The Fortunate Pilgrim

CHAPTER 8

THE FIRST FINE Saturday of spring Octavia decided to give the house a good cleaning. Vinnie and Gino were sent off to janitor the building—to wash the halls and stairs, and clean the backyard of the tenement. Little Sal and Baby Lena were given rags to dust the chairs and the great wooden table; the chairs with their many ringed rungs, the table with its great mysterious arches of wood beneath it, forming caves in which the two little children could sit and hide. With the great greasy bottle of lemon oil, they made everything shiny and green-black and slick so that Octavia had to go over it with a dry rag.

Everything was taken out of all the closets, and the shelves were lined with fresh clean newspaper. All the china was spread over the kitchen table to be washed of its film of dirt.

In an hour Vincent and Gino were back in the apartment with their broom and mop and pail and the kettle for hot soapy water. Gino said, “We’re all finished. I gotta go out and play stickball.”

Octavia’s head jerked out of the closet. She was angry. There had been a change in Gino the last few months. He had always been irresponsible; but pinned down, with no chance to disappear, he had worked cheerfully and well. Now he was sullen, defiant. He spoiled everything. She frowned at them both. Vinnie was getting just as bad.

Octavia called out, “Ma, look. They washed the whole building with one kettle of hot water. Four flights of stairs and four halls and the ground-floor marble with one lousy kettle of hot water.” She laughed contemptuously.

Lucia Santa said from the kitchen, “Eh, well, as long as it looks a little clean.”

Octavia almost screamed. “How the hell could it look clean with one kettle of hot water?” She heard her mother laugh and she laughed herself. It was such a beautiful morning. The apartment was flooded with yellow light.

The two boys standing there with the mop and pail looked so comical, they hated it so. Their faces were all twisted up with disgust. “All right,” Octavia said, “Vinnie, you help me with the closets; Gino, you wash the windows on the inside. Then you and Vinnie can bring all the junk down in the yard and I’ll finish the windows.”

“Like hell I will,” Gino said.

Octavia didn’t even look at him. “Don’t be smart.”

“I’m going out,” Gino said.

Vinnie and Sal were aghast at Gino’s audacity. None of the brothers ever dared defy Octavia; even Larry took orders from her sometimes. She always pulled their hair and slapped them when they were fresh and did not obey. Once she even hit Larry on the head with a milk bottle.

Octavia was kneeling half in the closet. She said over her shoulder, “Don’t make me get up.”

“I don’t care,” Gino said. “I ain’t washing any goddamn windows, I’m playing stickball.”

Octavia leaped up from the floor and was upon him. With one hand she grabbed his hair, with the other gave him two good slaps in the face. He tried to get away, but she was too strong for him. She held him fast. She pummeled him, though she did not really hurt him. She screamed, “Now you little bastard, say you won’t wash the windows and I’ll kill you.”

Gino didn’t answer. He tore himself free of her with an unexpected burst of strength. He looked at her, not with hate or fear, but with his painfully disarming surprise, his nakedly defenseless bewilderment. Octavia could never get used to that look. She beat Vinnie worse sometimes, so it was not guilt that she felt. And despite her feelings about the stepfather, she never thought of Lena, Sal, and Gino as half sister and brothers. They were her mother’s children.

Lucia Santa came out of the kitchen. She said to Octavia, “Enough, no more. Gino, just wash the two front windows and then go out and play.”

But Gino’s thin dark face was filled now with stubbornness and rage. He said, “I’m not washing no son-of-a-bitch windows.” He waited to see what they would do.

Conciliatingly, tentatively, Lucia Santa said, “Don’t curse, a small boy like you.”

Gino yelled, “Octavia curses all the time. And she’s a girl. You never say anything about her. And with other people she’s such a phony lady.” The mother smiled and Octavia turned her face away to keep from laughing outright. It was true. The boy friends, especially the Panettiere’s son, never dreamed how she swore. They would not dare use words in her presence that she used at home when irritated with her mother or her little brothers. Sometimes, when she was hysterical with rage, she shocked even herself. One of her girl friends had called her the “filthy-mouthed virgin.”

“Good, good,” the mother said. “Just help until lunchtime; then you can go out. The food will be ready soon.” She was aware that Octavia was angry at being overruled, but things had been going so well that she wanted peace in the family.

To her surprise, Gino said defiantly, “I ain’t hungry. I’m going out right now. The hell with lunch.” He took his stick-ball bat out of the corner and turned to leave. He was just in time to receive his mother’s hand, flush in his mouth.

She was angry. She shouted, “Animale. Hard head. You’re just like your father. Now stay in the house all day.”

He did not come up to her chin. She looked into his eyes, two great black pools of rage, crazy with a small boy’s frustration. He lifted up the stickball bat and threw it blindly, but carefully aimed not to hit anyone. The long thin stick arched gracefully and swept the table clean of its pile of china. There was a tremendous crash. Painted bits of dishes and cups flew around the room.

A moment of great stunned silence followed. Gino gave one startled look at his mother and Octavia, turned, and fled. Out the door, down the stairs, and into Tenth Avenue and the fresh spring sunlight. His mother recovered enough to shout down the dark hallway, through the smell of peppers, frying garlic, and olive oil, “Figlio de puttana! Beast! Animal! Don’t come home to eat.”

Gino felt a lot better walking up 31st Street. The hell with everybody. The hell with his mother and sister. They could all go to hell. He jumped when he felt a tug on his arm, but it was only Vinnie.

“Come on home,” Vinnie said. “Octavia says I gotta bring you home.”

Gino turned around. He gave Vinnie a push and said, “You wanna fight, you son-of-a-bitch?”

Vinnie looked at him gravely and said, “Come on, I’ll help with the windows. Then we’ll play ball.”

Gino ran up toward Ninth Avenue, and though Vinnie was a faster runner, there was no sound of anyone chasing him.

HE WAS FREE, but he felt a strange discontent. He wasn’t even mad. He just wasn’t going to do what anybody told him, not even Larry. The thought of Larry made him pause. He would have to get out of the neighborhood. Sure as hell they would send Larry after him.

On Ninth Avenue Gino hitched on the back of a horse and wagon going uptown. After a couple of blocks, the driver, a burly mustached Italian, saw him and flicked his whip. Gino jumped off, picked up a rock, and sailed it in the direction of the wagon. He had not taken aim really, but it came close. There was a roar of curses, the wagon stopped, and Gino fled toward Eighth Avenue. There he hitched on the back of a taxi. The driver saw him and went fast so that he couldn’t hop off until Central Park. The driver thumbed his nose and grinned at Gino.

For the first time in his life, he went into Central Park. He saw a fountain near a horse trough and took a drink of warm water. He did not even have a penny for a soda. He walked deeper into the park, as far as he could from west to east, until he saw the great white square stones that housed the rich. They meant nothing to him. His childish dreams did not include thoughts of money. He dreamed of bravery on a battlefield, of greatness on a baseball diamond. He dreamed of his own uniqueness.

Gino tried to find a spot in the park where he could sit against a tree and not see stone against the sky or, darting through the screen of leaves, the black shadows of moving cars and wagons. He searched for the illusion of a forest. But no matter where he stood or sat, whenever he made a complete turn, he found at least one facade of stone above the trees, a billboard suspended near the sky, the sound of honking horns, or the clatter of horses’ hoofs. The smell of gasoline mingled with the scent of grass and trees. Finally, exhausted, Gino lay down by a lake that had concrete banks, and, lidding his eyes, made the tall buildings lose their solidity and become airy, suspended above the trees like a picture in a fairy tale. Later he would come out of the forest and enter the city. Without warning, he fell asleep.

He slept an enchanted sleep. He knew people walked by and looked at him, a ball bounced near him, and two feather merchants came after it and stood looking down at him. But he could never wake up enough to really see them. The seasons changed as if years were going by. First it was very hot and Gino rolled along the grass to the shade of a tree. Then there were light sunny rains and he got wet, and then he was cold and it was dark, and then it was sunny again like summer. But he was too tired to ever get up. Cradling his head in his arms, burying his nose and eyes in fresh grass, he slept his life away, but when he awoke it was only one afternoon that had vanished.

The suspended spires of the city were all blue with approaching twilight; there were no yellow sun rays in the air. The park was black and green. Gino would have to hurry to get home before dark.

He got out of Central Park at 72nd Street. He was worried now. He wanted to get home to his own house, his own neighborhood; he wanted to see his brothers and sisters and his mother again. It was the longest he had ever been away from them. He hitched on a taxi. He was lucky; it went downtown and then over to Ninth Avenue. But at 31st Street the taxi was going too fast. Gino jumped anyway, pumping his feet before they touched the ground. He kept his balance, running swiftly. Suddenly he heard a shriek of metal behind him. He felt a shock and found himself lifted off his feet and flying through the air. He hit the pavement and jumped up. He wasn’t hurt, but he was frightened because he knew he had been run over.

A big blue car was half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter. A tall man got out of it and ran toward Gino. He had blue eyes and thin hair, and his face showed such a look of fright and concern that Gino felt sorry for him. He said immediately, “I’m O.K., mister.” But the man began feeling him all over his body for broken bones. There was only a big rip in the leg of his dungarees and blood coming out of it.

The man said with almost panicky nervousness, “Are you all right, sonny? How do you feel?”

Gino said, “My knee hurts.” The man looked at it. There was a deep scrape where blood was welling slowly. The man picked up Gino as if he were a baby and put him in the front seat of the car. To the people who had gathered around he said, “I’m bringing this kid to the hospital.”

In front of the French Hospital on 30th Street, the man parked his car and lit a cigarette. He looked at Gino intently, studying his face. “Now tell me the truth, kid, how do you feel?”

“I’m O.K.,” Gino said. His stomach felt weak. He was a little scared at being hit by a car.

“Let me see your knee,” the man said.

Gino rolled up his trousers leg. The bleeding had stopped and there was a raw scab beginning to form over the whole knee. “I never bleed when I get hurt,” Gino said proudly. “I always get a scab quick.”

The man sighed and said, “I guess we better go in.”

Gino said quickly, “Those hospitals, they always make you wait and I gotta get home or my mother will be real mad. I’m O.K., mister.” He got out of the car. “Besides, it wasn’t your fault.” His tone was that of one equal reassuring another. He limped away from the car.

The man called out, “Wait a minute, kid.” He leaned out of the window, extending a bill. It was five dollars.

Gino was embarrassed. “Nah,” he said. “It was my fault. I don’t want no money.”

“You take it,” the man said sternly. “Don’t make your old lady spend her dough on new pants because you wanta be a big shot.” He looked like Lindbergh when he was serious. When Gino took the money the man shook his hand, smiled, and said, in a relieved, flattering voice, “You’re O.K., kid.”

All Gino had to do to get home now was cross Ninth Avenue under the El and walk down 30th Street to Tenth Avenue.

He turned the corner feeling a great sense of happiness. Sal was playing in the street, his mother was sitting on her backless chair in front of the tenement, Zia Louche and another woman with her. Octavia was standing by the lemon ice stand talking with the Panettiere’s son. Gino walked past her and they made believe they didn’t see each other. In front of the tenement he stopped and faced his mother when she spoke to him.

She wasn’t mad, he could tell that. “Buona sera,” she said calmly. “You’ve decided to come home? Your supper is in the oven.” She glanced away quickly and talked to Zia Louche. Gino thought bitterly, She didn’t even notice my leg.

He limped up the stairs. He was relieved. Everything seemed to be forgotten. And now for the first time he was conscious of a dull throbbing ache in his knee. His mouth was dry and salty, his eyes hurt a little, and his legs were shaky.

Vinnie was reading in the kitchen. When he saw Gino, he took a plate of peppers and eggs and potatoes out of the oven and put it on the table. Then he went out into the hall to the icebox and brought back a bottle of milk. Gino took a slug right from the bottle. Then he sat down to eat.

Vinnie said quietly, but a little accusingly, “Where were you all day? Mom and Octavia were worried and Larry looked all over for you. They were worried about you.”

“Yeah, sure,” Gino said sarcastically. But he felt better. After a few mouthfuls he couldn’t eat any more. He put his leg up on the chair. It was stiff. He pulled up his pants leg. The scab was huge and bloody, and blown up like a black cake.

“Wow.” Vinnie was impressed. “You better put some iodine on that. And on your face and hands, too. You get in a fight?”

“Nah,” Gino said, “I just got hit by a car.” He almost cried when he said it. He went to the sink and washed. Then he went into the front room and unfolded the bed and undressed. He was cold, so he put a blanket over his body. He took the five-dollar bill from his pants and held it. His stomach quivered, his face felt hot. He saw the car now as he had not seen it then, rushing up and hitting him, and his body flying through the air. Vinnie was sitting on the bed near him. “I got hit by a car,” Gino said in a trembling voice. “See? The guy gave me five dollars. He was a nice guy. He even wanted me to go to a hospital, but I wasn’t hurt. I was just hitching and jumped off right in front of him. It was all my fault.” He opened his hand. “See? Five bucks.”

Both boys stared at the money. It was a fortune. Vinnie had a five-dollar gold piece for his Confirmation from Zia Louche, but he would never be allowed to spend it. “Gee,” Vinnie said, “what are you gonna do with it, give it to Ma?”

“Like hell,” Gino said. “If she knows I got hit by a car I’ll get a beating.” Then, seriously, “Let’s make those bottles of root beer like you always wanted to, Vinnie, and sell it and make money. Remember? Maybe we could build up a good business.”

Vinnie was delighted. It had always been his dream. “No kidding?” he asked. And when Gino nodded, Vinnie said, “You better let me hold the money. Ma might take it off you and make you save it.”

“No, sir,” Gino said suspiciously. “I’m gonna hold this money myself.”

Vinnie was surprised and hurt. Gino always let him hold his money, the ice money, the winnings from Seven-and-a-half.

“C’mon,” Vinnie said. “Let me hold the five dollars. You’ll lose it.”

Gino said spitefully, “I got hit by the car, you didn’t. You didn’t even come with me. You were on Octavia’s side. You’re lucky I made you a partner.”

He lay back on his pillow. Vinnie watched him carefully. Gino had never acted this way before. “O.K.,” he said. “You hold the money.”

Gino lay back on the pillow and said almost absently, “And I have to be the boss making the root beer. It’s my money.”

This hurt Vinnie’s feelings. He was the older and it was his idea. He nearly said, “You and your five dollars can go to hell.” But instead he said, “O.K., you’ll be the boss. You want a bandage on your knee?”

“Nah, it don’t hurt,” Gino said. “Let’s talk about how to make that root beer. And remember, don’t tell anybody I got hit by a car. I’ll just get a beating.”

Vinnie said, “I’ll go get a paper and pencil to figure expenses.” He went into the kitchen and cleaned the table and washed the dishes. The mother had given strict orders that Gino was to clean up after eating supper. Then he got the pencil and pad from his schoolbag.

When Vinnie got back to the front room it was almost dark, the last shreds of twilight. In the dimness he saw Gino’s relaxed hand on the blanket. The crumpled five-dollar bill was on the floor. Gino was sound asleep, his body completely inert, his eyes closed.

But there were strange sounds coming from the bed. Vinnie went closer and saw that his brother was crying in his sleep, tears streaming down his face. Vinnie shook him to wake him out of the nightmare, but his brother kept sleeping, breathing easily and deeply. The sounds of crying stopped finally, leaving only his face and eyelashes wet. Vinnie waited for a while beside the bed in case his brother should wake up and want the five dollars back. Then he put the money in their secret hiding place in the wall.

Vinnie sat on the window sill in the darkness. It was a very still night, too early in the spring for the people on the Avenue to stay down late. Even the railroad yards were quiet; there were no engines moving, no ringing of steel. Vinnie kept looking at the bed to make sure his brother was all right, and figuring where they could get the bottles for the root beer they would make. He knew that Gino would let him be the boss.

CHAPTER 9

THE SMOKY GRAY light of autumn made the city all lines and shadows. The bridge over Tenth Avenue was half obscured, as if it were over some bottomless gorge, not just two stories above a cobblestone street ruled with twin lines of steel. Underneath the bridge, from the direction of 29th Street, came a wagon, flat-bedded, drawn by a heavy brown horse. The wagon was loaded with thin crates made of splintery wood, the crates filled with purple wine-grapes.

The wagon parked midway between 30th and 31st Streets. Driver and helper stacked twenty crates in front of one tenement. The driver leaned back and called up to the city sky, as if singing a note, “Ca-te-rin-a, your grapes are waiting for you.” Four stories up a window opened, children leaned out, men and women. Seconds later, as if they had flown down the stairs, people erupted from the tenement. A man walked around the cases, sniffing like a dog at the clusters between the slats. “They are good this year?” he asked the driver. The driver did not bother to answer. He held out his hand for money. The man paid.

Meanwhile the wife posted two children as guards, while she and the other children each took a crate and carried them into the cellar. The father ripped a slat off a box, partially exposing its contents, and took out a great blue-black cluster of grapes to eat. When the children and wife came back from their load, they and the guards were each given a cluster. In front of each tenement this scene was repeated, the children eating pear-cluster blue-black grapes, the father leaning happily against his stack of crates while other men not so fortunate flocked around to wish him luck with his wine. They licked their lips, thinking of the great jugs, red-black, stacked against the walls of their cellars.

Gino was envious of the other children, those fortunate ones whose fathers made wine. He stood beside Joey Bianco’s father, but Joey was too cheap to give him grapes and so was his father. Joey’s father was too cheap to open a box for sampling even for relatives and close friends.

But now the Panettiere, fat and round, wearing his baker’s white hat, came to receive three towering stacks of crates in front of his shop. He opened two of the crates and handed out great clusters to all the children. Gino jumped in and got his share. The Panettiere said in his great booming voice, “Ragazzi, help carry and there will be pizza for all.” Like ants, the children swarmed over the three stacks of crates and they magically disappeared underground into the cellar. Gino was left without anything to carry.

The Panettiere looked at him reprovingly, “Ah, Gino, figlio mio, what will become of you? Work eludes you, try how you may. You must learn now; those who do not work do not eat. Away.”

The Panettiere started to turn but the angry look in the young boy’s eyes stopped him. “Ah,” he said. “It’s not your fault. You just do not move quickly toward work. If there had been one left you would have carried it, eh?” When Gino nodded, the Panettiere motioned him into the shop. By the time the other children had come up from the cellar to get their reward, Gino was already out on the Avenue eating his pizza, the hot tomato sauce cutting the sweet juice of the grape from his mouth and palate.

In the falling dusk the children, their mouths purple with grape and red with tomato sauce, ran screaming up and down the Avenue, raced up and down the steps of the bridge like howling demons, danced in the steam of the locomotive passing underneath, and reappeared in a shower of sparks. The stone city towered above them black with winter. It was their last frenzy before being called from windows to flee the falling night. They piled empty crates in the gutter, and one of the older boys set a match to the paper around the pile to make a bonfire. Tenth Avenue burst into beacons of orange light, and around them the children made a great circle. The calls from mothers leaning out of windows echoed throughout the cold twilight canyon streets, long and drawn out, shepherds down a mountainside.

Lucia Santa, like God behind a cloud, watched from her window on the top floor of 358 Tenth Avenue, her elbows resting on an unsheeted pillow. She regarded her children and the others eating grapes running over the bridge, halved in the light of orange bonfires, shredded into fluttering shadows by the chilly, windy autumn night. The cold was coming early this year. The summer, blessed season of rest for city people, had come to an end.

Now school would begin. There must be white shirts for the children, trousers mended and pressed. Shoes must be worn instead of sneakers patched with tape. Hair must be cut and combed. Winter’s gloves, always lost, must be bought; hats and coats. The stove must be put up in the living room next to the kitchen; it must be checked and kept filled. Money must be put aside for winter tribute to the doctor. In the back of her mind Lucia Santa thought of saving money by having Sal steal coal from the railroad yards. But Salvatore was too timid; he didn’t enjoy it. With Gino it was no longer possible. He was getting too big; he could be treated like a criminal. This Lucia Santa thought out with the cunning of the poor.

Now in the orange light she could see a small boy go out a little way from the sidewalk into the gutter and then run and jump over the bonfire. Gino. Determined to ruin his clothing. Then an even smaller boy tried it, and this one landed on the edge of the fire, setting up a shower of sparks. When Lucia Santa saw Gino back off for a second try she said aloud, “Mannaggia Gesù Crist.” She ran down the corridor of rooms to the kitchen, grabbed the black Tackeril and rushed down the stairs. Octavia looked up from the book she was reading.

As Lucia Santa burst out of the tenement door, Gino was sailing over the bonfire for the third time. In mid-air he saw his mother, then hit the ground, and tried to twist away. The thin black club caught him on the ribs, sharp and stinging. He let out a howl to satisfy his mother and ran up to the house. Then the mother saw Sal sailing over the fire, and when he ran past her, his trousers smelled burnt. She gave him time to duck before she swung the Tackeril but caught him flush just the same. Sal wailed and ran into the house after Gino. By the time Lucia Santa had climbed the stairs they had taken off their jackets and caps and hidden under the beds. They would be quiet, at least for a half hour. A time of day had come to an end, a season, a piece of the fabric of her life.

“Put your book away,” the mother said. “Help with the children.” Octavia sighed and put away her book. She always helped on Sunday night, in atonement for her Sabbath day of rest. She always felt a special kind of peace on Sunday night.

Octavia took down the drying clothes over the bathtub, cleaned the tub, and ran hot water into it. Then she went into her room and called under the bed. “Come on out, you two.” Gino and Sal crawled out. Sal said, “Is Mamma still mad?” Octavia said sternly, “No, but if you don’t behave she will be. Now no fighting in the tub, or you’ll both get killed.”

In the kitchen Lucia Santa prepared supper. Vinnie had come home from the movies and was helping her set the table. He would take his bath later.

When Gino and Sal came out their winter underwear was waiting for them, with its long legs and arms. From some forgotten hiding place their schoolbags appeared, battered but usable. Also waiting for them were meatball sandwiches and glasses of cream soda, for their mother refused to serve milk with food cooked in tomato sauce.

After supper Octavia gave them all a lecture—Sal, Gino, and Vinnie. It was familiar. “Now,” she said, “none of you kids are stupid. I want to see good report cards this term, and in conduct, too. Vinnie, you did all right last year, but you have to do better now you’re in second term high. You want to go to C.C.N.Y., don’t you? If your marks are good enough you can go free.” There could never be any question of paying for college. Vinnie would be lucky if he didn’t have to go to work right after high school. But Octavia had her own plans and her own money on this score. Vinnie would go to college, to C.C.N.Y. She would take care of the family. It was this that had made her at last give up any ideas of teaching.

She went on. “Gino, if you get conduct marks like last term, I’ll put you in the hospital, I’ll beat you black and blue. And your school work could be a lot better. Now behave, or you’ll wind up in reform school and disgrace the whole family.” She was laying it on too thick; Gino had never behaved badly enough to go to reform school, he never failed in conduct, and never got any D’s.

She had her audience. Even Baby Aileen sat up in her crib and climbed out to sit on a chair by the table. Octavia reached over and put the baby on her lap. “Sal,” she said, “you did all right last term. But now school will get harder for you. I’ll help with your homework, so don’t worry. I’m nearly as good a teacher as the ones in school,” she said with almost a little girl’s bragging pride. “One thing. I want everybody upstairs from the street when I come from work. By that time it will be dark and there’s no reason for you to be out anyway. Anybody not in this house by six o’clock will get the hell knocked out of them. And no card playing or fooling around until the homework is done and I check it. And you, Vinnie, Gino, Sal, take a night each helping your mother with the dishes. Give her a break.”

She gave one last warning, blood-chilling in its simplicity and sincerity, delivered without any flourish or preamble. “If you don’t get promoted, if you get left back, I’ll kill you.” Aileen moved uneasily in her lap. “Nobody is going to disgrace this family name, and you’re not growing up ignorant guineas to live on Tenth Avenue the rest of your life.”

Lucia Santa broke in, irritated by her daughter’s phrase. “Bastanza. Enough. They’re not going to a war, after all.” Then, to the kids, “But remember this, mascalzoni that you are. I would give anything to have gone to school, to be able to read and write. Only the sons of the rich went to school in Italy. At your age I was chasing goats and digging vegetables and shoveling manure. I killed chickens and washed dishes and cleaned houses. School to me would have been like movie pictures. If your father could have gone to school he would have had better work, and—who knows—might not have become ill. So: know your good fortune, or you will be taught how lucky you are with the Tackeril.

Sal was wide-eyed. Gino and Vinnie were composed, though a little impressed. Sal said in a scared voice, “But, Ma, what if I can’t learn, what if I’m not smart enough? That ain’t my fault.” He was so serious that the two women smiled.

Octavia said gently, “Don’t worry, everybody in this family is smart enough to pass. You just do your best. I’ll help you, and I was the smartest girl in my graduating class from high school.”

Vinnie and Gino said, “Ha, ha,” together, lured by her gentle, sad tone into teasing her. Octavia’s great dark eyes flashed, but she smiled and said to Lucia Santa, “Well, I was, wasn’t I, Ma?” This wistfulness for some glory unknown to them did more to persuade the children than any of her threats, except the one to kill them if they got left back. That threat they did not doubt for a moment.

Lucia Santa watched her daughter. She remembered how Octavia had loved to go to school, and it was this that made Lucia Santa tolerate such American airs, making education so important. She distrusted high ambition, high aims. For, the greater the reward, it followed, the greater the risks. You could become helpless in a shattering defeat. Better a modest safety. But Lucia Santa paid this deference to her daughter.

