The Fortunate Pilgrim (26 page)

For Chrissakes, he worked from four in the afternoon until midnight, Tuesdays through Sundays. Where the hell was he supposed to meet girls? He didn’t even know any guys his own age, only the men he had worked with the last four years at the freight office. Quickly and gruffly he took his leave.

Lucia Santa sighed heavily. “Where does he go late at night?” she asked. “What kind of people go with him? What do they do? They will take advantage of him, he’s so innocent.”

Octavia settled comfortably in her chair. She longed for a book in front of her and wished that her bed waited just down the hall. But far away, in the quiet, antiseptic apartment in the Bronx, her husband would not sleep until she returned. He would read and write in the draped and lamp-shaded living room with its carpeted floor, and he would welcome her with the fond yet pitying smile and say, “Did you have a good time with your family?” And then he would kiss her with a gentle sadness that made them alien to each other.

Lucia Santa said, “Don’t stay too late. I don’t want you on the subway when all the murderers ride up and down.”

“I have time,” Octavia said. “I’m worried about you. Maybe I should stay a couple of nights and give you a rest, take care of the kids.”

Lucia Santa shrugged. “Take care of your husband, or you will be a widow and know what your mother has suffered.”

Octavia said gaily, “Then I’ll just move right back in with you.” But, to her surprise, Lucia Santa looked at her grimly, searchingly, as if it were not a joke. She flushed.

The mother saw that her daughter’s feelings were hurt and said, “You woke me at a bad time. In my dream I was about to curse my devil of a son as I should curse him awake.”

Octavia said quietly, “Ma, just forget it.”

“No, I will never forget it.” Lucia Santa put her hand to her eyes. “And if there is a God, he will suffer for it.” She bowed her head and the look of utter weariness spread over her face and body. “His father was covered with earth and there were no tears from his oldest son.” Her voice was truly anguished. “Then Frank Corbo was nothing on this earth, he suffered for nothing and he burns in hell. And you made me let Gino back into the house without a beating, without a word. He never cared what we felt. I thought some terrible thing had happened to him, that he had gone mad like his father. And then he calmly returns, refuses to speak. I swallowed my bile, I choked on it, and it chokes me now. What kind of beast, what kind of monster? He brings the contempt of the world on his dead father and on himself, and then returns and eats and drinks and sleeps without shame. He is my son, but in my dreams I curse him and see him dead in his father’s coffin.”

Octavia yelled at her mother, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Her face was contorted with anger. “I went to his funeral and I hated him. So what? You went to his funeral and you didn’t let go one goddamn tear. You didn’t visit him once in the asylum the year before he died.”

That quieted both women. They sipped their coffee. Octavia said, “Gino will be all right, he has a good brain. Maybe he’ll be something.”

Lucia Santa laughed with contempt. “Oh, yes, a bum, a criminal, a murderer. But one thing he will never be. A man who brings home his pay envelope by honest labor.”

“See, that’s why you’re mad, really—because Gino won’t work after school. Because he’s the only one you can’t boss around.”

“Who should be his boss if not his mother?” Lucia Santa asked. “Or do you think he will never have a boss? That’s what he thinks. He will eat free the rest of his life, isn’t that it? But it isn’t so. What will happen to him when he finds out what life is, how hard it is? He expects too much, he enjoys life too much. I was like him at his age and I suffered for it. I want him to learn from me what life is, not from strangers.”

“Ma, you can’t.” Octavia hesitated. “Look at your darling Larry, all the trouble you took over him, and now he’s next thing to a gangster, collecting money for that phony union.”

“What are you talking about?” Lucia Santa gestured with contempt. “I couldn’t even get him to beat his little brothers for me, he was so chicken-hearted.”

Octavia shook her head and said slowly, wonderingly, “Ma, sometimes you’re so smart. How can you be so stupid?”

Lucia Santa absently sipped her coffee. “Ah, well, he’s out of my life.” She did not see Octavia turn her face away, and she went on. “Gino is the one who hurts my brains. Listen to this now. That nice job at the drugstore, he stayed two days. Two days. Other people keep jobs for fifty years, my son two days.”

Octavia laughed. “Did he quit or get fired?”

“Oh, you find it laughable?” Lucia Santa inquired in her politest Italian, betraying her complete exasperation. “They threw him out. After school one day he stopped to play football, then went to work. He thought surely they would close the store until he got there, no harm done. Little did he think the
padrone,
not wishing to kiss his trade away, would stay on himself. No, our dear Gino did not finish out his first week.”

“I’d better talk to him,” Octavia said. “What time does he come home?”

Lucia Santa shrugged. “Who knows? A king comes and goes when he pleases. But tell me this. What do these snotnoses have to talk about until three in the morning? I look out the window and see him sitting on the steps and talk and talk worse than the old women.”

