Each afternoon
when I reached the top of the hill, I re-checked my carrier bag to ensure all
of my folded newspaper missiles were arranged tails up. Then I’d push off and zoom down the other
side of the street at three times the speed of my uphill climb. I was a sight to see. I could finish the route in seven minutes if
I didn’t crash into a tricycle left on the sidewalk or go flying off in the
street into the path of moving cars when the bag of papers shifted its
weight. If the front wheel began to
wobble and I felt I was losing control,
I’d plan my impending crash by aiming at any of the bushes placed
lovingly in front of the houses by sweet elderly ladies who always expressed
more concern for my well being than their foundation plantings.
Not everyone
held my welfare to be more important than their tranquility. Especially when I missed the mark and took
out a potted plant. Or broke a storm door window. I once had to spend my Saturday afternoon
with an aggrieved customer, Mr. Ibonacci,
as he instructed me in the fine art of glass replacement. Boring.
Some customers
objected to my flying artillery tactics and feared for their safety and
property. Some curtly requested their
paper be laid quietly on the welcome mat or even in their back hallway. I would ignore them. If they continued to insist, I’d explain that
such was impossible since it would disturb the economic balance of the
newspaper’s pricing algorithm due to the extra work, and could only produce an
adjustment in the price which the management did not want to pass on to the
consumer. If they were still listening
at this point, I’d further explain that my delivery methods were fixed by
federal statute because of Freedom of the Press. This bullshit
worked two or three times, but eventually a few customers phoned the
newspaper downtown and expressed concern for the little children playing on the
sidewalk. I was ordered off what one
customer called my Newspaper Rocket. I
had to walk the route and trudge up the driveways of a few malcontents to
politely lay their papers in the back halls, including the home of the Santini
sisters.
Aside from Mr. Cassidy, these two adult sisters were the
only blemish on my happy years as a newspaper carrier. By the time I was done
with the women arguing, their shenanigans and the police, I’d had enough of
Italian sisters for a lifetime.
They argued all the time and constantly insulted each
other. Whenever I stepped into the back
hallway of their two-family home during that spring in high school, my stomach
would churn when either woman complained to me about the other. No matter who I ran into first, all I saw on
either face was anger, a stony coldness that reminded me of the way dead people
look in their caskets. One woman
complained that her contribution to
their oddly arranged two-floor household was more than her sister’s. The other said she had suffered the most from
their dead mother. I wondered if Mamma
Mia was relieved to have passed on after a lifetime of listening to her daughters
squabble, but I kept my opinion to myself.
I was just their dumb paperboy and the last thing I wanted to do was
become part of their war.
I figured the Santini sisters were welcome to live out
their lives of bickering and insults as long as they didn’t try to involve
me. I didn’t want to hear any of
it. You’d think at their age .. nearing
forty, according to neighbors …they would act like adults. I was only slowly progressing on my own walk
to maturity that year, but enough examples surrounded me of other adult
brothers and sisters who didn’t shout at each other. It was true my little brother and I seemed to
constantly argue, but I never shouted at him.
I just punched him or put a pillow over his face until he stopped
moving. And I always assumed I’d stop doing that as we
got older, when it would hurt if he hit back.
Too late, I realized the hearts of the Santini sisters
clashed in a storm of bitter feelings over a man from years before. Had I known how far jealousy drove an
aggrieved heart, I’d have been more frightened, and much sooner.
“My sister, she’s
stupid, stoonad,” said the sister in the downstairs flat whose name
appeared as Mrs. Santa in my newspaper route collection book. Newspaper boys never cared about any of the
names of customers on a route, but the newspaper management required the
information for their records. Most
names were made up by the paperboy in the hurry of teenage impatience. When a kid asked a customer’s name for his
collection book and the customer responded with Hapanozowitcz, a kid wrote Mr. Happy on the line. A fifteen year old could handle Smith and
Jones, but nothing more complicated.
Struizziero became Mr. Stress, because a teenager in a rush wouldn’t say to an adult, “What was
that? Can you spell it?” In the book I inherited from the previous
paperboy, I found Mr. Loan Ranger and
Mr. Rigley Field, names I assumed to be total fabrication. Juan Kipper, the older Jewish man down at the
corner named roughly after his holiday, was happy to be called anything civil,
he once told me when I got around to asking his real name. And the day we replaced Mr. Ibonacci’s door
glass I discovered his real name was not E. Bunny. In my collection book, the Santini sisters appeared as Mrs. Santa and Mrs. Claus, but from neighbors I knew their
real names. Downstairs was Mrs. Spina, a
widow. Her sister upstairs was Miss
Santini, a single woman who dressed as though still hunting for a man,
preferring short skirts and blouses that would give most women pneumonia. And as well, a following of men of low moral
character, as my grandmother would put it.
The Santini women had similar features, but to me they
seemed as different as day and night.
Although as attractive as her sister, the slightly older Mrs. Spina
dressed like an old woman and wore a dark blue ratty men’s cardigan sweater my
grandfather would have taken off and
given away to the first beggar to stop at his door. Her shoulders were stooped from a lifetime of
bearing up under something I did not understand and wouldn’t want to hear
about. While Miss Santini was seldom
home, Mrs. Spina never went anywhere, except to Mass on Sunday, the day she
left the sweater in the closet to shift for itself.
