His Right Arm

 

by Kenny Marotta

 

    “Why didn’t you come to me from the start, Nino?” Pietro half-scolded, shaking his hands before him with womanish dismay.

    Those cupped hands, held slightly apart, might have been support­ing some invisible infant. Was that what Pietro meant by the start? (So Nino asked himself.) Did he perhaps imagine Nino’s life would have been different had Nino been born into some other place, some other time? Could there be any question that, from all eternity, this life had been marked down, as in some book, for shame and defeat?

    After all, if it came to startings, Pietro and Nino had started the same, born in the same Pianosanto, and just as poor. If the Zammataros had owned a little land, the DelFinos had had a little shop; and in any case, both sons had been forced to go to America. But in the new country, Pietro had not known a moment of the ill luck that had dogged Nino—had found, rather, only more and more wealth. It was Nino alone who, just within the past year, had been robbed of his job, his twice-mortgaged house, even the few dollars he had trusted to the bank. He had had to sell his watch just to move his furniture off the street.

    In 1930 such fates, perhaps, were not unique. Their frequency was lit­tle consolation to Nino’s particular suffering, however. As he looked about him at Pietro’s richly furnished home, it was a further sting to Nino’s torment—if not, indeed, the deepest of all—that he now made part of a long list of worthless paesani to come suing for help from that famously generous man.

    “We could still take your family in,” Pietro insisted, “or at least one of the children, Nino. More wine?” With his last words, he reached to poise the jug above Nino’s glass, sitting still untouched on a table at his side. It was one of those little tables found in rich men’s houses, useful only for tripping guests, or discommoding them with unwanted gifts.

    As to the wine, Nino answered by silently placing his palm over the glass. To the other offer, he replied that Jimmy Torello, with whom Nino was living until he could afford to put down a month’s rent some­where, had more room than Pietro. Only a man of Nino’s self-control could have lied so boldly. The parlor they were sitting in was as big as any two rooms of Jimmy’s—and Jimmy had only three altogether. Nevertheless, Nino would have shunned Pietro’s even if Jimmy had had no more than a closet. Not that Jimmy offered better treatment: quite the contrary. But Jimmy’s scowl at his boarder’s every bite was in fact the only thing that made the signora Torello’s meals palatable to Nino. That proud man could not have kept anything down with Pietro filling his glass every minute.

    It was only for a job that he had come to Pietro, Nino finally con­fessed. And he never would have come pleading even for that if he had had any other choice. No money was coming in except what the oldest girl, Maria, earned at the box factory, and the few pennies her mother and sisters earned sewing on buttons at home. And the little this amounted to went straight, the moment it appeared, to Torello. There was no other boss left to appeal to, and such bossless work as shining shoes was beyond Nino, who couldn’t afford the tools.

    “Yes, certainly,” Pietro eagerly consented, almost before the visitor had finished making his request. “I can easily find something for you to do. But is there nothing more I can do for you?”

    “Besides letting me sweep the floors?” Nino asked. Even from men like Pietro, beggars could expect no better than that. “It’s already too much kindness for one day.”

    But Nino had underestimated his benefactor. Pietro entrusted him with more than sweeping, allowing him the care of all varieties of refuse in the meatpacking house Pietro had inherited from his wife’s father. The work left Nino, at day’s end, with reeking clothes and bloodied hands, so that this hard-lined man looked all the more like an implacable savage. And when he came home with his first week’s wages—came home to the daily sight of his wife and daughters bend­ing over the limp pile of shirts as if they too had been reduced to sav­agery, leaving nothing of their cannibal feast except the peels—Nino was confronted as well by the sight of Jimmy Torello’s outstretched hand.

    “I’ll pay you board, of course,” Nino remarked; but there was already some suspicion in his voice. That open palm looked as if it would take the whole world upon itself.

    Jimmy slowly shook his head, and tapped a finger on his palm.

