The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [343]
The boat lurched. A black wave could be felt looking in at the nearest porthole, out of the night.
"Ah, the Captain this boat—has he anywhere a wife?" cried Mama, and rolled her head toward the old lady, who gave no answer.
Poldy at once took out his papers. Hadn't Mr. Ugone's card at the table been enough?—even supposing it had not been Gala Night, with gelati somewhere on the way. Now Poldy was finding an envelope he had never brought out before, with an address written on it in purple ink—a long one.
"What town in Italy is that?" he demanded, and passed the envelope back and forth in front of Mr. Fossetta's eyes. Mr. Fossetta, with one sharp gesture of the hand and a shake of the head, went on taking fish-bones out of his mouth.
"Can't read? That's the town they're taking me to to get married." Poldy beamed. "My sweetheart and her brother, or cousin, or whoever comes with her to meet the boat in Naples, they'll take me there. How about you, can you read?" he asked Mr. Ambrogio, but on the way to him the envelope had reached the old lady, who deposited it in her lap.
Poldy only shouted to the waiter, "Gee, I'll take another plate of that!," pulling him back by the coat. It was not only Gala Night that Poldy asked for second plates—it was every night. He enjoyed the food.
"If," Mr. Fossetta remarked ostensibly to Mama, with something a little ominous in his voice, "if she has a brother, then it will be her brother come to meet him."
"Only daughters have I ever been sent!" cried Mama—then gave an even sharper cry.
Through the dining-room door, arriving at the same time as the veal course, Aldo Scampo had entered like a ghost. Tentatively, not seeming to see with his eyes at all, he made his way through the dining room with all its caps, past the Serto table without a sign. Even after he had sat down safely in his own chair, who could speak to him? He was so white.
Papa, however, blew his whistle. This time he stood up to do it.
And instantly, another old man—the old man in the red knit cap who slept in the day by the ship's engines and had not exchanged for a paper cap tonight—rose up from the other side of the room and answered Papa, with mumbled words and the vague waving of an arm. He thought somebody had been insulted. Papa blew the whistle back at him, and then, carried away at meeting opposition at last, blew without stopping—"Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!" The argument filled the dining room to its now gently creaking walls.
The head steward himself came to Papa's table—his first visit to the back of the room. Everybody but the other old man, and the old lady, who was crushing a crust, like a bone, between her teeth, grew hushed.
"What is the meaning of this whistle?" asked the steward.
Old Papa, with his head cocked and in the voice of a liar, told the steward that once a little boy, long ago, was going away to America from Italy. Papa's left hand dived low and gave the air a pat. On such a big ship—and his right hand poked the whistle into the girth of the steward—the little boy might have been lost. But his papa said to him, "Never mind. Whenever you hear this"—and before the steward knew it, the old man had blown it again, "Tweeeeet!"—"Papa." All this had the old sleepy-head raising both fists in the air and shaking them together as if he denied every word of that tale. The whistle was blowing and everybody else was shouting.
Aldo Scampo moved out of his chair and started silently out of the room the way he had come; only his yellow, pointed crown was crumpled like the antlers of a deer where, as he rose up, he had had to clutch his head.
"No gelati?" many called sorrowfully after him through their laughter.
"Why did he think he had to come, anyway?" Gabriella shrieked as he staggered past her. "Who's Aldo Scampo?"
"You imagine the sea is high tonight? Not at all!" The voice of a visiting Father, who was down from above for Gala Night in