“The bright side,” Sylvia said. “He has arms and legs. He has a job. And Jewishness passes through the mother.”
“See, you’re doing good already.”
Sylvia sat up in bed, she tore off the lace handkerchief. “He’s an uneducated Italian bartender with no future and, we can only hope to God, no past.”
“Sylvia, you were doing better before.”
Salvatore had told Magdalena about his meeting with Nicky. “Jumbo wants to see me and Nicky, the three of us, get together. Says he’s got a problem of the heart.”
Magdalena thought this was funny. “Such a big man must have a big heart.”
“I don’t know. At first, I didn’t want to be bothered. What do I know about Jumbo’s heart? Or anyone’s heart for that matter?”
Magdalena came and sat down next to Salvatore on the couch. She pulled her legs under her and leaned against him. “Come,” she said. “You have a great gift with women. I could see it when you were just an infant.” She put her arm around him, behind his back. “I fell in love with you the second I saw you.”
Salvatore remembered how when he was a little boy and he was unhappy or scared, he would bury his face in Magdalena’s hair and cry. She called his unhappiness miseria and she would hold him so close he couldn’t breathe. She would dry his tears with her long black hair, like Mary Magdalena, she would tell him, holding his face in her hands.
Salvatore would look her in the eyes. He would stop crying. “She dried his feet,” he told her.
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Magdalena would say, and pull him closer.
So, how’s Lindley?”
“Lindsey, Magdalena. It’s Lindsey.”
“What a name . . . there’s no translation. It means nothing. It’s not a saint. It’s not a flower. Huh . . .” Magdalena was polite to Salvatore’s wife but she did not take her seriously. She was too foreign, too pale, too benign. Magdalena thought Salvatore had forgone passion. She never believed that still waters ran deep. There were things you couldn’t hide behind your eyes.
Magdalena’s loyalty was only to Salvatore, the rest of the world was incidental. Since Amadeo’s death, Salvatore was the only one she cared about, but she never bothered him. She never called him. He had to seek her out, and when he said this to her, she shrugged her shoulders. “You know I’m here for you, Salvatore, and only you. You don’t have to hear my voice every day.”
So,” she said, getting up. Salvatore was glad when she got up. She unsettled him. Magdalena was still seductive, powerful. “Have your friends come here, Nicky and Jumbo. You can have the house to yourself. Zia Manfredi can cook for you and leave it in the kitchen. I’ll bring you antipasti from the store, olives and prosciutto and provolone, and fruit. If I remember, your friend Jumbo likes to eat. Tell them both to come here. You can have privacy and hear about Jumbo’s heart.”
She kissed him good night and he watched her go upstairs, watched the straightness of her back and the roundness of her hips move away from him. She was still a young woman, his stepmother. She was beautiful.
He wondered if she was going up to the top of the house. He knew this was where she kept the Black Madonna that she had brought from Castelfondo more than thirty years before. Salvatore never went to that part of the house, had never gone, except one time when he was twelve and Magdalena had taught him the secrets.
“A pity,” she had said to him one winter night during Advent, “that you weren’t born a girl.”
“Why?”
“I could teach you.”
“Teach me anyway.”
But Magdalena told him she was afraid. How could she teach a boy? He would grow into a man and then what? But then when he was twelve, she had covered his eyes with a handkerchief and led him up the stairs. It was Christmas Eve and she took him to the top of the house, under the eaves, and uncovered his eyes. She sat him in front of the shrine and fed him a special cake she had wrapped in the hem of her dress and warned him to be careful with what he would learn. Death magic, she called it. Love magic.
Afterward she made him kneel and she knelt behind him, her legs inside his, in front of the Black Madonna and she prayed for forgiveness for both of them. Salvatore had fallen asleep in her arms at the top of the house but woke up in his bed.
