The Black Madonna

by Louisa Ermelino

  “Yes, yes,” the women told Teresa. “Listen to her. Her husband Amadeo is a smart man.”

  Teresa looked down at the women and then faced Magdalena. “I know your husband,” she said. “Long before you came here, I knew him.”

  Magdalena clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She raised her chin. “Come with me now,” she said, and she took Teresa’s arm and pulled her off the stoop. Magdalena linked her arm with Teresa’s and held her close. Teresa stiffened but Magdalena held tight and led her around the corner to her house. It wasn’t a tenement, but a private house, and she and Amadeo and Salvatore lived in all of it.

  “She was lucky,” the women on the stoop said, talking about Magdalena, “to hook a man like that. He started with nothing like the rest of us but now he has a house with chandeliers hanging from every ceiling.”

  “And a bathroom with colored tiles on the wall,” one of the women said to another in a low voice, “pink and green, laid in a pattern, like a checkerboard.”

  “How do you know?” someone asked.

  “What do you mean by that? You think I’m lying? Tony the plumber told my husband.”

  The women argued about who knew what and who told whom, but they all agreed that whatever the color of the bathroom tiles, Magdalena had fallen in good. “If things had gone different,” one of them said, “it could have been Teresa living in that house.”

  But Mary Ziganetti shook her head. “Teresa never had the luck. Some people, they got a horseshoe up their ass, but not Teresa.”

  Amadeo Pavese was surprised when Magdalena brought Teresa into the house. He stood up when the women came into the parlor. It was the room where he and Teresa had spent Sundays, where Salvatore and Nicky had played. They were so tiny then; just little boys. Amadeo remembered how Teresa would put them down on the rug by her feet, one then the other, and how they would grab at her skirt with their fists and pull themselves up. They only wanted to be in her lap, he remembered, a long time ago.

  Amadeo came to Teresa and took her hand. “How good to see you,” he said. He felt awkward, uncomfortable. If Teresa could tell, she gave him no sign. She said nothing.

  Magdalena sat down in one of the big chairs. She leaned forward, legs apart, her elbows resting on her knees. “Teresa needs a doctor, Amo. A good one, the best, to make Nicola walk. I told her you would know, that you would help.”

  Teresa looked over at Magdalena. Such a girl, she thought. But a girl with power, who knew how to make her way in the world.

  “Of course,” Amadeo said. “Why didn’t you come before, Teresa? You know I would help you, always.”

  Teresa inclined her head. She half-closed her eyes. “I didn’t think,” she said.

  Magdalena stood up. “Good. It’s done. Come, Teresa. Have something with us.”

  “No, no. Thank you, but Nicky’s alone. I have to be with him. He needs me all the time. You understand.” She turned to go.

  Magdalena nodded. She followed Teresa to the door, but before she let her out, she touched Teresa’s arm. “Amadeo will pay,” she told her. “You don’t worry about nothing but Nicola.”

  Teresa shook her head. “I don’t worry,” she said. “Nicola has a father. His father will pay.”

  Amadeo Pavese had said he would find Teresa a doctor and a few days later there was a paper for her behind the counter in the candy store downstairs. On it was a doctor’s name, a Fifth Avenue address, and a phone number. Teresa called the doctor from the phone in the candy store to ask for an appointment. “Three weeks from today,” she told the women on the stoop.

  “Such a long wait,” they said, impressed.

  “He’s a very big doctor,” Teresa told them.

  “He must be good,” they said.

  Teresa waved a hand in the air over their heads. “The best,” she said. “Nothing but the best for my Nicky.”

  Three weeks later, Teresa got all dressed up and they took a cab to the doctor’s office. There were Persian rugs on the floor. The furniture was antique. “Alt’Italia,” Nicky’s mother whispered in Nicky’s ear when the doctor came into the room. “Toscano, genovese.” She sniffed in disapproval.

  “Look at his shoes,” Nicky told his mother. “You get me a pair like that and I’ll walk in hell.” Teresa made a face as if to smack him but would never do it in front of the Fifth Avenue doctor. Instead she twisted the tip of his ear in her gloved fingers and threatened him when he screwed up his face with the pain.

