The House at the Edge of Night (31 page)

Years later, when both of them had grown up and ceased to have anything to do with each other, Maria-Grazia would struggle to remember a time when her two sons had not been at war.

The boys were born what their English great-aunt and -uncle, in the stiff congratulatory letter they sent to the island after their second nephew's birth, called “Irish twins.” They emerged at the bracket ends of the year: Sergio in January 1954, Giuseppino the following December. The arrival of Sergio was prefaced by a forty-hour breech labor. In its worst throes, at four in the morning of the second night, Maria-Grazia swore again and again to Robert that she would never have another child.

But the day she carried Sergio home from the hospital in Siracusa, the three of them bundled in Robert's overcoat on the thwart of the ferryboat
Santa Maria della Luce,
he tenderly stroking her bruised sides, she changed her mind. “We'll have another one after all,” she said. “Only we'll have to hurry, before I lose my nerve.”

If Robert was alarmed at this news, he did not say so. “
Cara,
” he said, “we'll do whatever you like.” Before the infant Sergio could sit up by himself or take solid food, the elderly customers of the House at the Edge of Night had reason to gossip once more at the ballooning of Maria-Grazia's ankles and her sudden rushes from the bar to plunge her head in some lavatory or wastepaper basket. “That Englishman of yours is a force to be reckoned with,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman, prodding Maria-Grazia in the side, eliciting sniggers from the elderly
scopa
players.

But nothing now could shame Maria-Grazia. “These island men can take note,” she said, eliciting a chorus of hooting laughter from the fishermen in the corner.

Giuseppino emerged on his due date, obligingly headfirst. The delivery took less than an hour. Afterward, relatives and neighbors would never cease to point out this difference to Maria-Grazia, as though it revealed some profound fact about the character of each child. And perhaps that was where the trouble began.

The first thing that Sergio did, when the second baby was brought home, was crawl over to its cradle. Dragging himself to the foot of the crib, the infant Sergio hauled himself up by its bars and looked in. “Oh,” cried his grandmother Pina, moved. “See—he wants to greet his new brother.”

Instead, Sergio roared in the face of the other baby, startling it into tears. Sergio would not stop roaring until Pina had borne him away.

This was odd, for as Maria-Grazia remembered it, her younger boy, Giuseppino, had been the one who had started every argument ever since.

ROBERT HAD PLANNED,
in the joy that had followed her consenting to marry him, to take sole charge of the bringing up of the two children while Maria-Grazia handled the affairs of the bar.

But the care of the boys was not a thing that could be parceled out to one adult. It was a messy, disorderly thing, liable to engulf every nearby relative, to deprive all of them of sleep. The two babies could not be left alone together. Very quickly they wore both their mother and father out. In the spring of 1955, Concetta came in search of Maria-Grazia and found her asleep behind the counter of the bar, the customers having resorted to getting their own coffee and liquor. Rousing Maria-Grazia, the two of them traced Robert by the screaming to the red-tiled upstairs bathroom, where he was close to tears in a mess of baby shit and talcum powder, while Sergio was striking Giuseppino great blows to the head with one fist. Concetta considered all this with narrowed eyes. Then she knelt, retrieved Sergio from the puddle behind the toilet cistern, wiped Giuseppino's soiled backside, and supplied Signor Robert with a handkerchief.

“Oh, Concetta!” wept Maria-Grazia, who had followed her up the stairs and now witnessed the rage of her two sons. “These babies hate each other!”

“Now,” said Concetta, in the tone she had first learned from Pina Vella. “That's silly.”

“We can't manage any longer!” cried Maria-Grazia. “I can't get down to the bar, and Robert can't take care of both of them all by himself, and my mother and father are too old—” For Amedeo was eighty now, Pina close behind him, and she was afflicted by a swelling of the feet that had diminished her at last, so that she could only limp and hobble after the babies. “The business will be ruined,” said Maria-Grazia, “and these boys will kill each other before they're ten years old.”

“It's just fighting,” said Concetta. “All children fight. When I was a child I fought everything that moved. Other children, dogs, lizards. Your brothers must have fought, too, didn't they?”

“But not like this,” cried Maria-Grazia.

