The Black Madonna (4 page)

“So what about the crutch?”

“He lays it on the floor by his chair. I'll just slide it out while he's smooching with Uncle Miltie.”

“You think he's a homo?” Jumbo said. He had found biscotti in the kitchen and was dunking them in his grappa.

“Who? Milton Berle?”

“No, this old guy, Orlando. You should tell your father. He should know.”

“Jumbo, you are a real
mamaluke.
It's a good thing you eat all the time 'cause the things that come out of your mouth . . .” Salvatore flipped his cigarette butt out the back window and lit another.

“What if you get caught?” Nicky said. “Won't he know it's you?”

“Nah, he's half gone. I'm telling you. He combs his mop. He gives it haircuts.”

“Was he a barber?”

Salvatore shook his head. “He just likes things neat.”

“When can you get it?”

“This afternoon, tomorrow, first chance I get.”

“Where will I keep it?”

“In Jumbo's house.”

“Why my house?”

“Your house's such a mess, nobody will know it's there.”

“Hey . . .”

“Take it easy, Jumbo. It's no reflection on you. All of you stuffed in those three rooms. Your mother alone could fill it up. You're a big family.”

“In more ways than one . . .” Nicky started to giggle. “I'm sorry . . .” he said.

Salvatore was laughing now too. So was Jumbo. The bottle of grappa was almost empty. They couldn't stop laughing. Salvatore poured the last of it into his glass and tipped the bottle over on the floor. “One dead soldier,” he said. The three of them screamed. Jumbo fell off the couch and rolled under the table. And then they heard Matty J.

M
atty J had opened the window in his mother's bedroom. His mother had made the front room her bedroom, the room that looked out over Spring Street. Matty J had opened the window without the fire escape as far as it could go and he was straddling the window ledge, one leg dangling over the head of the gargoyle that decorated the line of windows along the top floor.

“I'm going to jump,” he shouted until every window on both sides of the street opened. People pushed each other to see, they leaned out their windows to watch. Matty J shouted until the people who lived in the back ran outside or into the front apartments without knocking to see what was going on. A crowd gathered in the street and stood there looking up.

No one on Spring Street had ever jumped out a window. Cesare Garibaldi's wife had fallen out shaking her dust mop, and a super had gone down hooking up a new clothesline. Charlie Esposito threatened to jump when his wife died, but that had just been talk.

Salvatore and Jumbo ran to the front window, dragging Nicky along between them. They had the best seats in the house. Matty J was out the window on the fifth floor of the building directly across from them. Matty J's mother screamed as loudly as Matty J.

Matty J's father pulled on his arm. Matty J pulled back and tilted farther out the window and his shoe fell off and hit Margie from the second floor on her forehead as she was looking up. The shoe was a loafer, soft as butter. Only this morning, his mother had shined it with a soft cloth. Matty J was shaking his fist at the sky and cursing God.

“He lost at the track,” Luisa Carelli told Annamaria Petrino. They were standing downstairs looking up. “Last week it was a card game.” She blew her nose and put the handkerchief in the front pocket of her apron.

Annamaria Petrino made a face. “His wife spoils him,” she said. “He's getting worse. He never tried to jump before. Sometimes he bangs his head against the door downstairs but he never tried to jump.”

“He always goes up the roof when he loses.”

“Yeah, but only to be nearer to God, to curse Him from a closer distance.”

I
nside, the boys elbowed each other out of the window. “Matty J's crazy,” Salvatore said.

“Crazy like a fox,” Jumbo answered. “He's forty-five years old and he's never had a job. That's my kind of crazy.”

“Here come the cops,” Nicky said. “What are they gonna do?”

“Talk him in,” Salvatore said.

“I didn't know cops did things like that.”

“Yeah, they're regular good Samaritans when they're not breaking heads.”

“Shh,” Nicky said. “I want to hear what's going on.”

Nicky listened to the policemen cajole Matty J. There were two of them. They were tall and blond. He imagined their nameplates said Donovan and Murphy. They talked to Matty J until he stopped screaming and then they took his arm and pulled him inside.

Matty J's mother was kissing the policeman's hand, the one that held Matty J's arm. “You saved my son,” she said. “You brought him back from the edge of hell, the jaws of death.” She covered the policeman's hands with her own. Her husband wiped the tears from her eyes with his handkerchief.

“We have to take him to Bellevue,” the cop said, “for observation.”

Matty J's mother was a small woman. She looked up at the big, blond policeman. “You crazy?” she screamed, and she bit him. She dug her teeth into the hand she had been caressing. Her husband held her shoulders. The policeman was shouting. His partner was pulling him out the door. Matty J's mother followed them down the stairs and into the street. “You leave my son where he is. You don't touch my son. Murderers. Killers.” The policemen worked their way through the crowd and got into their car. Everyone watched them drive away. “The nerve . . .” Matty J's mother said when the police car turned the corner. Everyone surrounded her in sympathy.

