The End (33 page)

She made a good-faith effort to distract herself with the news of the day but, reaching the sports section, was distracted from her distraction. She successfully refrained from rereading the article about the baker’s boy but then removed her shoes and put on slippers so as not to wake Ciccio as she climbed the stairs to his room. His door was ajar. His flattop was crimpled against the pillow. He had to sleep crookedly on the bed, with his legs folded up, because his body was too long for the mattress. (Lincoln, having been shot, was carried out of Ford’s Theatre and into a nearby boarding house, where, because of his extreme height, he had to be placed diagonally across the bed in which he died.) She knew that to watch this boy sleeping was to ingest a microscopic volume of cyanide, but among her faculties that were in decay was the discipline to avoid scenarios she well knew might lead to the ruin of her mind.

At length, he awoke. His face was red from the pressure of the pillow; his eyes remained closed as he sat up; his pajama shirt was too small under the arms.

She backed out of the doorway before he could see her scrutinizing his head and descended the stairs. She went out to refresh herself in advance of the midday heat. She felt both disgusting and giddy as she paced beneath the flapping Assumption Day banners on the avenue.

The bakery was closed. Scandal! When, by seven in the morning, had it ever been closed? But given what she’d read in the paper she ought to have known it would be closed. About twenty people conferred on the sidewalk. Very soon there were twice as many, then twice as many again. She was surprised so many intended to offer Rocco their condolences. She would have thought people would avoid him. Nobody knew him well. But company loved misery, so it appeared.

Then Rocco appeared, suddenly, among them, while the clock in the church was tolling. He wore a little bowler hat that was thirty years out of date and a woolen winter suit with vertical stripes that belonged on a financier from the gay nineties rather than on his peasant self—stunted, sallow, with fearing blue eyes that were like jewels in a coal bin. He tried to tell them it was all a misunderstanding, that his Mimmo was very well, that it was a fiasco, a bookkeeping error, a fraud, a boondoggle, but no one believed him.

... When, while trying to solve a simple problem, such as how to distract a distractible teenaged boy for a summer afternoon, a simple solution proved elusive, the most common mistake was to entertain progressively more complex schemes. One must keep one’s wits about one. One must await. First and foremost one must have one’s eyes open for shifting circumstances, especially seemingly unrelated circumstances, which might contain the simple seed of the simple solution that the Fates would later appear to have had in mind all along.

She had turned away from Rocco with the rest of the crowd and pointed herself homeward when at last patience and flexibility of mind paid off.

The solution was not to send Ciccio away, but to send herself away and take him with her. Federica would have to do the procedure on her own.

All Mrs. Marini needed, then, was an occasion to tether the boy to herself from one o’clock until nightfall. It came to her. She paused, turned, and headed back through the dispersing crowd as step-by-step her quandary tied itself into a bow. She reached the baker and told him he must come to lunch at her house that afternoon. He demurred, sipping at his empty coffee cup and waving her off with the saucer. She asserted herself. At last, he accepted. She hurried back up the avenue.

Federica didn’t need her anymore, she knew what she was about. Mrs. Marini’s own role of late was only to keep the client calm, to coo at her sweetly, and if Freddie needed a hand, Lina could lend it as well as any other cool-witted woman. Lina was already going to be in the house; she was a quick study. And then the next time Lina could, yes, why, yes, the next time Lina could—the blood rushed in her prickling eyes—
yes.

She could realize her forgotten ambition of years ago: Lina could succeed her.

“But, but . . . ,” stammered the fraudulent ghost in the shaggy Nico mask.

“I have won!” she said, suspending her disbelief about who it really was and throwing her arms about its hairy neck. “Love me!”

“I
do
love you, Coco,” it said, submitting to her kisses and elevating its monstrous brows as it said
“do.”
(However, Nico would never have said that, any more than she would have said it herself. He would have simply kissed her once, hard, on the mouth, and told her to go on talking, while he sat across the table and listened intently. That was his way, to sit and listen, chewing a piece of fruit. But she was ninety-three years old, and the poor creature who was his wife and longed so much to talk to him again was imprisoned in the crevasse. Whatever she had wanted to say to him had long ago withered on its stalk, been plowed under the ground, been eaten and excreted by worms, and sprouted again in strange and unexpected shapes.)

