The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [52]
He seemed to rise on his toes; he grew tall and menacing. Larry and the mother shrank away from him. The two white-jacketed interns formed a line with the two policemen and came toward him. Suddenly the father saw across the huge wooden table his son Gino’s face, the skin white with terror, the eyes almost blank, extinguished of sensibility. With his back to his enemies, the father winked one eye at his son. He saw the color flood back into Gino’s face, the fear relieved by surprise.
But now the comedy was over. The four men surrounded the father, not yet touching him. The father raised both his palms toward them as if beseeching them to halt, to listen to something important he was going to say. But he did not speak. He reached into his pocket and gave his wife the key to the apartment and then his billfold. Lucia Santa grasped him by the arm and pulled him out of the apartment and down the stairs. Larry took the father’s other arm. The police and white-jacketed men followed close behind.
Tenth Avenue was empty. The wind whipped around the ambulance and the police car parked before the tenement. Frank Corbo faced his wife in the dark street. He said in a low voice, “Lucia Santa, let me come home. Don’t let them take me away. They will kill me.” Across the street an engine hooted. The wife bowed her head. She dropped his arm and stepped away from him. Without warning, the two white-jacketed interns pounced on the father, slipped something over his arms, and half thrust, half lifted him into the ambulance. One of the police jumped in to help. There was not a sound. The father did not cry out. There was just a flying about of many blue-and-white-clad arms. The mother bit her fist, and Larry stood paralyzed. The ambulance drove away, and then the remaining policeman came over to them.
The cloudiness of early dawn veiled the stars, but it was not yet really light. Lucia Santa wept in the street as Larry gave the policeman their names, his father’s name, the names of the children and everyone in the house that night, and told how it had all begun.
IT WAS NOT until the next Sunday that anyone was permitted to visit the father. After dinner Lucia Santa said to her daughter, “Do you think I should let him come home, do you think it safe?” Octavia shrugged, afraid to give an honest answer. She was amazed at her mother’s optimism.
Larry assumed command as the eldest male of the family. He spoke as a man with contempt for the cowardice of women. “You mean you’ll let Pop rot in Bellevue just because he went off a little one night? Let’s get him the hell out of there. He’ll be all right, don’t worry.”
Octavia said, “It’s easy for you to talk like a big-hearted big shot. You’re never home. You’re out chasing floozies, your stupid little tramps. Then while you’re having your nice little fun, Mom and the kids and me are getting our throats cut. And you’ll be so-o-o sorry when you come home. But you’ll be alive and we’ll be dead. You’re not so dumb, Larry.”
“Ah, you’re always making a big thing outa nothing,” Larry said. “After the old man gets a taste of Bellevue, he’ll never get sick again.” Then, seriously and without malice, “Your trouble, Sis, is you never liked him.”
“Why should I?” Octavia said angrily. “He never did anything for Vinnie or even for his own kids. How many times did he hit Mamma? He even hit her once when she was pregnant, and I’ll never forget that.”
Lucia Santa listened to them both, her face somber, her black brows knit. Their arguments were the irrelevant arguments of children, their talk meant nothing to her. They were not competent, emotionally or mentally.
Like many others this illiterate, untrained peasant woman had the power of life and death over the human beings nearest to her. On every day in every year people must condemn and betray their loved ones. Lucia Santa did not think in terms of sentiment. But love and pity had value, a certain weight in life.
The man who had fathered her children, rescued her from a desperate and helpless widowhood, and wakened her to