“What did he tell you? Was it about me?” Alex demanded.
“No,” she snapped.
“Are you coming home now?”
Gina kept walking. “He’s not going to die,” she said. “He’s too angry to die. He’ll live for years, just on his self-righteousness.”
“What did he say?” Alex demanded, pleased by her bitterness.
“It’s none of your business,” she answered.
“Tell me,” he insisted. “Did he ask you to stay and you refused? Was it something like that?”
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t like that at all.”
“Well, what was it?” he said peevishly. “I couldn’t hear anything.”
“It’s not supposed to be a radio program, you know. There’s supposed to be some privacy about deathbed words.”
“But you said it’s not his deathbed,” he pursued, rushing to keep pace with her. “This has kept me up all night and I have a right to know.”
Gina stopped. “What he did,” she said, looking him in the eye, “was call me a whore.”
Alex laughed. “He really hangs on, doesn’t he?” he said appreciatively. “He really hangs on.”
She looked at him. Had he come to keep her company, or had he come to see if she were really there?
Six
“When your number’s up, it’s up. And when it’s not, it’s not,” said Nino’s nephew Vinnie. “Remember how they always called you last? Remember the position tryouts for the Falcons? You missed so many chances to make it, the season was over and you never even got up. Remember?” Vinnie said.
“Not as well as you do,” Nino said. “Why don’t you cheer me up and tell me about my wins?”
“I got less to think about than you,” Vinnie said, ignoring the advice. “That’s why my memory is so good. I go here and there,” he waved his hand. “Somehow there’s no time to think.” It occurred to him that Nino would never get up again. “It was never my talent, like it was yours,” Vinnie said, trying to make amends for Nino’s immobility.
“It isn’t how much you think,” Nino said sagely, “it’s what you think.”
“How was it, the operation?” Vinnie asked, eager to change the subject.
“One minute the doctor says to me, ‘Raise your leg.’ So I try to raise it. Then he says, ‘Raise the other one.’ That’s the last thing I remember. Next thing I know, they’re both gone.”
“Just like that,” Vinnie said, shaking his head. “Well, the important thing is that now you’ll get better.”
“Better than what?” Nino asked wryly.
“Better than you were.”
“Oh, you don’t get better from this,” Nino said emphatically. “When you’re damned, you’re damned.” He looked at Vinnie, offended that he had slighted his illness.
“I wouldn’t say damned, Nino. You’re not damned. You’re an amputee, but you’re not damned.”
“It’s a question of what comes first.”
“The diabetes came first,” Vinnie said, misunderstanding him. “Then the gangrene, and then the amputation. How could there be any doubt about that? Look at Antonetta’s son.” Vinnie gestured vaguely. “You know.”
“I know,” Nino said. “Laura thinks I don’t know, but I know even though I’m not in the family.”
“Funny, isn’t it,” Vinnie said. “How everybody knew but him. He got the diabetes too, but never took care of it, with that pot belly. At forty-nine he goes blind; two years later”—snap! went Vinnie’s fingers—“he’s gone. After he’s dead his wife calls Amarico to tell him his brother is dead and where the funeral will be. ‘He’s not my brother,’ Amarico says to her. ‘He’s my half-brother.’ What was the point of telling, after he was dead. These Neapolitans are crazy.”
“He was mad at his mother because she wouldn’t give him the money to become a loan shark.”
“She was right,” Vinnie said. “He’s the type who would rough up someone and wind up in jail in a business like that. It takes discipline to do that kind of work.”
Nino nodded his agreement. They were overly emotional, Neapolitans. That was Laura’s trouble. She kept answering when there weren’t any questions. He watched her in the corner, talking with the doctor. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but he knew she was telling him what to do by the way she underlined everything she said with her hands. These Neapolitans only talk with their hands. Tie up their hands, they couldn’t say a thing. He paused for a minute, amused at the possibilities.
When Gina came in, Laura joined Vinnie and Nino.
