Someone in the street shouted, “Ice cream! Lemon ice! Lemons!”
“There was a woman wearing a dog, I thought it was a dog on top of her hair,” Rocco said. “There was some kind of balm on the leather of the seat cushions that went all the way up my nose, and to this day if I smell it, there I am in the cabin. Midday. Rattle rattle, that was the tea service. Pressed copper on the ceilings. But the leather, that smell!”
The boy was mesmerized.
“Oh, it was just Newcomb’s neatsfoot oil. We even used it on our shoes,” she said.
“I kept a pet squirrel in the bachelor’s hotel, in a city that I couldn’t pronounce the name, and I went to adult education classes at the settlement house. I had an idea of everything improving. A little more food all the time, a heavier coat. My lungs were sound, my back was sound. Omaha. I couldn’t say the h, and then I could. Every part of me was pointed to a shining idea.”
“Ideas are trash,” Mrs. Marini said.
“I agree,” said the boy, shaking off his trance.
“Ideas aren’t really there,” she said.
“Of course they are. Like”—the baker paused, groping inwardly, then gestured up at the blank plaster of the ceiling—“the Holy Spirit, for example.”
Ciccio looked at her, waiting to hear what she would say.
“The Holy Spirit is for children and savages,” she said.
“I had a shining idea before my mind’s eye,” said the baker, “of the man I would become in the end.”
Ciccio sat up straight. He lifted his chin from its usual evasive slouch. The mismatched features of his mongrel face seemed briefly to align. He said, “Mr. LaGrassa, I think your son is dead.”
“Francesco Mazzone!” she hissed, spanking the table.
“You don’t have the first goddamn notion what you’re talking about,” Rocco told the boy. “Or yes you have, but it’s the first notion and nothing after. What is dead to a Christian?”
“Rude!” she exclaimed, but Ciccio wouldn’t look at her.
“I mean, this is kind of all a charade, right?” Ciccio said. “I mean, it’s kind of make-believe.”
She thought the baker was about to strike the boy. He stretched himself across the table, reaching, showing the back of his hand, but he only tapped the breast pocket of Ciccio’s shirt, three times confid ingly with his apish knuckles. It was a gesture of uncommon, obtuse, and misplaced affection, and Ciccio might have recoiled in response. Instead Ciccio looked down at the hand with interest, even admiration, as though he were the famous dog that had licked the hand of the surgeon vivisecting it. “You have a shining idea, too, my boy,” the baker said. “Everything seems to spin, am I right? But it spins around something compact in the middle. Or you’re in the dark in a dream, but you’re moving straight in one direction, like on a train in a tunnel. You don’t see the way out but you feel there’s a way out. Don’t you believe you’re pointed at it? I was supposed to work in steel when I got here, but the position fell through. Then I was a baker for twenty-nine consecutive years of days. I thought that was going to be the end, but I was wrong. That’s fallen through as well. God is great. He has something else in mind for me, and I know what it is. Daylight waiting on the outside of the tunnel when I get there, I believe. Everything else will be stripped away. But you know what? I will be the father of three sons. I’d know that even if I didn’t believe it.”
Rather than being a birther and a rearer of sons, Mrs. Marini had been a what, a dry goose, and a snuffer-out of sons. Bluntly, a dismemberer of them. And had been one so long it was impertinent to ask anymore whether that was the glowing goal to which she was always aimed, as in Rocco’s formulation, or whether instead her soul had been shaped by her work, as Rocco’s hands had been shaped by his. He weighed perhaps half as much as the boy, but the hands were three times as thick.
“What is dead to a Christian?” he repeated, pointing at the boy.
Ciccio’s tumid Adam’s apple bounced.
“Dead is dead,” Mrs. Marini said, taking the boy’s side again.
“To you he is dead,” said Rocco, “and to you he is dead, but to me he is alive.”
There was a pause. Ciccio looked at each of them, inquiring with his eyebrows whether it was his turn to speak.
Mrs. Marini said, “Go ahead.”
Ciccio turned to the baker. He said, “He’s alive as long as you know he’s alive.”
“Yes.”
“It’s so, even while it isn’t so.”
“Yes.”
“I wish I was older,” Ciccio said, looking down at his lap. “I wish I could think better. I mean, that’s a beautiful idea—”
“No, it isn’t, it’s disgusting,” she said. “Look up when you talk.”
“It’s a beautiful idea,” he went on, raising his chin a little, “but I just don’t know how to believe it. I feel like, if I was smarter I could believe it—”
“Were smarter,” she corrected.
“Were smarter. Or if I were somebody else.”
Mrs. Marini didn’t need any shining idea. That was all over. God might or might not be great. She had no evidence either way. She did, however, have ample evidence that the tempter, the prince of the silly world through which she had taught herself to walk backward, was very great indeed.
She loosed a long guffaw, haughty, at both of them. “Dead is dead is dead is dead is dead is dead,” she said. Then she put some cheese in her mouth.
She breathed out, long and deeply, her lips closed, and the spirits from the bottoms of her lungs moved over the chewy mass of cheese inside her mouth and up into her sinuses, which in turn perceived the most wondrous mild, living scent. It was like the smell of a man’s armpit just after he’s taken a bath.
Their three places were set at one end of the grand dining-room table. The window behind them let out on the alley that Mrs. Marini’s house shared with Rocco’s store. Some kids were out there throwing faint, pleasant firecrackers at the pavement. Then one of them set off a toy bomb that rattled the windows in the sashes and made Mrs. Marini’s ears ring.
At the table, they all three flinched.
When Mrs. Marini opened her eyes again, everything was as before except that at the far end of the vast void of the table, a figure was seated, tall, with brilliant red hair and an air of utter self-possession, as though even the table belonged to him.
Neither the boy nor Rocco, who went on talking, appeared to know that the figure was there. She looked at them both, making a little smile each to each, and glanced back to the far end of the table. The figure had not moved. It fixed her with its gaze. Its thick hair was curly, and sweat poured in great streams down the sides of its lovely face.
“That’s just a better mask than the others,” she told it. “I’m not so easily taken in.”
It wore a sleeveless undershirt. Its legs were dapperly folded in a way that showed her one of the knees above the surface of the table, so she saw that it was even wearing the military pants — black with red trim — that Nico had worn the day of the race.
“Leave me alone,” she said, her nose twisting.
The figure was out of breath. She saw that the head wasn’t merely sweating, it was soaked, as though it had just been dunked in the fountain. It looked not through her but at her, a ruthless look, glib and entitled. It extracted from its pocket the playing cards she had given him for a prize.