‘Maria,’ he sobbed. ‘Oh God, what have you done to me?’
He could see; dimly through a curtain of red he could see, and he staggered around.
‘Ah Maria, what have you done? What have you done?’
Around the room he staggered. He heard the weeping of his children, the words of Arturo: ‘Oh God.’ Around and round he staggered, blood and tears in his eyes.
‘Jesus Christi, what has happened to me?’
At his feet lay the green bills and he staggered through them and upon them in his new shoes, little red drops splattered over the shining black toes, round and round, moaning and groping his way to the door and outside into the cold night, into the snow, deep into the drift in the yard moaning all the time, his big hands scooping snow like water and pressing it to his burning face. Again and again the white snow from his hands fell back to the earth, red and sodden. In the house his sons stood petrified, in their new pajamas, the front door open, the light in the middle of the room blinding their view of Svevo Bandini as he blotted his face with the linen of the sky. In the chair sat Maria. She did not move as she stared at the blood and the money strewn about the room.
Damn her, Arturo thought. Damn her to hell.
He was crying, hurt by the humiliation of his father; his father, that man, always so solid and powerful, and he had seen him floundering and hurt and crying, his father who never cried and never floundered. He wanted to be with his father, and he put on his shoes and hurried outside, where Bandini was bent over, choked and quivering. But it was good to hear something over and above the choking – to hear his anger, his curses. It thrilled him when he heard his father vowing vengeance. I’ll kill her, by God, I’ll kill her. He was gaining control of himself now. The snow had checked the flow of blood. He stood panting, examining his bloody clothes, his hands spattered crimson.
‘Somebody’s got to pay for this,’ he said. ‘Sangue de la Madonna! It shall not be forgotten.’
‘Papa –’
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Then get in the house. Get in there with that crazy mother of yours.’
That was all. He broke his way through the snow to the sidewalk and strode down the street. The boy watched him go, his face high to the night. It was the way he walked, stumbling despite his determination. But no – after a few feet he turned, ‘You kids have a happy Christmas. Take that money and go down and buy what you want.’
He went on again, his chin out, coasting into the cold air, bearing up under a deep wound that was not bleeding.
The boy went back to the house. The money was not on the floor. One look at Federico, who choked bitterly as he held out a torn section of a five-dollar bill told him what had happened. He opened the stove. The black embers of burnt paper smoked faintly. He closed the stove and examined the floor, bare except for drying blood spots. In hatred he glared at his mother. She did not move or even heed with her eyes, but her lips opened and shut, for she had resumed her rosary.
‘Merry Christmas!’ he sneered.
Federico wailed. August was too shocked to speak.
Yeah: a Merry Chistmas. Ah, give it to her, Papa! Me and you, Papa, because I know how you feel, because it happened to me too, but you should have done what I did, Papa, knocked her down like I did, and you’d feel better. Because you’re killing me, Papa, you with your bloody face walking around all by yourself, you’re killing me.
He went out on the porch and sat down. The night was full of his father. He saw the red spots in the snow where Bandini had floundered and bent to lift it to his face. Papa’s blood, my blood. He stepped off the porch and kicked clean snow over the place until it disappeared. Nobody should see this: nobody. Then he returned to the house.
His mother had not moved. How he hated her! With one grasp he tore the rosary out of her hands and pulled it to pieces. She watched him, martyr-like. She got up and followed him outside, the broken rosary in his fist. He threw it far out into the snow, scattering it like seeds. She walked past him into the snow.
In astonishment he watched her wade knee-deep into the whiteness, gazing around like one dazed. Here and there she found a bead, her hand cupping fistfuls of snow. It disgusted him. She was pawing the very spot where his father’s blood had colored the snow.
Hell with her. He was leaving. He wanted his father. He dressed and walked down the street. Merry Christmas. The town was painted green and white with it. A hundred dollars in the stove – but what about him, his brothers? You could be holy and firm, but why must they all suffer? His mother had too much God in her.
