The Black Madonna (17 page)

“I met a girl.”

“For chrissakes, Jumbo. You told me that already. Whatta you getting senile?”

“But this ain't no ordinary broad. She's very classy . . . from Long Island. She's got a
college degree.
Can you believe it? A girl with a college degree interested in me? I can't hardly read the newspaper.”

Nicky squinted. He had been the route with college girls. They liked tough guys, or what they imagined to be tough guys. Just being a cop had gotten him plenty of action, one of the reasons his marriage broke up. He could see where Jumbo would be appealing, the opposites-attract thing, and who knows, maybe this girl had a thing for oversize guys, although as he remembered, Jumbo was no swordsman. He sat down on the bar stool and reached for the dish of peanuts but it was empty. Jumbo came over and stood in front of him. He leaned over on the bar, his fingers laced, his beefy forearms almost touching.

“You wanna drink?”

“I'm actually on duty.”

“C'mon, Nicky. There ain't been an unexplained homicide in this area since Tommy Rye disappeared. Does that count? When there's no corpi delectable?”

Nicky smiled. “I'm not organized crime, Jumbo. I'm homicide. So tell me about this girl.”

“She's perfect, Nicky. A little fat, but hey, I'm no Cary Grant. She teaches school in the Bronx. Third grade. The kids love her. They make her birthday cards every day.”

“So where'd you meet her?”

“She used to come in Jilly's with her girlfriends. You know how these career girls hang out together. They don't need no men. They got their own money. They got their own apartments. I seen a million of them, but Judy stayed late one night and we started talking. I bought her a drink. And then she started coming in without the girlfriends. You know how it is. . . . And I'm crazy about her. I feel like God's giving me a chance to make something outta my life. I feel like I got a purpose.”

“But what's the problem? It sounds normal to me.”

Jumbo sighed. He reached under the bar to fill the dish of peanuts. Luca Benvenuto complained to Fat Eddie Fingers that his peanut bill was cutting into the profits. How were the peanuts supposed to make the customers thirsty if the bartender ate them all? Jumbo dipped his fingers into the peanut dish and lowered his voice. “Nicky, she's a
mazzucriste.
”

“C'mon, Jumbo . . . this is 1968. . . .”

“I wanna marry this girl. I love this girl.”

“Jumbo, it's no big deal. Wake up, you're not the first one. Joe Tucillo married a Jewish girl.”

“Yeah, and where is he? He ain't here, is he? He moved to Timbuktu.”

“Well, face it, you gotta be sick in the head if you think you're gonna marry any educated girl and move her down here in one of these tenements with your mother. Christ, my ex-wife came from Mulberry Street and I had to buy her a house in Queens.”

“That's too bad she left you, Nicky. Maybe you're not the one I should be talking to about marriage. If she left you, you can't know much.”

“Maybe my mistake was marrying an Italian girl. You think they're gonna understand and they don't.”

“Like what?”

“Like Gina couldn't stand my mother. I told her, ‘My mother's a widow, she's been on her own since I was twelve. What does what I do for my mother have to do with you?'”

“That's the other thing, Nicky. My mother . . . she's convinced I'm hers forever now. I hear her all the time with my sisters. Promise me, she tells them. When I go, you take care of him. And she thinks nobody's good enough. Now I'm gonna come home with Judy Bernstein?” Jumbo was sweating. It was too dark for Nicky to see, but he could smell him. When Nicky arrested people, they'd smell like that. It was fear. And Nicky understood why. Antoinette Mangiacarne had Jumbo tied tight. And the apron strings were around his neck.

Some guys came in and sat at the other end of the bar. They called out for a drink. “Hold your horses. Can't you see I'm busy over here,” Jumbo yelled down the bar. “Goddamn ballbusters,” he said to Nicky.

“Jumbo, you're the bartender. They're customers. Go take care of them. What the hell are you doing?”

“Well, I'm not used to this, Nicky. You know you had time to get used to it. You went in the army. Now you're a cop. You're used to people telling you what to do. Me, I been an independent all my life. This shit is hard for me.”

