The Black Madonna

by Louisa Ermelino

  “Where’s the matches?”

  Salvatore looked at Jumbo. “The matches, you went in the kitchen for matches, you came back with eggplant. You got us sitting here like dopes.”

  “Big deal,” Jumbo said. His mouth was full. “Whatta you want? Can’t you see I’m eating?”

  Salvatore stood up. “I’ll get them,” he said.

  “There’s wine in the kitchen,” Nicky called after him, “in the corner under the sink, you want to get it.”

  Salvatore came back from the kitchen with a bottle and three glasses. “The hell with the wine,” he said. “Look what I found.” He held up a bottle of grappa, labeled with adhesive tape marked with the date it was made. He took the matches out of his pocket and lit his cigarette and Nicky’s. He inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, and then three perfect smoke rings. He filled their glasses, and proposed a toast to Sister Augustina. They gave the fascist salute and fell back on the couch.

  They were very glad that Nicky’s mother had gone uptown, that Nicky had no brothers or sisters, that they were alone in the apartment. “You’re the luckiest guy in the world,” Jumbo told Nicky. “You don’t go to school, you got no brothers or sisters busting your balls. Just you and your mother . . . imagine if she went to work. We’d have the whole place to ourselves all the time. We could get some girls to come over.” Jumbo hoisted up his pants. “Rosanna Montenegro . . .” He moved his tongue over his lips.

  Rosanna Montenegro had come from Italy and was put three grades back because she couldn’t speak English. She was a big girl, she had tits, and Salvatore swore he had seen a stain on her uniform skirt one morning when they were pledging allegiance to the flag. Sister Augustina had sent her home right after prayers.

  “Rosanna Montenegro?” Salvatore said. “What would you do with Rosanna Montenegro? Eat her lunch?”

  “You’re right,” Jumbo said. “What would I want with Rosanna Montenegro? Your sister’s easier.”

  “I don’t have a sister.”

  “If you did, she’d be a mattress.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want your fat-ass sisters if they were all laying here naked with bows on.”

  “How about Marielena?” Nicky said.

  “Marielena? She’s flat like an ironing board.”

  “She smells.”

  “Her socks are dirty.”

  “Maureen?” Nicky said.

  “The Irish one?”

  “All Maureens are Irish, stupid.”

  “What’s so great about Maureen?”

  Nicky leaned back and closed his eyes. He conjured up Maureen. “She’s got blue eyes and . . .”

  Salvatore put his hand around his throat and pretended to choke himself. “Give me a break,” he said. “She’s got all those disgusting freckles.”

  “Yeah,” Jumbo said. “They look like dirt.”

  Nicky sat up. “Well, anyway, you can forget it. My mother’s not getting no job. Why would she? My father takes care of everything. He sends us money all the time. He’s always sending presents.” Nicky pointed to the dolls on the shelf above their heads. “Look at that,” he said. “The house is full of stuff he sends.”

  “Yeah, your old man’s great, Nicky,” Salvatore said, “but listen . . .” He refilled their glasses. “I figured out how to get you a crutch.”

  “Where? How? Not a bum. Not from some Bowery bum.”

  “Naw, there’s this old guy on Sullivan Street, Orlando. I deliver his groceries from the store. The thing is, I wanted to find you two crutches, but Orlando’s only got one.”

  “Didn’t he get two?”

  “Yeah, but he lost one. That’s my point. If this one disappears, he’ll think he lost it.”

  “One crutch?”

  “He gets around good with it. If he can, you can.”

  “I never seen him.”

  “No one sees him. He don’t go out.”

  “How come?”

  “He don’t want nobody to call him a cripple.”

  “That makes sense. I can understand that,” Jumbo said.

  “You and my mother,” Nicky said. “So how you gonna get it?”

  “When he’s watching television.”

  “He’s got a television?” Jumbo said.

  “Yeah, my father got it for him since he’s stuck in the house all the time.”

  “Christ, I wish I had a television.”

  “Shut up, Jumbo. This is important,” Nicky said, turning to Salvatore. “So how you gonna get the crutch?”