Gina nodded to Nino without saying hello. “I brought you a radio so you can listen to the ball game,” she said.
“Don’t tell me what I should listen to,” Nino said.
“He’s too sick to listen to the radio,” Laura added. “Can’t you see that?”
“I want the radio,” Nino said. “What do you mean I’m sick?”
“I’ll put it under your pillow so you know where it is. When you feel up to it, it will be there.”
“How are you?” he asked Gina.
“OK,” she answered. “I’m fine. Very well.”
“Compared to me,” he whispered, “anybody is well. How are you compared to how you were?”
“Better,” she nodded. “Better than ever.”
“You look lousy,” Nino offered. “Your hair is too long and your clothes are too tight.”
“No kidding,” Gina said. “You, on the other hand, look terrific.”
“Never give an inch, do you. Someday you’ll learn the meaning of compassion.”
“Not from you,” she said.
“Why do you have to fight?” Laura asked. “Isn’t there enough trouble without that?”
“Yeah,” Vinnie said. “Especially in front of me. You know,” he said to Gina, “you should show more respect for your relatives.”
“I meant no offense to you, Cousin Vinnie,” Gina said. “Don’t take it that way.”
“If you don’t want me to take it that way, then don’t be so fresh to your father after all he’s been through,” Vinnie said piously.
He had her there. No one could deny it was terrible. Nino’s face had aged, she noticed, about a thousand years.
“I didn’t come to argue,” Gina said. “I just came to see how he was.” What was the point of trying to defend herself? If she claimed Nino had started the trouble, Vinnie would only say she provoked him by everything she was doing. It was better to let it drop.
“I’m glad to see you’re looking better,” she said to Nino.
“Well, now you have a father with no legs. You don’t have to worry about being followed,” he said, eyeing her.
What was she supposed to say? Why did he always have to set traps? “You’ll find a way.” She forced a grin.
“You’re right. I’m glad you know that.” He pressed back into his pillows. He seemed suddenly exhausted by everyone. He began to speak to Vinnie again, in rapid dialect she couldn’t fully catch.
“Let him rest,” Vinnie said. “He needs his sleep.” He ushered them away from the bed. “You better come back tomorrow,” he said to Gina.
“See that you do,” Nino called. “See that you do.”
The operation, Laura thought, is simple. Cut and saw and stitch; nothing complicated about this surgery. It just complicated everything about your life, she frowned, wheeling Nino from the hospital door where the nurse had left him. They cut and stitch and send you home. Then you have to live with what they’ve done for the rest of your life.
When the pin came loose that had fastened the left leg of Nino’s pants, Laura said, “I told him so. You can’t pin pants so they stay up when you move around.”
“Who did you tell?” Nino asked without interest.
“That doctor. He told me to wrap them like a blanket around each stump.”
Nino said nothing all the way home. This would be the only way he could go anywhere now. In a van for wheelchairs. The trip back to Queens
through the Midtown Tunnel made him even gloomier. Not even the view from the Queensboro Bridge to cheer him up, he thought bleakly. When they got home, Laura took his pants from the closet and made a pile of them. She measured the stumps while he lay back, cursing her under his breath. She measured each pants leg and cut off most of it.
“What you’ve got left,” she said to him, “is eleven inches on each side.”
He turned over. “Leave me alone. Don’t tell me such things. I can still feel them there, both of them.”
She looked at him. He never had much sense of reality. She sat hemming next to his bed to keep him company. In an hour or so she finished. She took the cuffs and bottoms she had cut off. None of them would make really good dust rags. Nevertheless, she slit them, cut them into rectangles, and folded them into a pile. Nino started to cry.
“Why do you do this in front of me?” he said.
“There is no point in crying over what’s gone. None at all. Now at least you’ll look neat.”
“Madonna mia,” he murmured.
“After all, even she can’t bring back your legs.” Then she added as an afterthought, “You could have prayed to Saint Anthony if you hadn’t offended him. Now it’s too late. He wouldn’t answer your prayers.”
