The Right Thing to Do

by Josephine Gattuso Hendin

  The trouble was lack of sleep. Every time she fell asleep since she had seen him at the hospital, livid and bruised in his bed, wired to machines and tubes, she had dreamed of him as he was when she was little. She would see him throwing a ball, ready to play catch with her as though she were a boy. The day the hard baseball hit her in the nose—she could feel the impact in her sleep. She remembered when she was five and she and her friend were playing in the empty lot near the church. They had found cans filled with hardened cement. They had tried to get the cement out, like a stone mud pie. When she had picked up the can it had fallen on her foot and her foot had swelled up like a balloon. She yowled with pain as she hobbled into the house. He had been home and he bound the foot in a splint made of Popsicle sticks and gauze. He packed it with ice in a towel and carried her to the doctor. By then she had been screaming at him—“It’s not that bad! Let me go! Let me down!” But he was convinced it was broken, and wouldn’t put her down until it had been X-rayed. He carried her for blocks, holding her so tightly she scarcely had air enough to screech and breathe at the same time. She dreamed that over and over, always without any sense of how he had meant to protect her. Always the sense of being held and trapped, the fear that anything wrong with her meant she would be stuck forever.

  Why can’t I get over that, she thought. After all, he’s the cripple now. But in her nights he still seemed to hold her in a grip she couldn’t break. She was beginning to sweat. She turned away from him, stepping through the clutter of wastebaskets and snack tables to stare out the window into the alley. She sat on the sill, pulling her feet up onto it, fitting herself into the window frame, staring at the gray wall. She had learned something about herself, learned that she was hooked on the act of leaving. It felt good. Escape was reassurance, was possibility, was avoiding entrapment. Even in the good times with Alex, she saw the trip back to her own place—a room as shabby as this one—as only a stopover to other, uncertain destinations. Going excited her. She would keep doing it. But without staying with anyone, what was there that would give life meaning or shape?

  She had learned to put those questions aside. She had concentrated on taking charge of her life in small pieces, parceling out the hours of each day as she saw fit. Studying anthropology she found her mental discipline seemed to grow, even if everything else became more chaotic. Nino had been right; she was calculating. The advantages she worked for weren’t material or practical, but psychic gains: to connect with something strong at the center of herself, to do something so well that that center took over everything; this was what she wanted. But, she could see, looking tensely at the rough wall, it might never happen. She felt the pressure of Nino’s fatalism. Was every attempt at success, every small accomplishment, just a way of moving another inch away from him? How many would it take to reach a safe distance?

  Poor Nino. His grayness was so terrible she couldn’t look at him. She hunched over, grasping her hands around her knees. The wholeness, the coherence, the orderliness of his life should have come to more than this terrible stability in a small room. You had to admire—she hesitated—his purity, his contempt for material things, his sense of moral obligation. How could she tell him how much he meant to her? Even the sense of reality, the practical sharpness, the toughness that seemed to set her off more and more, she had to admit, she owed to him. Of course, she wouldn’t admit it, not to him. So why now, when she had never felt stronger, never less angry with him, why, every night since his legs fell away, did she encounter in her dreams images of herself in his grip, an immobilized child? Which of them was the cripple, anyway?

  There she was, Nino thought, crouched like a baby in the belly staring at the alley wall. He tried to blink away the white film that seemed to be in his eyes all the time now. When she didn’t know he was around, or thought he wasn’t looking, her face was full of moods. As soon as he spoke to her it became fixed and brittle, just a mask. It’s because she’s afraid of me, Nino concluded. Well, she should be.

  “If I don’t talk to you, will you sit there like a stick forever? Is this the way you visit me? Is this your idea of cheering me up?” he demanded. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing, I’m fine. Anyway, that’s what I’m supposed to ask you. How are you?”

  “Don’t change the subject. I already know how I am. You don’t look fine. You look tense. Look how you’re gripping your hands, how you’re twisting toward me in that ridiculous position. Why don’t you sit here,” he ordered, pointing to the chair next to his bed. “You can jump out the window later.”