  “Easy. Orlando’s in love with Milton Berle. You know how he dresses up on the show like a woman”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, when Uncle Miltie’s in drag, Orlando thinks it’s really a woman, just his kind of woman, I guess, because he goes nuts. He starts throwing kisses, loud smacks you can hear all the way in the kitchen. His eyes water. He hates when Milton Berle comes back on as a man. Then he starts cursing at the television. He gets so excited and mad that he don’t even hear me when I leave. He don’t even know I’m gone.”

  “So what about the crutch?”

  “He lays it on the floor by his chair. I’ll just slide it out while he’s smooching with Uncle Miltie.”

  “You think he’s a homo?” Jumbo said. He had found biscotti in the kitchen and was dunking them in his grappa.

  “Who? Milton Berle?”

  “No, this old guy, Orlando. You should tell your father. He should know.”

  “Jumbo, you are a real mamaluke. It’s a good thing you eat all the time ’cause the things that come out of your mouth . . .” Salvatore flipped his cigarette butt out the back window and lit another.

  “What if you get caught?” Nicky said. “Won’t he know it’s you?”

  “Nah, he’s half gone. I’m telling you. He combs his mop. He gives it haircuts.”

  “Was he a barber?”

  Salvatore shook his head. “He just likes things neat.”

  “When can you get it?”

  “This afternoon, tomorrow, first chance I get.”

  “Where will I keep it?”

  “In Jumbo’s house.”

  “Why my house?”

  “Your house’s such a mess, nobody will know it’s there.”

  “Hey . . .”

  “Take it easy, Jumbo. It’s no reflection on you. All of you stuffed in those three rooms. Your mother alone could fill it up. You’re a big family.”

  “In more ways than one . . .” Nicky started to giggle. “I’m sorry . . .” he said.

  Salvatore was laughing now too. So was Jumbo. The bottle of grappa was almost empty. They couldn’t stop laughing. Salvatore poured the last of it into his glass and tipped the bottle over on the floor. “One dead soldier,” he said. The three of them screamed. Jumbo fell off the couch and rolled under the table. And then they heard Matty J.

  Matty J had opened the window in his mother’s bedroom. His mother had made the front room her bedroom, the room that looked out over Spring Street. Matty J had opened the window without the fire escape as far as it could go and he was straddling the window ledge, one leg dangling over the head of the gargoyle that decorated the line of windows along the top floor.

  “I’m going to jump,” he shouted until every window on both sides of the street opened. People pushed each other to see, they leaned out their windows to watch. Matty J shouted until the people who lived in the back ran outside or into the front apartments without knocking to see what was going on. A crowd gathered in the street and stood there looking up.

  No one on Spring Street had ever jumped out a window. Cesare Garibaldi’s wife had fallen out shaking her dust mop, and a super had gone down hooking up a new clothesline. Charlie Esposito threatened to jump when his wife died, but that had just been talk.

  Salvatore and Jumbo ran to the front window, dragging Nicky along between them. They had the best seats in the house. Matty J was out the window on the fifth floor of the building directly across from them. Matty J’s mother screamed as
loudly as Matty J.

  Matty J’s father pulled on his arm. Matty J pulled back and tilted farther out the window and his shoe fell off and hit Margie from the second floor on her forehead as she was looking up. The shoe was a loafer, soft as butter. Only this morning, his mother had shined it with a soft cloth. Matty J was shaking his fist at the sky and cursing God.

  “He lost at the track,” Luisa Carelli told Annamaria Petrino. They were standing downstairs looking up. “Last week it was a card game.” She blew her nose and put the handkerchief in the front pocket of her apron.

  Annamaria Petrino made a face. “His wife spoils him,” she said. “He’s getting worse. He never tried to jump before. Sometimes he bangs his head against the door downstairs but he never tried to jump.”

  “He always goes up the roof when he loses.”

  “Yeah, but only to be nearer to God, to curse Him from a closer distance.”

  Inside, the boys elbowed each other out of the window. “Matty J’s crazy,” Salvatore said.

  “Crazy like a fox,” Jumbo answered. “He’s forty-five years old and he’s never had a job. That’s my kind of crazy.”