Where now? He didn’t know, but not at home with her. He could understand his father. A man had to do something: never having anything was too monotonous. He had to admit it: if he could choose between Maria and Effie Hildegarde, it would be Effie every time. When Italian women got to a certain age their legs thinned and their bellies widened, their breasts fell and they lost sparkle. He tried to imagine Rosa Pinelli at forty. Her legs would thin like his mother’s; she would be fat in the stomach. But he could not imagine it. That Rosa, so lovely! He wished instead that she would die. He pictured disease wasting her away until there had to be a funeral. It would make him happy. He would go to her death-bed and stand over it. She would weakly take his hand in her hot fingers and tell him she was going to die, and he would answer, too bad Rosa; you had your chance, but I’ll always remember you Rosa. Then the funeral, the weeping, and Rosa lowered into the earth. But he would be cold to it all, stand there and smile a little with his great dreams. Years later in the Yankee stadium, over the yells of the crowd he’d remember a dying girl who held his hand and begged forgiveness; only for a few seconds would he linger with that memory, and then he would turn to the women in the crowd and nod, his women, not an Italian among them; blondes they’d be, tall and smiling, dozens of them, like Effie Hildegarde, and not an Italian in the lot.
So give it to her, Papa! I’m for you, old boy. Some day I’ll be doing it too, I’ll be right in there some day with a honey like her, and she won’t be the kind that scratches my face, and she won’t be the kind that calls me a little thief.
And yet, how did he know that Rosa wasn’t dying? Of course she was, just as all people moved minute by minute nearer the grave. But just suppose, just for the heck of it, that Rosa really was dying! What about his friend Joe Tanner last year? Killed riding a bicycle; one day he was alive, the next he wasn’t. And what about Nellie Frazier? A little stone in her shoe; she didn’t take it out; blood-poison, and all at once she was dead and they had a funeral.
How did he know that Rosa hadn’t been run over by an automobile since he saw her that last awful time? There was a chance. How did he know she wasn’t dead by electrocution? That happened a lot. Why couldn’t it happen to her? Of course he really didn’t want her to die, not really and truly cross my heart and hope to die, but still and all there was a chance. Poor Rosa, so young and pretty – and dead.
He was downtown, walking around, nothing there, only people hurrying with packages. He was in front of Wilkes Hardware Company, staring at the sports display. It began to snow. He looked to the mountains. They were blotted by black clouds. An odd premonition took hold of him: Rosa Pinelli was dead. He was positive she was dead. All he had to do was walk three blocks down Pearl Street and two blocks east on Twelfth Street and it would be proven. He could walk there and on the front door of the Pinelli house there would be a funeral wreath. He was so sure of it that he walked in that direction at once. Rosa was dead. He was a prophet, given to understanding weird things. And so it had finally happened: what he wished had come true, and she was gone.
Well, well, funny world. He lifted his eyes to the sky, to the millions of snowflakes floating earthward. The end of Rosa Pinelli. He spoke aloud, addressing imagined listeners. I was standing in front of Wilkes Hardware, and all of a sudden I had that hunch. Then I walked up to her house, and sure enough, there was a wreath on the door. A swell kid, Ro
sa. Sure hate to see her die. He hurried now, the premonition weakening, and he walked faster, speeding to outlast it. He was crying: Oh Rosa, please don’t die, Rosa. Be alive when I get there! Here I come Rosa, my love. All the way from the Yankee stadium in a chartered airplane. I made a landing right on the courthouse lawn – nearly killed three hundred people out there watching me. But I made it, Rosa. I got here all right, and here I am at your bedside, just in time, and the doctor says you’ll live now, and so I must go away, never to return. Back to the Yanks, Rosa. To Florida, Rosa. Spring training. The Yanks need me too; but you’ll know where I am, Rosa, just read the papers and you’ll know.
There was no funeral wreath on the Pinelli door. What he saw there, and he gasped in horror until his vision cleared through the blinding snow, was a Christmas wreath instead. He was glad, hurrying away in the storm. Sure I’m glad! Who wants to see anybody die? But he wasn’t glad, he wasn’t glad at all. He wasn’t a star for the Yankees. He hadn’t come by chartered plane. He wasn’t going to Florida. This was Christmas Eve in Rocklin, Colorado. It was snowing like the devil, and his father was living with a woman named Effie Hildegarde. His father’s face was torn open by his mother’s fingers and at that moment he knew his mother was praying, his brothers were crying, and the embers in the front-room stove had once been a hundred dollars.
