The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [122]
CHAPTER 26
WHILE THE WAR raged over the world, the Italians living along the western wall of the city finally grasped the American dream in their calloused hands. Money rolled over the tenements like a flood. Men worked overtime and doubletime in the railroad, and those whose sons had died or been wounded worked harder than all the rest, knowing grief would not endure as long as poverty.
For the clan of Angeluzzi-Corbo the magic time had come. The house on Long Island was bought, for cold cash, from people mysteriously ruined by the war. A two-family house, so that Larry and Louisa and their children could live in one apartment under the watchful eye of Lucia Santa. There would be separate, doored bedrooms for everyone, even Gino when he came home from the war.
On the last day Lucia Santa could not bear to help her children strip the apartment, fill the huge barrels and wooden boxes. That night, lying all alone in her bed, she could not sleep. The wind whistled softly through the window cracks that had always been shielded by drapes. Lighter patches of wall that had held pictures gleamed in the darkness. There were strange sounds in the apartment, in the empty cupboards and closets, as if all the ghosts of forty years had been set free.
Staring up at the ceiling Lucia Santa finally became drowsy. She put out her arm to trap a child against the wall. Falling into dreams she listened for Gino and Vincenzo to go to bed and for Frank Corbo to come through the hallway door. And where had Lorenzo gone again? Never fear, she told little Octavia, no harm can come to my children while I live, and then, trembling, she stood before her own father and begged linen for her bridal bed. And then she was weeping and her father would not comfort her and she was alone forever.
She had never meant to be a pilgrim. To sail a fearful ocean.
The apartment turned cold and Lucia Santa awoke. She got up and dressed in the dark, then put a pillow on the window sill. Leaning out over Tenth Avenue, she waited for light and for the first time in years really heard the railroad engines and freight cars grinding against each other in the yards across the street. Sparks flew through the darkness and there was the clear ringing of steel clashing on steel. Far away on the Jersey shore there were no lights because of war, only stars caught on the shade of night.
In the morning there was a long wait for the moving vans. Lucia Santa greeted neighbors who came to wish the family good luck. But none of the old friends came, none were left on Tenth Avenue. The Panettiere had sold his bakery when his son, Guido, came home wounded too badly for work. He had moved far out on Long Island, as far out as Babylon or West Islip. The mad barber with his houseful of daughters had retired; with so few male heads to cut because of the war, he too had moved out to Long Island to a town called Massapequa, near enough the Panettiere for a game of cards on Sundays. And others too had left for all those strange towns dreamed of for so many years.
Dr. Barbato, to everyone’s surprise, had volunteered for the Army and in Africa had become a hero of some sort, with his pictures in the magazines and a story of his exploits so terrifying that his father suffered a stroke from sheer exasperation at his son’s foolishness. Poor Teresina Coccalitti never moved out of her apartment, fiercely guarding the countless tins of olive oil and fat that would some day ransom her sons from death. Gino’s childhood friend, Joey Bianco, had in some clever fashion escaped the Army, no one knew how, had become rich, and bought a palace