The Black Madonna

by Louisa Ermelino

  ANTOINETTE

  1968

  To his mother, Jumbo was always special. He was, after all, her miracle, the son the Madonna had sent her after five girls, and not just an ordinary son, but a huge son, a giant of a son. Even the sight of his shadow caused a line of sweat to form between her breasts.

  Jumbo grew up to fulfill the prophecy of his birth. He was forever Jumbo, the biggest baby ever born on Spring Street, and Spring Street was where he stayed: in his mother’s house, at his mother’s table, or in the kitchen of one of his five sisters. Filomena, Raffaella, Albina, Angelina, and Rosina had each in their turn, in the order of their birth, married and moved from their mother’s apartment to another one in the same building. They were scattered, one on every floor, the eldest across from the ancestral home, and through their open doors they would recognize their brother’s footsteps and call to him as he climbed the stairs. He would stop to eat with one and then the other until he reached his mother’s house, where he’d eat again. The Last Supper, his mother, Antoinette, called it.

  The neighborhood had changed since Jumbo was a boy, since Nicky had fallen three stories from the rope in the alley, since Magdalena had arrived from Castelfondo to be Salvatore’s stepmother, but not much. Dante was still there in front of the building, but now, instead of standing, he sat in an old kitchen chair, stuffing poking through the upholstered vinyl of the seat cushion, and he ate in Antonina’s restaurant since his mother had died, big sandwiches of capicollo and roasted peppers on bread from Dapolito’s on Prince Street for lunch and four-course meals in the evening: antipasto, primo, secundo, and dolce. Some thought Antonina was sweet on Dante; there were rumors that he would rub up against her in the coat-check room when she took his coat in winter and his straw hat in summer but it could have been only talk. Antonina had thrown her drunken husband out into the street years ago and a woman alone, in business for herself, was suspected of every imaginable sin of the flesh, even down to a grope among the hangers during lunch hour.

  Sam & Al’s candy store was gone, and so was Barbato’s Pork Store, where Jumbo’s mother and Nicky’s mother would run up their bills and check through the plate-glass window to see who was inside before they entered, the pork store being narrow with a row of chairs along the wall, and not a place to meet your enemy.

  It was hard to believe that Nicky’s mother still inspired dread in Jumbo’s heart. But his own mother and his five doting sisters had kept the fear alive, always stuffing some medal or relic into one of his pockets to protect him from the ill luck they were sure Nicky’s mother wished upon him. Sometimes Jumbo’s mother Antoinette felt that in spite of all her efforts to protect the love of her life, her reason for breathing, Nicky’s mother had managed to do Jumbo harm, had held him back from his destiny. Here he was, a grown man, with no wife and no children.

  Antoinette had hoped for a better job for her son than bartender in Benvenuto’s across the street. She had relentlessly badgered Filomena’s husband, who worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company on East Sixteenth Street, to get Jumbo a job, a nice clean job where he could wear a suit and tie and write with a pen at a desk. But these were the least of her worries.

  There was the night Jumbo didn’t come home and his sisters held their collective breaths along with the food they had set aside for him. Antoinette crossed herself and braced for the worst of news, which came quickly, as news always did in the neighborhood, everyone on top of one another and always interested in his neighbor’s fate, fingers crossed that it was worse than their own. Word on the street was that Jumbo was into Fat Eddie Fingers for his life and to save it he had run away.

  Not just Jumbo’s mother and sisters and Fat Eddie Fingers knew Jumbo was gone. Everyone knew. Jumbo took up a lot of room. When he wasn’t around, you noticed. Everyone on Spring Street and Sullivan Street and Thompson Street noticed. Jumbo was missing and they all knew why.

  But unlike Nicky’s mother Teresa, Jumbo’s mother knew there were more important things than saving face, and she called together her gaggle of girl children and went off to Fat Eddie Fingers’s café on King Street to beg for Jumbo’s life. Fat Eddie Fingers had never had so many women in his café at once; it made him nervous. Some insisted it was the first time any women had set foot in his café.

  It was commonly known that Fat Eddie didn’t like women, not even his own mother, who had abandoned him for a country boy twenty years her junior and run off with him to a farm in Upstate New York when Eddie was only ten. The next-door neighbor, Mrs. Petrocelli, had fed Eddie and washed his clothes but it wasn’t enough to change Eddie’s mind about women in general and mothers in particular.

