The Fortunate Pilgrim (11 page)

The father watched and listened, as if he expected Mr. Colucci to say something he desperately wished to hear, as if Mr. Colucci were very close to saying some magic words that would be a key for him. He kept waiting.

In the front room Gino took his deck of cards from the round hole of the wall that housed the stovepipe in winter. “You wanta play Seven-and-a-half?” he asked Job. Vinnie was already sitting on the floor and taking pennies out of his pocket. Gino sat down opposite him.

“Card playing is a sin,” Job said. He was a small earnest boy, almost pretty, resembling his mother, but in no way effeminate. He sat down on the floor and watched.

“You want a hand for Chrissake?” Gino asked mildly.

“Swearing is a sin,” Job said.

“Bullshit,” Vinnie said. He never swore himself, but who did this snotnose think he was, telling Gino not to swear?

Gino tilted his head and looked at Job wisely. “You talk like that on this block, kiddo, they take off your pants and hang them on the lamp post. You have to run home and everybody sees your bare ass.” The frightened look on Job’s face satisfied them. They played cards and became absorbed in the game.

Job said suddenly, “Well, all right, but you two will go to hell, and pretty soon, too.”

Gino and Vinnie couldn’t be bothered.

Job said calmly, “My father said the End of the World is coming.”

Gino and Vinnie stopped playing for a minute. Mr. Colucci had impressed them.

Job smiled with confidence. “It’s people like you that will cause it. You make God mad because you do bad things like gamble and curse. If people like you did everything that me and my father told you, maybe God wouldn’t make the world end.”

Gino frowned. He had made his Communion and Confirmation the year before and the nuns who taught him the catechism had said nothing about this. “When does it happen?” he asked.

“Soon,” Job said.

“Tell us when,” Gino insisted, still respectful.

“It’s gonna be by fires and floods and guns coming out of the sky. Everything is gonna explode. The earth is gonna open up and swallow people into hell and the ocean’s gonna cover everything. And everybody is gonna burn in hell. Except just a few who believe and act good. And then God is gonna love everybody again.”

“Yeah, but when?” Gino was stubborn. He always wanted an answer when he asked a question, no matter what it was.

“Twenty years from now,” Job said.

Gino counted his pennies. “I’ll bet a nickel,” he said to Vincent. Vinnie dealt. Anything could happen in twenty years.

Vinnie lost. Old enough to be witty, he said, “If I had a name like Job the world couldn’t end too soon for me.”

The two brothers watched Job slyly and for the first time he became angry. He said, “I’m named after one of the greatest people in the Bible. You know what Job did? He believed. So God tested him. God killed his children, and then made his wife run away. Then God made him blind and gave him millions of pimples. Then God took all his money and his house. Then you know what? God sent a devil to Job’s house to ask Job if he still loved God. You know what Job said?” He paused dramatically. “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. I love my God.”

Vinnie was impressed and watched Job intently. Gino was outraged and asked, “Did he really mean it? Or was he afraid he was gonna get killed?”

“Sure he meant it,” Job said. “And then God gave him a lot of good luck to make up for it because he believed. My father says that Job was the first Literal Baptist. That’s why the Literal Baptists get saved when the world ends and everybody who doesn’t listen to us is gonna get buried for a million years. Or even more. You two had just better stop playing cards and swearing.”

But since he was just a nutty little kid, Gino riffled the cards, humping them and letting them cascade into place. Job watched, fascinated by such expertness. Gino looked at him and said, “You wanta try it?” He thrust the deck into Job’s hands. Job tried to riffle the cards and they scattered across the floor. He picked them up and tried again, his face intent and serious. Suddenly an enormous shadow spread across the room. Mrs. Colucci was watching them; they had not heard her come down the corridor of bedrooms.

Vinnie and Gino were fascinated by her beauty. They stared. She was looking her son up and down very coolly, with one eyebrow raised.

Job stuttered, “Mother, I wasn’t playing, Gino was just showing me how to shuffle. I just watched them play.”

Gino said warmly, “He ain’t lying, Mrs. Colucci, he just watched. You know,” he said with enormous wonder, “he wouldn’t play no matter what I said.”

Mrs. Colucci smiled and said, “I know my son never lies to me, Gino. But touching cards is a beginning. His father will be very angry with him.”

Gino smiled at her confidentially. “You don’t have to tell his father.”