Merry Christmas, Arturo!
Chapter Eight
A lonely road at the West End of Rocklin, thin and dwindling, the falling snow strangling it. Now the snow falls heavily. The road creeps westward and upward, a steep road. Beyond are the mountains. The snow! It chokes the world, and there is a pale void ahead, only the thin road dwindling fast. A tricky road, full of surprising twists and dips as it eludes the dwarfed pines standing with hungry white arms to capture it.
Maria, what have you done to Svevo Bandini? What have you done to my face?
A square-built man stumbling along, his shoulders and arms covered by the snow. In this place the road is steep; he breasts his way, the deep snow pulling at his legs, a man wading through water that has not melted.
Where now, Bandini?
A little while ago, not more than forty-five minutes, he had come rushing down this road, convinced that, as God was his judge, he would never return again. Forty-five minutes – not even an hour, and much had happened, and he was returning along a road that he had hoped might be forgotten.
Maria, what have you done?
Svevo Bandini, a blood-tinted handkerchief concealing his face, and the wrath of winter concealing Svevo Bandini as he climbed the road back to the Widow Hildegarde’s, talking to the snowflakes as he climbed. So tell the snowflakes, Bandini; tell them as you wave your cold hands. Bandini sobbed – a grown man, forty-two years old, weeping because it was Christmas Eve and he was returning to his sin, because he would rather be with his children.
Maria, what have you done?
It was like this, Maria: ten days ago your mother wrote that letter, and I got mad and left the house, because I can’t stand the woman. I must go away when she comes. And so I went away. I got lots of troubles, Maria. The kids. The house. The snow: look at the snow tonight, Maria. Can I set a brick down in it? And I’m worried, and your mother is coming, and I say to myself, I say, I think I’ll go downtown and have a few drinks. Because I got troubles. Because I got kids.
Ah, Maria.
He had gone downtown to the Imperial Poolhall, and there he had met his friend Rocco Saccone, and Rocco had said they should go to his room and have a drink, smoke a cigar, talk. Old friends, he and Rocco: two men in a room filled with cigar smoke drinking whiskey on a cold day, talking. Christmas time: a few drinks. Happy Christmas, Svevo. Gratia, Rocco. A happy Christmas.
Rocco had looked at the face of his friend and asked what troubled him, and Bandini had told him: no money, Rocco, the kids and Christmas time. And the mother-in-law – damn her. Rocco was a poor man too, not so poor as Bandini, though, and he offered ten dollars. How could Bandini accept it? Already he had borrowed so much from his friend, and now this. No thanks, Rocco. I drink your liquor, that’s enough. And so, a la salute! for old times’ sake …
One drink and then another, two men in a room with their feet on the steaming radiator. Then the buzzer above Rocco’s hotel-room door sounded. Once, and then once more: the telephone. Rocco jumped up and hurried down the hall to the phone. After a while he returned, his face soft and pleasant. Rocco got many phone calls in the hotel, for he ran an advertisement in the Rocklin Herald:
Rocco Saccone, bricklayer and
stonemason. All kinds of repair
work. Concrete work a specialty.
Call R.M. Hotel.
That was it, Maria. A woman named Hildegarde had called Rocco and told him that her fireplace was out of order. Would Rocco come and fix it right away?
Rocco, his friend.
‘You go, Svevo,’ he said. ‘Maybe you can make a few dollars before Xmas.’
That was how it started. With Rocco’s tool sack on his back, he left the hotel, crossed the town to the West End, took this very road on a late afternoon ten days ago. Up this very road, and he remembered a chipmunk standing under that very tree over there, watching him as he passed. A few dollars to fix a fireplace; maybe three hours’ work, maybe more – a few dollars.
