The Mezzogiorno Social Club Page 7

  The Ox had called Benny. “He wants us to meet him.”

  “For what?” Benny asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll come get you.”

  An hour later the three of them stood in the litter of ashes and charred remnants of the stable. Strachi’s shirt was bright in the midday sun, his thumbs tucked behind black suspenders.

  “What should we do with this?” he asked, twisting and looking around.

  “I don’t know,” The Ox said. “What?”

  Strachi looked to Benny. “You. What do we do with this?”

  “I don’t know, Don Cesare.”

  “What else but make another place for the dead?”

  “A cemetery?” The Ox asked.

  Strachi grunted. “What do you say?” he asked Benny.

  “A funeral parlor?”

  “Yes.” Strachi put an arm around Benny’s shoulders. “A business that sells sorrow and privacy that even the ignorant police would not disturb.”

  “But what do we know of the business?” The Ox asked.

  “That it needs an undertaker.”

  “But that is not all.”

  “Of course, that is not all. But an undertaker indebted to us. Who will it be, Ox?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know our friend with the shovel and the warrant of arrest?”

  “The Digger is a carpenter,” The Ox said.

  “And what else does he do?”

  “Makes coffins?”

  “And what else?”

  “He steals from the dead.”

  “So, he’s an undertaker,” Strachi said with a laugh and a cackle.

  Zella, Gaga, and the Digger

  The Digger was Marcello Ulino, a loose limbed man with a long face that grinned on its own. Doctors had told him that nerves and muscles, not the devil, made his face happy. A priest agreed and splashed him with holy water.

  He’d grown a moustache, let it grow to droop into a frown, but stares of people who did not know him and some who did, like his wife and sons, wouldn’t let him forget the look of a feeble mind on his face.

  The letter he’d been waiting for found its way to the dusty side of the mountain where his house had stood for centuries of Ulinos. The letter told him that, “the penal order could not be stopped. We are waiting for you.” Nothing, he knew, to do with stealing graves, but all to do with the dishonor of a child. He rolled out of bed in the middle of a night, woke his wife, handed her a fold of lire and kissed her cheek.

  “Soon you will come to America,” he told her, then lifted an old ammo crate that held his carpentry tools and papers onto his shoulder. He walked hours to the Mediterranean and boarded a fishing boat that took him to a cattle boat noisy with men and boys speaking Portuguese.

  Before the boat left the Mediterranean and all around him was black, he stood at the rail and snapped open the lock on the box. From it he took a tintype of himself, his wife and boys, tossed it into the salted wind, blessed himself, and wondered as to his importance to Don Cesare, cousin to both his mother and his father, having directed him to stay with Zella, the old woman.

  In the neighborhood before fire escapes, garbage pickup and indoor plumbing, Zella’s eyes stayed black and polished as the rosary beads that hung on the wall at the head of her bed. The line under her bony nose was her mouth and it smiled on one side and frowned on the other.

  Never without a kerchief to hide patches of scalp under her kinky gray hair, she spent afternoons at her kitchen window on the alley, mending children’s clothes that she gave to one society or another.

  Before Georgie Nuts made his first drop for Benny, the two of them went to Zella. Benny looked sharp in a derby, fresh collar and cuffs, and a suit by the sisters. Georgie, in his beat up corduroy jacket, looked slow.

  Zella raised her window when she saw them. She took off silver rimmed glasses, cleaned them with her apron, and put them back on her face.

  “The undertaker, how the hell did he get in here?” she asked Benny.

  “The Ox.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Ulino, Marcello.”

  “The son of a bitch scared the shit out of me this morning,” Zella said. “Looks like he’s the one that needs a coffin.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In bed.” She looked to Georgie. “And this is Giorgio with the nuts?”

  “The peanuts,” Georgie said, bowing a bit.

  “Tonight you start?”

  “Yes.”

  “He knows what to do?” she asked Benny.

  “He knows.”

  “The key, he has it?”

  “I got it,” Georgie said.

  “Come closer, let me see you.” She took off her glasses, cleaned them again. “Why I never see you before?”

  “I never saw you either.” Georgie smiled, and it looked like she smiled back.

  “You are chubby. You are married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kids?”

  “Five.”

  “You talk American?” she asked in English.

  “Sure,” Georgie said.

  “You always wear that jacket?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You look like a greenhorn. Bring peanuts when you come.”

  ***

  The next few mornings Zella found a sack of peanuts on her kitchen table and one morning found a kid sucking his thumb and staring into the window.

  “Guaglion’, what you do there?”

  “Where I live is burned.”

  “You are a boy of the stable?”

  “I am Apollo.”

  “Someone brought you here?”

  “For eat, and for work.”

  “Who brought you?”

  “He gave me nuts and nickels.”

  “Are those all the clothes you have?”

  “Yes.”

  “No socks?”

  “Nobody gave me.”

  “How many years you have?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “You are small if you are fifteen. You go to school?”

  “No school. I am strong.”

  “You have seen death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do the dead come to you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you speak American?”

  “Yes. Eat now?”

  Zella mumbled: “Another one they send me.”

  “What?”

  “You want work?”

  “I am strong.”

