Mile High Read online

  Paddy took his time. “You know me, Sal. I’ll take a little envelope if it’ll make you and the boys feel better. It’ll only go to the nuns annyhow. But—there is somethin’ else. Somethin’ close to me heart—”

  “Name it. You have only to say it, Paddy, because we know you are a fair man.”

  “Well, you’ll find this as hard to believe as annything you’ve ever heard, but I’m a shy man when it comes to women. For one thing—I mean, it’s the God’s truth, ain’t it?—I’m not a young man. I mean, I’m first to say that. But just the same, Sal, there’s this girl I want to marry, and, well, she’s younger an’ all. If you know what I mean.”

  “Lemme repeat. We must be sure. You say you wanna get married?”

  Paddy nodded earnestly.

  “I see. Good luck. God bless you. And keepa you.”

  “It’s not an ordinary situation, you see. I never met the girl. Although I seen her, of course. But she’s never seen me and doesn’t know I’m on God’s earth, if you want the truth of it.”

  “I see,” Don Salvatore said sagely, completely baffled.

  “But she’s an old-country girl, a Sicilian girl, and I thought—I mean, after all, the girls do what their fathers want, don’t they?”

  “It depends.”

  “But if Carmelo and you was to go to the father—”

  “Aaaaah!”

  “I give it a lotta thought. I mean, it could be a good thing all around for a man to have his daughter marry me, if you know what I mean, an’ I think you do.”

  “It will be an honor, Paddy. What is the father’s name?”

  “You know—the Correntes. Joe Corrente. The olive-oil fella. His daughter Maria is the one.”

  The capo mafioso, Carmelo Lumia, and his consigliere, Salvatore Purpi, called at the Corrente offices. The air sang with wonderful smells: crescenz and parmigiano, quartirolo and teleggio. As they were shown into Corrente’s room he became very pale: He knew well who they were.

  They were two men of respect. They showed no suggestion of either violence or power. They entered the room humbly, with deference, two elderly men who were unpretentiously dressed and very respectful. They showed their awareness of his place in the world, of his dignity and of the marks of his success. Their manner conveyed that what they wished most was to be of any large or small service to him. It filled him with dread. He leaped to his feet upon short, trembling legs and said in the dialect of northwestern Sicily, “Good day. Good day. You honor me by coming. Please seat yourselves and tell me how I may make you in any way more comfortable.” The two men sat down and faced Corrente across his desk. Don Carmelo’s voice was mellifluent and admiring. “We are here to express the gratitude and admiration for the way you organized the Italian community of Brooklyn at the time of the recent sadnesses.”

  “Thank you. I was happy to work on that. Judge Gant came to me and he said it would be a good thing because of what happened last month in New Orleans when the Matrangas and the Provenzanos had the disagreement. Over the docks.” He knew he must sound as though he were babbling, but he didn’t mind because these two men undoubtedly thought all people talked like that.

  “Then you know Judge Gant. Do you know Patrick J. West?”

  “I have met him. At the ball each year. I certainly know who he is. A very important man.”

  “Judge Gant is a boss, of course,” Don Carmelo reminded gently. “But Patrick J. West is a very big boss.”

  “I know that,” Corrente said. “I am sure of that.”

  “And he is a friend,” Purpi said with emphasis. “He is a friend of the friends.”

  Corrente began to sweat lightly. He was a short round man with a pencil-line mustache, something terribly démodé, over a soft, uncertain, pink mouth. He had to clear his throat to answer, lest he squeak. “But surely it isn’t possible that there is anything I can do for Patrick J. West?”

  “Yes, there is,” Don Carmelo said.

  “There is?”

  “I bring honor to you, signore. Patrick J. West wishes to marry your daughter.”

  “My daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which daughter? I have nine daughters.”

  “The daughter who is called Maria.”

  “Maria?” Corrente looked at them as though they had either gotten the girl’s name wrong or made a terrible mistake. He seemed stunned, incredulous. Slowly he felt his strength returning to himself now that he understood, as a businessman, the nature of their visit.

  “The daughter who dances the balleto,” Don Salvatore said.

