The Fortunate Pilgrim (22 page)

Larry was so stunned by this defiance that he turned away and walked out of the back room. Still dazed, but trying to compose himself and to show he had not been frightened, he stopped and asked the girl behind the counter for a loaf of corn bread and a cheesecake. The girl picked up the heavy tin of powdered sugar and sprinkled the cake. There was a roar from the back of the shop. “Don’t sell that crook nodding,” and Hooperman came charging out to stand behind the counter. He snatched the can of sugar from the girl and said to Larry with real hatred, “Out. Out of here. Out.” Larry stared at him, frozen with surprise and shock. The baker reached over and flicked his arm. Larry felt the powdered sugar spray his face and smelled the sweet scent in his nostrils. With absolutely no mental order, his left hand went out and fastened onto the baker’s right arm. Then Larry took his right fist and drove it into the short, blunt face. The head actually bounced away on its neck like a ball on a tight string and then bounced back again into his fist. He let go.

The face was ruined. The nose was smashed flat and flooded the sugared marble counter with blood. The lips were mashed into a red blob of flesh and on the left side the teeth had caved in. The baker looked down on the blood and then ran drunkenly around the counter to stand between Larry and the door. He called out thickly, “The police, get the police.”

The girl ran through the back room and out of the store. The two other bakers followed her. Hooperman stood barring the front door, arms outstretched, a wild maniacal glare looking out over his ruined face. Larry started around the corner to get out the back exit. He felt Hooperman rush at him, hang on him, not trying to punish, as if he did not dare, but dragging on him. Larry flung the baker away. Because he could not hit the man again, and because he realized now that he had disgraced the family and would go to prison, he swung his foot through the great shining glass front of the show counter. Broken glass flew around him and then he kicked the exposed long trays of cookies. The baker let out a howl of anguish and dragged him to the floor, and so the police found them, rolling over a glass- and cookie-covered floor in an embrace stronger than love.

In the police station two huge detectives took Larry to a back room. One of them said, “O.K., what happened, kid?”

Larry said, “I wanted to buy a cake and he threw sugar in my face. Ask the girl.”

“You shaking him down?”

Larry said no.

Another detective stuck his head through the doorway. “Hey, the kraut says this kid collects for di Lucca.” The detective who had been questioning Larry got up and left the room. In five minutes he came back and lit a cigarette. He didn’t ask Larry any more questions. They all waited.

Larry was overwhelmed. He could only think of his name in the papers, his mother in disgrace, himself a criminal and in prison, everyone despising him. And now he had spoiled everything for Mr. di Lucca.

The detective looked at his watch, left the room, and came back in a few minutes. He jerked a thumb toward the door and said, “O.K., kid, scram. You’re all squared away.”

Larry didn’t understand, and couldn’t believe what he heard. “Your boss is waiting outside,” the detective said.

One detective held the door open for Larry, and, as he walked out, he saw Mr. di Lucca standing at the bottom of the steps outside the precinct house.

Mr. di Lucca said, “Thanks, thanks,” and shook hands clumsily with the detective. Then he grabbed Larry by the arm and walked him down the street to a waiting car. The driver was a kid Larry had gone to school with and never seen since. He and Mr. di Lucca got into the back seat.

Then came the second surprise. Mr. di Lucca grabbed him by the arm and said in Italian, “
Bravo,
what a beautiful fellow you are. I saw his face, that animal, you did a lovely job. That bastard. Oh, you’re a beautiful fellow, Lorenzo. When they told me you hit him because he wouldn’t sell you bread, I was in heaven. Ah, if you were only my son.”

THEY WERE ON
Tenth Avenue going downtown. Larry stared out the window at the railroad yard. It was almost as if he were changing second by second, each drop of blood, each bit of flesh, into someone else. He would never go back to work in the railroad yards, he would never be afraid as he had been in that station house. The whole majesty of law had crumbled before his eyes with that handshake between Mr. di Lucca and the detective; his swift rescue and the admiration that marked his freedom. He thought of the baker’s blood, of the baker’s arms outstretched to bar his escape, of the mad staring eyes above that smashed pulpy face, and he felt a little sick.

Larry had to speak the truth. He said, “Mr. di Lucca, I can’t go around beating guys up for the money. I don’t mind collecting, but I’m not a gangster.”

Mr. di Lucca patted him soothingly on the shoulder. “No, no; who does these things for pleasure? Am I a gangster? Don’t I have children and grandchildren? Am I not godfather to the children of my friends? But do you know what it is to be born in Italy? You are a dog and you scratch in the earth like a dog to find a dirty bone for supper. You give eggs to the priest to save your soul, you slip the town clerk a bottle of wine merely to bandy words. When the
padrone,
the landowner, comes to spend the summer at his estate, all the village girls go to clean his house and fill it with fresh flowers. He pays them with a smile, and ungloves his knuckles for a kiss. And then a miracle. America. It was enough to make one believe in Jesus Christ.

