What was this? Even the salami drawer was empty. How about, while packing the picnic basket, somebody thinking to leave Papa a sandwich or an olive, perchance?
Well, now, let’s pull a chair to the icebox and collect ourselves. Let us observe the humid condense in droplets on the shells of our eggs and consider, levelheadedly, the limited time of our misery. Most of the morning he had already killed in bed. He was due at the church at five o’clock to hear mass, don his vestments, get blessed, and proceed with the rest of the sweepers and their brooms through the street, forcing the crowd to part so that the saint could pass. Once he returned home from his duties, the kids would be safely in the house, bouncing on the sofa, pouring into his ears their sweet noise.
Only, then, how many hours to dispose of? Six. Less than. Surely endurable.
Let us furthermore remind ourselves, as exasperated Phyllis reminds us with her daily exclamation, while circumspect us creeps out the door, kitchen knife in hand, to police the shrubs, that nobody is out there looking at us!
He was an ordinary Eddie, of no consequence. The palliative counsel of his Phyllis regarding how Eddie could teach himself not to see figures in the hedges that weren’t really there was for Eddie to seat himself and ask himself, What was there to see in this house? What was valuable to steal? Who was pretty to be peered in on and slobbered over? Say what you would about Phyllis the Spendthrift, Phyllis who exclaimed at a high pitch at their babies; she said so often the thing he needed somebody to tell him. She thought of him. For, look! Hiding behind the milk bottle in the icebox was a pot, and tied with a length of sewing thread to the handle of the lid of the pot was a note, punctured daintily at the top so that the thread could pass through, reading, in her hand, For Eddie. And inside was oxtail stew.
He was an ordinary Eddie warming his stew on the stove — this she knew he knew how to do — and nobody was outside looking in. An ordinary day with somewhat less to do, was all, and somewhat fewer to accompany him.
Lina received a telephone call on Assumption morning. It was Mrs. Marini, exclaiming that she had figured out what to do with Ciccio for the afternoon. Lina didn’t see why such an improbable threat merited such a tall fence, but never mind. (It was true, what they all thought, that Lina wouldn’t object to seeing the back of Ciccio before too long. The others found him interesting, but she did not. She did not find him horrid, either. He did not remind her of better or worse days. He did not give her a feeling of contempt. He did not give her any feeling at all.) Mrs. Marini kept calling Ciccio “him,” and “the boy,” as though his name had slipped her mind, and Lina had to wonder if Mrs. Marini had at last begun to forget things.
Lina did not say into the receiver, I have been ruing your death for thirty years.
She had thrown away the outdated religious calendar that hung from the balustrade over the telephone table and had replaced it with a philodendron plant in a wicker basket. Mrs. Marini elaborated her idea while Lina admired the plant, which was somehow thriving, although she could not remember having watered it.
Soon it became evident that the plot had unspoken goals. Mrs. Marini would not be Federica’s attendant, Lina would, and surely a first time would lead to a second and a third. In this way, Lina suspected, she would learn the procedure, would share in the proceeds, would grow accustomed to the income (she was now living on the last of Enzo’s life insurance), and would perhaps be tricked into staying in town.
She leaned back on two legs of a chair, her feet on the telephone table, trying on the idea like a hat in a store, while Mrs. Marini schemed. Only one element of the plot agreed with Lina right away: Federica was her kind of girl. She and Lina used to ride the trolley together — oh, it was twenty years ago, at least — from the drapery dealer’s warehouse, and Freddie would make sniping judgments, in dialect, of the other passengers. She was a Siracusana, too, by way of Indianapolis, and Akron, and here.
“We shall keep him talking. We shall keep his glass full,” Mrs. Marini explained.
But Lina felt she was also saying, And in so doing we shall make me unnecessary so I can die.
Federica arrived at noon with her armaments. The glinting, metallic materialness of them — an attitude of ancient authority and craft — their hingelessness, was sickening.
And sickeningly beautiful. Some of them (one in particular, a scoop) spoke their functions openly, in grunt words. Others suggested only purposeless, calibrated violence. But she couldn’t deny there was something beautiful here, timeless and human. A collection of simple levers shaped to fit the shape of women.
The cheese they ate at lunch after the salad was an Emmentaler, imported from Switzerland, with a musky taste so subtle Mrs. Marini could pick it up only if she exhaled through her nose while she chewed. It did not really go with the peaches, but the peaches were seasonable, and, anyhow, the niceties of cuisine were lost on her guest of honor. The baker had not eaten a raw green leaf in five years, he said. She thought the caverns of his mind must be very dark and cold. She imagined they were made of sandstone and inside them, prehuman creatures clad in animal skins sat in the dirt scratching pictures of bison on the wall with sticks and sacrificing their infant children to invented gods.
Ciccio had brought the baker an ashtray and the two of them were talking about the burning of Washington by the British during the Madison administration, an event of which Rocco had never heard.
Was there any greater pleasure, she wondered, than to sit by an open window in the summertime, and drink a little, and talk?
All of a sudden Ciccio was telling them some kind of riddle.
Rocco sipped his wine and put the glass back on the table. Then he spat out the answer: “Objects descending from the clouds!”
“Oh, good, a game,” Mrs. Marini enthused.
The skin of Rocco’s yellow-green face had darkened from the booze and heat. He folded his arms over his bulbous stomach, as the sweat showed through his shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled above the peeling elbows, so that white flecks of him had come off and freckled his rumpled blue tie. He won another round of the game and laughed out loud. She had not heard him laugh before. It was a smoker’s laugh, percussive and followed by a little fit of wheezing.
“Cry for help,” Ciccio said. “Play with the rope and the bucket.”
“Things to do in a well,” said Rocco, and laughed again, slurping his wine.
He was a loquacious drinker, even expansive; she wouldn’t have guessed. Ciccio asked how many of the states he had seen.
The baker peered into his spidery eyebrows and drummed the fingers of his smoking hand one by one mechanically on the tabletop. “Nine,” he responded. Then he drew some figures in the air. “Do you know, it was forty years ago this year I arrived on our shores? It was at New Orleans, in the Louisiana. March twenty-third, 1913. Easter Sunday or the Monday following, I can’t remember. The earliest Easter in a hundred years. I couldn’t trade my currency because of the holiday. A city of believers, New Orleans. But I didn’t stay long.”
“What did you eat on the first night?” she asked. “Everybody remembers that.”
“Brown rice soaked in broth,” he said. “Out of a tin cup. Then I got on a train. Northbound. North-northwest. Straight into the heart of the continent — that would be five of the states right there — toward the Nebraska. I made a wrong turn coming out of the toilet and found myself in first class.”