The Godmothers

by Camille Aubray

  “Just a summer storm, right?” Frankie asked hopefully.

  The man shook his head grimly. “This is mountain weather, son. Radio says that trees and power lines are down everywhere. Police closed the highway, and the trains ain’t running tonight.”

  “We’d better call home while we can,” Frankie said to Amie. “Is there a phone I can use to call Manhattan, sir?”

  “You getting a room?”

  “Sure,” Frankie said, then added, “Two rooms.”

  The man nodded toward a phone on a desk. “Then be my guest.”

  Amie was awakened in the middle of the night by a keening noise that terrified her. It was the wind, sounding like it was coiling around itself and picking up speed. Instinctively she jumped out of bed and stood by the closet, searching for her shoes. A moment later, there was a shattering sound as the window glass broke and fell right on her bed, just where she’d been sleeping only moments ago.

  Stumbling in the dark, she found the wall switch, but the lights didn’t go on. The rain was blowing sideways, right into the room. She felt her way to the door, yanked it open, and scurried across the carpeted hall, then knocked timidly on Frankie’s door. If he was asleep, he wouldn’t hear her, with all the noise of the storm.

  But Frankie opened his door, looking sleepy and disheveled, wearing only his shorts. “Amie, what’s wrong?” he asked.

  “My window blew in!” she exclaimed, shivering. “There’s glass everywhere, even on the bed! The lights are out, too.” Frankie pulled her into his room and sat her down on a chair.

  “You’re soaked,” he said. “I’ll get you a towel.”

  Amie buried her head in her hands. She wondered if Johnny was scared, up there at the sanitarium in this storm. He’d looked nearly skeletal, his face so pale, with dark circles under his eyes. He wasn’t eating enough. Did he want to die? Was he suffering that much? Was he really going to leave her, alone with their boys, in this terrible world where thugs took kids away from their mothers, as they had done to poor Lucy?

  “Oh, Frankie!” she exclaimed, filled with emotion, as he returned with a big towel and a bathrobe, then politely stepped aside so she could change in the bathroom. When she returned, she said, “I’m so worried. What’s going to happen to us all?” She had started to cry. Frankie, looking faintly alarmed at her tears, got a flask from his pocket and offered her a sip, putting his arm around her to stop her shivering and reassure her.

  “Don’t you worry,” he said soothingly. “We’re all survivors.”

  “You’ve been so good to Vinnie and Paulie,” she whispered. “I can’t tell you how much you mean to those boys. They absolutely worship you.”

  “Yeah, they’re good little ball players,” he said. “They remind me of me and Johnny when we were little—” When he broke off, choked with emotion, she saw that these visits to his dying brother were taking their toll on him, too. Perhaps that was why this trouble with Lucy was just too much for Frankie. Fate seemed against them these days, especially tonight, with the wind still howling around them like a pack of menacing wolves.

  “I really miss Chris,” Frankie confessed. “This is all my fault.”

  Amie was astonished. “How can you say that?”

  “I keep seeing his face, at Christmastime. Remember? When he was playing dice with your twins, and I yelled at him. Did you see the look on his face? Chris just wanted to be a man; he thinks being a tough guy is the only way to prove he’s really one of us. Why can’t I make him understand, he’s got nothing to prove? I always wanted a son. I always thought—he was mine, you know? And damn it, he was my boy, too. Is!” he corrected himself, horrified.

  “Of course he is!” Amie touched his handsome cheek. She was unprepared for the way he turned to her, like an animal grateful for a kind hand.

  Before she knew it, they were both reaching for each other—for love, for comfort, for the instinct to stay alive, when sorrow and sickness and death have come too close. Her passion was reawakening like a glowing ember in a dying fire that could be re-ignited by this spark, even if it had been such a long time since a man had reached for her and made her flesh respond to his touch. It was as if she’d been fasting and was now being nourished again; you didn’t miss it until it came back to you, and then you found out you’d been truly starving, for far too long.

  The next morning, the sun was shining brightly, as if nothing had happened, as if the night before had nothing to do with the new day. Amie and Frankie slept until nearly noon—when there was a sudden brisk knock on the door.

