Women and Children First (22 page)

“And what happened then?” asks Mrs. Russo. “Did the two Italos meet? Did that no-good man betray his best friend?”

“Then,” says my grandmother, “Anthony and I went to America. The war was reaching up into the mountains. My husband Anthony, always a practical man, knew that things were getting worse, and decided to sell the bakery and take us to some relatives in New York.

“On the night before we left, I went back to my old house. Looking through the window, I saw Mrs. Giuliano, kneeling before a statue of the Virgin, praying for her son’s return.

“‘Don’t worry,’ I wanted to call to her. ‘He’ll be back.’ And then I remembered: when Italo Giuliano returned to the village, I would no longer be there.”

“So Anthony and I came to Carmine Street. Here in America life was so different, I sometimes thought that all my memories had happened to someone else. When I remembered that view from my window, it seemed like something in a dream. And so, ten years ago, when a stranger knocked on my door, I didn’t think of Italo Giuliano. When a stranger knocks in America, you think of boys selling magazines; you don’t expect bandits from the wilds of Sicily.

“On that day, I opened my door to find a dapper old gentleman, with a bristling red moustache. He was well dressed, in a black coat and a trim gray hat. But his hair was oddly streaked, as if he’d dyed and redyed it many times. His eyes were nervous. He reminded me of a fox.

“‘What can I do for you?’ I said.

“‘Let me introduce myself,’ he answered.

“‘I haven’t got much time,’ I told him. But already, he’d opened his fist. In his palm were two gold discs, engraved with the words ‘Fidelity’ and ‘Homesickness.’

“‘Italo Giuliano!’ I cried.

“‘I was his first lieutenant,’ said the man, fixing me with his fox’s eyes.

“‘Come in,’ I said. ‘Come in. How is Italo?’ I asked, as soon as he’d stepped inside. ‘What’s he doing now? Is he still in the mountains, running with those bandits?’

“The man looked at me, puzzled. ‘He’s dead,’ he said. ‘He’s been dead forty years.’

“‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

“‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was there. Would you like me to tell you the story?’ Then, without waiting for a reply, he sat down at the kitchen table, and began:

“In the spring of 1933, one of our spies returned to camp with the news that a lone man had been asking around for Italo Giuliano, searching for him everywhere.

“‘What sort of man?’ Italo asked.

“‘A fool,’ replied the spy. ‘And probably an informer. He dresses like a gangster, like a teenage kid pretending to be a gangster. He wears an old leather jacket with the collar turned up. He chain-smokes cigarettes, narrows his eyes, and mumbles out of the corner of his mouth.’

“‘I know the man,’ said Italo Giuliano. ‘Go bring him back.’

“We thought it odd that Italo should invite a stranger to our camp, at such a crucial and dangerous time. But Italo had never failed us before. He was the best leader who ever lived and we trusted him completely.

“But when the stranger finally arrived, and we saw what kind of man he was, we began to wonder if something had impaired our chief’s judgment.

“The stranger was a fool. His gangster ways were ludicrous. He had a soft body, a pretty face, two empty eyes. He reminded me of a child.

“But Italo greeted him like a long-lost brother. ‘My oldest friend!’ he cried. ‘My oldest friend! What are you doing here?’

“‘I want to join the bandits,’ said the other.

“They began to talk, right there in the midst of us. And gradually, we saw: they’d been childhood pals. And this pretty boy, this nobody—he’d been the leader. Of course things had changed, but it took that fool some time to see it. At first, he still played the bigshot with Italo, teasing him, insulting him a little, saying that our captain wasn’t nearly so ugly as he used to be.

“Italo didn’t seem to mind. He couldn’t have been nicer, or more hospitable. In fact, he told his friend that he could stay as long as he pleased, and showed him to a tent.

“When Italo returned, we gathered round him. ‘Send him away,’ we said. ‘And let’s get out of here right now. That man’s a fool, he’s too soft to ride with us. Besides, he’s an informer if we’ve ever seen one. He can’t stay here, we’ve got to escape, it’s dangerous!’

“‘If he’s an informer,’ Italo said calmly, ‘let him go and inform. Meanwhile, my friend’s arrival calls for a celebration. Go get the wine we stole from the vineyards up north. Let’s drink.’

“Sick with uneasiness, we opened the wine. And that night, we drank until our fear of the informer no longer mattered.”

“Suddenly, the foxlike gentleman paused. He looked down at the ground, and wiped his moustache with the back of his hand.

