The Black Madonna (6 page)

Magdalena turned and narrowed her eyes at them. She raised her arm and made a screwing motion into the air with her hand before she went on down the street.

“Eh,” Annamaria Petrino said. “In Sicily, they don't leave a man and a woman in the same room alone. They're no fools.”

“What can you do?” Mary Ziganetti said when Magdalena had gone. “Naive, that's what she is.”

“That's not what I hear,” Annamaria Petrino whispered.

“You're terrible,” Mary Ziganetti said. “Filthy-minded. Now tell me, what do you hear about her?” And Vicky Palermo moved down a step, closer to Mary Ziganetti.

T
he next morning Teresa went to the phone booth in the luncheonette on Varick Street and called the hospital in the Bronx.

“Deceased,” the man at the other end of the line said.

“He's dead?”

“Dead.”

“No,” Teresa told him. “It can't be. I just saw him. I was talking to him yesterday.”

“Well, you ain't gonna talk to him today.”

“Check again. Angelo . . . Angelo Sabatini . . . S-A-B-A-T-I-N-I.”

“Lady, he's dead . . . this morning . . . heart attack.”

“How could you tell me this?”

“Listen, lady, you called me. I didn't call you.”

Teresa leaned against the wall of the phone booth. She clenched her teeth. “That sonofabitch,” she said. “Now he had to go and die? He couldn't wait a few weeks?” She slammed down the receiver and slid into the seat in the corner of the phone booth. A woman outside knocked on the glass door and pointed to the watch on her arm. Teresa turned her back to her and put another coin in the telephone and called back the hospital.

“Where is he?” she said.

“Who?”

“Angelo Sabatini. Where did they take him?”

“Is that you again, lady?”

“Where did you say he was?”

The man at the other end sighed. “Wait a minute,” he said and dropped the phone. The woman outside the phone booth banged on the glass door and made faces. Teresa made an obscene gesture with her free hand. “Body was released to Damiano's Funeral Home,” the man at the other end of the line told her.

“Where is it?”

“Damiano's, Burke Avenue in the Bronx. Got it? Satisfied?”

“Thank you,” Teresa said. She hung up, put in more money, called the candy store under her house, and asked for Dante. The woman outside the phone booth pushed against the glass door. Teresa held it closed with her foot.

She lifted her face to get the breeze from the little ceiling fan up in the corner of the booth, closed her eyes, and waited for Dante to come to the phone. By the time he got there, she had to put in another nickel to keep the connection, and then she asked him if he would look out for Nicky. She told him to buy a ham-and-cheese sandwich in Virginia's on Sullivan Street and one for himself, and to tell Virginia to put it on her bill, and to tell Nicky not to worry, that she would be home early, before dinner. She had to go uptown to see the doctor again, she told Dante. “You tell that to Nicky,” she said.

She opened the door of the phone booth and stepped on the foot of the woman who had banged on the glass. She pushed past the line of people waiting and she ignored the things they said to her. She walked east on Houston Street and rode the El up to Fordham Road. It was familiar now and she stopped the first person she met on the street and asked how to get to Damiano's Funeral Home.

“A few blocks down,” he told her, and when she found it, she stood outside across the street and admired the entrance. The name was in stained glass above the double doors: Damiano Funeral Home, it said, established 1895.

I
nside the entrance lobby, a man sat behind a desk off to the right, and across from him was a young woman, her eyes red, a handkerchief in her hand. She kept wiping her nose, twisting the handkerchief around in her fingers.

Teresa stepped up to the desk. “Excuse me,” she said.

“One moment,
signora,
” the man said.

Teresa turned to the woman. “Sorry,” she said to her. “I just want to ask a question.” The woman looked up. Confused, Teresa thought, almost terrified.

“Please,” the man said. “I'll be with you in a minute. My daughter's just lost her husband. We're . . .”

Teresa couldn't believe her good luck. She felt a sudden affection for the Bronx. “You're Damiano, the undertaker,” she said. “Am I right? And you . . .” she said to the woman, “you're Celestina, Angelo Sabatini's wife.”

The undertaker stood up and came from around the desk. “How can I help you?” he said. “Who are you?”

“Me? I'm Angelo Sabatini's wife, the real one.”

“This is ridiculous,” Damiano said. “Get out.”