“In Italy they were stronger than me. If I took an olive from the
padrone,
a carrot, or, God forbid, a loaf of bread, I must flee, hide in Africa to escape his vengeance. But here, this is democracy and the
padrone
is not so strong. Here it is possible to escape your fate. But you must pay.

“Who is this German, this baker, that he can earn his living, bake his bread without paying? The world is a dangerous place. By what right does he bake bread on that corner, in that street? The law? Poor people cannot live by all the laws. There would not be one alive. Only the
padroni
would be left.

“Now this man, this German, you feel sorry for him. Don’t. You see how nice the police treat you? Sure, you’re my friend, but this baker, right around the corner from the police, he doesn’t even send coffee and buns over to make friends. How do you like that? The man on the beat, the baker makes him pay for his Coffee An. What kind of a person is this?”

Mr. di Lucca paused, and on his face came a look of almost unbelieving, finicky disgust.

“This is a man who thinks because he works hard, is honest, never breaks the law, nothing can happen to him. He is a fool. Now listen to me.”

Mr. di Lucca paused again. In a quiet, sympathetic voice, he went on, “Think of yourself. You worked hard, you were honest, you never broke the law. Worked hard? Look at your arms, like a gorilla from hard work.

“But there is no work. Nobody comes and gives you a pay envelope because you are honest. You don’t break no law and they don’t put you in jail. That’s something, but will it feed your wife and children? So what do people like ourselves do? We say,
Good.
There is no work. We have no pay. We cannot break the law, and we cannot steal because we are honest; so we will all starve, me, my children, and my wife. Right?” He waited for Larry to laugh.

Larry kept his eyes on Mr. di Lucca, expecting something more. Mr. di Lucca noticed this and said gravely, “It will not always be like this, living by a strong arm. Enough. Do you still work for me? One hundred dollars a week and a better territory. Agreed?”

Larry said quietly, “Thanks, Mr. di Lucca, it’s O.K. with me.”

Mr. di Lucca raised a finger paternally. “Don’t pay no more dues for nobody.”

Larry smiled. “I won’t,” he said.

When Mr. di Lucca dropped him off on Tenth Avenue, Larry walked along the railroad yards for a while. He realized that you couldn’t always be nice to people and expect them to do what you wanted, not with money, anyway. You had to be mean. What puzzled him was the admiration people had for a man who did something cruel. He remembered the kraut’s face all smashed and wondered at Mr. di Lucca’s exultation over it. Because of this he would make money, his wife and child would live like people who owned a business, he would help his mother and brothers and sisters. And honestly, he didn’t hit the kraut because of the money. Hadn’t he paid the guy’s dues all the time?

CHAPTER
15

L
UCIA SANTA MAKES
the family organism stand strong against the blows of time: the growth of children, the death of parents, and all changes of worldly circumstance. She lives through five years in an instant, and behind her trail the great shadowy memories that are life’s real substance and the spirit’s strength.

In five years the outer world had thinned away. The black circles of gossiping women had shrunk, the children shouting and playing in the dark summer night seemed not so thickly clustered. Across the Avenue the clanging locomotives used an overhead roadway, and so the dummy boys with their peaked, buttoned caps, their sneaker spurs, and their red lanterns had vanished forever. The footbridge over Tenth Avenue, no longer needed, had been torn down.

In a few years the western wall of the city would disappear and the people who inhabited it would be scattered like ashes—they whose fathers in Italy had lived in the same village street for a thousand years, whose grandfathers had died in the same rooms in which they were born.

Lucia Santa stood guard against more immediate dangers, dangers she had conquered over the last five years: death, marriage, puberty, poverty, and that lack of a sense of duty which flourishes in children brought up in America. She did not know she defended against an eternal attack and must grow weaker, since she stood against fate itself.

But she had made a world, she had been its monolith. Her children, wavering sleepily from warm beds, found her toasting bread by early morning light, their school clothes hanging over chairs by the kerosene stove. Home from school, they found her ironing, sewing, tending great brown pots on the kitchen stove. She moved in clouds of steam like a humble god, disappearing and reappearing, with smells of warm cotton, garlic, tomato sauce, and stewing meats and greens. Betraying her mortality, the old cathedral-shaped radio poured out olive-oil songs by Carlo Buti, the Italian Bing Crosby and darling of Italian matrons, whose face, thin, suffering, and crowned with its greenhornish white fedora, leaned against salamis in every grocery store window on Tenth Avenue.