  Corrente wanted to laugh. Happily. With composure and pleasure. He felt positively arrogant with the new power. There was, after all, a sweetness in truth and justice in life. He wanted to laugh until he sobbed and hiccupped. Since his wife had died thirteen years before, his daughter Maria had been the scourge of his life, as she would be of any man’s. He could not believe his good fortune. He would be rid of the home-grown harridan in a manner that no one, not even a priest, could find fault with, and by doing so the Fratellanza would have fallen into his debt. And his new, elderly son-in-law was such a power in this city that he wanted to sing when he thought of all the hotels that would be forced to buy his cheeses. He almost felt affection for Maria for making all this possible. Aieee! And now—to business!

  “My little girl—you would say one of the most beautiful girls you have ever seen. I have shoveled money into her education. She has studied in Rome and in Paris.”

  “You lose a daughter, yes,” Don Salvatore said. “But do you not also gain?”

  “How? How, signori?” he pleaded to be told. “What compensates for the loss of such a daughter? A daughter who was to have begun a brilliant career in November on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera?”

  “Have you been paying a small tax to the little brothers on the docks when you land your imports?”

  “Always.”

  “Splendid, then,” Don Carmelo said. “As a wedding present to the father of the bride we are going to give you one year free of those little taxes.”

  “But you make me appear ungrateful! What am I sacrificing after all, only—”

  “Fifteen months,” Don Carmelo said with finality.

  “I thank you. But never mind my little business. What of the young man she loves and whom—if she marries—” He bit his tongue for telling such a lie. Maria had never acknowledged the existence of any man. If it were possible to accuse a girl of rape, then her mirror would accuse her.

  “Two days after the wedding,” Don Carmelo said, “you will be named a Commendatore of the Order of Saint Maurice and Saint Lazarus by the grateful Kingdom of Italy.”

  “Also every Italian-language newspaper in this country will run that news on its front page.”

  “It would honor Patrick J. West if I could be knighted before the wedding,” Mr. Corrente suggested.

  “Good. That will be done.”

  That night Giuseppe Corrente did not knock timidly on his daughter Maria’s door, the only private chamber in a house filled with women. He kicked it open. She glared at him. He kicked it shut behind him.

  “Are you drunk or something?” she shrilled. “What are you doing in my private, personal room? Have you lost your senses?”

  “Maria, have you heard of the Wolf? Carmelo, the Wolf, Lumia?”

  “What has that got to do with me?”

  “He came to see me today.”

  “I don’t care who came to see you today. Get out! Everything will be covered with a male stink in here.”

  “A man the Fratellanza needs very much, a man they regard very, very highly, a man for whom they would be happy to torture and kill—this man wants you.”

  “Wants me?” Her long, beautiful hand squeezed her full, firm breast.

  “Your body.”

  She screamed involuntarily.

  “But he wants to marry you. His name, his place, his fortune—all yours. He wants to marry you in a church.”


  She fainted.

  He didn’t touch her as she lay on the floor. He sat on the edge of her bed and mopped his underarms with any cloths, such as handkerchiefs, curtains, the pillow slip, hoping his male stink was at its apogee. She stirred at his feet. She picked herself up, tottered to the full-length mirror and touched herself longingly in eight or ten places, perhaps wondering if she could store them in safety and visit them alone. She wheeled on her father. “Why should I be sacrificed to save you?”

  “Oh, no, no. You have it wrong. They didn’t come to threaten me. If Don Carmelo sends men with knives or throwing acid, they will go directly to you.”

  “Papa! Papa, darling! What did you tell them?”

  “I told them you would respond as a Sicilian woman.”