Mrs. Colucci said coldly, “Of course I won’t tell him. But Job certainly will.” Gino was surprised and looked at Job questioningly. Mrs. Colucci said in a more gentle voice, “Mr. Colucci is the head of our house, as God rules over the world. You wouldn’t keep secrets from God, would you, Gino?” Gino looked at her thoughtfully.

Vinnie was angrily shuffling cards. He was mad at Gino for not seeing through these people, for acting as if they liked him, being fooled by their good manners. On Mrs. Colucci’s beautiful face he had seen a look of disgust at their playing cards, as though she had caught them in something shameful that you never talked about. “Stop butting in, Gino,” he said. He dealt out a hand.

Gino, intrigued by something he could not understand, said to Job, “You gonna tell your father? No kidding? If you don’t tell him, your mother won’t tell. Right, Mrs. Colucci?” The look of physical disgust came over the woman’s face, but she said nothing.

Job didn’t answer, but tears came out of his eyes. Gino was stunned. He said, “I’ll tell your father I pushed the cards into your hands. That’s what I did. Right, Vin? Come on, I’ll tell him.”

Mrs. Colucci said sharply, “His father will believe everything Job tells him. Good night, children. Say good night to your friends, Job.” Job said nothing, and they both went down the corridor to the kitchen.

The two brothers had no heart for more cards. Gino went to one window, opened it, and sat on the sill. Vincent went to the other window and did the same.

The railroad yard was dark except for a headlight of one working, black, invisible engine, grinding steel on steel. Even the Hudson River was almost blue-black beneath the faint autumn moon, and the cliffs of the Palisades were shadowy mountains beyond. Tenth Avenue below the window was dark and still, swept clean of smells and people by a cold October night wind. Only on the corner of 31st Street was there life, a bonfire with some half-grown boys around it.

Gino and Vincent saw their father come out of the building with the Coluccis. He was walking them to the trolley car on Ninth Avenue. They watched till he came back. They saw him stand by the bonfire, staring into its flames for a long time. They kept their eyes on him. Finally he walked down the Avenue and into the house.

Gino and Vincent left their windows. They unfolded their bed and made it. Vinnie put on his pajamas from the country. Watching him, Gino said, “That Job, he’s a nice kid, but he’s sure lucky he don’t live on our block.”

Mr. Colucci was not just a talker, he was a doer. Frank Corbo was working in Runkel’s chocolate factory the next week, and his homecoming at night was a delight for the children. He returned with his person and clothes scented with cocoa. Always he would have a great jagged boulder of chocolate in his pocket. It was pure chocolate, much more delicious than candy-store chocolate. He would give this to Gino to share among the children. Gino would hack it with a knife, give half to Vinnie and half to himself. Then they would each give a piece to Sal and Baby Lena. Gino always thought of his father as working on a great mountain rock of chocolate with a pickax, breaking it up into little pieces.

The father was to be baptized in the new faith at Easter time. Every night he went to the Coluccis’ for reading lessons, and then to the chapel for services and more lessons. Sometimes he would make Gino read to him from the Bible, but Gino always protested; he read badly and with obvious distaste, especially his father’s favorite passages, in which man was brought to book by a wrathful and revengeful God. Gino read this in such a voice, so unimpressed and bored, that he only irritated his father. One day Frank Corbo said to him gently and with a smile, “
Animale!
Don’t you believe in God then? Aren’t you afraid of dying and going to hell?”

Gino was surprised and confused. “I made my Communion and Confirmation,” he said. The father looked at him, shrugged, and never asked him to read again.

For the next two months everything went smoothly. There were no quarrels.

But then Lucia Santa, seeing her husband so well, working, quiet, well-behaved, thought there was no excuse for him not to be better. She complained that he was always out of the house, that his children never saw him, that he did not take her to visit relatives. And it was as if the father had been waiting for such a complaint, as if his new character had not really pleased him. There was a scene; he struck a blow, there were screams and shouts, Octavia threatened her father with a kitchen knife. It was like old times again. The father left the house and did not come back until the next morning.

He changed gradually. He did not go to chapel so often. Many nights he came straight home and went directly to bed without eating. He would lie in the bed staring up at the ceiling, not sleeping, not speaking. Lucia Santa would bring him a hot dish; sometimes he would eat, sometimes he would strike it out of her hand, soiling the bed covers. Then he would not let her change the bed sheets that night.

