Why was his mother unlike other mothers? She was that, and everyday he saw it again. Jack Hawley’s mother excited him: she had a way of handing him cookies that made his heart purr. Jim Toland’s mother had bright legs. Carl Molla’s mother never wore anything but a gingham dress; when she swept the floor of the Molla kitchen he stood on the back porch in an ecstasy, watching Mrs Molla sweep, his hot eyes gulping the movement of her hips. He was twelve, and the realization that his mother did not excite him made him hate her secretly. Always out of the corner of his eye he watched his mother. He loved his mother, but he hated her.
Why did his mother permit Bandini to boss her? Why was she afraid of him? When they were in bed and he lay awake sweating in hatred, why did his mother let Bandini do that to her? When she left the bathroom and came into the boys’ bedroom, why did she smile in the darkness? He could not see her smile, but he knew it was upon her face, that content of the night, so much in love with the darkness and hidden lights warming her face. Then he hated them both, but his hatred of her was greatest. He felt like spitting on her, and long after she had returned to bed the hatred was upon his face, the muscles in his cheeks weary with it.
Breakfast was ready. He could hear his father asking for coffee. Why did his father have to yell all the time? Couldn’t he talk in a low voice? Everybody in the neighborhood knew everything that went on in their house on account of his father constantly shouting. The Moreys next door – you never heard a peep out of them, never; quiet, American people. But his father wasn’t satisfied with being an Italian, he had to be a noisy Italian.
‘Arturo,’ his mother called. ‘Breakfast.’
As if he didn’t know breakfast was ready! As if everybody in Colorado didn’t know by this time that the Bandini family was having breakfast!
He hated soap and water, and he could never understand why you had to wash your face every morning. He hated the bathroom because there was no bathtub in it. He hated toothbrushes. He hated the toothpaste his mother bought. He hated the family comb, always clogged with mortar from his father’s hair, and he loathed his own hair because it never stayed down. Above all, he hated his own face spotted with freckles like ten thousand pennies poured over a rug. The only thing about the bathroom he liked was the loose floorboard in the corner. Here he hid Scarlet Crime and Terror Tales.
‘Arturo! Your eggs are getting cold.’
Eggs. Oh Lord, how he hated eggs.
They were cold, all right; but no colder than the eyes of his father, who glared at him as he sat down. Then he remembered, and a glance told him that his mother had snitched. Oh Jesus! To think that his own mother should rat on him! Bandini nodded to the window with eight panes across the room, one pane gone, the opening covered with a dish towel.
‘So you pushed your brother’s head through the window?’
It was too much for Federico. All over again he saw it: Arturo angry, Arturo pushing him into the window, the crash of glass. Suddenly Federico began to cry. He had not cried last night, but now he remembered: blood coming out of his hair, his mother washing the wound, telling him to be brave. It was awful. Why hadn’t he cried last night? He couldn’t remember, but he was crying now, the knuckle of his fist twisting tears out of his eyes.
‘Shut up!’ Bandini said.
‘Let somebody push your head through a window,’ Federico sobbed. ‘See if you don’t cry!’
Arturo loathed him. Why did he have to have a little brother? Why had he stood in front of the window? What kind of people were these wops? Look at his father, there. Look at him smashing eggs with his fork to show how angry he was. Look at the egg yellow on his father’s chin! And on his mustache. Oh sure, he was a dago wop, so he had to have a mustache, but did he have to pour those eggs through his ears? Couldn’t he find his mouth? Oh God, these Italians!
But Federico was quiet now. His martyrdom of last night no longer interested him; he had found a crumb of bread in his milk, and it reminded him of a boat floating on the ocean; Drrrrrrr, said the motor boat, drrrrrrr. What if the ocean was made out of real milk – could you get ice cream at the North Pole? Drrrrrrr, drrrrrrr. Suddenly he was thinking of last night again. A gusher of tears filled his eyes and he sobbed. But the bread crumb was sinking. Drrrrrr, drrrrr. Don’t sink, motor boat! don’t sink! Bandini was watching him.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ he said. ‘Will you drink that milk and quit fooling around?’
To use the name of Christ carelessly was like slapping Maria across the mouth. When she married Bandini it had not occurred to her that he swore. She never quite got used to it. But Bandini swore at everything. The first English words he learned were God damn it. He was very proud of his swear words. When he was furious he always relieved himself in two languages.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Why did you push your brother’s head through the window?’
