by Mario Puzo
The father asked in a low, menacing tone, “Why did you put this doll between us?”
Lucia Santa tried to keep her voice low. She whispered, “Frank, Frank, it’s your baby daughter. Wake up, Frank.”
There was a long silence, but Lucia Santa did not dare go back to sleep. Suddenly the whole bed shook violently.
He rose like an avenging angel. Light flooded the bedroom and the front room where the children slept, and there stood the father fully dressed. His face was almost black with the blood of rage. His voice was like thunder as he shouted, “OUT OF THIS HOUSE. BASTARDS, SONS OF WHORES AND BITCHES. OUT OF THIS HOUSE BEFORE I KILL YOU ALL.”
The mother sprang out of bed in her nightgown, the baby clutched in her arms. She went into the front room and told the frightened Gino and Vincent, “Quick, get dressed and get Salvatore and go to Zia Louche. Quickly now.”
The father was raving, cursing, but when he saw Vincent about to leave he said, “No, Vincenzo can stay. Vincenzo is an angel.” But the mother pushed Vincent down the corridor.
Father and mother were face to face. There was no mercy in the father’s eyes. He said quietly, but with real hatred, “Take your doll and get out of this house.” Lucia Santa looked at the only bedroom door, Octavia’s.
The father saw her look. He said, “Don’t make me knock on your daughter’s door. Get her down on the street where she belongs.”
The door opened. Octavia stood there, already dressed, and holding her dressmaker’s scissors in her right hand.
The mother said quickly, “Octavia, come with me.” Octavia was not afraid; she had come out of her room ready to do battle to protect her mother and the children. But now she saw on her stepfather’s face such a look of cruel delight that for the first time she was frightened. She took Baby Lena from her mother’s arms and, still holding the scissors, ran to the kitchen. Vinnie, Sal, and Gino were huddled together wearing only their coats over winter underwear. She herded them down the stairs and out of the house. Lucia Santa was left alone with her husband.
She put on clothes over her nightgown, asking him, her voice shaking, “Frank, what is it? You were so good all day, what is it now?”
The blue eyes were opaque, the harsh face calm. He repeated again, “Everyone out of this house.” He moved close to her and pushed her down the corridor of rooms toward the door.
Larry and the Panettiere burst into the apartment and came between them. The father grabbed Larry by the throat and pushed him against the wall, shouting, “Just because you gave me a dollar today you think you can interfere?” He threw a handful of change at his stepson.
Larry was watchful, alert. He said carefully, “Pop, I come to help. The cops are coming. You gotta quiet down.” A siren suddenly wailed. The father ran to the front room to look out the window.
In the street below he could see his three small children huddled in overcoats, surrounding Octavia, and Octavia pointing up toward him as the police came out of the car. He saw the two policemen running into the tenement. He became very quiet and went back down the corridor of rooms to the kitchen and said to them all in a very reasonable tone, “The police have clubs. No one can stand against the police. Not even God can stand against clubs.” He sat on a kitchen chair.
The two burly policemen, both Irish and tall, came into the open apartment cautiously and calmly. Larry took them aside and spoke to them in a low voice. The father watched them all. Then Larry came over and sat by his father. There were tears of anxiety in his eyes. He said, “Listen to me, Pop. There’s an ambulance coming. You’re sick, see? Now don’t make any trouble. For Mom and the kids.”
Frank Corbo gave him a violent push. Immediately the two policemen came forward, but the mother was ahead of them. “No, wait, wait,” she said.
She went to her husband and spoke quietly, as if the Panettiere and the policemen could not hear. Octavia and the children had come out of the cold of the street and stood on the other side of the room watching them. The mother said, “Frank, go to the hospital. They will make you well. What will the children feel when they see the police beat you and drag you down the stairs? Frank, Frank, be reasonable. I’ll come to see you every day. In a week, two weeks, you’ll be well. Come now.”
