“That is my wish.” Francesco turned to the butcher. “Rafaelo,” he said, “would you care for a glass of wine?”
“Well, that is entirely up to you, Francesco. You are the bossa.” The butcher licked his lips. He could taste the wine, but he did not wish to appear overly eager, lest the boss change his mind.
“Pino?” Francesco said. “What do you think? A glass of wine for the butcher?”
Pino considered the question gravely and solemnly. At last, he said, “Bossa, he has to work tomorrow.”
“That’s true,” Francesco said. “You’ll cut the meat badly, Rafaelo.”
“Bossa, tomorrow’s tomorrow,” Rafaelo said quickly. “And today is Sunday.”
“I think he’s thirsty,” Francesco said, and winked at Pino.
“I think they’re both thirsty,” Pino said.
“So let’s you and me have another drink,” Francesco said. He poured the glasses full again, raised his in toast, and said, “To Victor Emmanuel.”
“Are you drinking to the king without us?” Rafaelo said, appalled.
“To Victor Emmanuel,” Pino said, and drained his glass.
“Ahhh,” Francesco said. “Delicious.” He looked at the other men critically, as though estimating their capacity for alcohol, and measuring their thirst, and judging whether or not they were good and decent men, and hard workers, and religious besides. A smile broke on his face. He turned to Pino. “Now, please,” he said, “fill the glasses for our friends, and we will finish the wine together.”
Agnelli the iceman let out a sigh of relief. “I like it when you’re the bossa,” he said.
“Ah? And why?” Francesco asked.
“Because you have a soft heart,” Agnelli said.
“A soft head, I think,” Francesco said, and lifted his glass. “This time we drink to Italy together.”
Solemnly, the other men raised their glasses. “To Italy,” they said.
“To home,” Francesco said.
“Francesco!” Teresa yelled, and came running into the kitchen, her white apron covered with what Francesco first thought to be blood.
“Oh, Madonna mia!” he shouted, and leaped to his feet. “Che successe?”
“The barrel!”
“What barrel?”
“One of the barrels!”
“What? What?”
“It’s broken!”
“What do you mean? What is she talking about?” he asked Pino, who was as bewildered as he.
“Of wine!” Teresa said. “In the front room!”
“San Giacino di California!” Francesco shouted. “Andiamo!” he yelled to the other men, and ran out of the kitchen with the three of them behind him. The woman from downstairs knocked on the kitchen door, and when Teresa let her in she frantically told her there was wine on her ceiling, and it was dripping all over her bed. Teresa sighed. Francesco ran back into the kitchen, barefooted, his trouser legs rolled up, his feet stained a bright purple. He went immediately to the table and yanked the tablecloth from it.
“My tablecloth!” Teresa shouted.
“There’s wine all over the house!” he shouted back gleefully, and was gone.
“It’s dripping on my bed,” the lady from downstairs said.
“Yes,” Teresa said, looking somewhat distracted.
“We’ll drown in wine,” the lady said.
“Francesco will take care of it,” Teresa said.
In the other rooms, the men were shouting, and laughing, and swearing. Teresa, her hand to her mouth, stood beside the lady from downstairs, and listened.
“Catch it there!”
“I got it!”
“Mannaggia!”
“A calamity!”
“There!”
Pino and Francesco backed into the kitchen on their hands and knees, followed by the iceman and the butcher, all the men clutching wine-drenched towels and sheets and pillowcases, trying to stem the flood of wine as it ran through the rooms, sopping it up, slapping down makeshift dikes. “To your right, Giovanni!” and the iceman threw down his sodden sheet and yelled, “Got him!” and Teresa shouted, “My linens! Look at my linens!” and Francesco turned over his shoulder and saw the lady from downstairs, and said, “Buon giorno, signora,” and she answered with her eyes wide and her mouth open, “Buon giorno,” and Rafaelo the butcher clucked his tongue and said, “What a sin!” and the lady from downstairs said, softly, “It’s dripping on my bed,” and Francesco said, “Get some peaches, and we’ll dip them,” and burst out laughing again. They built a barricade of linens across the kitchen doorway, and finally stopped the flow of wine from the rest of the apartment. Sitting on the floor, dripping purple, laughing as though they had just been through some terrible battle together and had emerged victoriously, they heard Teresa say, “Why don’t you make your wine in the cellar, like other men?”
“What, and pay two dollars?” Francesco said.
Smiling, Teresa said, in Italian, “Ma sei pazzo, tu.”
“Let’s all have another drink,” Francesco said, and got to his feet. “Pino, I thought you were sotto bossa. Pour us some wine here.” He put his arm around Teresa’s waist. “Would you like a little wine, cara mia?”
“You’re crazy,” Teresa said, in English this time, but she was still smiling.
And when he was twenty-four (1907?), he came home from the tailor shop late one night, having worked till almost 4 A.M., and found his again-pregnant wife sitting in the kitchen with all the lights on, a bread knife on the table before her. She told him there had been odd knockings at the kitchen door, three knocks in a row, and when she called, “Who’s there?” no one answered, and there was silence. And then, a half hour later, there were three more knocks and again she called, “Who’s there?” and again there was no answer. And then, just before midnight, the same three knocks again, and this time, when she called, “Who’s there?” a voice whispered, “It is I, Regina,” and she knew it was Regina Russo, who had been killed by a horse-drawn cart on 116 Street four years ago before Teresa’s very eyes, and had reached out an imploring hand to Teresa even as the hoofs knocked her down to the cobblestones and the wheels crushed her flat.
Teresa had begun dabbling in the supernatural even before the birth of her second child, a boy she had named Luca in honor of her grandfather, and there were many occasions when Francesco would come home weary and hungry from the tailor shop only to find the neighborhood women clustered around the three-legged table in the kitchen, Teresa solemnly attempting to raise the dead, imploring them to knock once if their answer was yes, twice if it was no, the table wobbling beneath the trembling hands of the women, its legs sometimes banging against the floor in supposed response from the grave. Francesco considered all of this nonsense, and not for a moment did he believe that whoever had knocked on the door was Regina, who was after all dead and gone. But it worried him that Teresa had been alone in the apartment with the three children, and expecting another baby, when someone had knocked on the door and refused to answer. (He dismissed the whispered “It is I, Regina” as a figment of Teresa’s overactive imagination and her preoccupation with things supernatural.)
So he organized a group of men from the building, and each night they would take turns sitting in the hallway on one or another of the floors, and they did this for a week without result until finally on the very next night, when it was Francesco’s turn to guard the building, he saw a man coming up the stairs in the darkness, and he bunched his fists and waited as the man approached the landing. He could smell the odor of whiskey, he realized all at once that the man was stumbling, the man was drunk. He waited. The man approached the toilet set between the two apartments and then very politely knocked on the door of the toilet three times, and when he received no answer, entered and closed the door behind him. Francesco waited. Behind the door, he could hear the man urinating. Then he heard the flush chain being pulled, and the torrent of water spilling from the overhead wooden box. In the darkness, he smiled.