The Fortunate Pilgrim (18 page)

He saw his mother’s face take on a grim light of triumph. It was the same look she had when she heard about the
Panettiere
’s losing money. But when Gino told how Zi’ Pasquale had got drunk, his mother’s face changed and she said wearily, “Even clever people aren’t safe in this world, that’s how it is.” She and Octavia exchanged another glance of satisfaction. It had been the merest chance, pure luck, that they had put their money in postal savings. When they had opened the account they had been too shy to go through the white-pillared entrance and the great marble lobby of the bank with their little money.

The mother said, with impersonal sadness, as if her malicious triumph made her feel guilty, “Poor man, he loved money so much, he married a miser out of true affection. They were happy. A perfect marriage. But then nothing goes right, no matter what you do.”

No one paid attention to Lucia Santa. They knew her. In her speech and in her thinking she was pessimistic about life. Yet she lived like a true believer in good fortune. She rose in the morning with gladness, she bit into bread knowing it would be sweet. Her hope was a physical energy, replenished by her love for her children and the necessity to do battle for them. They all believed that she could never be afraid. So her words meant little, they were merely superstition. They ate in peace. When they finished, Larry lolled back with a cigarette and Octavia and the mother talked with him, telling stories about his escapades as a youth. Vinnie took Louisa’s plate of spaghetti and put the piece of beef in the hot sauce for a moment. Then he covered it with another plate.

Lucia Santa said, “Good boy, bring something to eat to your sister-in-law.” Vinnie went down the stairs with the two plates and a half-full bottle of cream soda. A few minutes later he came back empty-handed and sat at the table.

Larry looked at him for a moment and asked, “Is she O.K.?” When Vinnie nodded, Larry went on with the story he was telling.

CHAPTER
10

O
N A LATE
March Sunday afternoon, Octavia Angeluzzi stood in the kitchen, gazing down into the backyards below. Inside the block of tenements there was a great hollow square, which was cut up by wooden fences into many separate yards.

Octavia looked down on stone gardens, concrete loam. Some homesick
paesano
had left a box like a three-cornered hat filled with hairy dirt, and out of it grew a bony stick. At its foot little stems, like toes, wore deathly yellow leaves. In the silvery light of winter an empty red flowerpot rose out of a gray cemented flower bed. Above them, filling the air and crisscrossing so that not even a witch could have flown over the backyards, were innumerable frayed dirty white clotheslines stretching from windows to distant tall wooden poles.

Octavia felt terribly tired. It was the cold, she thought, the long winter without sunshine and the long hours at work. With the Depression, rates of pay had gone down. Now she had to work longer hours for less money. At night she and the mother sewed buttons on cards in their own home, sometimes with the kids helping. But the boys sneered at the low rate of pay, a penny a card, and would rarely work. She had to laugh at them. Children could afford to be independent.

There was an ache in her chest and in her eyes and head. She felt hot all over. And there was the constant refrain running through her mind, what were they going to come to with Larry’s money gone and the four kids to bring up? Every week now she had to go to the postal savings and take out money. The dream was shattered; they had slipped back in savings, receded years from owning a house.

Looking down at the desolate landscape, which was given a touch of strange humanity by a cat walking the top of a fence, she thought of Gino and Sal, growing up to be stupid laborers, loutish, coarse, living in slums, breeding children into the sack of poverty. A wild surge of anxiety rose in her, followed by a physical nausea and fear. She would see them cringe and suck for charity as their parents had done before them. The poor beg to stay alive.

And what about Vinnie? With shock Octavia realized that she had already written his future off. He would have to go to work early to help his brothers and sisters. There was no other way.

Oh, that lousy bastard Larry—leaving the family when they needed his help the most. And having the nerve to come up from the second floor to eat. But men were lousy. She had a sudden vision of a man—hairy, gorilla-like, naked and with penis enormous and erect—man the very image. Her cheeks flushed and she was so weak she could not stand. She went to the kitchen table and sat down. She felt a suffocating pain in her chest and realized with quiet terror that she was ill.

It was Gino who first came up and found Octavia leaning over the table, crying with fear and pain, spitting little red flecks of blood on the white and blue oilcloth. Octavia whispered, “Go call Mamma at Zia Louche.” Gino was so frightened that he turned and flew down the stairs without a word.

