Rocco was happy for him, lending him shirts and ties, throwing open his big wardrobe of suits. Lying in the darkness before sleep, he would wait for Bandini’s account of that day. Concerning other matters, they spoke in English, but of the Widow it was always in Italian, whispered and secretive.
‘She wants to marry me,’ Bandini would say. ‘She was on her knees, begging me to divorce Maria.’
‘
Si
,’ Rocco answered. ‘Indeed!’
‘Not only that, but she promised to settle a hundred thousand dollars on me.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I am considering it,’ he lied.
Rocco gasped, swung around in the darkness.
‘Considering it!
Sangue de la Madonna!
Have you lost your mind? Take it! Take fifty thousand! Ten thousand! Take anything – do it for nothing!’
No, Bandini told him, the proposition was out of the question. A hundred thousand would certainly go a long way toward solving his problems, but Rocco seemed to forget that there was a question of honor here, and Bandini had no desire to dishonor his wife and children for mere gold. Rocco groaned and tore his hair, muttering curses.
‘Jackass!’ he said. ‘Ah
Dio!
What a jackass!’
It shocked Bandini. Did Rocco mean to tell him that he would actually sell his honor for money – for a hundred thousand dollars? Exasperated, Rocco snapped the light switch above the bed. Then he sat up, his face livid, his eyes protruding, his red fists clinching the collar of his winter underwear. ‘You wish to know if I would sell my honor for a
hundred thousand dollars?’ he demanded. ‘Then look here!’ With that he gave his arm a jerk, tearing open his underwear in front, the buttons flying and scattering over the floor. He sat pounding his naked chest savagely over his heart. ‘I would not only sell my honor,’ he shouted. ‘I would sell myself body and soul, for at least fifteen hundred dollars!’
There was the night when Rocco asked Bandini to introduce him to the Widow Hildegarde. Bandini shook his head doubtfully. ‘You would not understand her, Rocco. She is a woman of great learning, a college graduate.’
‘Pooh!’ Rocco said indignantly. ‘Who the hell are you?’
Bandini pointed out that the Widow Hildegarde was a constant reader of books, whereas Rocco could neither read nor write in English. Furthermore, Rocco still spoke English poorly. His presence would only do harm to the rest of the Italian people.
Rocco sneered. ‘What of that?’ he said. ‘There are other things besides reading and writing.’ He crossed the room to the clothes closet and flung open the door. ‘Reading and writing!’ he sneered. ‘And what good has it done you? Do you have as many suits of clothes as I? As many neckties? I have more clothes than the president of the University of Colorado – what good have reading and writing done him?’
He smiled that Rocco should reason thus, but Rocco had the right idea. Bricklayers and college presidents, they were all the same. A matter of where and why.
‘I will speak to the Widow on your behalf,’ he promised.
‘But she is not interested in what a man wears.
Dio cane
, it is just the other way around.’
Rocco nodded sagely.
‘Then I have nothing to worry about.’
His last hours with the Widow were like the first. Hello and goodbye, they added up to the same thing. They were strangers, with passion alone to bridge the chasm of their differences, and there was no passion that afternoon.
‘My friend Rocco Saccone,’ Bandini said. ‘He’s a good bricklayer too.’
She lowered her book and looked at him over the rim of her gold reading glasses.
‘Indeed,’ she murmured.
He twirled his whiskey glass.
‘He’s a good man, all right.’
‘Indeed,’ she said again. For some minutes she continued to read. Perhaps he should not have said that. The obvious implication startled him.
He sat laboring in the muddle he had made of it, the sweat breaking out, an absurd grin plastered across the sickly convolutions of his face. More silence. He looked out the window. Already the night was at work, rolling shadowy carpets across the snow. Soon it would be time to go.
It was bitterly disappointing. If only something beside the beast stalked between himself and this woman. If he could but tear away that curtain the fact of her wealth spread before him. Then he might talk as he did to any woman. She made him so stupid.
Jesu Christi!
He was no fool. He could talk. He had a mind which reasoned and fought through hardships far greater than hers. Of books, no. There had been no time in his driven, worried life for books. But he had read deeper into the language of life than she, despite her ubiquitous books. He brimmed with a world of things of speak about.
