Let me hear you make a good Act of Contrition.”
I could not remember how to begin.
“O, my God, I am heartily sorry . . .” Guglielmo coaxed.
“O, my God, I am heartily sorry . . .” I repeated. Stopped.
“For having offended Thee.”
“For having offended Thee.”
“And I detest all my sins because . . .”
“Because . . .”
“Because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, but most of all . . .”
“But most of all . . . but most of all . . . because they offend
Thee
, my God, Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and . . . and I forget the rest.”
“And to amend my life.”
“And to amend my life.”
“Amen.”
“Amen.”
When I got home from the church that night, I walked into the kitchen. The baby was sleeping by the stove in her cradle. Ignazia I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 741
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and Prosperine were at the table, eating their supper. Minestrone, it was—I still remember. Minestrone and bread still warm from the oven. Real bread—not that American cotton I had been buying downtown. The soup had fogged up the kitchen windows.
I sat down with the two of them. “Get me a little of that stuff,” I told Prosperine. “It smells pretty good.”
She looked at Ignazia and Ignazia looked back at her. Then Ignazia’s chin shook a little bit—she was holding back her tears. It was she who got up and got the soup. And the three of us sat there and ate. Soup and bread. It was the first meal I’d eaten at my house since the night Prosperine had drunk my wine and told her crazy story. It was good soup, too—just right. My wife, may she rest in peace, could always take a little of this, a little of that, and make good
zuppa.
15 August 1949
The child was baptized Concettina Pasqualina, in honor of Mama and my brother Pasquale. Tusia and his wife were
gombare
and
madrina
. Just as he promised, Father Guglielmo came after the christening and blessed my house. He went from room to room (even the bathroom at the top of the stairs), mumbling his prayers in Latin and sprinkling holy water from the small vessel he had brought. He blessed the cellar last of all, stood right on the spot where Pasquale had landed and lifted the monsignor’s curse. Then he came back upstairs to the dining room table and ate what Ignazia, Prosperine, and
Signora
Tusia had cooked—
antipasto, pisci,
cavatelli, vitella
with roasted potatoes. Nothing but the best and plenty of it. I had bought the veal from Hurok myself. “He’s busy in the back,” his son had told me. “I can help you, Mr. Tempesta.” But I made him get the old man. “Give me the best veal in the store,” I told Hurok. “The stuff you sell to the big shots.” He told me the best would cost me more. I told him to worry about the meat and I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 742
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let me worry about the price. It was good veal, I remember. You could cut through it like butter. And it
should
have been tender, too.
Madonna!
That thieving Jew charged me thirty-five cents a pound!
I opened a savings account for Concettina at the Dime Bank of Three Rivers (twenty-five dollars) and let Ignazia order a child’s buggy from Sears and Roebuck’s book. There were two of them on the same page—one cheaper, the other better built but overpriced.
“Which should I get?” Ignazia asked.
“Get the sturdy one,” I said. “What do you think? That I want the thing falling apart on the street with the girl in it? Use your head for once!”
That
carrozza
from Sears and Roebuck helped take away some of Ignazia’s shyness around the
’Mericana
women on Hollyhock Avenue. Concettina had red hair and a homely lip, but she was blessed with a sweet and shy
disposizione
that sometimes reminded me of my brother Pasquale. Neighborhood ladies would stop for a little visit with the child and talk about their own children with Ignazia. These little visits led to cups of tea in other women’s parlors and walks into town for shopping. Ignazia reported every little conversation to me. This one said this! That one told her that!
I allowed and encouraged these exchanges. It gave Ignazia practice in speaking English and got her away from the influence of that other one. The more comfortable my wife became with decent women, the more she would free herself from that crazy friend of hers who smoked a pipe and was beneath her.
She and Prosperine still shared the back bedroom together, but now Ignazia began to let the other one know who was the woman of the house and who was the servant. One morning, when I got home from work, I walked in the front door and heard Ignazia and Prosperine in the middle of an argument. I followed their voices through the house to the back bedroom. “What’s the matter?” I asked my wife.
“Nothing’s the matter,” she said, glaring at Prosperine. “I only wish that some people knew their place, that’s all. When I give her I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 743
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money and tell her to walk to the market and buy a pound of cheese, I mean now, not when she feels like it.”
I grabbed Prosperine by the arm and walked her over to Ignazia.
The two of them looked away from each other. “This is my wife and the
padrona
of this house,” I reminded the Monkey. “We give you a place to sleep at night because you do what she says to do in the daytime. If she tells you ‘Go and get me some cheese,’ then go and get it. If she says ‘Lick the dirt off my shoes,’ then lick it. Or else you might find yourself sleeping outside in the cold. Understand?”
The Monkey scowled, said nothing. I squeezed her arm a little tighter. “Understand?” I asked again.
“All right, Domenico, let her go,” Ignazia said. “This is our business, not yours.”
“Anything that goes on inside this house is my business,” I told her. “
Anything.
And if this one doesn’t like it, she can pack her bag and get out of my hair.” At this, I tightened my grasp around the Monkey’s arm and walked her through the house to the front. Then I opened the door and gave her a little shove. “Go fetch the cheese,” I said. “Or I’ll beat you so hard, you’ll see double again, and this time without the help of a witch’s magic!”
When the Monkey reached the sidewalk, she stopped and turned back to me. “He who spits into the sky gets it back again!”
she shouted in Italian.
Italian was the language I shouted back at her, too. “Threaten me until the chickens piss, you skinny bitch,” I yelled back. I would have yelled more, too, but noticed two of Ignazia’s
’Mericana
lady friends across the street. They had interrupted their little chat to stare. Idle women are always ready to mind other people’s business.
