The Right Thing to Do Read online

  “We’ll need a lookout. Laura, you go down one flight ahead. Motion if it’s clear. We’ll do it one flight at a time. If someone’s going up, we’ll rush past and say we’re taking her to the hospital. If they’re going down ahead of us, we’ll just stop and wait. Maybe we’ll be lucky and there won’t be anybody.”

  “I don’t like this,” Angelo said. “Why don’t we just call the funeral home or the police or whoever you call. This whole thing is probably illegal anyhow.” He was close to tears. “I don’t like to see her hauled around like a bag of onions.”

  “If she was a bag of onions, we wouldn’t be taking all this trouble,” Laura said, putting her arm around him.

  “Angelo,” Vinnie encouraged, “this is not the time to think.”

  Vinnie already had his arm around Maria and was trying to support her head.

  “You help with her other side and feet,” he told Angelo, moving toward the door.

  Nino watched them make it down the first flight of stairs and turned back into the apartment. It was good to have Vinnie around, he thought. It was even right for Maria to go back to the old neighborhood. He switched off the lights and made sure the phonograph was off. If only they could get her safely to Vinnie’s it would all work out, he thought, putting the record back in its paper jacket. He took his cane and made his way to the door, pulling it shut behind him, leaving the ginger ale warming in the summer twilight that filtered through the window.

  It hadn’t been possible to carry Maria down five flights unnoticed, Nino discovered. The heat had brought everybody out. Agnese, Maria’s neighbor, even had to be told what was going on. “Maria,” she said, “would have loved this. She always did things her way. She never even liked to use the regular garbage. She used to carry her garbage out in a plastic bag and put it in a wire basket the city has on the corner. It was a regular game with the cop on the block. One time he followed her three blocks until she got tired of carrying her garbage around. She waited for him to catch up and handed it to him. When he put it down to write a ticket, she took his pen and said, ‘Don’t you have anything better to do than bother old ladies?’ She was something.” She patted Maria and went on ahead of them, just in back of Laura, to divert whomever they met.

  In the car, Nino and Laura sat next to Maria. Nino was nervous.

  “I hope you appreciate everything we’re doing for you,” Laura said to Maria.

  “She would have done it for you,” Vinnie said.

  “I won’t need to have it done for me,” Laura said.

  “I hope this works,” Nino said. “Tony Romano and I go back a long way, but I haven’t seen him since. . . .” He motioned to his legs. His stroke, climax of his diabetes, had left him a limping old man.

  “Father Romano is OK,” Vinnie reassured him. “You should see some of the people he’s buried. He doesn’t ask questions. If the Church was only for angels. . . .” He shrugged.

  When they reached Vinnie’s house, Laura sat in the driver’s seat so they wouldn’t get a ticket while Angelo and Vinnie helped Maria inside.

  “What will I do if a cop asks me to move?” she asked nervously. “I don’t even have a driver’s license.”

  “If they see you, they won’t ask,” Vinnie said, motioning Angelo to take Maria’s other side.

  When they got Maria into the apartment, they propped her up so she could sit on the convertible sofa in the living room. Adela, Vinnie’s wife, put a plaid blanket over Maria’s legs and tucked it in, covering the worn green upholstery. She fidgeted with the doily, crocheted by Vinnie’s mother, that covered the back of a grass-green armchair.

  “Maria always liked to be with people,” Adela said, trying to think of something good to say.

  “With her family,” Nino corrected.

  “You’re right about that,” Laura said, relieved to be out of the car. “She was all for her family. Whatever she was,” she said resignedly, sitting on a heavy mahogany side chair, “her place is with us.”

  “Living or dead?” Angelo asked dryly.

  While Vinnie called Father Romano, Adela brought out cold cuts and put them on the large table that filled most of the room. She went back to the kitchen and heated up the lasagna she had made two days before. They sat around the table and nodded that this was probably Maria’s last dinner on this side.

