5 August 1949
I left Signora Siragusa’s boardinghouse and took residence of my vitrified brick casa di due appartamenti on 1 April 1916. I had been the first Italian at American Woolen and Textile Company to rise to the position of boss dyer. Now I became the first of my countrymen to own his own home in Three Rivers—a home I had built with my own two hands! I welcomed Salvatore Tusia, the barber, and his wife and children to the left-side apartment and received my first monthly rent, eleven dollars and fifty cents, paid to me in cash. I had wanted twelve a month, but Tusia brought me down in exchange for a haircut whenever I needed one and a daily shave. I made Tusia cut my hair every Friday, to make sure I got my money’s worth.
I wrote to my Brooklyn cousins to say I would honor them with a two-day visit at Easter. Notify the Iaccoi brothers next door, I told them. The trip would allow me to meet, at long last, my bride-to-be, Prosperine. At this time, the Iaccois and I would establish a wedding date and finalize the dowry price. In fairness to myself, I would attach to the asking price the cost of my train ticket to and from New York and a new three-piece suit, which I would wear for the trip and also on my wedding day.
At my cousins’ table that Easter Sunday, I raised my glass and made a memorable speech about the Old Country and the Tempesta family. I spoke a eulogy to Papa and Mama and made tribute to my two departed brothers. My words brought tears to the eyes of all present, except for Lena and Vitaglio’s youngest brat, who was allowed to rummage beneath the dining room table, tickling ankles and pulling at the stockings of the adults. Shameful, disrespectful behavior! When that little mosquito snapped my garter in the middle of my remarks, I reached under the table and gave him what he deserved. The crying, head-bumping, and wine-spilling that followed ruined the rest of my speech. “Well,” Lena smiled, “let’s make the best of it and eat, then, before the macaroni gets any colder.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “if you and Vitaglio cannot rule your young ones any better than this, then why don’t we ignore the dead and eat?”
That evening, I excused myself, rose from the table, and went next door to my meeting with the Iaccoi brothers. Finally, I would feast my eyes on my Sicilian bride.
Fluttering like two pigeons, Rocco and Nunzio Iaccoi met me in the foyer and told me repeatedly what a great honor it was to receive into their home a man who had made himself such a success. They took me to their parlor and offered me the largest of the stuffed chairs, lit me a cigar, and carried the standing ashtray across the room for my convenience. When they were sure I was comfortable, they called to their cousin Prosperine, who was waiting in the kitchen. “Uncap the anisetta, cousin,” they sang out. “Bring three glasses.”
There was a long wait and then, in the kitchen, the sound of things dropping, glass breaking. “Scusi,” Nunzio Iaccoi said, smiling so broadly that it looked like he had a pain.
Rocco laughed and shrugged, shrugged and laughed. “In almost two years of living here, this is the first time that dear, sweet girl has broken anything,” he said. “My hotheaded half-sister, Ignazia, she throws things against the wall during temper fits, and is clumsy as well, but little Prosperine is as graceful and sure-handed as any young girl I’ve seen.”
That goddamned plumber wasn’t fooling me. The girl’s obvious clumsiness is a bargaining tool for me, I thought. Something to drive up the dowry price a bit.
Nunzio returned to the parlor. “The problem was nothing, ha ha,” he said. “If only all our problems could be swept away with a broom, eh, Domenico? Ha ha ha.” The brothers’ laughter and sighs did little to conceal their nervousness.
When Prosperine emerged from the kitchen, I attempted to rise, but each of the Iaccois held me down with a hand on my shoulders. “Sit, sit,” Rocco said. “No need to get up. Rest yourself.”
At first, I could not look at her face but saw, instead, her tiny size. She was no taller than a girl of twelve. No bigger than Mama! My eyes dropped to the floor.
I looked up from her high-buttoned shoes to her black dress with its small waist. She’d pinned a cluster of artificial flowers there. My eyes rose past the anisetta in their little glasses, which she held on a small tray before her. My glance moved from her flat bosom to a cameo pinned to the high neck of her dress. When I arrived at her faccia, my jaw dropped.
“Signore Domenico Tempesta,” Nunzio said. “May I present Prosperine Tucci, your sposa futura!”
“When hell freezes over!” I shouted. Elbowing past the brothers, I made my way to their front door!
The thing that had made me drop all sense of propriety was the face of Prosperine. For one thing, she was far from the young girl those lying plumbers had promised me. That skinny hag was probably thirty if she was a day! Worse—far worse—her homely, scrawny face bore a shocking resemblance to Filippa, that goddamned drowned monkey that had bewitched my poor brother Pasquale!
* * *
That night, I twisted and turned on my cousins’ lumpy divan as if I was back aboard the SS Napolitano! Had my brother Pasquale sent this skinny bitch up from the mundo suttomari as revenge because I had drowned his “little queen”? Had my brother Vincenzo sent her to mock, once again, my chastity? Or had Mama sent a monkey for me to marry because I had forsaken her to seek my fortune in America?
“Meglio celibe che mal sposato!”*I whispered to myself. Better to die without sons than to have to make them with that!
Somewhere in the middle of that long night in Brooklyn, a church bell rang three times. Mama, Pasquale, Vincenzo: maybe all three of them had conspired and sent this monkey-woman to me! But a gift sent is not the same as a gift accepted. I decided I would wait until daylight, board the earliest train possible, go back to my big house in Three Rivers, Connecticut, and live my life as a bachelor.
6 August 1949
The Iaccois and their monkey-cousin were already in Lena and Vitaglio’s kitchen when I awoke the next morning. It was the brothers’ angry voices that roused me from my pitiful sleep. “Ha! So here’s the man whose promises mean nothing!” Rocco said as I entered the kitchen.
“Please,” Lena told the Iaccois. “Let my poor cousin eat his breakfast in peace. Shouting is bad for digestione.” She placed before me frittata, sausage and potatoes, coffee, Easter bread. Here was a woman who knew how to take care of men!
