She was an Italian, sure; but could she help that? Was it her fault anymore than it was his? Oh look at her hair! Look at her shoulders! Look at that pretty green dress! Listen to that voice! Oh you Rosa! Tell ’em Rosa. Tell ’em about that cotton gin! I know you hate me, Rosa. But I love you, Rosa. I love you, and some day you’ll see me playing center field for the New York Yanks, Rosa. I’ll be out there in center field, Honey, and you’ll be my girl, sitting in a box seat off third base, and I’ll come in, and it’ll be the last half of the ninth, and the Yanks’ll be three runs behind. But don’t you worry, Rosa! I’ll get up there with three men on base, and I’ll look at you, and you’ll throw me a kiss, and I’ll bust that old apple right over the center field wall. I’ll make history, Honey. You kiss me and I’ll make history!
‘Arturo Bandini!’
I won’t have any freckles then, either, Rosa. They’ll be gone – they always leave when you grow up.
‘Arturo Bandini!’
I’ll change my name too, Rosa. They’ll call me Banning, the Banning Bambino; Art, the Battering Bandit …
‘Arturo Bandini!’
That time he heard it. The roar of the World Series crowd was gone. He looked up to find Sister Mary Celia looming over her desk, her fist pounding it, her left eye twitching. They were staring at him, all of them, even his Rosa laughing at him, and his stomach rolled out from under him as he realized he had been whispering his fancy aloud. The others could laugh if they pleased, but Rosa – ah Rosa, and her laughter was more poignant than all others, and he felt it hurting him, and he hated her: this dago girl, daughter of a wop coal miner who worked in that guinea-town Louisville: a goddamn lousy coal miner. Salvatore was his name; Salvatore Pinelli, so low down he had to work in a coal mine. Could he put up a wall that lasted years and years, a hundred, two hundred years? Nah – the dago fool, he had a coal pick and a lamp on his cap, and he had to go down under the ground and make his living like a lousy damn dago rat. His name was Arturo Bandini, and if there was anybody in this school who wanted to make something out of it, let him speak up and get his nose broke.
‘Arturo Bandini!’
‘Okay,’ he drawled. ‘Okay, Sister Celia. I heard you.’ Then he stood up. The class watched him. Rosa whispered something to the girl behind her, smiling behind her hand. He saw the gesture and he was ready to scream at her, thinking she had made some remark about his freckles, or the big patch on the knee of his pants, or the fact that he needed a hair cut, or the cut-down and remodeled shirt his father once wore that never fit him smartly.
‘Bandini,’ Sister Celia said. ‘You are unquestionably a moron. I warned you about not paying attention. Such stupidity must be rewarded. You’re to stay after school until six o’clock.’
He sat down, and the three o’clock bell sounded hysterically through the halls.
He was alone, with Sister Celia at her desk, correcting papers. She worked oblivious of him, the left eyelid twitching irritably. In the southwest the pale sun appeared, sickly, more like a weary moon on that winter afternoon. He sat with his chin resting in one hand, watching the cold sun. Beyond the windows the line of fir trees seemed to grow even colder beneath their sad white burdens. Somewhere in the street he heard the shout of a boy, and then the clanking of tire chains. He hated the winter. He could picture the baseball diamond behind the school, buried in snow, the backstop behind home plate cluttered with fantastic heaviness – the whole scene so lonely, so sad. What was there to do in winter? He was almost satisfied to sit there, and his punishment amused him. After all, this was as good a place to sit as anywhere.
‘Do you want me to do anything, Sister?’ he asked.
Without looking up from her work, she answered, ‘I want you to sit still and keep quiet – if that’s possible.’
He smiled and drawled, ‘Okay, Sister.’
He was both still and quiet for all of ten minutes.
‘Sister,’ he said. ‘Want me to do the blackboards?’
‘We pay a man for doing that,’ she said. ‘Rather, I should say we overpay a man for that.’
‘Sister,’ he said. ‘Do you like baseball?’
‘Football’s my game,’ she said. ‘I hate baseball. It bores me.’
‘That’s because you don’t understand the finer side of the game.’
‘Quiet, Bandini,’ she said. ‘If you please.’
He changed his position, resting his chin on his arms and watching her closely. The left eyelid twitched incessantly. He wondered how she had got a glass eye. He had always suspected that someone had hit her with a baseball; now he was almost sure of it. She had come to St Catherine’s from Fort Dodge, Iowa. He wondered what kind of baseball they played in Iowa, and if there were very many Italians there.
‘How’s your mother?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Swell, I guess.’
She raised her face from her work for the first time and looked at him. ‘What do you mean, you guess? Don’t you know? Your mother’s a dear person, a beautiful person. She has the soul of an angel.’