He would fall asleep for a bit; then wake near midnight, moaning and tossing about. He had terrifying headaches and Lucia Santa would bathe his temples with alcohol. Nevertheless, the next morning he would be well enough to go to work. Nothing kept him from his job.

That winter the nights were like a nightmare. The father’s cries would wake the baby. Gino, Vincent, and Sal would huddle together, Gino and Vincent curious and subdued, but Sal so frightened that he trembled. Octavia would wake and lie in her bed raging over her mother’s patience with the father. Larry missed it all, for he worked at night and stayed out until the early morning hours.

The father became worse. He would wake in the middle of the night and curse his wife, first in a slow, then a quickening, rhythm—the rhythms of the Bible. Everyone would be asleep, the house would be dark, when suddenly, rising out of the pitch blackness, the father’s voice would fill the apartment, vibrant, alive. “Whore” . . . “Bitch” . . . “Lousy, dir-ty, rot-ten, lying bastard” . . . Then, on a higher note and faster, “Fiend of hell—child of a whore—mother of a whore.” Last came a long stream of filth that ended in a great moan of pain and a terrifying cry for help, “
Gesù, Gesù,
help me, help me.”

Everyone awake, frightened, sitting up in bed, would wait, never knowing what he would do next. The mother would soothe him, talking in a low voice, pleading with him to be quiet so that the family could sleep. She would bathe his temples with alcohol until the apartment was filled with its burning smell.

Octavia and Lucia Santa quarreled about sending him to the hospital. Lucia Santa refused to consider it. Octavia, fatigued from lack of sleep and worry, became hysterical, and her mother had to slap her face. One night when the father began to moan “
Gesù, Gesù,
” from behind Octavia’s bedroom door came a mocking moan in answer. When the father cursed in Italian, Octavia shrieked back, aping his dialect, the filthy words in the foreign tongue, shrill in the darkness, more shocking than the cursing of the father. Sal and Baby Lena began to cry. Vinnie and Gino sat on the edge of their bed, stunned with sleep and fright. Lucia Santa pounded on her daughter’s bedroom door, pleading with her to stop. But Octavia was beyond control, and it was the father who stopped first.

Next morning the father did not go to work. Lucia Santa let him rest while she sent the children off to school. Then she brought her husband breakfast.

He was rigid as wood. His eyes stared emptily at the ceiling. When she shook him, he spoke in hollow tones. “I’m dead, don’t let them bury me without clothes. Put my good shoes on my feet. God has called me. I’m dead.” The mother was so frightened she felt his limbs. They were icy cold and stiff. Then the father began to call out, “
Gesù, Gesù.
Mercy.
Aiuto, aiuto.
#8221;

She tried to hold his hand. “Frank, let me call the doctor,” she said. “You’re sick, Frank.”

The father became as angry as a dead man could. In hollow menacing tones, he answered. “If the doctor comes, I’ll throw him out the window.” But the threat was reassuring to Lucia Santa, for now the cold blue eyes were alive with rage. Heat flowed into the limbs she touched. Then she heard someone coming up the stairs and into the house. It was Larry home from the night shift.

She called out, “Lorenzo, come here and see your father.” The tone of her voice brought Larry quickly down the corridor to the bedroom.

“Look how sick he is, and he won’t see the doctor,” the mother said. “Talk to him.”

Larry was shocked by his stepfather’s appearance. He had not noticed the change, the thinning of the face into gauntness, the tension in the mouth, the cording of the face into lines of madness. He said gently, “Come on, Pop. We gotta get a doc even if you’re dead. Maybe people will say Ma poisoned you or something. See? We gotta get a certificate.” He smiled at his stepfather.

But Frank Corbo gave him a look of contempt, as if the son were feeble-minded or insane. “No doctors,” he said. “Let me rest.” He closed his eyes.

Lucia Santa and Larry went into the kitchen at the other end of the apartment. The mother said, “Lorenzo, go to Runkel’s and get Mr. Colucci. He can talk to Frank. Last night he was so bad again. If this keeps up—no, get Mr. Colucci.”

Larry was dead tired and wanted to get to bed. But he saw that his mother, always so strong and confident, was near to tears she was too proud to shed. He felt an overwhelming love and pity for her, and yet a curious distaste for being involved in the affair, as if it was a tragedy that did not concern him. He patted his mother’s arm and said, “O.K., Ma,” and left the house in search of Mr. Colucci.