John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

On two counts could Carmella not walk past the Mariners House on North Square, and this was awkward for her because it was so close to Vicino di Napoli. But it was the landmark of the Boston Port and Seamen’s Society, “dedicated to the service of seafarers.” The schoolchildren in Angelù’s class had visited the Mariners House, but Carmella had skipped that school trip-after all, she’d lost a fisherman at sea.

It was just plain silly how more innocent connections to the fisherman and Angelù haunted her, but they did. She loved the Caffè Vittoria but avoided that room with the pictures of Rocky Marciano, because both the fisherman and Angelù had admired the heavyweight champion. And she’d eaten with her husband and son at the Grotta Azzurra on Hanover Street, where Enrico Caruso used to eat, too. Now there was no more going there.

The fisherman had told her that no sailor had ever been mugged on Hanover Street, or ever would be; it was a safe walk for even the drunken-most sailors, all the way from the waterfront to the Old Howard and back. In addition to the striptease places, there were cheap bars frequented by the sailors, and the arcades around Scollay Square. (Of course this would all change; Scollay Square itself would go.) But the world Carmella had lived in with her drowned husband and drowned son was both sacred and haunted to her-the whole length of Hanover Street!

Even the scavenging seagulls over the Haymarket reminded her of the Saturday people-watching she had done there, with Angelù holding her hand. Now she looked with caution at that restaurant on Fleet Street where Stella’s used to be; she occasionally ate there with Dominic, on the nights Vicino di Napoli was closed. They ate at the Europeo, too-Dominic usually had the fried calamari, but never New York-style. (“Hold the red sauce-I like it just with lemon,” the cook would say.) Would she no longer be able to eat in these places after her Gamba was gone? Carmella wondered.

She would certainly have to move into a smaller apartment. Would it be so hot in the apartment in the summer that she would become like one of those old ladies in the tenement building on Charter Street? They took their chairs out of their apartments so they could sit on the sidewalk, where it was cooler. Those cold-water tenements had been bedecked with streamers for the saints’ feasts in the summer. Carmella suddenly recalled Angelù as a little boy sitting on the fisherman’s shoulders; Hanover Street had been closed for a procession. It was the Feast of San Rocco, Carmella was remembering. Nowadays, she didn’t like to watch the processions.

IN 1919, GIUSÉ POLCARI had been a young man. He remembered the Molasses Explosion, which killed twenty-one people in the North End-including the father of some kid Joe Polcari had known. “He was-a boiled to death in a tidal wave of hot molasses!” old Joe had said to Danny. Though the war was over, those who’d heard the explosion thought the Germans were coming-that Boston Harbor was being bombed, or something. “I saw a whole piano floating in the molasses!” old Polcari told young Dan.

In the kitchen of Vicino di Napoli was a black-and-white photograph of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; the two anarchist immigrants were handcuffed together. Sacco and Vanzetti were sent to the electric chair for the murder of a paymaster and a guard at a shoe company in South Braintree. Old Polcari-in his final, addle-brained days-couldn’t remember all the details, but he remembered the protest marches. “Sacco and Vanzetti were framed! A stool pigeon in the Charlestown Street jail fingered them, and the State of Massachusetts gave-a the stool pigeon a free ride back to Italy,” old Joe had said to Danny. There’d been a procession for Sacco and Vanzetti that started on Hanover Street in the North End and went all the way to Tremont Street, where the mounted police had broken up the crowd; there were thousands of protesters, Joe Polcari among them.

“If you or your son ever have a problem, Gamba, you tell me,” Giusé Polcari said to Dominic. “I know-a some guys-they feex-a your problem for you.”

Old Polcari meant the Camorra, the Neapolitan version of the Mafia-not that Dominic could truly understand the distinction. When he’d behaved wildly as a kid, Nunzi had called him her camorrista . But it was Dominic’s impression that the Mafia was more or less in control of the North End, where both the Mafia and the Camorra were called the Black Hand.

When Dominic told Paul Polcari that the cowboy might be coming after him, Paul said, “If my dad were alive, he’d call his Camorra buddies, but I don’t know about those guys.”

“I don’t know about the Mafia, either,” Tony Molinari told Dominic. “If they do something for you, then you owe them.”

“I don’t want to involve you in my troubles,” Dominic said to them. “I’m not asking the Mafia to help me, or the Camorra.”

“The crazy cop won’t come after Carmella, will he?” Paul Polcari asked the cook.

“I don’t know-Carmella bears watching,” Dominic answered.

“We’ll watch her, all right,” Molinari said. “If the cowboy comes here, to the restaurant-well, we’ve got knives, cleavers-”

“Wine bottles,” Paul Polcari suggested.

“Don’t even think about it,” Dominic told them. “If Carl comes here looking for me, he’ll be armed-he wouldn’t go anywhere without that Colt forty-five on him.”

“I know what my dad would say,” Paul Polcari said. “He’d say, ‘A Colt forty-five is-a nothing- not if you’ve ever tried to get-a cozy with one of those women who work as stitchers in the shirt factory. Even naked, they got-a needles on ’em!’” (Joe Polcari meant the Leopold Morse factory in the old Prince Macaroni building; his son Paul said Giusé must have banged some tough broad who worked there, or he’d tried to.)

The three cooks laughed; they made an effort to forget about the deputy sheriff up in Coos County. What else could they do but try to forget about him?

Old Polcari had had a hundred jokes like that one about the shirt-stitchers. “Do you remember the one about the woman who worked the night shift at the Boston Sausage and Provision Company?” Dominic asked Paul and Tony.

Both chefs roared. “Yeah, she worked in the skinless-meat department,” Paul Polcari said.

“She had this sneaky little knife, for cutting the skin off the frankfurters!” Molinari remembered.

“She could peel-a your penis like it was a grape!” the three cooks shouted, almost in unison. Then Carmella came into the restaurant, and they stopped laughing.

“More dirty jokes?” she asked them. They were just firing up the pizza oven and waiting for the dough to rise; it was late morning, but the marinara sauce was already simmering. Carmella saw how worried they suddenly seemed, and they wouldn’t look in her eyes. “You were talking about Carl, weren’t you?” she asked them; they were like boys who’d been caught beating off. “Maybe you should do what Ketchum says-maybe, Gamba, you should listen to your old friend,” she said to Dominic. Two months had passed since Ketchum’s warning, but the cook still couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Carmella when he was leaving.

Now none of them could look at their beloved Gambacorta, the cook who limped. “Maybe you should go, if you’re going,” Carmella said to Dominic. “It’s almost summer,” she suddenly announced. “Do cops get summer vacations?” she asked them.

It was June-very nearly the last day of school, they all knew. That was a tough time of year for Carmella. All at once, there was nowhere she could go in the North End. The freed-from-school children were everywhere; they reminded Carmella of her Angelù primù , her first Angel.