The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [73]
The doctor left, feeling a mixture of self-disgust and satisfaction. He could have made fifteen dollars instead of a lousy two. He could have treated her for the next week, taken the X-rays in his office, the whole business. But he knew the poverty of the family. Later on he was angry with himself, feeling frustration that the skills he had learned must be given so cheaply, that the sacrifices made by his father should bear such sour fruit. He was a man with a powerful economic weapon he could not use at full strength. What lousy luck it hadn’t been the daughter of the Panettiere. He would have milked the baker dry, he would have wrung him out to the last drop. And with every justification, without really cheating, with all fairness. Oh, someday he would move into a practice, a neighborhood, where he could work and make his fortune with a clear conscience. Dr. Barbato was simply a man who could not stand the sight and smell of poverty. His sudden acts of compassion made him unhappy for days afterward. He seriously regarded them as a vice and not a virtue.
In the kitchen, Sal and Vinnie, finally home after the Sunday movie, sat quietly eating great slabs of crusty bread doused with vinegar and olive oil. Gino was sulking at a corner of the table, doing his homework. Lucia Santa watched them all somberly. “Gino,” she said, “go take a ten cents from my pocketbook for yourself. Then go call your brother Lorenzo to come upstairs—subito.#8221; She felt a sudden surge of love at his happy springing to do her wishes, his quick forgetting of a quarrel balm to her spirit.
The next morning Lucia Santa committed an act so monstrous that it lost her the sympathy of the whole of Tenth Ave-nue, of everyone who would have commisserated with her in this new misfortune. It made Dr. Barbato so angry that he cursed in Italian for the first time since entering medical school. Even Zia Louche scolded Lucia Santa. It was a foolish act, immoral, shocking; and yet it was merely an act of love. Lucia Santa did not take her daughter to Bellevue’s charity hospital; instead she had Larry drive them to the French Hospital on 30th Street between Ninth and Eighth Avenues, a little more than a block away. It was a cheerful, clean, and expensive hospital. The nurses there would be polite, the doctors charming, the clerical workers subservient. There would be no waiting for hours in dim halls for admittance. Lucia Santa’s daughter would be treated like a human being, that is, as a solvent member of society.
No one was more surprised than Lucia Santa herself. It was a fantastically foolish step that would wipe out the savings of years just at the time when they were most desperately needed. There would be no breadwinner in the home. It was an act of pure arrogance.
But there were reasons. Lucia Santa had lain awake all that night and, without sleeping, had suffered nightmares. She saw her beautiful young daughter imprisoned in the towers of Bellevue, lost in the dismal corridors, spat upon like an animal. And then there was superstition. Her husband had entered Bellevue and never returned. It was a charnel house; her daughter would die and they would