The Witch of Little Italy

by Suzanne Palmieri

  “Well—no. I guess not at the moment. Do you want me to be?” he asked.

  Eleanor stood up, her feet slipped out from under her, and she saved herself from falling by hanging onto the iron railing. Monkey bars. Lookit me Uncle George! I’m doing it! She was swinging, her arms burning, summer sweat stinging her eyes. Eleanor’s head ached with these echoes from the past. They felt like nuts and bolts clanging around. What would happen when they all found their way together? Who would she be? Eleanor took a large stride backward toward the curb. “I … I’ve made a huge mistake. I … I have to go.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Anthony, standing up and brushing the snow off the back of his jeans.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do what you need to do, but when you decide to come back—and you will—I’ll be here.” He went back into the building and shut the door,

  Eleanor turned around and walked to the curb to try and hail a cab. A crumpled ball of paper flew over her head and landed in the snow at her feet. It began to unfurl. Eleanor picked it up.

  That’s right. Move along. Nothing here to see.

  Love, Aunt Itsy.

  “Itsy,” Eleanor said the strange name aloud. It rolled off her tongue and mingled with the snowflakes. Her heart knew the name even if her mind only contained a small recollection. She turned back to see the woman who tossed the paper, but as she turned the door shut tight against her.

  Something stirred deep inside Eleanor. Something that urged her to take the bait. To run toward the secrets, into the unknown. If there was ever a time to be brave, she thought … And then Carmen’s voice from earlier in the evening: “A little self-confidence would go a long way…”

  Eleanor Amore straightened her posture and only tugged on her hat once as she stomped up the stairs and threw open the closed doors of 1313 170th Street.

  Once inside she leaned against the double doors and adjusted her eyes.

  A semicircle of oldness stood directly in front of her. Eleanor turned pale. The lamp on the hallway table gave a warm glow, and the doorways to both downstairs apartments were open, flooding the hall with dueling Christmas lights. The light flickered off the ruby poinsettia pin on Aunt Fee’s housecoat, and the high shimmer of the ladies’ hairspray.

  “Are you okay?” asked Mimi.

  They tightened their circle, coming toward her. Sandwiching her back against the door. Eleanor began to hyperventilate.

  Itsy held a pot full of what looked like tomato sauce, but smelled like fish. Eleanor was immediately sick to her stomach.

  “Move, ladies! I think she’s going to blow!” yelled Fee.

  Mimi rushed Eleanor into apartment 1A and closed the door. Fee shuffled across the hall into the apartment she shared with Itsy. But not Itsy. She stayed in the hall, thinking about a day long ago as well as a day yet to come.

  * * *

  “Are you going to be sick, love?” asked Mimi when she closed the door.

  “No,” said Eleanor, taking in air through her nose. “The smell’s gone. What was that?”

  “Crab Sauce. The Feast of the Seven Fishes, don’t you know?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s right,” said Eleanor, remembering the amazing meal from that last visit. Squid salad drenched in olive oil, stuffed lobster tails, and the crab sauce … her mouth watered and a warmth spread through her at the thought of the delicious food, but then the queasiness hit again.

  “Will you be all right in your mother’s old room? Or would you rather sleep with me? I wouldn’t mind sharing my bed,” Mimi said as she led Eleanor down a narrow hallway running the length of the apartment. The dim Christmas lights mimicked candle glow and cast long granddaughter and grandmother shadows against the walls.

  “No, I think I’d like to sleep in her room,” Eleanor said.

  You don’t want to share a bed with me, she thought, looking at her grandmother’s wide yet fragile back, you’re probably going to want to kick me out on my behind when you find out why I’ve come.

  “Is that so?” asked Mimi, stopping in front of a closed door.

  Eleanor held her breath. Did she hear me? Did I say that aloud? “What?” she asked.

  Mimi smiled. “You’d rather sleep in her room?”

  Eleanor relaxed. “We had a fight,” she explained. “I’d like to be close to her. It’s easier when she’s not around. If that makes any sense. When I was little and she left me with nannies I’d sleep in her nightclothes. It always made me feel better.”

