‘Oh God!’ she screamed. ‘Get away, get away! I hate you, I hate you!’ Then there was a crash of something through the green curtain, a flash as he jerked his head aside, and the harsh tearing of screen-wire so close to his ear that he felt he had been struck. From within he heard her sobbing and choking. He drew back and examined the broken curtain and screen. Buried in the screen, pierced through to the handle, was a long pair of sewing scissors. He was sweating in every pore as he walked back to the street, and his heart was working like a sledgehammer. Reaching into his pocket for a handkerchief, his fingers touched something cold and metallic. It was the key the Widow had given him.
Good, then. So be it.
Chapter Nine
Christmas vacation was over, and on January sixth school reopened. It had been a disastrous vacation, ever unhappy and full of strife. Two hours before the first bell August and Federico sat on the front steps of St Catherine’s, waiting for the janitor to open the door. It wasn’t a good idea to go around saying it openly, but school was a lot better than home.
Not so with Arturo.
Anything was better than facing Rosa again. He left home a few minutes before class, walking slowly, prefering to be late and avoiding any chance meeting with her in the hall. He arrived fifteen minutes after bell-time, dragging himself up the stairs as though his legs were broken. His manner changed the moment his hand touched the doorknob of the classroom. Brisk and alert, panting as though after a hard run, he turned the knob, whisked inside, and tiptoed hurriedly to his seat.
Sister Mary Celia was at the blackboard, at the opposite side of the room from Rosa’s desk. He was glad, for it spared him any stray encounter with Rosa’s soft eyes. Sister Celia was explaining the square of a right triangle, and with some violence, bits of chalk spattering as she lashed the blackboard with big defiant figures, her glass eye brighter than ever as it shot in his direction and back to the blackboard. He recalled the rumor among the kids about the eye: that when she slept at night, the eye glowed on her dresser, staring intently, becoming more luminous if burglars were about. She finished at the blackboard, slapping her hands clean of chalk.
‘Bandini,’ she said. ‘You’ve begun the new year true to form. An explanation please.’
He stood up.
‘This is going to be good,’ someone whispered.
‘I went over to the church and said the rosary,’ Arturo said. ‘I wanted to offer up the new year to the Blessed Virgin.’
That was always incontestible.
‘Boloney,’ someone whispered.
‘I want to believe you,’ Sister Celia said. ‘Even though I can’t. Sit down.’
He bent to his seat, shielding the left side of his face with his cupped hands. The geometry discussion droned on. He opened his text and spread it out, both hands hiding his face. But he had to have one look at her. Opening his fingers, he peeked through. Then he sat erect.
Rosa’s desk was empty. He swung his head around the room. She was not there. Rosa wasn’t in school. For ten minutes he tried to be relieved and glad. Then he saw blondie Gertie Williams across the aisle. Gertie and Rosa were friends.
Psssssssst, Gertie.
She looked at him.
‘Hey Gertie, where’s Rosa?’
‘She isn’t here.’
‘I know that, stupid. Where is she?’
‘I don’t know. Home, I guess.’
He hated Gertie. He had always hated her and that pale pointed jaw of hers, always moving with chewing gum. Gertie always got Bs, thanks to Rosa who helped her. But Gertie was so transparent, you could almost see through her white eyes to the back of her head, where there was nothing, nothing at all except her hunger for boys, and not a boy like himself, because he was the kind with dirty nails, because Gertie had that aloof air of making him feel her dislike.
‘Have you seen her lately?’
‘Not lately.’
‘When did you see her last?’
‘Quite a while ago.’
‘When? You lunkhead!’
‘New Year’s Day,’ Gertie smiled superciliously.
‘Is she quitting here? Is she going to another school?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘How can you be so dumb?’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Then please don’t talk to me, Arturo Bandini, because I certainly don’t want to talk to you.’
