The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzo
Up to now the job had been great. Larry understood what it was all about but refused to face his own part in it, refused to face the fact that some day he would have to make Hooperman pay. Larry paid Hooperman’s dues himself just to avoid trouble. This was O.K. until the day two other German bakers stiffed him. They told him with a sly grin to ask next week. Larry started thinking about getting back his old job in the railroad.
He walked past Hooperman’s and around the corner. There was the precinct police station house. No wonder the bastard was so brave. Cops right around the corner. Larry kept walking and tried to think things out. If he didn’t make Hooperman pay, it was back to the railroad and the lousy fifteen bucks a week. He would have to wait until Hooperman was alone and tell him that Mr. di Lucca was coming personally. Then he realized with a shock that it was Larry himself Mr. di Lucca would send. Soon he would try to scare the kraut, and if that didn’t work, he would quit. A gangster! How Octavia would scream with laughter. His mother would probably get the Tackeril to give him a beating. Ah, hell, it was too damn bad just because of one lousy thickheaded guy.
After walking around an hour he passed the Hooperman bakery window and saw the store was empty. He went in. The girl behind the showcases nodded and he went into the back rooms of ovens and tray-laden tables. And there was Hooperman, guffawing with two guests, the bakers who had stiffed Larry earlier in the day. There was a large tin can of beer on the table and three heavy golden steins circled it.
Larry felt a shock of betrayal, then bitter resentment. The men saw him and they all burst out in unrestrained, delighted laughter. Its very lack of malice was insulting. Larry understood what they thought of him, that they knew him for what he was, that he would never make Hooperman pay, that he was just a kid trying to be a grown-up because he had a wife and two babies.
Mr. Hooperman turned a whoop of laughter into speech. “Oooh, here is the collector. How much I give you today, ten dollars, twenty dollars, fifty dollars? Look, I’m ready.” He stood up and emptied his pockets of change and crumpled wads of green paper money.
Larry could not force a smile, or even his charm. He said as calmly as he could, “You don’t have to pay me, Mr. Hooperman, I just came to tell you you’re out of the union. That’s all.”
The other two men stopped laughing, but Hooperman got hysterical. “I never was in your union,” he roared. “I shit on your union. I never pay dues and I never give free coffee and cake, so shit on your union.”
Larry said, trying one last time to get in good, “I paid your dues, Mr. Hooperman. I didn’t want you in trouble, a good baker like you.”
This sobered the baker. He pointed a finger at Larry. “You loafer,” he said with quiet anger. “You gangster. You try to frighten me, then you try the friend stuff. Why don’t you work like me? Why do you come to steal my money, my bread? I work. I work twelve, fourteen hours, and I must give you money? You little shit you, get out. Get out of my store.”
Larry was so stunned by this defiance that he turned away and walked out of the back room. Still dazed, but trying to compose himself and to show he had not been frightened, he stopped and asked the girl behind the counter for a loaf of corn bread and a cheesecake. The girl picked up the heavy tin of powdered sugar and sprinkled the cake. There was a roar from the back of the shop. “Don’t sell that crook nodding,” and Hooperman came charging out to stand behind the counter. He snatched the can of sugar from the girl and said to Larry with real hatred, “Out. Out of here. Out.” Larry stared at him, frozen with surprise and shock. The baker reached over and flicked his arm. Larry felt the powdered sugar spray his face and smelled the sweet scent in his nostrils. With absolutely no mental order, his left hand went out and fastened onto the baker’s right arm. Then Larry took his right fist and drove it into the short, blunt face. The head actually bounced away on its neck like a ball on a tight string and then bounced back again into his fist. He let go.
The face was ruined. The nose was smashed flat and flooded the sugared marble counter with blood. The lips were mashed into a red blob of flesh and on the left side the teeth had caved in. The baker looked down on the blood and then ran drunkenly around the counter to stand between Larry and the door. He called out thickly, “The police, get the police.”
