Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [78]
“His wife Rita rings me up a little while ago to tell me she thinks he’s coming down with pneumonia from being stuck in that toilet all the time. I tell you true, Irene, that Angelo’s getting as pale as a ghost. The cops sure don’t treat that boy right. He loves the force. When he graduated from the cops’ academy, you woulda thought he just made it outta the Ivory League. He was sure proud.”
“Yeah, poor Angelo looks bad,” Mrs. Reilly agreed. “He’s got him a bad cough, that boy. Well, maybe he’ll feel a little better after he reads that thing Ignatius give me to give him. Ignatius says it’s inspirational literature.”
“Yeah? I wouldn’t trust no ‘inspirational literature’ I got from that Ignatius. It’s prolly fulla dirty stories.”
“Suppose somebody I know sees him with one of them wagons.”
“Don’t be ashamed, babe. It ain’t your fault you got a brat on your hands,” Santa grunted. “What you need is a man in that house, girl, to set that boy straight. I’m gonna find that nice old man ast about you.”
“I don’t want a nice old man. All I want is a nice child.”
“Don’t you worry. Just leave it to Santa. I’ll fix you up. The man runs the fish market says he don’t know the man’s name. But I’ll find out. As a matter of fact, I think I seen him walking down St. Ferdinand Street the other day.”
“He ast about me?”
“Well, Irene, I mean I didn’t get a chance to talk to him. I don’t even know if it was the same man.”
“You see that? That old man don’t care neither.”
“Don’t talk like that, girl. I’ll ask over by the beer parlor. I’ll hang around Sunday mass. I’ll find out his name.”
“That old man don’t care for me.”
“Irene, they’s no harm in meeting him.”
“I got enough problems with Ignatius. It’s the disgrace, Santa. Suppose Miss Annie, the next door lady, sees him with one of them wagons. She’s awready about to get us put under a peace bond. She’s all the time spying in that alley behind her shutters.”
“You can’t worry about people, Irene,” Santa advised. “The people on my block got dirty mouths. If you can live down here in St. Odo of Cluny Parish, you can live anyplace. Vicious is the word, believe me. I got one woman on my block’s gonna get a brick right in her face if she don’t shut up about me. Somebody told me she’s been calling me a ‘merry widow.’ But don’t you worry. I’m gonna get her good. I think she’s running with some man works at the shipyards, anyways. I think I’m gonna write her husband a little anonymous letter to straighten out that girl.”
“I know what it is, sugar. Remember I lived down there on Dauphine when I was a girl. The anonymous letters my poppa useta get… about me. Vicious. I always thought my cousin, that poor spinster girl, was writing them.”
“Which cousin was that?” Santa asked with interest. Irene Reilly’s relatives always had gory biographies that were worth hearing.
“That was the one knocked a pot of berling water on her arm when she was a child. She was kinda scalded looking. You know what I mean? I always seen her writing away at the kitchen table at her momma’s house. She was prolly writing about me. She was very jealous when Mr. Reilly started seeing me.”
“That’s the way it goes,” Santa said. A scalded relative was a dull figure in Irene’s dramatic gallery. Then she said hoarsely and cheerfully, “I’ll have a little party with you and Angelo and his wife, if she’ll come.”
“Aw, that’s sweet, Santa, but I don’t feel much like a party these days.”
“It’ll do you good to shake yourself a little, girl. If I can find out about that old man, I’ll invite him over too. You and him can dance.”
“Well, if you see the old man, babe, tell him Miss Reilly said, ‘Hello.’”
Behind the bathroom door Ignatius was lying passively in the tepid water pushing the plastic soap dish back and forth across the surface with one finger and listening now and then to his mother on the telephone. Occasionally he held the soap dish down until it filled with water and sank. Then he would feel for it on the bottom of