The End (13 page)

She was sure Lina had never indulged any sniping ghosts like this one; however, even if she had indulged them, she would have been able, as Mrs. Marini rarely was, to declare herself innocent at the last, or innocent enough, and march out into the cold autumn air.

There was a bench under the consignment-store awning where the girl and her mother sometimes sat and watched Joseph D’Agostino’s cockatoo through the plate glass and made doilies out of the bleached threads from a burlap bag, but neither Lina nor Patrizia was there.

There was a scent—she passed a woman in the intersection, a mother of nine but slender, clean-complected, the name was, the name was; but she must not
try
to remember, lest she fail—a smell of soap, hair, and something bitter besides, and it dropped her into a crevasse many ages old, accessible only via the nose and only if the scent was lost again at once: I have opened my sister’s carpetbag to see that she does not take my leggings with her when she leaves us forever tomorrow.

Such was her recent distraction that she’d allowed three days of newspapers to accumulate on her sideboard, a dereliction only of what she owed herself, since no one remained whose conversation demanded a knowledge of the news. The Prussians were departed, and Nico. Her peers were dead. And the age of gripping public events was over. Once women had been allowed to exert their influence at the polls, the nation had been beset by eerie calm. Consider aeroplanes and the Great War and the influenza and the headlong rush to outlaw good times (booze, she meant) that had preceded this, the republic’s least interesting decade. And, as though to emphasize the point, Elephant Park, where until recently a variety of peoples had lived (mostly Germans, agreed, but they were literate, they spent some money now and then on a pretty object that had no use, didn’t they?), had been narcotized over the last ten years by an injection of the unwashed from her own home country. Consequently, the Germans, the Danes, the Croats, and the Magyars had been driven off. One-family houses were divided into threes and fours. The refuse in the streets, the crowds, the rickety children, and barnyard animals tied to mailboxes—she was not pleased. She was like a Jew who had transferred herself to an obscure island in the outer Venetian lagoon and found, to her amazement, once she had grown old, that all her coreligionists had been moved out of the city and into her garden.

The new people had no politics. When Plato had gone to Sicily, hoping to put his political ideas into practice, the locals had sold him into slavery. As far as the new people cared, the body politic included their blood relations and nobody else. Equally and oppositely depressing: The
individual
also included the blood relations.
I
was
we.
The notion that you might sacrifice the good of your sister for the good of the commune was absurd, likewise that you might eat a whole chicken by yourself. She used to be more like them, in her peasant days. But she used to be a wretch.

She was in the street wearing a scowl to keep would-be chatters at bay. Now, if she wanted solitude, why not stay at home? Because she did not want solitude, she wanted the life of the mind, which was best lived in the street. Politics, or the life of others as lived by oneself, was the mind’s natural subject. Conversation was its natural sport. And the dearth these days, which seemed permanent, of interlocutors made her want to spit on—on everybody, on her own shoes!

And the fog gradually thickened into a swarming drizzle under the gas lamps overhead and the girl could not be found.

Mrs. Marini had voted for the first time at age sixty, for Warren Gamaliel Harding and the rest of the Republican ballot, thank you, bearing dearly the memory of T.R., dead almost two years, we would not look upon his like again. Harding seemed okay. Being himself an Ohioan, it would have pressed her loyalty to reject him. Let’s leave Europe to its feckless wars, he implied. Let’s stay at home and grow our corn. “Hear! Hear!” she said. This from a man born in the tall-corn town of Corsica, Napoleonic in name only, between Mansfield and Columbus, so he must have had a sense of humor, too, to advocate such a platform. She pardoned his vote for the Vol stead Act, since he was one of tens of millions to have been swept away in the hysteria for temperance, the backward bacchanal, and she ignored Prohibition anyway. If she’d known they would be so boring, the twenties, she would have voted for Cox—

No, she wouldn’t have. What was she saying? She was determined to get to work finally, but her material was somewhere among the fruit carts, evading her.