The girl ran through the back room and out of the store. The two other bakers followed her. Hooperman stood barring the front door, arms outstretched, a wild maniacal glare looking out over his ruined face. Larry started around the corner to get out the back exit. He felt Hooperman rush at him, hang on him, not trying to punish, as if he did not dare, but dragging on him. Larry flung the baker away. Because he could not hit the man again, and because he realized now that he had disgraced the family and would go to prison, he swung his foot through the great shining glass front of the show counter. Broken glass flew around him and then he kicked the exposed long trays of cookies. The baker let out a howl of anguish and dragged him to the floor, and so the police found them, rolling over a glass- and cookie-covered floor in an embrace stronger than love.
In the police station two huge detectives took Larry to a back room. One of them said, “O.K., what happened, kid?”
Larry said, “I wanted to buy a cake and he threw sugar in my face. Ask the girl.”
“You shaking him down?”
Larry said no.
Another detective stuck his head through the doorway. “Hey, the kraut says this kid collects for di Lucca.” The detective who had been questioning Larry got up and left the room. In five minutes he came back and lit a cigarette. He didn’t ask Larry any more questions. They all waited.
Larry was overwhelmed. He could only think of his name in the papers, his mother in disgrace, himself a criminal and in prison, everyone despising him. And now he had spoiled everything for Mr. di Lucca.
The detective looked at his watch, left the room, and came back in a few minutes. He jerked a thumb toward the door and said, “O.K., kid, scram. You’re all squared away.”
Larry didn’t understand, and couldn’t believe what he heard. “Your boss is waiting outside,” the detective said.
One detective held the door open for Larry, and, as he walked out, he saw Mr. di Lucca standing at the bottom of the steps outside the precinct house.
Mr. di Lucca said, “Thanks, thanks,” and shook hands clumsily with the detective. Then he grabbed Larry by the arm and walked him down the street to a waiting car. The driver was a kid Larry had gone to school with and never seen since. He and Mr. di Lucca got into the back seat.
Then came the second surprise. Mr. di Lucca grabbed him by the arm and said in Italian, “Bravo, what a beautiful fellow you are. I saw his face, that animal, you did a lovely job. That bastard. Oh, you’re a beautiful fellow, Lorenzo. When they told me you hit him because he wouldn’t sell you bread, I was in heaven. Ah, if you were only my son.”
THEY WERE ON Tenth Avenue going downtown. Larry stared out the window at the railroad yard. It was almost as if he were changing second by second, each drop of blood, each bit of flesh, into someone else. He would never go back to work in the railroad yards, he would never be afraid as he had been in that station house. The whole majesty of law had crumbled before his eyes with that handshake between Mr. di Lucca and the detective; his swift rescue and the admiration that marked his freedom. He thought of the baker’s blood, of the baker’s arms outstretched to bar his escape, of the mad staring eyes above that smashed pulpy face, and he felt a little sick.
Larry had to speak the truth. He said, “Mr. di Lucca, I can’t go around beating guys up for the money. I don’t mind collecting, but I’m not a gangster.”
Mr. di Lucca patted him soothingly on the shoulder. “No, no; who does these things for pleasure? Am I a gangster? Don’t I have children and grandchildren? Am I not godfather to the children of my friends? But do you know what it is to be born in Italy? You are a dog and you scratch in the earth like a dog to find a dirty bone for supper. You give eggs to the priest to
“In Italy they were stronger than me. If I took an olive from the padrone, a carrot, or, God forbid, a loaf of bread, I must flee, hide in Africa to escape his vengeance. But here, this is democracy and the padrone is not so strong. Here it is possible to escape your fate. But you must pay.
“Who is this German, this baker, that he can earn his living, bake his bread without paying? The world is a dangerous place. By what right does he bake bread on that corner, in that street? The law? Poor people cannot live by all the laws. There would not be one alive. Only the padroni would be left.