“Now, now, Mariuzza,” said Robert, putting a hand on her back comfortingly. “We'll find some way to resolve things.”

But their mother's despair had penetrated even the enraged consciousnesses of the two brothers. They ceased their warring for a moment and looked up at her, gazing with matching opal eyes from beneath peaked English eyelids. Sergio was a sage infant, with a curiously oversized face that gave him the look of a statue, some bald professor or diplomat from a nineteenth-century bust. Giuseppino, meanwhile, was a red little thing, alert, watchful, constantly spoiling for a fight. Concetta seized him and bore him out of his brother's sight, into the doorway, where she fastened the diaper with admirable speed and lulled him into calm.

But Concetta, despite her command of the warring babies, was not herself, Maria-Grazia saw now. Her shoulders were a little bowed down, her usual bright face somewhat pallid. The girl had been suffering troubles of her own. All spring, the island had been aflame with rumor about the girl and her father, Signor Arcangelo.

It had been known for some time that Arcangelo was vexed with his wayward youngest child. Concetta, according to her father, was supposed to be at an age when she put on long skirts and began to consider a husband. And instead here she was running about the island with the teenage sons of the fishermen, lighting fires and plunging into the sea in ripped-off slacks. She appeared to have grown out of her childhood seizures. And now she refused to be prayed for any longer, and had—during one particularly fierce argument, audible through Arcangelo's open windows all over the southern part of the town—flung her rosary out into the courtyard, announcing herself a heathen like Agata-the-fisherwoman.

This had gone on from Epiphany to the festival of the Presentation. On that night, after another particularly ferocious argument, Concetta had staged a rebellion. She left her father's shop in the midst of the last streaming storm of winter and proceeded, with a neat burlap sack containing all her belongings, along the main street, past the green fountain, through the Fazzolis' alleyway and up the poky passage grandly named Via Cavour, to arrive at the door of her great-aunt Onofria's house at a quarter past twelve. During her solitary march, which it seemed the whole town had witnessed from behind their curtains, everyone had observed the red marks running like a ladder up the backs of Concetta's arms and the bruises under her eyes. Concetta would not say where she had got them, claiming they had merely appeared like the stigmata of a saint, but any fool knew that when the backs of the arms were faintly lashed like that, the shoulders in between would be a mess of belt strokes.

Now, those islanders who had always sided with Arcangelo swung the tide of their favor toward Concetta. For the grocer, it emerged, had been beating her since she was a child. And other odd rumors surfaced: The girl had been made to sleep on the floor at her father's house, it was said, and had been ordered to hide away in the storage cupboard or the outside bathroom whenever a fit came over her to avoid alarming the shop's customers. Concetta did nothing to deny these rumors or confirm them. She merely shut herself up in the back bedroom of the widow Onofria's house and refused to come home.

“She's shamed me,” raged Arcangelo to
il conte. “
Can't you do something—bring her home, stop these lies about me spreading any further?” For his other children had always been so obedient: Filippo, who had followed him into the shop and now all but managed the place, allowing Arcangelo himself an easy retirement; and Santino, who worked as a land agent for
il conte
and rode about daily, swelling his father's heart with pride, beside
il conte
in the island's motorcar.

But
il conte
was not interested in the plight of his former friend. Since Andrea's departure, the count went about in distraction and seemed hardly to be listening at all. “Hasn't everyone beaten a stubborn child?” pleaded Arcangelo. “Hasn't everyone had to punish a son or a daughter? Am I to be held up for rebuke and shame because I've admonished my child—out of love, mind, not cruelty—merely in order to set her on the right path?”

“My wife and I never once beat Andrea,” said
il conte.
“You must solve your family troubles yourself. But”—here he extended a small scrap of comfort—“I daresay Concetta will come back once she's starving, for God knows the widow Onofria doesn't have enough about her to keep the girl.” For Onofria was one of
il conte
's dismissed peasants, and poor as a plowed field in winter, subsisting half on her wits and half on charity.

“Yes,” said Arcangelo, soothed. “Yes, yes—that Concetta'll be back soon, damn her, in time for the visit of her cousin Cesare for the Sant'Agata festival, and with any luck he'll consent to take her off my hands this year. She'll be old enough to marry.”

