A pause to observe the sweet melancholy of discouragement. Of maybe having failed.
Okay. Nevertheless. Bungle or no. She must be vigilant. Left in the state of her own nature, Lina was likely to tighten all the strings Mrs. Marini had loosened in her and loosen all the ones she’d tightened.
Some women were unfit not to marry. That one who stood too close behind you at the bakery, humming, audibly sucking a cherry coughing lozenge; the stranger who asked you to hold her bag while she boarded the streetcar and as you handed it back began to chant the litany of relations to whom she’d given her money and her faith, only to be hunted and stripped and ridiculed by them — in other words, the women (there were men, but the men were incurables from the beginning) who did not seem convinced that you, another person, distinct from themselves, were quite there. On meeting these people she knew immediately, in a leap of intuition over science’s head, that they were spinsters — who might have been saved if only in their youths someone had imposed a man on what was at the time merely their contented self-dependence and wasn’t yet their brainsickness. She was well aware. She might have been one of their number, but marriage had cracked her in the necessary way.
6
She speculated and spied and picked and plotted. She was trying to find a way of carrying out her new ambition, that Lina should succeed her, without dooming her old ambition, that Lina should marry someone, but in each of her plots she at last foresaw the same mistake and threw them one by one wrathfully into the trash. The mistake was that if Lina should take over the business, she would become self-sustaining, and thus the last reliable lever that could still press marriage upon her — that she was penniless, and so was her family — would be removed. It was for this same reason that Lina didn’t know she stood to inherit Mrs. Marini’s house and money.
She had one further misgiving about making the girl her apprentice. It was that Lina was a child. She lacked the natural cruelty that a conversance with the marital act encouraged one to refine.
Anyway, Mrs. Marini was short for this world. She was sick of sitting around. Her brain had a rash from scratching. It was sometimes necessary to commence doing before the plan of action was drawn. One must lay one’s faith in one’s native power of striking a thing, of whacking it with all one’s force the moment instinct says go. And. And, and, and, the plan existed, it must have, but in a dark corner of her undermind, where it was wisely protecting itself from her.
She went out into the street in search of Lina. It was a Thursday.
She aimed herself through the postwork commerce that clogged Eleventh Avenue, in which the city was opening a trench, half a mile long, for the fitting of sewer pipe. She peeked down into the moat as she made her precipitate way. Behind a single-file team of jackasses, a man down there was plowing up the clay and rocks.
Otherwise, she hardly observed. She was equal to motion plus thought. When the gears of the intellect began to click, sensation was a waste of time, and time did not pertain to her. She was attentive only that she not pay too close attention to what she was going to propose. The crucial elements of her plan must not make each other’s acquaintance up in the conscious mind until the latest possible moment, when they must be thrown together in a fit of resolve, as when, making a dough for pastry, one combines the ice water and the shortened flour with a few quick turns of the cold hand.
The sun went down. She kicked perhaps unnecessarily at a pigeon that kept an annoying pace a foot in front of her. She might have gone first to Eighteenth Street and called for Lina at home, but Umberto was out of work once more, the father, and therefore was certainly holed up in the house awaiting an audience for his grief, while his women, just two now, thanks to him, were at this hour in the street going pushcart to pushcart looking for the cheapest lemon, or else in somebody’s kitchen helping put up the last of the beans. A peasant woman is never alone.
She raked the streets, peeking in certain likely windows, not finding them.
She should have said a peasant woman is never solitary, because others are always with her. To be alone is to have no thoughts to keep one company. She herself, conversely, was quite unalone.
“What will become of that girl is so sad to ask, so you’d better meddle some more — I mean, fix everything,” said Nico from his moldering place.
“You shut up,” she said. She knew it was not really him because Nico was never sarcastic. It was only her own brain generating phantasmal senators to impede the exercise of her imperial rights. The style was wrong but the tone of voice was flawless.
“You’re all mealy-mouthed pitiation and no pity, Costanza. You don’t want to assist anybody. You have been unfitting that child for female kindliness since I exited the scene. Witch. You only want to ready her for witchdom. Twenty is so many years to have. You can’t be serious! See how you conduct yourself, with the lies and the twist ings. Twenty is the bloom of youth, hag. You don’t want to make her rich; you want to erect a monument to yourself. You don’t want her to get married; you—”
“Who will marry her? Give me his name!”
The girl wasn’t in any of the back gardens along Vermilion Avenue, nor in the church.
“You don’t want her to get married. You don’t want some bumpkin digging up your treasure. You only suspect that you ought to desire her benefit above your own, but you’re completely insincere. If you make her a witch, like yourself, all the boys will know and no one will call for her. This is your plan. And, by the way, you won’t be any good at it, the witching instruction. You’ll hector her and embarrass her. It won’t be like teaching somebody to read a newspaper in your boudoir. There will be the matter of your conscious subjects lying there. But I know what you’ll do. You’ll just give them some gas.”
“You are so wicked!” she said.
“No, you are!”
“What entitles you of all people to dress yourself up as my conscience?”
“Introspect and you will observe your incapacity to do a genuine kindness,” he said.
“Stop abusing me, Nicolo!”
But it wasn’t really him, as she had already decided. It was never really him. She might have her silly hopes, but in all honesty if the ghost of the true Nico should ever visit her, she wondered if she could bear to speak with it without ruining all the gains of her later years and turning back into her former, wretched self. There were certain things she dearly longed to say to him — things that had come to her only while she was pushing the gelatinous food between his teeth during his last days, while his kidneys were failing and after his mind was already destroyed — but they could only be said in the past.
She was sure Lina had never indulged any sniping ghosts like this one; however, even if she had indulged them, she would have been able, as Mrs. Marini rarely was, to declare herself innocent at the last, or innocent enough, and march out into the cold autumn air.
There was a bench under the consignment-store awning where the girl and her mother sometimes sat and watched Joseph D’Agostino’s cockatoo through the plate glass and made doilies out of the bleached threads from a burlap bag, but neither Lina nor Patrizia was there.
There was a scent — she passed a woman in the intersection, a mother of nine but slender, clean-complected, the name was, the name was; but she must not try to remember, lest she fail — a smell of soap, hair, and something bitter besides, and it dropped her into a crevasse many ages old, accessible only via the nose and only if the scent was lost again at once: I have opened my sister’s carpetbag to see that she does not take my leggings with her when she leaves us forever tomorrow.