“Now this man, this German, you feel sorry for him. Don’t. You see how nice the police treat you? Sure, you’re my friend, but this baker, right around the corner from the police, he doesn’t even send coffee and buns over to make friends. How do you like that? The man on the beat, the baker makes him pay for his Coffee An. What kind of a person is this?”
Mr. di Lucca paused, and on his face came a look of almost unbelieving, finicky disgust.
“This is a man who thinks because he works hard, is honest, never breaks the law, nothing can happen to him. He is a fool. Now listen to me.”
Mr. di Lucca paused again. In a quiet, sympathetic voice, he went on, “Think of yourself. You worked hard, you were honest, you never broke the law. Worked hard? Look at your arms, like a gorilla from hard work.
“But there is no work. Nobody comes and gives you a pay envelope because you are honest. You don’t break no law and they don’t put you in jail. That’s something, but will it feed your wife and children? So what do people like ourselves do? We say, Good. There is no work. We have no pay. We cannot break the law, and we cannot steal because we are honest; so we will all starve, me, my children, and my wife. Right?” He waited for Larry to laugh.
Larry kept his eyes on Mr. di Lucca, expecting something more. Mr. di Lucca noticed this and said gravely, “It will not always be like this, living by a strong arm. Enough. Do you still work for me? One hundred dollars a week and a better territory. Agreed?”
Larry said quietly, “Thanks, Mr. di Lucca, it’s O.K. with me.”
Mr. di Lucca raised a finger paternally. “Don’t pay no more dues for nobody.”
Larry smiled. “I won’t,” he said.
When Mr. di Lucca dropped him off on Tenth Avenue, Larry walked along the railroad yards for a while. He realized that you couldn’t always be nice to people and expect them to do what you wanted, not with money, anyway. You had to be mean. What puzzled him was the admiration people had for a man who did something cruel. He remembered the kraut’s face all smashed and wondered at Mr. di Lucca’s exultation over it. Because of this he would make money, his wife and child would live like people who owned a business, he would help his mother and brothers and sisters. And honestly, he didn’t hit the kraut because of the money. Hadn’t he paid the guy’s dues all the time?
CHAPTER 15
LUCIA SANTA MAKES the family organism stand strong against the blows of time: the growth of children, the death of parents, and all changes of worldly circumstance. She lives through five years in an instant, and behind her trail the great shadowy memories that are life’s real substance and the spirit’s strength.
In five years the outer world had thinned away. The black circles of gossiping women had shrunk, the children shouting and playing in the dark summer night seemed not so thickly clustered. Across the Avenue the clanging locomotives used an overhead roadway, and so the dummy boys with their peaked, buttoned caps, their sneaker spurs, and their red lanterns had vanished forever. The footbridge over Tenth Avenue, no longer needed, had been torn down.
In a few years the western wall of the city would disappear and the people who inhabited it would be scattered like ashes—they whose fathers in Italy had lived in the same village street for a thousand years, whose grandfathers had died in the same rooms in which they were born.
Lucia Santa stood guard against more immediate dangers, dangers she had conquered over the last five years: death, marriage, puberty, poverty, and that lack of a sense of duty which flourishes in children brought up in America. She did not know she defended against an eternal attack and must grow weaker, since she stood against fate itself.
But she had made a world, she had been its monolith. Her children, wavering sleepily from warm beds, found her toasting bread by early morning light, their school clothes hanging over chairs by the kerosene stove. Home from school, they found her ironing, sewing, tending great brown pots on the kitchen stove. She moved in clouds of steam like a humble god, disappearing and reappearing, with smells of warm cotton, garlic, tomato sauce, and stewing meats and greens. Betraying her mortality, the old cathedral-shaped radio poured out olive-oil songs by Carlo Buti, the Italian Bing Crosby and darling of Italian matrons, whose face, thin, suffering, and crowned with its greenhornish white fedora, leaned against salamis in every grocery store window on Tenth Avenue.