I took a sip of coffee, a mouthful of egg. I made those two goddamned plumbers wait. “A promise collapses when it is made to deceitful men,” I finally said.
How dare I accuse them of deceit, Nunzio shouted. It was I, not they, who had initiated discussion about a wife—two wives, not one, he reminded me.
“So what do you think? That I climbed up on that roof and pushed my poor brother off? What do you two fools expect me to do? Marry two women and live the life of a bigamo?”
“Marrying one of them will do!” Rocco said. “The one you promised to marry. The one who has spent two years waiting for her home to be completed and now has spent the night sobbing into her pillow because you have so grievously wronged her!”
“Eat, Domenico,” Lena insisted. “Eat your breakfast while it’s hot and then have your argument.”
As I chewed and swallowed, swallowed and chewed, I took small glimpses of Prosperine. She was seated on a chair by the window. In the morning light, she looked twenty-five, perhaps, not thirty, but she was even uglier than she had been the night before. Today she wore peasant clothes and a kerchief on that shrunken head of hers. She was smoking a pipe!
“You have falsely represented this creature,” I told the brothers. “Look at her over there, smoking like a man! She is not beautiful! She is not young!”
Nunzio stuttered and resorted to proverbs. “Gadina vecchia fa bonu brodo,”* he insisted. And I answered him with a proverb of my own: “Cucinala come vuoi, ma sempre cocuzza e!”**
“This woman is as pure as the Blessed Virgin,” Rocco argued.
“If this one is vergine,” I said, “it is due to lack of opportunity. No meat on her bones! No tette! This one would have shriveled the cazzu of my brother Vincenzo!” In reaction to my vulgarity, uttered in the heat of battle, my cousin Lena gave a scream and lifted her apron over her face. Not Prosperine, though. That one was as hard as nails!
“Beware, Tempesta,” Nunzio Iaccoi warned. “In America, there are courts of law that make sure a man keeps his word. We have saved every letter and telegram you sent.”
“Don’t try to scare me, plumber!” I shouted back. “What judge with eyes in his head would sentence me to a life with that one? She belongs at the end of an organ-grinder’s leash, not in the marriage bed of a man of property!”
Of course, I was a proper man and a gentleman and never would have spoken that way in the hag’s presence if those two brothers hadn’t pushed me to it, but now the damage was done. My eyes followed the others’ eyes to Prosperine and a shiver passed through me. Without blinking or turning away, she puffed on her pipe and glared at me with the black look of il mal occhio itself. As I have said before, a modern man such as Domenico Tempesta leaves superstition to foolish old women. But at that moment in my cousin Lena’s kitchen, I longed to clutch a gobbo, a red chili, a pig’s tooth—anything to ward off that monkey-woman’s evil eye!
My sweet cousin Lena, in an effort to end the impasse before fisticuffs broke out in her kitchen, poured coffee, passed biscotti and Easter bread to the Iaccois, and reminded us all that there had been, since the beginning of our negotiations, not one but two bridal candidates living under the Iaccois’ roof. “Scusa, Signorina Prosperine,” she said, addressing the other one without looking at her. “Scusa me a million times for saying so, but Domenico has changed his mind.”
Prosperine took the pipe from her mouth and spat out the open window. “Bah!” she said, then clamped the pipe again between her teeth.
Lena turned to me and took my hand. “Domenico, before you begin your long trip home, wouldn’t you at least like to meet the Iaccois’ pretty sister, Ignazia?”
“Let them marry off their women to other fools!” I said back. “I’m done with Iaccoi business!”
At this, Rocco raised his fists, but Nunzio pushed them back down again. “Aspetta un momento!” he said, then whispered to Rocco, who ran out the kitchen door. The rest of us waited and waited for . . . for who knew what? As for my stomach, it felt like I had swallowed the anchor of the SS Napolitano instead of my cousin’s eggs and bread and coffee!
Ten minutes later, Rocco burst back through the doorway. He had in his hands Ignazia’s immigration papers and a daguerreotype of the girl. The papers established that she had been born in 1898 and thus was truly eighteen years of age. The photograph verified that she was as beautiful as the other one was homely—a girl well suited to be the wife of a property owner. A girl with some meat on her bones.
I was persuaded to return after lunch to the Iaccois’ front parlor and wait for Ignazia’s arrival back from her friend’s home. As I waited, I stared at the picture of the girl, and fell under its spell. Her flowing hair and full lips stirred me. Her dark eyes looked directly at my eyes. Her full face whispered the promise of a figura as plump and lovely as Venus’s.
I fell in love with that picture and fell more in love still with the flesh-and-blood girl who walked defiantly through her brothers’ front door an hour later than she was expected.
“Where have you been?” her brother asked.
“I’ve been where I’ve been!” she answered boldly.
She was wearing a woolen coat dyed as red as blood. Such a striking vermiglio had never emerged from the vats at American Woolen and Textile, I tell you! And such a woman had never lived in the tiny village of Giuliana or in Three Rivers, Connecticut. Her hair, black and wild, ended where her buttocks began. Her wide hips were built to bracket a husband and to push forth children into the world. She had cast her spell upon me even before her coat was off! At long last, I was in love!
“Domenico Tempesta, it is my great pleasure to present to you my half-sister, Ignazia,” Rocco said.
This is the one, I told myself. This is the woman I have waited for. Here before me, scowling, stands my very own wife!
But the girl gave me barely a glance. Turning to Prosperine, she asked if she had fed the company all the braciola from the Easter meal the day before. She was as hungry as an elefante, she said, and patted her belly.
“Please, Ignazia, worry later about your stomach,” Nunzio said. “Sit and visit. Show a little respect for a man of property and a factory boss!”
Ignazia turned to Prosperine. “Ah, so this is your long-lost innamorato, eh?” she laughed.
“Bah!” the other one answered, puffing away on her pipe.
“Never mind your ‘bah,’” Nunzio scolded. “Make us espresso. Quick, before I turn you out of this house!”