Nuts. His day was ruined. All these years he and Rosa had been in the same class. Two of those years he had been in love with her; day after day, seven and a half years of Rosa in the same room with him, and now her desk was empty. The only thing on earth he cared for, next to baseball, and she was gone, only thin air around the place that once blossomed with her black hair. That and a little red desk with a film of dust upon it.
Sister Mary Celia’s voice became rasping and impossible. The geometry lesson faded into English composition. He pulled out his Spalding Yearbook of Organized Baseball and studied the batting and fielding averages of Wally Ames, third baseman for the Toledo Mudhens, up in the American Association.
Agnes Hobson, that phony little apple-polishing screwball with the crooked front teeth spliced with copper wire, was reading aloud from Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake.
Fooey, what bunk. To fight off boredom, he figured the lifetime career average of Wally Ames and compared it with that of Nick Cullop, mighty fencebuster with the Atlanta Crackers way down there in the Southern Association. Cullop’s average, after an hour of intricate mathematics spread over five sheets of paper, was ten points higher than Wally Ames’.
He sighed with pleasure. There was something about that name – Nick Cullop – a thump and a wallop about it, that pleased him more than the prosaic Wally Ames. He ended with a hatred of Ames and fell to musing about Cullop, what he looked like, what he talked about, what he would do if Arturo asked him in a letter for his autograph. The day was exhausting. His thighs ached and his eyes watered sleepily. He yawned and sneered without discrimination at everything Sister Celia discussed. He spent the afternoon bitterly regretting the things he had not done, the temptations he had resisted, during the vacation period which was passed now and gone forever.
The deep days, the sad days.
He was on time the next morning, pacing his approach to the school to coincide with the bell just as his feet crossed the front threshold. He hurried up the stairs and was looking toward Rosa’s desk before he could see it through the cloak-room wall. The desk was empty. Sister Mary Celia called the roll.
Payne. Present.
Penigle. Present.
Pinelli.
Silence.
He watched the nun inscribe an X in the roll book. She slipped the book in the desk drawer and called the class to order for morning prayers. The ordeal had begun again.
‘Take out your geometry texts.’
Go jump in the lake, he thought.
Pssssssst. Gertie.
‘Seen Rosa?’
‘No.’
‘Is she in town?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She’s your friend. Why don’t you find out?’
‘Maybe I will. And maybe I won’t.’
‘Nice girl.’
‘Don’t cha like it?’
‘I’d like to punch that gum down your throat.’
‘Wouldn’t you, though!’
At noon he strolled to the baseball diamond. Since Christmas no snow had fallen. The sun was furious, yellow with rage in the sky, avenging himself upon a mountain world that had slept and frozen in his absence. Dabs of snow tumbled from the naked cottonwoods around the ball field, falling to the ground and surviving for yet a moment as that yellow mouth in the sky lapped them into oblivion. Steam oozed from the earth, misty stuff oozing out of the earth and slinking away. In the west the storm clouds galloped off in riotous retreat, leaving off their attack on the mountains, the huge innocent peaks lifting their pointed lips tha
nkfully toward the sun.
A warm day, but too wet for baseball. His feet sank in the sighing black mud around the pitcher’s box. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or the next day. But where was Rosa? He leaned against one of the cottonwoods. This was Rosa’s land. This was Rosa’s tree. Because you’ve looked at it, because maybe you’ve touched it. And those are Rosa’s mountains, and maybe she’s looking at them now. Whatever she looked upon was hers, and whatever he looked upon was hers.
He passed her house after school, walking on the opposite side of the street. Cut Plug Wiggins, who delivered the Denver Post, moved by on his bike, nonchalantly flipping evening papers on every front porch. Arturo whistled and caught up with him.
‘You know Rosa Pinelli?’
Cut Plug spewed a gusher of tobacco juice across the snow. ‘You mean that Eyetalian dame three houses down the street? Sure, I know her, why?’
‘Seen her lately?’
‘Nah.’
‘When did you see her last, Cut Plug?’
