The Fortunate Pilgrim (21 page)

CHAPTER
13

T
HE DAY THE
letter came from Ravenswood, Octavia did not read it to her mother until all the children were in bed. It was a very short, official communication saying that the father could be released to his family on a trial basis if his wife would sign papers. It made plain that he would need constant care and supervision. With the letter came a questionnaire to be filled out. It asked the ages of the children, the income of the whole family and of each of its members. With it all, the letter made clear that the father was still an invalid, even though he was fit to be released.

Lucia Santa sipped her coffee nervously. “But he is not really well, then, they just want to test him,” she said.

Octavia wanted to be absolutely fair. “He is all right. He just can’t work or do anything. He has to be taken care of like a sick person. Maybe after a while he can go back to work again. Do you want him back?” she asked. She cast her eyes downward and blushed, for she was thinking shameful things of her own mother.

Lucia Santa watched her daughter’s blush with interest. “Why would I not?” she asked. “He is the father of three of my children. He earned our bread for ten years. If I owned a donkey or a horse who had worked so hard, I would treat him kindly when he was sick or in his old age. Why should I not want my husband back?”

“I won’t make any trouble,” Octavia said.

“There will be trouble enough,” Lucia Santa said. “Who can tell, he may do the children harm. And who can live those years over again? We would all have to suffer, risk our lives to give him another chance. No, it’s too much, too much.”

Octavia said nothing. They sat together for hours, or what seemed like hours, Octavia holding pen and ink bottle and writing paper ready to send an answer to the sanitarium.

The mother brooded over her problem. She remembered stories of similar cases, of loved ones returning to their homes and committing murders and other crimes in their madness.

She thought of her daughter Octavia, who would suffer, be driven into leaving her home, to marrying early to get out of the house.

It could not be risked. In full knowledge of what her decision meant (in her mind she saw the image of an animal encaged in iron and brick for countless years), she consigned her husband, the father of her children, the sharer of that one summer of delight, to a human and earthly eternity of despair. Lucia Santa shook her head slowly and said, “No, I won’t sign. Let him stay where he is.”

Octavia was surprised and even a little shocked. The memory of her own father’s death swept over her; she felt again that terrible sense of loss a little girl had felt. What if by some miracle he had been brought back to life, as now they could bring her stepfather back to life? She suddenly thought that she could never look Gino and Sal and little Aileen in the face if she did not bring their father home.

She said, “I think we should talk to Gino and Sal. After all, he’s their father. Let’s see how they feel. Maybe we should bring him home, Ma.”

Lucia Santa gave her daughter a searching look which seemed to judge and find wanting. It was a look that always disconcerted Octavia because it was so impersonal. Then she said, “What can children know? Leave them alone, they will have enough woe later on. And we cannot afford to bring their father home.”

Octavia said softly, bowing her head over her coffee, “Ma, let’s give it a try, for the kids. They miss him.”

When the mother answered her voice was surprisingly contemptuous. She shook her head and said, “No, my daughter, it’s easy for you to be kind and generous. But think: when it all becomes so difficult and you regret your generosity, you will have to suffer. And how angry you will be that your generosity inconveniences you. This has happened to me before. Beware the goodhearted, tender people who give because they know not what their generosity will cost. And then later become angry, spurn you when you count on their humanity. How my neighbors flocked to help me when your father died, how I wept at their goodness. But alas, we cannot be eternally good, eternally generous; we are too poor, we cannot afford it. And even your aunt, who was rich, she rebelled. It is so good—it feels so wonderful to be generous for a short period of time. But as a steady thing, it goes against the grain, it’s against human nature. You will get tired of your stepfather, there will be quarrels, shrieks, curses, and you will marry the first man you meet and disappear. And I will pay for your large, open heart.” She paused. “He will be sick for the rest of our lives.” With these words she condemned and sentenced her husband forever.

The women washed their coffee cups. The mother lingered in the kitchen to wipe off the table and sweep the floor; Octavia went to her room thinking of how she would talk to the children in the morning, realizing as she did so that she wanted to absolve herself from guilt.

