She did not want him back. Marrying him in the first place had meant for her that she no longer needed a husband. He had never suited her anyhow. She would have liked a husband like Robert, one who allowed himself to be made over into a kind of decorative, thoroughbred-looking hearth dog.
It was Robert’s face which said the most to Gavin. For Robert had always hated him and Gavin knew it and knew why and now he saw that he would have to pay for his difference, those twenty years of independence, for Robert meant not to leave him a shirt to his back.
VII
I see Gavin now and again on the train and sometimes we ride together, but I can’t be much company to him now, he doesn’t need anybody to stimulate any mock fears in him anymore, and he feels bad that he is no more company to me. He is aging badly and the strain of trying to lead a double life—that is, to include his legal one—is beginning to tell. He never tried to make his excuses convincing before, so now when he does steal a night away for himself, for Katherine, he has trouble thinking up what to tell Alice. He has softened a great deal towards Alice. No doubt this is partly tactical but mostly it is genuine. He knows now how much she missed in life and he is tender with her. But no matter what he does it’s wrong; when he comes home nights she is more suspicious than when he stays away, his excuses confirm her suspicions and his kindness leaves her no doubt at all.
I tell him every time I see him to get out of that house in Webster’s Bridge and he agrees vacantly but does nothing about it. Lately I’ve even seen him get off the train there again and just last night I was sure I saw Robert Hines follow him off there. He likes the place. It is the scene of all his happiness. He likes to recall what it was to him before Katherine and to contrast that with his present love. Perhaps he still tries to convince himself that they won’t think to look so near home. But at bottom it is hopelessness that keeps him there. What he had found at last seemed to him from the start too good to last and he is convinced that to move would merely postpone the inevitable end of a happiness which is more than he deserves.
Dolce Far’ Niente
AT THE banquet in honor of the Donatis after Giorgio retired from business, as old friends drank to them and recalled their early days, Gina felt as though they were the stars for the night of that television program This Is Your Life.
Joe Carlucci, in his toast, recalled Giorgio when he was just off the boat. Hard times those were. Little work for anybody, much less for a carpenter, which was what Giorgio had been born, back home in Borgo Santo Spirito. Lines of the jobless stretching around streetcorners in the city, and even in a small New England town, even one full of immigrants from your own part of the old country, only odd jobs for one who spoke no English. Aged twenty-nine, Giorgio apprenticed himself to the language.
His English in those days was that of the lumberyard and the hardware store—still was, pretty much. Word by word, how hard they came, how slowly they added up! As if he had had to make each one by hand using dull tools. Colla: glue. Chiodo: nail. Legno: wood. Cacciavite: screwdriver … And the curse of inches and feet, ounces and pounds, pints, quarts, and gallons. Hearing little children rattle off the tongue-twisting sounds, a grown man felt like a cretin.
Lou Whitehead (born Luigi Capobianco) remembered Giorgio scavenging for scrap lumber and hauling it on his back through the streets at night, laden like a mule.
Giorgio had been astounded to see good wood going to waste. Back home in Italy, that land of stone, every splinter was used and used again for generations. Here fine lumber was to be found discarded in vacant lots, in alleyways, on loading platforms at the backs of stores—packing crates, pallets, boxes: yours for the hauling away. So, on his back at first, then later with a cart he made using the wheels of a bicycle he found on somebody’s dump, Giorgio collected wood at night, roaming all over the town, and brought it to stack in his back yard.
What to make out of it? In those days nobody—meaning none of us, noialtri—was building much of anything. The only thing we were doing with any dependability was dying. So from his scavenged lumber Giorgio began making coffins. Poor coffins, pieced together out of scraps, but suited to the times, cheap, what the people could afford.
Most of the guests at that testimonial dinner were members of the burial insurance plan which, remembering them from the old country, Giorgio had started. In the beginning, subscribers paid, depending upon their age and upon Giorgio’s appraisal of their health, their habits, the hazards of their jobs, twenty-five cents, fifty cents a week, and for this Giorgio undertook to bury them when the time for it came. The scheme had almost ruined him at the outset. He could afford to laugh now, but remember Paolo Vacca? Stout as a staff, a bachelor without habits, a tailor, just thirty-two years old, that sly one outsmarted Giorgio by cashing in from a prick of his needle after paying just seventy-five cents in premiums.
Times were bad but even so people could not put off dying until a better day. When the filling station just down the road from the main gate of the Catholic cemetery went out of business, Giorgio rented the building. The location was ideal for a coffinmaker. With the war, times got better. People could afford to bury themselves in finer style. What Italian could resist having the last word with his friends by piquing their envy with a big expensive funeral? One such was a challenge to an even bigger one. Giorgio made a down payment on the building. Before long he was the boss of two men and two women. The women padded and quilted the satin linings that his coffins now featured.
Giorgio began to think of taking a wife and starting a family. For that he had to wait for the war to end.
