The Fortunate Pilgrim

CHAPTER 1

LARRY ANGELUZZI SPURRED his jet-black horse proudly through a canyon formed by two great walls of tenements, and at the foot of each wall, marooned on their separate blue-slate sidewalks, little children stopped their games to watch him with silent admiration. He swung his red lantern in a great arc; sparks flew from the iron hoofs of his horse as they rang on railroad tracks, set flush in the stones of Tenth Avenue, and slowly following horse, rider and lantern came the long freight train, inching its way north from St. John’s Park terminal on Hudson Street.

In 1928 the New York Central Railroad used the streets of the city to shuttle trains north and south, sending scouts on horseback to warn traffic. In a few more years this would end, an overhead pass built. But Larry Angeluzzi, not knowing he was the last of the “dummy boys,” that he would soon be a tiny scrap of urban history, rode as straight and arrogantly as any western cowboy. His spurs were white, heavy sneakers, his sombrero a peaked cap studded with union buttons. His blue dungarees were fastened at the ankle with shiny, plated bicycle clips.

He cantered through the hot summer night, his desert a city of stone. Women gossiped on wooden boxes, men puffed cigars of the De Nobili while standing on street corners, children risked their lives in dangerous play, leaving their blue-slate islands to climb on the moving freight train. All moved in the smoky yellow light of lamp posts and the naked white-hot bulbs of candy-store windows. At every intersection a fresh breeze from Twelfth Avenue, concrete bank of the Hudson River, refreshed horse and rider, cooled the hot black engine that gave warning hoots behind them.

At 27th Street the wall on Larry Angeluzzi’s right fell away for a whole block. In the cleared space was Chelsea Park placed with dark squatting shapes, kids sitting on the ground to watch the free outdoor movies shown by Hudson Guild Settlement House. On the distant giant white screen, Larry Angeluzzi saw a monstrous horse and rider, bathed in false sunlight, thundering down upon him, felt his own horse rise in alarm as its tossing head caught sight of those great ghosts; and then they were past the intersection of 28th Street, and the wall had sprung up again.

Larry was nearly home. There was the pedestrian bridge that spanned Tenth Avenue on 30th Street; when he passed beneath that bridge he would be home, his work done. He set his cap at a jauntier angle, rode straight in the saddle. All the people sitting on the sidewalk from 30th to 31st Streets were relatives and friends. Larry made his horse gallop.

He passed swiftly beneath the bridge, waved to the children leaning on its rails above his head. He made his horse rear up for the people on the sidewalk on his right, then turned the animal left into the open railroad yards that formed a great spark-filled plain of steel down to the Hudson River.

Behind him the huge black engine chugged white clouds of steam, and as if by magic, the bridge and its children vanished, leaving behind them thin beautiful screams of delight rising to the pale, almost invisible stars. The freight train curved into the yards, the bridge reappeared, and scores of damp children hurtled down the stairways to run along the Avenue.

Larry tied his horse to the hitching post by the switchman’s shanty and sat on the bench against the shanty wall. On the other side of the Avenue, painted on a flat screen, the familiar world he loved came alive inch by inch.

The brightly lit bakery was near the corner of 30th Street, its festooned lemon-ice stand surrounded by children. The Panettiere himself filled white-ridged paper cups with cherry-red, pale-yellow and glittering-white crystals of ice. He scooped generous portions, for he was rich and even went to race tracks to squander his money.

Next to the bakery, toward 31st Street, was the grocery, its windows filled with yellow logs of provolone in shiny, waxy skins and prosciutto hams, meaty triangles hanging in gaily colored paper. Then there was the barber shop closed for business but open for card playing, the jealous barber even now alert for any freshly cut heads that did not bear the mark of his scissors. Children covered the pavement, busy as ants, women, almost invisible in black, made little dark mounds before each tenement door. From each mound a buzzing hum of angry gossip rose to the summer, starry sky.

The dwarf-like switchman came from the tracks and said, “No more trains tonight, kid.” Larry unhitched his horse, mounted, then made the animal turn and rear up.

As the horse rose in the air, the row of tenements, the western wall of the great city, billowed, tilted toward Larry like some fragile canvas. In the open window of his own home, on the top floor of the tenement directly opposite, Larry saw the dark shape of what must be his little brother Vincent. Larry waved but there was no answering motion until he waved again. In the wall there were only a few scattered panes of yellow light. Everyone was down on the street, everyone was watching him. He struck his horse across the neck and galloped up the cobblestones of Tenth Avenue to the stable on 35th Street.

Earlier that evening, in twilight, when Larry Angeluzzi saddled his horse in St. John’s Park, his mother, Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo, also mother of Octavia and Vincenzo Angeluzzi, widow of Anthony Angeluzzi, now wife of Frank Corbo and mother of his three children, by name Gino, Salvatore and Aileen, prepared to leave her empty flat, escape the choking summer heat, spend her evening with neighbors in quarreling gossip and, most of all, to guard her children playing in the darkness of the city streets.

Lucia Santa was at ease tonight, for summer was the good time—the children never ill with colds or fevers, no worries about warm coats, gloves, boots for the winter snow and extra money for school supplies. Everyone rushed through supper to escape the airless rooms and move with the tide of life in the streets; there were no evening quarrels. The house was easily kept clean since it was always empty. But, best of all for Lucia Santa, her own evenings were free; the street was a meeting place and summer was a time when neighbors became friends. So now, heavy jet-black hair combed into a bun, wearing a clean black dress, she picked up the backless kitchen chair and went down the four flights of stairs to sit on the Avenue.

EACH TENEMENT was a village square; each had its group of women, all in black, sitting on stools and boxes and doing more than gossip. They recalled ancient history, argued morals and social law, always taking their precedents from the mountain village in southern Italy they had escaped, fled from many years ago. And with what relish their favorite imaginings! Now: What if their stern fathers were transported by some miracle to face the problems they faced every day? Or their mothers of the quick and heavy hands? What shrieks if they as daughters had dared as these American children dared? If they had presumed.

The women talked of their children as they would of strangers. It was a favorite topic, the corruption of the innocent by the new land. Now: Felicia, who lived around the corner of 31st Street. What type of daughter was she who did not cut short her honeymoon on news of her godmother’s illness, the summons issued by her own mother? A real whore. No no, they did not mince words. Felicia’s mother herself told the story. And a son, poor man, who could not wait another year to marry when his father so commanded? Ahhh, the disrespect. Figlio disgraziato. Never could this pass in Italy. The father would kill his arrogant son; yes, kill him. And the daughter? In Italy—Felicia’s mother swore in a voice still trembling with passion, though this had all happened three years ago, the godmother recovered, the grandchildren the light of her life—ah, in Italy the mother would pull the whore out of her bridal chamber, drag her to the hospital bed by the hair of her head. Ah, Italia, Italia; how the world changed and for the worse. What madness was it that made them leave such a land? Where fathers commanded and mothers were treated with respect by their children.

Each in turn told a story of insolence and defiance, themselves heroic, long-suffering, the children spitting Lucifers saved by an application of Italian discipline—the razor strop or the Tackeril. And at the end of each story each woman recited her requiem. Mannaggia America!—Damn America. But in the hot summer night their voices were filled with hope, with a vigor never sounded in their homeland. Here now was money in the bank, children who could read and write, grandchildren who would be professors if all went well. They spoke with guilty loyalty of customs they had themselves trampled into dust.

The truth: These country women from the mountain farms of Italy, whose fathers and grandfathers had died in the same rooms in which they were born, these women loved the clashing steel and stone of the great city, the thunder of trains in the railroad yards across the street, the lights above the Palisades far across the Hudson. As children they had lived in solitude, on land so poor that people scattered themselves singly along the mountain slopes to search out a living.

Audacity had liberated them. They were pioneers, though they never walked an American plain and never felt real soil beneath their feet. They moved in a sadder wilderness, where the language was strange, where their children became members of a different race. It was a price that must be paid.

In all this Lucia Santa was silent. She waited for her friend and ally, Zia Louche. She rested, gathering up her strength for the long hours of happy quarreling that lay ahead. It was still early evening, and they would not return to their homes before midnight. The rooms would not be cool before then. She folded her hands in her lap and turned her face to the gentle breeze that blew from the river below Twelfth Avenue.

A small, round, handsome woman, Lucia Santa stood at the height of her powers in health, mental and physical; courageous and without fear of life and its dangers. But not foolhardy, not reckless. She was strong, experienced, wary and alert, well-equipped for the great responsibility of bringing a large family to adulthood and freedom. Her only weakness was a lack of that natural cunning and shrewdness which does so much more for people than virtue.

When she was only seventeen, over twenty years ago, Lucia Santa had left her home in Italy. She traveled the three thousand miles of dark ocean to a strange country and a strange people and began a life with a man she had known only when they had played together as innocent children.

Shaking her head at her own madness, yet with pride, she often told the story.

There had come a time when her father, with stern pity, told her, his favorite daughter, that she could not hope for bridal linen. The farm was too poor. There were debts. Life promised to be even harder. There it was. There could be found only a husband witless with love.

In that moment she had lost all respect for her father, for her home, for her country. A bride without linen was shameful, shameful as a bride rising from an unbloodied nuptial bed; worse, for there could be no recourse to slyness, no timing of the bridal night near the period of flood. And even that men had forgiven. But what man would take a woman with the stigma of hopeless poverty?

Only the poor can understand the shame of poverty, greater than the shame of the greatest sinner. For the sinner, vanquished by his own other self, is in one sense the victor. But the poor are truly vanquished: by their world, by their padrones, by fortune and by time. They are beggars always in need of charity. To the poor who have been poor for centuries, the nobility of honest toil is a legend. Their virtues lead them to humiliation and shame.

But Lucia Santa was helpless, though her sulky, adolescent rage endured. Then a letter from America; a boy from the neighboring farm, her companion when they were both little children, wrote and asked her to join him in a new land. It was all done correctly through both fathers. Lucia Santa tried to remember the boy’s face.

And so one sunny Italian day Lucia Santa and two other village maidens were escorted to the town hall and then to the church by their weeping parents, aunts, and sisters. The three girls went on board ship, brides by proxy, sailing from Naples to New York, by law Americans.

IN A DREAM Lucia Santa entered a land of stone and steel, bedded that same night with a stranger who was her legal husband, bore that stranger two children, and was pregnant with the third when he carelessly let himself be killed in one of those accidents that were part of the building of the new continent. She accepted all this without self-pity. She lamented, true, but that was not the same thing; she only begged fate for mercy.

So then, a pregnant widow, still young, with no one to turn to, she never succumbed to terror, despair. She had an enormous strength, not unusual in women, to bear adversity. But she was not a stone. Fate did not make her bitter; that was left to friends and neighbors—these very neighbors who so intimately shared the summer night.

Ahh, the young wives, the young mothers, all the other young Italian women in a strange land. What cronies they were. How they ran to each other’s apartments, up and down the stairs, into the adjoining tenements. “Cara Lucia Santa, taste this special dish”—a platter of new sausage, Easter pie with wheat germ and clotted cheese and a crust glazed with eggs, or plump ravioli for a family saint’s day, with a special meat and tomato sauce. What flutters, what compliments and cups of coffee and confidences and promises to be godmother to the yet-to-be-born infant. But after the tragedy, after the initial pity and condolences, the true face of the world showed itself to Lucia Santa.

Greetings were cold, doors were shut, prospective godmothers disappeared. Who wished to be friendly with a young, full-blooded widow? Husbands were weak, there would be calls for assistance. In the tenements life was close; a young woman without a man was dangerous. She could draw off money and goods as the leech draws blood. They were not malicious, they showed only the prudence of the poor, so easy to mock when there is no understanding of the fear which is its root.

One friend stood fast, Zia Louche, an old, childless widow, who came to help, stood godmother when the fatherless Vincenzo was born and bought her godson a beautiful gold watch when he was confirmed so that Lucia Santa could hold up her head! for such a magnificent present was a mark of respect and faith. But Zia Louche was the only one, and when mourning time had passed Lucia Santa saw the world with new and wiser eyes.

Time healed the wounds and now they were all friends again. Perhaps—who knows?—the young widow had been too harsh in her judgment, for these same neighbors, true, in their own self-interest, helped her find a second husband who would feed and clothe her children. There was a marriage in church. These same neighbors gave her a glorious wedding-night feast. But Lucia Santa never let the world deceive her again.

AND SO ON this heavy summer night, with her first batch of children grown and safe, her second batch of children no longer infants except for Lena, and with some money in the post office; now, after twenty years of struggle and a fair share of suffering, Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo stood on that little knoll of prosperity that the poor reach, reach with such effort that they believe the struggle is won and that with ordinary care their lives are safe. She had already lived a lifetime; the story was over.

ENOUGH. HERE CAME Zia Louche, completing the circle. Lucia Santa paid attention, prepared to enter the torrent of gossip. But she saw her daughter Octavia coming from the corner of 30th Street, past the Panettiere and his red glass box of pizza and pale tin cans of lemon ice. Then Lucia Santa lost sight of her daughter; for one blinding moment her eyes were filled by the Panettiere’s wooden tub, brimming with red coppers and gleaming silver fishes of dimes and nickels. She felt a quick, hot surge of passionate anger that she could never possess such treasure and that the ugly baker should find fortune so kind. Then she saw the Panettiere’s wife—old, mustached, no longer able to bear children—guarding that wooden tub of copper and silver, her wrinkled shell-lidded dragon eyes flashing fire in the summer light.

Lucia Santa felt Octavia sitting beside her on the backless chair; their hips and thighs touched. This always irritated the mother, but her daughter would be offended if she moved, so she accepted it. Seeing her daughter so oddly handsome, dressed in the American style, she gave the old crony Zia Louche a smile that showed both her pride and a hint of derisive irony. Octavia, dutifully silent and attentive, saw that smile and understood it, yet she was bewildered once again by her mother’s nature.

As if her mother could understand that Octavia wanted to be everything these women were not! With the foolish and transparent cleverness of the young, she wore a powder-blue suit that hid her bust and squared the roundness of her hips. She wore white gloves, as her high school teacher had done. Her eyebrows were heavy and black, honestly unplucked. Hopelessly she compressed the full red lips to an imaginary sternness, her eyes quietly grave—and all to hide the drowning sensuality that had been the undoing of the women around her. For Octavia reasoned that satisfying the terrible dark need stilled all other needs and she felt a frightened pity for these women enchanted into dreamless slavery by children and the unknown pleasures of a marriage bed.

This would not be her fate. She sat with bowed head, listening, Judas-like; pretending to be one of the faithful, she planned treason and escape.

Now with only women around her, Octavia took off her jacket; the white blouse with its tiny red-ribboned tie was more seductive than she could ever know. No disguise could hide the full roundness of her bust. The sensual face, crown of blue-black curls and ringlets, great liquid eyes, all mocked the staidness of her dress. With malice she could not have made herself more provocative than she did in her innocence.

Lucia Santa took the jacket and folded it over her arm, an act of love that was maternal, that meant possession and dominance. But above all an act of reconciliation, for earlier that evening mother and daughter had quarreled.

Octavia wanted to go to night school, study to become a teacher. Lucia Santa refused permission. No; she would become ill working and going to school. “Why? Why?” the mother asked. “You, such a beautiful dressmaker, you earn good money.” The mother objected out of superstition. This course was known. Life was unlucky, you followed a new path at your peril. You put yourself at the mercy of fate. Her daughter was too young to understand.

Unexpectedly, shamefacedly, Octavia had said, “I want to be happy,” and the older woman became a raging fury, contemptuous—the mother, who had always defended her daughter’s toity ways, her reading of books, her tailored suits that were as affected as a lorgnette. The mother had mimicked Octavia in the perfect English of a shallow girl, “You want to be happy.” And then in Italian, with deadly seriousness, “Thank God you are alive.”

IN THE COOL evening air Octavia accepted her mother’s act of peace, sat gracefully, hands folded in her lap. Remembering the quarrel, she mused on the mystery of her mother’s speaking perfect English when mimicking her children. Out of the corner of her eye Octavia saw Guido, the dark son of the Panettiere, wavering through the warm summer night toward the light of her white blouse. In his dark, strong hand he bore a tall paper cup of fruit ice, lemon and orange, which he gave her, almost bowing, whispering hurriedly something that sounded like “Don’t spoil your shirt,” and then hurrying back to the stand to help his father. Octavia smiled, took a few mouthfuls out of politeness, and passed the cup to her mother, who had a passion for ices and sucked on the cup, greedy as a child. The buzz of the old women’s voices went on.

Her stepfather turned the corner of 31st Street and entered the Avenue, wheeling the baby carriage before him. Octavia watched him go from 31st Street to 30th and back again. And as her mother’s irony bewildered her, this tenderness of the stepfather confused her emotions. For she hated him as someone cruel, villainous, evil. She had seen him give blows to her mother, act the tyrant to his stepchildren. In the faded memories of Octavia’s childhood his courting of her mother followed too swiftly the day of her real father’s death.

She wanted to look at the sleeping baby, the little sister she loved passionately, though she was her stepfather’s child. But she could not bear speaking to the man, looking into his cold blue eyes and harsh angular face. She knew her stepfather hated her as she hated him and that each feared the other. He had never dared strike her as he sometimes struck Vinnie. And she would not have minded his blows to his stepson if he had been paternal in other ways. But he brought presents for Gino and Sal and Aileen and never for Vincent, though Vincent was a child still. She hated him because he never took Vincent for walks or haircuts with his natural children. She feared him because he was strange—the evil mysterious stranger of story books, the blue-eyed Italian with the Mephistophelean face; and yet she knew that really he was an illiterate peasant, a poor, contemptible immigrant who gave himself airs. One day she had seen him on the subway pretending to read a newspaper. She had rushed to tell her mother, laughing, contemptuous. Her mother had only given her a curious smile and said nothing.

BUT NOW ONE of the black-clad women was telling a story about a villainous young Italian girl (born in America, naturally). Octavia attended. “Yes, yes,” the woman said. “They were married for a month, they had finished with their honeymoon. Oh, she loved him. She sat on his lap in his mother’s home. When they visited she played with his hand. Like this—” two gnarled hands with warty fingers linked themselves lovingly, obscenely, in the storyteller’s lap— “and then they went to dance, in the church. The foolishness of those young priests who do not even speak Italian! Her husband won a prize for entering the door. He took the prize and dropped to the earth, dead. His poor heart, he was always sickly. His mother had always warned him, cared for him. But now. The young bride, dancing with another man, is told. Does she rush to the side of her beloved? She shrieks. She cried, ‘No, no. I cannot.’ She fears death like a child, not a woman. The loved one lies in his own piss alone, but she no longer loved him. She cries out, ‘No, I will not look at it.’ ”

Slyly Zia Louche, her tongue rolling up both meanings, said, “Ah! You may be sure she looked at It when It was alive.” A great burst of coarse laughter from all the women filled the Avenue, drawing jealous looks from other circles of women. Octavia was disgusted, angry that even her mother was smiling with delight.

To more serious things. Lucia Santa and Zia Louche stood fast against the rest of the circle on a point of ancient history, the exact details of a scandal twenty years ago across the sea in Italy. It amused Octavia to see her mother defer to Zia Louche and the old crone valiantly do battle for her mother, each of them treating the other like a duchess. Her mother turning to Zia Louche and asking respectfully, “E vero, Comare?” And Zia Louche always answering imperiously, “Sì, Signora,” showing no callow familiarity before the others. Octavia knew the relationship behind this, her mother’s gratitude for that valuable alliance in the hour of her most terrible misfortune.

But the quarrel was too finely drawn and Octavia became bored. She got up to look at her baby half sister, staring down at the carriage, not greeting her stepfather. She gazed down at the baby girl with an overwhelming tenderness, an emotion she did not even feel for Vincent. Then she walked toward the corner of 31st Street to look for Gino, saw him playing, saw little Sal sitting on the curb. She took Sal back to his mother. Vinnie was missing. Looking up, she saw him far above her, sitting on the window sill of the apartment, dark, motionless, guarding them all.

Frank Corbo, somber, watched his big stepdaughter lean over his baby. Strange with blue eyes, object of amusement (what Italian male wheeled his baby in the summer night?), illiterate, his mind mute, he saw the beauty of the stone city in darkness, felt the hatred of his stepdaughter without returning hatred. The harsh thin face concealed a wordless and consuming anguish. His life was a dream of beauty felt and not understood, of love twisted into cruelty. Countless treasures went by like shadows, the world was locked away. In search of deliverance, he would leave the city tonight and desert his family. In the early morning hours, while it was still dark, he would meet a farm truck and disappear without a word, without quarreling or giving blows. He would work in the brown and green fields of summer, gain peace from love, restore his strength.

He suffered. He suffered as a deaf-mute suffers who would sing seeing beauty, who cannot cry out in pain. He felt love and could not give caresses. There were too many people sleeping in the rooms around him, too many beings walked the streets around him. He dreamed terrible dreams. Tapestried on black, his wife and children circled him round, and from their foreheads each drew a dagger. He had cried out.

It was late, late; the children should be in bed, but it was still too hot. Frank Corbo watched his son Gino run crazily in some sort of tagging game incomprehensible to the father, as was the child’s American speech, as were the books and newspapers, the colors of the night sky, the beauty of the summer night and all the joys of the world he felt cut off from, all colored with pain. The world was a great mystery. Vast dangers that others could guard their children against would bring him and his loved ones into the dust. They would teach his children to hate him.

But still, the father, never knowing he would be saved, wheeled the carriage back and forth. Not knowing that deep down in his blood, in the tiny mysterious cells of his brain, a new world was forming. Slowly, day by day, pain by pain, beauty by lost beauty, the walls of the world he feared so much were crumbling in the timelessness of his mind, and in a year a new fantastic world would spring up, himself the god and king, his enemies startled and afraid, his loved ones forever lost and yet that loss of love not felt or mourned. A world of such chaotic pain that he would be drowned in ecstasy, mystery and fear banished. He would be free.

But it was like magic, and no hint or warning could come beforehand. Now, this night, he put his trust in one summer of tilling the earth, as he had done so long ago, a boy in Italy.

THE WORLD HAS a special light for children, and sounds are magical. Gino Corbo moved through the clang of engines, circles of mellow lamp-post lights, heard young girls laughing, and played his game so intently that his head ached. He ran back and forth across 31st Street, trying to capture other children or surround them. But someone always backed against a wall, hand outstretched. Once Gino was trapped, but a taxi cut his opponents off and he ran back to his own sidewalk. He saw his father watching and ran to him shouting, “Gimme a penny for lemon ice.” Snatching the coin, he ran along Tenth Avenue and planned a beautiful trick. He tried to run past his mother and her friends. Zia Louche grabbed his arm and pulled him off his feet, her bony fingers a trap of steel.

