“Good news? No, what is it?”
Baldy advanced on him, his face crazy with furrows, eyes lit with wine, a big garlic-eating grin. “Giovannella,” he said, and he wasn’t as drunk as he let on, “Giovannella and-a my son the law, they have their baby.”
O‘Kane just blinked. He didn’t ask what sex it was or if its hair was blond and one of its green Irish eyes imprinted with a lucky hazel clock, because he already knew, and the knowledge made him feel sick and dizzy, as if the ground had dipped beneath him. So he didn’t say anything, didn’t offer congratulations or best wishes to the new mother-he just blinked.
“Here,” Baldy said, standing over him in his best suit of clothes and the wine stains on his shirt, “have a cigar.”
O‘Kane went straight to her apartment after work, but he didn’t dare go up because there was a whole red-wine-spilling, accordion-playing, pasta-boiling wop hullabaloo going on up there and people all over the stairs, boisterous and laughing out loud. And when he did manage to sneak up two days later, the door was answered not by Giovannella but by a big square monument of a woman who shared a nose and eyes with her and nothing more. This was the mother, and no mistaking it. She said something in Italian and he tried to see past her into the familiar room, but she filled the whole picture all by herself and she knitted her black eyebrows and repeated whatever it was she’d said on pulling open the door and finding him there on the landing with his mouth hanging open. “Giovannella,” he said, the only word of Italian he knew, but the woman didn’t look to be all that impressed. One trembling blue-veined maternal hand went to the cross at her throat, as if to ward off some creeping evil, while the other gripped the edge of the door to bar his way, and in the instant before she slammed the door in his face with a violence that rocked the whole rotten stairway right down to its rotten supports, he heard the baby cry out, a single searing screech that resounded in his ears like an indictment.
The day he finally did get a look at Giovannella’s baby — his son, another son, and he a stranger to both of them — was the day Dolores Isringhausen came back from New York to open up her villa for the winter. It was a Saturday, and when he got off his shift there was a note waiting for him in the front hall at Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s. The envelope was a pale violet color, scented with her perfume, and all it said on the front was “Eddie.” He tore it open right there, standing in the hallway and old Walter Hogan watching him out of bloodshot eyes. “Got in last night,” he read, “and I’m already bored. Call me.” She hadn’t even bothered to sign her name.
He called her and her voice purred inside him till it felt as if all his nerve endings had sprouted fine little hairs, and he pictured her as he’d last seen her, in a Japanese robe with nothing underneath. “It’s Eddie,” he’d said, and she came right back at him with that cat-clawing whisper: “What took you so long?” They made a date for supper, and he kicked himself for not having a car to squire her around in. He didn’t like her driving — it was wrong somehow. It made him feel funny, as if he was half a man or a cripple or something, and he didn’t want anyone to see him sitting there like a dope in the passenger’s seat and a woman behind the wheel. The thing was, he didn’t need a car, not with Roscoe ferrying him to and from Riven Rock six days a week and everything in downtown Santa Barbara an easy walk or a seven-cent streetcar ride. He was saving his money, because he didn’t intend to be a nurse forever, and a car was just a drain, when you figured up the cost of gasoline, tires, repairs, and how many times had he seen Roscoe up to his ears in grease? But tonight he could sure use one — anything, even a Tin Lizzie that’d crank your arm off — just to pull up in Dolores’s drive and toot the horn a couple of times, and he felt cheap and low and thought he ought to stroll up to Menhoff’s to raise his spirits a bit.
That was when he spotted Giovannella. She was across the street in front of the greengrocer‘s, bending over to inspect the tomatoes, and beside her, in a perambulator the color of a bat’s wing, was the baby. Guido was nowhere in sight. O’Kane looked both ways and back over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching, then crossed the street and slipped up behind her, just another face in the crowd, and he was actually squeezing the fruit like a discerning housewife when he peered into the perambulator and saw the miniature features puckered like a sinkhole in the ground, eyes shut fast, a frilly blue bonnet pulled down over invisible eyebrows. But the skin — the fat clenched hands, the sinking face — was the color of Giovannella‘s, Giovannella’s purely, without adulteration, cinnamon on toast, Sicilian clay. Or dirt. Sicilian dirt.
Giovannella was aware of him now, looking up from her tomatoes while Wilson, the big-armed greengrocer, weighed them for her in a silver shovel-scoop of a scale, staring at him out of her stygian eyes. Her lips curled ever so slightly at the corners. “He’s beautiful, my baby, isn’t he, Eddie?”
O‘Kane looked to Wilson, and Wilson knew, everybody knew. Except maybe Guido. “Yeah,” he said, “sure,” and he felt numb all over, as if he’d been to the dentist and breathed deep of the gas till his mind fled away.
Oh, and her smile was rich now, her lips spread wide, teeth gleaming white in the sun. “You know what we decided to name him, Eddie? Huh?”
He didn’t have a clue. He looked to Wilson again and Wilson looked away.
“ ‘Guido,’ Eddie. We named him ‘Guido.’ After his father.”
And what did he feel then? Relieved? Thankful? Glad he hadn’t fathered another child to be raised a stranger to him? No. He felt betrayed. He felt rage. He felt jealousy, hot and electric, like a wire run right on up through him from his cock to his brain and the current on full. Wilson disappeared behind his melons and Guinea squash. A woman in a felt hat faded from black to gray bent over the radishes and then moved away down the aisle and into the cool depths of the shop. He looked hard at Giovannella. “What are you saying?”
The baby might as well have been carved of wood — it was there, in the carriage, sunk into itself. Giovannella tucked the brown paper sack of tomatoes under one arm and gave him a savage look. “You’re a big man, huh, Eddie? Always so cocksure — isn’t that right? The ladies’ man. The big stud.” She bit her lip, shot a glance around to see if anybody was watching. He was confused, adrift on a heavy sea, the sun throwing shadows across the street and the pavement glowing as if it was wet with rain. What did she want from him? What was the problem?
And then, as if he’d been awaiting his moment in the center of the stage, the baby woke up and flashed open his eyes — and there it was, for all the world to see, the green of Dingle Bay and three o‘clock in the afternoon.
Well, and that ruined the day for him, put a real kibosh on it, sent him into a funk that only whiskey could hope to salve. Of course, the moment the kid opened his eyes she whisked him away, the wheels of the perambulator spinning like a locomotive’s and the first feeble waking cry magnified into an infantile squall of rage, but by then she was at the corner and hustling down De la Guerra Street until the stony white columns of the First Security Bank swallowed her up. He didn’t follow her. Let her go, he thought, let her play her games, and wouldn’t she have made a sterling assistant to Savonarola, the hot iron glowing in her hand? The bitch. Oh, the bitch.