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The Black Madonna Page 6


  Nicky’s mother stepped up close to the bed. She leaned over her husband and he lifted his face to her. She caught up the collar of his soft cotton pajamas in both hands. “You never talk to me like that again,” she said. “You do like I tell you and then you leave. Everything’s changed. Anything I do now, I do for Nicky.”

  Angelo leaned back into the pillow. She pulled at him, ripped his collar, and when she let go, he fingered the torn cloth. His eyes were wet again. She turned to go. The men in the room looked down suddenly, pretending to see the cards, the letters, the magazines they held in their hands.

  “Teresa,” Angelo called. His voice was hoarse.

  “Don’t forget,” she said. “I know where to find you.”

  Teresa took the El back downtown. She was on Spring Street before she knew it. Until she climbed the four flights to the apartment, she didn’t realize how much her feet hurt.

  The morning after she had thrown away her treasures, Teresa lay in bed until noon. Nicky had been awake for hours but he lay there, waiting for her to move, to say something. He was frightened that she was dead and he was afraid to look at her, to touch her. He cried silently, his hand over his mouth. He was hungry. He had to pee. He was sure she was dead. He was almost hysterical when she turned to him in the bed and touched his face.

  “Nicola,” she said. “What is it?” He didn’t answer and she pulled him against her. She kissed his face and his ears and his fingers. She lifted the covers and kissed his feet.

  He giggled when she did this, but then he was angry. “Why did you do that?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Stay asleep so long. I thought you was dead. I have to pee.”

  “So why didn’t you go pee?”

  “I was scared. Why’d you scare me?”

  “So what?” she told him. “So I slept a long time, so you thought I was dead. What does it matter? I’m alive now, no? It’s a miracle. Why are you crying? You’re such a baby. I don’t have a son. I have a little girl.” She laughed at him, grabbed him between his legs. “Let me see,” she teased him. “Are you a little girl?”

  He lay in her arms and she stroked his hair. She sang him a Neapolitan song, a song about women. You’re like a cup of coffee, the lover sings, bitter until I stir you and the sugar comes to the top.

  “It’s going to be okay, Nicola,” she told him.

  “But you took everything, the stuff my father sent. What’d you do with it?”

  “We don’t need any of it,” she said. “Your father’s coming back. He’s coming back to see you, from halfway around the world, all the way back to Spring Street.”

  Nicky sat up and stared at her. She put pillows behind his head, ran her fingers along his arm. “He’s going to bring the money for your operation. He’s going to buy you toys and ice cream and say hello to all your friends.”

  “You saw him? He’s coming here?”

  “He’s coming, for sure.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.” She took his hands, kissed his open palms, and held them against her face. “I’ll make you breakfast,” she said, getting up, “coffee and milk, with an egg in it.”

  “And sugar.”

  “Spoonfuls of sugar . . . and you can sit by the window on Spring Street and call your friend Salvatore to come over. He’s a good boy, that one, just like you.”

  “And Jumbo . . .”

  “No,” she said. “He’s bad luck, that one. He’s no good.”

  “Mama . . .”

  “No,” she said, helping him out of the bed. “Don’t bother me. I said ‘no.’”

  Teresa went down that evening to sit on the stoop. Jumbo’s mother Antoinette was sitting at the bottom, and when Teresa saw her there, she stopped and sat on the top step next to Magdalena. She told Magdalena that Nicky’s father was coming home. There was no keeping him at sea, she said, after he heard about what had happened to his boy.

  She said this loudly enough for all the women to hear. They stopped talking and looked up at her. This was news. They could talk about Loretta Pagliani’s fallen womb anytime.

  The women moved nearer to her, except for Antoinette, who stayed where she was, and even slid a little farther away and looked out into the street.

  “When he heard about the accident,” Teresa said, “he made plans to come right home.”

  Antoinette blew her nose into a dirty handkerchief and stuck it in a big black pocketbook that swung from her arm. “Why now?” she said. “What took him so long?”

  “What difference does it make?” Vicky Palermo said. “He’s coming, isn’t he?”

