The Policewomen's Bureau

by Edward Conlon

  Dee lived three blocks away, and it was a pleasure to walk there on a spring evening, beneath the towering old oaks that lined the sidewalks. The neighborhood the Panzarino sisters had colonized was called Crestwood. Most of the houses were Tudors and Dutch colonials, built in the twenties and thirties, sturdily handsome, with a well-settled air. Marie’s house was almost as close to the Bronx River as her parents’ had been, a few miles downstream, but there it was a sewer; here, you could feed the ducks from the grassy banks. It was a favorite Sunday walk for Marie and Sandy. If she left Sid, would she leave all this, too?

  As they made their way beneath the trees, Marie wondered how long Sandy would be content to hold hands as they walked. Nothing could be better than this child; nothing could be worse than having another, right now. She had been so sick, so ruined, so sad after Sandy was born. She had made so much of herself since. To begin again? She didn’t know if it was possible. She’d heard of other mothers having the “baby blues” for a few months, despondent except for when they were crazy-angry. Was that what Marie had? She didn’t remember being angry, and it went on for two years. She was a dishrag until Ann brought that test to the cookout, and Dee twisted her arm to take it, and even her son-of-a-bitch husband drove like a madman to get her back home from Florida for the physical.

  “Are you going to sneeze again?”

  “No, baby. Tell me about your day. How was school? What did you do?”

  “A boy got sick in gym.”

  “I’m sorry about that, but what did you learn today?”

  “State capitals.”

  “Really? What’s the capital of Maryland?”

  Sandy squeezed Marie’s hand. “C’mon, Mommy. Can’t we just have a nice night out?”

  Marie started to laugh before she felt a chill in her heart. Sandy had picked up one of Sid’s lines, one of his milder dismissals of a subject not to his liking. There was something awful in the imitation, worse than when Sandy had put on the frightful face paint, which could be washed away. It troubled Marie to think about how Sandy might take after him. Sid’s better qualities were few enough—he was tall, handsome, charming to everyone else, not stupid—but aside from hoping Sandy inherited some of his height, Marie prayed his influences would be minimal.

  “Annapolis,” Marie said. “We’ll only do three.”

  “But Ma . . .”

  “Enough. New York.”

  “Albany.”

  “Good. California.”

  “Sacramento.”

  “Good. New Jersey.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Oh, Sandy!”

  At Dee’s, a car-shaped object in the driveway was covered with a tarpaulin. When had they changed from humble savers to proud spenders? Welcome to America! And here they were in the backyard: Mama and Papa on aluminum folding chairs that unsteadily held their weight, at the far poles of two picnic tables set end to end. Vera brought out a second tray of antipast, salamis and cheeses, olives and roast peppers, focaccia. Luigi was at the barbecue, tending to steaks, while Sal stood beside him, a highball in his hand, offering advice. Children stampeded around, and Mama held Vera’s infant. Sandy was about to join the donnybrook, but Marie led her over to pay respects to her grandparents first.

  “Ciao, Nonno!” Sandy cried out, running to embrace her grandfather.

  “Cara mia, Zandy! You so big now!”

  Sandy went to the far side of the table to hug her grandmother, kissing the infant in her arms. “Ciao, Nonna! And hello, little Joey! Can I go play now?”

  Mama asked, “Perché lasci questa ragazza vestirsi in pantaloni, come un uomo?”

  Why did Marie let the girl dress in pants, like a man? None of the next generation took in half of what their grandparents said. Papa’s effusive affection didn’t need subtitles. With Mama, Marie’s translations were faithful neither to the letter nor the spirit of what was said. “Nonna says your outfit is very pretty, Sandy.”

  “Thank you, Nonna!”

  Mama looked down at Sandy’s new Keds, bright red with white laces, and shook her head. “Quelle scarpe, una puttana non le porterebbe al circo.”

  Even if Mama believed that a whore wouldn’t wear those shoes to a circus, Marie felt no obligation to say so: “Nonna bets you run faster than all the boys, with your new sneakers.”

  “I do! I can!”

  And off Sandy skipped, cheerfully oblivious. Mama didn’t object to Marie’s renditions of her remarks, confident that the point had been made. She asked after Sid, as she always did. “Dov’è Serafino?”

