The Right Thing to Do Read online

  “He’s just a kid,” Vinnie said. “Don’t forget, of all Maria’s sons, he’s the one who helped. The others were glad to leave it to us. You have to go by what he did.”

  “He may be the best of them,” Nino said. “But you can’t excuse all of them by saying they’re just kids. They’re all just kids. Yours, mine, hers,” he gestured to where Maria had sat through dinner.

  “Sometimes they’re all just trouble,” Vinnie agreed. “My boy is all right, but he doesn’t have as much ambition as he should. Adele Ann is a sweet girl, but she’s too pretty for her own good.”

  Nino nodded. Adele Ann was a beauty. “They’re all after her?” he said.

  “They’re all after her,” Vinnie agreed. “It’s worse with a girl. What can you do? There’s a limit to how much you can watch. The neighborhood boys keep away. I mean, they behave because they’re afraid of me. But who knows who else she meets in school. Send a girl to school, you send her into trouble.”

  “You worry too much about it,” Laura said. “My father used to say, what’s the good of teaching a girl to write. If they can write, they get in trouble writing love letters! What an attitude! They do things different now than when we were young. It’s better. Nino had to take my father along every time we went to a movie. And I . . . ”—she hesitated to admit—“was twenty-seven. Remember, Nino?”

  “How could I forget?” Nino said sourly. “We were engaged for nine years.”

  “My father was afraid my sister would go to a dance one night when my mother was in the hospital and he had to visit her. So he actually tied her to the bed to stop her from going. That is insane. It’s good for them to go out and know each other. Then maybe they won’t make the mistakes we did.”

  “You aren’t saying we made mistakes,” Adela prodded.

  “No, no. I mean people of our time. In the olden days,” Laura said hastily.

  “You say that because you don’t have to worry about Gina. Not that she isn’t pretty. But she isn’t interested in boys,” Adela added quickly.

  Nino looked at Adela. Gina was pretty, but she wasn’t Adele Ann. Adele Ann looked like the young Ava Gardner, only more voluptuous.

  “Who knows what Gina’s interested in,” Nino said. “She doesn’t go out, not that much, but she gets phone calls all the time.”

  “What can happen on the telephone?” Laura asked.

  Nino looked at her. She was exasperating. “She’s secretive and deep,” he said. “She’s deep. You never know what she thinks. And she’s fresh. If you tell her she’s too secretive, she says, ‘Didn’t you teach me not to talk too much? Didn’t you always say,’” Nino mimicked, “‘Chi gioca solo non perde mai’? The man who plays alone never loses.”

  “That,” Vinnie said, “applies to men. A man has to keep his mouth shut to get on in the world. When a woman isn’t talking it means she has something to hide.”

  Nino nodded. Adela stared at Vinnie. Laura stared at her cannoli.

  “The way I see it,” Vinnie continued seriously, “I think she’s that way because you let her have her own room. It isn’t good for a girl to have that. She could sleep in the living room, like Adele Ann. Otherwise they get used to privacy. Too much privacy is no good for a girl. It spoils them.”

  “She has too many ideas of her own,” Nino agreed. “She thinks things will be possible that won’t be possible. She wants to go to college, so what does she do when I say yes? She listens to a teacher who tells her to apply to a fancy women’s college. I can tell her in advance she won’t get in. What do places like that want with Sicilian girls from Astoria? When the letter comes rejecting her, I open it and take it to high school so she would have to read it in front of the class. When she saw me, she thought I was bringing good news. She couldn’t imagine I would take the trouble with my leg to bring her a rejection. I figured she’ll start to cry, feel humiliated, and it will be all over. Instead she reads the letter, doesn’t flinch, and says to me, ‘You know bad news can always wait.’ She just shrugs to her friends. Now she’s more determined. This one,” he shrugged, pointing to Laura, “only eggs her on.”

  “What’s wrong if she goes to college?” Laura demanded, barely able to contain herself. “Do you think I brought her up so she could be tied to a chair, or sleep in a living room? She could be an elementary school teacher. That’s a good job for a woman. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing if that’s all she’ll learn. But that isn’t what she wants,” Nino said with a mildness that should have made Laura suspicious.

