The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [351]
"Mamma mia!"
"Crocefissa!"
Mama threw herself forward and arms came up and embraced her.
Then Mama herself was set to one side by a small brown hand with a thin gold ring on it. And there was Nonna, her big, upturned, dia- mond-shaped face shimmering with wrinkles under its cap of white hair and its second little cap of black silk. So low and so full of weight in all her shawls, she not only looked to be seated there—she was. Amply, her skirts covered whatever she was resting on.
Nonna drew Gabriella down toward all her blackness, which the sun must have drenched through and through until light and color yielded to it together, and to which the very essence of that smell in the air—of cinnamon and cloves, bananas and coffee—clung. Raising Gabriella's chin, Nonna set a kiss on one of her cheeks, then the other. Nonna's own cheek, held waiting, was brown as a nut and dainty as a rose. She gave Gabriella an ancient, inviting smile.
"Si," she said. "Si."
As Nonna began to address Gabriella, the very first words were so beautiful and without reproach, that they seemed to leave her out. Nothing had prepared Gabriella for the sound of Nonna. She couldn't understand a word. Her gaze wavered and fell. A little way off in the crowd she saw the feet of Miss Crosby, raised on tiptoe beside a suitcase. She had learned only one thing the whole way over, i gabbiani. And there, poor Maria-Pia Arpista, rigid as though bound and gagged, was being carried off by a large and shouting family, who were proudest of all of the baby's coming to meet her. But Nonna had not finished, already? Here was Mama rushing her off to the Customs.
Afterwards, there was Nonna watching for them in her same place, as they came out of the shed with their baggage behind them. The porter in a kind of madness—he was an old man—had thrown their trunk over his back, taken their suitcases, and then had seized the coats as well, and even the little hatbox that had been swinging since early morning on its string from Gabriella's finger, like a reminder. Now she had nothing but her purse.
And there apart stood Papa. Nobody had come to meet Papa. Even as Gabriella saw him, he was deciding not to wait. Bearing on his cane, still in the same old olive-colored sweater—why should she have expected that hole to be sewed up by this morning?—he walked, with nothing to carry, away into the widening sunlight as if he had blinders on. He's only come home to die, thought Gabriella. All the way over, he might have been the oldest and the poorest one. Mama pretended not to see him go. Her curiosity about Papa had long ago been satisfied; he had nobody: she knew it. It was the punishment for marrying twice.
Nonna, when they reached her, said calmly, "We will wait one little moment longer. A dizziness—it will pass."
Mama crossed herself, and laid her instant, tender hand to Nonna's cheek. The porter just as instantly shed every bit of the baggage to the ground
"Are you seventy-six too, Signora?" he asked. But he had meant it not disrespectfully, but respectfully, for he stood inclined, with a musing finger against his cheek, against a pillar he had made of the trunk dressed with the coats. She raised her eyes to the empty Pomona standing over them still—not empty, for Mr. Ugone still rode aboard, with Genoa yet to come. She could actually see him at that minute, standing at the rail with his cigar in his hand; but he did not see her. His gaze was bent and seemed lost on Poldy—still playing there with some of the little urchins, so that the dock took on the echoing sound of a playground just before dark. Maybe the surest people, thought Gabriella, are also the most forgetful of what comes next. All around was the smell of yellow leaves.
"Look what I see!" cried Mama, without ceasing to pat Nonna's cheek. "Mr. Scampo! Ah, I thought we had seen the last of him. On board ship—poor mamma mia!—he was passionately running