“Something was wrong with her, then,” said Maddalena.
“Now she lives in a convent,” Julian said. “But she’s not a nun.”
“You still think about her.”
“Not really,” said Julian. “Not until now. Not until I hear you complain about all this love in your life.” He smiled. “A boy in Italy builds you a bike, rebuilds your house. A man in America thinks you’re Marilyn Monroe. In a few weeks, you’ll have a child, someone else to adore you. This is what I mean by lucky.” He gestured toward the living room. “Look out the window, Maddalena—there’s no woman on the sidewalk waiting for me. No girl who used to watch me from her terrace, waiting for me to notice her. You and Antonio are the only ones who think twice about me.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It is. Come to this house in the middle of the day sometime, when it’s just me, talking to ghosts. See for yourself. I lie in my bed worrying what will happen when I get old and there’s no one to take care of me. I can’t even read anymore; it reminds me how much life I haven’t lived, all the people I’ll never meet. Every noise I hear outside, I think, what did they do to that little black boy? What kind of world is it when someone can just disappear, and nobody cares? I get so sad when you and Antonio leave every week. I don’t even realize it until I start to clean the coffee cups, and then it hits me like a slap in the face.” He looked down. “A man of forty years old, and you’re my only friends. You’d think I’d have more to show for such a long life.”
Tell me to stop whining, thought Julian. But Maddalena was too good a person, too compassionate, and—like most women, he imagined—too easily swayed by a man in pain. This was what had brought them together, after all, on Christmas Eve. He covered his eyes with his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Forget what I just told you.”
She touched his sleeve then, two fingertips on the sheer white fabric of his shirt. Her nails were painted pink, her hands slightly swollen, noticeable only in the snug fit of her wedding ring. “Think how long you had them,” she said. “Your parents.” She drew her hand away. “I’d trade places with you, if I could. I had my Mamma and Babbo only nineteen years. When I left them, I was still a girl. Never once in nineteen years did I think I’d live somewhere else—the next village maybe, but nowhere I couldn’t walk a few miles to find them. When you’re young, you think only little things will change. You don’t plan for a different country. Or a man like Antonio. Or a war.”
Antonio must have heard his name. His right foot, still hanging over the arm of the sofa, scratched the sole of his left. The springs squeaked as he turned onto his other side. If they trusted history, they had no more than five minutes before he’d wake.
“Forty years you lived here, under the same roof with them,” Maddalena continued. “Do you thank God every day for that?”
14
Easter
WE HAVE YOUR BOY, said the note that Abraham Waters held to Julian’s face. The letters, of identical size and spaced evenly apart, were written in black marker on a piece of thin cardboard. YOU LEAVE HE LIVES.
Julian stood on his porch, the noon sun stinging his eyes. He had just woken. He tied his robe across his middle, conscious of Waters’s wife staring at him from her own porch across the street.
Waters had one foot on the bottom step of his stoop, the other on the walkway. As far as Julian knew, this was the first time Waters had ever come onto his property.
He looked over at Rosa Volpe’s house but could not tell if she was peering through the drapes. The rest of the street was quiet—no cars passing, no wind, just a few robins scurrying across the yard. It was Good Friday, and not even the Lord’s looming death had inspired sympathy in the vandals.
“You see who left this?” Waters asked. “They taped it to my door. Right to my front door.”
Julian shook his head. “No,” he said, looking closer. The letters had been drawn so precisely that at first they seemed machine-made. Then he noticed that the writer had pressed down on the marker more forcefully for some words, more lightly for others, and that the lines sloped downward at an angle. There was a stain, oil or grease, under the letter W. They’d used electrical, not household, tape to affix the paper to the door. These clues led him to no conclusions, but they were clues nonetheless.
“It’s a fake,” Waters said. “Gotta be. You tell me they got him seven months ago and now they bring the sign? It’s bullshit.”
“I didn’t see anybody,” said Julian.
The wife crossed her arms. Julian had never seen her up close, but from this distance she seemed younger than Waters, thinner, certainly, but not by much, with matted hair and cheeks round as a cherub’s.
Waters shook the sign at him. “How much more can we take?” he said. His face contorted with a jolt, and his knees buckled, as if someone had just stabbed him in the leg.
“He won’t tell you,” the wife called out. “Will he?”
“Take this to the police,” said Julian, taking a step back. “They can do fingerprints. They can’t let this go on. It’s against the law.”
“No police care,” Waters said. He walked off, the cuffs of his pants dragging on the concrete.
“I’ve been watching for them,” said Julian. “From my window there.”
Waters turned around.
“It’s got to be teenagers. But I haven’t seen anybody. If I had, I’d—” He searched his mind for the course of action he’d likely have taken, then said something less likely: “I’d have chased them down. Wrung their necks. Or called the cops right then.”
“It’s not teenagers,” said Waters. “It’s two men. A woman, too. I saw all three of them, from the back. They’re lucky I don’t know their faces.”
The old lady—Waters’s mother? Mother-in-law?—appeared on the porch in her wide-brimmed straw hat and handed the wife a screaming baby. It was the first time Julian had seen her since last summer, when she’d sat knitting in her rocker all hours of the afternoon. She must have been making booties or a blanket for this new child.
