The End (28 page)

She could hear her blood rushing behind her eyes. She pressed her face against the window to cool it. She had made a purse to put herself in out of rag patches and chewing gum, and now they were going to try to spill her out.

A plow rumbled past, and her mother popped the brake and sped behind it. Twenty blocks of churchlike silence ensued.

Mrs. Marini twisted her knees to the passenger side of the gearshift so that they were pointed at Lina’s legs. Likewise, she dangled her right elbow behind the seat and turned her shoulders toward her. She took at least a minute to assume this position. Patrizia shifted the truck into third. Then, with the meat of her left hand, Mrs. Marini rapped the dashboard. “Now is the time when I am going to ask some questions and you are going to give some answers,” she said.

Lina said, “All right.”

“Where are your clothes.”

“In the back of the truck in my suitcase.”

“Where are the clothes that a rational person would wear in hostile weather such as this, such as woolen leggings and earmuffs.”

“I’m hot.”

“Are you experiencing the change of life.”

“I have been very, very hot for two days. No.”

“Do you have a fever? Let me check your head.”

“Yes, a little.”

“When was the last time you took Holy Communion.”

“Five years. Six years.”

“When was your last confession.”

“Six years ago.”

“What were you doing in Saskatchewan.”

“I had a job. It was Wyoming.”

“What kind of a job? I’ve heard rumors. I’ve heard ‘lumberjack’ and ‘stevedore’ and ‘football coach.’ I’ve heard all kind of innuendo, which I’ve had to go on because the horse’s mouth could not, evidently, pick up the telephone and give a call.”

“I was the cook at a school.”

“Were you unfaithful to your husband.”

Pause. “No.”

“Why would you allow yourself to leave the house in a state like this, without a little eye shadow, a little something to cover.”

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t care about me? About—”

“About what a stranger says or thinks.”

“Do you know how tall is your boy and what is the hair color.”

“No. I am assuming still brown.”

“That’s right.” Pause. “Don’t you want to know how tall? The answer is, For a boy his age, he is titanic. Why did you never call.”

“I didn’t have a telephone.”

“Did you forget the phone numbers of your husband and your mother?”

“I didn’t have a telephone.”

“For how long was the time of your stay in oater-movie-land? Boise, Medicine Hat, whatever.”

“Four or five years. It was Casper, Wyoming.”

“Where you worked at a school during which time.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Which the school had an office, presumably.”

“Yes.”

“Where they would have had a telephonic device of some type.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Yet you did not ask permission to use this device to make contact with your husband or your mother or myself, nor write a postcard communicating the telephone number of this place where we might from time to time speak with you. You were too busy reading
Riders of the Purple Sage
and suchlike.”

“I wrote with the address.”

“I do not want to hear little stories which you believe to be excul patory. How often did you write?”

Patrizia piped in, “She wrote me every Christmas.”

But Mrs. Marini talked over her. “How often did you write to your husband or to the boy? I know the answer to this to be, Maybe every once in the cows-come-home.”

“Not regularly.”

“Why did you leave Tombstone or Santa Fe or whatever the place.”

“Casper.”

“Why.”

“I don’t know.”

“Make something up.”

“I had a friend, I had only the one friend, and they were going to fire her. She stole a can of potato chips, was all she’d done, and she was leaving, and she was passing through here, and I decided—”

“A moment, please. This friend.”

“A woman who was the other cook.”

“A friend of yours.”

“Yes.”

“Onward.”

“And I decided I was going to come back here.”

“Why.”

“I don’t know.”

“Liar.”

“I don’t know.”

“Turn your eyes inward toward the soul and describe what you see,” the old woman said in a rage.

“I decided. That’s all. I wanted to come back.”

“And yet you didn’t come back.”

“I—I sent Enzo a telegram about Can I come home, I’ll be arriving at this time and place; but he wasn’t at the station and I thought that meant—”

“What telegram?”

