The Fortunate Pilgrim (25 page)

CHAPTER
18

L
UCIA SANTA ANGELUZZI
-Corbo rested, her shadow thick in twilight. Sitting at the round kitchen table, she awaited the strength to go down on Tenth Avenue and take the cool evening breeze.

During the day, for no reason, she had suffered, in some mysterious way, a blow to the spirit which for this one night had weakened her hold on life. She hid in the empty dark kitchen, out of reach, deaf and sightless to everything she loved and held dear. She yearned to sink into untroubled sleep, where there would not be a single ghost of dreams.

But who can leave the world unguarded? Lena and Sal played in the street below, Gino roamed the city like a wild beast in the jungle, Vincenzo slept defenseless in the back room that had been Octavia’s, waiting to be roused and fed for his four-to-midnight shift on the railroad. Her grandchildren, the children of Lorenzo, waited for her to put them to bed. Lorenzo’s wife, sick and bitter, must be cheered over a cup of hot coffee and restored to some faith in life, must be taught that her dreams of happiness were only fairy tales of girlhood every woman must lose.

Lucia Santa did not know her head was drooping over the great round table. For a moment the cool oilcloth against her cheek comforted her before she fell into that profound slumber in which everything rests except the mind. Her thoughts and cares raced up and up like little waves until they completely possessed her body and made it tremble in sleep. She suffered as she had never suffered when awake. She cried out soundlessly for mercy.

America, America, what different bones and flesh and blood grow in your name? My children do not understand me when I speak, and I do not understand them when they weep. Why should Vincenzo weep, that foolish boy, tears running down cheeks blue with the beard of manhood. She had sat on his bed and stroked his face as if he were still a child, terribly frightened. He had work, he earned his bread, he had a family and a home and a bed to rest his head, yet he wept and said, “I have no friends.” But what did that mean?

Poor Vincenzo, what do you wish from life? Isn’t it enough to stay alive?
Miserabile, miserabile,
your father died before you were born and his ghost shadows your life forever. Live for your small brothers and sister, and then for your wife and children, and time will pass and you will grow old and it will all be just a dream as I am dreaming now.

But never tell him fate is a demon. Vincenzo and Octavia, her best children, and both unhappy. How could this be, when Lorenzo and Gino, those two villains, smiled falsely at her and, holding joy in their teeth, ran through life their own way? Where were God and justice? Oh, but they would suffer too—they were not invincible; the evil are subject to fate. Still, they were her children, and those spermless bitches who whispered that Lorenzo was a thief and murderer were false as God.

No. Lorenzo would never be a real man as the peasant fathers on Tenth Avenue were real men, as her father in Italy was a real man: husbands, protectors of children, makers of bread, creators of their own world, accepters of life and fate who let themselves be turned into stones to provide the rock on which their family stood. This her children would never be. But she was finished with Lorenzo; she had done her duty and he was no longer a real part of her life.

Deep down inside her dream stirred a secret monster. Lucia Santa tried to wake herself up before she could see its shape. She knew she was sitting in her dark kitchen, but thought only a moment had gone by and that now she was about to pick up her backless chair and go down the stairs to the Avenue. Her head fell forward again on the cool oilcloth. The monster rose and took shape.

“You are like your father.” Thus had she always met rebellion in her most dearly beloved son. Gino’s stricken eyes would stay with her as he walked out of the house. But he never held a grudge. The next day he would behave as if nothing had happened.

It was a true curse. He had the same blue eyes, startling in a dark, Mediterranean face; he had the same withdrawn air and reluctance to speak, the same disregard for the concerns of those nearest to him in blood. He was her enemy, as his father before him, and she dreamed vengefully on his crimes: he treated her as a stranger, he never respected her commands. He injured her and the family name. But he would learn, this son of hers; she would help life be his teacher. Who was he to frolic in the streets at night and run in the park all day while his brother Vincenzo earned his bread? He was nearly eighteen; he must learn he could not be a child forever. Ah, if that could only be.