Because when Giorgio thought of a wife he thought, naturally, of home. No American woman for him, it went without saying. Like bred to like. American women were all right for American men, but for noialtri they were too independent, spoiled, lazy, extravagant, prone to infidelity, lax in bringing up their children. Nor could Giorgio marry just any Italian girl. For example, one from the Piemonte would never do for him. The Piemontesi lived on gnocchi. On Giorgio’s stomach gnocchi lay like a tombstone. In the Veneto, now, they ate polenta. Ah, polenta!
What Giorgio must have was a woman of his own strain. One who spoke the dialect. Who knew and could gossip with him about the people back home. A poor girl—though that went without saying: there was no other kind in Borgo Santo Spirito—a peasant girl, a contadina, a worker, one who knew the value of money, who would be grateful to him every minute of her life for lifting her out of that miseria and bringing her to America. A robust, obedient girl like they made them nowhere else, to bear him robust, obedient sons to help him in the business.
He went home to choose a wife in the autumn of 1947. He said in the village that he had come to visit his family. Nonetheless, unmarried girls—five, six to a family in some unfortunate cases—hung from their windows and balconies like canaries in cages whenever the rich Americano passed beneath.
He had seen Gina when she came down from the mountain where she had spent the summer tending the herd and making cheese. Brown as a chestnut she was and with muscles on her like a man’s.
“Daughter,” said her father, “Signor Donati here wants to marry you and take you with him to America. You are young. It is a long way to go. We will miss you. What do you say?”
She would have said yes to the Devil if he had come from America. What she said was what she had always said, although she was then a woman of seventeen: “It is for you to decide, babbo,” but knowing she would get her wish, that her father was as happy to have a child of his escape to America as she was glad to go, though it should mean they never saw each other again in this life.
They were married in the parish church of Borgo Santo Spirito. Gina still had as a memento one of the confetti, a candied almond, its silver coating long since blackened by time. They came home to Phillipsville where she bore Giorgio one son and two daughters, worked the farm he bought for her to work, tended her herd and made cheese, kept chickens, grew vegetables, raised rabbits for the table, rang
ing over the land with her sickle and her basket for the plants they favored, kept her barn neater than most women kept their kitchens and, expecting from them labor that no American was willing to give, lost one hired man after another so that when it got to be too much for her, with the children now gone from home and the house too big for the two of them and she alone in it all day, the farm was sold to city-folks for a good profit and they moved into town where, a country girl all her life, Gina felt lost and, without her animals to tend and to talk to, useless and lonely, in all that time never wearing anything but black while attending every Italo-American funeral in the town and county.
All the funerals! How many souls lay awaiting the Day of Judgment far from the place of their birth in coffins built by Giorgio Donati!
“A nice funeral,” he would say as they rode home from the cemetery. “They chose our best model. Nothing too good for them. It shows respect. Judge a man by the funeral his family gives him.”
Now she had nagged him into retiring and turning over the shop to son Frank and for the last month she had had him at home “with his hands in his hands.”
“Sono stanca morte della morte!” she said. “Viviamo un po’ mentre viviamo, per pietà!”
She always had to say everything to him twice, the first time in Italian for his benefit, the second time in English for herself. He never understood her English, although it was far better than his. It was as though, the language having cost him such effort, having, in fact, defeated him, he could never believe that she had been able to learn it.
She was proud of her English. Well she might be! God knew what labor it had cost her, lingua bisbàtica! She had come over speaking not one word of it. When she tried to pronounce a word it was like having a tombstone on her tongue. And that was just one word. There was one to be learned for every word she knew in Italian. That thought had many times made Gina hold her head in her hands and cry. Whenever she found a word that was a cognate—a cousin—she rejoiced as though having found a life-and-blood American cousin she never knew she had. Yet he insisted on their speaking Italian. As though to keep her in her place. She came to think of English as the language of emancipation, an emancipation other women had won, not she. Sometimes, God help her, she resented her mother tongue, as though it were a mark of subjection, of inferiority.
But if she chafed at being made to speak Italian with Giorgio, and took it out on him by making him listen twice to everything, she had to pay for it with the children. With them the case was reversed. She would have liked sometimes to speak Italian with them, but they had forgotten all that she had taught them.
When they were little she had spoken both languages with them, correcting them in English, reserving Italian for intimacy and affection—it was a language so well suited to motherhood! She knew of course that it was bad manners to speak a language that another person did not know; before she learned English she herself had suffered the pain of that slight many times. It was only when they were alone together that she spoke to the children in the old tongue. As infants they lay in the straw or in the grass and she crooned to them as she milked or gathered fodder for the rabbits, old songs from the old country and from times long ago.
Then the girls came home from play crying and were ashamed to say what had made them cry, the boy came home bruised, bloodied, and was ashamed to say what he had fought over. After that, whenever she spoke to them in Italian they were uneasy, embarrassed. They would answer her only in English. In time it came to be their only tongue. Then Gina spoke Italian with only one person, the one with whom she would have preferred to speak English.
“I am tired to death of death! Let us live a little while we are alive, for pity’s sake!”
Bewildered by her outburst, Giorgio asked, “What is it that you would like to do?”
A tombstone on her tongue, in neither language could she find a word to say. How was she to know what she would like to do? What opportunity had she ever had to learn what diversions life offered? She knew only what she did not want to do. Not work every minute of the day. Not be always a funeral mute, always dressed in black, always in the presence of grief, of relatives of the dead. Until she was put into her own, never again to go near another coffin.
