O‘Kane wasn’t following. “Mad? About what?”
“You’re the father, Eddie,” her voice soft as a heartbeat. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m pregnant.”
In the next moment he had her out the door and they were stalking up the street, pedestrians trying not to stare, the streetcar clanking by, a roadster parked at the curb, a sedan beyond, an old Reo beyond that. His blood was surging, and it wasn’t all bad. He was angry, of course he was angry, but there was a crazy exhilaration to it too. Sure the kid would be his — her husband, Guido, looked to be about a hundred and twelve years old though she insisted he was only thirty-six, and how could she have relations with a guy who looked like that, even if he was her husband? Of course the kid was his — unless she’d been fooling around with somebody else, and if she fooled around with him why wouldn’t she fool around with somebody else? But no, it had to be his, and it would come out with fair hair and sea-green eyes, he just knew it, and Baldy Dimucci and this Guido would hit the roof. There’d be a vendetta. Sicilian assassins. They’d crawl through the ground-floor window at night, brutally dispatching Mrs. Fitzmaurice and old Walter Hogan, who spent half his life snoring in a chair by the front door, and then come up the stairs and cut his own miserable throat.
Someone honked a bicycle horn. The greengrocer — Wilson — came out from behind a display of muskmelons and threw a pan of water in the gutter. “You’ll have to get rid of it,” O‘Kane said.
Giovannella stopped dead in her tracks, Giovannella the fury, Giovannella the lunatic. The candy melted out of her eyes. “What did you say?” she demanded. “I think my hearing must not be so good.”
The fat-ankled woman from the Goux Winery waddled past them with three kids in tow. A man with a panting dog almost ran into them. People were everywhere, swells ambling up the street from the Potter, women shopping for groceries, kids darting in and out of alleyways with balls and hoops. “Not here, Giov,” he said, and he wanted to take her by the arm and steer her someplace, someplace quiet and out of the way, but he couldn’t do that, because she wasn’t Giovannella Dimucci anymore — she was Giovannella Capolupo and he had no right to touch her. In public, anyway.
Suddenly she lurched away from him, her face twisted and ugly, and broke into a clumsy trot, fighting the weight of her skirts. He gave it a minute, inconspicuous Eddie O‘Kane, just another guy out for a Saturday-afternoon stroll, and then made his way up the street after her. By the time he got going, she was already a block ahead of him, still kicking out her skirts in an awkward trot, her head bobbing like a toy on a spring, people stopping to turn and stare after her. O’Kane quickened his pace, but not so much as to attract attention.
He caught up with her in front of Diehl’s Grocery, a place that catered to the carriage trade of Montecito — O‘Mara smoked hams from Ireland in the window, jars of curry and chutney from India, pears in crème de menthe, the sort of place that had no business with O’Kane or he with it. But there was a line of limousines parked out front, one of them Mr. McCormick‘s, which meant that Roscoe was around somewhere, and Sam Wah stalking the aisles inside, inspecting ginger root from Canton and curls of candied melon from Cambodia. Giovannella was standing at the window, her back to the street, staring at a perfectly stacked pyramid of tangerines. He saw her face reflected in the glass, her lips puffed with emotion, eyes like open wounds, and felt something give inside him. “Giovannella,” he said, “listen to me — can’t we talk?”
In the smallest voice: “I don’t want to talk to you, Eddie.”
Sam Wah’s face suddenly loomed up in the window, caught between two pink-and-brown hams, and Sam smiled a gap-toothed smile and O‘Kane waved, and then, whether the whole world was watching or not, he took Giovannella by the elbow and led her down the alley and into the next street over. They walked in silence, out of the commercial district and into a residential area, neat houses with deep-set porches and roses climbing up trellises. They found a place to sit on the knee-high roots of a big Moreton Bay fig tree that spread out over an empty lot like ten trees all grafted together. There was no one around. He took her hand and she gave him a sidelong look that seemed to have some conciliation in it, but with Giovannella you never could tell. Sometimes when she looked her softest she was about to explode, and when she exploded she could do anything, throw herself in front of a streetcar, jump off a building, rake your eyes out.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that, what I said back there on the street.”
“Eddie,” she said, surrender, forgiveness and reproach all in two syllables and one tone, and she took hold of him with a strength and intensity that was intoxicating and terrifying at the same time and kissed him, forcing her tongue into his mouth, again and again, crushing him, tearing at him, till finally he had to put his hands on her shoulders and come up for air.
“I’m not going to have my son raised by some wop shoemaker, that’s all,” he said.
That only made her hold on tighter. She was a woman drowning in the surf and he the lifeguard sent to rescue her, her nails like claws, every muscle straining to drag him down, and she wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t let him get his face clear, no neutral zone here, no calling for time out, her lips his lips, her nose his, her eyes and her breath. “Oh, yeah?” she said, and her voice was dangerous. “And what about the son you already have — whos raising him? Huh? You tell me. Who’s raising him, Eddie?”
Rosaleen was raising him, and if she had some man in her life, he didn’t know about it. He sent her money, when he remembered, and she sent him silence in return. No letters, no photographs, no nothing. But if he pictured her, and he did once in awhile, lingering over a beer when nobody was around, a mournful tune playing on the victrola, he pictured her alone and waiting, a photo of handsome Eddie O‘Kane on the wall above her bed.
“That’s none of your business,” he said.
A breeze came up and scoured the ground, scraps of paper suddenly pasted to the roots of the tree, branches groaning overhead. Still she clung to him, her breath hot in his face, the smell of her skin, soap, perfume. “You’re my husband, Eddie,” she whispered, “you’re the one. Be a man. Take me away someplace, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Or back home to Boston, I don’t care, I’ll go anywhere with you.”
“This is my home. Mr. McCormick—”
“Mr. McCormick. Don’t tell me about Mr. McCormick.” She pushed away from him, her eyes dilated and huge, hair falling loose at her nape and whipping round her shoulders. “It’s only a job, Eddie — you can get a job anywhere, a big strong man like you, an American born here and with an education too. Where’s your three o‘clock luck you’re always telling me about? Trust it. Trust me.”
But the curtain had fallen in his mind. The play was over. “You’ll have to get rid of it.”
“Never.”
“I’ll arrange it. I’ll ask around. He — whatever his name is — he’ll never have to know. Nobody will.”
Suddenly, and he didn’t know quite how it happened, they were boxing. Or she was boxing and he was just trying to fend off her blows. They struggled to their knees, then their feet. She swung at him, just like Rosaleen. “I hate you,” she sputtered, gasping, swinging, her voice dead calm between one ratcheting breath and the next. “It’s murder you’re talking about, you son… of a bitch, murder of an… innocent soul… How can you even… think of it, and you a… Catholic?”