In bed Octavia thought of the mother, her callousness, her cold decision. Then she remembered that she had left the letter in the kitchen. She rose and went down the hall in her slip. The light was still on.

Lucia Santa sat at the kitchen table with great bags of sugar, salt, and flour, filling the sugar bowl, the shakers, and copper flour jar. The letter, with its great black official seal and the printed government envelope, lay in front of her. She was staring down at it as if she could read, and seemed to be studying every word. She looked up at her daughter and said, “I’ll hold the letter, you can answer it in the morning.”

Gino, lying awake beside the sleeping Sal, heard everything through the open Judas window between the bedroom and the kitchen. He felt no resentment, no anger at his mother’s decision, only a queasiness like a stomachache. A little later the light went out in the kitchen, he heard his mother go past his bed to her own room, and then he fell into sleep.

Lucia Santa did not sleep. She reached out in the darkness to touch Aileen and found the smooth skin and the bony shoulders, the little body huddled against the coolness of the plaster wall. In the touch of that innocent, vulnerable flesh she drew some strength. This was a life she touched, and in her keeping. She was the protector of them all, she held their fate in her hands. From her would come the good and the evil, the joy and the travail. It was for this she had cast her husband into the pit.

But this was not enough. She brought before her eyes the times he had struck her, cursed his stepchildren, raved through the night and frightened his own children; she remembered his erratic labor, his costly religiosity. But she rejected everything in one despairing inward cry—“Frank, Frank, why didn’t you take care of yourself? Why did you let yourself become so ill?” She remembered his tearing up of his sweat-earned money, the look of hurt pride on his face, and his kindness when she had been a helpless widow. With a great sigh she accepted the truth. She was too weak in resources, too poor, to afford to show mercy to the man she loved. No, no mercy, she thought, no mercy, no mercy. She reached out again to touch the small sleeping body, the new satiny skin of the tiny human being beside her. Then she folded her arms, stared into the darkness, and waited patiently for sleep to come. She had condemned Frank Corbo never to see his children grown, never to share her bed, never to know a grandchild. In Italian, she murmured, “God, God, watch over me,
aiuta mi,
” as if she herself could never hope for the mercy she had refused.

After supper the next night, Octavia took Sal and Gino into the living room to speak to them. They were both a little apprehensive, because Octavia was so sweet, gentle, and schoolteacherish, but when she spoke Gino realized what was coming. He remembered what he had overheard the night before.

As Octavia explained why their father could not come home, Gino remembered the times his father had taken him for a haircut, and how they had watched each other, the little boy’s eyes straight ahead seeing magically in the mirror before him his father sitting on a wire chair, a mirrored wall behind his head. And his father seeing his son’s face in the mirror; though they were both facing the same way, one behind the other, yet they looked at each other without shyness, shielded by glass.

It had always seemed as if this mirror wall which brought them so magically face-to-face protected them enough so that they could study each other’s eyes, recognize that each was a part of the other.

Between them the white-mustached barber snipped hair on the black-and-white-striped sheet and gossiped in Italian with the father. Gino was mesmerized by the snip of the scissors and the soft falling of hair on his shoulders, by the white tiled floor, the white marble counter with its green bottles of hair lotion, all reflected in the mirrors around them. His father would smile at him through the glass wall and try to make him smile, but, protected by the intervening glass, the child would refuse; his face would remain solemn. It was the only time he could remember his father continually smiling.

When Octavia had finished explaining everything, Gino and Sal were ready to go downstairs to play. Their father was sick, which meant he would come back someday, and time had no meaning at that age. Octavia watched them closely for signs of distress. She asked gently, “Do you want him to come home right now?” And little Sal said almost tearfully, “I don’t want him to come home. He scares me.” Octavia and Gino were surprised because Sal had loved the father more than any of the other children.

Gino was uncomfortable because he felt responsible for his father. How many times had his mother said, “You’re just like your father,” when he had refused to do chores, been disobedient, shirked his responsibilities? So he accepted the fact that the troubles of the family all came from his father and so from himself. He said in a low voice, “Whatever Mom wants to do is O.K.” He paused and added, “I don’t care.”