  “Well, I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “It takes a long time to find a man at sea,” Teresa said. She kept her gaze level as though no one of importance sat below her. “He’s halfway around the world. It takes a long time.”

  Magdalena put a hand on Teresa’s shoulder. “You have a good man,” she told her. “He’s always taken care of you and Nicky.”

  Antoinette opened her pocketbook, took out her handkerchief, and blew her nose again. Then she stood up. “I’m going in,” she said. “It’s getting too windy down here.” She pushed past the women. “Excuse me,” she said, climbing over them. She stepped on the hem of Teresa’s dress.

  “Going to clean your house?” Teresa called after her, but Antoinette kept going.

  Teresa started talking again about how Nicky’s father was coming back and about all the places he would take them and all the presents he would bring. But before anyone could answer, she stood up and said good night.

  When the door had shut behind her, Mary Ziganetti shook her head. “This I want to see,” she said.

  Magdalena turned to her. “If she says he’s coming, why shouldn’t he come? Why would she lie?”

  “Ah, Magdalena,” Annamaria Petrino said. “You’re still a girl. You don’t know anything about life.”

  “So you say,” Magdalena answered. She stood up when she said this. Vicky Palermo laughed and tugged at the hem of her dress to get her to sit down again but Magdalena caught her dress and held it against her legs. She walked down the steps, careful not to step on fingers and toes.

  “And you, of all people to stick up for her. There’s no love lost between you two, believe me,” Mary Ziganetti said to Magdalena’s back. “She thought that boy was hers before you came. Who knows what she had in her mind or what went on?”

  Magdalena turned and narrowed her eyes at them. She raised her arm and made a screwing motion into the air with her hand before she went on down the street.

  “Eh,” Annamaria Petrino said. “In Sicily, they don’t leave a man and a woman in the same room alone. They’re no fools.”

  “What can you do?” Mary Ziganetti said when Magdalena had gone. “Naive, that’s what she is.”

  “That’s not what I hear,” Annamaria Petrino whispered.

  “You’re terrible,” Mary Ziganetti said. “Filthy-minded. Now tell me, what do you hear about her?” And Vicky Palermo moved down a step, closer to Mary Ziganetti.

  The next morning Teresa went to the phone booth in the luncheonette on Varick Street and called the hospital in the Bronx.

  “Deceased,” the man at the other end of the line said.

  “He’s dead?”

  “Dead.”

  “No,” Teresa told him. “It can’t be. I just saw him. I was talking to him yesterday.”

  “Well, you ain’t gonna talk to him today.”

  “Check again. Angelo . . . Angelo Sabatini . . . S-A-B-A-T-I-N-I.”

  “Lady, he’s dead . . . this morning . . . heart attack.”

  “How could you tell me this?”

  “Listen, lady, you called me. I didn’t call you.”

  Teresa leaned against the wall of the phone booth. She clenched her teeth. “That sonofabitch,” she said. “Now he had to go and die? He couldn’t wait a few weeks?” She slammed down the receiver and slid into the seat in the corner of the phone booth. A woman
outside knocked on the glass door and pointed to the watch on her arm. Teresa turned her back to her and put another coin in the telephone and called back the hospital.

  “Where is he?” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Angelo Sabatini. Where did they take him?”

  “Is that you again, lady?”

  “Where did you say he was?”

  The man at the other end sighed. “Wait a minute,” he said and dropped the phone. The woman outside the phone booth banged on the glass door and made faces. Teresa made an obscene gesture with her free hand. “Body was released to Damiano’s Funeral Home,” the man at the other end of the line told her.

  “Where is it?”

  “Damiano’s, Burke Avenue in the Bronx. Got it? Satisfied?”

  “Thank you,” Teresa said. She hung up, put in more money, called the candy store under her house, and asked for Dante. The woman outside the phone booth pushed against the glass door. Teresa held it closed with her foot.