  “What do you think she wants?” Laura asked.

  “She wants,” Nino said comfortably, “to get away from me. Just like Angelo,” he said. “She wants to be one of them. But she can’t be.” He began to nibble his sfogliatelli again.

  “She won’t be one of them?” Laura demanded angrily. “Why not? You think she’s not good enough?”

  “No,” Nino said, “that has nothing to do with it. She’ll never feel she belongs the way she does with us.”

  “She doesn’t feel she belongs with us,” Laura protested.

  “But she does,” Nino said with finality.

  “Maybe you’ve been trying the wrong approach,” Vinnie suggested. “You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Tell her since your stroke you can’t afford to let her go; you need the money from her working.”

  “She is working,” Nino admitted. “She has a full-time summer job at Columbia.”

  “She’s willing to work her way through?” Vinnie asked.

  Nino nodded.

  “Then what can you do.” Vinnie shrugged. “You should be glad she’s ambitious. Why don’t you encourage her? If you set yourself against this, it will only make trouble. See how it goes first.”

  “That’s it, Vinnie,” Laura said. “Why should they live like us?”

  “What’s wrong with the way we live?” Nino asked. “My father used to say, ‘When you leave the old ways, you know what you will lose, but not what you will find.’ That’s a Sicilian proverb.”

  “Remember the Neapolitan proverb, ‘When there’s no money coming in the door, love flies out the window’?” Laura demanded.

  “What has that got to do with anything?” Nino said.

  “Everything. I mean, not the money, but the way of living. When we had a chance to buy a house, you wouldn’t do it. You would rather live in a tenement. We don’t even know anyone who lives in an elevator building. You’re the only person I ever heard say good things about the Depression,” Laura said in disgust. “Where did your education get you?”

  “People were nicer in the Depression,” Nino said. “Less pretentious.”

  Laura went on furiously. “You’re happy if you can take a train to Yankee Stadium and eat hot dogs. In the meantime you brood about everybody who wants to do something else. You think everyone will fail or go wrong before they even try.” She stuck her thumb angrily in Vinnie’s ashtray and rubbed ashes onto it. “You want to mourn?” she said harshly. “Here,” she yelled, rubbing her thumb on his forehead. “You can have Ash Wednesday early this year!”

  “Laura!” Adela said, shocked. “Calm down.”

  “He doesn’t mourn for his sister because she’s dead. He drinks wine to his sister. But he mourns for my daughter because she’s alive!” Laura said angrily.

  “She secretive, she’s deep, and you encourage her,” Nino said quietly. “Put on your sweater.”

  “We’ve all been through a lot,” Vinnie said. “We all worry about the kids. Let’s just forget this. It was good that we could have a drink with Maria at the end.”

  “May she rest in peace,” Laura murmured, shocked at what she had done.

  “May she rest in peace,” Adela agreed.

  When Laura and Nino reached the street, Laura said, “I shouldn’t have gotten so upset in front of them.”

  “No,” Nino agreed, “you shouldn’t have.”

  “You shouldn’t have said those things about Gina in publ
ic,” Laura persisted.

  When will she learn to shut up? Nino thought to himself. This one won’t keep quiet and the other one won’t talk. The BMT rumbled; the car, covered with graffiti, careened rheumatically from side to side. He closed his eyes, gathering peace from the steady noise that drowned out all other sounds. Tony Romano was free, he thought. No wife, no daughter. No wonder he looked so young. Nino shook his head and sat silently, his hands resting on his cane, all the way to their stop.

  When they reached home Nino unlocked the door, held it open, and watched Laura walk into the apartment. They had no foyer, but instead a hall twenty feet long and thirty inches wide with a humped floor curving over a water pipe that had been laid beneath it. On either side of the wall hung family photographs, images that seemed to fall away from Nino as he limped past them. In the dim light, the eyes of the living and the dead seemed to stare at each other like adversaries poised on opposite sides of the hall. Faces from the past, they were locked in their separate frames, confronting each other, never together. There was nothing but memory to press them into a whole, into one family portrait. And no one but Nino seemed to want that. The ashes Laura had pressed upon him seemed to have fallen between him and Vinnie, dividing even them. Vinnie would think less of him because she did it.

