The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [46]
Gino and Vincent left their windows. They unfolded their bed and made it. Vinnie put on his pajamas from the country. Watching him, Gino said, “That Job, he’s a nice kid, but he’s sure lucky he don’t live on our block.”
Mr. Colucci was not just a talker, he was a doer. Frank Corbo was working in Runkel’s chocolate factory the next week, and his homecoming at night was a delight for the children. He returned with his person and clothes scented with cocoa. Always he would have a great jagged boulder of chocolate in his pocket. It was pure chocolate, much more delicious than candy-store chocolate. He would give this to Gino to share among the children. Gino would hack it with a knife, give half to Vinnie and half to himself. Then they would each give a piece to Sal and Baby Lena. Gino always thought of his father as working on a great mountain rock of chocolate with a pickax, breaking it up into little pieces.
The father was to be baptized in the new faith at Easter time. Every night he went to the Coluccis’ for reading lessons, and then to the chapel for services and more lessons. Sometimes he would make Gino read to him from the Bible, but Gino always protested; he read badly and with obvious distaste, especially his father’s favorite passages, in which man was brought to book by a wrathful and revengeful God. Gino read this in such a voice, so unimpressed and bored, that he only irritated his father. One day Frank Corbo said to him gently and with a smile, “Animale! Don’t you believe in God then? Aren’t you afraid of dying and going to hell?”
Gino was surprised and confused. “I made my Communion and Confirmation,” he said. The father looked at him, shrugged, and never asked him to read again.
For the next two months everything went smoothly. There were no quarrels.
But then Lucia Santa, seeing her husband so well, working, quiet, well-behaved, thought there was no excuse for him not to be better. She complained that he was always out of the house, that his children never saw him, that he did not take her to visit relatives. And it was as if the father had been waiting for such a complaint, as if his new character had not really pleased him. There was a scene; he struck a blow, there were screams and shouts, Octavia threatened her father with a kitchen knife. It was like old times again. The father left the house and did not come back until the next morning.
He changed gradually. He did not go to chapel so often. Many nights he came straight home and went directly to bed without eating. He would lie in the bed staring up at the ceiling, not sleeping, not speaking. Lucia Santa would bring him a hot dish; sometimes he would eat, sometimes he would strike it out of her hand, soiling the bed covers. Then he would not let her change the bed sheets that night.
He would fall asleep for a bit; then wake near midnight, moaning and tossing about. He had terrifying headaches and Lucia Santa would bathe his temples with alcohol. Nevertheless, the next morning he would be well enough to go to work. Nothing kept him from his job.
That winter the nights were like a nightmare. The father’s cries would wake the baby. Gino, Vincent, and Sal would huddle together, Gino and Vincent curious and subdued, but Sal so frightened that he trembled. Octavia would wake and lie in her bed raging over her mother’s patience with the father. Larry missed it all, for he worked at night and stayed out until the early morning hours.
The father became worse. He would wake in the middle of the night and curse his wife, first in a slow, then a quickening, rhythm—the rhythms of the Bible. Everyone would be asleep, the house would be dark, when suddenly, rising out of the pitch blackness, the father’s voice would fill the apartment, vibrant, alive. “Whore” . . . “Bitch” . . . “Lousy, dir-ty, rot-ten, lying bastard” . . . Then, on