“Trouble with your hired girl, Mr. Tempesta?” one of them called.
“No trouble I can’t handle, ha ha,” I called back.
Those meddling
mignotti
nodded their heads in sympathy and went back to their conversation about nothing. I closed the door and vowed I would fix this little problem whose real name I did not I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 744
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know but who called herself Prosperine Tucci. Once and for all, I would get that goddamned leech off my ass.
It was
Signora
Siragusa’s aches and pains that got Prosperine out of my house. Arthritis had begun to bow the old woman’s legs and knot her fingers so badly that she could no longer run the boardinghouse without help. The
signora
and I made a little arrangement. Prosperine would cook and clean there in exchange for a bed in the attic and a dollar a day, which the
signora
paid directly to me on Saturday mornings. At last I would get back some of the money I had spent feeding and clothing her, and a little compensation for putting up with her, too. (I gave Prosperine a dollar a week for tobacco and other necessities and kept five.) Now I only had to look at Prosperine’s ugly face on Sunday, her day off. Ignazia and the child and I would go off to Mass and Prosperine would walk over from Pleasant Hill and let herself in with the key. (That murdering
pagana
never went to church. Why bother? She knew where
her
soul was going after this life!) By the time Ignazia and I returned to the
casa di due appartamenti
, there she would be, sitting at my kitchen table, her stockings rolled down to her skinny ankles. Puffing on her pipe and helping herself to a glass of wine from the jug I kept under the sink. She never lifted a finger to help my wife with the afternoon meal. She just sat there like a little queen. Ha! That one was more like a pimple on the
culo.
At first, Ignazia had balked at the extra work Prosperine’s leaving had put on her. She was lonely without her friend, she said.
But even Ignazia saw that things were better with the other one gone during the week. Concettina began to smile at me and to talk—sometimes so many words strung together that she was almost making a speech! She was a pretty girl, except for that rabbit’s mouth of hers, and that hair as orange as a pumpkin. Some nights before I went to work, I rocked her on my knee and sang to her the little songs my mother had sung long ago to my brothers and me. When I sang, I sometimes saw a glimpse of Mama’s eyes in the girl’s eyes. Guglielmo could have been right about the red I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 745
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hair—my mother’s people had been from the North. It was not something Ignazia and I ever talked about. . . . Strange how those little melodies would travel back to me from the Old Country whenever I sat the girl on my lap. Some nights I’d go to work and sing them in my head all through my shift.
Ignazia liked to peek at us from the doorway when I sang to Concettina. Once or twice I even caught that wife of mine with a smile on her face. Sometimes, when she bathed the girl, I heard the two of them singing Mama’s songs together. They had both learned them from listening to me—my mother’s songs from my wife’s and the child’s mouths. A little thing like that could give me peace for an hour or an afternoon—could convince me that Violetta d’Annunzio had been put in the ground in Palermo—was suffering the torments of Hell—and that Ignazia was only my Ignazia.
I tried to complete the penance that had been assigned me—to sit and write about my life as Guglielmo had advised, but always I was too busy. A page here, a page there, with a week or two in between. I did not like to bring up the old stuff—Papa’s death at the mine, Uncle Nardo’s control over my fate, the loss of my father’s gold medal. . . . What was the good of reliving all of that? I bought a strongbox and locked up those few pages I had written—a
siciliano
knows better than to leave things like that lying around.
Sometimes after Mass or after a meeting about the new school, Guglielmo would ask me how my project was coming and I’d shrug and maybe fib a little and say I had written more than I had. What harm was there in that? I was a busy man, after all. Once I told the
padre
I was halfway to the present in the examination of my life.
“That’s wonderful, Domenico,” he said. “Let me know when you’re ready and the two of us will examine it together.”
When the new school was finished, the archbishop came down from Hartford for the dedication. I invited my cousins Vitaglio and Lena up from Brooklyn. They came on the train to New London with their brats, the seven of them loaded down with bags and I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 746
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packages and luggage for their overnight stay. My house was like Grand Central Station that Saturday night! Lena and Ignazia cooking and yakking away in the kitchen, Lena’s
bambini
squealing and chasing each other and Concettina from room to room.
. . . Vitaglio and I played
bocce
ball up in the backyard and got a little drunk on the homemade wine he had brought up from the city. At bedtime, Vitaglio kissed Lena goodnight and I kissed Ignazia. Then he and I went upstairs to bed. Before he got between the covers, Vitaglio went down on his knees to pray.
“What are you asking God for?” I joked. “A million dollars? Two million?”
“I’m not asking Him for anything,” he said. “I’m thanking Him for good food and wine, good health and
famiglia
.”
He got up off the floor and into bed, sighed, and went immediately to sleep. I reached over and extinguished the lamp, then lay there in the dark. The ceiling above me looked as black and vast as the Atlantic Ocean had looked on those long nights of crossing to America. I felt again the despair I had felt during those endless nights of passage. I thought about all that had happened since—what I had accomplished and what had come to me. Tears dripped down the sides of my face and into my ears. Lying beside me, Lena’s husband snored away. I was not much for praying—had given up all that after I left the seminary school to become a mason. But somewhere in the middle of that night, I rose from bed and went down on my knees. I thanked God for the same things Vitaglio had thanked him for—health, home,
famiglia
—and for helping me rid myself of the Monkey, too.
Next day, it seemed like every Catholic in Connecticut was there at St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church to witness the dedication of the new school! After the Mass and the ribbon-cutting, there was a special banquet and speeches in the church hall downstairs.
(Guglielmo wanted me and Ignazia to sit at the head table, so that’s where we sat, right next to Shanley, the mayor.) This
pezzo
grosso
gave a speech, that
pezzo grosso
gave one. Someone read a I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 747