  The doctor examined Nicky and talked to them for a long time. Teresa thought she might faint. She sat straight, her back not touching the chair. The bones of her corset dug into her sides. Her smile covered her teeth. The doctor talked about Nicky’s spine and nerves and muscles and said things she didn’t understand.

  “Can you make him walk?” she asked the doctor when she thought he was finished.

  “He needs an operation,” the doctor said.

  “And you swear to me he’ll walk?”

  “Signora, forgive me. I’m not God.”

  Teresa stood up. She touched the painted wooden cherries on the brim of her black straw hat. It was from an Easter long ago, before she was married, and she worried that it had lost its shape after all those years in the box under the bed where she had stored it. “Don’t worry about God,” she said. “I’ll take care of God. What can you do?”

  The doctor put a hand on Nicky’s knee. “I’ll do my best.”

  Like an amerigane, this doctor talks, Teresa said to herself, and this gave her confidence in him. Wasn’t America the greatest country in the world?

  The doctor sat back. “You have to consent to the operation, sign papers, and the boy has to want it.”

  “I want it. I want it,” Nicky said. “Anything beats this. I can’t do anything. I can’t go downstairs. I can’t go to school . . .”

  The doctor looked from Nicky to Teresa. “Why doesn’t he go to school?”

  “How much does the operation cost?” she said.

  “He needs to be in school,” the doctor said.

  “He needs to walk,” Teresa told him.

  “His father?”

  “His father’s away at sea, halfway around the world . . . Singapore, the Solomon Islands . . .” She tried to remember other names she had read off the stamps to the women on the stoop. “Suez,” she said after a moment.

  “You decide, signora . . . You call me, and I’ll make all the arrangements.”

  When they got outside, Nicky’s mother pulled his hair. She yanked it so hard Nicky thought she’d snapped his neck. “You keep quiet,” she said to him. “You don’t tell people your business. Life is hard enough without giving them things to use against you, a knife to stick in your heart.” She twisted Nicky’s ear and when she let go it was red like a summer tomato. “Who knows why this happened?” She looked up and shook her fist at the sky. “Only God knows why He did this.”

  Nicky started crying. “It wasn’t God. It was Jumbo,” he said. “Jumbo weakened the rope and when it was my turn it broke. The rope broke and I fell.” Nicky was bawling now, his eyes shut tight, tears caught in his lashes.

  A woman in a fur coat stopped in front of him. Colored feathers stuck out of her hat. “What is it?” she said to Teresa. “What are you doing to him?”

  “You mind your own business, you.” Teresa waved her away. “He’s my son. I’ll do whatever I want with him.” Teresa pulled Nicky upright and stuck her hand out, pushing Nicky into the cab that pulled up at the curb of Sixty-fourth and Fifth. She got in after him. “Worry about yourself,” she told the woman in the fur coat through the window. Teresa muttered to herself as the cab pulled away. She pushed her handkerchief in Nicky’s face. “Here,” she said. “Blow your nose.”

  All the way downtown, Teresa held her breath. She held it until she saw the bell tower of St. Anthony of Padua church and knew Spring Street was only two blocks away.

  Dante helped Teresa get him upstairs, and when Nicky was in his chair at t
he kitchen table, she took off her hat and filled the coffeepot. She asked Dante to sit down but he said it was too nice a day to be inside, which made Nicky cry like before.

  “He’s fine,” Teresa told Dante. “He’s just excited.” She put a hand on Nicky’s forehead to check for fever and Dante gave him a piece of gum. When Dante left, she shut the door and pulled the chain. She boiled the milk for the coffee. Nicky made a face when the skin of the milk went into his cup.

  “What?” she said.

  “I hate the scuma.”

  “You don’t know what’s good for you,” she told him, and took the cup for herself.

  “The scuma’s good for me?”

  “Of course. It’s got all the vitamins.”

  “You always say that. You say everything bad is good. You say the apple core’s the best part.”

  “That’s right. It is. What do you know?”

  “How could it be the best part? How? How?”

