The Black Madonna (18 page)

“Don't say that. She's near thirty. That's how you say it, near thirty.”

“Sylvia, go to sleep.”

“Oh, Harvey, do you remember when we first met?”

J
udy wanted Jumbo to meet her parents. She said if he really liked her as much as he said, if he loved her the way he said when they spent the night in the hotel on Twenty-third Street where he knew the night clerk and he pulled her on top of him, being much too large to risk it the other way, then he should meet her parents. Unless he wasn't serious, she said, but using her just to have a good time.

Jumbo cried when she said this. He loved her. He had never loved anybody before her. He swore this, but he was nervous. He knew she came from a nice family. He was positive. She was so educated, so cultured. Maybe they should wait. Give her parents time to get used to the idea of an Italian son-in-law, a bartender, no less. He knew that Jewish mothers wanted doctors; they wanted lawyers, professors. They went for titles. He knew he was right.

“Stop it,” Judy said, when he went on and on this way. “I'm telling them this weekend.”

“Whatta you gonna tell them?”

“That I met a man. That I love him. That I'm happier than I've ever been and I want them to meet him.”

“Ah, Judy, that's really how you feel?”

“Yes.”

He kissed her hands, sucked each finger one by one. He wished he could eat her except that then she would be gone.

“So? You'll come?”

“Suppose they don't want to meet me? Suppose they say ‘You're dead to us' and have a fake funeral. I heard about that. Vinny Maisano married a Jewish girl and her family did that. They never spoke to her again. It was like she was dead.” Jumbo had tears in his eyes. “Can you imagine that? They made believe like she died.”

“Jumbo, stop being dramatic. My parents wouldn't do that. They'll love you. If I love you, they'll love you. They'll have to.”

S
ylvia and Harvey could not have been happier when Judy announced she was taking the 11
A.M.
train home to Lawrence on Sunday and that she had something to tell them. Sylvia was beside herself. She made Harvey bring Nova Scotia and bagels and cream cheese from the East Side for their brunch. She told Harvey that she knew the news would be about Judy's beau. Fiancé, she hinted to her friends on the golf course. Engaged, she mentioned to her bridge club. She didn't sleep Saturday night. Sunday morning she was up at six setting out the Lenox.

H
arvey picked Judy up at the train station and drove straight home. Sylvia told him not to stop, but to come right back, which he did. She watched through the bay window as they got out of the car and came up the steps between the porch columns that reminded Sylvia of Tara and had convinced her to buy this house. Judy looked to Sylvia like she had put on some weight. This was the first disappointment. Didn't love take away your appetite? How could you snare a man carrying around twenty extra pounds? But Sylvia embraced her only child. She held her at arm's length and told her how wonderful she looked. Had she lost some weight?

T
hey sat at the table with the fresh flower centerpiece and the cut-crystal glasses filled with freshly squeezed orange juice while Judy told them about Jumbo. The Nova Scotia caught on Sylvia's temporary cap when she heard he wasn't Jewish but she recovered. Italian wasn't the worst thing. They were family people. Italians and Jews had lived side by side in the Bronx. It could be worse.

When Judy mentioned that he was a bartender, the bagel caught on what Sylvia feared was a tumor in her throat but she waited calmly to hear the rest, that he owned his own restaurant, which had in it a very graceful bar, like the divine Romeo Salta's. Didn't the owner sometimes step behind the bar to serve drinks? Sylvia asked herself. Successful restaurateurs had to be hands-on. Her Uncle Seymour had owned a restaurant. He had always said it. No absentee owners in the restaurant business. But no, Judy was saying, Jumbo didn't own the bar and restaurant. He only worked there.

College . . . what college had he gone to? City College had its share of
wunderkinds,
her brother Saul, for example. CCNY was an excellent school. Who could afford Yale and besides they had quotas. Sylvia was sure there must be quotas for Italians the same as for Jews.

Sylvia relaxed. She coughed up her bagel and took a sip of coffee. He hadn't gone to college? Self-educated? Sylvia's words, not Judy's, who was telling them how wonderful and kind and generous and smart her boyfriend was, and you know what? Judy said finally, “I love him.”

Harvey took Judy's hands in his and said he was so happy for her. Sylvia sat back in her chair and bit her tongue.

“Are you sure, dear? It's so important to have things in common.”

“I'm sure . . . And I'm sure you'll love him, too. You'll have to.”

“We will, won't we, Sylvia?” Harvey nodded his head, smeared cream cheese on his bagel. “Our Judy always had the best taste in friends.”

Sylvia rolled her eyes and wiped her mouth with her full-size linen napkin. Sweat broke out on her forehead. For the first time in a long time, she was lost for words. “You'll have to bring him out, sweetheart. Let us see this guy of yours.” She laughed. “You haven't even told us his name.”

Judy laughed, too. “It's Alfonso but everyone calls him Jumbo.”

Sylvia swallowed hard. Harvey carried the ball. “What an interesting name. How did he get it?”

“He thinks it's after that famous circus elephant. He was the biggest baby born on Spring Street, he tells me. The
Daily News
sent a photographer to take a picture of him and it was on the second page of the paper. Jumbo says the Italians love nicknames. Everyone has one.”

“Well, Jumbo's certainly easier to remember than Alfso.”

“Alfonso.”

“Excuse me,” Sylvia said.

“You okay, Mother?”

“Oh, I'm fine. You two go on. I'll be back in a minute.”

Sylvia Bernstein went upstairs to the pink bathroom attached to the master bedroom and threw up her guts. She washed her face and reapplied her makeup. Harvey and Judy waited for her in the living room.

“Sylvia,” Harvey said. “Are you okay?”

“Oh yes. It's the orange juice,” she said. “I shouldn't drink it. Too much acid.”