Margie from the second floor gave her Matty J's shoe. An hour later, Matty J was outside the building with the racing form. He was clean-shaven, his loafers polished to a dull sheen.

The three boys hung out the window until the street was back to normal. Salvatore looked at Nicky and Jumbo. “You know what those cops are saying?”

“Dumb guineas,” Jumbo said.

“Crazy wops,” Nicky answered.

“Sick dagos.”

“Dopey greasers.”

They hit and pushed each other. They laughed when Nicky fell over. “I'm going to be a cop,” Nicky told them. Jumbo choked. Salvatore bent double. The door grated against the chain.

“Shit shit shit,” Jumbo said. “It's your mother.” He crossed himself. Salvatore was out the back window. Jumbo caught his foot between the radiator and the wall. “Help me, help me.”

Salvatore turned back to pull at Jumbo's leg. “We can't leave Nicky like this,” he said to him. “Get back in.”

“No, No. I can't. The
malocchio.
She'll get me. She hates me.” He looked over his shoulder, yanked at his foot. “You know that, Nicky. Your mother hates me, the truth. She wishes me dead.” His foot pulled free.

“Nicky's mother doesn't make the
malocchio.
What's the matter with you?” Salvatore said.

“She'll get the woman on Bedford Street. They're in cahoots. She comes here all the time. My mother sees her. You don't know. You don't live in this building. You don't see what goes on.”

“For chrissakes, Jumbo.”

“No, go ahead,” Nicky said. “I'll be okay.”

“You sure?” Salvatore said.

“Yeah, go on. I mean it.” The last thing Nicky saw was the crack of Jumbo's ass where his shirt had worked its way out of his pants.

Nicky's mother banged on the door. “Nicola . . . you in there?” Nicky pulled himself over and took the chain off the door. “Why you don't answer?” she said. “Why you got the chain on?” He didn't say anything and she shut the door behind her. She closed the front window and pulled down the shade.

“Mama,” Nicky said. “You missed it. Matty J tried to jump out the window. The cops saved him.”

Teresa took off her hat and sat down on the couch. She made a face when she saw the cigarettes and the glasses. She kicked the empty bottle that rolled near her foot. She went over to Nicky and pulled him up by the ear. “All alike,” she said, “all of you.” She pushed him back onto the chair and he started to cry.

The dolls sat above her head, the fading sunlight caught on the garish colors of their dresses. She sat somber and black beneath them. She followed Nicky's eyes and looked up at the dolls as if she were seeing them for the first time.

“The doctor, Mama. What did the doctor say?”

“In a month.”

“I'll walk, Mama. He said that?”

“He'll do the operation. He'll do his best. That's what he said.” She took off her good shoes and rolled her stockings to under the knee. She went into the bedroom to change her clothes, and when she came out, in her arms were the squares of silk and the sequined slippers and the envelopes with stamps from all over the world. She took the dolls off the shelf and put them in a paper bag.

“What are you doing?” Nicky asked her.

“I'm going out,” she said. “You lock the door. Go to bed.” She carried everything down the stairs and walked east on Spring Street, beyond West Broadway, through the darkened streets of rag factories and paper warehouses, and as she went she dumped her treasures bit by bit into the giant bins by the loading platforms where the bums slept in cardboard boxes. It was very late when Nicky felt the weight of her in the bed beside him.

T
hat morning Teresa had left the house wearing her corset and the black straw hat with the wooden cherries; she didn't go to see the doctor on Fifth Avenue. Where she went was to the Merchant Seamen's Union Hall to find Nicky's father, to find out why the money had stopped, to tell him about his son, about the operation and the fancy doctor, and to ask him to come home and do something to make Nicky walk.

Teresa had never tried to reach him before, there had never been a reason, but now Nicky needed him. After the doctor, whom she doubted, all she had left was the Madonna. She couldn't put all her hopes on heaven. Not even the Mother of God was completely dependable. Sometimes a boy needed his father.

There was no guarantee her prayers would be answered. This she knew. God always answered, the priest would say when the women cried, but sometimes the answer was no.

At the union hall she gave the name to the man at the counter and waited while he looked in the file cabinets lined up along the wall behind him. “Sabatini . . . Sabatini . . . Angelo . . . Angelo Sabatini . . .” He pulled the card and came back to the counter. “His last ship docked two months ago.”

“Impossible,” Teresa said. She stood taller and straighter than before and shook her head until the wooden cherries rattled against the brim of the black straw hat and she felt foolish.

“What can I tell you, lady? It says so right here.”

“But I just got this,” she said, and handed him the last envelope she had received. It was postmarked the Maldive Islands.