“Hey.” Again from the end of the bar.

Nicky patted Jumbo's forearm. It reminded Nicky of a pork roast. He thought about getting a sandwich in the grocery store next door. Jumbo was always an inspiration. “Go take care of your customers. If you're gonna get married, you're gonna need a job.”

“My mother's right,” Jumbo said, picking himself off the bar. “I'm cursed.”

J
udy Bernstein was the apple of her father's eye. Her mother would have wished for a daughter a little slimmer, with a better nose and a finer set of teeth. Braces took care of the teeth, but the nose, which Sylvia knew could be fixed just as easily, Judy refused to alter, and Harvey Bernstein agreed. He spent part of every day of Judy's life telling her that she was the most beautiful creature who walked the earth and smart, too. When she was born, Harvey told Sylvia he didn't want any more children. This one was perfect and all he would ever want, so why should they have another?

Sylvia was content. She hadn't liked being pregnant, she hadn't liked giving birth. She didn't particularly like little children. She didn't even like what you had to do to get one, and with this most of her girlfriends agreed, except for Ann Hirshfeld, who would deal the cards for their weekly bridge game and tell them they didn't know what they were missing.

Sylvia was content. God had sent her Harvey, who provided a good living and never complained. Sylvia didn't have to cook much or clean at all and Harvey was happy when she spent his money. She did hope for more for her daughter: a professional man, a real professional—a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant. Sylvia had been on the right track herself. Harvey had been in podiatry school when she married him, but bad times hit and he left to go into the family bra and girdle business.

The store was on Grand Street and the business was cash. Harvey expanded to include sleepwear and hosiery and took over three other stores on the block. The Bernsteins moved from a tenement apartment in the Bronx to a house on Long Island. It was a commute but Harvey liked the quiet of the train and then the buzz of Grand Street, familiar and comfortable. He would talk with the other shopkeepers selling lingerie and fabric and bedspreads and custom curtains and eiderdown quilts. The customers were attractive and well dressed, wearing hats with feathers and three-quarter-length gloves that they would take off to finger the lace on a strapless bra or stretch a corset with long elastic garters for stockings.

Harvey had a makeshift dressing room in the back so the ladies could try things on and he kept a young shop assistant to help them with the hooks and snaps so essential to ladies' underwear. He'd have his lunch every day in the dairy restaurant across the street where the old waiters with bad feet and body odor knew his order, the same every day: potato-leek soup with dill served in the thick china of coffee shops, the soup slopped into the cup so that it had flowed over the edge, the cup sitting in a puddle of soup in the saucer that Harvey would put to his lips if no one was looking.

The trend to abandoning undergarments worried Harvey. He had read where the young girls weren't even wearing panties, let alone girdles, but Sylvia said he was crazy. Where was a woman without her foundation garments? Anyway, they had put enough away for a rainy day. The only thing left for them to do was to marry off Judy, but to tell the truth, this worried Sylvia. When Judy turned thirty, Sylvia had arranged a quiet dinner for the three of them at Trader Vic's in the city. She didn't want to advertise Judy's age, to start her friends gossiping or not being responsive when a possible suitor, a young nephew or a friend's son, came into town. Sylvia didn't want Judy to be thought of as old . . . as in maid. She remembered the dreaded card in the game Judy would play with her father as a little girl, the ugly hag with the disgruntled face.

Sylvia wished Judy would dress up more, tweeze her eyebrows, shorten her skirts. Those glasses! Sylvia would fret to Harvey in bed after the lights were out. She would only let Harvey read in bed for fifteen minutes and then the light had to go out. “She's not a bad-looking girl,” she would say in the dark. “What could it be?”

“Leave her alone. She's having fun. She's young yet.”

“She's not so young, Harvey, God forgive me for saying it. She's past thirty. And she's not even dating. We never should have let her move to the city. Who's she gonna meet there?”

“Who's she gonna meet here?”

