The Black Madonna (19 page)

“Who's Judy?”

“You're rushing me. I'm confused, and you're rushing me.”

Salvatore hugged Jumbo hello, surprised at the size of him. He was a behemoth, solid like a mountain. “You haven't changed,” Salvatore said.

“Oh, but you have,” Jumbo said. “Look at you. Mr. Big-Shot Lawyer. Although to tell the truth, I think I'm wearing a better shirt.”

Salvatore laughed. “Brooks Brothers,” he said.

“Emilio Garcia on Avenue C. Check out the monogram.” Jumbo held out his arm and on the cuff in light blue thread were his initials. You couldn't see them unless you looked close, which was just how Jumbo liked it.

They went into the kitchen. It was below the street level but looked out onto the garden in back. “Christ, Salvatore, I forgot what this house was like. It's a fucking mansion. The three of you lived in this whole house. How come we was always hanging out in Nicky's? My apartment was one big whorehouse with them sisters of mine. But this is something else.”

“Yeah,” Salvatore said, “but there was nowhere to go, only the garden. From One Ninety-six, between the fire escapes and the back alleys, we had the run of the neighborhood.”

“And please,” Nicky said, “don't remind me about fire escapes.”

Salvatore set out a bottle of vodka and three glasses with ice. Jumbo eyed the plates of
antipasti
Magdalena had made up from the store.

“So, brothers, here we are all together. Now tell us, Jumbo, what's going on.”

“What about the food, Sally? What's all that food over there? It's for us or Magdalena's saving it for a party or something?”

“Christ, Jumbo,” Nicky said. “How big could this problem be if all you're thinking about is sliced provolone? Man does not live by bread alone.”

“You got bread?”

H
e told them then about Judy Bernstein.

Nicky shook his head. “Ahhh, Jumbo, you're in trouble. I'd be really worried if I were you.”

“See. I knew it. I should be scared, right? I knew it. I'm not crazy. This is gonna be terrible.”

“What are you talking about?” Salvatore said. “This is 1968. I didn't marry an Italian girl.”

“Yeah, true,” Nicky said, “and aside from the fact that you're wearing striped shirts, you're doing better than me in the marriage department. But we're not talking marriage here, we're talking Antoinette Mangiacarne.”

“My mother wanted me to be a priest, Sally. She said she could only give me up to the church.”

“No, Jumbo, your mother wanted you to be her husband.”

“You take that back.”

“Okay okay. We're getting off the track here.”

“No, I think we're right on target. Jumbo's going out with a
mazzucriste
but his mother wouldn't be happy if he was with the Queen of England, so where does that leave him? Sounds like up shit's creek to me.”

Salvatore leaned back and poured another drink. “Correct me if I'm wrong, but do you realize we're three grown men conspiring like we're twelve years old?”

“I wish we were twelve again. Those times were great,” Jumbo said, “except when you was crippled, Nicky. That wasn't so good. That's when your mother started hating me.”

“Forget my mother and your mother, what about her mother? You aren't exactly a great catch.”

“Thanks for rubbing it in.”

“Just tell her, Jumbo. Just tell Antoinette you're getting married. You do want to get married? Or am I rushing you again?”

“No, of course I wanna get married. I want a nice life. I want some kids.”

“Does this girl know how much you weighed when you were born?” Nicky said. “Maybe she'll think twice.”

Salvatore put a hand on Jumbo's shoulder. “Just tell your old lady, Jumbo. Who knows? She might be happy. She probably worries about who's gonna take care of you when she's dead.”

“Believe me, she don't worry. I got all them sisters. I'm covered in the taking-care-of department.” Jumbo speared slices of mortadella, provolone, salami, roasted peppers, and artichoke hearts and layered them on a loaf of bread. He didn't bother with the plates Salvatore had laid out.

“So, you think it'll work out.”

“It'll be fine. Your mother loves you. She'll only want the best for you.”

“And you guys, you'll walk in my wedding?”

