The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [121]
At dinner, Octavia gossiped with Larry as she seldom did, laughing at his jokes and stories. Norman quietly sipped his glass of wine and chatted with Gino about books. When they finished, Sal and Lena cleared the table and started washing the mountain of dishes.
It was a beautiful Sunday for December, and visitors came—the Panettiere and Guido, finally out of the Army after his year’s service, the jealous barber, looking through the glass curtain of red wine, inspected all heads present for scars of a strange scissors. The Panettiere quickly took a plate of warm ravioli; he was mad about them, a dish his dragon of a wife had always been too busy counting money to prepare.
Even Zia Teresina Coccalitti, who had made her whole life a secret merely for advantage, who for so many years had made her fortune on home relief, with four strapping sons working—no one knew how; even she ventured to drink more than one glass of wine, munch a bread full of sausage, and chat with Lucia Santa about the happy days when they were girls in Italy shoveling manure from their backyards. Though usually Zia Coccalitti zippered her mouth with warty fingers when anyone asked her a personal question, today she smiled when twitted by the Panettiere about her swindling of the home relief. Made rash and generous by two glasses of wine, she told them all, free of charge, to take everything the Government gave, since in the long run you would pay the cursed State ten times over whether you took it or not.
Gino, bored by the talk, went to sit on the floor next to the cathedral-shaped radio and turned it on. He wanted to listen to the Giants football game. Lucia Santa frowned at this rudeness, though the radio was so low no one could hear it. Then she paid no more attention to him.
It was Norman Bergeron who first noticed something odd about Gino. His head was bent close to the radio, but he was watching everyone in the room. Then Norman saw that he was watching his mother very intently. There was a smile on his face. It was a smile that was in some way cruel. Octavia, seeing her husband watching Gino, turned toward the radio.
She couldn’t hear, but there was something so brilliantly alive in Gino’s eyes that she called out, “Gino, what is it?”
Gino turned his back to hide his face. “The Japs just attacked the United States,” he said. He turned up the radio and drowned out all the voices in the room.
GINO WAITED UNTIL after Christmas. Then directly from work one morning he enlisted in the Army. That afternoon he called Octavia’s husband at his office and asked him to tell Lucia Santa where he was. Sent to a training camp in California, he wrote regularly and sent money home. In the first letter he explained that he had volunteered to save Sal from the draft later on, but he never mentioned this again.
CHAPTER 25
AIUTA MI! AIUTA mi!” Screaming for help against the ghosts of her three dead sons, Teresina Coccalitti ran along the edge of the sidewalk, her body tilted strangely, her black clothes flapping in the morning breeze. When she reached the corner she turned and ran back again, crying out, “Aiuto! Aiuto!” but on that first familiar cry for help, windows had slammed shut above Tenth Avenue.
Now the woman stood in the gutter, legs apart. She raised her head to the sky and accused them all. She spoke in the vulgar Italian of her native village, and on that thin hawk’s face all native cunning, greed and vicious slyness had been eaten away by suffering. “Oh, I know you all,” she shouted up to the closed windows. “You wanted to fuck me, you whores and daughters of whores. You wanted to put it up my ass, every one of you, but I was too clever.” She tore at her face with claw-like nails until it was a mass of bloody strips. Then she raised her arms to the sky and screamed, “Only God. Only God.” She started running along the curb, her black hat bobbing up and down, as her only remaining son came around the corner of 31st Street to catch her and drag her home.
It had happened many times before. At first Lucia Santa used to rush into