The Midnight Boat to Palermo and Other Stories

by Rosemary Aubert

  “Your mother and father were really thrilled when I told them about your gift,” Sammy resumed. “I tried to be a little suspenseful. I played around with my suitcoat pocket, pretending to be looking for something. Then I pretended to find the envelope. ‘What can this be?’ I asked, like I never saw it before. ‘Seems to be plane tickets to Paris! ‘Paris?’ your father asked. ‘Why in heaven’s name would Marky think that his mother and I would want to go to Paris?’”

  Despite everything, I had to smile. Sammy mimicked my father exactly. He could imitate anybody’s voice. Of course he could.

  “’Because,’ I told him, ‘that’s where you go first when you’re on your way from Boston to Lourdes.’

  “I watched them real careful, Marky, so I could tell you precisely how they looked. Well, I thought your mother was going to cry, she was so surprised and happy. Your dad—well, he’s always said he’s happy if she is, and maybe it’s true. Anyway, it was perfect. I wished you could have been there—the two of them staring at those tickets as if they was tickets to heaven itself.” He stopped and took another sip of vermouth.

  Sammy Agnello hadn’t much worried about going to heaven, it seemed. He had a rap sheet as long as the silk scarf he wore in winter to complement his cashmere coat at those times in his life in which the proceeds of his crimes managed to outlast the time he did for them. Now that he was out on parole, he had to live on whatever I gave him to run errands for me, plus a small disability pension, but he was still an elegant man.

  “Yes, your folks looked like a couple of angels,” Sammy said. “I should have stopped then. I should of left well enough alone instead of shooting my mouth off.” His voice seemed to quaver. In his line of work, a steady voice was as much a necessity as if he’d been a radio announcer.

  “I told your parents that you were so excited about all the arrangements that you’d made for them that you’d made a little joke, that you’d said the only thing you were unable to arrange was for them to actually witness a miracle.”

  Sammy drained his glass. And he slid his hand beneath the lapel of his jacket, as if to hide it from view. I had known him all my life, and I had never seen him try to hide his hand, though anybody would have forgiven him for doing so.

  “They didn’t laugh at the joke, did they, Sammy?” I knew my mother.

  “No. We never mentioned it again. All the way over, your mother was so quiet. Almost like she knew something really big was going to happen. Your father was quiet, too, but then he always is. I figured maybe they were praying.

  “We get to Lourdes. There’s a lot of tourist business, and I was feeling upset by it. It’s noisy. Crowded. And my hand started to ache. It hadn’t done that in years, but I figured it was because on the way over, I had to help your mother carry her tote bag, and I held it in both hands for a couple of minutes—something I almost never do.

  “Anyway, I took them around a little. Your mother sees the crutches, the abandoned wheelchairs, the walkers, the whole thing. It’s impressive. I have to admit. But I’m not a religious man, Marky. With my history, how could I be?”

  “Plenty of people with your background become very religious later in life,” I reminded him.

  He shook his head. “Finally,” he said, “it’s the big event. A Healing prayer session at the shrine. Now your mother’s more like herself. Excited. And she wants everything perfect. She’s got a new dress. Your father’s in that suit he wore when he stood up for me in court the last time. Nice.

  “And I’m dressed, too. Only I can hardly do up my shirt because my hand is hurting so bad I had to get your mother to help. And when she did, she accidentally touched my bad hand. I never knew her to touch it before. Nobody ever touched it, really. Anyway, nothing happened. It still hurt.

  “We went to the healing. It was scary, Marky. I saw an awful lot of really sick people. I didn’t know what to think about it all. A lot of them were children. Bald children. I was watching this one kid while the priest was giving some sort of blessing. She was just kneeling there, looking up. I remember thinking that even bald she was a beautiful little girl.