His dazed, impatient eyes saw a circle of old women’s faces, some hairy and mustached. Frantic to be away, afraid the game would end, Gino tried to run. Zia Louche held him like a fly, saying, “Rest—sit with your mother and rest. You’ll be sick tomorrow. Feel how your heart is beating.” And she put her withered claw upon his chest. He pulled violently. The old crone held him and said with ferocious love, “Eh, come è faccia brutta.” He understood she was calling him ugly, and that made him still. He stared at the circle of women. They were laughing but Gino did not know they laughed with delight at his fierce desire, his blazing eyes.

He spat at Zia Louche, the fake spit of Italian women that shows contempt in a quarrel. It got him free, and he was so quick that his mother hit his face only a glancing blow as he sped away. Around the corner, along 30th Street to Ninth Ave-nue, up the Avenue to 31st Street, and then through 31st Street to Tenth Avenue he would go; having traveled the four sides of the city block, he would swoop into the game out of the darkness and with one masterly stroke shatter the enemy.

But as he ran full speed toward Ninth Avenue, a line of alien boys formed a wall against him. Gino pumped his legs higher and faster and burst through, shattered them. Clutching hands tore his shirt, the wind rushed against his face. On Ninth Avenue the boys came after him, but when he turned into the darkness at the top of 31st Street they did not dare to follow. Gino stopped running and walked softly along the stoops. He was on the final side of the square and below him, at the foot of the street, near Tenth Avenue, painted into the dim yellow cones of light cast by lamp posts, his friends scurried to and fro like little black rats, still playing. He was in time.

He rested in darkness and then went very softly, slowly, down the street. In a basement room he saw a little girl leaning against a wall half white, half electric blue. She rested her head against her arm upon the wall, hiding her eyes from the cold, artificial light of the room, empty, deserted behind her. Gino knew she was playing hide and seek, not crying, and that if he waited, the deserted room would come magically alive with shrieking girls. But he did not stop, not knowing he would always remember the girl alone, hiding her eyes against a blue and white wall; desolate, never changing, as if by not stopping he left her there forever, enchanted. He went on.

A dim patch of light made him pause. He shivered. Sitting at the window, leaning out of her street-level flat, an old Irish crone rested her head on a furry pillow and watched him move past her down the empty silent street. In that weak yellow light her head was bony with age, her thin, whiskered mouth bloody with the light of a holy red candle. Behind that feral face, faintly visible in the shadows of her room, a vase, a lamp, and a graven image gleamed like old bones. Gino stared at her. The teeth bared in greeting. Gino ran.

Now he could hear the shouts of his friends; he was near the circles of light on Tenth Avenue. He crouched on the steps of a cellar, hidden, powerful, ready to strike. He never thought to be afraid of the dark basement below or of the night. He forgot his mother’s anger. He existed only for this moment and the moment he would enter the pool of light and shatter it.

High over Tenth Avenue, Gino Corbo’s half brother, Vincenzo Angeluzzi, thirteen years old, brooded to the softened, whispery sound of the summer night that floated up to him. He brooded on his window sill, the long line of rooms behind him dark and empty, the door from the hall to the kitchen securely locked. He was self-exiled.

The dream of summer, freedom, and play had been taken from him. His mother had informed him that in the morning he would start working for the Panettiere, and work until school started in the fall. He would carry heavy baskets of bread in the hot sun while other boys swam in the river, played stickball and “Johnny Ride the Pony,” and hitched onto the backs of trolley cars to see the city. There would be no sitting in the shade eating lemon ice or reading by the wall of Runkel’s factory or playing “Bankers and Brokers” and “Seven-and-a-half” for pennies.

A watcher on the western wall of the city, everything weighed down his soul and spirit, the wasteland of railroad yards, steel tracks, deserted box cars, engines giving off dirty red sparks and low hoots of warning. The Hudson was a black ribbon beneath the cragged Jersey shore.

He dozed on his window sill, and the babel of voices rose like a faint shout. Far down the Avenue he saw the red lantern of a dummy boy leading his freight train from St. John’s Park. The children below him played on, and Vincent waited with gloomy satisfaction for their shouts of joy, savoring his bitterness at not sharing their pleasure. And then the children were screaming and scrambling up the steps of the bridge to wait for the damp cloud of steam that would make them invisible.

Vincent was too young to know that he was melancholy by nature, that this distressed his sister Octavia so that she brought him presents and candy. When he was a toddling infant Octavia used to take him into her bed, tell him stories, and sing songs so that he would go to sleep with a remembrance of smiles. But nothing could change his nature.

Below, he could hear Zia Louche quarreling shrilly and his mother’s strong voice supporting her. The resentment came that this old crone was his godmother and that the five-dollar gold piece she gave him every birthday must be paid for with a kiss—a kiss he gave only to make his mother happy. He thought his mother beautiful, though she was fat and always dressed in black, and he always obeyed her.

But Zia Louche, ever since he could remember, had made him hate her. Long ago when he played on the kitchen floor between his mother’s feet, Zia Louche would study him. The two women would be talking violently, without their public formality, recalling with gusto their misfortunes through the years. There would be a silence. The two women would look at him thoughtfully, sipping coffee. Then Zia Louche would sigh through age-browned teeth and say with hopeless, angry pity to the little boy, “Ah, miserabile, miserabile. Your father died before you were born.”

That was the climax; the old crone went on to other things, leaving him bewildered and watching his mother’s face go pale and her eyes turn red. She would reach down to touch him, but she never spoke.

Down in the street Vincent saw his sister Octavia get up to look at the baby. He hated her, too. She had betrayed him. She had not protested their mother’s sending him to work. Then the dummy boy rode under the bridge, and Vincent saw his brother Larry riding like a real cowboy on a black horse.

Even from so far up he could hear a loud clatter of hoofs on cobblestones. The children disappeared and the bridge vanished in a cloud of steam from the engine. With a great shower of sparks, the train slid into the railroad yards.

It was late. The night air had cooled the city. His mother and the other women picked up their stools and crates, called to husbands and children. His stepfather wheeled the baby to the tenement door. It was time to get ready for bed.

Vincent left his window sill and went back through the bedrooms to the kitchen. He unlocked the door to the hallway, opening the house for his family. Then he took the thigh-sized loaf of Italian bread and sliced off three thick, crusty chunks. Over these he poured red wine vinegar, then thick, yellow-green olive oil. He stood back and scattered salt over all three, inspecting them with a satisfied air. The coarse bread was a lovely red dotted with blots of greasy green. Gino and Sal would be delighted with this bedtime snack. They would all eat together. He waited. From the street, through windows still open and coming down the corridor of rooms between, he heard Gino’s voice in a loud continuous scream.

That scream froze Lucia Santa with the baby in her arms. Octavia, on the corner of 30th Street, turned toward 31st. Across the Avenue Larry wheeled around on his horse. The father, his temples bursting with fear, started to run and curse. But the child’s scream was one of hysterical triumph. Gino had shot out of the darkness and circled his enemies and was screaming, “Burn the city, burn the city.” So ending the game, he could not stop screaming the magic words or stop running. He aimed himself at his mother’s enormous menacing figure with great leaps into the air, remembered his insult to Zia Louche, and swerved away, through the door and up the stairs.

Lucia Santa, with every intention of striking him to the ground, stood overwhelmed by a fierce pride and tenderness at her child’s wild joy, the spirit that she must someday break. She let him pass unharmed.

The Neapolitan Italians dissolved from the dark streets and left the city to the clatter of hoofs on cobblestones as Larry Angeluzzi galloped his horse to the stable on 35th Street.

CHAPTER 2

THE ANGELUZZI-CORBO family lived in the best tenement on Tenth Avenue. There was only one apartment to each of the four flights so windows opened to the west on Tenth Avenue and to the east on the backyards, giving cross-ventilation. The Angeluzzi-Corbos, by having the whole floor—and the top floor at that—were able to use the back of the hallway for extra storage space. The icebox, a bureau, countless cans of tomato paste, and boxes of macaroni were stacked against the wall, for though the apartment consisted of six rooms, they were crowded for space.

The apartment was shaped like a long E with the middle prong missing. The kitchen formed the lower shelf; then the dining room, the bedrooms and the living room, with its windows facing on Tenth Avenue, made the long vertical line; and Octavia’s small, doored bedroom off the living room was the top prong of the E. Gino, Vinnie, and Sal slept in the living room on a bed that folded up into an upright dolly. This was put in a corner during the day and covered with a made-over drapery. The parents slept in the bedroom first on the line, and Larry in the next one. Then came the dining room, which was called the kitchen—it had a great wooden table, for eating and living—and at right angles to that was the real kitchen, with its boiler, sink, and stove. By the standards of the neighborhood, the apartment was wastefully commodious, and an example of Lucia Santa’s unthriftiness.

OCTAVIA PUT BABY Aileen on her mother’s bed and went into her own room to change into a house dress. When she came out the three boys were already sound asleep, their great bed having been unfolded onto the middle of the living room floor. She went down the corridor of rooms to the kitchen to wash her face. Her mother sat in the dining room, waiting, sipping a small glass of wine. Octavia knew her mother would stay up to finish their quarrel and that afterward, like conspirators, they would make plans together for the family’s fortune—a house on Long Island, college for the brightest child.

Lucia Santa began with intended conciliation, saying in Italian, “The baker’s son, he has his eye on you. Does he give you ices to make sure you won’t speak to him?” She enjoyed her irony, but paused to listen intently at a sound from the bedroom. She asked worriedly, “Did you put Lena in the middle of the bed? She won’t roll off?”

Octavia was furious. She could forgive the deliberate teasing, though her mother knew her aversion to the young men of the neighborhood. But she herself had given her little half sister the name Aileen. After long consideration Lucia Santa had consented. It was time to be American. But the name could not be said by an Italian tongue. Impossible. And so it had been shortened to the familiar Lena. Lucia Santa, after some valiant tries to please her daughter, one day lost her temper and shouted in Italian, “That is not even American.” And so the baby was Lena to everyone except the other children of the family. Octavia’s hand was in their face when they took such liberties.

Mother and daughter prepared for battle. Octavia patted her curls, then took her fingernail kit from a shelf in the kitchen. She said in meticulous, contemptuous English, “I’ll never marry one of these guineas. They just want a woman they can treat like a dog. I don’t want what you had in your life.” She began an elaborate operation on her nails. She would paint them tonight. It would annoy her mother.

Lucia Santa watched her daughter with exaggerated operatic calm, letting her breath go short and heavy. They resembled each other very much in anger—black liquid eyes flashing; full, sensuous features deadened with rage and sullenness. But when the mother spoke, her voice was reasonable.

“Ah,” she said. “This is how a daughter speaks to her mother in America? Brava. You would make a fine schoolteacher.” She bowed her head coolly to her daughter. “Mi, mi dispiace. I, I don’t care for it.” And the young girl knew that another such insolence would bring her mother upon her like a cat, hand open in her face. Octavia was not afraid, but she was dutiful within reason; and she knew that her mother, the family chief, leaned heavily on her, respected her, would never side with the outside world against her. She felt guilt at her disloyalty because she thought her mother’s life a waste.

Octavia smiled to make her words less cruel. She said, “I just meant I don’t want to get married or have children if I do. I don’t want to give up my whole life just for that.” In the last word she expressed her contempt and also her hidden fear of what she did not know. Lucia Santa looked her American daughter up and down. “Ah,” she said, “poor child of mine.” Octavia grew hot with a rush of blood and was silent. The mother thought of something else, rose, went into the bedroom, and returned with two five-dollar bills in the postal savings book. “Here, quick—put it in your dress before your father and brother come. Bring it to the post office tomorrow at work.”

Octavia said casually but with venom, “He’s not my father.”

Not the words but the quiet hatred behind them brought quick and passionate tears to the mother’s eyes. For only the two of them could remember Lucia Santa’s first husband; only the two of them had really shared that first life, suffered together. He was the father of three children, but only this child could hold his memory between them. To make it worse, Octavia had loved her father with passion, and his death had affected her greatly. The mother knew all this; she knew that the second marriage had destroyed some feeling in her daughter for herself.

The older woman said in a low voice, “You’re a young girl, you don’t understand the world. Frank married a widow desolate with three small children. He gave us our bread. He protected us all when no one except Zia Louche would even spit on our doorstep. Your own father was not as beautiful as you think. Ah, I could tell you stories—but he’s your father.” The tears were gone now and Lucia Santa wore the familiar mask of remembered sorrows, a mask of pain and rage which always distressed the young girl.

They had this quarrel many times and found the wound always fresh.

“He won’t help,” Octavia said. She was young, pitiless. “You make the poor kid, Vinnie, work for that lousy baker. He won’t have any fun this summer. And meanwhile, your beautiful husband, all he can do is be a janitor for free work. Why can’t he find work? Why is he so goddamn proud? Who the hell does he think he is? My father worked. He died working, for Chrissakes.” She paused to hold back her tears.

Then she went on quietly, as if she believed she could really convince her mother, “But him, he lost his job on the railroad just to be smart. The boss tells him, ‘Don’t take all day to get a pail of water,’ and so he took the pail and never went back. He thought that was so funny, he was really proud of that. And you never said a word. Not a goddamn word. I would have locked him out, I’d never let him in the house. And I goddamn sure hell wouldn’t let him give me another baby.” She said this scornfully, with a look meaning she would never let him commit a dark act of communion and domination that filled the night. But now her mother had lost patience.

“Talk about something you understand,” Lucia Santa said. “You are a young, stupid girl and you will be old and stupid. Christ give me patience.” She finished her wine in one swallow, and sighed wearily. “I’m going to bed. Leave the door open for your brother. And my husband.”

“Don’t worry about our beautiful Lorenzo,” Octavia said. She dabbed paint on her nails. The mother stared with distaste at the bright redness, came back into the room.

“What is it now with Lorenzo?” she asked. “He stops work midnight. Why shouldn’t he be home? All the girls are off the street except those little Irish tramps on Ninth Avenue.” She added with mock fervor, “Thank Jesus Christ he only ruins good, decent Italian girls.” She smiled with a touch of pride.

Octavia said coolly, “Larry might stay at the Le Cinglatas’. Mr. Le Cinglata is in jail again.”

The mother understood immediately. The Le Cinglatas made their own wine and sold it by the glass in their own home. In short, they were bootleggers violating the Prohibition laws. Only last week the Le Cinglata woman had sent Lucia Santa three great flagons, supposedly because Lorenzo had helped unload a wagon of grapes. And Signora Le Cinglata had been one of the three married in church by proxy those long years ago in Italy. The shyest, the coyest of them all. Good. There was nothing to be done tonight. The mother shrugged and went to bed.

But first she went into the living room and covered the three boys with a sheet. Then she looked out the open window, down into the dark street, and saw her husband still pacing up and down Tenth Avenue. She called softly, “Frank, don’t stay too late.” He did not look up at her or see the sky.

Finally she was in bed. And now she was reluctant to go to sleep, for it seemed to her that as long as she was awake she controlled, in some measure, the actions of her husband and son. She felt annoyance, a real displeasure, that she could not make them leave the world and enter their home, sleep when she slept.

She reached out. The infant was safely trapped against the wall. She called out, “Octavia, sleep, go to bed, it’s late. You work tomorrow.” But really because she could not sleep when anyone in the house was still awake. And then her daughter passed through the room without a word, rebellious.

In the heavy summer darkness sighing with the breath of sleeping children, Lucia Santa pondered over her life. Marrying a second husband, she had brought sorrow to her first child. She knew Octavia held her guilty of not showing proper grief. But you could not explain to a young virginal daughter that her father, the husband whose bed you shared, whom you were prepared to live with the rest of your life, was a man you did not really like.

He had been the master, but a chief without foresight, criminal in his lack of ambition for his family, content to live the rest of his life in the slum tenements a few short blocks from the docks where he worked. Oh, he had made her shed many tears. The money for food he had always given, but the rest of his pay, savings-to-be, he spent on wine and gambling with his friends. Never a penny for herself. He had committed such an act of generosity in bringing Lucia Santa to the new country and his bed, beggar that she was without linen, that he had no need to be generous again. One deed served a lifetime.

Lucia Santa remembered all this with a vague resentment, knowing it was not all truth. His daughter had loved him. He had been a handsome man. His beautiful white teeth chewed sunflower seeds and the little Octavia would accept them from his mouth as she never did from her mother. He had loved his daughter.

The truth was simple. He had been a kind, hard-working, ignorant, pleasure-loving man. Her feeling had been the feeling of millions of women toward improvident husbands. That men should control the money in the house, have the power to make decisions that decided the fate of infants—what folly! Men were not competent. More—they were not serious. And she had already begun the struggle to usurp his power, as all women do, when one terrible day he was killed.

But she had wept. Oh, how she had wept. A grief compounded with terror. Not grief for departed lips, eyes, hands, but a wail for her shield against this foreign world, a cry for the bringer of her children’s bread, the protector of the infant in her womb. These widows tear their hair and gash their cheeks, scream insane laments, do violence, and wear mourning for the world to see. These are the real mourners, for true grief is thick with terror. They are bereaved. Lovers will love again.

His death was comically grotesque. While a ship was being unloaded, the gangplank had given way high above the water, plunging five men and untold tons of bananas down into the river mud. Human limbs and banana stalks buried together. Never rising once.

She dared herself to think it: he had given them more dead than alive. In the darkness, now, years later, in mockery of her younger self, she smiled grimly. At what her younger self would think of such thoughts. But the court had awarded each of the children a thousand dollars—even Vincent not yet born but only too visible to the world. The money in trust, because here in America there was wisdom; not even parents were given charge of their children’s monies. She herself had received three thousand dollars that no one on the Avenue knew about except Zia Louche and Octavia. So it was not all in vain.

Not to be spoken of, not to be thought of even now, were those months with the child in her belly. A child whose father had died before he was born, like the child of a demon. Even now she was struck with a terrible superstitious fear; even now, thirteen years later, tears sprang beneath her eyelids. She wept for herself as she was then, and for the unborn child, but not for the death of her husband. Her daughter Octavia could never know or understand.

And then the most shameful: only a year after her husband’s death, only six months after the birth of that dead husband’s son, she—a grown woman—had for the first time in her life become passionate about a man, the man who was to become her second husband. In love. Not the spiritual love of young girls or priests; not the emotion for heroes in romances that could be told to a young girl. No; love was the word for the hot flesh, the burning loins, feverish eyes and cheeks. Love was the feel of turgid, spongy flesh. Ah, what madness, what foolishness for the mother of children. Thank Jesus Christ in heaven she was beyond that now.

And for what? Frank Corbo was thirty-five, never married; slender, wiry, and with blue eyes; considered odd for being unwedded at that age, odd also in his reticence, his silent nature and lonely pride—that pride so ludicrous in those who are helpless before society and fate. The neighbors, searching for a widow’s mate and feeder of four hungry mouths, thought him capable of any foolishness and a fine candidate. He worked steadily on the early morning shifts of the railroad gangs, and his afternoons were free for courting. There would be no scandal.

So the neighbors, out of kindness and self-preservation, brought them together, with conscience clear that both would make a good bargain.

The courtship was surprisingly young and innocent. Frank Corbo knew only the quick, cold whore’s flesh; he would come to a marriage bed fresh with love, with a boy’s eagerness. He pursued the mother of the three children as he would a young girl, making himself even more ridiculous in the eyes of the world. In the late afternoons he visited her as she sat before the tenement, guarding her playing and sleeping children. Sometimes he would take supper with them and leave before the children were put to bed. Finally one day he asked Lucia Santa to marry him.

She gave him an arch look, treating him like a young boy. She said, “Aren’t you ashamed to ask me, with a baby still in the carriage from my first husband?” And for the first time she saw that dark look of hate. He stammered out that he loved her children as he loved her. That even if she did not marry him he would give her money for the children. In fact, he made good money on the railroad and always brought the children ices and toys. He had sometimes even given her money to buy the children clothing. At first she had tried to refuse, but he had become angry and said, “What is it, you don’t wish to be friends with me? You think I’m like other men? I don’t care for money—” and started to tear up the dirty green bills. For some reason this had brought tears to her eyes. She had taken the money from him, and he had never presumed on his gifts. It was she who became impatient.

ONE SUNDAY IN spring, invited, Frank Corbo came to the midday meal, the feast of the week for Italian families. He brought with him a gallon of biting homemade Italian wine and a box of cream pastries, gnole and soffiati. He wore a shirt, a tie, a many-buttoned suit. He sat at table with children about him: shy, awkward, more timid than they.

The spaghetti was coated with Lucia Santa’s finest tomato sauce, the meatballs were beautifully round and peppered with garlic and fresh parsley. There was the dark green lettuce with olive oil and red wine vinegar, and then walnuts to eat with the wine. Everything had a bite to it of herbs and garlic and strong black pepper. They all stuffed themselves. Finally the children went down to the street to play. Lucia Santa should have kept them with her in the house to avoid scandal, but she did not.

And so in the golden afternoon with sunlight streaming through the long railroad flat, with the poor infant Vincenzo’s eyes shielded from sin by a conveniently placed pillow, they sealed their fate on the living room couch, the mother only slightly distracted by her children’s voices rising sweetly from the street below.

Ah, delight, delight, the taste of love. After so long an abstinence the animal odor was an aphrodisiac, a bell to ring in the coming joy; even now, so many years later, the memory was fresh. And in that act of love she had been the master.

The man so harsh, so strong against the world, had wept on her breast, and in the fast-fading sunlight she understood that in all his thirty-five years of life he had never received a caress with real tenderness. It was too much for him. He had changed afterwards. He had come too late to love, and he despised his weakness. But for that one afternoon she forgave him many things, not everything; and cared for him as she had never cared for her first husband.

There was very little trouble until his first child was born. His natural love for Gino became cancerous, murdering his love for wife and stepchildren, and he became evil.

But in the first year of marriage, in the trust of love, he told her of his childhood in Italy as the son of a poor tenant farmer. He had often been hungry, often cold, but what he could never forget was that his parents made him wear cast-off shoes which were too small. His feet became horribly deformed, as if every bone had been broken and then bound together in one grotesque lump. He showed her his feet as if to say, “I keep nothing from you; you needn’t marry a man with such feet.” She had laughed. But she did not laugh when she learned that he always bought twenty-dollar shoes, beautiful brown-grained leather. The act of a true madman.

His parents were a rarity in Italy, drunken peasants. They relied on him to work the farm and give them their bread. When he fell in love with a young girl of the village, the marriage was forbidden. He ran away and lived in the woods for a week. When they found him, he was little more than an animal. He was in shock and was committed to a mental institution. After a few months he was released, but he refused to return to his home. He emigrated to America, where in the densest city in the world he lived a life of the most extreme loneliness.

He took care of himself; he never became ill again. In his life of solitude and hard work he found safety. As long as he did not become emotionally entangled with other human beings, he was safe, as something immobile is to some degree safe from the dangers of motion. But this love which brought him back to life brought him back to danger, and perhaps it was this knowledge, animal-like, felt rather than known, that had made him so weak that Sunday afternoon.

Now, after twelve years of life together, the husband was as secretive with her as he had always been with other people.

