by Wally Lamb
“That’s all very fine, Tempesta,” Nunzio said, “but my brother and I are working men, not sultans. We haven’t that kind of fortune to hand over to you. Two hundred, and the other one goes to live with you, too.” Of those two snakes, Nunzio was the worst.
“Other one? What other one?” I said, though I knew very well who they meant.
“That one,” Nunzio said, pointing to the Monkey-Face who had just entered the room with our coffee.
“Out of the question!” I said. “I would not think of robbing you of your housekeeper.”
“Don’t be foolish, Tempesta,” Rocco advised. “She cooks and helps Ignazia clean your big house, she midwifes the babies when they come along, and then, when the time is right, you marry her off to some widower in need of a clean house. As for us, finding a servant in this city is as easy as opening the door and shouting for one.”
“Out of the question!” I repeated. “If you could not find this one a husband in all of New York, how can I hope to get rid of her in Connecticut? Four hundred. The other one stays here.”
Nunzio shrugged and sighed. “Then I guess Ignazia becomes the wife of that redheaded Irishman after all and you, Signore Domenico, lose a precious prize because of your greed. I pity you and weep for your stupidity.”
In the other room, the beautiful hotheaded girl was pacing the floor and arguing with herself. The door banged open. She threatened to cut out her heart if any of us stood between her and the Irishman. The door banged shut again.
“Three hundred seventy-five,” I told Nunzio. “For the one girl alone.”
“Three hundred,” Nunzio said. “And you take Prosperine.”
“Three hundred fifty and the other one stays here with you,” I said. “That is my final offer.”
Rocco opened his mouth to agree to my terms, but that goddamned Nunzio clamped his fat, hairy knuckles on his brother’s shoulder and squeezed. “As the eldest of the family, Signore Domenico, I am afraid I have to refuse on my half-sister Ignazia’s behalf.” He walked to the front door and held it open. “Arrivederci.”
I stood stammering at their stoop, staring blankly at the brothers. Could this be happening? Was I about to lose that hot-blooded creature who had stirred my ardore like the awakened lava of Mount Etna? So be it, then! I would not be cheated out of a dowry that would furnish my home. And I was goddamned if I would be stuck with that skinny hag of a monkey besides.
The door flew open once more. Ignazia’s cheeks were flushed with emotion and the little groove of skin above her pouting lip held a small bead of sweat. “You heard him, old man,” she shouted. “Arrivederci! Go!”
I moaned quietly, longing suddenly and illogically to step back inside and lick the clear, shimmering drop of nectar out of that little groove of hers, to taste her salt. I ached to undo her clothes and claim her. Such was the spell Ignazia had cast.
“Arrivederci,” Nunzio Iaccoi repeated. He closed the door and slid the bolt. There I stood on that sidewalk in Brooklyn, more alone than I had ever been before.
8 August 1949
On the long train ride home from New York, I whimpered for what I wanted, mumbling arguments to myself and to the Iaccois that made other passengers look away and change their seats. What did I care? I closed my burning eyes and saw her face, her figura. I sat there with my coat on my lap, a goat with a frozen cazzu like my brother Vincenzo. I would have that wench! Somehow, I would have her!
Strangest of all on that strange, strange day was my behavior when the train pulled into the New London station. It was five in the afternoon. I was due at work in another four hours. “Scusa,” I said, grabbing the conductor by his jacket sleeve. “Scusa, signore, but when does the next train leave here for New York?”
He checked his watch. “Hour, fifteen minutes,” he said.
On a scrap of paper I wrote a note to Flynn at the mill: “Emergency of family. Back tomorrow. Tempesta.” I gave a man headed for Three Rivers a whole dollar to make sure it got there. That’s how crazy that girl had made me! A whole silver dollar, pressed against the palm of a stranger!
I paced back and forth inside the station, outside the station, around the station. I was no longer simply Domenico Tempesta—I was both myself and a crazy man! “What’s the matter with you, eh?” I shouted inside my own head. “They could fire you for not showing up at work! You could lose your big house!”
