The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (100 page)

"Rock-a-bye baby!" she yelled down over their heads. "On the tree top! When the wind blows—"

Aldo, coming out of the family coats, put a grip around her neck for the last time. But even while he did it, instinct, too, told her she could not scream that way any longer. She was here.

"
Ecco! Ecco!
" came Mama's own voice, wildly excited. "
Mamma
mia!
" There she was, halfway across the yard.

And where she pointed, almost in the center of everything, was a little, low, black figure waiting. It was the quietest and most substantial figure there, unagitated as a little settee, a black horsehair settee, in a room where people are dancing.

"But she doesn't look like her picture!" cried Gabriella. And her foot came down and touched something hard, the hard ground of Naples. Out of it came a strange, rocking response—as if the earth were shocked on its part, to be meeting their feet. Then the coats were bundled in her arms.

"O.K.," said Aldo. "Got to line up my stuff and try for a train. Good-by, Mr. Ambrogio!" he shouted. "Don't let 'em try to keep you over here!" And off he went, at an odd trot.

"We shall never meet again!" Mr. Ambrogio, standing at the foot of the gangway now with his arm raised like a gladiator, had found words. Then, raising the other arm too, he half ran through the moving game of ball, to be gathered in by some old ladies—just like the ones he'd been escorting across the ocean. But in his consideration he did not even knock down Poldy's stack of suitcases and cardboard boxes, neat as a little house in the thick of the disembarkation.

"Gabriella Serto! You want to stay on ship?" Mama had seized her and was taking her through the crowd. "Think who you keep waiting! You want to go to Genoa?" Mama was first pushing her ahead, then pulling her back and shoving herself in front.

"
Mamma mia!
"

"Crocefissa!"

Mama threw herself forward and arms came up and embraced her.

Then Mama herself was set to one side by a small brown hand with a thin gold ring on it. And there was Nonna, her big, upturned, dia- mond-shaped face shimmering with wrinkles under its cap of white hair and its second little cap of black silk. So low and so full of weight in all her shawls, she not only looked to be seated there—she was. Amply, her skirts covered whatever she was resting on.

Nonna drew Gabriella down toward all her blackness, which the sun must have drenched through and through until light and color yielded to it together, and to which the very essence of that smell in the air—of cinnamon and cloves, bananas and coffee—clung. Raising Gabriella's chin, Nonna set a kiss on one of her cheeks, then the other. Nonna's own cheek, held waiting, was brown as a nut and dainty as a rose. She gave Gabriella an ancient, inviting smile.

"
Si,
" she said. "
Si.
"

As Nonna began to address Gabriella, the very first words were so beautiful and without reproach, that they seemed to leave her out. Nothing had prepared Gabriella for the
sound
of Nonna. She couldn't understand a word. Her gaze wavered and fell. A little way off in the crowd she saw the feet of Miss Crosby, raised on tiptoe beside a suitcase.
She
had learned only one thing the whole way over,
i gabbiani.
And there, poor Maria-Pia Arpista, rigid as though bound and gagged, was being carried off by a large and shouting family, who were proudest of all of the baby's coming to meet her. But Nonna had not finished, already? Here was Mama rushing her off to the Customs.

Afterwards, there was Nonna watching for them in her same place, as they came out of the shed with their baggage behind them. The porter in a kind of madness—he was an old man—had thrown their trunk over his back, taken their suitcases, and then had seized the coats as well, and even the little hatbox that had been swinging since early morning on its string from Gabriella's finger, like a reminder. Now she had nothing but her purse.

And there apart stood Papa. Nobody had come to meet Papa. Even as Gabriella saw him, he was deciding not to wait. Bearing on his cane, still in the same old olive-colored sweater—why should she have expected that hole to be sewed up by this morning?—he walked, with nothing to carry, away into the widening sunlight as if he had blinders on. He's only come home to die, thought Gabriella. All the way over,
he
might have been the oldest and the poorest one. Mama pretended not to see him go. Her curiosity about Papa had long ago been satisfied; he had nobody: she knew it. It was the punishment for marrying twice.

Nonna, when they reached her, said calmly, "We will wait one little moment longer. A dizziness—it will pass."

