He was a gainful tenant, a lifter and carrier of heavy things, a duster of high corners, a painstaking washer of her Dresden china. He listened to directions. He studied these days with a high degree of seriousness. He was not given to the catatonic inbursts to which his mother had been given at his age. With the egregious exception of his demeanor around Lina, he was unfailingly civil to adults. How easy to enumerate points in his favor.
But he must have had a dim view of the adult mind and its powers to see beneath surfaces. He thought he was successfully pulling the wool with respect to cigarettes, but Mrs. Marini knew about the cigarettes, and she knew where he hid them. He even seemed to think nobody had noticed when he moved into her house, when in fact a brief, uncomplicated meeting had taken place two days after the funeral. Patrizia was going back to the farm and wanted to clarify their responsibilities.
The three women had drunk black coffee in Enzo’s (Lina’s) kitchen. Lina was not certain that she would stay. Mrs. Marini could use a man in the house; her fingers were stiffening. For reasons that were unclear to each of them in different ways, Lina and her boy did not get along. So. As a courtesy, they also agreed to let him go on believing he’d orchestrated the whole thing without their permission, because to tell him they’d all agreed on it without his knowing would only demoralize him. Lina would visit regularly. Who knew. Perhaps a reconciliation could be effected. Meanwhile, sub rosa, Mrs. Marini would consult with them on the larger custodial decisions.
When Ciccio had first moved in, Mrs. Marini considered making a formal agreement with him according to which he must never come downstairs between certain nighttime hours, especially if he perceived that there were visitors, unless he heard a violent commotion. But he was too old and curious for that to work. Couldn’t she, then, simply unfold the whole business to him, was he too young for that? Perhaps not. He could keep his mouth shut. This required a conference. Lina didn’t care either way, but her mother was vehemently opposed. Mrs. Marini asked for her reasons, and Patrizia said, “Because no.” Until now their Ciccio plebiscites had all ended in consensus, but this time Lina let her mother have her way, and Mrs. Marini was outvoted.
Mrs. Marini then let it be known that her door should not be knocked on anymore, nor should she be telephoned directly. For now, Lina was to be telephoned, a code was to be employed, and a meeting would be scheduled. When they had had business during that spring and summer, Federica obtained the use of the cellar of a widow aunt of her husband’s who had indebted herself to Mrs. Marini some decades before.
However, that August, after Lina took a call from an anonymous man that eventually entangled them with a Negress from the West Side — a client Mrs. Marini should never have taken on, because one loose Negro would surely lead to a gaggle of others — they ran into the snag, which she should have foreseen, of Federica’s aunt-in-law refusing to let a colored person into her house.
They had scheduled the procedure for the afternoon of the Assumption, when the neighborhood would be mad with crowd and their clients’ stepping out of the trolley at Sixteenth Street would be a less noteworthy thing to witness than usual. Lina said they could use her house if they had to, except that Ciccio was always prowling around there, thinking they didn’t notice, stealing his old things. His room on Twenty-second was slowly emptying, and his room on Twenty-sixth was slowly filling up. (How could Mrs. Marini not take offense at being thought so blind?) And in the warm weather, he spent the daytimes reading in the backyard of his former home, like a cat spraying the bushes. He might show up wherever they did the thing. She needed a better plan.
Before Mrs. Marini knew it, the day had arrived. She sat in the kitchen gnawing a biscuit for breakfast and jotting the letters in the tiles of the crossword with the authority of a woodpecker hammering a tree. Ciccio was still asleep upstairs. She looked at the weather forecast. It read: Sweltering, dismal; evening thunderstorms. But she didn’t care. She felt absolutely terrific for no particular reason, or, rather, for innumerable reasons. She was rich; her neighbor’s yawp ing dog was dead of cancer; Eisenhower had humiliated Stevenson; even the smell of the newspaper ink was divine. Everything that touched her brain delighted it. The past was dead. She was alive!
The front page of the newspaper, above the fold, showed a photograph of a beaming young veteran in a tuxedo; however his limbs had been amputated. Ghastly.
“They call it an infantry because it’s made up of children,” commented a Nico-ish voice, but she ignored it.
Then she turned the paper over to read the other items.
“Ooh!” she exclaimed. “I know that name!”
It was the fifteenth of August, Assumption Day.
The name she had read was Mimmo LaGrassa. Three weeks after the armistice had been reached, and one day before he was to be released from a prisoner-of-war camp, he had died in Korea. He was the son of the baker Rocco.
How dreadful.
Well, not really. She hardly remembered the dead boy. She hardly knew Rocco. She still regarded her day with blithe curiosity. Instead of invoking sympathy, reading this article only made her feel certain close-to-home affections more sharply. They were caramel affections, from which she would have liked to unstick herself with a phrase, but none was at hand. She had noted these affections before and had diagnosed them by means of an elaborate analogy:
All people, having reached a certain age, developed presbyopia. Muscles in the eye weakened over time and the lenses lost their elasticity. It was not to be confused with hyperopia, although both implied an inability to see clearly what was near. Similarly, in Mrs. Marini’s experience, all people, having reached a somewhat later age, regardless of the temperament of their youths, became sentimental. In many cases the tender emotions of the later years were directed merely inward, at the old person herself. Often, however, she had found, this increase of tenderness was directed outward, toward other people or toward the visible, living world as such. According to her optometrist, all very old people who boasted that they didn’t need eyeglasses (often illiterates) were faking. She suspected but could not demonstrate that this increased sentimentality had a causal relationship with the disorder, so common among the elderly, that was characterized by the slow onset of amnesia and madness, and thence eventually to death. Therefore she tried to steer clear of circumstances in which her ever more heightened faculties of pity were likely to be excited. However, with Ciccio living in her house, that was more difficult to do.
She made a good-faith effort to distract herself with the news of the day but, reaching the sports section, was distracted from her distraction. She successfully refrained from rereading the article about the baker’s boy but then removed her shoes and put on slippers so as not to wake Ciccio as she climbed the stairs to his room. His door was ajar. His flattop was crimpled against the pillow. He had to sleep crookedly on the bed, with his legs folded up, because his body was too long for the mattress. (Lincoln, having been shot, was carried out of Ford’s Theatre and into a nearby boarding house, where, because of his extreme height, he had to be placed diagonally across the bed in which he died.) She knew that to watch this boy sleeping was to ingest a microscopic volume of cyanide, but among her faculties that were in decay was the discipline to avoid scenarios she well knew might lead to the ruin of her mind.
At length, he awoke. His face was red from the pressure of the pillow; his eyes remained closed as he sat up; his pajama shirt was too small under the arms.