“Let me lose it then!” the other part of me shouted back. “Let them fire their best worker and be damned!”
“But that hellcat’s not worth it!”
“Shut up! I will have her, whether she’s worth it or not!”
“You want her more than you want all that you’ve worked for? More than your dreams?”
“Si, more than my dreams!”
Such was the argument that raged in my head, worse by far than the worst headache. When the train rolled into the station, I found myself reluctant to get on it. She will bring you sorrow, I warned myself. But when the wheels started inching toward New York, toward my Ignazia, I boarded that train in a panic, found an empty seat, and collapsed into it. My head swam with fear and despair—and with relief. What was happening to me? What was happening?
Halfway there, I got up out of my seat, opened the door, and stood outside, letting the air rush around me. The wind took my hat and I barely noticed! I stared at the speeding ground below. Jumping headfirst might be better than this love-craziness, I told myself. But if I jumped, I would never see her again, never have that girl. I would lose her to that redheaded mick whose throat I would gladly slit if I knew what he looked like.
It was Ignazia herself who answered their front door. Her eye was blackened, her face swollen on one side.
“What? You again?” she shouted. “Look what I got because of you! Go away!” She spat on the stoop where I stood.
Then Nunzio was behind her, smiling like a fox with a mouthful of feathers. “Signore Domenico,” he said. “What a surprise!”
“I’ll pay you,” I told him, still staring at Ignazia. “I’ll give you four hundred for her.”
“No!” she screamed. “I’ll take poison! I’ll cut out my heart!”
Now Rocco appeared in the doorway, too. “Five hundred,” Nunzio said coolly, as if every day a suitor appeared at his door, offering to reverse the dowry process. “And you take the other one.”
“I’ll jump from the bridge!” Ignazia bellowed. “I’ll cut out my liver!”
“Five hundred,” I repeated, as if in a trance. “And I take the other one.”
Nunzio Iaccoi shook my hand and pulled me inside. Rocco uncorked the wine for celebration. Both brothers’ heads snapped back as they drained their glasses in single gulps, then poured some more. As for myself, nausea prevented me from doing more than wetting my lips on behalf of my good fortune. Ignazia continued screaming and wailing from the side room. Prosperine smoked in the doorway and glared.
9 August 1949
Ignazia and I were married in Brooklyn on 12 May 1916, civil ceremony. Prosperine and my cousin Vitaglio witnessed. On the train ride back to Connecticut, there were not three seats together. Ignazia wanted to sit with Prosperine, not me.
From my seat across the aisle and down, I could see all of Monkey-Face but only the blue velvet wedding hat of my new wife. Ignazia’s hat was decorated with red strawberries that shook with the motion of the train. She would love me once she saw my home, I told myself. She would love me.
As for the other one, I would get her work at the mill. If I was stuck with her, she would at least bring money into my house.
We arrived home after dark at 66-through-68 Hollyhock Avenue. I told Ignazia to wait at the doorway, then hurried from room to room, lighting the lamps. Then I took her hand and led her through the house, the other one trailing after us like a dark shadow.
When we had gotten to the last room upstairs, I took my new wife to the window and showed her the backyard garden—my little bit of Sicily. There was a full moon that n
ight, I remember; everything shone to its full advantage. “This is your new home, Ignazia,” I said. “How do you like it?”
Her shrug pierced my heart.
From a drawer, I took the embroidered sheets Signora Siragusa had sent over for a wedding present. “Use these,” I said. At last, I would enjoy the flesh of her who had tangled up my dreams and turned my sensible nature to porridge. At last, I would have opportunity to relieve this passione that had gripped me and made me crazy.
She and Prosperine dressed the bed while I waited outside in my backyard garden, smoking and watching the fireflies. Through the open window, I could see them up there—the homely one combing out the other’s long hair. I could hear them, too—Ignazia’s sobs and Prosperine’s consoling mumbles.
In our bed, I held her face and kissed her. “In time, this life with me will make you happy,” I said. She turned away. Tears dropped from her eyes onto my hands.
