“
Signore
Domenico Tempesta,” Nunzio said. “May I present Prosperine Tucci, your
sposa futura
!”
“When hell freezes over!” I shouted. Elbowing past the brothers, I made my way to their front door!
The thing that had made me drop all sense of propriety was the face of Prosperine. For one thing, she was far from the young girl those lying plumbers had promised me. That skinny hag was probably thirty if she was a day! Worse—far worse—her homely, scrawny face bore a shocking resemblance to Filippa, that goddamned drowned monkey that had bewitched my poor brother Pasquale!
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*
*
*
That night, I twisted and turned on my cousins’ lumpy divan as if I was back aboard the SS
Napolitano
! Had my brother Pasquale sent this skinny bitch up from the
mundo suttomari
as revenge because I had drowned his “little queen”? Had my brother Vincenzo sent her to mock, once again, my chastity? Or had Mama sent a monkey for me to marry because I had forsaken her to seek my fortune in America?
“
Meglio celibe che mal sposato!
”* I whispered to myself. Better to die
without sons than to have to make them with
that
!
Somewhere in the middle of that long night in Brooklyn, a church bell rang three times. Mama, Pasquale, Vincenzo: maybe all three of them had conspired and sent this monkey-woman to me! But a gift sent is not the same as a gift accepted. I decided I would wait until daylight, board the earliest train possible, go back to my big house in Three Rivers, Connecticut, and live my life as a bachelor.
6 August 1949
The Iaccois and their monkey-cousin were already in Lena and Vitaglio’s kitchen when I awoke the next morning. It was the brothers’ angry voices that roused me from my pitiful sleep. “Ha!
So here’s the man whose promises mean nothing!” Rocco said as I entered the kitchen.
“Please,” Lena told the Iaccois. “Let my poor cousin eat his breakfast in peace. Shouting is bad for
digestione
.” She placed before me
frittata
, sausage and potatoes, coffee, Easter bread. Here was a woman who knew how to take care of men!
I took a sip of coffee, a mouthful of egg. I made those two goddamned plumbers wait. “A promise collapses when it is made to deceitful men,” I finally said.
How dare I accuse them of deceit, Nunzio shouted. It was I, not they, who had initiated discussion about a wife—
two
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one, he reminded me.
“So what do you think? That I climbed up on that roof and pushed my poor brother off? What do you two fools expect me to do? Marry
two
women and live the life of a
bigamo
?”
“Marrying one of them will do!” Rocco said. “The one you
promised
to marry. The one who has spent two years waiting for her home to be completed and now has spent the night sobbing into her pillow because you have so grievously wronged her!”
“Eat, Domenico,” Lena insisted. “Eat your breakfast while it’s hot and then have your argument.”
As I chewed and swallowed, swallowed and chewed, I took small glimpses of Prosperine. She was seated on a chair by the window. In the morning light, she looked twenty-five, perhaps, not thirty, but she was even uglier than she had been the night before.
Today she wore peasant clothes and a kerchief on that shrunken head of hers. She was smoking a pipe!
“You have falsely represented this creature,” I told the brothers.
“Look at her over there, smoking like a man!
She
is not beautiful!
She
is not young!”
Nunzio stuttered and resorted to proverbs. “
Gadina vecchia fa bonu
brodo,
”* he insisted. And I answered him with a proverb of my own:
“
Cucinala come vuoi, ma sempre cocuzza e!
”**
“This woman is as pure as the Blessed Virgin,” Rocco argued.
“If this one is
vergine
,” I said, “it is due to lack of opportunity. No meat on her bones! No
tette
! This one would have shriveled the
cazzu
of my brother Vincenzo!” In reaction to my vulgarity, uttered in the heat of battle, my cousin Lena gave a scream and lifted her apron over her face. Not Prosperine, though. That one was as hard as nails!
“Beware, Tempesta,” Nunzio Iaccoi warned. “In America, there are courts of law that make sure a man keeps his word. We have saved every letter and telegram you sent.”
“Don’t try to scare me, plumber!” I shouted back. “What judge with eyes in his head would sentence me to a life with that one?
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She belongs at the end of an organ-grinder’s leash, not in the marriage bed of a man of property!”
Of course, I was a proper man and a gentleman and never would have spoken that way in the hag’s presence if those two brothers hadn’t pushed me to it, but now the damage was done. My eyes followed the others’ eyes to Prosperine and a shiver passed through me. Without blinking or turning away, she puffed on her pipe and glared at me with the black look of
il mal occhio
itself. As I have said before, a modern man such as Domenico Tempesta leaves superstition to foolish old women. But at that moment in my cousin Lena’s kitchen, I longed to clutch a
gobbo
, a red chili, a pig’s tooth—anything to ward off that monkey-woman’s evil eye!
My sweet cousin Lena, in an effort to end the impasse before fisticuffs broke out in her kitchen, poured coffee, passed
biscotti
and Easter bread to the Iaccois, and reminded us all that there had been, since the beginning of our negotiations, not one but
two
bridal candidates living under the Iaccois’ roof. “
Scusa, Signorina
Prosperine,” she said, addressing the other one without looking at her. “
Scusa
me a million times for saying so, but Domenico has changed his mind.”
Prosperine took the pipe from her mouth and spat out the open window. “Bah!” she said, then clamped the pipe again between her teeth.
Lena turned to me and took my hand. “Domenico, before you begin your long trip home, wouldn’t you at least like to meet the Iaccois’ pretty sister, Ignazia?”
“Let them marry off their women to other fools!” I said back.
“I’m done with Iaccoi business!”
