Harvey dug his fingers into the muscles at the base of Sylvia’s neck and told her that this should be the worst they ever had to worry about. Italians made beautiful babies, he said, which was the last thing Sylvia wanted to hear, and when Judy called with the news, Sylvia blamed Harvey, convinced his words had jinxed their only child.
“From your mouth to God’s ears,” she told him and took to her bed. The blinds were drawn, her bridge club was left looking for a fourth. Harvey closed the store on Grand Street and went on suicide watch. He sat by Sylvia’s bed alternately holding her hand and patting her leg. He tried not to fall asleep in the chair he had pulled close to the bed but his eyelids drooped and he would wake up stiff and bent and go down to the kitchen only to make Sylvia coffee. She refused to eat and drank the coffee black.
Secretly Harvey was pleased. He thought a grandchild, even a half-Italian grandchild, was a blessing. And just this morning, Judy had promised him they would raise it Jewish.
Jumbo’s reaction to Judy’s news was not so far from Sylvia’s. If he could have fit himself out the window that faced the back alley, he would have jumped. He knew from Matty J’s experience that any attempt to fling himself from the window facing Spring Street would never work. At the first sight of him, and Jumbo would be sighted, between the time and effort it would take to squeeze himself out onto the sill, and the pigeons he would send flapping off the window ledges, half the neighborhood would be in his house pulling him to safety. The other half would be standing in the street looking up, hoping in their heart of hearts that he would jump or fall or in some way complete the drama he’d started before the cops came and put in their two cents.
When Nicky called to see how he was doing, Jumbo cried into the phone. He begged Nicky to come by and when Nicky did, that afternoon, Jumbo brought him into the men’s room at Benvenuto’s and locked the door. “You know, Nicky, if Luca Benvenuto comes by and finds us in here with the door locked he’s gonna think . . . you know what he’s gonna think? He’s a small-minded guy.”
“Then what are we doing in here?”
“I don’t give a shit what he thinks about me, but you’re a detective. You gotta worry about these things. I want you to know what you’re getting into.”
“Jumbo, what is it?”
“What am I gonna do about Judy?”
“Whatta you wanna do?”
“Kill myself.”
“Besides that.”
“Nicky, would I drag you over here if I knew?”
“Marry the girl, Jumbo. Isn’t that what you want?”
“You’re forgetting about Antoinette. My mother, Nicky. She’s gonna kill me. She never even met this girl. How am I gonna hit her with this?”
Nicky shrugged. “Antoinette will come around. One fat baby and you’re home free.”
“What makes you think I’d have a fat baby?”
“Unlock the door before Benvenuto comes by, would you?”
Antoinette was having serious suspicions that something was not right with her son. He had started picking his underwear up off the floor and making his bed and sometimes even putting his plate in the sink, not normal behavior for a boy as coddled as the crown prince of Austria. Antoinette, not the best of housekeepers, noticed these things.
And his appetite was down. Antoinette was a brilliant cook; she held her reputation even in a neighborhood brimming with brilliant cooks, and she very carefully noted when someone did not eat, or in Jumbo’s case devour, her culinary efforts. Just last Sunday, she had made a bonsette, stuffing the pocket of the veal shoulder with egg and bread crumbs and parsley and cheese, sewing it closed with a needle and white thread, breathing in the fragrant steam when she took it out of the oven, before she sliced it into thick pieces.
Jumbo had nibbled. Rosina was the one who couldn’t stand it anymore. “Jumbo, what’s wrong with you?” she asked him with a poke in the ribs, and a red flag went up for Antoinette. She looked around at the round pink faces of the others: Albina, Raffaella, Angelina, and Filomena. They all remained with their forks in midair and then Antoinette knew. If her girls noticed, it wasn’t her babying him. It was serious.
She kept quiet until they gathered together that Monday for coffee, the time of day when they all sat in Antoinette’s kitchen, their children put to nap on couches and beds and chairs, the last moments they had together before their husbands came home, before they had to go home and cook dinner.
“Something’s wrong with your brother,” Antoinette told them.
It was Filomena who twisted her mouth to one side and said, “We’ve been through this, Mama. I’m telling you. Jumbo’s in love.”
