Black Sheep, White Lamb Read online

  “Mrs. Moran was right, may she rest in peace. ‘Oh-h-h, Mrs. Rocco,’” his mother tried to mimic the brogue of the departed Irishwoman, “‘he’s fadin’ away to a ton.’”

  “We had an accident at the house, mama,” he said, wanting to get the worst over with as quickly as possible.

  “Father Walsh already told me. It did not matter so much—after what happened there this morning.” She nodded toward the empty bed.

  “We haven’t got along very well without you, mama, have we?” Johanna said.

  Her mother lifted herself up carefully while Johanna fixed the pillows. In changing her position, Mrs. Rocco exposed one breast, round and plump, the nipple puckered. Georgie scowled but he could not take his eyes from it. His mother made a sound of mock reproval and drew her gown across her breast with exaggerated modesty. There was something close to mirth in her eyes, the eyes that but a moment before had been laden with the tears of mourning.

  Georgie moistened his lips.

  “It was an old house,” his mother said. “We are not so old, I’m not.” She ran her fingers through her dark hair that showed not a strand of grey. “Dr. Tagliaferro says it will not matter, my operation. Soon I will be younger than ever. Johanna, give me the mirror and the comb. In this hospital nobody takes care of the living. To the dead they come quick.”

  Her children watched her repair the brief ravages of sorrow for her friend. They were accustomed to the changes in her moods, and to her, sorrow was no more than a mood. Sometimes Johanna thought it even less—a pose. But for the sake of peace she had always gone along, even as her father before her, with the mood her mother fancied at the moment. Her tempers were too terrible.

  She looked up suddenly at Johanna. “Why don’t you wear a little lipstick?”

  “I don’t have any. We didn’t have time last night to take anything, not even papa’s picture.”

  Mrs. Rocco’s eyes flashed at her daughter, suspicious of an implied rebuke. But she said, “Father Walsh said the fire happened very quickly.”

  “He ought to know,” Georgie blurted out. “I mean, he was there just before it started.”

  The color shot up in Johanna’s face. Nor was it missed by her mother who chose from that moment on to play yet another role. “So the priest was there? He didn’t tell me that. What did he want, Johanna?”

  “He just stopped after visiting Mrs. Tonelli. We’re staying with Mrs. Tonelli, mama, She wants you to come also—as soon as you’re better.”

  “Why did he stop to see you? To talk about me?”

  Johanna shook her head.

  “To talk about me, I’ll bet,” Georgie said, trying to mend a damage he, for once, had not intended to cause.

  “About you he talks to me,” his mother said, thumping her breast as in a mea culpa. “What are they saying about me down there? Eh? What do they say so that a priest comes to talk to my daughter?”

  Johanna shook her head. She tried not ever to hear what was said about her mother, and people tried not to say anything about Catherine Rocco in front of her children, suddenly in their presence putting on the smiles of innocence. But like all covert malice, the smiling subterfuge served only to accent it. And Johanna had talked with Father Walsh about her mother; there was a thread between that conversation and what had happened in the hall. She just realized it then, remembering beyond the instant. The priest had been very careful to say nothing ill of her mother, but at the same time to explain that she was still a young woman, that she ought to be able, nay, encouraged, to marry again. And all the while both he and Johanna knew, although no word of it was said between them, that marriage had never been a bond to Catherine Rocco. It had merely bound one man to her for as long as he had lived. That was where the mercy of God had come into their conversation which she so well remembered: “We are all at the mercy of God as well as of one another. And for that we can be grateful. He has so much more of it than we have.”

  “What do they say about my operation?” her mother demanded.

  “I don’t know, mama. I don’t even know—if they know.”

  “Ho-ho, they know.” Her mother nodded vigorously. “They would all like the same disease.”

  Johanna’s face was flaming.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Georgie said.

  “You aren’t old enough to know,” his mother said. “And you are a boy, thank God. How is your girl friend?”

