Act of Revenge (10 page)

While they worked, Mrs. Ciampi wormed into, with a skill that the KGB would not have disdained, every cranny of her daughter's life, having already detected on her secret mother radar the unidentified bogey menacing Marlene's heart. The twins first, their little doings elaborated, discussed, the peculiar difference between them made light of, on the basis of other family twins, not to worry; Marlene's own work, deplored sadly, the infant Marlene, her brilliance and hoped-for future recalled, with the familiar anecdotes, the necessary dollop of guilt offered and accepted; the brothers and sisters analyzed, their recent triumphs and travails recounted, nor could one neglect highlights from the lives of Marlene's twenty-three first cousins, none of whom, it seemed, was required to shoot people in their chosen fields of endeavor.

The wash hung, the two women entered the house. Mrs. Ciampi offered coffee, which Marlene accepted with an internal shudder. It would be instant, with water barely boiled. Marlene's mother, unlike Marlene, had no interest in cuisine beyond assuring quantity, and had raised six children on canned and frozen, on Kraft dinners and Velveeta and Pepsi, unlike her own mother, who was a
maestra assoluta
of south Italian cuisine. Marlene thought about generations, about inheritance, about what she was doing here, really, as she sipped the weak and bitter cup.

“And how's my doll?” asked Mrs. Ciampi, feigning innocence, comprehending perfectly, of course, that the one person they hadn't discussed was the one most on Marlene's mind. “What's with Lucy?”

So it all came out, the rudeness, the disobedience, the sullen contempt. Mrs. Ciampi listened, gently encouraging, withholding comment. Marlene felt some of the misery lift and wondered how women her age who were estranged from their own mothers managed to raise children—who could they talk to? Books? Therapists? Not that Marlene considered Teresa Ciampi any great expert on child rearing: look how Marlene had turned out, after all, but she had the history, she'd been there, when the seeds were planted that—so Marlene believed in her deepest heart—were bearing in Lucy such unlikely fruit.

“Tell me,” Mrs. Ciampi said after her daughter had run down, “does she still go to church?”

“Oh, does she ever! I can't get her out of there. She makes the Little Flower look like Lenny Bruce.”

Her mother shot her a look dense with meaning. Decoded: you and your wise mouth, I told you a million times, you mock the church, you're going to get trouble and here it is.

Aloud, she said, “And you? Or you just drop her off?”

“I go, Ma. You know me. I punch the clock even if I don't work the shift. What, you think it's a punishment from
God
Lucy's giving me grief?”

“No, she's just taking after her mother.”

“Get out of here! I was a little angel compared to Lucy. I never opened my mouth.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I must have been in amnesia eighteen years, I wasn't really here.”

“When? Give me one time!”

“One time? Oh, let's see . . . you were fourteen, because it was the summer your great-aunt Angela passed away, God rest her soul. I came home from shopping and you were in the kitchen leaned over the ironing board, ironing your hair like you used to do, the hair God gave you wasn't good enough. You remember that?”

“I remember ironing my hair.”

Mrs. Ciampi raised her eyes. “Oh, thank you, Madonna, I'm not losing my mind. So I come in, I put my bags down, and I say, because it was a weekday, and you were working at Uncle Manny's, why're you doing that on a Tuesday, or whatever it was, you got work tomorrow, you're not going out, and you don't say anything, like a mule. So I ask you, where're you going you're ironing your hair. Still no answer. So I think, this is my house, my kitchen, and this little
strega
's pretending I'm not there? So I yank the cord from the iron out of the wall.”

She paused for effect, nodding, took a sip of coffee, assured herself that she had Marlene's full and fascinated attention, and resumed.

“You let out a yell like I never heard, and you called me a bad word, I won't even say what it was, and then you threw the iron at me. At my head.”

“No!”

“Yes. You think I'm making this up? Look over there on the door post, on the left. See that mark? It's painted two times since then, but you could still see it. That's the mark. Then you ran out, we didn't see you until God knows when at night. That was when you were climbing in and out up the drainpipe.”