The door was never locked against any child returning from school or play. Neither birth nor death could keep smoking dishes from appearing on the supper table. And at night Lucia Santa waited until her house was quiet and at rest before she sought her own sleep. Her children had never seen her eyes closed and defenseless against the world.

There were days in her life or months or seasons that were like cameos. One winter existed only because Gino had come home from school and found his mother completely alone, and they had spent a happy afternoon together without even speaking.

Gino studied his mother ironing clothes by the cold gray of falling twilight. He ran his nose over the stove, lifting pot covers to sniff, and he was not pleased. He didn’t care for the green spinach slick with olive oil. The pot with the boiled potatoes annoyed him further, so he slammed down the cover and said angrily, “Ah, Ma, ain’t you got anything good to eat?” Then he leaned over the radio to switch it to an American station. His mother made one threatening gesture and he jumped away. He really liked to listen to the Italian station, especially the
romanze
like the one his mother had on now. They always sounded as if they were killing each other, and he understood enough to follow it. It was nothing like the American soap operas. Here blows were struck; parents were not understanding, but firm and intolerant; men killed the lovers of their wives on purpose, and not by accident. Wives actually poisoned their husbands, usually with something that caused horrible pain, and there were screams to go with it. Their torture was a comfort to the living.

Gino got his library books and read at the kitchen table. On the other side his mother ironed clothes and the warm steam heated the room. It was very quiet in the apartment; everyone out of the house, Sal and Lena down in the street playing, Vinnie working. It grew darker, until suddenly Gino could not see to read. He raised his head and saw his mother watching him, motionless, a strange look on her face. There was the smell of the garlic and hot olive oil and floury potatoes, the sizzling of the pot of water on the kerosene stove. Then his mother reached her hand upward to turn on the light.

Gino smiled at her and his head went down to his book. Lucia Santa finished her ironing, folded the board away. She watched Gino at his reading. He rarely smiled; he had become a very stern-looking young boy, very quiet. How children changed. But he was still headstrong, still stubborn, sometimes as crazy as his father before him. She took the clothes into the bedroom and laid them away in the bureau. Then she returned to the kitchen and very quietly peeled some fresh potatoes, sliced them thin, made room on the stove for her great round black frying pan. A spoonful of brown homemade lard melted quickly. She fried the potatoes to a golden brown then splashed two eggs over the crusts. She heaped up a platter and, without saying a word, thrust it over Gino’s book and under his nose.

Gino let out a yelp of pure delight. Lucia Santa said, “Hurry up and eat before the others come and see, or no one will eat that good spinach.” He gobbled up the potatoes and helped her set the table for the others.

Another winter lived, belonged to her life, because of the death of Zia Louche. She had wept for the old woman more tears than she would shed for her own mother. The poor crone had died alone, in the cold of winter, in the bare two rooms that for the last twenty years had been her solitary nest. She had died like a beetle, her scaly skin stiff with cold, her stick-like legs twisted together, her veins iced blue by death. Her only comforter the black kerosene stove topped by a white enamel water pot.

Zia Louche, Zia Louche, where were your loved ones to care for your body? Where were the children to weep over your grave? And to think that she had envied that proud old woman’s lack of responsibilities, her life without worldly care. Lucia Santa knew her own good fortune then. She had created a world that would not end. It would never cast her out and she would never die alone and be buried in the earth like some forgotten insect.

But what a miracle she had brought them all so far, a mira-cle not possible without the formidable Zia Teresina Coccalitti, who, in the same winter that Zia Louche died, became an intimate of Lucia Santa and an ally of the Angeluzzi-Corbo family.

Teresina Coccalitti was the most feared and respected woman on Tenth Avenue. Tall, rawboned, dressed always in the black she wore for her husband twenty years dead, she terrorized fruit peddlers, grocers, and butchers; landlords never dared scold her for late rent, home relief investigators allowed her to sign necessary papers and never asked a single embarrassing question.

Her tongue was venomously foul, the tight bones of her face were pointed to the very devil’s mask of cunning. Yet when it suited her purpose she could show a fawning charm dangerous as a snake.

Four sons working, she collected home relief. When she bought a dozen fruit she reached out after paying and took an extra piece. She browbeat the butcher for the left-over scraps of veal, for the fat from a cut roast. Her hand was against the world.

It was Zia Coccalitti who taught Lucia Santa how to stretch a dollar. Eggs were bought from a fine young fellow who stole crates out of the backs of poultry trucks and sometimes even had fresh chickens. Suits and bananas came from those bold longshoremen who unloaded ships, though what suits were doing on a ship who could know. Dress material, good silks, genuine wool were sold door-to-door by polite and eloquent hijackers, neighborhood youths who kidnapped them by the trailerful. And all of these people dealt more honestly with you than the shopkeepers from Northern Italy who roosted on Ninth Avenue like Roman vultures.