While I did my business, I watched her downturned mouth, her eyes that gazed at the ceiling like statue’s eyes. Afterwards, I examined the embroidered sheets.
She had not bled. “Vergine?” I asked.
Fear flashed in her eyes. “Si, vergine,” she said. “Don’t hit! Don’t hit!”
Her love with the redhead had been pure, she told me. Some women didn’t bleed the first time, that was all. If I had doubts, I should send her back to Brooklyn.
She looked so beautiful. In her dark eyes, I thought I saw the truth. I beat her anyway, to teach her a lesson in case she was lying. I could not risk the dishonor of having a treacherous wife.
The next day, when I woke for my shift and went to the kitchen, Ignazia was not there. Prosperine was peeling potatoes for my supper. “Where is she, eh?” I asked. “A man wants his wife to cook his meals. Not a monkey.”
Prosperine dropped the potato but held the knife and walked over to me. “If you raise your hand to her again, Tempesta,” she whispered, “I’ll cut off your balls while you sleep.”
My first thought was to strike that scrawny monkey, but she held the point of her knife no more than a potato’s length away from me, down there. She looked and sounded crazy enough to carry out her threat. What, after all, did I know about this witch-cousin of those goddamned Iaccoi brothers, except that they had bargained desperately to be rid of her?
I turned and laughed to cover my fear. “If you ever dare raise a knife to me, you skinny bitch, you’ll get the worst end of it!”
She raised the knife higher, as high as my heart. “That’s what a dead man once thought, too,” she said. She spat on the floor.
“I mean what I say. Stay out of my business. I’ll break your arm if I have to.”
“I mean what I say, too,” she answered. “Hurt her again and I’ll make you a woman!”
* * *
When I returned to work that week, everyone congratulated me on my marriage and shook my hand until it was ready to fall off. Twice I fell asleep on my shift, once at the desk and once while standing against the wall as I supervised the wool-dyeing. From Flynn, my boss, I shut up and took the teasing about the passione of newlyweds, but not from those workers beneath me. When Drinkwater, that goddamned Indian, joked that my new wife kept me from getting sleep anywhere but on the job, I sent him home and docked him half a night’s pay. I sent home two giddy spinning girls, too. After that, they shut up their faces about what went on in my home!
The truth was that I could not sleep from thinking what that crazy mingia Prosperine might do. Finally, I solved the problem when I began the practice of pulling the heavy oak bureau in front of the bedroom door before retiring each morning. “I have to get in there to clean!” Ignazia protested. “To put away laundry! To wash the floor!”
“Do your work when I’m not here,” I told her.
“When you’re not here, I sleep! It’s nighttime.”
“Change your habits then.”
Only with the protection of that heavy bureau could I manage to get some rest, though still I slept poorly and with much interruption. Once I dreamed I saw Prosperine leaping from the maple tree into the open bedroom window, that goddamned peeling knife of hers clenched between her teeth. Bluejays flew behind her, hundreds of them. They flew inside, pecking at me and fluttering, circling around and around the bedroom. . . . Was this to be the lot in life of a man so speciale that he had once seen the Virgin’s tears? Was I to be boss-dyer at work and a monkey’s quarry inside my own casa di due appartamenti—the house I had built with my own two hands?
11 August 1949
One afternoon in the fall, I met Signora Siragusa on the street. “Domenico, you naughty fellow,” she chuckled. “I saw your little wife at Hurok’s Market yesterday. Already she’s got a little belly, eh? What’s the matter with you that you couldn’t wait?”
Next morning, I came home from the plant and lifted Ignazia’s gown while she slept in our bed. I saw.
I saw, as well, that the scowl Ignazia wore in my presence was gone when she slept. Was this the peace of mind she had had as a child in Sicily? In the arms of that redheaded Irishman? When her eyes opened and she saw me, her frowning returned.
“What’s this, eh?” I asked, my hand patting her belly.
For her answer, she burst into tears.
“Eh?” I repeated.
“What do you think it is with that thing of yours always poking inside of me?”
“When is it coming?” I asked her.
