The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [105]
“Who should be his boss if not his mother?” Lucia Santa asked. “Or do you think he will never have a boss? That’s what he thinks. He will eat free the rest of his life, isn’t that it? But it isn’t so. What will happen to him when he finds out what life is, how hard it is? He expects too much, he enjoys life too much. I was like him at his age and I suffered for it. I want him to learn from me what life is, not from strangers.”
“Ma, you can’t.” Octavia hesitated. “Look at your darling Larry, all the trouble you took over him, and now he’s next thing to a gangster, collecting money for that phony union.”
“What are you talking about?” Lucia Santa gestured with contempt. “I couldn’t even get him to beat his little brothers for me, he was so chicken-hearted.”
Octavia shook her head and said slowly, wonderingly, “Ma, sometimes you’re so smart. How can you be so stupid?”
Lucia Santa absently sipped her coffee. “Ah, well, he’s out of my life.” She did not see Octavia turn her face away, and she went on. “Gino is the one who hurts my brains. Listen to this now. That nice job at the drugstore, he stayed two days. Two days. Other people keep jobs for fifty years, my son two days.”
Octavia laughed. “Did he quit or get fired?”
“Oh, you find it laughable?” Lucia Santa inquired in her politest Italian, betraying her complete exasperation. “They threw him out. After school one day he stopped to play football, then went to work. He thought surely they would close the store until he got there, no harm done. Little did he think the padrone, not wishing to kiss his trade away, would stay on himself. No, our dear Gino did not finish out his first week.”
“I’d better talk to him,” Octavia said. “What time does he come home?”
Lucia Santa shrugged. “Who knows? A king comes and goes when he pleases. But tell me this. What do these snotnoses have to talk about until three in the morning? I look out the window and see him sitting on the steps and talk and talk worse than the old women.”
Octavia sighed. “Hell, I don’t know.” She made ready to leave. Lucia Santa cleared away the coffee cups. There was no gesture of affection, no farewell kiss. It was as if she were going away to visit and would be back. Her mother went to the front-room window to guard her daughter with her eyes until she turned off Tenth Avenue toward the subway.
CHAPTER 19
MONDAY NIGHT WAS Vinnie Angeluzzi’s night off from the railroad. It was the night he rewarded his flesh for the poverty of his life.
His mother and sister’s teasing had embarrassed him because he was going out to pay his five dollars and get laid, simply and efficiently. He was ashamed of this because it was another mark of failure. He remembered the pride hidden in his mother’s voice when she reproached Larry for taking advantage of young girls. She and Octavia would be disgusted if they knew what he was going to do now.
Vinnie had worked the four-to-midnight shift in the railroad since he quit high school. He had never gone to a party, never kissed a girl, never talked to a girl in the quiet of a summer night. His one day off was Monday, and there was nothing to do on that night of the week. His shyness made it worse.
So Vinnie went for his poor but honest fare, to a respectable whore house recommended by the chief clerk of the freight office who didn’t want his men hanging around bars to pick up clapped-up chippies or worse. Sometimes the chief clerk himself came along.
For this diversion all the clerks dressed in respectable fashion, as if they were going out to look for a job. They wore suits and ties and hats and topcoats, uniforms for the day of leisure, the seventh day to rest and celebrate the soul. Vinnie in his black fedora was always kidded about looking like a gangster, though he was the youngest of them all. They met in the Diamond Jim bar, which had a grill of hot dogs and hot roast beef sandwiches and cold cuts almost as gray as the skin on the chief clerk. Ceremoniously they would order whisky,