Octavia let them go. She went to the window and saw them come tumbling out of the door below. She felt an overwhelming sadness—not specific, but general, as if her stepfather had suffered some fate common to humanity and that some judgment waited for her, too.

CHAPTER
14

L
ARRY ANGELUZZI BEGAN
to understand something of life when his second child was born and the railroad gave him only three days’ work a week. He also got a look at himself in a human mirror.

One Sunday, on their way to visit a friend, Larry and Louisa stood at the corner of 34th Street and Tenth Avenue waiting for the trolley. Louisa had one child by the hand and he carried the baby. Suddenly Larry saw his kid brother Gino watching them from the other side of the Avenue. On that dark, tough, small boy’s face was a look of bewildered, sad pity and some sort of disgust. He motioned to Gino to come over, and as the boy walked across the Avenue, Larry remembered when Gino had been just a little kid and leaned back to watch his big brother on the horse. He smiled gently at Gino and said, “See what happens when you get married, kid?” Jokingly, not knowing that his kid brother would never forget.

Louisa, her face already bony and dry, frowned at both of them and said roughly, “You don’t like it?”

Larry laughed and said, “I’m only kidding.” But Gino looked at her gravely, bewitched by them both, seeing beyond them into something else.

Gino, out of necessary loyal courtesy, kept them company until their trolley came. Larry thought, He’s growing up; I was working at his age. He asked, “How you doing at high school, kid?” Gino shrugged. “O.K.,” he said.

When Larry got onto the trolley with his family he saw Gino watch after them as they moved away.

Rolling on steel, moving almost magically off from his younger brother in the clear cold air of that Sunday morning, Larry felt a sense of loss; that his life was over. And it was this morning, this encounter, this moment of insight that led to his new way of life, quitting the railroad and his eight years’ seniority and his surely lifetime steady job.

One morning the following week, Larry went down to the
panetteria
for some breakfast buns. He had not worked the night before, the railroad still slow. Guido, the baker’s son, his upper lip hairy with a small mustache, greeted him with real pleasure. They chatted. Guido had quit school to help full time in the bakery. Feeling himself a man of affairs, he asked, “Larry, how’d you like a good job?”

Larry smiled. “Sure,” he said with natural agreeableness, with no intention of leaving the railroad.

Guido said, “Come on.” They went into the back room. There was the
Panettiere,
a glass of anisette before him, chatting with a man his own age, definitely Italian but dressed American, with no trace of the greenhorn; hair trimmed close, tie skinny and plain and solid-colored.

Guido said, “Larry, I want you to meet Zi’ Pasquale, Mr. di Lucca, he grew up with my father in Italy. Zi’ Pasquale, this is my friend, Larry, I told you about.”

Larry flushed with pleasure at the knowledge that people had been talking about him. He wondered if the man was really Guido’s uncle, or whether this was a courteous term of address to a close friend of the family. Larry gave them a big smile and shook hands firmly with the stranger. The
Panettiere
said, “Sit down,” and poured him a glass of anisette. Larry laughed and said, “I don’t drink, I could use a cup of coffee.” He saw Mr. di Lucca looking him over with the frankly appraising stare an Italian father gives the courter of his daughter, eyes narrowed, wary, suspicious, weighing.

Guido served coffee and filled the stranger’s anisette glass. He said casually, “Pa, Zi’ Pasquale told you he was looking for a new man, right, Zi’ Pasquale? I got just the guy, my friend Larry. Remember all I told you about him?”

Both of the older men gave him a tolerant, affectionate smile; the
Panettiere
raised his hands in a gesture of disavowal, and Zi’ Pasquale shrugged as if to say, “No harm—youth.” In Italy things were not done this way. Zi’ Pasquale said in Italian to the
Panettiere,
”This one, he’s a good boy?” The
Panettiere
said reluctantly, “
Un bravo.
#8221; They all smiled at one another. They drank leisurely, and the two older men lit up De Nobili cigars. Everyone could see that Mr. di Lucca was impressed.

