The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [120]
The railroad put him on the midnight-to-eight-in-the-morning shift, and during these hours the dusty office was spooky with filing cabinets, dead black typewriters, and the almost invisible wire mesh of the cashier’s cage. Surrounded by these Gino typed the night away. He was very good at the job—his athletic coordination and his sharp eyesight helped. The quota was 350 bills a night, and he easily surpassed it. Sometimes he had an hour free to read while he waited for new bills to come up from the loading platform.
He never talked to the men he worked with, or joined in their general conversation. The night boss gave him the toughest bills to do, but he never protested. It didn’t matter. He hated it so much that nothing mattered. He hated the building and the rat-smelling office. He hated the dirty metal touch of the typewriter keys. He hated walking into that yellow circle of light that held the six billers and the boss rate clerk.
It was a pure hatred, physical; sometimes his body actually chilled, his hair bristled, and his blood turned so sour in his mouth that he could not help walking away from the light to the darkened windows to stare down at those imprisoned streets sentineled by yellow lamp posts. When the boss rate clerk, a young man named Charlie Lambert, called out, “Let’s bill freight, Gino,” in that voice men use to debase other men, he never answered, never went back to his machine right away. Even after he knew he was being singled out, he couldn’t hate Charlie Lambert. He felt such a cold contempt for the man that he could not think of him as something human or react to him with emotion.
To labor merely to exist, to spin away your life just to stay alive, was something he had never known. But his mother had known, Octavia had known, his father had surely known. Vinnie must have stood at this dark window a thousand nights while he himself roamed the streets of the city with his friends or slept trustfully in his bed.
But as the months went on, he found it easier to endure. What he could not think about was that it would never end. He understood that it might never end.
AS BEFITTED THE mother of a family in such goodly circumstances, Lucia Santa now ran her household like a real signora. The apartment was always warm, no matter what the price of coal and kerosene. There was always enough spaghetti in the pot for friends and neighbors who dropped in after mealtime. The children could hardly ever remember leaving the table without there being still enough meatballs and sausage soaking in a platter of sauce for one last foray. There were new forks and spoons for use at the Sunday feast, which everyone in the family, married or not, must attend—though no command was ever heeded more willingly.
On this first Sunday of December there was to be a special peranze. Larry’s oldest child was receiving his First Communion, and Lucia Santa was making ravioli. She had started the dough early, and now she and Octavia were building a fortress of the flour on the large square mixing board. They broke a dozen eggs into it, and another dozen, and another, until the four white powdery walls crumbled into a sea of white with floating yellow yolks. They mixed it all together into great crumbly balls of dough as bright as gold. Octavia and Lucia Santa grunted with labor as they rolled the balls out into thin sheets. Sal and Lena stirred a deep bowl full of ricotta cheese, and into the white creamy mass they beat pepper, salt and eggs that made it a filling fit for heaven.
While the ravioli boiled and the rich tomato sauce simmered, Lucia Santa put platters of prosciutto and cheese on the table. Then came platters of rolled beef stuffed with boiled eggs and onions, a huge piece of pork—dark brown, so tender from simmering in the sauce that it shed its flesh tenderly from the bone with just the touch of a