The Black Madonna

by Louisa Ermelino

  “Something, huh?” Nicky said. “I showed it once to a friend of mine in Chinatown. He told me about these clubs he’d heard the old wise guys talk about where they kept girls from all over the world. The members wore these rings so they could recognize each other. He was surprised I had it, because they were secret societies. But who knows? It could all be bullshit.”

  “Wow,” Jumbo said. “Your father belonged to a secret Chinese sex club?”

  “What do I know? He told me he won it in a crap game.” Nicky put an arm over the glass box and pointed to the poster of Peaches. “We’re a secret society,” he said. “We should all have rings.”

  They agreed that was a good idea, but they were drunk and it was forgotten until weeks later, when they were at Chi Chi Baines’s whorehouse on 125th Street drinking shots of Seagram’s and Nicky took out two blue velvet boxes. He handed one to Salvatore and one to Jumbo.

  “Rings,” he said. “Just like mine.”

  They woke up twenty-four hours later in the rooms Chi Chi rented above the bar. She had taken all their money, so she had her boyfriend Charles give them a ride downtown.

  But one morning when they were corking the champagne bottles—except for Jumbo, who was home sick with palpitations—Salvatore told Nicky that the life was getting to him.

  “You’re crazy,” Nicky said. “It don’t get much better than this. We got money . . . We got respect . . . We got broads . . .” He counted on his fingers.

  “Yeah, but do you want to be robbing johns ten years from now?”

  “In ten years, we could have our own joint . . .”

  “Stop dreaming. You still gotta have Fat Eddie,” Salvatore told him. “There’s always gonna be a Fat Eddie Fingers.”

  Salvatore had just come into work, was putting his suit jacket on the hanger, had changed into the short-sleeve white shirt and black pants he wore every night, when the busboy told him that Magdalena was on the phone. That it was important.

  After the club closed, when Salvatore was sitting at the bar in the Bon Soir with Nicky and Jumbo, he ordered a vodka martini and lit a cigarette. “They’re gonna shut down the Savannah Club,” he told them.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. They’re gonna close it down. They’re gonna arrest everybody in it.”

  “Where’d you hear this?” Nicky said.

  “Magdalena . . . My old man got the word.”

  “Close it down for what?” Nicky said. “The club’s legitimate.”

  “The undisclosed owners ain’t. The SLA is gonna pull the license.”

  “No disrespect, Salvatore, but I don’t believe it. Fat Eddie Fingers’s got every cop in the precinct on the payroll. That club’s as safe as Fort Knox. How do you know your old man isn’t just saying it to get you out?”

  “If he says it’s gonna happen, it will, and we better not be there.”

  “Salvatore’s right,” Nicky said. “It ain’t worth the risk.”

  “You guys are real pussies,” Jumbo said, but when they shut down the Savannah Club three months later, Jumbo was called as a witness and spent the next two winters with relatives in the backwoods of Georgia.

  Teresa made the sign of the cross when Nicky went into the army. Magdalena put Salvatore on the train for Syracuse University in Upstate New York and Antoinette went to the woman on Bedford Street for an amulet to save her son from the government and bring him back safely from the wilds of Georgia.

  It was the end of their life together as young men and the first time Jumbo had to run away.

  Nicky came to see his mother often. She was in the same apartment and would not move, not that he had anywhere to move her. He lived alone on West Twenty-third Street in a studio apartment that suited him fine. His ex-wife Gina had taken the house in Queens. She told him he might as well live in the city near his mother; he was way up her ass anyway. One of the things Nicky had never liked about Gina was her mouth. It was something about her he didn’t miss. Nicky didn’t want to think that he hadn’t moved back into the neighborhood because of what Gina had said to him about his mother. He convinced himself that he liked Twenty-third Street. He could come and go as he pleased and nobody knew his business. They for sure weren’t going to hear about him from Teresa. You could have squeezed her like a tomato and she still would never talk. Teresa should have married a Mafioso, the women on the stoop said behind her back, instead of that seaman. She would have been a good wife for a Mafioso. She never talked and she never got lonely and she always wore black.