“I stay here and take care of the house,” she had told
me. “My sister is the one who
works.” Her sister was also out often in
the evening, or so Mrs. Spina often complained and the neighborhood spy network
of widows verified.
Jigsaw puzzles were Mrs. Spina’s only entertainment, the
big kind in a large box of over a thousand pieces with a photo on the front of Mt.
Rushmore or another romantic destination
she’d never visited. She laid the puzzle
out on a table and worked on it for weeks.
The hobby was a family tradition and her sister also enjoyed puzzles. They competed to see who finished the same
size puzzle first. But how they
contended with each other produced more arguments. For the year I delivered their newspapers
they refused to speak to one another, except to holler Italian curses up and
down the back stairway. Being an Irish
kid, I knew no Italian except for curses heard often in the neighborhood and
even in church if the Italian priest wasn’t near.
On a Saturday morning in April of 1959, Mrs. Spina stood
in her kitchen doorway waiting for me to dig change out of my pocket. Sixty cents back for her dollar covered the
newspaper’s weekly price of forty cents.
Mrs. Spina was not a good tipper.
She wasn’t any kind of tipper.
I heard the door open upstairs at the top of the back
hallway. Miss Santini shouted down a
stream of Italian, including familiar words like strunz, stoonad and
pootanha, the latter an awful thing to call your sister, a prostitute to
use the nicer term.
Mrs. Spina turned and loudly spoke a stream of curses back
up the stairs.
“That woman,” she then said to me, “she shoulda been
offered to the devil.”
This was either an Italian rite that I hadn’t heard about
or just an example of the inventiveness family members demonstrate when
insulting each other.
I wasn’t coming up with any nickels so I dug deeper,
checking both front pockets. “I’m sure,”
I said to Mrs. Spina with my best Catholic schoolboy mannerly sarcasm, “that
God loves you both.”
“Oo Faa!” she groaned, “a little saint bringing my
newspaper.”
“I was trying to be cheerful,” I said..
“You do me a favor and you can give me just two quarters
change,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “as long as you’re not asking me to mow
your lawn for a dime.”
“Oh, no,” she said, “come in the dining room and get a
dish from the top of the armadietto for me. Come.” She grabbed my arm, still in my pocket diving
for change. The woman was quite strong
and dragged me through the door into the kitchen. She let go and moved to the doorway of her
dining room.
I was not supposed to enter a customer’s house or
apartment, and besides I didn’t want to. Mrs. Spina seemed safe enough, but an
incident from two months before had left me gun shy. As an adolescent boy I of course idly
entertained the fantasy of a voluptuous young woman one day answering my knock
in a bathrobe opened all the way down her front. Or perhaps wearing only a thin film of Saran
Wrap. Instead, a damsel in her late
twenties had asked me to mow her lawn and afterward pulled me into her
kitchen. She lunged at me and covered my
face with kisses while trying to get my shirt off. I escaped, but it scared the crap out of
me. Who would have guessed real sex
could be scary? But Mrs. Spina at nearly
40 years of age did not appear to be much of a risk. I crossed the kitchen and
joined her in the next room.
A buffet, a tall cabinet and table and chairs that
would seat a large Italian family crowded the dining room. A bright simple fixture of three light bulbs
hung from the ceiling and illuminated the center of the room. The furniture was old, the finish having
dulled over the years. Mrs. Spina may
have inherited her mother’s dining room set and I wondered if that might be
another source of upset between the two sisters.
Mrs. Spina indicated the tall cabinet in the corner
and on top was a colorful bowl like my mother served spaghetti from..
I stood on tip-toe, grabbed the dish and handed it to
her. She headed for the kitchen with it
in her arms and I began to follow. I
stopped midway through the dining room.
On the large table lay a jigsaw puzzle with a corner
and two of the borders assembled from the many pieces that would eventually
form a recognizable picture, often of a painting done by a great Italian master
such as Giotto or my favorite later in life, Caravaggio. But it might also be a photo of Niagara
Falls or the Grand Canyon.
I heard Mrs. Spina put the bowl on the kitchen
counter. She came back to the dining
room and stood next to me.
“She thinks she’s got me this time,” the woman
whispered while holding an upraised finger close to her chest so that only I
could see her pointing upstairs toward her sister. This was their favorite game, giving each
other a puzzle with the photo on the front of the box removed.
This trick made the work supremely difficult, and more so if the scene was
of something unfamiliar, such as an anonymous mountain. In their game, the first to have every tiny
puzzle piece in place was the winner.
The first sister to guess the subject of the picture would gain the
advantage and pull out way ahead of her sibling in her sprint to the finish
line. Mrs. Spina was at home all day and
devoted quite a bit of time to the work.
She was often the winner.
“Look,” she said, leaning over the puzzle.
I looked. It
was indeed a puzzle.
“It’s black and white. No color,”
she said, impatience in her voice when she noticed I wasn’t excited.
I could see that was true. So what? I thought.
“All the puzzles I've seen are in color,” she
said. “I bet my sister used an old photo
Mama took with her Brownie. She maybe
sent it away for a company to make into a puzzle,” she said. “We always talked about maybe doing
that. Expensive,” she added.
“Wouldn’t that make it easier to guess?” I said. The two women would have both seen the
photographs taken by their mother.
“My sister never makes anything easy,” said Mrs.