  “All right, I guess.” He hadn’t thought much about Rosie since leaving her at the Crazy Cat, a million years ago.

  Mrs. Rocco laughed. “I’ve forgotten who it is.” She winked at her son. “And so have you. Tell the truth.”

  “No, I haven’t. Rosie Gerosa.”

  “She is a lump.” Georgie scowled. “All right, a lump of sugar,” his mother added.

  Georgie grinned. “Yeah.”

  “I think you’re both being awful,” Johanna said.

  “Yeah?” Georgie said. It was an old alliance, his and his mother’s.

  Mrs. Rocco looked up at her daughter. “My little puritan. And how is Martin? Now there is a man. A knight. A shining knight in a paper box.”

  The scathing contempt implicit in the words cut Johanna to the quick. And frightened her. It was like being caught in a malignant dream, when these two got going, one topping the other. She was on the verge of admitting to herself that her mother was wicked. And Georgie had the same way, a way of making things dirty, which she held sacred. But she herself? Was she not flesh of their flesh—she, who could thrill to the touch of a priest’s hand? She felt faint and caught up Martin’s cologne, which she splashed in her hands. Holding them to her face, she was revived.

  Georgie said, “I’m going to be sick to my stomach if I stay here, ma. This place smells awful.”

  “It’s time for us to go anyway,” Johanna said. “They don’t allow visitors at this hour.”

  “They don’t allow!” her mother mimicked. “Nobody allows in this world. But if you take what is coming to you, all of a sudden it is allowed. Mr. Mancuso has our insurance policy, Johanna. Call him up. We are going to need the money to find a place to live. And for clothes. Everything burned, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. What was there to burn? It’s not too late to start over.”

  “That’s what Martin said.”

  “For Martin it is too late,” her mother said with an impatient wave of her hand.

  Johanna could not understand her mother’s dislike of Martin; it was like a wound to the girl that her mother reopened with a sudden thrust every time it seemed about to heal. And the worst of it was, in front of Martin her mother was her most ingratiating, smiling, curious about his studies—and that was what she made most fun of behind his back: a man of twenty-eight studying books. She was even affectionate toward him, flirtatious, so that Martin sometimes blushed and Johanna felt ashamed.

  “Ma, why can’t we live with Mrs. Tonelli? She invited us—you too,” Georgie said. “Boy, real napkins on the table. Like pillowcases. And a little bell. All she has to do is ring it and Mrs. Grey comes in and says, ‘yes, ma’am.’”

  “When you have that much money everybody says, ‘yes, ma’am,’ but not Catherine Rocco, not to any woman. I would rather live in a barn as long as it was my own.”

  “So would I,” Johanna said.

  “Okay,” Georgie said, a little pouty. “Come on, sis. I got to be at the fieldhouse at one o’clock and we got things to get first.”

  Johanna said, “Do you want me to bring you anything, mama?”

  “A million dollars. How about that?”

  “Seriously,” Johanna said.

  “Seriously, Johanna …” Her mother looked at her with a cold penetration. “… I am going to be ready to leave the hospital in a day or two. Are you glad?”

  “Of course, I’m glad.”

  “I don’t know why you should be,” her mother said, and turned away her head.

  Brother and sister walked the half-mile
distance from the hospital to the shopping district. It was actually the first time they had been alone since the fire, Dr. Tagliaferro having picked them up at the bus stop and given them a ride directly to the hospital. There was something Georgie had to know because a lot of things depended on it. “Jo, what did ma mean about the priest?”

  “I don’t exactly know, Georgie. I don’t always understand mama myself.”

  “I mean, I didn’t tell her,” Georgie said. “I couldn’t have, even if I wanted to.”

  “I know.”

  “What did she mean, then?”

  Johanna drew a deep breath. “It’s just that mama might want to get married again.”

  “Who to?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody.”

  “You don’t just marry anybody.”