SOMEONE HAD COME in the door. Someone was moving in the kitchen. But the footsteps went out again and down the stairs. For his own mysterious reasons, her husband had gone back into the street.

Night. Night. She wanted her husband in her bed. She wanted her older son in the house. She wanted everyone asleep in this safe tenement castle four stories above the ground, sealed against the world by brick and concrete and iron. She wanted everyone asleep, asleep in darkness, safe from life, so that she need no longer stand guard, could deliver herself up to oblivion.

She sighed. There was no recourse. Tomorrow she must quarrel with Frank to keep the janitor’s job. She must settle the Le Cinglata hash, the children’s clothes, the stove to boil the laundry soap. She listened to the breath of the sleeping children all around her—Lena in her bed, the three boys in the room separated from hers only by an archway, Octavia in the bedroom with its door open for air. She made her breath fall into their great rising and falling sighs, and then she was asleep.

OCTAVIA STRETCHED OUT on her narrow bed. She wore her rayon slip as a nightdress. The room was too small for any additional furniture except a tiny table and a chair, but it had a door she could close.

She was too hot and too young to sleep. She dreamed. She dreamed of her real father.

Oh, how she had loved him, and how angry she had been that he let himself be killed, left her alone with no one to love. At the end of each day she had met him in front of the tenement and kissed his dirty bearded face, its black stubble so hard it bruised her lips. She carried his empty lunch pail up the stairs and sometimes cajoled from him the wicked steel clawed baling hook of the longshoreman.

And then in the house she set his plate for dinner, jealously placing the fork with the straight tines, the sharpest knife, his small wineglass polished and flashing like a diamond. Fussing until the exasperated Lucia Santa smacked her away from the table so that food could be served. And Larry, sitting in his high chair, could never interfere.

Even now, so many years later, waiting for sleep, the thought like a cry, “Why weren’t you more careful?” Reproaching him for his sinful death, echoing her mother, who sometimes said, “He didn’t take care of his family. He didn’t take care of his money. He didn’t take care of his life. He was careless in everything.”

Her father’s death had brought the thin blue-eyed stranger with his slanting, uneven face. The second husband, the stepfather. Even as a child she had never liked him, accepted his gifts distrustfully, stood with Larry in hand, holding him, hiding behind the mother’s back, until he patiently found her. Once he had made a gesture of affection and she shrank away from his hand like an animal. Larry was the favorite until his own children came. He never liked Vincent for some reason, the lousy bastard—hateful, hateful.

But even now she could not blame her mother for marrying, could not hate her mother for bringing so much sorrow. She knew why her mother married this evil man. She knew.

IT WAS ONE of the most terrible times of Lucia Santa’s life, and much of the distress that followed her husband’s death was the fault of friends, relatives, and neighbors.

They had, every one, kept after Lucia Santa to let the newborn infant, Vincent, be taken care of by a rich cousin, Filomena, in New Jersey. Just for a little while, until the mother regained her strength. “What a boon to that childless couple. And she can be trusted, Filomena, your own first cousin from Italy. The child would be safe. And the rich Filomena’s husband would then certainly consent to be godfather and assure the child’s future.” And how they had spoken in tones of most sorrowful pity, so tenderly, “And you, Lucia Santa, everyone worries about you. How meager you are. Not yet recovered from the birth. Still grieving over your beloved husband and torn to rags by lawyers over the settlement. You need a rest from care. Treat yourself well for your children’s sake. What if you should die?” Oh, no threat was too much for them. “Your children would perish or go into a home. They could not be sent to the grandparents in Italy. Guard your life, your children’s only shield.” And they went on and on. And the child would be back in a few months, no, a month, perhaps a few weeks. Who could tell? And Filomena would come Sundays, her husband drove a Forda. They would bring her to their beautiful home in Jersey to visit the baby Vincenzo. She would be an honored guest. Her other children would have a day in the country, in the fresh air. La la la la.

Now. How could she deny them or herself or her children? Even Zia Louche nodded her warty head in agreement.

Only little Octavia began to weep, saying over and over again with childish despair, “They won’t give him back.” Everyone laughed at her fear. Her mother smiled and patted Octavia’s short black curls, ashamed now of her own reluctance.

“Only until I am well,” she told the little girl. “Then Vincenzo will come home.”

Later the mother was not able to understand how she had come to let the child go. True, the shock of her husband’s death and a midwife’s harshness at Vincenzo’s birth had left her weak. But this never excused her in her own mind. It was an act that gave her so much shame, made her despise herself so much that whenever she had a difficult decision to make, she recalled that one act, to make sure she would not be cowardly again.

And so little Vincent had gone away. The strange Aunt Filomena had come one noon when Octavia was in school, and when Octavia came home the crib was empty.

She had wept and screamed, and Lucia Santa had given one the left hand, two the right hand, fine, heavy slaps across the face, making her little daughter’s ears ring, saying, “Now, there is something to make you cry.” Her mother was glad to get rid of the baby. Octavia hated her. She was evil, like a stepmother.

But then came that terrible beautiful day that had made her love and trust her mother. Part of it she saw herself as a little girl, but the story had been told innumerable times, so that now it seemed to Octavia as if she had seen everything. For naturally it was told; it became a legend of the family, mentioned in an evening of gossip, spread out at the Christmas table over walnuts and wine.

The trouble started after only a week. Filomena did not come that first Sunday, there was no automobile to take Lucia Santa to visit her infant son. Only a telephone message to the candy store. Filomena would come the following week, and to show her good heart and regret there would be a money order for five dollars in the mail, a small peace offering.

Lucia Santa brooded that dark Sunday. She went to take counsel with her neighbors on the floors below. They reassured her, urged her not to think foolish things. But as the day wore on she became more and more somber.

Early Monday morning she said to Octavia, “Run. Go to 31st Street and get Zia Louche.” Octavia wailed, “I’ll be late for school.” Her mother replied, “Today you are not going to your beautiful school”—saying it with such menace that the girl flew from the house.

Zia Louche came, a shawl around her head, a blue wool-knitted jacket reaching to her knees. Lucia Santa served the ceremonial coffee, then said, “Zia Louche, I am going to see the little one. Care for the girl and Lorenzo. Do me this favor.” She paused. “Filomena did not come yesterday. Do you think I should go?”

In later years Lucia Santa always insisted that if Zia Louche had reassured her she would not have gone that day, and that for the honest answer she would always remain in the old woman’s debt. For Zia Louche, nodding her old crone’s head like a repentant witch, said, “I gave you bad advice, Signora. People are saying things I don’t like.” Lucia Santa begged her to speak out, but Zia Louche would not, because it was all gossip, nothing to be repeated to an anxious mother. One thing could be noted, though: the promise to send five dollars. The poor did well not to trust such charity. Best to go, set everyone’s mind at rest.

In the gay light of winter, the mother walked to the Weehawken Ferry at 42nd Street, and for the first time since coming from Italy, she rode water again. In Jersey, finding a streetcar, she showed a slip of paper with the address on it, and then walked many blocks until a friendly woman took her by the hand and guided her to the dwelling of Filomena.

Ah, what a pretty house it was for the devil to live in. It had a pointed roof, like nothing she had ever seen in Italy, as if it were a plaything, not to be used for people full grown. It was white and clean, with blue shutters and a closed-in porch. Lucia Santa was suddenly timid. People so well off would never practice treachery on a poor woman like herself. The breaking of the Sunday promise could be explained in many ways. Still, she knocked on the side of the porch. She went through the screen door and knocked on the door of the house. She knocked again and again.

The stillness was frightening; as if the house were deserted. Lucia Santa went weak with fear. Then, inside the house, her baby began to wail, and she was ashamed of her terrible, ridiculous suspicion. Patience. The baby’s wailing turned to shrieks of terror. Her mind went blank. She pushed against the door and went into the hallway and up the stairs, tracing those shrieks to a bedroom.

How pretty the room was; the prettiest room Vincenzo would ever have. It was all in blue, with blue curtains, a blue crib, a white stuffed toy horse standing on a little blue bureau. And in that beautiful room her son lay in his own piss. No one to change him, no one to quiet his shrieks of terror.

Lucia Santa took him in her arms. When she felt the lump of flesh warm and soaked in its own urine, when she saw the wrinkled rose face and the jet-black infant hair, she was filled with a savage, exultant joy, a knowledge that only her death could loosen this child from her. She stared around the pretty room with the dumb anger of an animal, noting all its assurances of permanency. Then she opened a bureau drawer and found some clothing to dress the baby. As she did so, Filomena came bursting into the room.

Then, then what a drama was played. Lucia Santa accused the other of heartlessness. To leave an infant alone! Filomena protested. She had only gone to help her husband open the grocery store. She had been gone fifteen minutes—no, ten. What a terrible, unlucky chance. But had not Lucia Santa herself sometimes left her infant alone? Poor people could not be as careful as they wished (how Lucia Santa sneered when Filomena included herself among the poor); their babies must be left to cry.

The mother was blind to reason, blind with an agonizing, hopeless rage, and could not say what she felt. When her child was left crying at home, it was flesh and blood of its own that came to the rescue. But what could a baby think if left alone and only a strange face appeared? But Lucia Santa said simply, “No, it’s easy to see that since this is not your own blood you don’t care to put yourself out. Go help in the store. I will bring my baby home.”

Filomena lost her temper. Shrew that she was, she shouted, “What of our bargain, then? How would I appear to my friends, that I can’t be trusted with your child? And what of all this I have bought, money thrown into air?” Then, slyly, “And we both know, more was meant than said.”

“What? What?” Lucia Santa demanded. Then it all came out.

There had been a cruel plot to do a kindness. The neighbors had all assured Filomena that, given time, the helpless widow, forced to work for her children’s bread, would gradually relinquish all claims to her infant son and let Filomena adopt the baby. They were deviously cautious, but made it understood that Lucia Santa even hoped for such good fortune. Nothing could be said outright, of course. There were delicate feelings to consider. Lucia Santa cut all this short with wild laughter.

Filomena played another tune. Look at the new clothes, this pretty room. He would be the only child. He would have everything, a happy childhood, the university, become a lawyer, a doctor, even a professor. Things that Lucia Santa could never hope to give. What was she? She had no money. She would eat dirt with her bread her whole life long.

Lucia Santa listened, stunned, horrified. When Filomena said, “Come, you understood why I would send you money every week,” the mother drew back her head like a snake and spat with full force into the older woman’s face. Then, child in her arms, she fled from the house. Filomena ran after her, screaming curses.

That was the end of the story as it was told—with laughter, now. But Octavia always remembered more clearly the part never told: her mother’s arriving home with the baby Vincent in her arms.

She entered the house feverish with cold, her coat wrapped around the sleeping infant, her sallow skin black with the blood of anger, rage, despair. She was trembling. Zia Louche said, “Come. Coffee waits. Sit down. Octavia, the cups.”

Baby Vincent began to cry. Lucia Santa tried to soothe him, but his shrieks grew greater and greater. The mother, furious with guilt, made a dramatic gesture, as if to hurl the infant away; then she said to Zia Louche, “Here, take him.” The old crone began to coo to the baby in a cracked voice.

The mother sat at the round kitchen table. She rested her head on her hand, hiding her face. When Octavia came with the cups she said, still shielding her face, “See. A little girl knows the truth and we laugh.” She caressed her daughter, her fingers full of hatred, hurting the tender flesh. “Listen to the children in the future. We old people are animals. Animals.”

“Ah,” Zia Louche crooned, “coffee. Hot coffee. Calm yourself.” The baby continued to wail.

The mother sat still. Octavia saw that a terrible rage at the world, at fate, made her unable to speak. Lucia Santa, her sallow skin darkening, held back her tears by pressing her fingers in her eyes.

Zia Louche, too frightened to speak to the mother, scolded the infant. “Come, weep,” she said. “Ah, how good it feels. How easy it is, eh? You have the right. Ah, how fine. Louder. Louder.” But then the child became still, laughing at that toothless, wrinkled face mirrored from the other side of time.

The old crone shouted in mock anger, “Finished so soon? Come. Weep.” She shook the baby gently, but Vincent laughed, his toothless gums a mockery of hers.

Then the old woman said slowly, in a sad, singsong voice, “Miserabile, miserabile. Your father died before you were born.”

At these words the mother’s control broke. She pressed her nails tightly into the flesh of her face, and the great streaming tears mingled with the blood of the two long gashes she made in her cheeks. The old crone chirped, “Come, Lucia, some coffee now.” There was no answer. After a long time the mother lifted her dark face. She raised her black-clad arm to the stained ceiling and said in a deadly earnest voice filled with venom and hate, “I curse God.”

Caught in that moment of satanic pride, Octavia loved her mother. But even now, so many years later, she remembered with shame the scene that followed. Lucia Santa had lost all dignity. She cursed. Zia Louche said, “Shh—shh—think of the little girl who listens.” But the mother rushed out of the apartment and down the four flights of stairs, screaming obscenities at the kind neighbors, who immediately locked the doors she pounded on.

She screamed in Italian, “Fiends. Whores. Murderers of children.” She ran up and down the stairs, and out of her mouth came a filth she had never known she knew, that the invisible listeners would eat the tripe of their parents, that they committed the foulest acts of animals. She raved. Zia Louche gave baby Vincent into Octavia’s arms and went down the stairs. She grabbed Lucia Santa by her long black hair and dragged her back to her home. And though the younger woman was much stronger, she let herself descend into howls of pain, collapsing helplessly by the table.

Soon enough she took coffee; soon enough she calmed and composed herself. There was too much work to do. She caressed Octavia, murmuring, “But how did you know, a child to understand such evil?”

Yet when Octavia had told her not to marry again, saying, “Remember I was right about Filomena stealing Vinnie,” her mother only laughed. Then she stopped laughing and said, “Don’t fear. I’m your mother. No one can harm my children. Not while I live.”

Her mother held the scales of power and justice; the family could never be corrupted. Safe, invulnerable, Octavia fell asleep, the last image flickering: her mother, baby Vincent in her arms returning from Filomena’s, raging, triumphant, yet showing guilty shame for ever having let him go.

LARRY ANGELUZZI (ONLY his mother called him Lorenzo) thought of himself as a full-grown man at seventeen. And with justice. He was very broad of shoulder, medium tall, and had great brawny forearms.

At thirteen he had quit school to drive a horse and wagon for the West Side Wet Wash. He had complete responsibility for the collection of money, the care of the horse, and the good will of the customers. He carried the heavy sacks of wash up four flights of stairs without loss of breath. Everyone thought him at least sixteen. And the married women whose husbands had already gone to work were delighted with him.

He lost his virginity on one of these deliveries, cheerfully, with good will, friendly as always, thinking nothing of it; another little detail of the job, like greasing the wagon wheels, half duty, half pleasure, since the women were not young.

The job of dummy boy, riding a horse and leading a train through the city streets, appealed to his heroic sense; and the money was good, the work easy, and advancement to brakeman or switchman possible—these were excellent jobs for a lifetime. Larry was ambitious; he wanted to be a boss.

Already he had the mature charm of the natural-born lady-killer. His teeth flashed pearly white when he smiled. He had strong, heavy, regular features, jet-black hair, and long black eyebrows and eyelashes. He was naturally friendly, always assuming that everyone thought well of him.

A good son, he always gave his mother the pay he earned. True, he now kept some money for himself, stashed it; but after all, he was seventeen and a young man in America, not Italy.

He was not vain, but he loved riding up Tenth Avenue on his black horse, with the freight train coiling slowly behind him while he swung a red lantern to warn the world of danger. There was always a surge of joy when he rode under the iron and wooden bridge at 30th Street and entered his own neighborhood village, making his horse prance for the children who waited for him and for the engine with its white cloud of steam. Sometimes he would halt his horse near the curb and the young people would gather round, begging for a ride, especially the girls. His brother Gino always looked up like a connoisseur admiring a picture—not too near, one foot in front of the other, head slightly back, leaning away, admiration shining in his eyes; he was so worshipful of his brother riding a horse that he never even spoke.

And yet, though Larry was hard-working, quite responsible for such a young man, he had one fault. He took advantage of the young girls. They were too easy for him. Angry mothers brought daughters to Lucia Santa and made ugly scenes, shouting that he kept the girls out too late, that he had promised to marry them. La la. Famous for his conquests, he was the neighborhood Romeo, yet popular with all the old ladies of the Avenue. For he had Respect. He was like a young man brought up in Italy. His good manners, which were as natural as his pleasantness, made him always ready to help in the countless mild distresses of the poor: he would borrow a truck to help someone move to a new tenement, visit for a few moments when an elderly aunt was in Bellevue Hospital. But most important of all, he took part with a real zest in all the events of communal life—marriages, funerals, christenings, death watches, Communions and Confirmations; those sacred tribal customs sneered at by young Americans. The old women of Tenth Avenue gave him their highest praise; they said of him that he always knew which things were really important. In fact, he had been offered an honor that no Italian could remember being given to so young a man before. He was asked to stand godfather to the son of the Guargios, distant cousins. Lucia Santa forbade it. He was too young for such a responsibility; the honor would turn his head.

LARRY HEARD GINO screaming “Burn the city,” watched him run, saw the people disappear from the street into the tenements. He trotted his horse up the Avenue to the stable on 35th Street, then galloped, catching in his ears the rushing wind, the great clatter of hoofs on cobblestones. The stableman was asleep, so Larry took care of the horse and then he was free.

He went directly to the Le Cinglata home, a short block away on 36th Street. Signora Le Cinglata served the anisette and wine in her kitchen, charging by the glass and doling out her wit to the customers who drank the most. There were never more than five or six of these at a time; they were always Italian laborers, and bachelors or men whose wives had never joined them from Italy.

Mr. Le Cinglata was finishing up one of those thirty-day sentences that were a risk of his trade. “Ah, the police,” Signora Le Cinglata always said on these occasions. “They have put my husband on the cross.” She was religious.

When Larry entered the apartment there were only three men. One of them, a dark Sicilian, encouraged by the knowledge that her husband was in jail, badgered the signora, holding her skirt as she went by, singing suggestive Italian songs. There was in his actions only the innocent lechery, the childish malice, of a primitive man. Larry sat down at their table. He enjoyed a chat in Italian with older men. He returned the signora’s smile of welcome, and his ready assumption of equality offended the Sicilian.

Raising his great, heavy brows in mock astonishment, he shouted in Italian, “Signora Le Cinglata, do you serve children here? Must I drink my glass of wine with suckling infants?” The woman put down a cherry soda for Larry and the Sicilian gave all a look of excruciating slyness. “Oh, excuse me,” he said in a deferential, broken English. “Itsa your son? Youra nepha-ew? He protecta you when youra husband is ina his little hideout. Oh, excusa me.” He roared until he choked.

The signora, plump, handsome, and tough, was not amused. “Enough,” she said. “Cease or find another place to drink. And pray I do not tell my husband of your pretty behavior.”

The Sicilian said with abrupt seriousness, “Thank God if nobody tells your husband of your pretty behavior. Why don’t you try a man instead of a child?” And he struck his chest with both hands, like a singer at the opera.

Signora Le Cinglata, in no way shamed but out of patience, said curtly, “Lorenzo, throw him down the stairs.”

The phrase was extravagant and meant only that the man should be persuaded to leave, as they all knew. Larry started to say something conciliatory, a friendly smile on his face. But the Sicilian, his honor affronted, stood up and roared in broken English, “You little shitta American cockasickle. You throw me down the stairs? I eat you up whole anda whole.”

The man’s broad, bearded face was lined with authoritative rage. Larry felt a quick surge of childish terror, as if it would be parricidal to strike this man. The Sicilian loomed, and Larry threw a straight right into that huge dark face. The Sicilian fell to the kitchen floor. Suddenly Larry’s fear was gone and he felt only pity and guilt for the man’s humiliation.

For the man could not use his hands and had not meant him real harm. He had come like a hugging bear to chastise a child, grotesque, human without being cruel. Larry helped him to a chair, gave him a glass of anisette to drink, murmured words of conciliation. The man struck the glass out of his hand and walked out of the flat.

THE NIGHT WORE on. Men came in, others left. Some played Brisk with an old dirty deck of cards, a convenience of the establishment.

Larry sat in the corner, subdued by his adventure. Then his feelings changed. He felt pride. People would think of him with respect, as a man to be wary of, yet not mean or vicious. He was the hero in the cowboy pictures, like Ken Maynard, who never struck a man on the floor. He grew drowsy, blissful, and then Signora Le Cinglata was talking to him in her strange, flirting way, in Italian, and his blood leaped awake. The time had come.

Signora Le Cinglata excused herself, saying she must fetch another gallon of wine and another bottle of anisette. She went out of the kitchen, through the rooms of the long railroad flat, and to the farthest bedroom. She had a door there. Larry followed her, mumbling that he would help her carry the bottles, as if she would be surprised or angry at his youthful presumption. But when she heard him lock the door behind them, she bent over to take a huge purple-colored gallon jug from among the many standing against the wall. As she did so, Larry gathered up her dress and petticoats in both his hands. She turned in her enormous pink bloomers, her belly bare, and gave a laughing protest: “Eh, giovanetto.” The large cloth buttons of her dress slipped from their holes and she lay on her back on the bed, the long, sloping, big-nippled breasts hanging out, the loose bloomers pulled aside. In a few great blind savage strokes Larry finished and lay on the bed, lighting a cigarette. The signora, buttoned up and respectable, took the purple jug in one hand and the clear, slender bottle of anisette in the other and together they returned to the customers.

In the kitchen, Signora Le Cinglata poured wine and touched glasses with the same hands that had fondled him. She brought Larry a fresh glass of cherry soda, but finicky that she had not washed, he would not drink.

Larry got ready to leave. Signora Le Cinglata followed him to the door and whispered, “Stay, stay for the night.” He gave her his big smile and whispered back, “Hey, my mother would ask for stories.” He played this role, the helpless dutiful son, when it pleased him to escape.

He did not go home. He went around the corner and back to the stable. He made his bed on straw and a horse blanket, using his saddle for a pillow. The restless moving of the horses in their stalls was soothing to him; the horses could not disorient his dreams.

Lying so, he reviewed his future, as he did many nights, as all young men do. He felt a great power. He felt himself, knew himself, as one destined for success and glory. In the world he lived in he was the strongest of the boys his age, the handsomest, the most successful with girls. Even a grown woman was his slave. And tonight he had beaten a grown man. He was only seventeen, and in his youthful mind the world would remain static. He would not become weaker, or the world stronger.

He would be powerful. He would make his family rich. He dreamed of wealthy young American girls with automobiles and large houses who married him and loved his family. Tomorrow before work he would go up to Central Park on his horse and ride along the bridle paths.

He saw himself coming down Tenth Avenue, a rich girl on his arm and everyone looking at him with admiration. The girl would love his family. He was not snobbish. He never thought they could be looked down upon, his family, his mother and sister, his friends. For he considered them all extraordinary, since they were really part of him. He had a truly innocent mind, and, sleeping in the smelly stable, cowboylike on a prairie of stone, fresh from his conquests of man and woman, Larry Angeluzzi never doubted his happy destiny. He slept in peace.

