Kiss of the Wolf

NINA

I give her credit. She’s married twelve years, she finds a note — a corner of another piece of paper, she showed it to me — under the dial thing on the phone. They have to make new arrangements, he’ll call from out west. She said to me when she told me, “Ma, new arrangements.”

What do you do? The house was paid for and she had the job at the school. No one was going to starve. So what do you do? Help her out, little things here and there. Get her to get a lawyer after him. For a few weeks they ate over. I cooked extras, lasagna, stew, you could freeze it, it’d keep for a while. We cleaned. She was never one for a clean house, but she wanted his stuff out. He wrote a letter from wherever he was, said he’d send for his things. She said he could send for whatever he liked, it’d all be out on the street. Which is where it went. She had boxes full of his crap on the curb. Bicycle outfits, sweaters, magazines, pictures in frames, baseball gloves. When you looked into the box, you saw things like playing cards and rings at the bottom. It was hard on Todd, so we tried to get her to stop, but she got wild, so we gave up. Todd sat on the front porch and watched her lug stuff out until Sandro made him come inside. Before he went, he took a few things out of the boxes, to keep. Sandro let it go. What are you going to do: take things out of the kid’s hands?

People in cars came from all over Connecticut, stopped and poked around and picked out what they wanted. Maybe two people came to the house to see if it was all right. We pleaded with her to save some stuff or at least have a tag sale, but forget it, she didn’t want to hear it. Some wedding stuff she left in the attic. That was it. Finally Sandro took three boxes of what was left to the Salvation Army. Todd was so upset watching it go that I felt bad for Sandro.

It was a sin.

You just try and convince everybody it’s not the end of the world.

You feel bad for the kid. What’s he know? What’s he supposed to make of all this? And for her.

She says, “Ma, I feel bad for you. This’s all been hard on you.” That’s the kind of heart she’s got. I tell her we all have our crosses to bear. Her father and I were lucky: she never got into drugs, did okay in school. Was never too wild. The Ciufolos, they were dealing whatever they were dealing years before they got caught. Now their mother visits them up in Danbury prison. And poor Mrs. Palasino, she’s raising a grandson, the parents took off.

Joanie’s husband wasn’t gone two days, Bruno Minea was over here, asking how she was. Mr. Bacigalupe, I call him. I said she was fine, thanks, and however she was, she wasn’t receiving visitors. She’s pretty, she’s still got her looks, so every ragazzo in town’s gotta sniff around, and every one of them thinks, you know, this is damaged goods, anyway. It’s like I told her: in Filene’s Basement you don’t handle the clothes the way you do upstairs. We were over the DeFeos’; Bruno sat next to her the whole time. He’s had his eye on her twenty years; twenty years he hasn’t had a good thought about her. They go back all the way to Blessed Sacrament. You see the look on his face around her we used to see from the dogs around the butcher’s. I told her, with him sitting right there, just like my mother told me: when he’s talking to you, you keep a volto sciolto pensiero stretto—an open face and a closed mind.

For a while she was feeling better. So what does she do? Her husband tells her to fly to Chicago, they need to talk. She flies to Chicago. Todd was up all night, every night. He stayed with us. Every five minutes: when were we gonna hear? Sandro almost went out of his mind. So they talked, nothing happened, she came home. The poor kid, he was a wreck. Joanie didn’t say anything for a few days, then she came over, sat with me here in the kitchen, and cried. She said, “Ma, what’d I do wrong? What’d I do?”

I didn’t say anything. But I wanted to tell her this story I remembered, from back in Italy: this guy worked the land for this baroness and lived a long way from her. One day she sent for him, said she wanted to see him. So he walks this whole way to see her, and when he gets to the gates of the villa, there she is, way off by the house. And she makes a sign for him to stop where he is. And she looks at him through this telescope she has, just looks at him, him standing there at the gate holding his hat. Then she waves her hand, bye-bye, bye-bye, and sends him away.