The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [29]
“They’re just mad because Pop left. They don’t know where he is. He musta run away.”
They both smiled at Vinnie’s joke. Only children ran away.
Far down Tenth Avenue they could see the red lantern of a dummy boy and behind it, like a small round ghost, the white dot of the trailing engine searchlight. The people below were shadows lit by lamp posts, by the blue and red streamer lights of the Panettiere’s lemon-ice stand, by the window bulbs of the grocery and candy stores.
Gino and Vincent, sit-sleeping on their childhood window sill, felt on their tired faces the fresh breeze from the Hudson River. It smelled of running water and, as if it had been carried great distances, of grass and trees and the other green things it had sprung from before it came to the city.
CHAPTER 4
BY LATE AUGUST, everyone hated summer except the children. The days were filled with the smell of burning stone, melting street tar, gasoline, and manure from horse-drawn wagons hawking vegetables and fruit. Over the western wall of the city where the Angeluzzi-Corbos lived hung clouds of steam trailed by locomotives, air immobilized by heat. Black flakes flew out of burning fires as engines packed freight cars into neat long rows. On this Sunday afternoon, when everything was still, the abandoned yellow, brown, and black railroad cars made solid geometric blocks in the liquid golden sunshine, abstractions in a jungle of steel and iron, stone and brick. The gleaming silvery tracks snaked in and out.
Tenth Avenue, open all the way to the river at Twelfth, with no intervening wall to give shade, was lighter than the other avenues of the city and hotter during the day. Now it was deserted. The enormous midday Sunday feast would last to four o’clock, what with the nuts and wine and telling of family legends. Some people were visiting more fortunate relatives who had achieved success and moved to their own homes on Long Island or in Jersey. Others used the day for attending funerals, weddings, christenings, or—most important of all—bringing cheer and food to sick relatives in Bellevue.
The more Americanized might even take their families down to Coney Island, but they would not do this more than once a year. The trip was long, and the size of families demanded great expenditures for frankfurters and sodas, even though they took their own food and drink along in paper bags. The men hated going. These Italians had never stretched idle on a beach. They suffered the sun all week working on the tracks of the railroad. On Sunday they wanted the cool of a house or garden, they wanted their minds occupied and alert over a deck of cards, they wanted to sip wine, or listen to the gossip of women who would not let them move a finger. They might as well go to work as go to Coney Island.
Best of all was a Sunday afternoon without duties. Children at the movies, mother and father took a little nap together after the heavy meal and made love in complete privacy and relaxation. It was the one free day a week and was jealously treasured. Strength was restored. Family bonds healed. Not to be denied, it was a day set aside by God himself.
On this Sunday the streets, empty, beautiful, marched in straight lines away from Tenth Avenue. Since the neighborhood was too poor to own automobiles, none marred the symmetry of concrete pavement interspersed with blue-gray slate. The sun glinted on the smooth black tar, on the iron railings of the stoops, and on the coarse brownstone steps. All this seemed fixed forever in the blinding sun of summer; it was dazzling, as if unveiled on this one day by idle factory chimneys.
But Lucia Santa had picked this day to be a day of strife, to catch the enemy, the Le Cinglatas, unaware.
Everybody was out of the house. Octavia, dutiful Italian daughter that she was, had taken Sal and Baby Lena for a walk. Vincenzo and Gino had gone to the movies. Lucia Santa was free.
The eldest son, the shield and buckler of a fatherless family, had not shown