‘How do I know?’ Arturo said. ‘I just did it, that’s all.’
Bandini rolled his eyes in horror.
‘And how do you know I won’t knock your goddamn block off?’
‘Svevo,’ Maria said. ‘Svevo. Please.’
‘What do you want?’ he said.
‘He didn’t mean it, Svevo,’ she smiled. ‘It was an accident. Boys will be boys.’
He put down his napkin with a bang. He clinched his teeth and seized the hair on his head with both hands. There he swayed in his chair, back and forth, back and forth.
‘Boys will be boys!’ he jibed. ‘That little bastard pushes his brother’s head through the window, and boys will be boys! Who’s gonna pay for that window? Who’s gonna pay the doctor bills when he pushes his brother off a cliff? Who’s gonna pay the lawyer when they send him to jail for murdering his brother? A murderer in the family! Oh Deo uta me! Oh God help me!’
Maria shook her head and smiled. Arturo screwed his lips in a murderous sneer: so his own father was against him too, already accusing him of murder. August’s head racked sadly, but he was very happy that he wasn’t going to turn out to be a murderer like his brother Arturo; as for August he was going to be a priest; maybe he would be there to deliver the last sacraments before they sent Arturo to the electric chair. As for Federico, he saw himself the victim of his brother’s passion, saw himself lying stretched out at the funeral; all his friends from St Catherine were there, kneeling and crying; oh, it was awful. His eyes floated once more, and he sobbed bitterly, wondering if he could have another glass of milk.
‘Kin I have a motor boat for Christmas?’ he said.
Bandini glared at him, astonished.
‘That’s all we need in this family,’ he said. Then his tongue flitted sarcastically: ‘Do you want a real motor boat, Federico? One that goes put put put put?’
‘That’s what I want!’ Federico laughed. ‘One that goes puttedy puttedy put put!’ He was already in it, steering it over the kitchen table and across Blue Lake up in the mountains. Bandini’s leer caused him to kill the motor and drop anchor. He was very quiet now. Bandini’s leer was steady, straight through him. Federico wanted to cry again, but he didn’t dare. He dropped his eyes to the empty milk glass, saw a drop or two at the bottom of the glass, and drained them carefully, his eyes stealing a glance at his father over the top of the glass. There sat Svevo Bandini – leering. Federico felt goose flesh creeping over him.
‘Gee whiz,’ he whimpered. ‘What did I do?’
It broke the silence. They all relaxed, even Bandini, who had held the scene long enough. Quietly he spoke.
‘No motor boats, understand? Absolutely no motor boats.’
Was that all? Federico sighed happily. And all the time he believed his father had discovered that it was he who had stolen the pennies out of his work pants, broken the street lamp on the corner, drawn that picture of Sister Mary Constance on the blackboard, hit Stella Colombo in the eye with a snowball, and spat in the holy water font at St Catherine’s.
Sweetly he said, ‘I don’t want a motor boat, Papa. If you don’t want me to have
one, I don’t want one, Papa.’
Bandini nodded self-approvingly to his wife: here was the way to raise children, his nod said. When you want a kid to do something, just stare at him; that’s the way to raise a boy. Arturo cleaned the last of his egg from the plate and sneered: Jesus, what a sap his old man was! He knew that Federico, Arturo did; he knew what a dirty little crook Federico was; that sweet face stuff wasn’t fooling him by a long shot, and suddenly he wished he had shoved not only Federico’s head but his whole body, head and feet and all, through that window.
‘When I was a boy,’ Bandini began. ‘When I was a boy back in the Old Country –’
At once Federico and Arturo left the table. This was old stuff to them. They knew he was going to tell them for the ten thousandth time that he made four cents a day carrying stone on his back, when he was a boy, back in the Old Country, carrying stone on his back, when he was a boy. The story hypnotized Svevo Bandini. It was dream stuff that suffocated and blurred Helmer the banker, holes in his shoes, a house that was not paid for, and children that must be fed. When I was a boy: dream stuff. The progression of years, the crossing of an ocean, the accumulation of mouths to feed, the heaping of trouble upon trouble, year upon year, was something to boast about too, like the gathering of great wealth. He could not buy shoes with it, but it had happened to him. When I was a boy –. Maria, listening once more, wondered why he always put it that way, always deferring to the years, making himself old.
