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By Root 732 0

were alone he told her to turn over on her stomach, and then he rolled up the plain woolen nightgown. He saw the knobby bumps at the base of the spine and said with a reassuring laugh, “Ah, Signora, you have arthritis. A month in Florida would make you a new woman. You need sunlight, heat, rest.” He examined her thoroughly and firmly, pressing parts of her body to see where she felt pain. He was conscious of the swelling buttocks of this peasant woman in her forties. Like her daughter’s they were the buttocks of the sensual Italian nudes hung in Florence, great, rounded, as deep as they were wide, but they aroused no desire in him. None of these women could. In his mind they were unclean, unclean with poverty. He pulled down the nightgown.

The woman turned around. The doctor looked at her gravely and said sternly, “What is this, Signora, you can’t walk, you can’t work in the house? It is not that serious. True, you need rest, but you should be able to walk. Your joints are swollen on the wrists and legs and your back, but it is not that serious.”

Lucia Santa looked at him for a long moment before she said, “Help me up.” Gingerly she swung her legs over the side of the bed and he tried to help her stand. As she began to straighten her back, she gave a muted shout of pain and slumped to a dead weight on his arms. He let her down gently to the bed. There was no question of a fake.

“Well, then, you have to rest, Signora,” Dr. Barbato said. “But this should pass. Not altogether, you will always have trouble, but I’ll soon have you at the stove again.”

Lucia Santa smiled at his little joke. “Many thanks,” she said.

WHEN DR. BARBATO left the Corbo house he took the fresh air on Tenth Avenue and pondered the world and humanity. He felt something resembling awe. With mock humor he recounted the misfortunes of this family. The husband in the cuckoo house, the daughter with that big white worm eating away behind those gorgeous tits (and don’t forget the first husband killed in that accident), the son with a dismal marriage to a poverty-stricken immature girl. Now the woman, burdened with half-grown children, become crippled herself. Lying there on that great beautiful ass and that heavy marblelike body, and having the nerve to get angry at his remarks.

He looked down the row of tenements, the windows burning little square fires against the wintry sky. Feeling sick, he muttered without knowing what he meant, “What the hell are they trying to do?” The cold wind came across the railroad yards from the Hudson and set his blood racing. He felt angry, challenged, that this had been permitted to happen in his sight, as if his face had been slapped, as if he were being dared to interfere in some cosmological bullying. His blood churned. This was too much. Too much. All right, he thought, let’s see what you can do. His blood now turned hot, so that despite the snapping cold, he had to loosen the collar of his coat and the wool scarf that his mother had knitted for him.

For the next two months Dr. Barbato, out of pure rage, practiced the art of healing. He visited Lucia Santa every second day, gave her injections, gave her heat treatments and chatted over old times with her for at least twenty minutes as he gave her massages. She was getting better, but still she could not rise from her bed. Dr. Barbato talked about Octavia, how she would be coming home from the sanitarium, and how distressed the daughter would be to find her mother so ill. A few days before Octavia was to come home he gave Lucia Santa shots of vitamins and stimulants, and the night before her return he found the mother sitting in the kitchen ironing clothes on the kitchen table, her children sitting around her, fetching water at her commands, and folding up the clothes for her. “Well, well, good, very good,” Dr. Barbato said cheerfully. “A sure sign of health if one can work, eh Signora?”

Lucia Santa smiled at him. It was a smile that acknowledged her debt and denied his wit. If there was work, people would get up from a deathbed to work, they both knew. As Dr.