  She lifted her face to get the breeze from the little ceiling fan up in the corner of the booth, closed her eyes, and waited for Dante to come to the phone. By the time he got there, she had to put in another nickel to keep the connection, and then she asked him if he would look out for Nicky. She told him to buy a ham-and-cheese sandwich in Virginia’s on Sullivan Street and one for himself, and to tell Virginia to put it on her bill, and to tell Nicky not to worry, that she would be home early, before dinner. She had to go uptown to see the doctor again, she told Dante. “You tell that to Nicky,” she said.

  She opened the door of the phone booth and stepped on the foot of the woman who had banged on the glass. She pushed past the line of people waiting and she ignored the things they said to her. She walked east on Houston Street and rode the El up to Fordham Road. It was familiar now and she stopped the first person she met on the street and asked how to get to Damiano’s Funeral Home.

  “A few blocks down,” he told her, and when she found it, she stood outside across the street and admired the entrance. The name was in stained glass above the double doors: Damiano Funeral Home, it said, established 1895.

  Inside the entrance lobby, a man sat behind a desk off to the right, and across from him was a young woman, her eyes red, a handkerchief in her hand. She kept wiping her nose, twisting the handkerchief around in her fingers.

  Teresa stepped up to the desk. “Excuse me,” she said.

  “One moment, signora,” the man said.

  Teresa turned to the woman. “Sorry,” she said to her. “I just want to ask a question.” The woman looked up. Confused, Teresa thought, almost terrified.

  “Please,” the man said. “I’ll be with you in a minute. My daughter’s just lost her husband. We’re . . .”

  Teresa couldn’t believe her good luck. She felt a sudden affection for the Bronx. “You’re Damiano, the undertaker,” she said. “Am I right? And you . . .” she said to the woman, “you’re Celestina, Angelo Sabatini’s wife.”

  The undertaker stood up and came from around the desk. “How can I help you?” he said. “Who are you?”

  “Me? I’m Angelo Sabatini’s wife, the real one.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Damiano said. “Get out.”

  But Teresa stood there, secure in her position, empowered, as confident as the devil. She would congratulate herself later. She took out the piece of paper, folded many times, that she had been carrying with her, her marriage certificate. She handed it to Damiano, and with it a wedding photo. She stood next to Angelo in the photo, in the white wedding gown they had bought in a secondhand store on the Lower East Side for fifteen dollars, Angelo in the black suit that was still hanging in the closet on Spring Street.

  Celestina Sabatini stood up. She pulled the picture from her father’s hand. The marriage certificate floated to the floor. Her tears had dried. “What is this? Who are you?” she screamed at Teresa.

  “I told you. Angelo’s real wife.” Teresa’s tone was even, almost pleasant. “And I’m only sorry he had such an easy death.”

  Celestina Sabatini put her hands in her hair and pulled. She opened her mouth and wailed. She rocked in her chair until it fell over and she toppled to the floor. Damiano the undertaker, her father, knelt over her, fumbling for the smelling salts he kept in his pocket to revive grieving widows. “Madonna,” he cried out to heaven, then, “Celestina . . . Celestina . . . I told you from the beginning that sonofabitch was no good. What’d you ever get from him? He should rot in hell.”

  Damiano held his daughter’s head off the floor and stroked her face. She sobbed in his arms. The sleeve of his jacket was wet and slimy. He looked up at Teresa. “What’d you come here for?” he asked her. “Trouble? What do you want? You think he had something? He was a broken-down valise.”

  “I want the body,” Nicky’s mother told him.

  They stared at her.

  “No,” Celestina shouted. “Never . . . the disgrace . . . what would people say?”

  “Exactly why I want the body,” Teresa said.

  Damiano looked at her closely. “Why should we do that? Give you the body?”

  “Because he was my husband, my legal husband, and I should bury him. And then . . .” She paused. “There’s the Social Security, the pension. It’s mine if I want it. Your daughter gets nothing.”

  “Get her out. Witch . . . devil . . . whore,” Celestina was shouting while her father held her up.

  Teresa looked her over. Scrawny, she thought, and no children. She turned to Damiano. “Give me the body,” she said. “Pay for the nice funeral I’m gonna give Angelo and I say nothing. Your daughter can have the Social Security. It’s a good country, America, no? She can even have the pension. We forget everything and everybody’s happy.”