The Monkey slumped into the kitchen; the two brothers’ faces regained their false smiles. They began to ask questions about my casa di due appartamenti and to repeat each of my answers to their half-sister. Ignazia tapped her shoe and sang a little song to herself instead of listening. “I’ll help in the kitchen,” she said.
I watched her rise and walk from the room. Bad as it was for bargaining, I could do nothing but stare at her exiting figure and then at the doorway through which she had passed.
“Ignazia’s job at the shoe factory has exposed her to many bad influences,” Rocco whispered after she had left the room. “She has gotten the foolish notion, for example, that, like ‘Mericani, Italian women should marry for love. Ha ha ha ha.”
“You like what you see, eh, Domenico?” Nunzio noted from across the room. “If she becomes your wife, she’ll soon forget all of these ‘Mericana ways. You’ll make her siciliana again!
For my part, I could do nothing but swallow and stare—finger her photograph in my hand and anticipate her reentrance from the kitchen.
The door banged open again a minute later. Ignazia was holding a heel of bread in one hand, a chicken leg in the other. “Oh, no!” she shouted, shaking her head violently. “Oh, no, no, no, no!”
“Scusa?” one of the brothers said.
“She just told me in the kitchen what you three old men have up your sleeves,” the girl said. “I’ve told you over and over. I’m going to marry Padraic McGannon and that’s who I am going to marry!”
“That lazy Irishman with no job?” Rocco shouted. “That redheaded mama’s boy whose mouth still smells of breast milk?”
I had first laid eyes on Ignazia only moments before, but hearing her profess her intentions to marry another man sank my heart and made me want to find that goddamned Irishman and strangle him! Such was Ignazia’s power over me.
“Where would you and that lazy good-for-nothing live?” Nunzio wanted to know.
Ignazia put her hands against her fleshy hips. “With his mother,” she said.
“On what?”
“On something old men know nothing about, that’s what. L’amore! Passione!”
Nunzio shook his head at the folly of it and Rocco made the sign of the cross. In the past few minutes, I had learned much about passione and amore. It was as if Mount Etna’s hot lava now boiled within me where, before, my blood had been cool. Ignazia robbed the room of air. This I knew above all else: that she would be the wife of no one but Domenico Onofrio Tempesta!
“Scusa, young lady, scusa,” I stood and began. “Your brothers and I have a long-standing agreement—one which will provide richly for you, if I should consent to make you my wife.” Here, I drew a deep breath and expanded my chest for her to see, wholly, the man she was getting.
“If you consent?” she laughed. “If you consent? Who wants to be your wife, old man? Go marry some gray-haired old nonna!” She bit savagely into that chicken leg of hers, ripping meat from the bone, and chewing ravenously as she glared at me.
The passione with which Ignazia rejected the idea of marrying me only made me desire her more. This impudent girl would be my wife, whether she liked it or not!
“Young lady,” I said, attempting reason. “Your brothers’ honor is at stake here. I paid good money for a train ride from Connecticut to meet my sposa futura. Trust me when I say that agreements between Sicilian men—which you needn’t bother your pretty head about—are binding!”
“How much?”
“Eh?”
“How much did you pay for your train ride?” she asked me.
I told her I had paid a dollar, fifty cents.
Brazenly, she produced a small change purse from a secret place beneath her skirts. She opened it and counted coins. “Here’s your precious money, then,” she shouted, flinging a handful of coins at my feet. Terrible behavior, and yet, it made me want her more—made me want to spank her for her impertinence, to ravage her, to tame her with my ardore! The girl made me short of breath—made me think crazy thoughts. I stood there, drunk with her, and suddenly knew my dead brother Vincenzo better than I had ever known him before.
“I am marrying Padraic McGannon and that’s who I’m marrying!” she declared again, then stormed from the room.
“That one has a hellcat’s disposition,” I said to the brothers, “but I suppose she will do. I’ll take her off your hands for a dowry of seven hundred dollars.”
“Seven hundred!” Rocco shouted. “What do you think—that we two are as rich as you? This girl is a jewel—a diamond waiting to be polished. Once she is cured of this love-foolishness over that redheaded mick—”
The mention of that boy again was like a scream in my ear. “Five hundred and fifty, then. That is my final offer. The money, after all, will be used to furnish the appartamento where your half-sister will live like a queen. When you two visit, you yourselves will sleep on feather beds her dowry will have purchased.”
“That’s all very fine, Tempesta,” Nunzio said, “but my brother and I are working men, not sultans. We haven’t that kind of fortune to hand over to you. Two hundred, and the other one goes to live with you, too.” Of those two snakes, Nunzio was the worst.
“Other one? What other one?” I said, though I knew very well who they meant.
“That one,” Nunzio said, pointing to the Monkey-Face who had just entered the room with our coffee.
“Out of the question!” I said. “I would not think of robbing you of your housekeeper.”
“Don’t be foolish, Tempesta,” Rocco advised. “She cooks and helps Ignazia clean your big house, she midwifes the babies when they come along, and then, when the time is right, you marry her off to some widower in need of a clean house. As for us, finding a servant in this city is as easy as opening the door and shouting for one.”
“Out of the question!” I repeated. “If you could not find this one a husband in all of New York, how can I hope to get rid of her in Connecticut? Four hundred. The other one stays here.”
Nunzio shrugged and sighed. “Then I guess Ignazia becomes the wife of that redheaded Irishman after all and you, Signore Domenico, lose a precious prize because of your greed. I pity you and weep for your stupidity.”
In the other room, the beautiful hotheaded girl was pacing the floor and arguing with herself. The door banged open. She threatened to cut out her heart if any of us stood between her and the Irishman. The door banged shut again.
“Three hundred seventy-five,” I told Nunzio. “For the one girl alone.”
“Three hundred,” Nunzio said. “And you take Prosperine.”
“Three hundred fifty and the other one stays here with you,” I said. “That is my final offer.”
