“Why much money?”
“You have heard of the artist? The Spaniard, Picasso?”
***
Philomena blessed herself with the church’s holy water, then walked on a side aisle to the rectory office, where Don Camillo sat in a cushioned chair, his curls short, but looking like the cherub curls of Church paintings, and his eyes soft and almost black. He would greet her, she knew, after reading from the small book that he read every day.
She stepped through to the kitchen, hung the jacket on a coat rack, and set the priest’s dinner, cool by now, on the stove to warm. She sat, wove rosary beads through her fingers and reached the second decade when Don Camillo came to the table.
“Good evening,” he said.
She stayed seated. “Good evening, Don Camillo.”
“So hot to cook, but I smell fish?”
“Yes, with the rice. But no good evening.”
“Why no good?”
“Laurio wears a black shirt. Not for a priest, but for Mussolini. Do you know of this?”
“No.”
“I have prayed that he be a priest, but as the Son of the Virgin — that poor woman — sheds His blood, my ungrateful son betrays them for gangsters with souls blacker than their shirts.”
She stood, scooped the dinner onto a plate and set it before Don Camillo. “So many prayers I have offered, and the saints have betrayed me.”
“No, no. We have yet to know what they have done.”
Philomena opened her mouth to speak, but the face of the man in the painting came to her and stopped her. She needed to see him again.
“I bring for you this jacket,” she said, motioning to the coat rack. “See if you like. I must hurry.”
***
Twilight softened the colors of sunset as Philomena resumed the rosary on her walk home. The shoemaker, leaving his shop, tipped his hat to her. The bread store, dark and vacant, reminded her that the baker was sick, and she would mention him to the saints.
She continued the rosary as she hurried up to her flat. She switched on the lamp on her dresser, took the painting from the hatbox and set it in the lamp’s glow. She moved Saint Anthony to let him see what she had not seen until the face of the man came to her at Don Camillo’s table.
“Look, Anthony. You see he is blind? See? He is the treasure.”
Philomena apologized to the saints for her anger and for accusing them as unreliable. She wondered with them what to do with the painting. Give it to Don Camillo and let him worry about it? Keep it till the day of Laurio’s vows?
She stepped lively into the kitchen humming songs about the sun, sky and sea she’d thought forgotten. She felt gratitude for the saints, a greater nearness to them, and a thought came to her.
“Do you suppose that after he takes his vows you will see that he is sent to our church here? Anthony, Rocco? Anybody? Yes, I know, you have done much already. Please be patient with me.”
She filled the sink with hot water, dropped in a bar of brown soap and a washboard, set her feet firmly on the floor and, as she ended the rosary, scrubbed one of Laurio’s white shirts till her fingers bled and the shirt’s cuffs whitened as if with the grace finding its way to Laurio’s soul.
Nicky Coco
Nicolo Cococozzi, Nicky Coco. Mid-thirties, brown curls around a Saint Anthony bald spot, sleepy black eyes, and ears like Andy Panda. Twelve years back he married Emma, Don Patsy Stellato’s older daughter.
The man and wife had both grown up in the neighborhood and in the camaraderie that made it what it was; the battles that chased away the brickbat warriors, mickey-finners, the Irish Tammany gangs; the Mezzogiorno guys who’d chased Arnold Rothstein’s leg breakers, gamblers, loan sharks and heroin dealers to running their business someplace else.
The Italians had snatched the unions from Jews and Communists, put button-holers, hat makers, sewers and pressers into the same local with heavy equipment operators. Italians ran the streets, gambling and protection. Women sat in Columbus Park with their kids, walked to shopping, walked to midnight mass and walked home, and nobody went near them.
It was a tough neighborhood, but a made neighborhood, nobody moving out, nobody coming in without an okay. It was where Nicky never wanted to leave, since he was a kid, humping tubs of mortar for masons, staying clammed up about shakedowns, broken legs, strong armed labor, and other things he wished he didn’t know.