As he sat there, staring at her for what he believed to be the last time, he realized that he was not afraid of this woman.
That he had never been afraid of her, that it was she who feared him. The truth angered him, his mind shuddering at the prostitution to which he had subjected his flesh. She did not look up from her book. She did not see the brooding insolence twisting one side of his face. Suddenly he was glad it was the end. With an unhurried swagger he rose and crossed to the window.
‘Getting dark,’ he said. ‘Pretty soon I’ll go away and won’t come back no more.’
The book came down automatically.
‘Did you say something, Svevo?’
‘Pretty soon I won’t come back no more.’
‘It
has
been delightful, hasn’t it?’
‘You don’t understand nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’
‘What do you mean?’
He did not know. It was there, yet not there. He opened his mouth to speak, opened his hands and spread them out.
‘A woman like you …’
He could say no more. If he succeeded, it would be crude and badly phrased, defeating the thing he wanted to explain. He shrugged futilely.
Let it go, Bandini; forget it.
She was glad to see him sit down again, smiling her satisfaction and returning to her book. He looked at her bitterly. This woman – she did not belong to the race of human beings. She was so cold, a parasite upon his vitality. He resented her politeness: it was a lie. He despised her complacency, he loathed her good breeding. Surely, now that it was over and he was going away, she could put down that book and talk to him. Perhaps they would say nothing important, but he was willing to try, and she was not.
‘I musn’t forget to pay you,’ she said.
A hundred dollars. He counted it, shoved it into his back pocket.
‘Is it enough?’ she asked.
He smiled; ‘If I did not need this money a million dollars would not be enough.’
‘Then you want more. Two hundred?’
Better not to quarrel. Better to leave and be gone forever, without bitterness. He pushed his fists through his coat sleeves and chewed the end of his cigar.
‘You’ll come to see me, won’t you?’
‘To be sure, Mrs Hildegarde.’
But he was certain he would never return.
‘Goodbye, Mr Bandini.’
‘Goodbye, Mrs Hildegarde.’
‘A merry Christmas.’
‘The same to you, Mrs Hildegarde.’
Goodbye and hello again in less than an hour.
The Widow opened the door to his knocking and saw the dotted handkerchief masking all but his bloodshot eyes. Her breath shot back in horror.
‘God in heaven!’
He stamped the snow from his feet and brushed the front of his coat with one hand. She could not see the bitter pleasure in the smile behind the handkerchief, nor hear the muffled Italian curses. Someone was to blame for this, and it was not Svevo Bandini. His eyes accused her as he stepped inside, snow from his shoes melting in a pool on the carpet.
She retreated to the bookcase, watching him speechlessly. The heat from the fireplace stung his face. With a groan of
rage he hurried to the bathroom. She followed, standing at the open door as he blubbered into fistfuls of cold water. Her cheeks crept with pity as he gasped. When he looked into the mirror he saw the twisted, torn image of himself and it repulsed him, and he shook his head in a rage of denial.
‘Ah, poor Svevo!’
What was it? What had happened?
‘What do you suppose?’
‘Your wife?’
He dabbed the cuts with salve.
‘But this is impossible!’
‘Bah.’
She stiffened, lifting her chin proudly.
‘I tell you it’s impossible. Who could have told her?’
‘How do I know who told her?’
He found a bandage kit in the cabinet and began tearing strips of gauze and adhesive. The tape was tough. He shrieked a volley of curses at its obstinacy, breaking it against his knee with a violence that staggered him backward toward the bathtub. In triumph he held the strip of tape before his eyes and leered at it.
‘Don’t get tough with
me
!’ he said to the tape.
Her hand was raised to help him.
‘No,’ he growled. ‘No piece of tape can get the best of Svevo Bandini.’
She turned away. When she came back he was applying gauze and tape. There were four long strips on either cheek, reaching from his eyeballs to his chin. He saw her and was startled. She was dressed to go out: fur coat, blue scarf, hat, and galoshes. That quiet elegance of her appeal, that rich simplicity of her tiny hat tipped jauntily to the side,
the bright wool scarf spilling from the luxurious collar of her fur, the gray galoshes with their neat buckles and the long gray driving gloves, stamped her again for what she was, a rich woman subtly proclaiming her difference. He was awed.