Rocco opened his mouth to agree to my terms, but that goddamned Nunzio clamped his fat, hairy knuckles on his brother’s shoulder and squeezed. “As the eldest of the family, Signore Domenico, I am afraid I have to refuse on my half-sister Ignazia’s behalf.” He walked to the front door and held it open. “Arrivederci.”
I stood stammering at their stoop, staring blankly at the brothers. Could this be happening? Was I about to lose that hot-blooded creature who had stirred my ardore like the awakened lava of Mount Etna? So be it, then! I would not be cheated out of a dowry that would furnish my home. And I was goddamned if I would be stuck with that skinny hag of a monkey besides.
The door flew open once more. Ignazia’s cheeks were flushed with emotion and the little groove of skin above her pouting lip held a small bead of sweat. “You heard him, old man,” she shouted. “Arrivederci! Go!”
I moaned quietly, longing suddenly and illogically to step back inside and lick the clear, shimmering drop of nectar out of that little groove of hers, to taste her salt. I ached to undo her clothes and claim her. Such was the spell Ignazia had cast.
“Arrivederci,” Nunzio Iaccoi repeated. He closed the door and slid the bolt. There I stood on that sidewalk in Brooklyn, more alone than I had ever been before.
8 August 1949
On the long train ride home from New York, I whimpered for what I wanted, mumbling arguments to myself and to the Iaccois that made other passengers look away and change their seats. What did I care? I closed my burning eyes and saw her face, her figura. I sat there with my coat on my lap, a goat with a frozen cazzu like my brother Vincenzo. I would have that wench! Somehow, I would have her!
Strangest of all on that strange, strange day was my behavior when the train pulled into the New London station. It was five in the afternoon. I was due at work in another four hours. “Scusa,” I said, grabbing the conductor by his jacket sleeve. “Scusa, signore, but when does the next train leave here for New York?”
He checked his watch. “Hour, fifteen minutes,” he said.
On a scrap of paper I wrote a note to Flynn at the mill: “Emergency of family. Back tomorrow. Tempesta.” I gave a man headed for Three Rivers a whole dollar to make sure it got there. That’s how crazy that girl had made me! A whole silver dollar, pressed against the palm of a stranger!
I paced back and forth inside the station, outside the station, around the station. I was no longer simply Domenico Tempesta—I was both myself and a crazy man! “What’s the matter with you, eh?” I shouted inside my own head. “They could fire you for not showing up at work! You could lose your big house!”
“Let me lose it then!” the other part of me shouted back. “Let them fire their best worker and be damned!”
“But that hellcat’s not worth it!”
“Shut up! I will have her, whether she’s worth it or not!”
“You want her more than you want all that you’ve worked for? More than your dreams?”
“Si, more than my dreams!”
Such was the argument that raged in my head, worse by far than the worst headache. When the train rolled into the station, I found myself reluctant to get on it. She will bring you sorrow, I warned myself. But when the wheels started inching toward New York, toward my Ignazia, I boarded that train in a panic, found an empty seat, and collapsed into it. My head swam with fear and despair—and with relief. What was happening to me? What was happening?
Halfway there, I got up out of my seat, opened the door, and stood outside, letting the air rush around me. The wind took my hat and I barely noticed! I stared at the speeding ground below. Jumping headfirst might be better than this love-craziness, I told myself. But if I jumped, I would never see her again, never have that girl. I would lose her to that redheaded mick whose throat I would gladly slit if I knew what he looked like.
It was Ignazia herself who answered their front door. Her eye was blackened, her face swollen on one side.
“What? You again?” she shouted. “Look what I got because of you! Go away!” She spat on the stoop where I stood.
Then Nunzio was behind her, smiling like a fox with a mouthful of feathers. “Signore Domenico,” he said. “What a surprise!”
“I’ll pay you,” I told him, still staring at Ignazia. “I’ll give you four hundred for her.”
“No!” she screamed. “I’ll take poison! I’ll cut out my heart!”
Now Rocco appeared in the doorway, too. “Five hundred,” Nunzio said coolly, as if every day a suitor appeared at his door, offering to reverse the dowry process. “And you take the other one.”
“I’ll jump from the bridge!” Ignazia bellowed. “I’ll cut out my liver!”
“Five hundred,” I repeated, as if in a trance. “And I take the other one.”
Nunzio Iaccoi shook my hand and pulled me inside. Rocco uncorked the wine for celebration. Both brothers’ heads snapped back as they drained their glasses in single gulps, then poured some more. As for myself, nausea prevented me from doing more than wetting my lips on behalf of my good fortune. Ignazia continued screaming and wailing from the side room. Prosperine smoked in the doorway and glared.
9 August 1949
Ignazia and I were married in Brooklyn on 12 May 1916, civil ceremony. Prosperine and my cousin Vitaglio witnessed. On the train ride back to Connecticut, there were not three seats together. Ignazia wanted to sit with Prosperine, not me.
From my seat across the aisle and down, I could see all of Monkey-Face but only the blue velvet wedding hat of my new wife. Ignazia’s hat was decorated with red strawberries that shook with the motion of the train. She would love me once she saw my home, I told myself. She would love me.
As for the other one, I would get her work at the mill. If I was stuck with her, she would at least bring money into my house.
We arrived home after dark at 66-through-68 Hollyhock Avenue. I told Ignazia to wait at the doorway, then hurried from room to room, lighting the lamps. Then I took her hand and led her through the house, the other one trailing after us like a dark shadow.
When we had gotten to the last room upstairs, I took my new wife to the window and showed her the backyard garden—my little bit of Sicily. There was a full moon that night, I remember; everything shone to its full advantage. “This is your new home, Ignazia,” I said. “How do you like it?”
Her shrug pierced my heart.
From a drawer, I took the embroidered sheets Signora Siragusa had sent over for a wedding present. “Use these,” I said. At last, I would enjoy the flesh of her who had tangled up my dreams and turned my sensible nature to porridge. At last, I would have opportunity to relieve this passione that had gripped me and made me crazy.
