by Mario Puzo
Even Octavia’s husband was working. Poor Norman Bergeron was miserable writing pamphlets for some Government agency—Civil Service, security, and good money. Octavia knew he was unhappy, but she thought it was just too bad about him. He could always write poetry when the people in Europe stopped killing each other and there was another Depression.
But best of all for Lucia Santa was Gino becoming a man, part of the real world. She would not have to quarrel with him anymore, she had almost forgiven him all the injuries he had made her suffer. He had even become more serious. Could it be that her struggles were at an end? Lucia Santa did not believe it for a moment, but she would never let it be said that she was one of those pitiful rags who refused to enjoy good fortune when it came.
Each night Gino went to work it was with the same feeling of unbelief. Ascending in the elevator of the freight building, then stepping into the circle of light with clattering billing machines, seemed just the beginning of a dream. But gradually he believed.
The railroad put him on the midnight-to-eight-in-the-morning shift, and during these hours the dusty office was spooky with filing cabinets, dead black typewriters, and the almost invisible wire mesh of the cashier’s cage. Surrounded by these Gino typed the night away. He was very good at the job—his athletic coordination and his sharp eyesight helped. The quota was 350 bills a night, and he easily surpassed it. Sometimes he had an hour free to read while he waited for new bills to come up from the loading platform.
He never talked to the men he worked with, or joined in their general conversation. The night boss gave him the toughest bills to do, but he never protested. It didn’t matter. He hated it so much that nothing mattered. He hated the building and the rat-smelling office. He hated the dirty metal touch of the typewriter keys. He hated walking into that yellow circle of light that held the six billers and the boss rate clerk.
It was a pure hatred, physical; sometimes his body actually chilled, his hair bristled, and his blood turned so sour in his mouth that he could not help walking away from the light to the darkened windows to stare down at those imprisoned streets sentineled by yellow lamp posts. When the boss rate clerk, a young man named Charlie Lambert, called out, “Let’s bill freight, Gino,” in that voice men use to debase other men, he never answered, never went back to his machine right away. Even after he knew he was being singled out, he couldn’t hate Charlie Lambert. He felt such a cold contempt for the man that he could not think of him as something human or react to him with emotion.
To labor merely to exist, to spin away your life just to stay alive, was something he had never known. But his mother had known, Octavia had known, his father had surely known. Vinnie must have stood at this dark window a thousand nights while he himself roamed the streets of the city with his friends or slept trustfully in his bed.
But as the months went on, he found it easier to endure. What he could not think about was that it would never end. He understood that it might never end.
AS BEFITTED THE mother of a family in such goodly circumstances, Lucia Santa now ran her household like a real signora. The apartment was always warm, no matter what the price of coal and kerosene. There was always enough spaghetti in the pot for friends and neighbors who dropped in after mealtime. The children could hardly ever remember leaving the table without there being still enough meatballs and sausage soaking in a platter of sauce for one last foray. There were new forks and spoons for use at the Sunday feast, which everyone in the family, married or not, must attend—though no command was ever heeded more willingly.
On this first Sunday of December there was to be a special peranze. Larry’s oldest child was receiving his First Communion, and Lucia Santa was making ravioli. She had started the dough early, and now she and Octavia were building a fortress of the flour on the large square mixing board. They broke a dozen eggs into it, and another dozen, and another, until the four white powdery walls crumbled into a sea of white with floating yellow yolks. They mixed it all together into great crumbly balls of dough as bright as gold. Octavia and Lucia Santa grunted with labor as they rolled the balls out into thin sheets. Sal and Lena stirred a deep bowl full of ricotta cheese, and into the white creamy mass they beat pepper, salt and eggs that made it a filling fit for heaven.
While the ravioli boiled and the rich tomato sauce simmered, Lucia Santa put platters of prosciutto and cheese on the table. Then came platters of rolled beef stuffed with boiled eggs and onions, a huge piece of pork—dark brown, so tender from simmering in the sauce that it shed its flesh tenderly from the bone with just the touch of a fork.