Spina.
When I later
climbed the back hall stairs and knocked on Miss Santini’s door to collect her
forty cents, the woman answered in her
bathrobe, but it wasn’t open. I supposed
Miss Santini was the prettier sister when they were girls, and I guess they
were still both attractive women, except they were forty.
I didn’t tell
Miss Santini I’d seen the latest puzzle.
To be honest, I felt guilty about entering her sister’s flat. But I wondered if she would tell me what was
in the puzzle photo. Besides, in her
bathrobe, she was kind of sexy and I found myself enjoying our little visit.
“Mrs. Spina
tells me you sent her a new puzzle,” I said.
Digging in her
purse for coins, she glanced up with alarm in her eyes.
“You stay
away,” she said. “ None of your business.”
“I wasn’t being
nosey,” I said, indignant.
She handed me
the coins and stood back. .
“She saputa,
my sister, a dummy,” said Miss
Santini. “Thinks she’s so good. Always trying to show she’s better. Always thought she was prettier. Oh, she was so-o-o much smarter. And Angelo … she thought he loved her the
best!”
“Who’s Angelo?”
I asked.
Miss Santini
reached for the edge of the door and began to swing it toward me.
“Our pet,” she
said, and closed the door in my face.
*
That spring of
my adolescence was made memorable when Jenny
Swartout kissed me and moved her tongue against my lips as we lounged in the
back seat of a 1939 Buick on a Sunday afternoon. Neither of us was old enough to practice
foreplay in a Buick or anywhere else, nor did either of us have a driver’s
license to take ourselves down a lonely road.
But a junk yard sat not far from our church and the old cars attracted
teenagers from our Sunday afternoon Chips & Soda group. Two by two the girls and boys sneaked out the
back door of the church hall and headed across the field for the old cars. Jenny’s bright and lustrous lips tasted like
potato chips and orange soda. When she
kissed me, she put her hand on my knee.
To a fifteen year old boy, this was tantamount to tearing her clothes
off. A knock on the Buick’s back window
by the Catholic Youth Leader ended our escapade. Although I tried mightily for a repeat
engagement, Jenny never again crossed the field with me to the junk yard. But I couldn’t forget us trying to maneuver
around the floor shift as the sun lay low on the horizon. I might daydream of other girls and their
standard equipment, but when I thought of Jenny’s orange lips they were enough
to send me off into a storm of impure thoughts.
Giving up Jenny
for lost when she began dating an older boy,
I fell for a new love in my life, a life largely played out in my
imagination. Annette Altomare was a
sweet girl with what appeared to be perky breasts beneath her roomy Catholic
school uniform. I lusted for her. Without having ever said Hello to her in the
school hallways or even smiled when I saw her on the bus stop, my mind soared with Hollywood movies of
Annette and I at the altar getting married, Annette and I with little bambinos
for whom I’d make a great father, and of course mostly Annette and I in bed,
doing what came naturally but without a lot of anatomical detail I wouldn’t
learn for a few years.
I suppose a
boiling over of hormones was responsible for my approach to life at fifteen
years old. Time stretched out before me into the distant future and I yearned
to finally become a man. Sixteen became
a magic number for me, but that birthday was almost a year away, an
eternity. At sixteen I planned get a
driver’s license and go anywhere I wanted without suffering the ignominy of
riding a bus or hitch hiking. I‘d land a
real job at the grocery store after school instead of my childish paper
route. I’d be making real money and buy
a car and take Annette out on dates. I’d
get a convertible, maybe an old Mercedes from a widow who just wanted to get
rid of it. Maybe she would sell the car
to me for under a hundred dollars. Then
Annette’s father, a burly policeman,
would no longer look at me like extra-white trash, a term he reserved
for Irishmen. He called me that name
years before when he coached my Little League team and I never showed up for
practice. I had seldom seen him since.
Meanwhile, I
needed the pittance my paper route provided and so I continued to roll and fold
the papers each night, toss them on front porches and in back hallways and come
around on Saturday mornings to collect my due.
Toward the end
of April I asked Mrs. Spina about the photo puzzle, but her enthusiasm had
evaporated.
“Oh, it’s a
picture of the two of us playing on Mama and Pappa’s bed when we were girls,”
she said.
“Did you claim the prize?” I asked, laughing.
“No prize,” she
said. “Who wins is the winner. You know what I mean?”
“You should
have a prize,” I said. “Like a cake or a
dish of ziti.”
“That woman
couldn’t bake a fig,” said Mrs. Spina with a sneer.
The following
week I arrived in the back hallway and found them arguing, shouting up and down
the stairwell. They couldn’t see each
other around the bend in the stairs, but each easily heard the other as they
cursed in the language their parents had used, although probably not the same
words. Mrs. Spina threw gestures up the
stairs in a way that was vaguely obscene and I’m sure her sister was just as
graphic up on the second floor. I tried
to interrupt to get my forty cents and leave, but they ignored me. Finally the kitchen door upstairs slammed and
there was silence. Mrs. Spina glanced at
me.
“I’m collecting
for the paper,” I quickly interjected before I lost her attention. But the upstairs door opened and Miss Santini
began to shout again.
