The following Sunday he came for her, lightly ascending the sun-bleached steps to the walkup above the drugstore where she lived with uncle and aunt and their five children. It was a hot September morning, all of Fresno and the broad dusty valley beyond held in the grip of something stupendous, a blast of air so sere and scorching you would have thought the whole world was a pizza oven with the door open wide. Siagris the Greek answered his knock. He was in his shirtsleeves and the sweat had made a washcloth of his garments, the white field of his shirt stuck like a postage stamp to the bulge of his belly. He didn’t smile but he didn’t look displeased either, and Baldasare understood the look: Siagris didn’t like him, not one bit, and in other circumstances might have gone out of his way to squash him like a bug, but then he had a niece who took up space and ate like six nieces, and Baldasare could just maybe deliver him from that. “Come in,” he said, and there was Baldasare, the cave-dweller, in a room in a house two stories above the ground.
Up here, inside, it was even hotter. The Siagris children lay about like swatted flies, and Mrs. Siagris, her hair like some wild beast clawing at her scalp, poked her head around the corner from the kitchen. It was too hot to smile, so she grimaced instead and pulled her head back out of sight. And then, in the midst of this suffocating scene, the voice of a ventriloquist cried out, “He’s here,” and Ariadne appeared in the hallway.
She was all in white, with a hat the size of a tabletop perched atop the mighty pile of her hair. He was melting already, from the heat, but when she focussed her wild eye on him and turned up her lips in the shyest of smiles, he melted a little more.
Outside, in the street, she gave him her arm, which was something of a problem because she was so much taller than he was, and he had to reach up awkwardly to take it. He was wearing his best suit of clothes, washed just the evening before, and the unfamiliar jacket clung to him like dead skin while the new celluloid collar gouged at his neck and the tie threatened to throttle him. They managed to walk the better part of a block before she put her feet together and came to a halt. “Where’s your carriage?” she asked.
Carriage? Baldasare was puzzled. He didn’t have any carriage — he didn’t even have a horse. “I no got,” he said, and he strained to give her his best smile. “We walk.”
“Walk?” she echoed. “In this heat? You must be crazy.”
“No,” he said, “we walk,” and he leaned forward and exerted the most delicate but insistent pressure on the monument of her arrested arm.
Her cheeks were splotched under the crisp arc of shadow the hat brim threw over her face and her olive eyes seemed to snatch at his. “You mean,” and her voice was scolding and intemperate, “you ain’t even got a wagon? You, with your big house you’re always telling me about?”
The following Sunday, though it wounded him to throw his money away like some Park Avenue millionaire, he pulled up to Siagris’ Drugstore in a hired cabriolet. It was a clear day, the sun high and merciless, and the same scenario played itself out in the walkup at the top of the stairs, except that this time Baldasare seemed to have things in hand. He was as short with Siagris as Sia-gris was with him, he made a witticism regarding the heat for the benefit of the children, and he led Ariadne (who had refused the previous week to go farther than a bench in the park at the end of the street) out the door, down the steps, and into the carriage like a cavaliere of old.
Baldasare didn’t like horses. They were big and crude and expensive and they always seemed to need grooming, shoeing, doctoring, and oats — and the horse attached to the cabriolet was no exception. It was a stupid, flatulent, broad-flanked, mouse-colored thing, and it did its utmost to resist every touch of the reins and thwart every desire of the man wielding them. Baldasare was in a sweat by the time they reached his property, every square inch of his clothing soaked through like a blotter, and his nerves were frayed raw. Nor had he made any attempt at conversation during the drive, so riveted was he on the task at hand, and when they finally pulled up in the shade of his favorite oak, he turned to Ariadne and saw that she hadn’t exactly enjoyed the ride either.
Her hat was askew, her mouth set in a thin unyielding line. She was glistening with sweat, her hands like doughballs fried in lard, and a thin integument of moistened dust clung to her features. She gave him a concentrated frown. “Well, where is it?” she demanded. “Why are we stopping here?”
His tongue ran ahead of him, even as he sprang down from the carriage and scurried to her side to assist her in alighting. “This is what I have want for to show you, and so long, because — well, because I am making it for you.”
He studied the expression of her face as she looked from the disreputable shack to the hummock of the well and out over the heat-blasted scrub to where the crown of his avocado tree rose out of the ground like an illusion. And then she saw the ramp leading down to the cellar. She was stunned, he could see it in her face and there was no denying it, but he watched her struggle to try on a smile and focus her eyes on his. “This is a prank, ain’t it? You’re just fooling with me and your house is really over there behind that hill”—pointing now from her perch atop the carriage—“ain’t it?”
“No, no,” he said, “no. It’s this, you see?” And he indicated the ramp, the crown of the avocado, the bump where the inverted cone of a new atrium broke the surface. “Twelve room, I tell you, twelve room.” He’d become insistent, and he had his hand on her arm, trying to lead her down from the carriage — if only she would come, if only she would see — and he wanted to tell her how cool and fresh-smelling it was down there beneath the earth, and how cheap it was to build and expand, to construct a nursery, a sewing room, anything she wanted. All it took was a strong back and a shovel, and not one cent wasted on nails and lumber and shingles that fell apart after five years in the sun. He wanted to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come, and he tried to articulate it all through the pressure of his hand on her arm, tugging, as if the whole world depended on her getting down from that carriage — and it did, it did!
“Let go!” she cried, snatching her arm away, and then she was sobbing, gasping for breath as if the superheated air were some other medium altogether and she was choking on it. “You said … you said … twelve rooms!”
He tried to reach for her again—“Please,” he begged, “please”—but she jerked back from him so violently the carriage nearly buckled on its springs. Her face was furious, streaked with tears and dirt. “You bully!” she cried. “You Guinea, Dago, Wop! You, you’re no better than a murderer!”
Three days later, in a single paragraph set off by a black border, the local paper announced her engagement to Hiram Broad-bent, of Broadbent’s Poultry & Eggs.
An engagement wasn’t a marriage, that’s what Baldasare was thinking when Lucca Albanese gave him the news. An engagement could be broken, like a promise or a declaration or even a contract. There was hope yet, there had to be. “Who is this Hiram Broadbent?” he demanded. “Do you know him?”
They were sharing a meal of beans and vermicelli in Baldasare’s subterranean kitchen, speaking in a low tragic Italian. Lucca had just read the announcement to him, the sharp-edged English words shearing at him like scissors, and the pasta had turned to cotton wadding in his throat. He was going to choke. He was going to vomit.
“Yeah, sure,” Lucca said. “I know him. Big, fat man. Wears a straw hat winter and summer. He’s a drunk, mean as the devil, but his father owns a chicken farm that supplies all the eggs for the local markets in Fresno, so he’s always got money in his pocket. Hell, if you ever came out of your hole, you’d know who I’m talking about.”