Bloodline (15 page)

The young men in the back room were noisier than ever after he left. It seemed that each one was trying to talk at the same time. She brought in a large pot of espresso, and as she left it on the table she heard someone say with great disdain, “The Mustache Petes will have to go.” She would have to ask Tina what the Mustache Petes were. Her friend always seemed to know such things. Across the street, the lights were on in the Falcones’ apartment. At least one light stayed on every night now, until Tommy came home from walking his police beat. Sometimes, if Sofia got out of bed early, she could look from the window and see him limping down the street toward his home.

She heard a truck driving down the street. It passed her building, then stopped at the corner; four workmen got out and began to lug into the truck the body of a dead horse, which had collapsed in the day’s heat and been allowed to lie where it fell. Watching out the window, Sofia wrapped her arms around herself and, despite the heat, tried to make herself shiver. Sometimes she was able to do that and it made the heat less noticeable. But tonight the shiver would not come.

Twice more since that first winter night, her father had come into her bed. She had not minded the one time because she felt sorry for him, but the last time—three weeks earlier—he had forced himself on her. Both times she had hated the thought of what she was doing, had known it was sick and evil, but after it was over her father lay next to her, holding her in his arms.

Sofia’s mind had told her to push her father away, to hate him, but her body wanted to be held, wanted to feel love. In some curious way, she blamed Tommy Falcone for her plight. Tina had been raised in a loving family, and as she grew up her thoughts had turned instantly, constantly to boys. Sofia’s thoughts never had. Somehow she had just expected that Tommy Falcone was going to marry her, and since that had already been decided in her mind, she did not have to think about other young men.

But now it was clear that Tommy had decided to chart his own path through life and Sofia was no part of it. He had destroyed her last decent chance to feel honest affection, and now she was stuck with only her father. She loathed what they had done—were still doing—together, and, yes, she suspected that if she kept on living here it would continue to go on.

The thought made her shudder.

This isn’t love,
she thought,
sleeping with your own father. It isn’t the way love is supposed to be. Love is warmth and sharing and friendship and poetry, and this is vile and sick.

And it is all I have … all I have ever had.

She had wanted to tell someone. She had thought of confessing her sin to Father Mario, but it was too unwholesome for even the church to forgive. She had not even been able to tell Tina, her best friend from whom she had no other secrets, although she had wanted to day after day. But something always stopped her from speaking.

I will tell her and she will regard me as an animal, as something from a barnyard, and will no longer be my friend.

That was the explanation she gave herself. But there was another fear, too. If she told Tina, she and Tina would talk about it. Tina was still a virgin and she would want to know how Sofia did it and how it felt, and Sofia would eventually have to tell her the awful, frightening truth: that she hated it, but once it started sometimes her body took over from her mind and she wanted it never to stop.

She had become a wanton, an animal. What decent man would ever want to be with her? What woman? Anyone?

Since that night five weeks earlier when she and Tina had gone looking for him on his beat over in the Village, she had thought of Tommy often, tried to imagine them living Tina’s dream of everybody living in the same house. She lay in bed at night, thinking of Tina and Tommy, and she touched herself, but her body would not respond to images of Tommy.

She had always assumed that she and Tommy would wed, and had never spent time thinking of other boys.

It was not as if she could not find someone else. Sofia was good-looking and she knew it, and she had for years understood the lustful gazes she drew while walking down the street. Every day she saw men who would race to jump into her bed.

Even Tommy’s cousin, Nilo, still looked at her that way, and he now lived in the same apartment building with her, and his landlady was a dried-up old prune. Yet, while Nilo was undeniably good-looking and seemed to be working regularly, Sofia feared that down deep he was just another Sicilian peasant. But even Nilo would be better than what she had now, she thought sadly.

Perhaps if she met other men. Justina had a small part-time job in a nearby factory office—gotten for her by her policeman father—and for several hours every day when she wasn’t home, practicing voice and piano, she met other people, people who weren’t from the neighborhood, who weren’t even Italian. Young men had even started calling for her at her house.