“Face down this shame,” counseled
il conte
. “And deal with Concetta once she comes home.”

But Concetta had other ideas. Now, kneeling beside Maria-Grazia with Sergio held prisoner by the scruff in one hand, Giuseppino squalling in the other, she said, “It's this business with my father I want to talk to you about.”

“Yes,
cara
. Tell me.”

Always, Maria-Grazia had loved the girl. Now Concetta, embarrassed and anxious for once in her life, proceeded with a little clearing of the throat: “I need work if I'm to keep myself and my old Zia Onofria. But who'll employ me after this disagreement with my father? People aren't fools. They know he's a great friend of
il conte
.”

“Work?” said Maria-Grazia. “What about school?”

Concetta straightened herself. “I left school last summer. I'll be eighteen.”

Eighteen. She had utterly missed the growing up of the child. Guilt burned at Maria-Grazia when she considered the beatings she had failed to notice, the odd marks she had always dismissed as belonging to the girl's wild adventures among the scrub grass and prickly pears. “I'd like to work here in the bar,” said Concetta. “Couldn't you employ me?”

Now Maria-Grazia understood the matter. “Go on.”

Concetta continued, all in a rush, “You need help—you've just said so yourself, you and Signor Robert—and I love the bar and I know how it works. I know how to make the coffee and the chocolate and do the accounts. Or I could take care of Sergio and Giuseppino. I'd be like Gesuina was, looking after you and your brothers when you were babies, except I'm not a hundred and twenty years old and blind like she was, God rest her soul.”

Maria-Grazia knew it would be a comfort to have the girl about every day, as she often had been as a child.

“Please, Maria-Grazia. Say yes. See how well I cleaned Sergio's ass just now—”

“That one's Giuseppino.”

“It doesn't matter—I'll learn which one's which. Please say yes, Maria-Grazia.”

“Yes,” said Maria-Grazia, and Robert said, “Of course, Concetta, you must work here. If Maria-Grazia agrees, you can begin at once.”

The following Monday, in a new black apron commissioned especially from the tailor Pasqualina to fit Concetta's small waist, in her one good dress pressed and sprinkled with lavender water, her cheeks gleaming with pride and a little anxiety, Concetta moved between the tables of the House at the Edge of Night for the first time in her official capacity as assistant to the bar. She heaved plates above her head with newfound grace, and listened to the tourists' orders with respectfully folded hands. “A miracle,” said Agata-the-fisherwoman. “Concetta tamed by you Espositos, when everyone else had given up hope.”

Meanwhile, Arcangelo went about with a face like bad weather, knowing he was shamed in everybody's eyes.

WITH CONCETTA IN THE HOUSE,
things began to proceed more calmly. She learned to startle the boys with a cry of
“Basta!”
just like Gesuina, and occupied them for hours in wild games of her own devising, until they were so exhausted that they forgot to be enemies. Proudly, she pushed them about town in their matching baby carriages, which Robert had yoked together with a broom handle so as to be able to propel both at once while keeping the boys separated—for even the sight of the other boy sharing his baby carriage filled each child with rage. Meanwhile, the bar had never been better tended, for Concetta had grown up in and out of the place, and she could carry a tray of drinks in one hand, heave the bawling Sergio in the other, and still remember an order of twelve pastries for Maria-Grazia behind the counter. More important, she loved the House at the Edge of Night. Maria-Grazia, looking back, didn't know how they had ever run the bar without her. Now, on every night on which she and Robert were able to sleep soundly, or retreat to their little room with the palm trees at the window and become again, for a few hours, the careless lovers they had been during the war, she offered the saint a silent prayer of thanks for the girl.

Concetta's father was seldom seen behind the counter of his shop any longer, leaving the running of it to his son Filippo. He spent his days in a vacant patch of earth beside the old Arab
tonnara,
where the young builder-fishermen 'Ncilino and Tonino had been employed to dig. “A new house,” speculated Agata-the-fisherwoman. “Why, the man's so shamed by the gossip about his daughter that he's decided to leave the town altogether.”