  “Make me some coffee,” Nino called out.

  Laura gave no reply, but in the white kitchen where the walls glared under a round flourescent light, she reached for the coffee pot still on the range.

  Nino watched her from the doorway, his face gray and grim. He opened the cabinet where Laura kept the dishes they used every day. He took out a dinner plate and threw it to the floor. Then he threw another and another until the linoleum was strewn with bits of flower-patterned crockery and shards of glass seemed to have gone everywhere.

  “You think you can criticize me in front of my nephew and get away with it! You think you can humiliate me with ashes!” Nino demanded.

  Laura stood silently, watching him.

  “Never do that again! If a wife can’t say anything positive about her husband, she shouldn’t say anything at all. You insult my dead sister, you encourage my daughter to rebel. You had better start behaving like my wife!” Nino’s voice, full and low in its rage, hardened. “You’ve gone too far. You and Gina have gotten out of hand. It’s going to stop! Do you understand?”

  Laura nodded. She had pushed him too far. He wouldn’t listen to her until he calmed down. She waited for his anger to pass.

  Nino could see that she was humoring him. Whenever she behaved sensibly and didn’t say anything to make more trouble it turned out to be a ploy, he thought. He picked up a coffee cup and threw it on the floor.

  “Now clean up this mess,” he said quietly, turning away. He went into the living room and sat down in his favorite chair. It was up to him to clean up the mess she had made of Gina. His body ached from the long day and the effort of doing right by Maria. His loss of her inflamed the painful memories of all that had ever eluded him. It was terrible how everything was falling apart. Where was the order, the wholeness of life? The dead became dust, but the living too seemed to fall from his fingers, blown here and there by the will to escape and outrage the obligations they had to each other.

  Nino could hear Laura angrily slamming what was left of the dishes into the metal garbage pail. The smell of coffee was beginning to fill the apartment. Nino smiled wearily. How like her to be furious at him while she made him coffee at the same time. She could never escape his reach and yet she had let their daughter grow slippery and elusive. A dark apprehension of what it might take to bring Gina back in line overtook him. But Gina, he resolved, tightening his grip on the arm of his chair, would not get away.

  Two

  “Pops,” said the fruit man, “your daughter passed by at three-thirty. She was carrying a load of books for over there,” he added, nodding toward the library.

  “Thanks,” said Nino, limping into the fruit store. “How are the tangerines today?” He tore open the spicy skin to sample it himself. “Give me five,” he said, assessing the tart juice. It was good to be in a neighborhood where everybody knew you. He had been here for forty-two years now. He knew every empty lot, garage, playground. When he was still a youth worker he would ferret his kids out from under cars where they were trying to stash drugs, from playgrounds where they played basketball and drank beer instead of going to school. Now they were in their thirties, some of them. He’d meet them on the street, walking their kids. They would show them off; they would tell him he straightened them out. They would try not to look surprised at how white-eyed and crippled he had become. They were good kids at heart, Nino thought. Stealing cars, robbing phone booths—it was what you could expect. It was different with his last boy, the fifth-grader who had set fire to P.S. 5 just to see the panic-stricken rush for safety, wondering how many kindergarteners would be trampled.

  He tucked the bag of tangerines under his arm, turned the corner, sat heavily on a bench, and waited. Here everything was in order. He could see the library two blocks away, the playground across the street where mothers pushed babies in little swings at one end and old men played bocce at the other. Some of the old men had dug up the grass and planted tomatoes. Johnny, the old carpenter, had built an arbor with latticework across the top. The grapevines nearly covered it now. It would be cool and sweet in there, Nino thought appreciatively. He kept his back to the space where P.S. 5 had been. Six stories of old red brick surrounded by a cement yard, the school had filled the middle of the block. How many teenagers he had retrieved from the monkey bars where they sat smoking pot on summer nights! It was all gone. All the rubble had been cleared away and only a swept, fenced-in emptiness was left. Somehow it was ominous, that space where nothing happened now.

