PRINCESS PALM

    For the fourth Monday in a row, Len Stusick was driving to Sarasota, putting a hundred miles on his dying Ford Festiva so his wife could covet her sister’s house. She ask me to check on it, Mimma told the cashier at the Speedway station as Len paid for their gas. She’d talk about the house to anyone who’d listen: neighbors, the mailman, their son in California who made a duty call once a month. My sister, she build a beautiful house in Sarasota because she miss me. She can’t stand it up north no more. She move to Florida because she can’t to live without me.
     The Festiva raced down the highway. Even with the windows down, the tiny car was industrially hot. In the left lane a flatbed roared past, carrying a load of palm trees, leaves flapping in the wind. Mimma clutched the door handle, hypnotized by the trucks and campers passing on both sides.
     “Relax,” said Len, his hands sweaty on the wheel. He was going seventy, five miles over the limit, but still the joker behind him flashed his headlights. If he were alone he’d floor it, but with Mimma along it wasn’t worth the grief. For someone who never learned to drive, she had strong opinions on how it should be done. 
     “My sister, she’s crazy!” said Mimma. “She could to get a place in Orange City for nothing. How come she want to live down here with all the traffico?”
     “Search me,” said Len. Years of marriage had taught him that that the less he said about his sister-in-law, the better. Though there was plenty he could say about Flora. She’d spent a fortune buying into a swanky gulfside development, and now she couldn’t be bothered to fly down from Jersey to look at what she’d bought. 
     They exited the highway at Gulf Shores Boulevard, a busy street of plazas and strip malls. Len counted two Cadillac dealerships, a pool supply store, and several ritzy boutiques selling boat fixtures and custom-made hammocks. They passed through a neighborhood of bungalows, little cinder-block cottages painted white and coral pink, their tiny lawns squared off with chain-link fences. Finally the road opened up and Len turned into the development. Flora and Tony’s house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac called Princess Palm Court, a sprawling split-level with a curved driveway and a ten-foot picture window in front. On either side were houses just like it, stucco monsters with identical floor plans. Len imagined coming home to one of these places at night with a few drinks in him. How the hell would you know which one was yours? 
    “You think it’s almost done?” Mimma asked hopefully.
    “It’s getting there,” said Len. Actually the place had looked finished months ago. Across the street two others had gone up in half the time. Two units, Len thought. God help me if I ever live in a unit.
    Mimma climbed out. The car rose noticeably without her weight. She inspected the lawn--freshly sodded, bordered with small date palms expensively planted by a landscaping service in town. She opened the front door with the key she kept in a special compartment inside her purse. 
     Len followed her inside. He always got a chill going into the house, though the air conditioning hadn’t been turned on and the place was stifling. Their footsteps echoed in the tall foyer. Skylights left pools of sunlight on the snow-white carpeting. There were a few additions since their last visit: an expensive chandelier of jagged glass in the entranceway, solid brass switch plates in the sunken living room.
     Mimma clapped her hands together. “It’s like we walk into a palace.” She stepped down carefully into the living room. She had macular degeneration and couldn’t see what was directly in front of her, just the outside edges of her field of vision. 
     Len followed her into the kitchen, the stone floor cool through the soles of his sandals. Jesus Christ, he thought. He wondered again how much Flora and Tony had sunk into the place. 
     Mimma opened one of the oak cabinets and inhaled deeply. 
     “Mmm!” she sighed. “There’s nothing like the smell of a new house. Nothing in the world.” 
     True enough, Len thought. You couldn’t get excited about the smell of anyplace they’d ever lived: the boarding house in Bakerton, with its coal furnace; the company houses and rented duplexes in Allentown, reeking of butane and neighbors’ cooking. Their current home, a cinder-block bungalow in Orange City, smelled like nothing at all; or maybe it was him. He didn’t smell as good as he used to, didn’t hear as good. Like Mimma’s eyesight, these senses were fading away. Things were slipping out of focus.
     Mimma went back to the foyer, where a delicate spiral staircase led to the bedrooms. She’d admired it for weeks but so far hadn’t climbed it. 
     “Lenny,” she said shyly. “You think I could to do it? I think maybe I’m too big.” She weighed nearly three hundred pounds, same as Len.
     He looked at his feet, wide and sunburned in his plastic sandals. “I don’t know,” he said.
     She took the first stair, leaning on the wrought-iron handrail. The staircase quivered with her weight. Mentally he crossed himself, a Dago habit of hers he’d picked up over the years. 
     “Take your time,” he said. “One step at a time.”
     He waited until she made it to the top before reaching into his pocket. He took out a small screwdriver and removed a brass plate from one of the light switches.