    “Are you crazy?” Nino cried, drawing back. “Am I a woman?”     Nino’s wife and daughters themselves looked up with surprise from their work. Their money was naturally turned over to Jimmy, as such funds would have been relinquished to Nino in his own house. It was for the head of the household to decide how the women’s money would be spent, doling out what he deemed necessary. But who had ever heard of a man being denied the money he had earned?

    “I keep my money,” said Nino, “and I’ll pay you board.”

    “Will you?” Jimmy inquired. “Perhaps your friend Pietro would agree to that. As for me, I’m not so rich.”

    “And what am I supposed to do?” Nino threw out his arms. “Keep my family living here like pigs for the rest of my life?”

    “Do you fear you won’t be able to buy another house in the country for this royalty, then?” Jimmy asked in return, gesturing to them. Their top buttons were undone because of the heat, and sweat plastered the stray hairs to their foreheads. “How can you say that, with your right arm?”

    Jimmy evidently hadn’t forgotten Nino’s words, years ago, in brag­ging about the purchase of his house. “How will I pay for it?” Nino had asked, repeating his friends’ skeptical question. (He had been one of the first of his paesani to risk such an investment; even Pietro had stayed in the tenements some years longer.) “Don’t you see this?” And he had bared his right arm, as if it bore some brand of good fortune. Yet it was blank, as ordinary as any man’s. It was sturdy enough, of course, so that he might have meant to put forth no more than the common boast of the working man: that the strength of his limbs would suffice to wring from life the promise that his children would not have to wage the same battle. But Nino had never been known to rejoice in a gift common to others. His very words, though sounding unmistakably with the gutturals of his paesani, had meanings of their own, as if a man should say a chair for a table, red for blue, wife for whore or enemy for friend. So now, his compatriots guessed it: he didn’t mean his muscle and bone at all. He mentioned the compact strength he shared with his fellows only to mock it. His right arm in itself was nothing, it mattered only in being connected to him, to that Nino Zammataro who was never to be confused with any other man—even those brothers of his blood he himself would have admitted to resembling. What set him apart was beyond mere bodily perception.

    That he was set apart, Nino perhaps demonstrated by failing to de­spair even now. At the end of the next work day he approached Pietro, whose white shirt was clean as when he had walked in that morning. He smiled at Nino as if he were equally pure; or was it that the odor of a thousand infernal barnyards, which Nino now carried indelibly with him, was a pleasure to the older man?

    “My daughter Maria,” Nino said, “could come to your house.”     Possibly this was not the form a request ought to take; but Pietro did not seem to notice. He scarcely concerned himself with the reasonings Nino proceeded to offer, merely nodding to them all, and only once gave any evidence of having paid attention. When Nino explained that Maria was making the best income, small as it was, of all the children, and might therefore save the most after her board was paid, Pietro raised his hand and said, “Board! I won’t hear of it. She’ll save every penny.” It required more effort for Nino to keep from crying out against this offer than it had taken him to keep silent when, in the army, two of his teeth were pulled.

    Still, Pietro had one reservation, which he offered with the embar­rassment of a house dog who has transgressed against the chief rule by which such creatures are suffered. “Since we’re speaking of young peo­ple together in one house, Nino, I should tell you that I’ve been in touch with Rocco Tagliani back in the paese, who helped me with my fare all those years ago—you remember him, Nino?”

    “And is he in prison now, for what he stole when he was sindaco?” Nino inquired.

    “Ah, you must be thinking of someone else,” Pietro innocently replied. “But he has a daughter the age of my oldest son, Joe—she’s a real scholar, has learned everything from the nuns, and finishes her school this year. And Rocco and I thought—for how many books can she find in a poor place like that?—how happy it would be if she came here, if she and Joe—” Pietro finished the sentence with a smile and a little shrug.

    Nino had no trouble understanding. “I’m sure she’ll have learned much in the convent,” he observed, “that will be useful to her when she comes to live with your son. As to my daughter,” he concluded, “she lacks the wit, if she had the courage, to chase after a man.”