IN THE ANGELUZZI-Corbo family only the children—Vincent, Gino, and Sal, tangled together in the one bed—dreamed real dreams.

CHAPTER 3

IN THE MORNING Octavia rose as the last freshness of the night air burned away before the rising August sun. She washed in the kitchen sink, and, walking back through the corridor of rooms, saw that her stepfather was not in bed. But he slept little and was an early riser. The other empty bedroom proved she had been right; Larry had not come home at all. Sal and Gino were uncovered, their sexual parts showing through the BVD underwear. Octavia covered them with the rumpled bed sheet.

Dressing for work, she felt the familiar despair and hopelessness. She choked on the warm summer air, on the closeness of the sweet warm odor of sleeping bodies. The morning light too clearly showed the cheap battered furniture, the faded wallpaper, the linoleum with black patches where its colored skin had worn through.

At such times she felt doomed: she was afraid that one day she would wake on a warm summer morning as old as her mother, in a bed and home like this, her children living in squalor, unending days of laundry, cooking, dishwashing before her. Octavia suffered. She suffered because life was not elegant, human beings not completely separate. And it sprang from a few dark moments in a marriage bed. She shook her head angrily, yet fearfully, knowing how vulnerable she was, knowing that one day she must lie on that bed.

CURLY BLACK HAIR combed, wearing a cheap blue and white frock, Octavia left the tenement and stepped onto the blue-slate sidewalk of Tenth Avenue. She walked the already burning pavement to her dressmaking shop on Seventh Avenue and 36th Street, going past the Le Cinglatas’ out of curiosity perhaps to see her brother.

Lucia Santa woke shortly afterward, and her first realization was that her husband had not come home. She rose instantly and checked the closet. His twenty-dollar shoes were there. He would be back.

She went through the other bedroom to the kitchen. Bravo. Lorenzo had not come home. Lucia Santa’s face was grim. She made coffee and her plans for the day. Vincenzo started to work in the bakery, good. Gino would have to help her with the janitor work, good. A punishment for his father, who shirked. She went to the hall and picked up the bottles of milk and the great loaf of Italian bread thick as her thigh, tall as a child. She sliced off heavy chunks and spread one with butter for herself. She let the children sleep.

It was another time of day she loved. The morning still fresh, the children about to waken and everyone else out of the house, herself strong for the duties of living.

“QUE BELLA INSALATA”—what beautiful salad—the words rose up to the sleeping children at their moment of awakening. They all sprang out of bed, and Gino looked out the window. Below was the hawker, standing on the seat of his wagon as he held up to the sky and the watching windows a pearly green lettuce in each outstretched hand. “Que bella insalata,” he said again, not asking anyone to buy, only asking the world to look at beauty. Pride, not cajolement, in his voice, he repeated his cry each time his horse took a mincing step along the Avenue. In his wagon were boxes of onions dazzling white, great brown potatoes, bushels of apples, bouquets of scallions, leeks, and parsley sprigs. His voice rose rich with helpless admiration, disinterested, a call to lovers. “What beautiful salad.”

At breakfast Lucia Santa instructed her children. “Listen,” she said, “your father has gone away for a little time. Until he comes back you must help. Vincenzo works in the panetteria. So you, Gino, will help me wash the stairs of the building today. Get me the clean pails of water, and wring the mop, and sweep if you prove not to be stupid. Salvatore, you can dust the bannisters, and Lena also.” She smiled at the two little children.

Vincenzo hung his head, sullen. But Gino looked at her with cool, speculative defiance. “I’m busy today, Ma,” he said.

Lucia Santa bowed her head to him politely. “Ah,” she said, “you are busy every day. But I’m busy too.” She was amused.

Gino pressed his advantage. He became very earnest. “Ma, I gotta get ice from the railroad today, I promised Joey Bianco. I’ll give you free ice before selling.” Then, with a stroke of genius, he added, “And Zia Louche too.”

Lucia Santa regarded him with an affection that made Vinnie jealous. Then she said, “Good, but remember my icebox must be filled—mine first of all.”

Vincent flung down his slice of bread and she gave him a menacing look. Then she said to Gino, “But this afternoon be home and help, or you will feel the Tackeril.” Her heart was not in it. He would not have much longer to play.

GINO CORBO, LIKE any ten-year-old general, had made great plans, not all of which he had told his mother. Looking out the window of the front room, he saw the railroad yards across the street chock full of helpless freight cars. Beyond them the Hudson River sparkled blue. To his child’s vision the air was marvelously pure. He ran through the apartment and out the door, down the stairs and into the August sun.

It was burning hot, the pavement warm beneath his sneakered feet. His faded blue denims and laddered rayon polo shirt fluttered in the breeze, then stuck to his body. He looked around for his friend and partner, Joey Bianco.

Joey was twelve, but shorter than Gino. He was the richest boy on Tenth Avenue and had over two hundred dollars in the bank. In winter he sold coal, now in summer he sold ice, and both he stole from the railroad cars. He also sold paper shopping bags in Paddy’s Market, which stretched along the streets on Ninth Avenue.

Here he came, dragging his great wooden box of a wagon behind him. It was the best wagon on Tenth Avenue. It was the only six-wheeled wagon Gino had ever seen, and the box could hold a dollar’s worth of ice or pull three kids riding. The small, stout wheels had heavy rubber tires; a long tongue of wood steered the two front wheels, and there were four other wheels for the box of the wagon itself. Joey even had clothesline instead of ordinary rope for his steering reins.

They had a ceremonial cup of lemon ice together to start the day. The Panettiere himself served them, so delighted by their industry he put an extra pat on each cup.

Joey Bianco was happy when Gino came. Gino let him collect and count the money. And Gino went on top of the cars. Joey liked to go up on the cars, but hated to leave his wagon alone. Now Gino said to Joey, “Come on, get in and I’ll give you a ride.” Joey held the steering line, sitting proudly in the box, and Gino pushed the wagon across the Avenue, past the switchman’s shanty, onto the gravel between the tracks. When they were hidden from view by the towering freight cars scattered around the yard, they stopped. Joey spotted an open hatch and took the ice tongs from his wagon.

Gino said commandingly, “Gimme those tongs.” He ran to the freight car and climbed its iron ladder to the open hatch on top.

Standing on that car roof, high above the ground, he felt free. Far off he saw the window of his front room bedroom and the whole wall of tenements. There were stores and people and horses and wagons and trucks. Gino seemed to sail by on an ocean of freight cars—brown, black, yellow, with strange names like Union Pacific, Santa Fe, Pennsylvania. Some empty cattle cars scented the air. Turning, he saw the cliffs of the Jersey Palisades patched with green, and blue water below. Through the hundreds of immobile freight cars a few black round engines chugged quietly, their white smoke adding a fresh burning smell pleasant in the morning summer.

Joey shouted up to him, “Come on, Gino, throw down the ice before the Bull comes.”

Gino took the shiny steel tongs and grappled blocks of ice out of the hatch. It was piled to the top and easy to drag out in one heave. He pushed each block over the car edge, watched it fall to the gravel. Great silvery chips broke off and flew back up at him. Joey put his arms around each crystal block and hugged it into the wagon. In no time it was full. Gino climbed down and pushed, while Joey pulled from the front and steered.

Gino had meant to fill up his mother’s icebox, but the Panettiere caught them as they came across the Avenue and bought the whole first load for a dollar. Then they went back for another. This time the grocer intercepted them and bought the whole load for a dollar, plus soda and sandwich.

Drunk with wealth, they decided to let their mothers wait, the family iceboxes remain empty. The third load went to the people living on the first floor. It was nearly noon. On the fourth load they ran into trouble.

The railroad cop had spotted them earlier, as they moved deeper and deeper into the yard, opening up fresh ice cars so they would not have to take ice from a depleted source. They foraged like an animal that kills three or four victims and takes a bite from the best part of each. So the cop waited and then walked toward them from the Tenth Avenue side, cutting off their retreat.

Joey saw him first and hollered up to Gino, “Butzo, it’s Charlie Chaplin.” Gino watched from his perch as the bandy-legged Bull grabbed Joey by the shirt and cuffed his face lightly.

Still holding Joey fast, the Bull called up to Gino, “O.K., kid, get down here or I come up and break your ass.”

Gino looked down, his face grave, as if he were really considering the offer, but scheming. The sun was very hot and warmed his blood, giving the world a special, fearless light. Gino quivered with excitement, but he felt no fear. He knew he was safe. The Bull would kick Joey out of the yard and break the wagon. But Gino had read a story about mother birds, and from it he made a plan as he looked down at the Bull: he would save Joey and the wagon.

Deliberately, he leaned his dark angular almost-man’s face over the car and hollered down, “Ha, ha. Charlie Chaplin can’t catch flies.” Then he ducked away and started down the ladder on the freight car’s other side. But took just a few steps and waited.

The Bull said ferociously to Joey, “You stay here.” Then ducked under the car to intercept Gino. He was just in time to see Gino scramble back up the ladder. The Bull crawled back to guard Joey.

Gino jumped up and down on top of the box car, chanting, “Charlie Chaplin can’t catch candy.”

The Bull made his face mean, his voice menacing. “Kid,” he said, “I’m warning you. Get down off that car, or when I get you I kick the shit outa you.”

That seemed to sober Gino and he stared down gravely. He thumbed his nose at the Bull and ran slowly, awkwardly, along the top of the freight car, jumped, teetered to the next car. On the ground the Bull kept pace easily, glancing back with a threatening face so that Joey would not try to escape with his wagon. The string of cars was only ten or eleven long.

Gino jumped a few cars, then pretended to climb down the other side. The Bull ducked underneath. He could not keep track of Joey if he did this, but he didn’t care. He had made up his mind the kid on top of the cars was going to get his ass broke.

Beckoning with his small hopping form, Gino ran along the car tops deeper into the yard, and then waited for the Bull to catch up, staring down at him. Then, raising his head, he could see Joey running and pulling the wagon toward freedom across the Avenue.

“Kid, you better come down,” the Bull said. “You make me chase you and you’ll get this.” He waved his club. He thought of drawing his gun as a bluff, but Italian laborers on one of the yard gangs might see him and he would be a marked man. He ducked back underneath the railroad car just in time to see Joey and the wagon cross safely over the Avenue. He became so angry that he shouted up to Gino, “You little black guinea bastard, you don’t come down and I’ll break your hump.”

Gratified, he saw the threat working; the kid was walking back along the car tops to stand directly over him. But then that dark, grave child’s face leaned out above him. He heard the little boy shout in sudden angry contempt that assumed equality of strength, “Fuck you, Charlie Chaplin.” A great dazzling white rock of ice went whizzing past the Bull’s head and the boy teetered clumsily along the car tops deeper into the maze of the yard.

The Bull, really angry now, but confident, ran hard to keep pace alongside, his head tilted upward comically. The kid was trapping himself. He was angry not at the curse, but at being called Charlie Chaplin. He was vain, and his bowed legs made him sensitive.

Suddenly Gino disappeared. The Bull ducked quickly under the freight car to catch him coming down the ladder on the opposite side. He tripped on the rails and lost a precious second. When he got to the other side, he saw no sign of his prey. He backed up to enlarge his field of vision.

He saw Gino almost literally flying along the top of the box cars, soaring from one to the other with no teetering awkwardness, up toward Tenth Avenue, and then disappearing over the side of the car away from the Bull. The Bull sprinted but was only in time to see the boy cross Tenth Avenue to the safe shade of the tenement wall, where, without a backward glance, Gino stopped to rest and get a lemon ice. There was no sign of the other kid.

The Bull had to laugh, he couldn’t help it. The balls on the kid, a little shit like that. But just the same, his day would come; he’d be Charlie Chaplin, O.K.; he’d make ’em scream, but not laughing.

GINO DID NOT bother to look back once he had crossed the Avenue. He wanted to find Joey Bianco and the ice money. He heard his mother yelling from the fourth-floor window, “Gino, bestia, where is the ice? Come, eat.”

Gino looked up, and above his mother he saw the blue sky. “I’ll be up in two minutes,” he shouted. He ran around the corner to 30th Street. Sure enough he saw Joey sitting on a stoop, his wagon tied to the iron railing of the basement.

Joey was brooding, almost in tears, but when he saw Gino he jumped in the air. He said excitedly, “I was gonna tell your mother—gee, I didn’t know what to do.”

Thirtieth Street was dusty and full of sun. Gino got into the wagon and steered, with Joey pushing him. On Ninth Ave-nue they bought hero salami sandwiches and Pepsis. Then they went on to 31st Street, where it was shady, and sat with their backs against the wall of Runkel’s chocolate factory.

They ate their sandwiches with the contentment and good appetite of men who have had a completely satisfying day: hard work, adventure, and their bread sweet with their own sweat. Joey was admiring and kept saying, “Boy, you sure saved me, Gino. You sure outfoxed that Bull.” Gino was modest, because he knew he had learned the trick from a book about birds, but he didn’t tell Joey.

The summer sun vanished. There were quick dark clouds. The dusty, heated air and the smell of hot stone pavements and melting tar were swept away by a rushing sheet of rain released by great claps of thunder; faintly, there was an elusive ghost and smell of something green. Joey and Gino crept under the loading platform. The rain pelted down, some of it coming through cracks in the platform floor, and they turned their faces up to the cool drops.

In the shaded, cellar-like darkness there was just enough light to play cards. Joey took the greasy pack out of his trousers pocket. Gino hated to play because Joey won a lot. They played Seven-and-a-half and Gino lost the fifty cents ice money. It was still raining.

Joey, stuttering a little, said, “Gino, here, here’s your fifty cents back for saving me from the Bull.”

Gino was offended. Heroes never took pay.

“Come on,” Joey said more firmly. “You saved my wagon, too. You gotta let me give the fifty cents back.”

Gino really didn’t want the money. It would spoil the adventure if Joey paid him to do a job. But Joey was nearly in tears, and Gino saw that for some reason he had to take the money. “O.K.,” Gino said. Joey handed it over.

Still it rained. They waited quietly while Joey restlessly riffled the cards. The rain kept coming down. Gino spun the half dollar on the pavement.

Joey kept watching the coin. Gino put it in his pocket.

“You wanta play Seven-and-a-half again double stakes?” Joey asked.

“Nope,” Gino said.

Finally the rain stopped and the sun came out and so did they, crawling like moles from beneath the platform. The washed sun was far in the west, over the Hudson River. Joey said, “Jesus, it’s getting late. I gotta go home. You comin’, Gino?”

“Ha, ha,” Gino said. “Not me.” He watched Joey pull his wagon toward Tenth Avenue.

The late shift came out of Runkel’s factory. The men smelled of the chocolate they made and the smell was sweet and sticky like flowers, heavy on the rain-freshened air. Gino sat on the platform and waited until no one came out.

He was deeply pleased with everything he saw—the tenement bricks dyed deep red by the ripening sun, the children coming out again to play in the streets, the few horses and wagons slowly wending toward the Avenue, one leaving a spotted trail of grainy, gold-flecked manure balls. Women came to opened windows; pillows appeared on ledges; women’s faces, sallow, framed in black bonnets of hair, hung over the street like gargoyles along a castle wall. Finally Gino’s eyes were caught by the swiftly flowing stream of rain water in the flooded gutters. He picked up a small flat piece of wood, took out his half dollar, balanced it on the wood, and watched it sail down toward the Avenue. Then he ran after it, saw he was nearing Tenth, picked up the wood and coin and walked back up toward Ninth Avenue.

On the way, passing a row of empty houses, he noticed a bunch of boys as big as Larry swinging on a rope hung from the roof four stories above them. They jumped from the ledge of the second-story window and swung high over 31st Street, riding through the air like Tarzan to the window of an empty house farther up the street.

A blond kid in a red shirt soared in his great half-circle, missed the window, pushed against the wall he hit with his feet and, twisting, soared back the way he had come. For a moment he gave the illusion of really flying. Gino watched with burning envy. But it was no use. They wouldn’t let him do it. He was too small. He went on.

On the corner of Ninth and 31st, in the light-shot oblong shadow of the El, Gino put his stick of wood with its rider coin back in the gutter and watched it sail down to 30th Street; bobbing, riding little wavelets, snagged by soggy bits of newspaper, fruit skins and cores, eroded smooth remains of animal turds, scraping the shining blue-black tarred street bottom beneath the water. The wooden stick turned the corner and started down 30th Street to Tenth Avenue without losing the coin. Gino trotted watchfully beside it, keeping an eye sideways for the kids who had chased him the night before. His boat sailed around tin cans, whirled around piles of refuse, but always fought free to sail finally through a succession of tiny gutter rainbows. Then Gino grabbed his half-dollar piece as the boat sailed down through the grates of the sewer beneath the bridge on Tenth Avenue. Thoughtfully he walked around the corner onto the Avenue and was hit in the stomach by little Sal, who, head down, was running away from a game of “Kick the Can.” Sal shouted excitedly, “Ma’s lookin’ for you. We already ate and you’re gonna get killed.”

Gino turned around and went back toward Ninth, searching for rainbows in the gutter. He backtracked to the empty houses, and found the rope dangling alone. Gino went to the basement and entered the house, climbing crumbling steps to the second floor. The house was gutted, the plumbing stolen for lead, the lighting fixtures gone. The floor was treacherous under a shale of plaster. Everything was still and dangerous as he tiptoed through the ghostly rooms and through doorless doorways. Finally he reached the window and could see the street. The square frame for the windows was only an empty stone socket. Gino stepped onto the ledge, leaned out, and grabbed the rope.

He pushed away from the ledge, and for one glorious moment he had the sensation of really flying of his own will. He soared through the air, out over the street, and, completing the arc, landed on the ledge of a window three buildings up the block. He pushed and sailed back, pushed and sailed out again—faster and faster, soaring back and forth, hitting the window ledges and the wall, then thrusting back out with his feet as if they were his wings, until his arms could no longer sustain him and he slid down the rope in midsail, burning his hands as he braked himself to the pavement and landed in a running movement toward Tenth Avenue, specially timed.

It was twilight. Gino was surprised, and purposeful with the knowledge that he was now in trouble, he trotted down 31st Street to Tenth Avenue, trying hard to keep the look of surprise on his face. But no one in his family was among the people already sitting before the tenements, not even Sal. He ran up the four flights of stairs.

Passing the second floor, he heard Octavia and his mother screaming at each other. Worried, he slowed down. When he came into the apartment he saw them both nose to nose, red spots on their sallow cheeks, eyes flashing black. They both turned to him, quiet, menacing. But Gino, fascinated, had eyes only for his brother Vinnie, already seated at table. Vinnie’s face was powdered dead white with flour, his clothes were caked with it. He looked very tired, his eyes enormous and dark in that floury face.

“Ah. You’re home,” his mother was saying. “Bravo.” Gino, noting that the two women were looking at him like judges, hurried to sit at the table so they would bring him food. He was starving. A stunning blow on the side of his head made him see stars, and through the dizziness his mother was shouting, “Sonamabitch. You escape the whole day. What did you do? And then the signor sits at table to eat without washing. Go. Figlio de puttana. Bestia. Vincenzo, wash also, you’ll feel better.” The two boys went to the kitchen sink to wash and came back to the table.

Tears were in Gino’s eyes—not because of the slap, but because of the terrible end to such a beautiful day. First a hero, then his mother and sister angry as if they hated him. He hung his head, shamed as any villain, not even hungry until his mother put a platter of sausages and peppers under his nose.

Octavia gave Gino one burning look and said to Lucia Santa, “He has to do his share. Why the hell should Vinnie work for him when his own father doesn’t give a damn? If he doesn’t work Vinnie quits the bakery. Vinnie’s going to have fun on his summer vacation, too.”

Without jealousy, Gino noticed that Octavia and his mother watched Vinnie with pity and love as he ate tiredly, listlessly. He could see that his sister was close to tears for some reason. He watched the two women fussing over Vinnie, serving him as if he were a grown man.

Gino put his hand in his pocket and took out the fifty cents and gave it to his mother. “I made this selling ice,” he said. “You can have it. I can bring home fifty cents every day.”

“You better make him stop stealing ice from the yards,” Octavia said.

Lucia Santa was impatient. “Eh, the railroad doesn’t care about children taking a little ice.” She looked at Gino, a curious warm smile on her face. “Bring your brother to the movies Sunday with the money,” she said. And she buttered a big piece of bread for him.

Vinnie’s face was still white, even with the flour gone. The strange lines of fatigue and tension, always obscene on the face of a child, made Octavia put her arm around him and say worriedly, “What did they make you do, Vinnie? Is the work too hard?”

Vinnie shrugged. “It’s O.K. It’s just so hot.” Then he added reluctantly, “I got dirty carrying sacks of flour from the cellar.”

Octavia understood. “The lousy bastards,” she spat out. To her mother she said, “Your dirty guinea paesan’ Panettiere making a kid like Vin carry those heavy sacks. When that son of his asks me for a date, I’ll spit in his face right in the street.”

Vinnie watched them hopefully. Octavia, so angry, might make him quit the job. Then he felt ashamed because his mother needed the money.

Lucia Santa shrugged and said, “Five dollars a week and our bread free as extra, a courtesy. Then free lemon ice when Vincenzo serves, and that’s money saved in summer. With their father gone—”

Octavia flared up. Her mother’s calm acceptance of the father’s desertion made her furious. “That’s just it,” she said. “His father left. He doesn’t give a shit.” Even through her anger she was amused at the look the two small boys gave her—a girl using a dirty word like that. But her mother was not amused and Octavia said in a reasonable tone, “It’s not fair. It’s just not fair to Vinnie.”

The mother spoke in grim Italian, asking, “Who are you to be a schoolteacher when you have the mouth of a whore?” She paused for an answer. But she had upset Octavia’s vision of herself. The mother continued, “If you want a house to give orders in, get married, have children, scream when they come out of your belly. Then you can beat them, then you can decide when they will work and how, and who works.” She looked at her daughter, coldly, as at a deadly rival. “Enough. Bastanza,” she said.

She turned on Gino. “You, giovanetto. From morning to night I don’t see you. You could be run over. You could be kidnapped. That’s one thing. Now. Your father has gone away for a time and so everyone must help. Tomorrow if you disappear I’ll give you this.” She went to the cupboard and took out the skinny wooden club used for rolling dough for the holiday ravioli, “The Tackeril.” Her voice became hoarse, more angry. “By Jesus Christ, I’ll make you visible. I’ll make you so black and blue that if you were the Holy Ghost you could not vanish. Now, eat. After, wash the dishes, clean the table, and sweep the floor. And don’t let me see you come down the stairs this night.”

Gino was impressed. Though unafraid, he had been alert and tense through the whole uproar. Out of such noise sometimes would come a wild swing which it was permissible to evade. But nothing happened. The two women went downstairs and Gino relaxed and ate, the fatty sausage, the oily pulpy peppers blending together deliciously on his hungry palate. The storm was over, there were no hard feelings. He would work for his mother tomorrow, help her out.

