The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [350]
"Poldy!" Aldo hailed him from the air. "See Naples and die, Poldy! Where's your girl?"
Poldy was running up and down the dock pitching a ball with some little boys of Naples. He wore the feathered hat, the bright yellowish coat with the big buttons that had galvanized them all so on the first day at sea, before they knew all about him. He shouted back, "Oh, she'll find me! I sent her a whole dozen poses!"
Poldy's and Aldo's laughs met like clapped hands over Gabriella's head, and she could hardly take another step down for anger at that girl, and outrage for her, as if she were her dearest friend, her little sister. Even now, the girl probably languished in tears because the little country train she was coming on, from her unknown town, was late. Perhaps, even more foolishly, she had come early, and was languishing just beyond that gate, not knowing if she were allowed inside the wall or not—how would she know? No matter—they would meet. The Pomona had landed, and that was enough. Poor girl, whose name Poldy had not even bothered to tell them, her future was about to begin.
"Watch me!" Poldy, just below, was shouting to the little boys: "I'll teach you how to throw a ball!"
But he turned his shining face upward and threw the ball at Gabriella. It only struck the Pomona's side and bounced back; all the same, she dodged and swayed, and Poldy covered his head with his sleeve in imitation shame, while the little urchins stamped up and down beside him, laughing in a contagious-sounding joy like the orfanelli's.
"Rock-a-bye baby!" she yelled down over their heads. "On the tree top! When the wind blows—"
Aldo, coming out of the family coats, put a grip around her neck for the last time. But even while he did it, instinct, too, told her she could not scream that way any longer. She was here.
"Ecco! Ecco!" came Mama's own voice, wildly excited. "Mamma mia!" There she was, halfway across the yard.
And where she pointed, almost in the center of everything, was a little, low, black figure waiting. It was the quietest and most substantial figure there, unagitated as a little settee, a black horsehair settee, in a room where people are dancing.
"But she doesn't look like her picture!" cried Gabriella. And her foot came down and touched something hard, the hard ground of Naples. Out of it came a strange, rocking response—as if the earth were shocked on its part, to be meeting their feet. Then the coats were bundled in her arms.
"O.K.," said Aldo. "Got to line up my stuff and try for a train. Good-by, Mr. Ambrogio!" he shouted. "Don't let 'em try to keep you over here!" And off he went, at an odd trot.
"We shall never meet again!" Mr. Ambrogio, standing at the foot of the gangway now with his arm raised like a gladiator, had found words. Then, raising the other arm too, he half ran through the moving game of ball, to be gathered in by some old ladies—just like the ones he'd been escorting across the ocean. But in his consideration he did not even knock down Poldy's stack of suitcases and cardboard boxes, neat as a little house in the thick of the disembarkation.
"Gabriella Serto! You want to stay on ship?" Mama had seized her and was taking