“How should I know?” she shrugged, pushing and hurrying herself out of the bed. “Those predictions are never exact. Maybe February. Maybe March. . . . What are you staring at me for?”
“Are you glad about it?” I asked.
She shrugged again, pulling on her dress. She twisted her braid into a knot and pinned it at the base of her neck. “These days, I take what comes. What other choice have you left me?”
I brought Ignazia to Pedacci, who was a shoemaker on the East Side and presidente of Figli d’Italia. Pedacci could tell boy or girl by having the mother walk up and down on the sidewalk in front of his store.
He stood in his doorway while Ignazia walked back and forth, back and forth, three, four times. Each time she got back to the front of the store, she stopped, but Pedacci waved his hand for her to walk some more.
Our request for a prediction had interrupted Pedacci’s game of pinochle in the back room. The other card players—Colosanto (the baker) and Golpo Abruzzi (brass factory)—watched Ignazia walk, too. From all that walking and watching, Ignazia became red-faced. She stopped and motioned me to her side, complaining in a voice loud enough for Pedacci and the others to hear. “All this staring! What am I—a statue in the museum?”
“Don’t be disrespectful,” I warned her. “If Pedacci says walk, then walk!”
A couple more trips to the stop sign and back, Pedacci rubbing his chin, squinting his eyes. Then he put up his hand to stop her.
My wife’s pregnancy was extremely difficult to predict, he whispered to me—one of the most difficult he had ever seen. The baby did not hang in the usual way. Tuscan women sometimes carried their children in this manner. Was Ignazia by any chance from Tuscany?
“No, no,” I told him. “Siciliana.”
Well, he said, with this one, it would be necessary to lift the tette to decide. Strictly for the purpose of accurate prediction. I understood, didn’t I?
“Of course, Don Pedacci, of course,” I said. “I am a modern man, after all, not some jealous, unschooled peasant from the Old Country. Let me just tell my wife.”
I approached Ignazia cautiously. That woman’s temper could sometimes blow like the shift whistle at American Woolen and Textile and it would not do for her to show me her usual disrespect in front of these men.
“It will be necessary for you to step inside for a minute with Signore Pedacci,” I whispered. “To make an accurate prediction, it is necessary for him to lift the tette.”
“What?” she shouted. “Mine? No, no, no, no! Go tell that old goat to
lift his own wife’s tette!”
“Please to keep down your voice,” I said, more firmly this second time. “The poor man is a widower.”
“Tell him to go feel the melanzana at the fruit market then and to keep his dirty hands off of me! I won’t be handled like a pair of shoes in his shop!”
I took my wife’s wrist, gave it a little twist to show her I meant business. “Show some proper obedience to your husband,” I warned her. “Do as I say.”
“Bah!” she said. But the twisting put fear in her eyes and she obeyed.
They were inside for four, five minutes. “Congratulations, Domenico!” Pedacci said when he emerged again. “A son!”
Ignazia stood behind him. The news had brought no joy to her face. Tears, it brought, and a frown I still see this morning, sitting in this garden, so many years later. Ignazia was, from the beginning, a wife to break a man’s heart.
“Come in back for a little drink,” Pedacci said. “Golpo and Colosanto and I want to toast your bambino.” He turned to Ignazia. “Just a small drink, Signora Tempesta. Then I’ll send him back out again. Sit down, ha ha. Tell my customers to come back in an hour, hour and a half.”
Ignazia locked her jaw and blew air out of her nose. She did not sit.
In Pedacci’s back room, I had a little drink and then another one and then Pedacci and the others invited me to play some cards. Was it a crime for a man who broke his back with factory work year in, year out, to sit with a paisano or two and have a simple game of cards? My wife thought so! I had just been dealt a beautiful hand when Abruzzi laughed and nodded his head toward the doorway.
There she stood.
I stood up and walked over to her. “What’s the matter with you, eh?” I whispered.
“Mi scappa la pippi!” she whispered back. Her feet did a little dance. Her hands made fists.
“Don’t speak such vulgarity in the presence of other men! Where’s your dignity? Hold it until we get home.”
