The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [116]
“I gotta get a job,” he said to Larry.
Larry nodded. “I set it up. You take Vinnie’s place in the railroad. You gonna keep going to school?”
Gino grinned. “Sure.”
Larry reached over and touched his arm. “You were always a good kid, Gino. But now you gotta straighten out a little, you know what I mean?”
Gino knew what he meant. That he had to think of the family. That he had to stop doing whatever he felt like doing. That he must please his mother more. That he must stop being a kid. He nodded. In a low voice he asked, “You think Vinnie really walked into that engine?”
The change in Larry’s face was frightening. Still heavily handsome, the flesh in his face had become the color and weight of bronze, and now that bronze seemed to smoke over with some poisonous rage.
“That’s a lot of shit. Now I straightened that engineer and fireman out. If you hear anybody, anybody, being smart, just let me know and I’ll straighten them out.” He waited a moment. “And don’t you tell anybody what happened when I talked to Lefty Fay.” The rage faded from his face; his skin became lighter. “If the old lady ever asks anything, swear on the cross it was an accident.”
Gino nodded.
They started walking back to the funeral parlor. Larry held Gino’s arm and said, “Don’t worry too much, kid. In a couple of years I’ll be in the big money, what with the war and all, and then I’ll bail the family out and you can do what you want.” He smiled. “I was like you once.”
Under the black awning they found Octavia waiting for them, shivering with cold. She asked shrilly, “Where did you two go? Mom is terribly nervous—she thinks Gino left.”
“Oh, Christ,” Larry said. “I’ll talk to Ma. You stay in the parlor, Gino.”
Gino felt the now-familiar physical fear and realized he must have looked frightened. Larry was protecting him. He was bewildered by the terror that swept over him.
In a few minutes Larry came back smiling and said, “Octavia just making a big deal out of nothing, like she always does. The old lady wants to make sure we’re here when they close up.”
People were filtering out. The undertaker appeared and, as a blood relative of death, he helped Larry and Gino speed the mourners on their way, until finally only those closest to the family remained. The huge funeral parlor empty, Gino could hear the chairs behind the small archway being scraped back as his mother and her friends prepared to leave the coffin. The long night was over. There was a strange silence in the other room, and Gino thought about walking home ahead of the others to avoid his mother. This one day he feared her as he had never feared anything in his life.
THE TERRIFYING SHRIEK caught Gino completely by surprise, freezing him with horror. It was followed by another scream that broke into a wail of anguish and his mother’s voice crying out, “Vincenzo, Vincenzo,” with such pitiful grief that Gino wanted to fly out the door and away where he could never hear her. The undertaker, perfectly calm, as if he had been waiting for just this, and as if he understood Gino’s thoughts, put a restraining hand on his shoulder.
Suddenly the archway was filled with black—four women coiling and twining around each other like snakes. Octavia, Louisa and Zia Teresina were trying to drag Lucia Santa through the archway, the struggle in terrible earnest.
They had tried words and caresses beside the coffin, but to no avail. They had tried to recall Lucia Santa to her duties as the mother of five other children, and she had dug her nails into her dead son’s coffin. Now the three women had no pity on her. They