  Whenever Nicky came into the hallway of the building on Spring Street, he felt like he was home. The walls were painted the yellow of puke, the bottom half a dark red like dried blood, to hide the scuffs and smears of so many people, the kids who would run their hands along the wall and bounce balls down the steps and drag bicycles and carts made of boxes and a broken roller skate. Nicky remembered Anna the Blonde and her six boys, who would come down the stairs in a circle of arms and legs punching and kicking except when it was raining, and then one of them would take the big umbrella from behind the door and walk to the diner on Varick Street where she worked and pick her up so she wouldn’t get wet. Whoever the lucky son was, he would hold the umbrella up high over Anna the Blonde’s head, being careful to protect her shoulders, and when she got home another one would take her wet shoes and stuff them with newspaper while she put her feet up on the round hassock in front of her chair in the living room.

  Anna the Blonde would leave on Friday night and not show up again until Sunday but her boys were devoted. “I’m not devoted?” Nicky would say when Teresa mentioned Anna the Blonde. He would take his mother’s hand when he said this. It was all she would allow him to do. She would kill for him, he knew, but she had stopped holding him when he grew taller than she was.

  Nicky pushed open the first door and then the second. There were mailboxes where before there had been simply a communal mail slot cut into the tile wall of the entrance hall, but now the residents waited for Social Security checks with the ardor of lovers and it never would have done to let those checks sit out in the open. These days, Nicky’s mother was always telling him, Who can you trust?

  He climbed the stairs, glad to see most of the doors open, even though as a cop he knew it wasn’t smart anymore. He would tell his mother every scam he came across but she would only wave her hand at him. “Nicola,” she’d tell him, “I never trust nobody. Why you worrying now?”

  He knocked on the door to her apartment, which was held ajar by a string from the doorknob to a nail in the wall inside and she heard him and called “Chi è?” from the parlor, getting up from the chair she had placed by the window so she could watch the street.

  “Stay, Ma, it’s me, Nicky.” He saw her through the cut in the wall dividing the kitchen and the living room. She sat back down on the kitchen chair that stayed permanently by the window. He put his fingers into the holy-water font inside her door and felt that it was dry. He went into the kitchen and filled a glass with tap water, which he poured into the half seashell. From habit, he crossed himself before he stepped inside to visit with his mother. She turned when he walked into the living room and she gave him her hand. He kissed her cheek, the skin dry and paper-thin, and he sat down on the couch, but she got up and made him come into the kitchen with her, where she put up coffee and took a box of cookies out of the tin cabinet next to the refrigerator.

  “How are you, Ma? You feel good?”

  “Who feels good at my age? Nothing works right anymore. . . . And those Mangiacarnes. The building’s full of them. All the sisters and their husbands and their dirty rotten kids. After what her son did, you think the family’d be embarrassed, that they’d move somewhere else. Go away.”

  “Ma, what are you talking about?”

  “Oh, you forgot already? That you were crippled because that big horse pushed you out the window?”

  “You never would have had your miracle if that rope didn’t break. And it wasn’t Jumbo’s faul
t. He didn’t push me. We were playing Tarzan.”

  “He didn’t help you neither.” She fussed around the kitchen, setting a cup and saucer down in front of him and he grabbed both her hands and kissed them. She softened then and came near him, put her hands on his head, bent to kiss his forehead.

  “So now, tell me. What’s new in the neighborhood? What’s going on?”

  “What’s to tell? Jumbo ran away, the boys were after him. This time I think they were gonna kill him . . . gambling, all the time gambling with no money. He owes his life. Poor Antoinette.”

  “So you’re feeling sorry for Jumbo’s mother?”

  “Whatta you crazy? Look . . . Look the things I gotta do to keep them away.” She pointed out the kitchen window, which faced the alley. On the clothesline from the window hung a dark brown army blanket. Nicky’s mother nodded her head toward the window. “Rosina’s across the alley. I gotta put that there so I don’t have to see her or her sisters’ or her mother’s face every day they sit in the kitchen like they got nothing to do. Instead of cleaning their houses, maybe cook something for their miserable husbands . . .”

  “That’s insulting, Ma, no? You leave that blanket there all the time?”

