The Evening News (20 page)

But the book would have to be in Mexican. And it would cost money, she thinks. She does not have much money. Barely enough for necessities, for neckbones and the beans of coffee and
formaggio
and
aglio
and salt. And of course for bread. What was she thinking about? she asks herself. Did she have to go to the store to buy something? Or is she just outside for her walk?

She looks inside the bookstore window and sees a longhaired girl behind the counter. Her head is bent. She is reading. Nonna smiles. It is what a young girl should do when she is in a bookstore. She should study books. When she is in church she should pray for a good husband, someone young, with a job, who will not hit her. Then when she is older, married, she should pray to the Madonna for some children. To
have one. To have enough. Nonna nods and begins counting on her fingers. For a moment she stops, wondering where she placed her rosary.

No, she says aloud. She is counting children, not saying the rosary.

Nonna is pleased she has remembered. It is a pleasant thought. Five children for the girl—one for each finger—and one special child for her to hold tightly in her palm. That would be enough. They would keep the girl busy until she became an old woman, and then, if she has been a good mother, she could live with one of her sons. The girl behind the counter turns a page of her book. Nonna wonders what happened to her own children. Where were Nonna's sons?

She hears a shout from the street. She turns. A carload of boys has driven up, and now, from the long red automobile, the boys are spilling out. Are they her sons? Nonna stares at them. The boys gather around the car's hood. One thumps his hand on the shining metal on his way to the others. One boy is laughing. She sees his white teeth. He embraces the other boy, then throws a mock punch.

They are not her sons.

She turns back. It is clear to her now that the girl has no children. So that is why she is praying there behind the counter! Nonna wants to go inside so she can tell the unfortunate Mrs. Swanks not to give up her hopes yet, that she is still young and healthy, that there is still time, that regardless of how it appears the holy saints are always listening, always testing, always waiting for you to throw up your hands and say
basta
and give up so that they can say heh, we would have given you a house full of
bambini
if only you had said one more novena. Recited one more rosary. Lit one more candle. But you gave up hope. The saints and the Madonna were like that. Time to them does not mean very much. And even God knows that each woman deserves her own baby. Didn't He even give the Virgin a son?

Poor Mrs. Swanks, Nonna thinks. Her Antonio must not be good for her. It is often the fault of the man. The doctors in New Jersey had told her that. Not once, but many times. That was so long ago. But do you think I listened? Nonna says to herself. For one moment? For all those years? My ears were deaf! Nonna is gesturing angrily with her hands. She strikes the store's glass window. It was part of Heaven's test, she is saying, to see if I would stop believing. She pulls her arms to her breasts as she notices the black horses. They stare at her with hollow eyes. Inside the bookstore the manager closes his book and comes toward the window. Nonna watches her close her book and stand, then raise her head. She wears a mustache. It is a boy.

Nonna shuts her eyes and turns. She was thinking of something— But now she has forgotten again. She breathes through her open mouth. It was the boys, she thinks. They did something to upset her. She walks slowly now to slow her racing heart. Did they throw snowballs at me? No, it is not winter again. Nonna looks around at the street and the sidewalk. No, there is no snow. But she feels cold.

Then they must have said something again, she thinks. What was it? Something cruel. She stops on the street. Something about—

The word returns. Bread.

So she is outside to go to the bakery. Nonna smiles. It is a very good idea, she thinks, because she has no bread. She begins walking again, wondering why she had trekked all the way to Taylor Street if she was out only for bread. The Speranza Bakery is on Flournoy Street, she says aloud. Still, it is pleasant today and walking is good for her heart. She thinks of what she might buy. A small roll to soak in her evening coffee?

The afternoon is bright, and Nonna walks up the shaded side of Loomis, looking ahead like an excited child at the statue of Christopher Columbus in the park. She likes the statue. Furry
white clouds float behind the statue's head. Jets of water splash at its feet. She remembers the day the workers uncovered it. There had been a big parade and many important speeches. Was there a parade now? Nonna faces the street. There is only a garbage truck.

So it must not be Columbus Day. Unless the garbage truck is leading the parade. But it is the mayor who leads the parade, Nonna says, and he is not a garbage truck. She laughs at her joke. She is enjoying herself, and she looks again at the green leaves on the trees and at the pure clean clouds in the blue sky.