Suddenly Mrs. Spina appeared to sense something. She reached out and took my wrist, pulled me into her kitchen and slammed the
door. Pushing me off toward the counter,
she opened the door briefly, peeked out and slammed it again. She stayed there a minute, opening it once
more and looking out, so I wandered into the dining room to look at the
puzzle. I thought I heard someone going
up the stairs. In a moment Mrs. Spina
came from the kitchen and stood beside me.
The black and
white puzzle lay on the table. The right
side was almost complete, as well as a small ribbon of the bottom border. Part of a bed could now be seen. A frame partially surrounded the half
scene. I wondered if it was a window,
but decided it was a large mirror, like the kind mounted on my mother’s
dresser. I made out a woman’s bare leg,
knee bent and pointing at the camera as she sat cross legged on the bed. The leg was bare to the hip and she had
pulled a sheet up between her thighs to afford a little modesty. It continued a bit higher, but the top and
side of her chest were uncovered. This
was not a photo of young girls playing on their parents’ bed, as Mrs. Spina
said a week ago. Here was a naked woman
wrapped partially in a sheet.
The one arm
visible so far was held high and the
elbow pointed outward as if she held something in front of her. Enough of the puzzle pieces to define her
face were in position, allowing me to guess the identity of the woman.
“Is this your
sister?” I said, embarrassed.
“Well … yes,” she said. “Years ago.
She’s playing with our old dog.
“I don’t see a dog,” I said.
“But I know
it’s the dog,” she said. “Our little …
Angelo.”
*
Aside from
Youth Group Sunday afternoon dalliances in the junk yard, which came to an end
when the youth leader discovered why we were so interested in old cars, my
social experiences in 1959 were mostly limited to school dances, where boys and
girls showed up wearing their best shirts or dresses. If lucky, we might dance with someone, but
mostly we stood around trying to look mature, and almost always walked home
alone or with members of our own sex.
There was no hard and fast rule in any of this, just the effects of
shyness and limited funds.
Billy Callahan
told me he had taken a girl out for a chocolate soda after the last monthly
dance on Friday night at the high school.
I was immediately transfused with enthusiasm to do the same with
Annette.
“How much did
it cost you?” I asked Billy.
“Forty-five
cents for each soda,” he said, “plus a nickel tip.”
“Under a
dollar,” I said, my mind already at work on how to get my hands on that much
money the night before I collected for my papers on Saturday morning. It was doable, I decided.
“Plus bus fare
for the two of us,” he added.
“What bus
fare?” I asked.
“You’re not
gonna abandon her there on the street once you leave the Soda Shop,” he
said. “You have to take her home on the
bus.”
“OK,” I said,
slightly disappointed.
”You’ve assumed a responsibility
for the woman once you take her on a date and buy her a soda,” he
lectured. “You have to escort her home
and pay her way.”
“But she would
have paid her own bus fare anyway,” I said.
“Haven’t you
ever heard of chivalry?” he asked. “It
means the man pays for everything.”
That seemed
excessive to me, but I had no other opinion to fall back on, unless I asked my
father, which I surely did not plan to do.
Only my little brother still asked my father’s advice, although I had
warned him that by doing so he was giving up potentially useful information he
should keep to himself.
I wasn’t in the
habit of discussing a lot of stuff with my father. A teenage boy goes places and does things
he’s knows not to ask permission for or discuss if he doesn’t want to be told
to desist. I hung around a pool hall
after school sometimes and my parents would have disapproved if they knew. And to save bus fare, I often hitchhiked
along the major city streets. I couldn’t
get over why people paid for a bus when most of us could just stick out our
thumb and be given a free ride.
Coming back
from a school basketball game the night after I discovered Miss Satini in the
picture puzzle, I walked along the town’s main thoroughfare with my thumb stuck
out, hoping to hitch a ride. A car
slowed down and stopped. With the
headlights shining in my eyes, I could
not tell the make or model of the car, but as I opened the door the vehicle
began to look familiar. By the time I
jumped in, I knew who was driving, but saw only a pair of long nylon
stocking-ed legs beneath the steering wheel.
Miss Santini said hello to me.
“Don’t you know
hitch hiking is” … and here she hiccupped … “dangerous? You could be taken advantage of by a
desperate woman.” The last two words
came out quite slurred, followed by a cackling laugh.
I tried to make
conversation … about my paper route, I think ... but was terribly
distracted. Her white blouse was open
down past the edges of her bra and her skirt was hiked up beyond her stocking
tops. She drove me to my street and
parked the car three doors away from my home in front of a house where all the
lights were off for the night. She turned
the ignition off and slid over next to me,
her clothing covering even less by the time she arrived on my side of
the car.
Resting her
head on my shoulder she said, “Do you want to kiss me?”
I don’t know
why I didn’t. She was very sexy, although her breath smelled of a sickly
sweetness. Call it instinct, but I
sensed I might lose something that night. And although I couldn’t name it, I
did not want to lose it. Not with this woman in this car on this warm night in
April at age fifteen. I wanted to save
it for someone my own age, someday. Or
maybe I was just scared.
Attempting to
change the subject as my hand searched for the door handle, I said, “I saw the
puzzle.”
She immediately
sobered and sat back from me.
”She showed
you?” Miss Santini all but screamed.
“Well, no, I
was--” I began.
“Va gootz,”
she said loudly. “The stupid c*nt!”
