The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [15]
He took care of himself; he never became ill again. In his life of solitude and hard work he found safety. As long as he did not become emotionally entangled with other human beings, he was safe, as something immobile is to some degree safe from the dangers of motion. But this love which brought him back to life brought him back to danger, and perhaps it was this knowledge, animal-like, felt rather than known, that had made him so weak that Sunday afternoon.
Now, after twelve years of life together, the husband was as secretive with her as he had always been with other people.
SOMEONE HAD COME in the door. Someone was moving in the kitchen. But the footsteps went out again and down the stairs. For his own mysterious reasons, her husband had gone back into the street.
Night. Night. She wanted her husband in her bed. She wanted her older son in the house. She wanted everyone asleep in this safe tenement castle four stories above the ground, sealed against the world by brick and concrete and iron. She wanted everyone asleep, asleep in darkness, safe from life, so that she need no longer stand guard, could deliver herself up to oblivion.
She sighed. There was no recourse. Tomorrow she must quarrel with Frank to keep the janitor’s job. She must settle the Le Cinglata hash, the children’s clothes, the stove to boil the laundry soap. She listened to the breath of the sleeping children all around her—Lena in her bed, the three boys in the room separated from hers only by an archway, Octavia in the bedroom with its door open for air. She made her breath fall into their great rising and falling sighs, and then she was asleep.
OCTAVIA STRETCHED OUT on her narrow bed. She wore her rayon slip as a nightdress. The room was too small for any additional furniture except a tiny table and a chair, but it had a door she could close.
She was too hot and too young to sleep. She dreamed. She dreamed of her real father.
Oh, how she had loved him, and how angry she had been that he let himself be killed, left her alone with no one to love. At the end of each day she had met him in front of the tenement and kissed his dirty bearded face, its black stubble so hard it bruised her lips. She carried his empty lunch pail up the stairs and sometimes cajoled from him the wicked steel clawed baling hook of the longshoreman.
And then in the house she set his plate for dinner, jealously placing the fork with the straight tines, the sharpest knife, his small wineglass polished and flashing like a diamond. Fussing until the exasperated Lucia Santa smacked her away from the table so that food could be served. And Larry, sitting in his high chair, could never interfere.
Even now, so many years later, waiting for sleep, the thought like a cry, “Why weren’t you more careful?” Reproaching him for his sinful death, echoing her mother, who sometimes said, “He didn’t take care of his family. He didn’t take care of his money. He didn’t take care of his life. He was careless in everything.”
Her father’s death had brought the thin blue-eyed stranger with his slanting, uneven face. The second husband, the stepfather. Even as a child she had never liked him, accepted his gifts distrustfully, stood with Larry in hand, holding him, hiding behind the mother’s back, until he patiently found her. Once he had made a gesture of affection and she shrank away from his hand like an animal. Larry was the favorite until his own children came. He never liked Vincent for some reason, the lousy bastard—hateful, hateful.
But even now she could not blame her mother for marrying, could not hate her mother for bringing so much sorrow. She knew why her mother married this evil man. She knew.
IT WAS ONE of the most terrible times of Lucia Santa’s life, and much of the distress that followed her husband’s death was the fault of friends, relatives, and neighbors.
They had, every one, kept after Lucia Santa to let the newborn infant, Vincent, be taken care of by a rich cousin, Filomena, in New Jersey. Just for a little while,