The coffee served and the maraschino sipped, Signor Di Bello drew the straw from a Virginia and settled for a smoke, while Aunt Carolina showed Bertino to the room in the attic appointed for his use. She unpacked his few belongings and placed them tidily in a small chest of drawers, at the same time laying before him solemnly the parish-house rules by which she governed Casa Di Bello. Had her brother below stairs heard this, it is likely that he would have sent up many a guffaw with his smoke rings, for by him these rules had received little honour save in the steady nonobservance.
Carolina had never set her face against Bertino’s coming to the house, and there was no method in the frosty greeting she had given him at the door. It was merely that the sight of him, standing there, bag and baggage, a whole day before the time, had staggered her orderly being and drawn from her an instinctive protest. This all came of her unruffled years as perpetua of the rectory—that domain of peace and even tenor, whose broad, clear windows she often regarded wistfully, looking over the churchyard to Mott Street, from her sanctum on the second floor.
A half decade had gone by since the Wednesday of Ashes when the brother and sister patched up the quarrel that had separated them in their poorer days and she returned to the air of laity. But the sacerdotal brand would not wear off, nor did she wish it to. In the conduct of the household her churchly notions had free scope enough, but applied in censorship of her brother’s life they met with dreary contempt. To no purpose did she preach when Mulberry buzzed with the latest story of his gallantries, for his ready argument was always an eloquent “Ma che!” and an unanswerable shrug of the shoulders. In vain did she wait up, often from compline to prime, that she might shame him when he came home aglow with bumpers of divers vintage. It was after a certain rubicund night at the Caffè of the Three Gardens that he cut short her usual sermon with a roaring manifesto against church and state and a declaration of personal liberty for all time.
“Snakes of purgatory!” he had remarked in conclusion, one foot on the staircase. “Am I not a man? If you want priests, go to the parish house, where you belong. Once a priest always a priest.” With this taunt, meant to be a parting one, he toddled up to bed, but, reaching the landing, stopped and called back: “If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll bring a wife here.”
From that time, which was two years before Bertino’s arrival, she gave up her nocturnal vigils, and without let or hindrance the signore feasted and drank with boon comrades, and cracked walnuts on his head with an empty bottle—a feat for which he was justly renowned in all the caffès of the quarter. The lowering peril of a wife in the house had set her to thinking as she had never thought before on this dire possibility. Her brother’s nonconformity was a flaw in her sceptre, but she knew that a wife meant the utter collapse of her sovereignty in Casa Di Bello. Wherefore she resolved to abide by the lesser evil, and bend her strength to warding off the greater. Thus it befell that with the accession of Bertino to the family she was not ill content. The coming of a man to the board imparted no misgiving. What her soul dreaded and her wits had guarded against was the advent of a woman. And she felicitated herself that no wife had succeeded in crossing the threshold. To her ever-watchful eye, she fondly believed, was due the blessing of her brother’s continuance in the path of bachelorhood, despite the caps that were set for him on every bush. The first families of the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani, along with the flower of the Genovesi, the Milanesi, and the Torinesi, had in turn put forth their famous beauties as candidates for his hand and grocery store. But they all had been driven from the Rubicon, and at present there was no pretender in the field. Had there been she would have known it, as she knew of all the other marital campaigns, through Angelica, who went to market daily and kept in touch with Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods, Mulberry’s queen of gossips.
CHAPTER III
A SPOT OF YELLOW PAINT
Next morning, while the sun gave its first touch to the bronze head of Garibaldi, Bertino tied on an apron and set to work in Signor Di Bello’s shop, that peerless grocery whose small window and large door look tranquilly on the Park of Paradise. For a dozen years it had been known far and wide among Italia’s children as “The Sign of the Wooden Bunch.” The nickname came of a piece of carved oak simulating a bunch of bananas that hung before the door. In the early days of his business life the padrone had learned that the air of Mulberry was singularly fatal to the real fruit that he put on show outside. It happened some days that as many as twenty bananas on one stem would evaporate, though all the others remained intact. It was always the ones nearest the ground that vanished. One evening it struck Signor Di Bello that a violent chemical change in the exposed fruit would put an end to its mysterious disintegration. So he substituted the bananas of art for those of Nature. The evaporation ceased straightway, but for two or three mornings thereafter certain small boys, on their way to the Five Points Mission School, beheld with bitter disappointment the oaken symbol, and answered its grin of mockery with looks of blackest disgust.
Those boys are workingmen now, and when they dream of the springtimes of childhood, they see Giorgio Di Bello, paint brush in hand, giving a fresh skin of yellow to the make-believe bananas. It was a promise of vernal roses as sure as the chirp of a bluebird in the churchyard grass or the gladsome advent of Simone the Sardinian with his hokey-pokey cart. When the people saw him giving the bunch its annual sprucing up, they were wont to exclaim: “Bravo! Summer is coming. Soon we shall have music in Paradise.”
The morning of Bertino’s début at the shop was a bright one of young June, and the baby maples of the Park were showing their first dimples of green. It was the blatant hour when Mulberry’s street bazaar is in full cry; when the sham battle fought every morning between honeyed sellers and scornful buyers is in hot movement; when dimes and coppers are the vender’s prize against flounders, cabbages, saucepans, calicoes, apples, and shoestrings, as the stake that fires the housewife’s tongue and eye; when stout-lunged hucksters cut the din with the siren songs their kind have sung for ages in the market place.
Spick and span in the clean blouse of Monday, Signor Di Bello stood on his broad threshold ready for the day’s trade. He had just shown Bertino how to convert the prosy doorway into a bower abloom with garlands of freckled salame, cordons of silvery garlic, clusters of cacciocavalli cheese; how to hang in the entry luring sheaves of wild herbs, strings of hazelnuts, and the golden colocynths that are—as all must know—an anodyne for every ill. To flaunt this ravishing group to the senses of the colony was Bertino’s first duty of the day. That accomplished, he set out on either side of the doorway the tubs of tempting stockfish, the black peas of Lombardy, parched tomatoes and red peppers, lupini beans in fresh water, ripe olives in brine, and macaroni of sundry types.