The father rose. As he did so, two white-jacketed interns came over the top of the stairway and into the open door of the apartment. The father stood by the table, head down, brooding. Then he raised his head and said briskly, “Everyone must have coffee. I’ll make it myself.” The two white jackets started toward him, but the mother moved across their path. Larry went beside her. The mother said to the interns and policemen, “Humor him, please. He will go if you humor him. But if you use force he will be an animal.”
While the coffee was perking, the father began to shave at the kitchen faucet. The interns were tense and alert. The policemen stood ready with nightsticks. The father finished quickly and set cups of coffee on the table. The children and Octavia were on the far side of the table. While they drank to please him, he made his wife fetch him a clean shirt. Then he surveyed them all with a sardonic gleam in his eyes.
“Figlio de puttana,” he began. “Evil men. I know you two policemen. At night, late, you go into the bakery and drink whisky. That’s how you work? And you, Panettiere. You make whisky in your back room against the law. Oh, I see you all at night when everyone sleeps. I see everything. At night I’m everywhere. I see the sins of the world. Monsters—fiends—murderers—sons and daughters of whores—I know you all. You think you can overcome me?” He was shouting rapidly, incoherently, and he gave the kitchen table a push, knocking over all the coffee cups.
He seemed to rise on his toes; he grew tall and menacing. Larry and the mother shrank away from him. The two white-jacketed interns formed a line with the two policemen and came toward him. Suddenly the father saw across the huge wooden table his son Gino’s face, the skin white with terror, the eyes almost blank, extinguished of sensibility. With his back to his enemies, the father winked one eye at his son. He saw the color flood back into Gino’s face, the fear relieved by surprise.
But now the comedy was over. The four men surrounded the father, not yet touching him. The father raised both his palms toward them as if beseeching them to halt, to listen to something important he was going to say. But he did not speak. He reached into his pocket and gave his wife the key to the apartment and then his billfold. Lucia Santa grasped him by the arm and pulled him out of the apartment and down the stairs. Larry took the father’s other arm. The police and white-jacketed men followed close behind.
Tenth Avenue was empty. The wind whipped around the ambulance and the police car parked before the tenement. Frank Corbo faced his wife in the dark street. He said in a low voice, “Lucia Santa, let me come home. Don’t let them take me away. They will kill me.” Across the street an engine hooted. The wife bowed her head. She dropped his arm and stepped away from him. Without warning, the two white-jacketed interns pounced on the father, slipped something over his arms, and half thrust, half lifted him into the ambulance. One of the police jumped in to help. There was not a sound. The father did not cry out. There was just a flying about of many blue-and-white-clad arms. The mother bit her fist, and Larry stood paralyzed. The ambulance drove away, and then the remaining policeman came over to them.
The cloudiness of early dawn veiled the stars, but it was not yet really light. Lucia Santa wept in the street as Larry gave the policeman their names, his father’s name, the names of the children and everyone in the house that night, and told how it had all begun.
IT WAS NOT until the next Sunday that anyone was permitted to visit the father. After dinner Lucia Santa said to her daughter, “Do you think I should let him come home, do you think it safe?” Octavia shrugged, afraid to give an honest answer. She was amazed at her mother’s optimism.
Larry assumed command as the eldest male of the family. He spoke as a man with contempt for the cowardice of women. “You mean you’ll let Pop rot in
Bellevue just because he went off a little one night? Let’s get him the hell out of there. He’ll be all right, don’t worry.”
Octavia said, “It’s easy for you to talk like a big-hearted big shot. You’re never home. You’re out chasing floozies, your stupid little tramps. Then while you’re having your nice little fun, Mom and the kids and me are getting our throats cut. And you’ll be so-o-o sorry when you come home. But you’ll be alive and we’ll be dead. You’re not so dumb, Larry.”
“Ah, you’re always making a big thing outa nothing,” Larry said. “After the old man gets a taste of Bellevue, he’ll never get sick again.” Then, seriously and without malice, “Your trouble, Sis, is you never liked him.”