  Patrick J. West took Maria Corrente as his bride on December 1, 1887. It was a sudden wedding. Mr. Corrente urged that there be a minimum of delay. It was a quiet wedding, performed at St. Jemma’s by Bishop James Fagin Ryan, assisted by Father Passanante, the bride’s own confessor. All newspapers reported the event decorously on the society pages. No mention was made of the age of the bride or the groom. Among the wonderful array of wedding presents they received were seven hundred bath towels and sixty-seven color paintings of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Although a honeymoon at Niagara Falls had been announced, the couple proceeded directly from the reception for a few friends at the Patrick J. West Democratic Club to their house in Oliver Street. The bride had fainted several times during the wedding ceremony and at the reception, and in her malaise had tossed the seven-tiered wedding cake at her sisters instead of the bridal bouquet. Only her family and the Mafia knew that the bride met her husband for the first time at the head of the aisle in the church when Mr. Corrente gave her away. The bride spoke only in Sicilian. Her father, always at her side, interpreted for her by saying, “My daughter tells you that she is a Sicilian woman, Your Grace, and that she speaks in the dialect of her country because this is the most meaningful day of her life.” She seemed reluctant to cut the wedding cake at the side of her groom for the benefit of the photographer from Il Progresso until Don Carmelo Lumia spoke to her briefly, perhaps explaining what the picture would mean to her father. She became very pale but she agreed with alacrity, although she fainted during the pretty rite.

  When bride and groom reached home alone she still had not spoken to him, and other than marrying him, had not acknowledged him from the moment they had met. His anger was mounting like the white smoke of the papal election signal, and in a very short time her disdain caused him to lose his head—or, to be fair, it was the combination of her disdain and his lust—and he clubbed her with his hard, baggy fists, then took her sexually wholly by force. She fought and clawed under him and screamed all through the act. It was his masculine opinion that after this clear show of domination she would come to her senses, because although he was not entirely an experienced man with delicately reared women, he had commanded many a battalion of whores, and he had a firm, if unilateral, belief in what women responded to.

  When she became conscious again he went to her side and attempted to soothe her by rubbing her wrists with Irish whiskey, but she fought him off as though he had come to rape her once more, snatching the bottle and striking him with it and slashing his right cheek severely with her nails. The same degrading combination of lust and anger got him so aroused that he raped her again, throwing her to the floor, whisking back her once-immaculate wedding gown to her chin, her new drawers in shreds from the first great encounter, and flinging himself through the air upon her body as though he were a small boy and she were a sled. She rolled to one side, screaming piercingly. He landed with heavy force on the floor and almost knocked himself unconscious, but the inequity of it all kept him alert, and his great hairy hand clamped upon her ankle and drew her slowly under him, pinning her with his elbows, his knees, then his hips with their gross passenger.

  When it was over this time he lay on top of her like a landed manta ray, gasping and frightened that he was having a coronary for, at last, his age had protested horribly. She grappled him off herself and rolled away. He mewed piteously that if he had to take it from her every time he wanted a little piece throughout their married life, he might well find himself at death’s door. Jesus! What a wedding night after so many long months of such glorious dreams. The injustice righted him. “What the hell is wrong here?” he raged. “You’re my wife. Here we are. This is alla sacred jooty for botha us.” She hawked and spat at him, then tried to kick him swiftly in the groin, and they had the last exchange of their life in the English language. “Every time you want to put that big hairy thing in me,” she said in a shrill, strident voice, “you’d better get Carmelo the Wolf and some button men to hold me down.”

  “Why—you shameless little cooze!” he shouted at her from the floor.

  “And remember this, you old mess. My father, that wet little shit, told me I had to marry you because I was a Sicilian woman. All right, you rancid, goat-bellied ruin, I will become a Sicilian woman from now until you are dead.”

  She never spoke to him in English again. When he spoke to her she answered obscenely in the Alcamo dialect that is not, in any way, as dulcet from a woman as, say, Parisian French. If he wanted her body he had to fight her desperately for it. She exercised with forty-pound iron dumbbells and grew stronger and stronger while he felt himself grow weaker until, after a short while, the whole damned struggle wasn’t worth it. She let herself go. She seemed to live on pasta and grow fatter by the hour. She wore the same shapeless black dress at all times and her dank black hair looked as though it had been arranged with an egg beater. She would not leave the house except to buy food. She cooked and served him only Sicilian dishes—riso chi cacuocciuli or farsumagru or pomaruoro o gratte, all a terrible mess to Paddy, a meat-and-potatoes man. He came home to eat less and less often. Neither her father nor her sisters visited Maria, and in a relatively short time it was as though no one remembered that she was in that house or that she had ever married or that she existed at all. Except her son, Eddie.

