ONE ROUND FOR CUCCIATA

                       ONE ROUND FOR CUCCIATA

                                by Irving A Greenfield

His sister, Rose, was furious with their brother-in-law, Seth, for having bought a casket for Ellen, their sister, before she died. But she was dying; and if they were lucky, she would die soon; perhaps within a few hours if she was lucky or, at the very most, the next day. The sooner it would be, the better it would be for everyone, including herself. 

For two years, she had been slowly dying from multiple myeloma. She had been reduced from a vibrant forty-two year old woman to a thing consumed by pain and an ever increasing voraciousness for morphine. Her long death culled the emotional and physical strength out of every member of the family, and made each of them a martyr from their individual perspectives.

“He’s burying her before she’s dead,” Rose complained. “He never loved her. These last two years he . . . he couldn’t stand the sight of her.”

They were in the visitor’s lounge, with its peppermint green walls and a large rectangular window that allowed them to look across the Hudson River into New Jersey from the fourteenth floor of the Presbyterian Hospital. Earlier in the morning, Rose had come into the city from Albany, where she lived with her husband, George, and daughter, Florence. She made the trip once a week; sometimes on a Monday, but more often on a Thursday. It was the last Thursday in April -- April Twenty ninth, nineteen sixty-five. 


Paul listened to Rose because he was there. But he focused his attention on the last red light in the sky that seemed to emanate out of the dark mass of central Jersey. Like ropes of pearls, the lights from the windows in the city’s skyscrapers to the south and from the catenaries of the George Washington Bridge to the north punctuated the gathering darkness. Aware that night throb of the city was beginning, Paul was acutely conscious that, not more than a dozen paces from the door of the visitor’s lounge, his sister lay dying. Almost without realizing what he was looking at, he saw Rose’s disembodied reflection and his own in the glass of the window. They looked as if they were hovering over the Henry Hudson Parkway. 

Rose had a tissue to her face. Though he could not actually see the redness, he knew her eyes were red rimmed from crying. Wearing a heavy woolen gray skirt, a faded yellow blouse, and a blue cardigan over it, she looked dowdy, older than her forty-four years. There was eight years between them. She was the middle daughter; Nadine, the oldest; Ellen, the youngest of the girls. There was six years between him and Ellen. Yet now, because their father had been dead for many years, he felt as if he were the father of all of them; including their mother, who was clearing eighty years, lacking one eye and almost blind in the other, but otherwise as healthy as a woman her age could be.

Paul was preemi, coming into this world when the taxi carrying his mother and cousin Fanny to the Beth El Hospital in Brownsville overturned on an icy corner. He was not only born in the cab immediately after the accident, he was also conceived as a result of an accident. Either the condom broke, or his father in his passion did not withdraw fast enough or -- or nothing. No matter how he, or anyone else, might look at his having been being born, he was not wanted as he was so frequently told by his mother, sisters, and father. He was an intrusion, and his mother tried to abort him using time honored purgatives and a crocheting needle when the purgatives failed. But Paul was tenacious. He lived. A tall, narrowly built man, prematurely gray, with dark blue eyes, Paul resembled no one in the family.

“Would you do something like that if your wife were dying?” she asked between sniffles.

Paul pretended not to hear her. He didn’t want to go wherever the conversation between them would go. He had something more important to think about other than her complaints against Seth.

In a more demanding tone, Rose repeated her question.

“I’m not Seth,” Paul said, still facing the window. A tug boat with its red and green navigation and white running lights on slid across the window.

“I come here and I see how he treats her,” she sniffled. “I break my back for my sister because I love her.”

He did not want to listen to Rose, but there was nowhere else for him to go. Two doctors and a nurse were in the room with Ellen. The nurse, a young black woman with a lilting West Indian accent, politely asked them to leave the room. She was on the four to midnight shift.

Paul lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke to his left. He wanted a drink. A scotch neat would have done wonders for him. He was, like Rose, weary. The entire family was emotionally exhausted.

“I’m going to have to leave soon,” Rose said. “George will meet me at the station at ten.”

He faced her. He wanted to say go now, but he didn’t. Had he, it would have caused another argument. Over the years, he had a belly full of arguments with her. They began when he reached puberty and continued ever since.

“I want to see her again before I leave,’ she said, her voice all choked up. “It could be the last time.”

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 Irving Greenfield is an american writer whose work has been published in Amarillo Bay, Runaway Parade, Writing Tomorrow, eFictionMag and the Stone Hobo; and in Prime Mincer, The Note and Cooweescoowee (2X) and THE STONE CANOE, electronic edition. He and his wife live in Manhattan. He has been a sailor, soldier and college professor, playwright and novelist.