In her sleep Lucia Santa heard the rising monster begin to laugh. What were these petty crimes? Even in Italy there were sons who found pleasure in selfish sloth and dishonor. But now judge the crime for which she had never reproached him and for which he had never suffered, for which there could be no pardon. He had refused to look upon the face of his dead father before it disappeared forever into the earth. And so now in the dream she began to scream and curse him down eternally to the bottomless pit of hell.

Light flooded the kitchen and Lucia Santa really heard steps coming to her door, knew she would awake before she uttered those irrevocable words of damnation. Gratefully she raised her head to see her daughter Octavia standing over her. She had never said those terrible words about Gino; she had not cast her most beloved son into the pit.

Octavia smiled. “Ma, you were groaning so much I heard you all the way down to the second floor.”

Lucia Santa sighed and said, “Make some coffee, let me stay in my own house tonight.”

How many thousands of nights had the two of them sat in the kitchen together?

Through the Judas window opening onto the row of bedrooms they had always listened for the steady breathing of the young children. Gino had been a troublemaker long ago, hiding under the round table surrounded by its huge clawed legs. To Octavia everything here was known. The ironing board, upright and ready in the window corner; the huge radio, shaped like a cathedral; the small bureau, with drawers for tableware, dish towels, buttons, and patching cloth.

It was a room to live in and to work in and to eat in. Octavia missed it. Her immaculate Bronx apartment had a table of porcelain with chromium chairs. The sink glistened white as a wall. Here was the debris of life. After a meal the kitchen looked like a battlefield with scorched pots, greasy bowls slippery with olive oil and spaghetti sauce and enough smeary dishes to fill a bathtub.

Lucia Santa sat motionless, her face, every line of her squat body, showed a terrible weariness of spirit. It was a look that had frightened Octavia as a child, but now she knew that it would pass, that in the morning her mother would rise mysteriously renewed.

Merely to show her sympathy, Octavia said softly, “Ma, don’t you feel good? Should I get Dr. Barbato?”

With deliberate, theatrical bitterness, Lucia Santa said, “I’m sick of my children, I’m sick of my life.” But saying the words cheered her up. Color flooded into her face.

Octavia smiled. “You know, I miss that most—you cursing me all the time.”

Lucia Santa sighed. “I never cursed you. You were the best of my children. Ah, if only the rest of these beasts could behave like you.”

The sentimentality alarmed Octavia. She said, “Ma, you always talk as if they were so bad. Larry gives you money every week. Vinnie hands over the pay envelope without even opening it. Gino and the kids stay out of trouble. What the hell do you want anyway, for Chrissakes?”

Lucia Santa’s body straightened, and her weariness flowed away almost visibly. Her voice grew vibrant as she prepared herself for a quarrel that was really passionate conversation, the pleasure of her life. She sneered in Italian, that language lovely for sneering, “Lorenzo, my oldest son. He gives me ten dollars every week—me, his mother, to feed his poor little fatherless brothers and sisters. But the little whores he runs with, they take the fortune he earns at the union. That poor wife will murder him in his bed. And I, I won’t say a word against her at the trial.”

Octavia laughed happily. “Your darling Lorenzo? Ah, Ma, you’re such a phony. Tonight he comes with his ten-dollar bill and his bullshit and you’ll treat him like a king. Just like those young chippies that fall for his crap.”

Lucia Santa said absently in Italian, “With a husband I thought your mouth would get cleaner as the other got dirty.” Octavia flushed deep red. Lucia Santa was pleased. Her daughter’s surface vulgarity, American, was no match for her own, bred in the Italian bone.

They heard footsteps coming through the rooms and then Vinnie entered the kitchen, his face dazed with sleep. He was wearing only slacks and an undershirt.