     “Eeeee! The bathtub!” Mimma cried. “Lenny, you got to come and see.”
     “Coming,” said Len. 
     He slid the switch plate into his pocket and went upstairs.
 

     So far it had been small things. 
     Their first time in the house, he’d wandered into the study and, while Mimma was admiring the landscaping out back, carved a small X into the doorframe. He didn’t know why. His behavior shocked him. He was a grown man, a war veteran, a grandfather. On the drive home, and for days afterward, he marveled at what he’d done. 
     He’d been reckless before. During the war he made four jumps behind enemy lines, every one of them a death mission. For most of his life he destroyed his lungs with tobacco and his liver with booze. At sixty he borrowed against his pension to become a chicken farmer and lost a bundle when his birds contracted a mysterious virus. Foolish things, regrettable things; but none as crazy as this.
     All week he had waited for the phone to ring, an irate call from Tony or the police. But the call never came, and a month later he and Mimma drove to Sarasota again. That time he cut a jagged hole in the dining room carpet. They went home, and again he waited for the call. When it came it was surprisingly mild: they’d had a couple of minor problems with vandalism, Flora told Mimma--probably some neighborhood kids. Then she asked if they could check on the house every week instead of once a month. That, Len thought, was the beauty part.
     “What good is that going to do?” he asked Mimma, all innocent. 
     “It make her feel better,” she said. “She want them to know somebody is watching.”
     With each visit he found another way to make his mark on the house. Once, in the kitchen, he cut a hole in a window screen. Another time he took a permanent marker and left jagged scrawls on the new drywall in the study. He never knew exactly what he was going to do, but he began bringing certain implements along: a pen knife, a screwdriver. Each time he was careful to leave a window open or a door unlocked, to give the “intruder” a way out. Mimma, entranced by the walk-in closets and expensive appliances, never noticed a thing.
 

     It was nearly five o’clock when they left Sarasota. Gulf Shores Boulevard hummed with traffic.
     “Goddammit,” Len muttered. He hit the gas and squealed through a yellow light.
     “Lenny!” said Mimma. “You should to have turned right.”
     “We need to go left,” he said through his teeth. 
     “Eeee! Don’t turn lef! Too dangerous,” said Mimma. “What they say in Modern Maturity? Three rights make a lef.” 
     He made a fast left at the next light, narrowly avoiding an oncoming El Dorado. He clenched his teeth as the other driver leaned on the horn.
     “Eeee! Christo!” Mimma squealed. “What you do that for? You could to have killed us!”
     “Take it easy,” said Len, though his heart was pounding. It wasn’t the smartest move, but he got stubborn when he was making a point. Alone, he was a benevolent driver, eager to give the other fellow a break. He did it for the wave, the wordless acknowledgement that he was a decent guy, better than most. It was more than he’d ever gotten from Mimma, though he’d fed and clothed her for forty-six years, gotten her out of Rome after the war when everything went to hell. He’d given her a better life than she could have had over there; and once, just once, he wished she’d admit it.
     They stopped at a Checkers restaurant and polished off two cheeseburgers each. Mimma was animated, eager to praise every board and nail on the second floor of her sister’s house. Four bedrooms, she told Len. Magnificent bathrooms, with marble sinks and a tub big enough for two. 
     “It look finish to me,” she said. “When they going to come, Lenny? How come it take so long?”
     It was nearly dark when they got back to Orange City, the house stifling from being shut up all day. Len turned on the ceiling fans and opened the windows while Mimma fed the cats. He was glad to be home, fancy or not, to sit at the table with one of Mimma’s macaroons and sift through the junk mail. The little discomforts--the heat, the neighbor’s barking dogs--didn’t bother him. He was sixty-nine, living in a house he owned outright, with no heating bills and a monthly check from Uncle Sam, enough to get by as long as the Festiva held out. He did what he wanted, when he wanted; and for a man who’d gone from the Army to the coal mines to the steel mills, that was nothing to sneeze at. He’d stopped wishing Mimma could see it that way. He knew that for her, life with him had never been enough. 
     An hour later, the phone rang. Flora. Len could tell instantly from the change in Mimma’s voice.
     “I knew it was you!” she cried joyfully before switching to Italian. After forty-six years Len recognized only a few words: casa, cucina, bellissima, splendida. House, kitchen, beautiful, splendid. Soon they would reminisce about the past, how they lived like royalty in Rome, on marble floors in a fancy building in the Piazza di Spagna. It made Len crazy. Stationed in Rome for ten months, through the long, sultry summer when the streets reeked of sewage, he’d seen the damp basement apartment where Mimma and Flora lived with their alcoholic father, the silent custode who polished the marble stairs himself.
