Georgie’s heart began to pound. “You told him, didn’t you? That I was home around ten o’clock? You told him about Father Walsh being there? I don’t mean you and him. I wouldn’t ever tell that to anybody. You know that, Jo. I mean, I tease you, but I wouldn’t tell anybody else.”
“I didn’t tell him about Father Walsh. I just said I thought you were home when you said you’d be.”
“You got to tell the truth, Jo. It don’t pay to lie to these guys. I was poking around in the basement, waiting for the padre to leave. Then I thought he was gone when I went outside and he wasn’t sitting in the living room with you any more. I didn’t mean to spy, Jo. I couldn’t help what you did. Could I?”
Johanna had thought the whole picture was gone forever from her mind. But after penitence came penance: ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys had not been enough. She prayed now within herself—to the Holy Ghost, as Father de Gasso had counseled, but the Holy Ghost was a stranger and she couldn’t get a picture of Him. She commended her trouble to the Sacred Heart.
Georgie was trying to figure ways of bolstering his own defense. “You could get old Martin in trouble that way, Jo. I mean, I don’t want to scare you or nothing, but the reason they keep asking about me—Martin and MacAndrews, you know, the guy that got killed? They were enemies—and the only way they can be sure Martin was in his room when he said he was is because I said so.”
“You said so?”
“Sure. He was trying to get the phone, watching from the window—you know the way he does?—wanting to phone you. And I seen him. I could tell them he was there, see? I saw him on my way home.”
“But he didn’t phone me,” Johanna said.
“What difference does that make? Sometimes you can be awful stupid, Jo, even for a girl.”
There were times when this would have angered Johanna, but now she just sat, silently hugging her own fears and doubts.
They had to ask at the hospital desk for special permission to visit their mother, the visiting hours already past. Johanna explained that she had not been able to get off work until four-thirty.
“What ward is she in?” the nurse asked.
Johanna told her. The nurse picked up the phone and made inquiries the girl could not hear. When she hung up, she said, “Mrs. Rocco was discharged this afternoon.”
Johanna and Georgie looked at each other.
“You mean she’s gone?” Georgie said to the nurse.
“That’s what I mean, young man.”
“But she didn’t have any money,” he blurted out. He knew that much of hospitals, that until you made arrangements for paying, you were stuck.
“Why don’t you speak to the cashier?” The nurse nodded at the caged window across the hall.
Johanna lingered at the reception desk while Georgie lunged toward the cashier’s window and, since no one was on duty, began to pound the handbell that had been placed there. “Please,” Jo said, “isn’t there someone who could tell me how she left? I mean, did someone come and get her?” Premonition was already nauseating her.
The white-clad receptionist said, but not unkindly, “I can’t give out that kind of information, dear, even if I knew. But I wasn’t on duty.”
Johanna lifted her head. “I wouldn’t want my brother to know—if it was—someone.”
“I tell you what you do,” the woman said. “I’m just a nurse’s aid. But when you get home, you call your mother’s doctor. He’d be more likely to know than anybody else.”
“Thank you,” Johanna said, and went to get her brother. “Come on, Georgie. Maybe mama’s already home, at Mrs. Tonelli’s.”
“I was there at four o’clock,” Georgie said. “There wasn’t nobody home, not even the old lady. She’s getting me the information.” He nodded toward the cashier, who was riffling the card file on her desk.
The cashier looked up, holding one card above the others. “The bill was paid in full.”
Georgie was quick and bold as Johanna could never have been. “Who paid it?” he said, and then qualified at once in a tone calculated to take the sting out of his directness: “I mean, if it was a check, the hospital’d want to be sure it didn’t bounce, wouldn’t they?”
The woman looked at her record. “Mrs. Teresa Tonelli.”
“Yeah?” Georgie said, feeling foolish. He recovered. “Thank you, lady. You don’t need to worry about that check, no, sir.”
To Johanna on the way out he said, “Don’t that beat everything? Don’t that just beat everything? Man, do I admire the old lady. What she wants, she gets. No arguments, no horsing around. She probably kidnapped ma. I wouldn’t put it past her, Jo.”
