Women and Children First (20 page)

Then Alvar thinks: Change it how? And now, though he tries, he cannot imagine a different life—happiness and success in his work. He cannot imagine any life but more of the one he is living. Slowly the largeness of Alvar’s moment leeches away to nothing and Alvar knows beyond any doubt that he isn’t Gorky, he isn’t even Sarkisian. The promise of Gorky’s life—that genius can reveal itself at any minute—won’t necessarily hold for Alvar’s. For one thing, he is a smaller person. He should have begged to see Sarkisian’s work. But all Alvar wanted was for Sarkisian to
like
him. Even now, he is reacting in a small way, sizing himself against Sarkisian and Gorky. Alvar will always be the slow learner, the acolyte, the kid you send up to the roof with a garbage-can lid. Now he says, “I know a story about Henry James.”

“What’s that?” asks Sarkisian.

“I used to live in Cambridge,” Alvar says, “across from the Mount Auburn Street Cemetery. One night I brought a girl home. I pointed out the window. I said, ‘That’s where Henry and William James are buried.’ And she said, ‘Too bad for them.’”

There’s a silence. Sarkisian looks at Alvar. Alvar has not told this story for a long time. Now he cannot believe he ever thought it was funny—or that he is telling cemetery stories to an eighty-year-old man. But what shocks him most is how, in the years since he last told it, he has crossed over a line. He is now on Sarkisian’s side.

Maybe the reason he told it is that the girl in the story was Marlise. He has brought Marlise’s voice in here; they have heard what she has to say. Alvar knows exactly when she said that—they had come back from one of those bandit lectures. And now he knows why he told it. Because Marlise was right: death is the bandit, the leveler putting everyone in the same line. The young men rowing on the lake, looking up girls’ dresses; the caribou, wacked-out and trembly, shuffling back and forth in the Franklin Park Zoo; Gorky, Sarkisian, Alvar—they each have a place in that line. Its length is what Bonnie is measuring as she points her arm and her rifle at Clyde; it’s the secret of her foxy smile. Because if
that
is her measure, the only distance that counts, then right now, right for the present, she and Clyde are lucky.

O
N WARM SUMMER EVENINGS
my grandmother sits on the traffic island in the middle of Sixth Avenue and tells Mrs. Russo about her bandit lover.

Buses speed past, blowing fumes in their faces. Drunks lurch toward them, begging for quarters. But the two old widows, roosting on their bench like enormous gray-headed chickens, never notice. For they are not really on that bench, or on that grimy concrete strip, or even in New York City.

They are in Sicily, fifty years ago, in the days of Italo Giuliano.

Ordinarily my grandmother is a quiet woman who rarely talks. But when she tells the story of Italo Giuliano, she speaks in the grand style, and her voice is assured and strong.

“In America,” she says, always beginning the same way, “whenever I heard people telling stories about the great bandits, I wanted to remind them that Italo Giuliano, the greatest bandit leader of all, was born in my own town. But I was smart. I kept quiet. I thought it would be foolish to let strangers know I once had inside information about a man like Italo Giuliano.”

“Not only foolish,” agrees Mrs. Russo, “but dangerous. You can never tell when they’ll use something like that against you.”

“Yet in fact, Mrs. Russo,” continues my grandmother, “I had the most inside information of all. Because ever since I was a baby in my cradle, my window looked directly into his.

“Our families were in business together. My father bought sheep from the local herdsmen. Italo’s father sold the mutton in his shop. The partnership had been started by our grandfathers—two best friends, so distrustful of each other that they built their houses a few feet apart, to keep each other honest.

“They spied on one another constantly. Whenever the herdsmen came to our house, Italo’s grandfather appeared at his window, pretending to check on the weather. Whenever the Giuliano family ate lunch, my grandfather watched carefully, making sure that his partner hadn’t taken the crown roast for himself.

“But by the time Italo and I were born, our grandfathers were dead. And our fathers, members of a more enlightened generation, no longer kept up the constant surveillance.

“I was the only one with the spy’s blood still running in my veins. And so, all through the rainy days of my childhood, I stood at my window and watched Italo Giuliano.