“Or else Providence is hiding her from you,” said the voice of one of her dead who lived in the crevasse, “because she is a child.”

She didn’t understand why the Democratic party was allowed to exist; a war had been fought and half a million men killed to expose the Democrats, and still they were among us.

Finally she permitted herself a snoop down Eighteenth Street. But no light glowed in the Montaneros’ hut (formerly a stable), and she paced back up the hill.

That woman’s name was so common, the woman she’d smelled in the intersection, and her plight was so common, and the cut of her coat, and the syncopated bleating of her accent, that Mrs. Marini presumed insipidness in her every particular, which was always unfair, as Mrs. Marini’s profession never failed to remind her, checking her tendency to assume that no other houses enclosed so many mansions as hers did. The woman’s name was Giacoma. The file card had fallen into the bottom of the brain’s drawer, but, here, she’d found it: a syphilitic, from her husband’s dalliances; the last two children were stillborn and blind, respectively; from her adolescent years in Brazil, she had learned to sing sweetly mournful songs in Portuguese.

Where was her quarry, her lamb, her pot to put her gold in?

There she was.

See her? A girl flitting over a bridge of bowed planks that spanned the sewer trench. Lina waved wildly, as though she also had come into the street in search of someone and it was Mrs. Marini she hoped to find.

“Here I am!” Mrs. Marini called in an ecstasy of self-esteem.

“Narcissus,” said Nico’s voice. “Sun Queen.”

Not to be abject in concession to him, but a phrase was in order, something to redirect her feelings outward and focus her wits. She said aloud, but softly:
“Make a fist and show me where your brains are.”

Lina waved again with her hat, vigorously, so that its pheasant feather was knocked askew.

Gray in her dowdy flannels. One misstep would send her ten feet down into the muck.

Here, kitty, kitty, beckoned the deep underneath, as the planks bounced.

Let her turn today to the happiness that all existing things share, dead or living. The chimney flues and the blinders on the dray horses, and the great pipes, wide enough to walk through, that were stacked in the avenue waiting to be buried, and she herself, a girl in the street, all shared the fate of existing in this time and place. She had waited at the door of the someone else she was sure to become for so long, like a dog under the porch while it snows. But this afternoon at last the past and the future coincided in the present moment. Her completion, which had lived behind this door from the beginning of beginnings, would at last, at last, impose itself, and the footfalls inside were audible and approached the door where she was waiting. The somebody else who she would become had eyes that would meet her eyes and claim Lina as her own and obliterate her at last. You, Lina would tell her once the door opened, have always been the only one—and now we have met: because Father has found someone to marry us.

Things were moving quickly now.

She was in the street, in search of Donna Costanza, who would help slow the things down and point to each one and explain it.

Along the sidewalk, the men talked closer to one another than the women because the brims of their hats didn’t get in the way, as hers did.

In the trench in the street, six men in coveralls were having their picture taken while they ate their working supper—though it was late and the light was poor; and the meat was stuck in their whiskers; and on the great timbers, which were like a parlor wall in the great trench where the pipes would go, they had tacked drawings of girls in the nude.

Boys in striped breeches showed their ribs through their thin shirts as they swung from the tree branches. It was too cold to go around without a coat, but the boys did as they pleased. They might swim in the creek bare-ass, daring her to watch. She didn’t watch anymore, openly from the bridge, with her legs dangling under the rail. Nowadays, she worked.

The man her father had found had already seen her photograph, for which she had borrowed her sister’s wedding dress. It was a piece of ingenuity of her father’s, so that no one could mistake the photograph for the kind men pass in trenches at suppertime. But she had not believed that the picture would work until today, when her father revealed that it had achieved its purpose. The man was two years in the union, could read and write, although not yet in English. A bricklayer from the countryside east of Naples whose one eye lazed. Fear not the mother, her father said, meaning the man’s mother. The mother would stay in Europe. Lina would be the mistress of her own house.