  “Come in.”

  The soles of Gaga’s shoes, hinged where stitching had not rotted away, slapped the linoleum on Zella’s kitchen floor. If he was strong, he didn’t look it. Skin and bones. Maybe stupid and maybe not, something going on behind big black eyes under his head of curls the color of old pennies.

  She began filling the counter tub and handed him a bar of brown soap. “Do you know what this is?”

  “For wash.”

  “Do you have bugs?”

  He shrugged.

  She rummaged his curls. “No bugs. Now wash. When you finish, leave the water. I’ll wash those filthy clothes and fix what I can. I don’t know how the hell you wear filth like that.”

  ***

  Zella put a bowl on the table in front of the boy. Hard boiled eggs crumbled over Polenta, and a loaf of bread. He ate, watching Zella and The Digger Ulino penciling ads for the newspapers: Carpentry, Bureaus, Chests, Chairs and Tables ...

  “Enough of that,” Zella snapped. “The other thing.”

  “You think?”

  “What do you think you’re here for?”

  ... Coffins of Fine Hardwoods.

  “This boy here,” she said, “he is not so stupid as he looks. He will work with you. Buy him a coat. And he needs shoes.”

  “Socks,” Gaga said.

  “I have socks for him,” Zella said.

  The Digger looked over the boy. “He will work? He is so small.” />
  “I am fifteen. I am strong.” He emptied his bowl, held on to the spoon. “There is more?”

  “You had enough,” Zella said and took his plate to the sink.

  She looked to The Digger.

  “Underwear too, he needs,” Zella said. “He has no family. He will stay with you. Teach him and see that he keeps himself.”

  The Digger tugged at a corner of his moustache.

  “Soon you will see to the arrangements of the tailor,” Zella said. “They told you of the tailor?”

  “I know, yes,” The Digger said.

  “Gaga knows too.”

  “Apollo,” Gaga said.

  Zella nodded.

  “What is the work?” The Digger asked.

  “The morgue will carry him to where you will lay him out. That is all you will do.”

  “And the coffin?”

  “It is at the morgue. This they do for us and this you do for Don Strachi.”

  “When?”

  “When you are told. And don’t grin when you do it. You look stunat’.”

  Crosses

  The day had been hot and cloudy. Rain began as Lucia and Rosina, both in the black taffeta Lucia had admired weeks before, sat in the breeze of one of the shop’s ceiling fans, reading the signatures on Mass cards and on store-bought notes of consolation. Lucia stood to return a card to one of the floral arrangements when she saw the morgue wagon jerk to a stop.

  Two figures in black — a tall man wearing a suit that fit well and a smile that didn’t, and a boy with pants too long — set the coffin on a wheeled carrier and brought it in.

  “I am Marcello Ulino,” the man said, his voice not as happy as his face. “I am sorry for your loss and circumstances.”

  He and the boy lifted the casket to the counter in front of the bins, then the man balled a scrap of flannel and handed it to the boy who stood on a chair and stuffed the wad into the bell at the door to mute the merry sound. The boy seemed to stiffen when the man set his hand at the back of his knee.

  “If there are chairs we will arrange them,” Ulino said.

  “Only the few that you see,” Rosina said. “The coffin will remain closed?”

  “Yes. The flowers, we will arrange.”

  “Thank you.”

  Visitors dropped envelopes of money and Mass cards into a hand basket on a stool near San Gennaro. Women in black dresses and dark scarves huddled around Lucia.

  “How beautiful the flowers,” one said.

  “The kindness of our people,” another said, as the boy from the florist shop brought in a cross of red and white roses, a dazzle in sharp contrast to the gray day. It offered no card, but it did let Lucia recognize both the sender and another cross, colorless and shapeless, intended to linger long after the whites and reds had fallen gray.

  The shop filled with familiar faces, some in suits and dresses that Enzo and she had tailored. She knew some of the others, one of them the large Armando Peppone, communist organizer, publisher and editor of Mondo Nuovo. He wore his suit of white flannel with a black tie on a shirt wrinkled with humidity and perspiration. Peppone occasionally had delivered his newspaper to trigger political arguments with Enzo.

  The man’s face, usually red and bright, showed sadness to Lucia. She didn’t care for him, his presence intrusive, probing. Weeks past he had come into the shop with a box of pastries.

  “Signora, I offer condolences and the services I or Mondo Nuovo can provide,” he’d said with a shallow voice. “I have been missing the talks with your husband. We agreed little in matters of history and politics, but we respected each other.”

  “He spoke well of you.”

  “He appreciated music and the master painters, about which I could offer little.”

  Lucia had heard Enzo and Joe Petrosino discuss the opera and the arias that the peasants of the Mezzogiorno had sung in the fields, the plazas, and in their homes. But she’d never heard Enzo talk of paintings.

  Peppone said: “In fact, he claimed to be the caretaker of a particular work.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Yes. Has no one inquired of a painting?”

  If Peppone had not asked, she would not have remembered that Benny Carlucco had mentioned a painting.

  “No one has asked,” she said, and lost sight of the fat man as he stepped to the door.