She and Prosperine dressed the bed while I waited outside in my backyard garden, smoking and watching the fireflies. Through the open window, I could see them up there—the homely one combing out the other’s long hair. I could hear them, too—Ignazia’s sobs and Prosperine’s consoling mumbles.
In our bed, I held her face and kissed her. “In time, this life with me will make you happy,” I said. She turned away. Tears dropped from her eyes onto my hands.
While I did my business, I watched her downturned mouth, her eyes that gazed at the ceiling like statue’s eyes. Afterwards, I examined the embroidered sheets.
She had not bled. “Vergine?” I asked.
Fear flashed in her eyes. “Si, vergine,” she said. “Don’t hit! Don’t hit!”
Her love with the redhead had been pure, she told me. Some women didn’t bleed the first time, that was all. If I had doubts, I should send her back to Brooklyn.
She looked so beautiful. In her dark eyes, I thought I saw the truth. I beat her anyway, to teach her a lesson in case she was lying. I could not risk the dishonor of having a treacherous wife.
The next day, when I woke for my shift and went to the kitchen, Ignazia was not there. Prosperine was peeling potatoes for my supper. “Where is she, eh?” I asked. “A man wants his wife to cook his meals. Not a monkey.”
Prosperine dropped the potato but held the knife and walked over to me. “If you raise your hand to her again, Tempesta,” she whispered, “I’ll cut off your balls while you sleep.”
My first thought was to strike that scrawny monkey, but she held the point of her knife no more than a potato’s length away from me, down there. She looked and sounded crazy enough to carry out her threat. What, after all, did I know about this witch-cousin of those goddamned Iaccoi brothers, except that they had bargained desperately to be rid of her?
I turned and laughed to cover my fear. “If you ever dare raise a knife to me, you skinny bitch, you’ll get the worst end of it!”
She raised the knife higher, as high as my heart. “That’s what a dead man once thought, too,” she said. She spat on the floor.
“I mean what I say. Stay out of my business. I’ll break your arm if I have to.”
“I mean what I say, too,” she answered. “Hurt her again and I’ll make you a woman!”
* * *
When I returned to work that week, everyone congratulated me on my marriage and shook my hand until it was ready to fall off. Twice I fell asleep on my shift, once at the desk and once while standing against the wall as I supervised the wool-dyeing. From Flynn, my boss, I shut up and took the teasing about the passione of newlyweds, but not from those workers beneath me. When Drinkwater, that goddamned Indian, joked that my new wife kept me from getting sleep anywhere but on the job, I sent him home and docked him half a night’s pay. I sent home two giddy spinning girls, too. After that, they shut up their faces about what went on in my home!
The truth was that I could not sleep from thinking what that crazy mingia Prosperine might do. Finally, I solved the problem when I began the practice of pulling the heavy oak bureau in front of the bedroom door before retiring each morning. “I have to get in there to clean!” Ignazia protested. “To put away laundry! To wash the floor!”
“Do your work when I’m not here,” I told her.
“When you’re not here, I sleep! It’s nighttime.”
“Change your habits then.”
Only with the protection of that heavy bureau could I manage to get some rest, though still I slept poorly and with much interruption. Once I dreamed I saw Prosperine leaping from the maple tree into the open bedroom window, that goddamned peeling knife of hers clenched between her teeth. Bluejays flew behind her, hundreds of them. They flew inside, pecking at me and fluttering, circling around and around the bedroom. . . . Was this to be the lot in life of a man so speciale that he had once seen the Virgin’s tears? Was I to be boss-dyer at work and a monkey’s quarry inside my own casa di due appartamenti—the house I had built with my own two hands?
11 August 1949
One afternoon in the fall, I met Signora Siragusa on the street. “Domenico, you naughty fellow,” she chuckled. “I saw your little wife at Hurok’s Market yesterday. Already she’s got a little belly, eh? What’s the matter with you that you couldn’t wait?”
Next morning, I came home from the plant and lifted Ignazia’s gown while she slept in our bed. I saw.
I saw, as well, that the scowl Ignazia wore in my presence was gone when she slept. Was this the peace of mind she had had as a child in Sicily? In the arms of that redheaded Irishman? When her eyes opened and she saw me, her frowning returned.
“What’s this, eh?” I asked, my hand patting her belly.
For her answer, she burst into tears.
“Eh?” I repeated.
“What do you think it is with that thing of yours always poking inside of me?”
“When is it coming?” I asked her.
“How should I know?” she shrugged, pushing and hurrying herself out of the bed. “Those predictions are never exact. Maybe February. Maybe March. . . . What are you staring at me for?”
“Are you glad about it?” I asked.
She shrugged again, pulling on her dress. She twisted her braid into a knot and pinned it at the base of her neck. “These days, I take what comes. What other choice have you left me?”
I brought Ignazia to Pedacci, who was a shoemaker on the East Side and presidente of Figli d’Italia. Pedacci could tell boy or girl by having the mother walk up and down on the sidewalk in front of his store.
He stood in his doorway while Ignazia walked back and forth, back and forth, three, four times. Each time she got back to the front of the store, she stopped, but Pedacci waved his hand for her to walk some more.
Our request for a prediction had interrupted Pedacci’s game of pinochle in the back room. The other card players—Colosanto (the baker) and Golpo Abruzzi (brass factory)—watched Ignazia walk, too. From all that walking and watching, Ignazia became red-faced. She stopped and motioned me to her side, complaining in a voice loud enough for Pedacci and the others to hear. “All this staring! What am I—a statue in the museum?”
“Don’t be disrespectful,” I warned her. “If Pedacci says walk, then walk!”
A couple more trips to the stop sign and back, Pedacci rubbing his chin, squinting his eyes. Then he put up his hand to stop her.
My wife’s pregnancy was extremely difficult to predict, he whispered to me—one of the most difficult he had ever seen. The baby did not hang in the usual way. Tuscan women sometimes carried their children in this manner. Was Ignazia by any chance from Tuscany?
“No, no,” I told him. “Siciliana.”
Well, he said, with this one, it would be necessary to lift the tette to decide. Strictly for the purpose of accurate prediction. I understood, didn’t I?