When the two of them got back, Octavia had recovered her strength and was sitting up straight. She had not cleaned the oilcloth. She had started to, so as not to alarm her mother, but some need for sympathy, a fear that she would be thought a malingerer in the family fight, had unconsciously persuaded her to leave everything untouched.

Lucia Santa rushed into the room. She saw at once her daughter’s woebegone, sick, and guilty face, and then the flecks of blood. She wrung her hands and cried out, “Oh, God of mine,” and burst into tears. These dramatics irritated Octavia and made Gino, behind her, mutter, “For Chrissakes.”

But that was for the moment. The mother immediately gained control, took her daughter by the hand, and led her down the row of bedrooms. She shouted back to Gino, “Run. Quick, to Dr. Barbato.” Gino, delighted with the excitement and his own importance, sped down the four flights of stairs again.

With Octavia safely in bed, Lucia Santa got a bottle of rubbing alcohol and went to watch over her daughter until the doctor came. She poured the alcohol liberally into her cupped hand, bathed Octavia’s hot forehead and face. They were both composed now, but Octavia noticed that familiar look of stern anxiety on her mother’s face, that look that seemed to close out the world. She tried to joke. “Don’t worry, Ma,” she said. “I’ll be all right. At least I’m not having a baby without a husband. I’m still
a good Italian girl.
#8221;

But in times like these Lucia Santa had no sense of humor. Life had taught her a certain respect for the frowns of fate.

She sat beside her daughter’s bed like a small black-clad Buddha. As she waited for the doctor, her mind raced ahead to what this illness would mean, what new woe it would bring. She felt overcome by disaster—her husband being sent away, her son marrying at an early age, the Depression with its lack of work, and now her daughter’s illness. She sat there gathering up her strength, for there was no question now of individual misfortune. The entire family was in danger, its whole fabric, its life. It was no longer a matter of single defeats; now there was danger of annihilation, of sinking to the lowest depth of existence.

Dr. Barbato followed Gino up the stairs into the apartment and through the rooms to where Octavia rested. As always he was beautifully dressed, and his mustache was trim. He had tickets for the opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and he was in a hurry. He had nearly not come, nearly told the boy to call Bellevue.

When he saw the girl and heard the story he knew his coming had been a waste of time. She would have to go to the hospital. But he sat down beside the bed, noticing she was embarrassed at being examined by so young a man, and that she was conscious of the mother who was keeping a watchful eye upon him. He thought with disgust, These Italians think men would screw a woman on her deathbed. He forced himself to say quietly, “Now, Signora, I will have to examine your daughter. Have the young boy leave us.” He prepared to pull down the sheet.

The mother turned and saw Gino wide-eyed. She gave him a backhanded slap and said, “Disappear. For once with my permission.” And Gino, who had expected praise for all his swift running in this emergency, went back to the kitchen muttering curses.

Dr. Barbato put his stethoscope on Octavia’s chest and stared off into space professionally, but really taking a good look at the girl’s body. He saw with surprise that she was very thin. The full bosom and wide, rounded hips were deceiving. She had lost a lot of weight. Her heavy, planed face did not show this loss, for, though finely drawn, it could never be haggard. The eyes, a great liquid brown, watched him with fearful intensity. The doctor’s mind registered, too, without desire, how ripe the body was for love. She looked like the great nude paintings he had seen in Italy on his graduation trip. She was a classical type, made for children and heavy duty on the connubial couch. She had better get married soon, sick or not.

He rose, covering the girl again with the bed sheet. He said with quiet reassurance, “You’ll be all right,” and motioned the mother to the other bedroom.

He was surprised when Octavia said, “Doctor, please talk in front of me. My mother will have to tell me, anyway. She won’t know what to do.”

The doctor had learned that the little niceties of the profession were lost on these people, and with reason. He said quietly to both of them, “You have pleurisy, not much, but you must go to the hospital for rest and X-rays. That blood you coughed up is serious. There may be something with the lungs.” For a moment this brought to his mind the opera he would see tonight. The heroine dying of TB, singing like mad beneath bright lights; her only loss a lover, a loss of pleasure; her death treated in such a way as to make it frivolous. He said truthfully, “Now don’t be alarmed; even if it is the lungs, it can’t be too serious. Don’t have any foolish fears. The worst that can happen is that your daughter will get a few months’ rest. So tomorrow, bring her to Bellevue Hospital Clinic. I’ll give her something for tonight.” He took out one of the samples sent him by the drug houses and gave it to the mother. “Now remember, tomorrow without fail, off to Bellevue. This flat is cold, the children too noisy, she needs rest. The X-rays are important. Now, Signora, don’t fail me.” In a gentler tone he added, “Don’t worry.”