“Why should I?” Octavia said angrily. “He never did anything for Vinnie or even for his own kids. How many times did he hit Mamma? He even hit her once when she was pregnant, and I’ll never forget that.”
Lucia Santa listened to them both, her face somber, her black brows knit. Their arguments were the irrelevant arguments of children, their talk meant nothing to her. They were not competent, emotionally or mentally.
Like many others this illiterate, untrained peasant woman had the power of life and death over the human beings nearest to her. On every day in every year people must condemn and betray their loved ones. Lucia Santa did not think in terms of sentiment. But love and pity had value, a certain weight in life.
The man who had fathered her children, rescued her from a desperate and helpless widowhood, and wakened her to delight, was no longer of any real value to her. He would bring war into the family. Octavia might leave; she would marry early to escape him. He would be a liability in the battle against life. She had her duty to her children, big and small. She dismissed love that was personal, an emotion of luxury, of uncomplicated lives.
But beyond love there was honor, there was duty, there was a union against the world. Frank Corbo had never betrayed that honor; he had only not been able to fulfill it. And he was the father of three of these children. There was blood there. In the future years she must look these children in the eye. She would have to account to them, for he had given them life, they were in his debt. Lurking behind this was the primitive dread that parents have of their own fate when they are old and helpless and become their children’s children, and in their turn seek mercy.
Gino, who all this time had been twisting and turning and quarreling with Sal and Vinnie, and seemingly inattentive to the conversation, suddenly said to his mother, “Poppa winked at me that night.”
The mother, bewildered, did not understand the word “wink.” Octavia explained.
Lucia Santa became excited. “See?” she said. “He was putting it on. He knew what he was doing but he was weakheaded, he couldn’t help himself.”
“You know,” Larry said. “He saw Gino looking so scared, that’s why. I told you it wasn’t anything serious. He’s a little sick, that’s all. Let’s get him home.”
The mother said to Octavia, “Eh, well?” She had already made up her mind but wanted her daughter’s consent. Octavia looked at Gino, who turned his head away.
“Let’s try it,” she said. “I’ll do my best.”
They all helped the mother get ready. The packing of the food, spaghetti in a small bowl, fruit, half a loaf of real bread. Just in case he could not come home this very day. They even made jokes. Lucia Santa said, “Ah, that night when he called Vincenzo an angel, then I knew he was crazy.” It was a bitter joke that would last through the years.
At last she was ready to leave. Gino asked her, “Is Pop really coming home today?”
The mother looked down at him. There was some sort of fear on his face she could not understand. She said, “If not today, then tomorrow, don’t worry.” She saw the anxiety vanish from his eyes, and his absolute trust gave her that familiar warm sense of power and love.
Vinnie, hearing his mother’s words to Gino, shouted with loyal happiness, “Hurrah! Hurrah!” Octavia said to her mother, “I’ll clean up the kids and have them dressed up in front of the house.”
Larry was going with her. Before they left, he told the children, “Now if we bring Pop home today, nobody bother him, let him rest. Just do everything he asks you to do.” Listening, the mother felt a great buoyancy of spirit; she believed that everything would end well, that the terrible night was not so significant as it had appeared. The strain had grown too great, everyone had been carried away by emotion. Really, there had been no need to call the police or the ambulance or have him taken to the hospital. But maybe it was for the best. Now the air was clear and they would all be the better for it.
Stout in black, and carrying the bundle of food herself, Lucia Santa walked to 23rd Street for the crosstown trolley car to Bellevue, her eldest son on her arm like a good, dutiful child.
Lucia Santa and her son went to a crowded reception desk and waited. After a long time they were told they must see the doctor, and they followed directions to his office.