Cut Plug leaned over the handlebars, wiped sweat from his face, spewed tobacco juice again, and lapsed into a careful checkup. Arturo stood by patiently, hoping for good news.
‘The last time I seen her was three years ago,’ Cut Plug said at last. ‘Why?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Forget it.’
Three years ago! And the fool had said it as though it didn’t matter.
The deep days, the sad days.
Home was chaos. Arriving from school, they found the doors open, the cold evening air in possession. The stoves were dead, their bins spilling ashes. Where is she? And they searched. She was never far away, sometimes down in the pasture in the old stone barn, seated on a box or leaning against the wall, her lips moving. Once they looked for her until long after dark, covering the neighborhood, peeking into barns and sheds, seeking her footsteps along the banks of the little creek that had grown overnight to a brownish, blasphemous bully, eating the earth and the trees as it roared defiance. They stood on the bank and watched the snarling current. They did not speak. They scattered and searched upstream and down. An hour later they returned to the house. Arturo built the fire. August and Federico huddled over it.
‘She’ll be home pretty soon.’
‘Sure.’
‘Maybe she went to church.’
‘Maybe.’
Beneath their feet they heard her. There they found her, down in the cellar, kneeling over that barrel of wine Papa had vowed not to open until it was ten years old. She paid no attention to their entreaties. She looked coldly at August’s tear-swept eyes. They knew they did not matter. Arturo took her arm gently, to raise her up. Quickly the back of her hand slapped him across the face. Silly. He laughed, a bit self-conscious, standing with his hand touching his red cheek.
‘Leave her alone,’ he told them. ‘She wants to be alone.’
He ordered Federico to get her a blanket. He pulled one from the bed and came down with it, stepping up and dropping it over her shoulders. She raised herself up, the blanket slipping away and covering her legs and feet. There was nothing more to do. They went upstairs and waited.
A long time afterward she appeared. They were around the kitchen table, fooling with their books, trying to be industrious, trying to be good boys. They saw her purple lips. They heard her gray voice.
‘Have you had supper?’
Sure, they had supper. A swell supper too. They cooked it themselves.
‘What did you have?’
They were afraid to answer.
Until Arturo spoke up: ‘Bread and butter.’
‘There isn’t any butter,’ she said. ‘There hasn’t been any butter in this house for three weeks.’
That made Federico cry.
She was asleep in the morning when they left for school. August wanted to go in and kiss her goodbye. So did Federico. They wanted to say something about their lunches, but she was asleep, that strange woman on the bed who didn’t like them.
‘Better leave her alone.’
They sighed and walked away. To school. August and Federico together, and in a little while Arturo, after lowering the fire and taking a last look around. Should he waken her? No, let her sleep. He filled a glass of water and put it at the bedside. Then to school, tiptoeing away.
Psssssst. Gertie.
‘What do you want?’
‘Seen Rosa?’
‘No.’
‘What’s happening to her, anyway?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is she sick?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You can’t think. You’re too dumb.’
‘Then don’t talk to me.’
At noon he walked out to the field again. The sun was still angry. The mound around the infield had dried, and most of the snow was gone. There was one spot against the right field fence in the shadows where the wind had banked the snow and thrown a dirty lace over it. But it was dry enough otherwise, perfect weather for practice. He spent the rest of the noon hour sounding out the members of the team. How about a workout tonight? – the ground’s perfect. They listened to him with strange faces, even Rodriquez, the catcher, the one kid in all the school who loved baseball as fanatically as himself. Wait, they told him. Wait until spring, Bandini. He argued with them about it. He won the argument. But after school, after sitting alone for an hour under the cottonwoods bordering the field, he knew they would not come, and he walked home slowly, past Rosa’s house, on the same side of the street, right up to Rosa’s front lawn. The grass was so green and bright he could taste it in his mouth. A woman came out of the house next door, got her paper, scanned the headlines, and stared at him suspiciously. I’m not doing anything: I’m just passing by. Whistling a hymn, he walked on down the street.
The deep days, the sad days.
