The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [13]
But she had wept. Oh, how she had wept. A grief compounded with terror. Not grief for departed lips, eyes, hands, but a wail for her shield against this foreign world, a cry for the bringer of her children’s bread, the protector of the infant in her womb. These widows tear their hair and gash their cheeks, scream insane laments, do violence, and wear mourning for the world to see. These are the real mourners, for true grief is thick with terror. They are bereaved. Lovers will love again.
His death was comically grotesque. While a ship was being unloaded, the gangplank had given way high above the water, plunging five men and untold tons of bananas down into the river mud. Human limbs and banana stalks buried together. Never rising once.
She dared herself to think it: he had given them more dead than alive. In the darkness, now, years later, in mockery of her younger self, she smiled grimly. At what her younger self would think of such thoughts. But the court had awarded each of the children a thousand dollars—even Vincent not yet born but only too visible to the world. The money in trust, because here in America there was wisdom; not even parents were given charge of their children’s monies. She herself had received three thousand dollars that no one on the Avenue knew about except Zia Louche and Octavia. So it was not all in vain.
Not to be spoken of, not to be thought of even now, were those months with the child in her belly. A child whose father had died before he was born, like the child of a demon. Even now she was struck with a terrible superstitious fear; even now, thirteen years later, tears sprang beneath her eyelids. She wept for herself as she was then, and for the unborn child, but not for the death of her husband. Her daughter Octavia could never know or understand.
And then the most shameful: only a year after her husband’s death, only six months after the birth of that dead husband’s son, she—a grown woman—had for the first time in her life become passionate about a man, the man who was to become her second husband. In love. Not the spiritual love of young girls or priests; not the emotion for heroes in romances that could be told to a young girl. No; love was the word for the hot flesh, the burning loins, feverish eyes and cheeks. Love was the feel of turgid, spongy flesh. Ah, what madness, what foolishness for the mother of children. Thank Jesus Christ in heaven she was beyond that now.
And for what? Frank Corbo was thirty-five, never married; slender, wiry, and with blue eyes; considered odd for being unwedded at that age, odd also in his reticence, his silent nature and lonely pride—that pride so ludicrous in those who are helpless before society and fate. The neighbors, searching for a widow’s mate and feeder of four hungry mouths, thought him capable of any foolishness and a fine candidate. He worked steadily on the early morning shifts of the railroad gangs, and his afternoons were free for courting. There would be no scandal.
So the neighbors, out of kindness and self-preservation, brought them together, with conscience clear that both would make a good bargain.
The courtship was surprisingly young and innocent. Frank Corbo knew only the quick, cold whore’s flesh; he would come to a marriage bed fresh with love, with a boy’s eagerness. He pursued the mother of the three children as he would a young girl, making himself even more ridiculous in the eyes of the world. In the late afternoons he visited her as she sat before the tenement, guarding her playing and sleeping children. Sometimes he would take supper with them and leave before the children were put to bed. Finally one day he asked Lucia Santa to