“Why didn’t you pray to him? You think you’ve got some kind of hotline.”
“Don’t be sarcastic. You were never willing to offer anything. Concetta promised to crawl on her knees from Mulberry Street to his church. Antonetta gave up bread for a year. You wouldn’t even name your child after him to save my mother’s life. Every time I think of that it burns me up.”
“That was years ago.”
“It doesn’t matter. What’s right is right.”
“Why do you add to my suffering, my misfortune?” he said, drawing out the syllables pathetically and pointing to his stumps.
That was the trouble with Sicilians, Laura thought. They brood. All the time. When something really goes wrong, they brood so much they can’t come back. Thank God I’m not one of them. “Your misfortune is what it is,” Laura said. “It is my misfortune too. The sooner we both accept that, the better off we’ll be. Maybe I could pray to Saint Anthony now. I thought in your case he wouldn’t listen. But maybe now,” she said, letting his grayness have its impact on her, “he would.”
“I don’t want any help from that bastard!” Nino said.
Laura stared at him. “You,” she said, pointing at him emphatically, “are hopeless.”
“That’s right,” he agreed. “Bring me lunch.” He pounded the bed. “Bring it here. I’m not getting up today.”
“You should move around,” Laura said. “If you don’t you’re liable to get gangrene in the stumps and go through this all over again. You have to try to keep your circulation up.”
“I’m not getting up. And I’m hungry. Bring it here and bring it now!” he said.
She walked into the kitchen. “A hell of a lot you care if I have to shorten everything again,” she flung at him over her shoulder.
He turned the television set on, making it as loud as possible.
“More baseball!” Laura yelled. “That’s all you care about.” After a while, she brought him a huge plate of spaghetti with meat sauce and two breaded veal cutlets, placed on a tin bed tray with a pattern of peaches and grapes painted on it. She went back into the kitchen and called Wilson Surgical Equipment to price a hospital bed for him.
“It’s eight hundred dollars if you buy it, and six hundred dollars per month if you rent it,” the salesman said.
“That’s an enormous rental,” Laura said. The price of everything connected with his illness had already passed beyond her imagination. “Why would anybody rent at that price when in two months it costs more than it would to buy it?”
“Because Medicare pays for the rental, but they won’t pay for the purchase of a bed,” the salesman said.
“That can’t be right.”
“It is. I know better than you, lady, I do this all the time. Let me know when you’re ready.”
“When could you have it here?” Laura said, giving her address.
“We deliver in Queens on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I can get it to you the Tuesday after you place the order.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said. Although what was there to think about? If you need something, you need it. It was just so hard to say you would rent something for more than it was worth, even if you weren’t paying for it with your own money. Well, it was your money, in taxes. You spend all your life watching every cent, and being careful, and you get into a position where you’re forced to waste. It was one thing after another. The more you tried to do the right thing, the more you were taken advantage of. Sometimes, she thought, I lose all my ambition. The kitchen floor, she noticed, hadn’t been cleaned in days. Either she had been in the hospital visiting him, or was too tired from the trip. She took a mop from its place behind the refrigerator and filled a bucket with water and Mr. Clean. She took out a foam pad for her knees for the places the mop wouldn’t reach. She made sharp-smelling puddles on the floor, leaning over them without moving her brush. She began to scrub under the kitchen table. When she had washed her way to the door, she took off her shoes and put on a pair of socks so she wouldn’t make footprints on the wet floor.
“Take away the dishes,” Nino yelled over the noise of the ball game. Laura went into his room and took his empty plates back toward the kitchen. He watched her.
“What’s on your feet?” he demanded.
“Socks.”
“Those are my socks,” he said.
“I thought,” she stammered, “since you didn’t need them anymore, I could use them.”
“What’s the matter with you, taking my socks? Give them back to me.”
“What for? We can’t afford to waste, you know. It isn’t cheap, buying medicine and food.”
“I’ll eat the socks.”
She took them off.
“Put them back.”