The mayor, she hears herself saying, is Irish. Nonna wonders why Irish is green. Italia too is green, but it is also red and white. The garbage truck clattering by her now is blue. So many colors.

She thinks of something but cannot place it. It is something about Italians and the Irish. The mayor. His name. He cannot be
paesano
because he is not from Italy. But she knows it is something to do with that. At the curb alongside her a pigeon pecks a crushed can.

It is Judas. Nonna remembers everything now. How the mayor unveiled the statue and then switched on the water in the fountain, how all of the neighborhood people cheered him when he waved to them from the street. All the police. Then the people were very angry, and the police held them back. Where did they want to go? Nonna thinks, then remembers. To the university, she says, to the new school of Illinois that the Irish Judas had decided to build in their neighborhood. The mayor's Judas shovel broke the dirt. And then, one by one, the old Italian stores closed, and the
compari
and
amici
boxed their belongings and moved, and the Judas trucks and bulldozers drove in and knocked down their stores and houses. The people watched from the broken sidewalk. Nonna remembers the woman who had tapped on her door, asking if she would sign the petition paper. The paper asked the mayor to leave the
university where it was, out on a pier on the lake. Was that any place for a school? Nonna asked the woman. The woman then spoke to her in the old language, but in the Sicilian dialect, saying that Navy Pier was a perfectly good place. Then why build the school here? Nonna said. Daley, the woman said. Because of Mayor Daley. Because he betrayed us. Because he wants to destroy all that the Italians have built. First on the North Side, with the Cabrini Green projects, he drove us out. Now he wants to do it again here. He wants to drive us entirely from his city, even though we have always voted for him and supported his machine. Sign the paper. If you understand me and agree, please sign the paper. For a moment Nonna thinks she is the woman. She looks down to see the paper in her hands.

There is no paper. The paper had not been any good. The men in the street had told Nonna that. Shouting up to her windows, waving at her with their angry fists. She had yelled from her windows for them not to make so much noise. Two men tried to explain. Then what is good? Nonna had asked them. You tell me. I want to know. What is good? She is shouting. A car on Loomis slows, then passes her by and speeds up.

These, the men had answered. Rocks. Nonna is afraid again as she remembers. She had pulled her drapes tightly shut. But still from behind her open windows she had been able to hear all through the long night the shouts of the men who kept her awake and the rocks, rocks, rocks, thrown at the squad cars patrolling the streets and through the windows of the alderman's office.

She hears the water. Splashing up to the feet of Christopher Columbus, the boy who stood at the sea's edge thinking the world was round like a shiny new apple. Nonna knows history. She memorized it to pass the citizen test. Columbus asked himself why he first saw the tall sails of approaching ships, and then the apple fell from the tree and hit him on the head and he discovered it. Nonna is smiling. She is proud that Columbus is
paesano.
Sometimes when she studied and could
not remember an answer, she would hit herself on the head. That knocks the answer out of sleeping, she says. Though sometimes it does not, and Nonna thinks of her own head, how once it had been full of answers, but now many answers are no longer there. She must have lost them when she wasn't looking. Should she pray to Saint Antonio? But he helps only with things, with objects. Maybe, Nonna thinks, when she puts something new inside her head, something old must then fall out. And then it is lost forever. That makes sense, she says. She laughs to herself. It is the way it is with everything. The new pushes out the old. And then— She puts her hands to her head.

There is only so much here, she says. Only so many places to put the answers. Nonna thinks of the inside of her head. She pictures brain and bone and blood. Like in the round white cartons in the butcher's shop, she says. The same. She makes a face. All those answers in all those little cartons. Suddenly Nonna is hungry. She wants a red apple.

A group of girls sits at the fountain's edge. Nonna hears their talk. She looks at them, cocking her head. Did they just ask her for an apple? Someone had been asking her a question. I don't have any, she says to the girls. She pats the pockets of her black coat. See? she says. No apples. She wonders what kind of girls they are, to be laughing like that on the street.