“Of course, Don Pedacci, of course,” I said. “I am a modern man, after all, not some jealous, unschooled peasant from the Old Country. Let me just tell my wife.”
I approached Ignazia cautiously. That woman’s temper could sometimes blow like the shift whistle at American Woolen and Textile and it would not do for her to show me her usual disrespect in front of these men.
“It will be necessary for you to step inside for a minute with Signore Pedacci,” I whispered. “To make an accurate prediction, it is necessary for him to lift the tette.”
“What?” she shouted. “Mine? No, no, no, no! Go tell that old goat to lift his own wife’s tette!”
“Please to keep down your voice,” I said, more firmly this second time. “The poor man is a widower.”
“Tell him to go feel the melanzana at the fruit market then and to keep his dirty hands off of me! I won’t be handled like a pair of shoes in his shop!”
I took my wife’s wrist, gave it a little twist to show her I meant business. “Show some proper obedience to your husband,” I warned her. “Do as I say.”
“Bah!” she said. But the twisting put fear in her eyes and she obeyed.
They were inside for four, five minutes. “Congratulations, Domenico!” Pedacci said when he emerged again. “A son!”
Ignazia stood behind him. The news had brought no joy to her face. Tears, it brought, and a frown I still see this morning, sitting in this garden, so many years later. Ignazia was, from the beginning, a wife to break a man’s heart.
“Come in back for a little drink,” Pedacci said. “Golpo and Colosanto and I want to toast your bambino.” He turned to Ignazia. “Just a small drink, Signora Tempesta. Then I’ll send him back out again. Sit down, ha ha. Tell my customers to come back in an hour, hour and a half.”
Ignazia locked her jaw and blew air out of her nose. She did not sit.
In Pedacci’s back room, I had a little drink and then another one and then Pedacci and the others invited me to play some cards. Was it a crime for a man who broke his back with factory work year in, year out, to sit with a paisano or two and have a simple game of cards? My wife thought so! I had just been dealt a beautiful hand when Abruzzi laughed and nodded his head toward the doorway.
There she stood.
I stood up and walked over to her. “What’s the matter with you, eh?” I whispered.
“Mi scappa la pippi!” she whispered back. Her feet did a little dance. Her hands made fists.
“Don’t speak such vulgarity in the presence of other men! Where’s your dignity? Hold it until we get home.”
“I can’t hold it!” she protested. The other three smiled at their cards. Pedacci began to whistle.
“Piss on yourself then, woman,” I said. “And piss on your disobedience, too!”
She banged the door. Behind it, out in the shop, I could hear her shouting at the shoes.
“That’s telling her,” Abruzzi said. “A king is a peasant in a castle where the woman rules.”
“Si,” Pedacci nodded and agreed. “Women, like horses, have to have their spirits broken or else they’ll make bad wives. Eh, Domenico?”
“Si, signore, si,” I said. “Breaking their spirit is the only way.”
When I came back out into the shoe shop—not more than two, three games later—Ignazia was nowhere. That goddamned Abruzzi made a joke that my poor wife had either defied me or floated out the door from her “little problem.”
When I got home, Ignazia was in the kitchen, soaking her blistered feet in warm water and salts. Her eyes were red. She had run the three miles back home.
The other one was at the sink, washing out Ignazia’s dress and underclothes. “Go to your room,” I told Prosperine. “I want to speak to my wife alone.”
But the Monkey just stood there, staring defiantly at me and wringing out Ignazia’s underclothes as if it was my neck in her hands.
“Go!” I commanded, clapping at her. “Hurry!”
She left the room slowly, watching me as she entered the pantry.
I began sweetly, as sweet as sugar. “So, you’re growing a boy inside you, eh? In a little while, you and I will have a son.”
“May God help any son who grows up as inhuman as you are,” she said.
“Inumano? Why am I inumano?”
The water in the basin sloshed and jumped over the sides. Her whole body shook from her sobbing.
“There, there,” I told her from across the room. “It’s the child that brings on this nervous condition of yours.”
Then Prosperine came out of the pantry again with two big onions. She began slicing them, staring not at the job but at me. She used a knife far too big for the job of onion-slicing. Chop chop chop. Hack hack hack. She worked and watched, eyeing me, butchering onions with her big knife.
On the night of 2 December 1916, I was at work, busy supervising the dyeing of wool for pea jackets, U.S. Navy. Earlier that week there had been problems on first shift—two bad dye runs that the second shift boss (goddamned French Canadian named Pelletier) had let get by him. The mistake had cost money to American Woolen and Textile, and Pelletier had been demoted. Janitore he was now, third shift.
“Have the Top Wop supervise the next runs,” Baxter, the owner’s son-in-law, had ordered Flynn. “If the Top Wop’s in charge, it’ll get done right.” It was Flynn who told me what Baxter had said. “He doesn’t mean anything when he calls you a wop,” he said. “Take it as a compliment. Just make sure you don’t fuck up any of the dye runs.”
I lost sleep that week and, in my sleeplessness, thought about my first work in America. It had been years now since I’d swept the main lobby of the New York Public Library or scrubbed men’s and women’s filth from those long rows of toilets, but as I lay awake, the stink and ache of that miserable work came back to me—the look of all those self-important New Yorkers walking past a lowly janitore, congratulating themselves and thinking how much better they were than I was. I had traveled far, had seized opportunity and been rewarded for my seriousness of purpose. But one misstep could turn me from a boss back to a toilet scrubber.
On that same night of 2 December, I was reexamining and rematching samples with a magnifying glass and a special lamp I had bought for better illumination—making sure one more time before approving the run. Flynn called out my name.
“Eh?” When I looked up, I saw Prosperine walking toward me with Flynn.
“Better come with me,” she said. “It’s her time.”
“What? How could it be her time already?”
She looked over at Flynn, who looked away. “Her water burst,” she whispered. “The pains have started. Maybe a problem, maybe not.”
“What kind of problem?”