    Surely this description was amply confirmed by the girl’s response to her father’s news. “Must I?” she asked in her fear of strangers—the same question she had asked upon learning, some months before, that she must take the trolley to her new job. “Walk, certainly,” her father had answered then, “only you’ll have to start back every night the moment you get home, if you’re to be there on time in the morning.” She had asked the question again when she learned they were to leave the home she was familiar with, and move in with the Torellos. On that occasion, however, Nino hadn’t trusted himself to answer.

    Reluctant though she might be, she was soon installed at her new residence, and Pietro learned quickly enough how little his family could have to fear from so spiritless a creature. He was soon praising her to Nino, in terms sure to delight the father. So modest the girl was, Pietro marvelled, so ready and eager to help. “I tell her to rest, to save her arms for the boxes,”—Pietro laughed at his own cleverness—“but she says she loves the little ones, and never gets a chance to cook at home.” What could please Nino more than to hear how his daughter had become an unpaid servant in another man’s house, and that man too the last he would have chosen to serve?

    For his part, Jimmy acted as if there were something illegal in Nino’s having removed the girl’s wages from his reach. Yet there was no denying that he took in more from the father than he had ever got­ten from the daughter, and he contented himself with complaining no oftener than three or four times in the course of an evening.

    Whenever his sense of grievance was especially acute, he relieved it by inquiring, “Is it a match, then, Nino? Is the butcher trying to raise his family by marrying into yours?” Nino might have answered, but his simple wife always went before him.

    “But how could it be a match,” she would ask Jimmy, “when my poor girl hasn’t even a dowry, and they’re so well off?” So Nino had to turn his attention to her instead, admonishing her to occupy herself with her needle, and to leave the arts of reasoning to her husband.

    However Nino himself would have defined Pietro’s purposes, he certainly wouldn’t have expected theft to be among them. But so it seemed to be when, on the Saturday afternoon when Maria was to come with her pay, she didn’t show up. Nino waited until dinnertime. Then he set out for Pietro’s house.

    He hadn’t been there since the day he had begged his job. Every mahogany surface, every pane of glass before the pictures hung on the walls, every piece of china in the cabinet, meant for display instead of use—for Nino could see, in the dining room, that the table was already set—all glared more brightly than before, so that the father might be blinded by the labor of his child in polishing them. What other’s labor could it have been, after all, since Pietro’s children lolled about, play­ing with toys or reading books like Turks in the harem? Nino looked among them for the famous boy, Pietro’s cherished heir, but saw no one sufficiently repugnant to match his imaginings.

    “She’s in the kitchen, Nino, we can’t keep her out of it!” Pietro said, taking his visitor’s arm and leading him to the back parts of the house.

    “Naturally,” Nino replied.

    Maria was holding a colander at the sink while Pietro’s wife poured into it the contents of a pot one might have bathed in. The woman had evidently positioned it so that the steam would strike Maria full in the face. The girl didn’t even have the sense to close her eyes, but blinked at the burning moisture.

    “Pa!” she cried, still blinking—proving that, by some miracle, she had preserved her sight—“are you staying to eat? I made the sauce!”

    “Eating is not for me,” replied her father, his stomach turning to a fist at the thought. “Did you get no wages this week?”

    “Ah!” the girl cried, and slapped her hand to her cheek. “I forgot. Mrs. DelFino said I could help cook today, and I was so excited—”

    “And next week,” Nino inquired, “will your agitation be the same?” She was to come to him, he concluded, immediately after her next pay.

    “But—” a voice piped up. It was a fat girl, with ringlets; for Pietro’s demon offspring had followed him to the kitchen. The child seemed embarrassed to finish her sentence, and only looked up at Maria.

    Maria seemed to understand. “Ah, it’s true, Pa,” she said, smiling at the small glutton, “they were going to go to the beach next Saturday, as soon as I got home to watch the baby.”