The mother said gravely to her children, “Yes, your sister could have been a schoolteacher if it had not been for your father.” She saw Gino looking directly into her eyes, intent. “Yes,” she said, speaking to him. “If your father had done his duty, supported his family, Octavia could have stopped work. But he never thought of anyone else, and you, figlio de puttana that you are, take after him. Tonight you jump over the fire. You spoil your good clothes and make your little brother a bad example. Now I have to buy new pants for school. Animale that you are. You never think of anyone. But I warn you—”

Octavia broke in quickly, “All right, Ma, that’s something else. The big thing is that they know how important school is to their life. If you learn something at school you can be somebody. Otherwise you’ll be just a slob down on the docks or in the railroad like Larry.”

When the children were in bed the mother became very busy ironing the wash for the next week, sewing up holes in clothing. She had a basket piled so high that she had only to reach out without stooping. Octavia propped her book against the big sugar bowl. There was absolute quiet, except for the creak of bedsprings from the bedroom whenever one of the children turned over restlessly in sleep. The women were in perfect ease and contentment, chiefs of an obedient tribe. Everything was running smoothly; they were both in rapport—the daughter a faithful but powerful underling; the mother undisputed chief, but showing her respect and admiration for a clever and faithful daughter’s help. It was never said, but the father’s banishment had relieved them of a great deal of tension and worry. They were almost happy he was gone, and their rule now absolute.

The mother rose to put coffee on the fire, for Octavia in her book would forget about everything. The mother wondered, What could be in these books that stunned her daughter into some magic oblivion? It was something she would never know, and if she had been younger she would have felt some envy or regret. But she was a busy woman with important work to be done for many years and could not make herself unhappy over pleasures of which she did not know the taste. She had enough regrets about pleasures whose taste she had known. But there was nothing to be done about that, either. She grimaced from the steam and her thoughts.

She had to go down to the other end of the hall to get the milk from the icebox again, and some good Italian peppered ham to tempt Octavia, who was getting too thin. Lucia Santa heard someone coming slowly up the steps, but whoever it was could only be on the second floor. She left the door of the apartment open, to get a little air from the ironing. Anyway, no one could go past their door to the icebox and bureau and then up the roof and escape. She sat at the table with her daughter, both of them drinking coffee, eating the prosciutto and coarse bread. They could both hear the steps coming up close, and then the shawled head of Zia Louche rose slowly and cautiously over the last step of the stairs and the old lady hobbled into the apartment, cursing terribly in Italian.

They were too intimate with her to give the usual greetings of formal courtesy. Lucia Santa rose to set another cup and slice more bread, though she knew the old dame never ate before other people. Octavia said pleasantly in Italian and with respect, “How are you feeling, Zia Louche?”

The old woman made a gesture of angry impatience, the gesture of a person who waits for a death that is in the present and therefore finds such a question not polite, in poor taste. They sat in silence.

“Work, work,” Lucia Santa said. “This school, what miracles they make over it. The children must dress like the President himself, and I must wash and iron like a slave.”

Zia Louche said, “Eh, eh,” and made another impatient gesture as if to brush away all people who expected life to run smooth. She took off her shabby black coat and then the long knitted sweater with its buttons down to her knees.

Under those gimlet eyes Octavia felt she could no longer read; it would not be respectful. She rose and began to iron slowly. The mother reached out and closed the book, which was lying open on the table, so the daughter could not look down at it and read while ironing. Then Octavia was aware that she was being accorded the rare honor of a direct address from Zia Louche.

“Young lady of mine,” Zia Louche said, with the rough familiarity of the old, “your handsome brother, has he appeared at all today?”

“No, Zia Louche,” Octavia replied demurely. If anyone else had used this tone with her she would have spat in her face, especially the smug fat matrons, those guineas who always spoke to young girls with voices filled with sly pity because they had never tasted the pleasures of a marriage bed.

“And you, Lucia Santa?” Zia Louche asked. When the mother shook her head the old woman continued sharply, “Then you have no concern for this beautiful son of yours, a boy of seventeen years, in a country like this? You have no fears for him?” Octavia saw her mother’s face contort in a frown of anxiety.

Lucia Santa shrugged helplessly. “What is now with that disgrazia? Saturday nights he never sleeps at home. Nothing has happened?”

Zia Louche gave a short harsh laugh. “Oh, yes, something has happened. A whole comedy has been played. And, as usual in America, the mother is the last to know. Calm, Lucia Santa, your beautiful son is safe, alive. The Lady Killer—” she said this last in American, with incredible relish—“has finally met a girl who is very much alive. Congratulations, Lucia Santa, on your son’s marriage and your new daughter-in-law—American style.”

The stunning effect of this was such that Octavia and her mother could only stare. The old lady, in her taunting way, hoped to draw some of their rage on herself, but now she had to give way to gales and gales of laughter that shook her old skeleton in its flesh of black cloth, gasping out, “No, no, Lucia Santa, you must forgive me, you have all my love in this, but oh, what a villain your Lorenzo is, cue mascalzone. It’s too much, it’s really too much.” But then she saw the stony face of her friend, the tight lips, the almost mortal insult that she had given. She composed herself. She held the wrinkled bones of her face in a gravity suitable to her years. But she could not hide a certain contempt for their anxiety.

“Again forgive me,” Zia Louche said. “But with a son who is such a whoremaster, what did you expect, after all? Would you rather see him beaten or dead? Your son is not stupid, Lucia Santa. Signora Le Cinglata, twenty years barren, and Signor Le Cinglata, married twice, forty years a husband and never a father, finally they are blessed.” She bowed her head mockingly. “Thanks be to the good God. But the man Le Cinglata thinks he owes his thanks to someone nearer and sharpens his knife to repay this debt. And the shameless woman Le Cinglata had a dream of marrying your son. Is this possible of a woman born and raised in Italy? Oh America—shameless land.” At this Lucia Santa raised a threatening hand to heaven in a wordless curse on the brazen Le Cinglata, but she leaned forward to hear more.

Zia Louche went on. “Your son finally is trapped by the tigers he has so thoughtlessly tamed. A word from the Le Cinglata to her husband and he is a dead man. But if he gives hope to the old whore, what may happen? What disgrace? She may even poison the old man and bring them both to the electric chair. But you know your son, he is clever and will do anything to avoid saying ‘No’ to anyone. So away he scampers to City Hall and marries a young innocent Italian girl who has watched him ride his horse on Tenth Avenue since she was in pigtails, without ever speaking to him. No one even knew he was acquainted with this bride, they had never even spoke together in public. Her people live on 31st Street, the family of Marconozzi, respectable, but the poorest of the poor. Oh, he is sly, your son, he will be a priest.”

The mother asked quietly, “Has the girl a good reputation?”

Zia Louche grinned lewdly. “Men like your son marry only those girls who are irreproachable. That is their philosophy. Who values the virgin more than the whoremaster? But she is a stick.” The old dame held up a bony skeleton forefinger, the gnarled bones lewder than any rounded flesh. “Dear God of mine, he’ll split her in two like a piece of kindling.” She crossed herself.

Octavia was furious, shamed by this marriage so typical of the poor, at the scandal, the sordidness of her brother’s life. The disgusting sex madness they were all infected with. She saw with surprise that her mother was now in no way disturbed and was even smiling faintly. Octavia did not understand that this news, while surprising, disconcerting, something that it was better should not have happened, was not really bad news. How could it be for a woman who waited for more terrible dreams to become a reality? The fear of mysterious illness, murderous deeds of passion, prison, the electric chair—all were perfectly possible, all discernible. Lorenzo could have married a whore, or a slattern, or even one of the Irish. So he had married in haste, a common occurrence with the sons of the poor and no disgrace; the disgrace lay with the parents of the girl. “Everyone will think the worst,” Octavia said aloud. “The rotten bastard.”

But Lucia Santa was laughing outright now, at the thwarting of the Le Cinglatas, at her son’s slyness. “Where is he now, this beautiful son of mine?” she asked Zia Louche.

Zia Louche said, “Let me finish. The man Le Cinglata now believes himself the father. A woman has only to hold a man on his knees by both ears and then she can lead him anywhere. But there is another question. The girl’s mother, ah, the mother of the bride, she must be told. There is the problem. They are as proud as they are poor. They will consider their daughter shamed.”

Lucia Santa made an impatient gesture. “I will go and tell them. We are as proud, and certainly as poor. We will understand each other. But now, where are they?”

The old woman rose, groaning as her bones creaked. She hobbled out the door and shouted down the stairwell, “Lorenzo, Louisa, come up.”

As the three women waited for the bridal pair to ascend the stairs, they pondered on this new change in fortune. The mother suddenly realized that the loss of her son’s income would be a serious blow to the family. But until he had children, he would be made to contribute something to his fatherless brothers and sisters. She was determined on that. Next, the second-floor apartment would be vacant soon; they could move into it, so she could watch her new daughter-in-law, help the couple in their early troubles, and with the babies to come—for she had no doubt she would soon be a grandmother. And then she had a great curiosity to see the looks of the girl her handsome son had finally chosen, the one who had finally put the bit in his mouth.

Octavia, too, was thinking now about money. That bastard Larry, deserting the family just when they needed the money most. And suddenly she was convinced that this was the real reason for his marriage, that the mother had ruled with too iron a hand, taking most of his pay check, restricting his freedom, so he had chosen this means of shedding his bonds. And now that the family was in trouble, Larry could see no future in it. Octavia prepared to welcome him as a brazen traitor and let his floozy have no doubts about her position with this family.

Zia Louche waited. Without a shred of malice, she was delighted to witness such a fine comedy.

Larry’s handsome dark head rose first above the stairs. The girl was almost invisible behind him. Larry had an embarrassed grin that was charming; its usual confidence was touched by an alien bit of shyness. His mother waited for him with a smile of welcome touched with forgiving contempt.

Larry said quickly, “Mom, Sis, I want you to meet my wife.” He brought the thin girl out from behind him. “Lou, this is my mother and sister Octavia.”

The mother embraced the young girl and made her sit down. At the sight of the beautiful, pale, thin face with the great haunting brown eyes, the immature figure, Octavia felt an overwhelming pity for the girl. This was just a kid, she would never be able to handle Larry, she didn’t know the life she would lead. Octavia, looking at her brother, his strong body, sleek black hair, knowing his romantic belief in himself, felt pity for him too; that this would be the end of his dreams; that his life had come to an end. She remembered him riding up Tenth Avenue on his black horse, sparks flying from cobblestones and steel tracks; the way he talked about himself as if he alone saw some great destiny. She understood that his goodness—his going early to work to help his mother, his leaving school and not preparing his mind for the life struggle—had left him without weapons to fight his fate. Now he would have children, the years would fly by as swiftly as the horse passed under the bridge, and he would be middle-aged. And since he was Larry, still dreaming. She had loved him once when they were children together, and now her pity made her kind to his child wife. She kissed Larry on the cheek and hugged her new sister-in-law, feeling the other’s body stiff with fright.

They all sat down to a wedding feast of coffee and dry buns and arranged that the newly married couple would sleep there until the apartment on the second floor was vacant. Larry became animated, talking cheerfully; everything was going well. He was perfectly at ease. But suddenly Louisa buried her face in her hands and began to weep, saying between low, choking sobs, “I’ve got to go home and tell my mother.”

Lucia Santa rose and said with determination, “We will all go. We should know each other, all of us, since we are related.”

Larry said tentatively, “Gee, Ma, I gotta go on the night shift. You go over with Lou, and then I’ll go over tomorrow.”

The young bride looked at him with fearful surprise. Octavia burst out angrily, “Like hell you will, Larry. Your wedding night is a good excuse for a day off from work. You go with Mom and Louisa to her house and stick up for your wife.”

Louisa looked at her wide-eyed, as if she had committed some blasphemy. Larry laughed and said, “Sis, come on, stop making a big deal out of the whole thing. You want me to go, Lou?” The girl nodded her head. He put a hand on her back protectively and said, “Then I’ll come.”

When the girl said, “Thanks, Larry,” Octavia laughed loudly. She was surprised that her mother gave her such a threatening look, surprised that her mother had not forced Larry to do what was right. But when Lucia Santa said courteously to her son, “I think it better if you come with us, Lorenzo,” she realized that her mother had accepted a new role; that she no longer considered herself the master of this particular child, and in some chilling way she was casting him out of her heart—not with anger or malice or lack of love, but as a burden to be dropped, to leave more strength for other burdens. When they all left, Octavia was so depressed that she ironed all the wash and did not reopen her book.

LIFE IS SO full of surprises for small boys that Gino was not surprised the next morning to see the long black hair of a girl in his brother Larry’s bed. Standing in his modest winter underwear, Gino studied them. Larry looked different, and the girl didn’t look right, either. The two pale faces, dead white with sleep in the chilly apartment, defenseless in a terribly deep unconsciousness, a tragic exhaustion, held the drawn purity of death. Both had jet-black hair, all scattered and untidy and flowing into each other as if it were a single silky mass of black grown together over both their faces. Then Larry stirred; strength and power and life came flowing back, blood rose from his body and tinged his cheeks. The heavy straight black eyebrows moved, his eyes opened, and the dark eyes flashed. Larry jerked his head away from the girl’s so that now their hair did not intermingle and he was separate. He saw Gino watching them and grinned.

Vinnie had already taken the top of the milk bottle, the first inch of frozen icy cream that was a prize for the early bird. Gino tried to open another milk bottle, but his mother made his hand sting with the flat of a knife.

When Gino went back through the bedroom to finish dressing, his brother Larry was sitting up, head resting on the bedspread, smoking a cigarette, and the girl was sleeping with her face to the wall, her back small and hunched against the world. The straps of a white slip showed, framing the shoulder bones that protruded like chicken wings from the skin. As Gino went by, Larry reached out and pulled up the blanket to cover his wife from the cold, showing his own hairy chest over the long, heavy underwear as he did so.

GINO NEVER FORGOT that year. So many things happened, starting with Larry’s marriage.

One day coming home from school he saw Joey Bianco sitting on Runkel’s platform, all his schoolbooks scattered on the sidewalk. To his astonishment, Joey was crying; but under his tears his face was set in a brooding rage. Gino approached cautiously and asked, “What’s the matter, Joey? Something happen to your father or mother?”

Joey shook his head, still crying. Gino sat down beside him hoisting himself up onto the platform. “You wanta play Seven-and-a-half?” Gino asked. “I got sixteen cents.”

“I got no money to play,” Joey said roughly. Then he wailed aloud. “I lost all my money. My father told me to put it in the bank and now the bank lost all my money. The lousy bastards. And my father doesn’t even care, he laughs at me. They all said I could have the money for myself when I get big, and then they stole it off me. And now they all laugh at me.” He was crying and cursing, heartbroken.

Gino was shaken. He, more than anyone else, knew what a terrible blow this was. How many times had Gino bought lemon ice and given Joey a lick because Joey wanted to save the two cents? How many times had Joey stayed home on Sunday afternoons to save the movie money and put it in the bank? How many times had Joey turned away from the hot dog vendor and his three-wheeled cart with the orange-striped umbrella, clutching a nickel firmly in his pocket, while Gino bit into the soft long bun, the juicy red hot dog, the white greasy sauerkraut and gobs of yellow mustard, all in one soul-filling mouthful? Gino felt the loss, too, for in some way it was his money. Though the other kids laughed at Joey, Gino had always respected him and given him at least one bite of hot dog, one taste of pizza, one lick of lemon ice to help him past temptation. And even at Easter, when everybody bought pink and white sugar eggs for a dime, even then Joey held fast, though Easter came but once a year. Gino was proud that his friend was the richest kid in Chelsea maybe, and certainly the richest kid on Tenth Avenue. So he asked slowly and fearfully, “Joey, how much did you lose?”

Joey said with desperate, dignified calmness, almost awestricken, “Two hundred and thirteen dollars.”

The two of them looked at each other absolutely aghast. Gino had never dreamed it would be so much. For the first time Joey realized the extent and finality of his tragedy. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. Gino said, “Come on, Joey, pick up your books. Joey, let’s go home.”

Joey jumped off the platform and kicked all the books savagely, kicked them until they were scattered yards apart in the gutter. He screamed, “Fuck the books. Fuck school. I’ll get even with everybody. I’m never going home.” He ran up toward Ninth Avenue and disappeared among the gray iron winter shadows of the El.

Gino picked up the schoolbooks. They were torn and dirty and smeared with grains of horse manure. He cleaned them against his pants and then went down to Tenth Avenue and up to Joey’s house at 356.

The Biancos lived on the third floor. After Gino knocked he heard a woman weeping and wanted to run down the stairs, but the door opened too quickly. Joey’s squat little mother, all in black, motioned him in.

Gino was surprised to see Joey’s father home already and sitting at the kitchen table. He was a little hunched-up man with enormous mustaches, who always wore a crumpled gray fedora in the street and for some reason was wearing it now at table. Before him stood a jug of dark red wine, and a glass half full beside it.

“I brought Joey’s books home,” Gino said. “He’s coming home after he helps the teacher.”

He put the books on the table. The little man looked up and said with drunken kindness, “Buono giovanetto, good boy. You’re the son of Lucia Santa and Joey’s friend, a good boy. You never listen to anyone, eh? You go your own way. Very good. Very good. Have a glass of wine with me. And thank God you have no father.”

“I don’t drink, Zi’ Pasquale,” Gino said. “Thanks anyway.” He was sorry for Mr. Bianco’s feeling so bad over his son’s loss. The mother sat at the table watching her husband.

“Drink, drink,” said Zi’ Pasquale Bianco. The woman produced a small wineglass and the man filled it. “To America,” the little man said. “To those American presidents of the banks, may they one day eat the guts of their mothers.”

“Quiet, quiet,” Mrs. Bianco said soothingly.

In earlier days Gino had seen Zi’ Pasquale in his daily resurrection, his glory and his triumph.

First the little bent man, gnarled, a body of lumps and knots, trudged wearily from the railroad yard over the sunken steel rails embedded in Tenth Avenue. How tired he was, how dusty and dirty, the sweat drying and sealing the pores. The round fedora, dirty gray and rimmed with black, repelled the dangerous rays of the sun; the empty lunch pail swung on the right side of his body as he came up the dark stairs of the tenement and into the apartment.

Off came his upper garments, out came warm water and soap, and Zia Bianco wiped his broad knotted back with a wet cloth. Then on with a clean blue shirt, a quick glass of wine as he took the jug from beneath the sink, and then to table.

First Zi’ Pasquale would look them all in the eye, almost accusingly, even Gino, and then he would give a little shake of his head to show he did not blame them for some mysterious woe. Then a sip of wine from his glass. Slowly, carefully, his spine straightened as if the strength were pouring back into his body. Then his wife bent over him with a great deep plate of beans and pasta cloudy with a steam of garlic and brown bean sauce. Zi’ Pasquale picked up a spoon as he would a shovel, scooped in, and with an expert laborer’s flip the mound of beans and pasta disappeared behind that enormous mustached mouth, and after three such thrusts he put down his spoon and tore off a great chunk from the loaf of bread.

Spoon in one hand, bread in the other, he poured life and energy into his very soul. With each mouthful he grew visibly stronger, more powerful. He grew taller in his chair, over them all. The skin of his face became pink, there was a flash of white teeth and even a trace of the black-red lips as the mustache soaked flat with sauce. The brown crusty bread crackled like gunfire between his teeth, the great metal spoon flashed like a sword around their heads. He drained his glass of wine. And as if he had crushed everything on the table to its primal state, there was the smell of grape and flour and raw bean roots in earth.

Finally Zi’ Pasquale took a knife from his wife and cut off a hunk of crumbly grainy cheese from the black-skinned wheel. He held it up to the light so all could fall under the spell of its aroma. His other hand plucked the remainder of the bread loaf from the table and then, powerful, serene, almost with holy authority, he actually smiled at them all and asked in his rough southern Italian, “Who’s better than me?”

His wife would give out a short “Eh” of agreement as if he were confirming a belief of her own that he himself had denied. But the two boys would always stare at him very thoughtfully, trying to understand.

They saw. Whose food tasted sweeter this night, whose wine coursed more strongly through the blood? Whose flesh and bones and nerves became at peace with such merciful repose? Zi’ Pasquale groaned with comfort as the pain of fatigue eased out of him. He raised himself a little to fart and a sigh of serious relief softly followed. At this very moment, who in all the world tasted more bliss?

Tonight Gino tried to say something comforting. “It’s all right, Zi’ Pasquale, Joey can save up again. I’ll help sell coal from the railroad and next summer we can sell ice. It won’t take long.”

The great mustaches began to quiver and the face wrinkled into laughter. “My son and his money. Ah, figlio mio, if that were all. Do you know what I lost, does my son know what I lost? Five thousand dollars. Twenty years of rising in the dark, working in the bitter cold and this terrible American heat. Insulted by the boss, my very name changed, a name existing a thousand years in Italy, the name of Baccalona”—his voice thundered the name—“from the town of Salerno, Italy. I gave it all up. And my son is crying in the street.” He drank another full glass of wine. “Five thousand dollars, twenty years of my life. My bones hurt with that money sweated out of their marrow. Damn heaven and Jesus Christ! They stole it from me without a gun, without a knife, in broad daylight. How is it possible?”

The woman said, “Pasquale, stop drinking. You have to go to work tomorrow, you did not work today. Many are losing their jobs in this Depression. Eat a little and go to sleep. Come now.”

Zi’ Pasquale said gently, “Don’t worry, woman, I’ll go to work tomorrow. Never fear. Didn’t I go to work when our little daughter died? Eh? Didn’t I go to work when you had the babies? When you were sick and the children sick? I’ll go to work, never fear. But you, poor woman, who never put on the electricity until it was too dark to see, just to save a penny! The times you ate spinach without meat and wore sweaters in the house to save coal. This means nothing to you? Ah, woman, you are made of iron. Hear me, little Gino, fear them.” Zi’ Pasquale drained one full glass of wine and fell unconscious to the floor without another word.

The woman, sure her husband could not hear now, let out lamentations. Gino helped her drag Mr. Bianco to the bedroom as she wept and cried out her woes. He watched her undress her husband until he was just a pathetic, huddled figure in long yellow-white underwear snoring drunkenly through his mustaches, funny enough for the comics.

The woman made Gino sit in the kitchen with her. Where was Joey? she asked. Then went on. Her poor husband, he was their hope, their salvation, he must not bend to the Furies. The money was lost—terrible, but not death.

America, America, what dreams are dreamed in your name? What sacrilegious thoughts of happiness do you give birth to? There is a price to be paid, yet one dreams that happiness can come without the terrible payments. Here there was hope, in Italy none. They would start again, he was only a man of forty-eight. He still had twenty years of work in his body. For each human body is a gold mine. The ore of labor yields mountains of food, shelter from the cold, wedding feasts, and funeral wreaths to hang on the tenement door. That comical little gnarled body in long winter underwear and gray mustaches still held a treasure to yield up, and with a woman’s practical sense Mrs. Bianco was worried more about her husband than about the money they had lost.

After a long time, Gino made his escape.

He was late arriving home; everyone was already at the table. How good it was to come into that warm kitchen that smelled of garlic and olive oil and tomato sauce bubbling like dark hot wine in the pot.

They all filled their dishes from the central bowl heaped high with spaghetti. There were no meatballs for the Thursday pasta, just a piece of cheap chuck beef, so tender from simmering in the sauce that you could lift out shredded pieces with a fork. As they were eating, Larry and his wife came from the apartment below to join them at table.

They were all glad to see Larry, especially the young boys. He always made things lively with jokes and stories about the railroad, he knew all the gossip about the families on the Avenue. Octavia and Lucia Santa were always cheerful and animated when he was there and would not scold the children.

Gino noticed that Louisa was getting fat, but her head was getting smaller.

“Yeah,” Larry was saying, “the Panettiere lost ten thousand dollars in the stock market and some more money in the bank, but he doesn’t have to worry with his store. A lot of people on the Avenue lost money. Thank God you’re poor, Mom.”

Octavia and her mother smiled at each other. The money was a secret from everyone, and it was in postal savings besides. Lucia Santa said to Louisa, “Eat more, you have to keep up your strength.” She took a great chunk of beef from Larry’s plate and put it on Louisa’s. She said to Larry, “You animale, you are strong enough. Eat spaghetti, your wife needs meat.”

A strange look of pleasure came over the young girl’s face. She was very quiet, she seldom spoke, but now she said timidly, “Thank you, Mom.” Gino and Vincent looked at each other; something struck them both as not quite right. They knew their mother inside out. She had not been sincere, she did not really like the girl, and the girl had been too woebegone in her thanks.

Larry grinned at the boys and winked. He took up a spoonful of sauce and said in great astonishment, “Look at the cockroaches on the wall.” It was the old, old game he played to steal their roast potatoes on Saturday nights. Vinnie and Gino refused to turn their heads, but Louisa looked around quickly, and in that moment Larry speared the piece of beef on her dish and took a bite out of it before putting it back. The children laughed, but Louisa, realizing she had been tricked, burst into tears. Everybody was astounded.

Larry said, “Ah, come on, that’s an old joke in our family. I was only kidding.” The mother and Octavia made sounds of sympathy, Octavia saying, “Leave her alone when she’s like that, Larry.” The mother said, “Louisa, your animal of a husband plays like the beast he is. Next time—the hot sauce in his face.”

But Louisa rose from the table and ran down the stairs to her apartment on the second floor.