  All that soft flesh stewed in perfume, all those females, and every one of them crying like a professional mourner had turned the tide, had convinced Fat Eddie Fingers to spare Jumbo’s life.

  The only thing Fat Eddie Fingers really wanted was his money, the vig on which was going up all the time. A dead man couldn’t pay any vig, let alone principal, not to mention the inconvenience of making a body the size of Jumbo’s disappear. A deal was struck. Jumbo would work the bar in Benvenuto’s restaurant, where Fat Eddie Fingers was an undisclosed partner. With double shifts six days a week and every paycheck signed back to Luca Benvenuto, who would cash the checks and hand the money over to Fat Eddie Fingers, Jumbo could be out of debt before he died of natural causes. For the check-cashing privilege, Jumbo had to pay Luca Benvenuto twenty percent. Once Antoinette knew her son was out of mortal danger, she appealed to Fat Eddie Fingers’s business side and negotiated for Jumbo’s tips. A man’s got to eat, Antoinette told him.

  Jumbo looked on the bright side. Eddie could have put him behind the wheel of a truck or on the docks lugging cargo. But here he was, walking to work, talking to people with clean hands, and best of all he wasn’t dead. He hadn’t even lost any weight. He hadn’t been gone that long. On a really good day, he thought of himself as being back “in the nightlife” like when he and Nicky and Salvatore had worked the Savannah Club. That was Fat Eddie Fingers’s joint, too. It was the year they turned eighteen.

  They had just finished high school, except for Jumbo, who had dropped out in his second year at Textile, when he told them he was going to work on Third Street, a block of nightclubs that featured high-yellow strippers with names like Hortense and Peaches.

  “When?” Nicky had said.

  “Next week. I start off as a bouncer. Then if I do good, Eddie says I get to be a waiter. You know the kind of dough they pull down in that joint?” Jumbo smacked his lips. He took two handfuls of peanuts from his pocket and started to chew.

  “Yeah,” Nicky said. “So how’d this happen?”

  “My uncle.”

  “What uncle?”

  “Well, I call him my uncle but he’s not really. He goes out with my sister Rosina. He’s connected. My mother don’t like to talk about it. She makes believe he’s an insurance salesman like Frankie, my sister Filomena’s husband, until she needs something. Last week she heard about a Sasso olive oil shipment that got lost on Pier Forty-two and she asked him to get her two gallons. Forget that. What are you two gonna do?”

  Nicky hit Salvatore on the back. “Salvatore’s got a future,” he said, “. . . tomatoes . . . broccoli . . .”

  “The old man wants me to go to college,” Salvatore said.

  Jumbo shuddered. “More school?”

  “Well, it sounds better than slicing salami . . .”

  “It all sounds like crap to me,” Nicky said. He shifted his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other.

  “Maybe I could take you with me,” Jumbo said. “Lemme ask my uncle.”

  “I’m in,” Nicky said. “You, Salvatore?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If I ask, though, you gotta come,” Jumbo said. “Don’t make me look bad ’cause I got a future with these guys.”

  “C’mon.” Nicky poked Salvatore. “Whatta you gonna do in college? This is a real opportuni
ty.” He turned to Jumbo. “He’s in and so am I. Go talk.”

  Amadeo Pavese did not believe it when Salvatore told him he was going to be a waiter in Fat Eddie Fingers’s club on Third Street with strippers who took the subway down from Harlem and worked the room when they were finished dancing on the stage.

  “That’s it?” he said to Salvatore. “You’re going to serve drinks in some bust-out joint full of five-foot-ten hookers and drunken johns?”

  “I don’t want to go to college.”

  “Come in the store. It’s yours.”

  “I don’t want to come in the store.”

  Amadeo blew through puffed-out cheeks, shook his clasped hands in disbelief, and left the room.

  Teresa hit Nicky with a wooden spoon when he told her. She cut open his head and waited until the blood had stained his shirt before she tried to bandage the wound. Nicky told Salvatore and Jumbo that the Neapolitans had twelve different words for a smack to the head and he knew them all. His mother blocked the door when he said he was going to the hospital. “The last time you came back a cripple,” she told him.