    “But you must think of it no more!” spoke up another voice, little deeper than the child’s, though it belonged to a youth already taller than his father. Nino had only to look at the face, where a red scratch indicated a recent effort to shave its three whiskers, to recognize Pietro’s spoiled son. Suffused with self-importance, this creature now turned his attention to his sister and scolded, wagging a finger before him, “You must remember, little one: Mary isn’t here to do your work.” Having spoken, he looked around him, with a satisfaction that would have befitted Solomon.

    Pietro was beaming. Catching Nino’s eye, he gestured silently to the boy as if to say, Have you ever seen anything like it? Nino would have readily agreed that he had not. But all Pietro said aloud was, “The boy is right, Nino. She is perfectly free.”

    “Excuse me,” Nino replied, “I will come for the money myself. I could not consent that your infant should be left alone, when it might choke.”

    So began Nino’s regular visits, on those Saturday evenings when the midsummer light lingered the better to reveal the circumstances of his daughter’s abasement. She wasn’t always to be found in the kitchen, for her masters could scarcely be satisfied by that labor alone. Once he nearly tripped over the heavy carpet, rolled up and laid across the entrance to the parlor, doubtless for his pigeon-boned daughter to carry down the front steps and beat where all the neighbors might see her. To make her labor worse, Pietro’s daughters were pulling the child’s arms and pinching her waist as they dragged her about the parlor floor.

    “They’re teaching me to dance, Pa,” the foolish girl cried out, so that she might be heard above the radio.

    Another time, he found her in one of the bedrooms upstairs, where the oldest daughter was pulling out her hair in little pieces. Half of it was already knotted tight to her head, so that the scalp showed through.

    “Will you make her bald, then?” Nino inquired.

    Maria answered for her busy tormentor. “She’s fixing my hair like hers, Pa.”

    Nino looked at the parrucchiere’s cabbage head and back at Maria’s. “If it were bald,” he said, “at least you’d have a chance for the convent.”

    Another time the smallest ones were taking turns in riding on her back. “You needn’t explain,” Nino assured his daughter. “No doubt they’re teaching you to be a donkey, a trick every poor man must learn soon or late.”

    The boy was always hovering near as well, holding out his hand as if it were something Nino might wish to touch, speaking as if he read the words from a book. “It is an honor to have you in our house, sir”; or, “I believe your daughter is on the back porch,” uttered with his eyes squinting, as if he were an old woman reading the magic drops of oil on the surface of her water pot.

    Pietro always nodded at these words, as if they were made of gold. (For Pietro was always present, too, just as, at home, Nino could never escape from Jimmy. All Nino’s most intimate family transactions, these days, were conducted in the midst of crowds.) Once Pietro even went so far as to confide in Nino, after one of his son’s weightier courtesies, “Wrong though it is to confess, Nino, I sometimes wish Rocco weren’t so set on having my boy, do you know what I mean?”

    Nino only replied, “You prefer to give him to the priesthood, then?” and turned to demand of Maria where she had stolen the jewels with which she had plugged the holes in her ears.

    “Rita lent them to me,” she replied, pointing with a smile to the tallest of the girls.

    Since that giantess nodded in confirmation, Nino left the subject by thanking her for her effort to make his daughter resemble a prostitute, which was no doubt her purpose. But the earrings were to come back to mind the next time he saw Maria.

    Most of the family was out front when he arrived. The men on this block had had nothing better to do with their money than to purchase empty patches of grass between themselves and the road, and even once you’d passed those you weren’t yet in the house, but had to traverse a pillared porch. Nino insisted he would find his own way to his daugh­ter, and walked into the house and back to the kitchen. When he opened the kitchen door, he found Maria standing unoccupied in the middle of the floor, presumably deciding whether to go next for the broom or a rag.

    What he noticed first, however, was that she was wearing, not the earrings, but another female ornament: a crimson blush. With a father’s instinct, he knew at once the guilty thoughts that it must signify—and that must have led her last week, had he only had sense to realize it, to bedizen herself with those jewels.

