by Mario Puzo
Gino put his hand in his pocket and took out the fifty cents and gave it to his mother. “I made this selling ice,” he said. “You can have it. I can bring home fifty cents every day.”
“You better make him stop stealing ice from the yards,” Octavia said.
Lucia Santa was impatient. “Eh, the railroad doesn’t care about children taking a little ice.” She looked at Gino, a curious warm smile on her face. “Bring your brother to the movies Sunday with the money,” she said. And she buttered a big piece of bread for him.
Vinnie’s face was still white, even with the flour gone. The strange lines of fatigue and tension, always obscene on the face of a child, made Octavia put her arm around him and say worriedly, “What did they make you do, Vinnie? Is the work too hard?”
Vinnie shrugged. “It’s O.K. It’s just so hot.” Then he added reluctantly, “I got dirty carrying sacks of flour from the cellar.”
Octavia understood. “The lousy bastards,” she spat out. To her mother she said, “Your dirty guinea paesan’ Panettiere making a kid like Vin carry those heavy sacks. When that son of his asks me for a date, I’ll spit in his face right in the street.”
Vinnie watched them hopefully. Octavia, so angry, might make him quit the job. Then he felt ashamed because his mother needed the money.
Lucia Santa shrugged and said, “Five dollars a week and our bread free as extra, a courtesy. Then free lemon ice when Vincenzo serves, and that’s money saved in summer. With their father gone—”
Octavia flared up. Her mother’s calm acceptance of the father’s desertion made her furious. “That’s just it,” she said. “His father left. He doesn’t give a shit.” Even through her anger she was amused at the look the two small boys gave her—a girl using a dirty word like that. But her mother was not amused and Octavia said in a reasonable tone, “It’s not fair. It’s just not fair to Vinnie.”
The mother spoke in grim Italian, asking, “Who are you to be a schoolteacher when you have the mouth of a whore?” She paused for an answer. But she had upset Octavia’s vision of herself. The mother continued, “If you want a house to give orders in, get married, have children, scream when they come out of your belly. Then you can beat them, then you can decide when they will work and how, and who works.” She looked at her daughter, coldly, as at a deadly rival. “Enough. Bastanza,” she said.
She turned on Gino. “You, giovanetto. From morning to night I don’t see you. You could be run over. You could be kidnapped. That’s one thing. Now. Your father has gone away for a time and so everyone must help. Tomorrow if you disappear I’ll give you this.” She went to the cupboard and took out the skinny wooden club used for rolling dough for the holiday ravioli, “The Tackeril.#8221; Her voice became hoarse, more angry. “By Jesus Christ, I’ll make you visible. I’ll make you so black and blue that if you were the Holy Ghost you could not vanish. Now, eat. After, wash the dishes, clean the table, and sweep the floor. And don’t let me see you come down the stairs this night.”
Gino was impressed. Though unafraid, he had been alert and tense through the whole uproar. Out of such noise sometimes would come a wild swing which it was permissible to evade. But nothing happened. The two women went downstairs and Gino relaxed and ate, the fatty sausage, the oily pulpy peppers blending together deliciously on his hungry palate. The storm was over, there were no hard feelings. He would work for his mother tomorrow, help her out.
Vinnie was staring down at his plate, not eating. Gino said cheerily, “Boy, I’ll bet you had it tough working for that bastid Panettiere. I saw you carrying a big basket. Where’d you bring it?”
“Nah,” Vinnie said. “They got a store on Ninth Avenue. It ain’t so bad. Just carrying the flour up the cellar.” Gino looked at him. There was something wrong.
But already Vinnie was feeling better and he took in great mouthfuls of food, not knowing that what he had felt all that day was fear. That he had suffered a common cruelty—a child sent from the warmth of his family to be commanded by strangers to perform their drudgery. It was his first experience of selling part of his being for money, so unlike doing something for his mother, or shining his big brother’s shoes for a nickel.
But school would come in the fall and set him free, and he would forget how his mother and sister had sent him out of the family and its rule by love and blood. He no longer thought of how he could not play stickball in the summer morning sun, or wander aimlessly around the block talking with friends, hiding in the shade of 31st Street as he sleepily licked a pleated paper cup of lemon ice. He felt the terrible sadness that only children can feel, because they have no knowledge of the sadness of others, of the general human despair.
