The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [119]
Their eyes flashed fire; energy and power radiated from their black-clad, lumpy bodies. They devoured everything that happened on the Avenue as they spoke. They hurled curses like thunderbolts at children headed for mischief. They sucked greedily on ridged paper cups of chilling lemon ice and took great bites of smoking hot pizzas, dipping brown invincible teeth deep into the lava of hot tomato sauce and running rivers of cheese to the hidden yeasty dough. Ready to murder anyone who stood in the way of so much as a crust of bread for themselves or their children, implacable enemies of death. They were alive. The stones of the city, steel and glass, the blue-slate sidewalks, the cobblestoned streets, would all turn to dust and they would be alive.
CHAPTER 24
CAN A DEVIL turn into an angel? The Panettiere, the mad barber, Dr. Barbato, and even the cunning Zia Teresina Coccalitti marveled at the change in Gino Corbo. It was true: disaster made a boy into a man, for now Gino slaved like a peasant in the railroad, gobbling up overtime and bringing his envelope home unopened to his mother.
Lucia Santa was so pleased that she gave Gino twice the spending money she had given Vinnie, swearing to Octavia that it was only just because Vinnie had always stolen his overtime. “See,” the mother said to Octavia on her Friday night visits, “Gino was always a good boy.” And Octavia had to agree, because despite his working at night and even overtime on Sunday, Gino was finishing his last term of high school and would graduate in January. He was even making the honor roll for the first time. This especially delighted Lucia Santa. “Wasn’t I right?” she asked Octavia. “It is the playing in the street that tires a child’s brain, not honest work.”
Octavia, still shaken by Vinnie’s death, was amazed and puzzled at how quickly her mother seemed to recover. She was quieter, more permissive with Sal and Lena but otherwise the same. Only once did she betray emotion. One night, when they were talking of Vinnie as a little boy, Lucia Santa said with bitter self-reproach, “If I had left him with Filomena in Jersey, he would be alive.” Relinquishing one of her proudest memories, and yet she still lived each day with the eager trust of a believer in good fortune.
And why not? Never had the world treated the family of Angeluzzi-Corbo so well. Gino made a fortune in the railroad. Sal was brilliant in high school and would surely go to college. Lena was equally brilliant and would be a schoolteacher. Both worked now in the panetteria selling bread after school, earning good wages, which made Lucia Santa gloat with Octavia over the bank books on Friday nights. Lucia Santa could only control her dangerous optimism by reminding herself that in a few short months, right before Christmas, the Panettiere’s son, Guido, would finish his year of Army service and take Sal and Lena’s place in the bakery. She could not count on this flood forever.
Even Octavia’s husband was working. Poor Norman Bergeron was miserable writing pamphlets for some Government agency—Civil Service, security, and good money. Octavia knew he was unhappy, but she thought it was just too bad about him. He could always write poetry when the people in Europe stopped killing each other and there was another Depression.
But best of all for Lucia Santa was Gino becoming a man, part of the real world. She would not have to quarrel with him anymore, she had almost forgiven him all the injuries he had made her suffer. He had even become more serious. Could it be that her struggles were at an end? Lucia Santa did not believe it for a moment, but she would never let it be said that she was one of those pitiful rags who refused to enjoy good fortune when it came.
Each night Gino went to work it was with the