CHAPTER 24

CAN A DEVIL turn into an angel? The Panettiere, the mad barber, Dr. Barbato, and even the cunning Zia Teresina Coccalitti marveled at the change in Gino Corbo. It was true: disaster made a boy into a man, for now Gino slaved like a peasant in the railroad, gobbling up overtime and bringing his envelope home unopened to his mother.

Lucia Santa was so pleased that she gave Gino twice the spending money she had given Vinnie, swearing to Octavia that it was only just because Vinnie had always stolen his overtime. “See,” the mother said to Octavia on her Friday night visits, “Gino was always a good boy.” And Octavia had to agree, because despite his working at night and even overtime on Sunday, Gino was finishing his last term of high school and would graduate in January. He was even making the honor roll for the first time. This especially delighted Lucia Santa. “Wasn’t I right?” she asked Octavia. “It is the playing in the street that tires a child’s brain, not honest work.”

Octavia, still shaken by Vinnie’s death, was amazed and puzzled at how quickly her mother seemed to recover. She was quieter, more permissive with Sal and Lena but otherwise the same. Only once did she betray emotion. One night, when they were talking of Vinnie as a little boy, Lucia Santa said with bitter self-reproach, “If I had left him with Filomena in Jersey, he would be alive.” Relinquishing one of her proudest memories, and yet she still lived each day with the eager trust of a believer in good fortune.

And why not? Never had the world treated the family of Angeluzzi-Corbo so well. Gino made a fortune in the railroad. Sal was brilliant in high school and would surely go to college. Lena was equally brilliant and would be a schoolteacher. Both worked now in the panetteria selling bread after school, earning good wages, which made Lucia Santa gloat with Octavia over the bank books on Friday nights. Lucia Santa could only control her dangerous optimism by reminding herself that in a few short months, right before Christmas, the Panettiere’s son, Guido, would finish his year of Army service and take Sal and Lena’s place in the bakery. She could not count on this flood forever.

Even Octavia’s husband was working. Poor Norman Bergeron was miserable writing pamphlets for some Government agency—Civil Service, security, and good money. Octavia knew he was unhappy, but she thought it was just too bad about him. He could always write poetry when the people in Europe stopped killing each other and there was another Depression.

But best of all for Lucia Santa was Gino becoming a man, part of the real world. She would not have to quarrel with him anymore, she had almost forgiven him all the injuries he had made her suffer. He had even become more serious. Could it be that her struggles were at an end? Lucia Santa did not believe it for a moment, but she would never let it be said that she was one of those pitiful rags who refused to enjoy good fortune when it came.

Each night Gino went to work it was with the same feeling of unbelief. Ascending in the elevator of the freight building, then stepping into the circle of light with clattering billing machines, seemed just the beginning of a dream. But gradually he believed.

The railroad put him on the midnight-to-eight-in-the-morning shift, and during these hours the dusty office was spooky with filing cabinets, dead black typewriters, and the almost invisible wire mesh of the cashier’s cage. Surrounded by these Gino typed the night away. He was very good at the job—his athletic coordination and his sharp eyesight helped. The quota was 350 bills a night, and he easily surpassed it. Sometimes he had an hour free to read while he waited for new bills to come up from the loading platform.

He never talked to the men he worked with, or joined in their general conversation. The night boss gave him the toughest bills to do, but he never protested. It didn’t matter. He hated it so much that nothing mattered. He hated the building and the rat-smelling office. He hated the dirty metal touch of the typewriter keys. He hated walking into that yellow circle of light that held the six billers and the boss rate clerk.

It was a pure hatred, physical; sometimes his body actually chilled, his hair bristled, and his blood turned so sour in his mouth that he could not help walking away from the light to the darkened windows to stare down at those imprisoned streets sentineled by yellow lamp posts. When the boss rate clerk, a young man named Charlie Lambert, called out, “Let’s bill freight, Gino,” in that voice men use to debase other men, he never answered, never went back to his machine right away. Even after he knew he was being singled out, he couldn’t hate Charlie Lambert. He felt such a cold contempt for the man that he could not think of him as something human or react to him with emotion.

