Peril

MRS. DAROCCA

She had never learned to drive, and so she walked now, moving her heavy body through the old neighborhood as if it were a stone pushed by the lithesome young girl she’d once been.

She walked past Our Lady of Fatima Parochial School and remembered Sister Amelia’s shocked response, the accusatory gaze of Father Santori the day he’d escorted her through the iron gate and on to the hard concrete walkway, grasped her shoulder, turned her brusquely, and sent her home with a cold final word, I’ll be speaking to your mother.

She walked past the row house her longshoreman father had finally managed to buy and recalled the mist in her mother’s eyes when the old priest left her house later that same afternoon and she came up the stairs to her prodigal daughter’s room and told her flatly that she’d shamed the family, This will break your father’s heart, Celia.

She walked past the little park where she’d met Frankie DaRocca and told him everything in a burst of anguished confession, recalling the soft touch of his hand on hers, I’ll marry you, CeeCee, past the stone church where he’d made good on that promise, past Frankie’s house, where she’d lived with Frankie and his widowed mother for the first five years, past the hospital where her son had been born, taking the name DaRocca, just as she had taken it seven months before.

In the space of a few blocks she passed all the remaining architecture of her youth, walking like the condemned young girl she’d been so many years before, the old landmarks of her neighborhood still wreathed in hostility and disappointment so that she picked up her pace as she moved through the last of them, rushing like someone running a gauntlet, her white orthopedic shoes padding ever more rapidly against the concrete sidewalk until she stopped before the house she sought, so much bigger than the rest, noticed the big blue Lincoln in its gated driveway, and so knew that he was home.

She had never been in Leonardo’s house, and as far as she knew neither of his parents had ever known about her. They’d behaved like the aristocrats Leonardo’s father had always claimed they came from, American only in that they rode in fancy cars rather than in fancy carriages. They’d had high hopes for their only son, and early on Leonardo had appeared perfectly suited to fulfill them, a tall, handsome boy with jet-black hair who’d been the pride of Our Lady of Fatima’s track team, a boy on the way to some big school, maybe even Notre Dame. How could she ever have expected him to throw all that away over some dumb Sicilian peasant girl pregnant with a little boy whose small dead body she could still see cradled in Frankie DaRocca’s slender teenage arms.

She made her way up the stairs, surprised that one of Leonardo’s thugs hadn’t suddenly appeared to block her way. She knew he’d gone in that direction, gotten in trouble with the law, gone to jail, then come out again to become some kind of small-time gangster, a downward and disreputable course that must have humiliated and enraged Leonardo’s parents. She’d heard that they’d disowned him after he was nabbed in a stolen car ring, but she’d heard only scant news since then. Clearly he’d inherited the family home, or perhaps bought it after his parents’ death. It was the sort of thing she could see him doing just to get even with them, buying back the house of his boyhood with the dirty money his parents would never have taken. He was like that, Leonardo, a guy in whom hurt quickly turned to anger. She’d seen that early on, and so had never told him about the little boy he’d fathered on a rainy night in a Queens parking lot, and who now lay still and dead in the DaRocca family plot.

The door opened and he stood in the shadowy light of the foyer, an old man in a floral shirt and baggy pants, the handsome face ravaged by time or worry, or just the corrosive things she knew he’d done. His hair was white and thick, but beneath its silver crown the young man she’d once known had entirely run to ground. Deep lines ran in jagged gullies down the sides of his face and spread out from his eyes, creased his forehead and gave his face the look of desert soil badly raked.

“You want something?” he barked.

“It’s CeeCee,” she told him. “CeeCee Maganara.”

She’d fixed herself up slightly, applied a little rouge and lipstick, worn the dress she’d bought for Della’s wedding and which, though tight, still showed her figure to good advantage. Now she realized that these considerations meant nothing, her little allurements added in vain. There was no glimmer of romantic appreciation left in Leonardo Labriola, and so she knew that what little power she thought she might have had over him had long ago dropped away.

He blinked dully, his eyes on her eyes, wandering nowhere, so that Celia knew that she was as unrecognizable to him as the little boy he’d sired, no less a foreign, unknown, crumbling thing. And yet he had loved her once, hadn’t he? He had said he did, and she had believed it. He had whispered it in her ear softly, gently, and through all the years that had passed since then, she had harbored the belief that it had been true. But now a wholly different truth emerged, the terrible nature of her gullibility, the lie she’d swallowed and then nurtured through the years, telling herself that once she’d been loved by a smart boy, a handsome boy, a boy with class, with a future, a boy on his way to college, that once, just once, she’d possessed the looks and manner of one who could summon the love of such a person. She had come in the hope of reluming that memory in the man who stood before her. Now she realized that no such possibility existed, or had ever existed, that she was merely one of many others he’d known briefly, then discarded.

“When we were…” she began, then stopped since there was no point in appealing to the past, the night in the car, the talk of love. All of that was dead. And so she said, “My daughter lives across the street from your son. That’s what I got to talk to you about, Leonardo.”

The way she’d used his first name appeared to drop a stone in the deep well of his consciousness, release a few small ripples into his mind. “What’d you call me?”

“Leonardo,” Celia answered. “I called you that in high school.”

Labriola’s eyes squeezed together but without recognition.

“The thing is, I want you to leave my daughter alone,” Celia said.

“You what?”

“You came to her house,” Celia said, but without the boldness she’d hoped to show him. Instead, she felt a rising fear she met the only way she knew how, which was to harden and grow more bold. “You threatened her. You came to her house and threatened her.”

Labriola leveled a lethal stare in Celia’s direction and stepped out onto the porch. “What I do is none of your fucking business.”

She could see the full depth of what he had become, the serpent that lay coiled within him. She felt like a small brown sparrow, he the hawk circling overhead. Her only choice was to act like a sparrow, charge the hawk as if it were the same size, inflate herself with courage. “Just leave my daughter alone,” she snapped back at him.

Labriola stepped toward her, and she felt the force of all the violence he’d known. It came at her like a wind, dry and brutal, and she lifted her hand as if against a blow.

“Don’t touch me,” she blurted out.

Labriola seemed to expand on a breath of hatred, grow immensely large in his fearful rage and spite. “You tell that daughter of yours she better keep her fucking mouth shut.”

Celia stumbled backward as Labriola pressed forward relentlessly.

“That bitch is going to pay,” Labriola screamed. “That fucking bitch that left Tony.”

She turned and headed down the stairs, moving far more quickly than she’d have thought possible, her arthritic limbs now scared into obedience, lubricating her arid joints with panic’s slithery oil.

“And if anybody gets between me and that worthless cunt, they’re going to pay too,” Labriola bellowed.

She reached the bottom of the stairs, then hurled herself down the walkway and through the gate, Labriola’s voice still rushing at her like a snarling dog.

“You tell that to your fucking daughter.”

She knew he’d stopped at the top of the stairs, but she didn’t dare look back to make sure, afraid that such a glance might inflame him further, send him flying through the clanging gate and after her again, his breath upon her back like a raging bear. And so she raced on down the street, her legs aching beneath her weight, her ankles shooting tongues of pain into her fleshy calves, until she finally stopped beside a tree, darted around it, then pressed her back against it, exhausted, panting, her mind still whirling in the aftermath of a meeting she’d thought might go well but which she would now remember only with a bitter taste, the last sweet thoughts of youth now shattered beyond repair, Labriola no more than a brutal old man, and she the fool who’d loved him all her life.