by Tony Romano
“Do you think Benito—do you think he looks after us up there?”
A slow rocking, barely perceptible, took root in him. He shrugged. “What do you mean ‘looks after us’?”
“I’m not sure what I mean.”
Still rocking, he brought the front of his sneakers together, the heels apart.
“Do you think about him a lot?”
“Uh-hum.” All anger was drained from him.
“Me, too.” She took in a deep breath so she could go on. “And does praying help?”
“I guess.”
“When you pray, do you, you know—how do you pray?”
“I just pray.”
“For his soul?”
“For everyone’s.”
She felt small and full at the same time.
“Sometimes,” she said, taking in the other porches, “I wish I was God.” She let this idea settle. “And when you prayed, Anthony, for everyone’s souls, I’d let you know I was listening. I’d give you a little sign. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.”
He leaned and rested his chin on his palm, his eyes downcast. “That would be nice,” he said.
“I’d let you know somehow that sad things aren’t going to last forever, that you and your family are not cursed. I’d make sure that kind words get delivered to you, to help you along.”
She heard Mama’s steps approaching the kitchen, so she lowered her voice, knowing their talk would be cut short, part of her relieved because she wasn’t sure she could conceal her doubts about God.
“I wouldn’t give anyone too much sadness,” she added. “Just enough so they appreciate all the good things they have. And I’d be forgiving, even if people didn’t believe in me.” She nudged him. “Do you think I’d be a good God, Anthony?”
He smiled shyly, maybe embarrassed by her blasphemy.
“Tonino,” Mama called. “Alfredo.”
“Coming, Ma.”
He stood and reached into his back pocket. He faced Victoria and placed his rosary in her palm. “You know all those things you said, about what you would do?”
Her gaze swept from the midnight-blue beads balled in her hand to his steady brown eyes.
Without rancor or irony, he said, plainly, “I think He already does all those things, Vicki.”
He didn’t know how to think about it.
He hadn’t expected to feel such relief, but that’s what overpowered him. He was eighteen and no longer a virgin. He wanted to tell his father to sew a patch on his sleeve. Look, Papa. I’m a man, he could say. From here on I’m a man. Although he’d always seen himself as apart from the guys who hung around the steps of the school talking about nailing this broad or that babe, he felt he’d joined their ranks; he felt an odd sense of accomplishment—not for what he’d done with Sylvia Gomez but for what she’d irreversibly done for him. At the same time, he knew he wouldn’t tell anyone, not until the episode had become just another story in his life, as if he were talking about another person. And when he told the story, he’d forget Sylvia’s last name and bridge the gap of their ages some, maybe make it her car they rode in so that the listener—some girl, he imagined—wouldn’t judge him too harshly for chasing a married woman just months after his little brother died. And he’d leave out the tears. If he told about the crying, he’d have to mention Benito and be reminded of what a prick he was for breathing and working and drifting away from the knowing that should have paralyzed him still. For weeks after the funeral he couldn’t finish a piss without the cold truth buckling him. And now there were chunks of time when he’d lose himself in mindless thoughts about a car he yearned for or the feast back in June or a new method for stocking the bar or just a fall breeze. His mother and father and even his sister hadn’t for a moment forgotten. He saw in the blankness of their stares what he should have felt.
He’d cried, sure. But he couldn’t sustain that pure ache of memory that gripped him at first. When the pain left for good, Santo feared, so would Benito. So when the tides of grief swept through him, he welcomed the pain. He welcomed the bright images of Benito at the kitchen table spooning down a lump of mashed potatoes and smearing a handful across his ear. The brightness was always fused with the shadowy fever images, sometimes choking Santo, but he welcomed that, too.