“But mama didn’t want to go there.”
“Jo, you know as well as I do, mama doesn’t know what she wants.”
Johanna was ashamed of her own first if unnamed fears. In truth, there wasn’t anything she liked about herself lately. Even her prayers, she thought, were like bedsheets she pulled over her head in the dark. You couldn’t pray and not be honest; that wasn’t prayer at all. And then even more unaccountably in her reckoning of herself, she said aloud, “I do hope she’s there.”
“Man,” Georgie said, “you ought to really have something to worry about.”
But they reached home to find Mrs. Tonelli alone with her housekeeper, giving the last instructions for dinner to Mrs. Grey.
“Where’s ma?” Georgie burst out.
Mrs. Tonelli looked at him coldly. She did not like to be interrupted. Nor did she like to have Mrs. Grey ignored, a tendency of Georgie’s unless he wanted something from her. “Go into the living room and wait for me,” she said.
Georgie followed his sister, stumbling over his own feet in the carpeted hall. Johanna ran as though she were expecting to find her mother waiting there to surprise them.
The room was lighted, but empty, so neat with all its well-upholstered chairs and shining little tables, its tall lamps and silk draperies, it looked like a magazine advertisement you were supposed to imagine yourself walking into.
Johanna found her knitting basket in the window seat and took it to a chair with a lamp beside it.
“I wish you wouldn’t knit, Jo. It makes me nervous.”
“That’s why I want to knit.” But she put the basket away.
Georgie lighted a cigaret, his first in Mrs. Tonelli’s house, and having lighted it, he couldn’t find an ashtray. He threw the dead match into the fireplace.
The first thing Mrs. Tonelli said, coming into the room, was, “Who is smoking?”
“I’ll put it out,” Georgie said.
“It is not good for football heroes.” She caned her way to the chair she always sat in and let herself down carefully. “I am tired,” she said, and then, looking from one of them to the other, “So, your mother has gone away. You can both stay with me now.”
“Where’d she go to?” “Why did she go away?” Brother and sister spoke simultaneously.
“Sit down,” Mrs. Tonelli said. The children obeyed her. “I made it possible for her to do exactly what she wanted to do. I assured her both of you would be taken care of. She sent you her love.”
“I’ll bet!” Georgie said, for everything that Johanna had told him about his mother’s operation came back to him, a flood of color like blood in his eyes. Dr. Tag: he made it possible. Not Mrs. T.—Dr. Tagliaferro.
Johanna said nothing, stunned. She had been right in the first place.
Mrs. Tonelli looked at Georgie. “So. Already you are a judge. You are not out of high school, but you are a judge.”
“Poor mama,” Johanna said at last.
Mrs. Tonelli grunted. “I agree, Johanna. But there is nothing you can say to a woman like that.”
Johanna drew herself up in the chair. “Georgie, I wish to speak to Mrs. Tonelli alone. Will you please go upstairs? I’ll come up in a few minutes.”
“What kind of corny crap is that? I’m no kid. I know she’s been sleeping with some guy for months, for years maybe.
What’d she need an operation for?”
“Be quiet!” Johanna commanded.
The old lady looked at him with contempt. “Loud waters run muddy. You will make me regret my invitation to you, George Rocco.”
Georgie’s recovery was almost complete and the more remarkable for what he had to hide of a sudden—raw hatred for the doctor involved. “You mean you still want Jo and me to live with you? I mean, even knowing that about our mother? What are people going to say? I mean, it wouldn’t be right for Jo and me to do that to you …”
“Shut up, Georgie.” The old woman laid her head back. “People were talking about me before your mother was even born. And I tell you, I cannot even remember whether or not it was true. That’s how important it was in my life. Georgie, if I ask you to leave it will not be on account of your mother. So do not be a hypocrite for my benefit. You are a smart boy. Don’t be too smart.” She took a deep breath and raised her head. “Johanna, Martin called you. He will come to see you tonight.”
Thank God, Johanna thought, thank God.