  One of the first two rapes “took,” as the old wives would say. She swelled up and in exactly ten lunar months from her wedding day she gave birth to their son and demanded so shrilly and hysterically of Father Passanante that the infant be christened Courance that the priest prevailed upon Paddy to include it as the child’s middle name. He became Edward Courance West, an odd enough name for a Sicilian-Irish baby.

  Until her son was fourteen years old—which was as long as the boy had her—she spoke to him only in Sicilian. She treated him distantly, with her special, stupid haughtiness, and the boy thought of her as a queen, regal in beauty and in bearing. The more he adored her the more she took care of herself, and her little raisin-eyes found their way out of their pillows of fat. She began to clean and scent herself. She cast off the black rag of a dress for other dresses, engaging and colorful, and after a while even took to going to the ladies’ barber in the neighborhood to get her hair dressed stylishly. Then, when the boy was fourteen and his heart totally hers and filled with love and joy of her, she ran off with a woman who sold silk stockings from door to door. She left behind a letter, in English, for her husband so that he would be sure to know what she had done. A door had opened for her. No one had been able to understand what had been wrong with her for all these years, but the touch of the lady sales agent’s hand and the look in her eye at that moment had put everything right in one flash.

  Paddy and his son responded bitterly to her desertion. Eddie held it against all women for all of his life. He never stopped seeking revenge upon every one of them for what his mother had done to his father and what she had done—the greater betrayal within the lesser one—to him.

  Eddie West saw his mother as a coldly beautiful snarler who spoke in a mysterious code that separated her from the rest of the world. The Dance itself and her aborted world triumphs as a dancer were in imagination totally achieved by her because they had be
en denied her. She paddled on her back in a limpid pool of wistful fantasies, always looking back to where she had almost begun. She transmitted her own frustration to her son and gave it form for him. Frustration at never being able to get through to her, at having to hear her speak a language that he thought no one else could speak, describing with disdain and emasculating indifference a world he could neither enter nor imagine. He would beat upon walls because he could not beat upon her. In his boy’s mind, then within his deserted adolescent consciousness, he thought of all women as repositories of some enormous secret that could not be dislodged unless it were shaken out or beaten out or stamped and kicked and strangled out. The discovery of this secret, this enigma, would explain the mystery of women and prove the key to open the mile-high doors that separated one vital part of him from the other deadened part with which he was forced to live.

  When she left him it was not that something wonderful and irreplaceable had vanished, leaving him unloved and alone. While she was with him he felt more unloved than after she’d gone. His father loved him and proved that every day, then proved it again and again. But when his mother went away without revealing the engima’s explanation and thus releasing the lock within the mile-high doors, his frustration multiplied itself, then squared itself, broadening, lengthening and deepening until the enigmas (more of them and all of them) were sunk at the center of a gigantic cube that was his “peculiarness,” standing alone on the barren plain of his existence at the geometric center of his frigid brain.

  When she was gone he convinced himself that it was not just his mother who was alien and hateful and the creator of frustration and pain, but all women, because the only opposite of his mother was his father, his father and the people his father brought to see him—heavyweight champions of the world, famous actresses, high-riding jockeys, Presidents of the United States, all activists, people who revealed, never concealed, amiable, outgoing, attentive and interesting. As the years went on he thought he had forgotten everything he had felt so keenly in that first month of nights after she had gone away, but the pain of the frustration had settled deeply into the cold mists inside his head, so deeply that he was not aware it was still there. Except that he hunted women, preferring the compliant, extroverted, instantly surrendering, totally available. And when, as it happened several times in his life, these total availables suddenly revealed an antic selfishness that thwarted him, the gigantic old frustration was dragged out of his head. He had then to shake, strike, stamp and strangle to try to rid himself of the old locked-in secret. Although he thought later that he had at last seen a glimpse of the explanation with his own wife, the echo of his mother’s meaning-within-no-meaning was still heard.