Vinnie was staring down at his plate, not eating. Gino said cheerily, “Boy, I’ll bet you had it tough working for that bastid Panettiere. I saw you carrying a big basket. Where’d you bring it?”

“Nah,” Vinnie said. “They got a store on Ninth Avenue. It ain’t so bad. Just carrying the flour up the cellar.” Gino looked at him. There was something wrong.

But already Vinnie was feeling better and he took in great mouthfuls of food, not knowing that what he had felt all that day was fear. That he had suffered a common cruelty—a child sent from the warmth of his family to be commanded by strangers to perform their drudgery. It was his first experience of selling part of his being for money, so unlike doing something for his mother, or shining his big brother’s shoes for a nickel.

But school would come in the fall and set him free, and he would forget how his mother and sister had sent him out of the family and its rule by love and blood. He no longer thought of how he could not play stickball in the summer morning sun, or wander aimlessly around the block talking with friends, hiding in the shade of 31st Street as he sleepily licked a pleated paper cup of lemon ice. He felt the terrible sadness that only children can feel, because they have no knowledge of the sadness of others, of the general human despair.

Gino cleaned the table and started to wash the dishes. Vinnie helped him dry. Gino told of his adventures with the railroad Bull, the empty house and rope, and playing cards with Joey; but he didn’t say anything about his boat-sailing all the way around the block, because ten years old was too old for that kind of stuff.

There was one dirty pot caked with grease and soot, which Gino hid in the oven. Then the two boys went into the living room to look out over the Avenue. Gino sat on one window sill and Vinnie on the other. They were both at peace.

Gino asked, “Why the hell are Mom and Octavia mad at me? I just forgot. I’ll do everything tomorra.”

“They’re just mad because Pop left. They don’t know where he is. He musta run away.”

They both smiled at Vinnie’s joke. Only children ran away.

Far down Tenth Avenue they could see the red lantern of a dummy boy and behind it, like a small round ghost, the white dot of the trailing engine searchlight. The people below were shadows lit by lamp posts, by the blue and red streamer lights of the Panettiere’s lemon-ice stand, by the window bulbs of the grocery and candy stores.

Gino and Vincent, sit-sleeping on their childhood window sill, felt on their tired faces the fresh breeze from the Hudson River. It smelled of running water and, as if it had been carried great distances, of grass and trees and the other green things it had sprung from before it came to the city.

CHAPTER 4

BY LATE AUGUST, everyone hated summer except the children. The days were filled with the smell of burning stone, melting street tar, gasoline, and manure from horse-drawn wagons hawking vegetables and fruit. Over the western wall of the city where the Angeluzzi-Corbos lived hung clouds of steam trailed by locomotives, air immobilized by heat. Black flakes flew out of burning fires as engines packed freight cars into neat long rows. On this Sunday afternoon, when everything was still, the abandoned yellow, brown, and black railroad cars made solid geometric blocks in the liquid golden sunshine, abstractions in a jungle of steel and iron, stone and brick. The gleaming silvery tracks snaked in and out.

Tenth Avenue, open all the way to the river at Twelfth, with no intervening wall to give shade, was lighter than the other avenues of the city and hotter during the day. Now it was deserted. The enormous midday Sunday feast would last to four o’clock, what with the nuts and wine and telling of family legends. Some people were visiting more fortunate relatives who had achieved success and moved to their own homes on Long Island or in Jersey. Others used the day for attending funerals, weddings, christenings, or—most important of all—bringing cheer and food to sick relatives in Bellevue.

The more Americanized might even take their families down to Coney Island, but they would not do this more than once a year. The trip was long, and the size of families demanded great expenditures for frankfurters and sodas, even though they took their own food and drink along in paper bags. The men hated going. These Italians had never stretched idle on a beach. They suffered the sun all week working on the tracks of the railroad. On Sunday they wanted the cool of a house or garden, they wanted their minds occupied and alert over a deck of cards, they wanted to sip wine, or listen to the gossip of women who would not let them move a finger. They might as well go to work as go to Coney Island.

Best of all was a Sunday afternoon without duties. Children at the movies, mother and father took a little nap together after the heavy meal and made love in complete privacy and relaxation. It was the one free day a week and was jealously treasured. Strength was restored. Family bonds healed. Not to be denied, it was a day set aside by God himself.

On this Sunday the streets, empty, beautiful, marched in straight lines away from Tenth Avenue. Since the neighborhood was too poor to own automobiles, none marred the symmetry of concrete pavement interspersed with blue-gray slate. The sun glinted on the smooth black tar, on the iron railings of the stoops, and on the coarse brownstone steps. All this seemed fixed forever in the blinding sun of summer; it was dazzling, as if unveiled on this one day by idle factory chimneys.

But Lucia Santa had picked this day to be a day of strife, to catch the enemy, the Le Cinglatas, unaware.

Everybody was out of the house. Octavia, dutiful Italian daughter that she was, had taken Sal and Baby Lena for a walk. Vincenzo and Gino had gone to the movies. Lucia Santa was free.

The eldest son, the shield and buckler of a fatherless family, had not shown the respect due to his blood or his mother. Lorenzo had not been present for the Sunday dinner. He had not been home to sleep for the last two nights, and came in each morning only to tell his mother that he had to work late and would sleep in the stable of the railroad. But Lucia Santa had found his good suit missing from the closet, and one of his two white shirts and a small suitcase were also gone. That was enough. Bastanza. Her word of decision.

A son of hers not yet eighteen, not married, not master of his own household, he dared to leave his own roof, his mother’s domain? What a disgrace to the family name. What a blow to her prestige in the neighborhood. What defiance of her just powers. Rebellion. Rebellion not to be borne.

Dressed in black, respectable in Sunday hat and veil, pocketbooked as befitted a matron, and short legs in brown cotton stockings fastened by garters that cut into the thighs, Lucia Santa went out on the blazing streets and walked up Tenth Avenue to 36th Street, where the Le Cinglatas lived. As she walked she whipped up her anger for the scene she would have to make. That little slut, that mealymouth, who twenty years ago had cried in church, making such a fuss that she would have to sleep with a man she had never seen. Del-i-cato. Oh, how awful—oh, how terrible—oh, ah, ah. Lucia Santa smiled grimly. These people who gave themselves airs. That was the true instinct of the born whore. Marriage vows and legal papers so that you could hold your head up, look everyone in the eye, rich or poor, that was important. As long as there was no disgrazia. Then if someone insulted your honor you could do murder with a clear conscience. But this was not Italy. She put away these thoughts, bloodthirsty as any greenhorn’s.

But truly, that was what America could do to a respectable Italian girl who no longer had parents to govern her. She was a woman now, the Le Cinglata. But what airs. What graces she had given herself. Oh, those were always the sly ones.

And her son. America or no America, seventeen years old or not, working or not working, he would obey his mother or feel her hand on his mouth. Ah, if his natural father was alive there would be real blows—but then, Lorenzo would never have dared leave a paternal roof.

The shade of the Le Cinglata tenement brought relief. Lucia Santa rested in the cool dark hallway, with its familiar musty smell of rodents, and gathered up her strength for the climb up the stairs and the battle awaiting her. For a moment she felt a weakening despair, a great sudden awareness of her vulnerability to fate and life—her children alienated by foreign ways and a foreign tongue, a husband so erratic that he was a liability in the fight for survival.

But such thoughts led to disaster. She ascended. No son of hers would be a gangster, a criminal sucked-out jellyfish to an older woman without shame. For one moment in the dark hallway, in those murky stairwells, Lucia Santa had a terrible vision of electric chairs, of her son bleeding, stabbed by the Sicilian or the jealous husband. By the time the Le Cinglata door opened, her swiftly coursing fearful blood had made her ready for battle.

But from the very first she was given pause. In the door stood husband Le Cinglata, heavily gray-mustached, in a clean white shirt and black suspendered trousers swelled by his paunch. He was not even pale from his short stay in jail.

Now Lucia Santa was in doubt. With the husband home, what was her son doing here? Could it all be gossip? But that she did not believe, especially when she saw the woman Le Cinglata standing by the table. The look of an enemy was on that face, a defiant guilt mixed with a strange jealousy.

This woman dressed in black, except that her face was thinner and younger than Lucia Santa’s, could be Lorenzo’s mother. That a woman her age should dare corrupt a child. Could they both have been so young once and she so innocent?

“Ah, Signora,” the man Le Cinglata was saying. “Come sit and have a glass of wine.” He ushered her to a white metal-topped table. He poured a glass from a half-gallon jug. “The grapes were good last year. This wine smells of Italy.” Then, with a wink, “This is not the wine I sell, believe me.” It was understood that only a respected guest like Lucia Santa was served from such a harvest.

The woman Le Cinglata brought out a plate of tarelle, hard and crusty, flecked with dark dots of pepper. She put them on the table, then folded her arms. She did not drink.

Signor Le Cinglata poured himself a glass and said, “Drink, Lucia Santa,” with such hearty friendliness that the mother was disarmed, as she always was by an unexpected courtesy. She drank. Then she said, in a gentler voice than she had intended, “I was passing by and thought Lorenzo might be here, helping Signora Le Cinglata with the customers.”

The husband smiled and said, “No, no. Sunday afternoons we rest. No business until night time. After all, we’re not Jews.”

Lucia Santa said, a little more forcefully, “Forgive me for saying this. You must understand a mother. Lorenzo is still too young for such a business. He has no judgment. One night he beat a man old enough to be his father. And a Sicilian who may decide to kill him. Of course, Signor Le Cinglata, you know about this, all these things.”

The husband was expansive, tolerant. “Ah, yes, I know. A good boy. Bravo, bravo, your Lorenzo. You have brought him up a good Italian, respectful to his elders, helpful, industrious. I know the good money we pay him he gives to his mother. There are not many people I would trust, give the freedom of my house, but with Lorenzo there could be no doubt. What an honest face he has.” And so on.

Lucia Santa became impatient and she broke in. “But he is not an angel from heaven. He must obey. Am I right? Does a son show respect to his mother or not? And now some of his clothes are missing. So I thought you might know, perhaps he rested here one night.”

For the first time the woman Le Cinglata spoke, and Lucia Santa marveled at her brassiness, her lack of shame, her hard voice. “Ah,” the woman said. “Your son is a man grown. He earns his own bread and some for your other children. We are not in Italy. You rule with too iron a hand, Signora.”

Here, now, the Le Cinglata woman made her mistake. Met with rudeness, Lucia Santa could become angry and voice her true feelings. She said coldly, politely, “Ah, Signora, you don’t know what trouble children make. How could you, you who are so fortunate not to have any? Ah, the worries of a mother, a cross pray to Christ you will never have to bear. But let me tell you this, my dear Le Cinglata. America or no America, Africa, or even England, it does not signify. My children sleep under my roof until they are married. My children do not become drunkards or fight with drunkards, or go to jail or go to the electric chairs.”

Now the woman Le Cinglata was angry and shouted back. “What? What? You’re saying that we are not respectable people? Your son is too good to visit here? But who are you? What part of Italy do you come from? In my province and yours there was not one of the nobility with the name of Angeluzzi or Corbo. And now my husband, the closest friend and fellow worker of your son’s true father, almost a godfather, he is not to be a friend to Lorenzo? Is that what you are saying?”

Now Lucia Santa was trapped, and she cursed the other woman’s slyness. She had an answer ready to hand but could not use it—that she objected not to the husband’s friendship, but to the wife’s. She did not dare. A jealous and deceived husband wreaked vengeance on wife and lover alike. She said defensively, “No, no, of course he can visit. But not work. Not stay so late amongst quarreling men. Not sleep here,” she concluded dryly.

The Le Cinglata woman smiled. “My husband knows your son slept here. He does not listen to idle gossip. He does not believe his wife would disgrace herself with a mere boy. He is thankful for your son’s protection. He gave your son twenty dollars for his good deeds. Now tell me. Does the boy’s own mother believe the worst of him?”

With the husband looking down her throat, Lucia Santa perforce said hurriedly, “No, no. But people talk. Your husband is a sensible man, thank God.” A fool and an idiot, she thought furiously. And as for a mother thinking the worst of her son, who had a better right?

But then, without knocking, entering as if it were his household, Lorenzo came in, stopped short, and the tableau that this made explained everything to the mother.

Larry smiled with genuine fondness at them all, his mother, then the paramour, then the husband he had made a cuckold. They smiled back. But the mother saw that the husband’s smile had a falsity and contempt for youth; it was the smile of a man who was not deceived. And the female Le Cinglata—that a woman her age should have such a look on her face, the lips full and wet and red, the black eyes penetrating, looking directly into the youth’s face.

Lucia Santa watched Lorenzo with grim irony. Her handsome son with the false heart. But he—his hair like blue-black silk, with his straight bronze heavy features, his big nose, heavily fleshed and masculine, his skin unbroken by adolescent blemish—he, the Judas, turned his head to view his mother with affectionate astonishment. He put down the suitcase he was carrying and asked, “Ma, what are you doing here? And I was just thinking what bad luck I missed you home.”

She knew what had happened. He had waited to see her leave, watching from some hiding place. Never dreaming she was coming here. Then quick into the house to get his clean clothes. Figlio de puttana, she thought, how two-faced he is.

But she did not let her anger show. “Ah, my son,” she said. “You’re moving into your new home? Signor and Signora Le Cinglata are adopting you? My cooking doesn’t please you? One of your blood has affronted you in some way? You’re making a change, are you?”

Larry laughed and said, “Ah, come on, Ma, quit kidding.” He was appreciative. He found her witty. He gave her his big flashing smile. “I told you I’m just gonna stay here and help out awhile. I want to give you some extra money. Zi’ Le Cinglata has to go to court and then to the country and buy grapes. Don’t worry, Ma, any money I get, it’s yours.”

“Grazia,” the mother said. They all smiled, even Signor Le Cinglata, that the youth thought himself so clever he could call his cuckold “Uncle.”

Signor Le Cinglata fell into the spirit of the thing. “Lucia Santa,” he said familiarly. “I look on Lorenzo as my very own son. Ah, what a disgrazia we have no children. But now who will protect my wife when I am away? This business is hard and dangerous for a woman alone. There must be a strong man in the house. Your son has his regular hours on the railroad. Then he comes here until early morning. He must sleep during the daytime. Your children run in and out, in and out. Why shouldn’t he get his rest here, where everything is quiet? I have absolute trust in your son and I don’t care about idle gossip. A man who makes the money I make need not worry about his neighbors’ opinions.”

It was all clear to the mother. She felt an overwhelming contempt for these people. Here was a husband, and an Italian, who for the sake of money let his wife cuckold him. Here was a wife who knew her husband cared more about the business and money than about her honor and good name, and made his wife his whore. Lucia Santa was truly shocked, for one of the few times in her life.

Where would it lead her son, living with such people? She said to Lorenzo, not even in anger, “Get all your things, figlio mio, and come back to your own roof. I don’t leave here until you come.”

Larry gave them all an embarrassed smile. “Come on, Ma,” he said. “I been working five years now and bringing home money. I’m no kid.”

Lucia Santa stood up, commandingly stout in black. She said dramatically, “I am your mother and you dare defy me before strangers?”

The female Le Cinglata said with savage contempt, “Va, va, giovanetto. Go with your mother. When a mother calls, children must obey.”

Larry’s face became red through the bronze and Lucia Santa saw the man’s anger in his eyes. He looked like his dead father. “Like hell I will,” Larry said.

The mother rushed across to him and hit him in the face, a good solid blow. He gave her a push that sent her staggering against the kitchen table.

The Le Cinglatas were aghast. There would be too much trouble now. They stepped between mother and son.

“Ahhh.” Lucia Santa gave a long hiss of satisfaction. “A son strikes his mother. Animale! Bestial Sfachim! Figlio de puttana! Thank God your father is dead. Thank God he does not see his son beating his own mother for the sake of strangers.”

Larry’s face had five red stripes, but he was no longer angry. He said sullenly, “Ah, Ma, I just pushed you away. Cut it out.” He felt guilty, conscience-stricken, to see tears of humiliation in his mother’s eyes.

Lucia Santa turned to the Le Cinglatas. “This is your pleasure, eh? Good. My son can stay here. But let me tell you this. My son will be in my house tonight. Or I will be in the police station. He is underage. I will send him to reform school and you people to prison. Selling wine and whisky is one thing, but here in America they protect children. As you said, Signora, we are not in Italy.” She spoke to her son. “And you, stay with your friends. I wouldn’t want your company in the street. Stay, enjoy yourself. But, dear son of mine, I warn you, sleep in my house tonight. Or big as you are I’ll put you away.” She made a dignified exit.

Walking home, she thought, Ah, that’s how people make their fortunes. Money comes before everything. But what scum they are. What animals. And yet when they have money they dare look everyone in the eye.

That night, after the children had been put to bed, Octavia and the mother sat drinking coffee at the great round kitchen table. There was no sign of Larry. Octavia was a little frightened at her mother’s determination to put Larry in reform school. She would not be able to go to work the next day. They would both have to go to the police station to swear out a summons. Octavia had never thought her mother could be so cruel and hard or so contemptuous of extra money earned by Larry at the Le Cinglatas’.

A knock on the door startled them, and Octavia went to open it. A tall, dark, good-looking man, dressed in a suit as beautiful as a movie star’s, smiled at her. He asked in perfect Italian, “Is this the home of Signora Corbo?” Then he added, “I am from the Le Cinglatas, their lawyer; they asked me to see you.”

Octavia brought him a cup of coffee. Friend or enemy, a guest was offered something to drink.

“Now,” the young man said. “Signora Corbo, you are foolish to get so upset about your son. Everyone is bootlegging. It is not something wrong. The President himself has his little drink. And are you so rich you can’t use a few dollars?”

“Mr. Lawyer,” the mother said, “I don’t care how or what you say.” The young man was observing her intently, not taking offense. She went on. “My son sleeps in the house of his mother, his brothers, his sisters. Until he has a wife. That, or off he goes to reform school to enjoy his pleasure. At eighteen let him leave and I will not be his mother. But until he is of age I have no choice. None of my children will be pimps or jailbirds or murderers.”

The young man was staring hard into her face. Then he said briskly, “Good. We understand each other. But perfectly, Signora. Now listen to me. On no account go to the police. I promise you that tomorrow without fail your son will be here. This trouble will not trouble you again. Now, that’s well said, is it not?”

“Tonight,” Lucia Santa said.

“Eh,” the young man replied. “I’m disappointed in you. Jesus Christ could not make your son come home tonight. You, a mother, with your experience of life—you must understand his pride. He thinks himself a man. Let him have this little victory.”

The mother was pleased and flattered and recognized the truth. She nodded assent.

The young man rose quickly and said, “Buona sera, Signora.” He bowed his head to Octavia and left.

“See?” the mother demanded grimly. “That is what I save your brother from.”

Octavia was bewildered.

The mother went on, “A lawyer—ha, ha. They do business with the Black Hand. There was ‘murder’ written all over his face.”

Octavia laughed with pure delight. She said, “Ma, you’re crazy, you really are.” And then she looked at her mother with love and respect. Her mother, a simple peasant, thinking this man a dangerous criminal, had not quailed or shown any fear. In fact, at the beginning she had looked as if she were going after the Tackeril.

“So now can I go to work tomorrow?” Octavia asked.

“Yes, yes,” Lucia Santa said. “Go to work. Don’t lose a day’s pay. We can’t afford it. People like us will never be rich.”

CHAPTER 5

HOLDING BABY LENA in her arms, Lucia Santa looked out the living room window into the blinding light of the late August morning. The streets were busy with traffic, and directly below her a peddler shouted his arrogant singsong. “Potatoes. Bananas. Spinach. Cheap. Cheap. Cheap.” His wagon was filled with red, brown, green, and yellow square boxes of fruits and vegetables. Lucia Santa might have been staring down at a child’s vivid, blotchy painting on her linoleum floor.

Across in the railroad yards she saw a crowd of people, men and young boys. Thank God Lorenzo was safe in his bed after the night shift, or she would have that terrible stabbing pain, the weakening fear in her legs and bowels. She watched the street intently.

She saw a small boy standing on top of a railroad car, staring down at the people below him. He was walking back and forth, a few steps at a time, quickly and frantically. The sun glinted on a blue rayon shirt laddered white across the chest. It could only be Gino. But what was he doing? What had happened? There were no engines near the car. He could not possibly be in danger.

Lucia Santa felt that power, that almost godlike sense of knowledge women feel looking down from windows at their children playing, observing and themselves unobserved. Like the legend of God peering out of a cloud at human children too engrossed to glance upward and catch him.

There was a glint of shiny black leather as the uniformed railroad policeman went up the ladder of the freight car, and the mother understood. She rushed into the bedroom and shouted, “Lorenzo, wake up. Hurry.” She shook him. She gave her voice an urgent shrillness that would make him jump. Larry came bounding out of bed, all hairy chest and legs and BVDs, indecent to any woman but a mother, his hair tousled, his face greasy with the sweat of summer sleep. He followed his mother to the living room window. They were just in time to see Gino jump from the top of the railroad car to escape the Bull, who had climbed up to get him. They saw him grabbed by another black-uniformed Bull, who waited on the ground. When Gino dropped through the air, the mother let out a scream. Larry bawled, “Jesus Christ, how many times I told you make that kid stop stealing ice?” Then he rushed into the bedroom and put on his pants and sneakers and ran down the stairs.

When he came out of the building, his mother was shouting from the window, “Hurry, hurry, they’re killing him.” She had just seen one of the policemen give Gino a cuff on the ear. The whole group was walking toward the shanty on Tenth Avenue. Lucia Santa saw Larry run across the Avenue, rush toward them, and grab Gino’s hand away from the police-man. In that moment she forgave his insults to her at the Le Cinglatas’, forgave his sullen behavior of the last few weeks. He still knew what a brother meant; that there was no obligation more sacred than blood, that it came before country, church, wife, woman, and money. Like God, she watched the sinner redeem himself, and she rejoiced.

Larry Angeluzzi ran across the street like a man rushing to commit murder. He had been pushed around enough. During the past weeks he had lived with a feeling of rage, humiliation, and guilt. His image of himself had been shattered. He had actually struck his mother and shamed her before strangers. And all for the sake of people who had used him and then sent him away. A child sent to do errands, then brought to heel; an object of ridicule. In his mind he had become a villain, an angel fallen from his own heaven. Sometimes he could not believe he had acted in such a fashion and thought of it as an accident—that his mother had tripped and stumbled, that he had put his hand out to steady her and been clumsy. But behind this thought came a quick flush of shame. Now, not knowing he was seeking redemption, he grabbed Gino away from the Bull and felt, as if it were a physical touch, his watching mother’s eye upon him.

Gino was crying, though not tears of pain or fear. Up to the last moment he had been sure he would escape. He had even dared to leap from the top of the railroad car to the hard gravel, and he had escaped injury. His tears were the tears of a little boy’s baffled rage and lost pride on being made small and helpless and trapped.