  “All the time, even though it’s wool and when it rains it smells . . . I could care less about insulting them . . . if they don’t know now . . .”

  She walked him down the narrow hallway when he was ready to leave. She put her fingers into the holy-water font and was surprised to see it was full. Nicky told her he had filled it . . . with water that had come from Rome, that the Pope had blessed.

  “Where’s the bottle?”

  “Whatta you want the bottle for?”

  “The bottle had holy water in it, the bottle’s holy, too. What’d you do? Throw it out?” She took the brown paper bag she had given him to put in the garbage pail downstairs and began to rummage through it. Nicky took the bag away and closed it back up.

  “Wait,” he said. “I got it. Don’t worry. Just give me a minute.” Nicky slipped into the bathroom, which was off the entrance hall, a long narrow room with a claw-foot tub and a toilet bowl at one end with a water tank above it and a flush chain. He rummaged in his pocket and found a small bottle of French perfume he had bought for his woman of the week. He flushed the toilet and emptied the small bottle into the swirling water. An ounce of joy perfume. He’d paid plenty for it—he’d given up swag when he made detective—but the old lady would kill him if she thought he had put tap water in her holy-water font. He put the bottle stopper back on and wiped it with the hand towel hanging on a plastic hook glued to the wall. His woman would have to wait. His mother was more important and any woman who got involved with him now would have to know that from the beginning.

  Maybe if Gina had had a child of her own she would have been able to deal with Teresa, who this second was banging on the door. “You got it? Whatta you doing in there?”

  Nicky opened the door and handed his mother the bottle. “Here, Ma, I found it. It was in my pocket.”

  “Grazie, Madonna,” she said, opening the empty bottle. She sniffed it and jerked her head back, her lips tight, her eyes closed.

  “The Pope,” Nicky told her. “He blesses water, it smells like perfume.”

  The next time he came, he saw the bottle on the night table by his mother’s bed, her rosary beads wrapped around it.

  All their mothers had painted plaster saints on tabletops and shelves and hanging on the walls. Votive candles flickered in dark red and blue glass. Nicky’s mother had hollow crucifixes in every room with long, tapered candles inside, ready for the rites of the dead. There were strands of blessed palm from Palm Sunday wrapped around the crucifixes. All of this was sacred. Nicky was convinced that the reason for all the saints and holy cards and medals and strands of dusty palm was that there was no way to get rid of them.

  You couldn’t throw them out. “They’re blessed,” his mother would scream. You couldn’t give them away; everyone had their own. So they slowly accumulated until they became part of the decor.

  Nicky came into the street and the first person he saw was Dante, who came right over to him and put his arms around him. Dante touched Nicky’s legs. He always said they belonged to him, too. “You always come around,” he said. “Not like some of them, like your old friend Salvatore.”

  “Yeah,” Nicky said. “Well, there’s the old lady I gotta see and my precinct’s right here.”

  “You did good, Nicky, you’re a good kid.” Dante put a hand on his shoulder. “But you were a sonofabitch small. I remember,” he said, and he laughed. He stood straight for an old man. He showed Nicky the cane they gave him at St. Vincent’s Hospital. “I don’t know why. I don’t go no place but I guess it’s good to have.” He kept it hooked over the back of the kitchen chair he sat on outside the building, and at night when he put the chair under the stairs, he put the cane there too.

  “Did you hear about Jumbo?” Dante said.

  “My mother started to tell me something.”

  “He’s working in Benvenuto’s. Did you know that?”

  “No. I’ll stop in and see him.”

  “Yeah, you should. It’s slow in the afternoon. You can catch up. What a shame. He had the world by the balls, working uptown in Jilly’s.”

  “What happened?”

  “He got in over his head. You know Jumbo. If he had half the money he made, he’d be on Easy Street, but what can I tell you? We all end up in the ground anyway . . . pushing up daisies. Not that I ever seen a daisy growing in Calvary. I got a spot waiting for me, right on top of my mother, but I ain’t planning on going just yet. Gives me the creeps. When I hit the number, I’m gonna get one of them drawers.”

  “Jumbo’s in Benvenuto’s now?”