“Lorenzo, go after her, bring her down something to eat,” Lucia Santa said.

Larry had folded his arms. “Like hell I will,” he said. He started to eat his spaghetti again. No one said anything. Finally Gino said, “Joey Bianco lost two hundred and thirteen dollars in the bank and his father lost five thousand dollars.”

He saw his mother’s face take on a grim light of triumph. It was the same look she had when she heard about the Panettiere’s losing money. But when Gino told how Zi’ Pasquale had got drunk, his mother’s face changed and she said wearily, “Even clever people aren’t safe in this world, that’s how it is.” She and Octavia exchanged another glance of satisfaction. It had been the merest chance, pure luck, that they had put their money in postal savings. When they had opened the account they had been too shy to go through the white-pillared entrance and the great marble lobby of the bank with their little money.

The mother said, with impersonal sadness, as if her malicious triumph made her feel guilty, “Poor man, he loved money so much, he married a miser out of true affection. They were happy. A perfect marriage. But then nothing goes right, no matter what you do.”

No one paid attention to Lucia Santa. They knew her. In her speech and in her thinking she was pessimistic about life. Yet she lived like a true believer in good fortune. She rose in the morning with gladness, she bit into bread knowing it would be sweet. Her hope was a physical energy, replenished by her love for her children and the necessity to do battle for them. They all believed that she could never be afraid. So her words meant little, they were merely superstition. They ate in peace. When they finished, Larry lolled back with a cigarette and Octavia and the mother talked with him, telling stories about his escapades as a youth. Vinnie took Louisa’s plate of spaghetti and put the piece of beef in the hot sauce for a moment. Then he covered it with another plate.

Lucia Santa said, “Good boy, bring something to eat to your sister-in-law.” Vinnie went down the stairs with the two plates and a half-full bottle of cream soda. A few minutes later he came back empty-handed and sat at the table.

Larry looked at him for a moment and asked, “Is she O.K.?” When Vinnie nodded, Larry went on with the story he was telling.

CHAPTER 10

ON A LATE March Sunday afternoon, Octavia Angeluzzi stood in the kitchen, gazing down into the backyards below. Inside the block of tenements there was a great hollow square, which was cut up by wooden fences into many separate yards.

Octavia looked down on stone gardens, concrete loam. Some homesick paesano had left a box like a three-cornered hat filled with hairy dirt, and out of it grew a bony stick. At its foot little stems, like toes, wore deathly yellow leaves. In the silvery light of winter an empty red flowerpot rose out of a gray cemented flower bed. Above them, filling the air and crisscrossing so that not even a witch could have flown over the backyards, were innumerable frayed dirty white clotheslines stretching from windows to distant tall wooden poles.

Octavia felt terribly tired. It was the cold, she thought, the long winter without sunshine and the long hours at work. With the Depression, rates of pay had gone down. Now she had to work longer hours for less money. At night she and the mother sewed buttons on cards in their own home, sometimes with the kids helping. But the boys sneered at the low rate of pay, a penny a card, and would rarely work. She had to laugh at them. Children could afford to be independent.

There was an ache in her chest and in her eyes and head. She felt hot all over. And there was the constant refrain running through her mind, what were they going to come to with Larry’s money gone and the four kids to bring up? Every week now she had to go to the postal savings and take out money. The dream was shattered; they had slipped back in savings, receded years from owning a house.

Looking down at the desolate landscape, which was given a touch of strange humanity by a cat walking the top of a fence, she thought of Gino and Sal, growing up to be stupid laborers, loutish, coarse, living in slums, breeding children into the sack of poverty. A wild surge of anxiety rose in her, followed by a physical nausea and fear. She would see them cringe and suck for charity as their parents had done before them. The poor beg to stay alive.

And what about Vinnie? With shock Octavia realized that she had already written his future off. He would have to go to work early to help his brothers and sisters. There was no other way.

Oh, that lousy bastard Larry—leaving the family when they needed his help the most. And having the nerve to come up from the second floor to eat. But men were lousy. She had a sudden vision of a man—hairy, gorilla-like, naked and with penis enormous and erect—man the very image. Her cheeks flushed and she was so weak she could not stand. She went to the kitchen table and sat down. She felt a suffocating pain in her chest and realized with quiet terror that she was ill.

It was Gino who first came up and found Octavia leaning over the table, crying with fear and pain, spitting little red flecks of blood on the white and blue oilcloth. Octavia whispered, “Go call Mamma at Zia Louche.” Gino was so frightened that he turned and flew down the stairs without a word.

When the two of them got back, Octavia had recovered her strength and was sitting up straight. She had not cleaned the oilcloth. She had started to, so as not to alarm her mother, but some need for sympathy, a fear that she would be thought a malingerer in the family fight, had unconsciously persuaded her to leave everything untouched.

Lucia Santa rushed into the room. She saw at once her daughter’s woebegone, sick, and guilty face, and then the flecks of blood. She wrung her hands and cried out, “Oh, God of mine,” and burst into tears. These dramatics irritated Octavia and made Gino, behind her, mutter, “For Chrissakes.”

But that was for the moment. The mother immediately gained control, took her daughter by the hand, and led her down the row of bedrooms. She shouted back to Gino, “Run. Quick, to Dr. Barbato.” Gino, delighted with the excitement and his own importance, sped down the four flights of stairs again.

With Octavia safely in bed, Lucia Santa got a bottle of rubbing alcohol and went to watch over her daughter until the doctor came. She poured the alcohol liberally into her cupped hand, bathed Octavia’s hot forehead and face. They were both composed now, but Octavia noticed that familiar look of stern anxiety on her mother’s face, that look that seemed to close out the world. She tried to joke. “Don’t worry, Ma,” she said. “I’ll be all right. At least I’m not having a baby without a husband. I’m still a good Italian girl.”

But in times like these Lucia Santa had no sense of humor. Life had taught her a certain respect for the frowns of fate.

She sat beside her daughter’s bed like a small black-clad Buddha. As she waited for the doctor, her mind raced ahead to what this illness would mean, what new woe it would bring. She felt overcome by disaster—her husband being sent away, her son marrying at an early age, the Depression with its lack of work, and now her daughter’s illness. She sat there gathering up her strength, for there was no question now of individual misfortune. The entire family was in danger, its whole fabric, its life. It was no longer a matter of single defeats; now there was danger of annihilation, of sinking to the lowest depth of existence.

Dr. Barbato followed Gino up the stairs into the apartment and through the rooms to where Octavia rested. As always he was beautifully dressed, and his mustache was trim. He had tickets for the opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and he was in a hurry. He had nearly not come, nearly told the boy to call Bellevue.

When he saw the girl and heard the story he knew his coming had been a waste of time. She would have to go to the hospital. But he sat down beside the bed, noticing she was embarrassed at being examined by so young a man, and that she was conscious of the mother who was keeping a watchful eye upon him. He thought with disgust, These Italians think men would screw a woman on her deathbed. He forced himself to say quietly, “Now, Signora, I will have to examine your daughter. Have the young boy leave us.” He prepared to pull down the sheet.

The mother turned and saw Gino wide-eyed. She gave him a backhanded slap and said, “Disappear. For once with my permission.” And Gino, who had expected praise for all his swift running in this emergency, went back to the kitchen muttering curses.

Dr. Barbato put his stethoscope on Octavia’s chest and stared off into space professionally, but really taking a good look at the girl’s body. He saw with surprise that she was very thin. The full bosom and wide, rounded hips were deceiving. She had lost a lot of weight. Her heavy, planed face did not show this loss, for, though finely drawn, it could never be haggard. The eyes, a great liquid brown, watched him with fearful intensity. The doctor’s mind registered, too, without desire, how ripe the body was for love. She looked like the great nude paintings he had seen in Italy on his graduation trip. She was a classical type, made for children and heavy duty on the connubial couch. She had better get married soon, sick or not.

He rose, covering the girl again with the bed sheet. He said with quiet reassurance, “You’ll be all right,” and motioned the mother to the other bedroom.

He was surprised when Octavia said, “Doctor, please talk in front of me. My mother will have to tell me, anyway. She won’t know what to do.”

The doctor had learned that the little niceties of the profession were lost on these people, and with reason. He said quietly to both of them, “You have pleurisy, not much, but you must go to the hospital for rest and X-rays. That blood you coughed up is serious. There may be something with the lungs.” For a moment this brought to his mind the opera he would see tonight. The heroine dying of TB, singing like mad beneath bright lights; her only loss a lover, a loss of pleasure; her death treated in such a way as to make it frivolous. He said truthfully, “Now don’t be alarmed; even if it is the lungs, it can’t be too serious. Don’t have any foolish fears. The worst that can happen is that your daughter will get a few months’ rest. So tomorrow, bring her to Bellevue Hospital Clinic. I’ll give her something for tonight.” He took out one of the samples sent him by the drug houses and gave it to the mother. “Now remember, tomorrow without fail, off to Bellevue. This flat is cold, the children too noisy, she needs rest. The X-rays are important. Now, Signora, don’t fail me.” In a gentler tone he added, “Don’t worry.”

The doctor left, feeling a mixture of self-disgust and satisfaction. He could have made fifteen dollars instead of a lousy two. He could have treated her for the next week, taken the X-rays in his office, the whole business. But he knew the poverty of the family. Later on he was angry with himself, feeling frustration that the skills he had learned must be given so cheaply, that the sacrifices made by his father should bear such sour fruit. He was a man with a powerful economic weapon he could not use at full strength. What lousy luck it hadn’t been the daughter of the Panettiere. He would have milked the baker dry, he would have wrung him out to the last drop. And with every justification, without really cheating, with all fairness. Oh, someday he would move into a practice, a neighborhood, where he could work and make his fortune with a clear conscience. Dr. Barbato was simply a man who could not stand the sight and smell of poverty. His sudden acts of compassion made him unhappy for days afterward. He seriously regarded them as a vice and not a virtue.

In the kitchen, Sal and Vinnie, finally home after the Sunday movie, sat quietly eating great slabs of crusty bread doused with vinegar and olive oil. Gino was sulking at a corner of the table, doing his homework. Lucia Santa watched them all somberly. “Gino,” she said, “go take a ten cents from my pocketbook for yourself. Then go call your brother Lorenzo to come upstairs—subito.” She felt a sudden surge of love at his happy springing to do her wishes, his quick forgetting of a quarrel balm to her spirit.

The next morning Lucia Santa committed an act so monstrous that it lost her the sympathy of the whole of Tenth Ave-nue, of everyone who would have commisserated with her in this new misfortune. It made Dr. Barbato so angry that he cursed in Italian for the first time since entering medical school. Even Zia Louche scolded Lucia Santa. It was a foolish act, immoral, shocking; and yet it was merely an act of love. Lucia Santa did not take her daughter to Bellevue’s charity hospital; instead she had Larry drive them to the French Hospital on 30th Street between Ninth and Eighth Avenues, a little more than a block away. It was a cheerful, clean, and expensive hospital. The nurses there would be polite, the doctors charming, the clerical workers subservient. There would be no waiting for hours in dim halls for admittance. Lucia Santa’s daughter would be treated like a human being, that is, as a solvent member of society.

No one was more surprised than Lucia Santa herself. It was a fantastically foolish step that would wipe out the savings of years just at the time when they were most desperately needed. There would be no breadwinner in the home. It was an act of pure arrogance.

But there were reasons. Lucia Santa had lain awake all that night and, without sleeping, had suffered nightmares. She saw her beautiful young daughter imprisoned in the towers of Bellevue, lost in the dismal corridors, spat upon like an animal. And then there was superstition. Her husband had entered Bellevue and never returned. It was a charnel house; her daughter would die and they would cut her into little pieces and put her flesh in bottles.

So in the early morning hours Lucia Santa made her decision, and felt such a tremendous relief that she cared nothing of what the world would think—her friends, her relatives or her neighbors. In the darkness of her bed she had wept, the solitary terrible weeping that must be done alone with no one to see; not a show of grief, but a release of anguish that takes the place of consolation from a friend or loved one. Lucia Santa wept for strength because there was no one in the world to draw strength from. Hers was the terrible act of those who cannot show their need for pity. In daylight she composed herself, and when she rose from her bed, her face was strong and confident.

After the kids had been sent to school, Larry came up and they wrapped Octavia, already warmly dressed, in blankets. They helped her down the stairs and into Larry’s car. When Lucia Santa got into the car she said to her son, “Drive to the French Hospital.” Octavia started to protest, but the mother shouted with rage, “Quiet. Don’t say a word.”

The formalities were over quickly. Octavia was put in a quiet, clean, lovely room with another young girl. There were pictures on the wall. On the way home Larry told his mother, feeling the jealousy he always felt for his sister, that he would give five dollars a week for the family until Octavia was working again. His mother reached out and touched him for a moment, and said in Italian, “Ah, you’re a good boy, Lorenzo.” But in her tone Larry recognized his dismissal; she did not count him, did not trust him, she had no respect for him in this crisis. But if he had been in Octavia’s place he would never have broken down, if she had picked him instead of her.

CHAPTER 11

LUCIA SANTA ANGELUZZI-Corbo, a beleaguered general, pondered the fate and travails of her family, planned tactics, mulled strategy, counted resources, measured the loyalties of her allies. Octavia would be away at a rest home for six months. She would not be able to work for possibly a year. A year’s wages lost.

Lorenzo gave five dollars a week, sometimes two or three dollars more. Vincenzo would work in the bakery—another five dollars a week and money saved on bread. Gino was worthless, Sal and Aileen too young.

And Lorenzo’s wife was pregnant, another chink in the armor. Perhaps better not count on the money from Lorenzo, either.

No, think another way. Vincenzo had three years to go to finish high school. Was it necessary for him to graduate? Gino was headstrong, he must be tamed, he must help, she was too lenient with him.

The mother realized more than ever how important Octavia was to the family in things besides money. It was Octavia who made the children get good marks in school, brought them to the free dental clinic in the Hudson Guild. It was Octavia who planned how to save money and hide it in the post office, no matter how much they needed it for food and clothing. It was Octavia who gave her strength, on whom she leaned, who supported her in moments of weakness.

And now, Lucia Santa thought, she was alone again. The terrible battles were to be fought again. But older, tougher, experienced, she did not feel the helpless despair and terror she had known as a young widow. She was a hardened veteran to disaster and her spirit was not weakened by young and foolish dreams. She fought now as one desperately fights merely to remain alive.

Lucia Santa came to the decision she had to come to. There was nothing for it but to apply for welfare, to go on the home relief. And the struggle to come to this decision involved many things.

In no way did it involve conscience, or a concern for giving the authorities fair play. She had been born in a land where the people and the state were implacable enemies. No, there was a better reason.

Charity is salt in the wound. It is painful. The state gives charity with the bitter hatred of a victim to his blackmailer. The receiver of free money is subjected to harassment, insult, and profound humiliation. Newspapers are enlisted to heap scorn on the arrogant bastards who choose to beg instead of starve or let their children starve. It is made clear that the poor seek charity as a great and sordid chicanery in which they delight. And there are some who do. As there are some people who delight in sticking hot needles deep into their abdomens, swallow pieces of broken bottles. A special taste. Speaking for humanity in general, the poor accept charity with a shame and loss of self-respect that is truly pitiful.

Larry arranged for the investigator to come to the house, but he would not stay for the interview. His male pride was affronted. He would not be a party to it, he disassociated himself from the whole thing. Lucia Santa found a hiding place for the imported Italian olive oil she did not dream of doing without; it would be a telling blow against her.

THE INVESTIGATOR CAME late in the afternoon. He was a solemn, comical-looking young man with great round black eyes. Those eyes had thick round eyebrows above them and dark circles beneath them so that he looked like an olive owl. But he was polite. He knocked at the door politely. He inspected the apartment with apologies, opening cupboard doors and closets and wandering through the apartment more like a prospective tenant than a home relief investigator. He addressed Lucia Santa as “Signora,” and his own name had a touch of elegance; he was called La Fortezza.

He listened to Lucia Santa’s story and wrote down all the particulars in his notebook, nodding and murmuring expressions of regret in Italian when she told about a particular misfortune. He spoke college Italian, but he could be understood.

Forms were spread out, questions asked. No, no; she had no money in the bank, nor did her children; she owned nothing, no insurance; nothing. She had no jewelry to sell except her wedding ring but he assured her that that was exempt. When they were finished, Mr. La Fortezza sat on his chair and leaned his body forward, his hands clasping the edge of the table like talons, his black-circled round eyes reproachful.

“Signora Corbo,” he said, “it displeases me greatly to inform you there will be difficulties. Each of your three eldest children has money in trust from the unfortunate accident to their father. Strictly speaking, that money must vanish before you can get welfare. That is the law. And if I do not report this money you have, I will be in trouble.” He looked at her gravely.

Lucia Santa was taken completely by surprise. That this polite young man, an Italian boy, had acted the spy, had gone to neighbors for information, then set a trap—this enraged her. She said bitterly, “Good. I’ll throw the money in the streets.”

He smiled at her joke and waited. She sensed all was not lost. “Isn’t there something you can do for me?” she asked.

Mr. La Fortezza had a slightly uncomfortable look, an owl swallowing a particularly vigorous mouse. “Ah, Signora,” he said, “one hand does not wash itself alone.” Then, still a little embarrassed (he was still too young to be comfortable in dishonesty), he explained that he would risk his job to get her sixteen dollars every two weeks, but that when he brought the check she would have to give him three dollars. After all, it was money she should not receive, he was breaking the law, and so on. The bargain was struck. Lucia Santa was so grateful that she served coffee with cake, though coffee alone was enough for the laws of hospitality. And over the coffee Mr. La Fortezza told his woes. How he had taken his degree in law after many sacrifices by his parents, people like herself; now there was no work, and he had to take this lowly job with the city. How could he ever repay his father on his salary? It pained him to work in such a fashion, but how could he ever hope to have his own practice unless he made a little extra money? And after all, they both profited, since the signora was not really entitled to an allowance from the welfare. And so on. They parted friends.

Mr. La Fortezza came every two weeks with the check. There would be a ceremony. Gino would be sent down to the grocery to pay the outstanding bill and get the check cashed. He would also buy a quarter-pound of American ham, picture pink in its rectangular border of white, creamy, sweet fat; some soft, sliced, American bread; and yellow American cheese. For Mr. La Fortezza had a weak stomach and turned up his nose at honest Italian salami and pepperoni, the tingling sharp provolone, the crusty gum-cutting Italian bread.

Gino would watch wide-eyed at the little scene to be played. The thin pink and yellow slices laid out on a long cere-monial platter, the large mug of coffee, and Mr. La Fortezza at his ease, resting his swollen feet on another chair as he talked to Lucia Santa of his trials and tribulations, the mother shaking her head in sympathy. For the poor man climbed countless flights of stairs, quarreled with those low-class Italians who tried to conceal their sons’ working and cursed because he would not approve their applications for relief, saying that he was a Jew and not an Italian, for no Italian would serve this government against his own kinfolk. “Ah,” Mr. La Fortezza said always, “was it for this my poor parents pinched each penny? Ate scarola and pasta and beans every day of the week? For their son to earn his bread at the cost of his health?” Lucia Santa would cluck with pity.

The owl eyes were sad. Mr. La Fortezza was out in all kinds of weather. He was not well. Four years at the university studying hard. “Signora,” he said, “I am not one of the clever ones; after all, my people were illiterate peasants for a thousand years, and even now it is enough for them that I do not have to work with my hands.”

The ham and cheese eaten, he would stand, ready to take his leave. Lucia Santa would give him the three dollars with an exquisite tactfulness, picking up his hand and thrusting the money into it as if he would absolutely refuse if she did not press him. Mr. La Fortezza would make a gesture of reluctance, pushing back the money; then he would sigh and raise an eyebrow and say “Eh” in a hopeless voice to show that his circumstances were so desperate that refusal was impossible.

It was true, they were fond of each other. He liked the older woman for her courtesy, her regard for his feelings, her little thoughtful snack with the coffee. She on her part felt a real sympathy for the sad-looking boy, thanking God that none of her sons showed so little joy in life. She felt no resentment that she must pay tribute.

In a few weeks Mr. La Fortezza got Lucia Santa a fifteen-dollar-a-month rental allowance. Without being asked, Lucia Santa put a five-dollar bill in his hand instead of three dollars. It was an understanding with a foundation like a rock.

It grew. He got her another four dollars a week. Lucia Santa made it a point to have a little parcel of groceries for him to take home, a pound of the pink sweet ham, a bottle of homemade fiery anisette to help his digestion. Now that Larry had a ramshackle tin lizzie that he tinkered with when he was not working, the mother had her son drive Mr. La Fortezza home all the way to the Bronx on Arthur Avenue.

The three of them, Larry, Mr. La Fortezza, and Gino, would ride in the bouncing rattling car, darting between horses and wagons and trolleys and automobiles. Gino noticed that Larry was always polite, but had a contempt for the young lawyer that came out in little kidding remarks. Mr. La Fortezza obviously did not dream that he was being kidded. He would earnestly tell his misfortunes like beads. How little the welfare paid its investigators, the payments that must be made on the house in the Bronx, how his parents were now getting so old they could not work, and he would have to support them and discharge the mortgage. There was real fear, almost terror, in his voice when he spoke of his desperate need for money, and this puzzled Gino. For Mr. La Fortezza was rich. He had been to college, he owned a two-family house, his family went away in the summer for vacation. What people on Tenth Avenue dreamed of achieving after forty years of heavy toil, this young man already had; he lived the dream and he was more terrified than the meanest laborer in Gino’s tenements.

When Mr. La Fortezza got out of the car, his little brown bag of groceries under his arm, Larry lit a cigarette and winked at his kid brother. Gino winked back. They drove home to Tenth Avenue in some way cheered and confident, as if the world was theirs to conquer.

DR. BARBATO, CLIMBING the four flights to the Angeluzzi-Corbo apartment, was a man grimly determined that by Jesus Christ this time this family would pay his due. Try to help them and someone else made the money. Why should he lose money to the French Hospital?

So Bellevue Hospital was too good for these poor ignorant guinea bastards? They wanted the best of medical care, did they? Who the hell did they think they were, these miserabili, these beggars without a pot to piss in, on home relief and the daughter in the sanitarium at Raybrook.

The door was open as the doctor came over the top stair. Sentineled there was little Sal, looking very solemn. In the kitchen the supper dishes were scattered all over the table, the yellow oilcloth dotted with scraps of French-fried potatoes and eggs. Gino and Vincent were playing a game of cards on this table. A fine pair of bandits, the doctor thought angrily, but he was softened when Vincent left the table to lead him through the string of rooms, doing so with a natural, shy courtesy, and saying in a gentle voice, “My mother is sick.”

In the dark, windowless bedroom lay the heavy figure Lucia Santa. Standing beside her was the small girl Aileen, letting her face and hands be washed by the cloth the mother took from a water basin beside her bed. The scene reminded the doctor of some of the religious pictures he had seen in Italy, not for any sentimentality, but because of the composition of the reposing mother tending the child and the lighting of the room, with the dim yellow of the electric bulb casting a beatific glow on the dark-colored walls.

He tried to isolate the resemblance. Then he realized from his reading that it was simply a peasant upbringing, the child’s complete reliance on its mother. These were the people that famous painters had used.

Dr. Barbato stood at the foot of the bed and said gravely, “Ah, Signora Corbo, you’re having bad luck this winter.” It was an expression of sympathy and a reminder of how badly she had behaved with Octavia.

Even lying flat on her back, Lucia Santa could become so violently angry that her cheeks flushed and her great black eyes flashed. But the reverence of the poor for so exalted a personage as the doctor made her hold her tongue, though she could have reminded him that he too had eaten from her hand a slice of coarse bread soaked in wine vinegar and olive oil. She said meekly, “Ah, Doctor, my back, my legs, I can’t walk or work.”

The doctor said, “First send the child to the kitchen.” The little girl stood closer to the bed and put one arm out to her mother’s head. The mother said gently, “Go, Lena, go in the kitchen and help your brothers with the dishes.” The doctor smiled and Lucia Santa, seeing the smile, called out in Italian, “Vincenzo, Gino, mascalzoni that you are, have you started the dishes? Have you left the kitchen a mess for the doctor to see? Wait—I’ll cripple both of you. Lena, go, and tell me if they don’t work.”

The little girl, delighted with her role of spy, ran to the kitchen.

Dr. Barbato walked around the bed and sat on it. He pulled down the blanket and put his stethoscope to her chest, first on top of the nightgown. As he was about to tell her to raise her nightgown the little girl was beside him, dark brown eyes curious. She said to her mother, “Gino and Vincent are washing the dishes and Sal is cleaning the table.”

The mother saw the doctor’s annoyance. “Good, good, Lena, and now you go help them and watch them. No one is to come in here until I call. Tell them that.” The little girl scampered away.

Lucia Santa had put out her hand to touch her daughter’s head, and the doctor, seeing the swollen wrists, knew what he could expect. When they were alone he told her to turn over on her stomach, and then he rolled up the plain woolen nightgown. He saw the knobby bumps at the base of the spine and said with a reassuring laugh, “Ah, Signora, you have arthritis. A month in Florida would make you a new woman. You need sunlight, heat, rest.” He examined her thoroughly and firmly, pressing parts of her body to see where she felt pain. He was conscious of the swelling buttocks of this peasant woman in her forties. Like her daughter’s they were the buttocks of the sensual Italian nudes hung in Florence, great, rounded, as deep as they were wide, but they aroused no desire in him. None of these women could. In his mind they were unclean, unclean with poverty. He pulled down the nightgown.