  “It’s probably the maid,” he said as Amie scurried into the bathroom to hide.

  But it was Sal. He must have set out quite early that morning, to deliver more bad news. “Frankie,” he said bluntly, “you can’t go home.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Frankie demanded. “What’s wrong now? What happened? Is it Lucy?”

  “No, it’s you,” Sal said, looking worried. “The police got a ‘tip’ and raided your office at the apartment building on MacDougal Street. They found some of that stolen jewelry from the goddamn Pericolo brothers in your desk.”

  From her hiding place in the bathroom, Amie stifled a gasp and pressed her ear closer to the door to hear.

  “What?” Frankie exclaimed.

  “The Pericolo brothers are making like canaries, singing to the cops and the D.A., telling them the kinds of lies they like to hear, you know, to curry favor. They’re saying that you put them up to that jewel theft, that you were their Boss and made them do it because they owed you money. They told the cops they’d find the last of the loot stashed in that little office of yours, and, surprise surprise, when the cops raided it, they found a big, expensive necklace. Those jerks had stolen it, and some of the other swag, from some dowager’s town house on the Upper East Side; rumor is, the lady’s hairdresser was in on the scheme.”

  “What necklace?” Frankie demanded, bewildered.

  “Some big silver thing with giant turquoises on it. That’s not all. The cops found a shitload of counterfeit ration coupons in your desk, to boot. So now, Frankie, the police are looking everywhere for you,” Sal repeated emphatically. “A detective came to the house and asked Lucy where you were. She said she had no idea. Everybody covered up for you. So now you gotta leave that car of yours in a ditch somewhere up here, make it look like you had an accident. That shouldn’t be hard to do. Smash a fender and make it look bad. I can drive Amie home. I can say I had to go pick her up after she visited Johnny.”

  Sal looked around. “Where the hell is Amie, anyway? The guy at the front desk said she was in the room across the hall, but that place is a wreck.”

  Amie emerged, blushing, from the bathroom. Sal registered this briefly and recovered, but it was enough to make Frankie feel ashamed. Sal kept pretending he wasn’t fazed, which was worse, in a way. Frankie said tensely, “The Pericolos are in jail. How the hell did they get a necklace into my office?”

  Amie spoke up now. “Alonza,” she ventured. “When Tessa met with her at the tea shop, she said that Alonza was wearing a big, expensive turquoise necklace. Tessa figured that it was part of the jewelry that Alonza’s sons stole, remember?”

  Sal agreed. “The Pericolos probably got Alonza to plant it in your office, along with those phony ration coupons.”

  Frankie said bitterly, “I knew we should have killed those guys.”

  “Frankie, peddling counterfeit ration coupons in wartime is serious,” Sal warned. “We have to get you out of the country, now. Normally we’d send you to Italy, but Italy’s a shambles, with Mussolini and all.”

  “No, not Italy,” Frankie said slowly. “Did you hear anything more about Chris—and Eddie?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Sal said hurriedly. “They say Eddie Rings has family in Ireland, where he can trust people to hide him. Our cop friend found out what town Eddie’s from, in farm country outside Dublin. Best word is, he went back there with the kid.”

  “Ir
eland,” Frankie said resolutely, as if doing penance. “Then that’s where I’m going, Sal. Tell Lucy I’ve gone to get Christopher back.”

  * * *

  “I hope Sal got to Frankie before the police did,” Filomena said in a low voice.

  “He did. Sal phoned to say he’s bringing Amie home,” Petrina said. She sighed. “But isn’t it just like Amie to go off and leave us with this crowd? Never thought I’d work in a pub!”

  For, although Johnny’s bar was usually closed on Sunday, a large group of men had rented out the back room for a private afternoon of card playing that had stretched well into the night.

  Twelve men sat around the table, betting, eating and drinking heavily, chortling when they won and swearing loudly when they lost a hand. The room was choked with smoke. The bartender told Filomena that the man who’d set up the card game had been polite enough but he’d given no indication of the roughness of this crowd.

  “Why don’t they just go home?” Petrina moaned.

  “Yes, I don’t like the look of this group,” Filomena agreed in a low voice. She had sensed that these people were trouble from the moment they’d entered. They were nothing like the regulars, the successful, well-dressed men who normally used this room.