  “Oh yes. It makes a world of sense.” Mimi’s hand rested on the closed door. She moved her palm against it like a mother who rubs a child’s back at night. “I don’t come in here much. Only to clean. So you’ll find a lot of her in here, or at least the ‘her’ she was when she was mine.” Mimi moved her hand to the doorknob. It was made of cut glass in a deep shade of purple. Mimi stopped for a moment and looked up at Eleanor. There were tears in her eyes. “When she was little she liked to pretend this was the largest amethyst in the world, you know. It was the most marvelous thing, her imagination.”

  Mimi opened the door, pushing past the squeaky complaints of its hinges.

  The room was old-fashioned but lovely, just like Eleanor’s memory of the rest of Mimi’s apartment. And so much like Carmen’s own personal style. Only Carmen called it “Classic Chic.”

  There was a four-poster bed pushed against a large window, and a beautiful Persian rug under her feet. Against one wall stood a two-door armoire with full-length oval mirrors, etched with misty vines and flowers at the borders. Kitty-corner on another wall was an inviting dressing table. Eleanor sat down on the pink cushioned chair in front of it and took stock of the shiny contents cluttering the tabletop before her. Makeup jars, perfume bottles, necklaces … all waiting for a sixteen-year-old Carmen to come home and claim them.

  Mimi stood perched at the threshold, her posture unsure. The air between them began to settle into a silence. Awkward, yet softly exciting. Like an unexpected snow day.

  “Can I get you something to eat? A cup of tea, maybe?” asked Mimi.

  “No, thank you.” Eleanor’s voice sounded strange in her own ears. Higher. A pitch she was unused to.

  Mimi took a hesitant step into the room, sniffed the air, and moved closer to Eleanor. Soon she was behind her and they looked at each other in the dressing table mirror. So many reflections of people all in one night, thought Eleanor. “I looked at my mother tonight in a mirror just like this. When we were fighting.”

  Mimi took off Eleanor’s hat and put it on the dressing table. She picked up a heavy silver brush with soft white bristles and began to brush out Eleanor’s long, straight hair.

  “Your mother has always liked to have conversations in mirrors. She gets to look at herself while she talks. I’m sure you know how vain she is,” said Mimi as she brushed down to the ends of her granddaughter’s hair.

  Eleanor looked at Mimi in the mirror. It wasn’t like looking at Carmen’s reflection at all. There wasn’t any competition, or tension. Mimi just … was. She was there, brushing her hair as if she’d done it every night for as long as they both could remember.

  A pile of small paperback books caught Eleanor’s attention and she pulled against her grandmother’s strokes. T. S. Eliot. e. e. cummings. Tennyson. Keats.

  “She liked poetry, huh?” asked Eleanor.

  “Yes. She doesn’t anymore? She used them for her monologues at school.”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen her read anything but scripts. And beauty magazines. She likes music though.” Thinking of Carmen curled up with a new script made Eleanor start to cry.

  And she likes to dance. And she smells like India. And she hates me.

  “You know how you tell a naturally beautiful woman from the rest?” asked Mimi.

  “How?” asked Eleanor, grateful for the detour.

  “If she’s still pretty when she cries, that’s how. A lot of women swell up and get all blotchy. But a naturally beautiful woman will shine.
Look at you…” Mimi put down the brush and rested her chin on the top of Eleanor’s head, placing her hands on each side of Eleanor’s face, centering their reflection. “You are shining, my dearest beauty.”

  Eleanor wanted to say so many things. But nothing came out. She pulled away from her grandmother and put her hat back on.

  Mimi took the hint and went to leave. “Will you be okay? Do you need anything?”

  “I don’t know,” said Eleanor, her throat tight.

  “No, of course you don’t. Well, it might be cold comfort, but I love you, Eleanor, and I’m glad you’re home.”

  Come home … she heard again. Was it Mimi’s voice all along? How? And then there was the sound of a wailing child. Eleanor put her hand to her mouth to make sure it wasn’t her own weeping ripping free again. It wasn’t.

  “Who’s that, Mimi?”

  “Who’s what?”

  “Is there a little child living here? I just heard someone crying.”

  A shadow flickered across Mimi’s eyes. “I didn’t hear anything. Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t want to sleep with me?”