  “Sometimes you do!” Johanna cried out—half in anger, half in frustration. Not from anything said by her mother, by Father Walsh—but from silence itself, Martin’s, the neighbors’—and from things half-said, and the flowers she had seen in her mother’s room, she knew. She had known well enough not to ask who the flowers had come from, not even to comment on them. All the times before her operation, her mother had been going away—to doctors, she had said, to hospitals in the city where she had to stay a day or two, never long enough to visit. Johanna knew. Everybody knew now—except Georgie.

  And Georgie at that point arrived at a sudden conclusion of his own. “Jo, ma’s got a boy friend, hasn’t she? That’s what it’s all about, ain’t it?”

  “Isn’t it,” Johanna corrected mechanically. “I think it is in a way.”

  “I’ll kill him!”

  “Oh, shut up, Georgie. You aren’t going to kill anybody, and it doesn’t help saying things like that.”

  Georgie stopped stock-still, going slowly over in his mind fragments of things he had heard and not understood between mother and daughter, and other things he had heard—about Dr. Tagliaferro, for example. “Did ma have an abortion, Jo?”

  “You shouldn’t even say such things. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know plenty. I got ears. Old Doctor Tag—I’ve heard the guys talking about him. ‘That abortionist.’ I’ve heard it, Jo.”

  Blessedly for Johanna they had to be quiet for a moment, approaching a woman who was waiting for her dog to make up his mind which side of the tree he most fancied. The woman said “Good morning” as they passed. Johanna answered her.

  “That’s just their way of talking about Dr. Tagliaferro,” she tried to explain rationally when they were beyond the woman’s hearing. “It’s because he treats women for … internal troubles.” She wasn’t sure herself she knew what that meant, but it sounded knowing. “Even so, they shouldn’t say that. Abortion is a terrible sin … and it’s against the law.”

  “What’s ‘internal troubles’?”

  Johanna drew a deep breath.

  “All right,” Georgie said. “What kind of an operation did ma have?”

  “It’s called a hysterectomy.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, for one thing,” Johanna said, trying to be very careful, “if she was to get married again, she couldn’t have any more children.”

  “Man!” Georgie plunged one fist into his other hand like a ball into a baseball mitt. He did it again. “The bastard!”

  “Georgie!”

  He glanced at her, his eyes aglint with fury. Excited with it. “You women sure split hairs, don’t you? Oh, man …”

  His sister shook her head.

  “What’s the difference between an abortion and a hyst … whatever it is?”

  “There’s a great difference. There is!”

  “Nuts.” He stopped again, abruptly, awkwardly, for he had been trying to pace his steps to his sister’s. Johanna had to turn round to him. “You know where the difference is, sis?” He pecked at her forehead with a stubby finger. “In your upstairs room. In your head, I mean. That’s where it is.” Then with a rare bit of insight, he added, “And you can’t stay there all your life.”

  8

  COUNTY DETECTIVE BASSETT SLEPT until nine o’clock, an achievement ordinarily impossible among his houseful of youngsters. His wife had managed to keep the youngest in the kitchen, and the fact that it was Saturday took care of the older ones. The older they got the better they liked bed—in the morning. Bassett called his office and then Kearns whom he was pretty sure he wakened. Calls to the Hillside police station were, at certain hours, automatically put through to the chief’s house. Bassett made out his schedule for the day only to have it changed at breakfast by his son. He had quite forgotten his promise to go to the football game that afternoon, and it was Newport’s big game of the year … with Hillside.

  “Well, that’s neat anyway,” he commented, hearing where they were to play.

  “It’ll be neat if we beat them,” his son, John, corrected.

  Bassett promised to be there. As usual, his wife inveighed against football as a barbarous sport. “I say that any game where the players have to wear armor for protection is just plain medieval.”

  “Armor she says,” her son chided.

  “Nor,” said Bassett, leaving the table and giving her a light kiss on the forehead, “was there anything just plain about medievalism.”

  He thought about her views on football as he drove across the mountain, musing on what sports did not require armor. He was reminded of Martin Scully’s barefisted fight with Mac Andrews.