To labor merely to exist, to spin away your life just to stay alive, was something he had never known. But his mother had known, Octavia had known, his father had surely known. Vinnie must have stood at this dark window a thousand nights while he himself roamed the streets of the city with his friends or slept trustfully in his bed.

But as the months went on, he found it easier to endure. What he could not think about was that it would never end. He understood that it might never end.

AS BEFITTED THE mother of a family in such goodly circumstances, Lucia Santa now ran her household like a real signora. The apartment was always warm, no matter what the price of coal and kerosene. There was always enough spaghetti in the pot for friends and neighbors who dropped in after mealtime. The children could hardly ever remember leaving the table without there being still enough meatballs and sausage soaking in a platter of sauce for one last foray. There were new forks and spoons for use at the Sunday feast, which everyone in the family, married or not, must attend—though no command was ever heeded more willingly.

On this first Sunday of December there was to be a special peranze. Larry’s oldest child was receiving his First Communion, and Lucia Santa was making ravioli. She had started the dough early, and now she and Octavia were building a fortress of the flour on the large square mixing board. They broke a dozen eggs into it, and another dozen, and another, until the four white powdery walls crumbled into a sea of white with floating yellow yolks. They mixed it all together into great crumbly balls of dough as bright as gold. Octavia and Lucia Santa grunted with labor as they rolled the balls out into thin sheets. Sal and Lena stirred a deep bowl full of ricotta cheese, and into the white creamy mass they beat pepper, salt and eggs that made it a filling fit for heaven.

While the ravioli boiled and the rich tomato sauce simmered, Lucia Santa put platters of prosciutto and cheese on the table. Then came platters of rolled beef stuffed with boiled eggs and onions, a huge piece of pork—dark brown, so tender from simmering in the sauce that it shed its flesh tenderly from the bone with just the touch of a fork.

At dinner, Octavia gossiped with Larry as she seldom did, laughing at his jokes and stories. Norman quietly sipped his glass of wine and chatted with Gino about books. When they finished, Sal and Lena cleared the table and started washing the mountain of dishes.

It was a beautiful Sunday for December, and visitors came—the Panettiere and Guido, finally out of the Army after his year’s service, the jealous barber, looking through the glass curtain of red wine, inspected all heads present for scars of a strange scissors. The Panettiere quickly took a plate of warm ravioli; he was mad about them, a dish his dragon of a wife had always been too busy counting money to prepare.

Even Zia Teresina Coccalitti, who had made her whole life a secret merely for advantage, who for so many years had made her fortune on home relief, with four strapping sons working—no one knew how; even she ventured to drink more than one glass of wine, munch a bread full of sausage, and chat with Lucia Santa about the happy days when they were girls in Italy shoveling manure from their backyards. Though usually Zia Coccalitti zippered her mouth with warty fingers when anyone asked her a personal question, today she smiled when twitted by the Panettiere about her swindling of the home relief. Made rash and generous by two glasses of wine, she told them all, free of charge, to take everything the Government gave, since in the long run you would pay the cursed State ten times over whether you took it or not.

Gino, bored by the talk, went to sit on the floor next to the cathedral-shaped radio and turned it on. He wanted to listen to the Giants football game. Lucia Santa frowned at this rudeness, though the radio was so low no one could hear it. Then she paid no more attention to him.

It was Norman Bergeron who first noticed something odd about Gino. His head was bent close to the radio, but he was watching everyone in the room. Then Norman saw that he was watching his mother very intently. There was a smile on his face. It was a smile that was in some way cruel. Octavia, seeing her husband watching Gino, turned toward the radio.

She couldn’t hear, but there was something so brilliantly alive in Gino’s eyes that she called out, “Gino, what is it?”

Gino turned his back to hide his face. “The Japs just attacked the United States,” he said. He turned up the radio and drowned out all the voices in the room.

GINO WAITED UNTIL after Christmas. Then directly from work one morning he enlisted in the Army. That afternoon he called Octavia’s husband at his office and asked him to tell Lucia Santa where he was. Sent to a training camp in California, he wrote regularly and sent money home. In the first letter he explained that he had volunteered to save Sal from the draft later on, but he never mentioned this again.