It has been said of this great hospital that its professional staff is the finest in the world, that its nurses are more efficient and hard-working than any other nurses and that its medical care for the indigent is as good as can be had. But for Lucia Santa these things mattered little on this Sunday afternoon. To her, it seemed, Bellevue was the terror of the poor, the last painful and shameful indignity they suffered from life before they went to their death. It was filled with the dregs, the helpless of humanity, the poverty-stricken. Tuberculars sat on cheerless balconies sucking in soot-filled air, watching the stone city distill the poison which devoured their lungs. The senile aged lay unattended except by visiting relatives, who brought them food to eat and tried to fan alive a breath of hope. In some wards were those enraged by life, God, humanity, who had swallowed lye or done some other terrible injury to their bodies in their lust for death. Now, with physical agony to relieve their other sufferings, they clung to life. And then there were those insane who had rushed out of the world into some kinder darkness.
Lucia Santa reflected that whatever else you might say of the place, you must say the truth: that it was a hospital of charity. It owed her and people like her nothing and would receive nothing from them. Its dark tiled corridors were noisy with children waiting for drugs, treatment, stitches. In one ward children crippled by automobiles and drunken parents fought over a solitary wheelchair.
In some beds were the righteously ill—men whose labor had earned bread for their wives and children, whose fear of death was compounded by the vision of their helpless, unprotected families.
It was a hospital where people brought food every day to their loved ones—casseroles of spaghetti, bags of oranges, and towels and decent soap and fresh linen. It was a factory for the human vessel to be glued together without pity, tenderness, or love. It was a place to make an animal fit to take up his burden. It was heedless of the hurt spirit; it gave a grudging charity that on principle would never dispense flowers. It hung on the eastern wall of the city, medieval in its tower-like formation and iron gates, a symbol of hell. The pious poor crossed themselves when they entered those gates; the gravely ill resigned themselves to death.
Lucia Santa and her son found the doctor’s office and entered. The mother could not believe that such a young man in his ill-fitting white jacket held power over her husband. As soon as they were seated, he told her that she could not see her husband that day; it would be best if she signed certain necessary papers.
The mother said to Larry in a low voice, in Italian, “Tell him about the wink.” The doctor said in Italian, “No, Signora, you tell me.” The mother was surprised, he looked so American.
He spoke the Italian of the rich and he treated her with gentlemanly courtesy. Lucia Santa explained to him how at the height of madness that terrible night her husband had winked his eye at his oldest natural son. To reassure him, to show he was not really crazy. It was clear, he had let himself go out of weakness or exasperation with his family, or despair at his
fate. They were poor. He was really too ill to earn a living. This was the reason, sometimes, that men behaved so strangely. And he had gone all winter without a hat. His brains had been chilled with the cold. And she must not forget that, digging the new subway for Eighth Avenue, he had been buried alive a few minutes and hurt his head.
She went on and on to show that the illness was physical, external, subject to simple care, but she always came back to the winking of the eye. He had fooled them all that night. They had everyone been taken in, even the doctors.
The doctor listened with grave courtesy and tact, nodding his head in agreement that the winking of the eye was very strange, that the cold, the blow on the head might be at fault, murmuring encouragement. The mother did not realize that this courtesy was an expression of pity and compassion. When she finished, he spoke in his beautiful Italian, revealing himself as an enemy.
“Signora,” he said, “your husband is very ill. Too ill for this hospital. Too ill for your home. He must be sent away. Perhaps in a year or two he will be well. No one knows. These things are still a mystery.”
The mother said in a low voice, “I will not sign any papers. I want to see my husband.”
The doctor glanced at Larry and shook his head. Larry said, “Come on, Ma, I’ll bring you back tomorrow, maybe we can see Pop then.”
Lucia Santa sat still, dumb as an animal. The doctor said in a gentle, hopeless voice, “Signora, if your husband had a fever, an ague, you would not send him out to earn his living, you would not drive him out to cold and labor. If his legs were broken you would not make him walk. For him to go out in the world is too much. It is too painful for him. The illness is a signal so that he will not go to his death. You can show your love for your husband by signing these papers.” He touched a yellow manila folder on his desk.
The mother raised her head and stared at him. She said in rude Italian, “I will never sign.”