CHAPTER 12
OCTAVIA HAD BEEN away for six months. In that time Lucia Santa had never visited her daughter; it had been impossible. The trip was too long, her duties at home too great, and she did not trust Larry and his battered car. To leave the children alone was not even considered.
The day Octavia returned, Larry and Vinnie went to meet her at Grand Central Station. The rest of the family waited in the apartment, the children dressed in their Sunday clothes, Lucia Santa in her finest black dress. Zia Louche scurried around the kitchen replenishing boiling water, stirring tomato sauce.
Gino watched out the front window. At last he flew to the kitchen yelling, “Ma, here they come.”
Lucia Santa wiped away the tears that sprang to her eyes. Zia Louche started throwing the ravioli into the pot of boiling water. The door of the apartment was open and the children went to the stairhead, leaned over the banister and listened to the tread of feet coming up the stairs.
When Octavia appeared, they almost did not recognize her. They had been prepared for someone pale, invalid-like, someone they could tenderly minister to; crushed, risen from the dead. They saw an American girl, full blown. Octavia no longer even had her usual sallow skin. Her cheeks were rosy red, her hair waved in a permanent, American style. She was wearing a skirt and sweater with a belted jacket over it. But most of all, what made them feel like strangers was her voice, her speech, and her manner of greeting them.
She smiled sweetly, her teeth showing between her controlled lips. She let out a cry that was delightful yet subdued, hugged Sal and Aileen, and said to each of them, “Oh, darling, darling, how I missed you.” Then she went to Lucia Santa and kissed her on the cheek instead of on the mouth and said with a pretty, coquettish air, “Oh, I’m so glad to be home.”
Larry and Vincenzo came up over the stairwell, each carrying a suitcase and looking a little embarrassed.
Octavia gave Gino a peck on the cheek and said, “My, you’re getting handsome.” Gino backed away. Everyone stared. What had happened to her?
The only ones delighted with this new personality were the two small children, Sal and Aileen. They would not leave her side, they devoured her sweetness with their eyes and ears and bodies, stood trembling with pleasure as she ran her fingers through their hair and hugged them over and over, repeating in a most charming way, “Oh, how big you’ve grown.”
Lucia Santa made Octavia sit down at once. She paid no attention to these new airs. She wanted her daughter to rest from the climb up the four flights of stairs. Zia Louche, already serving dinner, said to Octavia, “Ah, thank God you’re back, young woman, your mother needs you.” She bustled back to the stove before Octavia could answer.
The meal was the most uncomfortable one ever eaten in the Angeluzzi-Corbo household. The conversation was a polite exchange of information among strangers. Gino and Vinnie did not fight at the table. Sal and Eileen were absolute angels, never quarreling over who got the biggest meatballs. Louisa came up with the baby and kissed Octavia gingerly behind the ear so as not to get any infection. She sat down next to Larry, holding the baby away from Octavia. Octavia cooed over the baby but did not touch him. Larry ate, made excuses, and then left to go to work on the four-to-midnight shift. He hurried away.
When Octavia made a motion to start clearing the table, everyone rose in horror. Even Gino leaped to his feet and grabbed dishes to take to the sink. Lucia Santa cried out, “What are you trying to do, get sick again?” So Octavia sat, with little Sal and Aileen resting against her legs and looking up adoringly at her.
Only the mother sensed the sadness behind Octavia’s smiles and gay talk. For sitting in the apartment again, seeing the rooms crammed with beds and clothes closets and strewn with the belongings of children, had made Octavia feel a wave of despair. As the afternoon wore on into evening, she watched her mother perform all the remembered, endless chores—the dish washing; the ironing of fresh clothes; lighting the kerosene stove in the kitchen and the coal stove in the front room; with twilight, the putting on of the gaslight that caged the room with shadows; and finally, preparing the children for bed. Octavia thought of what she would be doing at the sanitarium now, this minute. They would be in the garden taking a walk, she and her girl friend. They would be in their rooms waiting for dinner and gossiping about the romances going on. They would all be eating together and afterward playing bridge in the game room. Octavia felt nostalgic for the life she had left, the only life she had known devoted to the care of one’s self, health and pleasure, without worry and responsibility. She felt awkward in her own home, and her family seemed strangers to her. She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she never noticed how stiffly her mother moved about the house.
At bedtime, when Gino and Vinnie were undressing by the folding bed in the front room, Gino whispered to Vinnie, “She didn’t curse one time the whole day.”
Vinnie said, “I guess you can’t curse in the hospital and she forgot.”
Gino said, “I hope so. It sounds lousy when a girl curses, especially your own sister.”
SO NOW THEY were alone in the kitchen, Octavia and Lucia Santa. They sat at the great round table with its yellow oilcloth cover. The coffee cups glared white before them. The ironing waited for Lucia Santa in a corner of the room. A pot of water hissed on the kerosene stove. From down the hallway of bedrooms came the soft sighing breath of the sleeping children. In the pale yellow light of the kitchen they faced each other, and the mother told of the troubles of the past six months. How disobedient Gino had been, and even Vinnie and the small ones. How Larry and his wife, Louisa, had not helped as much as they should, and how she herself had been ill but had never had anything put in the letters to Octavia that would distress her.
It was a long recital and Octavia only interrupted to say at intervals, “Ma, why didn’t you write me, why didn’t you tell me?” The mother replied, “I wanted you to get well.”
There was no gesture of affection between them. Octavia said gently, “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll be back to work next week. And I’ll see that the kids do all right in school and help in the house.” She felt a surge of strength and confidence and pride in her mother’s need of her. In that moment all her strangeness fell away. She was home. When Lucia Santa began to iron, Octavia went to her room and got a book to read to keep her mother company.