Larry was used to it. He had come to know that there was something extremely pleasing in his smile and manner, something that made him instantly likeable to both men and women. He knew this in all modesty, enjoyed it, and was thankful for his gift, which made him even more likable.

“You think you like a job with me?” Mr. di Lucca asked.

Here Larry’s more positive virtues came into play, his instinctive feeling for what was proper with these particular people. This was a personal question. Do you respect me as a man? Do you accept me as a tribal chief, as a second father, as an honorary godfather? If he dared now to ask what kind of a job, how much money, where, when, how, what guarantees, then all was finished. Everything would be over.

So even though he did not want the job, could not conceive of giving up his eight years’ seniority in the railroad, yet out of sheer natural courtesy and meaningless agreeability, Larry said with great sincerity, “It would be a pleasure to work for you.”

Pasquale di Lucca brought both hands together with a great thunderclap of flesh. His eyes flashed, his face took on a look of astonished pleasure. “Now by Christ in Heaven,” he said. “Is it possible that Italians still grow young men like this in America?” Guido burst out laughing with delight, and the
Panettiere
beamed at them all. Larry kept a modest smile on his lips.

“Now I show you what a man I am,” Pasquale di Lucca said. He took out a roll of bills and held out three twenties to Larry, saying, “This is your first week pay. You come to my office tomorrow morning and start work. You wear a suit and tie, neat, not flashy; like an American, like me. Here’s my office.” He took a small card out of the breast pocket of his jacket and gave it to Larry. Then he leaned back in his chair puffing on his cigar.

Larry accepted the money and the card. He was too stunned to say anything further except to murmur his thanks. This was twice the money he earned in the railroad, even full time.

Guido said proudly, “What did I tell you, Zi’ Pasquale?” And Mr. di Lucca nodded his head in agreement.

They all had fresh drinks, and now Larry could ask about the work. Mr. di Lucca explained that Larry would be a collection agent for the bakery union, that he would have a very quiet, easy territory and, if he did well, a more lucrative one in a year or two. He explained that all the bakery owners also paid dues, not just the hired help, and on a higher scale. Larry would have to keep account books like an insurance man, he would have to show tact, be able to pass the time of day, keep on friendly terms with everyone, never drink while working, never get involved with any women in the bakeries. It would be hard work, he would earn his salary. Mr. di Lucca finished his glass of anisette, rose, shook hands with Larry, and said, “Ten o’clock tomorrow.” Then he embraced the
Panettiere
with a manly hug, tapped Guido on the cheek and slipped him a folded bill, saying affectionately, “Work well for your father, eh? He’s too easy, like an American, but if I hear stories—your Uncle Pasquale comes down and makes you into a good Italian son.” Underneath the affection there was iron.

Guido gave him a playful push and said, “Don’t worry about me, Zi’ Pasquale.” He linked arms with him and took him to the door, and they laughed at each other as they went out. Zi’ Pasquale said, “Marry a good Italian girl to help in the store.”

When Guido came back he danced all around Larry shouting, “You made it, you made it.” When he quieted down, he said, “Larry, in two years you got your own house on Long Island. My Zi’ Pasquale is no piker. Right, Pop?”

The
Panettiere
drank his anisette slowly, then sighed. “Ah, Lorenzo, Lorenzo, my brave one,” he said. “Now you will learn what the world is and become a man.”

Larry Angeluzzi had a good living. He slept late, had lunch at home, and then made the rounds of the bakeries in his territory. The Italian bakers were fine, they gave him coffee and cookies; the Polish bakers were sullen but soon warmed to his charm, even though he would not drink hard liquor with them. They delighted in his success with the young Polish girls who came for Coffee An, and stayed until Larry had to move on to his next stop. Sometimes he even used the back room of a bakery for a quick screw, knowing the baker would be delighted to have something on the girl and would himself take her back there regularly.