“Oh, Jesus, you
knew
about the drainpipe?”

“Don't swear. Yeah, I know you think my head's full of lasagna, but I got eyes.”

“And you never said anything. Did you tell Pop about the drainpipe?”

Mrs. Ciampi sniffed disdainfully. “Are you joking? You'd be six feet underground I ever told him the things you pulled. I didn't tell him about the iron either. He came home and saw the mark, I said I was changing the kitchen bulb and the ladder fell.”

“I can't believe this,” said Marlene. She felt an odd constriction in her chest, and the room seemed to be growing warmer. “I don't remember
any
of that. And you didn't do
anything
about it?”

“I prayed, Marlene. I sent up so many novenas . . . Father Martini, if you remember him, let him rest in peace, Father Martini said, ‘Teresa, you wore out the roof on the church. That's why we need a new roof, Teresa Ciampi.' What else could I do? Whip you like a dog? Lock you up?” She sighed, sipped the cooling coffee. “Anyway, it turned out better than I expected, tell you the honest truth. You stopped with those bums with the motorcycles, you won the scholarship to Sacred Heart . . . I'm not saying you're not still
pazza
, but it's your life, darling. But what I'm saying, about Lucy, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Have patience and bring her by more, I'll talk to her.”

Marlene nodded, hardly hearing. “I'm stunned, Ma. Now you're going to tell me
you
were out of your skull when you were Lucy's age, too.” Silence at this. “Well,
were
you?”

“That's none of your business,” said Mrs. Ciampi, and looked away.

The object of this discussion, having calmed her fury just enough so that she was no longer shaking, dressed in her usual jeans, sneakers, and embroidered vest over a T-shirt, this one imprinted with a color rendition of a can of Chung-King Chicken Chow Mein, and fled the loft. On an ordinary summer vacation day she would have headed, of course, for the Asia Mall to hang out and help out, but this was, naturally, impossible, her mother having ruined her life forever. She had her musette bag stocked with her favorite books, her journal, pens, a compact dictionary or two, and something less than $200 in crumpled bills, her stash.

She walked in a northerly direction, up Crosby, over to Broadway on Spring, up Broadway, through the heart of cast-iron Soho. She almost headed for Old St. Patrick's, where she might dump some part of her burden of pain, but decided against doing so until the wrath had left her heart. Father Dugan was a smart fellow, and he would snatch the secret from her in no time, as one could not lie to a priest, and she did not want to give it up just yet. She began playing with the idea of going to Washington Square Park and making a start as a junkie prostitute street person. Pro: it would focus the entire energy and attention of the family on Lucy, where it truly belonged, and would make her mother utterly miserable, which she deserved. Con: hideous pain and early death. Still, she had to do
something
. . . .

At Prince Street she became aware that someone was following her. In an instant the stupid adolescent maundering left her mind by the nearest exit. Her true self popped up out of the mire, looked around, and took charge.

Lucy paused, as she had learned to do, at a corner window and checked the reflection, and then turned east on Prince. Halfway down the block, she suddenly dashed across the street, as if attracted by the display in a gallery window opposite. She saw an oriental man in dark clothes and a cheap straw hat walk past on the north side of Prince and stop to examine some rugs on display in a window. He could see her reflection as she could see his. When Lucy moved west again, he followed, keeping to the opposite side of the street. Then, between one of her sideways glances and another, he vanished.

Lucy was impressed. She had been taught that (non-crazy) people follow other people for one of two reasons: either they wish to know where the target is going and what she's doing there, or they wish to find her in a vulnerable position, alone, for example, in the classic dark alley, and there do her mischief. In both cases, of course, the follower must be careful not to let the target know she is being followed, while the target should perform various maneuvers when she suspects she is, so as to break the follower from cover. This Lucy had just done, and the follower, spotted, had broken off his follow.