By the time she got home, Ciccio had given up waiting on her for his breakfast and had fried his own eggs, five of them. The shells were in the sink, along with the crusts of half a loaf of white bread; he did not like seeds. She explained Rocco’s misfortune. Curiously, the boy made no response and only went on feeding shamefacedly at the coagulated mound on his plate.

In order to do their share to help him, she and Ciccio would entertain the baker for an afternoon, understood? Rocco was acutely unwell and so, necessarily, in an egoistic frame of mind. Their job was to give him something outside himself to think about. Was she making herself clear? She trusted that Ciccio had no other plans for the afternoon.

He chewed, and chewed, and swallowed; he and Nino were going to go fish the quarry in Eastpark, he said, but he could beg off if it was important to her. (Here her circumspection was vindicated. “Fishing at the quarry” was what he often said he was going to do when his real intention was to read conspicuously in Enzo’s garden.)

“Very good,” she said. “We shall keep him talking. We shall keep his glass full. He’ll get lazy and want to stay. We shall make absolutely sure he remains with us at least until five and then we shall all three walk together through the feast. What’s this look of disenthusement?”

“Nothing.”

“Fie on your nothing.”

“Nothing, I just . . .
plop, plop, plop,
go the minutes sometimes, you know.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Who is this other Cheech?” No, but she must resist. He was a millstone, a chore, a bacterium.

He said, “I told you, nothing happened.”

“This Cheech of the sorrowful countenance,” she went on, even so.

“Nothing, I just—‘Where’s Pop?’ I ask myself sometimes, like a boob.”

The big bastard. He was trying to kill her.

18

D
on’t look at him. Don’t let any type of snoopy slinking outside the walls of his home stick its face into his bulwark of hedges and spy Eddie through the kitchen window—half-naked and hangdog, bent over in front of the electric icebox, in the house all empty but for him this Assumption morning, the appliance making its buzz—and see him poking at the wax-paper shroud of the bacon slab, wishing he knew how he might extract edible food from the package. Leave Eddie in peace to be a mopey and sweat alone. Retirement was a humbug. There were 604 individual plants in his garden out back. He had entirely routed the aphids from his cucumbers. His tomatoes consulted him before blooming. And then?

Phyllis was fed up with the feast, which was every year in the misery of summer, when who wants to eat standing up and squished in with the thousands and their foul breath on you? And the scorched-meat stench, anyway, arguing Phyllis had said, and the rabble that these days came to gape and point. Why not use the car for the purpose for which the car was intended—was Phyllis’s yesterday idea—namely, for driving to Sandusky and then tying their kids to a roller coaster and letting them splash about in the poisoned lake? Um, was it not, tomorrow, a day of holy obligation? pious Eddie had asked to know. With or without, she said, their wet-blanket father. He had sired too many children too late in life.

Don’t look at him in his gotchies, out of bed at the crack of eleven in the a.m., having slept through the cooler hours of garden watering and several other hours thereafter. Don’t watch him, the abject, turn around and let the interior of the icebox chill his ass, failing to remember, Did Phyllis boil the bacon and then slice or the vice versa? Had the kids been made by Phyllis the Forsaker to file into their papa’s room single file in the dawnlight hour, when usually he was out pruning and hydrating—except not today, which he’d dreaded this morning in his dreams all night, the house unquickened by the pitter-patter of his wee ducklings and so still, for which reason he’d slept until the heat woke him—and gently wake Papa and gently kiss his nose before they left deserted Eddie to his dozing?

What was this? Even the salami drawer was empty. How about, while packing the picnic basket, somebody thinking to leave Papa a sandwich or an olive, perchance?

Well, now, let’s pull a chair to the icebox and collect ourselves. Let us observe the humid condense in droplets on the shells of our eggs and consider, levelheadedly, the limited time of our misery. Most of the morning he had already killed in bed. He was due at the church at five o’clock to hear mass, don his vestments, get blessed, and proceed with the rest of the sweepers and their brooms through the street, forcing the crowd to part so that the saint could pass. Once he returned home from his duties, the kids would be safely in the house, bouncing on the sofa, pouring into his ears their sweet noise.

