The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [14]
She gave him an arch look, treating him like a young boy. She said, “Aren’t you ashamed to ask me, with a baby still in the carriage from my first husband?” And for the first time she saw that dark look of hate. He stammered out that he loved her children as he loved her. That even if she did not marry him he would give her money for the children. In fact, he made good money on the railroad and always brought the children ices and toys. He had sometimes even given her money to buy the children clothing. At first she had tried to refuse, but he had become angry and said, “What is it, you don’t wish to be friends with me? You think I’m like other men? I don’t care for money—” and started to tear up the dirty green bills. For some reason this had brought tears to her eyes. She had taken the money from him, and he had never presumed on his gifts. It was she who became impatient.
ONE SUNDAY IN spring, invited, Frank Corbo came to the midday meal, the feast of the week for Italian families. He brought with him a gallon of biting homemade Italian wine and a box of cream pastries, gnole and soffiati. He wore a shirt, a tie, a many-buttoned suit. He sat at table with children about him: shy, awkward, more timid than they.
The spaghetti was coated with Lucia Santa’s finest tomato sauce, the meatballs were beautifully round and peppered with garlic and fresh parsley. There was the dark green lettuce with olive oil and red wine vinegar, and then walnuts to eat with the wine. Everything had a bite to it of herbs and garlic and strong black pepper. They all stuffed themselves. Finally the children went down to the street to play. Lucia Santa should have kept them with her in the house to avoid scandal, but she did not.
And so in the golden afternoon with sunlight streaming through the long railroad flat, with the poor infant Vincenzo’s eyes shielded from sin by a conveniently placed pillow, they sealed their fate on the living room couch, the mother only slightly distracted by her children’s voices rising sweetly from the street below.
Ah, delight, delight, the taste of love. After so long an abstinence the animal odor was an aphrodisiac, a bell to ring in the coming joy; even now, so many years later, the memory was fresh. And in that act of love she had been the master.
The man so harsh, so strong against the world, had wept on her breast, and in the fast-fading sunlight she understood that in all his thirty-five years of life he had never received a caress with real tenderness. It was too much for him. He had changed afterwards. He had come too late to love, and he despised his weakness. But for that one afternoon she forgave him many things, not everything; and cared for him as she had never cared for her first husband.
There was very little trouble until his first child was born. His natural love for Gino became cancerous, murdering his love for wife and stepchildren, and he became evil.
But in the first year of marriage, in the trust of love, he told her of his childhood in Italy as the son of a poor tenant farmer. He had often been hungry, often cold, but what he could never forget was that his parents made him wear cast-off shoes which were too small. His feet became horribly deformed, as if every bone had been broken and then bound together in one grotesque lump. He showed her his feet as if to say, “I keep nothing from you; you needn’t marry a man with such feet.” She had laughed. But she did not laugh when she learned that he always bought twenty-dollar shoes, beautiful brown-grained leather. The act of a true madman.
His parents were a rarity in Italy, drunken peasants. They relied on him to work the farm and give them their bread. When he fell in love with a young girl of the village, the marriage was forbidden. He ran away and lived in the woods for a week. When they found him, he was little more than an animal. He was in shock and was committed to a mental institution. After a few months he was released, but he refused to return to his home. He emigrated to America, where in the densest city in the