  “I was comfortable that way,” she said, picking her way to the chair through the clutter.

  “Always on edge, wanting to go, wanting to go,” he grumbled. “What is that saying? A wise man is happy anywhere? Smart people don’t always look, look, look for someplace else. They want what they have, and learn how to enjoy it.”

  “I don’t think I know anybody like that,” Gina said sourly. “That doesn’t apply to anyone who’s really alive. Being restless is being alive.”

  “Being restless is the worst part of being alive,” Nino corrected. “It is definitely at the bottom. It shows a lack of understanding and discipline. Your restlessness,” he said meditatively, without malice, “is the lowest, most foolish kind. You keep running after happiness and pleasure. You were even foolish enough to want to live like an adult before you are one. Only an idiot . . . an afflicted person”—he corrected himself, edging away from nastiness—“would be an adult before he had to. You ran after change, you wanted to speed everything up. You know where speeding up time leads?” he asked mildly. “It leads to the end and it’s a mistake to hasten the end. The right thing isn’t change. It’s simple, static, maybe lonely.” He paused for a moment. “It’s getting rid of the idea that you should be looking for anything. It’s realizing that happiness is a static thing, something that happens when you feel no desire for anything tangible. It’s freedom from disturbance, from wanting to move around.”

  Gina listened, disturbed and irritated, but moved by how he could go on. He always justified whatever condition he was in. Now that his legs were gone, immobility was in. The happiest man, she thought derisively, is the one who can’t move, can’t want, can’t think, can’t will.

  “Life,” Nino began winding down, “should have the fewest possible distractions. Laura!” he shouted. “Bring me coffee!”

  “You shouldn’t yell at her like that. And she shouldn’t come like she does, like a slave.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” he said. “Your mother is a saint.” He grinned. “I’m the occasion for her saintliness. For . . .”—his voice trailed off for a moment—“. . . for her grace. She’ll gain an indulgence through me. You see,” he went on, “doing nothing, lying here, everything falls into place.”

  It’s death, she thought. It’s a justification for his leaving. By the time he goes he’ll be able to tout it as the best, the rightest thing to do.

  “Look at you. You want this, you want that, you want them. You think you’ll find something better than me.” He leaned over shakily. “You listen to me. You are restless and you are a woman. That combination is a disease. And that disease has symptoms. You have will, that’s a symptom. But you lack discipline. And will without discipline isn’t going to bring you anything but misery. You’ll make one mistake after another. You’ll suffer,” he said, his voice becoming tearful. “You’ll suffer. Let me tell you,” he said, his long yellowed fingers closing around her hand, “there is no cure for what you’ve got.”

  “Why does every conversation have to turn into an attack on me?” Gina said, choking up.

  “Because . . .” he began, but his voice broke. Why did he bother? He couldn’t answer anymore. Somehow all his weakness was rolled up into her! She had been so lovely, so gentle, laughing all the time since she was a baby. He had thought the world was too rough for her. Now look at her, just a tramp. She couldn’t even keep her legs together. She had to g
o off with that—the word exploded the pictures of her he carried in his mind: the starched pinafores, the white dresses. He could see her in her white silk blouse, with Alex unbuttoning it.

  “You bitch,” he muttered. “You filthy bitch.”

  She looked at him impassively.

  “That doesn’t bother you, does it?” he said, half rising from his bed, his skin gray against the white sheets.

  “It bothers me. It bothers me. There’s nothing I can say to it. I can’t even take in all you say. You go from one mood to another.”

  “You take it all in,” he accused her. “Don’t play dumb with me.”

  “I can’t get all it means,” she murmured.

  “Don’t talk back to me,” he said, clenching his fists into the sheets.

  “Look,” she said, “don’t get upset. You want me to leave?”

  “You like the idea, don’t you. Can’t wait to get away. Well, you can damn well stay here. I feel like talking and I can’t talk to your mother because she never keeps quiet.”