  “No, I’m fine. But that was definitely a crying child. Maybe outside?”

  “Maybe it’s a ghost?” offered Mimi, unaffected by the idea.

  “Is the building haunted, Mimi?”

  “Isn’t every building haunted?” asked Mimi, playfully. “Well, goodnight, Babygirl. I’m glad you are here. If that crying keeps you up, you come and get me, okay? Promise?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  The door closed. And Eleanor was alone.

  She picked up the e. e. cummings paperback off the dressing table and made her way around the room. Atop the trunk at the end of the bed there was a radio combination record player. Eleanor lifted the blue plastic lid, pushed the on switch, and prayed. The turntable began to spin. She lifted the arm and placed the needle to the black vinyl. This was the last record my mother listened to in her bedroom.

  Connie Francis’ “Where the Boys Are” came singing out.…

  Where the boys are, someone waits for me …

  Eleanor smiled. It was so … sixteen of her! She sat on the end of the bed and let the book of poetry open to a natural place. A clue to her mother’s favorite page.

  Anyone lived in a pretty how town

  (with up so floating many bells down)

  Up, so floating. That summed up Eleanor’s mood. Something that spanned comfort and terror. But things that terrified most people didn’t scare Eleanor Amore. It was a quirk of sorts, her absolute affection for all things Gothic and dreadful. When she was younger and she’d ask Carmen about monsters in closets or ghosts under the bed, Carmen would roll her eyes and send out smoke rings shooing her away with an If-only-life-could-be-that-interesting look. But Carmen didn’t understand. Eleanor wasn’t afraid of the common childhood threat. She was delighted.

  Her paintings reflected her need for dark themes. Her figures rarely had eyes, only reflections of what Eleanor supposed were their secrets. If there was a vase of roses she’d find the one that was wilted, and examine, with her brush, the potential of decay.

  “Morose, doom-prophet, depressed, troubled.” These were all words used to describe her and her artwork.

  “And we can’t forget pathetic,” she reminded herself aloud. That was Cooper’s favorite insult. “Eleanor, you’re absolutely pathetic,” he’d say after he hit her. And worse, after they’d have sex.

  Cooper. She didn’t even want to think about him in this place, in her newfound sanctuary, her sacred space … she didn’t want to channel his energy. But it was too late. Even just the thought of him barged over her, unwanted and present all the time.

  She couldn’t block out the memories just like she couldn’t protect her body from his fists.

  She took off her clothes, all except her hat, and looked at her naked body in the armoire mirrors. She examined her bruises. Some old and yellow, fading. Some newer, red and angry. It bothered her that she knew the lifespan of bruising.

  The first few months with Cooper weren’t so bad. She wasn’t in love, but he was beautiful to look at—and popular. And for a brief moment Eleanor felt like a participant in her life instead of an observer. Carmen paid attention. Her relationship with a rich, good-looking boy inspired Carmen to call Eleanor on a weekly basis to “check in.” Other girls at Yale swooned over her. Wanting to know her secret. How the strange girl with the freaky green hat had won the most desirable freshman boy at Yale. If only she’d known the secret herself, she may have been able to avoid the last three and a half years. The secret? Damage. Cooper smelled damage a mile away. He knew she’d never run. She’d never tell.

  “Oh God,” she said into the air as a wave of nausea washed over her. The thick black of sticky memories sloshed up like oil. The memory of those months. Especially the first night she’d had sex with him. The night she lost her virginity. The night he hit her and put his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream. When she didn’t leave him, or report him the next morning, they both knew she belonged to him. And try as she might, Eleanor couldn’t figure out why she stayed. That week, when Carmen called, Eleanor told her mother what was happening. There was a silence on the line and then the question: “What did you do?”

  What did she do?

  “Why didn’t you tell me to get away from him? Why?” Eleanor asked the walls. Her chest hurt. A familiar void opening up. The rush of breath leaving her as her peripheral vision went fuzzy. She sat down in the middle of the floor and wrapped her arms around herself willing it all to go away. She searched the room for answers.

