During the time that she was absent, Cosmo LoPonti busied himself with his largest job yet: the entire electrical contracting for an exclusive housing project then being built in Weston, the first of its kind—and, because of an amendment to the town charter the next year, also the last. Lonely without Vittoria, Cosmo worked double-time, late into the evenings, on weekends and holidays. The work was completed three weeks ahead of schedule, and the builder was so grateful to Cosmo that he privately offered him one of the smaller houses for a mere $32,000, one third below the asking price. Cosmo obtained the mortgage, purchased the house, and had moved in by the time Vittoria returned to Boston in the same plane that was carrying her mother’s corpse.
None of Vittoria’s North End friends saw her after the funeral in St. Anthony’s Church, and none of them ever learned that when she got off the plane at Logan Airport, Vittoria LoPonti, in a black dress, a black pillbox hat, and a black veil, was carrying a seven-month-old baby in her arms, a child whom she had christened Andrea.
Cosmo and Vittoria LoPonti began a new life for themselves in Weston. Newcomers were not accepted easily by the community, but the couple were quiet and unostentatious and did nothing to offend their neighbors. No one had anything against them, and gradually, by the time Andrea was in grammar school, there were so many more persons in the town of more recent vintage than the LoPontis that people had come to look on Cosmo and Vittoria as established town citizens.
Vittoria was faithful in her attendance at the PTA and eventually came to hold office there; Cosmo granted the city a five percent discount on contracted work. They both attended town meetings, and sometimes Vittoria actually stood up and spoke on such issues as playground safety and public swimming pools. By the time Andrea was enrolled in Miss Britten’s Academy, Cosmo was a town alderman, and Vittoria the vice-president of the Society for the Preservation of Weston Antiquities.
Cosmo had prospered. The family had moved to a larger house—not part of the tract—and purchased a summer cottage right on the ocean, at Yarmouthport, on Cape Cod. Here Vittoria and Andrea spent their summers, with Cosmo coming down on the weekends. Andrea’s sterling achievements at Miss Britten’s had been the crowning of the couple’s success in the town. Vittoria thought she had never been so happy in her life as the day on which she announced to the general membership of the Society for the Preservation of Weston Antiquities that Andrea had been accepted at Radcliffe, Vassar, and Wenham, but had decided to go to the last “because it was nearest Cosmo and me.”
Cosmo and Vittoria LoPonti had been born and raised in Boston’s North End and still bore many traces of that upbringing. Foremost among these was their strict loyalty to the Catholic Church; they believed fervently in the infallibility of the parish priest. They would never be entirely at home in Weston, because of its overwhelmingly Yankee and Protestant flavor, but Andrea was different: she had never known that insular, prying, noisy Italian community, had never been blessed with its raucous happinesses or touched by its pathetic sorrows. She attended church regularly, even went to confession—and confessed truthfully; but religion had never really entered her heart.
Andrea did not look like her parents, both of whom were of obvious Italian extraction. She had green eyes, a fair complexion, and long, thick, blond hair that fell in soft waves over her shoulders. She had occasionally entertained the notion that she was adopted, but had never questioned Cosmo and Vittoria about it. All children have such fantasies, she told her sophisticated self, and she would have died rather than admit to such a puerile insecurity.
She had sometimes wondered about the single earring that pierced the lobe of her right ear. She could not remember a time when she had been without it, and any new acquaintance invariably questioned her, “What happened to the other one?” When Andrea put to her mother the same question, Vittoria had replied, “Oh that—it was the fashion when you were little.”
Miss Britten’s Academy was housed in a large, Tudor-syle mansion near the town common, across a wide, manicured lawn that had groupings of the tallest and most beautiful blue spruces in the township. The young women who were admitted to this establishment in such small numbers were select, highly motivated, rich, and parent-pressured. High achievements there had been no struggle for Andrea who had excelled from the start. She studied no more and worked no harder than the three forlorn girls who came in at the tag end of the class—girls whose intelligence had been overlooked in the interests of their parents’ vast wealth or impeccable social standing. Andrea LoPonti was quick—no fellow student had been quicker. She seemed to retain effortlessly all that she read; she possessed an easy fluency when a pen was thrust into her hands; she had an unfailing instinct for what her instructors wanted of her.
In each of the six reporting periods of each of her six years at Miss Britten’s, Andrea LoPonti had maintained a straight-A average. She liked literature and history and could bear up under social studies, so doing well in those courses was no difficulty. She disliked the sciences and mathematics, but had an innate understanding of them and came out better than many of her friends who struggled long and hard with concepts that never really became comprehensible to them. Art appreciation, needlework, “domestic economics,” consumer advocacy, astronomy, Italian, French, and Latin posed no difficulties either.
To Vittoria and Cosmo, Andrea was the perfect, dutiful daughter. Any faults she possessed they made themselves blind to; and they had long ago determined that she should never have to struggle, as they and their parents had struggled, in the material world. Her natural intelligence and intellectual attainments, her easy popularity with the other girls at the school they saw as a reward for their years of carefully and lovingly applied discipline; for their years of daily prayers. They had encouraged her in her friendships and, when she was fifteen, allowed her to double-date with one of her best girl friends. Andrea always came home at an early hour appointed by herself, and never with liquor on her breath or cigarette smoke in her clothing.