Afterwards she felt foolish and chided her unruly old heart. Fearful of being punished for her ingratitude, she counted her blessings along with the beads of her rosary.
Now, looking about her at the banquet table, at her children and her grandchildren, Gina awaited a feeling of contentment. She had earned it, that she knew. This if ever was the time for it. Instead she asked herself was it for this that she had left home and come to a strange country? Was it for this that she had worked so hard, so long? Was it for this that she had been so self-denying, so risparmiatissima? The huge savings that Giorgio and she were wildly rumored to have laid up had earned them the envy of their friends, and to be envied was sweet; what was bitter was the knowledge that it had earned them the contempt of their children. What they despised was not just their parents’ frugality but all the old-world ways it represented. When, shocked at some extravagance, Gina lectured them and told how life had been back in Borgo Santo Spirito, they sighed wearily and said, “Mom, this is the U.S.A. You only live once and you can’t take it with you.” Using her childhood as a lesson in the need to work and to save, Gina had succeeded in teaching her children to be bored with her childhood and ashamed of their background of poverty. Towards the three Americans to whom she had given birth, Gina had the feeling that they were of a different race, one that held itself superior to hers and despised her native tongue, her memories, the history and the customs of her people and her place. In the land where she had spent most of her life she felt herself to be a stranger.
The evening ended with the presentation to Giorgio by his former employees of a watch, now that he would never again need to know the time of day. It was passed around the table for all to admire, ending with Gina. It was a heavy gold pocket watch with a heavy gold chain. The watch was silent, its hands still. That was because it had yet to be wound and set going, as Gina quickly realized; but for a moment it seemed to her that time had stopped, had never begun, that in her gnarled and workworn fingers she held the emblem of her joyless past, her joyless future, her approaching end. Attributing her tears to gratitude and a sense of fulfillment, the guests all smiled at her.
As for Giorgio, never one for dolce far’ niente, he had lately found a way to pass the time. In his basement workshop he was busy nowadays making little wooden chests. Of scrap lumber—there was an endless supply at the shop. Nice little lidded chests. For keeping things in.
The Patience of a Saint
WHENEVER THE villagers of Tracytown sighed and said, as they had been doing for some thirty years now, “What will become of poor Ernest when old lady van Voorhees dies?” they were thinking not of Ernest’s dependence upon his mother but rather of his dependence upon her dependence upon him. Ernest van Voorhees lived for his mother. Poor soul, he had nothing else to live for.
The van Voorhees for generations had been subsistence farmers. While all about them mechanization came and small farmers like them sold out to bigger holdings, moneyed outsiders for whom farming was a profitable loss, they kept on with their few dairy cows, sold eggs, hay for the saddlehorses of the ever-growing number of summer and weekend people up from the city. They netted herring in the Hudson on their spring spawning run and smoked and salted down a year’s supply as their pioneer forebears had done. They canned the produce from their kitchen garden, stored roots, apples. In the fall they regularly put their couple of deer in the village’s cold-storage locker.
But even for Ernest, who lived only to work, and no bigger than it was, the farm was too much for him alone. So, his younger brother having been killed in Korea, when his old father died it had to be sold. Since then Ernest and his mother had lived in a trailer some five miles outside the village, not far from their old farm, for whose new owners Ernest worked part-tim
e. He supported himself and his old mother by hiring out to do odd jobs. He mowed my lawns, raked my leaves, cut my firewood, and I was but one of several for whom he did these and other chores. No better mower of lawns could be found, not even among golfcourse-keepers. Each time a different pattern so that the nap would not be pressed in any one prevailing direction but would always stand up like that of a fresh-laid carpet. With a chainsaw he was as skillful as a professional logger. A workhorse. Non-stop. Tireless. And for this the wages he charged were such that when I moved to the area and Ernest came to work for me I made myself unpopular with his other employers by insisting upon paying him more. A non-smoker, non-drinker, non-gambler, non-womanchaser—a non-everything was Ernest van Voorhees: a model of the negative virtues. The respect felt for him in the village was not unmixed with pity for all that he was missing out on in life and with a sense that such self-abnegation as his was possible only because he was “not quite all there,” though what more those who said that about him had that Ernest did not have, I for one was never able to discern.
But the outstanding thing about Ernest, the thing that earned him the village’s universal, unstinting, and unqualified admiration was his dutifulness toward his old mother. He tended her like a baby, which was about what she had now become, was never without her, and his devotion was even more exemplary because his mother was not an attractive nor a sensible woman, never had been, and now that her mind had failed her, was enough to try the patience of a saint. All this not to mention the odor. Giuseppina, our cleaning woman, whenever she paused in her work and glanced out the window and saw Ernest mowing the lawn or spading the flowerbed while his mother dozed in the pickup truck, would say, “Poor soul! What will become of him when she is gone?” And from Giuseppina’s ample bosom, which had known what it was to nurse, would issue the contented sigh with which the sight of filial selflessness can inflate a mother’s breast.
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Page 20
