The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [100]
“O.K., Ma,” he said and ran down the steps.
Larry was annoyed. “Doesn’t he know he should stay home tonight?” he asked his mother.
Lucia Santa shrugged. “Every night he goes to his Hudson Guild. He is the duke of his club of snotnoses.”
Larry said righteously, “That’s no way to show respect for his father. I go past the Guild when it’s dark, and him and his friends are loving up the girls. You shouldn’t let him do that tonight.”
There was a shout of laughter from Octavia. Larry being moral always made her giggle. “You should talk,” she said. “Remember the stuff you pulled when you were that age?”
Larry grinned, gave his wife a swift glance. She was busy with the infant. “Aw, come on, Sis,” he began, and then, as if nothing had happened, the family history and adventures began to be retold as Sal and Lena cleared away the table. Norman Bergeron opened a book of poetry. Vinnie leaned his sallow face on his hand and listened intently. Lucia Santa brought out bowls of walnuts, a jug of wine, and bottles of cream soda. Teresina Coccalitti dropped in, and with her as a new audience they told all the old stories about Frank Corbo. Octavia began with the familiar line, “When he called Vinnie an angel I knew he was crazy. . . .” They would go on until bedtime.
The next morning Lucia Santa found that Gino had not come home that night to sleep. He often stayed away during the hot summer months, bumming around with his friends, doing God knows what. But on this day of all days, when he might make them late for the funeral? She was truly angry.
Everyone finished breakfast, and still Gino did not come. His good suit was laid out on his bed with a fresh white shirt and a tie. Lucia Santa sent Vinnie and Larry out to look for him. They cruised in their car past the Hudson Guild Settlement House on 27th Street and then went to the candy store on Ninth Avenue, where the boys sometimes gambled all night at cards. The bleary-eyed owner said yes, Gino had been there until just an hour ago and had left with some friends to see the morning show at the Paramount movie house or the Capitol or the Roxy, he wasn’t sure which.
When they returned and told Lucia Santa the news, she seemed dazed. All she said was, “Well, then, he can’t come.”
As they were all getting into the car, Teresina Coccalitti came around the corner of 31st Street to wish them a good voyage. In her usual black, with her dark sallow face and raven hair, she looked like a snip of the night that had refused to disappear. Now that there was an empty place in the car, Lucia Santa asked her to come along. Teresina was honored—a day in the country would be a real treat. She did not hesitate for a moment but pushed in and took Vinnie’s seat next to the window. And so it was that she could tell the whole story to her friends on Tenth Avenue of how the Angeluzzi-Corbo family drove out to Long Island to bury Frank Corbo, how his eldest son disappeared and did not look upon his natural father’s face before it disappeared into the earth. And how only Lucia Santa wept—but tears so full of gall that they could only have sprung from a well of anger, not grief. “There will be a day of reckoning,” the Coccalitti woman said, shaking her black hawk’s head. “He is a serpent in the heart of his mother.”
CHAPTER 18
LUCIA SANTA ANGELUZZI-Corbo rested, her shadow thick in twilight. Sitting at the round kitchen table, she awaited the strength to go down on Tenth Avenue and take the cool evening breeze.
During the day, for no reason, she had suffered, in some mysterious way, a blow to the spirit which for this one night had weakened her hold on life. She hid in the empty dark kitchen, out of reach, deaf and sightless to everything she loved and held dear. She yearned to sink into untroubled sleep, where there would not be a single ghost of dreams.
But who can leave the world unguarded? Lena and Sal played in the street below, Gino roamed the