Nicky put an arm around Jumbo. Salvatore did the same from the other side. Jumbo left his hands where they were, holding his sandwich, but he had tears in his eyes.

J
umbo met Judy uptown. They walked in Central Park, through the zoo, where Jumbo got sad at the lions and gorillas in small iron-barred cages inside houses that stank of rotted vegetables and animal shit. He didn't see the romance in zoos. And the smell got into the bag of peanuts and the candy bars he bought to eat along the way and took away some of his appetite. He wished he could bring Judy down the neighborhood but he had visions of his five sisters tearing out her beautiful brown hair strand by strand, breaking her glasses, and then he would have to hit them and he didn't think he could do that, not even for Judy.

“Did you tell your mother?” she asked, sticking a hand into his bag of peanuts. He didn't like that. He had told her he would buy her a bag but she had said no, she didn't want any, and here she was mooching his, but he loved her, so he held the bag closer to her and let her grab a handful.

“I didn't. I been working later and later and she's asleep when I get home.”

“Well, I told Sylvia and Harvey.” Just the names of Judy's parents made the short hairs at the back of Jumbo's head curl.

“And?”

“They're fine; they can't wait to meet you.”

“Really?”

“Really. When can you come? It's got to be the weekend. We could take the train out and have lunch with them. What about this Sunday?”

Sunday was the day Antoinette cooked special for the whole family: Rosina, Filomena, Raffaella, Albina, Angelina, and their husbands and their kids all crammed into Antoinette's kitchen eating meatballs and sausages and
braciole,
drinking the homemade wine Frankie Watermelons sold from a horse and wagon he parked on Sullivan Street. They'd have romaine lettuce and tomatoes with red onions that Antoinette would soak in cold water to make them sweet, and then coffee and banana cream pie and Boston cream pie and éclairs and cream puffs from Dellarova's on Bleecker Street. The Mangiacarne family loved all kinds of cream cake with their espresso. The kids had theirs with milk.

“Jumbo, Jumbo, what about Sunday?”

Jumbo reminded himself that this was the girl he loved. “Sunday. Sure. Sunday's a good day for me.” He handed Judy the bag of peanuts. His appetite was gone.

He left her off at her apartment on Seventy-third Street and Park Avenue. She asked him to come up and he did but he was too nervous to do anything but watch television. He never stayed over. She thought it was quaint and old-fashioned that he worried about her reputation. What would her neighbors think if they saw a man leaving her apartment, he told her, and who could miss him?

But the truth was, he liked to sleep home. He slept in the tiny second bedroom off the kitchen that faced the back alley and his mother peeked in every morning, even before she made coffee. He had slept in the living room as a young boy, on the pull-out couch, his sisters all piled together in this bedroom that was his now, his parents in the bedroom off the front. Jumbo got the bedroom when the last of his sisters married. The room was small but it was cool in the summer and quiet, and it had a door. Antoinette had always been proud that none of her children had ever had to sleep in a
brande
in the kitchen. It was one of her badges of honor. That and that they never went hungry. Hunger was not a problem in the neighborhood, but the sheer size of the Mangiacarnes spoke of the good life, of excess. Antoinette let the curtains turn to tatters and the linoleum crack and split but her table always groaned with the best that money could buy.

Her daughters had followed her example, which was why Nicky's mother brought down invective on their heads. One dirty woman in the building was tolerable but now they were six. Six Mangiacarnes, one messier than the next.

T
eresa laughed when Nicky told her that Jumbo's mother believed she had the power to cast the
malocchio.
“Ha,” she told him. “If I had the power, they would all be in kingdom come by now.” She lowered her voice and spoke into Nicky's ear. “Magdalena has the power. But she's very clever. She keeps it only for herself.”

“Magdalena doesn't believe in that, Ma. You forget when I couldn't walk, she sent you to the doctor?”