“It must have been the pure thrill of spying that attracted me, because it wasn’t a very interesting sight. All Italo ever did was read. Day after day, I watched him mumbling to himself and turning the pages with a faraway look in his eye. He was oblivious to everything else. He never even flinched when his brothers teased him, pelting him with chunks of raw mutton, or gory sheep’s hearts that splashed his books with blood.

“Our village was very isolated, high up in the mountains, fifty kilometers from the nearest school. So Italo had been obliged to teach himself. He began with the words on flour sacks and tobacco packages. He read the family Bible seven times. He borrowed the priest’s missal and pored over the senseless Latin. He even took to standing at the crossroads, flagging down passing trucks and badgering the drivers for newspapers from distant cities.

“Whenever Mrs. Giuliano heard about that, there was something to see from my window. ‘This reading is turning you into a bandit!’ she’d scream at her son.

“Right from the start, Italo was a sensitive boy. After each of his mother’s harangues, he’d run away from home, and crawl through the narrow alley between our houses.

“‘Angela,’ he’d whisper up at me. ‘I’m on the run. Take me in.’

“I’d let him stay in my mother’s kitchen until the good smells made him so hungry that he forgot his quarrel. But one day, even I lost patience. What good is spying, I thought to myself, if you’re always spying on the same old thing?

“‘Italo,’ I said, ‘maybe your mother’s right. Why do you waste your time reading? Do you like it when your brothers tease you? Do you want everyone to call you a bookworm?’

“‘Yes,’ replied Italo Giuliano, ‘I do.’

“I was just a little girl then, with a little girl’s mind. But suddenly, as I looked at my friend, I understood as well as any woman: Italo wanted to be teased about his reading. That way, no one would tease him about his looks.

“For Italo Giuliano was the homeliest boy in Sicily. Even as a child, his skin was covered with purple cysts the size of grapes. His nose looked as if God had stuck a lump of dough in the middle of his face. His eyebrows grew together over his nose in one long eyebrow which reminded me of a frowning, hairy mouth.

“When he was small, the village children teased him mercilessly, saying that he resembled the putrefying sheep’s heads behind his father’s shop. Yet by the time he started to read, they no longer called him ‘the Sheep.’ Italo thought that he owed his reprieve to his new knowledge, but he was wrong. The children’s sudden kindness had nothing to do with his reading. Rather, it was this: everyone in the village had begun to recognize the sweet nature beneath that sour face.

“He was the most generous and patient boy who ever lived,” says my grandmother, hugging herself so hard that the flesh trembles on her arms. “He was my best friend, he would have done anything for me. Whenever my father hit me, I ran to Italo. Whenever I was sick, he sat on my bed and read aloud to me. And whenever I woke up screaming from a bad dream, I’d call across the alley, and make Italo walk with me until I was calm.”

“Didn’t your parents worry?” asks Mrs. Russo. “A little girl like that, staying out all night with her boyfriend?”

“They wished they had reason to worry,” says my grandmother. “They would have liked me to marry Italo someday, for business reasons. And they knew how I admired his sweetness. But they also knew that the combination of his good nature and his homely face meant that I would never love him as a man.

“It was that way with all the girls. We loved Italo so much that we let him stay near us even after we’d started chasing the other boys away with stones. ‘Look, Italo,’ we’d say. ‘Look how much we love you.’

“But it wasn’t really love. Love was what we felt for those other boys, who teased us so meanly that we had to chase them away. And Italo was the one we punished for their sins.

“We took terrible advantage of him. We asked him for favors, sent him on errands, and never did anything in return. Sometimes, when our mothers gave us custard, Italo would ask us to save him the last bite. ‘Of course,’ we’d say. But we always forgot.”

“Then why did he put up with it?” interrupts Mrs. Russo. “Were you girls his only friends?”

“He was too good-natured to resist,” replies my grandmother. “Besides, he had another friend, a boy.”

“And who was that?”

Of course, Mrs. Russo knows the answer. She’s heard this story a thousand times. But this last question is her favorite; she’s been leading up to it all along. And now, she settles back on the bench, waiting with delight. “What was his name?” she asks.

“His name,” says my grandmother, “was Italo Giuliano.”

“They were distant cousins,” she continues, “related by some long-ago marriage that no one could remember. Yet after my neighbor was christened Italo, the other Mrs. Giuliano, the cafe owner’s wife, stormed through the village, cursing their kinship to high heaven.

