The Black Madonna

by Louisa Ermelino

  When they sat down to eat and Antoinette served Jumbo his sixth meatball and poured gravy over his bread she was convinced the prayers had worked. Jumbo was back, the old Jumbo who belonged to her was back in her kitchen filling his belly, filling her soul.

  The Sunday of the wedding, Jumbo wore his best suit and a custom shirt and the solid gold watch he had gotten from Maurizio the jeweler on Spring Street who sold swag from the back of his store. Nicky drove with Jumbo out to Long Island. The ceremony was short and he understood none of it and everyone cheered when he broke the glass wrapped in a napkin under his foot. He kissed Judy, whom he hadn’t seen all week, and they danced at a party right there in the synagogue and spent the night in a motel near her parents’ house and he struggled to carry her over the threshold because she had gained a lot of weight. Nicky decorated the car with tin cans and white crepe paper tied to the bumpers, which mortified Sylvia, but she couldn’t complain about everything. Harvey drove Nicky to the train, since Jumbo and Judy had taken his car. Nicky liked the old man a lot, he told Jumbo when he came into Benvenuto’s later in the week for a drink.

  “So how does it feel to be married?” Nicky asked him.

  “Great, just great. My wife’s out in Long Island with Harvey and Sylvia and I’m here with Antoinette. And somehow everybody’s happy but me.”

  “Well, what the hell are you doing?”

  “I told them I gotta work double shifts this week. I can’t get out there. They’re happy. They got their daughter in their clutches and the baby’s got a name, even if it’s not such a great name, they can cope.”

  “Jumbo . . .”

  “I know . . . I’m gonna tell her. I swear to God.”

  “Good. That’s good, Jumbo. I’m proud of you.”

  “Yeah . . . you better be ready to come and get me when she stabs me with a bread knife.”

  “I’ll be there. I’m a homicide detective, remember?”

  Antoinette did not take the news sitting down. She threw a pot, one of her big macaroni pots, across the room and missed Jumbo’s head by inches. She screamed so loud that doors flung open throughout the whole building and all her daughters came running from their apartments at once. The sisters convened. Jumbo had not thought to ask his sisters to be there, to support him. He knew at the first sound of trouble they would come in anyway, and take his mother’s part.

  Rosina held Antoinette’s hands. Albina cleaned up the mess the flying pot had made, breaking the frame of silver dollars, a souvenir from Antoinette’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Filomena wiped her mother’s tears. Angelina patted her mother’s shoulders. Raffaella yelled at Jumbo after Antoinette had stopped. Then they all yelled while their mother cried.

  “How could you do this?” Albina said. “Say nothing and then hit her with this. Who do you think you are? Poor Mama. She works her fingers to the bone for you, you big chooch, and you do this?”

  “Knock up some Jew and come home like nothing happened?”

  “Married? Just like that?”

  Rosina kissed her mother’s face. “It’s okay, Mama. Look on the bright side. He’s not married in church. He’s not really married. He can always do it again, the right way, to the right kind of girl.”

  Antoinette pushed her away and sobbed into her hands. “A mazzucriste . . . a puttana yet . . . carrying my grandchild . . . ahhhhhhhiyeeee.” She cursed Teresa for taking her to Magdalena and giving her hope. She cursed Magdalena for not making things right. She knew Magdalena had the power, everyone knew it, but she, too, was just another puttana. Antoinette raved. Jumbo took his mother’s hand and kissed it. He held it until she got quiet. He put her head on his shoulder and scowled at his sisters, who had retreated, disgusted with their brother, with their mother, so weakly cradled in his arms.

  “Please, Mama. it’s gonna be nice,” he said. “You’re gonna love Judy. She’s a good girl, smart, quiet.” He spoke softly into Antoinette’s ear so that only she heard. “And there’s money there. You know how you always say you don’t wanna go in the ground. You know how you’re afraid of the dirt on top of your head in Calvary?” Antoinette’s huge back heaved as she nodded her head, hidden in the crook of Jumbo’s arm. “Well, the first thing I’m gonna do is buy you a drawer. I told Judy already and she said okay. I’m gonna buy you one of those drawers in New Jersey. Whatta you think?”