  “All of a sudden, she closes her eyes and she starts to sway, like she’s going to faint. Without thinking, I reached out to catch her. And then I saw what was happening. I was reaching out with my bad hand. It hurt like hell. But it didn’t look like hell. Not anymore. My fingers were straightened out. I wasn’t disabled anymore. Before I could even think about what had happened, I hear your mother shouting, ‘It’s a miracle. Sammy is cured!’ Then everybody is screaming and shoving and touching me….”

  Sammy shivered. So did I. I felt sick. I didn’t know what to say. There were tears in Sammy’s voice, and I think on his face, too, but I couldn’t force myself to look.

  “Sammy,” I said, “they haven’t come yet, have they?”

  He shook his head again. “No,” he said, “but somebody’s going to open their trap sooner or later. They’ll show up. Cops always do. And what am I going to tell them? That yes, I’m an able-bodied guy now but that I was handicapped at the time that guy got strangled in my building—on my floor even? I’m an innocent man, Marky. You know I am. But I’m also the last person who saw him alive—and aside from the real killer—the only person in the whole world who doesn’t have an alibi. And I’ve got a rap sheet as long as a rope. How are you going to keep me from being hauled in, Marky?”

  “You’re a fraud artist, Sammy. Not a killer. It’s the wrong M.O. You’ve never gone down for a violent offense before. That’s got to count for something.”

  But not much. We both knew that. For whatever reason, Sammy Agnello was a cured man. But he was also a man with a dead neighbor and a story nobody would believe.

  I poured us both another vermouth. I handed back his glass. He reached out and took it in his straight fingers. They trembled a little, the way a baby’s legs tremble when he’s just learning how to walk.

  OLD MAIDS

  When I was little, my mother told me that both the Martinelli sisters had had fiancés, but that they went away in the war and never came back. She said someday I would grow up and have a fiancé and that it would be the happiest time of my life. Even now, after more than fifty years, I remember the pictures of all those handsome soldiers that never came back, but what I remember most about the Martinelli sisters was the way they smelled.

  My grandmother smelled of spaghetti sauce. Sometimes she’d come into our house on a winter afternoon when the air outside was so fresh and frigid that you wouldn’t dream that anything coming in at the door could smell other than cold. I’d run to her and throw my arms around her waist, and even though she’d come all across town on the bus, and taken off her apron, and changed into a smart dress—the way she always did when she visited—she still smelled of warm spaghetti sauce. I figured that was the way married women—especially Italian grandmothers—had to smell.

  The Martinelli sisters smelled of White Gardenia. You could catch a whiff of it the minute they stepped into the vestibule and shook their fur coats off their shoulders and into my mother’s outstretched hands. “The right place for fur is on animals,” she always mentioned after they left.

  I knew it was White Gardenia because I spent part of every Saturday afternoon bothering my cousin who worked in the perfume department of Jenss Brothers on Main Street. She let me smell as many bottles as I needed to until I found out what it was that the Martinellis wore. Of course, our city being as small as it was, my cousin could have just told me what perfume they bought. But that would not be right. “Career girls have beauty secrets,” she reminded me.

  I already had a few beauty secrets. For example, I had a nice collection of used lipsticks—all the same shade. I picked them out of the garbage of my mother’s room. When one got worn down flat, she threw it away and replaced it with another. If I was careful, I could use my pinkie to dig a little out of the tube and spread it on my mouth. Of course, I could only do this when my grandmother was babysitting because she
always pretended not to notice when my lips became a smeary blur of “Really Red”.

  Another of my beauty secrets was the fact that, though I was only allowed a capful of bubble bath, I regularly used enough to fill the entire tub with suds. My goal was to make it impossible for me to see even one square inch of my skin beneath the foam. I imagined the Martinellis positively drowning in bubbles of White Gardenia, which came in gift sets that my cousin had let me see.

  I was allowed half an hour alone to have my bath. Sometimes I would spend nearly the whole time trying to wash all the bubbles out of the tub, but other times, I would pretend to be grown up. In front of the mirror, I practiced talking like the Martinelli sisters, rolling their names on my tongue.