  Teresa had been paying an insurance policy on Angelo for years. She would put aside money every week and when Mr. Schimel would come to collect it the first Friday of the month, she would make him a cup of tea. He would hold the sugar cube in his teeth while he drank it. He was a nice man, Mr. Schimel, rumored to be the father of certain neighborhood children, all boys. Teresa liked him. Because of Mr. Schimel, she could take care of herself.

  Teresa’s feet hurt. She sat down on one of the chairs against the wall meant for the mourners. She crossed her legs at the ankle and reached over and took a peppermint from a glass dish on Damiano’s desk. She dropped the cellophane wrapping in the ashtray near her chair.

  “Never . . . never,” Celestina cried over and over.

  “Celestina,” her father said. “Let’s think about this.”

  “But what will they say? No wake . . . no funeral . . . no grave? No, I can’t. I don’t care what she says. Angie’s my husband.”

  “Of course he is, cara.”

  Teresa stood up. “Angelo’s dead. He’s nobody’s husband anymore.” She walked to the door. Damiano followed her. Celestina was close behind. He caught up with her outside.

  “Wait, signora,” he said. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “I think I’m being fair,” Teresa said. “After all, what am I asking for? Do I want anything for myself?”

  “You’re right,” he said. Damiano looked back at his daughter. Her makeup was smeared in lines down her cheeks. Her hair stuck out from her head in greasy knots where she had pulled at it. The perfect widow, Teresa thought, like in the old country, and she pushed a stray piece of hair back behind her ear.

  “Where do you want the body sent?” Damiano whispered.

  Teresa took a walk around the neighborhood before she got on the El and went back home. She thought she would like it here, if things had been different. She thought about all the other places where she had never been, only a train ride away. When Nicky could walk again, she told herself, they would go places, take the train and see things.

  Downtown on Sullivan Street, she went into Nucciarone’s funeral home and told the undertaker to expect her husband’s body. She told him she wanted the best for Angelo and she told him whe
re to send the bill. The undertaker told her how sorry he was, how death was always so terrible and unexpected, and when he took her in the freight elevator to the room downstairs, she chose the bronze casket, the one lined in white velvet.

  He complimented her on her choice. He smiled at her and held her hand. The body would be ready tomorrow afternoon, he said, and he left to call the newspapers.

  The next afternoon, the people waited outside the funeral parlor. There was no more room on the sidewalk and they stood in the street. The men laughed and ground out cigarettes underneath their polished black shoes. The women whispered, heads covered. They waited for the widow and her son to arrive, to go in first. The children held their mother’s hands, restless, wanting to go in, to get it over with, to go to the park, to get ice cream, to do all the things they were promised after they had visited the dead.

  JoJo Santulli drove Teresa and Nicky to the funeral home in his uncle’s car. Dante was in the car, too, sitting in the front next to JoJo, and he opened the door for Teresa and helped her carry Nicky into the funeral parlor. Teresa and Dante held Nicky between them. His feet dragged along the ground. Everyone followed behind and held their breath.

  “Poverino,” someone said.

  “And now this,” someone else said.

  The wake was in the back room, the big room, and the procession moved slowly along the narrow hall, Nicky and Teresa and Dante in front, following the undertaker in his long black coat, striped trousers, and top hat.

  Over the coffin was an American flag in red and white and blue carnations. “He was a hero in the war,” Teresa told the florist when she ordered it. There was a bleeding heart of red roses that said “Beloved Wife,” with red satin ribbons streaming from its center, and a ship of white roses from Nicky. Underneath the ship was a sea of carnations dyed blue.

  Angelo Sabatini lay inside the coffin in a double-breasted pinstriped suit, a small diamond stickpin in his tie, and the white velvet lining tucked under so that everyone could see that the coffin was bronze. He was still young when he died and he had died suddenly. “The perfect combination,” old man Nucciarone told Teresa when he saw the body. “I’ll make him look so good, no one will believe he’s dead. Trust me,” he said, and he patted her hand.