Baker Towers (23 page)

He climbed the porch stairs on tiptoe. The old floorboards creaked beneath his weight.
The porch,
he remembered: he had promised to help Joyce with the porch. But he was due at the store Monday afternoon. He would have to leave first thing in the morning.

He glanced over his shoulder at the Cadillac gleaming beneath the street lamp. He’d stopped along the highway and paid a dollar to have it washed. Now the small extravagance shamed him. He’d always been vain about his cars.

He closed the screen door quietly behind him; feeling along the wall, he climbed the stairs to his room. His suitcase sat at the foot of the bed; he hadn’t even bothered to unpack it. Shame prickled his skin. Had his mother noticed? Did she know he was in such a hurry to leave?

He clicked open the suitcase. In the pocket of his trousers he found his checkbook.
Why not?
he thought.
For God’s sake, what is money for?

His hand shaking, he wrote a check for $5,814, the exact sticker price of a ’55 Eldorado ragtop, payable to Joyce Novak. On the memo line he wrote, in wavy letters:
You pay rent, you never have nothing.

He left the check on top of the bureau. By the time she found it, he would be halfway to Philadelphia.

E
very year, in the third week of July, Mount Carmel Church held its annual festival and spaghetti dinner. Tents were raised on the church lawn. In the street, a bandstand and rides for the children: chair swings, a miniature carousel. Susquehanna Avenue was closed off with sawhorses, causing a tangle of traffic on the street below. Every year the local merchants grumbled.
Might as well shut down for the weekend. No one does business on Dago Day.
A few wrote letters to the mayor. But John Mastrantonio chaired the town council. Every year the requisite permits were issued, and Dago Day was celebrated as planned.

Every Italian in town worked at the festival. When Rose Novak was a girl, her aunts fried sausages and rolled meatballs in the church basement. Before he went away to war, her brother had helped build the gaming booths—darts, ringtoss, chuck-o-luck—and hammered the posts into the parish lawn. Her uncle Vincent had built the wooden platform used in the procession, to carry Our Lady of Mount Carmel through the streets of the town. Each year the platform was decorated with fresh-cut roses, the
statue draped in a long cloak of sky blue velvet. Carried, always, by six young men, and followed by the Legion of Mary, the Knights of Columbus and the church choir. The procession wound its way through Little Italy, a slow-moving beast sluggish in the afternoon heat, easily caught by the small dark-eyed children who pursued it, carrying dollar bills punctured with safety pins. The bills were pinned to Our Lady’s cloak. The sign of the cross was made.

The festival ended with a pyrotechnics display; for many years, Rose’s father had driven his wagon to Punxsutawney to buy the firecrackers. All of Bakerton watched the fireworks, but the Italians had the best view, from the steep hill behind the church.

As a girl of eleven, Rose cleared tables at the spaghetti dinner. She had just come over with her mother. Starting fifth grade at the grammar school, she had learned, cruelly, that her English was poor; but at Mount Carmel that didn’t matter. The patrons spoke to her in Italian. The women in the kitchen called her
bella,
gave her anisette cookies and exclaimed over her long hair. As a teenager, she helped decorate Our Lady’s platform. During the procession she sang in the choir.

After her marriage, Rose stopped working at the festival. Her children were baptized at St. Casimir’s, and she acquired a collection of dowdy hats, which the Polish women favored over mantillas. Her life was in all ways Polish except for one day each summer: on the third Saturday in July, Stanley stayed home alone; Rose and the children trekked across town to the festival. There, Georgie and Dorothy chased around the churchyard with their Scarponi cousins. Rose sat under an awning with her aunts, playing bingo and drinking Sambuca, speaking Italian and breaking out periodically in cawing laughter. Years later, her children would remember that Rose laughed more on Dago Day than on all the other days of the year combined.

T
HE THIRD SATURDAY
in July was the hottest day of the year. At eleven in the morning the temperature reached a hundred degrees. “It’s not so bad,” Rose told the girls, in defiance of all evidence. She could still distinguish light from dark, could recognize certain shapes; but her feet were swollen, a sign her heart was failing. Still she would not miss the festival.

Joyce drove them into town and dropped them off at the church—the nearest parking space was blocks away. Dorothy led Rose to a chair under the canopy, where her aunts were playing bingo.

The aunts—in their seventies now—greeted them with hugs and shrieks. “You looking good, honey,” said Aunt Marcella, kissing Dorothy loudly. “You hang in there, you be good as new.”

Dorothy guided Rose to a folding chair. She
did
feel well. She had regained a little weight; her daily walks had improved her appetite. Little by little, her speech had returned. She’d set her hair and wore a new dress. Joyce had taken her shopping for her thirtieth birthday that spring.

“Dorothy,” said Aunt Bruna. “Come here,
bella.
I got a job for you.” The kitchen was shorthanded, she explained; the second seating had begun, and there weren’t enough waitresses. “We need some girls to pour coffee. Pretty girls,” she said, winking. “Keep the men occupied while they wait.”

In this way Dorothy found herself in the church basement, an apron wrapped around her waist. Long tables stretched from wall to wall, set with folding chairs. Families sat close together: grandparents, young couples, children in Sunday clothes. There was no telling where one family ended and the next began. The same features repeated up and down every table: brown eyes, black hair, sharp noses, square chins. The overflow crowd waited in line at the door. The room seemed to Dorothy very full—perfume,
cigar smoke, laughter, all tightly contained by the cinder-block walls.