  Still, why couldn’t Laura like it around here anymore? He knew she had been disappointed when he had refused to take the house by the river. But buying it would have meant borrowing from her father and living with him. How could he when the old man was so rigidly set in his ways? Laura had wanted to live near the river, on the sweet street, the winding block of private houses with yards filled with rose-bushes and fig trees. The masons and construction people who had made money all lived there, some in houses fantastic with stone grottoes to the Blessed Virgin, with cement animals coyly wide-eyed, with stone doghouses that looked like monuments to a dead emperor. Winding down to the river, toward the field where young men played soccer, the street ended in Astoria Park, where the park met the shore. The river beach, stippled with rocks and pebbles, invited all the kids to send pebbles soaring over the water, plopping in a finale of spreading circles. Across the river stood the skyline of Manhattan, rippling shadows over the oily water, the late-afternoon sun turning the river-city into a mirage of power and defiance. Unreal beyond the fig trees and little rosebush gardens, Manhattan was always there, a foreign country with different ways. In the park, huge stone columns that supported the Triboro Bridge had been fenced off so nobody could climb them; the arching steel and cement curving up against the immense weight of the roadway soared toward the city and beyond. If it seemed like a route to possibility, it also implied that some possibilities were out of reach.

  Nino was so absorbed he almost failed to notice Gina walking down the library steps. She was all dressed up, he noticed sourly, and she carried a paper bag. Nobody dresses like that for a library. The city, he thought. She must be going to the city dressed like that. He moved as quickly as he could to the El, crossing the street so he could climb the stairway she wouldn’t take. The green banister, warm under his hand, helped prop him up step by step as he hurried to the top. He had to get there before she saw him. He hobbled out of the stairwell just in time to see through the grimy window that she had reached the opposite stairway. Right again!

  Dropping his token in, Nino moved to the shadowy end of the platform, past the token seller in the throne room they had built for coin changers years before. Now the fancy cupola seemed
feathered, peeling and fluttering huge green paint chips like a molting bird in the stale air. Nino settled into the shadows of the platform and opened his newspaper in front of his face. No matter that it wasn’t today’s. The thing was to have one folded in your pocket all the time, just in case. She always goes to the other end of the platform to see over the dome of Saint Demetrios’s church. But the train was already rumbling behind him. She reached the platform and sprinted, so intent on making it she didn’t see him limping into the third car. He moved to the second car while the train was in the tunnel. He could see her through the glass windows in the doors between the cars. She had stood up, waiting for the train to stop at Fifty-ninth Street. She can’t wait to get out, he thought. Is she just going to Bloomingdale’s? He pushed the question away because Bloomingdale’s wouldn’t make her look that eager. And what was she carrying in that bag? My bag! he remembered suddenly. He must have left it on the bench.

  She had been so eager to make the train that it had taken Gina a minute after sitting down to realize that she had glimpsed Nino limping into another car. What can he want in the city? she wondered. Me! it came to her. He is following me. Had he done it before? It was shocking, sickening; his hobbled pursuit of her radiated mistrust, contempt for her privacy; it showed how low he must have held her to think it was necessary. She began to feel dizzy and hot with rage. Even the spectacular view of the city she always waited for, as the curving rails peaked before the train descended into the tunnel, couldn’t dispel her shock. She rose, moving to the door, staring out the window as the train fled underground.

  For a long time now, she could see that she was everything to him, that he could only deal with losing her by controlling her life, so that whatever happened to her would show his mark. You don’t have to do this, Nino, she whispered to the shut door. How could it have come to this? He had always been so kind—wonderful, really—when she was little. The trips to the park, the circus, the patience he had playing catch with her, the hours of talk, talk, talk, the trips to the Statue of Liberty, his rhapsodic, crazy feeling for city streets—there had been a lot between them. And then there came his somber and suspicious looks, his careful observations of her at weddings, in the neighborhood, until he seemed to be all eye. Totally vigilant, he watched what she ate, what she left, what she read. Why had it happened? What had she done? The subway hurtled noisily through the tunnel, lurching from side to side, throwing her against the door.