Mama crossed herself, and laid her instant, tender hand to Nonna's cheek. The porter just as instantly shed every bit of the baggage to the ground

"Are you seventy-six too,
Signora?
" he asked. But he had meant it not disrespectfully, but respectfully, for he stood inclined, with a musing finger against his cheek, against a pillar he had made of the trunk dressed with the coats. She raised her eyes to the empty
Pomona
standing over them still—not empty, for Mr. Ugone still rode aboard, with Genoa yet to come. She could actually see him at that minute, standing at the rail with his cigar in his hand; but he did not see her. His gaze was bent and seemed lost on Poldy—still playing there with some of the little urchins, so that the dock took on the echoing sound of a playground just before dark. Maybe the surest people, thought Gabriella, are also the most forgetful of what comes next. All around was the smell of yellow leaves.

"Look what I see!" cried Mama, without ceasing to pat Nonna's cheek. "Mr. Scampo! Ah, I thought we had seen the last of him. On board ship—poor
mamma mia!
—he was passionately running after our Gabriella. It was necessary to keep an eye on her every minute."

"Her fatefulness is inherited from you, Crocefissa, my child," said Nonna.

"All my girls have been so afflicted, but five, like me, married by eighteen," Mama said—pat, pat, pat.

Aldo was coming toward them slowly, with his strange new walk of today, almost hidden by a large number of hopeful porters attacking him like flies from all sides. He did not wave; but how could he? He was loaded down. Gabriella did not wave herself, but suddenly missing the old, known world of the
Pomona,
she gave one brief scream. Nonna bent a considering head her way, as though to place the pitch.

"
That
she gets from her father," said Mama. "The
Siracusano!
"

"Ah," replied Nonna. "Daughter, where is my little fan? Somewhere in my skirts, thank you. With the years he has calmed himself, Achille? You no longer tremble to cross him?"

Gabriella said absently, "She should've seen him hit the ceiling when I flunked old typewriting."

"
Per favore!
" cried Mama to her. "Quiet about things you know nothing about, yet! Say good-by to Mr. Scampo."

Aldo had pulled a disreputable raincoat over his thick, new brown suit; even now he wore no hat, and his hair was down in his eyes. In addition to two suitcases he was carrying something as tall, bulky, and toppling as a man. It towered above his head.

Mama said, "If you think this fellow looks strong,
mamma mia,
I tell you now it is an illusion. He is delicate!"

"Only on Gala Night," protested Gabriella, "That's the one and only time he faded out of the picture. And so did you, Mama."

"We stop first thing at Santa Maria, to thank Holy Mother for one fate she saved you from!" Mama said. She shook her head one way, Nonna nodded hers in another.

"Hey! What you got in that thing, a dead body?" cried Gabriella to Aldo in good old English. She went bounding out to meet him.

"Watch out!" said Aldo, who seemed to have to walk in a straight line, by now, or fall. "You got nothing but just one trunk and those suitcases? You're luckier than you know."

"
You
watch out who you bump with that funeral coffin."

"
You
watch out how you talk about what I got. This is a musical instrument." With Gabriella there in his path, Aldo had to come to a full stop. The porters closed in in fresh circles of hope. "A cello," Aldo said, embracing it. Even one ear was being used to help hold it. "And after I rode it all the way in the bed over mine on the boat, the Naples Customs grabbed it right out the cover and banged the strings and took a stick and knocked all around inside it! I bet you heard it out here."

"What did you have in it?" called Mama.

"My socks!" Aldo shouted to Gabriella. "All my socks that my aunt knitted! It's going to be
cold
in Italy this winter!"

"Aldo, don't yell," said Gabriella. "That's my grandmother."

"Oh, yeah. She looks pretty well to me," said Aldo. "She ought not to've tried to meet a boat in Naples, though."

"Mother—excuse me—Mr. Scampo, a shipboard acquaintance," said Mama.

"
Il Romeo? Il pellegrino, Signore
Scampo?" murmured Nonna serenely. She moved a glistening black silk fan back and forth in front of her now, in a way that seemed to invite any confidence.

"I'm just saying good-by to Mrs. Serto and Gabriella, ma'am," said Aldo.

Gabriella had clapped her hand over her mouth. She cried, "Aldo! Did you hear her?
Romeo!
First Mama thought you were Dick Tracy or somebody, the time you spent studying crime the whole way over—now Nonna is asking if you're not a pilgrim!"

"And what did
you
ever think I was?" Aldo stared at her rudely, clasping his burden round in that clumsy and painful way that made him look as though
he
were the one to wonder how people ever parted.