“I sent a telegram but I thought he got it but he didn’t come but I talked to him later on the phone but he didn’t get it. You see. He didn’t get the telegram. But I—but I could’ve said, I’d sent this telegram about Could I come, I will be arriving; but you weren’t there, but the telegram didn’t arrive, but I want to come home now. But I kept my mouth shut. But I could’ve. He would’ve come to get me. I know. But I was too afraid to ask him. Because what if he said no? But I was only in Pittsburgh by then. And I could have said please. And he might have said yes.”

“I know what he would have said.”

“Stop it, Costanza. Stop it right now,” Patrizia said.

“And you know what he would have said, too.”

“Stop it,” Patrizia said.

“You would have talked him awake or driven him home yourself.”

“That’s enough,” Lina said.

“You’re a fool. I love you. You’re a fool.”

“Shut your decrepit mouth,” Lina said.

“Why did you stay in Pittsburgh.”

“I got a job.”

“Coffee grinder. Monkey salesman.”

“I was sewing drapes in a department store.”

“How often did you write to your husband or to the boy—shut up, Patrizia, and let her answer the question.”

“Twice.”

“One time and then one more time.”

“Yes.”

“Are you experiencing the change of life?”

“Maybe, I’m not sure. My heart races.”

“Why did you leave Wyoming—you know you know you know.”

“Why was I in Wyoming to begin with? is what you mean.”

“Unstitch. Disassemble piece by piece.”

“Why was I in Wyoming.”

“Why were you in Wyoming.”

“Why did I take the job.”

“Why.”

“Why did I look for the job. Why did I stop in Douglas. Why did I sleep in the wayside in Wisconsin.”

“Don’t you want to know? If you don’t know, who knows?”

“Why wasn’t I here.”

“First one foot, then the other.”

“Why did I leave.”

“Yes.”

“It was humid out.”

“And then?”

“Why did I get in the car?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“It was humid and I didn’t want to get in the car, which would be more humid. Why was I getting in the car?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I can
tell
you, but it isn’t what you want. It was insignificant.”

“It was? I bet it was.”

“Yes, but it was an insignificant errand, and afterward I got back in the car and thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to drive awhile with the window open? It had nothing to do with youse two or Enzo or Cheech or anyone.”

“This errand—”

“It was nothing—I was making cheese, but there was no rennet left. You see?”

Silence.

“And then I kept on driving.”

The plow veered onto a highway. Where they were, most of the streetlights were broken. Snow was falling. The snow cover was blue. The truck crawled up a hill. Lina’s face was stiff from the cold of the window. She remembered she still had the girl’s handkerchief in her dress pocket.

“How long are you staying?” Mrs. Marini asked.

“I have all my things.”

“Are you
staying
staying, then?”

“Maybe.”

“Nobody will beg you now,” Patrizia said.

“Me, or a piece of cheese?” Mrs. Marini said.

“You can’t make me ashamed.”

“Shame is useless,” Mrs. Marini said. “Get rid of shame.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“Just get rid of it.”

“I’m
not
ashamed.”

“It is debilitating and ex post facto and useless.”

“You won’t make me apologize,” said Lina.

“You will, though.”

“I absolutely will do no such thing.”

Mrs. Marini said, “I ask that you give me that.”

“Go ahead.”

“Please.”

“Please what?”

“Please apologize to me,” Mrs. Marini said.

“No.”

“Good, fine, thank you. I accept. But apologies never kept me company. Apologies never tied your shoes.”

Her house—rather, Vincenzo’s house—looked as though it had recently been in order but then an extremely fastidious person had been directed to turn it into a pigsty. Newspapers, schoolbooks, and a table lamp formed an inelegant obelisk in a corner of the front room. The dining-room and kitchen chairs had been left upturned on the tabletops, as in a restaurant after hours. Twine strung around brass tacks in the window jambs held back the dusty curtains. The air was thick with bleach.

They found a note from Ciccio on the icebox beginning,
To Whom It May Concern,
saying that he planned to spend the night at Ricky’s.