“Oh, stop it. If she was here she'd be at the club on weekends. There's always a stray man here and there. People would see her. They'd want to fix her up. Now she's just Sylvia and Harvey's daughter who moved to the city. Besides she seems too independent. No one wants a girl like that.”

“Sylvia, she'll be fine.”

“You think so, Harvey? She's got nobody. Not a brother, not a sister, just us, and when we die someday, God forbid, Judy's gonna be all alone.” Sometimes when Sylvia said this, she would cry softly into her manicured hands. Her hairdo would quiver and Harvey would pat her hand and sometimes take her in his arms and sometimes even get a hard-on and make love to her, careful not to disturb her hairdo.

A
ntoinette Mangiacarne, sometimes known as Mama Jumbo, thrived on her only son. Even his missteps, somewhere deep in her heart, gave her pleasure because they tied him to her all the more tightly. She never hesitated for a minute to go to Fat Eddie's Club on King Street that time Jumbo had run away. For her son, she would have thrown herself in front of a moving train and pulled her daughters along after her. She believed when he was born that he was destined for great things but fate had intervened when Nicky's mother had targeted him for her grudge. Antoinette knew that if she had had an ally more powerful than Teresa Sabatini, Jumbo would be a doctor by now, a lawyer, a business owner, a restaurateur, an executive in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

But if it wasn't to be, her consolation was that she was here to protect him from real terror and physical harm. He had stayed healthy, thank God, with an appetite that never faltered through all the usual childhood sicknesses and the most terrible stomachaches and flu and fevers. Antoinette could not remember a time when Jumbo's weight dipped even a pound, when his pants had ever been loose at his waist. For this she was grateful and could put up with the evil eye that Nicky's mother had invoked. After all, if you didn't have your health, you had nothing. Antoinette knew this because she and her family had nothing but their health, and cheap rent on their tenement apartments.

Secretly Antoinette thought it was not a bad thing that had brought Jumbo back to the neighborhood bar in Benvenuto's. She had worried about him uptown at night. This way he was here. She could see him coming and going. She knew where he was every day and every night of the week because Fat Eddie Fingers had been clear about the hours Jumbo had to work if he wanted to continue breathing and Antoinette had solemnly sworn on the head of her dead husband that Jumbo would do exactly as Eddie asked. Antoinette finally felt that things were under control. Nicky's mother's curse might have been lifted or frittered away, its energy spent, or Jumbo just too vigorous and healthy to be influenced by its evil anymore. If Antoinette had known what was brewing, she might have lost her appetite, she might have needed more than two handkerchiefs in her apron pocket to collect her tears or contain her fury.

I
t had been a slow night at Jilly's, a Tuesday. Jumbo thought the group of girls who came in and sat at the bar looked snotty. Haughty would have been the word but Jumbo would not have used a word like haughty. They all ordered brandy alexanders except for one girl. She ordered scotch on the rocks, telling Jumbo her father had taught her that when you drink, it was the sugar that killed you. “Smart man,” Jumbo said, and liked her right away. When all the girls got up to leave and she purposely waited for him to come down to her end of the bar, he took her drink off the check and smiled at her.

She had long brown hair and glasses, which Jumbo thought made her look smart. On her way out he noticed her big ass and the line of her panties underneath her knit dress and then and there he hoped he would see her again.

Jumbo never thought about girls except the ones you paid for or else left before dawn. To get serious meant responsibility and Jumbo knew his limits. Mouths to feed and rent to pay? He had never lived on his own. He hadn't even been able to make it with Nicky and Salvatore. That three weeks when he was eighteen had been the last time he had been out of his mother's house, except for that time he hid out in Georgia, which no one counted. Antoinette had cried when he moved back home. She had lovingly hand-washed every piece of dirty clothing he brought back with him, and his sisters Rosina and Albina had stayed home from work one whole day to press everything, even his boxer shorts and undershirts, and fold them neatly one on top of the other and place them back in the empty drawers that had waited for his return.