‘The door at the end of the hall is an extra bedroom,’ she said. ‘I should be back around midnight.’
‘You’re going someplace?’
‘It’s Christmas Eve.’ She said it as though, had it been any other day, she would have stayed home.
She was gone, the sound of her car drifting to nothing down the mountain road. Now a strange impulse seized him. He was alone in the house, all alone. He walked to her room and groped and searched through her effects. He opened drawers, examined old letters and papers. At the dressing table he lifted the cork from every perfume bottle, sniffed it, and returned it exactly to where he had found it. Here was a desire he had long felt, bursting out of control now that he was alone, this desire to touch and smell and fondle and examine at leisure everything that was her possession. He caressed her lingerie, pressed her cold jewels between his palms. He opened inviting little drawers in her writing desk, studied the fountain pens and pencils, the bottles and boxes therein. He peered into shelves, searched through trunks, removing each item of apparel, every nicknack and jewel and souvenir, studied each with care, evaluated it, and returned it to the place whence it had come. Was he a thief groping for plunder? Did he seek the mystery of this woman’s past? No and no again. Here was a new world and he wished to know it well. That and no more.
It was after eleven when he sank into the deep bed in the
extra room. Here was a bed the like of which his bones had never known. It seemed that he sank miles before dropping to sweet rest. Around his ears the satin eiderdown blankets pressed their gentle warm weight. He sighed with something like a sob. This night at least, there would be peace. He lay talking to himself softly in the language of his nativity.
‘All will be well – a few days and all will be forgotten. She needs me. My children need me. A few more days and she will get over it.’
From afar he heard the tolling of bells, the call for midnight Mass at the Church of the Sacred Heart. He rose to one elbow and listened. Christmas morning. He saw his wife kneeling at Mass, his three sons in pious procession down the main altar as the choir sang ‘Adeste Fideles.’ His wife, his pitiful Maria. Tonight she would be wearing that battered old hat, as old as their marriage, remade year after year to meet as far as possible the new styles. Tonight – nay, at that very moment – he knew she knelt on wearied knees, her trembling lips moving in prayer for himself and his children. Oh star of Bethlehem! Oh birth of the infant Jesus!
Through the window he saw the tumbling flakes of snow, Svevo Bandini in another woman’s bed as his wife prayed for his immortal soul. He lay back, sucking the big tears that streamed down his bandaged face. Tomorrow he would go home again. It had to be done. On his knees he would sue for forgiveness and peace. On his knees, after the kids were gone and his wife was alone. He could never do it in their presence. The kids would laugh and spoil it all.
One glance at the mirror next morning killed his determination. There was the hideous image of his ravaged face, now purple and swollen, black puffs under the eyes. He could
meet no man with those telltale scars. His own sons would flinch in horror. Growling and cursing, he threw himself into a chair and tore at his hair.
Jesu Christi!
He dared not even walk the streets. No man, seeing him, could fail to read the language of violence scrawled upon his countenance. For all the lies he might tell – that he had fallen on the ice, that he had fought a man over a card game – there could be no doubt that a woman’s hands had torn his cheeks.
He dressed, and tiptoed past the Widow’s closed door to the kitchen, where he ate a breakfast of bread and butter and black coffee. After washing the dishes he returned to his room. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of himself on the dresser mirror. The reflection angered him so that he clinched his fists, and controlled the desire to smash the mirror. Moaning and cursing, he threw himself on the bed, his head rolling from side to side as he realized it might be a week before the scratches would heal and the swelling subside so that his face was fit for the gaze of human society.
A sunless Christmas Day. The snowing had stopped. He lay listening to the patter of melting icicles. Toward noon he heard the cautious knocking of the Widow’s knuckles on the door. He knew it was she, yet he leaped out of bed like a criminal pursued by the police.
‘Are you there?’ she asked.
He could not face her.
‘One moment!’ he said.
Quickly he opened the top dresser drawer, whipped out a hand towel, and bound it over his face, masking all but his eyes. Then he opened the door. If she was startled by his appearance, she did not show it. Her hair was pulled
up in a thin net, her plump figure wrapped in a frilled pink dressing gown.