The Accused, Harold R. Daniels [read out loud books txt] 📗

she was beginning to hope that nothing would come of the incident at the drive-in, Louise came home to find her brother Dominick sitting at the kitchen table staring moodily into space.

“You’re home early, Dom,” she said brightly. “Sick?”

He stood up. “Frances Adiano went to confession this morning,” he said flatly. “The priest told her she better tell her folks what happened to her the night she was out with you.”

Louise backed against the kitchen sink. “It wasn’t my fault,” she whimpered.

Dominick said something obscene in Italian. “They are going to send her away,” he said. “You know something, you little bitch? They are going to send her to Boston to her uncle’s house. I’ll tell you something else. Her mother is wearing black for her.” He took two steps toward her and slapped her with his callused hand, knocking her to the floor where she crouched, afraid to cry out. Dominick bent over her, his face contorted. “What am I supposed to say when I see her brother or her father? You tell me that, you hear?” He straightened and wheeled away only to turn back. “The Adianos won’t tell Pa. They’ve got shame for Frances. If he finds out, I think I’ll kill you.”

Louise was sufficiently frightened by the incident to keep to the house for the next week or so. After that she called Eddie at his hotel and arranged to meet him again. By the time the horses moved on to another circuit, taking him with them, she was known in a half a hundred cafes and night clubs on the Hill. She became a pet of the small-time mobsters who congregated in such places. She had money when she needed it. The gamblers in the places she frequented would make small bets for her for luck when they phoned in their own bets. She became skillful at shuffleboard. There was a table in almost every bar and she could challenge the best players on even terms. She did so only when she had to. It was easier to find some half-drunk player who didn’t know her or of her and she did not hesitate to cheat on the scoring when it was possible to do so, confident that her patrons would protect her against any accusations if she was caught. She never went back to school.

Dominick seldom spoke to her. The old man, Attilio, seemed to age overnight and to shrink inward like a winter apple. The other brothers, in their turn, tried to reason with her and they became enraged at her defiance and came to follow Dominick’s example. It was not a happy house.

About a year later, when her reputation was completely shattered, old Attilio fired a drunken laborer. The laborer, frantic with rage, cursed at the old man. When he could not find enough bitter things to say about the old man himself, he screamed, “You think you so much, you! That girl of yours, she is no better than a whore anybody on the Hill can sleep with.”

Dominick had driven a sand truck up in time to catch part of it. He leaped down from the cab without stopping to switch off the motor and was on the man, beating him to the ground in a shuddering huddle before he could say more. The old man turned away without speaking. He went home and never again came on a job. He would sit by the hour in the kitchen, not speaking. He treated Louise, whenever he saw her, as a little girl. When she would come in stupidly drunk, he never seemed to notice.

More and more often she began to stay away from home. For a month at a time she would have a room in a hotel. She made the winter tour of Florida with the race track crowd. When she came back after being gone three months, Attilio greeted her as if she were a child again and had just come home from school. A pattern was established that lasted until she was in her thirties.

Several weeks before she met Alvin Morlock for the first time, an icy fact was brought home to Louise. She was getting old. She had been sitting in a bar listening to two youths boldly discussing the women in the place. They had started with two girls at the far end of the bar and had worked their way back and she had complacently waited until they came to her. “There’s something,” they would say. “She could put her shoes under my bed any time.” She had waited while they had discussed the woman next to her. Then one of the youths had said, “She was a real doll once. My brother used to go out with her.” He was obviously referring to her, Louise Palaggi, and she could scarcely believe what she was hearing. She ordered another drink; while she drank it she remembered the spans of three and four days without a date that were becoming common now, and which she had put down as chance or coincidence. That night she studied her face and body carefully. The faint haze of black hair on her upper lip was becoming increasingly more difficult to hide. There were wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth and the skin of her throat had become papery. There was a definite thickening of her hips and lower body and the breasts that had been so firm were softening. She was familiar with the dramatically sudden aging of Italian women; she had seen it a hundred times. Almost overnight a red-lipped provocative bride could become a shapeless, sexless old woman.

She could fight it but it would be at best a delaying action. Frightened, she began a deliberate search for security. She had sense enough to know that she would not find it in the sphere in which she then moved. She began a careful preparation by renewing certain old friendships. This was not easily done. The girls—women, now—of her youth had to be carefully approached. She had openly and contemptuously violated the standards by which they lived, and it took every trace of a charm that had been considerable to overcome their wary distrust. But it had to be done. They had their clubs and their dances. To the dances came the retired mail carriers and the widowed grocers, the eager greenhorn_ paisans_ from the old country, and the substantial middle-aged men newly loosened by death from the silver cord that was so strong in Italian people.

She had felt that she could be, with ease, the belle of the local dances and she was frightened again when she was little more than a wallflower at her first discreet appearance. She studied the younger women, tight-breasted and slim-waisted, who competed for the available men and shrewdly concluded that she was overmatched. This first sortie took place at a dance sponsored by a parish womens’ club. She conceded that she would have to lower her standards. Her visit to the Balboa Club on the night that she met Alvin Morlock for the first time was the result of that concession. On that night old Attilio had said to her, “You my good girl, Louise. You don’t be out too late.”