     At the end would come the usual opera: how lonely! How desperate! How they missed and loved each other! Len had heard it his whole married life. For forty-six years he’d listened, sick with jealousy. He forbade Mimma to call her sister more than once a month. Often he neglected to pay the bill, secretly delighting when the service was shut off.
     Flora. The little monkey had haunted their marriage from the start. Mimma had wanted to marry him, wanted to come to America, though the America in the movies looked nothing like Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a dirty town of outhouses and strip mines, snowstorms and railroad noise. Okay: he had lied to her, claimed he owned a house and land, promised her the good life. He was a pockmarked coal miner’s son with no education and no prospects; he had nothing to offer. That he’d been handsome didn’t occur to him until years later, when Tony--his old buddy Tony--showed him a photo taken at a tavern in Rome. Len and Tony were in uniform, one blond, the other dark. The sisters sat in the middle: Mimma full-lipped and dreamy, staring over the photographer’s shoulder; Flora small and fine-boned, her dark eyes flashing, a delicate gold chain pooling in the hollow of her collarbone. 
     How they had all changed. Mimma’s joints ached from carrying her weight; her doctor had recommended a hip replacement they couldn’t afford. Len’s belly was so large he wore only flip-flops; he couldn’t bend over to tie his shoes. Where Len and Mimma had both expanded, Tony and Flora seemed to have shrunk. Tony had grown stooped and frail, Flora small and wizened like a little monkey, her brown skin creased and leathery from expensive vacations in the sun.
     Len shuffled out to the garage, where he always went when he started thinking about the past. He located the fifth of bourbon in his toolbox. It was the only good thing about the monkey’s phone calls: they distracted Mimma long enough for him to have a drink.
     He and Tony had met the sisters in the last year of the war, at an Army dance in Rome. It was Tony who approached them. He introduced himself and Len, then asked the sisters to dance. They stood there a moment eyeing each other, the two GIs and the two Italian girls. The smaller one stood closest to Len, shapely in a green silk dress, her waist so narrow he could have wrapped his hands around it. He reached for her hand. She looked right past him and took Tony’s arm. In that moment Flora decided the course of their four lives.
     From the very beginning, Tony and Flora had it easy. Tony’s father had a contracting business back in Newark. Tony had gone to school and even knew some Italian from his Dago parents. And unlike Mimma, who was either too slow or too stubborn to learn, Flora picked up English fast. In the beginning, she’d even translated for Len and Mimma, relaying his clumsy compliments, his false promises, Mimma’s shy replies. From the beginning, Flora had been in the middle of them.
     At first she forgave his lies. Living in Bakerton, missing her family desperately, she clung to him. He would never forget those nights, sleeping on a twin mattress in a boarding house across from the fire station, waking up to the ghostly shriek of the fire whistle. Len never minded the noise. Lying there against his wife, he’d felt only gratitude.
     Then, after the baby, everything changed. Mimma wept constantly. She ate so little she was unable to nurse. Her face had the hollow look of an old woman’s. Not knowing what else to do, Len put her on a train to New Jersey to see her sister. By then Flora and Tony were married and living in Newark. Tony had taken over his father’s contracting business; their second baby was on the way. 
     Mimma stayed in Newark an entire summer. She’d left their son behind in Bakerton; each day Len took the boy to the landlady’s on his way to work. Then, in September, there was a knock at Len’s door: the downstairs neighbor, who had a telephone. 
     “She’s not coming back,” Flora told him, her voice strong and resolute. “She can’t take another winter in that horrible place.”
     He left that night to get her, Altoona to Harrisburg to Philly to Newark, ten hours on a coal train that carried a car full of passengers at the end. After three days of convincing, he won her back, but only by promising they’d move closer to her sister. A week later he had a job at Beth Steel; they moved into a duplex on Hanover Street in Allentown, a narrow brick road lined with porches and small bare yards, where the steelworkers’ wives spoke Dutch across the clotheslines and their children played stickball in the street. 
     But with Flora only two hours away, Mimma changed. She complained about everything: the cramped house, the smell of the mills, the snooty Dutch who treated her like dirt because of her accent. Worse, she was a cold mother. This shocked Len. His own mother had died when he was a baby, yet he’d always believed that all women loved children. It shocked him to see Mimma feed their son, bathe and dress him, with no more care than she took washing floors or rolling dough for pasta. Worse still, she turned away from Len. Terrified of a second child, she slept on the sofa. She’d sleep on the floor for the rest of her life, she said, before she’d let Len touch her again.