    Nino was about to speak to her on the subject, emphasizing in partic­ular the wisdom of her choice—for he knew to what disastrous object alone a sinister fate would have led his daughter’s straying affec­tions—when he realized that the boy, too, was there. He was close by Nino, in fact, just inside the doorway, and with a blush like Maria’s upon his smooth skin. So it was that young man instead who became the beneficiary of Nino’s remarks.

    “Bravo!” Nino cried. “Do you plan just to ruin her, signore, or to give your father the excuse he wants to drive her out of his house, and save the pennies in food she eats up?”

    The boy having no answer, Nino asked his question again, in this and other forms, until the ardor of his queries had brought Pietro inside.

    “But what’s wrong?” he inquired. And even a besotted father such as Pietro had to admit, once Nino pointed it out to him, that leaving an unmarried boy and girl alone together was not a thing respectable peo­ple did.

    “Ah,” Pietro explained, “it’s because we think of her so easily as one of our own!” (“If only she could be,” he added with a sort of sad wink to Nino—who simply stared unblinking at the wealthier man.) “But I know it’s no excuse, Nino,” Pietro added remorsefully, “and it certainly won’t happen again.”

    “Certainly,” Nino replied, “why should I expect it, when I have seen the sort of respect with which she is treated in this house?”

    Whatever Nino expected, the fact was that, from this time, he never found the two young people alone together again, and Pietro repeatedly assured him that he never would. Maria even complained of it once.

    “It’s embarrassing, Pa,” she said. “When I leave the room, Joe’s father has to call out to find where Joe is, and both of them are always apologizing to me.”

    “Apologizing?” Nino asked the wise girl. “So that’s what it’s called, in America?”

    Then came a Saturday when Nino’s temper was a little shorter than ordinary. It was early September, and one of his daughters was clamor­ing for school, reminding Nino how little he had saved for his house in all this time. The need for such matters as shoes didn’t stop while he tried to save, and some of Maria’s wages had had to make up, in Jimmy’s pocket, for her mother’s and sister’s failings: one week, two shirts had gone back stained to the jobber, so that the next two weeks the seamstresses had had to work for nothing at all.

    Jimmy was at his worst, too, perhaps from a similar concern about outfitting for school the two of his children too young to keep away from it. “That match is a long time in coming, Nino,” he observed this Saturday afternoon, “but I’m sure it’s as likely as ever. And what a lucky man you’ll be then! For I’m sure Pietro will give you a better job, then, such as he gave his brother-in-law, the pazzo.”

    There was an undoubted imprecision in Jimmy’s words. Everyone agreed that Pietro’s wife’s brother—whom Nino had seen once or twice in a corner of Pietro’s office, straightening piles of paper, or perhaps sorting string—wasn’t crazy, only feeble-minded. Nino didn’t stay to correct his landlord, however, but only strode out of the apartment with a somewhat quicker breath than usual.

    When he got to Pietro’s house, his breath was quicker still, for he had walked all the way, and walked hard.

    “Today you must stay for dinner,” Pietro said, taking his arm, “for we have things to talk of.”

    “I have never found eating and talking at once good for the health,” Nino replied, “or even certain kinds of listening.”

    “Ah,” Pietro persisted, opening the swinging door to the kitchen, “but today—”

    If Nino’s breath had been quick, now it stopped entirely. “Is this,” he demanded, “what you would have me listen to?”

    For before his eyes was the old sight repeated: the two young people in the kitchen alone, with no work on their hands but the devil’s.

    “I should have explained earlier,” Pietro was saying. “You see, she’s taken the veil.”

    Nino looked at his daughter, who was blushing, but wore a foolish look of contentment as well. “And do they let creatures like that inside the convent?”

    “But do you know the girl?” Pietro puzzlingly asked.

    After a few more exchanges, the truth became clearer: it was Rocco’s daughter, the girl in the paese, who had grown so enamored of the place of her schooling that she couldn’t bring herself to leave it in this lifetime.

