by Mario Puzo
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 He had the same blue eyes, startling in a dark, Mediterranean face; he had the same withdrawn air and reluctance to speak, the same disregard for the concerns of those nearest to him in blood.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.