  Mama’s end of the picnic table was close to the barbecue, and Sal leaned over to respond before Marie could. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, tall and reasonably fit, with black hair slicked up in a pompadour. He dressed as if he’d come from a resort, in a white short-sleeve shirt, sky-blue slacks, white loafers with gold buckles.

  “Mama, Sid’s working. Didn’t I tell you?” Sal said, winking at Marie as if she were a glad player in the game. “Very big case, it may go all night. In Harlem, with the colored people. He was so sorry he couldn’t see you tonight. He told me your knee was not so good. He wanted to know, how is it feeling?”

  Mama fanned herself and cast a glance toward one end of the yard, then the other, as if adversaries might be listening. “Che Dio mi sia testimone, è gentile da parte sua chiedere. Il mio ginochhio? Sono contenta di essere viva, credo . . .”

  Whatever. Marie kissed Sal quickly, making the barest contact of lips on each cheek. Cafone, she cursed silently. Stronzo! Faiscifo, you prick of misery. It rankled that Sid felt his mother-in-law was owed the courtesy of an RSVP, that his brother-in-law was updated on his nightly whereabouts, when his wife would have been punched for asking. It pained her that he and Sid got on so well. Ann held herself responsible for her husband’s wandering eye and heavy hands, because she couldn’t have children.

  “Is it a case in Harlem?” Marie asked sweetly. “I thought he was handling something Puerto Rican, in the Bronx.”

  She walked past him to Luigi, who crossed his eyes and laughed before he dropped his two long forks on the grill to embrace her. He was the smallest of the husbands, slightly stocky now but still light on his feet. He had soft, rounded features and an alert, mostly droll air. Luigi picked up the forks and checked the steaks before setting them down again, so he’d have both hands free to tell his story. “You know who came in the shop today?”

  Sal angled in closer, and even Mama was eager to hear.

  “Richard Burton’s understudy in Camelot.”

  “That’s something, it is. Really, that is something else,” Sal offered, a statement that Marie couldn’t find fault with, aside from its utter emptiness.

  Mama asked, “Chi è, lui?”

  “Richard Burton, Mama,” said Sal, “A movie star, he was in The Robe. About the Bible, in ancient Rome. Very classy.”

  “Ah, sì,” said Mama, content to withdraw from the conversation. Marie didn’t know if Sal was lying, or if the meaning of the term “understudy” had eluded him.

  “Does he need insurance?” Sal ventured, with a hungry look. “Do any of them need insurance? When they come back, can you ask?”

  Luigi suppressed a wince and offered a bland demurral—Uh, I didn’t maybe—before reaching down to the cooler to pull a beer from the ice. He punched two holes in the top of a can of Schaefer and drained half of it at a gulp.

  “Marie, where’s my manners?” he burst out, when he finished. “Let me get you something to drink, a little wine? Let me go—”

  But Marie was ruthless in cutting off his escape. “Thanks, but I ought to help out the gals in the kitchen.”

  She strode briskly toward the house. Guy sat on the back steps with his two-year-old, tossing him into the air. The child looked like a toy in his massive hands. There was concrete dust on his boots, but he had on a clean T-shirt. Marie could picture Vera badgering him to change, and Guy throwing his dirty shirt at her as he chased her around the house. She l
eaned down to kiss him as she passed. “Hey, Guy.”

  “Hey, Marie.”

  She tousled his hair and headed into the kitchen. Dee was at the stove, Vera at the table, chopping onions for the salad. Ann stood to the side with a cigarette, in a blue-and-white tennis dress that Marie thought fetching until she recalled that it matched Sal’s outfit. The humidity of the room broke on her like a wave, and the odors of sausage, garlic, and cigarettes choked her. It was hot as a body here, 98.6 degrees. Marie felt her stomach curdle, and she thought she might be sick; the nausea dissipated, but then she felt light-headed. Ann clasped her arm and ushered her to a seat next to Vera, who cooed, “What is it, honey?”

  Ann hovered, touching Marie’s brow with the back of her hand. “You don’t feel feverish,” she said. “Maybe a little. Can I get you a drink?”

  Vera found a vacant space on the forehead to take her own reading. “No, she’s fine. Is it your stomach, do you want something to settle it?”

  Dee fixed her with an appraising stare. “Are you pregnant?”

  The other sisters took the question as a joyous announcement. Vera would have had a child every year, and Ann would have given anything, just to have one.

