crawled to her chair and placed his hand on her knee. Still in prayer, she shook her head like one hypnotized. It was her way of telling Federico not to interrupt her, or to touch her, to leave her alone.
The next morning she was her old self, tender and smiling through breakfast. The eggs had been prepared ‘Mamma’s way,’ a special treat, the yolks filmed by the whites. And would you look at her! Hair combed tightly, her eyes big and bright. When Federico dumped his third spoonful of sugar into his coffee cup, she remonstrated with mock sternness.
‘Not that way, Federico! Let me show you.’
She emptied the cup into the sink.
‘If you want a sweet cup of coffee, I’ll give it to you.’ She placed the sugar bowl instead of the coffee cup on Federico’s saucer. The bowl was half full of sugar. She filled it the rest of the way with coffee. Even August laughed, though he had to admit there might be a sin in it – wastefulness.
Federico tasted it suspiciously.
‘Swell,’ he said. ‘Only there’s no room for the cream.’
She laughed, clutching her throat, and they were glad to see her happy, but she kept on laughing, pushing her chair away and bending over with laughter. It wasn’t that funny; it couldn’t be. They watched her miserably, her laughter not ending even though their blank faces stared at her. They saw her eyes fill with tears, her face swelling to purple. She got up, one hand over her mouth, and staggered to the sink. She drank a glass of water until it sputtered in her throat and she could not go on, and finally she staggered into the bedroom and lay on the bed, where she laughed.
Now she was quiet again.
They arose from the table and looked in at her on the bed. She was rigid, her eyes like buttons in a doll, a funnel of vapors pouring from her panting mouth and into the cold air.
‘You kids go to school,’ Arturo said. ‘I’m staying home.’
After they were gone, he went to the bedside.
‘Can I get you something, Ma?’
‘Go away, Arturo. Leave me alone.’
‘Should I call Dr Hastings?’
‘No. Leave me alone. Go away. Go to school. You’ll be late.’
‘Should I try to find Papa?’
‘Don’t you dare.’
Suddenly that seemed the right thing to do.
‘I’m going to,’ he said. ‘That’s just what I’m going to do.’ He hurried for his coat.
‘Arturo!’
She was out of bed like a cat. When he turned around in the clothes closet, one of his arms inside a sweater, he gasped to see her beside him so quickly. ‘Don’t you go to your father! You hear me – don’t you dare!’ She bent so close to his face that hot spittle from her lips sprinkled it. He backed away to the corner and turned his back, afraid of her, afraid to even look at her. With strength that amazed him she took him by the shoulder and swung him around.
‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you? He’s with that woman.’
‘What woman?’ He jerked himself away and fussed with his sweater. She tore his hands loose and took him by the shoulders, her finger-nails pinching the flesh.
‘Arturo, look at me! You saw him, didn’t you?’
‘No.’
But he smiled; not because he wished to torment her, but because he believed he had succeeded in the lie. Too quickly he smiled. Her mouth closed and her face softened in defeat. She smiled weakly, hating to know yet vaguely pleased that he had tried to shield her from the news.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘I see.’
‘You don’t see anything, you’re talking crazy.’
‘When did you see him, Arturo?’
‘I tell you I didn’t.’
She straightened herself and drew back her shoulders.
‘Go to school, Arturo. I’m all right here. I don’t need anybody.’
Even so, he remained home, wandering about the house, keeping the stoves fueled, now and then looking into her room, where she lay as always, her glazed eyes studying the ceiling, her beads rattling. She did not urge him to school again, and he felt he was of some use, that she was comforted with his presence. After a while he pulled a copy of Horror Crimes from his hiding place under the floor and sat reading in the kitchen, his feet on a block of wood in the oven.
Always he had wanted his mother to be pretty, to be beautiful. Now it obsessed him, the thought filtering beyond the pages of Horror Crimes and shaping itself into the misery of the woman lying on the bed. He put the magazine away and sat biting his lip. Sixteen years ago his mother had been beautiful, for he had seen her picture. Oh that picture! Many times, coming home from school and finding his mother weary and worried and not beautiful, he had gone to the trunk and taken it out – a picture of a large-eyed girl in a wide hat, smiling with so many small teeth, a beauty of a girl standing under the apple tree in Grandma Toscana’s backyard. Oh Mamma, to kiss you then! Oh Mamma, why did you change?
Suddenly he wanted to look at that picture again. He did the pulp and opened the door of the empty room off the kitchen, where his mother’s trunk was kept stored. He locked the door from the inside. Huh, and why did he do that? He unlocked it. The room was like an icebox. He crossed to the window where the trunk stood. Then he returned and locked the door again. Vaguely he felt he should not be doing this, yet why not: couldn’t he even look at a picture of his mother without a sense of evil degrading him? Well, suppose it wasn’t his mother, really: it used to be, so what was the difference?
Beneath layers of linen and curtains that his mother was saving until ‘we get a better house,’ beneath ribbons and baby clothes once worn by himself and his brothers, he found the picture. Ah, man! He held it up and stared at the wonder of that lovely face: here was the mother he had always dreamed about, this girl, no more than twenty, whose eyes he knew resembled his own. Not that weary woman in the other part of the house, she with the thin tortured face, the long bony hands. To have known her then, to have remembered everything from the beginning, to have felt the cradle of that beautiful womb, to have lived remembering from the beginning, and yet he remembered nothing of that time, and always she had been as she was now, weary and with that wistfulness of pain, the great eyes those of someone else, the mouth softer as if from much crying. He traced with his finger the line of her face, kissing it, sighing and murmuring of a past he had never known.
As he put the picture away, his eye fell upon something in one corner of the trunk. It was a tiny jewel box of purple velvet. He had never seen it before. Its presence surprised him, for he had gone through the trunk many times. The little purple box opened when he pressed the spring lock. Inside it, nestling in a silk couch was a black cameo on a gold chain. The dim writing on a card under the silk told him what it was. ‘For Maria, married one year today. Svevo.’
His mind worked fast as he shoved the little box into his pocket and locked the trunk. Rosa, Merry Christmas. A little gift. I bought it, Rosa. I’ve been saving up for it a long time. For you, Rosa. Merry
