Peril

must have been not to have known that she was only trying to make him feel comfortable, or like a big shot, or whatever way a homely girl thought she ought to make a guy feel so he’d take an interest. Still, it was sweet of her to have tried to make him feel good about himself, Mortimer thought. But then, she’d always been good to him, he supposed, never one to bitch all that much, never one to complain when he wasn’t around. Just a decent person, Dottie was, a woman with a big, kind heart. The salt of the earth, he told himself, his wife was the salt of the earth.

“Dottie,” he said quietly.

She didn’t turn from the counter. “Yeah.”

“Dottie.”

He heard the plaintive sound in his voice and knew that she’d heard it too, because she turned toward him slowly, a quizzical look in her eyes.

He smiled quietly and patted his lap. “Come here.”

She didn’t move but simply stared at him wonderingly, a slice of white bread in her hand, a pink plastic knife in the other. “I’m making lunch,” she said.

“Come here,” he repeated.

She came forward reluctantly, bringing the bread and knife with her, and sat down on his lap.

“Dottie,” he repeated. He could feel her great weight on his legs, the vast round bulk of her, soft and doughy, like holding a huge sack of flour.

“Dottie . . .” he began again, but the words stopped in his throat and he could only stare at her mutely, a strange sense of failure descending upon him as he admitted to himself that there was nothing he could do for her, nothing that would comfort or protect. It was too late. And so he simply patted her back softly and said, “Get up.”

She looked at him oddly.

“Get up,” he repeated, now remembering the one person on earth he might still help in some way.

“Morty, what’s the matter with you!” Dottie asked.

Mortimer gave no answer, but merely strode into the bedroom, pulled out the top drawer of the bureau, and dug around in a tangle of socks until he found the pistol. “I gotta go,” he told Dottie as he came back out of the room.

“You ain’t having lunch?”

“No,” he said. He yanked on his coat and the old rumpled hat and fled out into the dreary corridor, then down the unpainted stairs, floor after floor, the stabbing pain in his abdomen increasing with each step until he burst out into the crisp autumn air, all but running now, dodging traffic as he crossed Eighty-sixth Street, then stopped dead and drew in a long, shaky breath, his gaze rising up the lightless windows of his building until it reached the terrace of his apartment, where he saw Dottie standing in her old faded housedress, peering down, searching for him in the crowd.

He fled into a nearby shop, and from that vantage point watched his wife give up the search and shrink back into the apartment, where he imagined her at the kitchen counter again, smearing mayonnaise on a piece of white bread.

Even now he wasn’t sure what he’d wanted to say to her as she sat on his lap. Dottie, you know I love you, right? No, that wasn’t it, because he didn’t really, and never had. Dottie, I got some bad news. That couldn’t have been it, because he wasn’t at all sure she would find the news of his impending death all that difficult to take.

Then suddenly he knew what he’d wanted to say: Dottie, is there anything I can do . . . That was what he’d intended to ask her. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you? A dumb question, he thought now, which was why the answer had come to him so quickly, No, asshole, there’s not a damn thing you can do for her.

The pistol sagged down in his jacket pocket, and as he felt its weight he thought again of Abe. Abe had done him the only favor that mattered to him now. He said he would hold on to the fifteen grand and give it to Dottie when the time came. He was a friend, Abe, and even though fifteen grand was nothing, a lousy year’s rent, still when he’d asked Abe to hold on to it, Abe had agreed without the slightest hesitation. He curled his fingers around the handle of the pistol. Okay, then, he thought, one good turn deserves another.

MRS. DAROCCA

She had never learned to drive, and so she walked now, moving her heavy body through the old neighborhood as if it were a stone pushed by the lithesome young girl she’d once been.

She walked past Our Lady of Fatima Parochial School and remembered Sister Amelia’s shocked response, the accusatory gaze of Father Santori the day he’d escorted her through the iron gate and on to the hard concrete walkway, grasped her shoulder, turned her brusquely, and sent her home with a cold final word, I’ll be speaking to your mother.

She walked past the row house her longshoreman father had finally managed to buy and recalled the mist in her mother’s eyes when the old priest left her house later that same afternoon and she came up the stairs to her prodigal daughter’s room and told her flatly that she’d shamed the family, This will break your father’s heart, Celia.

She walked past the little park where she’d met Frankie DaRocca and told him everything in a burst of anguished confession, recalling the soft touch of his hand on hers, I’ll marry you, CeeCee, past the stone church where he’d made good on that promise, past Frankie’s house, where she’d lived with Frankie and his widowed mother for the first five years, past the hospital where her son had been born, taking the name DaRocca, just as she had taken it seven months before.

In the space of a few blocks she passed all the remaining architecture of her youth, walking like the condemned young girl she’d been so many years before, the old landmarks of her neighborhood still wreathed in hostility and disappointment so that she picked up her pace as she moved through the last of them, rushing like someone running a gauntlet, her white orthopedic shoes padding ever more rapidly against the concrete sidewalk until she stopped before the house she sought, so much bigger than the rest, noticed the big blue Lincoln in its gated driveway, and so knew that he was home.

She had never been in Leonardo’s house, and as far as she knew neither of his parents had ever known about her. They’d behaved like the aristocrats Leonardo’s father had always claimed they came from, American only in that they rode in fancy cars rather than in fancy carriages. They’d had high hopes for their only son, and early on Leonardo had appeared perfectly suited to fulfill them, a tall, handsome boy with jet-black hair who’d been the pride of Our Lady of Fatima’s track team, a boy on the way to some big school, maybe even Notre Dame. How could she ever have expected him to throw all that away over some dumb Sicilian peasant girl pregnant with a little boy whose small dead body she could still see cradled in Frankie DaRocca’s slender teenage arms.

She made her way up the stairs, surprised that one of Leonardo’s thugs hadn’t suddenly appeared to block her way. She knew he’d gone in that direction, gotten in trouble with the law, gone to jail, then come out again to become some kind of small-time gangster, a downward and disreputable course that must have humiliated and enraged Leonardo’s parents. She’d heard that they’d disowned him after he was nabbed in a stolen car ring, but she’d heard only scant news since then. Clearly he’d inherited the family home, or perhaps bought it after his parents’ death. It was the sort of thing she could see him doing just to get even with them, buying back the house of his boyhood with the dirty money his parents would never have taken. He was like that, Leonardo, a guy in whom hurt quickly turned to anger. She’d seen that early on, and so had never told him about the little boy he’d fathered on a rainy night in a Queens parking lot, and who now lay still and dead in the DaRocca family plot.

The door opened and he stood in the shadowy light of the foyer, an old man in a floral shirt and baggy pants, the handsome face ravaged by time or worry, or just the corrosive things she knew he’d done. His hair was white and thick, but beneath its silver crown the young man she’d once known had entirely run to ground. Deep lines ran in jagged gullies down the sides of his face and spread out from his eyes, creased his forehead and gave his face the look of desert soil badly raked.

“You want something?” he barked.

“It’s CeeCee,” she told him. “CeeCee Maganara.”

She’d fixed herself up slightly, applied a little rouge and lipstick, worn the dress she’d bought for Della’s wedding and which, though tight, still showed her figure to good advantage. Now she realized that these