At dinner, Octavia gossiped with Larry as she seldom did, laughing at his jokes and stories. Norman quietly sipped his glass of wine and chatted with Gino about books. When they finished, Sal and Lena cleared the table and started washing the mountain of dishes.
It was a beautiful Sunday for December, and visitors came—the Panettiere and Guido, finally out of the Army after his year’s service, the jealous barber, looking through the glass curtain of red wine, inspected all heads present for scars of a strange scissors. The Panettiere quickly took a plate of warm ravioli; he was mad about them, a dish his dragon of a wife had always been too busy counting money to prepare.
Even Zia Teresina Coccalitti, who had made her whole life a secret merely for advantage, who for so many years had made her fortune on home relief, with four strapping sons working—no one knew how; even she ventured to drink more than one glass of wine, munch a bread full of sausage, and chat with Lucia Santa about the happy days when they were girls in Italy shoveling manure from their backyards. Though usually Zia Coccalitti zippered her mouth with warty fingers when anyone asked her a personal question, today she smiled when twitted by the Panettiere about her swindling of the home relief. Made rash and generous by two glasses of wine, she told them all, free of charge, to take everything the Government gave, since in the long run you would pay the cursed State ten times over whether you took it or not.
Gino, bored by the talk, went to sit on the floor next to the cathedral-shaped radio and turned it on. He wanted to listen to the Giants football game. Lucia Santa frowned at this rudeness, though the radio was so low no one could hear it. Then she paid no more attention to him.
It was Norman Bergeron who first noticed something odd about Gino. His head was bent close to the radio, but he was watching everyone in the room. Then Norman saw that he was watching his mother very intently. There was a smile on his face. It was a smile that was in some way cruel. Octavia, seeing her husband watching Gino, turned toward the radio.
She couldn’t hear, but there was something so brilliantly alive in Gino’s eyes that she called out, “Gino, what is it?”
Gino turned his back to hide his face. “The Japs just attacked the United States,” he said. He turned up the radio and drowned out all the voices in the room.
GINO WAITED UNTIL after Christmas. Then directly from work one morning he enlisted in the Army. That afternoon he called Octavia’s husband at his office and asked him to tell Lucia Santa where he was. Sent to a training camp in California, he wrote regularly and sent money home. In the first letter he explained that he had volunteered to save Sal from the draft later on, but he never mentioned this again.
CHAPTER 25
AIUTA MI! AIUTA mi!” Screaming for help against the ghosts of her three dead sons, Teresina Coccalitti ran along the edge of the sidewalk, her body tilted strangely, her black clothes flapping in the morning breeze. When she reached the corner she turned and ran back again, crying out, “Aiuto! Aiuto!” but on that first familiar cry for help, windows had slammed shut above Tenth Avenue.
Now the woman stood in the gutter, legs apart. She raised her head to the sky and accused them all. She spoke in the vulgar Italian of her native village, and on that thin hawk’s face all native cunning, greed and vicious slyness had been eaten away by suffering. “Oh, I know you all,” she shouted up to the closed windows. “You wanted to fuck me, you whores and daughters of
whores. You wanted to put it up my ass, every one of you, but I was too clever.” She tore at her face with claw-like nails until it was a mass of bloody strips. Then she raised her arms to the sky and screamed, “Only God. Only God.” She started running along the curb, her black hat bobbing up and down, as her only remaining son came around the corner of 31st Street to catch her and drag her home.
It had happened many times before. At first Lucia Santa used to rush into the street to help her old friend, but now she watched from her window like everyone else. Who would have thought that fate would dare to strike such a blow against Teresina Coccalitti? Kill three of her sons in one year of war, and she such a cunning sly person, always secretive and capable of any treachery for her own advantage. Did nothing help then? Was there no escape for anyone? For if evil cannot prevail against fate, what hope is there for the good?
