by Mario Puzo
Sonny, startled by the sound of Sandra’s voice, pointed to the railroad bridge and said, “I was just remembering how I liked to sit on that bridge when I was little and watch the trains.”
From the kitchen, Mrs. Columbo said, “Eh! The trains! Always the trains! May God grant me peace from them!”
Sandra met Sonny’s eyes and smiled at her grandmother’s habitual grumbling. The smile seemed to excuse Mrs. Columbo, saying It’s just the way she is, my grandmother.
Mrs. Columbo came in from the kitchen carrying a dish of sautéed potatoes, which she placed in front of Sonny. “My Sandra made these,” she said.
Sonny pushed his chair back from the table and folded his hands over his belly. He had just consumed three servings of chicken and a big side dish of linguine in marinara sauce, plus assorted vegetables, including a whole stuffed artichoke. “Mrs. Columbo,” he said, “I don’t say this very often, but I swear to you, I can’t eat another bite!”
“Mangia!” Mrs. Columbo said fiercely, and pushed the plate of potatoes closer to him as she dropped down into her seat. “Sandra made these just for you!” She was dressed all in black, as was usual for her, though her husband had died a dozen years ago.
Sandra said to her grandmother, “Non forzare—”
Sonny said, “Nobody has to force me to eat!” He dug into the potatoes and made a big deal about how delicious they were, while Sandra and her grandmother beamed at him as if nothing in the world could give them more pleasure than watching him eat. When he finished off the serving he raised his hands and said, “Non piú! Grazie!” and laughed. “If I eat another bite,” he added, “I’m gonna explode.”
“Okay,” Mrs. Columbo said, and she pointed into the tiny living room off the kitchen, where the only furnishings were a sofa against the wall, a coffee table, and a stuffed chair. An oil painting of Christ’s face contorted with suffering hung over the sofa, next to another oil of the Virgin Mary with her upraised eyes full of a profound mixture of grief and hope. “Go sit,” she said. “I’ll bring the espresso.”
Sonny took Mrs. Columbo’s hand as he stood up from the table. “The meal was magnificent,” he said, touching his fingers to his lips and opening his hand in a kiss. “Grazie mille!”
Mrs. Columbo looked at Sonny suspiciously and repeated herself. “Go sit,” she said, “I’ll bring the espresso.”
In the living room, Sandra took a seat on the sofa. The navy blue dress she wore came down to just below her knees. She ran her hands along the fabric, smoothing it over her legs.
Sonny, in the middle of the room, watched Sandra, uncertain whether to take a seat beside her or to sit across from her on the stuffed chair. Sandra offered him a shy smile but otherwise gave him no signal. He looked behind him, into the kitchen, where Mrs. Columbo was out of sight at the stove. He calculated quickly that he might have a minute or two alone with Sandra and so sat down alongside her on the couch. When he did so, her smile blossomed. With that as encouragement, he took her hand in his and held it while he gazed at her. He kept his eyes on her eyes and away from her breasts, but he knew already that they were full and heavy under the straining buttons of her plain white blouse. He liked the darkness of her skin and her eyes and her hair, which was so black it almost appeared blue in the last of the daylight coming through the living room window. He knew she was only sixteen, but everything about her was womanly. He thought about kissing her and wondered if she would let him. He squeezed her hand, and when she squeezed his in return he glanced into the kitchen to be sure Mrs. Columbo was still out of sight, and then leaned across the space between them, kissed her on her cheek, and leaned back to get a good look at her and gauge her reaction.
Sandra craned her neck and stood up a little so that she could better see into the kitchen. When she was apparently satisfied that her grandmother wouldn’t interrupt them, she put one hand on the back of Sonny’s neck and the other on the back of his head, pushing her fingers up into his hair, and she kissed him on the lips, a full, wet, delicious kiss. When her tongue touched his lips, his body reacted, every part of him tingling and rising.