She shrugged.
“You left her alone then?”
The Monkey shook her head. “Signora Tusia from next door is with her.”
I looked from the Monkey’s face to Flynn’s, and then back again. I saw Baxter watching us through the glass wall of his office. “Go home,” I said. “Let women fix women’s problems. What do you think—that I can drop everything and run? Stop interrupting a man at his workplace.”
Prosperine ignored the order. “She needs dottore,” she said. “Signora Tusia thinks so, too. Better fetch him on your way home.”
I leaned my face close to her face. “Doctors reach into the pockets of honest workers,” I said. “Go home and midwife her instead of walking around town. Earn your keep for once, you lazy mingia.” If I didn’t get her out of there, I might end up janitore.
I walked back to my samples. Flynn stood staring at me. Baxter, too.
“Figliu d’una mingia!” her voice screamed. “You’ll save a penny and lose your wife!”
My workers stopped their tasks to stare at that skinny bitch who dared to raise her voice to me that way. What could I do but grab her by the collar and coat sleeve and throw her out of that goddamned mill? I had work to do! The earnings of a janitore could not support a home such as mine—could not feed and clothe a wife and son, let alone a goddamned monkey with murder in her eye!
For the rest of that shift, I could not concentrate. I looked again and again at the clock. Had my son come into the world by now? Should I beat Prosperine for her public defiance? Should I fetch Quintiliani, the Italian dottore, on my way home from my shift? Each hour that went by was a week. But the dyeing went successfully. Baxter was right: if you wanted the job done right, put Domenico Tempesta in charge—even on the nights when his head was full of worry!
At dawn, I left the mill and hurried to the home of Quintiliani. His housekeeper said he was still out from the middle of the night, boy with burst appendix. She said my hired girl had come looking for him earlier and that she’d sent her on to Yates, the Yankee dottore.
When I got home, Yates’s roadster was parked in front of the casa di due appartamenti. My heart boomed inside my chest like a drum in a parade. I opened the front door and followed Ignazia’s screams to the back of the house.
She was lying on the kitchen table, wrapped in blankets and shivering. Tusia’s wife wiped at her face and neck and hair. Yates was working on her down there.
Prosperine was the first to notice me. “Figliu d’una mingia,” she mumbled under her breath.
Then Ignazia saw me. “Out! Get out, you!” she shouted. “See what your filthy business has brought down on me!”
The Yankee dottore told me to wait in the front room—that he and I needed to talk but not at this crucial time.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Ignazia wailed.
“Avanzata!” Prosperine commanded my wife. “Avanzata!”
I went into the pantry, not the front room as the Yankee dottore had told me to do. Who was he to tell me where to go inside my own house?
“Come on, Mrs. Tempesta! Don’t stop! Come on, now!”
“Good, Ignazia, very good, keep going,” Tusia’s wife encouraged. Their directions, Ignazia’s screaming and shouting, became a quiet murmur in the distance.
It was on the sideboard, next to the pump. . . .
A small bundle, wrapped hastily in a bloody sheet. I knew what it was before I lifted the cloth.
Blue feet, he had, and blue fingers. Black eyelashes. Black hair on his head, still wet from the birth. His thing was a little button. So perfect, he was, but blue.
I leaned closer. Smelled his smell. Touched his lips. He was neither cold nor warm. His soul was still in the pantry. . . .
I used what was there—soapy dishwater, olive oil shaken from the bottle into my hand. A worker’s hand it was—rough and used, stained with blue dye. Not the smooth white hand of a priest. Not a hand worthy of touching perfezione. I used what was there.
With my thumb, I traced an oily cross on his forehead, one on each small eyelid as well. With my cupped hand, I dribbled the water onto his tiny head. “I baptize thee, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” I whispered it in English, not Italian, for this dead, unnamed son of mine was ‘Mericano. His futura would have been a great one, but he had no life.
Was it sacrament or sacrilege, what I did? Battesimo performed by a man who had soiled a monsignore with a trowelful of wet cement and caused the death of a brother? Had I saved my son’s soul or damned it to hell in that pantry? That was the question I asked myself a thousand sleepless nights after that impromptu baptism . . . the question I have asked a silent God ever since.
Always from Him, silenzio. . . .
I kissed my son’s small hand, covered him again with the cloth. Picked him up and held him close to me.
“Aieeh!” Ignazia wailed and then the second one bleated its complaints to the world. From the pantry doorway, I held the dead firstborn and watched Yates cut the cord of the one that lived.
“Girl!” Prosperine croaked.
“Capiddi russo!” Tusia’s wife announced.
“She’s a redhead, all right,” the Yankee dottore said. “She’s got a harelip, too.” Ignazia strained to see her. “Oh oh oh,” she whimpered, staring at that squalling thing, hungry for her, with love in her eyes.
“Bambina mia . . .”
I held my son tighter.
“Bambina mia,” Ignazia kept chanting. “Bambina mia.” She kept kissing its face, its head, its tiny broken mouth. At that moment it was clear to me: she had not been vergine when she married me. She had opened her legs not only to her husband but to that Irishman she loved. Her belly had filled up with not one but two bambini. And now it was clear: she had no love for the dead boy that had been mine. She loved only the flawed, living girl—the child of that goddamned redheaded mick.
After he had finished with Ignazia, the dottore came out into my cold, brown garden. We needed to talk, he said.
Talk then, I told him. I was still holding the dead boy.
Why didn’t I give that poor child to the women inside so that they could clean it up? He was going to have to take him to the city coroner when he left. It was the procedure in cases such as these. Ignazia and I would get him back for the burial. He presumed I was going to call a priest, right?
No coroner, I told him. No priest.
“Well, what you do about the religious business is your own decision, Mr. Tempesta, but the law’s the law concerning the coroner. Say, you should look on the bright side of things. You were lucky this time.”
“Lucky?” I asked. Was he mocking me? Spitting on my loss?