Gino cleaned the table and started to wash the dishes. Vinnie helped him dry. Gino told of his adventures with the railroad Bull, the empty house and rope, and playing cards with Joey; but he didn’t say anything about his boat-sailing all the way around the block, because ten years old was too old for that kind of stuff.
There was one dirty pot caked with grease and soot, which Gino hid in the oven. Then the two boys went into the living room to look out over the Avenue. Gino sat on one window sill and Vinnie on the other. They were both at peace.
Gino asked, “Why the hell are Mom and Octavia mad at me? I just forgot. I’ll do everything tomorra.”
“They’re just mad because Pop left. They don’t know where he is. He musta run away.”
They both smiled at Vinnie’s joke. Only children ran away.
Far down Tenth Avenue they could see the red lantern of a dummy boy and behind it, like a small round ghost, the white dot of the trailing engine searchlight. The people below were shadows lit by lamp posts, by the blue and red streamer lights of the Panettiere’s lemon-ice stand, by the window bulbs of the grocery and candy stores.
Gino and Vincent, sit-sleeping on their childhood window sill, felt on their tired faces the fresh breeze from the Hudson River. It smelled of running water and, as if it had been carried great distances, of grass and trees and the other green things it had sprung from before it came to the city.
CHAPTER 4
BY LATE AUGUST, everyone hated summer except the children. The days were filled with the smell of burning stone, melting street tar, gasoline, and manure from horse-drawn wagons hawking vegetables and fruit. Over the western wall of the city where the Angeluzzi-Corbos lived hung clouds of steam trailed by locomotives, air immobilized by heat. Black flakes flew out of burning fires as engines packed freight cars into neat long rows. On this Sunday afternoon, when everything was still, the abandoned yellow, brown, and black railroad cars made solid geometric blocks in the liquid golden sunshine, abstractions in a jungle of steel and iron, stone and brick. The gleaming silvery tracks snaked in and out.
Tenth Avenue, open all the way to the river at Twelfth, with no intervening wall to give shade, was lighter than the other avenues of the city and hotter during the day. Now it was deserted. The enormous midday Sunday feast would last to four o’clock, what with the nuts and wine and telling of family legends. Some people were visiting more fortunate relatives who had achieved success and moved to their own homes on Long Island or in Jersey. Others used the day for attending funerals, weddings, christenings, or—most important of all—bringing cheer and food to sick relatives in Bellevue.
The more Americanized might even take their families down to Coney Island, but they would not do this more than once a year. The trip was long, and the size of families demanded great expenditures for frankfurters and sodas, even though they took their own food and drink along in paper bags. The men hated going. These Italians had never stretched idle on a beach. They suffered the sun all week working on the tracks of the railroad. On Sunday they wanted the cool of a house or garden, they wanted their minds occupied and alert over a deck of cards, they wanted to sip wine, or listen to the gossip of women who would not let them move a finger. They might as well go to work as go to Coney Island.
Best of all was a Sunday
afternoon without duties. Children at the movies, mother and father took a little nap together after the heavy meal and made love in complete privacy and relaxation. It was the one free day a week and was jealously treasured. Strength was restored. Family bonds healed. Not to be denied, it was a day set aside by God himself.
On this Sunday the streets, empty, beautiful, marched in straight lines away from Tenth Avenue. Since the neighborhood was too poor to own automobiles, none marred the symmetry of concrete pavement interspersed with blue-gray slate. The sun glinted on the smooth black tar, on the iron railings of the stoops, and on the coarse brownstone steps. All this seemed fixed forever in the blinding sun of summer; it was dazzling, as if unveiled on this one day by idle factory chimneys.
But Lucia Santa had picked this day to be a day of strife, to catch the enemy, the Le Cinglatas, unaware.
Everybody was out of the house. Octavia, dutiful Italian daughter that she was, had taken Sal and Baby Lena for a walk. Vincenzo and Gino had gone to the movies. Lucia Santa was free.