He turned it over a few times and gave it back to her. “This is fine, lady, but I'm telling you, Angelo Sabatini ain't at sea. He's in the Bronx. Leastwise, that's where the union's sending his disability checks.”

Nicky's mother looked down at her envelope. The stamps were particularly large and beautiful. They showed bright blue fish flying out of the foam at the tip of an ocean wave. “What's the date on the postmark?” the man behind the counter asked, leaning over. “When did you get that letter? Sometimes . . .”

“It doesn't matter,” she said. She put the envelope face down on the counter between them. “If he's not at sea, he's not at sea. If he's in the Bronx, he's in the Bronx.”

“That's not what I said.”

“Yes, you said that.”

“I said his checks are going to the Bronx.”

Nicky's mother didn't move. She stood there, staring, her hands folded on the counter like a schoolteacher waiting for her class to quiet.

“Listen. How about I give you the address?”

“Where he's living in the Bronx?”

“I don't know where he's living. All I know is where the checks are going. It says here on the card that the checks are going to the Bronx. Look, it's right on the card.” He held it out to her but she stared straight ahead. “I'll write it down for you,” he told her, and wrote the address on the back of the envelope from the Maldive Islands and pushed it across the counter to her. “Go see for yourself. What do I know? I just pull the files.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Who are you?” he asked her.

“His wife.”

The man looked down at the card in his hand. “Cynthia, right?” He smiled at her. He had a front tooth outlined in gold. “The union knows everything,” he said.

Teresa smiled back at him. Behind the smile her teeth bit into her bottom lip. Cynthia . . . Teresa thought. What kind of a name was that? Angelo was with a woman named Cynthia, his wife, the card said. Teresa closed her hand around the envelope until the edges of it cut into her skin. Her betrayal was complete. There was a sudden bad taste in her mouth. “Thank you,” she said again. She turned and left the building.

She went down the nearest subway and studied the map. She asked the man in the change booth how to get to the Bronx and he told her the Bronx was a big place.

She showed him the address and he told her to go to Houston Street and take the Third Avenue El. She thanked him and felt lucky.

It was a long ride. “Liar, cheat, thief,” she mumbled to herself, but when the sun cut through the grime on the windows, she forgot about her son's father. She looked out the window and imagined that she was going away somewhere, somewhere nice. She expected that the train would pass out of this city and into the country and she thought that she might open the window and smell the fresh air.

There was an old woman sitting next to her who asked where she was going, and Teresa showed her the envelope with the address on it. “Get off at Fordham Road,” she said, and asked Teresa for the stamps. Without hesitating, Teresa tore them off the envelope and gave them to her. Without the stamps, the envelope looked ugly and unimportant.

The train came into Fordham Road and Teresa got off and waited on the wooden platform until it pulled away. The old woman waved through the window, the stamps in her hand, and Teresa waved back. She looked down at the remnant of the envelope she held. It was nothing, she thought, dirty paper, and after she had studied the address written on the back of it until she could close her eyes and still see it, she tore the envelope into small pieces and threw them into one of the square metal garbage containers that hung under the gum dispensers.

Down all the steps to the street, she thought about finding Nicky's father. She slowed her pace. She thought about going back up the stairs on the other side and taking the train down to Spring Street and forgetting about him but then she was in the street and her mind cleared. She had been taking care of herself and Nicky for a long time. When she found the dirty rotten sonofabitch . . . She closed her eyes then cast them up to heaven and asked the Madonna that he die spitting blood. She imagined him, his face no longer handsome, red spittle dried on his lips, and she felt better. She would know what to do when she found him. She trusted herself.

This neighborhood was similar to her own, she noticed. There were faces like her own; she knew the language and the sounds on the street. It was no Park Avenue. She walked slowly, watching for the numbers on the buildings.

Outside a doorway, where a group of men sat on kitchen chairs, she stopped. They were talking, smoking, watching the street. One man ground out his cigar. It was an Italian stogie, a guinea stinker. She could smell it from where she stood. She watched him pull off the burnt end with his fingers and chew the stub.

“Signori,”
she said, standing at a respectful distance. The man chewing the cigar stub raised his hat to her.

“I'm looking,” she said, “for Angelo Sabatini.”

“Sabatini? Angelo?” The man scratched his head before he replaced his hat. “You mean Angie Kiwi? . . . The sailor?” Nicky's mother clenched her hands into fists, her nails dug into her palms.

“Maybe,” she said. “He's a merchant seaman?”

“Yeah, Angie Kiwi . . . I don't know why they call him that. Who remembers these things?”

“There's a bar he hung out in,” another man said. He was leaning against the building, his legs crossed at the ankles. “A sailor's joint, the Kiwi. Maybe that's how he got the name.”

“Funny name.”

“Yeah, must come from someplace them sailors go. They go some crazy places . . .”

Nicky's mother shifted her weight. Her feet hurt. “He's lived here long?” she said, her voice low, friendly.