“Why d’you think that?” Antoinette said. “I only wish he would find a nice girl. I’m not gonna be here forever. You girls got your own families.” Antoinette put her hand to her heart. “I know, I know how you feel about your brother, but you gotta think about your kids. They have to come first.”
Filomena pushed against her sister Albina’s elbow and the two of them smiled and let Antoinette’s sighs settle into the air fragrant with garlic and oil. “He does have a girl, Mama,” Albina said.
“And it’s about time,” Angelina chimed in. Rosina sat to Angelina’s left and she pushed at her sister’s elbow.
Antoinette sat down, heavily, carefully, in the vinyl kitchen chair that barely contained her. “What makes you say that? If he had a girl he’d bring her home to meet the family, no? If he was serious?” Antoinette shook her head. She got up and started to make more coffee. “I think you’re pazze. All of you. Jumbo had a girl, he would tell me, or somebody would.”
“Times change, Mama. You think this neighborhood knows everything.”
“Pshew . . . I can name ten people who would give their eyeteeth to let me know something like that. Besides, if your brother had a girl, wouldn’t he say something? Jumbo and I are like this,” and Antoinette held up her hand, the second and third fingers intertwined.
“Just tell her, for God’s sake,” Raffaella said.
“What? Tell me what?”
“He’s got a girl, Mama. Tony Four-Heads saw him uptown in Jilly’s. That’s where he met her.”
“So, Jumbo goes with a lot of girls. Nice-looking boy like him. Why not?”
“This is one girl, Mama. She’s a Jew, a schoolteacher from Long Island. He’s been all over uptown with her.”
Antoinette backed against the wall and steadied herself on the tin cabinet where the toaster sat under a floral cover that matched the doily underneath. She moved a chair out from the table and fell into it. “Madonna mia! Whatta’m I gonna do? Rosina, Albina, Filomena, Angelina, Raffaella . . . aiutami!” Antoinette started to breathe heavy. She pulled her dress up and the girls rushed to undo the garters that held her stockings over her knees and cut off her circulation. They fanned her with their handkerchiefs. They pressed a cool washcloth to her sweat-beaded forehead and they held her hands while she cried and raved and they watched the clock. They had to be in their houses by five to have dinner on the table on time.
Antoinette calmed down, sobbing into her hands, wiping her nose with a fist like a giant child. “You go,” she told her daughters. “If I need you, I’ll yell in the hall.” They left in tandem, all five of them, asses and arms and knees bumping against the table and chairs and cabinets that cluttered the kitchen that was big for a tenement kitchen but small for the Mangiacarne sisters. Fifteen minutes of confusion and they were gone, outside in the hallway, dragging kids and bundles up and down the broken marble stairs of 196 Spring Street, and Antoinette was left in her kitchen, alone with the news that her baby boy was seeing a girl, a Jew, and he was keeping it secret from her.
She wouldn’t ask him about it. Antoinette was too clever to switch the balance of power. This she knew. Let him perspire. Life was long. Anything could happen. And in the meantime, she would do her best to adjust fate.
The next day when she heard Nicky’s mother, Teresa, climbing the stairs, she called ou
t to her through the open door. Antoinette didn’t like Teresa, was afraid of her ever since she blamed Jumbo for Nicky falling the three stories into the yard all those years ago, but everyone knew Teresa had experienced a miracle when Nicky had walked at his father’s funeral. And Antoinette believed, like everyone else, that Teresa had the knowledge, that she had tapped into some higher power. White or black, it didn’t matter which, as long as you got what you wanted.
Teresa stopped when she heard her name and looked up to where the voice was coming from. She was surprised and waited to hear it again before she climbed the extra flight of stairs and went to Antoinette’s door and looked inside down the narrow inner hall that was the entrance to the apartment. “Chi è?” she said.
“Teresa, come in, Teresa. It’s Antoinette. Come. I’ve got crespelle I just made. Here, with the powdered sugar. Use as much as you like. Everybody waits for Easter but I make them all the time. I just took out the last one. Look, the oil’s still hot. Maybe you like them with honey? I got honey, too, but come in. Sit down. How long you’re not in my house?”