Sofia had wanted to get a job, too, maybe even in the place Tina worked so she could be close to her friend. It would have been easy for her father to get her such a job, he met so many people in the restaurant. But he had insisted that she stay in the restaurant and learn how to become his bookkeeper. She wasn’t even a regular waitress, only being called on to serve tables when someone failed to show up for work or if they were very busy. A waitressing job might have been bearable. At least waitresses got a chance to meet and talk to other people. Most of the time, Sofia sat alone in the back room under a dim light, looking at bills and invoices and rows of numbers.

She would never meet anyone
.

Tina had tried to help. She talked often of Sofia marrying Tommy, and while that idea did not terribly interest Sofia any longer, she liked being around Tina to hear her talk about weddings and marriage and love. The only problem with Tommy, Tina said, was that he was working all night as a policeman and going to school all day and there wasn’t time for anything else. Tommy was planning to be a rich lawyer someday, and that took a lot of work and did not leave much energy left over.

“Not even for you,” Tina had said. “But I’ll work at him.”

“Don’t even think of it, Tina,” Sofia had responded. “It doesn’t matter. You and I will be friends forever.”

Sofia walked away from the window and climbed into bed, kicking the covers away from her. She hesitated a moment, then said her nightly prayers, adding a quick Act of Contrition and begging Jesus to forgive her for what she had become, and stretched out. But sleep would not come.

Just a few blocks away, over in Greenwich Village, even this late at night, people were laughing, living, loving, she knew, and she was lying here like a bloated dying toad. She had dreamed of a life of freedom, of poetry … but none of the young lady poets of the Village, in all their works she had read, had anything to say that addressed how desolate and unhappy she had become.

She tried desperately to call up a poem, even a single line, that could tell her there was a bright side, but the only verse she heard in her head were lines and rhythms of death and despair.

Tears welled in Sofia’s eyes. She could not think of Tommy Falcone; all that was in her mind was some broad abstract idea of love. She forced herself to picture him and she saw Tommy and Tina and Sofia, all together, as one. Maybe Tommy could still be her way out of this trap. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, then dreamily pulled up her thin nightgown and rested her fingers between her thighs and slowly began to move them. Her breath started to come in little gasps. She could feel the beginning of that special feeling start to take hold. She worked her hand more quickly. Tommy’s face was gone now; all that was left in her mind was Tina. It was happening. She could feel it almost there.

And then the outside door to the apartment slammed open to a loud, rapid-fire burst of cursing and swearing. The feeling ebbed. For a moment, Sofia tried to keep it going, to get it back, but it was no use. She took her hand away and tried to fight back her fears and frustration. Outside her bedroom door, in the parlor beyond, the battle between her parents raged, growing in intensity.

Sofia was surprised. Whatever result taking her father to bed might have on her immortal soul, it had brought a few months of peace in the family, the first that Sofia had ever known. Not that things had greatly improved. Mrs. Mangini had grown even more withdrawn and cold to her husband than she had been before, and sometimes Sofia felt the old woman had guessed what was happening between her father and her.

But still, for a while, there had been no arguments or shouting and, best of all, there were no more beatings. Whatever else she had done, Sofia had brought her mother personal safety.

Now that seemed to be over. Matteo Mangini was cursing his wife with an unending stream of Italian invective. She pressed her fingertips into her ears, but she could still hear them.

“Fatti i cazzi tuoi,” her father shouted.

“Figlio di zoccola,” her mother responded.

Sofia listened, afraid to do anything, afraid not to. Abruptly, the swearing stopped and she could hear her father’s heavy footsteps lumbering across the wooden floor of the apartment toward her door. She heard his hand grab the doorknob.

Please, dear God, may he not come to me tonight. Please, may I not give in to him. Please, God, spare me this.

Then another stream of epithets erupted from her mother.