  He sat in the car for a moment in front of the MacAndrews house. The house had been painted within the year, white with green shutters. On the northern edge of the Hillside limits, it bore little in common with the houses at the heart of the village. It looked New England, and somehow virginal even from the outside. But that, Bassett thought, was because he knew that MacAndrews, a bachelor, had lived with his sister, a spinster named Grace. His visualization of her was as a tall, flat woman, thin-lipped, greying hair parted in the middle and gathered into a wren’s nest at the back of her head. He rang the bell, noticing idly that the doors had recently been painted a duck black, grimly prophetic on the painter’s part.

  Except that her hair was white, he had been right on Miss MacAndrews’ appearance—even to the center part. She was neither hostile nor warm in her greeting, but she opened the door to him and, seeing his identification, allowed him to enter. The house was as neat inside as out, the upholstered chairs primly decked in fresh antimacassars. The one ashtray in the room was a stand, the chrome recently polished—since MacAndrews’ death, he would say. And obviously during his lifetime it had been the only place he was allowed to put his cigaret ashes. Bassett would have taken an oath that upstairs all MacAndrews’ belongings were laid out, sorted for disposal.

  He murmured his solicitations.

  “I could have told them right off it was not a natural death,” Miss MacAndrews said. She spread her skirt with the backs of her hands and sat down opposite him, choosing a straight chair. Bassett sat forward in his; to call any chair easy in this house would be a misnomer. “James was in sound health—for which we gave thanks to Almighty God every day of our lives.” There were traces of a Scotch accent in her speech.

  “Would you say he had enemies in the town?”

  “Oh, he had them a-plenty. The Mafia were out for him, you know.”

  “The Mafia?”

  “Don’t pretend you haven’t heard, Mr. Bassett, and you in the District Attorney’s office. They run the gambling in Hillside the same as in the rest of the country. And other things as well—if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure that I do,” Bassett said, although he was fairly sure that when a woman like Miss MacAndrews referred to “other things,” it could only mean sex.

  “Then you’ll find them out from other than me,” she said, confirming his suspicion.

  “Your brother was opposed to the gambling?”

  “Aren’t you?” she challenged.

  He did n
ot feel called upon to affirm his own virtue in this instance. He knew that MacAndrews had been one of the complainants to the District Attorney’s office. “I was thinking—that unless I’m badly mistaken—it was going on all the same right under his nose.”

  “It was, Mr. Bassett, and he could not do a thing about it. There are those who will tell you James was a company man—that’s the Communist word for it, a company man. Because he was loyal to his employer. He was loyal, and that’s a word they know nothing about. But he was also a man of his own principles, James. And when the company forbade his interference in the simple pleasures—their words, not mine!—of the workers, James obeyed his conscience and went to the District Attorney.”

  “He seems to have made enemies on all sides,” Bassett said, and hoped immediately that the irony had not come through in his voice.

  “The righteous are as proud of their enemies as they are of their friends.”

  Rather prouder, Bassett thought, but merely nodded assent. “I wonder if maybe you and I couldn’t sort a few of them out individually, Miss MacAndrews …”He waited, hoping she would volunteer names as readily as opinions. But whoever or whatever her and her brother’s enemies, silence was not among them. The kitchen clock was no more at home with it than she was.

  “What about this young fellow, Martin Scully?” he finally prompted.

  “Aye, there’s one,” she said. “Red as the flag of Russia. It is my opinion—and I’m not the only one who thinks it—he’s in the pay of the Communists. Mind, that’s only opinion, I would not say it to everyone. But I ask you this: why would a young man with his abilities stay in a menial factory job in this day and age if there wasn’t something—or somebody making it worth his while?”

  “How long has he been in his present job, do you know, Miss MacAndrews?”

  “Near ten years, I would say. I know it’s seven since he started making trouble … secret meetings.” She leaned forward and said the two words in a half-whisper.