  Antoinette lifted her head, her eyes red and swollen. She patted Jumbo’s face. “You’re a good boy,” she said. “Which way the drawer is gonna go? Longways?”

  “Longways. You can sleep on it.”

  “And this baby. You’re gonna baptize it? It’s gonna be Catholic, no, like us?”

  “I swear, Mama.”

  “You’re gonna name it after your father it’s a boy? Salvatore?”

  “I promise.”

  “Antoinette after me it’s a girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you, figlio mio.”

  Eh,” Antoinette said later on the stoop. “You do the best you can. My Jumbo got married quick,” she told the women, “because the girl didn’t want no fuss. You know, these girls with money, it don’t matter to them a big wedding. Everything they do is big. They go to big parties all the time. They don’t need no cafone show, you know what I mean? But we’re gonna have a big christening. Jumbo wants to do that. If it’s a boy, it’s gonna be Salvatore, a girl, whatta you think? Antoinette!”

  “Hmmm,” Aggie Mancuso said. “She’s pregnant already?”

  “Ain’t that something? My Jumbo don’t fool around. He’s a real man, no blanks. On her wedding night it happened.”

  “How long they’re married?”

  “Well, you figure it out. She’s due in six months, unless she’s early. That happens a lot. So they’re married three months. Can’t you count?”

  “We can count, Antoinette,” Aggie Mancuso said. “We can all count real good.”

  “How come they’re not living together?”

  “Her mother wants her out there until they get settled. They got a big house, a pool. Jumbo don’t want to live just anywhere so they’re gonna take their time. What’s the rush? They got everything.”

  “You met the family?”

  “Sure. Of course. They’re coming Sunday. I’m gonna cook. Their eyes are gonna pop out when they taste my meatballs.”

  “Maybe we’ll see them then.”

  “Could be. You see a big Cadillac on Spring Street, you know my son’s in-laws are here.”

  True to Antoinette’s word, the Bernsteins arrived on Sunday. Harvey pulled up in his white Cadillac and saw that the only parking spot was taken by a white-haired man sitting on a vinyl upholstered kitchen chair in the street. Harvey pulled up beside Dante and Sylvia leaned over and stuck her head out Harvey’s window before Harvey could say anything and demanded to know what he was doing blocking the spot. Dante knew immediately his mission was accomplished.

  “You the Bernfelds?”

  “Yes. Yes,” Harvey said. Sylvia hit him in the shoulder.

  “Don’t volunteer, Harvey. How many times do I have to tell you? You’d volunteer for the Cossack army if I wasn’t here to save you.” She leaned over Harvey and spoke out the window to Dante. “Maybe we’re the Bernsteins,” Sylvia said. “Who wants to know?”

  Dante got up out of the chair and moved it to the sidewalk. “She’s all yours,” he said to Harvey and guided him into the spot, which was tight for a big a car like Harvey’s Cadillac. Dante opened the door for Sylvia. He tipped his hat. “I was hoping you was gonna come soon,” he said. “Antonina’s got the food waiting for me. I don’t usually eat this late but I promised Jumbo I’d wait.”

  Sylvia raised the corners of her mouth in a semi-smile and stood on the sidewalk looking up, her eyes shaded, trying to find number 196. She was slightly appalled, she told Harvey, on the way up the stairs, and when he mentioned their first apartment in the Bronx, Sylvia looked at him as though he had two heads. “What does the Bronx have to do w
ith it? Why do you always have to drag up the past?”

  “Stop it, please,” Judy said. She had sat without a word during the ride and the exchange with Dante but the stairs were a struggle for her and she just wanted to get this over with. She didn’t really care about Jumbo’s mother and had already decided that he could come here to visit her by himself and she wouldn’t give a damn.

  The stoop had been empty. Jumbo had purposely made it a Sunday so the women would be home from church, stirring their gravy, too busy to gather one above the other. But they were not too busy to hang out the windows, and when Dante had yelled up to tell Jumbo and Antoinette that the Bernfelds had arrived, they had all heard and they were leaning out now, elbows resting on the pillows that covered the window ledges so that they could sit comfortably and watch the street.