H
er name was Judy, not Angelina or Cosima or Bernadina, and when she walked into Jilly's alone that Friday night, Jumbo swooned. He hadn't remembered her mouth being so full. She wore lipstick and a sweater that was cut low enough so he could see the top of her breasts and she sat alone at the bar and leaned over so that when he poured her scotch he could see down into her sweater. He imagined he could see her nipples pushing against the wool but of course he couldn't because Judy Bernstein's father was in lingerie and her bra was padded and double-layered with lace and Jumbo would have had to have X-ray vision to see even the hint of a nipple but he imagined where they were and that was good enough.

He took her to an after-hours joint down on Broadway and then to Ratner's for breakfast. “You're Jewish?” he asked her when he heard the name Bernstein.

“Why? That matters?”

“No, whatta you kidding? I meet all kinds of people in my business. You kidding or what?”

“I don't really observe.”

“What?”

“Observe . . . the rules . . . like not eating pork.”

“Pork?”

“Jews don't eat pork . . . or shellfish. Don't you know that?”

“Sure I know that. So you don't eat pork?”

“I do. I thought God would strike me dead the first time I had a ham sandwich but here I am.”

“I'm glad, Judy.”

“That I eat pork?”

“No, that God didn't strike you dead.”

T
hey went out for four months. Jumbo knew his way around the city. He took her to shows and restaurants and clubs and discos. They went out every weekend and twice during the week. He was going into debt but he wasn't worried. It was small potatoes compared to when he was gambling.

Antoinette was suspicious. He was staying out later and later and he had stopped giving her money for the house, which before he had forced her to take. “No,” she always said when Jumbo pushed the rolled-up bills into her hand. “That horse's ass, that
s'facime
takes everything you make.” Jumbo would slip the money into her pocketbook and she would find the bills at the bottom of her bag when she went shopping.

But lately, Jumbo had been apologizing. “I got some expenses, Ma,” he told her. “You know that fat bastard takes everything.”

Antoinette smelled a rat. She tortured Rosina and Albina and Filomena and Angelina and Raffaella but they swore they knew nothing, had seen nothing. Antoinette noticed a smear of pink on Jumbo's shirt collar and had a mild fainting spell. She showed it to Rosina. “Ma, he's a man, for chrissakes. You want him to be a fag?”

“You think that's it? Just a one-time thing?”

“Well, I don't see no steady girl around here, do you?”

“No, you're right. It's nothing, right? A little fun. He's a man, after all.”

“Didn't I just say that?”

“But suppose some girl tricks him, gets herself pregnant? Suppose it's not even his baby? She's a big whore. Gives it out to everybody and poor Jumbo gets stuck because he's a dope. Your father never told him anything. And how could I say those things? I'm his mother.”

“Ma, please, Jumbo's thirty-two years old. He can take care of himself. You should be glad if he's with a woman. My Tony was thinking for real he might be a
riccone.
”

“Why? Because he's not a pig like the jerks you and your sisters married?”

“Ma, please, I'm trying to make you feel better.”

“You're not. I don't feel better. I feel sick to my stomach.” Antoinette mixed a big glass of water and Brioschi. The bubbles soothed her stomach, the fizz tickled her nose, which she used to sniff for perfume and other aromas that would give her fears a name.

T
he Bernsteins were pleased when Judy told them she was seeing somebody and that was the reason she hadn't been home to visit. With her job and all, there wasn't time. Sylvia didn't pry. She didn't want to interfere but she poked Harvey every night when he turned off his light and rolled over. “D'ya think it's serious? It's been months. Did she say anything to you?”

“No, Sylvia.”

“But she always talks to you. She's closer to you than she is to me. I'm her mother. She should tell me. But she hasn't, not a word. She should be asking me for advice. After all, there's ways to get a man. I hope she's being careful. You know, nobody buys the cow when they get the milk for free. It sounds old-fashioned, but it's true.”

“Oh, Sylvia, please . . . She's thirty-five years old.”