“‘Madame,’ he said softly. ‘You know the rest of the story yourself. The next morning, we were attacked by an army battalion. Everyone was killed, including Italo Giuliano. In the crossfire, the soldiers accidentally shot their own informer. I alone survived to carry out my leader’s wish—to find you, and give you his friendliest regards.’”

“For a moment,” says my grandmother, “I couldn’t speak. Then, I looked at my visitor, and began to scream. ‘Of course I know the story,’ I screamed. ‘The brave outlaw, betrayed by his best friend. I’ve heard it a thousand times. And that’s why I don’t believe a single word you say.’

“‘Because Italo Giuliano knew that story too. He’d read it as a boy, in his books. And he would never have walked into such an obvious trap. He knew Italo Salvatore had a hundred reasons for betraying him. He would never have gone along with it, and died such a ridiculous death.’

“‘Besides, I knew you were lying from the beginning. You said that Italo called the stranger his oldest friend. But Italo Giuliano would never have said that. For
I
was his oldest friend!’

“The gentleman stood up. ‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ he said.

“‘You saw nothing!’ I said. ‘You’re an impostor, seeking charity. You’ve come here with lies and stolen souvenirs, looking for some kind of pity.’

“‘If Italo didn’t die in Sicily,’ said the man, ‘then where is he?’

“‘He isn’t really dead!’ I screamed, and slammed the door behind him.”

Mrs. Russo takes a deep breath. “Do you really think he’s still alive?” she asks. “He’d be old now, like us.”

“He promised he’d come back,” says my grandmother. “I pray for my husband Anthony among the dead souls. But I pray for Italo Giuliano among the living.”

Once again, my grandmother gazes off into the uptown traffic, peering at each passing taxi—as if, at any moment, Italo Giuliano might come riding up, in the back seat of a cab.

“What I want to know,” says Mrs. Russo, “is this: Why did he become a bandit? Was it his love for you, his friendship with Italo Salvatore, his homeliness, his reading? Was it all that mistreatment he took as a boy?”

“Those might have been his reasons,” replies my grandmother, “but I do not think they were. With a man like Italo there are no simple answers. Mrs. Russo,” she sighs, “tell me: Was there ever another man on this earth like Italo Giuliano?”

Mrs. Russo hesitates for several minutes. “Your husband Anthony,” she says at last, “was a very good man.”

Now the truth of the matter is this: for twenty years Mrs. Russo was in love with my grandmother’s husband Anthony. Like her friend, she is a modest woman; so she confined her passion to a few hesitant waves from her window across the courtyard. But once each year, at the Knights of Columbus Ball, she and Anthony danced one waltz. And that is what Mrs. Russo remembers.

And so, every time my grandmother tells the story of Italo Giuliano, Mrs. Russo hears it as the story of her husband Anthony. Whenever she hears it, she understands why that unhappy look came into Anthony’s eyes as they waltzed to the orchestra’s sad, slow tunes. She understands that it was the look of a man whose wife is married to the memory of a bandit.

Personally, Mrs. Russo couldn’t care less about Italo Giuliano. To her, he is no more important than the drunks who stumble across the traffic island.

And that is the true story of bandit lovers—of men like Italo Giuliano, Cartouche, Robin Hood, Lampiao, and Wu Sung.

They never really die. But they can only really live in the hearts of women like me and my grandmother.

A
T THE PASSOVER SEDER
, they are talking about Davy Crockett. All the guests are about the same age and remember the same TV. Perhaps they are thinking of Davy Crockett because of Gail and Maury’s country primitive decor. How at home he would feel on their Shaker bench, at their roughhewn colonial trestle table!

“The Alamo!” says Gail.

“What was he doing there?” Maury asks. “I forget.”

“Shopping for a Bowie knife,” says Gail’s sister Becky.

“Right,” Gail says. “Putting it on his American Express.”

Becky sets down the spoon with which she’s been feeding Gail and Maury’s baby, Randy. “Do you know me?” she says, holding up an imaginary card. “Probably you don’t recognize me without that stupid raccoon hat.”

Everyone laughs, perhaps a bit too heartily; they all know that Becky is having a difficult time. Right now Becky feels okay, tipsy on Manischewitz kirs—“the nostalgia drink,” Gail calls it—and tempted to ask: How could they have got through the seder with no one reading from the Haggadah and Davy Crockett in place of Elijah the Prophet? But why criticize? At least Gail and Maury attend their local Reform synagogue. And why be ungrateful when Gail and Maury are letting Becky spend two weeks with them in Tuckahoe, hiding out from her regular life—her loft, her husband Jack, the gallery she and Jack own together?

