Last Night in Twisted River (25 page)

As Carmella lay in bed, she thought about the places she could no longer go in the North End, first because she’d gone there with the fisherman, and then—more painfully—because she associated specific areas of the neighborhood with those special things she’d done with Angelù. Now where would she no longer be able to go when Dominic (her dear Gamba) had left her? the widow Del Popolo wondered.

After Angelù drowned, Carmella took no more walks on Parmenter Street—specifically, not in the vicinity of what had been Cushman’s. The elementary school, where Angelù had gone to the early grades, had been torn down. (In ’55, or maybe in ’56—Carmella couldn’t remember.) In its place, there would one day be a library, but Carmella wouldn’t ever walk by that library.

Because she’d always been a waitress at Vicino di Napoli—it had been her first job and became her only one—she was free most mornings. When the little kids at Cushman’s took their school trips in the neighborhood, Carmella had always volunteered to be one of the parents who went along—just to help the teachers out. Therefore, she no longer went anywhere near the Old North Church, where she and Angelù’s class of schoolchildren had been shown the steeple that was restored in 1912 by the descendants of Paul Revere. It was an Episcopal church—one Carmella wouldn’t have attended, because she was Catholic—but it was famous (foremost, for its role in Paul Revere’s ride). Enshrined, under glass, were the bricks from the cell where the Pilgrim fathers had been imprisoned in England.

On two counts could Carmella not walk past the Mariners House on North Square, and this was awkward for her because it was so close to Vicino di Napoli. But it was the landmark of the Boston Port and Seamen’s Society, “dedicated to the service of seafarers.” The schoolchildren in Angelù’s class had visited the Mariners House, but Carmella had skipped that school trip—after all, she’d lost a fisherman at sea.

It was just plain silly how more innocent connections to the fisherman and Angelù haunted her, but they did. She loved the Caffè Vittoria but avoided that room with the pictures of Rocky Marciano, because both the fisherman and Angelù had admired the heavyweight champion. And she’d eaten with her husband and son at the Grotta Azzurra on Hanover Street, where Enrico Caruso used to eat, too. Now there was no more going there.

The fisherman had told her that no sailor had ever been mugged on Hanover Street, or ever would be; it was a safe walk for even the drunken-most sailors, all the way from the waterfront to the Old Howard and back. In addition to the striptease places, there were cheap bars frequented by the sailors, and the arcades around Scollay Square. (Of course this would all change; Scollay Square itself would go.) But the world Carmella had lived in with her drowned husband and drowned son was both sacred and haunted to her—the whole length of Hanover Street!

Even the scavenging seagulls over the Haymarket reminded her of the Saturday people-watching she had done there, with Angelù holding her hand. Now she looked with caution at that restaurant on Fleet Street where Stella’s used to be; she occasionally ate there with Dominic, on the nights Vicino di Napoli was closed. They ate at the Europeo, too—Dominic usually had the fried calamari, but never New York–style. (“Hold the red sauce—I like it just with lemon,” the cook would say.) Would she no longer be able to eat in these places after her Gamba was gone? Carmella wondered.

She would certainly have to move into a smaller apartment. Would it be so hot in the apartment in the summer that she would become like one of those old ladies in the tenement building on Charter Street? They took their chairs out of their apartments so they could sit on the sidewalk, where it was cooler. Those cold-water tenements had been bedecked with streamers for the saints’ feasts in the summer. Carmella suddenly recalled Angelù as a little boy sitting on the fisherman’s shoulders; Hanover Street had been closed for a procession. It was the Feast of San Rocco, Carmella was remembering. Nowadays, she didn’t like to watch the processions.

IN 1919, GIUSÉ POLCARI
had been a young man. He remembered the Molasses Explosion, which killed twenty-one people in the North End—including the father of some kid Joe Polcari had known. “He was-a boiled to death in a tidal wave of hot molasses!” old Joe had said to Danny. Though the war was over, those who’d heard the explosion thought the Germans were coming—that Boston Harbor was being bombed, or something. “I saw a whole piano floating in the molasses!” old Polcari told young Dan.