  “I thought she was a saint.”

  “She is.” He grinned. “A Neapolitan saint is a noisy saint. You think I like everything quiet in its place because I’m afraid of life. But you’re wrong. It’s because I like to protect things. Whenever you change something, you make it worse. That’s true regardless of what you intend. Even if you want to do something right, you wind up with the wrong thing if you interfere with the way things are.

  “When I was a boy in Ventimiglia, there was a girl everybody in the village loved. She was a schoolteacher—young, sweet, kind. She was only nineteen when she got sick with cholera and died. While she was dying, she said goodbye to all her friends and she asked them to bury her with her father. Because everyone loved her, they tried to outdo themselves when she died in doing what she had wanted. Now, her father had died the year before,” Nino said, getting into his story. “But the carpenter, to please her, built an oversize coffin. The priest agreed to bless it. Everyone went to the cemetery to bring back her father, to . . . reunite Lucia with her father. They opened up his coffin. It was a summer day. You could smell the lemon trees,” he said, his voice trailing off for a moment. “We all stood watching while the carpenter worked on the lid. He raised it up. It was a miracle! There was her father, looking perfectly alive! Everything was the same, nothing decayed after a whole year.” He waved his hand over Gina. He could see she hung on every word. He passed his hand above her, as if in benediction.

  “We crossed ourselves,” Nino continued, “marveling at the perfection of his body. Even the priest thought God had offered him a chance to see His work. I was only a little boy, but he clasped my hand and said something about the power of the resurrection. The strength of love! Lucia must have known he would be like this. But as we crossed ourselves for the third time, Lucia’s father fell to dust. Everything—the skin that had seemed so perfect—all fell into dust! I was only a boy,” Nino repeated, “but I remember as if it were this morning, as if it were only a moment ago that I ran there, and saw it, and saw the face fall into nothing.”

  Nino and Gina, spellbound, looked at each other. He had the gift of taking her out of herself. He caught her up in his stories. It made her uncomfortable, but it was undeniable: she couldn’t ward off his spell.

  “What happened then?” Gina asked softly, afraid he might not go on.

  “Then,” Nino continued, “Ignazio, the butcher, said, ‘It’s a shame to put a beautiful girl in with a skeleton,’ and shook his head.

  “The priest was upset too. It wasn’t, you know, strictly right to have disturbed the grave. They only did it because of how much they loved Lucia. The priest must have thought that God let them witness His miracle, and maybe Lucia’s father fell to dust to remind us we should have left him alone.

  “The shoemaker said it couldn’t be done to put her in with a corpse. The women started to wail and cross themselves. Then the candlemaker said we should go ahead and do what we said we would do because they were both dead, even if one looked more dead than the other.

  “Most of the people agreed with him. Fabrizio, the lamp-lighter, said it wasn’t right to promise Lucia we would bury her with her father and not do it. The promise, after all, contained nothing about the state of her father at the time. I can see Fabrizio say it! How he loved to sound like a lawyer.

  “The women said they should decide because it was a matter of delicacy. Concetta said that if we put her in, she wouldn’t recognize her father in that condition. She might think she had been put in with a stranger. To put a young, beautiful, unmarried girl in with a stranger! The women wrung their hands.”

  Nino lifted his long yellow fingers and pressed his hands together. His nails were stained with iodine; the cuticles seemed to have receded into the fingers, making them look like long and graceful pincers.

  “We all stood around in confusion,” Nino continued. “The carpenter said, ‘I made the coffin for two. Let them rest together.’ We all turned to the priest, who had fallen to his knees, praying over the open coffin.

  “‘What shall we do, Father? What is the right thing to do now?’ we asked him. ‘What can be done with them?’”

  Nino leaned toward Gina with tears in his eyes. He clasped her hands and fell silent.

  “What did the priest say?” Gina asked, breathlessly held by his voice.