Sandra moved away from Sonny and straightened out her dress again. She stared blankly in front of her and then glanced once at Sonny before she went back to looking straight ahead. Sonny slid closer to her and put his arms around her, wanting another kiss like the last one, but she put her hands flat against his chest and held him off, and then Mrs. Columbo’s voice came booming in from the kitchen. “Eh!” she shouted. “How come I don’t hear any talking in there?” By the time she peeked in from the kitchen a second later, Sonny and Sandra were seated on opposite ends of the sofa, smiling back at her. She grunted, disappeared again into the kitchen, and returned a moment later with a large silver tray on which she carried a decanter of espresso, two dainty cups, one for her and one for Sonny, and three cannolis.
Sonny eyed the cannolis greedily, and then he found himself chattering away again as Mrs. Columbo poured the espresso. He enjoyed talking about himself, about how he hoped to make something important of himself in time, and how he wished to work with his father eventually, and how big his father’s business was, the Genco Pura Olive Oil business, how every store in the city carried their olive oil, and maybe one day they’d go nationwide. Sandra listened with rapt attention, hanging on his every word, while Mrs. Columbo nodded approvingly. Sonny had no problem talking and eating. He sipped his espresso and talked. He took a bite of his cannoli, savored it a second, and then went on talking. And every once in a while he risked a glance at Sandra, even with Mrs. Columbo hovering.
Luca sat at the dinner table across from his mother and held his head in his hands. A moment earlier he had been eating and thinking his own thoughts and ignoring her as she went on and on about one thing or another, but then she started getting into her suicide spiel and he felt one of his headaches coming on. Sometimes he got headaches so bad he was himself tempted to put a bullet in his brain just to make the throbbing stop.
“Don’t think I won’t do it,” his mother said, and Luca massaged his temples. He had aspirin in the bathroom medicine cabinet here, and stronger stuff in his apartment on Third.
“Don’t think I won’t,” his mother repeated. “I’ve got it all planned out. You don’t know what it’s like or you wouldn’t do this to your own mother, always having to worry one of the neighbors will knock on the door and tell me my son’s dead, or he’s going to jail. You don’t know what it’s like, every day like that.” She blotted tears from her eyes with the corner of a white paper napkin. “I’d be better off dead.”
“Ma,” Luca said. “Will you lay off it, please?”
“I can’t lay off it,” his mother said. She tossed her knife and fork down to the table and pushed her plate away. They were eating pasta and meatballs for supper. She’d made a mess of the meal because she’d heard rumors from a neighbor that some big-shot gangster was going to murder her son, and she kept imagining him like James Cagney in that movie where he’s dragged through the streets and shot up and then they bring him home to his mother looking like a mummy in his bandages and leave him at the door for her to find, and she kept thinking of Luca like that and so she overcooked the spaghetti and burned the sauce and now the ruined meal sat in front of them like an omen of worse things to come, and she kept thinking she’d rather kill herself than live to see her son murdered like that or sent to jail. “I can’t lay off it,” she repeated, and then she was sobbing. “You don’t know,” she said.
Luca said, “What don’t I know?” It seemed to him that his mother had turned into an old woman. He could remember days when she wore nice clothes and put on makeup. She had been beautiful once. He’d seen the old pictures. She had bright eyes and in one picture she wore a long pink dress and carried a matching parasol as she smiled at her husband, at Luca’s father, who was a big guy too, like Luca, tall and powerfully built. She’d married young, still in her teens, and she’d had Luca before she turned twenty-one. Now she wa
s sixty, which was old, but not ancient, and that’s how she looked to him now, ancient, all skin and bones, the outline of her skull shockingly visible under her papery, wrinkled face; her gray hair stringy and thinning with a bald spot on the top of her head. She wore drab, dark clothes, a crone dressed in rags. She was his mother, but still, he found it hard to look at her. “What don’t I know?” he asked again.
“Luca,” she said, pleading.
“Ma,” he said. “What is it? How many times have I told you? I’m gonna be fine. You don’t have to worry.”
“Luca,” she said again. “I blame myself, Luca. I blame myself.”
“Ma,” Luca said. “Don’t start. Please. Can we please eat our meal?” He put his fork down and rubbed his temple. “Please,” he said. “I’ve got a splittin’ headache.”