In the kitchen of Vicino di Napoli was a black-and-white photograph of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; the two anarchist immigrants were handcuffed together. Sacco and Vanzetti were sent to the electric chair for the murder of a paymaster and a guard at a shoe company in South Braintree. Old Polcari—in his final, addle-brained days—couldn’t remember all the details, but he remembered the protest marches. “Sacco and Vanzetti were framed! A stool pigeon in the Charlestown Street jail fingered them, and the State of Massachusetts gave-a the stool pigeon a free ride back to Italy,” old Joe had said to Danny. There’d been a procession for Sacco and Vanzetti that started on Hanover Street in the North End and went all the way to Tremont Street, where the mounted police had broken up the crowd; there were thousands of protesters, Joe Polcari among them.

“If you or your son ever have a problem, Gamba, you tell me,” Giusé Polcari said to Dominic. “I know-a some guys—they feex-a your problem for you.”

Old Polcari meant the Camorra, the Neapolitan version of the Mafia—not that Dominic could truly understand the distinction. When he’d behaved wildly as a kid, Nunzi had called him her
camorrista
. But it was Dominic’s impression that the Mafia was more or less in control of the North End, where both the Mafia and the Camorra were called the Black Hand.

When Dominic told Paul Polcari that the cowboy might be coming after him, Paul said, “If my dad were alive, he’d call his Camorra buddies, but I don’t know about those guys.”

“I don’t know about the Mafia, either,” Tony Molinari told Dominic. “If they do something for you, then you owe them.”

“I don’t want to involve you in my troubles,” Dominic said to them. “I’m not asking the Mafia to help me, or the Camorra.”

“The crazy cop won’t come after Carmella, will he?” Paul Polcari asked the cook.

“I don’t know—Carmella bears watching,” Dominic answered.

“We’ll watch her, all right,” Molinari said. “If the cowboy comes here, to the restaurant—well, we’ve got knives, cleavers—”

“Wine bottles,” Paul Polcari suggested.

“Don’t even think about it,” Dominic told them. “If Carl comes here looking for me, he’ll be armed—he wouldn’t go anywhere without that Colt forty-five on him.”

“I know what my dad would say,” Paul Polcari said. “He’d say, ‘A Colt forty-five is-a
nothing—
not if you’ve ever tried to get-a cozy with one of those women who work as
stitchers
in the shirt factory. Even naked, they got-a needles on ’em!’” (Joe Polcari meant the Leopold Morse factory in the old Prince Macaroni building; his son Paul said Giusé must have banged some tough broad who worked there, or he’d tried to.)

The three cooks laughed; they made an effort to forget about the deputy sheriff up in Coos County. What else could they do but try to forget about him?

Old Polcari had had a hundred jokes like that one about the shirt-stitchers. “Do you remember the one about the woman who worked the night shift at the Boston Sausage and Provision Company?” Dominic asked Paul and Tony.

Both chefs roared. “Yeah, she worked in the skinless-meat department,” Paul Polcari said.

“She had this sneaky little knife, for cutting the skin off the frankfurters!” Molinari remembered.

“She could peel-a your penis like it was a
grape!”
the three cooks shouted, almost in unison. Then Carmella came into the restaurant, and they stopped laughing.

“More dirty jokes?” she asked them. They were just firing up the pizza oven and waiting for the dough to rise; it was late morning, but the marinara sauce was already simmering. Carmella saw how worried they suddenly seemed, and they wouldn’t look in her eyes. “You were talking about Carl, weren’t you?” she asked them; they were like boys who’d been caught beating off. “Maybe you should do what Ketchum says—maybe, Gamba, you should listen to your old friend,” she said to Dominic. Two months had passed since Ketchum’s warning, but the cook still couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Carmella when he was leaving.

Now none of them could look at their beloved Gambacorta, the cook who limped. “Maybe you should go, if you’re going,” Carmella said to Dominic. “It’s almost summer,” she suddenly announced. “Do cops get summer vacations?” she asked them.

It was June—very nearly the last day of school, they all knew. That was a tough time of year for Carmella. All at once, there was nowhere she could go in the North End. The freed-from-school children were everywhere; they reminded Carmella of her Angelù
primù
, her first Angel.

The deputy sheriff had been with Six-Pack for these slowly passing two months. Yes, it was still a relatively new relationship, but—as Ketchum had pointed out—two months was a long time for Carl to go without whacking a woman. The cook couldn’t remember a time when one
week
went by and the cowboy didn’t hit Injun Jane.

