The Black Madonna Read Online Free PDF Page A

the door, but before she let her out, she touched Teresa’s arm. “Amadeo will pay,” she told her. “You don’t worry about nothing but Nicola.”
    Teresa shook her head. “I don’t worry,” she said. “Nicola has a father. His father will pay.”
    A madeo Pavese had said he would find Teresa a doctor and a few days later there was a paper for her behind the counter in the candy store downstairs. On it was a doctor’s name, a Fifth Avenue address, and a phone number. Teresa called the doctor from the phone in the candy store to ask for an appointment. “Three weeks from today,” she told the women on the stoop.
    â€œSuch a long wait,” they said, impressed.
    â€œHe’s a very big doctor,” Teresa told them.
    â€œHe must be good,” they said.
    Teresa waved a hand in the air over their heads. “The best,” she said. “Nothing but the best for my Nicky.”
    T hree weeks later, Teresa got all dressed up and they took a cab to the doctor’s office. There were Persian rugs on the floor. The furniture was antique.
“Alt’Italia,”
Nicky’s mother whispered in Nicky’s ear when the doctor came into the room.
“Toscano, genovese.”
She sniffed in disapproval.
    â€œLook at his shoes,” Nicky told his mother. “You get me a pair like that and I’ll walk in hell.” Teresa made a face as if to smack him but would never do it in front of the Fifth Avenue doctor. Instead she twisted the tip of his ear in her gloved fingers and threatened him when he screwed up his face with the pain.
    The doctor examined Nicky and talked to them for a long time. Teresa thought she might faint. She sat straight, her back not touching the chair. The bones of her corset dug into her sides. Her smile covered her teeth. The doctor talked about Nicky’s spine and nerves and muscles and said things she didn’t understand.
    â€œCan you make him walk?” she asked the doctor when she thought he was finished.
    â€œHe needs an operation,” the doctor said.
    â€œAnd you swear to me he’ll walk?”
    â€œ
Signora,
forgive me. I’m not God.”
    Teresa stood up. She touched the painted wooden cherries on the brim of her black straw hat. It was from an Easter long ago, before she was married, and she worried that it had lost its shape after all those years in the box under the bed where she had stored it. “Don’t worry about God,” she said. “I’ll take care of God. What can
you
do?”
    The doctor put a hand on Nicky’s knee. “I’ll do my best.”
    Like an
amerigane,
this doctor talks, Teresa said to herself, and this gave her confidence in him. Wasn’t America the greatest country in the world?
    The doctor sat back. “You have to consent to the operation, sign papers, and the boy has to want it.”
    â€œI want it. I want it,” Nicky said. “Anything beats this. I can’t do anything. I can’t go downstairs. I can’t go to school . . .”
    The doctor looked from Nicky to Teresa. “Why doesn’t he go to school?”
    â€œHow much does the operation cost?” she said.
    â€œHe needs to be in school,” the doctor said.
    â€œHe needs to walk,” Teresa told him.
    â€œHis father?”
    â€œHis father’s away at sea, halfway around the world . . . Singapore, the Solomon Islands . . .” She tried to remember other names she had read off the stamps to the women on the stoop. “Suez,” she said after a moment.
    â€œYou decide,
signora
. . . You call me, and I’ll make all the arrangements.”
    W hen they got outside, Nicky’s mother pulled his hair. She yanked it so hard Nicky thought she’d snapped his neck. “You keep quiet,” she said to him. “You don’t tell people your business. Life is hard enough without giving them things to use against you, a knife