The Black Madonna by Louisa Ermelino Page B

surprised to see her still standing there, and the handsome young man shrugged his shoulders and pulled on the sleeves of his jacket so that they fell just right over his shirt cuffs. “Where could he be?” he said. “The hospital we all go to.”
    The cigar chewer pointed up the street. It’s not far,” he said. “Keep walking straight. You can’t miss it.”
    The old man chewing the cigar stub laughed out loud. He was missing teeth. Nicky’s mother could see this when he laughed. “He’s a good guy, that Kiwi. If you see him, tell him Frankie Moe sends his regards.”
    â€œLife is funny,” one of the men said. “You never know what’s coming next.”
    â€œCelestina must wear Angie out every time he comes home. This time his ticker couldn’t take it.” The man on the bench bit into his apple.
    â€œYeah, maybe Celestina’s got something those slanty-eyed girls don’t.”
    â€œHey, you forgetting about this lady?” The fly swatter turned his head.
    But Teresa was gone. She had left and no one had seen her go, not even the handsome young man who had watched her so carefully from the start.
    T eresa found the hospital easily enough. It was a great cavernous building that took up a city block. When she got inside, she felt dizzy and out of breath. She could hear her heart beating. She sat down on a bench against the wall and waited for the feeling to pass.
    She spoke to no one but sat with her eyes straight ahead. She thought about Nicky alone in the apartment but it was still early in the day, she reminded herself, and she relaxed, unlacing her fingers, which she held tightly together in her lap. She had left Nicky lunch, and Dante was downstairs, standing watch outside the building. It was a beautiful day.
    At the main desk she got the room number of Angelo Sabatini with no trouble at all. He was in the men’s ward, they told her, on the second floor. The halls of the second floor were crowded with men in chairs, in pieces, suspended on metal racks. The smell of illness, the smell of them, made her hold her breath, but then she was in front of his room. She stopped and made herself small outside the door. She didn’t see him at first. There were two rows of iron beds and she looked carefully from one bed to the other at the faces of the men. She was straining to see clearly and still stay hidden.
    She saw him finally in the last bed, by the window. Even here, she thought, he managed to find a way. Thirty men and Angelo Sabatini gets the window, the light, the air, the view. She stepped inside. The room went silent for an instant while the men closest to the door looked her over. There was a card game going on near the center of the room, wheelchairs pushed together. The men raised their heads.
    She walked softly toward Angelo’s bed at the end of the row, the last bed, the one by the window. She smiled at the men who stopped what they were doing to look at her, count her steps, realize she was not there for them.
    Angelo was asleep. She stood there at the side of his bed. His hair was as black as she remembered. His beard made a shadow along the hollows of his cheeks. He looked the same to her except he was thinner. She could see that now, standing over him. He was still handsome, more handsome a man than she would be expected to have. She knew that. She had heard the whispers.
    For that moment, she forgot what he had done, forgot her curses, her son at home with no father and legs that didn’t work. She conjured up the color of his eyes behind the closed lids. Nicky had those blue eyes. Everyone had said they would change. “All babies have blue eyes when they’re born,” Jumbo’s mother had insisted down at the stoop, rubbing her belly, amazing them all with its size such a short time into her pregnancy. But Nicky’s eyes hadn’t changed, except to get more blue. Jumbo’s mother would never