The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [340]
Gabriella stayed as she was, caught in an element as languorous as it was strange, like a mermaid who has been netted into a fisherman's boat, only to find that the fisherman is dreaming. Where no eye oversaw them, the sea lifted and dropped them both, mindless as a cradle, up and down.
Even when La Zingara clattered out on deck, with a spectacled youth at her heels, and, seeing Aldo, gave the sharp laugh of experience, Aldo only shut his lips, like a reader who has just licked his finger to turn a page. But Gabriella sat up and caught her hair and her skirt, seeing those horn-rims: that young man was marked for the priesthood.
With the pop of corks being drawn from wine bottles, La Zingara kicked off her shoes. Then she began dancing in her polished, bare feet over the deck. ("Practicing," she had replied with her knifelike smile when the mothers wondered where she went all day—furiously watching an actress rob the church.) She made the horn-rimmed young man be her partner; to dance like La Zingara meant having someone to catch you. In a few turns they had bounded to the other side of the deck.
"Excuse me," said a new voice. Miss Crosby had unfolded herself and come over on her long legs. Speaking across the sleeping Aldo as though she only called through a window, she asked, "What do you call those birds in Italian?"
"What birds?"
"There! Making all that racket!" Miss Crosby pointed out to sea with her book, First Lessons in Italian Conversation. "Ever since we've been passing Sardinia."
"Didn't you ever see seagulls before?"
"I just want to know the Italian."
"I gabbiani" said Gabriella.
In a moment, Miss Crosby made a face, as if she were about to grit her teeth, and said "Grazie." She went away then. Gabriella crossed her legs beneath her and sat there, guarding Aldo.
Three members of the crew presently materialized, one raising his gun toward the birds that were flying and calling there, shifting up and down in the light.
"No!" cried Aldo in his sleep.
In two minutes he was up shooting with the sailors, and she was merely waiting on him.
"Terrible responsibility to be coming into property—who knows how soon!" said Mama.
"It's nothing to be sneezed at," said Gabriella. A white triangle of salve—Maria's Harry had tucked that into her suitcase—was laid over her nose; the rest of her face still carried a carnation glow.
Just those three sat propped on the back of the rearmost bench—Gabriella, Aldo Scampo, and Mama. They could see the long blue wake flowing back from them, smooth as a lady's train.
"Look at the dolphins!" cried Aldo.
"Where, where? Wanting their dinner. A terrible responsibility," said Mama. She ran her loving little finger over the brooches settled here and there on her bosom, like St. Sebastian over his arrows. If she had had to slap Gabriella at the lunch table for getting lost on her morning walk, all was delicato now. Nice naps had been taken, tea was over with, and real estate in the vicinity of Naples had come up in conversation.
"And tomorrow, Gala Night," said Mama. "Am I right, Mr. Scampo?"
"Yeah, Mrs. Serto, I guess you are," said Aldo.
Mama slipped down from between them to her feet, her fingers threw them a little wave that looked like a pinch of salt, and she began a last march around deck. Her opposite turn was the public room, where her friends would by now be collecting, the indisposti propped deadweight among them but able to listen, and the well ones speculating peacefully out of the wind.
When Mama passed the bench again—really her farewell time, and then she would leave the sunset to young sweethearts—all seemed well. With the obsessiveness that characterizes a family man, Aldo was drumming a soft fist into Gabriella's plump young back, which held there unflinchingly, while her words came out in snatches with the breath cut off between.
"Nothing to be sneezed