Teresa entered on the theory that you never show your enemies your true feelings. She accepted Antoinette’s invitation to sit at her big kitchen table covered in flowered oilcloth. Antoinette moved the ironing from one of the chairs and wiped down the spot just in front of Teresa. She took a chipped cup from the pile of dishes in the sink, ran it under hot water, and dried the bottom before she poured Teresa’s coffee. She offered her the carton of milk and a jelly jar filled with sugar lumps and pushed the tower of fried dough across the table to her. The fluted edges of the delicate pastries caught the powdered sugar, which Teresa insisted she preferred over honey.
“These are good, Antoinette,” Teresa said, taking small bites.
“Ah, not thin like yours, I bet, Teresa. Yours, I hear, are like tissue paper.” Teresa smiled at the compliment. Her crespelle were as thin as tissue paper but these weren’t bad.
“It’s so good to see you,” Antoinette went on. “You know, all these years in the same building and we don’t talk, all because of our boys. They’re men now and still we don’t talk. Silly, no?”
Teresa didn’t answer, being a woman of few words and great action, and unlike Antoinette, secretive. Only the saints knew her heart. She sat very still, looking around under her eyelids. It was a very messy house. Teresa had always known this. It was a very messy family. Everyone knew this. But when Antoinette started crying, big fat tears that soaked the front of her apron, Teresa forgot the state of Antoinette’s house and listened. They were, after all, both mothers. Weren’t all women the same under the flesh?
They had both been blessed with one son, only one. Shouldn’t this bring them together? Antoinette told Teresa. And their boys, they had always been close and, thank God, the terrible thing that had happened to Nicky had been fixed. Thank God he had walked.
Teresa nodded. She crossed herself, her right hand going from her forehead to between her breasts, from her right shoulder to her left in the sign of the cross, ending at her lips. She kissed her fingers and opened the thumb and forefinger of her hand to complete the benediction and she leaned back waiting for Antoinette to go on. She knew this was a prelude, that Antoinette had something on her mind.
“How did Nicky walk? How, Teresa? What did you do? The miracle . . . how did it happen?”
“What is it, Antoinette? What do you want?”
Antoinette pulled a handkerchief from her apron pocket and filled it with tears. It was a scrap of cotton in her big red hands. She pulled a second handkerchief out and blew her nose. “I want my son back, Teresa. He’s got a girl, a . . .” and here she lowered her voice, “a mazzucriste!”
Teresa shook her head. “Antoinette,” she said. “I can’t do nothing. My Nicky married an Italian girl and look, she left him with nothing. I don’t even have a grandchild and he has to pay her money! Count your blessings. Maybe she’s a nice girl. Did you meet her?”
“I don’t wanna meet her. I know what happens. I’ll never see him no more. The girls pull. Jumbo don’t have a chance. My brother-in-law, remember Jerry? He married a girl from down South. After that, who saw him? My mother-in-law got cataracts from crying. This woman, she didn’t even want kids. ‘Ugh,’ she told my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law was a saint. You knew her, Teresa. She had fifteen kids and Jerry’s wife tells her ‘Ugh.’”
Antoinette leaned over and Teresa put her arms around her and forgot for a moment that Antoinette had spawned the mortodevame that had crippled her son. Teresa let it go. She patted the hump of Antoinette’s back and muttered something about the woman on Bedford Street who was dead now and had left no heirs. “What about Magdalena?” she said into Antoinette’s ear. “She comes from the other side and I’ve heard things, about a Madonna, a Black Madonna, that she brought with her when she came.”
On Long Island, Sylvia spoke secretly to Harvey. There were things that could be done, she whispered. Ira Fleishberg’s daughter had taken a weekend in Puerto Rico. Maybe Harvey could ask. Didn’t he have Puerto Ricans working in the store? Weren’t there a lot of them on Grand Street?
Harvey was horrified. “A child, Sylvia, our grandchild.”
“Harvey, please, think of it. Our Judy tied forever to that . . . Oh, please. Meet my son-in-law Dumbo. Oh, Harvey . . .”
“Jumbo, his nickname is Jumbo, Sylvia. Be fair.”
