She backed out of the doorway before he could see her scrutinizing his head and descended the stairs. She went out to refresh herself in advance of the midday heat. She felt both disgusting and giddy as she paced beneath the flapping Assumption Day banners on the avenue.
The bakery was closed. Scandal! When, by seven in the morning, had it ever been closed? But given what she’d read in the paper she ought to have known it would be closed. About twenty people conferred on the sidewalk. Very soon there were twice as many, then twice as many again. She was surprised so many intended to offer Rocco their condolences. She would have thought people would avoid him. Nobody knew him well. But company loved misery, so it appeared.
Then Rocco appeared, suddenly, among them, while the clock in the church was tolling. He wore a little bowler hat that was thirty years out of date and a woolen winter suit with vertical stripes that belonged on a financier from the gay nineties rather than on his peasant self — stunted, sallow, with fearing blue eyes that were like jewels in a coal bin. He tried to tell them it was all a misunderstanding, that his Mimmo was very well, that it was a fiasco, a bookkeeping error, a fraud, a boondoggle, but no one believed him.
… When, while trying to solve a simple problem, such as how to distract a distractible teenaged boy for a summer afternoon, a simple solution proved elusive, the most common mistake was to entertain progressively more complex schemes. One must keep one’s wits about one. One must await. First and foremost one must have one’s eyes open for shifting circumstances, especially seemingly unrelated circumstances, which might contain the simple seed of the simple solution that the Fates would later appear to have had in mind all along.
She had turned away from Rocco with the rest of the crowd and pointed herself homeward when at last patience and flexibility of mind paid off.
The solution was not to send Ciccio away, but to send herself away and take him with her. Federica would have to do the procedure on her own.
All Mrs. Marini needed, then, was an occasion to tether the boy to herself from one o’clock until nightfall. It came to her. She paused, turned, and headed back through the dispersing crowd as step-by-step her quandary tied itself into a bow. She reached the baker and told him he must come to lunch at her house that afternoon. He demurred, sipping at his empty coffee cup and waving her off with the saucer. She asserted herself. At last, he accepted. She hurried back up the avenue.
Federica didn’t need her anymore, she knew what she was about. Mrs. Marini’s own role of late was only to keep the client calm, to coo at her sweetly, and if Freddie needed a hand, Lina could lend it as well as any other cool-witted woman. Lina was already going to be in the house; she was a quick study. And then the next time Lina could, yes, why, yes, the next time Lina could — the blood rushed in her prickling eyes—yes.
She could realize her forgotten ambition of years ago: Lina could succeed her.
“But, but. .,” stammered the fraudulent ghost in the shaggy Nico mask.
“I have won!” she said, suspending her disbelief about who it really was and throwing her arms about its hairy neck. “Love me!”
“I do love you, Coco,” it said, submitting to her kisses and elevating its monstrous brows as it said “do.” (However, Nico would never have said that, any more than she would have said it herself. He would have simply kissed her once, hard, on the mouth, and told her to go on talking, while he sat across the table and listened intently. That was his way, to sit and listen, chewing a piece of fruit. But she was ninety-three years old, and the poor creature who was his wife and longed so much to talk to him again was imprisoned in the crevasse. Whatever she had wanted to say to him had long ago withered on its stalk, been plowed under the ground, been eaten and excreted by worms, and sprouted again in strange and unexpected shapes.)
By the time she got home, Ciccio had given up waiting on her for his breakfast and had fried his own eggs, five of them. The shells were in the sink, along with the crusts of half a loaf of white bread; he did not like seeds. She explained Rocco’s misfortune. Curiously, the boy made no response and only went on feeding shamefacedly at the coagulated mound on his plate.
In order to do their share to help him, she and Ciccio would entertain the baker for an afternoon, understood? Rocco was acutely unwell and so, necessarily, in an egoistic frame of mind. Their job was to give him something outside himself to think about. Was she making herself clear? She trusted that Ciccio had no other plans for the afternoon.
He chewed, and chewed, and swallowed; he and Nino were going to go fish the quarry in Eastpark, he said, but he could beg off if it was important to her. (Here her circumspection was vindicated. “Fishing at the quarry” was what he often said he was going to do when his real intention was to read conspicuously in Enzo’s garden.)
“Very good,” she said. “We shall keep him talking. We shall keep his glass full. He’ll get lazy and want to stay. We shall make absolutely sure he remains with us at least until five and then we shall all three walk together through the feast. What’s this look of disenthusement?”
“Nothing.”
“Fie on your nothing.”
“Nothing, I just. . plop, plop, plop, go the minutes sometimes, you know.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Who is this other Cheech?” No, but she must resist. He was a millstone, a chore, a bacterium.
He said, “I told you, nothing happened.”
“This Cheech of the sorrowful countenance,” she went on, even so.
“Nothing, I just—‘Where’s Pop?’ I ask myself sometimes, like a boob.”
The big bastard. He was trying to kill her.
18
Don’t look at him. Don’t let any type of snoopy slinking outside the walls of his home stick its face into his bulwark of hedges and spy Eddie through the kitchen window — half-naked and hangdog, bent over in front of the electric icebox, in the house all empty but for him this Assumption morning, the appliance making its buzz — and see him poking at the wax-paper shroud of the bacon slab, wishing he knew how he might extract edible food from the package. Leave Eddie in peace to be a mopey and sweat alone. Retirement was a humbug. There were 604 individual plants in his garden out back. He had entirely routed the aphids from his cucumbers. His tomatoes consulted him before blooming. And then?
Phyllis was fed up with the feast, which was every year in the misery of summer, when who wants to eat standing up and squished in with the thousands and their foul breath on you? And the scorched-meat stench, anyway, arguing Phyllis had said, and the rabble that these days came to gape and point. Why not use the car for the purpose for which the car was intended — was Phyllis’s yesterday idea — namely, for driving to Sandusky and then tying their kids to a roller coaster and letting them splash about in the poisoned lake? Um, was it not, tomorrow, a day of holy obligation? pious Eddie had asked to know. With or without, she said, their wet-blanket father. He had sired too many children too late in life.
Don’t look at him in his gotchies, out of bed at the crack of eleven in the a.m., having slept through the cooler hours of garden watering and several other hours thereafter. Don’t watch him, the abject, turn around and let the interior of the icebox chill his ass, failing to remember, Did Phyllis boil the bacon and then slice or the vice versa? Had the kids been made by Phyllis the Forsaker to file into their papa’s room single file in the dawnlight hour, when usually he was out pruning and hydrating — except not today, which he’d dreaded this morning in his dreams all night, the house unquickened by the pitter-patter of his wee ducklings and so still, for which reason he’d slept until the heat woke him — and gently wake Papa and gently kiss his nose before they left deserted Eddie to his dozing?