  “You’re just spoiled,” she said. “When I was your age, I ate everything and I said thank you. I never talked back.” She poured coffee into his milk and stirred in three spoonfuls of sugar. She gave him a plate of anisette biscuits and ran a hand through his hair. She kissed the streaks of dirt the tears had made on his face and then she sat down with a pencil and paper and wrote numbers in columns.

  “Whatcha doing?” Nicky wanted to know.

  “Nothing. Dunk your biscotti.”

  “Can I go down?” he said. “The doctor said I could. He said I should go to school.”

  “He’s up Fifth Avenue. What does he know about here? You stay in the house. When you walk, you can go all over. I don’t care where you go. Now be quiet. I got things to figure out.”

  “Am I getting the operation?”

  “The doctor said you needed the operation?”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “Just eat your biscotti. Leave everything else to me. I’m your mother, no?”

  Teresa left early the next morning. She was wearing the black straw hat with the painted wooden cherries and her corset. Before she left, she stood by the side of the bed where Nicky slept and she pushed back his hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with her thumb. He pretended to be asleep, and lay still until he heard the door shut and her footsteps on the stairs. He said three Hail Marys to measure time before he pulled himself over to the front window and watched his mother turn the corner up Sullivan. Then he made his way to the back to call Salvatore.

  Salvatore’s bedroom window was open. Nicky could see him in front of the mirror over his dresser knotting the blue tie he wore to school. His hair was wet and slicked back. Magdalena was shouting for him to hurry. Her voice carried across the alley.

  Nicky cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled Salvatore’s name over the din of voices and sounds from the open windows. Salvatore turned when he heard him and waved.

  “Come over,” Nicky said.

  Salvatore leaned out the window and looked up. “I’m late, Nicky. What is it?”

  “I said, come over. Don’t go to school. My mother’s gone. See if you can find Jumbo.”

  “Jumbo? That’s easy. He’s in Sam and Al’s stealing candy. He’s in there every morning, pays for three Hersheys and takes six.”

  “So get him and come over.”

  “I don’t know, Nicky. I got caught cutting school last week.”

  “C’mon, Sally. I can’t take it in here much longer. Besides, the old lady’s gone for the whole day.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She told me she was going uptown, to see that doctor about my legs.”

  Magdalena shouted, louder than before. “I gotta go,” Salvatore said. “Before she gets serious.”

  “You coming over?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Nicky went to the front window to wait. He pulled the shade up as high as it would go. He put a pillow under his elbows and leaned far over the windowsill and looked out on to the street. He didn’t care who saw him with his tongue hanging out.

  On the corner of Prince and Sullivan, Salvatore caught up with Jumbo and his five sisters. Before they turned down the street toward the subway, Jumbo’s sisters petted and kissed him goodbye until he cried. When they left, Salvatore had to give him a handkerchief to wipe off all the lipstick. “Christ, Jumbo, I’d whack them if I was you.” Jumbo didn’t answer. He took the wrapper off a Mounds bar. “I thought you ate Hersheys in the morning.”

  Jumbo shrugged. “I mix it up.”

  “We’re cutting school,” Salvatore said. “We’re going over Nicky’s.”

  Jumbo nodded. His mouth was full of coconut. He was looking over Salvatore’s shoulder. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Fat Augustina . . .”

  Salvatore turned and saw the seventh-grade nun coming down Sullivan Street. Her arms were folded across her chest, her hands hidden in the sleeves of her habit. A silver crucifix swung at the end of the oversized black rosary she wore wrapped around her waist.

  Sister Augustina was built like the truck that delivered coal, and they called her Il Duce behind her back. Jumbo said she was bald underneath the veil and Nicky had drawn cartoons of her naked on the wall in the boys’ bathroom.

  She had always been a “boys’ nun,” and after Father Tom mixed the classes, she was never really happy again. She sat the boys and the girls on opposite sides of the room in an effort to recapture the past. Some years she put the boys in front and the girls in back. The girls annoyed her. They made her wince. They fawned and whined and went home to cry to their mothers.