  “My son, Vinnie Junior, made this himself,” said Vinnie, putting a gallon jug on the table. “He has all the equipment and a real touch. It’s better than Chianti.” He filled water glasses half full and passed them around. “It’s also good with Seven-Up, but taste it this way first.” He raised his own glass. “I guess we could drink this one for Maria.” He held his glass toward her. “May you find your rest,” he said genially.

  “May you find your rest!” they echoed.

  By the time Father Romano showed up they were relaxed and filled with warmth. Nino hobbled to the door as Adela was telling him how glad she was to see him and offering him a glass of wine.

  “Nino,” Father Romano said, surprised. “You here? It’s been a few years now since I’ve seen you,” he said, taking in his gray face and his cane. “When did this happen?” he asked, covering Nino’s lameness with a sweep of his hand.

  “It’s been a while now,” Nino said. “I couldn’t run for first base today.”

  Tony Romano shook his head. “We’re all getting older,” he said. “Who was taken?”

  “Maria,” Nino said. “It was Maria.”

  “I remember her very well,” Father Romano lied. “She was . . . ,” he groped for words, “ . . . so full of life.”

  “In those days we were all full of life. Remember how we would run around the hills in Ventimiglia and hide out in the cemetery?” Nino asked. “Now, one by one, we’re going in. Remember the sign over the entrance?”

  Father Romano thought for a minute. “It doesn’t come back,” he said.

  “You were thinking of other things then. Then,” Nino prodded him with his cane, “you weren’t so respectable.”

  “What did it say?” Father Romano asked.

  “It said: ‘Remember you who enter me; as we are now so you shall be.’”

  Father Romano smiled. “She was a wonderful woman, Maria. All for her children. At least,” he continued, stepping toward her chair, “she left among those she loved.” He raised his hand in benediction and began, while they all gathered around Maria, “Nomine Patris, Filii, Spiritus Sancti. . . .”

  When he left, telling Nino he would come to see him, they all felt suddenly low. They went back to the table, and Adela brought out pastry and coffee while Laura cleared the lasagna dishes.

  “Don’t you think it’s time to call the funeral parlor and have her picked up?” Laura said, sitting down.

  “We haven’t finished having coffee,” Nino told her. “Sit down.”

  “We don’t even have a death certificate,” Laura said.

  “You don’t need a piece of paper to tell you she’s gone,” Vinnie said. “Around here, Moretti’s takes care of everything.”

  “Laura’s right,” said Angelo. “I’ll call the funeral parlor. They may take a while to come.”

  “Romano always had a good heart,” Nino said. “They don’t make priests like that anymore.”

  “He’s OK,” Vinnie agreed, “maybe a little too fond of the wine.”

  “Where’s Junior and Adele Ann?” Laura asked.

  “He’s working on his car and she’s out with her boyfriend,” Vinnie said, looking at his watch. “Maybe Moretti’s will come for Maria before they get home.”

  “It’s better that they don’t know what happened,” Laura said. “I’ll tell Gina Maria died, but nothing else. This business might give them wrong ideas. How can you make them respect religion if they know what you have to go through just to make the Church do the right thing?”

  “Well,” Vinnie said, “they came through after all. Those Irish twerps aren’t the Church. Romano with all his faults understands more.�
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  “You’re right,” said Laura. “It’s people like Maria who always say the wrong thing who need the Church. It was wrong not to pray for her. It’s a sin to be like that,” she said.

  “We’ll gain an indulgence for this,” Adela said, not content to leave it with an insult to the priest.

  “Don’t be too sure,” Vinnie said. “Didn’t they do away with indulgences when they got rid of Saint Christopher?”

  “They’ll send someone for Mom,” Angelo said, coming back from the telephone. “They’re not busy tonight.”

  “And the doctor?” asked Laura.

  “They have someone. You were right,” he said to Vinnie. “The old neighborhood is different.”

  “Have another drink,” Adela urged. “You look tense. It isn’t every day you lose a mother.”

  “I haven’t lost her yet,” said Angelo, nodding toward Maria. “She’s still here. Alive or dead, her place is with her family, right?” His stomach seemed to beat, contracting and relaxing in a painful rhythm.