“Long enough, yeah. He married a girl from around here. Ain't that right,Vinny?”

“Yeah, he's married to Damiano's daughter Cynthia.”

“Damiano the undertaker?”

“Yeah.”

“Where'd she get that name? I never heard nobody with that name.”

“It's Celestina, but you know. They all want to be up-to-date today so she calls herself Cynthia.”

“What a name . . . Cynthia.” The old man with the cigar butt sighed and spat out some black juice and coughed. He turned to the man sitting next to him, who was dozing in the sun. “Ain't that right?” he said, nudging him with his elbow. “Angie Kiwi's married to Celestina Damiano? The one with the big earrings?”

His friend opened his eyes, brushed aside a fly that had landed on the top of his very large ear. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “They live over there”—and he pointed across the street—“on the top floor. Celestina, she's always complaining about the stairs.”

“Her name's Cynthia,” the man leaning against the building said.

“Well, I call her Celestina. I ain't up-to-date like some people.”

“You can call her what you want, but Angie Kiwi's not there.” This from a fourth man, young and handsome. He looked at Teresa, his eyes careful. It was what he did with women.

“Well, that figures. Sailors are never home. My mother always said they made good husbands. ‘And if you're lucky,' she used to say, ‘they die young and leave a pension.'”

“What does your mother know? Your father drove an elevator.”

“That don't mean she didn't have dreams.”

“Angie Kiwi's in the hospital,” the young man said. He lit a cigarette that he took from a silver case.

“No . . . what are you telling me?” the old man chewing the cigar said.

“It's his ticker. They brought him in a few days ago.”

“How do you like that? Guy survives all them years going all over the place, makes it through the war, finally gets home, and bang, his ticker goes.”

“Ain't that always the way?”

“But it got him off the ships.”

“Nah, that was a fugazy. Celestina's brother made a connection in the union. Angie Kiwi put in a disability claim, said he hurt his back, and the brother pushed it through. They can't prove nothing about your back. It's the best way to go. Worst thing, you carry a cane a few years till they settle. My brother-in-law got ten gees, moved to Florida.”

“You're right, I remember. Angie Kiwi told my brother Charlie he had to stay flat on his back all the way from Singapore to make the story stick. Told him it almost wasn't worth it, missing all them slanty-eyes on the way home. Said when them girls heard Angie Kiwi wasn't coming back, they cried for days.”

“He's full of shit,” the young man said.

The man standing against the building laughed. The old man chewing the cigar stub spat out tobacco juice. The young man checked his shoes.

The old one swatting flies raised his hand. “Shut up,” he said. “The lady, she don't want to hear you.” He tipped back his chair and tipped his hat to Nicky's mother. “
Scusate, signora
. . .” he said, extending his hand.

“Niente,”
Teresa said. She smiled a little bit. She had wanted them to forget she was there. She felt the young man's eyes on her and she swayed slightly, rocking back and forth on the heels of her shoes. She wasn't used to going long distances in shoes with such high heels, such delicate soles, but her feet had stopped hurting. She couldn't feel anything but the flush of triumph and revenge.

Angelo Sabatini, her husband, who had another wife, another name . . . Angie Kiwi, they called him up here, who made girls from halfway around the world cry, was lying in the hospital with a bad heart. She said a sudden prayer to the Virgin that he should not get off so easily. Not a heart attack, she begged. He should die in agony, but, she added, not before she found him, not before she told him the way things were.

The men had forgotten her again. She waited and listened, but they were discussing a bocce game now, and someone named Gianni Michalini's accident. She stepped forward. “Poor Angelo,” she said softly. “Do you know where he is? What hospital?”

They all looked up, as though surprised to see her still standing there, and the handsome young man shrugged his shoulders and pulled on the sleeves of his jacket so that they fell just right over his shirt cuffs. “Where could he be?” he said. “The hospital we all go to.”

The cigar chewer pointed up the street. It's not far,” he said. “Keep walking straight. You can't miss it.”

The old man chewing the cigar stub laughed out loud. He was missing teeth. Nicky's mother could see this when he laughed. “He's a good guy, that Kiwi. If you see him, tell him Frankie Moe sends his regards.”

“Life is funny,” one of the men said. “You never know what's coming next.”

“Celestina must wear Angie out every time he comes home. This time his ticker couldn't take it.” The man on the bench bit into his apple.

“Yeah, maybe Celestina's got something those slanty-eyed girls don't.”

“Hey, you forgetting about this lady?” The fly swatter turned his head.

But Teresa was gone. She had left and no one had seen her go, not even the handsome young man who had watched her so carefully from the start.

T
eresa found the hospital easily enough. It was a great cavernous building that took up a city block. When she got inside, she felt dizzy and out of breath. She could hear her heart beating. She sat down on a bench against the wall and waited for the feeling to pass.