  Sylvia found the steps tricky. They were steep and worn in the center. She struggled in her delicate high heels to make the five flights of stairs, holding on to the grimy banister, ignoring the occasional urchin who stood by an open door to watch the procession of the Jews from Long Island. They had been waiting, the women, to see what Jumbo had married because they had been convinced, as they were about Dante, that he never would marry, never leave his mother or the building on Spring Street where all his sisters lived with their husbands and children.

  Jumbo was waiting on the landing to meet them. Judy rushed into his arms and he held her for an embarrassed moment, glad Antoinette was inside. He shook Harvey’s and Sylvia’s hands and led them into the apartment.

  “Good trip in?” he said to Harvey and Sylvia. “Did you hit traffic?”

  “No, not much,” Harvey said. “That was nice of your friend to save us a parking spot.”

  “Yeah, well, Dante’s always outside. It must be fifty years he hasn’t left Spring Street.” Sylvia raised an eyebrow but was looking at the wallpaper pattern on the kitchen walls, big plaid patches in red and white with teapots and spoons and plates.

  “Here they are,” Jumbo announced to the kitchen filled with Mangiacarnes. The five sisters descended. They kissed Judy and Sylvia and Harvey in a round robin. One would grab them and pass them on to the next sister, the next husband, the next child. Sylvia was dizzy, Judy was shy and grateful, Harvey was covered with lipstick, his hands filled with the flesh of arms and waists and occasionally boobs and behinds. By the time he had kissed and felt up all of Jumbo’s sisters and embraced their husbands and children, he had tears in his eyes. He liked this, the smell of the gravy cooking on the stove, the heat of the bodies, the steam from the boiling macaroni pot. Sylvia was horrified. She gritted her teeth and closed her lips, terrified someone would slip a tongue between them. The touch of each sweaty hand made her cringe. The worst was when Jumbo smothered her in his arms and whispered “Mama” in her ear.

  The sisters insisted they couldn’t stay, they just couldn’t. They were just too many. Sylvia was glad to see them file out. There certainly were too many of them, she thought, and they were all too big. They left through the narrow entranceway, patting and pinching as they went until there were just the five of them: Judy, Sylvia, Harvey, Jumbo, and Antoinette.

  Antoinette wiped her hands on her front apron. “Come into the parlor,” she said. “Sit down. Have a drink.”

  They moved the few steps into the living room, which was separated from the kitchen by a wall with a square cut into it and dressed with a curtain as though it were a window. The living room had two windows that faced the street. There was a couch, a coffee table, two chests of unmatched drawers, a television set, and a chair with a hassock. There was barely enough room to get around all the furniture, and Jumbo guided the Bernsteins to the couch, where they sat like three blind mice facing Jumbo in the chair with the hassock.

  Sylvia looked around carefully, wondering where on earth they slept and how on earth the group that had just left had ever fit all together in these miserable rooms. She didn’t know that Antoinette was very proud of these rooms, that they faced the front, that they were square, and that she actually had two bedrooms, one tucked off the living room, one off the kitchen, each with a cardboard closet and a window. Antoinette had nothing to be ashamed of. She did notice how skinny Sylvia was and she wondered if she might be sick. It looked like cancer to her but she knew enough not to ask. She offered the Bernsteins a highball, which Jumbo got up and mixed in the kitchen in a cocktail shaker that had instructions printed on the glass.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” Harvey said. “Reminds me of my mother’s apartment in the Bronx.” He had to, Sylvia thought, refer to the Bronx. He just couldn’t let it go, and when Harvey launched into a rhapsody about the old neighborhood, Sylvia pulled her dress down over her knees, plastered on a smile, and sipped her highball.

  Antoinette got up and Harvey followed her into the kitchen. She took out a meatball from the pot and put it into a small dish for him to taste. Sylvia scolded from the parlor, but Harvey was gone. He asked to use the bathroom and Antoinette pointed to a door in the corner of the kitchen. Harvey opened the door and looked into a room the size of a closet with a toilet inside. He closed the door and turned back to Antoinette. “Excuse me,” he said. “There’s no sink.”

  “What do you want?” Antoinette said.

  “I want to wash my hands.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say that? I thought you had to go. There,” and she pointed to the kitchen sink next to the stove and the big gooey bar of brown soap in the saucer on the drainboard.

