Salvatore Scibona - The End

The girl wasn’t a girl. She was nearly forty. She wore a severely starched blue sundress and had tied a white mohair sweater around her shoulders. She had a pretty face, disfigured by acne scars. A plump woman about Lina’s age, an aunt, accompanied her. The aunt said they’d been led to believe that Lina’s friend was a colored woman. Lina replied that she’d assumed the girl herself was white. The tone of this exchange was of nonchalance, or at most of petty amusement, but it was insincere. The colored women were visibly disturbed to hear that such an immodest payment would be exacted from them. Mrs. Marini asked Lina and the aunt to excuse themselves briefly while she asked the woman a few private questions. Lina, the aunt, and the dog watched in silence, out of earshot, from the opposite lip of the fountain, which was webbed with cracks across its dry concrete basin and festooned with leaves, bird feces, and the splinters of a busted radio.

The streetcar home was a sweltering, flesh-on-flesh affair. A white woman made her son get out of his seat so that Mrs. Marini could sit down. Lina held on to a strap in the ceiling and was pressed in her back, when the car accelerated, by a man whose halitosis she smelled, although she couldn’t see him. Her purse dangled in Mrs. Marini’s face. Mrs. Marini muttered in Italian that when she’d asked the woman if the man in question was exerting unwelcome pressure on her, the woman only said there wasn’t anything more miserable than a yellow baby.

Lina said, “Probably not.”

“What ‘probably’?” Mrs. Marini said testily. “Probably nothing. ”

The woman seated beside her, with the boy on her lap now, looked at Lina for a moment too long, and when she looked away, she did so with the fake lethargy of a person who has been caught paying attention and tries to defend herself by saying implicitly, I wasn’t looking at you, I was looking at the empty space in front of you.

Then, with neither warning nor perceivable cause, Lina was overcome by a seizure of cramping behind her eyes. She tightened her grip on the strap hanging from the ceiling of the car. She felt a surge of pressure in her brain and a vivid intuition of homesickness and of having been permanently banished — but from where?

Then, just as abruptly, it passed.

Ciccio was a good boy. She would never tell him so, but Mrs. Marini cared for him very much. She did not need to hold forth about her feelings, like a troubadour or a knight-errant. These scenes, such as one saw at the show in which Bertha fell into Bill’s embrace while they blubbered out their sweet nothings, embarrassed her.

Likewise, she had never needed to tell Enzo that — contrary to her early suppositions — she, she. . well, she did not entirely disapprove of him. Lina was the only person to whom she had ever, as an adult, made the conventional three-word so-called confession. But that was an accident. What she’d meant to imply was, You’re a fool; I love and punish you by saying it; you’re a fool. Although it may not have come out that way. In any event, Mrs. Marini’s behavior in Ciccio’s company was testimony enough, thank you.

He was a gainful tenant, a lifter and carrier of heavy things, a duster of high corners, a painstaking washer of her Dresden china. He listened to directions. He studied these days with a high degree of seriousness. He was not given to the catatonic inbursts to which his mother had been given at his age. With the egregious exception of his demeanor around Lina, he was unfailingly civil to adults. How easy to enumerate points in his favor.

But he must have had a dim view of the adult mind and its powers to see beneath surfaces. He thought he was successfully pulling the wool with respect to cigarettes, but Mrs. Marini knew about the cigarettes, and she knew where he hid them. He even seemed to think nobody had noticed when he moved into her house, when in fact a brief, uncomplicated meeting had taken place two days after the funeral. Patrizia was going back to the farm and wanted to clarify their responsibilities.

The three women had drunk black coffee in Enzo’s (Lina’s) kitchen. Lina was not certain that she would stay. Mrs. Marini could use a man in the house; her fingers were stiffening. For reasons that were unclear to each of them in different ways, Lina and her boy did not get along. So. As a courtesy, they also agreed to let him go on believing he’d orchestrated the whole thing without their permission, because to tell him they’d all agreed on it without his knowing would only demoralize him. Lina would visit regularly. Who knew. Perhaps a reconciliation could be effected. Meanwhile, sub rosa, Mrs. Marini would consult with them on the larger custodial decisions.

When Ciccio had first moved in, Mrs. Marini considered making a formal agreement with him according to which he must never come downstairs between certain nighttime hours, especially if he perceived that there were visitors, unless he heard a violent commotion. But he was too old and curious for that to work. Couldn’t she, then, simply unfold the whole business to him, was he too young for that? Perhaps not. He could keep his mouth shut. This required a conference. Lina didn’t care either way, but her mother was vehemently opposed. Mrs. Marini asked for her reasons, and Patrizia said, “Because no.” Until now their Ciccio plebiscites had all ended in consensus, but this time Lina let her mother have her way, and Mrs. Marini was outvoted.

Mrs. Marini then let it be known that her door should not be knocked on anymore, nor should she be telephoned directly. For now, Lina was to be telephoned, a code was to be employed, and a meeting would be scheduled. When they had had business during that spring and summer, Federica obtained the use of the cellar of a widow aunt of her husband’s who had indebted herself to Mrs. Marini some decades before.

However, that August, after Lina took a call from an anonymous man that eventually entangled them with a Negress from the West Side — a client Mrs. Marini should never have taken on, because one loose Negro would surely lead to a gaggle of others — they ran into the snag, which she should have foreseen, of Federica’s aunt-in-law refusing to let a colored person into her house.

They had scheduled the procedure for the afternoon of the Assumption, when the neighborhood would be mad with crowd and their clients’ stepping out of the trolley at Sixteenth Street would be a less noteworthy thing to witness than usual. Lina said they could use her house if they had to, except that Ciccio was always prowling around there, thinking they didn’t notice, stealing his old things. His room on Twenty-second was slowly emptying, and his room on Twenty-sixth was slowly filling up. (How could Mrs. Marini not take offense at being thought so blind?) And in the warm weather, he spent the daytimes reading in the backyard of his former home, like a cat spraying the bushes. He might show up wherever they did the thing. She needed a better plan.

Before Mrs. Marini knew it, the day had arrived. She sat in the kitchen gnawing a biscuit for breakfast and jotting the letters in the tiles of the crossword with the authority of a woodpecker hammering a tree. Ciccio was still asleep upstairs. She looked at the weather forecast. It read: Sweltering, dismal; evening thunderstorms. But she didn’t care. She felt absolutely terrific for no particular reason, or, rather, for innumerable reasons. She was rich; her neighbor’s yawp ing dog was dead of cancer; Eisenhower had humiliated Stevenson; even the smell of the newspaper ink was divine. Everything that touched her brain delighted it. The past was dead. She was alive!

The front page of the newspaper, above the fold, showed a photograph of a beaming young veteran in a tuxedo; however his limbs had been amputated. Ghastly.