  “Calm down,” Adela advised.

  “I’m not tense,” Angelo snapped. “I’m not upset! I just wonder why we have to do things this way. The lying, carrying her body around, talking to her as though she were alive. If she were she would have told you she didn’t give a damn where she was buried. She didn’t care about those things.”

  “At the end,” Nino said, “everyone cares about those things. She would never have found her rest buried in a place far from her family, in ground that had never been blessed.”

  “Even your father is there,” Laura added.

  “Yeah,” said Vinnie. “Maybe they play the mandolin on the other side too.”

  “There is no other side,” said Angelo. “And if there were, what difference would a prayer make that was said as the result of all this lying? There is no truth in it.”

  “Truth?” asked Vinnie, irritated.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Nino. “You think that Irishman’s prayer would have counted more? When I was a boy my mother would tell me how they treated the Italian priests like servants. You think their prayers count more than ours?”

  “This is different,” Angelo insisted. “This is a deliberate fraud.”

  “Fraud!” Nino shouted furiously. “It’s not your place to worry about whether God feels tricked or not. It’s not your worry, it’s His. It’s your job to make sure your mother is buried in the right place. What happens afterwards is out of your hands. Anyway, God doesn’t think in terms like ‘fraud.’”

  “How do you know how God thinks?” demanded Angelo.

  “I don’t,” Nino admitted. “But it doesn’t matter. Look, you’re tired. You’ve been through a lot. Don’t worry about what is or isn’t true.” He softened. “You’re a good boy, Angelo, but you’re confused. She brought you up to follow the rules, but you were born here and you haven’t made up your mind which rules to follow. If you look for rules based on ‘truth’ and ‘feelings’ you’ll make yourself unhappy because you’ll never find a foolproof way of telling which is which. You’ll spoil your life worrying over nothing you can solve. I’m Maria’s older brother. Your father is dead, you are young. It’s my place to bury her correctly even though she shot her mouth off like a woman.”

  “You think the way you do things is a solution?” Angelo demanded. “You’re always arguing for the old ways. You don’t just follow them, you hang on to them as though they’re all that’s saving you from going under. But they don’t help. They have no meaning here. Look at Carlino!” Angelo said.

  “Your brother is much older than you,” Vinnie broke in. “Don’t bring him into this.”

  “In Italy he had to get married,” Angelo went on, ignoring him. “The parents of his girl tell him, ‘You don’t marry Luisa, your bones go to America, not you.’ She’s sixteen; he’s thirty-two. They have nothing in common. But he marries her. They have the baby.”

  “If there was a baby,” Adela said, “they had something in common.”

  “It was right for her father to make him marry her if he had . . .” Nino made a gesture.

  “But what good was it? He was twice her age. Over there, maybe things would work out. But they are here. The child is seven, in school. Luisa learned English and has a good job. Now she wants a divorce because she doesn’t love him. Her parents tell her if she gets a divorce they will never speak to her again. He’s afraid she’ll leave. If she leaves, he says he’ll have nothing. She serves papers on him twice, but she doesn’t leave the house.”

  “That’s right,” Laura interrupted. “A woman should never be the one to leave the house.”

  “Let him finish,” Nino said.

  “So they live together. Nothing goes on between them. They just . . . coexist in the same house. Everyone else in this country gets a divorce. Everyone else dies without being hauled around in search of a priest who doesn’t ask questions. But not us. With us, if you were brought up one way, forget it. Your life is set in cement. There’s no point in trying to change. Mom would have liked things to be different,” Angelo said. “She hated the way we live.”

  “You’re wrong,” Nino said. “She didn’t hate the way we live. She just wanted to be a little freer.” An image of Maria running through the streets of Ventimiglia, up the hill to the cemetery, racing after a pack of urchins, passed through his mind. “She liked to go her own way; for a woman she was something of an anarchist,” he mused. “She would get tired of the family, of doing what she was told. But she found,” Nino said, warming to his point, “that the ways which made her feel free only led to more and more responsibility.”