Only, then, how many hours to dispose of? Six. Less than. Surely endurable.

Let us furthermore remind ourselves, as exasperated Phyllis reminds us with her daily exclamation, while circumspect us creeps out the door, kitchen knife in hand, to police the shrubs, that
nobody is out there looking at us!

He was an ordinary Eddie, of no consequence. The palliative counsel of his Phyllis regarding how Eddie could teach himself not to see figures in the hedges that weren’t really there was for Eddie to seat himself and ask himself, What was there to see in this house? What was valuable to steal? Who was pretty to be peered in on and slobbered over? Say what you would about Phyllis the Spendthrift, Phyllis who exclaimed at a high pitch at their babies; she said so often the thing he needed somebody to tell him. She thought of him. For, look! Hiding behind the milk bottle in the icebox was a pot, and tied with a length of sewing thread to the handle of the lid of the pot was a note, punctured daintily at the top so that the thread could pass through, reading, in her hand,
For Eddie.
And inside was oxtail stew.

He was an ordinary Eddie warming his stew on the stove—this she knew he knew how to do—and nobody was outside looking in. An ordinary day with somewhat less to do, was all, and somewhat fewer to accompany him.

Lina received a telephone call on Assumption morning. It was Mrs. Marini, exclaiming that she had figured out what to do with Ciccio for the afternoon. Lina didn’t see why such an improbable threat merited such a tall fence, but never mind. (It was true, what they all thought, that Lina wouldn’t object to seeing the back of Ciccio before too long. The others found him interesting, but she did not. She did not find him horrid, either. He did not remind her of better or worse days. He did not give her a feeling of contempt. He did not give her any feeling at all.) Mrs. Marini kept calling Ciccio “him,” and “the boy,” as though his name had slipped her mind, and Lina had to wonder if Mrs. Marini had at last begun to forget things.

Lina did not say into the receiver, I have been ruing your death for thirty years.

She had thrown away the outdated religious calendar that hung from the balustrade over the telephone table and had replaced it with a philodendron plant in a wicker basket. Mrs. Marini elaborated her idea while Lina admired the plant, which was somehow thriving, although she could not remember having watered it.

Soon it became evident that the plot had unspoken goals. Mrs. Marini would not be Federica’s attendant, Lina would, and surely a first time would lead to a second and a third. In this way, Lina suspected, she would learn the procedure, would share in the proceeds, would grow accustomed to the income (she was now living on the last of Enzo’s life insurance), and would perhaps be tricked into staying in town.

She leaned back on two legs of a chair, her feet on the telephone table, trying on the idea like a hat in a store, while Mrs. Marini schemed. Only one element of the plot agreed with Lina right away: Federica was her kind of girl. She and Lina used to ride the trolley together—oh, it was twenty years ago, at least—from the drapery dealer’s warehouse, and Freddie would make sniping judgments, in dialect, of the other passengers. She was a Siracusana, too, by way of Indianapolis, and Akron, and here.

“We shall keep him talking. We shall keep his glass full,” Mrs. Marini explained.

But Lina felt she was also saying, And in so doing we shall make me unnecessary so I can die.

Federica arrived at noon with her armaments. The glinting, metallic materialness of them—an attitude of ancient authority and craft—their
hingelessness,
was sickening.

And sickeningly beautiful. Some of them (one in particular, a scoop) spoke their functions openly, in grunt words. Others suggested only purposeless, calibrated violence. But she couldn’t deny there was something beautiful here, timeless and human. A collection of simple levers shaped to fit the shape of women.

The cheese they ate at lunch after the salad was an Emmentaler, imported from Switzerland, with a musky taste so subtle Mrs. Marini could pick it up only if she exhaled through her nose while she chewed. It did not really go with the peaches, but the peaches were seasonable, and, anyhow, the niceties of cuisine were lost on her guest of honor. The baker had not eaten a raw green leaf in five years, he said. She thought the caverns of his mind must be very dark and cold. She imagined they were made of sandstone and inside them, prehuman creatures clad in animal skins sat in the dirt scratching pictures of bison on the wall with sticks and sacrificing their infant children to invented gods.