The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [117]
But the mother, like some stubborn animal, huddled up her heavy body in one resistant heap and could not be budged further. She did not protest. She did not wail again. Her black hat and veil fell sideways, raffishly, on her head. Her face was swollen, obstinate, and inhuman with almost bestial anguish. And yet she had never been more terrible, unconquerable, as if this world of death must smash into bits and vanish before her imperious grief.
The three women stood away from her. Louisa burst into tears. Octavia covered her face with her hands, then called out in a muted voice, “Larry, Gino, help us.”
They crossed the floor and stood with the women around the mother. Gino did not dare touch her. Lucia Santa raised her head. She spoke to Gino: “Don’t leave your brother alone,” she said. “Don’t let him stay by himself tonight. He was never brave. He was too good to be brave.”
Gino bowed his head in assent.
“You never obey me,” she said.
Gino said very low, “I’ll stay all night. I promise.” He forced himself to reach out and straighten her hat, very quickly, the first time in his life he had done such a thing for her. His mother reached up slowly to touch her veiled hat and took it off. She carried it in her hand as she walked to the door, as if she could not bear to shield her face, as if now, her head uncovered, she could face life again, its unreversible injustice, its inevitable defeat.
The undertaker offered to bring Gino a cot and apologized for having to lock the street door, showing Gino a bell he could ring in the registry if he wanted to get out. He himself slept in a room directly above. Gino kept nodding his head to show he understood until the man disappeared through an interior doorway.
Alone in the dark funeral parlor, knowing his dead brother’s coffined body hid just behind the small archway, Gino felt safe as he had not felt since before his brother died. He arranged wooden folding chairs in a row to serve as a couch and rolled up his coat for a pillow. Lying so, smoking, one arm against the cool wall, he tried to think of how his world had changed.
He thought of the things he had learned. Larry was really a gangster and people were afraid he would kill them. How dopey that was. Larry had never even punched his kid brothers. And Lefty Fay was a jerk saying Vinnie had walked into the engine—Vinnie was so timid he had stopped sitting on the window sill. And his mother crying and hollering and making all that trouble. Drowsily he let his mind tell what he truly felt, that her grief was excessive, that she made a ceremony of death. And then he remembered his own tears on the stoop. But he had been weeping for Vinnie as a small boy, when they had played together and sat on the star-bright window sill at night. Gradually it came to him that there was so little pity for the dead in grief. That it was a wailing for something lost, by only a very few, and so ceremony must be made of death, to hide what all must know to be true: that the death of a human being means so very little.
Poor Vinnie? Who grieved for him? He had become a whining, unhappy young man whom no one wanted to be with. Even his mother was sometimes impatient with him. She had wept for the many different little Vincents that had come before. As I did, Gino thought. I never cared for him after. Larry didn’t. Even Octavia didn’t really care. But Larry’s wife had cared, for some reason Louisa had cared. And old Zia Louche would have wept. Just before he fell asleep, Gino wanted to go through the archway and look at his brother’s dead face, to force himself to feel more pain, but he was too tired. His cigarette dropped to the glittering black floor, its tiny red ember like a coal