The eldest son, the shield and buckler of a fatherless family, had not shown the respect due to his blood or his mother. Lorenzo had not been present for the Sunday dinner. He had not been home to sleep for the last two nights, and came in each morning only to tell his mother that he had to work late and would sleep in the stable of the railroad. But Lucia Santa had found his good suit missing from the closet, and one of his two white shirts and a small suitcase were also gone. That was enough. Bastanza. Her word of decision.
A son of hers not yet eighteen, not married, not master of his own household, he dared to leave his own roof, his mother’s domain? What a disgrace to the family name. What a blow to her prestige in the neighborhood. What defiance of her just powers. Rebellion. Rebellion not to be borne.
Dressed in black, respectable in Sunday hat and veil, pocketbooked as befitted a matron, and short legs in brown cotton stockings fastened by garters that cut into the thighs, Lucia Santa went out on the blazing streets and walked up Tenth Avenue to 36th Street, where the Le Cinglatas lived. As she walked she whipped up her anger for the scene she would have to make. That little slut, that mealymouth, who twenty years ago had cried in church, making such a fuss that she would have to sleep with a man she had never seen. Del-i-cato. Oh, how awful—oh, how terrible—oh, ah, ah. Lucia Santa smiled grimly. These people who gave themselves airs. That was the true instinct of the born whore. Marriage vows and legal papers so that you could hold your head up, look everyone in the eye, rich or poor, that was important. As long as there was no disgrazia. Then if someone insulted your honor you could do murder with a clear conscience. But this was not Italy. She put away these thoughts, bloodthirsty as any greenhorn’s.
But truly, that was what America could do to a respectable Italian girl who no longer had parents to govern her. She was a woman now, the Le Cinglata. But what airs. What graces she had given herself. Oh, those were always the sly ones.
And her son. America or no America, seventeen years old or not, working or not working, he would obey his mother or feel her hand on his mouth. Ah, if his natural father was alive there would be real blows—but then, Lorenzo would never have dared leave a paternal roof.
The shade of the Le Cinglata tenement brought relief. Lucia Santa rested in the cool dark hallway, with its familiar musty smell of rodents, and gathered up her strength for the climb up the stairs and the battle awaiting her. For a moment she felt a weakening despair, a great sudden awareness of her vulnerability to fate and life—her children alienated by foreign ways and a foreign tongue, a husband so erratic that he was a liability in the fight for survival.
But such thoughts led to disaster. She ascended. No son of hers would be a gangster, a criminal sucked-out jellyfish to an older woman without shame. For one moment in the dark hallway, in those murky stairwells, Lucia Santa had a terrible vision of electric chairs, of her son bleeding, stabbed by the Sicilian or the jealous husband. By the time the Le Cinglata door opened, her swiftly coursing fearful blood had made her ready for battle.
But from the very first she was given pause. In the door stood husband Le Cinglata, heavily gray-mustached, in a clean white shirt and black suspendered trousers swelled by his paunch. He was not even pale from his short stay in jail.
Now Lucia Santa was in doubt. With the husband home, what was her son doing here? Could it all be gossip? But that she did not believe, especially when she saw the woman Le Cinglata standing by the table. The look of an enemy was on that face, a defiant guilt mixed with a strange jealousy.
This woman dressed in black, except that her face was thinner and younger than Lucia Santa’s, could be Lorenzo’s mother. That a woman her age should dare corrupt a child. Could they both have been so young once and she so innocent?
“Ah, Signora,” the man Le Cinglata was saying. “Come sit and have a glass of wine.” He ushered her to a white metal-topped table. He poured a glass from a half-gallon jug. “The grapes were good last year. This wine smells of Italy.” Then, with a wink, “This is not the wine I sell, believe me.” It was understood that only a respected guest like Lucia Santa was served from such a harvest.
The woman Le Cinglata brought out a plate of tarelle, hard and crusty, flecked with dark dots of pepper. She put them on the table, then folded her arms. She did not drink.
Signor Le Cinglata poured himself a glass and said, “Drink, Lucia Santa,” with such hearty friendliness that the mother was disarmed, as she always was by an unexpected courtesy. She drank. Then she said, in a gentler voice than she had intended, “I was passing by and thought Lorenzo might be here, helping Signora Le Cinglata with the customers.”