“Hey, wait a
minute.” I said. “You shouldn’t say such--”
“Fancul! I’ll kill her, the dumb bitch!”
She was so
upset she scared me. Her face was
awful, like a little girl wanting to kill the older sister who took away her
doll. The hatred erupted from her like
bottled up poison as she continued to curse and tell me things would be better
if her sister were dead.
“Oh, c’mon,” I
said, in an attempt to calm her down. “You’re just upset. She’s your sister.”
“She’s the
devil and I should have gotten rid of her long ago,” Miss Santini said, and the slurring
returned. “I’ll cut her heart out, just
like a chicken.”
From somewhere
a small pearl handled knife appeared.
She may have kept it for protection when she was out for the
evening. Miss Santini passed it under my
chin, the point scraping my skin as a
chilling smile took over her features.
“Look,” I said,
“she didn’t mean for me to see the puzzle.”
“Get out!” she
said. “Go home.”
One can’t
reason with a drunken woman, especially if she has a weapon. I left her and
walked the half block to my house. My
mother waited at the door.
“Did you just
get out of that car down the street?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Couple of old people lost and asking directions.”
”To where?” she
asked, suspicious.
“The
cemetery,” I said brusquely and walked
by her to the bedroom. My little brother lay peacefully sleeping on his side of
the room, so I gave him a good punch in the shoulder just to remind him I had
rights of primacy as his elder.
I was upset
with the ferociousness of Miss Santini.
I never knew anyone who would seriously hurt a brother or sister, but I
wondered if I had finally met someone evil enough to do so. In the morning
there was blood on my pillow from beneath my chin. My brother remarked that only a space alien
could bite himself on the chin.
*
After school on
the following Friday I walked along my paper route and made up my mind to ask
Annette out for a chocolate soda after the dance. I pictured the two of us on the gym floor as
I issued the invitation and received an enthusiastic response. Maybe she’d throw in a full body hug and make
it worth the double bus fare.
At the
Santini’s, I threw the papers in the back hall and noticed Mrs. Spina’s door
ajar. It seemed odd. No sound came from inside the flat when I
knocked. I knocked again, wishing Mrs.
Spina would open the door. I had tried
to not let my imagination work overtime since my ride with her sister. But this
was not good. Mrs. Spina seldom left her
flat, except for Sunday Mass, and certainly never with the door left open. I told myself Miss Santini could not have
been serious about hurting her sister.
I pushed the
door open a little farther and stuck my head in the kitchen.
“Mrs.
Spina?” I said, my voice beginning to
quaver.
There was no
response. The kitchen seemed
unused. Often there was a dish cooking
on the stove or ingredients lined up on the counter for a later meal. I called her name again. I was reminded of a fellow paper boy’s
experience a few blocks away. He had
found an old man dying in a kitchen the
year before when he heard moaning and opened the door. I didn’t want to find a dead or dying
woman. I had no idea how to handle such
a catastrophe.
Maybe she was
on the second floor, although I’d never seen her up there with her sister. I leaned back out of the kitchen doorway and
turned and headed up the stairs. At
least this delayed going into Mrs. Spina’s flat and searching for her. Hopefully it would prove unnecessary when I
found her upstairs.
Halfway up I
saw red streaks on the wall of the hallway.
I wondered if Miss Santini might have
brought down a dish with red sauce and spilled some on the way. I should say that’s what I hoped. It really looked like blood. When I saw a smeared bloody palm print, the
shock almost sent me reeling over backward down the stairs. I don’t know how long I stared at that palm
print, but finally I allowed it to tell me I must go back down the stairs and
search for Mrs. Spina.
“Mrs. Spina?” I
called as I passed through the kitchen.
I saw more blood on the yellow wall telephone and red drops spattered on
the linoleum floor beneath. My stomach
was about to heave. In the dining room
more blood had dribbled on the floor.
The puzzle lay
on the table and was almost complete. In
the photograph, Miss Santini sat naked in bed, a sheet partially covering
her. One arm held a cheap Brownie camera
just below her smirking face. Her other
arm was raised and so was her middle finger.
Miss Santini had taken the photo in the mirror that sat atop a low
dresser across from the bed. She must
have first tipped the mirror down like my brother and I did with Mom’s mirror
when we were little kids and played in our parents’ bedroom.
A man with a
head of curly hair lay in bed with her, on his back and evidently sleeping,
most of his face away from the camera. I
wondered if he was Mrs. Spina’s late husband.
Her sister’s middle finger and the look of triumph on her face said
everything about who was a winner and who was a loser. Who wins is the winner. That’s what Mrs. Spina had told me.
Was this the
first that Mrs. Spina knew her sister slept with her late husband? Why would Miss Santini send the photo to her
sister, and why have it made into a puzzle?
Why now?
I must have
said the word “why” out loud, because a man’s voice answered.
“Good
question,” he said. “What the hell are you
doing here?”
In a bedroom
off the dining room Annette’s father, a police detective and my former Little
League Coach, sat on the foot of a
bed. He stood up and walked toward me.
“I’m their
paper boy, Coach,” I whined.
“And the worst
right fielder I ever had on my team,” he said. “Now you’re a woman killer.”
A thick leather
patch hung from the pocket of his sport coat. On it was a silver badge that
must have weighed three pounds.