They must be common, Nonna thinks. Their laughter bounces up and down the sunny street. Like Lucia, the girl who lives downstairs, who sometimes sits out on the steps on summer nights playing her radio. Nonna often watches the girl from her windows; how can she help it, the music is always so loud. A polite girl, Nonna thinks, but always with that radio. And once, one night when Nonna was kneeling in her front room before her statue of the Madonna, she heard Lucia with somebody below on the stairs. She stopped praying and listened. She could not understand any of the words, but she recognized the tone, and, oh, she knew what the girl and the
boy were doing. The night was hot, and that brought back to her the thin face of her Vincenzo, and she was suddenly young again and back in terrible New Jersey, in her parents' house, with young Vincenzo in the stuffed chair opposite her and around them the soft sound of her mother's tranquil snoring. Nonna shakes her head. She knows what she must feel about that night. She was trusting, and Vincenzo was so handsome—his black curls lay so delicately across his forehead, and his smile was so wet and so white, bright—and she allowed the young boy to sit next to her on the sofa, and she did not protest when he took her hand, and then, when he kissed her, she even opened her mouth and let his wet tongue touch hers. Oh, she was so frightened. Her mouth had been so dry. On the street now she is trembling. She is too terrified to remember the rest. But the memory spills across her mind with the sound of the girls' easy laughter, and she moves back on the pink sofa and does not put up her hands as Vincenzo strokes her cheek and then touches her, gently, on the front of her green dress. And then she turns to the boy and quickly kisses him. The light from the oil lamp flickers. The snoring stops. She looks at Vincenzo, and then she blushes with the shame of her mortal sin, and now if Vincenzo does not say they will marry she knows she will have to kill herself, and that in God's eyes she has already died.

Nonna is still, silent, standing in her guilt on the street, afraid even now to cross herself for fear she will be struck down. She feels the stifling weight of her sin. Vincenzo then moved back to the stuffed chair, coughing. Neither spoke. She began to cry. The next morning Vincenzo spoke to her father.

There are boys at the fountain now, talking. Nonna looks up from the crack in the sidewalk she was staring at. The girls sit like bananas, all in a bunch. One of the boys flexes his arm muscles, like a real
malandrino.
The girls look at him and laugh. Nonna recognizes Lucia. She wears a tight pink top and short pants. Why doesn't she hear Lucia's radio? Nonna wonders.
A voice inside her head answers her question. Because the girl is with the boys. And when you are with them, Nonna says out loud, you do not need the radio.

They look up. Nonna knows she must avoid them. They heard me, she whispers to herself, and now they will throw apples at me.
Santa Maria, madre di Dio.
She feels awkward as her feet strike the pavement. From behind she hears them calling.

Nonna! Hey Nonna! Who were you talking to? Hey, Nonna!

Nonna begins to run, and as she does her heavy purse bangs her side, up and then down, again and again. Then the sound of their laughter fades away, and Nonna slows, feeling the banging inside her chest. Now they heard, she thinks, now they know my sin, and they will tell everyone. And then everyone, even the old priests here in Chicago, will know. I'll have to move to another neighborhood, she tells a fire hydrant. I'll pack my pans and the Madonnina and flee. But I have done that already two times. First, from New Jersey, and then when I was punished by the machines who flattened my house down. Nonna does not count the move from Naples, when her family fled poverty and the coming war, nor the move from her parents' house when she married Vincenzo.

He would not have wanted her to be so lonely, she thinks. She is lucid, then confused. Vincenzo understood why she could bear no children; it was because of their sin. Perhaps now that everybody knows, she thinks, she would not have to move any more. Maybe since the whole world knows, I can finally rest where I am now and be finished with my punishment. And then I'll die, Nonna says. And then, if I have been punished enough, I will be once again with my Vincenzo.

Her legs turn the corner for her. They are familiar with the streets. Nonna is on Flournoy, across from the church of Our Lady of Pompeii. At first the building looks strange to her, as if she were dreaming. The heavy wooden doors hang before her inside a golden cloud. She walks into the cloud. It is the
blood in her head, the bone and the brain, she thinks. She pictures the fat butcher. The church's stone steps are hollowed, like spoons. Again she feels hungry. As she walks into the sunlight she wonders why she is wearing such a heavy coat. Nonna asks the doors her question. The doors stand high before her, silent. She pulls on their metal handles. The doors are locked.