Mrs. Tonelli said, “Now go and dress up your hair, young Mr. Rocco. You have shaken it up like a mop. Dinner will be ready in five minutes.”
Georgie got out of the room with the best grace he could manage. When he was gone, Johanna said, “Do you know where she is, Mrs. Tonelli?”
“No. I only know I went up to offer her the hospitality of my house. I knew from Dr. Tagliaferro she was ready to be released. She said, ‘You want my children to stay with you, don’t you?’ I said yes, because it is true and because I knew she wanted me to say it.”
“She did it because of us,” Johanna said, “for our good.”
“Child, do you believe that?”
“Yes, I do!” Her eyes flashed defiance at anyone who thought otherwise.
“I envy her her daughter. Help me up, Johanna.” On her feet she was unsteady. “I think I had better have my dinner on a tray in my bedroom. Please send Mrs. Grey in to me.”
Throughout dinner Georgie occupied his mind with a number of wild schemes for revenge, though he was by no means sure for what he proposed to be revenged. This way he got what he wanted, to stay in the luxury—to him—of the Tonelli house. But even that was losing some of its flavor. The old lady was getting beyond his savvy, bugging him all the time. He wasn’t sure she didn’t fatten people up the better to eat them. After all, old Martin had cleared out, and he was close kin. All he’d have had to do was stick around and collect her insurance and everything else once she kicked off. Insurance … He was about to ask his sister what was holding it up. But she wouldn’t know. She’d wait till doomsday and say it took time. She always made excuses for everybody but him. He should have gone to see the agent with her, but he couldn’t do everything, could he?
“Jeez, Jo, this meat is tough.”
“Not when you chew it,” Jo said.
He could have expected that. How was he going to know it was tough if he hadn’t chewed it? He took a mouthful of green beans. He hadn’t had a bite of pasta since moving in. Funny, he’d thought he’d never want to eat another string of spaghetti as long as he lived. Now he’d settle for a dish of it in plain oil and garlic.
“Know what, Jo? The old lady and Der Tag, they’ve trapped us like a couple of mice they’re playing with. With ma here it’d been different. We’d’ve been a family, you know?”
“I’m going to find her, Georgie. I’ve made up my mind.”
“What for? She doesn’t want us.”
“I think she does.”
“You got a funny way of believing what you want to believe, Jo. Look, why couldn’t we put the heat on old Mancuso to get us our insurance money? Then you and me could clear out, you know, maybe go and live in New York or some place. I could go to a good school for a change. I ain’t learning anything in Hillside, Jo. You know that yourself. You’re always saying I could if I applied myself, but if I really applied myself, first thing you know I’d know more than most of them teachers we got.”
Johanna laughed, and laughing, enjoyed it. She and Martin used to laugh a great deal. It was strange—Friday night she had asked Martin to take her away from Hillside, and now here was Georgie proposing to do it. She lost the feeling of laughter.
Georgie saw her eyes go dead on him. “Oh,” he said, “I forgot about old Martin.”
“This is our home,” Johanna said.
“That ash-pile across the street?”
“We’ll find a place and bring mother back.”
“What’ll people say? I got to grow up in this town. Goddamn old Doctor Tag!”
“Will you stop blaming him, Georgie!”
“Why? He’s an abortionist. All the guys say he is. I heard ’em talking at the firehouse. That’s why they call him Der Tag.”
“Der Tag means ‘the day.’ I took German in high school.”
“Der means German and German means Nazi and Nazi means killer. That’s where it comes from, and I’d be ashamed to admit I took German if I was you.”
Holy Mary, Mother mild, Johanna said under her breath. “Are you through with your supper?” She got up from the table and took their plates.
“Why don’t you ring the bell? That’s what it’s on the table for.”
“For the same reason I took German!” she all but screamed at him and backed her way into the kitchen through the swinging door.
Georgie did not wait for dessert. Having said the word “abortionist” he had suddenly hit upon a scheme of proving it of Doctor Tagliaferro. It was going to take some doing, but if he could pull it off it would be sensational. And like the gambling raid, it’d be for the good of everybody, cleaning up Hillside. The Mafia strikes again!
