The Godmothers

by Camille Aubray

  A waiter appeared carrying a bucket filled with ice and a whole bottle of champagne, which he expertly popped open and then poured into tall glasses. Petrina lifted her champagne glass, took a satisfied sip, and sighed.

  “Now, that,” she said, “is the good stuff. Taste and learn, kid.”

  Filomena’s head was already spinning from this whirlwind day. They watched as Mr. Costello’s passage through the crowd elicited fawning respect from many people, not merely the ones who worked there but the elegant customers as well. Filomena whispered, “He is very important, yes?”

  Petrina said in a low, conspiratorial tone, “You bet! Frank Costello is the man they call the ‘Prime Minister.’” At Filomena’s puzzled look, Petrina added, “Because he’s got all the uomini importante—every politician, judge, and cop worth knowing—in tasca—in his pocket. He’s the Big Boss of our neck of the woods. But he started out un povero immigrato, like everybody else. He knows my father from the Prohibition days. He’s always been fair, Pa says.”

  Filomena had been nodding, but at the word Prohibition her blank look caused Petrina to say impatiently, “Prohibition—it was a stupid law, years ago, that made it illegal to sell drinks! Then, after that, Mr. Costello made a ton of money on slot machines. Oh, for heaven’s sake, you know, machines you put coins into, to gamble, like candy machines. You never saw one? Well, anyway, now he lives in a beautiful penthouse at the tippy-top of the Majestic apartments—I’ll show you on the way home.”

  Petrina had adopted the tone of a schoolteacher, and somehow it reminded Filomena of Rosamaria. For, despite Petrina’s hauteur, there seemed to be an earnest sincerity lurking in her efforts to educate her future sister-in-law, so Filomena made a valiant effort to understand.

  “People pay tribute to this man?” she asked, finally catching on, and remembering something that Rosamaria had told her. Everyone has to pay tribute to somebody.

  Petrina nodded. “Let’s drive past his apartment building—the Majestic—on the way home. They say Costello even keeps slot machines in his penthouse, for his dinner guests to use. But they’re rigged—to make sure that his guests never lose!”

  11

  Greenwich Village, Autumn 1943

  Early the next morning, Filomena was roused out of her bed by Tessa herself.

  “Get dressed, hurry! You are coming with me now. It’s market day,” Tessa said. She waited, silently at first, watching Filomena dress, observing her new clothes from yesterday’s expedition with Petrina. “Yes, it’s nice for a wife to look pretty,” Tessa said dryly, “but there are more important things in life. Come, I’ll show you.”

  They set out on foot, passing through the cozy part of Greenwich Village, with its graceful old houses built around quiet, sedate parks, sometimes tucked into eccentric, twisty cobbled streets. Tessa, dressed in a light wool suit and veiled hat, held herself proudly erect, not speaking, except for moments when she nodded to other well-dressed neighbors. Silence seemed the rule on these well-to-do streets. But not very far from these genteel residences were the busy market streets, teeming with enterprise and life.

  Amid shops, stalls, and pushcarts, Filomena quickly saw that this was much more than an ordinary grocery expedition. Tessa moved briskly through the neighborhood like a serious businesswoman, stopping at each specialty vendor to assess what to order, and to teach Filomena by pointedly saying, “This is what Mario likes to eat.” But Tessa put only some fruit and a few other things in her basket; she ordered everything else to be delivered to her house.

  Sometimes she would demand of Filomena, “Do you know how to tell if this is fresh?” as she selected the ripest melon or a box of the best tomatoes. But when they reached the fishmonger, Filomena put up a hand, and it was she who selected the fish. She came from a family of fishermen, after all. “Bene!” Tessa said approvingly. They moved on.

  Tessa never had to stand on line. All the merchants were so deferential to her. No matter how busy they were, they dropped whatever they were doing to come and take Tessa’s hand, to greet and serve her personally. The balding, rotund baker came around his glass counter to personally put a warm loaf of bread into her basket. The tall, mustachioed butcher went into the back room and cut his freshest meat for her, then sent his boy to deliver it to Tessa’s cook so that it would be there before they got home. At a time when everyone else was using ration coupons to pay for their restricted shares of everything from gasoline and shoes to meat, butter, and sugar, Tessa seemed to have limitless credit. Filomena could not help admiring Tessa, and she felt her own prestige rising as the shopkeepers smiled at her with courtesy.