At the bar now, he paced from one end to the other, wiping a table along the way, nodding to the two leathery-faced men playing scopa in the booth. Out front, a few regulars milled around chomping on toothpicks, watching traffic whiz by. The days were getting shorter and they wouldn’t be out front much longer. Santo ducked in and out of the back to rinse his rag, exaggerating every movement so that Uncle Vince on his hard-backed chair just outside the screen door might be distracted from his smoking. Vince sat with legs crossed, his hands cupped on his knee, a trail of smoke curling from his fingers. When he drew the cigarette to his mouth, he pulled in quick, short drags, just enough to let out a single ring of smoke each time. He seemed absorbed and absent at the same time, clumps of ash falling to his black canvas shoes and the crease in his trousers.
Santo knew what he wanted but didn’t know how to form the questions. And he needed to act quickly before his father returned. Agostino spent most of his time at the store these days, but he’d disappear without notice for stretches at a time, sometimes fifteen minutes, sometimes an hour. Hands in his pockets, he’d walk the streets. Birdwalking, Vince called it.
“Mio Santo. How many?” Vince called from outside.
“Two at a booth. And Carlo and a few others out front.”
“When more come, you call, hey.”
“I call.”
Santo twisted and squeezed the rag and watched the water pool up around the drain, then swirl down, a satisfying sound. The scent of rat poison and the disinfectant meant to hide that caught in his throat. Rag in hand, he took a step toward the screen. “Did you call in the order?”
Vince turned in his chair and shook his head. He blew out a smoke ring and watched it rise. He’d get to it, his eyes said. Anyone other than Santo would have remained doubtful, and a small part of Santo always was, but his uncle came through each time, never annoyed by Santo’s reminders.
“You Papá. He birdwalk, hey?”
“I guess.” Santo put his face to the screen and looked out through the mesh of wire squares. “Did you catch the rat?”
“Ha.” Vince leaned over the table and stubbed out his cigarette in one of the silver ashtrays Santo emptied each night. “No worry. I get,” he said. As he leaned back he winced in pain and touched his hip. “Acchhhh.”
Santo played with the hook on the screen, latching and unlatching it to the eyelet.
“Where does he go?” Santo asked. “When he walks, where does he go?”
Vince brushed the ash off his pants with the back of his hand. “No place,” he said. “Joosta jaywalk. Ha.”
“It’s ‘just,’ not ‘joost,’” Santo said.
“Che?”
“Nothing. Forget about it. I was joosta making fun.”
Vince shrugged and tilted back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head. “You tell me forget, I forget.”
Santo stepped outside and wiped Vince’s table. “So he doesn’t stop anywhere? Maybe visit someone along the way? Stop for coffee maybe? A cup of coffee?”
Vince’s brow tightened, his amused grin slowly fading. His gaze swept from the rag to Santo’s eyes. He straightened his back. “Coff, you say? We have coff. Every day I make coff.”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone else, you know, makes coffee better.” Santo wanted to wink like he’d seen Eddie do, but winking didn’t come naturally to him. But Vince understood.
“Mio Santo. You talk crazy. Why you talk crazy, hey?”
His hands were moving wildly now, and he broke off into Italian, damning America and the boat that brought him.
Santo sank into the chair across from his uncle, certain now that Vince knew all about the girl at the feast and the baby. The
baby was a boy. Some detail about that night told him the baby was a boy, but he couldn’t recall what it was. He fixed his gaze on his uncle, took in his long face and day-old whiskers. Vince knew. Santo’s father and Vince had talked about the girl, at this table maybe, and she had caused shouting and table tremors. Uncle Vince wouldn’t have been able to grin and shrug this away. Not this. Not then, not now.
But would Vince help him find this girl and her baby?
Santo brushed off a leaf with his rag, anticipating his uncle’s myriad denials and questions. Why you need to find? his uncle would say. Is no you busyness. This girl, è una putana. She make baby with someone else. Mio Santo. Santo, mio Santo. After you find, wadda you gonna do? Make one big famiglia?