  So Many Rescues

  Lucia was thirteen years old, attracting the smiles and glances of the men and boys who worked the DiStasi farm, one of them a day worker, an Algerian with teeth black and broken, skin the color of smoke, and the pale eyes of a lost spirit.

  At the end of a summer day, Lucia set home through a field that kept the caretaker cottage apart from the DiStasi home, and came across the Algerian sitting on the ground, his back against a wheel of the tool wagon. She did not like this man.

  He called to her, but she pretended not to hear and kept walking. She felt him come up behind her, then step beside her. He’d been a sailor, he said, and in all of the world had never seen a woman so beautiful.

  “I am not yet a woman,” she said.

  He gripped her face to kiss her, she refused. He insisted and they grappled and he threw her to the ground. She screamed and he put his hand over her mouth and bared her and bit her and tore her and she bled and she heard the cottage door and the voice of Cuccio, then saw the black fire of the dog’s eyes as his jaws arrested the attacker.

  Other dogs responded, Signore DiStasi in his house robe at a run behind them, his shotgun angled before him. As the rapist begged and yelled pitifully, Signore DiStasi left him to the dogs, carried Lucia to the cottage and Mama, and rushed back out.

  The frightened sobs of mother and daughter ended at the sound of the shotgun’s blast.

  “Finut’, figlia mi. Finut’.” Finished, my daughter. She let her eyes grow wide. “No one must know.”

  “Mama, I’ve done wrong?”

  “You did no wrong, daughter. But the tongues of gossip make the innocent suffer,” she whispered. “That is why no one must know.”

  No one knew, but Lucia suffered.

  Her wedding night, Enzo examined the sheets to find no blood, no evidence of broken virginity. He paced, arms stiff and hands locked behind him, while she sat at the kitchen table, with sobs that wouldn’t let her breathe.

  “I’ve done no wrong, Enzo,” she cried.

  She should have told him before she even got on the boat, he said, should have given him the respect an honorable man deserves. She watched his reflection in the dark of the window, watched the hands at his back open and close.

  He stopped pacing, turned and faced her, and with the lifted eyes of a plaster saint, he blessed himself and uttered the moans of a child banished to the limbo that anguished children of i putan’ must bear. Then he forced himself into her.

  ***

  At dawn on a Sunday morning, she woke with memory bright and thoughts clear. Don Cesare Strachi had freed her from the debts of the viewing, the mass and the burial. He had freed her too of the burden — the cross — of Enzo. Of this she allowed no doubt.

  At the kitchen table, a glass of milk, a pencil and paper, words to Don Cesare Strachi seemed to write themselves. Your benevolence warms me. You have assisted me during difficult times. I vow gratitude.

  She slipped the note into an envelope and stood at the kitchen window looking to where clouds and tenements shared shades of dawn. As a dapple of blue broke from a corner of sky, a group of young women in summer dresses chatted as they passed beneath the window.

  One of their dresses reminded Lucia of a wedding dress — not her dress, because it was white. She had seen it in dreams this past week, a night or two after Don Strachi’s visit to the shop and his offer of dinner.

  “I must finish the work before this day is over,” she had said.

  “Tomorrow then.”

  “But the work leaves me so tired, Don Cesare.”

  She glanced in the looking glass at herself and the growing child due
before Christmas.

  “Your sister will tend to the shop.”

  “My sister does more than she should be asked to do. I must not leave her another burden.”

  Strachi shifted so that window light reflected softly in Lucia’s eyes.

  “On Sunday — ”

  “On Sunday too there is work.”

  “Soon you will begin a life where work does not matter.”

  “How can that be? There is no life without work.”

  “I will arrive on Sunday evening to your home. There is no better time than dinner to discuss arrangements I have made.”

  Still at the kitchen window, she watched a green Cadillac stop at the curb and The Ox climb from the driver’s seat. Except for its soaring canvas roof, the automobile was open, its leather seats polished and inviting. Don Cesare tossed most of a cigar to the gutter and, as The Ox walked into the building, moved from the passenger seat to the back seat.

  Lucia heard The Ox climb the stairs and knock on the door.

  She kept it closed. “Yes?”

  “Don Cesare is here, Signora.”

  “But I have not agreed.”

  “Please, Signora.”

  She opened the door as far as the chain lock allowed. “Must we do what he asks?”

  “Please, Signora.”

  “I must dress,” she said but she was lying. She’d already bathed and dressed earlier.

  ***

  Lucia had rarely been in a restaurant, and never one like Bertolotti’s on West Third Street, out of the neighborhood. Strachi, his hand at her elbow, enjoyed greetings in English and in napulitan’, first by waiters, then by a man in a tux and a white carnation, who led them to a round table set for six.

  “Others will be with us?” Lucia asked.

  “Just us.”

  “So big a table?”

  “It is my table, always available.”

  “Where is your friend?”

  “He prefers to stand at the bar.”

  “It is how he guards you?”

  “He insists.”

  Feeling out of place became less to do with the careful glances of men at the bar than with her widow’s dress of what she once had thought an attractive material.

  She sat and the Camorrista settled his bulk next to her, their backs to a mahogany wall rich with paintings and sconces of glass tinted rosy with gas flames.