“You don’t know how I suffer,” his mother said, and she wiped tears from her face with her napkin. “I know you blame yourself for that night, all these years,” she said, “because—”
Luca pushed his plate of spaghetti across the table into his mother’s plate. When she jumped back, he grasped the table in his hands and he looked like he might pitch the whole thing over into her lap. Instead, he folded his hands in front of him. “Are you starting on that again?” he said. “How many times do we have to go over this, Ma? How many goddamn times?”
“We don’t have to talk about it, Luca,” she said, and then the tears were flowing down her cheeks. She sobbed and buried her head in her hands.
“For Christ’s sake…” Luca reached across the table to touch his mother’s arm. “My father was a drunk and a loudmouth, and now he’s burnin’ in hell.” He opened his hands as if to say What’s to talk about?
Through her sobs, without looking up from her hands, his mother said again, “We don’t have to talk about it.”
“Listen, Ma,” Luca said. “It’s ancient history. I haven’t thought about Rhode Island in ages. I can’t even remember where we lived. All I remember is it was up high, like nine, ten floors up, and we used to have to walk because the elevator never worked.”
“On Warren Street,” his mother said. “On the tenth floor.”
“It’s ancient history,” Luca repeated. He pulled his plate back in front of him. “Let it go.”
Luca’s mother dried her eyes on her sleeve and positioned herself in front of her plate of food as if she might try eating again, though she was still sobbing, her head bobbing with each spasm of breath.
Luca watched her as she cried. The veins stood out on his neck and his head throbbed with a pain that was like heat, like something hot wrapped around his head being pulled tight. “Ma,” he said gently. “The old man was drunk and he would have killed you. I did what had to be done. That’s the long and the short of it. I don’t understand why you keep coming back to it. Jesus, Ma, really. You think you’d want to forget it. A couple of times every year, without fail, you want to talk about this again. It’s over. It’s ancient history. Let it be.”
“You were only twelve,” his mother managed to say through her sobs. “You were only twelve, and it was after that everything started with you. It was after that you started getting in trouble.”
Luca sighed and toyed with one of the meatballs on his plate.
“You didn’t mean to do it,” his mother said, her voice barely above a whisper. “That’s all I want to say. I blame myself for all of it. It wasn’t your fault.”
Luca got up from the table and started for the bathroom. His head was pounding, and he knew it was one of those headaches that would last all night unless he took something. Aspirin weren’t likely to help much, but even a little was worth trying. Before he made it to the bathroom, though, he stopped and went back to his mother, where she was sobbing again with her head in her arms, her plate of pasta pushed aside. He touched her shoulders, as if he were about to massage her. “Do you remember our neighbor?” he asked. “The guy who lived across the hall from us?” Under his hands, he felt his mother’s body stiffen.
“Mr. Lowry,” she said. “He was a high school teacher.”
“That’s right,” Luca said. “How’d he die?” He waited a moment and then said, “Oh, right, he fell off the roof. That’s right. Isn’t it, Ma?”
“That’s right,” his mother whispered. “I hardly knew him.”