The woman turned around. The doctor looked at her gravely and said sternly, “What is this, Signora, you can’t walk, you can’t work in the house? It is not that serious. True, you need rest, but you should be able to walk. Your joints are swollen on the wrists and legs and your back, but it is not that serious.”

Lucia Santa looked at him for a long moment before she said, “Help me up.” Gingerly she swung her legs over the side of the bed and he tried to help her stand. As she began to straighten her back, she gave a muted shout of pain and slumped to a dead weight on his arms. He let her down gently to the bed. There was no question of a fake.

“Well, then, you have to rest, Signora,” Dr. Barbato said. “But this should pass. Not altogether, you will always have trouble, but I’ll soon have you at the stove again.”

Lucia Santa smiled at his little joke. “Many thanks,” she said.

WHEN DR. BARBATO left the Corbo house he took the fresh air on Tenth Avenue and pondered the world and humanity. He felt something resembling awe. With mock humor he recounted the misfortunes of this family. The husband in the cuckoo house, the daughter with that big white worm eating away behind those gorgeous tits (and don’t forget the first husband killed in that accident), the son with a dismal marriage to a poverty-stricken immature girl. Now the woman, burdened with half-grown children, become crippled herself. Lying there on that great beautiful ass and that heavy marblelike body, and having the nerve to get angry at his remarks.

He looked down the row of tenements, the windows burning little square fires against the wintry sky. Feeling sick, he muttered without knowing what he meant, “What the hell are they trying to do?” The cold wind came across the railroad yards from the Hudson and set his blood racing. He felt angry, challenged, that this had been permitted to happen in his sight, as if his face had been slapped, as if he were being dared to interfere in some cosmological bullying. His blood churned. This was too much. Too much. All right, he thought, let’s see what you can do. His blood now turned hot, so that despite the snapping cold, he had to loosen the collar of his coat and the wool scarf that his mother had knitted for him.

For the next two months Dr. Barbato, out of pure rage, practiced the art of healing. He visited Lucia Santa every second day, gave her injections, gave her heat treatments and chatted over old times with her for at least twenty minutes as he gave her massages. She was getting better, but still she could not rise from her bed. Dr. Barbato talked about Octavia, how she would be coming home from the sanitarium, and how distressed the daughter would be to find her mother so ill. A few days before Octavia was to come home he gave Lucia Santa shots of vitamins and stimulants, and the night before her return he found the mother sitting in the kitchen ironing clothes on the kitchen table, her children sitting around her, fetching water at her commands, and folding up the clothes for her. “Well, well, good, very good,” Dr. Barbato said cheerfully. “A sure sign of health if one can work, eh Signora?”

Lucia Santa smiled at him. It was a smile that acknowledged her debt and denied his wit. If there was work, people would get up from a deathbed to work, they both knew. As Dr. Barbato prepared to give her an injection she murmured in Italian, “Ah, Doctor, how am I going to pay you?” For once he was not angry. With a comforting smile he said, “Just invite me to your daughter’s wedding.” Implying that there were joys in living, that rewards must follow suffering, good fortune follow bad; that all would be well, the daughter would recover, the children grow, time pass.

CHAPTER 12

OCTAVIA HAD BEEN away for six months. In that time Lucia Santa had never visited her daughter; it had been impossible. The trip was too long, her duties at home too great, and she did not trust Larry and his battered car. To leave the children alone was not even considered.

The day Octavia returned, Larry and Vinnie went to meet her at Grand Central Station. The rest of the family waited in the apartment, the children dressed in their Sunday clothes, Lucia Santa in her finest black dress. Zia Louche scurried around the kitchen replenishing boiling water, stirring tomato sauce.

Gino watched out the front window. At last he flew to the kitchen yelling, “Ma, here they come.”

Lucia Santa wiped away the tears that sprang to her eyes. Zia Louche started throwing the ravioli into the pot of boiling water. The door of the apartment was open and the children went to the stairhead, leaned over the banister and listened to the tread of feet coming up the stairs.

When Octavia appeared, they almost did not recognize her. They had been prepared for someone pale, invalid-like, someone they could tenderly minister to; crushed, risen from the dead. They saw an American girl, full blown. Octavia no longer even had her usual sallow skin. Her cheeks were rosy red, her hair waved in a permanent, American style. She was wearing a skirt and sweater with a belted jacket over it. But most of all, what made them feel like strangers was her voice, her speech, and her manner of greeting them.

She smiled sweetly, her teeth showing between her controlled lips. She let out a cry that was delightful yet subdued, hugged Sal and Aileen, and said to each of them, “Oh, darling, darling, how I missed you.” Then she went to Lucia Santa and kissed her on the cheek instead of on the mouth and said with a pretty, coquettish air, “Oh, I’m so glad to be home.”

Larry and Vincenzo came up over the stairwell, each carrying a suitcase and looking a little embarrassed.

Octavia gave Gino a peck on the cheek and said, “My, you’re getting handsome.” Gino backed away. Everyone stared. What had happened to her?

The only ones delighted with this new personality were the two small children, Sal and Aileen. They would not leave her side, they devoured her sweetness with their eyes and ears and bodies, stood trembling with pleasure as she ran her fingers through their hair and hugged them over and over, repeating in a most charming way, “Oh, how big you’ve grown.”

Lucia Santa made Octavia sit down at once. She paid no attention to these new airs. She wanted her daughter to rest from the climb up the four flights of stairs. Zia Louche, already serving dinner, said to Octavia, “Ah, thank God you’re back, young woman, your mother needs you.” She bustled back to the stove before Octavia could answer.

The meal was the most uncomfortable one ever eaten in the Angeluzzi-Corbo household. The conversation was a polite exchange of information among strangers. Gino and Vinnie did not fight at the table. Sal and Eileen were absolute angels, never quarreling over who got the biggest meatballs. Louisa came up with the baby and kissed Octavia gingerly behind the ear so as not to get any infection. She sat down next to Larry, holding the baby away from Octavia. Octavia cooed over the baby but did not touch him. Larry ate, made excuses, and then left to go to work on the four-to-midnight shift. He hurried away.

When Octavia made a motion to start clearing the table, everyone rose in horror. Even Gino leaped to his feet and grabbed dishes to take to the sink. Lucia Santa cried out, “What are you trying to do, get sick again?” So Octavia sat, with little Sal and Aileen resting against her legs and looking up adoringly at her.

Only the mother sensed the sadness behind Octavia’s smiles and gay talk. For sitting in the apartment again, seeing the rooms crammed with beds and clothes closets and strewn with the belongings of children, had made Octavia feel a wave of despair. As the afternoon wore on into evening, she watched her mother perform all the remembered, endless chores—the dish washing; the ironing of fresh clothes; lighting the kerosene stove in the kitchen and the coal stove in the front room; with twilight, the putting on of the gaslight that caged the room with shadows; and finally, preparing the children for bed. Octavia thought of what she would be doing at the sanitarium now, this minute. They would be in the garden taking a walk, she and her girl friend. They would be in their rooms waiting for dinner and gossiping about the romances going on. They would all be eating together and afterward playing bridge in the game room. Octavia felt nostalgic for the life she had left, the only life she had known devoted to the care of one’s self, health and pleasure, without worry and responsibility. She felt awkward in her own home, and her family seemed strangers to her. She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she never noticed how stiffly her mother moved about the house.

At bedtime, when Gino and Vinnie were undressing by the folding bed in the front room, Gino whispered to Vinnie, “She didn’t curse one time the whole day.”

Vinnie said, “I guess you can’t curse in the hospital and she forgot.”

Gino said, “I hope so. It sounds lousy when a girl curses, especially your own sister.”

SO NOW THEY were alone in the kitchen, Octavia and Lucia Santa. They sat at the great round table with its yellow oilcloth cover. The coffee cups glared white before them. The ironing waited for Lucia Santa in a corner of the room. A pot of water hissed on the kerosene stove. From down the hallway of bedrooms came the soft sighing breath of the sleeping children. In the pale yellow light of the kitchen they faced each other, and the mother told of the troubles of the past six months. How disobedient Gino had been, and even Vinnie and the small ones. How Larry and his wife, Louisa, had not helped as much as they should, and how she herself had been ill but had never had anything put in the letters to Octavia that would distress her.

It was a long recital and Octavia only interrupted to say at intervals, “Ma, why didn’t you write me, why didn’t you tell me?” The mother replied, “I wanted you to get well.”

There was no gesture of affection between them. Octavia said gently, “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll be back to work next week. And I’ll see that the kids do all right in school and help in the house.” She felt a surge of strength and confidence and pride in her mother’s need of her. In that moment all her strangeness fell away. She was home. When Lucia Santa began to iron, Octavia went to her room and got a book to read to keep her mother company.

When Octavia had been home a week, she and the welfare investigator finally met. Octavia had been sweet; happy to be home, she did not show her old bossiness, and never cursed or screamed.

She bustled into the apartment about four in the afternoon and was surprised to see Mr. La Fortezza, his feet on a chair, sipping his light coffee and eating his ham sandwich. Mr. La Fortezza took a good look at her boldly handsome face and put aside his delicacies. He rose to his feet like a gentleman. “This is my daughter,” Lucia Santa said, “Octavia. My eldest.”

Mr. La Fortezza, abandoning his Italian manner, said in a friendly American voice, briskly, casually, “I’ve heard a lot about you, Octavia. Your mother and I have had some good long talks. We’re old friends.”

Octavia nodded coldly and her great dark eyes made the gesture one of dislike, a dislike she had not meant to betray.

Lucia Santa, anxious at this discourtesy, said, “Come have some coffee and talk to the young man.” To Mr. La Fortezza she added, “This is the smart one, she reads books all the time.”

“Yes, do have some coffee,” Mr. La Fortezza said. “I would enjoy talking to you, Octavia.”

Octavia was so offended she nearly cursed. The condescending use of her first name, his familiarity, made her spit, but into her handkerchief, as befitted a newly recovered lung patient. They watched her with sympathetic understanding. So she sat and listened to her mother toady to the welfare investigator.

Now he had read novels, Mr. La Fortezza had, in which the poor working girl had only to be smiled at and condescended to by a young man of the higher classes and the lucky female would fall flat on her back, legs waving in the air like a dog. Understand, not because of the money, but the recognition of nobility. Alas, Mr. La Fortezza did not have that flashing air, that smiling blondness, that slim American debonair charm, or the million dollars (always the million dollars), which of course meant nothing to heroines. And so La Fortezza became more and more animated, loquacious, and as charming as his two dark circled owl eyes would permit. Octavia looked at him more and more coldly. Gino and Vincent came into the house and, seeing their sister’s face, lounged around the room, happily expectant.

La Fortezza spoke now of literature. “Ah, Zola, he knew how to write about the poor. A great artist, you know. A Frenchman.”

Octavia said quietly, “I know.” But La Fortezza went on. “I would like to see him alive today to write about how the poor must live on the few pennies the welfare gives. What a farce. Now there is a man whose books your daughter should read, Signora Corbo. That would be an education in itself. And it would make you understand yourself Octavia, and your environment.”

Octavia, itching to spit in his eye, nodded quietly.

La Fortezza was gratified, as was the mother. With solemn eyes he said, “Why, you are an intelligent girl. Would you like to see a play with me sometime? I ask you in front of your mother to show my respect. I’m old-fashioned myself as your mother can tell you. Signora, isn’t it true?”

Lucia Santa smiled and nodded. She had visions of her daughter marrying a lawyer with a good city job. For mothers, even in books, do not set their sights so high as heroines. She said benignly, “He’s a good Italian boy.”

La Fortezza went on. “We’ve had many long talks together, your mother and I, and we understand each other. I’m sure she would not object to our having a friendly date. The city gets us the theater tickets cut-rate. It will be a new experience for you instead of the movies.”

Octavia had been to the theater with her girl friends many times. The dressmaking shops got cut-rate tickets, too. Octavia had read the same novels and always had a supreme contempt for the heroines, those generous, witless maidens who exposed themselves to shame while serving pleasure to men who flaunted their wealth as bait. But that this stupid starving guinea college kid thought he could screw her. Her eyes began to flash and she spat out shrilly in answer to his invitation, “You can go shit in your hat, you lousy bastard.” Gino, in a corner with Vinnie, said, “Ooh-oh, there she goes.” Lucia Santa, like an innocent sitting on a lit powder keg and only now seeing the sputtering fuse, looked around dazedly as if wondering where to run. A surge of blood coursed through Mr. La Fortezza’s face, even his owl eyes turned red. He was petrified.

For there is nothing more blood-curdling than a young Italian shrew. Octavia’s voice in a high, strong, soprano note berated him. “You take eight dollars a month from my poor mother, who has four little kids to feed and a sick daughter. You bleed a family with all our trouble and you have the nerve to ask me out? You are a lousy son-of-a-bitch, a lousy, creepy sneak. My kid brothers and sister do without candy and movies so my mother can pay you off, and I’m supposed to go out with you?” Her voice was shrill and incredulous. “You’re old-fashioned, all right. Only a real guinea bastard from Italy with that respectful Signora horseshit would pull something like that. But I finished high school, I read Zola, and I have gone to the theater, so find some greenhorn girl off the boat you can impress and try to screw her. Because I know you for what you are: a four-flusher full of shit.”

“Octavia, Octavia, stop,” Lucia Santa shouted in horror. She turned to the young man to explain. “She is ill, she has a fever.” But Mr. La Fortezza was flying through the door and down the stairs. He had left his brown parcel behind him. His face as he fled was the face of a man caught redhanded in the most shameful of sins and it was a face they never saw again. Two weeks later there was a new investigator, an American old man, who cut their relief down but told them the money in trust was not counted by welfare as assets of the family, since the magistrate could release the money only in some dire need for a particular child, and one child’s money could not be used for the other two children or for the mother.

But the final scene with Mr. La Fortezza was one that Gino and Vincent never forgot. They shook their heads at the girl’s terrible cursing. They resolved with all their hearts that they would never marry a girl like their sister. But at least now it ended that atmosphere, that special treatment accorded to the sick, the strain of politeness toward a member of the family who returned from the hospital or from a long voyage. There was no question. This was the Octavia of old. She was well again. Even the mother could not remain angry at her daughter’s behavior, though she never understood her indignation with Mr. La Fortezza. After all, everyone must pay to stay alive.

CHAPTER 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry was so stunned by this defiance that he turned away and walked out of the back room. Still dazed, but trying to compose himself and to show he had not been frightened, he stopped and asked the girl behind the counter for a loaf of corn bread and a cheesecake. The girl picked up the heavy tin of powdered sugar and sprinkled the cake. There was a roar from the back of the shop. “Don’t sell that crook nodding,” and Hooperman came charging out to stand behind the counter. He snatched the can of sugar from the girl and said to Larry with real hatred, “Out. Out of here. Out.” Larry stared at him, frozen with surprise and shock. The baker reached over and flicked his arm. Larry felt the powdered sugar spray his face and smelled the sweet scent in his nostrils. With absolutely no mental order, his left hand went out and fastened onto the baker’s right arm. Then Larry took his right fist and drove it into the short, blunt face. The head actually bounced away on its neck like a ball on a tight string and then bounced back again into his fist. He let go.

The face was ruined. The nose was smashed flat and flooded the sugared marble counter with blood. The lips were mashed into a red blob of flesh and on the left side the teeth had caved in. The baker looked down on the blood and then ran drunkenly around the counter to stand between Larry and the door. He called out thickly, “The police, get the police.”

The girl ran through the back room and out of the store. The two other bakers followed her. Hooperman stood barring the front door, arms outstretched, a wild maniacal glare looking out over his ruined face. Larry started around the corner to get out the back exit. He felt Hooperman rush at him, hang on him, not trying to punish, as if he did not dare, but dragging on him. Larry flung the baker away. Because he could not hit the man again, and because he realized now that he had disgraced the family and would go to prison, he swung his foot through the great shining glass front of the show counter. Broken glass flew around him and then he kicked the exposed long trays of cookies. The baker let out a howl of anguish and dragged him to the floor, and so the police found them, rolling over a glass- and cookie-covered floor in an embrace stronger than love.

In the police station two huge detectives took Larry to a back room. One of them said, “O.K., what happened, kid?”

Larry said, “I wanted to buy a cake and he threw sugar in my face. Ask the girl.”

“You shaking him down?”

Larry said no.

Another detective stuck his head through the doorway. “Hey, the kraut says this kid collects for di Lucca.” The detective who had been questioning Larry got up and left the room. In five minutes he came back and lit a cigarette. He didn’t ask Larry any more questions. They all waited.

Larry was overwhelmed. He could only think of his name in the papers, his mother in disgrace, himself a criminal and in prison, everyone despising him. And now he had spoiled everything for Mr. di Lucca.

The detective looked at his watch, left the room, and came back in a few minutes. He jerked a thumb toward the door and said, “O.K., kid, scram. You’re all squared away.”

Larry didn’t understand, and couldn’t believe what he heard. “Your boss is waiting outside,” the detective said.

One detective held the door open for Larry, and, as he walked out, he saw Mr. di Lucca standing at the bottom of the steps outside the precinct house.

Mr. di Lucca said, “Thanks, thanks,” and shook hands clumsily with the detective. Then he grabbed Larry by the arm and walked him down the street to a waiting car. The driver was a kid Larry had gone to school with and never seen since. He and Mr. di Lucca got into the back seat.

Then came the second surprise. Mr. di Lucca grabbed him by the arm and said in Italian, “Bravo, what a beautiful fellow you are. I saw his face, that animal, you did a lovely job. That bastard. Oh, you’re a beautiful fellow, Lorenzo. When they told me you hit him because he wouldn’t sell you bread, I was in heaven. Ah, if you were only my son.”

THEY WERE ON Tenth Avenue going downtown. Larry stared out the window at the railroad yard. It was almost as if he were changing second by second, each drop of blood, each bit of flesh, into someone else. He would never go back to work in the railroad yards, he would never be afraid as he had been in that station house. The whole majesty of law had crumbled before his eyes with that handshake between Mr. di Lucca and the detective; his swift rescue and the admiration that marked his freedom. He thought of the baker’s blood, of the baker’s arms outstretched to bar his escape, of the mad staring eyes above that smashed pulpy face, and he felt a little sick.

Larry had to speak the truth. He said, “Mr. di Lucca, I can’t go around beating guys up for the money. I don’t mind collecting, but I’m not a gangster.”

Mr. di Lucca patted him soothingly on the shoulder. “No, no; who does these things for pleasure? Am I a gangster? Don’t I have children and grandchildren? Am I not godfather to the children of my friends? But do you know what it is to be born in Italy? You are a dog and you scratch in the earth like a dog to find a dirty bone for supper. You give eggs to the priest to save your soul, you slip the town clerk a bottle of wine merely to bandy words. When the padrone, the landowner, comes to spend the summer at his estate, all the village girls go to clean his house and fill it with fresh flowers. He pays them with a smile, and ungloves his knuckles for a kiss. And then a miracle. America. It was enough to make one believe in Jesus Christ.

“In Italy they were stronger than me. If I took an olive from the padrone, a carrot, or, God forbid, a loaf of bread, I must flee, hide in Africa to escape his vengeance. But here, this is democracy and the padrone is not so strong. Here it is possible to escape your fate. But you must pay.

“Who is this German, this baker, that he can earn his living, bake his bread without paying? The world is a dangerous place. By what right does he bake bread on that corner, in that street? The law? Poor people cannot live by all the laws. There would not be one alive. Only the padroni would be left.

“Now this man, this German, you feel sorry for him. Don’t. You see how nice the police treat you? Sure, you’re my friend, but this baker, right around the corner from the police, he doesn’t even send coffee and buns over to make friends. How do you like that? The man on the beat, the baker makes him pay for his Coffee An. What kind of a person is this?”

Mr. di Lucca paused, and on his face came a look of almost unbelieving, finicky disgust.

“This is a man who thinks because he works hard, is honest, never breaks the law, nothing can happen to him. He is a fool. Now listen to me.”

Mr. di Lucca paused again. In a quiet, sympathetic voice, he went on, “Think of yourself. You worked hard, you were honest, you never broke the law. Worked hard? Look at your arms, like a gorilla from hard work.

“But there is no work. Nobody comes and gives you a pay envelope because you are honest. You don’t break no law and they don’t put you in jail. That’s something, but will it feed your wife and children? So what do people like ourselves do? We say, Good. There is no work. We have no pay. We cannot break the law, and we cannot steal because we are honest; so we will all starve, me, my children, and my wife. Right?” He waited for Larry to laugh.

Larry kept his eyes on Mr. di Lucca, expecting something more. Mr. di Lucca noticed this and said gravely, “It will not always be like this, living by a strong arm. Enough. Do you still work for me? One hundred dollars a week and a better territory. Agreed?”

Larry said quietly, “Thanks, Mr. di Lucca, it’s O.K. with me.”

Mr. di Lucca raised a finger paternally. “Don’t pay no more dues for nobody.”

Larry smiled. “I won’t,” he said.

When Mr. di Lucca dropped him off on Tenth Avenue, Larry walked along the railroad yards for a while. He realized that you couldn’t always be nice to people and expect them to do what you wanted, not with money, anyway. You had to be mean. What puzzled him was the admiration people had for a man who did something cruel. He remembered the kraut’s face all smashed and wondered at Mr. di Lucca’s exultation over it. Because of this he would make money, his wife and child would live like people who owned a business, he would help his mother and brothers and sisters. And honestly, he didn’t hit the kraut because of the money. Hadn’t he paid the guy’s dues all the time?

CHAPTER 15

LUCIA SANTA MAKES the family organism stand strong against the blows of time: the growth of children, the death of parents, and all changes of worldly circumstance. She lives through five years in an instant, and behind her trail the great shadowy memories that are life’s real substance and the spirit’s strength.

In five years the outer world had thinned away. The black circles of gossiping women had shrunk, the children shouting and playing in the dark summer night seemed not so thickly clustered. Across the Avenue the clanging locomotives used an overhead roadway, and so the dummy boys with their peaked, buttoned caps, their sneaker spurs, and their red lanterns had vanished forever. The footbridge over Tenth Avenue, no longer needed, had been torn down.

In a few years the western wall of the city would disappear and the people who inhabited it would be scattered like ashes—they whose fathers in Italy had lived in the same village street for a thousand years, whose grandfathers had died in the same rooms in which they were born.

Lucia Santa stood guard against more immediate dangers, dangers she had conquered over the last five years: death, marriage, puberty, poverty, and that lack of a sense of duty which flourishes in children brought up in America. She did not know she defended against an eternal attack and must grow weaker, since she stood against fate itself.

But she had made a world, she had been its monolith. Her children, wavering sleepily from warm beds, found her toasting bread by early morning light, their school clothes hanging over chairs by the kerosene stove. Home from school, they found her ironing, sewing, tending great brown pots on the kitchen stove. She moved in clouds of steam like a humble god, disappearing and reappearing, with smells of warm cotton, garlic, tomato sauce, and stewing meats and greens. Betraying her mortality, the old cathedral-shaped radio poured out olive-oil songs by Carlo Buti, the Italian Bing Crosby and darling of Italian matrons, whose face, thin, suffering, and crowned with its greenhornish white fedora, leaned against salamis in every grocery store window on Tenth Avenue.

The door was never locked against any child returning from school or play. Neither birth nor death could keep smoking dishes from appearing on the supper table. And at night Lucia Santa waited until her house was quiet and at rest before she sought her own sleep. Her children had never seen her eyes closed and defenseless against the world.

There were days in her life or months or seasons that were like cameos. One winter existed only because Gino had come home from school and found his mother completely alone, and they had spent a happy afternoon together without even speaking.

Gino studied his mother ironing clothes by the cold gray of falling twilight. He ran his nose over the stove, lifting pot covers to sniff, and he was not pleased. He didn’t care for the green spinach slick with olive oil. The pot with the boiled potatoes annoyed him further, so he slammed down the cover and said angrily, “Ah, Ma, ain’t you got anything good to eat?” Then he leaned over the radio to switch it to an American station. His mother made one threatening gesture and he jumped away. He really liked to listen to the Italian station, especially the romanze like the one his mother had on now. They always sounded as if they were killing each other, and he understood enough to follow it. It was nothing like the American soap operas. Here blows were struck; parents were not understanding, but firm and intolerant; men killed the lovers of their wives on purpose, and not by accident. Wives actually poisoned their husbands, usually with something that caused horrible pain, and there were screams to go with it. Their torture was a comfort to the living.

Gino got his library books and read at the kitchen table. On the other side his mother ironed clothes and the warm steam heated the room. It was very quiet in the apartment; everyone out of the house, Sal and Lena down in the street playing, Vinnie working. It grew darker, until suddenly Gino could not see to read. He raised his head and saw his mother watching him, motionless, a strange look on her face. There was the smell of the garlic and hot olive oil and floury potatoes, the sizzling of the pot of water on the kerosene stove. Then his mother reached her hand upward to turn on the light.

Gino smiled at her and his head went down to his book. Lucia Santa finished her ironing, folded the board away. She watched Gino at his reading. He rarely smiled; he had become a very stern-looking young boy, very quiet. How children changed. But he was still headstrong, still stubborn, sometimes as crazy as his father before him. She took the clothes into the bedroom and laid them away in the bureau. Then she returned to the kitchen and very quietly peeled some fresh potatoes, sliced them thin, made room on the stove for her great round black frying pan. A spoonful of brown homemade lard melted quickly. She fried the potatoes to a golden brown then splashed two eggs over the crusts. She heaped up a platter and, without saying a word, thrust it over Gino’s book and under his nose.