Judy hugged her mother when she came close enough. “Oh, I feel so happy now that I've told you. And you don't mind too much that he isn't Jewish?”

“We can talk about all that later,” her father said.

S
ylvia retired to bed with a lace handkerchief drenched in Chanel No. 5 tied over her eyes. “Look on the bright side, Sylvia,” Harvey said. “Our baby's happy. She's found a man who loves her. What else can we hope for?”

“The bright side,” Sylvia said. “He has arms and legs. He has a job. And Jewishness passes through the mother.”

“See, you're doing good already.”

Sylvia sat up in bed, she tore off the lace handkerchief. “He's an uneducated Italian bartender with no future and, we can only hope to God, no past.”

“Sylvia, you were doing better before.”

S
alvatore had told Magdalena about his meeting with Nicky. “Jumbo wants to see me and Nicky, the three of us, get together. Says he's got a problem of the heart.”

Magdalena thought this was funny. “Such a big man must have a big heart.”

“I don't know. At first, I didn't want to be bothered. What do I know about Jumbo's heart? Or anyone's heart for that matter?”

Magdalena came and sat down next to Salvatore on the couch. She pulled her legs under her and leaned against him. “Come,” she said. “You have a great gift with women. I could see it when you were just an infant.” She put her arm around him, behind his back. “I fell in love with you the second I saw you.”

Salvatore remembered how when he was a little boy and he was unhappy or scared, he would bury his face in Magdalena's hair and cry. She called his unhappiness
miseria
and she would hold him so close he couldn't breathe. She would dry his tears with her long black hair, like Mary Magdalena, she would tell him, holding his face in her hands.

Salvatore would look her in the eyes. He would stop crying. “She dried his feet,” he told her.

“Don't believe everything you hear,” Magdalena would say, and pull him closer.

S
o, how's Lindley?”

“Lindsey, Magdalena. It's Lindsey.”

“What a name . . . there's no translation. It means nothing. It's not a saint. It's not a flower. Huh . . .” Magdalena was polite to Salvatore's wife but she did not take her seriously. She was too foreign, too pale, too benign. Magdalena thought Salvatore had forgone passion. She never believed that still waters ran deep. There were things you couldn't hide behind your eyes.

Magdalena's loyalty was only to Salvatore, the rest of the world was incidental. Since Amadeo's death, Salvatore was the only one she cared about, but she never bothered him. She never called him. He had to seek her out, and when he said this to her, she shrugged her shoulders. “You know I'm here for you, Salvatore, and only you. You don't have to hear my voice every day.”

S
o,” she said, getting up. Salvatore was glad when she got up. She unsettled him. Magdalena was still seductive, powerful. “Have your friends come here, Nicky and Jumbo. You can have the house to yourself. Zia Manfredi can cook for you and leave it in the kitchen. I'll bring you
antipasti
from the store, olives and prosciutto and provolone, and fruit. If I remember, your friend Jumbo likes to eat. Tell them both to come here. You can have privacy and hear about Jumbo's heart.”

She kissed him good night and he watched her go upstairs, watched the straightness of her back and the roundness of her hips move away from him. She was still a young woman, his stepmother. She was beautiful.

He wondered if she was going up to the top of the house. He knew this was where she kept the Black Madonna that she had brought from Castelfondo more than thirty years before. Salvatore never went to that part of the house, had never gone, except one time when he was twelve and Magdalena had taught him the secrets.

“A pity,” she had said to him one winter night during Advent, “that you weren't born a girl.”

“Why?”

“I could teach you.”

“Teach me anyway.”

But Magdalena told him she was afraid. How could she teach a boy? He would grow into a man and then what? But then when he was twelve, she had covered his eyes with a handkerchief and led him up the stairs. It was Christmas Eve and she took him to the top of the house, under the eaves, and uncovered his eyes. She sat him in front of the shrine and fed him a special cake she had wrapped in the hem of her dress and warned him to be careful with what he would learn. Death magic, she called it. Love magic.

Afterward she made him kneel and she knelt behind him, her legs inside his, in front of the Black Madonna and she prayed for forgiveness for both of them. Salvatore had fallen asleep in her arms at the top of the house but woke up in his bed.

Salvatore loved Magdalena. She was his fantasy, his dream, the mother of fairy tales, the only mother he knew. In the neighborhood they whispered, they suspected, they believed in their hearts that Amadeo would be sorry for taking a child bride with a son who would grow up. They knew the stories, they knew the power of familiarity and the pull between men and women and they knew that Salvatore would grow out of his short pants and become a man. They held their breath for years and years but then Salvatore was out of the house and Amadeo was dead. Thank God for America, the women on the stoop said. In the old country, it would have turned out different.

S
o Nicky and Jumbo and Salvatore met in the house on Sullivan Street where Salvatore had grown up. Jumbo had to ask Luca Benvenuto for a couple of hours off. Jumbo shrugged when Luca agreed but docked Jumbo two hours' pay.

Salvatore opened the door when they rang the bell. Nicky was dripping wet even though Jumbo held a big black umbrella over him. “I passed by the bar to pick Jumbo up and he wasn't there,” Nicky said. “So I had to wait downstairs and got caught in the rain. No way I could go up the house and get him. His mother goes crazy when she sees me.”

“C'mon. It's not my mother that's the problem. Your mother started all the trouble. She's the one's got it in for me ever since I was a kid. Like it was my fault what I weigh.”

They stepped inside. Jumbo stuck the umbrella in the stand near the door and Nicky wiped his shoes on the mat inside the entrance hall. “Wipe your feet,” Nicky told Jumbo. “Where's your culture?”

“I know. I know. That's my problem. This girl . . . Judy . . . She's got culture up the ass. How's it gonna work?”