A letter from Donna Toscana arrived, Maria’s mother. Donna Toscana with the big red tongue, not big enough to check the flow of angry saliva at the very thought of her daughter married to Svevo Bandini. Maria turned the letter over and over. The flap gushed glue thickly where Donna’s huge tongue had mopped it. Maria Toscana, 345 Walnut Street, Rocklin, Colorado, for Donna refused to use the married name of her daughter. The heavy, savage writing might have been streaks from a hawk’s bleeding beak, the script of a peasant woman who had just slit a goat’s throat. Maria did not open the letter; she knew its substance.
Bandini entered from the back yard. In his hands he carried a heavy lump of bright coal. He dropped it into the coal bucket behind the stove. His hands were smeared with black dust. He frowned; to carry coal disgusted him; it was a woman’s work. He looked irritably at Maria. She nodded to the letter propped against a battered salt cellar on the yellow oilcloth. The heavy writing of his mother-in-law writhed like tiny serpents before his eyes. He hated Donna Toscana with a fury that amounted to fear. They clashed like male and female animals whenever they met. It gave him pleasure to seize that letter in his blackened, grimy hands. It delighted him to tear it open raggedly, with no care for the message inside. Before he read the script he lifted piercing eyes to his wife, to let her know once more how deeply he hated the woman who had given her life. Maria was helpless; this was not her quarrel, all of her married life she had ignored it, and she would have destroyed the letter had not Bandini forbidden her even to open messages from her mother. He got a vicious pleasure out of her mother’s letters that was quite horrifying to Maria; there was something black and terrible about it, like peering under a damp stone. It was the diseased pleasure of a martyr, of a man who got an almost exotic joy out of the castigation of a mother-in-law who enjoyed his misery now that he had come upon hard times. Bandini loved it, that persecution, for it gave him a wild impetus to drunkenness. He rarely drank to excess because it sickened him, but a letter from Donna Toscana had a blinding effect upon him. It served him with a pretext that prescribed oblivion, for when he was drunk he could hate his mother-in-law to the point of hysteria, and he could forget, he could forget his house that remained unpaid, his bills, the pressing monotony of marriage. It meant escape: a day, two days, a week of hypnosis – and Maria could remember periods when he was drunk for two weeks. There was no concealing of Donna’s letters from him. They came rarely, but they meant only one thing; that Donna would spend an afternoon with them. If she came without his seeing a letter, Bandini knew his wife had hidden the letter. The last time she did that, Svevo lost his temper and gave Arturo a terrible beating for putting too much salt on his macaroni, a meaningless offense, and, of course, one he would not have noticed under ordinary circumstances. But the letter had been concealed, and someone had to suffer for it.
This latest letter was dated the day before, December eighth, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. As Bandini read the lines, the flesh upon his face whitened and his blood disappeared like sand swallowing the ebb tide. The letter read:
My Dear Maria:
Today is the glorious feast day of our Blessed Mother, and I go to Church to pray for you in your misery. My heart goes out to you and the poor children, cursed as they are by the tragic condition in which you live. I have asked the Blessed Mother to have mercy on you, and to bring happiness to those little ones who do not deserve their fate. I will be in Rocklin Sunday afternoon, and will leave by the eight o’clock bus. All love and sympathy to you and the children.
Donna Toscana.
Without looking at his wife, Bandini put the letter down and began gnawing at an already ravaged thumb nail. His fingers plucked his lower lip. His fury began somewhere outside of him. She could feel it rising from the corners of the room, from the walls and the floor, an odor moving in a whirlpool completely outside of herself. Simply to distract herself, she straightened her blouse.
Feebly she said, ‘Now, Svevo –’
He arose, chucked her under the chin, his lips smiling fiendishly to inform her that this show of affection was not sincere, and walked out of the room.
‘Oh Marie!’ he sang, no music in his voice, only hatred pushing a lyrical love song out of his throat. ‘Oh Marie. Oh Marie! Quanto sonna perdato per te! Fa me dor me! Fa me dor me! Oh Marie, Oh Marie! How much sleep I have lost because of you! Oh let me sleep, my darling Marie!’