He didn’t smoke or gamble, kept his drinking to a glass of wine at dinner, and was a cinch to be a good father if Emma got pregnant again and, if she held it for three months, the doctor said, she would go the other six. She’d had two miscarriages and both times Nicky’s nose bled till she came home from the hospital.
Emma leaned toward a kind of chubby that policed itself with the results of little sleep and a hurry-up way about her. Two years older than her sister, the pretty Antoinette, she was quicker with wit, sharper with figuring angles, and more emotional on the Baby Grand that still sat in the Stellato house where the sisters had learned to play it. Her face was small and soft, and, as Nicky learned twelve years past, the pretty in it took its time being noticed.
Nicky liked being on his jobs, breaking balls with his guys and bragging that he built his houses better than code. A layback, on-the-level guy whenever he could be, which was most of the time, and that’s the way father-in-law Stellato urged him to be. But quick with a buck if the building inspectors needed a little something to help move the paperwork. “Everybody gotta eat, you know,” he’d say with a throaty chuckle, and palm off a few fins.
In winter he wore a blue and black checkered lumber jacket and a cap with earmuffs that made him look dopey. But the man wasn’t dopey, not the way he built, rented and sold rows of one, two and four family homes.
He and Emma lived in the downstairs in one of his houses, a two family with a garage in the back that used to be a carriage house. They had moved in during the last of reconstruction, weeks after the wedding and big deal reception. More than Nicky’s idea of a reception, but Patsy picked up the tab and sent the honeymooners to the Caribbean. Emma’s idea. They wanted babies and she figured palm trees, sun and ocean would keep Nicky working at it.
The house could have been a castle the way they treated it, coddled it like a breathing thing. Nothing ever stayed old or broken. The upstairs rooms, five of them, stayed vacant. They didn’t need the rent money and Emma didn’t like the idea of strangers living over their heads. And if she ever got all the kids she wanted ... I mean, who knows?
Anyway, Nicky, generous good guy, went along with his wife’s funny ideas. But because of the empty upstairs, they picked up a cross. Sonny Burgundi.
On the evening after a day long and cold for guys out in the weather, the radio playing in the living room, the kitchen warm and steamy with Emma’s lentil soup, she and Nicky sat to eat. Quietly, as usual, then Emma spoke.
“My father wants Antoinette upstairs after the wedding.”
Nicky stared, as if he hadn’t heard her.
“Nicky?” she said.
“And Sonny?”
“Of course, Nicky.”
“Your father’s worried about her?”
Emma shrugged in a way that said: And what do you think?
“What’s the difference now? He already had reason to end this problem, but he let things go and now ... shit.”
“You’re right, Nicky. But my mother, she begged him, you know, as long as he doesn’t hurt Antoinette ...”
“Yeah, yeah, and in the meantime, we carry the cross.”
Nicky downed two glasses of wine that night.
So this peaceful house, this cherished home, where nothing stayed broken, got good and broken before Emma finished the dishes. And it stayed that way. Not with yelling, kicking and biting, but with the quiet that happens when a stranger stays too long.
But Emma did the right thing for the house. She invited her mother and her father, and Antoinette and Sonny for a Sunday dinner.
Antoinett
e got to Emma’s kitchen early that day, coming downstairs in the green dress she had worn to mass, a little snug with new life growing. Her hair, like her mother’s and her sister’s, was almost black, or almost brown, but a color that allowed envious red highlights. Her face, not long, but longer and rosier than Emma’s, had changed little since the face in her baby pictures.
Emma was standing at the stove, a splash of sauce at the front of her house dress.
“Where’s Mama?” Antoinette asked.
“That dress looks nice on you. I didn’t go to church today. You must have gone early.”
“Yeah, where’s Mama?”
“On the phone in the bedroom trying to find Daddy.”
“We can’t eat without him? He already said he’s not coming, she should leave it alone.”
Josephine came into the kitchen, took off her apron and tossed it to Antoinette. “Be careful with that dress. Don’t get it dirty. You look so pretty.”