Who lived otherwise? No one in their world.

And so the years passed. Only five? Seeming more, yet so quickly gone. Only death could mark off time.

The
Panettiere
one day found his wife dead like the dragon she was, talons buried deep in a pail of heavy silver, on her face the peaceful look of one who had found the true Jesus. Then what a change came over the
Panettiere.
That horse of work left everything to his son, Guido, who grew thin over the hot ovens. He closed the bakery early, no longer made lemon ice or kept the glass-walled stand clean for pizza. Day and night he roistered with his old cronies in the back of the barber shop, losing those buckets of silver and copper his dragon-wife had so faithfully guarded. And he took the air regularly, strolling along Tenth Avenue like a duke, fat American cigars smoking in his mouth.

And so it was the
Panettiere
who first spied Octavia towing her future husband around the corner of 31st Street onto Tenth Avenue. He watched them with interest and compassion as they approached Lucia Santa, who was seated innocently on her backless chair before the tenement. One look at the young man was enough. The Angeluzzi-Corbo family was about to suffer another misfortune.

This macaroni carried a stack of books—a grown man—and with high pompadour black hair, his horn-rimmed spectacles, thin sliced features curved like a bow, proclaimed himself a Jew. Not only a Jew, but a Jew not in the best of health.

At once it became known that Octavia Angeluzzi was to marry a heathen. A scandal. Not because the man was a Jew, but because he was not an Italian. Worse than that was the girl’s sheer contrariness. Where did she find a Jew, in Christ’s name? For blocks uptown and downtown, east side and on the western wall of Tenth Avenue, there were only Catholic Irish, Polish, and Italians. But then, what could be expected of an Italian girl who wore business suits to cover her breasts?

There was no prejudice or ill-feeling. The old crones, uncles, aunts, and godparents were happy that a relative had found a breadwinner so late in life. She must be at least twenty-five years of age, ripe for trouble.

Now, thanks to the good Jesus, she would be married, know life: in short, she would open wide her legs. She would never have to bear that tactful deference given to old maids, the crippled, and the deformed. They rejoiced that Octavia would not go rotten like uneaten fruit. And remember—Jews were moneymakers of the finest feather. Octavia Angeluzzi would lack for nothing, and, good Italian daughter that she was, she would not let her mother, little brothers, and sister go free of luxury. So said the neighbors, the
Panettiere,
Zia Coccalitti, and the mad jealous barber, who eyed the Jew’s high pompadour with an inflamed covetous eye.

Lucia Santa did not share these optimistic views. True, this young man was handsome, fair, slender of build, and gentle as a girl. As for his being a Jew, it was not that she had no prejudice, it was merely that her distrust was so great that it included Christians, Irish, Turks, and Jews alike. But this particular fellow carried a stigma. Wherever he went, there was a book under his arm or open in his hands.

It is easy to laugh at the prejudices of the poor, their reasoning springs from a special experience. How irritating to hear some thieving Sicilian rascal say, “If you seek justice, put a gift in the scale.” How insulting to a noble profession when the sly Teresina Coccalitti whispered, “When you say lawyer, you say thief.” Lucia Santa had a saying of her own. “They who read books will let their families starve.”

Had she not seen with her own eyes how Octavia devoured books long into the night (she had never dared say it, but could not this be the reason for her daughter’s illness and visit to the sanitarium?) when she could have been sewing dresses for the budding daughters of the Santini, the
Panettiere,
and that maniac barber, earning God knows what sums of dollars? Her sons, too—Vinnie, Gino, and now even little Sal—went to the library for books of nonsense, insensible to the outside world and its duties. And for what? To numb their brains with stories that were not true, to enter worlds in which they could never live. What foolishness.

Illiterate, she was safe from corruption and could have no idea of the magic of books. Still, she sensed their power and rarely protested. But she had seen too many people, finding life painful, evade battle duty. As a poor man should not waste time and money on drink and cards, as a woman should not waste her strength and will on dreams of happiness, so youth, with a great struggle ahead, should not poison its will with fairy tales and dreams that enchanted them from paper pages they turned and turned and turned into the night.

If Lucia Santa had known how right she would prove to be, she would have chased Norman Bergeron out of her tene-ment with the
Tackeril.
A true renegade, he refused to battle for his bread against his fellow man. Foolishly, innocently kind, he wasted his college degree to become a social worker; but he was not capable of that stern force of character so necessary to those who administer charity. He was like a butcher who faints at the sight of blood. An uncle gave him a minor clerical post in his garment business, and it was there he met Octavia.

Like all weak men, Norman Bergeron had a secret vice. He was a poet. Not only in English, but—much more terrible—in Yiddish. Worse, he knew only one thing thoroughly: Yiddish literature—a talent he himself said was less in demand than any other on earth.