  On the back of the door a nightgown hung from a metal hook. A permanent hook. Not the plastic ones you find in the newer stores, the ones that go over the doorframes and make life more difficult. Just a simple metal hook and a pretty nightgown hanging from it. White with yellow flowers.

  Carmen’s, of course. Eleanor got up fast and grabbed for the nightgown hungrily. She yanked it off the hook and pressed it against her face while she did the math. Carmen left the Bronx in 1961 when she was sixteen years old. Eleanor wasn’t born until Carmen was thirty-nine, on the cusp of forty. That meant the nightgown had been hanging there for over forty years. And still, the fabric smelled like her mother. Spicy and warm.

  Relaxing, Eleanor slipped on the light nightgown. It must have been summer when Carmen left because it was sleeveless with lace eyelet edging and tiny buttons down the front.

  The nightgown worked better than any drug. All the terrible memories took flight. She stood in the middle of her mother’s room wearing her mother’s nightgown, listening to her mother’s Connie Francis record. Calmed, her hands went to her stomach.

  “I’m here for you. I don’t know who you are, or what’s in store for us, but I’m here for you. And I swear—I swear to God that if anyone ever hurts you, I’ll kill them.”

  She turned down the bedcovers like she’d lived in the place her whole life and got into the bed. It felt like a dream she’d had a million times. The comfort. Better than any five-star hotel. The city sounds hummed a soft lullaby, muted by the thick glass window and falling snow outside. Eleanor didn’t feel like being that snow anymore. She felt like being Eleanor Amore of the Bronx. Whoever that might be.

  Refuge is a subjective thing. It can be found in the most unlikely places. Cardboard boxes, underpasses, subway stations. It can be found in drug addiction, under thick layers of skin, and in churches, too. Eleanor Amore found her refuge in an old brick building throbbing with loss and possibly frequented by an invisible crying child. And as the darkness fell soft all around, each resident of 1313 170th Street went to bed with the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same.

  In apartment 1A, next to the room that would now belong to Eleanor, Mimi knelt by her bed and cried soft tears of gratitude into hands folded in prayer. She prayed to the God of her father’s family and the Goddess of her mother’s. Once Mimi’d felt that a new life was growing inside Eleanor
she’d taken out her mother’s spell book and cast the Lost Witch spell. She’d done it alone, without her sisters, knowing that a new life opens all the channels of the mind. And her granddaughter had listened to her yearning and heeded the call. Mimi climbed into bed with more joy in her heart than she’d held in many years. More joy than she thought it was able to hold at all.

  In Apartment 1B, Fee fell asleep in her worn-out easy chair eating Christmas cookies and watching a rerun of Bob Hope’s Christmas special on the Family Channel, her snoring as loud as her voice. But as she fell to sleep her thoughts were of her grandniece, and the children she’d never had. How different would it all have been? She wondered. And in her dreams she was thin and quiet and was running down the beaches with her sisters.

  Itsy sat up straight in her bed leaning her head against the hard headboard and rubbing her eyes with her hands. I need a plan, she thought. If the girl is to stay, then I need a plan.

  Anthony, in Apartment 2A, slept on the floor to be closer to his one true love. And directly downstairs, Eleanor drifted into sleep trying to grasp all of her lost memories while the soft snow created a cocoon all around them.

  And in apartment 2B, Georgie’s old apartment, piled high with all his things packed up in boxes and bags, a child was crying.

  3

  Itsy

  After the day that took half our family, the building went to Mimi. She was the oldest functioning child. It was a wonderful gift. And to be honest, it belonged more to her than me or Fee. Mimi loved every brick of the place, still does. It’s harder for me and Fee to forget the ghosts. I don’t know if Mimi forgets them, or just blinds herself, but I don’t ask and she doesn’t tell.

  Eight siblings and two parents in a two-bedroom apartment was close comfort. Mama and Papa slept in the front bedroom, the four sisters (myself included) slept in the back bedroom, and the boys slept in the attic. They had a fireplace up there for the cold winter nights, but those boys were a strong lot. They liked it up there. They planned their lives up there. My twin, George, was always supposed to be up there with them, but he usually crept into bed with me or Mama. He said he couldn’t sleep with the older boys because they scared him. Said they talked about how they were going to die.