  They were not called Betty or Sue or Mary like our neighbors. Nobody ever shouted over a backyard fence to them, “Hey, Betty!” the way my mother did to her housewife friends as they hung bottomless baskets of clothes on the line.

  The Martinellis were called Felicia and Antoinette. “Good evening, Felicia,” I’d say to myself in the mirror. “And how are you faring these days?” I didn’t know what “faring” meant, but I was sure the Martinellis did.

  Another reason nobody ever shouted to the Martinellis over the backyard fence was that they didn’t have one. Unlike all the married women I knew, they lived in an apartment. “It’s a shame,” my grandmother said, “all those fine things their mother bought them—dishes, everything. And no house…”

  I’d never been to their apartment—to any apartment, actually—but I knew it was on the fifth floor, which meant you could take an elevator to get to it—much more exciting than climbing the concrete steps that led to our bungalow. And downtown, too. Whenever the Martinellis wanted to shop or go to the show—which was often, I was sure—they never had to stand on the corner of Porter and 32nd street and wait forty minutes for a bus. Nor did they have to wait until somebody came home with the car. They took a taxi. “Such a waste,” my grandmother said.

  I was well aware also that apartments, unlike houses, had balconies where women like the Martinellis could sun themselves in summer. In winter, they went to Florida.

  “Where’s Florida?” I asked my mother.

  “Where people richer than us go,” was her answer.

  The reason the Martinelli sisters were rich was because they worked at jobs. After she told me how happy she was that she’d married my grandfather and so never had to work in a factory again, my grandmother explained to me that the Martinelli sisters had good clean work. Antoinette was a receptionist at an office. I could just imagine her sitting behind a big typewriter, a switchboard beside her and an interesting parade of people—probably from out of town—marching past her desk every single day.

  Felicia, I found out, worked for a dentist. I hated the dentist, so I changed my mirror name to Antoinette.

  You could also tell that the Martinellis were rich because of their jewels. On her ears, my mother wore little gold-plated circles, given to her by my father on their anniversary, and my grandmother had pearls left to her by her mother when she died. But the Martinellis wore diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds. Their earrings hung “halfway to their knees,” according to my grandmother.

  My mother kindly pointed out that the bracelets and necklaces, earrings and pins of the Martinellis were exactly like those worn by the princesses in my books.

  “Or career girls,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Of course it goes without saying that the Martinellis were never pregnant or any other kind of fat. Betty and Sue and Mary, when they visited, always giggled and said, “I shouldn’t….” when they reached for a second piece of cake or another slice of pie. I never saw the Martinelli sisters take anything but coffee—milk, no sugar. My mother said they were so skinny they’d disappear if they turned sideways. “Like a long drink of water,” my grandmother agreed, popping a cookie into her mouth.

  Cotton dresses, wool sweaters, nylon blouses that sometimes turned yellow and had to be thrown away—these were the things married women like my mother wore. Or maternity clothes.

  Once, when they came to our house before going out for New Year’s Eve with men they called, “our beaus,” the Martinelli sisters wore strapless gowns of pale satin with wide overskirts ruffled in pleated organdy. They had mink stoles on. Felicia’s was black. Antoinette’s was the color of champagne. I had never seen champagne, but my cousin had told me all about it.

  “How much does a mink stole cost?” I asked my mother the next day.

  “The right place for fur is on animals,” she replied.

  I don’t know when it was that I began to realize that what made the Martinellis so different was the fact that they weren’t married. Besides being saved from working in a factory and having gold circle earrings and babies, I hadn’t yet figured out why women got married, though I was well aware that you needed men for romance.

  “This will capture the heart of that special someone,” my cousin told me as she squirted behind my ears with the White Gardenia tester one Saturday.

  “Why do people get married?” I asked her.

  “You’ll find out,” she teased.