  Jumbo laughed from the living room. “That’s funny, Harvey,” he said. “Did you think someone stole the sink? Get it, Ma?” Sylvia held out her glass for a refill. Antoinette raised an eyebrow. She didn’t know Jews were drinkers. The Irish, yes, not the Jews. Antoinette liked the father. She had given him the dish towel to dry his hands and he was at the table, tearing off a piece of bread, mopping up the gravy from the meatball. She thought the girl was plain and she thought that was good but she wouldn’t have minded beautiful grandchildren. She knew that good looks were more trouble than they were worth in a wife. Nicky had married that beautiful Gina Gandalfo with the long black hair and the big tits and had lost her just as fast, although Nicky was not Antoinette’s idea of a man.

  Antoinette looked Judy over carefully, especially her bulging stomach. She seemed quiet and definitely pregnant. Antoinette calculated: six Mangiacarne women to one of her. The mother didn’t look like much competition. Sucking Judy into the family or, better yet, leaving her behind should not be a problem for the Mangiacarnes. Antoinette was thinking these thoughts, about to call the Bernsteins to the table, when a huge crate swung outside the living room windows.

  “What’s that?” Judy said, pointing. She went to the window and looked down; there was a piano movers’ truck parked downstairs. “Look,” she said, “they’re moving a piano.”

  “It’s not a piano,” Antoinette said, putting the bowl of macaroni on the table. “It’s Lucy Petrazzini. She passed away last night.” Antoinette crossed herself.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Judy said. “Was she ill?”

  “She had everything. Diabetes, heart condition, psoriasis, asthma. She was four hundred pounds. Dr. Vincenza told her, ‘Lucy, you’re digging your grave with your own fork.’” Antoinette shook her head. “She wouldn’t listen.”

  Sylvia estimated Antoinette to tip the scales at way over two hundred pounds herself. She shuddered to imagine Lucy. “That’s a shame,” she said.

  “Yeah, Nucciarone, he’s our undertaker, the one the Naples people use, he came last night but he took one look and said there was no way he was getting her through the door, forget down the stairs.”

  “That was smart,” Harvey said, “calling the piano movers.”

  “Oh, he’s smart. Did you ever meet a dumb undertaker? Now we’re all thinking, what’s he gonna bury her in? A piano box? Eh, we’ll see tomorrow when they lay her out.”

  Sylvia held out her plate for Antoinette to fill and pulled it back so quic
kly a meatball rolled onto the table. Jumbo speared it and ate it off his fork. Harvey sat, his shirt covered with a huge cloth napkin that Antoinette had tucked into his collar after she made him take off his jacket, which she hung on the back of the bedroom door off the kitchen where Jumbo slept.

  “You’re not eating, Sylvia,” Antoinette said. “Something wrong?”

  “Mother has a delicate stomach,” Judy said.

  “I knew it was something but I didn’t want to ask,” Antoinette said. “That’s why you look so sick, huh? So skinny. Poor thing. You want me to make you pastina? That’s easy to digest.”

  “No, no,” Sylvia said. “Please, I’m fine. This is delicious.”

  “Well,” Antoinette said, “Harvey here made up for you. You want to take some home? Jumbo can bring me the bowl next time he comes.”

  “I’d love some to take home,” Harvey said. And Antoinette shuffled macaroni and meatballs into a green Pyrex bowl, telling Jumbo just to make sure she got the bowl back because it was part of a set.

  Sylvia stood up as soon as she could, edging toward the door, hoping to avoid the physical contact she’d endured when she arrived. “Traffic is terrible on a Sunday night,” she said. “We should be going.” Harvey stood up with her and then Judy, who got up and stood behind Jumbo. She ran her hand along his neck and up under his hair. Antoinette noticed.

  “Where you going?” Antoinette said. “There’s more food. I got roast chicken, potatoes, salad, coffee, cake. Where you going so soon? The kitchen was hot and she wiped her face with the dish towel.

  “We’ll come another time,” Sylvia said. “This was wonderful. Thank you. We loved it. But you know, Judy gets tired. You remember.”

  “Let’s go, sweetheart,” Judy said to Jumbo. She bent down and kissed his ear.