“I didn’t kill
her,” I said, realizing I was accused of
Mrs. Spina’s murder. And maybe both
sisters. Detective Altomare simply
shook his head. Up and down or sideways
it was impossible to tell. He just moved
it around a little.
“What happened?” I asked, my voice an octave
higher than usual.
“Did you know
the women in this house very well?” he
asked, using the past tense for both sisters.
“I just deliver
the paper,” I cried.
“The lady in
the puzzle,” he said. “Who is she?”
“I don’t know,”
I said. I tried to stop my chin from trembling.
Detective
Altomare sighed with impatience. He
glanced down at the floor, shifted his weight from one foot to the other and
quickly back again. The he moved close
to me and continued to stare into my face.
“Who’s the guy sleeping in the bed?” He
gestured toward the puzzle on the table.
“I … I don’t
know,” I said.
He leaned even
closer, towering over me. I easily
understood he owned the air I was breathing.
“Why don’t you just start telling me
everything you know, punk,” he said, quietly.
“And if it’s helpful, maybe I won’t arrest you for murder or breaking
into this flat. And maybe I won’t send
your sorry little ass off to jail for anything I can think up.” He ended his statement with a much louder,
“Huh?”
I told him
everything I knew ... almost. Everything
I considered possible. I even began to tell him I thought it could be Communist
agents who wanted the house for a radio listening post. After all, we were only
15 miles from a Strategic Air Command air base, and there were always
suspicious looking men hanging around the barbershop down on the corner. The Polish barber, Pete Warblowski, was a
newspaper customer listed in my collection book as Peter Wabbit. Who but a spy would use such a fake name? I stopped in mid sentence when he glared at
me with an evil eye. He didn’t want speculation. I didn’t tell him the lady in the bed was
Miss Santini. I might be the prime
suspect, so I don’t know why I tried to save the woman from prosecution. The paper boy’s code of silence, maybe, or I
might have been still thinking of her trying to kiss me a few nights before.
Detective
Altomare let me go after 45 minutes.
“The Grand Jury
may want to indict you,” he added.
“Don’t leave town.”
Where would I
go? I probably had enough money only for
a bus ticket to Albany. I
didn’t know anyone there, but I had read Legs Diamond hid out in a downtown
hotel when the police were chasing him.
Even if I borrowed two dollars, after the bus ticket I’d have about 35
cents to pay for a hide-out.
My mother asked
me twice at supper why I was so quiet.
Even Dad looked quizzically at me, and he was never in the habit of
worrying about the moods of teenage boys, having been one a long time ago.
Half of my
thoughts concerned the killing. How
could such a terrible thing happen and who killed the sisters? I was also trying to come to grips with the
idea of being accused of murder. How
could anyone think I would do such a thing?
I had often smothered my little brother, but I knew when he stopped
moving he was faking it. What if I was
convicted? If I got out of prison in 20
years, would Annette be waiting? And how
would she look as an older woman of 35?
What about college? What about
turning 18 and being allowed to drink beer? Did they have beer in prison? Was prison as bad as I had heard? At least I might get my own room, even if it
was a small cell.
There was a guy
in the paper a year before who had his murder sentence upped to life because he
raped his victim. Would I be accused of
that and never get out of jail? How could
I prove I was a virgin? Was there a
test, or would a string of witnesses do?
Maybe I could get the Girls Choir at school to all sign a petition or a
greeting card testifying I’d never even tried to look down the fronts of their
blouses. And would anyone believe that?
My father went
out to a church meeting and my mother began to quiz me, following me into the
living room, where I had planned to turn on the TV to see if I was on the Six
O’Clock News.
“You can always
tell me anything,” she said. “I know
something is bothering you.”
“No, I’m
OK,” I said. But I knew if I didn’t confess, she would
hound me to tears.
“Nothing is
ever that terrible,” she said.
“Nothing is
wrong, Mom,” I said. “I’m just a little tired tonight.”
“If you’ll just
tell me I’m sure we’ll both feel better about it.”
.“I’ve been
accused of murdering two ladies on my paper route,” I said.
If someone had
walked into the room and whacked the woman over the head with a baseball bat,
the instant look of shock on her face would have been no different.
“Two sisters,” I added, helpfully.
She tried to
speak. Her jaw moved, but no sound came
out.
“They were
older, almost forty,” I said, wondering
what other details might be of interest.
Recovering a
bit, she squeaked, “Were they Jewish?”
“I’m not a
Nazi, Mom,” I said.
“No,” she said,
“I meant the only two sisters I know on your route are the Fineberg girls.”
I told her
about the Santini sisters, the puzzle, Detective Altomare and Angelo the dog,
who of course I had not met.
Poor Mom. As she sat opposite me on the edge of her
chair, she seemed to shrivel up as she drew her knees up, practically to her
chin.
“We can get
through this,” she said. “Don’t worry,”
she repeated several times. But she
looked more worried than ever and her forehead was knit with concern.
“I have to
leave,” I said.
“Don’t run from
the law!” she pleaded. “We can get
through this.”
“I have to go
to the dance,” I said.
She was
incredulous. ”You can’t go to a … a d-dance. You’re a suspected murderer for
God’s sake!”
For Mom to ever
use the word God without being deep in prayer was a shock to my ears. She might as well have used the F word.
“I didn’t do
it, Mom,” I said in my calmest voice..
