap in the ceiling and was pressed in her back, when the car accelerated, by a man whose halitosis she smelled, although she couldn’t see him. Her purse dangled in Mrs. Marini’s face. Mrs. Marini muttered in Italian that when she’d asked the woman if the man in question was exerting unwelcome pressure on her, the woman only said there wasn’t anything more miserable than a yellow baby.

Lina said, “Probably not.”

“What ‘probably’?” Mrs. Marini said testily. “Probably
nothing.
”

The woman seated beside her, with the boy on her lap now, looked at Lina for a moment too long, and when she looked away, she did so with the fake lethargy of a person who has been caught paying attention and tries to defend herself by saying implicitly, I wasn’t looking at you, I was looking at the empty space in front of you.

Then, with neither warning nor perceivable cause, Lina was overcome by a seizure of cramping behind her eyes. She tightened her grip on the strap hanging from the ceiling of the car. She felt a surge of pressure in her brain and a vivid intuition of homesickness and of having been permanently banished—but from where?

Then, just as abruptly, it passed.

Ciccio was a good boy. She would never tell him so, but Mrs. Marini cared for him very much. She did not need to hold forth about her feelings, like a troubadour or a knight-errant. These scenes, such as one saw at the show in which Bertha fell into Bill’s embrace while they blubbered out their sweet nothings, embarrassed her.

Likewise, she had never needed to tell Enzo that—contrary to her early suppositions—she, she . . . well, she did not entirely disapprove of him. Lina was the only person to whom she had ever, as an adult, made the conventional three-word so-called confession. But that was an accident. What she’d meant to imply was, You’re a fool; I love and punish you by saying it; you’re a fool. Although it may not have come out that way. In any event, Mrs. Marini’s behavior in Ciccio’s company was testimony enough, thank you.

He was a gainful tenant, a lifter and carrier of heavy things, a duster of high corners, a painstaking washer of her Dresden china. He listened to directions. He studied these days with a high degree of seriousness. He was not given to the catatonic inbursts to which his mother had been given at his age. With the egregious exception of his demeanor around Lina, he was unfailingly civil to adults. How easy to enumerate points in his favor.

But he must have had a dim view of the adult mind and its powers to see beneath surfaces. He thought he was successfully pulling the wool with respect to cigarettes, but Mrs. Marini knew about the cigarettes, and she knew where he hid them. He even seemed to think nobody had noticed when he moved into her house, when in fact a brief, uncomplicated meeting had taken place two days after the funeral. Patrizia was going back to the farm and wanted to clarify their responsibilities.

The three women had drunk black coffee in Enzo’s (Lina’s) kitchen. Lina was not certain that she would stay. Mrs. Marini could use a man in the house; her fingers were stiffening. For reasons that were unclear to each of them in different ways, Lina and her boy did not get along. So. As a courtesy, they also agreed to let him go on believing he’d orchestrated the whole thing without their permission, because to tell him they’d all agreed on it without his knowing would only demoralize him. Lina would visit regularly. Who knew. Perhaps a reconciliation could be effected. Meanwhile, sub rosa, Mrs. Marini would consult with them on the larger custodial decisions.

When Ciccio had first moved in, Mrs. Marini considered making a formal agreement with him according to which he must never come downstairs between certain nighttime hours, especially if he perceived that there were visitors, unless he heard a violent commotion. But he was too old and curious for that to work. Couldn’t she, then, simply unfold the whole business to him, was he too young for that? Perhaps not. He could keep his mouth shut. This required a conference. Lina didn’t care either way, but her mother was vehemently opposed. Mrs. Marini asked for her reasons, and Patrizia said, “Because no.” Until now their Ciccio plebiscites had all ended in consensus, but this time Lina let her mother have her way, and Mrs. Marini was outvoted.

Mrs. Marini then let it be known that her door should not be knocked on anymore, nor should she be telephoned directly. For now, Lina was to be telephoned, a code was to be employed, and a meeting would be scheduled. When they had had business during that spring and summer, Federica obtained the use of the cellar of a widow aunt of her husband’s who had indebted herself to Mrs. Marini some decades before.

However, that August, after Lina took a call from an anonymous man that eventually entangled them with a Negress from the West Side—a client Mrs. Marini should never have taken on, because one loose Negro would surely lead to a gaggle of others—they ran into the snag, which she should have foreseen, of Federica’s aunt-in-law refusing to let a colored person into her house.

They had scheduled the procedure for the afternoon of the Assumption, when the neighborhood would be mad with crowd and their clients’ stepping out of the trolley at Sixteenth Street would be a less noteworthy thing to witness than usual. Lina said they could use her house if they had to, except that Ciccio was always prowling around there, thinking they didn’t notice, stealing his old things. His room on Twenty-second was slowly emptying, and his room on Twenty-sixth was slowly filling up. (How could Mrs. Marini not take offense at being thought so blind?) And in the warm weather, he spent the daytimes reading in the backyard of his former home, like a cat spraying the bushes. He might show up wherever they did the thing. She needed a better plan.

Before Mrs. Marini knew it, the day had arrived. She sat in the kitchen gnawing a biscuit for breakfast and jotting the letters in the tiles of the crossword with the authority of a woodpecker hammering a tree. Ciccio was still asleep upstairs. She looked at the weather forecast. It read:
Sweltering, dismal; evening thunderstorms.
But she didn’t care. She felt absolutely terrific for no particular reason, or, rather, for innumerable reasons. She was rich; her neighbor’s yawp ing dog was dead of cancer; Eisenhower had humiliated Stevenson; even the smell of the newspaper ink was divine. Everything that touched her brain delighted it. The past was dead. She was alive!

The front page of the newspaper, above the fold, showed a photograph of a beaming young veteran in a tuxedo; however his limbs had been amputated. Ghastly.

“They call it an infantry because it’s made up of children,” commented a Nico-ish voice, but she ignored it.

Then she turned the paper over to read the other items.

“Ooh!” she exclaimed. “I know that name!”

It was the fifteenth of August, Assumption Day.

The name she had read was Mimmo LaGrassa. Three weeks after the armistice had been reached, and one day before he was to be released from a prisoner-of-war camp, he had died in Korea. He was the son of the baker Rocco.

How dreadful.

Well, not really. She hardly remembered the dead boy. She hardly knew Rocco. She still regarded her day with blithe curiosity. Instead of invoking sympathy, reading this article only made her feel certain close-to-home affections more sharply. They were caramel affections, from which she would have liked to unstick herself with a phrase, but none was at hand. She had noted these affections before and had diagnosed them by means of an elaborate analogy:

All people, having reached a certain age, developed presbyopia. Muscles in the eye weakened over time and the lenses lost their elasticity. It was not to be confused with hyperopia, although both implied an inability to see clearly what was near. Similarly, in Mrs. Marini’s experience, all people, having reached a somewhat later age, regardless of the temperament of their youths, became sentimental. In many cases the tender emotions of the later years were directed merely inward, at the old person herself. Often, however, she had found, this increase of tenderness was directed outward, toward other people or toward the visible, living world as such. According to her optometrist, all very old people who boasted that they didn’t need eyeglasses (often illiterates) were faking. She suspected but could not demonstrate that this increased sentimentality had a causal relationship with the disorder, so common among the elderly, that was characterized by the slow onset of amnesia and madness, and thence eventually to death. Therefore she tried to steer clear of circumstances in which her ever more heightened faculties of pity were likely to be excited. However, with Ciccio living in her house, that was more difficult to do.