Or maybe not. Back on Broadway by this time, she waited until the light had just turned red against her and flew across the honking street and down into the Prince Street subway station. There she did the standard drill, waiting for a downtown train, boarding it, jumping off an instant before the doors closed. The platform was empty. She crossed to the other platform, waited for an uptown local, and took it to Eighth Street. From there she walked over to Washington Square and found a bench by the chess tables.

This park was, like many another in the city, a drug market and urban squalor demo. Around the noble arch, dingy and scrawled upon, a fake cake in the window of an unprosperous baker, bored Guatemalan nannies of bond trader/ad executives' babies alternated with crack dealers, with their zoned-out clients, with bemused Asian architecture students, with kids from the Tisch School making videos about the collapse of civilization, the soundtrack provided by folk singers encouraging people to join the coal miners' union, their warbles competing with a half dozen boom boxes blasting salsa, ska, punk, R&B, and heavy metal into the innocent green canopy, echoing back, mixing strangely, assaulting the ears of those who were not yet used to the love songs of the city, hardly disturbing the slumber of the bond trader/ad executives' babies, as the Guatemalan nannies gently rocked them to whatever transient beat penetrated, their flat brown faces closed tight against America.

For Lucy, child of the city, all this was as a wheat field to a Kansas kid, an unremarkable background, against which only a few objects had any chance of standing out. A disheveled person holding an automatic weapon might engage her interest, for example, or the guy who had been following her. Meanwhile, she sat and read
Claudine en Menage
. It would be hard for anyone who has never been captivated by a fictional character to comprehend the depths of Lucy's disappointment in Claudine, or to credit that the end of the second book in the series—in which Claudine agrees to marry a man old enough to be her father—had contributed considerably to the recent explosion with her mother. In one corner of her mind she had imagined (while understanding at some level the absurdity of the notion) that Claudine would marry Kim, and somehow combine a life of intimate sensuality with exotic adventures involving a large number of foreign languages.

Her devotion to the series was such, however, that she read grimly on, and after a while found some satisfaction in Claudine's discovery that marriage to the old fart was not what she had expected, and increasing fascination in the prospect of her lesbian affair with the delicious Rézi. Naturally these juicy parts made her think of spinning it all out to her friends in the fur room, and the recollection that all that was lost forever, and probably her friends with it, pierced her heart anew, and the pages blurred.

She dabbed her eyes and then gasped, for standing right in front of her was the oriental man in the straw hat.

“You know,” he said in French, “it does little good to make your escape so brilliantly and then to come sit here all oblivious like an eggplant on a windowsill. Would you care for a peanut?”

She took one from the proffered bag, and he sat down next to her.

“How did you do that?” she asked grumpily. “I thought I got away clean on the subway.”

“So you did, but, as you are aware, my study of the secrets of the Orient has given me certain mystic powers far beyond your puny Western abilities.” With this he slitted his eyes mysteriously and waggled his thick eyebrows. This person, who called himself Tran Vinh Din, was a medium-sized Vietnamese of unprepossessing appearance, somewhat more than fifty years old, wiry of build, calm of demeanor. Except for the shallow dent in the side of his head and the scars on his hands and the oddly twisted fingernails, he looked like someone to whom nothing interesting had happened, a schoolteacher, say, or a cook in a noodle joint. In fact, he had been a schoolteacher and a cook in a noodle joint, but between those two occupations, in the years between 1954 and 1975, he had been a member, and eventually quite a senior member, of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, known inaccurately as the Viet Cong. After that he had been a political prisoner of the People's Republic of Vietnam and after that a boat person and after that a fraudulent immigrant under his false name (a common enough story at the time in New York, save the Viet Cong part), and now was a sometime employee of Marlene Ciampi, as well as her daughter's best friend over the age of thirteen.

“
Merde,
” responded Lucy with assurance and took a handful of nuts.

“So you respond with the word of Cambronne, and properly in this case. In fact, I meet you here entirely by accident, although you still should not have let me approach. I could have been two rough fellows with a big sack.”

“In full day in the middle of a crowded park?”

“Oh, yes, these chess players would have leaped to your defense, I have no doubt. Many unpleasant things may happen in the full light of day.”