His mother had done the washing that day. He arrived home through the alley and saw it hanging on the line. It had grown dark and suddenly cold. The washing hung stiff and frozen. He touched each stiffened garment as he walked up the path, brushing his hand against them to the end of the line. A queer time to wash clothes, for Monday had always been wash day. Today was Wednesday, maybe Thursday; certainly it was not Monday. A queer washing too. He stopped on the back porch to unravel the queerness. Then he saw what it was: every garment hanging there, clean and stiff, belonged to his father. Nothing of his own or his brothers, not even a pair of socks.
Chicken for dinner. He stood in the door and reeled as the fragrance of roast chicken filled his nostrils. Chicken, but how come? The only fowl left in the pen was Tony, the big rooster. His mother would never kill Tony. His mother loved that Tony with his jaunty thick comb and his fine strutting plumes. She had put red celluloid anklets on his spurred legs and laughed at his mighty swagger. But Tony it was: on the drainboard he saw the anklets broken in half like two red fingernails.
In a little while they tore him to pieces, tough though he was. But Maria did not touch him. She sat dipping bread into a yellow film of olive oil spread across her plate. Reminiscences of Tony: what a rooster he had been! They mused over his long reign in the chicken yard: they remembered him when. Maria dipped her bread in olive oil and stared.
‘Something happens but you can’t tell,’ she said. ‘Because if you have faith in God you have to pray, but I don’t go around saying it.’
Their jaws ceased and they looked at her.
Silence.
‘What’d you say, Mamma?’
‘I didn’t say a word.’
Federico and August glanced at one another and tried to smile. Then August’s face turned white and he got up and left the table. Federico grabbed a piece of white meat and followed. Arturo put his fists under the table and squeezed them until the pain in his palms drove back the desire to cry.
‘What chicken!’ he said. ‘You ought to try it, Mamma. Just a taste.’
‘No matter what happens, you have to have faith,’ she said. ‘I don’t have fine dresses and I don’t go to danc
es with him, but I have faith, and they don’t know it. But God knows it, and the Virgin Mary, and no matter what happens they know it. Sometimes I sit here all day, and no matter what happens they know because God died on the cross.’
‘Sure they know it,’ he said.
He got up and put his arms around her and kissed her. He saw into her bosom: the white drooping breasts, and he thought of little children, of Federico in infancy.
‘Sure they know it,’ he said again. But he felt it coming from his toes, and he could not bear it. ‘Sure they know it, Mamma.’
He threw back his shoulders and strolled out of the kitchen to the clothes closet in his own room. He took the half-filled laundry bag from the hook behind the door and crushed it around his face and mouth. Then he let it go, howling and crying until his sides ached. When he was finished, dry and clean inside, no pain except the sting in his eyes as he stepped into the living-room light, he knew that he had to find his father.
‘Watch her,’ he said to his brothers. She had gone back to bed and they could see her through the open door, her face turned away.
‘What’ll we do if she does something?’ August said.
‘She won’t do anything. Be quiet, and nice.’
Moonlight. Bright enough to play ball. He took the short-cut across the trestle bridge. Below him, under the bridge, transients huddled over a red and yellow fire. At midnight they would grab the fast freight for Denver, thirty miles away. He found himself scanning the faces, seeking that of his father. But Bandini would not be down there; the place to find his father was at the Imperial Poolhall, or up in Rocco Saccone’s room. His father belonged to the union. He wouldn’t be down there.
Nor was he in the cardroom at the Imperial.
Jim the bartender.
‘He left about two hours ago with that wop stonecutter.’
‘You mean Rocco Saccone?’
‘That’s him – that good-looking Eyetalian.’
He found Rocco in his room, seated at a table radio by the window, eating walnuts and listening to the jazz come out. A newspaper was spread at his feet to catch the walnut shells. He stood at the door, the soft darkness of Rocco’s eyes letting him know he was not welcome. But his father was not in the room, not a sign of him.