Larry knew one of the Bulls, Charlie, but the other was a stranger. Larry had spent many a winter night in the shanty swapping stories with Charlie about the local girls, laughing at the bowlegged man’s conceit. But now he said coldly to both of them, “What the hell you guys doing to my kid brother?” He had meant to be conciliating; he knew it was a time for friendliness and charm. But the words came out in a rough challenge.

The tall Bull, the stranger, said to Charlie Chaplin, “Who the hell is this guy?” and reached over to grab Gino. Larry pushed Gino behind him and said, “Go on home.” Gino didn’t move.

Charlie Chaplin said to his partner, “He’s the dummy boy on the night shift.” Then, “Listen, Larry, this kid brother of yours stole ice all summer. One time he throws rocks at me and tells me go fuck myself. A kid like that. Your brother or not, I’m gonna make his ass black and blue. Now step aside, kid, or get hurt. And out of a job in the bargain. You work for the railroad, too, don’t forget. And you are wrong, Jack.”

One of the watching laborers said in Italian, “They gave your brother a few pretty slaps already.”

Larry stepped backward until he felt pavement instead of gravel. They were out of the yard. He said, “We’re off railroad property now. You guys got no jurisdiction.” Larry decided to reason; he didn’t want to lose his job. “But I’m surprised at you, Charlie. Since when you been a company man? Every kid on Tenth Avenue steals ice from the yards. Even your girl’s kid brother. What the hell, you’re not talking to a greenhorn. O.K., you hit my brother because he hit you with a rock. You’re even.” He saw out the corner of his eye, first the crowd, then Gino, dry-eyed and somber, his small boy’s face wearing a look of thirsty vengeance that was comical. Larry said affectionately to his half brother, “You go in this yard again and I’ll give you a beating. Now, come on.”

It was well done. Everyone had saved face, he hadn’t been too tough and made enemies, and he hadn’t backed down. Larry was proud of his good judgment. But the tall, strange Bull spoiled everything. He said to Charlie Chaplin, “So you made me come all the way over here for nothing?” Charlie shrugged. The tall Bull reached out and gave Gino a backhanded slap in the face and said toughly, “Just let me see you in here.” Larry hit him so hard that the black visored cap went flying through the crowd. The circle widened, and everyone waited for the bloody-mouthed Bull to get up. Without his cap he looked much older, and less menacing in his almost complete baldness. The Bull got up and faced Larry.

They stared at each other. The Bull took off his gun belt and gave it to Charlie along with his black jacket. He was long-chested in his tan shirt. He said quietly, “O.K., you’re one of these tough guineas. Now you’re gonna fight.”

“Not here,” Charlie said. “Let’s get behind those cattle cars.” They all walked back into the yard to a natural square of gravel. There was no idea of a trap. It was an affair of honor. Both Bulls lived on the West Side. To use their official authority now would disgrace them forever in the neighborhood.

Larry slipped out of the BVD top and stuffed it into his pants. Young as he was, he had a chest as hairy as and even broader than the older man’s. Larry felt only one fear—that his mother would come down and make a scene. If she did that, he would leave the house for good. But glancing upward, he saw her figure still at the window.

For the first time in his life, Larry really wanted to fight, to hurt someone, to show himself the master of his world.

People were running across the Avenue to watch the fight. Heads were popping out of tenement windows. The Panettiere’s son, Guido, came to him and said, “I’ll be your second.” Behind him was Vinnie with a scared look on his face.

Larry and the Bull raised their hands against each other. In that moment Larry felt the full force of his mother watching at the window, and his two small brothers tense and wide-eyed in the crowd. He felt a great surge of power. He would never be humbled; they would never see him beaten. He sprang at the older man. They rained blows on each other, their fists sliding off each other’s shoulders and arms. One of the Bull’s defensive blows struck the onrushing Larry full in the face and left a long bloody gash on his cheek.

The Panettiere’s son rushed between them, yelling, “Take off the ring, you yellow bastard. Fight fair.” The Bull flushed and took the rough gold wedding ring he had slipped up to his knuckle and threw it to Charlie Chaplin. The crowd jeered. The Bull rushed at Larry.

Larry, a little frightened at all the blood running down his face, yet filled with a murderous hatred, hit the Bull with a roundhouse right to the stomach. The Bull went down. The crowd yelled. Guido kept shouting, “Knock him out, Larry. Knock him out.” The Bull got up and everyone was still. Larry heard his mother, far away, screaming, “Lorenzo, stoppa stoppa.” Some of the people turned and looked across the Avenue and up toward the tenement window. Larry made a furious, imperious gesture for his mother to shut up.

The two men kept swinging at each other until the Bull went down again, not from the force of a blow, but to get rest. He was winded. When he got up, Larry knocked him down with a painful blow in the face.

The older man, furious with humiliation, grabbed Larry by the neck and tried to kick him. Larry flung him away. They were both exhausted, and neither was skillful enough to score a clear-cut victory. Charlie Chaplin grabbed the Bull and Guido grabbed Larry. Each held his friend back. The fight was over.

“O.K.,” Charlie Chaplin said with authority. “It was a good fight. You both showed you ain’t yellow. Shake hands and no hard feelings.”

“Right,” said Guido. Then, with a wink at Larry and with a voice filled with condescension for the Bulls, he said, “It’s a draw.” Some of the crowd shook Larry’s hand and patted him on the shoulder. Everybody knew he had won the fight.

And then both Larry and the Bull had sheepish smiles on their faces. They shook hands laughing and grasped each other’s shoulders to show their friendship. The Bull said huskily, “You’re all right, kid.” There were murmurs of approval. Larry put his arm around Gino and said, “Let’s go, brudder.” They crossed the Avenue and went up the stairs to the house. Guido and Vincent came with them.

When they came into the house the mother aimed one blow at Gino, which he dodged easily. Then she saw Larry’s cheek. She wrung her hands and moaned, “Marrone, marrone,” and rushed to put a wet rag on the cut, meanwhile screaming at Gino, “Sfachim, because of you, your brother gets a beating.”

“Ah, Ma,” Larry said proudly and happily. “I won the fight—ask Guido.”

“Sure,” Guido said. “Your son could be a professional fighter, Mrs. Corbo. He knocked the hell out of that Bull. He wouldn’t have a mark except for that ring.”

Gino said excitedly, “Ma, Larry knocked that bastard down four times. That makes you win the fight, right, Larry?”

“Sure,” Larry said. “But you cut out that cursing.” He felt full of affection for his mother and brother and the whole family. “Nobody is gonna lay their hands on anybody in my family,” he said. “I woulda killed the guy except for my job in the railroad.”

Lucia Santa gave them all coffee. Then she said, “Lorenzo, go back to sleep. Remember you work tonight.” Guido and Vinnie left for the bakery. Larry undressed and went to bed. Lying there, he could hear Gino telling his mother all about the fight in an excited happy voice.

Larry felt tired and at peace. He was no longer a villain. Tonight when he rode up Tenth Avenue on his horse, the great black engine and endless train behind him, people on the Avenue would look at him, shout to him, talk to him. He would be treated with respect. He had protected his brother and the family honor. No one would dare mistreat anyone in his family. He fell asleep.

In the kitchen the mother, her face awful with fury, said to Gino, “If you go into the railroad again, I’ll kill you.” Gino shrugged.

Lucia Santa was happy, but a little irritated by all the fuss about the fight, the masculine pride and hoopla, as if such things were really of great importance. Now she wanted to hear no more of it. She had that secret contempt for male heroism that many women feel but never dare express; they find masculine pride in heroics infantile, for after all, what man would risk his life day after day and year after year as all women do in the act of love? Let them bear children, let their bodies open up into a great bloody cavern year after year. They would not be so proud then of their trickling scarlet noses, their little knife cuts. Gino was still babbling about the fight. She picked him up by the scruff of the neck and threw him out the door like a kitten. She shouted after him, “Don’t dare be late for supper.”

THE REST OF the summer Lucia Santa had to do battle with Octavia in a cruel heat that was burnt out of concrete. The pavement and gutters were covered with the dust of dried manure flakes, soot—the debris of millions of people and animals. Even the great structures of inanimate stone seemed to shed gritty particles into the air as a dog sheds hair.

Octavia won. First she switched jobs and became a sewing teacher for the Melody Corporation, an organization promoting the sale of sewing machines. Octavia gave the free lessons that went with each purchase. The pay was three dollars a week less than she had been getting, but there would be promotions. Then, too, she could sew dresses for her mother and Baby Lena right at work. This last persuaded Lucia Santa. That was one victory.

Vinnie had become very thin during the summer. The mother worried, and so did her daughter. One day Octavia took her three little brothers to the free dental clinic at the Hudson Guild Settlement House. Earlier she had seen a sign saying that applications were open for the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, which sent children to summer camp for two weeks or to special country homes. She had entered Vinnie’s name. That was before the job with the Panettiere.

Now she broached the subject with her mother. Vinnie would only lose two weeks’ pay. He would have to leave the job when school opened in the fall anyway. Here was an opportunity for him to spend two weeks in the country with a private farm family, all expenses paid. The mother protested, not because of the money, but because she could not grasp the basic principle that a city child ought to spend a few weeks in the fresh country air. Herself a peasant, she could not believe this. Also she found it hard to believe that a strange couple would agree to take an unknown child into their home for two weeks without making him work or earn his keep. When Octavia explained that people received a small payment, she understood. It must be a good sum.

Finally Lucia Santa consented. Gino would take Vincent’s place in the bakery for two weeks. Vinnie was given a letter he could mail so that if he did not like it, Octavia would come and get him. Then Vincent didn’t want to go. He was terrified of having to live with strange people. But Octavia became so angry and close to tears that he went.

Gino ruined the family reputation for industry and reliability working for the Panettiere. After a bread delivery he would not return for hours. He came late and left early. He threw flour sacks down the cellar stairs and dragged them up, ripping the bags, spilling the flour. He ate tons of pizza and lemon ice. Yet no one could be angry with him. The Panettiere merely informed the mother that Gino would not be an acceptable substitute for Vincenzo next summer and they both laughed, which made Octavia furious. God forbid, if Vinnie did what they were laughing at, the mother would beat him black and blue.

Octavia had her reward. Suddenly it was the end of summer, school was only a week away, and Vinnie came home. The change was astonishing. He had a new suitcase of shining brown leather. He wore new white flannel trousers, a white shirt, a blue tie, and a blue jacket. His face was tanned and full. He was at least an inch taller. He was quite the man of the world when the social workers dropped him off in a cab they had taken from Grand Central Station.

That night the Angeluzzi-Corbo family went indoors early. When Vinnie told them all about the country, Gino and Sal were wide-eyed, and even Baby Lena seemed to be listening.

The country was a place without brick or pavement. The streets were made of dirt; apples, small and green, hung on trees all around. Raspberries grew on bushes wherever you went. You just ate everything when you felt like it. The country was a small white house made of wood, and the nights were so cold you had to use blankets. Everybody had a car because there were no subways or trolley cars. The mother was unimpressed. She had lived in the country. But Gino was stunned at the thought of what he had missed.

Then Vincent showed them his pajamas. He was the first one in the family to own a pair. They were yellow and black, and he had picked them out himself. The mother said, “But you sleep in these?” In winter everyone slept with heavy under-wear and a knitted sweater of coarse wool. In hot weather there were BVDs. Pajamas were for the Chinese.

“But why did these people buy you all these clothes?” she asked. “Do they get that much money from the Funda?”

“No,” Vinnie said proudly, “they like me. They want me back next year and they said I could bring Gino too. I told them all about the family. They’re gonna write me letters and send me a Christmas present. So I’ll have to send one to them too.”

“So, they have no children?” the mother asked.

“No,” said Vincent.

Seeing him happy, Octavia said impulsively, “You won’t have to go back to the bakery, Vin. It’s only a week before school. He can go to hell.” Vinnie was delighted. They both looked toward Lucia Santa, but she smiled at them in agreement. Her face was thoughtful.

She was wondering. There were good people in the world, then, that made strange children happy. What kind of people were these? How safe they must be that they could squander love and money on a boy they had never seen and might never see again. Vaguely she sensed that outside her world was another as different as another planet. It was not a world that people like themselves could ever stay in. They entered by charity, and charity exhausted itself like a falling star, burned out. Ah, in Italy they eat the children of the poor alive, the rich, the fat landowners. But it was enough that for tonight her children were happy and had hope. She was content.

The summer ended badly for Octavia. Her boss, a portly, genial man, always very nice, called her into the office one evening.

“Miss Angeluzzi,” he said, “I’ve had my eye on you. You are a fine teacher. The women who buy their machines and get their lessons from you are very happy with you. And they are very happy with their machines. And that is the rub, my dear girl.”

Octavia was bewildered. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“Well, you’re young, you’re obviously intelligent. That’s good, very good. And you have determination. You get a job done. I noticed one woman having trouble, a very stupid woman, that was easy to see, and you stuck with her until she got the technique. I won’t make any bones about it, you’re the best girl we ever had.” He patted her kindly on the arm, and she drew away. He smiled; her benighted Italian upbringing had betrayed her. A man only touched you for one reason.

Octavia’s mind was spinning with pleasure at his praise. She was a real teacher after all. She had been right all the time.

“But, Octavia,” the boss went on gently, “the Melody Sewing Machine Company is not in business to give sewing lessons. Or even to sell those inferior machines we advertise to make people come into the store. We want to sell the good machines. The best. Now that is what your job really is. I’m promoting you to saleslady, with a two-dollar raise. But you still do the same thing. Only be sociable.” Her eyes suddenly flashed and he smiled. “No, not with me. Be sociable and go out with these ladies you teach. Have coffee with them, get to be real friendly. You speak Italian, and that helps. Now, we don’t make money on the machines we advertise. Your job is to make these people switch to the better models. Understand? Just go on as you do now. Only be their friend, maybe even go out at night with them. Come to work a little late the next morning. If you sell good you make your own hours.” He started to pat her arm again, stopped and gave her an amused, fatherly smile.

Octavia left the office impressed, happy, tremendously flattered. Now she had a good job, a job with a future. That afternoon she went out with some of the young married women when they had their coffee break, and they talked with her so respectfully and with such deference that she felt very important, just like a real teacher. When she asked one of them how the machine worked, the woman said it was fine, adding, “Your boss tried to make me change to that fancy expensive one. But why should I? I’m just making dresses for my kids and myself and saving a little money.” Then Octavia saw clearly what her boss had asked her to do.

Once started on her job of selling, she had for the first time in her life to make a moral and intellectual decision that had nothing to do with her own personal relationships, her body, her sex, her family. She learned that to get ahead in the world meant despoiling her fellow human beings. She thought of her mother, a greenhorn, being cheated in such a fashion. If it had been a case of padding bills, overcharging to keep her job, she might have done so. But she still was so naÏve that she felt that to use her personality, her smiles, her words of friendship, was like using her body for material gain. Sometimes she tried, but she was not capable of the final bullying that was needed to clinch a sale.

In two weeks she was fired. The boss stood near the door as she went out. He shook his head at her, smiling with gentle pity, and said, “You’re a nice girl, Octavia.” But she did not smile in return. Her black eyes flashed angrily and she gave him a look of contempt. He could afford to understand her. He had lost nothing, his way of life had conquered. His was the easy amiability of the victor over the vanquished. She could not afford such tolerance.

Octavia began to lose her dreams. Now it seemed that the teachers she had loved had really tricked her with their compliments, with their urgings to find a better life, a life she could not afford to seek. They had sold her an ideal too expensive for her world.

Octavia went back to the garment shops. When she had a new job she told her mother the whole story; the mother listened silently. She was combing little Sal’s hair, holding the boy between her knees. She merely said, “People like you will never be rich.”

Octavia said angrily, “I wouldn’t do it to poor people. You wouldn’t do it, either. Put money in those lousy bastards’ pockets.”

Lucia Santa said wearily, “I’m too old for such tricks. And I have no talent. I don’t like people well enough to be nice to them, not even for money. But you, you’re young, you can learn. It’s not so hard. But no. My family, they read books, they go to movies, they think they can act like rich people. Have pride. Be poor. It’s nothing to me. I was poor, my children can be poor.” She pushed Sal toward the door.

Sal turned around and said, “Give me two cents for a soda, Ma.” The mother, who always gave him two cents, said angrily, “Didn’t you hear what I just told your sister? We are poor. Now go.”

Sal looked at her gravely. She thought with irritation that all her children were too serious. Then Sal said, with the perfect reasonableness of a child, “If you never give me two cents will you be rich?” Octavia let out a shriek of laughter. The mother took her pocketbook and with a straight face gave Sal a silver nickel. Sal ran out of the house without another word.

Lucia Santa shrugged and smiled at Octavia. And yet, the mother thought, if I never gave my children two cents for soda, we might be rich. If I never gave them money for the moving pictures and baseballs, if I made meat only once a week and put on the electric light only when it was pitch dark. If I sent my children to work all year round instead of waiting till they finish high school, if I made them sew buttons on cards at night instead of reading and listening to the radio—who knows?

Thousands of houses had been bought on Long Island by miserly thrift. But it would never work with her family. They would all be miserable, including herself. And it was her fault. She had not rubbed their noses in poverty as a good mother should.

She had no illusions about human beings. They were not evil, not deliberately malicious. But money was God. Money could make you free. Money could give you hope. Money could make you safe. Renounce money? As well ask a man to give up his gun in the wild jungle.

Money guarded the lives of your children. Money lifted them out of darkness. Who has not wept for lack of money? Who has not wept for money? Who comes when money calls? Doctors, priests, dutiful sons.

Money was a new homeland. Lying awake at night thinking of the growing sums in the bank, Lucia Santa felt the sudden physical chilling sharpness mixed with fear that a prisoner feels when counting the days to stay behind walls.

And money was friends, respectful relatives. A new Jesus could never rise to reproach those with money.

Not to be rich, but to have money; to have money like a wall to put your back to, and then face the world.

Octavia knew her mother was thinking about money. Money for doctors, money for clothes, money for the oil stove, money for school books, money for Communion suits. Money for a house on Long Island, and maybe little Sal would be the one to go to college.

And yet, Octavia thought, with all this her mother was careless with money. She bought the best olive oil, expensive cheese, imported prosciutto. She served meat at least three times a week. And many times she called a doctor for the ailing children, where other families would give home remedies and wait for the fever or cold to pass. At Easter time each child had a new suit or dress.

But every few weeks there was five or ten dollars that the mother would give Octavia to put away. There was now over fifteen hundred dollars in the postal savings book that no one knew about except her and her mother. Octavia wondered what the magic signal would be that would make her mother decide to take one of the great steps in a family’s life and buy a house on Long Island.

IT WAS AUTUMN, the children going to school, the nights too chilly to sit on the Avenue, and too much work to do to spend a whole evening in gossip. There were clothes to wash and press, shoes to shine, buttons to be sewn on cards to earn extra money. Oil stoves were brought out of hiding from backyard and cellar. The city changed its lights; the sun became a chilly yellow, the pavements and gutters steely gray. The buildings became taller and thinner and more distinct from each other. You could no longer smell the stone and tar. The air lost its summer solidity of dust and heat. White smoke from bull engines in the railroad yard smelled of nature. It was on the morning of such a day that Frank Corbo came home to his family.

CHAPTER 6

THE BIG CHILDREN were off to school and work. Zia Louche was having a coffee with Lucia Santa. They both heard steps on the stairs and when the door opened, Frank Corbo, proud, but like a child waiting for a sign of welcome, stood for a few moments before entering the apartment. He looked well, his face brown and full, the eyes gentler. Lucia Santa said coolly, “Ah, you’re home finally.” But there was a note of welcome in her voice despite the resigned, unspoken protest. Zia Louche, being older, knew how to treat a returning husband. She said, “Ah, Frank, how well you look. How good it is to see you looking so well.” And she bustled around to get him a cup of coffee. Frank Corbo sat at the table opposite his wife.

They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment. There was nothing either could say. What he had done had been impossible not to do. He could make no apology, no plea for understanding. She must accept it as she must accept sickness and death. And just as impossible was it that she could forgive him. She rose and went to the door where he had left his suitcase, as if he might not stay, and put it in the farthest corner of the room. Then she made him a quick omelet to go with his coffee.

When she bent her head over to serve him, he kissed her cheek and she accepted the kiss. It was an act of two people who have betrayed each other and with this kiss pledged themselves never to seek vengeance.

The two women and the man sat around drinking coffee. Zia Louche asked, “So how was it to go back on the land? Ah, work, real work is the best thing for a man. In Italy people work sixteen hours a day and never get sick. But you, you look very fine. The land agreed with you, then?”

The father nodded his head. He was polite. “It was good,” he said.

The two small children, Sal and Baby Lena, came down the corridor from the front room, where they had been playing. When they saw their father, they stopped and held each other’s hand. They stared at him.

Zia Louche said sharply, “Go kiss your father, go.” But the father was looking at the children with the same helpless vulnerable ghost of remembered love, a kind of wonder, remembrance mixed with wariness, of danger. When they came to him he bent and kissed their foreheads with an infinite gentleness. After he had done this his wife saw that stricken look in his eyes that had always troubled her so.

From his pocket the father took two small brown paper bags of candy and gave one to each of the children. They sat on the floor beside his chair, to open the bags and explore their gifts, brushing against the father’s legs like cats. He drank his coffee, seemingly unaware, making no gesture to touch them again.

Zia Louche left. When the door closed, the father took a roll of bills from his pocket, kept two for himself, and gave the rest to Lucia Santa. There was a hundred dollars.

She was overwhelmed. “Maybe you did the right thing. You look better. How do you feel, Frank?” Her voice was touched with concern, a little apprehensive.

“Better,” the husband said. “I was sick. I didn’t want to fight before I left, so I couldn’t tell you. The noise in the city, in the house. My head hurt all the time. Out there it was quiet. I worked hard all day and at night I slept without dreams. What man could want more?”

They were both silent. At last he said, as if in apology, “That’s not much money, but it’s everything I earned. I didn’t spend a penny on myself. My boss gave me the suitcase, the clothes, and my living. Better than staying here and washing your stairs.”

The mother said quietly, reassuringly, “It is a lot of money.” But she could not help adding, “Gino did your stairs for you.” She expected him to be angry. But Frank nodded his head and said in a reasonable, gentle voice, without irony, “Children must suffer for the sins of their fathers.”

He spoke like a churchgoer, a Christian, and, in confirmation of her suspicion, he took a red-edged holy book from the pocket of his jacket.

“You see this?” he asked. “This book has the truth and I can’t even read it. It’s in Italian and still I cannot read it. When Gino comes home from school he can read to me. The places are marked.”

The mother watched him intently. “You must be tired,” she said. “Go on to bed and sleep. I’ll send the children down to play in the street.”