The Italians paid their dues without question, as befitted people who in the old country gave eggs to a priest for reading a letter and wine to a village clerk for telling them what the laws were. The Poles paid the money just for his company and charm. He had trouble only with the German bakers.

It was not so much that they did not want to pay, but he felt they did not want to pay an Italian. They rarely offered him coffee and buns or chatted to show their friendliness. They paid him as they paid their breadman or the milk guy. That was O.K., he drank too much coffee now anyway, but it made him feel like a gangster.

But maybe he felt this way because he had trouble with only one bakery and that was German. And what made him more uncomfortable for some reason was that this baker made the best bread, the most delicious and generous birthday cakes, the fanciest cookies. He did a tremendous business, and yet he refused to pay any dues. He was the only one Larry could not collect from. When he reported it to Mr. di Lucca, that man shrugged and said, “You make a good living? Earn it. Try a coupla months, then talk to me.”

One day Larry was late on his rounds. On one stop, out of sheer nervousness, he had screwed an extremely ugly girl who then had the nerve to try and make a big deal out of it. It hadn’t helped. He dreaded stopping at Hooperman’s. The short, squat, squareheaded German now actually kidded him, treated him like a jerk, made jokes. It always ended with Larry buying some bread and cookies, not only to show good will, not only because they were the best in the city, but to give Hooperman a chance to say they were on the house and so to start some sort of friendly relationship.

Up to now the job had been great. Larry understood what it was all about but refused to face his own part in it, refused to face the fact that some day he would have to make Hooperman pay. Larry paid Hooperman’s dues himself just to avoid trouble. This was O.K. until the day two other German bakers stiffed him. They told him with a sly grin to ask next week. Larry started thinking about getting back his old job in the railroad.

He walked past Hooperman’s and around the corner. There was the precinct police station house. No wonder the bastard was so brave. Cops right around the corner. Larry kept walking and tried to think things out. If he didn’t make Hooperman pay, it was back to the railroad and the lousy fifteen bucks a week. He would have to wait until Hooperman was alone and tell him that Mr. di Lucca was coming personally. Then he realized with a shock that it was Larry himself Mr. di Lucca would send. Soon he would try to scare the kraut, and if that didn’t work, he would quit. A gangster! How Octavia would scream with laughter. His mother would probably get the
Tackeril
to give him a beating. Ah, hell, it was too damn bad just because of one lousy thickheaded guy.

After walking around an hour he passed the Hooperman bakery window and saw the store was empty. He went in. The girl behind the showcases nodded and he went into the back rooms of ovens and tray-laden tables. And there was Hooperman, guffawing with two guests, the bakers who had stiffed Larry earlier in the day. There was a large tin can of beer on the table and three heavy golden steins circled it.

Larry felt a shock of betrayal, then bitter resentment. The men saw him and they all burst out in unrestrained, delighted laughter. Its very lack of malice was insulting. Larry understood what they thought of him, that they knew him for what he was, that he would never make Hooperman pay, that he was just a kid trying to be a grown-up because he had a wife and two babies.

Mr. Hooperman turned a whoop of laughter into speech. “Oooh, here is the collector. How much I give you today, ten dollars, twenty dollars, fifty dollars? Look, I’m ready.” He stood up and emptied his pockets of change and crumpled wads of green paper money.

Larry could not force a smile, or even his charm. He said as calmly as he could, “You don’t have to pay me, Mr. Hooperman, I just came to tell you you’re out of the union. That’s all.”

The other two men stopped laughing, but Hooperman got hysterical. “I never was in your union,” he roared. “I shit on your union. I never pay dues and I never give free coffee and cake, so shit on your union.”

Larry said, trying one last time to get in good, “I paid your dues, Mr. Hooperman. I didn’t want you in trouble, a good baker like you.”

This sobered the baker. He pointed a finger at Larry. “You loafer,” he said with quiet anger. “You gangster. You try to frighten me, then you try the friend stuff. Why don’t you work like me? Why do you come to steal my money, my bread? I work. I work twelve, fourteen hours, and I must give you money? You little shit you, get out. Get out of my store.”