“Thanks, Ma. What do you need me to do?”
“Set the dining room table, the table cloth is ... you know where it is. Bring in the meatballs and the gravy. Your father went for bread, the macaroni’s going in. Where’s Sonny?”
“He’s coming down.”
Nicky, the bread and a bottle of chianti got to the table as Sonny, a new smudge on his face that was supposed to be a moustache, came in, said hello to his mother-in-law and nodded to everybody else.
“Next week is spring,” Antoinette said, letting go the breath she’d been holding while she watched her husband ignore everybody but her mother.
“Thank God,” Josephine said. “So cold this year. No?”
“Emma, this gravy is good,” Nicky said. “Your mother must have helped. Right Mama?”
“My son-in-law loves to tease his wife,” Josephine said, talking to no one. She looked like Antoinette and laughed like Emma. “Not that I didn’t help.”
“Too bad your husband didn’t come for dinner,” Sonny said to her, his voice light, his eyes on the plate in front of him.
“He had something to do,” Josephine said.
“I told you that, Sonny,” Antoinette said, then nudged him.
“Oh, yeah, before I forget.” He took an envelope from a hip pocket, slapped it on the table near Emma and said to Nicky: “Rent. Last month, this month, and next month.”
“How nice,” Nicky said.
Antoinette had once asked Sonny how he made money.
“Business.”
“Business with Mootzi Tonno?”
“Yeah, sometimes he gets something.”
“Like what, Sonny?”
“Just business, Antoinette. Just business.”
When she and Emma were kids, still living in a two bedroom apartment, Mama yelled a lot and cried a lot. The argument Antoinette was remembering now came from the envelope on the table.
A Sunday back then too, the rooms quiet, dinner dishes put away, espresso pots and cups still on the kitchen table, Daddy polishing his shoes over the kitchen sink.
“You’re going out?” Mama asked.
“Yeah, gotta go out.”
“What’s so important that you gotta go out on a Sunday night?” Mama asked, her hands in the dishwater.
“Again with this, Josephine? How many times? Things I don’t talk about, Josephine. You should know that by now. Where’s my shirt?”
“In the bedroom. Where you left it.”
“You didn’t press it?”
“I didn’t know you needed it. You didn’t tell me.”
“What about a fresh collar?”
“In the drawer. When will you be back?” Josephine dried her hands as her husband walked away.
“When I get back,” he called from the bedroom.
“Where you going?” She called after him, then, in the bedroom, “With that rotten son of a bitch Morello?”
“Look, what I gotta do, I do.” He held an envelope for Josephine to see. “What you spend I don’t complain.” He dropped the envelope on the bed. “And watch your mouth.”
Josephine got to watching her mouth pretty quick and she cried only when she was alone. The quiet got nice for Emma and Antoinette, always getting surprised with new furniture, clothes, the piano lessons.
***
Since her high school years, Antoinette had vowed to keep herself for her husband, that her first man would be her last. And there had been something comfortable about Sonny — he’d promised to marry her anyway — a familiarity that ran chills through her when he slapped the rent money on Emma’s table.
How many times she told herself that she should have recognized him for what he was before she’d started sneaking out to meet him, before lying down with him and breaking a piece of her own vow, then desperately clinging to what remained of her first man being her last.
Besides, she’d reasoned even now, to not be married and have a baby would be shame for the family. Mama had agreed, but unlike Mama, Antoinette would never again ask her husband how he made his money.
Sonny had been coming home every night, and that was good, asking how she felt, any kicks today? You need something? But Antoinette had heard enough whispers between her father and his friends to make her wise. They all wanted something and Sonny wanted a button, wanted to be a soldier. And when she watched him figure that nobody would propose him, he faked a few months of interest to stay on the good side of things. Only his long face showed the world that it owed him a living.
Antoinette accepted her own doing and she plucked good from the bad. Like the pleasure in her belly and the security of this house — thank God for Nicky Coco — as near a home like the one where she and Emma — thank God for Emma too — had grown up.