When he had undressed and gone to bed she brought him a wet towel so that he could wipe his face and hands. He made no attempt to possess her or show any desire, and when he closed his eyes and sank back into the bed, it seemed as if he were closing his eyes against the world he had re-entered. Lucia Santa sensed something terribly wrong beneath the external health, the seeming good fortune. Looking down at him, she felt a strange pity for this man she had loved, who had been her husband so many years. As if in the course of every day, with each second, each minute, each day, she had spun out his fate, as if he were her prisoner dying in his cell. She was an innocent jailer, she had not pursued him, she had not condemned him, she had not sentenced him. But she could never let him escape. Lucia Santa sat on the bed and put her hand on his. He was already asleep. She sat so for a time, in some way glad that he would be sleeping safe in his bed when the rest of the family returned home, that Octavia, Larry, Gino, and Vinnie would see him for the first time defenseless, and so they could pity him.

That evening the family was at supper when the father rose and joined them. Octavia said “Hello” very coldly. Larry was warm in his greeting, saying with utmost sincerity, “You’re looking good, Pop. We missed you around here.”

Gino and Vincent gazed at him curiously. The father asked Gino, “Have you been good to your mother while I was away?” Gino nodded. The father sat down and then, as an afterthought, he took the two one-dollar bills from his pocket and without a word gave them to Gino and Vincent.

Octavia was angry that he had not asked Vincent if he had been good. She understood Vincent and knew that he had been hurt, that the dollar would not make up for this. It made her even angrier because she understood that her stepfather had not done this intentionally.

Suddenly the father made a statement that startled all of them.

“Some of my friends are visiting me tonight,” he said. He had never brought friends to the house. As if he knew or felt in some way that this was not really his home, that he could never be the chief of this family. He had not even brought card-playing cronies home for a glass of wine. Tonight Larry had to go to work, but Octavia decided to stay and meet these people, and give her mother support if they were in league with her stepfather against the family.

THE HOUSE WAS neat, the dishes washed, fresh coffee on the stove, and store-bought cake on the table when the visitors came. They were Mr. and Mrs. John Colucci and their nine-year-old son, Job.

The Coluccis were young, in their early thirties. Mr. Colucci was thin and saturnine, with only a slight accent to show that he was not born in America. He wore a shirt, tie, and jacket. His wife was heavy and voluptuous, but not fat. She had no accent, but she seemed more Italian than her husband.

The whole Angeluzzi-Corbo family was surprised at the affection the Coluccis showed for Frank Corbo. They shook his hand warmly, inquired after him tenderly, said, “And this is your wife” in admiring tones, and “These are your children?” as if awe-struck and incredulous. They treated him as if he were a rich uncle, Lucia Santa thought. And she could see her husband reacting to their love. He was never demonstrative, but she could tell by his tone, by his respectful voice, in which for the first time since their marriage she heard that note which means that the speaker will bow to the wishes and opinions of his listeners. He was nervous, anxious to please. For the first time, he seemed to want people to think well of him. He poured the coffee himself.

They all sat around the great kitchen table. Octavia was charming in the best American style, with frequent smiles and a low sweet voice. The Coluccis had perfect manners. It was obvious that Mr. Colucci worked in an office and not with his hands. Mrs. Colucci spoke a refined Italian she could never have learned in Italy. They were not the children of mountain peasants but from the class of officials, of long generations of civil servants in Italy. Mr. Colucci was one of the few Italians whose family had emigrated to America for religious reasons instead of poverty. They were Protestants, and here in America they had formed a new sect, the Literal Baptist Church.

It had of course been the will of God that they met Frank Corbo. The farm owner was a first cousin of the Coluccis’ and they spent their summer vacation on the farm for the sake of their son’s health. Lucia Santa, a reconstructed peasant, raised her eyebrows at this repetition of a theme she had heard so much during the past summer. But, Mr. Colucci went on, what showed the hand of God was that they lived only a few blocks away from each other in the city, and every morning he passed the house of Frank Corbo. Mr. Colucci worked in the Runkel chocolate factory around the corner on 31st Street. Best of all, he was sure he could get Frank Corbo a job in the factory, but it was not for that they had come to visit.

No. Mr. Colucci had promised he would teach Frank Corbo to read and write. They would use the Bible as text. They had come tonight to keep their promise to visit him, to teach him, not only reading and writing, but about Jesus Christ. He would have to come to their class in the chapel of the Literal Baptist Church. Mr. Colucci wanted to make sure that Mrs. Lucia Santa Corbo would not object, would not be offended, if her husband came three nights a week to the chapel. He knew the respect, the consideration due an Italian wife and mother of children. He made no mention of religious objections, as if he knew there would be none.

Lucia Santa looked at him with a more kindly eye. She gathered that her husband would become a Protestant, but to her this was unimportant in every sense. He was a grown man. But the job at Runkel’s. He would bring home free chocolate and cocoa. The pay would not be insignificant. This was good fortune. Her husband could become a Jew if he wished. She gave not her assent, for that was not hers to give; the father could not be vetoed. She gave her blessing.

The tension relaxed, they talked about themselves, told each other what part of Italy they had come from, when and why they had left. The Coluccis did not smoke or drink. Religion was their life, for they believed in a living God. They told wondrous tales of the miracles their faith had wrought. At their meetings in chapel, believers fell to the ground in a trance and spoke in strange tongues; drunkards became total abstainers, evil men who regularly tattooed their wives and children black and blue became sweet as saints. Lucia Santa raised her eyebrows in polite astonishment. Mr. Colucci went on. “Sinners become God-like. I myself was a great sinner, in what manner I would rather not say.” His wife bowed her head for a moment, and when she looked up there was a small, grim smile on her lips. But Mr. Colucci had not said this boastingly. His was the manner of a man who had been the victim of a terrible misfortune and who after great suffering had been rescued through no virtue of his own.

Mr. Colucci went on to make himself clear. Even now, if Frank did not feel the faith, it did not matter. They were his friends, they would do everything to help him. Out of love for him and God. Faith would come in its own time.

The family was impressed, despite the words “love” and “God.” They had never met or even heard of a man like Mr. Colucci. Lucia Santa waited for some request, some trick that would exact payment for this good fortune. But there was none. She rose to make fresh coffee and bring out the tarelle. The father watched them all, impassive but seemingly content.

There could be no doubt. Everything was in harmony. Mr. Colucci sensed this and was carried away. He explained more about their religion. Everyone should love each other, no one should desire worldly goods. Shortly, Armageddon would come, God would wipe out the world, and only the chosen, the true believers, would be saved. Mrs. Colucci nodded her head. Her beautiful mouth, with its natural, dark, bloody red color, was tight with conviction, her magnificent dark eyes flashed around the room.

The children, sensing they had been lost track of, sneaked away. Gino, Vincent, and Job went down the corridor to the front room. Mr. Colucci went on. Lucia Santa listened with polite calm. These people were going to get her husband work. Bravo. They could have his prayers. All her children except Sal and Lena had already made their Communion and Confirmation in the Catholic Church, but she had done this as she dressed them in new clothes on Easter Sunday, as part of a primitive social rite. She herself had long ceased to think of God except to automatically curse his name for some misfortune. There was no question; when she died she would prudently take the last rites of her church. But now she did not go to Mass even for Christmas or Easter.

Octavia was more impressed. She was young and a belief in goodness and a desire to do good works inspired respect in her. She wished she were as beautiful as Mrs. Colucci and she thought for a moment that it was a good thing that Larry wasn’t home to exercise his charms on her, as he surely would.

The father watched and listened, as if he expected Mr. Colucci to say something he desperately wished to hear, as if Mr. Colucci were very close to saying some magic words that would be a key for him. He kept waiting.

In the front room Gino took his deck of cards from the round hole of the wall that housed the stovepipe in winter. “You wanta play Seven-and-a-half?” he asked Job. Vinnie was already sitting on the floor and taking pennies out of his pocket. Gino sat down opposite him.

“Card playing is a sin,” Job said. He was a small earnest boy, almost pretty, resembling his mother, but in no way effeminate. He sat down on the floor and watched.

“You want a hand for Chrissake?” Gino asked mildly.

“Swearing is a sin,” Job said.

“Bullshit,” Vinnie said. He never swore himself, but who did this snotnose think he was, telling Gino not to swear?

Gino tilted his head and looked at Job wisely. “You talk like that on this block, kiddo, they take off your pants and hang them on the lamp post. You have to run home and everybody sees your bare ass.” The frightened look on Job’s face satisfied them. They played cards and became absorbed in the game.

Job said suddenly, “Well, all right, but you two will go to hell, and pretty soon, too.”

Gino and Vinnie couldn’t be bothered.

Job said calmly, “My father said the End of the World is coming.”

Gino and Vinnie stopped playing for a minute. Mr. Colucci had impressed them.

Job smiled with confidence. “It’s people like you that will cause it. You make God mad because you do bad things like gamble and curse. If people like you did everything that me and my father told you, maybe God wouldn’t make the world end.”

Gino frowned. He had made his Communion and Confirmation the year before and the nuns who taught him the catechism had said nothing about this. “When does it happen?” he asked.

“Soon,” Job said.

“Tell us when,” Gino insisted, still respectful.

“It’s gonna be by fires and floods and guns coming out of the sky. Everything is gonna explode. The earth is gonna open up and swallow people into hell and the ocean’s gonna cover everything. And everybody is gonna burn in hell. Except just a few who believe and act good. And then God is gonna love everybody again.”

“Yeah, but when?” Gino was stubborn. He always wanted an answer when he asked a question, no matter what it was.

“Twenty years from now,” Job said.

Gino counted his pennies. “I’ll bet a nickel,” he said to Vincent. Vinnie dealt. Anything could happen in twenty years.

Vinnie lost. Old enough to be witty, he said, “If I had a name like Job the world couldn’t end too soon for me.”

The two brothers watched Job slyly and for the first time he became angry. He said, “I’m named after one of the greatest people in the Bible. You know what Job did? He believed. So God tested him. God killed his children, and then made his wife run away. Then God made him blind and gave him millions of pimples. Then God took all his money and his house. Then you know what? God sent a devil to Job’s house to ask Job if he still loved God. You know what Job said?” He paused dramatically. “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. I love my God.”

Vinnie was impressed and watched Job intently. Gino was outraged and asked, “Did he really mean it? Or was he afraid he was gonna get killed?”

“Sure he meant it,” Job said. “And then God gave him a lot of good luck to make up for it because he believed. My father says that Job was the first Literal Baptist. That’s why the Literal Baptists get saved when the world ends and everybody who doesn’t listen to us is gonna get buried for a million years. Or even more. You two had just better stop playing cards and swearing.”

But since he was just a nutty little kid, Gino riffled the cards, humping them and letting them cascade into place. Job watched, fascinated by such expertness. Gino looked at him and said, “You wanta try it?” He thrust the deck into Job’s hands. Job tried to riffle the cards and they scattered across the floor. He picked them up and tried again, his face intent and serious. Suddenly an enormous shadow spread across the room. Mrs. Colucci was watching them; they had not heard her come down the corridor of bedrooms.

Vinnie and Gino were fascinated by her beauty. They stared. She was looking her son up and down very coolly, with one eyebrow raised.

Job stuttered, “Mother, I wasn’t playing, Gino was just showing me how to shuffle. I just watched them play.”

Gino said warmly, “He ain’t lying, Mrs. Colucci, he just watched. You know,” he said with enormous wonder, “he wouldn’t play no matter what I said.”

Mrs. Colucci smiled and said, “I know my son never lies to me, Gino. But touching cards is a beginning. His father will be very angry with him.”

Gino smiled at her confidentially. “You don’t have to tell his father.”

Mrs. Colucci said coldly, “Of course I won’t tell him. But Job certainly will.” Gino was surprised and looked at Job questioningly. Mrs. Colucci said in a more gentle voice, “Mr. Colucci is the head of our house, as God rules over the world. You wouldn’t keep secrets from God, would you, Gino?” Gino looked at her thoughtfully.

Vinnie was angrily shuffling cards. He was mad at Gino for not seeing through these people, for acting as if they liked him, being fooled by their good manners. On Mrs. Colucci’s beautiful face he had seen a look of disgust at their playing cards, as though she had caught them in something shameful that you never talked about. “Stop butting in, Gino,” he said. He dealt out a hand.

Gino, intrigued by something he could not understand, said to Job, “You gonna tell your father? No kidding? If you don’t tell him, your mother won’t tell. Right, Mrs. Colucci?” The look of physical disgust came over the woman’s face, but she said nothing.

Job didn’t answer, but tears came out of his eyes. Gino was stunned. He said, “I’ll tell your father I pushed the cards into your hands. That’s what I did. Right, Vin? Come on, I’ll tell him.”

Mrs. Colucci said sharply, “His father will believe everything Job tells him. Good night, children. Say good night to your friends, Job.” Job said nothing, and they both went down the corridor to the kitchen.

The two brothers had no heart for more cards. Gino went to one window, opened it, and sat on the sill. Vincent went to the other window and did the same.

The railroad yard was dark except for a headlight of one working, black, invisible engine, grinding steel on steel. Even the Hudson River was almost blue-black beneath the faint autumn moon, and the cliffs of the Palisades were shadowy mountains beyond. Tenth Avenue below the window was dark and still, swept clean of smells and people by a cold October night wind. Only on the corner of 31st Street was there life, a bonfire with some half-grown boys around it.

Gino and Vincent saw their father come out of the building with the Coluccis. He was walking them to the trolley car on Ninth Avenue. They watched till he came back. They saw him stand by the bonfire, staring into its flames for a long time. They kept their eyes on him. Finally he walked down the Avenue and into the house.

Gino and Vincent left their windows. They unfolded their bed and made it. Vinnie put on his pajamas from the country. Watching him, Gino said, “That Job, he’s a nice kid, but he’s sure lucky he don’t live on our block.”

Mr. Colucci was not just a talker, he was a doer. Frank Corbo was working in Runkel’s chocolate factory the next week, and his homecoming at night was a delight for the children. He returned with his person and clothes scented with cocoa. Always he would have a great jagged boulder of chocolate in his pocket. It was pure chocolate, much more delicious than candy-store chocolate. He would give this to Gino to share among the children. Gino would hack it with a knife, give half to Vinnie and half to himself. Then they would each give a piece to Sal and Baby Lena. Gino always thought of his father as working on a great mountain rock of chocolate with a pickax, breaking it up into little pieces.

The father was to be baptized in the new faith at Easter time. Every night he went to the Coluccis’ for reading lessons, and then to the chapel for services and more lessons. Sometimes he would make Gino read to him from the Bible, but Gino always protested; he read badly and with obvious distaste, especially his father’s favorite passages, in which man was brought to book by a wrathful and revengeful God. Gino read this in such a voice, so unimpressed and bored, that he only irritated his father. One day Frank Corbo said to him gently and with a smile, “Animale! Don’t you believe in God then? Aren’t you afraid of dying and going to hell?”

Gino was surprised and confused. “I made my Communion and Confirmation,” he said. The father looked at him, shrugged, and never asked him to read again.

For the next two months everything went smoothly. There were no quarrels.

But then Lucia Santa, seeing her husband so well, working, quiet, well-behaved, thought there was no excuse for him not to be better. She complained that he was always out of the house, that his children never saw him, that he did not take her to visit relatives. And it was as if the father had been waiting for such a complaint, as if his new character had not really pleased him. There was a scene; he struck a blow, there were screams and shouts, Octavia threatened her father with a kitchen knife. It was like old times again. The father left the house and did not come back until the next morning.

He changed gradually. He did not go to chapel so often. Many nights he came straight home and went directly to bed without eating. He would lie in the bed staring up at the ceiling, not sleeping, not speaking. Lucia Santa would bring him a hot dish; sometimes he would eat, sometimes he would strike it out of her hand, soiling the bed covers. Then he would not let her change the bed sheets that night.

He would fall asleep for a bit; then wake near midnight, moaning and tossing about. He had terrifying headaches and Lucia Santa would bathe his temples with alcohol. Nevertheless, the next morning he would be well enough to go to work. Nothing kept him from his job.

That winter the nights were like a nightmare. The father’s cries would wake the baby. Gino, Vincent, and Sal would huddle together, Gino and Vincent curious and subdued, but Sal so frightened that he trembled. Octavia would wake and lie in her bed raging over her mother’s patience with the father. Larry missed it all, for he worked at night and stayed out until the early morning hours.

The father became worse. He would wake in the middle of the night and curse his wife, first in a slow, then a quickening, rhythm—the rhythms of the Bible. Everyone would be asleep, the house would be dark, when suddenly, rising out of the pitch blackness, the father’s voice would fill the apartment, vibrant, alive. “Whore”… “Bitch”… “Lousy, dir-ty, rot-ten, lying bastard”… Then, on a higher note and faster, “Fiend of hell—child of a whore—mother of a whore.” Last came a long stream of filth that ended in a great moan of pain and a terrifying cry for help, “Gesù, Gesù, help me, help me.”

Everyone awake, frightened, sitting up in bed, would wait, never knowing what he would do next. The mother would soothe him, talking in a low voice, pleading with him to be quiet so that the family could sleep. She would bathe his temples with alcohol until the apartment was filled with its burning smell.

Octavia and Lucia Santa quarreled about sending him to the hospital. Lucia Santa refused to consider it. Octavia, fatigued from lack of sleep and worry, became hysterical, and her mother had to slap her face. One night when the father began to moan “Gesù, Gesù,” from behind Octavia’s bedroom door came a mocking moan in answer. When the father cursed in Italian, Octavia shrieked back, aping his dialect, the filthy words in the foreign tongue, shrill in the darkness, more shocking than the cursing of the father. Sal and Baby Lena began to cry. Vinnie and Gino sat on the edge of their bed, stunned with sleep and fright. Lucia Santa pounded on her daughter’s bedroom door, pleading with her to stop. But Octavia was beyond control, and it was the father who stopped first.

Next morning the father did not go to work. Lucia Santa let him rest while she sent the children off to school. Then she brought her husband breakfast.

He was rigid as wood. His eyes stared emptily at the ceiling. When she shook him, he spoke in hollow tones. “I’m dead, don’t let them bury me without clothes. Put my good shoes on my feet. God has called me. I’m dead.” The mother was so frightened she felt his limbs. They were icy cold and stiff. Then the father began to call out, “Gesù, Gesù. Mercy. Aiuto, aiuto.”

She tried to hold his hand. “Frank, let me call the doctor,” she said. “You’re sick, Frank.”

The father became as angry as a dead man could. In hollow menacing tones, he answered. “If the doctor comes, I’ll throw him out the window.” But the threat was reassuring to Lucia Santa, for now the cold blue eyes were alive with rage. Heat flowed into the limbs she touched. Then she heard someone coming up the stairs and into the house. It was Larry home from the night shift.

She called out, “Lorenzo, come here and see your father.” The tone of her voice brought Larry quickly down the corridor to the bedroom.

“Look how sick he is, and he won’t see the doctor,” the mother said. “Talk to him.”

Larry was shocked by his stepfather’s appearance. He had not noticed the change, the thinning of the face into gauntness, the tension in the mouth, the cording of the face into lines of madness. He said gently, “Come on, Pop. We gotta get a doc even if you’re dead. Maybe people will say Ma poisoned you or something. See? We gotta get a certificate.” He smiled at his stepfather.

But Frank Corbo gave him a look of contempt, as if the son were feeble-minded or insane. “No doctors,” he said. “Let me rest.” He closed his eyes.

Lucia Santa and Larry went into the kitchen at the other end of the apartment. The mother said, “Lorenzo, go to Runkel’s and get Mr. Colucci. He can talk to Frank. Last night he was so bad again. If this keeps up—no, get Mr. Colucci.”

Larry was dead tired and wanted to get to bed. But he saw that his mother, always so strong and confident, was near to tears she was too proud to shed. He felt an overwhelming love and pity for her, and yet a curious distaste for being involved in the affair, as if it was a tragedy that did not concern him. He patted his mother’s arm and said, “O.K., Ma,” and left the house in search of Mr. Colucci.

MR. COLUCCI, DESPITE the fact that he was an office worker, could not get off from work. He came at five o’clock, bringing with him three other men. Their clothes smelled of cocoa. They went in to see Frank Corbo lying lifeless in his bed.

They ringed themselves around him like disciples. “Frank, Frank,” Mr. Colucci said gently. “What is this? What are you doing? You cannot leave your wife and children. Who will give them bread? God would not call you now; there is too much good for you to do. Frank, come now, rise up, listen to a friend who loves you. The time is not yet.” The other men murmured “Amen” as though to a prayer. “We must get you a doctor for your headaches,” Mr. Colucci said.

The father raised himself up on one elbow. He spoke in a low, angry voice, full of life now. He said, “You told me there was never any need for doctors, that God decides, man believes. Now you are false. You are Judas.” And he pointed, arm extended, forefinger almost in the Colucci eye. He was a picture on the wall.

Mr. Colucci was stunned. He sat down on the bed and took Frank Corbo’s hand in his. He said, “My brother, listen to me. I believe. But when I see your wife and children to be left so, my faith wavers. Even mine. I cannot make my faith your destruction. You are ill. You have these headaches. You suffer. Dear brother, you do not believe. You say God has called you and you say you are dead. You blaspheme. Live now. Suffer a little longer. God will have mercy on you at Armageddon. Rise now and come to my home for supper. Then we will go to chapel and pray together for your deliverance.” Mr. Colucci was weeping. The other men bowed their heads. The father looked at them wide-eyed, seemingly rational.

“I will rise,” he said formally and motioned them to leave so that he could dress. Colucci and the other men went into the kitchen and sat at the table to drink the coffee Lucia Santa set before them.

Mr. Colucci stared silently at the wooden table. He was in terrible distress. What he had seen in that bed was a caricature of Christ and the true believer, the belief carried to its logical conclusion; the lying down to die. He said to Lucia Santa, “Signora Corbo, your husband will be home at nine this evening. Have the doctor come. Have no fear, I will stay with him.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Signora, believe in me. Your husband has true friends. He will have prayers. He will be cured. And his soul will be saved.”

Lucia Santa became coldly, implacably angry at his touch. Who was this man with his single child, a stranger to her grief and suffering, to presume to comfort her? Callow, criminal in his meddlesome religiosity—he was the cause of her husband’s illness. He and his friends had disordered her husband’s mind with their foolishness, their obscene and obsequious familiarity with God. And beyond that she had a feeling of disgust for Mr. Colucci. In some profound way she felt that he cared nothing for life or for his fellow man; that with a beautiful wife he showed a deep distrust and lack of faith by resting with one child. Remembering his weeping at her husband’s bed, she felt an overpowering contempt for him and all men who sought something beyond life, some grandeur. As if life, life itself, were not enough. What airs they gave themselves. She looked away from Mr. Colucci, his pity, his suffering, so that he could not see her face. She hated him. It was she who would feel the anguish, the rage of the sufferer who must bow to fate; as for Mr. Colucci, his would be the easy tears of compassion.