  “Here come the cops,” Nicky said. “What are they gonna do?”

  “Talk him in,” Salvatore said.

  “I didn’t know cops did things like that.”

  “Yeah, they’re regular good Samaritans when they’re not breaking heads.”

  “Shh,” Nicky said. “I want to hear what’s going on.”

  Nicky listened to the policemen cajole Matty J. There were two of them. They were tall and blond. He imagined their nameplates said Donovan and Murphy. They talked to Matty J until he stopped screaming and then they took his arm and pulled him inside.

  Matty J’s mother was kissing the policeman’s hand, the one that held Matty J’s arm. “You saved my son,” she said. “You brought him back from the edge of hell, the jaws of death.” She covered the policeman’s hands with her own. Her husband wiped the tears from her eyes with his handkerchief.

  “We have to take him to Bellevue,” the cop said, “for observation.”

  Matty J’s mother was a small woman. She looked up at the big, blond policeman. “You crazy?” she screamed, and she bit him. She dug her teeth into the hand she had been caressing. Her husband held her shoulders. The policeman was shouting. His partner was pulling him out the door. Matty J’s mother followed them down the stairs and into the street. “You leave my son where he is. You don’t touch my son. Murderers. Killers.” The policemen worked their way through the crowd and got into their car. Everyone watched them drive away. “The nerve . . .” Matty J’s mother said when the police car turned the corner. Everyone surrounded her in sympathy.

  Margie from the second floor gave her Matty J’s shoe. An hour later, Matty J was outside the building with the racing form. He was clean-shaven, his loafers polished to a dull sheen.

  The three boys hung out the window until the street was back to normal. Salvatore looked at Nicky and Jumbo. “You know what those cops are saying?”

  “Dumb guineas,” Jumbo said.

  “Crazy wops,” Nicky answered.

  “Sick dagos.”

  “Dopey greasers.”

  They hit and pushed each other. They laughed when Nicky fell over. “I’m going to be a cop,” Nicky told them. Jumbo choked. Salvatore bent double. The door grated against the chain.

  “Shit shit shit,” Jumbo said. “It’s your mother.” He crossed himself. Salvatore was out the back window. Jumbo caught his foot between the radiator and the wall. “Help me, help me.”

  Salvatore turned back to pull at Jumbo’s leg. “We can’t leave Nicky like this,” he said to him. “Get back in.”

  “No, No. I can’t. The malocchio. She’ll get me. She hates me.” He looked over his shoulder, yanked at his foot. “You know that, Nicky. Your mother hates me, the truth. She wishes me dead.” His foot pulled free.

  “Nicky’s mother doesn’t make the malocchio. What’s the matter with you?” Salvatore said.

  “She’ll get the woman on Bedford Street. They’re in cahoots. She comes here all the time. My mother sees her. You don’t know. You don’t live in this building. You don’t see what goes on.”

  “For chrissakes, Jumbo.”

  “No, go ahead,” Nicky said. “I’ll be okay.”

  “You sure?” Salvatore said.

  “Yeah, go on. I mean it.” The last thing Nicky saw was the crack of Jumbo’s ass where his shirt had worked its way out of his pants.

  Nicky’s mother banged on the door. “Nicola . . . you in there?” Nicky pulled himself over and took the chain off the door. “Why you don’t answer?” she said. “Why you got the chain on?” He didn’t say anything and she shut the door behind her. She closed the front window and pulled down the shade.

  “Mama,” Nicky said. “You missed it. Matty J tried to jump out the window. The cops saved him.”

  Teresa took off her hat and sat down on the couch. She made a face when she saw the cigarettes and the glasses. She kicked the empty bottle that rolled near her foot. She went over to Nicky and pulled him up by the ear. “All alike,” she said, “all of you.” She pushed him back onto the chair and he started to cry.

  The dolls sat above her head, the fading sunlight caught on the garish colors of their dresses. She sat somber and black beneath them. She followed Nicky’s eyes and looked up at the dolls as if she were seeing them for the first time.

  “The doctor, Mama. What did the doctor say?”

  “In a month.”