Early in an afternoon she opened her door and called down the hall stairs.
“Emma? Ma, you here?”
“Yes,” Josephine called back. She had been visiting almost every day since Antoinette and Sonny moved in. “You have the dress from Rose?”
“Yes, come up.”
Antoinette stood at the top of the stairs, the dress on a hanger, the skylight making highlights in it.
Josephine, in a new dress of her own, looked up. “Oh, how nice, Antoinette.”
“Rose did the whole thing herself,” Antoinette said. “And she can take it in after the baby. See the pleats, how nice?”
Emma in pajamas and robe, curlers in her hair, stepped into the hall behind her mother. “That Rose is an artist.” Then, climbing the steps quickly, said softly: “What the hell was that son of a bitch hollering about last night?”
“I don’t know. Something went wrong and he takes it out on me. Did you tell Mama he was yelling?”
“No.”
“Did Nicky say anything?”
“I don’t think he heard. He didn’t wake up.”
“Ma, what are you waiting for? Come up,” Antoinette said, and led them into the dining room, its tall windows looking down at the street, little girls on a stoop playing with dolls and carriages, boys in the gutter with bottle caps.
“Sit. I’ll make coffee,” Antoinette said.
“We just had,” Josephine said, sitting at the table, shuffling in her chair to face Antoinette. “Let’s talk about something.”
Antoinette draped her dress over the easy chair at the windows, where she liked to sit listening to the radio.
“Okay, Ma, what are we talking about?” She sat at the table, a piece of smile on her face.
“Your father and I think it’s a good idea for the colored girl to help out a little,” Josephine said. “What’s her name, Emma?”
“Bobbi.”
Bobbi had helped Emma with housework during her pregnancies and miscarriages.
“I feel okay,” Antoinette said. “Maybe when it gets closer.”
“Seven months is close,” Josephine said, a nervous laugh in her voice.
“I don’t know, I mean ...”
“Your father’ll pay for it.”
“No, Sonny’ll pay.�
��
“Please, no problems.”
“No. He’ll pay if he knows what’s good for him.”
“There’s something else,” Josephine said. “I might as well say now, Antoinette.”
“Yes?”
“The baby. Your father says don’t name him after him.”
“What?”
“Your father says don’t name him after him.”
Antoinette stiffened. “What the hell is that?”
“Yes, but wait. He says that Emma’s the older one and her baby, and when the time comes — ”
“If the time comes,” said Emma.
“Her baby should be named after him first.”
“So, both can’t be named after him? That happens all the time, Ma. He doesn’t know that?”
“That’s what he wants in that thick head of his. That Emma is older, he means, you know,” Josephine said.
“In other words my baby’s a bastard of a mistake and my father, the gangster, makes no mistakes. New rules whenever he wants. He hates Sonny and he makes you tell me a story.”
“Who’s better to tell you? I mean, it’s not a story.”
Emma took Antoinette’s hand and said: “Look, you said once that Sonny wanted to name the baby after Benny. Rose’s Benny.”
“Yes, he did,” she said, “and I said: ‘The baby gets named for my father. That’s the way it works.’ I told him, and he said okay. But forget it now. The hell with him.”
“Don’t talk like that, Antoinette,” Josephine said. “You don’t mean it.”
Antoinette’s eyes went from hard to sad to teary. “If it’s a girl I can’t name her after you either?”
Emma smiled. “It’s a boy,” she said.
“The gnome? Lina?” Antoinette said. “Yes.”
“Little Benny,” Antoinette said, as if seeing him.
“That’s not all,” Josephine said, as if holding a secret. “You tell her, Emma.”
“Tell me what?”
“What the gnome said, that if the neighborhood is saved, it will be by a boy of this house.”
The Speak
Benny Bats walked into the site shack on Nicky’s job. Nicky looked up from the Daily Mirror sports page. “Hey, Benny, how you doing? Georgie told me you guys were coming around. Where is he?”
The Mezzogiorno Social Club Page 15