Rosie Gerosa met him in the grade school playground. She’d come running when he called her, but the first thing she said was, “I can’t stay out very long. I’ve got homework to do.”
“Me too. I’ll do it with you,” Georgie said.
“I was beginning to think you didn’t like me any more.”
Georgie couldn’t see her face clearly, but he could hear the pout in her voice. “I been busy.”
Rosie giggled. “I know.”
“You don’t know from nothing,” Georgie said warningly.
“I don’t mean I’m saying I know. I just mean I’m knowing I know.”
Georgie kicked a beer can from under one of the swings and sat down, wedging his bottom in. “I want to ask a big favor of you, Rosie. What I really mean, I want to make you a partner.”
“For life?” Rosie said, giggling again.
Life, Georgie thought, Life! She was already popping out of her brassiere. Next thing, she’d be like her old lady, always hooking her thumb into her girdle to get what was overflowing tucked back in.
“I was only kidding, Georgie.”
“No. I was thinking serious,” he said. “I figure what I got to do is important, and if you help me out, well, we’re kind of engaged.”
“You didn’t even ask me,” Rosie said, and gave herself a start on the swing next to his.
“I’m asking you now, ain’t I?” Georgie said. “Sit still.”
Rosie dragged her feet till she came to a stop, but she said, “I don’t think I’d like to be married to someone who told me to sit still and then didn’t do anything.”
How the hell had he got into this? He wanted to kiss Rosie just now like he wanted a bellyache, but he pulled her swing close to his and kissed her cheek.
“The great lover,” Rosie said sarcastically.
“Listen, are you going partners or not?”
“Maybe,” Rosie said, and he realized he was going to have to make her feel it was for keeps between them. He got off the swing and began turning her around, knotting the chain so as to raise the swing higher and higher. It got harder all the time. She was no midget. Finally he got it to where he could bend a little and kiss her the way she wanted. The taste of her lipstick made him want to throw up. But Rosie tried to squiggle off the swing
and doing it, caused his hand to be pinched in the links of the chain.
“Christ!” Georgie cried, “you’ve busted my hand.”
“My poor darling baby, let me see it,” Rosie said, and began crawling all over him.
“It’s bleeding,” Georgie said though he thought himself that the red might be lipstick.
“I’ll have to take him to see Doctor Tagliaferro,” Rosie persisted motheringly.
“Cut it out,” Georgie said, and put his wounded hand under his sweater where he hoped she wouldn’t go after it. “I want you to go see Dr. Tag.”
“Me?”
“Rosie, he does terrible things, like taking women’s insides out, you know, their sex organs, and things. I mean, this is a secret between you and me, and I wouldn’t even talk about it to a girl if I didn’t have to.”
He told her then, with his own embellishments, some of the things he had overheard, eavesdropping at the back of the fire station. “That kind of doctor, Rosie, shouldn’t be allowed in Hillside. Shouldn’t be allowed, period.”
Rosie was a little sick with the combination of shock and pleasure that Georgie would tell her such things. “I better sit down for a minute,” she said.
“Better keep walking,” Georgie said. “I know how you feel. I felt that way too when I first heard about it.” He felt it was safe to start them down the deserted path toward the street on which Tagliaferro had his office. “What we’re going to do is trap him and then make an exposé, like they do in the newspapers.”
Rosie didn’t say anything, but she took Georgie’s arm and clung to it.
“I figure it’s our duty,” Georgie went on. “Don’t you?”
“I guess so.”
Georgie began then, pouring it on about how good-looking she was, that there wasn’t a boy in town wouldn’t want to call her his girl. Rosie revived under that treatment. “Man, would I go around telling everybody you were my girl if you wasn’t something special? And I don’t mean just that way. I idealize you.”
Rosie said a very humble “Thank you, Georgie.”
“What we’re going to do—I’ll wait outside and you go in and see Doc Tagliaferro. Maybe if you could look as if you was going to bust out crying any minute, you know, scared? You’ll tell him you think maybe you’re going to have a baby.”
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