“‘All my life,’ she said, ‘I’ve wanted a son named Italo. And now that old witch has beaten me to it. But I’ll have my way yet. I’ll name my next son Italo, even if it means that there will be two boys in this town with the same name.’

“‘Don’t do it,’ the women advised her. ‘You’ll doom them to confusion. They’ll be hobbled for life.’

“‘Then I’ll call him Italo Salvatore,’ said the cafe owner’s wife. ‘But that’s the farthest I’ll go.’

“Yet the villagers need never have worried about confusing the two Italos, for no two boys could have been more different. Italo Salvatore grew tall and handsome. His eyes had a dreamy look, like those of the saints on the chapel wall. Unlike my neighbor, he was illiterate, and very charming—with a flashing wink, a quick smile, and a terrible mean streak.

“At first, the two Italos ignored each other. But before they entered their teens, they suddenly decided to become friends. After that, they acted as if their common name was some hilarious private joke. Whenever the handsome boy was called, my neighbor would answer; when a traveling dentist pulled my neighbor’s tooth, the other Italo faked a howl of pain. For a while, they even dressed alike and claimed to be twins.

“And so the view from my window began to change. Late at night, Italo still sat alone, reading. But in the evenings, he and his friend played together, pretending to be pirates, soldiers, bandit kings.

“Italo Salvatore was always the leader in those games. It seemed wrong. Not only was my neighbor older, but, even then, he had the courage and ingenuity that were to make him the most beloved bandit chief in all Sicily. But the other’s mean streak gave him an advantage. Like the girls, he mistreated his good-natured friend. He bossed him around like an unpaid servant. He even teased him about his looks, saying that no sensible girl would ever love a boy whose eyebrows grew together over his nose.

“Italo Salvatore had no such problems, and that, too, was a source of power. For all the village girls adored him, adored that dreamy expression. Naturally they threw stones at him. But after they’d chased him away, they surrounded my neighbor and pumped him for information about his handsome friend.

“‘Listen,’ they’d say, ‘what does that stupid Italo Salvatore say about us, behind our backs?’

“‘He never mentions you,’ beamed Italo, proud to be the chosen confidant of so many beautiful girls.

“And so the two boys complemented each other. Their friendship seemed to increase the homely one’s familiarity, and the handsome one’s mystery.”

“Eventually Italo Salvatore also became my friend. At first he didn’t like me, and my neighbor kept us apart, as if he were unwilling to share us. But gradually, Italo Salvatore learned that I was clever, that he could treat me like another boy; and my neighbor came around. So the three of us began to play together.

“Every Saturday morning, we went for long walks through the fields. My neighbor and I always lagged slightly behind, while Italo Salvatore ran ahead, searching for buried treasure. Sometimes he’d find an old spoon, a rusty coin, a used-up cartridge. Once he unearthed a small tortoiseshell comb and gave it to me, saying that girls’ things made him sick.

“At home, I washed the comb, and wrapped it in a cloth, as if it really was a treasure. For in giving me that present, Italo Salvatore had won my heart. Not that I adored him, like those giggling girls. But I didn’t want him to treat me like another boy.

“And so, on those Saturday morning walks, all my clever remarks were aimed at Italo Salvatore. I wanted to impress him, to intrigue him, to make him laugh. I even bought a miniature of St. Michael, because the saint’s dreamy expression reminded me of Italo Salvatore.

“Sometimes I wondered if my neighbor was hurt by my crush on his handsome friend. But Italo never seemed to mind; he never seemed to notice. His sweet good nature never changed.

“Of course he doesn’t care, I thought, he doesn’t think of me that way.

“In fact, he didn’t seem to think of anyone that way. For, in those troublesome times, Italo alone seemed unaffected by those strange things that were happening to the rest of us, those changes, those daily surprises. He grew taller; his voice deepened; his complexion got worse. Yet he never seemed confused, unhappy, full of new secrets.

“Lucky Italo, I thought. It’s easy for him.

“But late one night, as I stood at my window, I saw something that made me realize I’d been wrong.

“It was a hot evening in July. Italo’s family had gone out to escape the heat, leaving him alone. Spying from my darkened room, I saw him take the pincers which his mother used on stubborn pinfeathers. I saw him stare into the mirror, tense with concentration.