There was no stopping him. She listened to his feet on thin soles as they flecked the floor like drops of water spitting on a stove. She heard the swish of his patched and sewed overcoat as he flung himself into it. Then silence for a moment, until she heard a match strike, and she knew he was lighting a cigar. His fury was too great for her. To interfere would have been to give him the temptation of knocking her down. As his steps approached the front door, she held her breath: there was a glass panel in that front door. But no – he closed it quietly and was gone. In a little while now he would meet his good friend, Rocco Saccone, the stonecutter, the only human being she really hated. Rocco Saccone, the boyhood friend of Svevo Bandini, the whiskey-drinking bachelor who had tried to prevent Bandini’s marriage; Rocco Saccone, who wore white flannels in all seasons and boasted disgustingly of his Saturday night seductions of married American women at the Old-time dances up in the Odd Fellows Hall. She could trust Svevo. He would float his brains on a sea of whiskey, but he would not be unfaithful to her. She knew that. But could she? With a gasp she threw herself into the chair by the table and wept as she buried her face in her hands.
Chapter Two
It was a quarter to three in the eighth-grade room at St Catherine’s. Sister Mary Celia, her glass eye aching in its socket, was in a dangerous mood. The left eyelid kept twitching, completely out of control. Twenty eighth graders, eleven boys and nine girls, watched the twitching eyelid. A quarter to three: fifteen minutes to go. Nellie Doyle, her thin dress caught between her buttocks, was reciting the economic effects of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, and two boys behind her, Jim Lacey and Eddie Holm, were laughing like hell, only not out loud, at the dress caught in Nellie’s buttocks. They had been told time and time again to watch out, if the lid over Old Celia’s glass eye started jumping, but would you look at Doyle there!
‘The economic effects of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin were unprecedented in the history of cotton,’ Nellie said.
Sister Mary Celia rose to her feet.
‘Holm and Lacey!’ she demanded. ‘Stand up!’
Nellie sat down in confusion, and the two boys go
t to their feet. Lacey’s knees cracked, and the class tittered, Lacey grinned, then blushed. Holm coughed, keeping his head down as he studied the trade lettering on the side of his pencil. It was the first time in his life he had ever read such writing, and he was rather surprised to learn it said simply, Walter Pencil Co.
‘Holm and Lacey,’ Sister Celia said. ‘I’m bored with grinning goons in my classes. Sit down!’ Then she addressed the whole group, but she was really speaking to the boys alone, for the girls rarely gave her trouble: ‘And the next scoundrel I catch not paying attention to recitation has to stay until six o’clock. Carry on, Nellie.’
Nellie stood up again. Lacey and Holm, amazed that they had got off so easy, kept their heads turned toward the other side of the classroom, both afraid they might laugh again if
Nellie’s dress was still stuck.
‘The economic effects of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin were unprecedented in the history of cotton,’ Nellie said.
In a whisper, Lacey spoke to the boy in front of him.
‘Hey, Holm. Give the Bandini a gander.’
Arturo sat in the opposite side of the room, three desks from the front. His head was low, his chest against the desk, and propped against the ink-stand was a small hand mirror into which he stared as he worked the point of a pencil along the line of his nose. He was counting his freckles. Last night he had slept with his face smeared with lemon juice: it was supposed to be wonderful for the wiping out of freckles. He counted, ninety-three, ninety-four, ninety-five … A sense of life’s futility occupied him. Here it was, the dead of winter, with the sun showing itself only a moment in the late afternoons, and the count around his nose and cheeks had jumped nine freckles to the grand total of ninety-five. What was the good of living? And last night he had used lemon juice, too. Who was that liar of a woman who had written on the Home Page of yesterday’s Denver Post that freckles ‘fled like the wind’ from lemon juice? To be freckled was bad enough, but as far as he knew, he was the only freckle-faced Wop on earth. Where had he got these freckles? From what side of the family had he inherited those little copper marks of the beast? Grimly he began to poll around his left ear. The faint report of the economic effects of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin came to him vaguely. Josephine Perlotta was reciting: who the hell cared what Perlotta had to say about the cotton gin? She was a Dago – how could she possibly know anything about cotton gins? In June, thank God for that, he would graduate from this dump of a Catholic school, and enroll in a public high school, where the wops were few and far between. The count on his left ear was already seventeen, two more than yesterday. God damn these freckles! Now a new voice spoke of the cotton gin, a voice like a soft violin, sending vibrations through his flesh, catching his breath. He put down his pencil and gaped. There she stood in front of him – his beautiful Rosa Pinelli, his love, his girl. Oh you cotton gin! Oh you wonderful Eli Whitney! Oh Rosa, how wonderful you are. I love you, Rosa, I love you, love you, love you!