Salvatore loved Magdalena. She was his fantasy, his dream, the mother of fairy tales, the only mother he knew. In the neighborhood they whispered, they suspected, they believed in their hearts that Amadeo would be sorry for taking a child bride with a son who would grow up. They knew the stories, they knew the power of familiarity and the pull between men and women and they knew that Salvatore would grow out of his short pants and become a man. They held their breath for years and years but then Salvatore was out of the house and Amadeo was dead. Thank God for America, the women on the stoop said. In the old country, it would have turned out different.
So Nicky and Jumbo and Salvatore met in the house on Sullivan Street where Salvatore had grown up. Jumbo had to ask Luca Benvenuto for a couple of hours off. Jumbo shrugged when Luca agreed but docked Jumbo two hours’ pay.
Salvatore opened the door when they rang the bell. Nicky was dripping wet even though Jumbo held a big black umbrella over him. “I passed by the bar to pick Jumbo up and he wasn’t there,” Nicky said. “So I had to wait downstairs and got caught in the rain. No way I could go up the house and get him. His mother goes crazy when she sees me.”
“C’mon. It’s not my mother that’s the problem. Your mother started all the trouble. She’s the one’s got it in for me ever since I was a kid. Like it was my fault what I weigh.”
They stepped inside. Jumbo stuck the umbrella in the stand near the door and Nicky wiped his shoes on the mat inside the entrance hall. “Wipe your feet,” Nicky told Jumbo. “Where’s your culture?”
“I know. I know. That’s my problem. This girl . . . Judy . . . She’s got culture up the ass. How’s it gonna work?”
“Who’s Judy?”
“You’re rushing me. I’m confused, and you’re rushing me.”
Salvatore hugged Jumbo hello, surprised at the size of him. He was a behemoth, solid like a mountain. “You haven’t changed,” Salvatore said.
“Oh, but you have,” Jumbo said. “Look at you. Mr. Big-Shot Lawyer. Although to tell the truth, I think I’m wearing a better shirt.”
Salvatore laughed. “Brooks Brothers,” he said.
“Emilio Garcia on Avenue C. Check out the monogram.” Jumbo held out his arm and on the cuff in light blue thread were his initials. You couldn’t see them unless you looked close, which was just how Jumbo liked it.
They went into the kitchen. It was below the street level but looked out onto the garden in back. “Christ, Salvatore, I forgot what this house was like. It’s a fucking mansion. The three of you lived in this whole house. How come we was always hanging out in Nicky’s? My apartment was one big whorehouse with them sisters of mine. But this is something else.”
“Yeah,” Salvatore said, “but there was nowhere to go, only the garden. From One Ninety-six, between the fire escapes and the back alleys, we had the run of the neighborhood.”
“And please,” Nicky said, “don’t remind me about fire escapes.”
Salvatore set out a bottle of vodka and three glasses with ice. Jumbo eyed the plates of antipasti Magdalena had made up from the store.
“So, brothers, here we are all together. Now tell us, Jumbo, what’s going on.”
“What about the food, Sally? What’s all that food over there? It’s for us or Magdalena’s saving it for a party or something?”
“Christ, Jumbo,” Nicky said. “How big could this problem be if all you’re thinking about is sliced provolone? Man does not live by bread alone.”
“You got bread?”
He told them then about Judy Bernstein.
Nicky shook his head. “Ahhh, Jumbo, you’re in trouble. I’d be really worried if I were you.”
“See. I knew it. I sho
uld be scared, right? I knew it. I’m not crazy. This is gonna be terrible.”
“What are you talking about?” Salvatore said. “This is 1968. I didn’t marry an Italian girl.”
“Yeah, true,” Nicky said, “and aside from the fact that you’re wearing striped shirts, you’re doing better than me in the marriage department. But we’re not talking marriage here, we’re talking Antoinette Mangiacarne.”
“My mother wanted me to be a priest, Sally. She said she could only give me up to the church.”
“No, Jumbo, your mother wanted you to be her husband.”
“You take that back.”
“Okay okay. We’re getting off the track here.”
“No, I think we’re right on target. Jumbo’s going out with a mazzucriste but his mother wouldn’t be happy if he was with the Queen of England, so where does that leave him? Sounds like up shit’s creek to me.”