But Teresa stood there, secure in her position, empowered, as confident as the devil. She would congratulate herself later. She took out the piece of paper, folded many times, that she had been carrying with her, her marriage certificate. She handed it to Damiano, and with it a wedding photo. She stood next to Angelo in the photo, in the white wedding gown they had bought in a secondhand store on the Lower East Side for fifteen dollars, Angelo in the black suit that was still hanging in the closet on Spring Street.

Celestina Sabatini stood up. She pulled the picture from her father's hand. The marriage certificate floated to the floor. Her tears had dried. “What is this? Who are you?” she screamed at Teresa.

“I told you. Angelo's real wife.” Teresa's tone was even, almost pleasant. “And I'm only sorry he had such an easy death.”

Celestina Sabatini put her hands in her hair and pulled. She opened her mouth and wailed. She rocked in her chair until it fell over and she toppled to the floor. Damiano the undertaker, her father, knelt over her, fumbling for the smelling salts he kept in his pocket to revive grieving widows.
“Madonna,”
he cried out to heaven, then, “Celestina . . . Celestina . . . I told you from the beginning that sonofabitch was no good. What'd you ever get from him? He should rot in hell.”

Damiano held his daughter's head off the floor and stroked her face. She sobbed in his arms. The sleeve of his jacket was wet and slimy. He looked up at Teresa. “What'd you come here for?” he asked her. “Trouble? What do you want? You think he had something? He was a broken-down valise.”

“I want the body,” Nicky's mother told him.

They stared at her.

“No,” Celestina shouted. “Never . . . the disgrace . . . what would people say?”

“Exactly why I want the body,” Teresa said.

Damiano looked at her closely. “Why should we do that? Give you the body?”

“Because he was my husband, my legal husband, and I should bury him. And then . . .” She paused. “There's the Social Security, the pension. It's mine if I want it. Your daughter gets nothing.”

“Get her out. Witch . . . devil . . . whore,” Celestina was shouting while her father held her up.

Teresa looked her over. Scrawny, she thought, and no children. She turned to Damiano. “Give me the body,” she said. “Pay for the nice funeral I'm gonna give Angelo and I say nothing. Your daughter can have the Social Security. It's a good country, America, no? She can even have the pension. We forget everything and everybody's happy.”

Teresa had been paying an insurance policy on Angelo for years. She would put aside money every week and when Mr. Schimel would come to collect it the first Friday of the month, she would make him a cup of tea. He would hold the sugar cube in his teeth while he drank it. He was a nice man, Mr. Schimel, rumored to be the father of certain neighborhood children, all boys. Teresa liked him. Because of Mr. Schimel, she could take care of herself.

Teresa's feet hurt. She sat down on one of the chairs against the wall meant for the mourners. She crossed her legs at the ankle and reached over and took a peppermint from a glass dish on Damiano's desk. She dropped the cellophane wrapping in the ashtray near her chair.

“Never . . . never,” Celestina cried over and over.

“Celestina,” her father said. “Let's think about this.”

“But what will they say? No wake . . . no funeral . . . no grave? No, I can't. I don't care what she says. Angie's my husband.”

“Of course he is,
cara.
”

Teresa stood up. “Angelo's dead. He's nobody's husband anymore.” She walked to the door. Damiano followed her. Celestina was close behind. He caught up with her outside.

“Wait,
signora,”
he said. “I'll talk to her.”

“I think I'm being fair,” Teresa said. “After all, what am I asking for? Do I want anything for myself?”

“You're right,” he said. Damiano looked back at his daughter. Her makeup was smeared in lines down her cheeks. Her hair stuck out from her head in greasy knots where she had pulled at it. The perfect widow, Teresa thought, like in the old country, and she pushed a stray piece of hair back behind her ear.

“Where do you want the body sent?” Damiano whispered.

T
eresa took a walk around the neighborhood before she got on the El and went back home. She thought she would like it here, if things had been different. She thought about all the other places where she had never been, only a train ride away. When Nicky could walk again, she told herself, they would go places, take the train and see things.

Downtown on Sullivan Street, she went into Nucciarone's funeral home and told the undertaker to expect her husband's body. She told him she wanted the best for Angelo and she told him where to send the bill. The undertaker told her how sorry he was, how death was always so terrible and unexpected, and when he took her in the freight elevator to the room downstairs, she chose the bronze casket, the one lined in white velvet.