Gino let out a yelp of pure delight. Lucia Santa said, “Hurry up and eat before the others come and see, or no one will eat that good spinach.” He gobbled up the potatoes and helped her set the table for the others.

Another winter lived, belonged to her life, because of the death of Zia Louche. She had wept for the old woman more tears than she would shed for her own mother. The poor crone had died alone, in the cold of winter, in the bare two rooms that for the last twenty years had been her solitary nest. She had died like a beetle, her scaly skin stiff with cold, her stick-like legs twisted together, her veins iced blue by death. Her only comforter the black kerosene stove topped by a white enamel water pot.

Zia Louche, Zia Louche, where were your loved ones to care for your body? Where were the children to weep over your grave? And to think that she had envied that proud old woman’s lack of responsibilities, her life without worldly care. Lucia Santa knew her own good fortune then. She had created a world that would not end. It would never cast her out and she would never die alone and be buried in the earth like some forgotten insect.

But what a miracle she had brought them all so far, a mira-cle not possible without the formidable Zia Teresina Coccalitti, who, in the same winter that Zia Louche died, became an intimate of Lucia Santa and an ally of the Angeluzzi-Corbo family.

Teresina Coccalitti was the most feared and respected woman on Tenth Avenue. Tall, rawboned, dressed always in the black she wore for her husband twenty years dead, she terrorized fruit peddlers, grocers, and butchers; landlords never dared scold her for late rent, home relief investigators allowed her to sign necessary papers and never asked a single embarrassing question.

Her tongue was venomously foul, the tight bones of her face were pointed to the very devil’s mask of cunning. Yet when it suited her purpose she could show a fawning charm dangerous as a snake.

Four sons working, she collected home relief. When she bought a dozen fruit she reached out after paying and took an extra piece. She browbeat the butcher for the left-over scraps of veal, for the fat from a cut roast. Her hand was against the world.

It was Zia Coccalitti who taught Lucia Santa how to stretch a dollar. Eggs were bought from a fine young fellow who stole crates out of the backs of poultry trucks and sometimes even had fresh chickens. Suits and bananas came from those bold longshoremen who unloaded ships, though what suits were doing on a ship who could know. Dress material, good silks, genuine wool were sold door-to-door by polite and eloquent hijackers, neighborhood youths who kidnapped them by the trailerful. And all of these people dealt more honestly with you than the shopkeepers from Northern Italy who roosted on Ninth Avenue like Roman vultures.

Who lived otherwise? No one in their world.

And so the years passed. Only five? Seeming more, yet so quickly gone. Only death could mark off time.

The Panettiere one day found his wife dead like the dragon she was, talons buried deep in a pail of heavy silver, on her face the peaceful look of one who had found the true Jesus. Then what a change came over the Panettiere. That horse of work left everything to his son, Guido, who grew thin over the hot ovens. He closed the bakery early, no longer made lemon ice or kept the glass-walled stand clean for pizza. Day and night he roistered with his old cronies in the back of the barber shop, losing those buckets of silver and copper his dragon-wife had so faithfully guarded. And he took the air regularly, strolling along Tenth Avenue like a duke, fat American cigars smoking in his mouth.

And so it was the Panettiere who first spied Octavia towing her future husband around the corner of 31st Street onto Tenth Avenue. He watched them with interest and compassion as they approached Lucia Santa, who was seated innocently on her backless chair before the tenement. One look at the young man was enough. The Angeluzzi-Corbo family was about to suffer another misfortune.

This macaroni carried a stack of books—a grown man—and with high pompadour black hair, his horn-rimmed spectacles, thin sliced features curved like a bow, proclaimed himself a Jew. Not only a Jew, but a Jew not in the best of health.

At once it became known that Octavia Angeluzzi was to marry a heathen. A scandal. Not because the man was a Jew, but because he was not an Italian. Worse than that was the girl’s sheer contrariness. Where did she find a Jew, in Christ’s name? For blocks uptown and downtown, east side and on the western wall of Tenth Avenue, there were only Catholic Irish, Polish, and Italians. But then, what could be expected of an Italian girl who wore business suits to cover her breasts?

There was no prejudice or ill-feeling. The old crones, uncles, aunts, and godparents were happy that a relative had found a breadwinner so late in life. She must be at least twenty-five years of age, ripe for trouble.

Now, thanks to the good Jesus, she would be married, know life: in short, she would open wide her legs. She would never have to bear that tactful deference given to old maids, the crippled, and the deformed. They rejoiced that Octavia would not go rotten like uneaten fruit. And remember—Jews were moneymakers of the finest feather. Octavia Angeluzzi would lack for nothing, and, good Italian daughter that she was, she would not let her mother, little brothers, and sister go free of luxury. So said the neighbors, the Panettiere, Zia Coccalitti, and the mad jealous barber, who eyed the Jew’s high pompadour with an inflamed covetous eye.

Lucia Santa did not share these optimistic views. True, this young man was handsome, fair, slender of build, and gentle as a girl. As for his being a Jew, it was not that she had no prejudice, it was merely that her distrust was so great that it included Christians, Irish, Turks, and Jews alike. But this particular fellow carried a stigma. Wherever he went, there was a book under his arm or open in his hands.

It is easy to laugh at the prejudices of the poor, their reasoning springs from a special experience. How irritating to hear some thieving Sicilian rascal say, “If you seek justice, put a gift in the scale.” How insulting to a noble profession when the sly Teresina Coccalitti whispered, “When you say lawyer, you say thief.” Lucia Santa had a saying of her own. “They who read books will let their families starve.”

Had she not seen with her own eyes how Octavia devoured books long into the night (she had never dared say it, but could not this be the reason for her daughter’s illness and visit to the sanitarium?) when she could have been sewing dresses for the budding daughters of the Santini, the Panettiere, and that maniac barber, earning God knows what sums of dollars? Her sons, too—Vinnie, Gino, and now even little Sal—went to the library for books of nonsense, insensible to the outside world and its duties. And for what? To numb their brains with stories that were not true, to enter worlds in which they could never live. What foolishness.

Illiterate, she was safe from corruption and could have no idea of the magic of books. Still, she sensed their power and rarely protested. But she had seen too many people, finding life painful, evade battle duty. As a poor man should not waste time and money on drink and cards, as a woman should not waste her strength and will on dreams of happiness, so youth, with a great struggle ahead, should not poison its will with fairy tales and dreams that enchanted them from paper pages they turned and turned and turned into the night.

If Lucia Santa had known how right she would prove to be, she would have chased Norman Bergeron out of her tene-ment with the Tackeril. A true renegade, he refused to battle for his bread against his fellow man. Foolishly, innocently kind, he wasted his college degree to become a social worker; but he was not capable of that stern force of character so necessary to those who administer charity. He was like a butcher who faints at the sight of blood. An uncle gave him a minor clerical post in his garment business, and it was there he met Octavia.

Like all weak men, Norman Bergeron had a secret vice. He was a poet. Not only in English, but—much more terrible—in Yiddish. Worse, he knew only one thing thoroughly: Yiddish literature—a talent he himself said was less in demand than any other on earth.

But all this was yet to be known. And despite her many misgivings, Lucia Santa seemed (to Octavia’s amazement) to take some pleasure in her daughter’s not marrying an Italian.

Now it was true that Lucia Santa wanted each of her sons to marry a good Italian girl who knew from the cradle that man ruled, must be waited on like a duke, fed good food that took hours to prepare; who cared for the children and the house without whining for help. Yes, yes, all her sons should marry good Italian girls. Her son Lorenzo had found his fortune with Louisa, and that was the proof.

On the other hand, what mother who had suffered under the masculine tyranny could wish on her tender daughter those guinea tyrants, those despotic greenhorns, who locked up their wives at home, never took them out except to a wedding or funeral; who made an uproar fit for wild goats if spaghetti was not steaming on the table at the precise moment their baronial boots crossed the doorsill; who never raised a finger to help their pregnant wives, and sat calmly smoking stinking De Nobili cigars while their big-bellied women stood on window sills, so top-heavy as they washed dirty glass that they were in danger of tumbling like balloons to the pavement of Tenth Avenue.

Thank God Octavia was marrying a man who was not an Italian and therefore might show mercy to womankind. Only once did Lucia Santa make an insulting remark about her daughter’s choice, and that was years later. One day, in the course of gossip, cursing her children one by one for their ingratitude and pigheadedness and finding no fit crime for Octavia, she said with withering scorn, “And she, my most intelligent child, picked for a husband the only Jew who does not know how to make money.”

But all in all this marriage was the fitting crown to five years of good fortune. Lucia Santa insisted on a big wedding, properly in church. There was no trouble with Norman Bergeron. His reading of books was a virtue here. He made no objection to being married as a Christian or to bringing up his children as Christians. There were no objections from his family. He explained to Lucia Santa that they had declared him dead and outcast because of his marriage. Lucia Santa was pleased to hear this good news. It would simplify everything. Octavia and Norman would belong to her.

CHAPTER 16

LUCIA SANTA SPARED no expense. The wedding party in the tenement was done in the finest style. Great purple jugs of wine from the Panettiere’s cellar lined the outside hall of the apartment, mountains of succulent prosciutto and logs of the strongest cheeses covered the table and waited on linen-sheeted beds, brightly colored wedding cookies and long candy-covered almonds filled borrowed silver trays. In the kitchen there were tiers of soda boxes—orange, cream, and strawberry—stacked to the ceiling.

Everyone on Tenth Avenue came to pay respects, and even those proud relatives who owned their own homes on Long Island to gossip and lord it over the poor peasants they had left so far behind. For who could resist such a wedding and what for some was the first intimate sight of a heathen bridegroom?

The young people danced in the front room amidst colored streamers and to the music of a gramophone borrowed from the mad barber. In the dining room and kitchen at the other end of the flat, the old Italians gossiped on rows of borrowed chairs that stood against the blue-painted plaster walls. Octavia gave the great ceremonial silken pouch for presents of money envelopes to Lucia Santa, who clutched it lovingly against her hip. With dignity, she pulled at its silvery strings to open its jaws and let it gulp proffered treasure.

For Lucia Santa it was a day of glory. But there is no day so fine that it does not hold some displeasure.

An old schoolmate of Octavia’s high school days, an Italian girl whose family lived in their own house with a telephone, by name of Angelina Lambecora, dropped in for a short time to wish Octavia well and bring an expensive, patronizing present. But this slut proceeded to turn the heads of all the young men and even some of the old. Her beautifully planed face was made up as by a professional, rouge, even eye-shadow and some delicate lipstick that hid the sluttishness of her wide mouth and made it as inviting as those deep red grapes of Italy. She was dressed in the fashion of who-knows-what—half-suit, half-dress, with the top half of her pushed-up breasts plumped high for the eyes to feast on. Every man danced with her. Larry deserted his wife for her, until poor Louisa wept. He trailed the hussy, thrusting himself before those painted eyes, giving off clouds of his dazzling charm, showing those white square teeth in his most disarming and flattering smile. Angelina flirted with them all, waggled her tail in dance as the Panettiere, his son Guido, the narrow-eyed barber, and the white-haired Angelo of seventy-five years, whose life was his candy store, all deserted the gossip and the wine to stand like dogs, tongues hanging, knees bent to relieve pressure on the groin, eating her up with their hot glances. Until Angelina, feeling her mascara melting in the stuffy apartment, announced she must leave and catch her train to Long Island. Octavia kissed her quickly to speed her on her way, for even Norman Bergeron, shorn of his books this one night, had fixed Angelina with his horn-rimmed poet’s eye.

All very well. The world was never made without its proper number of sluts. One day she too would have children, grow fat and old, and gossip in the kitchen as others took her place. But this finicky morsel, coolly rejecting the flower of Tenth Avenue, old and new, went into the kitchen to say good-bye to Lucia Santa, cooing in the best American style, as if she were an equal because she was young and beautiful. Lucia Santa smiled as coolly and distantly as any baroness and accepted the honeyed words with pleasure, thinking meanwhile that if little Lena grew up like this one in that house they would buy on Long Island, little Lena would be a young American lady whose strapped ass matched the colors on her face.

Angelina turned to take her leave and then the misfortune fell. Her eyes lighted on Gino, barely sixteen, but tall and dark and strong, handsome in the new gray suit bought from the hijacking longshoreman just for this occasion.

Gino had made himself useful opening bottles of soda and jugs of wine to serve the Italians in the kitchen. He was quiet and distant, he moved with a quick fluidity that had a strange attractiveness. All this made him seem respectful, in the old Italian tradition, a servant to his elders. Only Lucia Santa knew it meant the people here in this room were completely meaningless to him. He did not see their faces, he did not hear their speech, he did not care if they thought well or ill of him, and he did not care if they lived or died. He moved in a world that did not exist but in which he had been trapped and jailed for this one night. He served them to make time pass.

But since the relatives had no way of knowing all this, they were impressed—especially a distant cousin from Tuckahoe, Piero Santini, dark-bearded, thin as a rail from work, who owned four trucks. He had a fat and foolish wife, bedecked with false jewels, at present gobbling cookies by the ton, and a shy daughter of seventeen, who sat between her father and mother and could not take her eyes off Gino.

Piero Santini noticed his daughter’s heated glance, which was no surprise since he guarded her like a dragon. At first he was displeased, then reflected. His little Caterina had been brought up very strictly, in the old Italian style. Never mind “boy friends this” and “go on dates that” or dance outside the family circle. “Ha, ha, ha! Damma the dance,” Piero Santini would say as he did an obscene little jig.

He drummed into Caterina’s noodle what men wanted: to stick something between her legs and blow her belly up, then off, leaving her to shame, misery and the suicide of her parents. But she was ripe. How long could this go on? His wife was a numbskull and he himself was ready to buy two more trucks. He would be busy far into the night counting his money and spying on his help so that they did not steal the very balls from between his legs.

So Piero Santini, with that adaptability which had proven his success in business, switching his trucks from hauling produce to hauling garbage, sometimes even to carrying whisky when the price was right, turned his thoughts another way. Perhaps the time had come. He watched Gino and was impressed. What a quiet boy, and not lazy by any means. The way he moved showed a strong quick body; no doubt he could load a truck in half the time it took two lazy helpers and driver. He would be worth his weight in gold. (How Lucia Santa and all her friends and neighbors would have laughed at his thinking so of Gino—the champion job-loser on Tenth Avenue, an absolutely hopeless case.) Santini kept watching Gino. When his wife moved nearer a fresh pile of cookies and Gino served him a glass of wine, he patted the empty chair beside him and said in Italian, “Come sit here a minute, let me talk to you.”

This mark of favor drew the attention of everyone. Piero Santini, the rich cousin from Tuckahoe, so charming to this starving, poverty-stricken youth? All eyes devoured them. Teresina Coccalitti nudged Lucia Santa, who, despite her lack of cunning, understood what was afoot.

For like a magnet all glances must shift from the two males to the young maiden. Caterina Santini was a legend, a myth, an Italian flower who bloomed in the evil American soil without being corrupted. A credit to her parents, and at a tender age, skilled in all the secrets of cookery, she prepared for her father at the Sunday feast handmade macaroni; she did not use paint, did not wear high heels to weaken her pelvic bones.

But now her day had come, as it comes even to saints. Sin and desire were stamped on her face. Flushed red, her breast rising and falling, she was bursting out of her skin. You could feel the heat coming off her, and her eyes, demurely cast down to her twitching lap, fooled no one.

What a stroke for Lucia Santa, and for her son with the ugliest face, though true, he was a magnificent young animal, as why shouldn’t he be, playing in the sun all day instead of working after school? What a blessing to the nuptial feast. Lucia Santa, eager as a wolf scenting blood, leaned forward to catch what the sly Santini spoke to her son, but the cursed music from the front room drowned those words she lusted to hear.

And now this saturnine Piero in oily Italian inquired after Gino, “So, young man, what do you do, what do you plan for your life, eh, still at school?” But strangely enough this young man regarded him with grave eyes as if he did not understand good Italian. Then he gave a little smile, and Piero understood: the lad was overcome by this attention from majesty and too shy to answer. To put him at his ease and get nearer the subject, Piero clapped Gino on the shoulder and said, “My dear daughter is dying of thirst. Bring her a glass of cream soda like a good chap. Caterina, isn’t it true, you’re dying of thirst?”

Caterina did not raise her eyes. She was terrified at what was happening to her. She nodded her head.

Gino caught the word “soda” and the girl’s nod. He rose to serve her. He understood nothing of what was happening, and how could he, since these people did not exist. When he brought the soda, he turned away quickly and did not see Piero Santini pat the chair again. Piero Santini, astounded at this insult, grimaced and shrugged his shoulders for all to see, as if to ask, “With such ill-mannered starving wretches, what use to show a kindly courtesy?” Everyone snickered at the humiliation of the proud close-fisted rich Santini and sighed for his poor daughter, who dipped her red unpowdered nose into a fizzing cream soda, mortified. And it was like a play to see the look of rage on Lucia Santa’s face at the behavior of her son Gino, who everyone knew was as mad as his father and would end up in the same fashion, and wasn’t this the proof?

It was at the end of this comedy that the beautiful Angelina appeared and made her farewells; and, to the astonishment of all, Gino made his second conquest. The second was more logical than the first. For one thing, Gino was the only male who did not see Angelina when he looked at her, and this immediately demanded her interest. Then, too, she sensed the general disapproval of the role she played, and in defiance she played it to the hilt. She caught hold of Gino, swayed toward him, and said to Lucia Santa, “What handsome sons you have.” And Gino was shocked awake; he smelled her perfume, felt the warmth of her arm, saw those wide, perfectly painted lips pouted up at him. He didn’t know what was happening, but he was perfectly willing to stay still and find out. When Angelina asked for her coat, all the men volunteered and, what’s more, like gallant cavaliers, offered to walk her to the subway, but she said very prettily, “Gino will take me to the station—he’s too young to be wicked.”

Since all the beds were laden with platters of food awaiting their turn for table, Larry and Louisa’s apartment below was used as a coat room. Angelina said, “I’ll go down with him.” She took Gino by the arm and they both left. The wedding party went on. Lucia Santa thought of sending Vincenzo down to Larry’s apartment on some excuse, to make sure nothing happened, and then thought better of it. Her son was old enough and grown enough to taste a woman, and here was a fine opportunity with no danger to him. Manga franca. He would not have to pay in any fashion. Let it be.

Dr. Barbato came to drink his glass of wine, eat the icy-looking pastries, and dance with the bride. He observed Lucia Santa, surrounded like a queen, and went to put his little envelope in her great satin bag. He was greeted with regal coolness. He became angry; he had expected to be fussed over after all he had done for this mangy family. But what had his father said, “Never expect gratitude from a donkey or a peasant.” However, a glass of good wine mellowed Dr. Barbato, and the second glass mellowed him even further. Without wanting to, without affection, he understood these people. How could a person like Lucia Santa show gratitude to everyone who had helped her? She would be constantly on her knees. To her such help was merely fate. As she blamed no living man for her misfortunes, so she gave no one credit for little strokes of luck, which included the stray charity of Dr. Barbato.

Dr. Barbato touched his mustache, straightened his vest. He had attended many of these Italians, and some of them had been children with his father in Italy, but they showed him a coolness, as if he were a usurer, a padrone, or even an undertaker. Oh, he knew very well how they felt behind the respectful, honeyed Signore Dottore this and Signore Dottore that. He fed on their misfortunes; their pain was his profit; he came in their dire need and fear of death, demanding monies to succor them. In some primitive way they felt the art of healing to be magic, divine, not to be bought and sold. But who then should pay for the colleges, the schools, the long hours of study and nerve-racking toil while they, the ignorant clods and louts, drank their wine and bet their sweaty silver on the turn of a dirty playing card? Let them hate me, he thought; let them go to the free clinics, let them wait for hours before some intern bastard looks them over like a bull or cow. They could croak in Bellevue and he would work on Long Island, where people would fight to pay his bills and know what they were getting. Dr. Barbato, to show that such poor greenhorns could in no way affect him, gave his best farewell smile and said his good-byes in his best university Italian, which made him almost unintelligible, and then, to the relief of everyone, he took his leave.

As the festivities went on above them, Angelina and Gino tried to find her coat among the heaped-up garments in Larry’s apartment. Lucia Santa’s fears were groundless. Angelina was not the reckless girl she appeared, and Gino was still too innocent to take advantage of her weakness. Before he walked her to the subway, she gave him a long kiss, the warmth of her heavy mouth coated with a layer of lipstick. Her body pressed against his so fleetingly that Gino could only use it in his dreams.

YES, THE WEDDING was a success, one of the best on the Avenue, a credit to the family of Angeluzzi-Corbo, and a feather in the cap of Lucia Santa. Who did not rest on her glory, but invited the family of Piero Santini for Sunday dinner so that Gino could perhaps show Caterina the sights of the city she had missed from living up there in the distant woods of Tuckahoe.

SUCH A MAN as Piero Santini does not amass four trucks and contracts to haul city garbage by being sensitive to humiliation. The Santinis came to dinner the very next Sunday.

Lucia Santa outdid herself. On Sunday morning she broke a wooden spoon over Gino’s head, parting enough skin to let in common sense, and convincing him it was wise not to go out in the street to play stickball. She then made sauce fit for a king of Naples and rolled out wide macaroni from homemade dough. For the green salad she opened the bottle of almost sacred oil sent from Italy by her poor peasant sister—oil impossible to buy, first blood of the olive.

Gino, in his new gray suit from the long shore, Caterina in her red silk dress, were trapped side by side. Vincenzo, the favorite of old ladies, amused the enormous Signora Santini by telling her fortune with cards. Salvatore and Lena cleared the table and washed the dishes, industrious and grimly efficient as elves. Finally Gino, as coached by his mother, asked Caterina if she would like to go to the movies, and she, always dutiful, looked toward her father for permission.

For Piero Santini the moment was terrible. It was like those few times he let his trucks be used to haul whisky and did not see them for days at a time, did not know where they were, what was happening to them. He suffered now almost as much. But it could not be helped; this was America. He nodded assent, but said, “Don’t be back too late, eh, tomorrow is work.”

Lucia Santa beamed as the young couple left. Victorious, she cracked walnuts and fed the working Salvatore and Lena greasy, knotty morsels. She filled Piero Santini’s wineglass, placed a platter of iced cream puffs next to the elbow of Signora Santini. Larry and his wife, Louisa, came up to join them for a coffee that was steaming black and oily with anisette. Piero Santini and Lucia Santa exchanged sly, satisfied glances, gossiped with the newborn familiarity of those about to become relatives. But not an hour had passed when there was the clatter of heels on the stairway, and in came Caterina, alone, wild-eyed, with a tear-stained face, to seat herself at the table without a word.

Consternation. Santini swore, Lucia Santa clasped her hands in prayer. What had happened? Had that animale of a Gino raped her in the streets, or in the movie house itself? Had he brought her up to the roof? What! In God’s name! At first, Caterina did not answer but finally she whispered that she had left Gino in the movies; he was watching a picture she did not want to see. Nothing had happened.

Who believed her? No one. Gone was the cozy friendliness, the good cheer. Air and speech turned cold. But what in the sacred name of Jesus Christ could possibly have happened? Ah, the clever young, what evils they perpetrated, no matter how unfavorable the circumstances. But no coaxing of Caterina would make her reveal the mystery, and finally, bewildered, the Santinis took their leave.

The family of Angeluzzi-Corbo—Lucia Santa, Vinnie, Larry and Louisa, the stern-faced Sal and Lena—waited, grouped around the table like judges, for the appearance of the criminal. At last Gino, hungry as a wolf from his four hours in the movies, leaped up the stairs, dashed through the door, and almost skidded to a halt when the force of all those accusing eyes struck him.

Lucia Santa rose but wavered; she was raging, yet helpless. Of what was he guilty? She began on safe ground. “Animale, bestia, what did you do to that poor girl in the movies?”

Gino, wide-eyed with surprise, said, “Nothing.”

His innocence was so plain that Lucia Santa assumed he was crazy, that he did not know right from wrong.

She controlled herself. She asked patiently, quietly, “Why did Caterina leave you there alone?”

Gino shrugged. “She said she was going to the ladies’ room. She took her coat. When she didn’t come back I figured she didn’t like me, so I figured the hell with it, and I saw the movie. Ma, if she didn’t like me, what’s the sense of you and her father making her go with me? She acted funny all the time—wouldn’t even talk.”

Larry shook his head pityingly at the whole affair. He said to his mother jokingly, “See, Ma, if it was me, we would have a truck in the family by now.” Louisa sniffed and Vinnie said to Gino kindly, “You dope, she’s supposed to be stuck on you.”

Now to most of the family it was a joke. But Lucia Santa, the only one who saw to the core of the matter, became truly angry. She seriously considered opening up Gino’s head a little more with the Tackeril, for surely he was as mad as his father.