When Octavia had been home a week, she and the welfare investigator finally met. Octavia had been sweet; happy to be home, she did not show her old bossiness, and never cursed or screamed.
She bustled into the apartment about four in the afternoon and was surprised to see Mr. La Fortezza, his feet on a chair, sipping his light coffee and eating his ham sandwich. Mr. La Fortezza took a good look at her boldly handsome face and put aside his delicacies. He rose to his feet like a gentleman. “This is my daughter,” Lucia Santa said, “Octavia. My eldest.”
Mr. La Fortezza, abandoning his Italian manner, said in a friendly American voice, briskly, casually, “I’ve heard a lot about you, Octavia. Your mother and I have had some good long talks. We’re old friends.”
Octavia nodded coldly and her great dark eyes made the gesture one of dislike, a dislike she had not meant to betray.
Lucia Santa, anxious at this discourtesy, said, “Come have some coffee and talk to the young man.” To Mr. La Fortezza she added, “This is the smart one, she reads books all the time.”
“Yes, do have some coffee,” Mr. La Fortezza said. “I would enjoy talking to you, Octavia.”
Octavia was so offended she nearly cursed. The condescending use of her first name, his familiarity, made her spit, but into her handkerchief, as befitted a newly recovered lung patient. They watched her with sympathetic understanding. So she sat and listened to her mother toady to the welfare investigator.
Now he had read novels, Mr. La Fortezza had, in which the poor working girl had only to be smiled at and condescended to by a young man of the higher classes and the lucky female would fall flat on her back, legs waving in the air like a dog. Understand, not because of the money, but the recognition of nobility. Alas, Mr. La Fortezza did not have that flashing air, that smiling blondness, that slim American debonair charm, or the million dollars (always the million dollars), which of course meant nothing to heroines. And so La Fortezza became more and more animated, loquacious, and as charming as his two dark circled owl eyes would permit. Octavia looked at him more and more coldly. Gino and Vincent came into the house and, seeing their sister’s face, lounged around the room, happily expectant.
La Fortezza spoke now of literature. “Ah, Zola, he knew how to write about the poor. A great artist, you know. A Frenchman.”
Octavia said quietly, “I know.” But La Fortezza went on. “I would like to see him alive today to write about how the poor must live on the few pennies the welfare gives. What a farce. Now there is a man whose books your daughter should read, Signora Corbo. That would be an education in itself. And it would make you understand yourself Octavia, and your environment.”
Octavia, itching to spit in his eye, nodded quietly.
La Fortezza was gratified, as was the mother. With solemn eyes he said, “Why, you are an intelligent girl. Would you like to see a play with me sometime? I ask you in front of your mother to show my respect. I’m old-fashioned myself as your mother can tell you. Signora, isn’t it true?”
Lucia Santa smiled and nodded. She had visions of her daughter marrying a lawyer with a good city job. For mothers, even in books, do not set their sights so high as heroines. She said benignly, “He’s a good Italian boy.”
La Fortezza went on. “We’ve had many long talks together, your mother and I, and we understand each other. I’m sure she would not object to our having a friendly date. The city gets us the theater tickets cut-rate. It will be a new experience for you instead of the movies.”
Octavia had been to the theater with her girl friends many times. The dressmaking shops got cut-rate tickets, too. Octavia had read the same novels and always had a supreme contempt for the heroines, those generous, witless maidens who exposed themselves to shame while serving pleasure to men who flaunted their wealth as bait. But that this stupid starving guinea college kid thought he could screw her. Her eyes began to flash and she spat out shrilly in answer to his invitation, “You can go shit in your hat, you lousy bastard.” Gino, in a corner with Vinnie, said, “Ooh-oh, there she goes.” Lucia Santa, like an innocent sitting on a lit powder keg and only now seeing the sputtering fuse, looked around dazedly as if wondering where to run. A surge of blood coursed through Mr. La Fortezza’s face, even his owl eyes turned red. He was petrified.
For there is nothing more blood-curdling than a young Italian shrew. Octavia’s voice in a high, strong, soprano note berated him. “You take eight dollars a month from my poor mother, who has four little kids to feed and a sick daughter. You bleed a family with all our trouble and you have the nerve to ask me out? You are a lousy son-of-a-bitch, a lousy, creepy sneak. My kid brothers and sister do without candy and movies so my mother can pay you off, and I’m supposed to go out with you?” Her voice was shrill and incredulous. “You’re old-fashioned, all right. Only a real guinea bastard from Italy with that respectful Signora horseshit would pull something like that. But I finished high school, I read Zola, and I have gone to the theater, so find some greenhorn girl off the boat you can impress and try to screw her. Because I know you for what you are: a four-flusher full of shit.”
“Octavia, Octavia, stop,” Lucia Santa shouted in horror. She turned to the young man to explain. “She is ill, she has a fever.” But Mr. La Fortezza was flying through the door and down the stairs. He had left his brown parcel behind him. His face as he fled was the face of a man caught redhanded in the most shameful of sins and it was a face they never saw again. Two weeks later there was a new investigator, an American old man, who cut their relief down but told them the money in trust was not counted by welfare as assets of the family, since the magistrate could release the money only in some dire need for a particular child, and one child’s money could not be used for the other two children or for the mother.
But the final scene with Mr. La Fortezza was one that Gino and Vincent never forgot. They shook their heads at the girl’s terrible cursing. They resolved with all their hearts that they would never marry a girl like their sister. But at least now it ended that atmosphere, that special treatment accorded to the sick, the strain of politeness toward a member of the family who returned from the hospital or from a long voyage. There was no question. This was the Octavia of old. She was well again. Even the mother could not remain angry at her daughter’s behavior, though she never understood her indignation with Mr. La Fortezza. After all, everyone must pay to stay alive.