As far as he knew, he and his brothers were the only nonpaying students at that Catholic school. The tuition was only two dollars a month for each child, but that meant six a month for him and his two brothers, and it was never paid. It was a distinction of great torment to him, this feeling that others paid and he did not. Once in a while his mother would put a dollar or two in an envelope and ask him to deliver it to the Sister Superior, on account. This was even more hateful. He always refused violently. August, however, didn’t mind delivering the rare envelopes; indeed, he looked forward to the opportunity. He hated August for it, for making an issue of their poverty, for his willingness to remind the nuns that they were poor people. He had never wanted to go to Sister School anyway. The only thing that made it tolerable was baseball. When Sister Celia told him his mother had a beautiful soul, he knew she meant his mother was brave to sacrifice and deny for those little envelopes. But there was no bravery in it to him. It was awful, it was hateful, it made him and his brothers different from the others. Why, he did not know for certain – but it was there, a feeling that made them different to all the others in his eyes. It was somehow a part of the pattern that included his freckles, his need for a haircut, the patch on his knee, and being an Italian.
‘Does your father go to Mass on Sunday, Arturo?’
‘Sure,’ he said.
It choked in his throat. Why did he have to lie? His father only went to Mass on Christmas morning, and sometimes on Easter Sunday. Lie or not, it pleased him that his father scorned the Mass. He did not know why, but it pleased him. He remembered that argument of his father’s. Svevo had said, if God is everywhere, why do I have to go to church on Sunday? Why can’t I go down to the Imperial Poolhall? Isn’t God down there, too? His mother always shuddered in horror at this piece of theology, but he remembered how feeble her reply to it was, the same reply he had learned in his catechism, and one his mother had learned out of the same catechism years before. It was our duty as Christians, the catechism said. As for himself, sometimes he went to Mass and sometimes not. Those times he did not go, a great fear clutched him, and he was miserable and frightened until he had got it off his chest in the confessional.
At four thirty, Sister Celia finished correcting her papers. He sat there wearily, exhausted and bruised by his own impatience to do something, anything. The room was almost dark. The moon had staggered out of the dreary eastern sky, and it was going to be a white moon if it ever got free. The room saddened him in the half light. It was a room for nuns to walk in, on quiet thick shoes. The empty desks spoke sadly of the children who had gone, and his own desk seemed to sympathize, its warm intimacy telling him to go home that it might be alone with the others. Scratched and marked with his initials, blurred and spotted with ink, the desk was as tired of him as he was of the desk. Now they almost hated one another, yet each so patient with the other.
Sister Celia stood up, gathering her papers.<
br />
‘At five you may leave,’ she said. ‘But on one condition –’
His lethargy consumed any curiosity as to what that condition might be. Sprawled out with his feet twined around the desk in front of him, he could do no more than stew in his own disgust.
‘I want you to leave here at five and go to the Blessed Sacrament, and I want you to ask the Virgin Mary to bless your mother and bring her all the happiness she deserves – the poor thing.’
Then she left. The poor thing. His mother – the poor thing. It worked a despair in him that made his eyes fill up. Everywhere it was the same, always his mother – the poor thing, always poor and poor, always that, that word, always in him and around him, and suddenly he let go in that half darkened room and wept, sobbing the poor out of him, crying and choking, not for that, not for her, for his mother, but for Svevo Bandini, for his father, that look of his father’s, those gnarled hands of his father’s, for his father’s mason tools, for the walls his father had built, the steps, the cornices, the ashpits and the cathedrals, and they were all so very beautiful, for that feeling in him when his father sang of Italy, of an Italian sky, of a Neapolitan bay.
At a quarter to five his misery had spent itself. The room was almost completely dark. He pulled his sleeve across his nose and felt a contentment rising in his heart, a good feeling, a restfulness that made the next fifteen minutes a mere nothing. He wanted to turn on the lights, but Rosa’s house was beyond the empty lot across the street, and the school windows were visible from her back porch. She might see the light burning, and that would remind her that he was still in the classroom.
Rosa, his girl. She hated him, but she was his girl. Did she know that he loved her? Was that why she hated him? Could she see the mysterious things that went on inside him, and was that why she laughed at him? He crossed to the window and saw the light in the kitchen of Rosa’s house. Somewhere under that light Rosa walked and breathed. Perhaps she was studying her lessons now, for Rosa was very studious and got the best grades in class.
Turning from the window, he moved to her desk. It was like no other in that room: it was cleaner, more girlish, the surface brighter and more varnished. He sat in her seat and the sensation thrilled him. His hands groped over the wood, inside the little shelf where she kept her books. His fingers found a pencil. He examined it closely: it was faintly marked with the imprint of Rosa’s teeth. He kissed it. He kissed the books he found there, all of them so neatly bound with clean-smelling white oilcloth.
At five o’clock, his senses reeling with love and Rosa, Rosa, Rosa pouring from his lips, he walked down the stairs and into the winter evening. St Catherine’s Church was directly next to the school. Rosa, I love you!