Mrs. Marini went home. Lina and her mother rolled off their stockings and got on their knees to scrub the kitchen floor. Midnight came, and it was 1953. Evidently her husband’s hair had gone white; she found it on the pillow of his bed.

The next morning, the three women spread out the contents of Lina’s bags on the kitchen table. A snowstorm whistled about the house. Her mother said, “Where are the rest?”

“These are the rest,” she said.

“Where are the rest of your
clothes,
Carmelina,” Mrs. Marini said.

“These are all the clothes I have.”

They boiled water in three pots on the stove. Mrs. Marini measured the black dye powder and dumped a cup of salt into the pot for the cotton and another into the pot for the wool.

Lina had made nearly all the clothes from the leavings of the home-economics room at the school in Casper, and none of the patterns or colors mattered to her.

They did not dye her nylons or handkerchiefs.

You want a why. But there is no why. You want a depiction complete with flora, sunsets, How deep was the snow in the blizzard of ’49? How was the furniture arranged in the cell where I slept in the dormitory? These are the faces of the friends I knew there; but no such depiction is forthcoming, too bad, no artifacts by which in later years to verify that I was there and my recollections are credible, no way to disprove your suspicion that I simply was, then was not, and now am again since I departed the train onto the platform. I want to be a line that extends and ravels and at length intersects itself again, a path that can be retraced stepwise, but I am not, I am discontinuous.

Another cavelike day elapsed before the snow broke and she was able to climb Vermilion Avenue to the mortuary carrying two suits of Enzo’s, one of which was for the father, who was to be cremated in it and sent home in a steel urn. As she left the mortician’s office, the blaze of white winter sun on the snow was like a chemical explosion that left spots on her field of vision, so that she could hardly make her way for squinting and could not tell if the commercial district of the neighborhood had decayed or been revived in her absence. Peering through a gap in her fingers, she noticed a familiar storefront, lacking a sign but evidently open in spite of the storm, and went in.

The bell on the door of the bakery tinkled, and the curtain flag of Ohio was pulled aside as the baker Rocco emerged, rattling a piece of candy across his molars.

“Tell me,” he said roughly, snapping open a wax-paper bag.

“Two crescents, please. Marmalade.” She opened her change purse, but there were only dimes and pennies.

Below the chalkboard where the prices were listed hung a photograph of a handsome boy, clean shaven and dreary-eyed, wearing a white military hat and smiling coldly. The photograph had been ardently colorized—the American flag in the background painted in, the lips purpled; the flush of the cheeks was girlish.

A note above it on the chalkboard read:
Prisoner of Our Enemy
832
Days Consecutive So Far.

“Otherwise?” the baker said.

“Nothing, thank you.”

“Forty-six cents, if you can find it in there.”

But she couldn’t, and had to ask him to put one of the crescents back.

“This is Montanero, if I’m not mistaken. I heard you had gone off to the Wyoming,” he said. “Sorry that I forget your other name.”

“Charlotte,” she said automatically. It was her alias. She never used it again.

15

C
iccio finally spoke the word he had seen typed all over the vineyard. “I’ll have to absquatulate,” he said.

Exactly when he made up his mind to let his mother have the house on Twenty-second Street, he couldn’t say.

Everything had gone to hell. Everything had gone to hell in a flash. Since it was everything that had gone to hell, you’d think nothing new could go there, and since it was to hell that everything had gone, you’d think it couldn’t sink any farther, but not so.

Regarding the three days after the crash, he suffered from a selective kind of amnesia: He had no sensory record of that time, but he remembered ideas and emotions perfectly. He could remember feeling liberated, and not jubilant but, he had to say, happy; the calamity was a meal for the mind. But he couldn’t remember what he had been physically doing, in what physical place, while he was thinking. He knew he had been on the farm; it wouldn’t have been too exciting, whatever he was up to. Eventually he asked his grandmother, who told him he’d been in the vineyard, on snowshoes, tying vines sunup to sundown. He wouldn’t come inside for lunch, which she had had to drive out to him on the tractor.

To be delirious from Latin was to have turned out of the furrow, as a plow.