“Well, I mean …
this is serious,” she said. “Wait for
your father to come home.”
“I’ll be home early,” I said. “I really have to go. Really!
I stood and
walked toward the back door.
She turned and
followed me with sad eyes as if I was walking toward the gallows.
“Is your
picture in the Post Office yet?” she
asked.
“It just
happened today,” I said.
“And you were
in school, weren’t you?” she said. “What
time? You didn’t skip Geometry again,
did you?”
“You can’t kill
two people and get back for fourth period, Mom,” I said with some exasperation.
She nodded
slowly, as if she would give that opinion some consideration.
“I’ll be home
before Dad gets back,” I lied again. I
walked through the kitchen and left the house.
I forgot to
wear my best shirt. And tonight might be
the last time I’d see Annette. I doubted her father would allow her to visit me
in the basement of the city jail while I awaited trial. I remembered I needed to make a few early
collections on the paper route for the two dollars to take Annette out and pay
her bus fare home. I ran the three
blocks between my house and the paper route.
It was getting dark and I looked for lights in the windows to signal who
was at home. Mr. and Mrs. Rigley Field
overcame their surprise and gave me their 40 cents. So did a few other customers as I worked my
way up the street until I had two dollars.
Coming away
from Mr. Charles Tuna’s house, I noticed a light shining from a window in Mrs.
Spina’s flat. Detective Altomare was
still at work, which meant he hadn’t told Annette of my future indictment. My stomach was churning, but if I didn’t want
damaging testimony at my trial about my lying, I had to go in there and tell
the detective the woman in the puzzle was Miss Santini.
I knocked on
the back door and Mrs. Spina opened it.
Quite a large dressing sat above one eye, held in place with a band
around her head.
“You’re alive!”
I exclaimed. “I’m glad you’re OK,” was
all I could think to add. A thousand
pound weight lifted off my shoulders.
“That puttana!”
she spat. “She can’t kill me!” She stepped out of her door and turned to the
stairway.
“Sfatcheem!”
she bellowed up the stairs. A muffled
stream of invective I couldn’t
understand came back down the stairs, but I could imagine Miss. Santini’s reaction to have been called a shitface.
Satisfied to
have that out of the way, Mrs. Spina turned back to me with a gentle lady-like
smile.
“I went up to
discuss her disgusting puzzle,” she said.
“She threw a water glass at me!
Hit me in the head,” she said, pointing to her scalp where the bandage
covered the hair line. “I tried to have her arrested, but the police wouldn’t
do it.”
“They thought I
killed the two of you,” I said.
She laughed and
then looked apologetic.
“I’m sorry
about all of this,” she said. “The
detective, he told me you helped him.”
“Well,” I
answered, “I guess so. Sure.”
“You saw the
puzzle after we went to the hospital?” she asked.
“Well, not very
well,” I lied.
“Did you tell
the detective you saw Angelo in the picture?” she asked, looking at me
intently.
“There was no
dog I could see in the photo, Mrs. Spina,” I said.
She nodded her head, as if in
understanding.
“I told you
Angelo was a dog before you saw the whole puzzle,” she said. “Angelo was the man in the bed with my
sister.”
I was
embarrassed, but I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Was that your husband?”
“Oh, no. Poor Marco, he died in the war. So young.
No, this was all after the war.”
“I’m sorry,” I
said.
“After the war,
my sister and I went to dances together.
We met Angelo and he came back here.
One night downstairs, other night upstairs.” She giggled, then said, “Finally, Angelo
chose her. She won, she was the
winner. It was OK then, none of us were
married.
She looked at
me earnestly and said. “Married changes
things. Terrible sin. Not right.”
I didn’t know
what to say.
“She still rubs
my face in it,” said Mrs. Spina. “ I
can’t believe she did such a picture.
And to have it made into a puzzle.
She knew it would get to me, even if it took a while for me to figure it
out.”
It was getting
late. I needed to leave for the
dance.
“I have to get
going.”
“If you see the
detective again,” she said, “you tell him you saw Angelo in the picture,”
I wondered why
she wanted to involve Angelo with the police.
“Are you sure you want me to tell that to
Detective Altomare?”
“Oh, yes,” she
said. “You tell him about Angelo.”
“But all I saw
was a head of hair. I don’t even know
the guy.”
“You tell him,”
she said.
*
With my arms
loosely around Annette in the middle of the gym floor at the school dance an
hour later, I popped the question. To my
stunned amazement she said yes, she would
accompany me to the soda shop afterward.
The place was
busy when we arrived and found a table. I now felt bad I’d left Mom at home to
announce to my father their boy was accused of murder. I should have found a pay telephone and
called her, but that was another dime and I was afraid if I left Annette alone
for one second, she would bolt out the door and find her own way home. The money I‘d save on her bus fare was not
worth the shame of having my first date run out on me.
It was a rather
quiet date and not very much like what I had hoped for on my first. I could think of absolutely nothing to say to
Annette as I sat across from her at the soda shop. I ached to tell her I’d been accused of a
sordid murder and was now exonerated, but given her father’s role I had the sense to not bring it up. And of all the dumb stunts, I feigned
disinterest because I’d rather appear bored than tongue tied. She was probably insulted. I just couldn’t think of anything to say that
wouldn’t sound stupid. I sat there rigid
and it occurred to me there was nothing for me to brag about, except I could
tightly roll a newspaper and throw it thirty feet from a moving bicycle with
accuracy … most of the time. I could
solve a quadratic equation and I could swallow air and burp the longest of any
boy I knew. I suspected she wouldn’t be
interested in any of these accomplishments.