  “The priest said,” Nino continued, “‘Lucia’s father had been preserved by God for his goodness. In disturbing his body, we disturbed his rest and his freedom from earthly cares. When he fell into dust, God showed His displeasure at what we had done.’ The priest clasped his hands and stared at the skeleton.

  “The carpenter said, ‘I meant no harm. Madonna mia.’

  “Concetta said, ‘Father, God sees into our hearts!’ and crossed herself.

  “The priest said, ‘I erred in not preventing this.’” Nino had begun to grin. “He said . . . the priest said . . .”—Nino continued—“he said, ‘What is in our hearts has nothing to do with it. Our duty is to follow what has been ordained for us. The right thing is to do what has always been done. All change is for the worse!’” Nino was grinning wickedly at Gina.

  She stared at him for a moment. “You made that up. You made the whole story up!” She was really mad now, he thought, smiling. He could still catch her up, anytime he wanted. She believed.

  “No,” he said, smiling. “It was all the truth. Especially the end.”

  “What end?” Gina demanded. “You never finish anything. You make your own point and let it hang!”

  He looked at her, amused. She was really hooked.

  “You want to know what they did with the body?”

  “Sure,” she said, trying to sound cool. “I’m curious. What did they do with it?”

  “They argued with the priest for getting them into such a confusing spot. Then they tried to put everything back the way it was before. They nailed up the father’s coffin, filled half the double one with flowers, and buried Lucia in it alone. But of course,” Nino said in a conciliatory tone, “they couldn’t undo what they had done.”

  Gina watched him.

  “Or maybe,” Nino continued, “they prayed until God knit back the father’s bones and restored his body to its original state.”

  “Come on,” Gina said. “Stop making up stories. I want to know the truth of what they did.”

  “How you care what I say!” he said. “You thought by walking out, you got out of reach. Well, I can see you didn’t. But I’ll tell you what happened, just as if you hadn’t run away. To tell you the truth,” he continued meditatively, “I always wondered whether it was really the best thing they did. Of course, it was the women who believed they had found the answer. Concetta figured out they could wrap the father in a bedspread and pin a picture of him to the top. This way Lucia would see it was her father. ‘Sooner or later,’ Concetta said, opening her hands to the sky, ‘they will look alike.’ She waved to the inscription on the cemetery gate,
‘Fummo come voi, sarete come noi.’ As we are now, so you shall be. ‘So, it’s all right,’ Concetta said. I was only a boy, so I didn’t give an opinion. But all my life I’ve wondered.”

  Gina felt like a small bug caught in a web that spread back into life and forward into death. Which side the spider was on, you wouldn’t know until he lunged at you. If you were looking for an out, it didn’t pay to try death, because it offered no real exit.

  “I’ve often wondered,” Nino repeated, “whether it was really the best thing we did. When I find out, it will clear up a lot. But then it seemed like a simple, practical solution, the kind the women always came up with.” He fell silent for what seemed like a long time. Gina, softened by his doubt, wanted to touch his hand. He seemed to sense this, because he reached for hers. “You have to promise me something,” he said softly.

  Gina nodded, too caught up in the sudden tenderness between them to hedge.

  “You foolish little girl,” he said gently, brushing her face with his fingers. “Someday you’ll see just how foolish you are now. But who knows, it may be a while before I see you again. And when I do I want you to tell me what you’ve done with yourself. I want you to be able to say that you’ve always done right.”

  “But it isn’t always possible to tell what the right thing to do is,” Gina protested, not liking the direction this was taking. “You yourself just said—”

  “If it was easy,” Nino interrupted, “it wouldn’t be an accomplishment to do it.” He tightened his grip, his nails cutting into her wrist.

  “Anyway,” Gina persisted, “the world out there is different.” She gestured to the window. “It’s not so simple. It’s not just a question of what you do,” she said heatedly. Life with Alex was agony sometimes, because she did do the right thing and it was never enough. “People want more than behavior. They expect . . . they demand a certain kind of feeling going along with it.” What a mistake, she felt. She was getting in over her head again. But Nino didn’t take advantage.