How like an idiot saint he had said the girl didn’t likehim; without a flicker of rancor, not a bit of hurt masculine pride. What was Caterina, then, to this proud son of hers? Shit? The daughter of a wealthy man who could assure his future and his bread; comely, with strong legs and breasts, far above this wastrel, this good-for-nothing, this fodder for the electric chair; and he didn’t care? It was beneath his notice, if you please, that a jewel of an Italian girl didn’t like him. Who did he think he was, the king of Italy? What a fool if he could not see how the eyes of poor Caterina devoured him. Oh, but he was hopeless, hopeless, his father all over again, and on the road to some terrible misfortune. She grabbed the Tackeril to beat him, unjustly, for her pleasure and the alleviation of her bile, but her son, Gino, with the instinct of true criminals who flee even when innocent, whirled and flew down the stairs. So was shattered another dream for Lucia Santa, and foolish and comical though it was, it planted the first seed of hatred in her breast.

CHAPTER 17

FOR SEVEN YEARS Frank Corbo had left his family in peace. Now he was to trouble them again. Far out on Long Island, in the Pilgrim State Hospital for the Insane, he decided to make his final escape. And so one dark night he hid in his caged bed and secretly sent his brain spinning against the bones of his skull. Slowly, divinely, he called up the great wave of cerebral blood that hurled his body onto the tiled floor of the ward and freed forever that tiny spark that was the remainder of his soul.

WHEN THE TELEGRAM came, Lucia Santa was drinking her mid-morning coffee with the formidable Teresina Coccalitti. And that terrible woman, to show her great friendship, revealed one of her secrets. She could read English. This astounded Lucia Santa more than the news in the telegram. How armed this woman was against the world. And how coolly she now regarded Lucia Santa. There could be no false grief before those cunning eyes.

It is most terrible to know that another human being who has put his life in trust to you can no longer move you to pity for his fate. To herself Lucia Santa was completely honest: Frank Corbo’s death brought a sense of relief, a freedom from hidden, nagging fear that someday she must again condemn him to his cage. She dreaded him; she feared for her children; she begrudged the sacrifices his living would demand.

Go further. Trust in the forgiveness of God: the death of her husband lifted a terrible burden from her spirit. On her rare visits, seeing him caged behind barred windows, her faith in life drained away, she had lost her strength for days afterward.

Lucia Santa felt no grief; only an enormous relief from tension. The man who fathered three of her children had died gradually in her heart during those years he was hidden away in the asylum. She could not keep before her eyes his living flesh.

Now Teresina Coccalitti showed the iron mind that was the legend of Tenth Avenue. She put Lucia Santa on the right path. Why bring her husband’s body all the way to New York, pay an undertaker, make a big fuss, remind everyone that her husband died insane? Why not take the whole family out to the hospital and have the funeral there? Frank Corbo had no family in this country to take offense or to pay their respects. Hundreds of dollars would be saved, gossip cut off.

A queen could not have reasoned more coldly.

Lucia Santa prepared a huge supper, too heavy really for the warm summer weather, and the Angeluzzi-Corbo family ate together that night. No one was grief-stricken by the death of the father. Lucia Santa was shocked when Gino took the news very coolly, looking into her eyes and shrugging. Salvatore and Aileen could not be expected to remember him, but Gino was eleven when his father was sent away.

As they ate, they made plans. Larry had already called the hospital long distance and arranged for the funeral to be held at noon and for a headstone to be put up in the hospital cemetery. He had borrowed his chief’s limousine—Mr. di Lucca had insisted—to drive them all up there. They would start at seven sharp in the morning; it would be a long drive. They would be home by evening. Only one day of work would be missed. Octavia and her husband would sleep in Lucia Santa’s house, in Octavia’s old room. Lena could sleep again with her mother this one night. It was comfortably arranged.

Gino ate hurriedly and then put on a clean shirt and trousers. As he went out the door, Lucia Santa called after him anxiously, “Gino, be home early tonight. We leave at seven in the morning.”

“O.K., Ma,” he said and ran down the steps.

Larry was annoyed. “Doesn’t he know he should stay home tonight?” he asked his mother.

Lucia Santa shrugged. “Every night he goes to his Hudson Guild. He is the duke of his club of snotnoses.”

Larry said righteously, “That’s no way to show respect for his father. I go past the Guild when it’s dark, and him and his friends are loving up the girls. You shouldn’t let him do that tonight.”

There was a shout of laughter from Octavia. Larry being moral always made her giggle. “You should talk,” she said. “Remember the stuff you pulled when you were that age?”

Larry grinned, gave his wife a swift glance. She was busy with the infant. “Aw, come on, Sis,” he began, and then, as if nothing had happened, the family history and adventures began to be retold as Sal and Lena cleared away the table. Norman Bergeron opened a book of poetry. Vinnie leaned his sallow face on his hand and listened intently. Lucia Santa brought out bowls of walnuts, a jug of wine, and bottles of cream soda. Teresina Coccalitti dropped in, and with her as a new audience they told all the old stories about Frank Corbo. Octavia began with the familiar line, “When he called Vinnie an angel I knew he was crazy….” They would go on until bedtime.

The next morning Lucia Santa found that Gino had not come home that night to sleep. He often stayed away during the hot summer months, bumming around with his friends, doing God knows what. But on this day of all days, when he might make them late for the funeral? She was truly angry.

Everyone finished breakfast, and still Gino did not come. His good suit was laid out on his bed with a fresh white shirt and a tie. Lucia Santa sent Vinnie and Larry out to look for him. They cruised in their car past the Hudson Guild Settlement House on 27th Street and then went to the candy store on Ninth Avenue, where the boys sometimes gambled all night at cards. The bleary-eyed owner said yes, Gino had been there until just an hour ago and had left with some friends to see the morning show at the Paramount movie house or the Capitol or the Roxy, he wasn’t sure which.

When they returned and told Lucia Santa the news, she seemed dazed. All she said was, “Well, then, he can’t come.”

As they were all getting into the car, Teresina Coccalitti came around the corner of 31st Street to wish them a good voyage. In her usual black, with her dark sallow face and raven hair, she looked like a snip of the night that had refused to disappear. Now that there was an empty place in the car, Lucia Santa asked her to come along. Teresina was honored—a day in the country would be a real treat. She did not hesitate for a moment but pushed in and took Vinnie’s seat next to the window. And so it was that she could tell the whole story to her friends on Tenth Avenue of how the Angeluzzi-Corbo family drove out to Long Island to bury Frank Corbo, how his eldest son disappeared and did not look upon his natural father’s face before it disappeared into the earth. And how only Lucia Santa wept—but tears so full of gall that they could only have sprung from a well of anger, not grief. “There will be a day of reckoning,” the Coccalitti woman said, shaking her black hawk’s head. “He is a serpent in the heart of his mother.”

CHAPTER 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Chrissakes, he worked from four in the afternoon until midnight, Tuesdays through Sundays. Where the hell was he supposed to meet girls? He didn’t even know any guys his own age, only the men he had worked with the last four years at the freight office. Quickly and gruffly he took his leave.

Lucia Santa sighed heavily. “Where does he go late at night?” she asked. “What kind of people go with him? What do they do? They will take advantage of him, he’s so innocent.”

Octavia settled comfortably in her chair. She longed for a book in front of her and wished that her bed waited just down the hall. But far away, in the quiet, antiseptic apartment in the Bronx, her husband would not sleep until she returned. He would read and write in the draped and lamp-shaded living room with its carpeted floor, and he would welcome her with the fond yet pitying smile and say, “Did you have a good time with your family?” And then he would kiss her with a gentle sadness that made them alien to each other.

Lucia Santa said, “Don’t stay too late. I don’t want you on the subway when all the murderers ride up and down.”

“I have time,” Octavia said. “I’m worried about you. Maybe I should stay a couple of nights and give you a rest, take care of the kids.”

Lucia Santa shrugged. “Take care of your husband, or you will be a widow and know what your mother has suffered.”

Octavia said gaily, “Then I’ll just move right back in with you.” But, to her surprise, Lucia Santa looked at her grimly, searchingly, as if it were not a joke. She flushed.

The mother saw that her daughter’s feelings were hurt and said, “You woke me at a bad time. In my dream I was about to curse my devil of a son as I should curse him awake.”

Octavia said quietly, “Ma, just forget it.”

“No, I will never forget it.” Lucia Santa put her hand to her eyes. “And if there is a God, he will suffer for it.” She bowed her head and the look of utter weariness spread over her face and body. “His father was covered with earth and there were no tears from his oldest son.” Her voice was truly anguished. “Then Frank Corbo was nothing on this earth, he suffered for nothing and he burns in hell. And you made me let Gino back into the house without a beating, without a word. He never cared what we felt. I thought some terrible thing had happened to him, that he had gone mad like his father. And then he calmly returns, refuses to speak. I swallowed my bile, I choked on it, and it chokes me now. What kind of beast, what kind of monster? He brings the contempt of the world on his dead father and on himself, and then returns and eats and drinks and sleeps without shame. He is my son, but in my dreams I curse him and see him dead in his father’s coffin.”

Octavia yelled at her mother, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Her face was contorted with anger. “I went to his funeral and I hated him. So what? You went to his funeral and you didn’t let go one goddamn tear. You didn’t visit him once in the asylum the year before he died.”

That quieted both women. They sipped their coffee. Octavia said, “Gino will be all right, he has a good brain. Maybe he’ll be something.”

Lucia Santa laughed with contempt. “Oh, yes, a bum, a criminal, a murderer. But one thing he will never be. A man who brings home his pay envelope by honest labor.”

“See, that’s why you’re mad, really—because Gino won’t work after school. Because he’s the only one you can’t boss around.”

“Who should be his boss if not his mother?” Lucia Santa asked. “Or do you think he will never have a boss? That’s what he thinks. He will eat free the rest of his life, isn’t that it? But it isn’t so. What will happen to him when he finds out what life is, how hard it is? He expects too much, he enjoys life too much. I was like him at his age and I suffered for it. I want him to learn from me what life is, not from strangers.”

“Ma, you can’t.” Octavia hesitated. “Look at your darling Larry, all the trouble you took over him, and now he’s next thing to a gangster, collecting money for that phony union.”

“What are you talking about?” Lucia Santa gestured with contempt. “I couldn’t even get him to beat his little brothers for me, he was so chicken-hearted.”

Octavia shook her head and said slowly, wonderingly, “Ma, sometimes you’re so smart. How can you be so stupid?”

Lucia Santa absently sipped her coffee. “Ah, well, he’s out of my life.” She did not see Octavia turn her face away, and she went on. “Gino is the one who hurts my brains. Listen to this now. That nice job at the drugstore, he stayed two days. Two days. Other people keep jobs for fifty years, my son two days.”

Octavia laughed. “Did he quit or get fired?”

“Oh, you find it laughable?” Lucia Santa inquired in her politest Italian, betraying her complete exasperation. “They threw him out. After school one day he stopped to play football, then went to work. He thought surely they would close the store until he got there, no harm done. Little did he think the padrone, not wishing to kiss his trade away, would stay on himself. No, our dear Gino did not finish out his first week.”

“I’d better talk to him,” Octavia said. “What time does he come home?”

Lucia Santa shrugged. “Who knows? A king comes and goes when he pleases. But tell me this. What do these snotnoses have to talk about until three in the morning? I look out the window and see him sitting on the steps and talk and talk worse than the old women.”

Octavia sighed. “Hell, I don’t know.” She made ready to leave. Lucia Santa cleared away the coffee cups. There was no gesture of affection, no farewell kiss. It was as if she were going away to visit and would be back. Her mother went to the front-room window to guard her daughter with her eyes until she turned off Tenth Avenue toward the subway.

CHAPTER 19

MONDAY NIGHT WAS Vinnie Angeluzzi’s night off from the railroad. It was the night he rewarded his flesh for the poverty of his life.

His mother and sister’s teasing had embarrassed him because he was going out to pay his five dollars and get laid, simply and efficiently. He was ashamed of this because it was another mark of failure. He remembered the pride hidden in his mother’s voice when she reproached Larry for taking advantage of young girls. She and Octavia would be disgusted if they knew what he was going to do now.

Vinnie had worked the four-to-midnight shift in the railroad since he quit high school. He had never gone to a party, never kissed a girl, never talked to a girl in the quiet of a summer night. His one day off was Monday, and there was nothing to do on that night of the week. His shyness made it worse.

So Vinnie went for his poor but honest fare, to a respectable whore house recommended by the chief clerk of the freight office who didn’t want his men hanging around bars to pick up clapped-up chippies or worse. Sometimes the chief clerk himself came along.

For this diversion all the clerks dressed in respectable fashion, as if they were going out to look for a job. They wore suits and ties and hats and topcoats, uniforms for the day of leisure, the seventh day to rest and celebrate the soul. Vinnie in his black fedora was always kidded about looking like a gangster, though he was the youngest of them all. They met in the Diamond Jim bar, which had a grill of hot dogs and hot roast beef sandwiches and cold cuts almost as gray as the skin on the chief clerk. Ceremoniously they would order whisky, and one of the clerks would say commandingly, “This is my round,” and lay his money on the bar. When each had carefully paid for a round of drinks, they stepped out into 42nd Street, into the raging neon fire of the movie houses that stretched stone to stone along both sides of the street. By this time there were so many wandering human beings that they took great care to keep together, as though if one of them became separated he would float away, helpless to rejoin the others. As they walked along 42nd Street, they passed the great, painted cardboard women soliciting in upright wooden frames, their nudity etched in electric reds and purples.

It was a sedate, four-story hotel, demurely invisible in that fire of cold, burning flesh. When they marched through the entrance they went directly to the elevator. They did not have to pass through the lobby since this particular entrance was used only by people like themselves. The elevator operator winked, a serious, business-like wink, by no means a frivolous comment on the job at hand, and took them up to the top floor. The elevator operator led them down a carpeted hall, left his iron cage open and unguarded to knock on the appropriate door and whisper the secret password, then studied them closely as they filed into the room.

It was the living room of a two-bedroom suite with too many small leather chairs. Usually there was a man reading a magazine, waiting his turn. There was a woman barely visible in the kitchen alcove, drinking coffee and directing traffic. In her cupboard were bottles of whisky and glasses. Anyone who wanted a drink could step into the alcove and put down a dollar bill, but usually things moved so fast there was not time. This woman had very little to do with the customers and seemed more like a guardian of this world.

It was this woman’s face that Vinnie remembered always—never the girls who worked in bedrooms. She was short and her hair was heavy and very black and though there was no way of telling her age, she was too old for the trade. But it was her face and voice that made her inhuman.

The voice was the horrible hoarse voice that some whores have, as if torrents of diseased semen flooding the body had rotted the vocal cords. She spoke only with some great effort of will. Her voice was more frightening than any visible scar. Her features were to Vinnie’s young eyes the very mask of evil. The mouth was thick and formless and pressed firmly over teeth that thrust out the flesh. The cheeks and jowls were heavy, pendulous, dowager-like, but the nose was bold and thickened by something more mysterious than nature, the eyes black and soulless as two pieces of coal. Beyond all this there was something in her every word and gesture which showed, not that she hated or despised the world, but that she no longer felt any fleshly emotion for anyone or anything in it. She was sexless. When she passed near you her head tilted sideways, sharklike. Once she glided by and Vinnie shrank back as if she would rend flesh from his body. As a man came out of a bedroom she pointed to the next customer but only after opening a bedroom door to croak inside, “O.K., honey?” Hearing that voice Vinnie’s blood would run cold.

But he was young. When he entered the bedroom, his blood ran hot again. He would just vaguely see the painted face of the woman, always the same. Usually blonde, she moved in the golden circle of a heavily shaded lamp so that the colors on her face seemed to refract the light, the painted red mouth, the long pale nose glistening through its powdery white bone, the deathly, ghostlike cheeks, and black-smudged green-looking eyeholes.

What happened next always embarrassed Vinnie. The woman would lead him to a low table in the corner of a room, where there was a basin filled with hot water. He would take off his shoes, socks, and trousers, and she would wash his private parts, taking a good, clinical look.

Then she would lead him to the bed against the far wall, he still wearing his shirt and tie (once, presumptuous with passion, he had started to remove even these and the woman said, “No, for Christ’s sake, I ain’t got all night”) and, slipping out of her robe, stand nude before him in the dim light of the fringed bedside lamp.

The painted red nipples, the rounded belly with roll of fat, the neat black triangle and two long columns of heavily powdered thighs all served the purpose. When the whore threw off her robe and presented that body, the blood rushed to Vinnie’s brain with such force that he had a headache for the rest of the evening.

The embrace was formal, an earnest pantomime, the woman sinking back on the coverleted bed, Vinnie drawn over her, falling to one knee, braking his body down into the vise of scissoring limbs.

He was lost. Flesh; flesh hot soft against his own; melting wax; warm, yielding, sticky clinging meat without blood or stringy nerves. His body, separate tissue, chambered, soaked up what that meat distilled. His stretched taut frame impressed itself upon that wax which depressed with the shape of his own bones and in one blinding moment he was free, reprieved from loneliness.

That was all. His fellow clerks waited and they all went out for a Chinese dinner, and then a movie at the Paramount or bowling, topped off with late coffee in the Automat. As the clerks found steady girls or became engaged, they would not stop coming to the hotel, but they cut the evening short afterward to visit their girl friends. Defanged.

For Vinnie it was like the food he ate, the bed he slept in, the money he earned, part of the necessary routine of life to stay alive. But as time went on he felt himself becoming separate from the world around him and its inhabitants.

CHAPTER 20

WHERE WERE THOSE wretches who cursed America and its dream? And who could doubt it now? With the war in Europe, English, French, Germans and even Mussolini lavishing millions for murder, every Italian along the western wall of the city had his pockets full. The terrible Depression was over, a man no longer needed to beg for his bread, home relief investigators could be cursed down the stairs. Plans were made to buy houses on Long Island.

True, it was money earned to help people kill each other. The war in Europe made all the jobs. So grumbled those with a fresh head begging for troubles. But in what other country could even the poor get rich on the world’s misfortune?

Natives of the south, Sicily, Naples, the Abruzzi, these Italians on Tenth Avenue did not concern themselves about Mussolini’s winning the war. They had never loved their country of birth; it meant nothing to them. For centuries its government had been the most bitter enemy of their fathers and fathers’ fathers before them. The rich had spat on the poor. Pimps of Rome and the north had sucked their blood. What good fortune to be safe here in America.

Only Teresina Coccalitti was displeased. She could no longer declare her sons not working in these good times, and she had been kicked off the home relief. Now she went about secretly, buying great bags of sugar and tins of fat and endless bolts of cloth. She said mysteriously to Lucia Santa, “There will come a day—ah, there will come a day…” but then she zipped up her mouth with her fingers and would not say another word. What did she mean? True, there was a military draft, but only one boy from Tenth Avenue had been called. Nothing grave.

Lucia Santa was too busy to let the Coccalitti’s words buzz in her head. Floods of gold were washing over the tenements. Children were working after school. Sal and Lena had part-time jobs in the new drug factory on Ninth Avenue. Vinnie worked seven days a week. Let the people in Europe kill each other to their hearts’ content if that was their pleasure. The village of Lucia Santa’s parents was so small, the land so worthless, that none of her relatives could be in danger.

Only that scoundrel Gino did not work. But this was his last summer of idleness. He would graduate high school in January and there would be no more excuses. There was no profit in asking friends to find him jobs. Lucia Santa had tried, and Gino always got himself fired.

But there was one thing that mascalzone could do. Vinnie had forgotten his lunch bag again; Gino could take it to him. Lucia Santa blocked Gino’s way as, baseball bat under his arm, that midwife’s glove on his hand, he sought to get past her bulky form. Like a duke with cane and hat. “Bring this to your brother on the job,” she said, holding out the greasy brown bag, and she could have laughed to see his finicky disgust. How proud he was, all people are who do not have to sweat for bread. How tender.

“I’m late, Ma,” Gino said, ignoring the bag.

“Late for what?” Lucia Santa asked impatiently. “Late to get married? Late to put all the money you earned this week in the bank? Late to see a friend about some honest work?”

Gino sighed. “Ma, Vinnie can get something to eat in the diner.”

It was too much. Lucia Santa said bitterly, “Your brother is giving his life away for you—he never plays or runs in the park. You never even ask him to go out with you, and he is so lonely. But you can’t even bring him his bread? You are a disgrace. Go play your baseball and bum around with your friends. I’ll bring it myself.”

Shamed, Gino took the lunch bag. He saw the light of victory in his mother’s eyes, but he didn’t care. He really wanted to do something for Vinnie.

He trotted easily along Tenth Avenue up toward 37th Street and then down to Eleventh Avenue. He loved the full freeness of his body moving through the heavy summer air. When he was smaller he had taken giant leaps to see if he could fly as it seemed he might, but he was too old now. Just before he reached the freight building, he threw the brown paper bag high in the air in front of him, then put on a dazzling burst of speed to catch it before it hit the ground.

He rose slowly through the old rat-smelling building in an iron-grilled elevator. The operator, in a gray dirty uniform with wormy yellow insignia on the lapels, opened the metal doors with that mysterious contempt some adults have for the young, and Gino stepped out into a loft office that stretched away to the far end of the building.

It was like a nightmare in which a man sees a prison that he knows he will someday come to live in. There were long rows of desks with billing machine typewriters spewing forth rolls of multiple lading accounts. The men who operated these machines were all in vests and white shirts and loose, dangling ties. They were older than Vinnie, and they were very quick. The machines clattered blindly. Each desk had its own yellow lamp; the rest of the office was in darkness except for a long counter heaped with printed bills. At this counter a long thin bent man with the grayest face that Gino had ever seen was sorting out bills under a huge spotlight. There was no sound of voices. There was no hint of daylight outside. It was as if these people were all entombed above the rumbling of the coupling freight trains that moved below in the pit of the building. Gino looked, and at last he spotted Vinnie.

Vinnie was the only man without a vest, and he wore a colored shirt so he could use it two or three days without changing. His curly black hair looked damp under the yellow steel-armed lamp. Gino saw that Vinnie was slower than the others and that his face was screwed up with intense concentration to his task. The others had the blank expressions of sleepwalkers.

Suddenly Vinnie looked up. He stared at Gino without expression. He lit a cigarette. With surprise, Gino realized that Vinnie couldn’t see him, nor could any of the others. He was standing in darkness outside their world. He walked past the first line of desks into the living yellow square. As if he had blocked out the sun, heads snapped up. Vinnie raised his eyes.

There was a heartbreaking gladness on Vinnie’s face. His smile was sweet, as it had been in their childhood. Gino raised the lunch bag and threw it. Vinnie caught it expertly and Gino went to stand awkwardly by his desk.

“Thanks, kid,” Vinnie said. The men on either side of him stopped typing, and he said to them, “This is my kid brother, Gino.”

Gino was embarrassed at the pride in Vinnie’s voice. The two men said “Hiya, kid,” and gave him cold, appraising looks. He became conscious of his blue dungarees and white wool sweatshirt and felt foolish, as if he had come to some grave assembly frivolously attired. The gray-faced man called out, “Bill freight, you guys, we’re running behind.” Then he shambled over to Vinnie and gave him a sheaf of bills. He looked like a lean old rat. “You’re behind your count now, Vinnie,” he said.

Vinnie said nervously to the retreating back, “I won’t take my break later.” Gino turned to leave. Vinnie got up and walked him out of the circle of light to the elevator. They waited, listening to the grind of iron cables and the growl of the ascending cage.

“Take a short cut through the railroad yard,” Vinnie said. “But watch your ass when those engines come down.” He rested his hand on Gino’s shoulder. “Thanks for bringing my lunch. You got a game Saturday?”

“Yeah,” Gino said. The elevator was taking a long time. He wanted to get out. He saw Vinnie glance nervously toward the clattering machines in the circle of light and flinch as the gray rat face turned, blindly seeking them in the darkness.

“If I get up in time I’ll come watch,” Vinnie said. Then the elevator was there, its two iron doors sliding back, and Gino stepped in and began the slow descent. The smell of decay, of rats, and of old shit made him sick. When he stepped out of the building he lifted his head to the warm, lemon, September sunlight. He stood still in almost joyful relief and freedom.

He didn’t give Vinnie another thought. He started to run slowly through the railroad yard, a great field of gleaming white steel that alternately fanned out and converged mysteriously in the sun. He cradled his right arm as if he were carrying a football and sped over the wooden ties, slipping around the steel rails that came together to trap his flying feet. Black locomotives came toward him and he slipped away easily to the left and right, picking up speed. A locomotive came up behind him, its engineer seated at the window on Gino’s side. Gino raced it, going full speed across the wooden ties alongside the engine, flying ahead, until the engineer gave him a casual glance and then the black engine chugged louder and clacked past him. When it swerved off into a maze of stationary brown and yellow freight cars, Gino stopped, exhausted. He felt a little sweat beneath his white woolen jersey and he was ravenously hungry, thirsty—and then suddenly he found himself strong and fresh again. He swung into a long, loping run to Chelsea Park. There he saw his friends tossing a baseball and waiting for him.

CHAPTER 21

ONE MORNING A week later Lucia Santa woke up sensing that something was wrong. Sal and Lena were still in bed. Sometime in the early morning hours Lucia Santa had heard Gino come home; she knew his careless, noisy undressing. But Vinnie she had not heard. Then she remembered that Monday was his night off, and on those nights he sometimes came home even later than Gino.

Though she knew it was impossible for anyone to enter the house without her waking, she checked Vinnie’s bed. He now used Octavia’s old room, the only private one in the apartment. The bed had not been slept in, but Lucia Santa was not seriously alarmed. Later, when she had sent the children off to school, she leaned on the pillowed window sill and watched for him to appear on the Avenue. Time went by; she saw the early shift of trackwalkers come across the Avenue for lunch and knew it must be nearly noon. For the first time she became worried. She put on a heavy knit wool jacket and went downstairs to see Lorenzo.