  No, tonight’s customers were coarse and uncouth, hardened to the point where they disrespected everyone, especially women. They had brutish faces and even uglier attitudes, casually abusive; they were the kind of group who thought it was funny to trip the busboy and watch him fall, shattering a tray of glasses and then having to sweep it all up, while they kept jeering.

  “These aren’t big gangsters,” Petrina said under her breath with contempt, confirming Filomena’s opinion. “They’re a dime a dozen; that’s what makes them so mean. They know they’ll never be the boss of anybody, except the wives and kids they beat up and the poor slobs who work for them. But our bartender isn’t their foot soldier!”

  As the evening wore on, it became clear that these customers considered Petrina and Filomena their servants, too. They summoned more and more platefuls of food, which they ate rapidly with the table manners of bears. But worse than the mounting dirty dishes and overflowing ashtrays and empty beer bottles was the rising tension that filled the air in a heavier way than the smoke from their cheap cigars. One man even tore up his cards in an infantile fit of pique at the bad hand he’d been dealt.

  “This can’t possibly end well,” Petrina said, voicing the dread that everyone working here tonight felt in their bones.

  And sure enough, when some of the men finally threw in their cards, rose to their feet, stretched, and headed out, the nervous, perspiring waiter took this as a signal to deposit their bill on their table—and the storm finally broke.

  “Put it on my tab, my good man,” said one of the remaining card players.

  “You don’t have a tab, sir,” the waiter said anxiously.

  “I don’t?” The man gave him a murderous glare. Then he burst out into an ugly laugh and turned to his companions. “Anybody got a tab here?” he shouted.

  One man pulled his pockets inside out, feigning destitution. Another called out, “Sure, I got a tab, but I left it in Cincinnati,” and guffawed uproariously. The entire group began asking one another, “You got a tab? He’s got a tab? Who’s got a tab?”

  Petrina and Filomena, watching from the waiter’s station, were ostentatiously polishing the clean glasses and the silverware, as a signal that the bar was about to close.

  “Hey, toots!” called out one of the three men who remained seated, counting his winnings, looking at the women. “We’ll pay you next month, you cap-eesh?”

  Petrina winced, then shook her head. “No tabs here,” she said. “You pay now.”

  “Me pay now?” the man echoed, giving her the same murderous glare. “Me no pay now. Me thinks me no pay until your husband comes home. What do you think of that, you dumb bitch?”

  Whoosh. The answer to his question came so sharply and swiftly that the whole roomful of people gasped in unison—as a steak knife sliced through the air and only barely missed cutting off the nose of the offensive blowhard. As it was, the knife landed in the wall so close to the man’s face that for a moment he didn’t dare move his head.

  Petrina turned in amazement to Filomena, whose face remained impassive. Before anyone could say a word, she hurled another one, which landed on the opposite side of the man’s head, having the psychological effect of pinning him in place for fear of where a third one might land.

  “You pay now,” Filomena said in a clear, hard voice, “or I’ll cut more than those cards for you.”

  The other men didn’t move, either. But the bartender reached under his bar for the baseball bat that he kept there yet seldom had to use.

  “You want to play like the big boys?” Petrina said scornfully to the customers. “Know what happens in this neighborhood to a man who’s too poor to pay his bills?”

  The word poor hit its mark as effectively as the knife. The loudmouth scooped up a large handful of his winnings and threw down the cash on an empty table with a show of contempt, before collecting the rest of his profit and then stalking out the back door. The other men followed quickly now, muttering to one another but careful this time not to be overheard.

  The terrified busboy hurriedly locked the door behind them.

  In the silence that followed, Filomena gathered her and Petrina’s coats. Finally, she said, “We’re going to have to make some changes around here.”

  “Right,” Petrina agreed. “We’ve never had trouble from the big fish. But these goddamned guppies have to go. We’ll tell Amie that from now on, no more hosting any amateur Sunday card games. These little jerks want to gamble, let them play bingo at church.”

  Glancing at Filomena, she added respectfully, “But it’s a mighty good thing that one of us knows how to throw a blade and pin an enemy to the wall!”