“I told you. She keeps it for herself. You think it was an accident Amadeo married her, a peasant girl young enough to be his daughter with his poor wife still warm in the grave? He was over there weeks and weeks. I never heard a word. I was taking care of Salvatore. I went to the priest. I thought Amadeo was dead and I would have two mouths to feed instead of one. And then he shows up, married.”

The neighborhood had buzzed when Amadeo came back from Lucania with Magdalena. The women spent so much time on the stoops and in each other's houses that almost nothing got done. The dust mops stayed on the hooks in the wall and there was no line at the butcher's. They heard about Magdalena before they saw her. No one could remember who first told the story.

They watched the entrance to Amadeo's house from early in the morning. Amadeo went to his store and came home, and they greeted him and he greeted them back, but no one mentioned his bride (if he had even married her, who knows these things, the women on the stoop said).

Magdelena stayed inside the house. She would get down on the floor and put her cheek to the cold tiles. She would go from room to room and say the names out loud in English of the colors on the walls. She would stack and restack the dinner plates in the glass cupboards, and of course, she would play with the baby, who was getting very pale from staying inside.

To entice her to go out, Amadeo bought her a coach carriage, an English one that turned at the touch of a finger, and on the first day of the new moon she dressed herself and Salvatore, put him in the English coach carriage, and went for a walk. She walked for hours, up one block and down the next. She crossed Houston Street and went over to Bleecker. She walked all the way to Fourth Street Park and sat under the shadow of the arch with the nannies in their white uniforms watching their Fifth Avenue babies. She smiled when anyone looked at her, and before she went home, she passed by Amadeo's store, and when he came outside, she kissed him on the mouth in front of everyone in the street.

“Bold,” someone said, on the stoop the next day, and the women fell into a circle, heads together, the younger ones filled with envy, the older ones shaking their heads, feigning shock. The feeling was that she was too young, too beautiful, too slim. Her hair was too black and there was too much red where the light caught it. Her eyes were too strange. They had gold in them, one of the younger women said.

Magdalena wore the polished goat's bone close to her skin, and when she bathed, she let the water run over it to move its power into her. She did the same with all her jewels, and Amadeo would find her in the bath adorned with all the pearls and rubies and diamonds he had given her. She put together a shrine to the Black Madonna at the top of the house, under the eaves, with the stone Zia Guinetta had pressed into her hand when she left Castelfondo, the stone with the face of the Black Madonna. In front of the shrine Magdalena put offerings of food and flowers. She burned candles. To the women on the stoop, she was inaccessible. Sometimes she was giddy like a young girl and then suddenly serious like an old woman. They never drew her into their circle. She didn't want to come. She was an outsider. They never went to her house for coffee and cake, or invited her into their houses, and at Easter they didn't taste her pies filled with sausage and cheese or bring her pieces of theirs wrapped in dish towels, the crust thick and rising to a dome.

They saw her garden of herbs from their fire escape windows and they smelled her cooking that wasn't food, and they talked among themselves, but they were always polite because she was Amadeo Pavese's wife and he was a
padrone
and they were always frightened of what they couldn't understand. It was a trait that went back hundreds of years, the way they shouted when all they meant to do was talk.

N
icky pinched his mother's cheek. “You do too have the power,” he said. “You're the
strega.
” And he kissed her on the mouth the way she loved but pretended that she didn't.

Over pastrami at Katz's Deli, Judy told Jumbo that it was set for Sunday. They ate at Ratner's once a week and at Katz's every Thursday. Jumbo wanted to show Judy how much he loved her. How better than loving her food? Besides, he believed that if he married her, he would spend the rest of his life eating pastrami and blintzes, and he wanted to practice.

When Jumbo told Antoinette he wouldn't be home for dinner Sunday, she didn't blink an eye. Antoinette was no dope. She knew her son. Who else had seen him every day of his life, except for those three weeks when he had gone to live with that
scifo
Nicky, and Amadeo Pavese's son Salvatore. She told the girls later that day when they all congregated for afternoon coffee and cake, before they trudged upstairs and down to their own apartments, that she knew something was up with their brother.