“Jesus Christ,” said Waters. “That one never stops.”
“Your youngest?” Julian asked.
“Yeah.”
“How many do you have?”
“Four. With Abie.”
A car approached, slowed, then continued on. One of the Lamberti brothers. Waters stood in the driveway, watching him go.
“I don’t believe in it,” Julian said. “What those people are doing. I just want you to know. It’s my neighborhood, too.”
“You’re right,” said Waters. “It’s your neighborhood. That’s absolutely right.”
Back in his living room, with the drapes drawn and the newspaper before him on the coffee table, Julian tried to count the Waters children. There was Abe, of course. There was the new baby. He’d seen a girl once, too; she had braided hair, shiny shoes, and an unremarkable face. He could not recall setting eyes on a fourth child, but it was possible there were two girls close in age, and he had simply never seen them together. One of them, the younger perhaps, may have grown too afraid to attend school, so she stayed at home to help the mother with the new baby and the old lady. Julian imagined the girls lying beside each other at night, worried that if their brother could be kidnapped, so could they. Whenever they heard a noise—the egg against the window, the wind, the creak of their father’s pacing across the floorboards—they clutched each other and promised never to separate. Then, when morning came, one caught the bus for school, and the other pulled the covers up over her head.
LATE AFTERNOON THE next day, Holy Saturday, Julian spotted a familiar-looking woman at the deli counter of Angelo’s Market. He hid behind a tall display of lemonade cans and watched her. She squatted in front of the assortment of cold cuts, pointed to the turkey, and asked for a half-pound. “As thin as you can get it,” she said, enunciating every syllable, as if Angelo’s teenaged son did not speak English. It was Helen, from Mrs. Stella’s. In profile, she looked older
than Julian remembered from the nights he played for her. She had heavier eyes, and fine streaks of gray in her hair. He’d last seen her on Christmas Eve, when the lights in the restaurant were playing tricks, and the candles flickered between her and that bearded man she’d brought to dinner.
Today she wore slacks, a formfitting black sweater, and a light jacket. A gold pin in the shape of a musical note was affixed to the jacket. She pointed to the boiled ham, requested a half-pound, and consulted her shopping list. As she read, she bit the tip of her thumbnail. Julian hoped she was planning a big Easter dinner, just so he could watch her stand there, ordering, for a while.
He sneezed, but Helen did not turn around. He cursed Angelo Montale for his dusty store. If the man owned a rag or a broom, Julian never saw him or any of his employees use it. He relied on the heavy foot traffic and high turnover to keep his grocery store looking fresh, but the quarter-inch layer of dust on the less popular items—jars of mayonnaise, bottles of maple syrup, the lemonade cans behind which Julian crouched—told the tale all too clearly. There was such a thing as loyalty, though, and Angelo had run this store for as long as Julian had been alive. The five separate times in the ‘30s when he’d been laid off from Bancroft Mill, Julian’s father had even worked here part-time at the meat counter. There was no other Italian-run grocery in the neighborhood, unless you counted the fruit vendors who pushed their carts up and down Union, or Arienzo’s Fish Market, or Three Little Bakers on Lancaster Avenue. The prices at the A&P were a few cents lower, but you had to risk the chance someone would catch you and curse you for patronizing the place. Once you crossed the line into the A&P, what would stop you from getting your bread from anyone but Lamberti? Your cigarettes from anywhere but Arturo Cozzi’s Smoke Shop? You could not plead poverty as a defense, since Angelo was known to offer half-price to any Italian immigrant who’d lost his job, or found himself with a new baby, or gambled away his savings.
Julian’s mother had taught him to bring his own dust rag to this market. When no one was watching, he’d wipe off the packages of dried pasta, the tops of the orange juice bottles, the cans of tomatoes. He put these in the wire basket, which he’d also cleaned. A trip to Angelo’s took a great deal of time, as Julian always felt obliged to stop and talk with one or another of his parents’ friends. They’d ask the same question—“How are you getting along?”—and he’d offer the same answer: “Bene, bene. Just fine.” They’d say they heard he was playing the accordion at Mrs. Stella’s, and he’d answer with a lie he’d told so many times that he almost started to believe it: he’d broken two fingers shoveling snow that winter, and they still hadn’t healed.
“What a shame!” they’d say. “My nephew told me you played very nice.”
“Time heals all wounds,” Luigi Dellucci liked to say, in reference to the fingers. He’d offered the same condolence at both his parents’ funerals. He might have said the same thing to Julian as an apology for the daughter who’d rejected him.
“Signor Giulio Fabbri!” said a voice behind him.
Ida Grasso.
This time, Helen immediately looked over at Julian, and expressed—he was almost sure—an unannoyed surprise. The surprise may have even been called pleasant, if he’d had the time to consider it. Instead he had to contend with Ida, who’d grabbed his arm and slipped hers through it. She talked on and on in her throaty Napolitana dialect: Did he want to meet them at nine o’clock Mass tomorrow morning, or was he going to the vigilia tonight? Did he prefer cauliflower or broccoli with his roast? Did he like the wine her brother had brought him week before? It was expensive Chianti, triple the price of the kind they normally drank; the only problem was it stained her teeth and gave her gas. She wondered if maybe she just wasn’t used to the good kind.