So far as popularity and ease with studies went, Andrea’s freshman year at Wenham was only an extension of Miss Britten’s Academy. Although the town of Newton bordered Weston and the college was only twenty minutes from Andrea’s home, she had persuaded her parents to allow her to live on campus. Despite the four-thousand-dollars-a-year cost for room and board, Vittoria and Cosmo had acquiesced, and Andrea resided in Wordsworth Hall from September through May.
By the end of October of her freshman year, Andrea was well settled into the rhythm of college life. Many other women of the freshman class were nervous about living up to the standards of the college, hoped desperately they would fulfill their parents’ expectations, suffered agonies over which courses to take, and imagined that every move they made would have a direct bearing on their future happiness. It was not so for Andrea. She had tentatively determined to major in history, because history was the sort of thing that would not get in the way of her adult life. Andrea could not imagine that the announcement in the Sunday Globe of her engagement to some North Shore scion would read, “Miss LoPonti has a degree in biological chemistry from Wenham.” People would expect her to do something with a degree as technical as that—but nobody expected you to do anything with a degree in history.
She took courses that pleased and interested her: Advanced French Literature (concentrating on the late eighteenth century), Regency England (the most romantic era in history, she considered), Mathematics for NonConcentrators (to fulfill distribution requirements), Introduction to Modern Dance (a physical, not an academic course), and Elementary Russian. It was not as heavy a burden of instruction as she might have assumed, but Andrea had the idea that she ought to take things easy for the first few months and grow accustomed to Wenham —it was possible she would be distracted by the novelty of life on campus and away from home, and she wanted a little room to accommodate that distraction.
No accommodation proved n
ecessary, however; Andrea LoPonti adapted readily to the exigencies of college life. She had no fear of her courses, and if she was a little in awe of her professors and instructors, who were ever so much more distant and strange than the young PhDs who had taught at Miss Britten’s, Andrea at least did not allow herself to be shy in class. She participated fearlessly in discussion and was not ashamed to ask questions when she did not understand. Andrea was a quick reader, even in French, and she was so used to the mechanics of learning a new language that not even Russian declensions could daunt her. Andrea had no thought of a career—she saw her mother’s life as the ideal: unburdened and moneyed and free, and she intended to emulate Vittoria LoPonti in marrying a man who could provide copiously for her comfort. Andrea, however, intended to differ from her mother in this: Andrea would not marry a man who was on his way up, she would marry a man who was already there. Thus, imagining that she would never need to bother with job applications and resumes and admission forms to graduate schools, Andrea was not worried about grades—and did all the better for that insouciance.
Andrea lived on the fourth floor of Wordsworth Hall, a colonial-style dormitory with ivy-covered walls, close-clipped yew hedges, and flagstone walkways. For the first few weeks of the term, she had shared her large corner room with a young woman from Parkersburg, West Virginia. Andrea had hardly suppressed her unbridled contempt for her roommate—contempt for her weepy homesickness, her terror of the college, her hour-long whispered telephone calls to her boyfriend every night. The third week in October the girl had transferred back to a community college in West Virginia, and Andrea was left the room to herself. She made the acquaintance of most of the women in the dorm, a little more than half of whom were freshmen, but formed no attachment to any but the girl who lived in the corner room next to Andrea’s.
Marsha Liberman—Andrea was sure that she had been called Marcie in high school—was slender and dark, with thick black hair that fell in short, permed ringlets about her oval face.
Marsha had a roommate, whom she described as a narcolept because the girl slept as many as fourteen hours a day, she was so unhappy at Wenham. In consequence, Marsha spent much time in the library or in Andrea’s room, where the two girls read their assignments, gossiped and told one another their pasts. They double-dated, and Marsha spent occasional weekends in Weston, glad for the chance to be away from the school for a few days, although her home was only in Waltham, the town neighboring Weston to the north. On campus Andrea and Marsha became a team, and by the end of that first year their friends found themselves unable to refer to one without also mentioning the other.
Occasionally, on weekends that Vittoria and Cosmo spent on Cape Cod, Andrea was allowed to remain alone in Weston, so long as Marsha could stay over. These times, the two girls would invite over their most intimate half-dozen friends, make complicated mixed drinks with exotic names that they found in a bartender’s guide, talk about sex, and smoke the marijuana that Marsha had got from her older sister, Joanna. On Sunday morning Andrea and Marsha would run the vacuum cleaner over the shag rugs, open the windows, hide the empty pint bottles in neighbors’ garbage cans, and run the waste disposal and trash compactor almost constantly; often the house looked better upon the LoPontis’ return than when they had left.
14
On a hot, lazy Saturday morning at the beginning of June, Andrea LoPonti took a sip of coffee and stared listlessly out the bowed window of the breakfast nook. This small alcove, with a dizzyingly busy red-and-white Americana wallpaper, looked out over the side lawn of the split-level house in Weston. Andrea brushed her hair back over her shoulders, leaned her elbows on the table, and watched her father as he stood in the middle of the yard, slowly turning the fine spray of water from the hose in arcs from left to right. Her first year of college was behind her, and Andrea had moved back into the Weston house only one week earlier. She looked forward to a long summer of self-imposed lassitude.