“What I’m saying is, you could have lost the both of them, and your wife to boot. This little fella here had breached. He was blocking the birth canal. It was a tricky business making things come out as well as they did. Don’t worry about that harelip of hers. There’s no cleft palate, far as I can tell. She’ll be okay. She won’t talk funny.”
He waited before he said the rest.
“Mr. Tempesta, your wife could have died last night. Her heart’s weak. Had the fever when she was a girl, she says. Sometimes disease leaves the heart damaged, see? The two births put that ticker of hers under a terrible strain.” He talked in a loud, slow voice, as if I was deaf or stupid. “Another tricky delivery like this one could kill her, understand? Even a normal delivery—a single birth with no complications. To be on the safe side, you and her have to stop practicing intercourse. Either that, or I can fix her before I leave.”
I cupped my hand to the top of the boy’s head, looked out at nothing.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Mr. Tempesta? I better say it plain. Either I fix her or you have to stop fucking her.”
I closed my eyes, caressed the top of the boy’s cold head. “No need to talk gutter talk,” I said. “No need to speak filth in the company of my son.”
“Say, look now, don’t get uppity with me. I’m just telling you, that’s all. Knock that chip off your shoulder, why don’t you? Count your blessings.” He stood and put his hands out for the boy, but I did not hand him over.
Whatever tears I have shed, I have shed them in the privacy of this garden. Never in the house itself. Never in front of women. Even in the middle of winter nights, it is here where I have always come to cry.
Later that day, Yates came back with the coroner, a policeman, and Baxter from the mill. Baxter did the talking. “You’re a valued worker, Domenico,” he said. It was the first time he had ever called me by my name—first time he had called me anything but Top Wop. “And I can certainly appreciate your sadness. I have children, too, you know—I know what it’s like. But damn it, man! The company looks bad if something like this makes it into the papers, see? We don’t like trouble. We can’t keep lawbreakers on the payroll, it’s as simple as that. Don’t bring trouble down on your head, man. The child’s dead. Give it up.”
I was suddenly cold and hungry . . . and so tired that I was afraid I might weep in the presence of the four of them. The small weight I clutched to my chest was suddenly an armload of brick.
I saw Tusia’s wife looking out her kitchen window. Saw the sadness in her eyes. She was a good woman, Tusia’s wife. Her love for her husband and children was sweet and pure. Undirtied. She had stayed with Ignazia all night and through the morning. It was to her that I pointed—to Tusia’s wife.
“Have Signora Tusia come out,” I said. “You others go wait in front.”
The signora came out of the house and up into the garden. “May God bless this child,” she whispered, taking him from me. Tears fell from her eyes. “And may God bless you, too, Domenico, and show you His mercy.”
“Save your prayers, signora,” I told her. “God spends none of His mercy on Tempesta.”
For the rest of that afternoon I sat like a stone in my garden—too tired, even, to stand up and go inside.
Sometime near dark, Prosperine came outside with a bowl of hot farina.
“Is she asleep?” I asked.
“They’re both asleep,” she said. “In my room in the back. Go on, eat. Put something in your stomach before you go to work.”
I took a bite of the cereal. Its warmth inside my mouth was a comfort. “To hell with work,” I heard my voice say. “I hope that goddamned mill goes up in flames and all the bosses with it! Give me a match and kerosene and I’ll do the job myself!”
The Monkey stood in the cold, her breath a thing I could see. “It should have been the girl who died,” she said, finally. “Bad enough to be born female. Worse to be born female and have the rabbit’s lip. Hers will be a hard life.”
I squinted up at her, studied her in what was left of the day’s light. She was wearing her nightgown and long coat. Her hair was down—black braids, as skinny as knitting needles. “It’s cold,” she said. “Come inside.”
“Ignazia is glad it’s the girl who lived,” I said. “My wife cares only about that one with its rabbit-face and orange hair.”
“It’s what she has to do,” Prosperine said. “Or else the grief would kill her. She’d die in her bed from the loss of the boy.”
“Bah!” I said.
“Give her time, Tempesta. Let her heal.”
I stood up and went inside.
Got myself dressed.
12 August 1949
The next morning was Saturday. When I got back to the house, I sat in the kitchen, eating and listening to Ignazia coo and sing to the baby from behind the Monkey’s half-opened bedroom door. I rose and stood in the doorway. When Ignazia saw me, she told me to come and see. “Do you want to hold her?” she asked.
I shook my head. Stared at it. Lying in the sheets, it stuck out its tongue. Waved its fist at me. “Maybe this one will grow up to be a boxer,” I said.
Ignazia smiled at my little joke, and then began to cry. “What do you think of Concettina for her name?” she said.
“Concettina?” I said. “That was my mother’s name.”
“Si. I remember. It’s a pretty name.”
“Concettina,” I repeated.
“You need to get some rest, Domenico,” she told me. “Then you have to go and see the priest. Arrange for the boy’s burial Mass and for Concettina’s battesimo.”
I shook my head. “No priest,” I said. “No battesimo.”
Tears came into my wife’s eyes. For the boy, there had been no time, she said, but she wanted to make sure this child was cleansed of sin.
I stood up. This child was made from sin, I wanted to shout at her. Domenico Tempesta was too wise to be a fool! But all I said was, “No battesimo.”
All that day I slept the sleep of the dead, and when I woke again, it was nighttime. I went downstairs. Prosperine sat at the kitchen table with a glass and a jug of my wine from the cellar. “She and the baby have just gone to sleep,” she said. “Sit down. Pour yourself some wine.”
“I don’t want wine,” I said. “I just woke up.”
“Pour me some more then,” she ordered, as if she were master of my house and I were the servant.
Usually, that one snuck around with a burglar’s silence—a word here, a grunt there. But on that strange night, wine and circumstance unhinged the Monkey’s tongue. For hours we sat in that kitchen. She drank and smoked her pipe and talked, rapping her empty glass against the tabletop when she wanted more. Half a jug she drank that night, maybe more.
That was the night she told me her story. The night the Monkey drank my wine and revealed to me the truth of what she was—what they both were. . . .