  23

  July 1944

  The knife-throwing incident gave Filomena a legendary status for a while. It inspired Lucy, who, still struggling to comprehend the disappearances of both Chris and Frankie, found an outlet for her fears by telling the others that they should all take up boxing, for self-defense.

  “I mean it!” she insisted. “Pete the cop knows an ex-fighter who’s willing to give us lessons. I’m not saying we ever have to get in a ring with anybody. But if we know we can throw a good punch, people will hear that in our voices. My theory is that men bully women and children because they know we won’t punch them in the face like a guy would. So, let’s learn how. Then we’ll teach the kids, all of them!”

  “We’d better humor her,” Petrina observed to the others. “She’s on the edge.”

  So they all cautiously agreed and took eight lessons from a very tall, quiet teenage light-heavyweight fighter who’d lied about his age in order to get into the ring. He’d done well for himself and was still living in the neighborhood with his mother, who’d known and admired Tessa. The fighter’s name was Vincent Gigante, and he was polite and encouraging, teaching them early in the morning when there were no men around.

  “Just remember, ladies,” he advised, “watch your opponent’s eyes, not only his fists. And don’t forget to roll with the punches. That means, don’t get caught standing still, ’cuz you’ll absorb the whole force of his punch. When a punch comes your way, move ahead of it, so even if he hits you, it won’t be so hard when it lands.”

  One afternoon, when Lucy finished work at the hospital and returned to her town house, she was surprised to find Petrina there, waiting for her. Amie was still at Johnny’s bar. Petrina said cautiously, “Lucy, I was at the jewelry shop with Mario’s wife today and we were just wondering—how come you never wear the earrings that Frankie gave you?”

  Lucy bit her lip, then said in a burst, “Because my earlobes are too big and fat for the darned post! I’m not all slender and delicate like you with your wee kitten ears.”

  Petrina said gently, “No, no! It�
��s not that your ears are too big. The posts are too short, that’s all. Happens all the time. We can fix that! We just solder on a longer post.”

  “You can do that?” Lucy said. “Great! I didn’t want to tell Frankie I had chubby ears.”

  Her voice stopped abruptly at the thought of her missing husband. This was not lost on Petrina; it was the real reason she was here, to lend support. She’d seen that the normally stoic Lucy was visibly worn down with guilt and worry, but, as always, Lucy avoided discussing her feelings about Chris. They’d heard nothing from Frankie, because he was a fugitive and could not risk contacting them yet. The plan was that, as soon as he was able, Frankie would send a message via Sal’s network of contacts. Lucy hated this helpless waiting.

  “Come with me, Lucy dear,” Petrina said briskly and decisively. “You and I are going out to hunt for a witness. And, possibly, a traitor in our midst.”

  “What’s that mean, eh?” Lucy asked, taken aback. “Just what are you up to now?”

  “Let’s find out who planted that necklace in Frankie’s office!” Petrina said boldly.

  “I’d bet it was Alonza,” Lucy said, following her. “But of course I can’t prove it.”

  Petrina made a skeptical face. “Don’t you remember what Alonza looks like?”

  “Of course.” Lucy shuddered. “Who could forget? That garish makeup. I’ve seen Halloween masks less frightening.”

  “Exactly. If a stranger like Alonza showed up in that close-knit apartment house to plant the stuff in Frankie’s office, she could hardly slip in and out unnoticed. The whole building would be chattering. Her sons were already in jail, so they couldn’t have planted it. So maybe Alonza paid someone who lives here to do it for her,” Petrina said.

  Lucy sighed. “Oh, Lordy, these days, anyone is susceptible to a bribe. Johnny told Amie it could be someone we ‘know and trust,’ like Sal, or Domenico, or the cook’s drug-addicted son. Or even the janitor—I suppose he’s an obvious suspect. He has all the keys at his disposal. Poor old Fred. He’s been working there forever. His wife died three years ago, and his living room is still a shrine to her, bless him. You should see it. He’s kept the framed pictures of her patron saints, and he lights the candles beneath them every Friday, just as she used to do. But one thing Fred doesn’t do is dust that place!”