  “He’s always in there. It was that or push up daisies. Myself, I think Fat Eddie made a bad deal. But what the hell, Eddie can afford it. Jumbo fucks up this time, Fat Eddie’s gotta take care of him. Fat Eddie said this was Jumbo’s last chance. That’s what I heard anyhows. You hear a lot just standing around. I could write a book.” Dante pinched Nicky’s cheek as if he were still a small boy.

  Nicky took the old man’s hand. The skin was translucent, the veins thick and raised. “Maybe I’ll stop in Benvenuto’s. C’mon. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Nah, thanks. I can’t stay inside. I get too nervous. I get, what do you call it? . . . Claustrophonic? At night I go upstairs the last minute and I close my eyes and get in bed. The morning’s not so bad but the night gives me the willies. I don’t like the dark, makes me think about that place I mentioned before and bars are dark inside, even in the day, especially Benvenuto’s.” Dante raised his eyebrows and pointed across the street with his chin. “Too dark to count your change.”

  “I’ll see you soon,” Nicky said.

  Dante shook his head. “I’m here,” he said. “If you don’t see me, go look in Calvary, unless I hit the number before then. Then you gotta go find me in the drawer.”

  Benvenuto’s Bar and Restaurant had an entrance on the corner into the bar and one on the side for the restaurant. Nicky crossed the street and went into the bar. It was long and narrow and as dark as Dante’s worst nightmare. Jumbo was at the far corner, his elbows on the bar, his head resting on his hands watching a baseball game on TV. Nicky knocked with his knuckles on the bar and Jumbo looked up, wary, suspicious. It was too dark to see and he walked down the length of the bar in what seemed to Nicky like slow motion. Jumbo was a big guy who liked to stay put. That much hadn’t changed. Nicky leaned back farther into the shadows and waited until Jumbo was close enough to touch.

  “Oh God, it’s you,” Jumbo said. He took hold of Nicky’s arm and pulled him halfway over the bar. He put his hands on Nicky’s shoulders, wrapped him in his arms. “I thought that bastard Jimmy Ticks was back from the grave. Remember how he was always rapping his knuckles on everything?”

  “Disappointed?”

  “Are you kidding? That was t
he only wake I can remember where everybody smiled for three days.” Jumbo grabbed Nicky’s head and held it. He kissed him on the mouth. “You rotten sonofabitch. Make good and we never see you.”

  “I’m here all the time. I come see the old lady.”

  “Well, you know, I was keeping late hours, working nights uptown. My sister was talking about you the other day.”

  “Which one?”

  “Filomena, Raffaella, Albina, Angelina, Rosina . . . Who knows? They’re all the same. They’re all ballbusters, drive me crazy, but look at you . . . how d’ya stay so slim?” Jumbo ran his hand down Nicky’s shirt. “Your tie lays flat. Me, I gotta get them made custom or they stick out like a handle. You still drinking Jack Daniel’s?” Jumbo asked him. “Lemme buy you a drink.” He set up two glasses with ice and reached behind the bar.

  Nicky watched Jumbo pour the drinks. He saw the ring on Jumbo’s pinky finger. Nicky reached out and touched it. “Still got it, huh?” he said.

  Jumbo looked up. “What are you kidding? It’s the only piece of gold I got left. I hocked everything, but not this. I ain’t gonna forget them times, Nicky . . . Me, you, and Salvatore, that’s once in a lifetime.” He turned the ring. “Salvatore’s still got his. I seen it on him last time he was down here. Salvatore, big-time lawyer . . . something, huh?”

  Nicky picked up his glass. He shook it so the ice rattled. “Salvatore was always smart . . . and stand-up, like his old man. Good to everybody. Remember Amadeo? My mother thought he was God.”

  “And then there was Magdalena. . . .”

  “Whatta you mean?”

  “Nothing,” Jumbo said, “but she wasn’t exactly your everyday Italian mama, was she? She always had people talking. Taking over the grocery when Sally’s father died. We used to make fun of Salvatore selling vegetables. Now it’s a gourmade store. Magdalena was one smart cookie.” Jumbo put a hand on Nicky’s shoulder. “And look at you, homicide detective, first class . . . not bad. Only me, I’m stuck behind this goddamn bar.”