  “How come the Martinelli sisters never got married?” I asked my mother one day.

  For a while, she kept pounding the bread dough she was kneading, as though thinking about my question good and hard. Finally, she answered.

  “Felicia and Antoinette are the prettiest girls in our crowd. Always were. They lost their fiancés in the war. Lots of girls did. But they had many other chances to get married—”

  “Lots of beaus?”

  My mother smiled. “Lots and lots…”

  “So how come they never did? Get married, I mean.”

  She gave the dough a good hard punch. It popped out from under her fist, and she punched it again. “The truth is,” she said, “they never found a man who could treat them as well as they treat themselves….”

  She picked up the hunk of dough and slammed it back down. “Now,” she said, “they’re nothing but a couple of old maids.”

  I thought about that for a pretty long time. What was it like to go to Florida? No boots. No leggings. No helping my father shovel the front walk.

  What would it feel like to have a string of emeralds around your neck?

  What would it be like to meet exciting people all day long, then come home, take an elevator up to your apartment, sit on the balcony with a coffee, then call a cab and go to the show?

  That night, while I still had time before my mother would knock on the bathroom door and shout, “What are you doing in there?” I imagined how my own bathroom would be. There would be a shelf beneath the mirror, a nice long shelf. On it would be ranged the complete White Gardenia line: perfume, cologne, toilet water. A big bottle of bubble bath. A round box of powder with a thick white puff with a satin circle on the back that had the letters WG written on it in silver.

  The next day, my grandmother came to visit. She sat down at the kitchen table with a nice cup of tea and a few cookies. “Gramma,” I asked her, “what happens if a person never gets married?”

  “Oh, honey,” she said, “don’t worry. You’ll get married. You’re pretty as a kitten.”

  “No, I mean, what if a person doesn’t want to get married?”

  She reached out and pulled me close to her. She smelled of roasted peppers with a touch of garlic. “Well,” she said, “you’ll end up an old maid. Now you don’t want that, do you?”

  “No, Gramma,” I said.

  But I lied.

  THE BENCH RESTS

  He’d only come to the courthouse to bring his wife her lunch.

  Which had been confiscated at Security, of course.

  He should have foreseen that. He checked the impulse to shake his head in self-disgust. Yet again, he’d neglected to weigh the new against the old, the probable against the dead certain.

  Walking slowly down the long, slippe
ry hallway that led toward the up escalator, he tried to concentrate. What exactly had his wife told him about lunch time? That her testimony might be finished by then? It had been two or three years, but he still remembered that the schedule of the court was as wily as a bronco. No knowing what time she’d really be done.

  He mourned the loss of that confiscated lunch, though. He could still make a pretty mean sandwich. He’d even remembered not to include anything that smelled strong. At the last minute, he’d added a nice apple. He hoped that the required noise of crunching wouldn’t embarrass his wife if she had to eat in the company of strangers.

  Suddenly an old memory flitted through his brain. He was seated on the bench. The court clerk in her smart black robe was directly in front of him, down a level, so that he was looking at the top of her head. He could see that she was pretending to annotate the day’s docket. But what she was really doing was silently unwrapping a chocolate bar. The smell of it wafted up to his nostrils. He could stop the proceedings and get her to surrender it….

  “Judge Marshall! Come for a little visit? It’s so nice to see you.”

  The voice cut through his daydream like a shiv. He turned and almost banged into a young lawyer with an armful of files. It surprised the old judge to see cardboard folders, pieces of paper sticking out of them willy-nilly in a messy display of mismanaged paperwork. He thought they’d have done away with all that paper by now—put the records on the internet or something.

  “You’ve got yourself quite a pile of documents there,” he said to the young man in order to stall for time to remember his name.

  “Merkovitch,” the lawyer said, as if he knew what the judge was thinking. “I’m Dalton Merkovitch. I worked with you on the Blane case—for three years, actually.”