  “How wonderful! My God!”

  “Look at you! Just look!”

  Marie looked up at Dee, impassive at the stove. Her expression was neither accusing nor celebratory; instead, it had a clinical clarity that made the emotion of the other sisters seem shallow and primitive. “Don’t get ahead of yourselves,” Marie said, taking a glass of water from Ann. “Don’t start knitting little booties just yet. I had a long day, and I skipped lunch.”

  “Well, then, either way, you could use a cocktail,” Ann volunteered, touching her to check for fever, one last time. “An Old Fashioned? Anybody else?”

  Dee accepted, while Vera shook her head, and Ann disappeared to the bar in the living room. Vera left to make Marie a little plate of antipast. Marie was apprehensive about being left alone with Dee. A timer went off with a Ping! on the stove, and Dee hoisted the heavy pot to drain. When she nearly dropped it, Marie jumped up to help her—Stop! You want to kill yourself?—taking hold of one of the handles to empty it into the colander. Their faces were flushed with steam, but the heat didn’t bother Marie as it had, a moment before. Dee dumped the pasta, greens, and sausage into a bowl. She gave it a stir and then turned to Marie, her gaze still direct, though there was a kindness in her eyes. “See? You don’t even know your own strength. You can get through anything. Sit down now, have a little something.”

  As Ann arrived with the drinks, and Vera with a plate, all three began talking again, as if nothing had happened. Which it hadn’t, Marie supposed. She felt better once she started to eat, and she was no longer the center of attention. She didn’t want to be pregnant. And she couldn’t even think the other word anymore, training herself to stick to the shorthand, “AB.” If she slipped and said the letters aloud, maybe they’d mistake them as code for something innocuous, like an atomic bomb. Her sisters would forgive her divorce. Dee would throw her a party. What would Mama and Papa say? It would kill Mama, at least. Her options became jumbled in her mind: Stay and go and live and die—

  “All right, let’s get this show on the road,” Dee said, satisfied that the pasta was as close as it would ever come to passing maternal muster. Mama would have spent half the day making it. Dee’s had come from a box. “How many are we? I’m only putting out real plates for grown-ups. What’s the count? Mama, Papa, Ann and Sal, Marie, Dee and Luigi, Vera and Guy. Nine. And I ought to put out a tablecloth, even if it’s plastic.”

  “You know you’ll hear about it, if you don’t,” said Ann, as they all set to their tasks. Proper plates and paper ones, glasses and plastic cups, metal cutlery and plasticware were deployed for majors and minors. Outside, the trays of antipast were lifted to lay the tablecloths. Dee set out the big bowl of orecchiette, a little one of grated cheese. Luigi took the meat off the grill and set up the record player on a card table, plugging it into an extension cord. He put on The Great Caruso. He always started dinner with Mario Lanza, who had once been a customer.

  Most of the children rushed to the table before they were called. Marie gravitated toward Papa’s end of the table, calling Sandy to sit beside her. She was surprised to hear her order countermanded by Mama: “Zandra! Sit by Nonna.”

  Sandy looked at Marie, less than delighted, but she did as she was told. It wasn’t as if she didn’t love her Nonna, but she was jealous of her time with Marie.

  “Zandra!”

  Mama had never approved of Sandy’s name, knowing of no saint who shared it, but Marie had been determined in her choice. Refusing to call the baby “Stella” had been one of her few early acts of resistance. There was nothing wrong with the name; Marie thought it beautiful, the Italian word for star. She loved Sinatra’s “Stella by Starlight”—My heart and I agree, she’s everything on earth to me. But Stella was Sid’s mother’s name, and Marie would have no sooner agreed to it than she would have suffered a brand on her child’s flesh. She thought of what might be inside her—Might be! Maybe! Maybe not!—and then banished the subject of baby names from her mind. She drank her cocktail, glad that Ann had made it on the stiff side.

  Luigi was across from her, next to Papa, and there were several children on both sides of the benches before Guy and Ann, who were both within earshot. Sal was agreeably out of range, cornering Mama. Vera and Dee were next to Sandy, a buffer against Mama’s maledictions and Sal’s recitations from Playboy’s Party Jokes. Marie closed her eyes for a moment and listened to the choral blur of Mario Lanza and kid noise: Perfetto. No, bellissimo però. Already Marie felt better, and, in the lenient evening breezes, the scents of garlic and grilled meat were sweet again. Hands began to grab at the food when Mama barked for order, and Papa said grace.