  Nicky sat back down. “We’re all going to work there. Me and Jumbo and Salvatore. Jumbo’s uncle said he’d vouch for us.”

  “Jumbo, Jumbo . . . from the day he was born he’s been a knife in my side.”

  “It’s always Jumbo,” Nicky said, raising his voice. “What about Salvatore? How come you never have anything to say about him?” Teresa let go of the rag she had been pressing against Nicky’s head and the blood started to pour out again. It ran down his ear and along the side of his face. “Ma . . . Don’t be like that. I’m gonna make good money. You’ll see. You’ll be glad.”

  She sat down and drummed her fingers on the table. “I’ll be glad when I’m in my grave,” she said.

  Magdalena put her arms around Salvatore and held him against her. She held the lobe of his ear between her thumb and first finger. “You do what you want,” she whispered. “It’s a free country, America.”

  From the first moment Magdalena had taken Salvatore in her arms, when he was just a baby, she had been his. From that first moment, she had wanted to give him everything.

  When Magdalena arrived in New York, Amadeo had taken her to Teresa Sabatini’s apartment on the fifth floor of the building on Spring Street to pick up Salvatore. Teresa had him ready but Magdalena had to almost pull him from her arms. He had been dressed in blue from head to toe, a knitted cap down over his ears.

  “This is Magdalena,” Amadeo had said.

  “Piacere.” Teresa did not hold out her hand.

  “Where’s Nicky?” Amadeo asked.

  “Asleep. I didn’t want him to see his brother leave.”

  “They’re not brothers, Teresa,” Amadeo said. His voice was low.

  Teresa shrugged. “Blood . . . milk . . . who can say?” She looked over at Magdalena, who was taking off Salvatore’s hat. “He gets cold easy. Better you leave his hat,” Teresa said. Salvatore cried and squirmed in Magdalena’s arms. “And he doesn’t like to be held that way. He’s fussy about the way he likes to be held.”

  “Please, signora, you show me how,” Magdalena said. She brought Salvatore to Teresa and put him back in her arms. Teresa put him over her shoulder and held him close, his head in the hollow of her shoulder. Magdalena put the knitted cap on Salvatore’s head and pulled it down over his ears.

  Amadeo took the valise Teresa had packed with Salvatore’s things and Teresa handed him to Magdalena. He was asleep.

  “You’ll come to see him?” Magdalena said. Teresa said yes but she never did, and Amadeo told Magdalena to leave it alone.

  Antoinette was not happy, either. She blamed not the boyfriend of Rosina, who spoke for Jumbo with Fat Eddie Fingers, but Nicky, whose mother would not leave Jumbo’s destiny alone. There was no other reason she could see why everyone else but Jumbo had graduated high school, why Jumbo played five dollars on the numbers every week, why he wanted to waste himself in nightclubs rather than, say, a nice steady job with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company like Filomena’s husband Frankie. Frankie had explained to her that Jumbo needed a diploma, that the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was very strict about these things, but Antoinette didn’t want to hear it. And it was no consolation to her that Nicky, too, was working in the strip joint on Third Street because Antoinette was convinced that Nicky would leave unscathed, but Jumbo? Something bad would happen to Jumbo and only to him because Nicky’s mother would see to it with her evil eye and her widow’s ways.

  Nicky’s mother had never taken off the black she had put on when her husband died, and she wore the black scarf on her head as though she were back in the villages of Lucania. Her handkerchiefs had black borders and her ear loops were black, not gold. She had a certain respect among the women who sat on the stoop for her devotion to the old ways. She had hidden the radio for two years after her husband’s funeral and for the first six months had not gone outside, but sent Nicky on his new legs to do her shopping.

  Antoinette was modern. She had bought a black dress and stockings for her husband’s wake and funeral; the hat with a small silk net veil she had borrowed from a cousin, but the outfit had disappeared after the cemetery and lunch at Antonina’s Restaurant on Thompson Street. By the next afternoon, she was on the stoop in a multicolored flowered housedress with two front pockets. In all fairness, the women who liked her said, at Antoinette’s weight, it was hard to manage in anything but a housedress.