  “Respect,” Tessa said as they left the markets, “is what separates us from the animals. Remember that you must never do anything to lose respect for this family.”

  They turned a corner and were nearly home when something emerged from an alleyway and blocked their path. It was a stray mastiff, his muddied fur mottled and matted. He planted himself on four strong, tall legs, growling through heavy, drooling lips, as if daring them to pass. When Tessa took a small step, he snarled, baring sharp teeth, and he emitted a vicious bark. Tessa froze. A taut moment of dread seemed suspended in the very air, as the wild, angry creature was evidently trying to decide which one of them to attack first.

  The decision rumbled in his throat as he sprang toward Tessa. But she managed to sidestep him, so he ended up butting his powerful head against her basket. This momentarily distracted the creature, as oranges and lemons bounced at him like missiles.

  In that brief confusion, Filomena made a swift calculation. As a girl, she’d seen a pack of wild dogs maul a boy. But this beast was alone, a stranger in the neighborhood. This wasn’t his territory. It was hers. “Go home!” she shouted loudly, firm and decisive. “Now! Go home!”

  The dog turned his reddened, furious eyes to her, his nostrils flaring as he bared his long, ugly teeth. She straightened up taller but stayed in place. “Go home!” she shouted in a clear, fearless voice that rang through the street like a bell. The dog, still growling, paused, sizing her up; then, dropping his head, he turned and trotted away.

  “Brava,” Tessa said quietly, as if seeing Filomena for the first time.

  While Tessa was out shopping with Filomena, the brothers were in charge of other preparations.

  “Look, Mario,” Johnny said early that evening, lighting a cigarette, “Frankie and I just want to have a little talk with you, okay?”

  Mario had been summoned to a place he scarcely ever went to—the town house where Johnny lived with Amie and their kids on the first floor. Tonight, all of the children were upstairs at Lucy and Frankie’s place, being fed an early dinner by the maid. The wives were over at Tessa’s. So this meeting was clearly for men only.

  “What’s up?” Mario asked with mild suspicion.

  “First of all, understand that we support your ideas,” Johnny continued. “Pop says you want to start your own business; that’s fine.”

  Mario eyed his brothers with some amusement. He surely hadn’t been summoned here to discuss business; they’d never do that without having their father present. Yet they’d taken time out of their busy day to team up for this meeting, playing their usual roles: Johnny, the measured “thinker” of the family, and Frankie, the “charmer” and dealmaker.

  “Secondly,” said Frankie, as if the two of them had rehearsed this among themselves before inviting Mario here, “we want to be sure that you are getting married because you want to, not just because Ma set this up, you know?”

  Again, this struck Mario as a formality, and he replied, “Yes, it is what I want.”

  The brothers exchanged a significant look.

  Frankie said, “Christ, Johnny, put that cigarette out, will ya? You smoke too much.” Then he took the plunge. “Look, kid,” Frankie said awkwardly, “we took you out for your sixteenth birthday, so we know that you know the basic facts of life.”

  Mario, who preferred not to think too much about his one
and only excursion with prostitutes, waved his hand without comment. “But marriage,” Johnny began, “with somebody you love, I mean, it’s different from all that.”

  Frankie said quickly, “What Johnny means is, most young girls like your Rosa don’t know anything about it. So, you can’t just charge in like a bull in a china shop, as they say.”

  Mario suppressed a smile. “Right,” he said soberly. He decided this wasn’t the time to tell them he’d also had a brief fling with the widowed art teacher at school, until she married the music teacher and ran off with him to Philadelphia. Mario had not been sorry to see them go; he’d learned plenty but was glad to have it end on a lighthearted note.

  “So, just take it easy,” Johnny said. “Don’t expect a lot from your bride on the wedding day; everybody’s exhausted by the time you go to bed, you know? Getting to know each other takes a while. And speaking of time, even if she starts worrying about when the babies will come, don’t worry. They’ll come, soon enough.”