     He’d gotten a wife back, all right, but not the one he’d lost. It wasn’t something he thought about about every day, but he was thinking of it now as the screen door slammed. He hid his drink behind a bag of kitty litter just as Mimma lumbered into the garage.
     “She coming!” Mimma cried. “The house is finish! Flora and Tony, they coming to Sarasota!”
 

     The next day Len got up while Mimma was asleep, the large dark mound of her snoring softly in the other bed. They’d had twin beds for years, at Mimma’s insistence. He barely remembered what it was like to wake up next to her, the fragrance of her breath and hair surrounding him like a weather system. 
     He showered and dressed. In the kitchen the six cats crowded around a plate of tuna fish. Mimma hunched over her breakfast, corn flakes floating in half-and-half.
     “How come you awake?” she said.
     “The V.A.,” said Len. “I got to get my check-up.”
     “Today?” She poured another splash of cream into the bowl and dusted the cereal with sugar. “How come you no tell me? I could to come with you.”
     “They’ll keep me waiting all day,” said Len. “No use in both of us sitting there.”
     “Whatever you want.” Mimma squinted at the grocery ads, the only part of the paper she ever read. “When you come home we go to Winn-Dixie. They got bananas nineteen cents a pound.”
     Len was halfway to Sarasota when the sky clouded over. The all-weather station said a storm was blowing in from the Gulf. Since moving to Florida he’d become fascinated with the weather, the violent thunderstorms and occasional tornadoes that whipped up without notice.
     Princess Palm Court looked deserted. In the distance he heard hammering, the squeal of a drill. He took his toolbox from the trunk and opened the front door with the key he’d stolen from Mimma’s purse. 
     Inside, the house was darker than he’d ever seen it. Again he felt the chill. He climbed the spiral staircase. The wind kicked up; on the west side of the house the windows rattled in their frames. 
     In the master bedroom he rummaged in his toolbox for an Exacto knife. The thick white carpeting ripped easily after the first cut. Poor quality, Len thought, stopping to wipe his hands on his pants legs. By the time he finished, there was a pile of carpet scraps in the corner of the room. The air thickened with linty dust. 
     He moved on to the bathroom. He gave the spray can a few shakes and let loose on the marble floor. The week before, the Tampa Tribune had run a story on gang graffiti. Len closed his eyes, trying to remember the jagged symbols he’d seen in the photographs. He sprayed until the can was empty, the room filled with fumes. His heart pounded in his chest. Thunder rumbled in the distance like a tired old engine. 
     He staggered out to the hallway and sat on the cool wood floor, sweating and panting. That was all he needed: to have another heart attack, in Flora’s goddamned house yet. He sat until he caught his breath. The first raindrops slid down the windowpanes, slow as tears.
 

     Two days later the call came.
     “Eeee!” Mimma cried when she answered the phone. Her round face flushed with pleasure. To Len it was like watching a piece of fruit ripen before his eyes. “Two calls in one week,” she said. “What I do to deserve this, cara mia?”
     Len went out to the garage and waited. He thought of the last time he’d seen his sister-in-law, her and Tony sitting in his living room, hands folded in their laps as if they preferred not to touch anything. The screen door slammed.
     “Lenny!” Mimma called. Her voice sounded thick, panicked. “Solge, where are you?”
     After all these years, his stomach still jumped. It was her special name for him, back from the days when he was handsome in his uniform. Since then she’d rarely used it: five years back, when he landed in the hospital with pneumonia, and more recently, after his heart attack.
     She came into the garage red-faced, her eyes streaming tears.
     “What’s the matter?” said Len.
     She shook her head, too upset to speak English. She reached out her arms to him and Len went to her. It was a clumsy embrace: they were out of practice, and so big that their bellies touched first, but Len didn’t care. He rocked her gently from side to side, breathing in the smell of her: hairspray, hand lotion, Comet cleanser. My wife, he thought. My wife.
     “She not going to come,” Mimma sobbed, and in spite of himself his heart broke for her. “She build that beautiful house and now she going to sell it. She change her mind.” 
     Len stroked her back.
     “She afraid to come,” said Mimma. “She think she get broken into, like in Newark. She think they come and rape her.”
     “Hush,” said Len, rocking, rocking.
     “She afraid of the neighborhood. That beautiful neighborhood! That’s how come she change her mind.”
 

     They sat on the screened porch and watched the sun go down. Len found the Jacksonville station they could only get at night, an AM station that played Mimma’s favorites: Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney. Mimma sang softly with the radio, her lovely contralto voice as clear as a young girl’s.