THERE WERE THINGS
Carmella had never told her dear Gamba about his beloved Daniel. How the boy had managed to get laid before he even went off to Exeter, for example. Carmella had caught Danny doing it with one of her nieces—one of those DiMattia girls, Teresa’s younger sister Josie. Carmella had gone out to work in the restaurant, but she’d forgotten something and had to go back to the Wesley Place apartment. (Now she couldn’t even remember what it was she’d forgotten.) It was Danny’s day off from his busboy job. He already knew he had a full scholarship to Exeter—maybe he was celebrating. Of course Carmella knew that Josie DiMattia was older than Danny; probably Josie had started it. And all along Dominic had suspected that
Teresa
DiMattia—or her friend Elena Calogero,
definitely
a kissing cousin—would sexually initiate Danny.

Why was Gamba so worried about that? Carmella wondered. If the boy had had
more
sex—she meant in those years when he was a student at Exeter—maybe he wouldn’t have become so infatuated with that Callahan girl when he went to college! And if he’d fucked a few
more
of his kissing cousins—Calogeros
and
Saettas, or for that matter every female in the DiMattia family—possibly he would have knocked up someone a whole lot nicer than Katie!

But because Dominic had obsessed about Elena Calogero and Teresa DiMattia, when Carmella came into the apartment and saw Danny fucking someone on her bed, she first assumed it
was
Teresa who was initiating the frightened-looking fifteen-year-old. Naturally, young Dan was frightened because Carmella had caught them at it!

“Teresa, you whore!” Carmella cried. (She actually called the girl a
troia—
from that notorious Trojan woman—but the word meant “whore,” of course.)

“I’m Josie, Teresa’s sister,” the girl said indignantly. She must have been miffed that her aunt didn’t recognize her.

“Well, yes, you are,” Carmella replied. “And what are you doing using
our
bed, Danny? You’ve got your own bed, you
disgraziato—
”

“Jeez, yours is bigger,” Josie told her aunt.

“And I hope you’re using a condom!” Carmella cried.

Dominic used condoms; he didn’t mind, and Carmella preferred it. Maybe the boy had found his father’s condoms. When it came to condoms, it was a dumb world, Carmella knew. At Barone’s Pharmacy, they kept the condoms hidden, completely out of sight. If kids asked for them, the pharmacist would give them shit about it. Yet any responsible parent who had a kid that age would tell the kid to use a condom. Where exactly were the kids supposed to get them?

“Was it one of your dad’s condoms?” Carmella asked Danny, while the boy lay covered by a sheet; he looked mortified that she’d discovered him. The DiMattia girl, on the other hand, hadn’t even bothered to cover her breasts. She just sat sullenly naked, staring at her aunt with defiance. “Are you going to confess this, Josie?” Carmella asked the girl. “How are you going to confess this?”

“I brought the condoms—Teresa gave them to me,” Josie said, ignoring the larger question of confession.

Now Carmella was really angry. Just what did that
troia
Teresa think she was doing, giving her kid sister condoms! “How many did she give you?” Carmella asked. But before the girl could answer, Carmella asked Danny: “Don’t you have any homework to do?” Then Carmella seemed to realize that she was guilty of a certain hypocrisy in her hasty judgment of Teresa. (Shouldn’t Teresa be
thanked
for giving her kid sister condoms? Yet had the condoms
enabled
Josie to seduce Secondo?)

“Jeez, do you want me to count them or something?” Josie asked her aunt, about the condoms. Poor Danny just looked like he wanted to die, Carmella would always remember.

“Well, you kids be careful—I have to go to work,” Carmella told them. “Josie!” Carmella had cried, as she walked out of the apartment, just before she’d slammed the door. “You wash my sheets, you make my bed—or I’ll tell your mother!”

Carmella wondered if they had fucked all afternoon and evening, and if they’d had enough condoms. (She was so upset about it, she forgot that she’d gone back to the apartment because she’d forgotten something.)

Her dear Gamba had wanted his son to be safe from girls—and how the cook had cried when Danny went away to Exeter! Yet Carmella could never tell him that sending the boy to boarding school hadn’t really worked. (Not in the way Dominic had hoped.) Dominic had also been overly impressed by the list of the colleges and universities many Exeter graduates attended; the cook couldn’t understand why Danny hadn’t been a good enough student at the academy to get into one of those Ivy League schools. The University of New Hampshire had been a disappointment to Dominic, as were his son’s grades at Exeter. But the academy was a very hard school for someone coming from the Mickey, and Danny had demonstrated little aptitude for math and the sciences.