The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [71]
Lucia Santa said, “Good boy, bring something to eat to your sister-in-law.” Vinnie went down the stairs with the two plates and a half-full bottle of cream soda. A few minutes later he came back empty-handed and sat at the table.
Larry looked at him for a moment and asked, “Is she O.K.?” When Vinnie nodded, Larry went on with the story he was telling.
CHAPTER 10
ON A LATE March Sunday afternoon, Octavia Angeluzzi stood in the kitchen, gazing down into the backyards below. Inside the block of tenements there was a great hollow square, which was cut up by wooden fences into many separate yards.
Octavia looked down on stone gardens, concrete loam. Some homesick paesano had left a box like a three-cornered hat filled with hairy dirt, and out of it grew a bony stick. At its foot little stems, like toes, wore deathly yellow leaves. In the silvery light of winter an empty red flowerpot rose out of a gray cemented flower bed. Above them, filling the air and crisscrossing so that not even a witch could have flown over the backyards, were innumerable frayed dirty white clotheslines stretching from windows to distant tall wooden poles.
Octavia felt terribly tired. It was the cold, she thought, the long winter without sunshine and the long hours at work. With the Depression, rates of pay had gone down. Now she had to work longer hours for less money. At night she and the mother sewed buttons on cards in their own home, sometimes with the kids helping. But the boys sneered at the low rate of pay, a penny a card, and would rarely work. She had to laugh at them. Children could afford to be independent.
There was an ache in her chest and in her eyes and head. She felt hot all over. And there was the constant refrain running through her mind, what were they going to come to with Larry’s money gone and the four kids to bring up? Every week now she had to go to the postal savings and take out money. The dream was shattered; they had slipped back in savings, receded years from owning a house.
Looking down at the desolate landscape, which was given a touch of strange humanity by a cat walking the top of a fence, she thought of Gino and Sal, growing up to be stupid laborers, loutish, coarse, living in slums, breeding children into the sack of poverty. A wild surge of anxiety rose in her, followed by a physical nausea and fear. She would see them cringe and suck for charity as their parents had done before them. The poor beg to stay alive.
And what about Vinnie? With shock Octavia realized that she had already written his future off. He would have to go to work early to help his brothers and sisters. There was no other way.
Oh, that lousy bastard Larry—leaving the family when they needed his help the most. And having the nerve to come up from the second floor to eat. But men were lousy. She had a sudden vision of a man—hairy, gorilla-like, naked and with penis enormous and erect—man the very image. Her cheeks flushed and she was so weak she could not stand. She went to the kitchen table and sat down. She felt a suffocating pain in her chest and realized with quiet terror that she was ill.
It was Gino who first came up and found Octavia leaning over the table, crying with fear and pain, spitting little red flecks of blood on the white and blue oilcloth. Octavia whispered, “Go call Mamma at Zia Louche.” Gino was so frightened that he turned and flew down the stairs without a word.
When the two of them got back, Octavia had recovered her strength and was sitting up straight. She had not cleaned the oilcloth. She had started to, so as not to alarm her mother, but some need for sympathy, a fear that she would be thought a malingerer in the family fight, had unconsciously persuaded her to leave everything untouched.
Lucia Santa rushed into the room. She saw at once her daughter’s woebegone, sick, and guilty face, and then the flecks of blood.