There was no room for shyness, no time. She hurried from table to table pouring coffee; the simplicity of the task reassured her, the impossibility of making conversation in the loud room. Men laughed and called to her.
Hey, coffee girl. Another refill here. Good thing you so skinny, get between them tables like that.
Old men, strongly perfumed, in pink shirts and pastel slacks. Some bald, with oiled scalps; others with low hairlines, graying pompadours beginning just above the eyebrows. Dorothy smiled back; it was impossible not to. She filled their cups and returned to the kitchen for a fresh pot.

For an hour or more she raced and poured. Packed full of bodies, the room grew close. The heat of the kitchen astonished her, the enormous pots of boiling macaroni, the steaming vats of tomato sauce. She wiped her brow. Around her the room began to spin.

“Whatsa matter?” someone called. The voice seemed very far away.

“She gonna pass out,” said another.

“I got her.” Someone took the coffeepot from her hands; she felt herself lifted, briefly, off the floor. A man’s arms beneath her.
I’m swimming,
she thought.

“Hey, you okay? Lights still on in there?” He was her age, perhaps older. He looked like the others: the eyes, the hair.

“Poor girl, she need some air,” a woman crowed. “Angie, be a good boy and take her outside.”

T
HEY SAT
on the back steps of the rectory, shaded at that hour by a gnarled cherry tree.

“That was a close call,” he said. “You almost hit the deck.”

“I don’t know what happened.”

“Hotter than hell in there.” He fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette.

“I’ve been ill. I’m still getting my strength back.” She leaned against the brick wall, slightly cooler than her skin. “Thank you for helping me. I’m sorry to take you away from your dinner.”

“That’s all right.” He loosened his tie. His neck looked thick and powerful; his white shirt was damp under the arms. “I’d rather sit here with you.”

“I should get back,” she said, rising.

“Easy.” He laid a hand on her leg. A large, handsome hand, the wrist covered with black hair. “Sit a minute. I’ll get you some water.”

He returned with a paper cup and a piece of garlic toast. “Here. Eat this.”

She took the bread, warm and buttery. It left an oily film on her fingers. She realized she hadn’t eaten all day.

“My mother says you’re too skinny. I said I like you the way you are.” He said it simply, as though it meant nothing.

“She asked me your name,” he said.

“Dorothy Novak.”

“Angelo Bernardi. They call me Angie.”

“Angelo,” she repeated. It was a beautiful name.

“B
ERNARDI,” SAID JOYCE
. “The undertakers?”

The sisters were sitting on the front porch, drinking glasses of lemonade. Up and down Polish Hill the neighbors were doing the same. The fireworks had finished; the children had been put to bed. It was too hot to sleep.

“There were three of them that I remember,” said Joyce, ticking them off on her fingers. “Jerry was two years ahead of me. Plus there were two older boys, twins. They were all in the service.”

“Victor and Sal,” said Dorothy, who had graduated with them. “I remember Victor and Sal.”

It was an exercise performed in small towns everywhere: the tracing back through generations, the connecting of in-laws and distant cousins, names familiar from church or school. Rose and her sisters were masters of the art; Joyce and Dorothy had grown up listening to their aunts exchange information over coffee and cake. It could not accurately be called gossip; there was nothing malicious in the talk. It was simply the female way of ordering the world, a universe where everyone was important and all activities worthy of notice.

“Angelo?” Joyce frowned. “There was another cousin, older, but he got married a few years ago. A Scalia girl. Her sister was at the factory with me.”

“I know he said Bernardi.” An exotic name, lovely in her mouth. Already she had said it a dozen times. He had asked for her phone number but hadn’t written it down.
Right here,
he said, tapping his temple.
I got it right here.

“Wasn’t one of the Bernardis a ballplayer?” Joyce asked. “Do you remember this? He played for Baker, and then got drafted by one of the professional teams.”

Dorothy frowned. “You’re thinking of Ernie Tedesco. That was a long time ago.”

“Could be,” said Joyce. “I don’t know why I thought Bernardi. Why don’t you just ask Mama? She’s an expert on the Italians.”

Dorothy nodded. It would have been logical to ask Rose first, but something had stopped her.

“Don’t say anything just yet,” she said. “He might not even call.”

H
E DIDN’T CALL
.

Weeks passed. In the afternoons she walked through Little Italy, glancing at parked cars, peering into shop windows. Above every store were two floors of apartments, their windows covered in lace. He might live anywhere. She might walk past his window every day. She would never know.

(On those long walks she did not think of her mother, the summer Rose spent looking for Stanley Novak, before he wandered into the seamstress’s shop to order his wedding suit. The way she had hunted him, the nakedness of her need. Stanley himself had never known. Rose would carry the secret to her grave.)

One afternoon Dorothy bought a pastry at Bellavia’s and sat there a long time eating it, at a tiny table facing the window. An old woman passed, dressed in black. At the end of the block the parochial school had let out for recess: shouts and squeals, the singsong voices of girls jumping rope. Across the street, cars idled in front of the funeral parlor; at the head of the line, an old-fashioned black hearse, chrome gleaming in the sun. Mourners filed out of the building, stopping to shake hands with the old man who stood at the door. The man was thin and very stooped. He looked a hundred years old.