She knew her oldest son was always at his worst in the morning, but she was too nervous to wait. She found Larry at his morning coffee, rumpled undershirt draped over with black wiry chest hair. He sipped his coffee and said with real impatience, “Ma, he’s not a baby, for Chrissakes. Whatever he’s doing, he got through too late to come home. When he wakes up he’ll go to work.”

“But what if something happened to him?” Lucia Santa asked anxiously. “How would we know?”

Larry said drily, “Don’t worry, the cops got their nose in everything.”

Louisa poured coffee for the mother. Her beautiful heavy face, usually placid, was also worried. She was fond of Vinnie—she knew him better than anyone except his mother, and she felt the absence strange. “Larry, please go and look,” she said.

This was so unusual for her that Larry gave up. He patted his mother on the shoulder. “I’ll go up to Vinnie’s office, O.K., Ma? Now let me finish my coffee.” And so Lucia Santa had to go back upstairs and wait.

At three o’clock Gino and the children came home from school, and still Larry had not returned. The mother tried to make Gino stay with her, but he seemed not to understand. He fled without even answering, stopping only to grab his football. Sal and Lena did their homework on the round kitchen table and she fixed bread with olive oil and vinegar for them. Finally, at five o’clock, Larry came to tell her that Vinnie was not at work and that nobody had heard from him. She could see that Larry was worried, too, and she began wringing her hands and calling on God in Italian.

LOUISA CAME UPSTAIRS with her children and tried to quiet the mother. In the turmoil no one heard the other footsteps coming up behind her. Suddenly there was the black uniform of a railroad Bull in the doorway, beside him the gray face of the Panettiere. The Panettiere stepped in front of the Bull, as if to stop Lucia Santa from seeing and hearing him, unconsciously holding both his hands up, palms toward her, in a gesture of such unutterable pity that Lucia Santa was struck dumb. It was Louisa who suddenly wailed in terror.

GINO WAS SITTING quietly on the Hudson Guild stoop with his friends when Joey Bianco came by and said to him, “You better go home, Gino, there’s a lot of trouble at your house.”

Gino rarely saw Joey Bianco anymore. They had grown out of their comradeship, as children do, and now they felt embarrassed by each other. So Gino did not try to stop Joey as he kept walking, or ask him what had happened. He almost didn’t even bother to go home, but then decided to see what it was all about.

He short-cutted diagonally across Chelsea Park and ran easily along Tenth Avenue until he reached the corner of 30th Street. Then he saw a crowd in front of his tenement and started walking very slowly.

There was no one from the family in the crowd. Gino ran up the stairs and into the apartment.

It was thronged with neighbors. In the corner by the window Gino saw Sal and Lena standing stiff and alone, faces blank with fright. Part of the crowd eddied away, and he could see his mother seated in a chair. Dr. Barbato was holding a needle in the air. Larry was gripping his mother with all his strength to keep her from bucking up and down in convulsions.

She looked horrible, as if the muscles connecting each feature of her face to the other had been smashed. Her mouth was twisted oddly and she seemed to be trying to speak. Her eyes had the peculiar direct stare of the blind. The lower part of her body was jerking up out of her chair and then Dr. Barbato’s arm flashed as he stabbed the needle into her arm. Then he stood over her and watched.

Slowly, Lucia Santa’s features flowed together in some sort of peace. Her eyelids closed down and the tension went out of her body.

“Put her to bed,” Dr. Barbato said. “She’ll sleep now for an hour. Call me when she wakes up.”

Larry and some of the women carried Lucia Santa into the bedroom. Gino saw he was standing next to Teresina Coccalitti. Very low, the first time he had ever spoken to her, he asked, “What happened to my mother?”

Zia Teresina was glad to tell him. It was her pleasure this black day to set one thing right. “Oh, nothing happened to your mother,” she said, measuring her words. “It is your brother Vincenzo. They found him in the railroad yards run over by an engine. As for your mother, that’s what happens to parents when they grieve for their children. Show a little pity for her now.”

Gino remembered always the look of hatred on her black hawk’s face; he remembered always how little grief he felt at his brother’s death and how shocked he was that anyone, his mother or anyone, could be so destroyed by sorrow.

WHEN LARRY CAME out of the bedroom he motioned for Gino to follow him. They ran down the stairs together and into Larry’s car. It was growing dark. They drove up to 36th Street and Ninth Avenue and stopped in front of a brownstone tenement. Larry spoke for the first time. “Go up to the third floor and tell Lefty Fay to come downstairs. I wanta talk to him.” But at that moment he saw someone come down the stoop and lowered his window, and called out, “Hey, Lefty.” Then said to Gino, “Let him in your place, go in the back.”

Lefty Fay was a tall, big-shouldered Irishman and Gino remembered he had grown up with Larry—in fact had been the only one on the block who could lick Larry in a fist fight. As both men lit cigarettes, Gino huddled in the back seat. Zia Teresina’s brutal message was still just so many words. He did not feel Vinnie was really dead.

Larry’s voice was calm in the darkness. Weary. “Christ, what a lousy day for everybody.”

“Yeah,” Lefty Fay said. His voice was rough by nature, but now held a note of real sadness. “I was just going out for a drink. I couldn’t even eat supper.”

“How come you didn’t know it was my brother after your engine hit him?” There was no accusation in Larry’s voice, but Lefty Fay said angrily, “Christ, Larry, you ain’t blaming me? It was deep in the yard near 42nd Street.” When Larry didn’t answer he went on more calmly, “I only saw him as a kid when you and me used to hang out together. He changed a lot since then. And he didn’t have any identification.”

“I don’t blame you,” Larry said. His voice was very tired. “But the Bull says you wrote in your report that my brother jumped in front of the engine. How come?”

In the darkness Gino waited for Fay to answer. There was a long silence. Then the rough voice, curiously muted, said, “Larry, I swear to Christ that’s the way it seemed to me. If I’d known it was your brother, I’d never put it in the report, but that’s the way it seemed to me.”

Gino could feel Larry forcing some strength back into his voice. “C’mon, Lefty,” he said. “You know my brother Vinnie wouldn’t do something like that. He was always afraid of his own shadow even when he was a kid. Maybe he was drunk or just got confused. You can change the report.”

Fay said quickly, “Larry, I can’t, you know I can’t. The cops’ll be all over me. Then I lose my job.”

Larry’s voice, decisive, said, “I guarantee you a job.”

There was no answer. Larry went on. “Lefty, I know you’re wrong. But if you stick with the report, you know what happens to my mother? She’ll go off her nut. You used to eat at my house when we were kids. You gonna do that to her?”

Fay’s voice wavered. “I gotta think of my wife and kids.” Larry didn’t answer. “If I change the report, the railroad may have to give your mother compensation. That means they’ll go after my ass, sure as hell. I just can’t do it, Larry. Don’t ask me.”

“You get half the dough,” Larry said, “and I’m asking you.”

Fay laughed with nervous anger. “Just because you work for di Lucca you gonna strong-arm me, Larry?” It was almost a challenge, a reminder of the days when they were kids and Lefty had beat Larry down into the sidewalk.

Suddenly a voice spoke that Gino did not recognize and that made his blood chill with animal fear. It was a voice deliberately saturated with all the venom and cruelty and hate that a human creature can summon from the depths of his being. The voice was Larry’s. “I’ll crucify you,” he said. It was beyond a threat. It was a deadly promise, and it was inhuman.

The fear that filled the car made Gino feel physically ill. He swung the door open and got out into the fresh air. He wanted to walk away, but he was afraid that if he did so Larry might do something to Fay. But then he saw Fay get out of the car and Larry reaching out the open window to hand over some folded bills. When Fay walked away Gino got into the front seat. He couldn’t look at his brother. As they drove home, Larry said in a tired voice, “Don’t believe that guy’s crap, Gino. Every time there’s an accident, everybody lies. Nobody wants to get blamed. And the Bull told me Vinnie was drunk—he smelled the booze. It was his fault, all right, but he never jumped in front of no engine.” He paused, and then, as if he had to explain, he said, “I worry about the old lady, Christ, I worry about the old lady.” Neither one of them could speak of Vinnie.

CHAPTER 22

EVEN DEATH BRINGS labor and toil: coffee to be made for intimate mourners, wine served, gratitude and affection shown for the dutifully presented sorrow of relatives and friends.

Without fail, everyone must be notified officially by the closest blood relative of the deceased. There were the godparents who lived in New Jersey, the prickly cousins in their castles on Long Island, the old friends in Tuckahoe; and all these must be treated this one day like dukes, for the bereaved are in the public eye, and their manners must be faultless.

Then, too, since only greenhorns mourned in their own homes, the wake must be held in a funeral parlor and a member of the family must always be on hand to greet the mourners. The body of poor Vincenzo must never be left alone on this earth. He would have more companions in death than he ever had in life.

Early on the first evening of Vincenzo’s wake, the Angeluzzi-Corbo family gathered in the kitchen on Tenth Avenue. The room was cold. Since no one would be back until very late, the kerosene stove had been put out.

Lucia Santa sat at the table, straight, heavy, and squat in black, her eyes thick-lidded and narrowed. She drank coffee, not looking at anyone, her sallow face almost yellow. Octavia sat beside her, half-turned toward her, ready to touch her and ready to do her bidding in any way. The mother’s strange immobility frightened her daughter.

Lucia Santa looked around the room as if seeing them all for the first time. Finally she said, “Give Salvatore and Lena something to eat.”

“I’ll do it,” Gino said instantly. He was in a black suit, with a black silk band on his left arm. He had been standing behind his mother, out of her sight, leaning against the window sill. Now he moved quickly through the door to the icebox in the hall. He was glad to be out of the room even for a moment.

All that day he had stayed in the house to help his mother. He had served coffee, washed dishes, greeted visitors, taken care of the kids. All that day his mother had not spoken one word to him. Once he had asked her if she wished something to eat. She had given him a long, cool look and turned away from him without speaking. He had not spoken to her again, and had tried to stay out of her sight.

“Anybody else want something?” he asked nervously. His mother looked up, directly into his eyes, two spots flushing mysteriously high on her cheeks.

“Give Mamma some more coffee,” Octavia said. She spoke softly, as they all did, almost in a whisper.

Gino got the coffee pot and poured his mother’s cup full. Doing so, he touched her body and she leaned away from him, looking up at him in such a way that he froze, stupidly holding the great brown pot high over the table.

Larry said, “We’d better get started.” He looked startlingly handsome in his black suit and black tie and snow white shirt. The mourning band on his arm was flapping loose. Lucia Santa leaned over to pin it shut.

Octavia asked, “What about Zia Coccalitti?”

“I’ll come back for her later,” Larry said. “Her and the Panettiere and Louisa’s mother and father.”

Octavia said nervously, “I hope there aren’t too many little kids running around the funeral parlor. I hope they have enough sense to leave the kids home.”

No one answered. They were all waiting for Lucia Santa to make the first move. Gino leaned back against the window sill, slouched, head down, not looking at anyone, out of his mother’s sight.

Finally Octavia could wait no longer. She got up and put on her coat. Then she fastened black silk mourning bands on Sal and Lena. Louisa got up and put on her coat. Larry waited impatiently at the door. Still Lucia Santa did not move. They were all a little frightened by her calm. Octavia said, “Gino, get Mom’s coat.” Gino went to the bedroom, put on his own and then came back to stand beside his mother’s chair. He held her coat wide open so that she could rise easily into it. His mother took no notice of him. “Come on, Ma,” he said softly, and in his voice for the first time was all the pity he felt for her.

It was only then she turned in her chair, looked up at him with a face so merciless and cold that Gino stepped back. Finally she said, quite calmly, “Oh, you’re going to this funeral, are you?”

For a moment they were all stunned, unbelieving, not understanding what she had said out of sheer disbelief in its cruelty, until they saw Gino’s face go white and stricken. He held the coat between himself and his mother as if to shield himself. His eyes had a sick fascination.

The mother continued to look at him with a terrible, merciless stare. She spoke again quite calmly. “But why the honor? You never went to see your father in his coffin. And while your brother was alive, you never helped him, you never had time to spare from your precious friends to comfort your own flesh and blood. You never had any pity for him, you never gave him anything.” She paused to let an insulting forgiving contempt enter her voice. “You want to show how sorry you are now? You pour coffee, you hold my coat. Then maybe you’re not an animal, after all. Then even you must know how your brother loved you, how good he was.” She waited, as if for a reply, then said quite simply, “Go away. I don’t want to see your face.”

Everything she had said, he had known she was going to say. Without knowing he did so, he looked around the room for someone to help him, but on their faces he saw the sick horror of people watching some terribly mangled victim of an accident. Then it was as if he had gone blind and he could see nothing. He let the coat drop to the floor and stepped back, until he touched the window sill.

He never knew whether he closed his eyes or simply refused to see his mother’s face as she began to shout at him, “I don’t want you to go. Take off your coat. Stay home and hide again like the animal that you are.” And then Octavia’s voice rose against hers, angry yet pleading. “Ma, are you crazy? Shut up, for Chrissake.” He could hear Lena begin to whimper with terror. And then finally there were sounds of people leaving the room and going down the stairs. Gino recognized a strange laugh as his mother’s, mingled with the rustle of stiff new clothes. Then he heard Octavia’s voice whisper, “Don’t pay any attention to Mom. Wait a while, then come to the funeral parlor. She wants you to come.” There was a pause, then she said, “Gino, are you all right?” He nodded his head toward her voice.

It was very still. Slowly he could see again. The electric bulb threw a dirty yellow circle of light, and floating in it was the great round table littered with coffee cups and little spills of muddy liquid caught in the folds of scarred oilcloth. Since he had to wait before going to the funeral parlor he cleaned up the kitchen and washed the dishes. Then he put on his jacket with the black arm band and went out of the house. He locked the door with the big brass key and put the key under the icebox. When he went out the tenement door downstairs, he brushed against the tailed funeral wreath nailed to it. The flowers were black with night.

Gino walked downtown on Tenth Avenue, past where the bridge used to be, following the elevated track until it was swallowed up by an enormous building. Suddenly he saw a street sign that said St. John’s Park, but there were no trees. He remembered his brother Larry had always said he rode the dummy horse from St. John’s Park, and as a kid Gino had thought it was a real park, a grove of trees with grass and flowers.

The funeral parlor was on Mulberry Street and he knew he must walk east. Going crosstown, he dropped into a lunch counter to buy some cigarettes.

The men sitting at the counter were all night workers, even the clerks dressed in rough clothes. There was a terrible loneliness in the smoky air, as if nothing could bring these people together. Gino left.

Outside, the streets were dark, except for small circles of light cast by the street lamps. Far down the block he saw a small neon cross. Suddenly Gino felt a strange trembling weakness in his legs and he sat on a stoop to smoke a cigarette. For the first time he realized that he would see Vinnie’s dead face. He remembered himself and Vinnie late at night alone in the house sit-sleeping on the childhood window sill, counting the stars above the Jersey shore.

He put his hands over his face, surprised by tears. A band of little children came swirling down the street through circles of yellow light. They stopped and watched him, laughing. They were fearless. Finally he got up and quickly walked away.

There was a long black awning from the door of the funeral parlor to the gutter, a veil for mourners against the sky. Gino went through the door into a little anteroom, from which an archway opened into an enormous cathedral-like hall filled with people.

Even those he knew seemed like strangers. There was the Panettiere, lumpy as coal in his old black suit; his son, Guido, sinisterly dark of jowl. The barber himself, that solitary maniac, sat quietly on a chair, his inspecting eyes gentled by death.

The women from Tenth Avenue sat lined against the walls in formal rows, and the billing clerks from Vinnie’s night shift stood around in clusters. There was Piero Santini from Tuckahoe and his daughter Caterina, married now, and her belly swelling, face rosy, and eyes cool and confident with known and satisfied desire. Louisa, her beautiful face peculiarly grief-stricken, sat with her children in a corner and watched her husband.

Larry stood with a group of men from the railroad. Gino was shocked to see them acting quite normally, smiling, gossiping about overtime on the job, buying a house on Long Island. Larry was talking about the bakery business, and his genial smile was setting them all at ease. They could have been sitting over Coffee An in the bakery.

Larry saw Gino and motioned him to come over. He introduced Gino to the men, who shook his hand with solemn firmness to show their respectful sympathy. Then Larry took Gino aside and whispered, “Go in and see Vinnie and talk to your mother.” For a moment Gino was bewildered by his saying “go in and see Vinnie,” as if his brother were alive. Larry led him deep to the far end of the room, where there was another, smaller, archway almost hidden by a group of men gathered in front of it.

Two little boys skittered past Gino on the polished black floor, and an outraged shouted whisper followed from their mother. A young girl not more than fourteen chased after them, cuffed them soundly, and dragged them back to their chairs against the wall. Gino finally made his way through the second archway into another small room. Against the far wall was the coffin.

Vinnie lay on white satin. His bones, his brows, his high, thin nose swelled like hills around his closed, hollowed eyes. The face was remembered, but this was not his brother. Vinnie wasn’t there in any way. It was all gone—the awkward posture of his body, the shielded, hurt eyes, the awareness of defeat, and the gentle, vulnerable kindness. What Gino saw was a soulless, invincible statue, without interest.

And yet he was offended by the women in this small room. They sat against the wall at right angles to the coffin, talking in soft voices but in a general way. His mother spoke little, but in a quite natural tone. To please her, Gino walked to the coffin and stood directly over his brother, looking more at the satin coverlet and feeling nothing because it wasn’t really Vinnie—only some general proof of death.

He turned to go out the archway but Octavia rose and took his arm and led him to his mother. Lucia Santa said to the woman sitting next to her, “This is my son Gino, the oldest after Vincenzo.” It was her way of telling them he was the child of her second husband.

One of the women, face wrinkled like a walnut, said almost angrily, “Eh, giovanetto, see how mothers suffer for their sons. Take care you don’t bring grief to her.” She was a blood relative, and could speak with impunity, though Octavia bit her lip with anger.

Gino bowed his head and Lucia Santa said, “Did you eat anything?” Gino nodded. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t look at her. He felt a physical fear that she would strike out at him in front of everyone. But her voice was completely normal. His mother dismissed him. “Go help Lorenzo talk to people, do what he tells you.” And then Gino was amazed to hear her saying to the women around her, in a voice heavy with satisfaction, “There are so many people, Vincenzo had so many friends.” It sickened him. None of these people knew Vinnie or cared about him.

His mother saw that look and understood it. The callow, arrogant contempt the young have for sham because they are ignorant of the terrible need for shields against the blows of fate. She let him go. He would learn.

Time became a shadow in that dark hall. Gino greeted newcomers and led them across the mirror-black floor to where his mother sat and Vinnie waited in his coffin. He saw Lucia Santa draw solace from the people who meant nothing to her or his dead brother. Zia Louche would have truly mourned her godson, but Zia Louche was dead. Even Octavia didn’t seem to care as much as he thought she would.

As if in a dream, Gino showed all these strangers where to sign the registry, where to put their contributions in the box on the wall. Then he turned them loose like pigeons to home their way across the black polished floor to relatives they had not seen since the last funeral.

For the first time in his life he played the role of a member of the family. He ushered people in and then ushered them out. He chatted, inquired after families, shook his head politely at their horror over the accident that had brought this tragedy, identifying himself, yes, he was the oldest son of the second husband, watching them classify him as the disgrazia. The Santinis could not hide their relief that they had not become allied to this family and this tragedy. Dr. Barbato came only for a few minutes, patted Gino on the shoulder with unexpected kindness, and for once did not look guilty or aloof. The Panettiere, more intimate than the others, almost one of the family (after all, he had been for a time the employer of the deceased), said to Gino, “Eh, was it an accident then? The poor boy, he was always so sad.” Gino didn’t answer.

Zia Teresina Coccalitti, that shark in human form, never said a word to anyone. She sat by Lucia Santa paralyzed with fright—as if death, being so close, must jealously discover the existence of her and her four sons, their cheating the home relief, their house packed with the sugar and flour and fats she was so sure would make her fortune some day.

Guido, the Panettiere’s son, was there in his Army uniform. He was one of the first soldiers picked in the peacetime draft, and home on his first leave. He seemed a true mourner. There were tears in his eyes when he bowed his head to kiss Lucia Santa’s cheek. Don Pasquale di Lucca came, out of consideration for Larry, to pay his respects, and no doubt the hundred-dollar bill in the contribution box was his, though like a true gentleman he put it in an envelope without a note. The enormous hall was now filled with people, the little children had fallen asleep in their chairs along the wall.

Near eleven o’clock, when people had stopped coming in, Larry took Gino by the arm and said, “Let’s go out for Coffee An. I told Guido to take over.”

They went out in just their jackets, down the street to a small luncheonette. Over the coffee, Larry said to Gino kindly, “Don’t worry about the old lady screamin’. She’ll forget it tomorrow. And listen, kid, me and Octavia are gonna help you carry the load. I’m givin’ fifty a month and she’s gonna give fifty.”

For a moment Gino didn’t know what in hell Larry was talking about. Then he saw that his world had turned around. His mother and sister and brother depended on him now. All the years had been spun away to bring him finally to what had always been waiting for him. He would go to work, sleep, there would be no shield between himself and his mother. He would be drawn into the family and its destiny. He could never run away again. And he was surprised by the acceptance, near relief, he felt, now that he understood. It was almost good news.

“I gotta get a job,” he said to Larry.

Larry nodded. “I set it up. You take Vinnie’s place in the railroad. You gonna keep going to school?”

Gino grinned. “Sure.”

Larry reached over and touched his arm. “You were always a good kid, Gino. But now you gotta straighten out a little, you know what I mean?”

Gino knew what he meant. That he had to think of the family. That he had to stop doing whatever he felt like doing. That he must please his mother more. That he must stop being a kid. He nodded. In a low voice he asked, “You think Vinnie really walked into that engine?”

The change in Larry’s face was frightening. Still heavily handsome, the flesh in his face had become the color and weight of bronze, and now that bronze seemed to smoke over with some poisonous rage.

“That’s a lot of shit. Now I straightened that engineer and fireman out. If you hear anybody, anybody, being smart, just let me know and I’ll straighten them out.” He waited a moment. “And don’t you tell anybody what happened when I talked to Lefty Fay.” The rage faded from his face; his skin became lighter. “If the old lady ever asks anything, swear on the cross it was an accident.”

Gino nodded.

They started walking back to the funeral parlor. Larry held Gino’s arm and said, “Don’t worry too much, kid. In a couple of years I’ll be in the big money, what with the war and all, and then I’ll bail the family out and you can do what you want.” He smiled. “I was like you once.”

Under the black awning they found Octavia waiting for them, shivering with cold. She asked shrilly, “Where did you two go? Mom is terribly nervous—she thinks Gino left.”

“Oh, Christ,” Larry said. “I’ll talk to Ma. You stay in the parlor, Gino.”

Gino felt the now-familiar physical fear and realized he must have looked frightened. Larry was protecting him. He was bewildered by the terror that swept over him.

In a few minutes Larry came back smiling and said, “Octavia just making a big deal out of nothing, like she always does. The old lady wants to make sure we’re here when they close up.”

People were filtering out. The undertaker appeared and, as a blood relative of death, he helped Larry and Gino speed the mourners on their way, until finally only those closest to the family remained. The huge funeral parlor empty, Gino could hear the chairs behind the small archway being scraped back as his mother and her friends prepared to leave the coffin. The long night was over. There was a strange silence in the other room, and Gino thought about walking home ahead of the others to avoid his mother. This one day he feared her as he had never feared anything in his life.

THE TERRIFYING SHRIEK caught Gino completely by surprise, freezing him with horror. It was followed by another scream that broke into a wail of anguish and his mother’s voice crying out, “Vincenzo, Vincenzo,” with such pitiful grief that Gino wanted to fly out the door and away where he could never hear her. The undertaker, perfectly calm, as if he had been waiting for just this, and as if he understood Gino’s thoughts, put a restraining hand on his shoulder.

Suddenly the archway was filled with black—four women coiling and twining around each other like snakes. Octavia, Louisa and Zia Teresina were trying to drag Lucia Santa through the archway, the struggle in terrible earnest.

They had tried words and caresses beside the coffin, but to no avail. They had tried to recall Lucia Santa to her duties as the mother of five other children, and she had dug her nails into her dead son’s coffin. Now the three women had no pity on her. They would not let her stay. They would not let her drive herself mad with grief. They were merciless. Octavia had one arm and shoulder. Louisa dragged on the other arm but with less force, so that Lucia Santa’s heavy body slewed around to one side. Zia Teresina clutched Lucia Santa cruelly by the neck and breasts and was dragging her forward along the mirror-black floor.

But the mother, like some stubborn animal, huddled up her heavy body in one resistant heap and could not be budged further. She did not protest. She did not wail again. Her black hat and veil fell sideways, raffishly, on her head. Her face was swollen, obstinate, and inhuman with almost bestial anguish. And yet she had never been more terrible, unconquerable, as if this world of death must smash into bits and vanish before her imperious grief.

The three women stood away from her. Louisa burst into tears. Octavia covered her face with her hands, then called out in a muted voice, “Larry, Gino, help us.”

They crossed the floor and stood with the women around the mother. Gino did not dare touch her. Lucia Santa raised her head. She spoke to Gino: “Don’t leave your brother alone,” she said. “Don’t let him stay by himself tonight. He was never brave. He was too good to be brave.”