    “So why shouldn’t these two be a couple?” Pietro asked.

    “With your permission, sir,” the boy was saying, with a bow and a hand held against his heart, as if he were a courtier and Nino the Emperor of China.

    “And next time you must bring your wife, Nino,” put in Pietro’s own spouse, who had joined the mob, “we can be sisters.”

    “These children can live upstairs,” Pietro added, placing his two hands on Nino’s shoulders.

    Nino twisted away, as from a shirt of fire. “So she can be your ser­vant for life?” he demanded.

    “But what do you mean?” asked Pietro with a smile. “We know how to value her better than that!”

    “You’d like your son’s father-in-law, then,” Nino said, backing fur­ther away, “to be the man who cleans the leavings of your animals?”

    “We must talk of that, too,” Pietro said, nodding. “What’s the pur­pose of a man’s luck, if not to share it with others? You remember, cara,” he asked, with a nod at his wife, “the job I made for your brother?” Then he turned back to Nino. “Why should you stay forever at the job you’re doing now?”

    “Why indeed?” Nino echoed, reaching blindly for Maria’s hand, as a man might grope for his wallet before fleeing a burning house. “Or why should my daughter stay at this one?”

    With that, he pulled her out of the kitchen behind him, through gleaming dining room and glittering parlor, and out to the street, where he led her in silence as far as the end of Jimmy’s block.

    There he let her go to find her own way home. For himself, he walked the streets for a while, as if looking for a job to take the place of the one he had thrown away; certainly he was as likely to find one on a Saturday night as any other time. When he finally chose to return to Jimmy’s, there were red eyes enough in the house, but at least he had spared himself most of the weeping.

    Nino didn’t sit down upon entering, but continued to circle the room, as if by the very momentum of his earlier perambulations. His women­folk kept their eyes on him in silence. It was Jimmy who spoke first.

    “I don’t pretend to understand your principles,” he frankly confessed, “but one thing I do know: the money you’ve given up for those principles wasn’t yours. It was mine.” He tapped his finger against his chest, lest there be any mistake.

    Nino paused for a moment, as if this were indeed a thought. Then he put his hands down among the shirts, leaned across the table, and offered Jimmy a nod of elaborate politeness, not unlike that with which the former suitor to his daughter’s hand had favored Nino him­self.

    But Jimmy evidently had more to say. “I know one other thing as well. With your rich friends, you’ve spoiled me, Nino. It seems to me I’ve become used, these past two months, to the money you’ve brought home, though I accepted you for practically nothing when I first took you in off the street. But I fear that may be where I’ll have to send you again, if you can’t satisfy the new tastes you’ve taught me, and I can’t say who else will take you in for so low a price—unless it’s that family you seem to feel your blood is so unsuited to.”

    These words hardly seemed to trouble Nino. Indeed, once they were spoken, he reared back, his smile becoming a laugh, as if Jimmy had fallen into his trap.

    “This is the sum of what you know,” asked Nino, “and yet you call yourself a man? Let me help you at least, my friend, by reminding you of another thing you once knew of, but evidently have forgotten.”

    “And what’s that?” Jimmy inquired, with his fool’s look of suspi­cion.

    “This right arm!” Nino cried, thrusting it out before him, to shake in Jimmy’s face a shirt he had seized, flapping like a banner.

    Jimmy stared in silence. Possibly he was only stunned. But this was enough for Nino, who drew himself up and began to circle the room again, like a lion, or a man seeking work.

    Certainly his gesture conveyed the former. When one more circuit of the room was through, he nodded sharply, conclusively, in what could only be the token of his triumph. It was even more than a lion’s: on his face was the kind of exaltation seen only in pictures of saints in ecstasy, so transported that their very hands know not what they’re doing, or else invest their deeds with mystic purposes, not to be deciphered this side the wall of flesh.

    So nodding, and with one final flourish of the shirt clutched in his fist, Nino sat down, and took up the needle.