Until now, Santo hadn’t thought that far ahead. He knew only this much. He had a baby brother out there, a half brother or whatever they called him, and he wanted to look in his eyes to see those wide brown orbs gazing back, the baby in some primal way sensing the tie between them. And Santo would lift the boy high with both hands to let him know he hadn’t been abandoned, that his veins ran wide with Peccatori blood, that his lineage was composed of proud people who worked without complaint, who savored bread and wine and who danced and swore, who faltered and fell, too, but endured and loved without condition.
He had the other thoughts, too, of course, the thoughts that rose swiftly in a flash of white and seized his heart, hope bursting out of him. Maybe, just maybe, he’d see a part of Benito in this baby. And then he’d get another chance. He’d be a brother to this one. Maybe Papa’s mistake wasn’t a mistake after all. Maybe there were no mistakes. Soon enough, these surging thoughts gave way to despair, though, because he knew, he knew with a certainty that doubled him over, that this baby couldn’t replace Benito, that nothing could. Even in the midst of his despair, however, or maybe because of it, Santo could never talk himself out of finding the poor kid who might otherwise grow up without a big brother. Sweet obligation, Santo thought. He couldn’t recall where he’d heard the term, school or church probably, but the words surfaced whenever he thought about his June-feast brother. That boy out there was his sweet obligation.
“Remember that night we were looking out at the Ferris wheel? The chairs seemed to come out of the trees. You remember that?”
“Upstairs.”
Santo leaned forward, his chin almost touching the white tabletop. He could still push himself away from the table, he thought, sweep up the front. The front could always use sweeping. Instead, he imagined he was Eddie Milano, with the same assured voice and the cagey eyes that wouldn’t be averted. “Something strange happened that night,” Santo said. “The old ladies were carrying the Madonna, collecting money the way they do, and everything was so loud, you couldn’t think. I was holding my damn ears it was so loud. I turned around, I don’t know why, but I turned around and behind me, down the street, this crazy old lady, an old bag…she wanted to—I don’t know how to say it—she wanted to strangle Papa.”
“You Papá?” Vince tried to look surprised and then baffled, but he had an awful time hiding what he knew, his bushy brows curling and uncurling with each new thought.
“She kept poking her finger at him. Like this. If her fingers were a gun…pfff.” He reached for a cigarette from the table. “Did Papa ever mention anything about that night? What the old lady wanted, anything like that?”
“The feast, hey?”
“Yeah. Right on the sidewalk. In the middle of everything.”
“Joosta you Papá and old lady, hey?”
Santo nodded. “Do you remember Papa telling you anything about that, Zio? What she wanted with him?”
“Hmm…old lady.” He glanced at his thumbnail and then used it as a toothpick between his two front teeth. “I no rememb.”
“You no rememb, huh?”
“What. Why you laugh?”
“I don’t know. You have such a good memory, that’s all.”
“If I no rememb, I no rememb. What I gotta do?”
“Help me.”
“Help?”
“Just tell me her name.”
Vince sprang from his chair and began pacing from the table to the screen door, lamenting in two languages to every saint he knew and some he didn’t about the capo tosto young people today. They didn’t know when to leave things alone. They opened everything, they had to peek inside, they had to know the secrets that were better left buried. Some matters were private and should remain private forever. But not today. Not in the year one thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven. Televisione, that’s what ruined everything. He stopped pacing and bore down on his nephew. “Santo,” he pleaded. “You tell before, old lady she crazy. No? That’s all. She crazy. Now you forget, hey.”
He looked like he might say more, but he turned abruptly and left.
Santo watched the screen door slap shut behind him as he disappeared to the front. His uncle wouldn’t give him the chance to protest or explain or push further, and Santo didn’t blame him. His uncle would wonder for the rest of the night whether Santo had seen the girl and the baby, too. But he wouldn’t ask.
When the lull came at ten as it usually did, Santo crept up to Vince’s apartment to retrieve the store books. Every time he gathered them he wanted to laugh, as if keeping them separate would foil some surprise investigation by the IRS. Now that he knew his uncle’s elaborate accounting system, he was the only one to ever touch the books, jotting down the day’s receipts in one, and inflating and deflating the figures in the others. He enjoyed every part of the process—separating and stacking the dollar bills, totaling each pile, writing the numbers in the gridded ledgers. Seeing the day’s inky numbers dry on the page gave him the sense that his life was moving forward. The numbers mattered. The numbers he could control.