  “Okay? You got that?” Frankie asked briskly.

  “Got it. Thanks,” Mario said. Both of his brothers breathed a sigh of relief. Frankie went over to the sideboard and poured them all a drink.

  “Salute!” Frankie said.

  “Amen,” Johnny replied, giving Mario a slap on the back.

  When Lucy came home from her hospital shift that day, she went to Tessa’s house first; it was customary for her to do so before going to her own house. She found Amie alone in the parlor.

  “No Tessa today,” Amie reported. “She’s taken Mario’s girl to the market, then to the dressmaker for the final fitting. Johnny says you and I must stay away from our house till dinnertime, ’cause he and Frankie are having ‘a little talk’ with Mario. Isn’t that sweet?”

  Lucy knew that Amie had gotten into the habit of sipping a little sherry at this hour. Today, what Lucy herself wanted was a whiskey, badly. Not just because the hospital had been busy; by now, Lucy was accustomed to handling all kinds of crises: patient distress, staff nerves, the assorted catastrophes of blood and flesh that she always did her best to put right.

  But today, just as her shift was about to end, she’d been in the emergency room to make a last check on a staff issue there when an ambulance arrived with the police behind it, and Lucy received a small shock. A girl had apparently drowned in the Hudson River.

  Lucy was standing right by the hospital’s door when the stretcher arrived, and as the sheet was pulled back from the corpse, Lucy recognized that poor bloated face as belonging to the girl who’d given birth to Christopher, nearly a decade ago. Lucy had never even learned her name.

  “Another Jane Doe. I think I’ve seen her before; she’s a hooker from the West Side,” the policeman told the doctor who was on call.

  “Looks like a suicide,” said the doctor after examining the body. The policeman nodded.

  “I’ll ask around and see if she had any family, but these girls never do.”

  Lucy had felt herself going lightheaded, and she actually had to sit down and pretend to be going through charts to regain her composure. Even after she’d roused herself and hurried home, she still felt shaky, glancing over her shoulder as if she were guilty of murder.

  What does it mean? she asked herself. Did the girl really jump, or did someone throw her in? If so, why, poor thing? Girls like that got “used up” fast, ageing before their time. Lucy knew that she herself could have ended up on the streets if her luck had run out.

  It was a relief to be home now, sipping her whiskey, quietly brooding.

  But Amie was in the mood to chat. “Mario’s girl is getting very glamorous,” she commented. “Petrina’s got her all gussied up. Nail polish!” She paused. “Well?” she asked. “What do you think of this new girl that Mario is going to marry?”

  “Hmm? Oh, she’s all right, I guess.” Lucy nodded thoughtfully, resolutely trying to forget the bloated face of that drowned woman. In the warm, sheltering lamplit glow of this parlor, Frankie’s family had always felt like a fortress, where she and Christopher would forever be protected. But tonight was a reminder that there was still a nasty world out there that might come tapping at her windowpane like the tree branches on a windy night. Lucy reflected that by now she should be used to life’s little shocks.

  Even the shocks that occurred inside her own home. Once, she’d found guns hidden under the bed. Frankie swore it would never happen again, and it didn’t. Still, there were times when she’d discovered an astonishing amount of money, in cash, hidden in empty coffee cans or stashed in an old steamer trunk in the closet, even a hatbox. But that had been a while ago.

  “The cook’s son is in trouble. He’s a dope addict,” Amie volunteered. “I felt so sorry for her. She had to send him away to stay with friends in New Jersey. They know a priest who helps dopers kick the habit.” Amie sighed. “Boys are harder to control than girls. You’re lucky you have a daughter like Gemma. I hope I have a girl one day.”

  Lucy felt a familiar pang. After the birth of her daughter, Gemma, the doctors had said that Lucy couldn’t have any more babies, because she’d had a uterine rupture, caused by bad scarring from the previous birth in Ireland. Lucy suspected it had to do with the pitiful medical care she’d gotten back at that girls’ home; the nuns there always sought the cheapest doctors they could find, who acted as if they had been called into slums and couldn’t wait to do the job and get out.