Salvatore leaned back and poured another drink. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but do you realize we’re three grown men conspiring like we’re twelve years old?”
“I wish we were twelve again. Those times were great,” Jumbo said, “except when you was crippled, Nicky. That wasn’t so good. That’s when your mother started hating me.”
“Forget my mother and your mother, what about her mother? You aren’t exactly a great catch.”
“Thanks for rubbing it in.”
“Just tell her, Jumbo. Just tell Antoinette you’re getting married. You do want to get married? Or am I rushing you again?”
“No, of course I wanna get married. I want a nice life. I want some kids.”
“Does this girl know how much you weighed when you were born?” Nicky said. “Maybe she’ll think twice.”
Salvatore put a hand on Jumbo’s shoulder. “Just tell your old lady, Jumbo. Who knows? She might be happy. She probably worries about who’s gonna take care of you when she’s dead.”
“Believe me, she don’t worry. I got all them sisters. I’m covered in the taking-care-of department.” Jumbo speared slices of mortadella, provolone, salami, roasted peppers, and artichoke hearts and layered them on a loaf of bread. He didn’t bother with the plates Salvatore had laid out.
“So, you think it’ll work out.”
“It’ll be fine. Your mother loves you. She’ll only want the best for you.”
“And you guys, you’ll walk in my wedding?”
Nicky put an arm around Jumbo. Salvatore did the same from the other side. Jumbo left his hands where they were, holding his sandwich, but he had tears in his eyes.
Jumbo met Judy uptown. They walked in Central Park, through the zoo, where Jumbo got sad at the lions and gorillas in small iron-barred cages inside houses that stank of rotted vegetables and animal shit. He didn’t see the romance in zoos. And the smell got into the bag of peanuts and the candy bars he bought to eat along the way and took away some of his appetite. He wished he could bring Judy down the neighborhood but he had visions of his five sisters tearing out her beautiful brown hair strand by strand, breaking her glasses, and then he would have to hit them and he didn’t think he could do that, not even for Judy.
“Did you tell your mother?” she asked, sticking a hand into his bag of peanuts. He didn’t like that. He had told her he would buy her a bag but she had said no, she didn’t want any, and here she was mooching his, but he loved her, so he held the bag closer to her and let her grab a handful.
“I didn’t. I been working later and later and she’s asleep when I get home.”
“Well, I told Sylvia and Harvey.” Just the names of Judy’s parents made the short hairs at the back of Jumbo’s head curl.
“And?”
“They’re fine; they can’t wait to meet you.”
“Really?”
“Really. When can you come? It’s got to be the weekend. We could take the train out and have lunch with them. What about this Sunday?”
Sunday was the day Antoinette cooked special for the whole family: Rosina, Filomena, Raffaella, Albina, Angelina, and their husbands and their kids all crammed into Antoinette’s kitchen eating meatballs and sausages and braciole, drinking the homemade wine Frankie Watermelons sold from a horse and wagon he parked on Sullivan Street. They’d have romaine lettuce and tomatoes with red onions that Antoinette would soak in cold water to make them sweet, and then coffee and banana cream pie and Boston cream pie and éclairs and cream puffs from Dellarova’s on Bleecker Street. The Mangiacarne family loved all kinds of cream cake with their espresso. The kids had theirs with milk.
“Jumbo, Jumbo, what about Sunday?”
Jumbo reminded himself that this was the girl he loved. “Sunday. Sure. Sunday’s a good day for me.” He handed Judy the bag of peanuts. His appetite was gone.
He left her off at her apartment on Seventy-third Street and Park Avenue. She asked him to come up and he did but he was too nervous to do anything but watch television. He never stayed over. She thought it was quaint and old-fashioned that he worried about her reputation. What would her neighbors think if they saw a man leaving her apartment, he told her, and who could miss him?