  Salvatore pulled Jumbo into LaCapria’s building and they ditched their books under the stairs and doubled back through the alleys and up the fire escape ladder of Nicky’s building. Jumbo stopped in front of Vicky Palermo’s window on the second floor to catch his breath. She had nailed it shut after Nicky’s fall. She said she didn’t want any more surprises.

  Jumbo was breathing hard. He grabbed Salvatore’s arm and held him back. “Did she see us?” Jumbo said. A drop of sweat hung at the end of his nose, another at his chin.

  “No point worrying about it now,” Salvatore told him. He kept climbing. He was on the third-floor fire escape when Jumbo yelled for him to wait. Windows opened around the alley. Gracie Petrussi was hanging sheets. Jumbo flattened himself against Vicky Palermo’s window. He jammed his fingers into a pocket and felt for his last Hershey bar. By the curve of it, he knew it had almonds.

  “C’mon,” Salvatore called down. “What are you waiting for?”

  “Shh, Gracie Petrussi . . . She’ll see us. She’ll tell my mother.” Jumbo slid down along the window and sat on the ledge. He unwrapped the Hershey bar and bit into it, sucked the chocolate around the almonds until they were dry and chalky in his mouth. He decided to stay where he was. He was afraid of heights. He had been ever since Nicky fell. “Good thing it wasn’t you,” his mother told him later. “Your size, you would have gone through the earth. We would have found you in China.”

  Salvatore had to come all the way back down to get Jumbo and stand right behind him on the way up, so close that Jumbo could lean back and feel Salvatore’s body against his own, like a wall.

  Salvatore pushed Jumbo in through Nicky’s window. Jumbo scraped his knee and left chocolate handprints on the curtains where he had grabbed at them. “You sure your mother’s gone for the whole day?” he asked Nicky, spitting on his fingers and rubbing the blood off his knee. Jumbo was afraid of Nicky’s mother.

  “She’ll overlook you in a minute, say something, do something to bring you harm. She’s out to get you,” Jumbo’s mother would tell him. His five sisters would nod in agreement. Only this morning, while Jumbo’s mother was tying a white silk scarf around his neck to protect him from drafts, she had stabbed a finger at the floor. “That strega on the fifth floor, she’s jealous of you, your big strong legs. She blames you for what happened to her fatherless son.”

  “He’s got a father,” Jumbo said.

&n
bsp; “Where? Who says? Who sees him?” Antoinette said.

  “He told me.”

  “Never mind. You just stay away. They go right. You go left.”

  Jumbo’s five sisters bowed their heads. They worried about their baby brother. He was like their own child. They would give him nickels and licorice whips. They would hide jelly-filled candies and cherries wrapped in red foil in their clothes. Jumbo would press his body against theirs, each sister in turn, and search for the candy. He would dig his fingers into their sides and under their breasts. He tickled them until they screamed. “Oh, baby,” they would say and kiss the top of his head.

  Jumbo stood inside the window, afraid to sit. “Relax,” Nicky said. “She’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  “Uptown, to see that fancy doctor on Fifth Avenue that’s going to make me walk, the one Salvatore’s father knows.”

  “You sure that’s gonna take all day?”

  “You kidding? You know how far uptown is? I been there. It’s a long ways away from here, lemme tell you.” Nicky frowned. “Why’re you so nervous?”

  “I don’t know. She don’t like me, your mother. She never liked me.”

  “Forget this bullshit,” Salvatore said. He took out a collection of cigarette butts and lined them up on the coffee table. Some of them were two inches long. He sent Jumbo into the kitchen to get matches. Jumbo came back with a dish of eggplant.

  “Whatta you got?”

  “It was on the table, Nicky.”

  “My mother must have left it for lunch.”

  “Can I have it?”

  “Now, Jumbo? It’s for lunch,” Salvatore said. He picked a cigarette butt off the table and sat back on the couch. He put his feet up.

  “So, I’m hungry now. That’s a crime? Jeez, Sally.”

  “Eat it, Jumbo,” Nicky said. “Take whatever you want. If it’s gone, my mother’ll be happy.” He leaned over the coffee table, took one of the longer cigarette butts and put it in his mouth.