CHAPTER 26
WHILE THE WAR raged over the world, the Italians living along the western wall of the city finally grasped the American dream in their calloused hands. Money rolled over the tenements like a flood. Men worked overtime and doubletime in the railroad, and those whose sons had died or been wounded worked harder than all the rest, knowing grief would not endure as long as poverty.
For the clan of Angeluzzi-Corbo the magic time had come. The house on Long Island was bought, for cold cash, from people mysteriously ruined by the war. A two-family house, so that Larry and Louisa and their children could live in one apartment under the watchful eye of Lucia Santa. There would be separate, doored bedrooms for everyone, even Gino when he came home from the war.
On the last day Lucia Santa could not bear to help her children strip the apartment, fill the huge barrels and wooden boxes. That night, lying all alone in her bed, she could not sleep. The wind whistled softly through the window cracks that had always been shielded by drapes. Lighter patches of wall that had held pictures gleamed in the darkness. There were strange sounds in the apartment, in the empty cupboards and closets, as if all the ghosts of forty years had been set free.
Staring up at the ceiling Lucia Santa finally became drowsy. She put out her arm to trap a child against the wall. Falling into dreams she listened for Gino and Vincenzo to go to bed and for Frank Corbo to come through the hallway door. And where had Lorenzo gone again? Never fear, she told little Octavia, no harm can come to my children while I live, and then, trembling, she stood before her own father and begged linen for her bridal bed. And then she was weeping and her father would not comfort her and she was alone forever.
She had never meant to be a pilgrim. To sail a fearful ocean.
The apartment turned cold and Lucia Santa awoke. She got up and dressed in the dark, then put a pillow on the window sill. Leaning out over Tenth Avenue, she waited for light and for the first time in years really heard the railroad engines and freight cars grinding against each other in the yards across the street. Sparks flew through the darkness and there was the clear ringing of steel clashing on steel. Far away on the Jersey shore there were no lights because of war, only stars caught on the shade of night.
In the morning there was a long wait for the moving vans. Lucia Santa greeted neighbors who came to wish the family good luck. But none of the old friends came, none were left on Tenth Avenue. The Panettiere had sold his bakery when his son, Guido, came home wounded too badly for work. He had moved far out on Long Island, as far out as Babylon or West Islip. The mad barber with his houseful of daughters had retired; with so few male heads to cut because of the war, he too had moved out to Long Island to a town called Massapequa, near enough the Panettiere for a game of cards on Sundays. And others too had left for all those strange towns dreamed of for so many years.
Dr. Barbato, to everyone’s surprise, had volunteered for the Army and in Africa had become a hero of some sort, with his pictures in the magazines and a story of his exploits so terrifying that his father suffered a stroke from sheer exasperation at his son’s foolishness. Poor Teresina Coccalitti never moved out of her apartment, fiercely guarding the countless tins of olive oil and fat that would some day ransom her sons from death. Gino’s childhood friend, Joey Bianco, had in some clever fashion escaped the Army, no one knew how, had become rich, and bought a palace for his mother and father in New Jersey. So now it was really time for the Angeluzzi-Corbo family to leave.
FINALLY PIERO SANTINI came with his trucks from Tuckahoe. The war made such services dear to arrange, but Santini came as a favor to a native of his very own village in Italy. And because, mellowed now, it gladdened his heart to help the happy end to this story.
Lucia Santa had shrewdly left out a pot and some scarred cups. She gave Santini coffee and they drank it while looking down on Tenth Avenue, balancing their drinks on the window sill. Octavia and Sal and Lena carried light packages down to the waiting vans while two old muscular Italians, grunting like donkeys, let their backs be saddled with enormous bureaus and beds.
After a time the only thing left in the apartment was the backless kitchen chair deemed too worthless for the fine house on Long Island. Louisa and her three little children came up the stairs then to wait with them, the little villains wading through a sea of discarded clothing and the litter of stripped cupboards and left-over newspaper.