He complimented her on her choice. He smiled at her and held her hand. The body would be ready tomorrow afternoon, he said, and he left to call the newspapers.

T
he next afternoon, the people waited outside the funeral parlor. There was no more room on the sidewalk and they stood in the street. The men laughed and ground out cigarettes underneath their polished black shoes. The women whispered, heads covered. They waited for the widow and her son to arrive, to go in first. The children held their mother's hands, restless, wanting to go in, to get it over with, to go to the park, to get ice cream, to do all the things they were promised after they had visited the dead.

JoJo Santulli drove Teresa and Nicky to the funeral home in his uncle's car. Dante was in the car, too, sitting in the front next to JoJo, and he opened the door for Teresa and helped her carry Nicky into the funeral parlor. Teresa and Dante held Nicky between them. His feet dragged along the ground. Everyone followed behind and held their breath.

“Poverino,”
someone said.

“And now this,” someone else said.

The wake was in the back room, the big room, and the procession moved slowly along the narrow hall, Nicky and Teresa and Dante in front, following the undertaker in his long black coat, striped trousers, and top hat.

Over the coffin was an American flag in red and white and blue carnations. “He was a hero in the war,” Teresa told the florist when she ordered it. There was a bleeding heart of red roses that said “Beloved Wife,” with red satin ribbons streaming from its center, and a ship of white roses from Nicky. Underneath the ship was a sea of carnations dyed blue.

Angelo Sabatini lay inside the coffin in a double-breasted pinstriped suit, a small diamond stickpin in his tie, and the white velvet lining tucked under so that everyone could see that the coffin was bronze. He was still young when he died and he had died suddenly. “The perfect combination,” old man Nucciarone told Teresa when he saw the body. “I'll make him look so good, no one will believe he's dead. Trust me,” he said, and he patted her hand.

N
icky came into the room where his father was laid out. His mother and Dante were on either side of him, his arms over their shoulders, their arms across his back. Nicky had seen his father only that one time, when he came to Spring Street and showed him how to tie that knot. He stretched out his neck to look, saw the open casket, and smelled the flowers, and then he started to scream and cry.

The crowd behind pushed forward and Teresa lost hold of him. She shouted to God and to Dante, who reached out to grab him in an embrace before he fell.

But Nicky didn't fall. He put one foot in front of the other and he walked. He looked straight ahead and walked up the aisle to the coffin. Teresa shouted out and the crowd fell back. She moved toward Nicky, toward the coffin, but Dante held her. He dropped to his knees and pulled her down next to him.

The crowd began to mumble. The undertaker jumped on a chair in the back. “A miracle,” he shouted. “God has performed a miracle . . . here . . . in this funeral parlor on Sullivan Street.”

Teresa tried to get up. She still thought Nicky would fall. She wanted to protect him, to save him. “No,” Dante said in her ear.

The undertaker had stepped down from the chair. He moved to the front of the room to direct the mourners. He pointed them to the velvet kneeler in front of the coffin, holding their hands in his for a moment as they passed by on their way to pray before the body. “A miracle,” he told them as they moved through the aisles. He smiled, thought about expanding . . . selling relics. He kissed his fingers and touched the feet of the statue of the Madonna that stood on a pedestal in a corner of the room.

Nicky knelt at his father's casket. “I knew it,” he said to the body. “I knew you'd come back and I'd walk again.”

Donna Rubina Fiore from Bedford Street called out and made the sign of the cross on her forehead, her lips, her heart. She told the people near her that she had cast this spell. She had made Nicky Sabatini walk. The undertaker implied that the funeral parlor was blessed. “Ask yourself,” he said. “Why has God chosen this place?”

When Nicky got up from the casket, everyone clapped and cheered. The men came and slapped him on the back, the women covered him with kisses. The children gave him gum and marbles and sucking candies they had hidden in their pockets. Jumbo gave him half a Hershey bar, the mark of his fingers imprinted in the chocolate. He had stolen it from Sam & Al's candy store only that morning.

