He’s too much of a wanderer.”
“Oh, Gina.”
“I know. Listen.” She leaned closer. “Tell me, are they … his father and his sister … are they still upset with him over what happened? It’s been so many years.”
Ben also leaned forward, as if talking about difficult things required hushed voices. “All I know is that no one speaks of him. His name is never mentioned.”
Gina sat back, exhaling with resignation and sadness.
The front door opened, they both turned and in the porch light stood Mimoo, helped up the stairs by Rita, the renter from the third floor.
“Who is this?” Mimoo said to Gina without preamble.
“Well, I’m going to head up,” Rita said. “Your mother did well tonight. Won twenty dollars. Hit bingo three times.”
“Who is this, Gina?” Mimoo repeated.
“It’s Ben Shaw, Mimoo.”
“Who?”
Ben stood up to greet Gina’s mother. “Hello, Mrs. Attaviano.”
“It’s Harry’s friend from years ago, Mimoo. Remember, Panama Canal?”
“I remember everything,” said Mimoo, glaring at Gina and taking off her coat. “You’re looking for Harry in the wrong place, young man. He’s in the Correctional.”
“Yes, I know,” Ben said. “I drove your daughter home so she wouldn’t have to take the train.”
Mimoo walked past them, on her way upstairs. “Come help me,” she said to Gina. “I’m going to fall down I’m so tired. Bingo this late doesn’t come without a price.”
Gina turned to Ben. “I have to run. Thank you so much for the ride. Sorry I kept you.”
“It was my pleasure—” He was stopped by Mimoo’s loud snort from the bottom of the stairs. “Nice to see you again, Mimoo. Please give my regards to Salvo.”
Upstairs, the first thing Mimoo said was, “And you’re doing what, exactly?”
“Harry’s old friend, Mother,” Gina said impatiently. “Basta.”
“Your brother is out gallivanting somewhere, rowdy in a roadhouse, I’m sure. Good thing he didn’t come back early to see you gallivanting in your own house.”
On Sunday, when Salvo did come back, barely making it in time for the start of the ten o’clock Mass, Gina leaned to her mother before the litany of supplication and whispered, “Oh, yes, Salvo is the one to judge me.”
“Just because he lives in a glass house doesn’t mean he won’t throw stones.”
And right after the service, barely out of St. Mary’s doors, Mimoo turned to her hungover, rumpled son and said, “You’ll never guess who drove your sister home from Concord yesterday.”
“Do I dare guess?” said Salvo, squinting terribly in the morning sunshine and adjusting his gray serge cap so it covered his eyes.
“Ben Shaw. Remember him? Some Panama foolishness long ago. Was that boy sweet on your sister, or what?”
Salvo didn’t even turn his head to Gina, who was standing tall and elegant near the entrance, saying hello to the other parishioners, smiling, friendly, cleaned up for church, in a blue gingham dress and a wool coat, both old but pressed and well kept. Salvo’s parka coat was torn on one sleeve and stained with the revelry of many a Saturday night. “As long as it wasn’t her suddenly sprung-from-jail husband, it’s no never mind to me.”
“Salvo, I don’t know whether to thank you or to smack you,” said Gina. “But what I must do is bid you both goodbye.”
“Where are you off to?”
“Where I’m off to every Sunday,” said Gina. “To visit my husband.”
They sit across from each other. Roy, Harry’s guard, a burly, very large black man, born and bred free in the north, and now a sentinel over the incarcerated white man, has taken a real shine to Gina, and sometimes, when he’s the only one on duty, he lets Harry touch her across the partition. When she hands him the newspaper he takes it from her and then holds her hands until Roy clears his throat. They sit. Sometimes they don’t say much.
Sometimes it’s because there’s nothing to say.
Sometimes it’s because there’s too much.
Today they speak almost as if there are no penumbras.
“What books did you bring me?” he asks. “I finished five days ago the two lousy ones you brought last week.”
“Does lousy refer to the quantity of the books or their quality?”
“Both.”
She laughs.
“They were terrible and there wasn’t nearly enough of them. Why can’t you bring me more? I’ve memorized the paper. It’s gotten so desperate I actually opened the Bible Roy left on my table pretending he forgot.”
“Oh, dear, things can’t be that bad, mio marito,” she says, “that you’re reduced to reading the Bible.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“What, you didn’t like Sons and Lovers?”
“Not much. That Oedipal bullshit. Not for me.”
“What’s Oedipal?”
“Never mind.”
“I never read it.”
“That’s fine. But just in case the rest of Lawrence’s oeuvre is from the same cloth, don’t bring him.”
“How about The Man Without a Country?” she asks, teasing. “Can I bring that?”
“I know that idiot thing by heart,” he says, frowning. “Why would you bring that to me here?”
“I’m joking.”
“Oh.”
“Has prison excised your sense of humor, Harry?”
“My irony meter is clearly down,” he says. “Don’t say things you don’t mean. At the very least smile when you say them so I know to laugh myself.”
“Okay, tesoro.”
“And that other book you brought me, The Seven Who were Hanged, no more like that. I was thisclose to being the eighth by the time I’d finished it.”
“But you asked me specifically to bring it