And then the final moment had come. Mr. di Lucca’s limousine, now Larry’s, was waiting in front of the tenement. Octavia and Louisa swept the little children down the row of dirty, deserted bedrooms and out the door. Then Octavia said to Lucia Santa, “Come on, Ma, let’s get out of this dump.”
To everyone’s surprise a dazed look came over Lucia Santa’s face, as if she had never really believed she must leave this house forever. Then instead of going toward the door, she sat on the backless kitchen chair and began to weep.
Octavia shooed Louisa and her children down the stairs before turning on her mother. Her voice was shrill, exasperated. “Ma, what the hell’s the matter now? Come on, you can cry in the car. Everybody’s waiting.” But Lucia Santa bowed her head into her hands. She could not stop her tears.
Then the mother heard Lena’s angry voice say, “Leave her alone”; and Sal, who never spoke, said, “We’ll bring her down, you go ahead.”
Octavia went down the stairs and the mother raised her head. Her two youngest children guarded her on each side. She had not realized they were so grown. Lena was very pretty, very dark, with her father’s blue eyes, but her face was like Gino’s. Then she felt Salvatore’s hand on her shoulder. He had the eyes of a man who could never get angry. In that moment the mother remembered how Sal and Lena, silent in their corner, had watched and surely judged them all. She could not know that to them their mother had been a heroine in some frightening play. They had watched her suffer the blows of fate, their father’s fury, her hopeless struggles with Larry and Gino and the terrible grief of Vinnie’s death. But as she reached out to touch their bodies she knew that they had judged her and found her innocent.
THEN WHY DOES Lucia Santa weep in these empty rooms? Who is better than her?
She goes to live in the house on Long Island, her grandchildren beneath her feet. Salvatore and Lena will become doctors or schoolteachers. Her daughter Octavia is a forelady in the dress shops, and her son Lorenzo is the president of a union, giving out jobs as grandly as a duke in Italy. Her son Gino is still alive while millions die. There will always be enough food and money for an old age surrounded by respectful and loving children. Who is better than her?
In Italy forty years ago her wildest dream had not gone so far. And now a million secret voices called out, “Lucia Santa, Lucia Santa, you found your fortune in America,” and Lucia Santa weeping on her backless kitchen chair raised her head to cry out against them, “I wanted all this without suffering. I wanted all this without weeping for two lost husbands and a beloved child. I wanted all this without the hatred of that son conceived in true love. I wanted all this without guilt, without sorrow, without fear of death and the terror of a judgment day. In innocence.”
&n
bsp; AMERICA, AMERICA, BLASPHEMOUS dream. Giving so much, why could it not give everything? Lucia Santa wept for the inevitable crimes she had committed against those she loved. In her world, as a child, the wildest dream had been to escape the fear of hunger, sickness and the force of nature. The dream was to stay alive. No one dreamed further. But in America wilder dreams were possible, and she had never known of their existence. Bread and shelter were not enough.
Octavia had wanted to be a teacher. What had Vinnie wanted? Something she would never know. And Gino—what dreams he must have had, surely the wildest of them all. But even now through the tears, through the anguish, a terrible hatred rose, and she thought, Most of all he wanted his own pleasure. He had wanted to live like a rich man’s son. Then she remembered how she had broken her own father’s heart to win linen for her marriage bed.
With terrible clarity she knew Gino would never come home after the war. That he hated her as she had hated her father. That he would become a pilgrim and search for strange Americas in his dreams. And now for the first time Lucia Santa begged for mercy. Let me hear his footsteps at the door and I will live those forty years again. I will make my father weep and become a pilgrim to sail the fearful ocean. I will let my husband die and stand outside that house in Jersey to scream curses at Filomena with Vincenzo in my arms and then I will weep beside his coffin. And then I will do it once again.