He had grown into a short young man with a husky frame on which there was not a single ounce of extra flesh, so that he appeared rawboned and awkward. His face was dark and unhealthy-looking, and he had a heavy shadow of beard. He should have looked fierce and tough with his craggy features, his thick mouth and heavy nose, but the dark wide eyes were peculiarly defenseless and timid and he rarely smiled. Worst of all for Octavia, his personality had changed. He had always had something engagingly sweet and obliging about him; he had always been kind and thoughtful in a completely natural way. But now, though he was obedient to his mother and put himself out for other people, he followed his courtesies with a sort of bitter, mocking complaint. Octavia would much rather he just told everybody to screw off. She worried about him, but he irritated her, too. He was a disappointment. She smiled grimly at the thought. Aren’t we all? She reflected on her husband alone in the Bronx apartment, reading, writing, waiting for her.

Vinnie growled with sleepy irritation. His voice was deeply masculine, yet childish and petulant. “Ma, why the hell didn’t you wake me up? I told you I gotta go out. If I hadda go to work you woulda woke me up on time.”

Octavia said sharply, “She fell asleep. It’s no picnic taking care of you bastards.”

Lucia Santa turned on Octavia. “Why do you pick on him? He works hard all week. He sees his sister, when? And she curses him. Come sit down, Vincenzo, have some coffee and something to eat. Come, my son, and maybe your sister can find a pleasant word for you.”

Octavia said angrily, “Ma, you’re such a phony.” Then she saw something in Vinnie’s face that made her stop. At first, when his mother reproached Octavia, Vinnie looked smugly satisfied, pathetic with gratitude at her sticking up for him, but when Octavia laughed, he had suddenly realized that he was being softsoaped by his mother. He smiled sourly to think that he could be so easily consoled, and then he laughed with Octavia at himself and his mother. They drank coffee and chatted together with that deep familiarity a close family feels, which keeps them from boring each other, no matter how dull the talk.

Octavia saw Vinnie’s sullen face lighten into tranquillity, and she remembered the gentle sweetness. He smiled and even laughed at Octavia’s stories about being a forelady in the dress shop. He made jokes about his job in the railroad. And Octavia realized how much her brother missed her, how her marriage had broken the pattern of the family—and for what? Oh, she knew what it was now; she heeded its call and her body rose and fell in consummating passion and she could not spurn it now as once she had, but still she was not happy.

No, she was not as happy with her husband as she was at this instant, happy that she had lightened the look of suffering and loneliness on her young brother’s face, caught so naked and fresh from sleep. She had wanted to do so much for him, and had done nothing—and for what? The desire for flesh had been too strong for her and she had found a gentle husband who overcame her fears. There would be no children, and thanks to this and other elementary precautions against fate, she and her husband would rise out of poverty to a better life. She would be happy someday.

When Vinnie was dressed, Lucia Santa and Octavia regarded him with the special fondness women of a family have for their young males. They both imagined Vinnie walking down the street and beating girls off with a stick. They assumed he would have a night of pleasant, conquering adventure, among friends who could not fail to admire and love and cherish him for the prince that they, his mother and sister, knew him to be.

Vinnie put on his blue serge suit and his sleazy silk tie with its great swirling patterns of red and blue. He slicked his hair with water, framing his craggy, sensitive face in neatly combed, symmetrical blocks of heavy black hair.

Octavia teased, “Who’s the girl, Vinnie? Why don’t you bring her home?” And the mother said, not sternly, American enough to make a joke, “I hope you picked a good Italian girl, not an Irish tramp from Ninth Avenue.”

Vinnie found himself smiling a pompous, satisfied smile, as if he had a dozen girls at his feet. But, knotting his tie and seeing his face and his phony smile in the mirror, he became depressed and scowled.

He was used to family flattery, to remarks like “Ah, he is the quiet one, the one you never know anything about; that’s the one you have to watch out for; God knows how many girls he has hidden away in another neighborhood.” He couldn’t help looking fatuous under their praise, but how the hell could they believe such things?