Judy, too, was getting edgy. She refused to see Jumbo unless he set the date and here she was getting bigger and bigger faster than she had expected. It was three months and then four. She spent weekends at her parents’ house in tears. Her mother moaned that she had waited too long. Her father held her in his arms and said she could have whatever she wanted. If Alfonso was the boy for her, then they would embrace him like their own son. Judy cried harder, tearing at her hair. Sylvia would leave to put a cold compress over her eyes and lie down in the darkened bedroom until one weekend when she took Harvey aside and shook his arm until it hurt.
“It’s four months, Harvey. Is this putz gonna marry her or what? Enough is enough. Talk to him. Make him do something.”
Harvey and Sylvia went into Judy’s room and told her to call the father of her unborn child and have him come out to Long Island. “No swimming,” Sylvia said. “And definitely no lunch. Tell him to eat before he comes. We have to settle this once and for all.”
When Jumbo got the call, he borrowed Nicky’s car and drove to Long Island, where the Bernsteins sat him down in the living room and said they were willing to let Judy marry him for the sake of the child.
Jumbo was a little bit stunned at their attitude. Judy was pregnant. If he didn’t marry her, who would? Wasn’t he holding the cards here? He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tapped one out and put it in his mouth. He waited for Sylvia to get him an ashtray. He asked Harvey for a light. Judy sat at the end of the couch near her mother, frowning one minute, sobbing the next.
Jumbo wanted to tell her everything would be okay and that he loved her and of course he would marry her, but he wasn’t going to let her parents push him around. If he showed weakness now, they’d crucify him. He was practically on the cross already. He wasn’t going to give them the hammer and nails, too.
“What are you doing?” Harvey said to him. “You have a responsibility here. Are you going to be a man about it or what?”
Jumbo blew out the smoke he had inhaled lighting his cigarette. “Harvey . . .” he said, but Sylvia had had enough. She jumped up, threw aside Judy’s hand that had crawled into her lap, and pulled the cigarette out of Jumbo’s mouth.
“Listen, you fat greaseball,” she said. “You don’t deserve our Judy but she wants you so she’s going to get you. She’s going to get exactly what she wants. A rabbi’s doing the ceremony and the baby’s going to be Jewish. Understand?”
Jumbo looked at Judy, who turned her face away. “Sure, Sylvia,” he said. “Anything you say.”
“Mrs. Bernstein.”
“You said . . .”
“Never mind. All bets are off. I’m calling our rabbi. Sunday. You be here in a suit and tie. You wanna invite your family, some friends, it’s fine by us but you be here on time. And you don’t see Judy until then. She’s leaving her job and she’s staying with us.”
“Okay. I’ll be here. Like I said, Sylvia . . . Mrs. Bernstein. I love Judy. I . . .”
“Goodbye, Alfso.”
“Judy . . .”
“Never mind Judy,” Sylvia said. She walked over to the door and held it open. “Three o’clock Sunday, suit and tie. And I don’t want to hear your voice or see your face until then.”
Jumbo drove back to the city, one hand on the wheel. He decided to think about what suit he was going to wear. He left the car parked on Grand Street and went up the house. It was too early for dinner so he ate Antoinette’s meatballs and sausage right out of the gravy pot. He ate like his old self, which made Antoinette believe he was getting better, that his foolishness with this Jewish girl was a thing of the past.
Even though Antoinette was sure that Magdalena had played dumb when she had gone with Teresa to ask her for help, to ask her to take the love curse off Jumbo, seeing her Jumbo eat like this made her think that maybe Magdalena had taken pity and made the miracle. Carmella Lispinardi had told her years ago about Magdalena in the top of her house, under the eaves. Carmella had seen through her windows, had seen Magdalena pull the shades but not before she had caught a glimpse of a shrine with flowers and candles. She couldn’t see much, she had whispered to the women on the stoop, but it had looked like church, except the curtains were black and Magdalena had pulled them across the windows when she came into the room.
Magdalena had welcomed Antoinette and Teresa. She had been curious to see them together after such a long feud and was amused that the mother love that had torn them apart was bringing them together. She knew they didn’t believe her when she said the rumors of her dark powers were false but she told them that she would pray to the Black Madonna for Jumbo’s happiness. She promised Antoinette that she would remember him in her prayers.
The Black Madonna Page 20