The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [102]
Light flooded the kitchen and Lucia Santa really heard steps coming to her door, knew she would awake before she uttered those irrevocable words of damnation. Gratefully she raised her head to see her daughter Octavia standing over her. She had never said those terrible words about Gino; she had not cast her most beloved son into the pit.
Octavia smiled. “Ma, you were groaning so much I heard you all the way down to the second floor.”
Lucia Santa sighed and said, “Make some coffee, let me stay in my own house tonight.”
How many thousands of nights had the two of them sat in the kitchen together?
Through the Judas window opening onto the row of bedrooms they had always listened for the steady breathing of the young children. Gino had been a troublemaker long ago, hiding under the round table surrounded by its huge clawed legs. To Octavia everything here was known. The ironing board, upright and ready in the window corner; the huge radio, shaped like a cathedral; the small bureau, with drawers for tableware, dish towels, buttons, and patching cloth.
It was a room to live in and to work in and to eat in. Octavia missed it. Her immaculate Bronx apartment had a table of porcelain with chromium chairs. The sink glistened white as a wall. Here was the debris of life. After a meal the kitchen looked like a battlefield with scorched pots, greasy bowls slippery with olive oil and spaghetti sauce and enough smeary dishes to fill a bathtub.
Lucia Santa sat motionless, her face, every line of her squat body, showed a terrible weariness of spirit. It was a look that had frightened Octavia as a child, but now she knew that it would pass, that in the morning her mother would rise mysteriously renewed.
Merely to show her sympathy, Octavia said softly, “Ma, don’t you feel good? Should I get Dr. Barbato?”
With deliberate, theatrical bitterness, Lucia Santa said, “I’m sick of my children, I’m sick of my life.” But saying the words cheered her up. Color flooded into her face.
Octavia smiled. “You know, I miss that most—you cursing me all the time.”
Lucia Santa sighed. “I never cursed you. You were the best of my children. Ah, if only the rest of these beasts could behave like you.”
The sentimentality alarmed Octavia. She said, “Ma, you always talk as if they were so bad. Larry gives you money every week. Vinnie hands over the pay envelope without even opening it. Gino and the kids stay out of trouble. What the hell do you want anyway, for Chrissakes?”
Lucia Santa’s body straightened, and her weariness flowed away almost visibly. Her voice grew vibrant as she prepared herself for a quarrel that was really passionate conversation, the pleasure of her life. She sneered in Italian, that language lovely for sneering, “Lorenzo, my oldest son. He gives me ten dollars every week—me, his mother, to feed his poor little fatherless brothers and sisters. But the little whores he runs with, they take the fortune he earns at the union. That poor wife will murder him in his bed. And I, I won’t say a word against her at the trial.”
Octavia laughed happily. “Your darling Lorenzo? Ah, Ma, you’re such a phony. Tonight he comes with his ten-dollar bill and his bullshit and you’ll treat him like a king. Just like those young chippies that fall for his crap.”
Lucia Santa said absently in Italian, “With a husband I thought your mouth would get cleaner as the other got dirty.” Octavia flushed deep red. Lucia Santa was pleased. Her daughter’s surface vulgarity, American, was no match for her own, bred in the Italian bone.
They heard footsteps coming through the rooms