At this, Rocco raised his fists, but Nunzio pushed them back down again. “
Aspetta un momento!
” he said, then whispered to Rocco, who ran out the kitchen door. The rest of us waited and waited for
. . . for who knew what? As for my stomach, it felt like I had swallowed the anchor of the SS
Napolitano
instead of my cousin’s eggs and bread and coffee!
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Ten minutes later, Rocco burst back through the doorway. He had in his hands Ignazia’s immigration papers and a daguerreotype of the girl. The papers established that she had been born in 1898
and thus was truly eighteen years of age. The photograph verified that she was as beautiful as the other one was homely—a girl well suited to be the wife of a property owner. A girl with some meat on her bones.
I was persuaded to return after lunch to the Iaccois’ front parlor and wait for Ignazia’s arrival back from her friend’s home. As I waited, I stared at the picture of the girl, and fell under its spell.
Her flowing hair and full lips stirred me. Her dark eyes looked directly at my eyes. Her full face whispered the promise of a
figura
as plump and lovely as Venus’s.
I fell in love with that picture and fell more in love still with the flesh-and-blood girl who walked defiantly through her brothers’
front door an hour later than she was expected.
“Where have you been?” her brother asked.
“I’ve been where I’ve been!” she answered boldly.
She was wearing a woolen coat dyed as red as blood. Such a striking
vermiglio
had never emerged from the vats at American Woolen and Textile, I tell you! And such a woman had never lived in the tiny village of Giuliana or in Three Rivers, Connecticut. Her hair, black and wild, ended where her buttocks began. Her wide hips were built to bracket a husband and to push forth children into the world. She had cast her spell upon me even before her coat was off! At long last, I was in love!
“Domenico Tempesta, it is my great pleasure to present to you my half-sister, Ignazia,” Rocco said.
This is the one, I told myself. This is the woman I have waited for. Here before me, scowling, stands my very own wife!
But the girl gave me barely a glance. Turning to Prosperine, she asked if she had fed the company all the
braciola
from the Easter meal the day before. She was as hungry as an
elefante,
she said, and patted her belly.
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“Please, Ignazia, worry later about your stomach,” Nunzio said.
“Sit and visit. Show a little respect for a man of property and a factory boss!”
Ignazia turned to Prosperine. “Ah, so this is your long-lost
innamorato,
eh?” she laughed.
“Bah!” the other one answered, puffing away on her pipe.
“Never mind your ‘bah,’” Nunzio scolded. “Make us espresso.
Quick, before I turn you out of this house!”
The Monkey slumped into the kitchen; the two brothers’ faces regained their false smiles. They began to ask questions about my
casa di due appartamenti
and to repeat each of my answers to their half-sister. Ignazia tapped her shoe and sang a little song to herself instead of listening. “I’ll help in the kitchen,” she said.
I watched her rise and walk from the room. Bad as it was for bargaining, I could do nothing but stare at her exiting figure and then at the doorway through which she had passed.
“Ignazia’s job at the shoe factory has exposed her to many bad influences,” Rocco whispered after she had left the room. “She has gotten the foolish notion, for example, that, like
’Mericani
, Italian women should marry for love. Ha ha ha ha.”
“You like what you see, eh, Domenico?” Nunzio noted from across the room. “If she becomes
your
wife, she’ll soon forget all of these
’Mericana
ways. You’ll make her
siciliana
again!
For my part, I could do nothing but swallow and stare—finger her photograph in my hand and anticipate her reentrance from the kitchen.
The door banged open again a minute later. Ignazia was holding a heel of bread in one hand, a chicken leg in the other. “Oh, no!”
she shouted, shaking her head violently. “Oh, no, no, no, no!”
“
Scusa?
” one of the brothers said.
“She just told me in the kitchen what you three old men have up your sleeves,” the girl said. “I’ve told you over and over. I’m going to marry Padraic McGannon and that’s who I am going to marry!”
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“That lazy Irishman with no job?” Rocco shouted. “That redheaded mama’s boy whose mouth still smells of breast milk?”
I had first laid eyes on Ignazia only moments before, but hearing her profess her intentions to marry another man sank my heart and made me want to find that goddamned Irishman and strangle him! Such was Ignazia’s power over me.
“Where would you and that lazy good-for-nothing live?” Nunzio wanted to know.
Ignazia put her hands against her fleshy hips. “With his mother,”
she said.
“On what?”
“On something old men know nothing about, that’s what.
L’amore! Passione!
”
Nunzio shook his head at the folly of it and Rocco made the sign of the cross. In the past few minutes, I had learned much about
passione
and
amore.
It was as if Mount Etna’s hot lava now boiled within me where, before, my blood had been cool. Ignazia robbed the room of air. This I knew above all else: that she would be the wife of no one but Domenico Onofrio Tempesta!
“
Scusa
, young lady,
scusa,
” I stood and began. “Your brothers and I have a long-standing agreement—one which will provide richly for you,
if
I should consent to make you my wife.” Here, I drew a deep breath and expanded my chest for her to see, wholly, the man she was getting.
“If
you
consent?” she laughed. “If
you
consent? Who wants to be
your
wife, old man? Go marry some gray-haired old
nonna!
” She bit savagely into that chicken leg of hers, ripping meat from the bone, and chewing ravenously as she glared at me.
The
passione
with which Ignazia rejected the idea of marrying me only made me desire her more. This impudent girl would be my wife, whether she liked it or not!
“Young lady,” I said, attempting reason. “Your brothers’ honor is at stake here. I paid good money for a train ride from Connecticut to meet my
sposa futura.
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between Sicilian men—which you needn’t bother your pretty head about—are binding!”