  Salvatore, Nicky, and Jumbo went to work in the Savannah Club. It was the beginning of their lives as young men. They worked for tips and made more money than they could spend, serving fifty-dollar bottles of cheap white wine mixed with seltzer water and labeled French champagne. They rinsed out the bottles at night and refilled them in the morning, twisting gold foil around the corks, regluing the labels when they came loose.

  After the show, the strippers sat with the men in school ties and business suits, their one hand delicately touching a cheek, the other under the table. When the men asked, the strippers would order champagne.

  Jumbo worked the door while Nicky and Salvatore served bottle after bottle, shaking them first, so the cork would pop like Dom Pérignon, and turning the bottles upside down into the silver-plated ice bucket when they were still three-quarters full. They would smile, but never at the girls, who cut them into the action, and at the end of every night sat with them at a table in the back. With the jukebox turned up loud they would smoke reefer and count their tips. They left work with a wad of bills folded in half, fifties on the outside, making a bulge in their pants pocket. Sometimes they went down to the crap game in the basement, where Fat Eddie Fingers tried to take back the bulge in their pants, and sometimes they went uptown to Harlem with the dancing girls who loved them and taught them what to do in rooms with velvet paper on the walls.

  They had sharkskin suits custom-made and while they got their hair cut, pretty girls in white coats painted clear polish on their fingernails. The three of them took an apartment together on West Tenth Street for the closet space and because they couldn’t live home. They left the neighborhood far behind, they thought, for their new lives in the Village.

  They were on their own except for Jumbo, who moved back home in three weeks. He missed his mother, he said, the way she pressed his shirts, her meatballs with pignoli nuts and raisins, the lasagne packed with sausage and mozzarella, and he missed his five sisters, who still bought him satin hearts filled with chocolates on Valentine’s Day.

  Salvatore felt bad when Jumbo left the apartment. They had been fourteen when they cut their hands and mixed their blood to declare their allegiance. They had waited for St. Joseph’s Day, and had sliced a pocketknife across the center of their palms. Now they were bound for life, Salvatore said. Magdalena had told him about St. Joseph’s Day, the day of the year when men could become brothers.

  Nicky put a hand on Salvatore’s arm when he brooded. “C’mon. Let’s face it,” Nicky said.
“It’s better with him gone. He took up an awful lot of room.”

  They were in the Savannah Club when Nicky had the rings made. They had gone down to shoot craps in the basement after work and they were losing. Salvatore and Jumbo were cleaned out but Nicky was hot. There was a pile of money on the floor. Only Fat Eddie Fingers was calm. He waited for the seven. Salvatore saw him moving his lips in a silent prayer, and sure enough, Nicky threw a seven.

  Nicky stood up. “That’s it,” he said. “Tonight I worked for nothing.”

  Eddie grabbed his wrist. “You was doing so good,” he said. “Why you gonna stop now?”

  “Good? I’m broke,” Nicky said.

  Fat Eddie moved his head to the side. He took Nicky’s arm. “What about this?” He pointed to the ring on Nicky’s fourth finger.

  “My inheritance,” Nicky said.

  “I like it. It interests me.”

  “Me too,” Nicky said. He was looking up at Fat Eddie. Everyone else was looking down.

  “You sure you’re not in?” Fat Eddie still had his hand on Nicky’s wrist.

  Nicky shook his head. Salvatore held his breath. Jumbo thought he might wet his pants. Fat Eddie let go and picked up the dice. “Okay,” he said. “But I expect to see you down here tomorrow.”

  Jesus,” Jumbo said when they got outside. “That took balls. I would’ve given him the goddamn ring.”

  “Get outta here. It’s the only thing I ever got from my old man.” Nicky thought a minute. “Unless you count the knot.” If Jumbo heard, he didn’t let on.

  “Let’s see it,” Salvatore said. He turned the ring over in his hand. “Where’s it from?”

  “My father won it in a crap game in Hong Kong. He said he’d explain it to me when I grew up, but he dropped dead first.”

  Jumbo took the ring from Salvatore and held it up to the light over the poster of Peaches that was in a glass box outside the club. The ring was square on top with carvings that went down both sides. It was heavy in his hand and the gold it was made from had a reddish tinge.