The door was never locked against any child returning from school or play. Neither birth nor death could keep smoking dishes from appearing on the supper table. And at night Lucia Santa waited until her house was quiet and at rest before she sought her own sleep. Her children had never seen her eyes closed and defenseless against the world.
There were days in her life or months or seasons that were like cameos. One winter existed only because Gino had come home from school and found his mother completely alone, and they had spent a happy afternoon together without even speaking.
Gino studied his mother ironing clothes by the cold gray of falling twilight. He ran his nose over the stove, lifting pot covers to sniff, and he was not pleased. He didn’t care for the green spinach slick with olive oil. The pot with the boiled potatoes annoyed him further, so he slammed down the cover and said angrily, “Ah, Ma, ain’t you got anything good to eat?” Then he leaned over the radio to switch it to an American station. His mother made one threatening gesture and he jumped away. He really liked to listen to the Italian station, especially the romanze like the one his mother had on now. They always sounded as if they were killing each other, and he understood enough to follow it. It was nothing like the American soap operas. Here blows were struck; parents were not understanding, but firm and intolerant; men killed the lovers of their wives on purpose, and not by accident. Wives actually poisoned their husbands, usually with something that caused horrible pain, and there were screams to go with it. Their torture was a comfort to the living.
Gino got his library books and read at the kitchen table. On the other side his mother ironed clothes and the warm steam heated the room. It was very quiet in the apartment; everyone out of the house, Sal and Lena down in the street playing, Vinnie working. It grew darker, until suddenly Gino could not see to read. He raised his head and saw his mother watching him, motionless, a strange look on her face. There was the smell of the garlic and hot olive oil and floury potatoes, the sizzling of the pot of water on the kerosene stove. Then his mother reached her hand upward to turn on the light.
Gino smiled at her and his head went down to his book. Lucia Santa finished her ironing, folded the board away. She watched Gino at his reading. He rarely smiled; he had become a very stern-looking young boy, very quiet. How children changed. But he was still headstrong, still stubborn, sometimes as crazy as his father before him. She took the clothes into the bedroom and laid them away in the bureau. Then she returned to the kitchen and very quietly peeled some fresh potatoes, sliced them thin, made room on the stove for her great round black frying pan. A spoonful of brown homemade lard melted quickly. She fried the potatoes to a golden brown then splashed two eggs over the crusts. She heaped up a platter and, without saying a
Gino let out a yelp of pure delight. Lucia Santa said, “Hurry up and eat before the others come and see, or no one will eat that good spinach.” He gobbled up the potatoes and helped her set the table for the others.
Another winter lived, belonged to her life, because of the death of Zia Louche. She had wept for the old woman more tears than she would shed for her own mother. The poor crone had died alone, in the cold of winter, in the bare two rooms that for the last twenty years had been her solitary nest. She had died like a beetle, her scaly skin stiff with cold, her stick-like legs twisted together, her veins iced blue by death. Her only comforter the black kerosene stove topped by a white enamel water pot.
Zia Louche, Zia Louche, where were your loved ones to care for your body? Where were the children to weep over your grave? And to think that she had envied that proud old woman’s lack of responsibilities, her life without worldly care. Lucia Santa knew her own good fortune then. She had created a world that would not end. It would never cast her out and she would never die alone and be buried in the earth like some forgotten insect.
But what a miracle she had brought them all so far, a mira-cle not possible without the formidable Zia Teresina Coccalitti, who, in the same winter that Zia Louche died, became an intimate of Lucia Santa and an ally of the Angeluzzi-Corbo family.
Teresina Coccalitti was the most feared and respected woman on Tenth Avenue. Tall, rawboned, dressed always in the black she wore for her husband twenty years dead, she terrorized fruit peddlers, grocers, and butchers; landlords never dared scold her for late rent, home relief investigators allowed her to sign necessary papers and never asked a single embarrassing question.
Her tongue was venomously foul, the tight bones of her face were pointed to the very devil’s mask of cunning. Yet when it suited her purpose she could show a fawning charm dangerous as a snake.