  “Benedici, Signore, noi e questi tuoi doni, che stiamo per ricevere . . .”

  The pasta was ladled out, the wine uncorked. Papa leaned down to pinch little Anthony’s cheek. Dee’s boy, who had just turned nine. He’d been making faces at his seven-year-old sister, Genevieve.

  “What you gonna be, when you grow up, huh? Tell Nonno.”

  “I dunno.”

  “This is America, you can be anything. A doctor, a judge, maybe even a business tycoon.”

  The boy squinted in concentration, and then he beamed when the answer occurred to him. “I know—a dinosaur!”

  Papa thought for a moment, making sure that he understood. When he was certain, he rendered his opinion. “Whadda you, stupid?”

  Genevieve perked up at her brother’s fall from grace. “How about me, Nonno? Can I be anything?”

  He smiled and blew her a kiss. “You can be a good girl.”

  Papa ate with deliberation, dipping down to scoop up a bite or two at a time, before raising his head to survey the long table. Marie could picture what he saw, how he saw it: These are my children, this is what I have made. On an ordinary day here, we have more food than we’d get at a wedding, back home. She read the movement of his eyes as they took in the abundance of platters, of grandchildren, as if the pages of a book were turned slowly before him. He had sailed alone to America when he was twelve years old. His fifteen-year-old brother Gio met him at the dock with a horse and wagon. A fifty-pound block of ice wrapped in newspaper was in the back. On the way home to the tenement where they’d share a cot, Gio stopped at a building on Broadway and pointed to where Papa had to haul the ice to the fifth floor. Welcome to America!

  When Papa smiled, Marie touched his cheek, as if he were the child, and his face was so aglow with emotion that she was afraid he’d cry. Papa stiffened then for a moment, and then he blinked. Marie watched him intently, alert to the possibility that he was afflicted by something more than sentiment. “Cara mia . . .”

  No, he was fine. Marie listened to Ann tell Guy about problems they were having with the ventilation at “the new building,” as she called UN Headquarters on 49
th Street. She’d begun when they were in Long Island. Luigi told Gaetano, Vera’s eldest, that young Joe DiMaggio always ate his vegetables. Papa drained his wineglass, but when he reached for a refill, the bottle was empty. Luigi rose, but Marie told him to sit down. She wanted to get up and move around a little.

  When she returned with two bottles of store-bought chianti, she set one beside Papa and took the other to the far end of the table. Sandy had an air of disquiet, while Mama appeared satisfied to a degree that was not entirely explained by the fine food and company. Marie stroked Sandy’s hair. “What is it, baby?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You sure?” Marie turned to her mother. “Ma? What’s up?”

  “Le ho raccontato la storia di Sant’Antonio.”

  “A story about St. Anthony? It upset you, Sandy?”

  “A little.”

  “I’ve told you St. Anthony stories before, he’s a very holy man, the patron saint of lost things. Go ahead, tell me the story.”

  “There was a boy named Leonardo, who was very bad,” Sandy began uncertainly. “He kicked his mother. But then he felt bad, he went to St. Anthony and confessed. St. Anthony says, anybody who kicks his own mommy, his foot should be cut off. So Leonardo runs away crying and cuts off his own foot.”

  Marie asked, “And then?”

  “And then?” Sandy shrugged. “I guess he bled a lot. Did he die?”

  “Ma, come on! Why did you tell her such a terrible story?”

  “Come può essere una storia terribile, se era un uomo santo?”

  “For one, it’s a terrible story for a little girl. For another, you didn’t finish it. What happened next, Sandy, was when St. Anthony heard about what Leonardo did, he went and got the foot and put it back on him. He cured him, he healed the foot.”

  “Sì, è come finisce. Un miracolo, tanti miracoli.”

  “And it’ll be a miracle if Sandy isn’t up all night with nightmares. Come on, Mama, she’s only a kid!”

  Mama shrugged. Marie made a face at Vera for not stopping the story, or at least finishing it, but she knew that she shouldn’t try to shift the blame. When Sal lunged across the table for the wine bottle, toppling his glass, Marie found a suitable target for her ire. “Can I pass you the wine, Sal?”