The last dinner Jack and Becky went to was in a sculptor’s Chelsea loft; a Japanese chef made sushi. Becky said, “Don’t you think sushi’s like some kind of drug? I mean, you get this great protein rush, but six hours later you better eat something quick or you get suicidal.” There was a silence. Then a woman named Darlene sighed and said, “
I
think sushi’s like sex.” Later, Darlene got up to go home, and Jack—without a word to Becky—put on his coat and went with her. Darlene’s half Malaysian, a critic for a London punk-art journal. It’s the least of her problems, but still Becky’s horrified that she has been left for a woman with a Mousketeer name.

The brisket Becky’s mashing with the back of her fork to feed Randy couldn’t be less like sushi; for this alone, Becky feels a rush of warmth toward Gail, who has been saying all week that what got Becky into trouble was asking too many questions. It wasn’t the number of questions, thinks Becky, but asking the same one too often.

“Next year,” was how Jack always answered. Next year Becky will be forty, and, until the sushi party, had been making a point of it. Jack said he was sorry, he understood, he needed to think more about what having a child would mean.
This
is what it means, Becky thinks now: meat, plate, fork to mouth. No need to think any further. If only she’d known enough to say that.

“Kentucky,” Gail’s saying. “No, wait, Tennessee. Kentucky’s Daniel Boone.”

“Killed him a bear when he was only three,” Maury says.

“Three?” Gail says.

“Hear that?” Becky tells baby Randy. “You’ve got a year and a half.”

Gail has talked Becky into collecting books for the temple sisterhood book drive; eventually the books will go to an orphanage in Haifa. Every afternoon, Gail gives Becky a list of names and directions, buckles Randy into his car seat, and sends them out to cruise the suburban streets shaped like horseshoes and keyholes, named for developers’ daughters and wives. “Right on Beverly,” Becky says to Randy. “Left on Caroline, left on Lorraine.”

Mostly it’s older women who have signed up to donate books. They all assume that Randy is Becky’s baby, and Becky doesn’t correct them. The women seem glad to see Becky and Randy instead of the man in the truck they were probably expecting. They invite Becky in for coffee and cake, and Randy, who has a winning personality and can be trusted with an inch in a plastic cup, gets lots of attention and juice.

Becky knows these women. Wednesday afternoons they troop through the gallery by the bus load. At first Becky thought they were only into it for the dressing-up and slumming, but after a while she observed how
interested
they were. Now, seeing their Gropper and Soyer prints, she wonders: Interested in
what
? Becky’s most successful artist is a twenty-two-year-old German who makes giant pachinko machines. Sometimes, especially when the women boast about their children’s careers, Becky longs to mention the gallery. But personal conversation might lead to her having to admit that Randy isn’t her baby, and it doesn’t seem worth it. This fantasy they are enacting—that she and the women are joined in some sisterhood of mothers and babies and grown children still present in the high-school earth science texts their mothers are giving Becky—is sweeter than whatever satisfaction she might get from chattering about the art world.

Jack has promised to spend these two weeks moving his things out of their loft. Gail promises he’ll come back. Becky has promised Gail that, if he does, she’ll just get pregnant and not ask so many questions. For practice, Becky decides not to ask what the orphans in Haifa will do with boxfuls of
Reader’s Digest
—condensed Herman Wouks. Not asking lets Becky feel so sincerely appreciative that sometimes tears come to her eyes as she thanks the women for their generosity.

Becky’s truly grateful, though not just for the books. She feels some useful ceremony is taking place here, blessing her days with rhythm and purpose—an astonishing feeling for someone whose husband is, perhaps at this very moment, dividing his books and records from hers. Gail
knew
this would do Becky good; she says Becky needs to get out of herself and plug into a community. Gail was always an expert at conning her—in this case, into picking up books and babysitting Randy at the same time. Still, Becky wonders if Gail might not be right. Perhaps it’s the weather, the daffodils and forsythia, the fresh air, but often, driving Randy around to the women’s houses, Becky is reminded of the summer she and Jack spent in California, driving their Rent-A-Wreck convertible. She has that same breezy notion that if she just
times
things well, everything will be all right. And maybe that’s why it always seems a good omen when, at the end of the afternoon, she pulls into Gail’s driveway with Randy so newly and deeply asleep that he can be carried into the house for a long nap in his crib.