Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“You’re talkin’ crazy,” he said uncomfortably. He got up from the chair. “Then whaddya here for, to preach to me?”

She grappled beneath the seedy black garb that encased her. A sheaf of banded currency was in her hand when she brought it out again.

“A ridarti...”

To give back this...

She showed it to him first, lying in her palm. Then she spat violently into the middle of it, and flung it away from her. It landed anywhere, she did not look to see, she did not want to know.

“Danaro insanguinato...”

Money with blood on it! The dead cry out from this kind of money. Their voices are within it.

“You’re a fool,” he sneered. “You could have had everything in the world, and you live like a rat in a hole—”

“No, sei tu l’idiota...”

No, you are the fool, not I! She struck her hand sharply against her chest.

“Io sono onesta...”

I am honest. I am a poor woman, but I am honest, clean. My husband worked hard all his life until he died worn-out, but he too was clean. We were not like you.

He strode toward her furiously, backed his arm in threat.

She didn’t flinch. “Colpiscimi...” Hit me. It will not be the first time.

“You lying old bat!” This time his arm completed the threat, he struck her across the face.

She tottered, regained her balance, only smiled sleepily. The eyes that looked at him held no pity, no softness, not any kind of feeling at all. They were eyes of glass, of agate in a statue.

“Questo e’ il momenta...”

This is the hour I knew would come. I have waited for it many years. Now it is here. In my village there was a saying when I was a young girl. “God punishes without having to use hands or feet.” I see the punishment before me now. I feel no pity for you. My heart is as dead as a stone. For I am one of those you have killed. The first, perhaps. More slowly than some of the others, but just as completely. I walk around in the grave you have put me in. And in the grave there are not mothers, only corpses.

She turned away abruptly, in leave-taking without farewell.

“It will be finished soon, anyway,” he heard her say stonily.

“They’ll never get me!” he shouted toward her. “D’ye hear what I’m saying? They’ll never—”

She looked back briefly, nearer the door now. “They do not have to. You will go just as surely, without them. Your years are already days, your days are minutes. You have the Bad Sickness in you. The sickness that creeps like a worm, and once it is in, cannot be got out again. No man’s hand needs to be raised against you...”

He stared at her in almost superstitious fright. “Even that you know—” he breathed in awe. “Who told you? Nobody knows that about me!” Mechanically, as if from some long-forgotten habit interred for years and now brought to the surface again by sudden instinctive fear, he made a sneaking, furtive sign of the cross. “What are you, a witch or something?”

She slitted her eyes at him in contempt. “Non v’era bisogno di dirlo...”

One does not have to be told. One knows. One sees the signs. This is nothing new. I saw it in my village, small as it was, when I was young. Even there it was not new. One crossed to the other side of the road in passing it by, that was all. I knew it had come into my house already when you were still only a boy of sixteen.

His breath hissed in stunned intake.

“La tazza, la forchetta...”

The cup you drank from, the fork you ate with, kept apart, hidden from the rest. They were always missing when I washed the things. Those were the signs that told me. You did not come to me for help. You went to the streets for help, instead. The streets where you already robbed the storekeepers, and roamed at night the leader of a pack, marauding with knives. And the streets gave you back what you had given to them. Now the mark is on you, and it is too late for help anymore.

The arms and the legs die, and you cannot move anymore. Then the tongue dies, and there are no more words, only sounds like the animals make. Childhood comes back, but going the other way, rushing toward you from the grave.

“Shut up!” he squalled, and cupped the heels of his hands tight against his ears.

She turned away with a flick of disgust. The door opened at her grip. He was watching her now with a mixture of disbelief and defiant bravado.

“You walking out on me this way? You too? My own mother? All right, go ahead! Who needs you? Vecchia. Just an old woman. You shut up all these years, though, didn’t you, when things were going good?” he railed. “And now cuz you think they’re going bad, you turn on me like all the rest.”

She released a scoffing breath.

He changed suddenly, softened for a moment. “Close the door,” he coaxed. “Come on back in. Stay with me awhile. I’m lonely. I ain’t got nobody of my own. These others— D’you remember when I was a kid, and you used to make lasagne for Vito and me, and bring ’em hot to the table—?”

“Quella non ero io...”

That was not I, that was another woman, long gone now. A woman whose prayers were not answered.

“You’re my mother, you can’t change that,” he told her, between a snicker and a derisive grin, like one who is certain he holds the upper hand.

“Io non sono piu’ tua madre...” she whispered smolderingly.

Mother, no. Just a woman who bore a devil. The woman who once bore you says good-bye to you.

The door clapped closed and she was gone.

His mouth opened in a gape of disbelief, a disbelief such as one might feel if one stood back and watched one’s own self betray one.

Then it clicked shut, and defiance spread over his face once more. He swept his arm out and around before him in contemptuous dismissal. “All right, let ’em all go!” he bellowed. “All of ’em! I don’t need nobody! I’ll make it alone! I come up by myself, and I’ll stay up by myself!”

He went over and looked into the mirror, and straightened the hug of the padding that sloped upon his shoulders.

“It’s me for me, all by myself, just like it’s always been,” he said aloud to the scowling reflection facing him. “If God ain’t going to forgive you, if God ain’t going to give you a break, then what good is God? They can have God. I’ll take Abbazzia. What good is being good? You stay poor all your life, like her and eighty million others. You get run over by a car like my brother Vito did, and they let you lie there in the rain, newspapers from a trash-can spread over you. Then ’cause a priest comes and mumbles over you, that means you’re going to heaven. Who wants to go to heaven in the rain, on an empty stomach, soaking newspapers thrown over you, without a dime in your pocket? The hell with heaven. He worked hard, he never stole, he never scrapped, he never pulled a knife on no one. He was good, and look what he got. I was smart, and look what I got—”

He flourished his own hand toward his reflection’s hand, so that his reflection’s eyes could see the explosively brilliant diamond on the little finger.

He picked up the money she had flung on the floor. “There ain’t no good or bad, anyway,” he grunted. “They just tell you that in the church when you’re a kid, to keep you from getting wise that everyone else has something, and you ain’t got nothing. There’s only dumb and smart. And if you don’t want to be the one, then you gotta be the other.”

He riffled the money back into orderly shape, tucked it into his billfold, put it away.

He summed up his life, content with it, proud of it.

“Abbazzia picked smart for his.”