Luca smoothed his mother’s hair again, and then left her and went to the bathroom, where he found a bottle of Squibb’s in the medicine cabinet. He shook out three aspirin, popped them in his mouth, and then closed the medicine cabinet door and looked at himself in the mirror. He’d never liked his looks, the way his brow protruded over deep-set eyes. He looked like a fucking ape-man. His mother was wrong about it being an accident: He had intended to kill his father. The two-by-four was out in the hallway because he’d left it there. He’d already made the decision to beat his father’s skull in the next time the old man punched his mother or knocked Luca across the room or kicked him in the balls, which was something he liked to do and then laugh about while Luca moaned and whimpered. He did these things, though, only when he was drunk. When he wasn’t drunk he was nice to Luca and Luca’s mom. He’d take them down to the docks and show them where he worked. Once he took them both out on the water in somebody’s sailboat. He’d put his arm around Luca’s shoulder and call him his big boy. Luca almost wished the good stuff had never happened, because the old man was drunk a whole lot and nobody could put up with him like that, and if there wasn’t that other side of him, then maybe Luca wouldn’t have dreams where his father was always coming back. It made him tired, the dreams and the little flashes of memory that were always popping up: his mother naked from the waist down and her blouse torn open, exposing the shiny white skin of her belly swollen taut and round as she crawled away from his father on the floor, bleeding where he’d already stabbed her, the old man crawling after her with a carving knife, screaming he’d cut it out of her and feed it to the dogs. All that blood and her round, white belly swollen, and then the old man’s bloody head when Luca laid him out with the two-by-four. His father was out cold with the first blow to the back of the head, and then Luca stood over him and wailed on him until there was nothing in the air but blood and screams, and then the police and days in the hospital, and a funeral for the infant brother who’d never made it out of the womb alive, the funeral while Luca was still in the hospital, before he could come home. He’d never gone back to school after that. He’d only made it as far as fifth grade, and then he was working in the factories and on the docks before they moved to New York, where he worked in the rail yards, and that was something else he didn’t like about himself: He was ugly and stupid.
Only he wasn’t so stupid. He watched himself in the mirror. He watched his own dark eyes. Look at you now, he thought, and he meant that he had more money than he knew how to spend and he ran a small, tight gang that everybody in the city feared, even the biggest of the hotshots, Giuseppe Mariposa—even Mariposa was scared of him, of Luca Brasi. So he wasn’t so stupid. He closed his eyes and the throbbing in the back of his head filled up the darkness, and in that throbbing darkness he remembered the rooftop on Rhode Island where he had lured their neighbor, Mr. Lowry, the teacher. Luca’d told him he had a secret to share, and once they were up on the roof he’d pushed him over. He remembered him falling, the way his arms reached out on the way down as if someone might yet take his hand and save him. He remembered him landing on the roof of a car and the way the roof caved in and the window glass shattered like an explosion.
In the bathroom, Luca ran some water into his cupped hands and washed his face. It felt cool and he smoothed his hair with his wet hands and then went back out into the kitchen, where his mother had already cleared the table and was standing in front of the sink with her back to him, washing the dishes.
“Listen, Ma,” Luca said. He massaged her shoulders gently. Outside the evening was fading into night. He flipped on the kitchen lights. “Listen, Ma,” he said again. “I’ve got
to go.”
His mother nodded without looking up from her work.
Luca approached her again and smoothed her hair. “Don’t worry about me, Ma,” he said. “I can take care of myself, can’t I?”
“Sure,” his mother said, her voice barely audible over the running water. “Sure you can, Luca.”
“That’s right,” Luca said. He kissed her on top of the head, and then found his jacket and hat on the hall tree next to the door. He slipped into the jacket and settled the hat on his head, tilting the brim over his forehead. “All right, Ma,” he said, “I’m going.”
With her back to him still, without looking up from the dishes, his mother nodded.
On the street, at the foot of the steps to his mother’s building, Luca took a deep breath and waited for the pounding in the back of his head to subside. Climbing down the steps had made the throbbing worse. He smelled the river in the wind and then the sharp odor of manure someplace close by, and when he glanced out onto Washington Avenue he located a big pile of crumbling horseshit close to the curb—no wagons around, only a few cars and people walking home, climbing the steps into apartment houses, talking with neighbors. A couple of scrawny kids in tattered jackets ran past him like they were running away from something, but Luca didn’t see anyone chasing them. In his mother’s building, a window opened and a little girl looked out. When she saw Luca looking back at her, she ducked into the apartment and slammed the window down. Luca nodded to the closed window. He found a pack of Camels in his jacket pocket and lit up, cupping the match in his hands to shield it from the wind. It was blustery out and the weather was turning cold. The streets were darkening and the shadows of the apartment houses swallowed up spaces around stoops and in tiny front yards and long alleys. The throbbing in Luca’s head was still there but a little better. He walked to the corner of Washington and then turned right on 165th, heading for his apartment, which was in between his mother’s place and the warehouse.