“That’s some riddle you guys made up to catch Jews in the Inquisition.”
“A, B, both A and B, neither A nor B?”
“Do you want to see my horns, Father?”
“Put another way, one might ask, Is it better to feel or to think?”
“That’s easy!” Ciccio said. “To feel.”
17
The voice on the line was male, croaking, forthright, unquestionably Palermitano, stentorian, and sad. In the background, Lina heard someone raking gravel.
The man said, “You’re selling a bicycle.”
“Yes, go on.”
“I have the correct number for the woman that’s selling a bicycle?”
“All I do is answer the phone,” Lina said.
“From this point, the transaction proceeds how, I don’t know.”
“You have a conversation face-to-face.”
“We are who?”
“You, the person for whom you wish to buy the bicycle, the friend of mine who’s selling.”
“I don’t get it. What are you doing picking up her phone? What kind of an operation is this? You’re her, aren’t you — I mean, it’s your own bicycle, isn’t it.”
Evidently he was an outsider of the neighborhood, the accent notwithstanding. No one that lived here would have needed to ask if the bicycle was hers. “I’ll talk to my friend about a place and a time,” she said.
“We’re discussing dollars and cents at this meeting?”
“The price is fixed. Up for discussion is whether this bicycle is a good idea in this circumstance. If your friend has been in need of the bicycle longer than twelve weeks, I’m afraid my friend can’t help her.”
“I might say, ‘Don’t worry. I have no doubts this is the right bicycle. Let’s skip to the heart of the matter.’”
“I don’t think my friend is willing to sell her bicycle on those terms,” Lina said.
“A place and a time,” said the man.
“Call back in ten minutes and I’ll let you know.”
“It would be helpful if the place was West Side. There is a little park someplace. There is a little park, actually, on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Auglaize Street.”
“I’m writing this down.”
She hung up the phone and rang Mrs. Marini’s line.
Mrs. Marini said she could do it at ten a.m. the next day.
Lina hung up the phone, smoked a cigarette, knocked over her salt shaker, righted it, swept the salt into her hand; and the phone rang again.
“Tell me it’s better if I don’t attend this meeting myself,” said the man.
“Sir. I pick up the phone, then I put it back down. Do you understand?”
“Well, maybe I won’t come then myself, maybe. Maybe I’ll go do something else, if it’s all the same maybe to you, and let the girl talk to you on her own.”
“That’s as you please,” Lina said, positioning herself in front of the opened window so that when she threw the salt over her shoulder it landed outside in the grass. She asked how her friend would know his friend.
There were some benches around a broken-down fountain, he said. And the girl would have a schnauzer pup on a leash.
The next morning, for a diversion, Lina tagged along with Mrs. Marini on the trolley ride. Wisconsin Avenue was the principal thor oughfare of a neighborhood that had used to be called Old Marsh, or the Bottom Marsh, or the Bottoms. Twice, maybe three times, as a young girl, she’d overheard a very old person on the streetcar say he was getting off at “the Bottoms” or coming from there. It was a name from a lost era. Mrs. Marini was among the last who still called it by its succeeding name, The Hague. Lina herself had always known it as New Odessa, but that name wasn’t long for this world, either. When she and Mrs. Marini crossed Tooley Boulevard, they discovered that the windows of the shops on Auglaize Street were covered with pressboard, the Cyrillic neons were shut off, and they were heading into a part of town where neither of them would have agreed to go if they’d known better.
The girl wasn’t a girl. She was nearly forty. She wore a severely starched blue sundress and had tied a white mohair sweater around her shoulders. She had a pretty face, disfigured by acne scars. A plump woman about Lina’s age, an aunt, accompanied her. The aunt said they’d been led to believe that Lina’s friend was a colored woman. Lina replied that she’d assumed the girl herself was white. The tone of this exchange was of nonchalance, or at most of petty amusement, but it was insincere. The colored women were visibly disturbed to hear that such an immodest payment would be exacted from them. Mrs. Marini asked Lina and the aunt to excuse themselves briefly while she asked the woman a few private questions. Lina, the aunt, and the dog watched in silence, out of earshot, from the opposite lip of the fountain, which was webbed with cracks across its dry concrete basin and festooned with leaves, bird feces, and the splinters of a busted radio.
The streetcar home was a sweltering, flesh-on-flesh affair. A white woman made her son get out of his seat so that Mrs. Marini could sit down. Lina held on to a strap in the ceiling and was pressed in her back, when the car accelerated, by a man whose halitosis she smelled, although she couldn’t see him. Her purse dangled in Mrs. Marini’s face. Mrs. Marini muttered in Italian that when she’d asked the woman if the man in question was exerting unwelcome pressure on her, the woman only said there wasn’t anything more miserable than a yellow baby.
Lina said, “Probably not.”
“What ‘probably’?” Mrs. Marini said testily. “Probably nothing.”
The woman seated beside her, with the boy on her lap now, looked at Lina for a moment too long, and when she looked away, she did so with the fake lethargy of a person who has been caught paying attention and tries to defend herself by saying implicitly, I wasn’t looking at you, I was looking at the empty space in front of you.
Then, with neither warning nor perceivable cause, Lina was overcome by a seizure of cramping behind her eyes. She tightened her grip on the strap hanging from the ceiling of the car. She felt a surge of pressure in her brain and a vivid intuition of homesickness and of having been permanently banished — but from where?
Then, just as abruptly, it passed.
Ciccio was a good boy. She would never tell him so, but Mrs. Marini cared for him very much. She did not need to hold forth about her feelings, like a troubadour or a knight-errant. These scenes, such as one saw at the show in which Bertha fell into Bill’s embrace while they blubbered out their sweet nothings, embarrassed her.
Likewise, she had never needed to tell Enzo that — contrary to her early suppositions — she, she. . well, she did not entirely disapprove of him. Lina was the only person to whom she had ever, as an adult, made the conventional three-word so-called confession. But that was an accident. What she’d meant to imply was, You’re a fool; I love and punish you by saying it; you’re a fool. Although it may not have come out that way. In any event, Mrs. Marini’s behavior in Ciccio’s company was testimony enough, thank you.