  “What responsibilities?” Angelo demanded. “What are you talking about?”

  “You,” Nino said. “You and your brothers and sisters. But once she discovered her duty, she did it, no matter what. She was an anarchist at heart,” he repeated. “If she could have changed things, she wouldn’t have changed them the way you want. You want to be one of them. You want to follow their rules instead of ours. But what are their rules? Premarital sex with contraceptives? Marriage vows you can change your mind about three weeks later? Contracts for everything that show you mistrust everyone you deal with? When we want to change we don’t put our trust in other people’s rules. We assume the burden. Look at Carlo Tresca! Look at your uncle Sal! Remember your cousin Gesuele!” Nino hoisted himself up on his cane. “That is individualism like Seneca praised—personal responsibility for the good of others. Your mother knew the price of the freedom she wanted. She paid it. Her life is in order. You see?” he demanded, flourishing his cane. “She has come to rest. You look at us and you see we are crude. I know what you think. You think I am a cripple because I can’t control my diabetes, my appetite. You think that your mother died with nothing but a few records. I look at us and I see that whatever we are, and no matter what we feel, we do the right thing.

  “That young priest was one of you,” Nino cried. “He put a stain on his soul just to follow rules. He thinks he’s right because he followed the book. You can’t absolve yourself by following a book. Romano knows that. You look down on him because he accepts things. He doesn’t ask questions because he knows the answers don’t matter. What’s right doesn’t have anything to do with opinions, answers, personal things. There is no middle ground of contracts, sincerity, feelings,” he said with disgust. “And the ways you want to follow are even worse than the priest’s. Changing this, changing that. Sooner or later you’ll see that everything that changes, changes for the worse. You know one of the worst punishments in Dante’s hell was to doom a soul to change forever from one thing to another. If Dante were alive today, he would say, ‘That soul is a spoiled kid.’” Nino shook his cane.

  “Take it easy,” Vinnie said. “Every time you let your diploma talk, you don’t sound like yourself. Angelo is OK. He’s one of us, aren’t you, Angelo,” he said soothingly. “It isn’t easy to lose a mother like Maria, and he’s holding up very well.”


  “Be careful,” Nino said, pointing to Angelo, but winding down, “that you don’t let her down by becoming a fool. Don’t question whether she should have received the rites or if she should be buried with the likes of us. You are a man. You are supposed to know who you are and what you want.”

  “He knows, he knows,” Vinnie said, “he just wants to be accepted. They all want that.”

  Angelo sat, seething. He could never figure why, since Nino was so obviously wrong, it was so hard to beat him. His certainty gave him an edge, but that couldn’t be all of it. Gina thought he was really attracted to Nino’s opinions because Nino made everything make sense. When he talked, Gina said, everything hung together in one piece, like a glued puzzle. Even what didn’t fit, didn’t fit for reasons you could understand. Things could go wrong, or break down, but that was only a lapse in a system that was totally synchronized. “You’ll never get the better of him,” Gina had told Angelo, “because you would like things to make sense, too. You don’t argue with your whole heart.” Angelo had been suspicious that she was putting him down, but she wasn’t. “What do you do?” he had demanded roughly, “if you have it figured?”

  “Me? I don’t do anything at all,” she had replied with a smile. “I believe everything he says.” He had turned away, disgusted. But he was here doing everything Nino said, and where was she?

  “You make me sick,” Angelo said to Nino.

  “It’s a sin to fight in front of your mother,” Laura said as the doorbell rang.

  “Whether I make you sick or not,” Nino said darkly, “answer the door and take your mother to the funeral home.”

  Angelo got up and walked to the door. He watched as the men from Moretti’s put Maria on a stretcher and followed them out without saying goodbye to anyone.

  “What makes you sick,” Nino called out after him, “is that you can’t admit you’re one of us.”

  Angelo slammed the door.

  “What a terrible thing for Maria’s last dinner to end in a fight like that,” said Adela, “when the lasagna was still good.”

  “It was even better than it was on Sunday,” Nino agreed.