The Widow Hildegarde? Of course he knew who she was, but who in Rocklin did not? A town of ten thousand people, and one woman owning most of the land – who among those ten thousand could avoid knowing her? But who had never known her well enough to say hello, and that was the truth.
This very road, ten days ago, with a bit of cement and seventy pounds of mason’s tools on his back. That was the first time he saw the Hildegarde cottage, a famous place around Rocklin because the stone work was so fine. Coming upon it in the late afternoon, that low house built of white flagstone and set among tall pine trees seemed a place out of his dreams: an irresistible place, the kind he would some day have, if he could afford it. For a long time he stood gazing and gazing upon it, wishing he might have had some hand in its construction, the delight of masonry, of handling those long white stones, so soft beneath a mason’s hands, yet strong enough to outlast a civilization.
What does a man think about when he approaches the white door to such a house and reaches for the polished foxhead brass knocker?
Wrong, Maria.
He had never talked to the woman until that moment she opened the door. A woman taller than himself, round and large. Aye: fine-looking woman. Not like Maria, but still a fine-looking woman. Dark hair, blue eyes, a woman who looked as though she had money.
His sack of tools gave him away.
So he was Rocco Saccone, the mason. How do you do?
No, but he was Rocco’s friend. Rocco was ill.
It didn’t matter who he was, so long as he could fix a fireplace. Come in Mr Bandini, the fireplace is over there. And so he entered, his hat in one hand, the sack of tools in the other. A beautiful house, Indian rugs over the floor, large beams across the ceiling, the woodwork done in bright yellow lacquer. It might have cost twenty – even thirty thousand dollars.
There are things a man cannot tell his wife. Would Maria understand that surge of humility as he crossed the handsome room, the embarrassment as he staggered when his worn shoes, wet with snow, failed to grip the shining yellow floor? Could he tell Maria that the attractive woman felt a sudden pity for him? It was true: even though his back was turned, he felt the Widow’s quick embarrassment for him, for his awkward strangeness.
‘Pretty slippery, ain’t it?’
The Widow laughed. ‘I’m always falling.’
But that was to help him cover his embarrassment. A little thing, a courtesy to make him feel at home.
Nothing seriously wrong with the fireplace, a few loose brick in the flue-lining, a matter of an hour’s work. But there are tricks to the trade, and the Widow was wealthy. Drawing himself up after the inspection, he told her the work would amount to fift
een dollars, including the price of materials. She did not object. Then it came to him as a sickening afterthought that the reason for her liberality was the condition of his shoes: she had seen the worn soles as he knelt to examine the fireplace. Her way of looking at him, up and down, that pitying smile, possessed an understanding that had sent the winter through his flesh. He could not tell Maria that.
Sit down, Mr Bandini.
He found the deep reading chair voluptuously comfortable, a chair from the Widow’s world, and he stretched out in it and surveyed the bright room cluttered neatly with books and bric-a-brac. An educated woman ensconced in the luxury of her education. She was seated on the divan, her plump legs in their sheer silk cases, rich legs that swished of silk when she crossed them before his wondering eyes. She asked him to sit and talk with her. He was so grateful that he could not speak, could only utter happy grunts at whatever she said, her rich precise words flowing from her deep luxurious throat. He fell to wondering about her, his eyes bulging with curiosity for her protected world, so sleek and bright, like the rich silk that defined the round luxury of her handsome legs.
Maria would scoff if she knew what the Widow talked about, for he found his throat too tight, too choked with the strangeness of the scene: she, over there, the wealthy Mrs Hildegarde, worth a hundred, maybe two hundred thousand dollars, and not more than four feet away – so close that he might have leaned over and touched her.
So he was an Italian? Splendid. Only last year she had traveled in Italy. Beautiful. He must be so proud of his heritage. Did he know that the cradle of western civilization was Italy? Had he ever seen the Campo Santo, the Cathedral of St Peter’s, the paintings of Michelangelo, the blue Mediterranean? The Italian Riviera?
No, he had seen none of these. In simple words he told her that he was from Abruzzi, that he had never been that far north, never to Rome. He had worked hard as a boy. There had been no time for anything else.