Octavia sighed. “Hell, I don’t know.” She made ready to leave. Lucia Santa cleared away the coffee cups. There was no gesture of affection, no farewell kiss. It was as if she were going away to visit and would be back. Her mother went to the front-room window to guard her daughter with her eyes until she turned off Tenth Avenue toward the subway.

CHAPTER
19

M
ONDAY NIGHT WAS
Vinnie Angeluzzi’s night off from the railroad. It was the night he rewarded his flesh for the poverty of his life.

His mother and sister’s teasing had embarrassed him because he was going out to pay his five dollars and get laid, simply and efficiently. He was ashamed of this because it was another mark of failure. He remembered the pride hidden in his mother’s voice when she reproached Larry for taking advantage of young girls. She and Octavia would be disgusted if they knew what he was going to do now.

Vinnie had worked the four-to-midnight shift in the railroad since he quit high school. He had never gone to a party, never kissed a girl, never talked to a girl in the quiet of a summer night. His one day off was Monday, and there was nothing to do on that night of the week. His shyness made it worse.

So Vinnie went for his poor but honest fare, to a respectable whore house recommended by the chief clerk of the freight office who didn’t want his men hanging around bars to pick up clapped-up chippies or worse. Sometimes the chief clerk himself came along.

For this diversion all the clerks dressed in respectable fashion, as if they were going out to look for a job. They wore suits and ties and hats and topcoats, uniforms for the day of leisure, the seventh day to rest and celebrate the soul. Vinnie in his black fedora was always kidded about looking like a gangster, though he was the youngest of them all. They met in the Diamond Jim bar, which had a grill of hot dogs and hot roast beef sandwiches and cold cuts almost as gray as the skin on the chief clerk. Ceremoniously they would order whisky, and one of the clerks would say commandingly, “This is my round,” and lay his money on the bar. When each had carefully paid for a round of drinks, they stepped out into 42nd Street, into the raging neon fire of the movie houses that stretched stone to stone along both sides of the street. By this time there were so many wandering human beings that they took great care to keep together, as though if one of them became separated he would float away, helpless to rejoin the others. As they walked along 42nd Street, they passed the great, painted cardboard women soliciting in upright wooden frames, their nudity etched in electric reds and purples.

It was a sedate, four-story hotel, demurely invisible in that fire of cold, burning flesh. When they marched through the entrance they went directly to the elevator. They did not have to pass through the lobby since this particular entrance was used only by people like themselves. The elevator operator winked, a serious, business-like wink, by no means a frivolous comment on the job at hand, and took them up to the top floor. The elevator operator led them down a carpeted hall, left his iron cage open and unguarded to knock on the appropriate door and whisper the secret password, then studied them closely as they filed into the room.

It was the living room of a two-bedroom suite with too many small leather chairs. Usually there was a man reading a magazine, waiting his turn. There was a woman barely visible in the kitchen alcove, drinking coffee and directing traffic. In her cupboard were bottles of whisky and glasses. Anyone who wanted a drink could step into the alcove and put down a dollar bill, but usually things moved so fast there was not time. This woman had very little to do with the customers and seemed more like a guardian of this world.

It was this woman’s face that Vinnie remembered always—never the girls who worked in bedrooms. She was short and her hair was heavy and very black and though there was no way of telling her age, she was too old for the trade. But it was her face and voice that made her inhuman.

The voice was the horrible hoarse voice that some whores have, as if torrents of diseased semen flooding the body had rotted the vocal cords. She spoke only with some great effort of will. Her voice was more frightening than any visible scar. Her features were to Vinnie’s young eyes the very mask of evil. The mouth was thick and formless and pressed firmly over teeth that thrust out the flesh. The cheeks and jowls were heavy, pendulous, dowager-like, but the nose was bold and thickened by something more mysterious than nature, the eyes black and soulless as two pieces of coal. Beyond all this there was something in her every word and gesture which showed, not that she hated or despised the world, but that she no longer felt any fleshly emotion for anyone or anything in it. She was sexless. When she passed near you her head tilted sideways, sharklike. Once she glided by and Vinnie shrank back as if she would rend flesh from his body. As a man came out of a bedroom she pointed to the next customer but only after opening a bedroom door to croak inside, “O.K., honey?” Hearing that voice Vinnie’s blood would run cold.

But he was young. When he entered the bedroom, his blood ran hot again. He would just vaguely see the painted face of the woman, always the same. Usually blonde, she moved in the golden circle of a heavily shaded lamp so that the colors on her face seemed to refract the light, the painted red mouth, the long pale nose glistening through its powdery white bone, the deathly, ghostlike cheeks, and black-smudged green-looking eyeholes.