But the truth was, he liked to sleep home. He slept in the tiny second bedroom off the kitchen that faced the back alley and his mother peeked in every morning, even before she made coffee. He had slept in the living room as a young boy, on the pull-out couch, his sisters all piled together in this bedroom that was his now, his parents in the bedroom off the front. Jumbo got the bedroom when the last of his sisters married. The room was small but it was cool in the summer and quiet, and it had a door. Antoinette had always been proud that none of her children had ever had to sleep in a brande in the kitchen. It was one of her badges of honor. That and that they never went hungry. Hunger was not a problem in the neighborhood, but the sheer size of the Mangiacarnes spoke of the good life, of excess. Antoinette let the curtains turn to tatters and the linoleum crack and split but her table always groaned with the best that money could buy.
Her daughters had followed her example, which was why Nicky’s mother brought down invective on their heads. One dirty woman in the building was tolerable but now they were six. Six Mangiacarnes, one messier than the next.
Teresa laughed when Nicky told her that Jumbo’s mother believed she had the power to cast the malocchio. “Ha,” she told him. “If I had the power, they would all be in kingdom come by now.” She lowered her voice and spoke into Nicky’s ear. “Magdalena has the power. But she’s very clever. She keeps it only for herself.”
“Magdalena doesn’t believe in that, Ma. You forget when I couldn’t walk, she sent you to the doctor?”
“I told you. She keeps it for herself. You think it was an accident Amadeo married her, a peasant girl young enough to be his daughter with his poor wife still warm in the grave? He was over there weeks and weeks. I never heard a word. I was taking care of Salvatore. I went to the priest. I thought Amadeo was dead and I would have two mouths to feed instead of one. And then he shows up, married.”
The neighborhood had buzzed when Amadeo came back from Lucania with Magdalena. The women spent so much time on the stoops and in each other’s houses that almost nothing got done. The dust mops stayed on the hooks in the wall and there was no line at the butcher’s. They heard about Magdalena before they saw her. No one could remember who first told the story.
They watched the entrance to Amadeo’s house from early in the morning. Amadeo went to his store and came home, and they greeted him and he greeted them back, but no one mentioned his bride (if he had even married her, who knows these things, the women on the stoop said).
Magdelena stayed inside the house. She would get down on the floor and put her cheek to the cold tiles. She would go from room to room and say the names out loud in English of the colors on the walls. She would stack and restack the dinner plates in the glass cupboards, and of course, she would play with the baby, who was getting very pale from staying inside.
To entice her to go out, Amadeo bought her a coach
carriage, an English one that turned at the touch of a finger, and on the first day of the new moon she dressed herself and Salvatore, put him in the English coach carriage, and went for a walk. She walked for hours, up one block and down the next. She crossed Houston Street and went over to Bleecker. She walked all the way to Fourth Street Park and sat under the shadow of the arch with the nannies in their white uniforms watching their Fifth Avenue babies. She smiled when anyone looked at her, and before she went home, she passed by Amadeo’s store, and when he came outside, she kissed him on the mouth in front of everyone in the street.
“Bold,” someone said, on the stoop the next day, and the women fell into a circle, heads together, the younger ones filled with envy, the older ones shaking their heads, feigning shock. The feeling was that she was too young, too beautiful, too slim. Her hair was too black and there was too much red where the light caught it. Her eyes were too strange. They had gold in them, one of the younger women said.
Magdalena wore the polished goat’s bone close to her skin, and when she bathed, she let the water run over it to move its power into her. She did the same with all her jewels, and Amadeo would find her in the bath adorned with all the pearls and rubies and diamonds he had given her. She put together a shrine to the Black Madonna at the top of the house, under the eaves, with the stone Zia Guinetta had pressed into her hand when she left Castelfondo, the stone with the face of the Black Madonna. In front of the shrine Magdalena put offerings of food and flowers. She burned candles. To the women on the stoop, she was inaccessible. Sometimes she was giddy like a young girl and then suddenly serious like an old woman. They never drew her into their circle. She didn’t want to come. She was an outsider. They never went to her house for coffee and cake, or invited her into their houses, and at Easter they didn’t taste her pies filled with sausage and cheese or bring her pieces of theirs wrapped in dish towels, the crust thick and rising to a dome.
The Black Madonna Page 18