“Could be,” said Julian.
Helen tilted her head at him, smiled, and walked toward the other end of the store. She picked up an onion, examined it, and put it back on the pile.
Ida’s basket held only her purse. “You want to hear something funny?” she asked. “I forgot why I came here. We need two things for tomorrow, but I can’t remember which two. I never write anything down.”
“If you walk around a little, maybe it will come to you,” said Julian.
“That’s what I was doing,” she said.
“Well, buon fortuna!” Julian said. “Good luck!” He broke free, patted her shoulder, and kissed her on both cheeks. “I need onions.”
“Oh, we have plenty of onions,” Ida said, and headed in the opposite direction.
Ten steps and there was only a bin of potatoes between him and Helen. “Excuse me, Signora,” he began.
She turned to him.
“I meant to say good afternoon before, but—you know Ida Grasso, don’t you? Her husband is the owner of Mrs. Stella’s—she was talking to me first, and now—I didn’t want you to think me rude, or that I didn’t recognize you, so—” He bowed slightly. “Good afternoon. Happy Easter.”
She nearly succeeded in returning the greeting, but Julian interrupted her. “I didn’t know you shopped here. I never saw you anywhere but the restaurant. Do you live in this neighborhood? I thought for some reason you had a house maybe in the suburbs? Somebody told me that, I think?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I live in Forty Acres.”
The Irish neighborhood. Just a few blocks east, the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, but a land foreign as Cuba. “And you come here for—” Julian looked in her basket. In addition to the ham and turkey, she had bought ground beef and a pound of lamb shoulder.
“I don’t like our butcher,” she explained. “Henderson’s, on Delaware Avenue. Don’t ever go there. He cheated my husband out of money once. I tell everybody I meet not to give him any business.”
“Well, my heart belongs to Angelo,” Julian said, his hand on his chest. In his mind he had a picture of the bearded man with whom Helen had eaten Christmas Eve dinner. They did not seem like husband and wife, though; they spoke too formally with each other, like boss and secretary. And the girl—Abigail, he remembered—looked nothing like him.
She smiled, balanced her basket on the pile of potatoes, and folded her arms. “So why don’t you play anymore? We all miss you. They didn’t fire you, did they?”
Julian scanned the aisle for Ida. No sign of her. He nearly told Helen the lie about his fingers, then stopped himself. “I wasn’t fired,” he said. “I just—”
“It took too much out of you.”
“Yes.”
“I could see that.”
“You could?”
She pointed to the gold pin on her sweater. “I’m a music teacher. Piano, violin, some guitar. To kids mostly, and a few adults. I can see when someone feels every note. Never tried the accordion, though.”
Julian said, “It’s not a lady’s instrument.”
“No, I guess not,” she said, and laughed. “I miss hearing you, though.” She looked over his shoulder. “We go to Mrs. Stella’s quite often, and I always tell Abigail—she’s my daughter—wasn’t it much nicer when that man was playing?”
“That’s very kind,” said Julian.
“I’m a terrible cook, you see. And Abigail deserves to eat well once in a while. She turned twelve last month. March 14.”
“I met her,” said Julian. “You probably don’t remember. On Christmas Eve. She pulled on my jacket.” He smiled.
Helen covered her mouth. Up close, Julian could now see that every one of her fingernails had been bitten down. She wore only one ring—an emerald on her right hand. “I’m sorry about that,” she said, and picked up her basket. “You have a good memory.”
“She’s a beautiful young lady,” said Julian.
He helped her find the right onion and advised her against the smallish and bruised tomatoes. They were the last of a bad bunch, and besides, the vendors on Union always had the freshest produce. The difference was night and day. But she was too timid to bargain with the vendors, she explained. Half the tim
e she didn’t understand them; the other half they flirted with her.
“I can help you some weekend,” said Julian, head down, eyes fixed on an almond that had fallen into the barrel of walnuts. “I know how they work. I can get you a good deal.”
She didn’t say anything. Not yes, not no.
They got in line. She set her items on the counter beside the cash register, and at that moment Julian decided he, too, had finished his day of shopping. He would walk her out, gentleman-like, to her car or the bus or maybe all the way to Forty Acres.
He could feel Angelo and his nephew watching him from the deli, on the opposite end of the store. They had their arms around each other, snickering. Ida had disappeared. Helen’s purchases, which included a lot of meat, a carton of cigarettes, and a swirled candy stick, came to $6.33; his purchases—a can of grapefruit juice, a box of pretzels—to forty-eight cents.
“That’s all you’re getting?” Helen asked.
Julian shrugged. “It’s all I need.”
“You should talk to my mother,” said Helen, as he escorted her out of Angelo’s. It was a warm evening, and Fifth Street was crowded with people. The men wore short-sleeved shirts; the women carried their fur wraps on their arms. “‘You spend too much money,’ she says—on food, on restaurants, on clothes. She’ll be happy you helped me save a few pennies. I don’t mind it, either.”
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