Gino bowed his head in assent.

“You never obey me,” she said.

Gino said very low, “I’ll stay all night. I promise.” He forced himself to reach out and straighten her hat, very quickly, the first time in his life he had done such a thing for her. His mother reached up slowly to touch her veiled hat and took it off. She carried it in her hand as she walked to the door, as if she could not bear to shield her face, as if now, her head uncovered, she could face life again, its unreversible injustice, its inevitable defeat.

The undertaker offered to bring Gino a cot and apologized for having to lock the street door, showing Gino a bell he could ring in the registry if he wanted to get out. He himself slept in a room directly above. Gino kept nodding his head to show he understood until the man disappeared through an interior doorway.

Alone in the dark funeral parlor, knowing his dead brother’s coffined body hid just behind the small archway, Gino felt safe as he had not felt since before his brother died. He arranged wooden folding chairs in a row to serve as a couch and rolled up his coat for a pillow. Lying so, smoking, one arm against the cool wall, he tried to think of how his world had changed.

He thought of the things he had learned. Larry was really a gangster and people were afraid he would kill them. How dopey that was. Larry had never even punched his kid brothers. And Lefty Fay was a jerk saying Vinnie had walked into the engine—Vinnie was so timid he had stopped sitting on the window sill. And his mother crying and hollering and making all that trouble. Drowsily he let his mind tell what he truly felt, that her grief was excessive, that she made a ceremony of death. And then he remembered his own tears on the stoop. But he had been weeping for Vinnie as a small boy, when they had played together and sat on the star-bright window sill at night. Gradually it came to him that there was so little pity for the dead in grief. That it was a wailing for something lost, by only a very few, and so ceremony must be made of death, to hide what all must know to be true: that the death of a human being means so very little.

Poor Vinnie? Who grieved for him? He had become a whining, unhappy young man whom no one wanted to be with. Even his mother was sometimes impatient with him. She had wept for the many different little Vincents that had come before. As I did, Gino thought. I never cared for him after. Larry didn’t. Even Octavia didn’t really care. But Larry’s wife had cared, for some reason Louisa had cared. And old Zia Louche would have wept. Just before he fell asleep, Gino wanted to go through the archway and look at his brother’s dead face, to force himself to feel more pain, but he was too tired. His cigarette dropped to the glittering black floor, its tiny red ember like a coal in hell. Sleeping, he huddled on his row of chairs, cold against the paneled wall. He tried to struggle away from sleep, not knowing he had let out a cry that woke the undertaker in the room above.

It was not true. He had never killed his brother. He held his mother’s coat before her face, but his arms were so terribly tired. Her accusing eyes bore him back, and seeking some sort of mercy, he whispered, “I cried on the stoop down the street, see my face is still wet.” But his mother only sneered and said, “It’s just another one of your tricks. Animale—animale—animale—”

And she was smiling at him. The dazzling smile of a young woman. Gino almost fell into the trap that would have destroyed them both. He almost spoke about the day he had stood in front of the tenement, waiting for her to bring his father home. But slyly, cunningly, he bowed his head. As she had not accused him in life, he would not accuse her in his dreams. Trembling, he promised to become another Vinnie, work in the railroad, marry, live in the tenements along the Avenue, wait at trolley stops with a child in his arms, chain himself in the known, lightless world he had been born in.

CHAPTER 23

THE OLD WOMEN of Tenth Avenue circled in the summer night and incanted the woes of the family Angeluzzi-Corbo.

At first they all cried out in sympathy, “Ah, what a terrible life! Poor Lucia Santa—her first husband dead, the second destroyed for life, and now a grown son, already a breadwinner, struck down. What tragedy, what misfortunes. Maledictions on God, His world, and all His mysterious saints and fates.”

Their heads wagged in agreement. But another woman—no stranger to misfortune, respected for her hard life—nodded a gray head and then said, True, true, and yet she has a grown daughter, a forelady—intelligent, married to a sober man. She has masculine children who would do credit to any mother. Lorenzo, married, giver of grandchildren, making his fortune in the bakery union; Gino, now a good dutiful boy, a head of the family that made you think of Italy with his hard work on the railroad and never in trouble with the police. Salvatore, who won medals in school and would surely be a professor. Lena, an Italian daughter of the old school, a worker in the home, ever obedient, ever dutiful. Look how they all respected Lucia Santa. The two married ones still gave money; Gino brought his pay envelope home unopened.

Five good children. True, no husband, but considering some husbands on Tenth Avenue, this might not be a real misfortune. At least Lucia Santa had now only a small family. Even poor Vincenzo, dead, had never brought disgrazia to his family. He had been ill and fallen beneath a railroad engine. It was an accident. And he had been buried in holy ground. Poor Vincenzo, born under an unlucky star, had met a destiny prepared for him at the beginning of time.

So the balance was struck. Many women had suffered as much or more. Husbands had been killed on the job, infants born misshapen, children had died from harmless colds, small injuries. There was not a woman in the circle who had not buried at least one child.

And look at those misfortunes Lucia Santa had escaped. Daughters pregnant without a husband in sight for miles around; sons who became jailbirds of the finest feather or found a way to rest their disobedient legs in the electric chair. Drunken, gambling, whoremastering husbands.

No, no. Lucia Santa had been fortunate to escape for so long a period of time that measure of sorrow due her station in life. All her children were strong, healthy, handsome, the world was before them. Soon she would reap the rewards of all her travail. So, courage. America was not Italy. In America you could escape your destiny. Sons grew tall and worked in an office with collars and ties, away from the wind and earth. Daughters learned to read and write, and wore shoes and silk stockings, instead of slaughtering the bloody pig and carrying wood on their backs to save the strength of valuable donkeys.

Had not misfortune entered once even into heaven? Who could escape sorrow? Who could pass through life without weeping? Only the dead do not suffer. Ah, the happy, happy dead. The old women clasped their hands to give thanksgiving for the day they would leave this earth, this unhappy vale of tears. Yes, yes, the happy dead who suffered no more.

Their eyes flashed fire; energy and power radiated from their black-clad, lumpy bodies. They devoured everything that happened on the Avenue as they spoke. They hurled curses like thunderbolts at children headed for mischief. They sucked greedily on ridged paper cups of chilling lemon ice and took great bites of smoking hot pizzas, dipping brown invincible teeth deep into the lava of hot tomato sauce and running rivers of cheese to the hidden yeasty dough. Ready to murder anyone who stood in the way of so much as a crust of bread for themselves or their children, implacable enemies of death. They were alive. The stones of the city, steel and glass, the blue-slate sidewalks, the cobblestoned streets, would all turn to dust and they would be alive.

CHAPTER 24

CAN A DEVIL turn into an angel? The Panettiere, the mad barber, Dr. Barbato, and even the cunning Zia Teresina Coccalitti marveled at the change in Gino Corbo. It was true: disaster made a boy into a man, for now Gino slaved like a peasant in the railroad, gobbling up overtime and bringing his envelope home unopened to his mother.

Lucia Santa was so pleased that she gave Gino twice the spending money she had given Vinnie, swearing to Octavia that it was only just because Vinnie had always stolen his overtime. “See,” the mother said to Octavia on her Friday night visits, “Gino was always a good boy.” And Octavia had to agree, because despite his working at night and even overtime on Sunday, Gino was finishing his last term of high school and would graduate in January. He was even making the honor roll for the first time. This especially delighted Lucia Santa. “Wasn’t I right?” she asked Octavia. “It is the playing in the street that tires a child’s brain, not honest work.”

Octavia, still shaken by Vinnie’s death, was amazed and puzzled at how quickly her mother seemed to recover. She was quieter, more permissive with Sal and Lena but otherwise the same. Only once did she betray emotion. One night, when they were talking of Vinnie as a little boy, Lucia Santa said with bitter self-reproach, “If I had left him with Filomena in Jersey, he would be alive.” Relinquishing one of her proudest memories, and yet she still lived each day with the eager trust of a believer in good fortune.

And why not? Never had the world treated the family of Angeluzzi-Corbo so well. Gino made a fortune in the railroad. Sal was brilliant in high school and would surely go to college. Lena was equally brilliant and would be a schoolteacher. Both worked now in the panetteria selling bread after school, earning good wages, which made Lucia Santa gloat with Octavia over the bank books on Friday nights. Lucia Santa could only control her dangerous optimism by reminding herself that in a few short months, right before Christmas, the Panettiere’s son, Guido, would finish his year of Army service and take Sal and Lena’s place in the bakery. She could not count on this flood forever.

Even Octavia’s husband was working. Poor Norman Bergeron was miserable writing pamphlets for some Government agency—Civil Service, security, and good money. Octavia knew he was unhappy, but she thought it was just too bad about him. He could always write poetry when the people in Europe stopped killing each other and there was another Depression.

But best of all for Lucia Santa was Gino becoming a man, part of the real world. She would not have to quarrel with him anymore, she had almost forgiven him all the injuries he had made her suffer. He had even become more serious. Could it be that her struggles were at an end? Lucia Santa did not believe it for a moment, but she would never let it be said that she was one of those pitiful rags who refused to enjoy good fortune when it came.

Each night Gino went to work it was with the same feeling of unbelief. Ascending in the elevator of the freight building, then stepping into the circle of light with clattering billing machines, seemed just the beginning of a dream. But gradually he believed.

The railroad put him on the midnight-to-eight-in-the-morning shift, and during these hours the dusty office was spooky with filing cabinets, dead black typewriters, and the almost invisible wire mesh of the cashier’s cage. Surrounded by these Gino typed the night away. He was very good at the job—his athletic coordination and his sharp eyesight helped. The quota was 350 bills a night, and he easily surpassed it. Sometimes he had an hour free to read while he waited for new bills to come up from the loading platform.

He never talked to the men he worked with, or joined in their general conversation. The night boss gave him the toughest bills to do, but he never protested. It didn’t matter. He hated it so much that nothing mattered. He hated the building and the rat-smelling office. He hated the dirty metal touch of the typewriter keys. He hated walking into that yellow circle of light that held the six billers and the boss rate clerk.

It was a pure hatred, physical; sometimes his body actually chilled, his hair bristled, and his blood turned so sour in his mouth that he could not help walking away from the light to the darkened windows to stare down at those imprisoned streets sentineled by yellow lamp posts. When the boss rate clerk, a young man named Charlie Lambert, called out, “Let’s bill freight, Gino,” in that voice men use to debase other men, he never answered, never went back to his machine right away. Even after he knew he was being singled out, he couldn’t hate Charlie Lambert. He felt such a cold contempt for the man that he could not think of him as something human or react to him with emotion.

To labor merely to exist, to spin away your life just to stay alive, was something he had never known. But his mother had known, Octavia had known, his father had surely known. Vinnie must have stood at this dark window a thousand nights while he himself roamed the streets of the city with his friends or slept trustfully in his bed.

But as the months went on, he found it easier to endure. What he could not think about was that it would never end. He understood that it might never end.

AS BEFITTED THE mother of a family in such goodly circumstances, Lucia Santa now ran her household like a real signora. The apartment was always warm, no matter what the price of coal and kerosene. There was always enough spaghetti in the pot for friends and neighbors who dropped in after mealtime. The children could hardly ever remember leaving the table without there being still enough meatballs and sausage soaking in a platter of sauce for one last foray. There were new forks and spoons for use at the Sunday feast, which everyone in the family, married or not, must attend—though no command was ever heeded more willingly.

On this first Sunday of December there was to be a special peranze. Larry’s oldest child was receiving his First Communion, and Lucia Santa was making ravioli. She had started the dough early, and now she and Octavia were building a fortress of the flour on the large square mixing board. They broke a dozen eggs into it, and another dozen, and another, until the four white powdery walls crumbled into a sea of white with floating yellow yolks. They mixed it all together into great crumbly balls of dough as bright as gold. Octavia and Lucia Santa grunted with labor as they rolled the balls out into thin sheets. Sal and Lena stirred a deep bowl full of ricotta cheese, and into the white creamy mass they beat pepper, salt and eggs that made it a filling fit for heaven.

While the ravioli boiled and the rich tomato sauce simmered, Lucia Santa put platters of prosciutto and cheese on the table. Then came platters of rolled beef stuffed with boiled eggs and onions, a huge piece of pork—dark brown, so tender from simmering in the sauce that it shed its flesh tenderly from the bone with just the touch of a fork.

At dinner, Octavia gossiped with Larry as she seldom did, laughing at his jokes and stories. Norman quietly sipped his glass of wine and chatted with Gino about books. When they finished, Sal and Lena cleared the table and started washing the mountain of dishes.

It was a beautiful Sunday for December, and visitors came—the Panettiere and Guido, finally out of the Army after his year’s service, the jealous barber, looking through the glass curtain of red wine, inspected all heads present for scars of a strange scissors. The Panettiere quickly took a plate of warm ravioli; he was mad about them, a dish his dragon of a wife had always been too busy counting money to prepare.

Even Zia Teresina Coccalitti, who had made her whole life a secret merely for advantage, who for so many years had made her fortune on home relief, with four strapping sons working—no one knew how; even she ventured to drink more than one glass of wine, munch a bread full of sausage, and chat with Lucia Santa about the happy days when they were girls in Italy shoveling manure from their backyards. Though usually Zia Coccalitti zippered her mouth with warty fingers when anyone asked her a personal question, today she smiled when twitted by the Panettiere about her swindling of the home relief. Made rash and generous by two glasses of wine, she told them all, free of charge, to take everything the Government gave, since in the long run you would pay the cursed State ten times over whether you took it or not.

Gino, bored by the talk, went to sit on the floor next to the cathedral-shaped radio and turned it on. He wanted to listen to the Giants football game. Lucia Santa frowned at this rudeness, though the radio was so low no one could hear it. Then she paid no more attention to him.

It was Norman Bergeron who first noticed something odd about Gino. His head was bent close to the radio, but he was watching everyone in the room. Then Norman saw that he was watching his mother very intently. There was a smile on his face. It was a smile that was in some way cruel. Octavia, seeing her husband watching Gino, turned toward the radio.

She couldn’t hear, but there was something so brilliantly alive in Gino’s eyes that she called out, “Gino, what is it?”

Gino turned his back to hide his face. “The Japs just attacked the United States,” he said. He turned up the radio and drowned out all the voices in the room.

GINO WAITED UNTIL after Christmas. Then directly from work one morning he enlisted in the Army. That afternoon he called Octavia’s husband at his office and asked him to tell Lucia Santa where he was. Sent to a training camp in California, he wrote regularly and sent money home. In the first letter he explained that he had volunteered to save Sal from the draft later on, but he never mentioned this again.

CHAPTER 25

“AIUTA MI! AIUTA mi!” Screaming for help against the ghosts of her three dead sons, Teresina Coccalitti ran along the edge of the sidewalk, her body tilted strangely, her black clothes flapping in the morning breeze. When she reached the corner she turned and ran back again, crying out, “Aiuto! Aiuto!” but on that first familiar cry for help, windows had slammed shut above Tenth Avenue.

Now the woman stood in the gutter, legs apart. She raised her head to the sky and accused them all. She spoke in the vulgar Italian of her native village, and on that thin hawk’s face all native cunning, greed and vicious slyness had been eaten away by suffering. “Oh, I know you all,” she shouted up to the closed windows. “You wanted to fuck me, you whores and daughters of whores. You wanted to put it up my ass, every one of you, but I was too clever.” She tore at her face with claw-like nails until it was a mass of bloody strips. Then she raised her arms to the sky and screamed, “Only God. Only God.” She started running along the curb, her black hat bobbing up and down, as her only remaining son came around the corner of 31st Street to catch her and drag her home.

It had happened many times before. At first Lucia Santa used to rush into the street to help her old friend, but now she watched from her window like everyone else. Who would have thought that fate would dare to strike such a blow against Teresina Coccalitti? Kill three of her sons in one year of war, and she such a cunning sly person, always secretive and capable of any treachery for her own advantage. Did nothing help then? Was there no escape for anyone? For if evil cannot prevail against fate, what hope is there for the good?

CHAPTER 26

WHILE THE WAR raged over the world, the Italians living along the western wall of the city finally grasped the American dream in their calloused hands. Money rolled over the tenements like a flood. Men worked overtime and doubletime in the railroad, and those whose sons had died or been wounded worked harder than all the rest, knowing grief would not endure as long as poverty.

For the clan of Angeluzzi-Corbo the magic time had come. The house on Long Island was bought, for cold cash, from people mysteriously ruined by the war. A two-family house, so that Larry and Louisa and their children could live in one apartment under the watchful eye of Lucia Santa. There would be separate, doored bedrooms for everyone, even Gino when he came home from the war.

On the last day Lucia Santa could not bear to help her children strip the apartment, fill the huge barrels and wooden boxes. That night, lying all alone in her bed, she could not sleep. The wind whistled softly through the window cracks that had always been shielded by drapes. Lighter patches of wall that had held pictures gleamed in the darkness. There were strange sounds in the apartment, in the empty cupboards and closets, as if all the ghosts of forty years had been set free.

Staring up at the ceiling Lucia Santa finally became drowsy. She put out her arm to trap a child against the wall. Falling into dreams she listened for Gino and Vincenzo to go to bed and for Frank Corbo to come through the hallway door. And where had Lorenzo gone again? Never fear, she told little Octavia, no harm can come to my children while I live, and then, trembling, she stood before her own father and begged linen for her bridal bed. And then she was weeping and her father would not comfort her and she was alone forever.

She had never meant to be a pilgrim. To sail a fearful ocean.

The apartment turned cold and Lucia Santa awoke. She got up and dressed in the dark, then put a pillow on the window sill. Leaning out over Tenth Avenue, she waited for light and for the first time in years really heard the railroad engines and freight cars grinding against each other in the yards across the street. Sparks flew through the darkness and there was the clear ringing of steel clashing on steel. Far away on the Jersey shore there were no lights because of war, only stars caught on the shade of night.

In the morning there was a long wait for the moving vans. Lucia Santa greeted neighbors who came to wish the family good luck. But none of the old friends came, none were left on Tenth Avenue. The Panettiere had sold his bakery when his son, Guido, came home wounded too badly for work. He had moved far out on Long Island, as far out as Babylon or West Islip. The mad barber with his houseful of daughters had retired; with so few male heads to cut because of the war, he too had moved out to Long Island to a town called Massapequa, near enough the Panettiere for a game of cards on Sundays. And others too had left for all those strange towns dreamed of for so many years.

Dr. Barbato, to everyone’s surprise, had volunteered for the Army and in Africa had become a hero of some sort, with his pictures in the magazines and a story of his exploits so terrifying that his father suffered a stroke from sheer exasperation at his son’s foolishness. Poor Teresina Coccalitti never moved out of her apartment, fiercely guarding the countless tins of olive oil and fat that would some day ransom her sons from death. Gino’s childhood friend, Joey Bianco, had in some clever fashion escaped the Army, no one knew how, had become rich, and bought a palace for his mother and father in New Jersey. So now it was really time for the Angeluzzi-Corbo family to leave.

FINALLY PIERO SANTINI came with his trucks from Tuckahoe. The war made such services dear to arrange, but Santini came as a favor to a native of his very own village in Italy. And because, mellowed now, it gladdened his heart to help the happy end to this story.

Lucia Santa had shrewdly left out a pot and some scarred cups. She gave Santini coffee and they drank it while looking down on Tenth Avenue, balancing their drinks on the window sill. Octavia and Sal and Lena carried light packages down to the waiting vans while two old muscular Italians, grunting like donkeys, let their backs be saddled with enormous bureaus and beds.

After a time the only thing left in the apartment was the backless kitchen chair deemed too worthless for the fine house on Long Island. Louisa and her three little children came up the stairs then to wait with them, the little villains wading through a sea of discarded clothing and the litter of stripped cupboards and left-over newspaper.

And then the final moment had come. Mr. di Lucca’s limousine, now Larry’s, was waiting in front of the tenement. Octavia and Louisa swept the little children down the row of dirty, deserted bedrooms and out the door. Then Octavia said to Lucia Santa, “Come on, Ma, let’s get out of this dump.”

To everyone’s surprise a dazed look came over Lucia Santa’s face, as if she had never really believed she must leave this house forever. Then instead of going toward the door, she sat on the backless kitchen chair and began to weep.

Octavia shooed Louisa and her children down the stairs before turning on her mother. Her voice was shrill, exasperated. “Ma, what the hell’s the matter now? Come on, you can cry in the car. Everybody’s waiting.” But Lucia Santa bowed her head into her hands. She could not stop her tears.

Then the mother heard Lena’s angry voice say, “Leave her alone”; and Sal, who never spoke, said, “We’ll bring her down, you go ahead.”

Octavia went down the stairs and the mother raised her head. Her two youngest children guarded her on each side. She had not realized they were so grown. Lena was very pretty, very dark, with her father’s blue eyes, but her face was like Gino’s. Then she felt Salvatore’s hand on her shoulder. He had the eyes of a man who could never get angry. In that moment the mother remembered how Sal and Lena, silent in their corner, had watched and surely judged them all. She could not know that to them their mother had been a heroine in some frightening play. They had watched her suffer the blows of fate, their father’s fury, her hopeless struggles with Larry and Gino and the terrible grief of Vinnie’s death. But as she reached out to touch their bodies she knew that they had judged her and found her innocent.

THEN WHY DOES Lucia Santa weep in these empty rooms? Who is better than her?

She goes to live in the house on Long Island, her grandchildren beneath her feet. Salvatore and Lena will become doctors or schoolteachers. Her daughter Octavia is a forelady in the dress shops, and her son Lorenzo is the president of a union, giving out jobs as grandly as a duke in Italy. Her son Gino is still alive while millions die. There will always be enough food and money for an old age surrounded by respectful and loving children. Who is better than her?

In Italy forty years ago her wildest dream had not gone so far. And now a million secret voices called out, “Lucia Santa, Lucia Santa, you found your fortune in America,” and Lucia Santa weeping on her backless kitchen chair raised her head to cry out against them, “I wanted all this without suffering. I wanted all this without weeping for two lost husbands and a beloved child. I wanted all this without the hatred of that son conceived in true love. I wanted all this without guilt, without sorrow, without fear of death and the terror of a judgment day. In innocence.”

AMERICA, AMERICA, BLASPHEMOUS dream. Giving so much, why could it not give everything? Lucia Santa wept for the inevitable crimes she had committed against those she loved. In her world, as a child, the wildest dream had been to escape the fear of hunger, sickness and the force of nature. The dream was to stay alive. No one dreamed further. But in America wilder dreams were possible, and she had never known of their existence. Bread and shelter were not enough.

Octavia had wanted to be a teacher. What had Vinnie wanted? Something she would never know. And Gino—what dreams he must have had, surely the wildest of them all. But even now through the tears, through the anguish, a terrible hatred rose, and she thought, Most of all he wanted his own pleasure. He had wanted to live like a rich man’s son. Then she remembered how she had broken her own father’s heart to win linen for her marriage bed.

With terrible clarity she knew Gino would never come home after the war. That he hated her as she had hated her father. That he would become a pilgrim and search for strange Americas in his dreams. And now for the first time Lucia Santa begged for mercy. Let me hear his footsteps at the door and I will live those forty years again. I will make my father weep and become a pilgrim to sail the fearful ocean. I will let my husband die and stand outside that house in Jersey to scream curses at Filomena with Vincenzo in my arms and then I will weep beside his coffin. And then I will do it once again.

But having said this, it was all too much. Lucia Santa raised her head and saw that Salvatore and Lena were watching her anxiously. Their grave faces made her smile. Strength surged back into her body, and she thought how handsome her last two children were. They looked so American, too, and this amused her for some reason, as if they had escaped her and the rest of the family.

Salvatore held her coat open so that she could rise easily into it. Lena murmured, “I’ll write Gino the new address as soon as we get there.” Lucia Santa glanced at her sharply, sure she herself had said nothing aloud. But the young girl’s face, so like Gino’s, made her want to weep again. She took one last look at the naked walls and then left her home of forty years forever.

Out on Tenth Avenue three women clad in black waited for her with folded arms. She knew them well. One raised her withered hand to salute her, called out, “Lucia Santa, buona fortuna.” Truly meant, without malice, yet on a warning note, as if to say, “Beware, there are years to come, life is not over.” Lucia Santa bowed her head in thanks.

Larry tapped the steering wheel with impatience as they all scrambled into the limousine. Then he moved it forward slowly so that the two moving vans could follow, moving east toward the Queensborough Bridge. At first, because of the mother’s tears, there was a heavy silence, then the three little children squirmed and began fighting. Louisa shouted and slapped them quiet. The tension relaxed and they all talked about the house. Larry said it would take an hour to get there. Every two minutes the children asked, “Are we in Long Island yet?” and Sal or Lena would say, “No, not yet.”

Lucia Santa rolled down the window to enjoy the fresh air. She took one of the little boys on her lap, and Larry smiled at her and said, “It’ll be great living together, huh, Ma?” Lucia Santa caught Lena’s eye, but that innocent was like Gino, too simple to understand her mother’s grin. Octavia smiled. They had always seen through Larry. They both understood. Larry was delighted that Louisa and the children would have company, while he, animal that he was, chased young girls starved by the war.

Then they were ascending the slope of Queensborough Bridge, running through the slanted, flashing shadows of suspended cables. The children stood up to see the slate-gray water below, but in just a few moments they were off the bridge and rolling down a wide, tree-lined boulevard. The children began to shriek, and Lucia Santa told them, yes, now they were on Long Island.