“Pisciasotto!” Sofia heard her call out. Matteo stopped with Sofia’s door open just a crack. Then he closed the door. She could hear him walking away, heavily, deliberately.

Sofia was frightened. She got out of bed, pulled a robe around her, and tiptoed to the bedroom door. When she opened it a crack, she saw her mother backed against the far wall. Matteo had one hand over her face and was banging her head against the wall. With the other hand, he had a grip around his wife’s neck and was trying to lift her off the floor.

Sofia watched in absolute horror for the space of two or three heartbeats. If she did not do something immediately, her mother would be dead. She threw open the door and ran into the living room, throwing herself on her father’s back and clawing and hammering at him.

“Papa, stop! Papa, stop!”

At first, it did no good. It was as if he were a robot, made of steel, unable to be moved from his path. Then, slowly, he became aware of his daughter’s attack. He dropped his wife into a heap on the floor, reached out and plucked Sofia off his back, and threw her onto the couch.

She started to get up and he slapped her down with a brutal combination of backhand and open-hand slaps. She slumped back, blood seeping from the corner of her mouth where his heavy ring had caught her.

Sofia saw his eyes were glassy from drinking too much. Her mother struggled to raise herself into a sitting position on the floor.

Matteo looked back at her, then at his daughter again. Slowly, elaborately, as if commanding his wife to bear witness, he pulled off his suspenders, opened his trouser fly, and slid his pants down his legs.

“Watch this, you dried-up old crone,” he rasped bitterly.

He moved toward Sofia and extended a hand to touch her cheek. She stiffened. She could not stand it anymore, not anymore, not this way. She wished it had never started, but she vowed it would end here. As Matteo leaned over her, reaching inside his khaki-colored underwear, Sofia stretched backward, grasping for something, anything that would help. Her hand found a table lamp, closed around it, then, with strength she did not know she had, smashed it across the side of her father’s head.

Matteo fell backward, away from his daughter, off the couch. He was down, moaning, but not unconscious. Sofia backed away from him, clambering over the edge of the couch and hurrying toward the apartment door. From the corner of her eye, she could see her mother slowly rising.

Wearing only her robe and nightgown, Sofia opened the door and ran out into the hall and toward the stairs. As she started down, the front door of the building opened and Nilo entered. He saw her above him, saw the blood on her face, and ran up the steps and put his arms around her.

“What happened? What’s wrong?” he asked. His voice was thick and slurred, and Sofia smelled strong wine on his breath. Still, for a moment she thought of telling him, of even asking to spend the night safely in his room. But it would just be too scandalous.

“I’m all right,” she said, and pulled away from him and ran down the steps and out the front door.

As Nilo came down to watch, he saw her clamber up the fire escape across the street and sneak up the two flights until she was outside Tina’s bedroom, tapping on the window. He waited until he saw the window open and Sofia climb through before he went back inside.

He thought for a moment of going to the Manginis’ apartment and seeing if things were all right, but then put the thought aside and stumbled up the steps toward his own furnished room.
I have my own problems. Let Sofia deal with hers. I can’t take care of the world.

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Sofia and Tina managed to leave the Falcone apartment without anyone seeing them. Sofia was wearing a dress of Tina’s; she had applied a lot of powder to cover the bruise on her face.

On the street, Tina said, “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.”

“Then you tell me what is,” Sofia said.

“We could go over to Mount Carmel and talk to Mario,” Tina said. “He’s a priest. He knows how to take care of things. Or you could let my father go talk to your father and get it all straightened out.”

Sofia shook her head. Despite their closeness, she had not told Tina what had actually happened, only that Mr. Mangini had beaten her and her mother up. Sofia decided that the rest of it must remain a secret.

“It’s a family matter,” she said. “I shouldn’t even have come over to you last night. But I didn’t have anyplace else to go.”

“That’s a fine thing to say,” Tina snapped. “I’m your best friend, in case you’ve forgotten.” She already knew there was something Sofia had not told her, and she had guessed what it was.