Someone in a double-breasted coat, with the flag of America stuck in his hatband and in his horse’s harness bells, drove past and told the street it must try his brand of soda pop. And a thin-lipped girl slouched on the seat next to him, dourly waving to the crowd that did not pay her any mind.

A woman stood on a plow while a man behind the wheel of a flivver dragged it through the remains of the charity vegetable garden.

A man sold potatoes from a steam cart in front of the pharmacy. Lina had never needed to enter the pharmacy, because her health was excellent. All her pieces worked, her father had told the man, whose name was Vinciuzzo—but she shouldn’t use dialect names or presume affections.

Her husband-in-waiting was a latecomer. Her father said that when he showed the man proof of her penmanship and her addition and subtraction, the man had noted that she didn’t draw a line across her sevens, as Europeans did. In other words, her skills would be her dowry. Her father would not have to pay him to have her married, as he had Mr. Schaeffer to take Antonietta off his hands. He had sold her by not having to pay, so now he and Mother could go and live on a grape farm in the country, as he had always wanted. And in this respect, Lina was proud.

She hoped the new man would let her wear her skirts above her shoes so that the hems didn’t need so often to be mended. She wasn’t finicky, but she hoped his teeth were sound. She wondered which language they would speak in the house and with the children.

Her life had been like the clay that she and her mother and her sister dug out of the creek bed and molded around a turkey or a capon at Christmastime, careful to make the mold in the shape of the bird inside, like a sarcophagus; and they baked it all slowly, and took it out to cool, and painted feathers on it with whitewash—and eyes with shoe polish, and its wattle with her mother’s lipstick—and waited for her father to come to the table and say that he blessed it, and the three of them, and Saint Joseph, his patron, and for him to hold the hammer and smash it. While they cheered and the steam came out.

She would meet the man-in-waiting on Saturday. And if she accepted him—she could not see why she would not accept him—then he would be the one, a month from now, for whose sake she would paint the case around herself and let him smash her.

Everything was going to commence at one time with a smash. It was fitting, it seemed impossible and right, that she would be introduced to her completion by something that otherwise was a crime.

Donna Costanza was not at home and so could only be making the passage in the street, pacing monkishly, as she did. Lina’s feelings were so severe now, and she knew there were some disclosures Donna Costanza had held back, waiting for today, about what she must do for her husband and what she mustn’t ever do to him. Her mother wouldn’t do that. Her mother watched more and spoke with her face. But sometimes Lina was betwixt and between, and Donna Costanza could be trusted to explain.

Her father had met with this man, and even kissed the sides of his face, as he must have done to seal the agreement—even though the man was saying in so many words that he was going to lift her clothes off her and touch her underneath. Her mother had given a look that said, It is this way. And nothing else. As though for her father to have to watch as people greeted her on the arm of this man with the horrible laughing knowingness in their eyes, as though her father’s simply agreeing to it because it was this way, because it had always been this way, would alleviate his shame.

She could move about freely only because everyone knew to whom she belonged, like a bicycle you might leave unchained anywhere you pleased because a thief would have no place to ride it without being called a thief by everyone who saw him. But now there was a middle time that Donna Costanza, she hoped, might help her with, when her father had relinquished his claim to her and she didn’t belong to her father or yet to anyone else.

The married women shouting to each other in the street, and the ratty laundry flapping over her head, and the spoiling fruit in the carts, were all so filthy and pure and perfected because they had all met now. And her mother had shown with her face today that now all of Lina’s parts would come suddenly into order, as though a rope was pulled tight.

Once, when she was a child, her mother had sent her to Donna Costanza’s garden to pick some leaves off the laurel tree for a stew, but she had misunderstood and had come back with a branch as long as her arm, saying she had been asked for only a little, but, look, she had found so much. And her father had scolded her mercilessly and held her by the scruff of her neck as he conveyed her along Chagrin Avenue with a brush and a pot of tar and showed her how to graft the branch onto the tree again. His intention was to instruct her that as much as possible she must strive to keep things from going to pieces.