Teresa took places and that night she collected the envelopes the undertaker had provided. They were stuffed with money. Everyone was hoping for some of her blessing, her luck, to rub off on them. The number runners didn't get home until midnight that night and every night of Angelo Sabatini's wake. Everyone played the date of the miracle, the time of the miracle, the street number of the funeral parlor. Everyone went to sleep determined to remember their dreams. Every night of the wake the mourners dug deep into their pockets and filled the envelopes with money, a token of their sorrow and respect and hope for a score.

He left her alone in life, they said about Angelo Sabatini, but he worked a miracle for her in death.

Teresa insisted that Nicky sit in the first chair, the chair of honor, and greet all the people who filed past the coffin. They kissed his hands and pressed them against their foreheads.

Nicky took Salvatore on the side and told him it was creepy and he would be glad when it was over. Salvatore told him to enjoy it. He had been touched by God, Salvatore told him. Even Magdalena had said it and she knew these things. It was a once in a lifetime.

The night before the funeral, Teresa made Nicky sit at the kitchen table and then she went to all the windows and pulled down the shades. She locked the door and hooked the chain, and then she took out the white envelopes that she had collected every night at the wake and put them on the table. She gave half of the envelopes to Nicky, and the two of them unfolded the money from inside the envelopes and put it into piles, stacks of ones, fives, tens, and twenties. There was even a hundred-dollar bill from the undertaker and Nicky held it up and turned it over in his hands until his mother slapped his face and told him to put it down. “It's only money,” she said. “First comes honor.”

There were hardly any ones. She told him he could keep the few there were. Then she made him stand up. To look at him, she said. She made him walk around the table, to see his legs work. “Tomorrow's the funeral,” she told him. “Tomorrow, in the morning before church, we go say goodbye to your father. You stay in the room with me when they close the box. You watch with me.”

“Why?” Nicky asked her.

“To make sure they don't take nothing. You think they care? They strip you naked before they close the box if nobody's looking.”

“You're gonna bury him with the cuff links?”

“Why not? How's he gonna look when he gets where he's going with no cuff links? Like a pauper?”

“What about the ring?”

“Which ring?”

“The one he gave me, that time he came. Remember? I showed you and you said I'd lose it and you put it away. Well, you must of given it back to him because he's wearing it. I saw it on his hand. It's a big ring, square, all gold. It's got shapes on it, like a tongue . . .”

Nicky's mother pushed the side of his head with her hand. “What are you talking about? A tongue . . . How can you talk to me like that?”

“What? Whadda you want from me? It looks like a tongue. He said he got it in Hong Kong, in a crap game. The guy didn't want to give it to him but he had no money, all he had was the ring.”

“So?”

“So can I have it? Papa gave it to me.”

“Why not? Remind me tomorrow when they close the casket and I'll get it for you. You're his only son. You deserve something.” She pulled him down on her lap and put her mouth against his ear. “Poor Nicola,” she said softly. “Your father's dead.”

“What do you think it's like to die?”

“It's like going to sleep.”

“Where do you think Papa is now?”

She turned her face away at this question. With devils burning his feet, she hoped to herself . . . with monsters poking sticks into the openings in his body. She shrugged her shoulders, tightened her arms around Nicky. “I don't know,” she told him, “but how bad could it be? Nobody ever comes back.” She petted his head and kissed his temples. “You're not too sad, are you, Nicola?”

“Nah, we all gotta go,” he told her.

He squirmed in her lap. “What?” she said. “What is it? Tell me.”

Nicky fingered the dollar bills she had given him. He touched the piles of money on the kitchen table one by one. “Look at all this, Ma.”

“What?”

“All this money. We're making out like bandits.”

“So?”

“So, can't we keep him an extra day?”

Teresa grabbed his ears and pushed him off her lap. She knocked him to the floor. She picked the money off the table and threw it at him.

“What should I expect?” she said to no one. “His father's son.” Nicky watched her. Then he smiled and came and stood behind her. He put his arms around her waist and buried his face in her neck like a lover. She covered his hands with hers.

A
nd Teresa walked in the procession for Our Lady of Mount Carmel, even though Nicky could walk, even though the miracle had already happened. She walked barefoot carrying a lighted candie all the way up to 115th Street because she had promised. She prayed in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel to protect her son, the way years ago and far from New York, Magdalena had prayed in a village church to the Black Madonna to grant her wish, the same Black Madonna that looked over Antoinette's kitchen, that lay hidden in Teresa's top dresser drawer. Always, there was the Black Madonna.