CHAPTER 17

FOR SEVEN YEARS Frank Corbo had left his family in peace. Now he was to trouble them again. Far out on Long Island, in the Pilgrim State Hospital for the Insane, he decided to make his final escape. And so one dark night he hid in his caged bed and secretly sent his brain spinning against the bones of his skull. Slowly, divinely, he called up the great wave of cerebral blood that hurled his body onto the tiled floor of the ward and freed forever that tiny spark that was the remainder of his soul.

WHEN THE TELEGRAM came, Lucia Santa was drinking her mid-morning coffee with the formidable Teresina Coccalitti. And that terrible woman, to show her great friendship, revealed one of her secrets. She could read English. This astounded Lucia Santa more than the news in the telegram. How armed this woman was against the world. And how coolly she now regarded Lucia Santa. There could be no false grief before those cunning eyes.

It is most terrible to know that another human being who has put his life in trust to you can no longer move you to pity for his fate. To herself Lucia Santa was completely honest: Frank Corbo’s death brought a sense of relief, a freedom from hidden, nagging fear that someday she must again condemn him to his cage. She dreaded him; she feared for her children; she begrudged the sacrifices his living would demand.

Go further. Trust in the forgiveness of God: the death of her husband lifted a terrible burden from her spirit. On her rare visits, seeing him caged behind barred windows, her faith in life drained away, she had lost her strength for days afterward.

Lucia Santa felt no grief; only an enormous relief from tension. The man who fathered three of her children had died gradually in her heart during those years he was hidden away in the asylum. She could not keep before her eyes his living flesh.

Now Teresina Coccalitti showed the iron mind that was the legend of Tenth Avenue. She put Lucia Santa on the right path. Why bring her husband’s body all the way to New York, pay an undertaker, make a big fuss, remind everyone that her husband died insane? Why not take the whole family out to the hospital and have the funeral there? Frank Corbo had no family in this country to take offense or to pay their respects. Hundreds of dollars would be saved, gossip cut off.

A queen could not have reasoned more coldly.

Lucia Santa prepared a huge supper, too heavy really for the warm summer weather, and the Angeluzzi-Corbo family ate together that night. No one was grief-stricken by the death of the father. Lucia Santa was shocked when Gino took the news very coolly, looking into her eyes and shrugging. Salvatore and Aileen could not be expected to remember him, but Gino was eleven when his father was sent away.

As they ate, they made plans. Larry had already called the hospital long distance and arranged for the funeral to be held at noon and for a headstone to be put up in the hospital cemetery. He had borrowed his chief’s limousine—Mr. di Lucca had insisted—to drive them all up there. They would start at seven sharp in the morning; it would be a long drive. They would be home by evening. Only one day of work would be missed. Octavia and her husband would sleep in Lucia Santa’s house, in Octavia’s old room. Lena could sleep again with her mother this one night. It was comfortably arranged.

Gino ate hurriedly and then put on a clean shirt and trousers. As he went out the door, Lucia Santa called after him anxiously, “Gino, be home early tonight. We leave at seven in the morning.”

“O.K., Ma,” he said and ran down the steps.

Larry was annoyed. “Doesn’t he know he should stay home tonight?” he asked his mother.

Lucia Santa shrugged. “Every night he goes to his Hudson Guild. He is the duke of his club of snotnoses.”

Larry said righteously, “That’s no way to show respect for his father. I go past the Guild when it’s dark, and him and his friends are loving up the girls. You shouldn’t let him do that tonight.”

There was a shout of laughter from Octavia. Larry being moral always made her giggle. “You should talk,” she said. “Remember the stuff you pulled when you were that age?”

Larry grinned, gave his wife a swift glance. She was busy with the infant. “Aw, come on, Sis,” he began, and then, as if nothing had happened, the family history and adventures began to be retold as Sal and Lena cleared away the table. Norman Bergeron opened a book of poetry. Vinnie leaned his sallow face on his hand and listened intently. Lucia Santa brought out bowls of walnuts, a jug of wine, and bottles of cream soda. Teresina Coccalitti dropped in, and with her as a new audience they told all the old stories about Frank Corbo. Octavia began with the familiar line, “When he called Vinnie an angel I knew he was crazy. . . .” They would go on until bedtime.

The next morning Lucia Santa found that Gino had not come home that night to sleep. He often stayed away during the hot summer months, bumming around with his friends, doing God knows what. But on this day of all days, when he might make them late for the funeral? She was truly angry.

Everyone finished breakfast, and still Gino did not come. His good suit was laid out on his bed with a fresh white shirt and a tie. Lucia Santa sent Vinnie and Larry out to look for him. They cruised in their car past the Hudson Guild Settlement House on 27th Street and then went to the candy store on Ninth Avenue, where the boys sometimes gambled all night at cards. The bleary-eyed owner said yes, Gino had been there until just an hour ago and had left with some friends to see the morning show at the Paramount movie house or the Capitol or the Roxy, he wasn’t sure which.

When they returned and told Lucia Santa the news, she seemed dazed. All she said was, “Well, then, he can’t come.”

As they were all getting into the car, Teresina Coccalitti came around the corner of 31st Street to wish them a good voyage. In her usual black, with her dark sallow face and raven hair, she looked like a snip of the night that had refused to disappear. Now that there was an empty place in the car, Lucia Santa asked her to come along. Teresina was honored—a day in the country would be a real treat. She did not hesitate for a moment but pushed in and took Vinnie’s seat next to the window. And so it was that she could tell the whole story to her friends on Tenth Avenue of how the Angeluzzi-Corbo family drove out to Long Island to bury Frank Corbo, how his eldest son disappeared and did not look upon his natural father’s face before it disappeared into the earth. And how only Lucia Santa wept—but tears so full of gall that they could only have sprung from a well of anger, not grief. “There will be a day of reckoning,” the Coccalitti woman said, shaking her black hawk’s head. “He is a serpent in the heart of his mother.”