What happened next always embarrassed Vinnie. The woman would lead him to a low table in the corner of a room, where there was a basin filled with hot water. He would take off his shoes, socks, and trousers, and she would wash his private parts, taking a good, clinical look.

Then she would lead him to the bed against the far wall, he still wearing his shirt and tie (once, presumptuous with passion, he had started to remove even these and the woman said, “No, for Christ’s sake, I ain’t got all night”) and, slipping out of her robe, stand nude before him in the dim light of the fringed bedside lamp.

The painted red nipples, the rounded belly with roll of fat, the neat black triangle and two long columns of heavily powdered thighs all served the purpose. When the whore threw off her robe and presented that body, the blood rushed to Vinnie’s brain with such force that he had a headache for the rest of the evening.

The embrace was formal, an earnest pantomime, the woman sinking back on the coverleted bed, Vinnie drawn over her, falling to one knee, braking his body down into the vise of scissoring limbs.

He was lost. Flesh; flesh hot soft against his own; melting wax; warm, yielding, sticky clinging meat without blood or stringy nerves. His body, separate tissue, chambered, soaked up what that meat distilled. His stretched taut frame impressed itself upon that wax which depressed with the shape of his own bones and in one blinding moment he was free, reprieved from loneliness.

That was all. His fellow clerks waited and they all went out for a Chinese dinner, and then a movie at the Paramount or bowling, topped off with late coffee in the Automat. As the clerks found steady girls or became engaged, they would not stop coming to the hotel, but they cut the evening short afterward to visit their girl friends. Defanged.

For Vinnie it was like the food he ate, the bed he slept in, the money he earned, part of the necessary routine of life to stay alive. But as time went on he felt himself becoming separate from the world around him and its inhabitants.

CHAPTER
20

W
HERE WERE THOSE
wretches who cursed America and its dream? And who could doubt it now? With the war in Europe, English, French, Germans and even Mussolini lavishing millions for murder, every Italian along the western wall of the city had his pockets full. The terrible Depression was over, a man no longer needed to beg for his bread, home relief investigators could be cursed down the stairs. Plans were made to buy houses on Long Island.

True, it was money earned to help people kill each other. The war in Europe made all the jobs. So grumbled those with a fresh head begging for troubles. But in what other country could even the poor get rich on the world’s misfortune?

Natives of the south, Sicily, Naples, the Abruzzi, these Italians on Tenth Avenue did not concern themselves about Mussolini’s winning the war. They had never loved their country of birth; it meant nothing to them. For centuries its government had been the most bitter enemy of their fathers and fathers’ fathers before them. The rich had spat on the poor. Pimps of Rome and the north had sucked their blood. What good fortune to be safe here in America.

Only Teresina Coccalitti was displeased. She could no longer declare her sons not working in these good times, and she had been kicked off the home relief. Now she went about secretly, buying great bags of sugar and tins of fat and endless bolts of cloth. She said mysteriously to Lucia Santa, “There will come a day—ah, there will come a day . . .” but then she zipped up her mouth with her fingers and would not say another word. What did she mean? True, there was a military draft, but only one boy from Tenth Avenue had been called. Nothing grave.

Lucia Santa was too busy to let the Coccalitti’s words buzz in her head. Floods of gold were washing over the tenements. Children were working after school. Sal and Lena had part-time jobs in the new drug factory on Ninth Avenue. Vinnie worked seven days a week. Let the people in Europe kill each other to their hearts’ content if that was their pleasure. The village of Lucia Santa’s parents was so small, the land so worthless, that none of her relatives could be in danger.

Only that scoundrel Gino did not work. But this was his last summer of idleness. He would graduate high school in January and there would be no more excuses. There was no profit in asking friends to find him jobs. Lucia Santa had tried, and Gino always got himself fired.

But there was one thing that
mascalzone
could do. Vinnie had forgotten his lunch bag again; Gino could take it to him. Lucia Santa blocked Gino’s way as, baseball bat under his arm, that midwife’s glove on his hand, he sought to get past her bulky form. Like a duke with cane and hat. “Bring this to your brother on the job,” she said, holding out the greasy brown bag, and she could have laughed to see his finicky disgust. How proud he was, all people are who do not have to sweat for bread. How tender.

“I’m late, Ma,” Gino said, ignoring the bag.

“Late for what?” Lucia Santa asked impatiently. “Late to get married? Late to put all the money you earned this week in the bank? Late to see a friend about some honest work?”

Gino sighed. “Ma, Vinnie can get something to eat in the diner.”

It was too much. Lucia Santa said bitterly, “Your brother is giving his life away for you—he never plays or runs in the park. You never even ask him to go out with you, and he is so lonely. But you can’t even bring him his bread? You are a disgrace. Go play your baseball and bum around with your friends. I’ll bring it myself.”