“You worried, Ma?” Rosina said.

“Of course I'm worried. How many times can I save his life?”

“Well,” Albina said, “he's not gambling. He hasn't got a pot to piss in and there's no one on the East or West Sides who'll lend him a dime.”

Filomena sighed. She dunked her almond biscotti in her coffee cup. “It must be a girl.”

“Whatta you talking about?” Antoinette turned purple. “How could he have a girl? Someone would see, no? Someone would tell me? Everybody knows everything in this neighborhood. They don't miss a trick.”

“Hey, Ma, wake up. It's a big world out there,” Angelina told her.

“You mean, a girl that's not from here? Somebody we don't know?”

“Unlikely,” Raffaella said. “I don't think Jumbo has universal appeal.”

Antoinette smacked her shoulder. Raffaella spilled her coffee and wiped it up without a word. “Any girl in her right mind would kill for a man like your brother.”

“C'mon, Ma,” Rosina said. “We love Jumbo, but he's no Cary Grant.”

“Oh, please . . . Cary Grant, Cary Grant. Why? Your husband looks like Cary Grant? Who cares about Cary Grant, anyway? He's a
riccone.
I read it in the newspaper, him and that one that wears the tights, the pirate.”

“Errol Flynn?”

“Yeah, him.” Antoinette cleared the table around them, pushing at their hands and elbows. “Go home now. I gotta make supper,” and she piled the dishes and cups and saucers onto the ones from breakfast that were still in the sink.

J
udy wanted to take the train but Jumbo borrowed Luca Benvenuto's car, which cost him a day's pay, and they set off early in the afternoon. He had gotten Luca to leave the car on Varick Street and Jumbo had gotten dressed in the back room of the bar. He wore a suit and tie and he had wet his hair and pomaded it until the teeth marks of the comb were as clear as furrows in a plowed field. Judy was waiting downstairs for him on Seventy-third Street and he noticed that she was very nicely dressed with a scarf around her hair and gloves and a pocketbook made of alligator that he had never seen her carry before.

They drove with the radio on and the windows open. Judy smoked cigarettes and blew the smoke out the window. Jumbo was sweating. He could feel the wet creeping through his shirt and suit jacket and hoped it was all in his imagination. He would have to leave his jacket on. He hoped they wouldn't stay too long.

The house was bigger than he had expected. He actually hadn't expected anything. To him, a house was a house, but this place looked like something out of the movies, nothing like his uncle's house in New Jersey where his family went for Fourth of July. There was a Cadillac and a Mustang convertible parked in the driveway of the three-car garage. Judy said they sold her car when she moved to the city. The Mustang was her mother's. Jumbo was impressed that Mrs. Bernstein had her own car. He was impressed that she could drive it. Antoinette didn't even take the bus. She only went somewhere if she got picked up and dropped off door to door and even then only for weddings, a trip to the cemetery after a funeral, and those Fourth of July parties in New Jersey.

Judy rang the doorbell and Jumbo wondered how come she didn't have the key. The door opened in a split second. They had been standing there, Mr. and Mrs. Bernstein. He saw right away that Judy favored her father, the nose and the hair and the height. Mrs. Bernstein—“Oh, please dear, call me Sylvia”—was tall and slim in pale green silk pants and a printed silk top that was a Pucci knockoff. It seemed like a classy getup to Jumbo.

Mrs. Bernstein, or Sylvia, as she insisted he call her, didn't remotely remind him of anybody's mother. He suddenly felt bad for Judy. He thought about how she wouldn't be able to help loving Antoinette. He felt better about the whole thing now, seeing how poor Judy had grown up. This big house but a mother who walked around in silk pants on a Sunday afternoon. How could she possibly cook anything?

Judy kissed her father and mother on the cheek and followed them into the living room. Jumbo went to sit on the couch but the Bernsteins just kept walking, through the dining room, and the den, and the kitchen, out to the patio by the pool.