  Lucy thought it was an unfair punishment, that she couldn’t give Frankie any sons. She’d sobbed on his shoulder, but he assured her that he didn’t care, saying he loved Gemma and Chris and it was enough. Still, she made him promise not to tell his family of her “defect.”

  “I’d love to have a little girl to dress up,” Amie was saying dreamily.

  “Why don’t you?” Lucy asked curiously.

  Amie blushed. “Johnny was so amorous when we met. But once the twins were born, I don’t know, he’s still very loving, but he acts as if I’m the Madonna now. Is Frankie like that?”

  Lucy was embarrassed. “No, Frankie is insatiable,” she admitted. “Honestly he wears me out sometimes. But I can’t resist him. It’s like I just have no control over it.”

  Amie felt a stab of envy, for Johnny had once been that way, too. Such handsome men, so full of life and joy, and yet, there was something elusive about all of them. This new girl and Mario seemed so in love. What might interfere with their marital harmony?

  “Men are too complicated.” Amie sighed.

  “No,” said Lucy ruefully, “men are too simple.”

  When Filomena and Tessa returned home, Tessa went straight to her private study at the back of the house. Filomena found Lucy and Amie chatting amiably in the family parlor, but they fell silent when they saw her and did not resume talking until she went upstairs. Perhaps they think I’m a spy for Tessa, Filomena thought wistfully.

  At suppertime, Lucy and Amie went back to their house to dine with their husbands. Filomena ate with Mario and his parents, mostly in silence, which was a relief, after such whirlwind days. Then Gianni spoke. “Mario, we’ve arranged for you and your new wife to live with us, here in this house,” he said with a certain formality.

  Mario, unperturbed, turned to Filomena and explained, “This house is the biggest, and my parents’ bedroom is on the first floor. Ours will be upstairs, so we’ll have privacy. With the war on, we think this is the best way.”

  Filomena nodded. But when his parents had retreated to their bedroom, Mario said to her in a low voice, “I will save our money, and as soon as we’re able, I’ll buy a house for us that will be all our own, if that’s what we decide we want. All right?”

  Filomena again consented. Mario put his arms around her, and kissed her on the lips, for the first time. She liked this unexpected intimacy and felt herself kissing him back, and since he was still a bit of a stranger, this was a new, somewhat illicit thrill.

  “I’ll say good night now,” he whispered. Mario’s bedroom, she lear
ned, was a third, smaller room upstairs that he’d lived in all his life, since childhood; right down the hall was another, much bigger bedroom that had once been Petrina’s but would soon be theirs.

  Filomena turned away and followed the corridor that led to the guesthouse. She climbed the stairs to her little bedroom with a sigh of relief, eager to sleep. But through the window on the street side, the lamplight was so bright that she went to close the curtains.

  Then she saw, in the light of the streetlamps, two heavyset men below, standing in the road at the corner, their faces in half-shadow. They were staring at this house, or staring at nothing; she couldn’t tell. She saw the red-tipped glow of a cigarette that one of them was smoking. Instinctively she drew back from the window, not wanting to be seen in her nightgown. Cautiously she peeped out from the side. The men seemed to confer with each other awhile, then finally they moved away and disappeared around a corner.

  Feeling unsettled, Filomena closed the curtains, returned to bed, and pulled the covers over her, shivering a bit. But soon she felt warm and safe again, and she drifted off to sleep.

  12

  Greenwich Village and Candlewood Lake, Connecticut, Autumn 1943

  Filomena’s wedding day dawned bright, cool, and sunny.

  “You look so pretty, Miss,” whispered Donna, the maid, as she helped the bride dress. The guest room was already empty of Filomena’s things, for she was no longer a guest. After today, she would be family.

  Mario’s father, Gianni, was going to give her away, so he was waiting downstairs in the parlor. The house was eerily quiet; everyone else was already at the church.

  When Filomena descended the stairs, the maid picked up her train and put it over Filomena’s arm, then left her alone in the parlor with Gianni. He had dressed up proudly for the occasion in a dark suit, and his elegant head of hair, so full for a man of his age, made him look like a regal lion today.