Shamed, Gino took the lunch bag. He saw the light of victory in his mother’s eyes, but he didn’t care. He really wanted to do something for Vinnie.

He trotted easily along Tenth Avenue up toward 37th Street and then down to Eleventh Avenue. He loved the full freeness of his body moving through the heavy summer air. When he was smaller he had taken giant leaps to see if he could fly as it seemed he might, but he was too old now. Just before he reached the freight building, he threw the brown paper bag high in the air in front of him, then put on a dazzling burst of speed to catch it before it hit the ground.

He rose slowly through the old rat-smelling building in an iron-grilled elevator. The operator, in a gray dirty uniform with wormy yellow insignia on the lapels, opened the metal doors with that mysterious contempt some adults have for the young, and Gino stepped out into a loft office that stretched away to the far end of the building.

It was like a nightmare in which a man sees a prison that he knows he will someday come to live in. There were long rows of desks with billing machine typewriters spewing forth rolls of multiple lading accounts. The men who operated these machines were all in vests and white shirts and loose, dangling ties. They were older than Vinnie, and they were very quick. The machines clattered blindly. Each desk had its own yellow lamp; the rest of the office was in darkness except for a long counter heaped with printed bills. At this counter a long thin bent man with the grayest face that Gino had ever seen was sorting out bills under a huge spotlight. There was no sound of voices. There was no hint of daylight outside. It was as if these people were all entombed above the rumbling of the coupling freight trains that moved below in the pit of the building. Gino looked, and at last he spotted Vinnie.

Vinnie was the only man without a vest, and he wore a colored shirt so he could use it two or three days without changing. His curly black hair looked damp under the yellow steel-armed lamp. Gino saw that Vinnie was slower than the others and that his face was screwed up with intense concentration to his task. The others had the blank expressions of sleepwalkers.

Suddenly Vinnie looked up. He stared at Gino without expression. He lit a cigarette. With surprise, Gino realized that Vinnie couldn’t see him, nor could any of the others. He was standing in darkness outside their world. He walked past the first line of desks into the living yellow square. As if he had blocked out the sun, heads snapped up. Vinnie raised his eyes.

There was a heartbreaking gladness on Vinnie’s face. His smile was sweet, as it had been in their childhood. Gino raised the lunch bag and threw it. Vinnie caught it expertly and Gino went to stand awkwardly by his desk.

“Thanks, kid,” Vinnie said. The men on either side of him stopped typing, and he said to them, “This is my kid brother, Gino.”

Gino was embarrassed at the pride in Vinnie’s voice. The two men said “Hiya, kid,” and gave him cold, appraising looks. He became conscious of his blue dungarees and white wool sweatshirt and felt foolish, as if he had come to some grave assembly frivolously attired. The gray-faced man called out, “Bill freight, you guys, we’re running behind.” Then he shambled over to Vinnie and gave him a sheaf of bills. He looked like a lean old rat. “You’re behind your count now, Vinnie,” he said.

Vinnie said nervously to the retreating back, “I won’t take my break later.” Gino turned to leave. Vinnie got up and walked him out of the circle of light to the elevator. They waited, listening to the grind of iron cables and the growl of the ascending cage.

“Take a short cut through the railroad yard,” Vinnie said. “But watch your ass when those engines come down.” He rested his hand on Gino’s shoulder. “Thanks for bringing my lunch. You got a game Saturday?”

“Yeah,” Gino said. The elevator was taking a long time. He wanted to get out. He saw Vinnie glance nervously toward the clattering machines in the circle of light and flinch as the gray rat face turned, blindly seeking them in the darkness.

“If I get up in time I’ll come watch,” Vinnie said. Then the elevator was there, its two iron doors sliding back, and Gino stepped in and began the slow descent. The smell of decay, of rats, and of old shit made him sick. When he stepped out of the building he lifted his head to the warm, lemon, September sunlight. He stood still in almost joyful relief and freedom.

He didn’t give Vinnie another thought. He started to run slowly through the railroad yard, a great field of gleaming white steel that alternately fanned out and converged mysteriously in the sun. He cradled his right arm as if he were carrying a football and sped over the wooden ties, slipping around the steel rails that came together to trap his flying feet. Black locomotives came toward him and he slipped away easily to the left and right, picking up speed. A locomotive came up behind him, its engineer seated at the window on Gino’s side. Gino raced it, going full speed across the wooden ties alongside the engine, flying ahead, until the engineer gave him a casual glance and then the black engine chugged louder and clacked past him. When it swerved off into a maze of stationary brown and yellow freight cars, Gino stopped, exhausted. He felt a little sweat beneath his white woolen jersey and he was ravenously hungry, thirsty—and then suddenly he found himself strong and fresh again. He swung into a long, loping run to Chelsea Park. There he saw his friends tossing a baseball and waiting for him.