The husband smiled and said, “No, no. Sunday afternoons we rest. No business until night time. After all, we’re not Jews.”
Lucia Santa said, a little more forcefully, “Forgive me for saying this. You must understand a mother. Lorenzo is still too young for such a business. He has no judgment. One night he beat a man old enough to be his father. And a Sicilian who may decide to kill him. Of course, Signor Le Cinglata, you know about this, all these things.”
The husband was expansive, tolerant. “Ah, yes, I know. A good boy. Bravo, bravo, your Lorenzo. You have brought him up a good Italian, respectful to his elders, helpful, industrious. I know the good money we pay him he gives to his mother. There are not many people I would trust, give the freedom of my house, but with Lorenzo there could be no doubt. What an honest face he has.” And so on.
Lucia Santa became impatient and she broke in. “But he is not an angel from heaven. He must obey. Am I right? Does a son show respect to his mother or not? And now some of his clothes are missing. So I thought you might know, perhaps he rested here one night.”
For the first time the woman Le Cinglata spoke, and Lucia Santa marveled at her brassiness, her lack of shame, her hard voice. “Ah,” the woman said. “Your son is a man grown. He earns his own bread and some for your other children. We are not in Italy. You rule with too iron a hand, Signora.”
Here, now, the Le Cinglata woman made her mistake. Met with rudeness, Lucia Santa could become angry and voice her true feelings. She said coldly, politely, “Ah, Signora, you don’t know what trouble children make. How could you, you who are so fortunate not to have any? Ah, the worries of a mother, a cross pray to Christ you will never have to bear. But let me tell you this, my dear Le Cinglata. America or no America, Africa, or even England, it does not signify. My children sleep under my roof until they are married. My children do not become drunkards or fight with drunkards, or go to jail or go to the electric chairs.”
Now the woman Le Cinglata was angry and shouted back. “What? What? You’re saying that we are not respectable people? Your son is too good to visit here? But who are you? What part of Italy do you come from? In my province and yours there was not one of the nobility with the name of Angeluzzi or Corbo. And now my husband, the closest friend and fellow worker of your son’s true father, almost a godfather, he is not to
be a friend to Lorenzo? Is that what you are saying?”
Now Lucia Santa was trapped, and she cursed the other woman’s slyness. She had an answer ready to hand but could not use it—that she objected not to the husband’s friendship, but to the wife’s. She did not dare. A jealous and deceived husband wreaked vengeance on wife and lover alike. She said defensively, “No, no, of course he can visit. But not work. Not stay so late amongst quarreling men. Not sleep here,” she concluded dryly.
The Le Cinglata woman smiled. “My husband knows your son slept here. He does not listen to idle gossip. He does not believe his wife would disgrace herself with a mere boy. He is thankful for your son’s protection. He gave your son twenty dollars for his good deeds. Now tell me. Does the boy’s own mother believe the worst of him?”
With the husband looking down her throat, Lucia Santa perforce said hurriedly, “No, no. But people talk. Your husband is a sensible man, thank God.” A fool and an idiot, she thought furiously. And as for a mother thinking the worst of her son, who had a better right?
But then, without knocking, entering as if it were his household, Lorenzo came in, stopped short, and the tableau that this made explained everything to the mother.
Larry smiled with genuine fondness at them all, his mother, then the paramour, then the husband he had made a cuckold. They smiled back. But the mother saw that the husband’s smile had a falsity and contempt for youth; it was the smile of a man who was not deceived. And the female Le Cinglata—that a woman her age should have such a look on her face, the lips full and wet and red, the black eyes penetrating, looking directly into the youth’s face.
Lucia Santa watched Lorenzo with grim irony. Her handsome son with the false heart. But he—his hair like blue-black silk, with his straight bronze heavy features, his big nose, heavily fleshed and masculine, his skin unbroken by adolescent blemish—he, the Judas, turned his head to view his mother with affectionate astonishment. He put down the suitcase he was carrying and asked, “Ma, what are you doing here? And I was just thinking what bad luck I missed you home.”