In a trance he walked down the gloom-shrouded middle aisle, the holy water still cold on the tips of his fingers and forehead, his feet echoing in the choir, the smell of incense, the smell of a thousand funerals and a thousand baptisms, the sweet odor of death and the tart odor of the living mingled in his nostrils, the hushed gasp of burning candles, the echo of himself walking on tiptoe down and down the long aisle, and in his heart, Rosa.
He knelt before the Blessed Sacrament and tried to pray as he had been told, but his mind shimmered and floated with the reverie of her name, and all at once he realized he was committing a sin, a great and horrible sin there in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, for he was thinking of Rosa evilly, thinking of her in a way that the catechism forbade. He squeezed his eyes tightly and tried to blot out the evil, but it returned stronger, and now his mind turned over the scene of unparalleled sinfulness, something he had never thought of before in his whole life, and he was gasping not only at the horror of his soul in the sight of God, but at the startling ecstasy of that new thought. He could not bear it. He might die for this: God might strike him dead instantly. He got up, blessed himself, and fled, running out of the church, terrified, the sinful thought coming after him as if on wings. Even as he reached the freezing street, he wondered that he had ever made it alive, for the flight down that long aisle over which so many dead had been wheeled seemed endless. There was no trace of the evil thought in his mind once he reached the street and saw the evening’s first stars. It was too cold for that. In a moment he was shivering, for though he wore three sweaters he possessed no mackinaw or gloves, and he slapped his hands to keep them warm. It was a block out of his way, but he wanted to pass Rosa’s house. The Pinelli bungalow nestled beneath cottonwoods, thirty yards from the sidewalk. The blinds over the two front windows were down. Standing in the front path with his arms crossed and his hands squeezed under his armpits to keep them warm, he watched for a sign of Rosa, her silhouette as she crossed the line of vision through the window. He stamped his feet, his breath spouting white clouds. No Rosa. Then in the deep snow off the path his cold face bent to study the small footprint of a girl. Rosa’s – who’s else but Rosa, in this yard. His cold fingers grubbed the snow from around the print, and with both hands he scooped it up and carried it away with him down the street …
He got home to find his two brothers eating dinner in the kitchen. Eggs again. His lips contorted as he stood over the stove, warming his hands. August’s mouth was gorged with bread as he spoke.
‘I got the wood, Arturo. You got to get the coal.’
‘Where’s Mamma?’
‘In bed,’ Federico said. ‘Grandma Donna’s coming.’
‘Papa drunk yet?’
‘He ain’t home.’
‘Why does Grandma keep coming?’ Federico said. ‘Papa always gets drunk.’
‘Ah, the old bitch!’ Arturo said.
Federico loved swear words. He laughed. ‘The old bitchy bitch,’ he said.
‘That’s a sin,’ August said. ‘It’s two sins.’
Arturo sneered. ‘Whaddya mean, two sins?’
‘One for using a bad word, the other for not honoring thy father and mother.’
‘Grandma Donna’s no mother of mine.’
‘She’s your grandmother.’
‘Screw her.’
‘That’s a sin too.’
‘Aw, shut your trap.’
When his hands tingled, he seized the big bucket and the little bucket behind the stove and kicked open the back door. Swinging the buckets gingerly, he walked down the accurately cut path to the coal shed. The supply of coal was running low. It meant his mother would catch hell from Bandini, who never understood why so much coal was burned. The Big 4 Coal Company had, he knew, refused his father any more credit. He filled the buckets and marveled at his father’s ingenuity at getting things without money. No wonder his father got drunk. He would get drunk too if he had to keep buying things without money.
The sound of coal striking the tin buckets roused Maria’s hens in the coop across the path. They staggered sleepily into the moon-sodden yard and gaped hungrily at the boy as he stooped in the doorway of the shed. They clucked their greeting, their absurd heads pushed through the holes in the chicken wire. He heard them, and standing up he watched them hatefully.
‘Eggs,’ he said. ‘Eggs for breakfast, eggs for dinner, eggs for supper.’
He found a lump of coal the size of his fist, stood back and measured his distance. The old brown hen nearest him got the blow in the neck as the whizzing lump all but tore her head loose and caromed off the chicken shed. She staggered, fell, rose weakly and fell again as the others screamed their fear and disappeared into the shed. The old brown hen was on her feet again, dancing giddily into the snow-covered section of the yard, a zig-zag of brilliant red painting weird patterns in the snow. She died slowly, dragging her bleeding head after her in a drift of snow that ascended toward the top of the fence. He watched the bird suffer with cold satisfaction. When it shuddered for the last time, he grunted and carried the buckets of coal to the kitchen. A moment later he returned and picked up the dead hen.
‘What’d you do that for?’ August said. ‘It’s a sin.’
‘Aw, shut your mouth,’ he said, raisin
g his fist.
Chapter Three
Maria was sick. Federico and August tiptoed into the dark bedroom where she lay, so cold with winter, so warm with the fragrance of things on the dresser, the thin odor of Mamma’s hair coming through, the strong odor of Bandini, of his clothes somewhere in the room. Maria opened her eyes. Federico was about to sob. August looked annoyed.