"Yes,
Signore
?" said Nonna. "Perhaps you will tell us?"

"Well, ma'am, what I came to Italy for, since somebody really
asks
me, is study cello in Rome under the G.I. Bill," said Aldo. "
Musicista, Signora.
"

"
Sfortunato!
" exclaimed Nonna, and gave a familiar-sounding click of the tongue.

"I already have a son-in-law in Buffalo the same!" cried Mama.

There Aldo stood before the three of them.

"Hey, Aldo. Want to see our trunk real quick?" asked Gabriella gently. She moved over to it, and the porter swept off the coats, unveiling it. The Serto trunk stood there—its size, shape, and weight all apparent, also the rope that went around it and the original lock that nobody trusted, and the name "Serto" painted on the lid in the confident lettering of a pharmacist. It did not matter that the hand of Customs had gone romping through it—it was restored now to the miracle of ownership.

"It's full of presents, I can tell you," said Gabriella.

Advice arrived almost like gratitude upon Aldo's face, as pride had come upon hers. "Then keep your eye on it till you get it home," he told her. "A fellow in New York told me they'll steal them even from over your head, in Naples. With a kind of tongs, very nifty. Running around over the rafters of the Customs shed, or even hanging over the gate as you go out. Everybody here knows about it, and don't even try to stop it."

"Shame," said Mama. "That's not talking nice about Naples."

And again, as Nonna spoke to him too, he was pulled around in a daze.

"My mother is telling you, Mr. Scampo, the human voice alone is divine," said Mama with her little chin up. "Not the screeching of cats. She is telling you there still may be time to set right your mistake—she sees you so young. Of course, in
Napoli
, she once sang with Caruso."

Nonna was looking up at Aldo. No two smiles were the same in her face. Aldo had now turned dark red, and his head hung.

"Well, good-by, Aldo," said Gabriella in English, and he looked up already startled, as if to see someone he had never expected to see again.

"Be good," he replied formally, and momentarily setting the suitcases down, he shook hands with them all, even their porter, who joined the circle.

"Good-by, Mr. Scampo! Maybe we all meet at St. Peter's
Ognissanti
—who knows?" said Mama. That was what she'd said to everybody.

As Aldo staggered away, Gabriella reached out her hand and with her fingertips touched his cello—or rather its wrinkled outer covering, at once soft and imperious. It was like touching the forehead of an animal, from which horns might even start; but indeed, the old lady's withered and feminine cheek had felt just as mysterious to Gabriella's kiss. Aldo's back grew less and less familiar with every step, while the porters like a family of acrobats were leaping and crying in chorus, "
Stazione! Stazione!
" all around him. They all saw him pass, unrobbed and unaided, through the archway into the big Piazzf md away into the sliding life of the streets, and then Mama brought her handkerchief up to her face like a little nosegay of tears.
She
was being the daughter—the better daughter.

But Nonna was still the mother. Her brown face might be creased like a fig-skin, but her eyes were brighter now. Surely they knew everything. They had taken Gabriella for granted.

"Come now," Nonna said.

She stood up. She was smaller than Mama, she came only to Gabriella's shoulder. But as she turned around, a motion of her hand, folding shut the little fan and pointing away with it, told them they were none of them any too soon. She stood perfectly straight, and could have walked by herself, though Mama, with a cry of remembrance, seized hold of her. Gabriella took her place a step behind. The porter once more—he, one man, all alone, and possibly for nothing—shouldered the backbreaking luggage of women, to which now something extra was added—the little rush-bottomed fireside stool on which the old lady had been sitting. They all set off toward the gate.

Only for the space of a breath did Gabriella feel she would rather lie down on that melon cart pulled by a donkey, that she could see just disappearing around the corner ahead. Then the melons and the arch of the gate, the grandmother's folding of the fan and Mama's tears, the volcano of early morning, and even the long, dangerous voyage behind her—all seemed caught up and held in something: the golden moment of touch, just given, just taken, in saying good-by. The moment—bright and effortless of making, in the end, as a bubble—seemed to go ahead of them as they walked, to tap without sound across the dust of the emptying courtyard, and alight in the grandmother's homely buggy, filling it. The yellow leaves of the plane trees came down before their feet; and just beyond the gate the black country horse that would draw the buggy shivered and tossed his mane, which fell like one long silver wave as the first of the bells in the still-hidden heart of Naples began to strike the hour.