The senses in which Lina was at fault were too many to list, but that didn’t stop her. There was the disappearing with no trace and no word for days and days. There was thereafter the word every couple of years communicating little more than that she was alive and in a lunar Western outpost working in the kitchen of a school, and then, of all places, in Pittsburgh. There was the reasonable if not demonstrable hypothesis that, Enzo and his father having reportedly been dead tired before they left the farm, they may both have fallen asleep, if only for a second, which never would have happened if Lina had been in the car. She never fell asleep in cars. She would have kept Enzo awake or driven them home herself, because she wasn’t proud and careless behind the wheel like he was. There was the little matter of leaving her boy with no mother. There was the husband who said, Thick or thin. There was the mother whom everybody else had already abandoned. There was the man in the other car, who was also killed, and Lina would have talked Enzo awake or driven herself. There was the no reason ever given, to anybody, not in a letter, not in a phone call, for leaving. There was Mrs. Marini’s own theory that there never had been a reason, only a decision, made and executed in a single deft, unmeditated stroke. There was Costanza Marini. There was, What about her? There was, I gave you my heart every day for thirty years. There was, Even when you pass a dead dog on the road, you pay it the courtesy of a backward glance. There was, I drove you from my thoughts, I did not say your name while you were away.
She may have reserved her severest judgment for the sins, committed by someone else, of which she happened to consider herself most guilty, but that wasn’t the point. She wasn’t interested in extenuating circumstances or Christian psychology or petty tolerance. She was interested in driving a stake of fear into Lina’s heart. The Lord would have his opportunity for retribution in due course. Meantime, there was a price to be paid down here, at home.
She was plucking her eyebrows before the bedroom mirror when Patrizia and the boy arrived. Ciccio came in and sat on the bed, expressing curiosity as to what she was doing to her face.
“I don’t come out of the package like this, you know,” she said.
He said, “What do I know about cosmetology?”
“Did you tramp snow on my rugs?”
In the mirror, she saw him lift his stocking feet for her approval.
He said, “Are you sick or something?”
“No,” she responded.
“You look sick. Pardon me saying it.”
Patrizia shuffled into the bedroom, tinkling her keys. Her face was swollen and splotched. Mrs. Marini checked Ciccio’s face in the mirror, but it was a weird and peachy mask of health and goodwill. Then he left the room. Patrizia looked at her sideways as she continued to lay siege to her brows. From the other side of the house she heard Ciccio repeatedly opening and closing the icebox.
“Are you hungry?” Patrizia yelled toward the doorway.
“No,” he called back.
“Are you playing with my icebox door?” Mrs. Marini asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you like the noise? The clicking noise?”
“Yeah,” he said feebly.
He did that before church, when she made him go, and before returning home when his father had a list of chores waiting for him, and before the penmanship practice to which she used to subject him in the afternoons. It was his way of asking to be left alone.
She faced Patrizia and made a coquettish smile.
“Don’t start, Costanza,” Patrizia hissed. “You be nice.”
“I’m nice,” she whispered, leering. “I’m always nice. I’m so very, very nice. Don’t you think I look nice?”
Come to think of it, her strategy would come off much more smoothly if Ciccio were left at home. Too bad Patrizia insisted on driving. She wanted Lina to herself.
“Let him stay here,” she said.
“He’ll go,” said Patrizia. “He wants to go.”
“We’ll have to smoosh together in the cab, which will be hot and disaccommodating.”
“He likes trains,” Patrizia insisted.
“We’ll smoosh and think of the trouble with the shifter.”
“When he was a baby, he had the toy trains that he pushed on the sofa and the driveway, and he made the train noises. Remember? He had the stripy hat I made him.”
“A passenger car. A sedan.”
“We’ll buy him peanuts that he likes.”
Mrs. Marini and the boy were connected temperamentally. She had a keen sense of justice, as did he. She had the snapping of a clothespin; he had the opening and closing of the icebox door, a waste of gas she would not have indulged for anyone else. The connection antedated his birth and had its source in events and confidences of the kind that her profession had taught her to inter in deep caverns, so far out of day-to-day reach that it required no effort to keep them there.
(The events that had led to Lina becoming pregnant with the boy were such a confidence; however, Lina’s specific reasons for refusing to dispose of him when he was still only a germ were not. It had seemed to both Enzo and Mrs. Marini the only unobjectionable course. If Lina had run away in shame at that time, no explanation would have been expected of her. Instead it was as though she had waited to disappear until no one could have imputed to her any motive other than supreme egoism.
“Aw, Coco,” said the glib ghost that pretended it was her husband, “takes one to know one.”
“How about you give me a whisper of fellow feeling for once?” she exclaimed. “Will you never understand me? Carmelina was my heir. She wrote herself out of my will. On a whim. How absurd.”)
“If you had the sort of car in which it’s appropriate for four people to ride at the same time,” Mrs. Marini said, “I admit I would have no quibble. But you have the truck.”
“I’m going to eat one of these bananas,” Ciccio yelled from the kitchen.
Patrizia lowered her voice further. “I want your best behavior,” she said.
“I have mortadella in the drawer on the right on the bottom,” Mrs. Marini yelled back.
“Save your rotten-egg throwing for at least a month. As a favor to me.”
“I don’t see the bread,” he said.
“A month?” said Mrs. Marini. “A month from now she’ll be hunting seals in Norway.”
The train waddled north out of the soot-smeared green dells above Pittsburgh into the familiar flatland, in the direction of Erie, Pennsylvania, where the woman would transfer to a two-and-a-half-hour westbound into Ohio.
She asked a cadaverous young man who was reading the Book of Mormon across the aisle if he had any cigarettes, but he said he didn’t. She tottered into the next car, scanning the seats for a prematurely wrinkled face. The other passengers glanced at her and looked aside. Finally, an army private gave her a Chesterfield but claimed to have no matches.
Her husband, from whom she was estranged, detested Chesterfields. He would indiscreetly leave a room in which Chesterfields were being smoked. In the dining car, she got a light from a girl behind the counter. The canteen was closed for business. They were only a few miles from Erie. Nobody was in the car but the two of them. The girl was perhaps twenty-five years old and wore a golden yellow turban tied in front with a knot that was like a French crescent pastry. She wheeled a bucket from behind the counter and then pressed with her foot on the lever of one of the castors and locked it in place.