Cosmo LoPonti was a tall, stoutly built man with short, thick, black hair that was combed straight back from his wide, dark face. He was happy during the brief Massachusetts growing season, and he was miserable in the winter. Then, when there was no gardening work to be done, he pored over seed catalogues, visited hardware stores and looked longingly at tools he didn’t need, made plans for enlarging flower beds, and nearly killed his indoor plants with excessive care.
Andrea swallowed the last quarter cup of her lukewarm coffee in a single gulp, and turned on her chair. Crossing her legs at the ankles, she rearranged the folds of her new cornflower blue bathrobe and poured another cupful from the electric percolator on the table. A dozen feet away, at the kitchen counter, Vittoria LoPonti prepared dainty egg- and chicken-salad sandwiches for the biweekly meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Weston Antiquities. Vittoria knew much more interesting Italian hors d’oeuvres, but she did not like to emphasize her ethnicity in the club.
“You ought to have something besides coffee,” said Vittoria without turning. She wiped her hands on her small tea apron and crossed to the refrigerator. Her hair, clasped at the nape of her neck, fell in a thick ponytail down her back. Andrea was thankful that her mother had resisted the weight that came to so many Italian women in early middle age; Vittoria LoPonti, though not thin, retained a shapely figure.
“What are you going to do today, Andrea?”
“I’m not sure,” said Andrea hesitantly.
Vittoria said nothing for a moment. “That means you’re not going to do anything, doesn’t it?”
Andrea made no reply.
“You know, your father and I have been thinking about you, and what you’re going to do this summer.”
“You’re not going to ask me to go to the Cape again, are you? I’ll die if I have to spend another summer in Yarmouthport. There’s nothing to do there, and there’s nowhere to go, and—”
“And no young men,” said Vittoria, completing her daughter’s thought.
“Well, of course there’re boys around there,” said Andrea, “but they’re always these macho beach bum types, or trying to be, and all the really good looking boys turn out to be gay, and where does that leave me?”
“Andrea!”
“Well it’s true, and then the ones who are in college always try to maul you to death when they get drunk, and when they’re not drunk, they’re too shy to speak two words in the same half hour, and you promised me you wouldn’t make me go back there, even on the weekends!”
“All right, Andrea, all right. You don’t have to get hysterical, but it seems to me that some girls would relish the opportunity to go to the shore in the summer. But that wasn’t what your father and I were talking about.”
“What were you talking about, then?” asked Andrea sullenly.
“Your father and I agreed that you were mature enough to stay here by yourself during the summer, as long as he’s going to be here during the week, and as long as Marsha’s parents have agreed to let her stay here with you over the weekends. And your father and I were thinking that maybe it would be a good idea if you got a job.”
Andrea put her cup down with such a clunk, that the hot coffee spilled out onto the surface of the table. She dropped her forehead into the upturned palms of her hands and shook her head slowly. But Vittoria had not turned round, and the dramatics were lost on her.
“Mother,” Andrea moaned, “this is the summer. I need to recuperate—I worked myself to death at Wenham this last year. I wanted to get a tan, I wanted—”
“If you wanted a tan, then you’d go to Yarmouthport. And, Andrea, you have never had to work for a grade in your life, and you know it!”
“Mother—”
“It’s not that we need the extra money—you know we don’t, and we wouldn’t try to fool you by telling you we did. But you also know that Cosmo and I weren’t always so well off as we are now. There was a time when we had
to scrape by, there was a time when Papa had to help us. There was a time when the only heat in the house came out of the oven. Anyway, we think it’s important that you get a job, just so that you’ll learn what it’s like to get a paycheck, and learn about taxes, and making a budget, and sticking to it, and all the things that come together to help make you a better adult. You’re nearly nineteen now, and in girls these days, that’s certainly adulthood. You had last summer all to yourself, and I just think it’s time, sweetheart. I started working when I was twelve. That was the year I got my Social Security card. Andrea, you don’t even have a Social Security card.”
During her mother’s speech, Andrea leaned back in her chair, recrossed her legs, and examined her nails. A noise in the driveway drew her attention, and she was pleased to see Marsha Liberman’s apple-green Volkswagen pull up behind her father’s black Continental in the garage. A moment later Marsha, wearing a pair of cuffed denim shorts with matching suspenders and a brown gingham blouse, stepped out of the car and went over to speak to Cosmo. As she greeted him, she carefully adjusted the brown gingham bandana that was tied gypsy-style round her head.
Vittoria began to spread egg salad on heart-shaped morsels of Pepperidge Farm white bread. “A job would be good experience at working with people. I love you, Andrea, but I have to say that sometimes you think that the whole world was created just for your own benefit and comfort. Mrs. Marks, you know who I mean, at the Svelte Lady Shoppe, told me just yesterday—”
Marsha knocked briefly at the kitchen door and, without waiting to be called inside, opened the screen door and stepped through.
Blood Rubies Page 11