  “I’ll walk, Mama. He said that?”

  “He’ll do the operation. He’ll do his best. That’s what he said.” She took off her good shoes and rolled her stockings to under the knee. She went into the bedroom to change her clothes, and when she came out, in her arms were the squares of silk and the sequined slippers and the envelopes with stamps from all over the world. She took the dolls off the shelf and put them in a paper bag.

  “What are you doing?” Nicky asked her.

  “I’m going out,” she said. “You lock the door. Go to bed.” She carried everything down the stairs and walked east on Spring Street, beyond West Broadway, through the darkened streets of rag factories and paper warehouses, and as she went she dumped her treasures bit by bit into the giant bins by the loading platforms where the bums slept in cardboard boxes. It was very late when Nicky felt the weight of her in the bed beside him.

  That morning Teresa had left the house wearing her corset and the black straw hat with the wooden cherries; she didn’t go to see the doctor on Fifth Avenue. Where she went was to the Merchant Seamen’s Union Hall to find Nicky’s father, to find out why the money had stopped, to tell him about his son, about the operation and the fancy doctor, and to ask him to come home and do something to make Nicky walk.

  Teresa had never tried to reach him before, there had never been a reason, but now Nicky needed him. After the doctor, whom she doubted, all she had left was the Madonna. She couldn’t put all her hopes on heaven. Not even the Mother of God was completely dependable. Sometimes a boy needed his father.

  There was no guarantee her prayers would be answered. This she knew. God always answered, the priest would say when the women cried, but sometimes the answer was no.

  At the union hall she gave the name to the man at the counter and waited while he looked in the file cabinets lined up along the wall behind him. “Sabatini . . . Sabatini . . . Angelo . . . Angelo Sabatini . . .” He pulled the card and came back to the counter. “His last ship docked two months ago.”

  “Impossible,” Teresa said. She stood taller and straighter than before and shook her head until the wooden cherries rattled against the brim of the black straw hat and she felt foolish.

  “What can I tell you, lady? It says so right here.”

  “But I just got this,” she said, and handed him the last envelope she had received. It was postmarked the Maldive Islands.

  He turned it over a few times and
gave it back to her. “This is fine, lady, but I’m telling you, Angelo Sabatini ain’t at sea. He’s in the Bronx. Leastwise, that’s where the union’s sending his disability checks.”

  Nicky’s mother looked down at her envelope. The stamps were particularly large and beautiful. They showed bright blue fish flying out of the foam at the tip of an ocean wave. “What’s the date on the postmark?” the man behind the counter asked, leaning over. “When did you get that letter? Sometimes . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. She put the envelope face down on the counter between them. “If he’s not at sea, he’s not at sea. If he’s in the Bronx, he’s in the Bronx.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Yes, you said that.”

  “I said his checks are going to the Bronx.”

  Nicky’s mother didn’t move. She stood there, staring, her hands folded on the counter like a schoolteacher waiting for her class to quiet.

  “Listen. How about I give you the address?”

  “Where he’s living in the Bronx?”

  “I don’t know where he’s living. All I know is where the checks are going. It says here on the card that the checks are going to the Bronx. Look, it’s right on the card.” He held it out to her but she stared straight ahead. “I’ll write it down for you,” he told her, and wrote the address on the back of the envelope from the Maldive Islands and pushed it across the counter to her. “Go see for yourself. What do I know? I just pull the files.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Who are you?” he asked her.

  “His wife.”

  The man looked down at the card in his hand. “Cynthia, right?” He smiled at her. He had a front tooth outlined in gold. “The union knows everything,” he said.

  Teresa smiled back at him. Behind the smile her teeth bit into her bottom lip. Cynthia . . . Teresa thought. What kind of a name was that? Angelo was with a woman named Cynthia, his wife, the card said. Teresa closed her hand around the envelope until the edges of it cut into her skin. Her betrayal was complete. There was a sudden bad taste in her mouth. “Thank you,” she said again. She turned and left the building.

  She went down the nearest subway and studied the map. She asked the man in the change booth how to get to the Bronx and he told her the Bronx was a big place.