LITMIR.BIZ

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I’m going to head up,” Rita said. “Your mother did well tonight. Won twenty dollars. Hit bingo three times.”

      “Who is this, Gina?” Mimoo repeated.

      “It’s Ben Shaw, Mimoo.”

      “Who?”

      Ben stood up to greet Gina’s mother. “Hello, Mrs. Attaviano.”

      “It’s Harry’s friend from years ago, Mimoo. Remember, Panama Canal?”

      “I remember everything,” said Mimoo, glaring at Gina and taking off her coat. “You’re looking for Harry in the wrong place, young man. He’s in the Correctional.”

      “Yes, I know,” Ben said. “I drove your daughter home so she wouldn’t have to take the train.”

      Mimoo walked past them, on her way upstairs. “Come help me,” she said to Gina. “I’m going to fall down I’m so tired. Bingo this late doesn’t come without a price.”

      Gina turned to Ben. “I have to run. Thank you so much for the ride. Sorry I kept you.”

      “It was my pleasure—” He was stopped by Mimoo’s loud snort from the bottom of the stairs. “Nice to see you again, Mimoo. Please give my regards to Salvo.”

      Upstairs, the first thing Mimoo said was, “And you’re doing what, exactly?”

      “Harry’s old friend, Mother,” Gina said impatiently. “Basta.”

      “Your brother is out gallivanting somewhere, rowdy in a roadhouse, I’m sure. Good thing he didn’t come back early to see you gallivanting in your own house.”

      On Sunday, when Salvo did come back, barely making it in time for the start of the ten o’clock Mass, Gina leaned to her mother before the litany of supplication and whispered, “Oh, yes, Salvo is the one to judge me.”

      “Just because he lives in a glass house doesn’t mean he won’t throw stones.”

      And right after the service, barely out of St. Mary’s doors, Mimoo turned to her hungover, rumpled son and said, “You’ll never guess who drove your sister home from Concord yesterday.”

      “Do I dare guess?” said Salvo, squinting terribly in the morning sunshine and adjusting his gray serge cap so it covered his eyes.

      “Ben Shaw. Remember him? Some Panama foolishness long ago. Was that boy sweet on your sister, or what?”

      Salvo didn’t even turn his head to Gina, who was standing tall and elegant near the entrance, saying hello to the other parishioners, smiling, friendly, cleaned up for church, in a blue gingham dress and a wool coat, both old but pressed and well kept. Salvo’s parka coat was torn on one sleeve and stained with the revelry of many a Saturday night. “As long as it wasn’t her suddenly sprung-from-jail husband, it’s no never mind to me.”

      “Salvo, I don’t know whether to thank you or to smack you,” said Gina. “But what I must do is bid you both goodbye.”

      “Where are you off to?”

      “Where I’m off to every Sunday,” said Gina. “To visit my husband.”

      They sit across from each other. Roy, Harry’s guard, a burly, very large black man, born and bred free in the north, and now a sentinel over the incarcerated white man, has taken a real shine to Gina, and sometimes, when he’s the only one on duty, he lets Harry touch her across the partition. When she hands him the newspaper he takes it from her and then holds her hands until Roy clears his throat. They sit. Sometimes they don’t say much.

      Sometimes it’s because there’s nothing to say.

      Sometimes it’s because there’s too much.

      Today they speak almost as if there are no penumbras.

      “What books did you bring me?” he asks. “I finished five days ago the two lousy ones you brought last week.”

      “Does lousy refer to the quantity of the books or their quality?”

      “Both.”

      She laughs.

      “They were terrible and there wasn’t nearly enough of them. Why can’t you bring me more? I’ve memorized the paper. It’s gotten so desperate I actually opened the Bible Roy left on my table pretending he forgot.”

      “Oh, dear, things can’t be that bad, mio marito,” she says, “that you’re reduced to reading the Bible.”

      “That’s what I’m saying.”

      “What, you didn’t like Sons and Lovers?”

      “Not much. That Oedipal bullshit. Not for me.”

      “What’s Oedipal?”

      “Never mind.”

      “I never read it.”

      “That’s fine. But just in case the rest of Lawrence’s oeuvre is from the same cloth, don’t bring him.”

      “How about The Man Without a Country?” she asks, teasing. “Can I bring that?”

      “I know that idiot thing by heart,” he says, frowning. “Why would you bring that to me here?”

      “I’m joking.”

      “Oh.”

      “Has prison excised your sense of humor, Harry?”

      “My irony meter is clearly down,” he says. “Don’t say things you don’t mean. At the very least smile when you say them so I know to laugh myself.”

      “Okay, tesoro.”

      “And that other book you brought me, The Seven Who were Hanged, no more like that. I was thisclose to being the eighth by the time I’d finished it.”

      “But you asked me specifically to bring it for you!”

      “Don’t listen to me. The problem with it is built into the title. When you see a title like that, Gina, run the other way. The Russian angst is too depressing for a man in a cell. Everything is terrible and everyone is about to die. And then they do die. What’s wrong with those Russians and their entire line of literature?”

      “How about Chekhov?”

      Harry is tepid toward Chekhov. “He is so tubercular. I never know when he’s finished. Everything I read by him, it could all end a hundred pages earlier or a hundred later, I have no way of telling. It’s like breathing.”

      “How about I bring you some Sherlock Holmes next week?”

      “Yes,” he says, brightening. “Excellent. Stay away from the melancholics. Hardy, Gide. All the Russians.”

      She looks down into her satchel.

      “What did you bring me this week?”

      “I brought you Love Among the Chickens.”

      He laughs. “I like it already,” he says, taking Wodehouse from her hands. His fingers linger on hers.

      “What about Oscar Wilde? The Soul of Man Under Socialism?” She smiles.

      “You’re teasing, right? Very good. But no, thank you. I’ve had quite enough of his anarchic blather, his and his mentor Kropotkin’s. Nothing pleases them—”

      “Well, Kropotkin is Russian.”

      “The least of his problems. They contradict themselves constantly. They make me pine for curfew, and we can’t have that. What else?” He waits eagerly.

      “Look—I sewed a new layette for one of Mimoo’s housecleaning ladies who’s having a baby,

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