The figuring wouldn’t begin until midnight, after the doors were locked, but tonight Santo wanted a look around. He placed the first book from Vince’s pajama drawer on the kitchen table and began searching the apartment. If he heard someone coming up the stairs, he would race to the bedroom closet for the second book and claim he was getting ready for the counting. Vince was so inept at hiding things, mainly because he worried he’d forget where he hid them, that Santo felt certain he’d find something, some clue about where he could find his half brother. Thinking about him that way, as his brother, seemed reassuring and jarring at the same time, like trying on one of his father’s tailored patterns just before he stitched the seams.
He moved quickly from room to room, stopping at the kitchen each time to listen for footsteps. The lights around the neon arrow outside the front window blinked lazily, washing the apartment in a haze of pink with each pulse. After searching both bedrooms, he’d found two clumps of dollar bills stuffed into a single sock, a handful of envelopes shoved inside a bigger envelope, a small stack of magazines featuring women partially clothed, and a box of old photographs, nothing he hadn’t seen before.
He couldn’t tell whether he’d been searching for five minutes or twenty-five, so he slipped back down to the store and refilled drink after drink. Two rounds later, as a trolley bus clanked past Grand Avenue, an image took hold of him. He’d been mulling over where else he could search and remembered the envelopes. He hadn’t been sure what he was searching for—an address book, some personal belonging of the baby that his father had stole away—but not an envelope. This one, letter size, thrown in among the stack of correspondence from beverage distributors and utility companies, must have caused Santo to pause because in his mind’s eye now he could see the brown letters emblazoned across the return: Saint Somebody Savings & Loan. His uncle didn’t trust banks—number one crook Americano, he called them—which is why Santo had paused upstairs. Whenever they passed a bank, his uncle scoffed and talked about how money was handled in the old country. The time he bought his Cadillac, he took out a fistful of cash from his pocket. He might as well have been buying a loaf of bread.
Santo bounded up the stairs and, short of bre
ath, stared at the envelope with the brown block letters that would lead him to his brother. He gently pushed back the seal and reached inside. A waxy yellow money-order receipt. The numbers stamped by a machine: 10,000 United States Dollars. And typed below that: Ten Thousand and Zero/Hundred Dollars. Santo’s hand shook. He studied the name imprinted in the carbon. He tucked the receipt back in the bank envelope and that one into the larger envelope and whispered the name. He wanted to hear it. He wanted to remember.
4
When she was nine Victoria came home talking about the bomb drills they’d practiced at school with their desks, great big desks with florid iron legs that would protect them from all dangers, and Agostino couldn’t find it in himself to reassure her that their house would never be bombed. After some delay, he told her everything would be okay, of course, but he knew his words came too late and that each reassurance fell hollow on both their ears. It seemed to him that the older his children got, the more distant he got from them. He once believed that the American education he paid for had split him apart from his children. But now he understood the silence between them. He couldn’t stop the bombs or halt the disease or lower the fever. He couldn’t do a goddamn thing. And as his children grew older, this revelation slowly dawned on them, too.
The moment he lay down in his bed and reached to his wife to satisfy his cursed urges, the moment he planted his wetness, he’d brought sure death to all his children. That was his gift to them, the one burden he could never lift. Having children, Agostino decided, was the most selfish of all acts.
These ideas had crossed his mind before in brief snatches, but now they became his obsession. In the middle of pouring a drink or counting change, he could think of nothing else. If a customer asked how he was doing, he’d fight off the twitch at the corner of his mouth by tightening his lips, creating an inward sort of smile, and spout off about Russia or Sputnik or whatever else was in the news that day. But the whole time he’d be thinking about his gift to his children.