Finally, on the
bus ride to her house, Annette erupted in chatter. Maybe she tired of my silence or didn’t want
to appear in public with a boy who was no more lively or talkative than he
would be on the day of his funeral.
At her door,
she asked me to come in to meet her parents.
“Oh, no, I
can’t,” I said. I never wanted to see
her father again.
Annette huffed
in annoyance. “It’s customary for you to
meet my parents.”
“Yes, but—“
The door
suddenly swung open wide and Detective Altomare filled the door frame. His surprise at discovering me outside with
his daughter would have been hilarious if I hadn’t recently been a murder
suspect.
“I didn’t know
you two were out tonight,” he said, blocking the door.
“Daddy, let us
in the house,” said Annette.
“Well, honey,”
her father said, “your date and I have to go outside and talk business for a
minute. You come inside and I’ll be
right back.”
A woman I
remembered from the ball games as Mrs. Altomare came up behind the detective
and said, “Angelo, is everything all right?”
Angelo? His name on the baseball program had always
been A.C. Altomare and all the adults called
him Ace. The detective’s hair had grayed a little, but this could be
the same head of curly hair I’d seen in bed in the picture puzzle.
He hustled me
off the porch and guided me to the sidewalk and then down the street.
“We need to
talk,” he said.
“Mrs. Spina
told me to tell you I saw Angelo in the picture puzzle,” I said.
“I’ll just bet
she did,” he said, spitting out the words with anger.
I stopped and
looked up at the man. He was obviously
uncomfortable.
“Was that
you?” I asked.
“That was many
years ago,” he said. “Before I met
Annette’s mother.”
I remembered
hearing someone on the stairs the day I was in Mrs. Spina’s dining room. She had roughly pulled me into the kitchen
when she noticed something or maybe someone behind me.
“That was you,”
I said. “Sure, that was Angelo. The day Mrs. Spina pulled me into her
kitchen. You must have been out on the
back porch. And then you went up to see
Miss Santini.”
He looked
crestfallen and guilty, caught.
“I can explain
that,” he said. “I can also cause a lot
of trouble for you and your big mouth.”
“But you can’t
charge me with murder,” I said.
*
When I got home
that night, my father made me tell him everything, twice. He was upset, and advised me to keep the
story to myself.
“Don’t get into
any more conversations with Mrs. Spina or her sister,” he said. “Or any of the Altomares.”
“That’s not
right,” I said.
“You let me decide
what’s right in this case,” he said.
“Concentrate on your school work.”
My mother said
nothing, but the steely look in her eyes told me she was upset.
Not sure why I
was apologizing I glanced at her, “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“You go out on
your first date,” she said, “and you don’t tell your Mother?”
Annette
immediately began to ignore me in the halls at school. Poor kid, I can’t imagine what she went
through, because her father’s car was soon showing up regularly in the Santini
sisters’ driveway. I heard later he
divorced Annette’s mother and took up with Miss Santini, who I guess was the
winner. But as a prize, Detective Altomare struck me as a distant second to a
cake or a dish of ziti
I left the
paper route a short time later when I lied about my age and went to work for an
advertising specialty company delivering soap samples to people’s homes. It paid better, but wasn’t as much fun. You definitely couldn’t throw bars of soap
against people’s doors. Two years later I went off to college and seldom returned
to my home town, except for family disasters.
In my thirties,
I flew back for Aunt Lily’s funeral. My
aunt was known throughout the city and the church was quite crowded. For over thirty years her outlandish
newspaper columns treated a range of subjects far beyond her analytical
abilities but well within the grasp of her acerbic wit. She had fought and won three libel cases.
I sat up near
the front of the church behind the immediate family of cousins and when the
pews emptied out after the service I was
one of the last to leave the church. An
older woman approached me and said Hello.
It took a moment for me to recognize her.
“Mrs. Spina,” I
said. “My gosh, it’s been years. You look well.”
“And you’re all
grown up,” she cooed.
“And how is
your sister?” I asked, carefully.
A cloud seemed
to cross her features.
“Oh,” she said,
avoiding my eyes, “not so good.”
I saw myself as
a youngster and a feeling of dread echoed from the past and pulled on my stomach.
Instantly, pity rose in me for the kid who had been subjected to these
two women so long ago. A delayed anger
accompanied it.
“You know,” I
said evenly, “that was a lot for a fifteen-year-old to be put through.”
“I am truly
sorry,” she said, with compassion in her eyes. “My sister died ten years ago.”
“I’m sorry to
hear it,” I said, but I could not have sounded sincere.
A man came up
behind her and she turned as if familiar with his footsteps. As he approached us I recognized him,
Detective Altomare. He didn’t even
glance at me. I could imagine why, after
Dad spoke to the District Attorney.
“Are you ready
to go?” he asked her.
Mrs. Spina’s
face reddened and she smiled up at me.
But it was not a smile of embarrassment.
The elder Santini sister had the smile of a winner. Who wins is the winner, she told me long
ago. Sometimes it takes a while.
copyright 2007, 2014, David Griffin