“They’re wet. I can’t put them in a drawer.”
“Hang them where I can see them,” he ordered.
She hung them over the back of a chair and walked out of the room.
“How quickly you can walk away from me,” he muttered.
“I’m going shopping,” she said. “I need fruit.”
“You can’t leave now. What if I need something?” he implored.
She looked at him. “All right,” she said, “I’ll stay. But I have to go out sometime. I can’t stay here always just in case you want a glass of water.”
“I’ll tell you when you can go,” he said quietly. But he knew that when he fell asleep, as he always did now after eating, she would leave. The prospect of her waiting for him to fall asleep kept him up for an extra hour and a half. My vigil, he thought to himself. My watchful eye! But the effort at sight cost him more each moment. My baleful glance, he thought dreamily, as Laura peeked in once again to see if he was out yet. I’m the evil eye—the thought flitted through his slowing brain and made him smile into the sleep he couldn’t keep off another moment.
His wakefulness cast a shadow over everything. It proved he had weight. How funny his balefulness seemed, though, as he reached through sleep. He seemed to travel now, losing bitterness as he went, losing even the sting of what he had lost as he reached another side of memory. He was reaching it now. He could smell the sun-warmed juniper, the sea spray, the homecoming place. He knew that soon when he went there he would meet Maria. The villagers would be there: Fabio and his father, Enrico, would be arguing. His mother would be crocheting at the window, yards of bedspreads spilling from her lap in a pattern of roses and grape leaves, all in ivory silk thread. So far it was still a swept and brilliant openness he reached through sleep. He could see the craggy cliffs full of shadow and light; the sun playing across the pitted surface like a comforting hand. He had been sure he would grow up to be like the cliffs, worn and constant. Now they took him in, the craggy emptines
s swelling on every side like an embrace. So far his sleep had been all flight, warmth, and return, the precarious rocks like a cradle to his age. But he feared more and more the certain day when sleep would bring him a welcoming committee.
When Gina came in he was in an almost breathless sleep. She sat down, without bothering to take off her jacket, at the folding card table Laura had put near the bed. The gray bareness of the room hit her with as much force as his ashen face. I never realized how bad it was, she thought. All those years, it was just a room. She had never been in a room, she realized, that wasn’t just a place to put a bed and a chest until she left him. Not, she thought wryly, that she had one herself. But she saw they existed; they had warmth, light, color, a personal stamp. It wasn’t just that Nino had no money. It is, she thought, his personal stamp, this grayness. The muddy gray-beige of the walls, the faded ninon curtains, the wooden slat blinds, the pitted walls, painted over and over but never plastered and smoothed, the floor scarred with metal roller skate wheels, the streak where the sewing machine had been dragged to be taken out and motorized. The lamp with the thick globe, bought on sale, but no bargain for it shed almost no light, the heavy crucifix over the bed, the plasticized diplomas, the picture of Cardinal Spellman—the list swelling in her mind began to produce the familiar homecoming feeling, the solid anger she only wanted to flee.
Only by flight could you hope to leave it behind, she thought. It was a thing, that anger, an object like the plasticized diplomas, the crucifix that had hung over her grandmother’s coffin—the list beginning again couldn’t be silenced; the things seemed to speak for themselves. How much distance does it take to stop hearing them? All he had done was lie there sleeping, and he had already exhausted her, she thought. Still another easy victory. She looked around restlessly. She would wait. If he didn’t wake up in half an hour, she would write a note and leave. What could she say? Write a note: Dear Dad, Came but you were out. Ha ha. Or, Dear Dad, Brought you some oil and vinegar. Given your vegetable state, it seemed the perfect gift. . . . She was disgusted with herself just for thinking that. He was right. She was terrible. It was the sense of disturbance she couldn’t get rid of, and the stale anger he brought out in her. That was what made her nasty, she thought, edging away from the issue. There it is, getting angry makes you want to run from it; but anger exhausts, and cuts your stamina so you can’t.
The Right Thing to Do Page 17