The doctor left, feeling a mixture of self-disgust and satisfaction. He could have made fifteen dollars instead of a lousy two. He could have treated her for the next week, taken the X-rays in his office, the whole business. But he knew the poverty of the family. Later on he was angry with himself, feeling frustration that the skills he had learned must be given so cheaply, that the sacrifices made by his father should bear such sour fruit. He was a man with a powerful economic weapon he could not use at full strength. What lousy luck it hadn’t been the daughter of the
Panettiere.
He would have milked the baker dry, he would have wrung him out to the last drop. And with every justification, without really cheating, with all fairness. Oh, someday he would move into a practice, a neighborhood, where he could work and make his fortune with a clear conscience. Dr. Barbato was simply a man who could not stand the sight and smell of poverty. His sudden acts of compassion made him unhappy for days afterward. He seriously regarded them as a vice and not a virtue.

In the kitchen, Sal and Vinnie, finally home after the Sunday movie, sat quietly eating great slabs of crusty bread doused with vinegar and olive oil. Gino was sulking at a corner of the table, doing his homework. Lucia Santa watched them all somberly. “Gino,” she said, “go take a ten cents from my pocketbook for yourself. Then go call your brother Lorenzo to come upstairs—
subito.
#8221; She felt a sudden surge of love at his happy springing to do her wishes, his quick forgetting of a quarrel balm to her spirit.

The next morning Lucia Santa committed an act so monstrous that it lost her the sympathy of the whole of Tenth Ave-nue, of everyone who would have commisserated with her in this new misfortune. It made Dr. Barbato so angry that he cursed in Italian for the first time since entering medical school. Even Zia Louche scolded Lucia Santa. It was a foolish act, immoral, shocking; and yet it was merely an act of love. Lucia Santa did not take her daughter to Bellevue’s charity hospital; instead she had Larry drive them to the French Hospital on 30th Street between Ninth and Eighth Avenues, a little more than a block away. It was a cheerful, clean, and expensive hospital. The nurses there would be polite, the doctors charming, the clerical workers subservient. There would be no waiting for hours in dim halls for admittance. Lucia Santa’s daughter would be treated like a human being, that is, as a solvent member of society.

No one was more surprised than Lucia Santa herself. It was a fantastically foolish step that would wipe out the savings of years just at the time when they were most desperately needed. There would be no breadwinner in the home. It was an act of pure arrogance.

But there were reasons. Lucia Santa had lain awake all that night and, without sleeping, had suffered nightmares. She saw her beautiful young daughter imprisoned in the towers of Bellevue, lost in the dismal corridors, spat upon like an animal. And then there was superstition. Her husband had entered Bellevue and never returned. It was a charnel house; her daughter would die and they would cut her into little pieces and put her flesh in bottles.

So in the early morning hours Lucia Santa made her decision, and felt such a tremendous relief that she cared nothing of what the world would think—her friends, her relatives or her neighbors. In the darkness of her bed she had wept, the solitary terrible weeping that must be done alone with no one to see; not a show of grief, but a release of anguish that takes the place of consolation from a friend or loved one. Lucia Santa wept for strength because there was no one in the world to draw strength from. Hers was the terrible act of those who cannot show their need for pity. In daylight she composed herself, and when she rose from her bed, her face was strong and confident.

After the kids had been sent to school, Larry came up and they wrapped Octavia, already warmly dressed, in blankets. They helped her down the stairs and into Larry’s car. When Lucia Santa got into the car she said to her son, “Drive to the French Hospital.” Octavia started to protest, but the mother shouted with rage, “Quiet. Don’t say a word.”

The formalities were over quickly. Octavia was put in a quiet, clean, lovely room with another young girl. There were pictures on the wall. On the way home Larry told his mother, feeling the jealousy he always felt for his sister, that he would give five dollars a week for the family until Octavia was working again. His mother reached out and touched him for a moment, and said in Italian, “Ah, you’re a good boy, Lorenzo.” But in her tone Larry recognized his dismissal; she did not count him, did not trust him, she had no respect for him in this crisis. But if he had been in Octavia’s place he would never have broken down, if she had picked him instead of her.