CHAPTER 7

THE DOCTOR WAS a son of the landlord who owned many tenements on Tenth Avenue. That Italian peasant father had not strained and sweated, had not left his homeland, had not squeezed every penny out of his compatriot tenants, had not supped on pasta and fagioli four times a week so that his son could become a Samaritan. Dr. Silvio Barbato was young, but he had no illusions about the Hippocratic oath. He had too much respect for his father, was too intelligent in his own right to be sentimental about these southern Italians who lived like rats along the western wall of the city. But still he was young enough to think of suffering as unnatural. Pity had not been squeezed out of him.

He knew Lucia Santa. As a boy, before his father had become wealthy, he had lived on Tenth Avenue and shown her the respect due an older woman. He had lived as she did not, with his spaghetti on Thursdays and Sundays; pasta and fagioli on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays; and scarola on Mondays to clean out the bowels. He could not overawe her and act completely professional. But whenever he entered a home like this, he blessed his father.

His escape was complete. His father had been shrewd to make him a doctor. People always became sick, there were always hospitals, work came. The air was filled with germs, bad times or good. Some escaped for a while but there was always the long process of dying. Everyone alive had money that would find its way into a doctor’s pocket.

He sat down for his cup of coffee. He must, or they would never call him again. The icebox in the hall was probably full of cockroaches. The daughter—what was her name?—was old enough to work and she was so developed that marriage was imperative or she would get in trouble. There were too many people explaining things about the patient. The family friends and advisers had gathered round—that most irritating thing to doctors. The old women cronies were the worst.

At last he saw the patient, who was in bed. He seemed calm. Dr. Barbato felt the pulse, took the blood pressure. It was enough. Behind that calm, harsh face there must be an unbearable tension. From other doctors he had heard about cases like this one. It was always the men who crumbled under the glories of the new land, never the women. There were many cases of Italian men who became insane and had to be committed, as if in leaving their homeland they had torn a vital root from their minds.

Dr. Barbato knew what to do here. Frank Corbo should be hospitalized, given a long period of rest, removed from pressure. But this man had to work, he had children to feed. They would all have to gamble. Dr. Barbato continued his examination. Drawing back the sheet, he was startled to see a pair of hideously deformed feet and felt an almost superstitious fear. “How did this happen?” he asked in Italian. His voice was polite but firm, demanding an answer.

The father rose on his elbows and drew the sheet back over his legs. “They are not your concern,” he said. “They do not trouble me in any way.” This was an enemy.

“You have headaches then,” the doctor said.

“Yes,” the father said.

“For how long?”

“Forever,” the father said.

There was nothing to be done here. Dr. Barbato wrote out a prescription for a heavy sedative. He waited patiently for his fee while the mother scurried into another room to take money out of its hiding place. He felt a little uncomfortable. He always wished that the people who gave him money were a little better dressed, that they had better furniture. Then he noticed the radio and his compunctions vanished. If they could afford such a luxury, they could afford an illness.

Frank Corbo went back to work the next week. He was a great deal better. Sometimes at night he moaned and cursed aloud, but only for a few minutes, and after midnight he would always remain asleep. But before another week was ended, he came home one day just before lunch. He stood in the doorway and said to his wife, “The padrone sent me home,” he said, “I’m too sick to work.” To Lucia Santa’s horror, he began to weep.

She sat him at the kitchen table and brought him coffee. His body was very thin. He talked as he had never talked since their marriage year. He asked her in a frightened voice, “Am I that ill? The padrone says I stop work too much and I forget the machine. That I should take a long rest and then come see him. But I’m not that sick, I’m just getting better, I’m controlling myself. I take care of myself now. Isn’t it true?”

Lucia Santa said, “Don’t worry about work, rest a little. You have to get well. This afternoon go for a walk, bring Lena for some air in the park.” She looked down at his bowed head. Was he better or worse? There was nothing she could do but wait.

When he left with Baby Lena, the mother gave him a dollar for candy and cigars. She knew he loved having some money in his pocket and that it would cheer him up. He was gone the whole afternoon and came back just in time for supper.

The whole family was gathered around the table, Octavia, Larry, Vincent, Gino, and Sal. They all knew their father had lost his work and they were subdued. But he was quiet, and so well behaved and helpful to his wife that soon everyone was at ease. It seemed as if the shock of losing his job had knocked all the other nonsense out of his head. Everyone chattered. Larry tricked the boys by saying that the cockroaches were playing baseball on the wall and when Sal and Gino turned around he stole potatoes from their dishes. Octavia fed Baby Lena and held her on her lap. Vinnie watched everything. Larry couldn’t fool him. He touched his mother’s dress as she went by, serving food, and she stopped and served him first.

When everyone left the table, Lucia Santa asked her husband if he was going to chapel. He answered that he did not need Mr. Colucci any more. The mother was astonished. Could it be that her husband, who, to his family’s detriment, had never been cunning, had used the Coluccis just to get work? But then why the illness? The contradiction troubled her.

Later, when bedtime came, Lucia Santa settled in her kitchen chair to sew until midnight. Now she always wanted to be fully dressed and ready when her husband had his attacks. If by midnight nothing had happened, it would be safe to go to bed; the danger would be over.

Frank Corbo watched her and, with what for him was tenderness, said, “Go. Go get some rest. I’ll stay up a bit and then come to bed.” She knew he meant until after midnight. It was nearly eleven now. Everyone else was asleep and Larry had gone to work. Lucia Santa felt a great surge of relief and pride that her judgment had proven sound. He was better. Men had these spells, but they passed. “I’ll finish this little bit,” she said. As she sewed, he smoked his cigar. He served her a glass of wine and even took one for himself, though it was against the Colucci religion. It was after midnight when they went to bed, with Baby Lena lying between them. It was very dark, the very black heart of night, when Lucia Santa woke to hear her husband repeating in a clear, even tone, “What is this doll doing between us? Quick, before I throw it out the window.” Lucia Santa put one arm over the sleeping baby and said in a low, urgent voice, “Frank, what is it? What’s the matter?” Still stunned with sleep, she could not comprehend.

The father asked in a low, menacing tone, “Why did you put this doll between us?”

Lucia Santa tried to keep her voice low. She whispered, “Frank, Frank, it’s your baby daughter. Wake up, Frank.”

There was a long silence, but Lucia Santa did not dare go back to sleep. Suddenly the whole bed shook violently.

He rose like an avenging angel. Light flooded the bedroom and the front room where the children slept, and there stood the father fully dressed. His face was almost black with the blood of rage. His voice was like thunder as he shouted, “OUT OF THIS HOUSE. BASTARDS, SONS OF WHORES AND BITCHES. OUT OF THIS HOUSE BEFORE I KILL YOU ALL.”

The mother sprang out of bed in her nightgown, the baby clutched in her arms. She went into the front room and told the frightened Gino and Vincent, “Quick, get dressed and get Salvatore and go to Zia Louche. Quickly now.”

The father was raving, cursing, but when he saw Vincent about to leave he said, “No, Vincenzo can stay. Vincenzo is an angel.” But the mother pushed Vincent down the corridor.

Father and mother were face to face. There was no mercy in the father’s eyes. He said quietly, but with real hatred, “Take your doll and get out of this house.” Lucia Santa looked at the only bedroom door, Octavia’s.

The father saw her look. He said, “Don’t make me knock on your daughter’s door. Get her down on the street where she belongs.”

The door opened. Octavia stood there, already dressed, and holding her dressmaker’s scissors in her right hand.

The mother said quickly, “Octavia, come with me.” Octavia was not afraid; she had come out of her room ready to do battle to protect her mother and the children. But now she saw on her stepfather’s face such a look of cruel delight that for the first time she was frightened. She took Baby Lena from her mother’s arms and, still holding the scissors, ran to the kitchen. Vinnie, Sal, and Gino were huddled together wearing only their coats over winter underwear. She herded them down the stairs and out of the house. Lucia Santa was left alone with her husband.

She put on clothes over her nightgown, asking him, her voice shaking, “Frank, what is it? You were so good all day, what is it now?”

The blue eyes were opaque, the harsh face calm. He repeated again, “Everyone out of this house.” He moved close to her and pushed her down the corridor of rooms toward the door.

Larry and the Panettiere burst into the apartment and came between them. The father grabbed Larry by the throat and pushed him against the wall, shouting, “Just because you gave me a dollar today you think you can interfere?” He threw a handful of change at his stepson.

Larry was watchful, alert. He said carefully, “Pop, I come to help. The cops are coming. You gotta quiet down.” A siren suddenly wailed. The father ran to the front room to look out the window.

In the street below he could see his three small children huddled in overcoats, surrounding Octavia, and Octavia pointing up toward him as the police came out of the car. He saw the two policemen running into the tenement. He became very quiet and went back down the corridor of rooms to the kitchen and said to them all in a very reasonable tone, “The police have clubs. No one can stand against the police. Not even God can stand against clubs.” He sat on a kitchen chair.

The two burly policemen, both Irish and tall, came into the open apartment cautiously and calmly. Larry took them aside and spoke to them in a low voice. The father watched them all. Then Larry came over and sat by his father. There were tears of anxiety in his eyes. He said, “Listen to me, Pop. There’s an ambulance coming. You’re sick, see? Now don’t make any trouble. For Mom and the kids.”

Frank Corbo gave him a violent push. Immediately the two policemen came forward, but the mother was ahead of them. “No, wait, wait,” she said.

She went to her husband and spoke quietly, as if the Panettiere and the policemen could not hear. Octavia and the children had come out of the cold of the street and stood on the other side of the room watching them. The mother said, “Frank, go to the hospital. They will make you well. What will the children feel when they see the police beat you and drag you down the stairs? Frank, Frank, be reasonable. I’ll come to see you every day. In a week, two weeks, you’ll be well. Come now.”

The father rose. As he did so, two white-jacketed interns came over the top of the stairway and into the open door of the apartment. The father stood by the table, head down, brooding. Then he raised his head and said briskly, “Everyone must have coffee. I’ll make it myself.” The two white jackets started toward him, but the mother moved across their path. Larry went beside her. The mother said to the interns and policemen, “Humor him, please. He will go if you humor him. But if you use force he will be an animal.”

While the coffee was perking, the father began to shave at the kitchen faucet. The interns were tense and alert. The policemen stood ready with nightsticks. The father finished quickly and set cups of coffee on the table. The children and Octavia were on the far side of the table. While they drank to please him, he made his wife fetch him a clean shirt. Then he surveyed them all with a sardonic gleam in his eyes.

“Figlio de puttana,” he began. “Evil men. I know you two policemen. At night, late, you go into the bakery and drink whisky. That’s how you work? And you, Panettiere. You make whisky in your back room against the law. Oh, I see you all at night when everyone sleeps. I see everything. At night I’m everywhere. I see the sins of the world. Monsters—fiends—murderers—sons and daughters of whores—I know you all. You think you can overcome me?” He was shouting rapidly, incoherently, and he gave the kitchen table a push, knocking over all the coffee cups.

He seemed to rise on his toes; he grew tall and menacing. Larry and the mother shrank away from him. The two white-jacketed interns formed a line with the two policemen and came toward him. Suddenly the father saw across the huge wooden table his son Gino’s face, the skin white with terror, the eyes almost blank, extinguished of sensibility. With his back to his enemies, the father winked one eye at his son. He saw the color flood back into Gino’s face, the fear relieved by surprise.

But now the comedy was over. The four men surrounded the father, not yet touching him. The father raised both his palms toward them as if beseeching them to halt, to listen to something important he was going to say. But he did not speak. He reached into his pocket and gave his wife the key to the apartment and then his billfold. Lucia Santa grasped him by the arm and pulled him out of the apartment and down the stairs. Larry took the father’s other arm. The police and white-jacketed men followed close behind.

Tenth Avenue was empty. The wind whipped around the ambulance and the police car parked before the tenement. Frank Corbo faced his wife in the dark street. He said in a low voice, “Lucia Santa, let me come home. Don’t let them take me away. They will kill me.” Across the street an engine hooted. The wife bowed her head. She dropped his arm and stepped away from him. Without warning, the two white-jacketed interns pounced on the father, slipped something over his arms, and half thrust, half lifted him into the ambulance. One of the police jumped in to help. There was not a sound. The father did not cry out. There was just a flying about of many blue-and-white-clad arms. The mother bit her fist, and Larry stood paralyzed. The ambulance drove away, and then the remaining policeman came over to them.

The cloudiness of early dawn veiled the stars, but it was not yet really light. Lucia Santa wept in the street as Larry gave the policeman their names, his father’s name, the names of the children and everyone in the house that night, and told how it had all begun.

IT WAS NOT until the next Sunday that anyone was permitted to visit the father. After dinner Lucia Santa said to her daughter, “Do you think I should let him come home, do you think it safe?” Octavia shrugged, afraid to give an honest answer. She was amazed at her mother’s optimism.

Larry assumed command as the eldest male of the family. He spoke as a man with contempt for the cowardice of women. “You mean you’ll let Pop rot in Bellevue just because he went off a little one night? Let’s get him the hell out of there. He’ll be all right, don’t worry.”

Octavia said, “It’s easy for you to talk like a big-hearted big shot. You’re never home. You’re out chasing floozies, your stupid little tramps. Then while you’re having your nice little fun, Mom and the kids and me are getting our throats cut. And you’ll be so-o-o sorry when you come home. But you’ll be alive and we’ll be dead. You’re not so dumb, Larry.”

“Ah, you’re always making a big thing outa nothing,” Larry said. “After the old man gets a taste of Bellevue, he’ll never get sick again.” Then, seriously and without malice, “Your trouble, Sis, is you never liked him.”

“Why should I?” Octavia said angrily. “He never did anything for Vinnie or even for his own kids. How many times did he hit Mamma? He even hit her once when she was pregnant, and I’ll never forget that.”

Lucia Santa listened to them both, her face somber, her black brows knit. Their arguments were the irrelevant arguments of children, their talk meant nothing to her. They were not competent, emotionally or mentally.

Like many others this illiterate, untrained peasant woman had the power of life and death over the human beings nearest to her. On every day in every year people must condemn and betray their loved ones. Lucia Santa did not think in terms of sentiment. But love and pity had value, a certain weight in life.

The man who had fathered her children, rescued her from a desperate and helpless widowhood, and wakened her to delight, was no longer of any real value to her. He would bring war into the family. Octavia might leave; she would marry early to escape him. He would be a liability in the battle against life. She had her duty to her children, big and small. She dismissed love that was personal, an emotion of luxury, of uncomplicated lives.

But beyond love there was honor, there was duty, there was a union against the world. Frank Corbo had never betrayed that honor; he had only not been able to fulfill it. And he was the father of three of these children. There was blood there. In the future years she must look these children in the eye. She would have to account to them, for he had given them life, they were in his debt. Lurking behind this was the primitive dread that parents have of their own fate when they are old and helpless and become their children’s children, and in their turn seek mercy.

Gino, who all this time had been twisting and turning and quarreling with Sal and Vinnie, and seemingly inattentive to the conversation, suddenly said to his mother, “Poppa winked at me that night.”

The mother, bewildered, did not understand the word “wink.” Octavia explained.

Lucia Santa became excited. “See?” she said. “He was putting it on. He knew what he was doing but he was weakheaded, he couldn’t help himself.”

“You know,” Larry said. “He saw Gino looking so scared, that’s why. I told you it wasn’t anything serious. He’s a little sick, that’s all. Let’s get him home.”

The mother said to Octavia, “Eh, well?” She had already made up her mind but wanted her daughter’s consent. Octavia looked at Gino, who turned his head away.

“Let’s try it,” she said. “I’ll do my best.”

They all helped the mother get ready. The packing of the food, spaghetti in a small bowl, fruit, half a loaf of real bread. Just in case he could not come home this very day. They even made jokes. Lucia Santa said, “Ah, that night when he called Vincenzo an angel, then I knew he was crazy.” It was a bitter joke that would last through the years.

At last she was ready to leave. Gino asked her, “Is Pop really coming home today?”

The mother looked down at him. There was some sort of fear on his face she could not understand. She said, “If not today, then tomorrow, don’t worry.” She saw the anxiety vanish from his eyes, and his absolute trust gave her that familiar warm sense of power and love.

Vinnie, hearing his mother’s words to Gino, shouted with loyal happiness, “Hurrah! Hurrah!” Octavia said to her mother, “I’ll clean up the kids and have them dressed up in front of the house.”

Larry was going with her. Before they left, he told the children, “Now if we bring Pop home today, nobody bother him, let him rest. Just do everything he asks you to do.” Listening, the mother felt a great buoyancy of spirit; she believed that everything would end well, that the terrible night was not so significant as it had appeared. The strain had grown too great, everyone had been carried away by emotion. Really, there had been no need to call the police or the ambulance or have him taken to the hospital. But maybe it was for the best. Now the air was clear and they would all be the better for it.

Stout in black, and carrying the bundle of food herself, Lucia Santa walked to 23rd Street for the crosstown trolley car to Bellevue, her eldest son on her arm like a good, dutiful child.

Lucia Santa and her son went to a crowded reception desk and waited. After a long time they were told they must see the doctor, and they followed directions to his office.

It has been said of this great hospital that its professional staff is the finest in the world, that its nurses are more efficient and hard-working than any other nurses and that its medical care for the indigent is as good as can be had. But for Lucia Santa these things mattered little on this Sunday afternoon. To her, it seemed, Bellevue was the terror of the poor, the last painful and shameful indignity they suffered from life before they went to their death. It was filled with the dregs, the helpless of humanity, the poverty-stricken. Tuberculars sat on cheerless balconies sucking in soot-filled air, watching the stone city distill the poison which devoured their lungs. The senile aged lay unattended except by visiting relatives, who brought them food to eat and tried to fan alive a breath of hope. In some wards were those enraged by life, God, humanity, who had swallowed lye or done some other terrible injury to their bodies in their lust for death. Now, with physical agony to relieve their other sufferings, they clung to life. And then there were those insane who had rushed out of the world into some kinder darkness.

Lucia Santa reflected that whatever else you might say of the place, you must say the truth: that it was a hospital of charity. It owed her and people like her nothing and would receive nothing from them. Its dark tiled corridors were noisy with children waiting for drugs, treatment, stitches. In one ward children crippled by automobiles and drunken parents fought over a solitary wheelchair.

In some beds were the righteously ill—men whose labor had earned bread for their wives and children, whose fear of death was compounded by the vision of their helpless, unprotected families.

It was a hospital where people brought food every day to their loved ones—casseroles of spaghetti, bags of oranges, and towels and decent soap and fresh linen. It was a factory for the human vessel to be glued together without pity, tenderness, or love. It was a place to make an animal fit to take up his burden. It was heedless of the hurt spirit; it gave a grudging charity that on principle would never dispense flowers. It hung on the eastern wall of the city, medieval in its tower-like formation and iron gates, a symbol of hell. The pious poor crossed themselves when they entered those gates; the gravely ill resigned themselves to death.

Lucia Santa and her son found the doctor’s office and entered. The mother could not believe that such a young man in his ill-fitting white jacket held power over her husband. As soon as they were seated, he told her that she could not see her husband that day; it would be best if she signed certain necessary papers.

The mother said to Larry in a low voice, in Italian, “Tell him about the wink.” The doctor said in Italian, “No, Signora, you tell me.” The mother was surprised, he looked so American.

He spoke the Italian of the rich and he treated her with gentlemanly courtesy. Lucia Santa explained to him how at the height of madness that terrible night her husband had winked his eye at his oldest natural son. To reassure him, to show he was not really crazy. It was clear, he had let himself go out of weakness or exasperation with his family, or despair at his fate. They were poor. He was really too ill to earn a living. This was the reason, sometimes, that men behaved so strangely. And he had gone all winter without a hat. His brains had been chilled with the cold. And she must not forget that, digging the new subway for Eighth Avenue, he had been buried alive a few minutes and hurt his head.

She went on and on to show that the illness was physical, external, subject to simple care, but she always came back to the winking of the eye. He had fooled them all that night. They had everyone been taken in, even the doctors.

The doctor listened with grave courtesy and tact, nodding his head in agreement that the winking of the eye was very strange, that the cold, the blow on the head might be at fault, murmuring encouragement. The mother did not realize that this courtesy was an expression of pity and compassion. When she finished, he spoke in his beautiful Italian, revealing himself as an enemy.

“Signora,” he said, “your husband is very ill. Too ill for this hospital. Too ill for your home. He must be sent away. Perhaps in a year or two he will be well. No one knows. These things are still a mystery.”

The mother said in a low voice, “I will not sign any papers. I want to see my husband.”

The doctor glanced at Larry and shook his head. Larry said, “Come on, Ma, I’ll bring you back tomorrow, maybe we can see Pop then.”

Lucia Santa sat still, dumb as an animal. The doctor said in a gentle, hopeless voice, “Signora, if your husband had a fever, an ague, you would not send him out to earn his living, you would not drive him out to cold and labor. If his legs were broken you would not make him walk. For him to go out in the world is too much. It is too painful for him. The illness is a signal so that he will not go to his death. You can show your love for your husband by signing these papers.” He touched a yellow manila folder on his desk.

The mother raised her head and stared at him. She said in rude Italian, “I will never sign.”

The doctor flushed. Then he said gravely, “I see you have a package for your husband. Do you wish to take it to him yourself? You will not be able to stay, but you can speak for a moment.” The mother flushed in her turn at his kindness, and nodded. The doctor picked up the phone on his desk and spoke to someone. Then he rose and said to Lucia Santa, “Come with me.” When Larry rose from his chair the doctor said, “I think you had better wait for your mother here.”

Lucia Santa followed the white jacket through dark, prison-like corridors, up steps and down, until after going a long distance they came to a door which opened into a huge tiled room scattered over with bathtubs, some of which were curtained from view. She followed the doctor across the room toward another door in the far corner. But suddenly the doctor stopped by one of the curtained bathtubs. With his right hand he grasped her firmly by the arm, as if to save her from tripping or falling. With his left hand he pulled back the curtain on its rod of metal.

A naked man, his arms bound to his side, sat in a tub of clear water. The mother cried out, “Frank!” And the narrow skull turned toward her, the face elongated in the bare-toothed grimace of a wild animal trapped in terror. The blue eyes were like glass, glittering in soulless rage. They looked not at her, but at the invisible sky above. It was a face of hopeless satanic madness, and the doctor let the curtain fall as the woman’s long helpless wail of anguish brought attendants running to them. The brown paper fell to the tiled floor, breaking, soiling Lucia Santa’s stockings and shoes.

She was sitting in the office again. Larry was trying to stop her weeping. But she wept for herself who must be a widow again, who must sleep forever in a lonely bed; for her other children, who must be fatherless, too; she wept that she had been conquered, overcome by fate. And she wept because for the first time in many years she had been terrified; she had loved a man, borne his children, and then seen him, not dead, but with his soul torn from his body.

She signed all the papers. She thanked the doctor for his kindness. When they left the hospital, Larry took her home in a taxi. He was worried about her. But when they got out on Tenth Avenue, she was completely recovered; he did not even have to help her up the stairs. They never noticed the children, Gino, Vinnie and Sal, waiting on the corner of the Avenue.