The Black Madonna Read Online Free Page A

province,” Donna Rubina said. “Magnificent, no?” Teresa nodded, afraid to do more. Donna Rubina handed the card to Teresa. “For you,” she said. Teresa closed her hand over the picture of the Black Madonna. “Keep her hidden,” Donna Rubina said. “Keep her hidden for yourself and your son.” Teresa reached into her pocket but Donna Rubina stopped her. “No, no,” she said. She smiled. “Next time.”
    When Teresa got home she put the holy card with the picture of the Black Madonna in her top dresser drawer, between the folds of silk cloth from halfway around the world.
    G et me crutches,” Nicky told his mother, “so I can go downstairs. I can go up the block. I can go to school.”
    â€œHow can you do that? You can’t walk.”
    â€œIf you get me crutches, I can.”
    â€œYou think you gonna crawl, Nicky? Forget it. When you walk, you go downstairs. You crawl, you stay home.”
    â€œBut I can’t walk. You just said I can’t.”
    â€œYou will. I promise,” she told him and then she made a sound, a long, low wail, a cry, until he promised to stop asking her and give her more time before he hobbled around outside like a cripple, like the boy in the movie she took him to see every Christmas at the Loew’s Sheridan. “There’s still Our Lady of Mount Carmel,
La Madonna Bruna,
” she said. “The Madonna who answers. I’ll do the novena. I’ll walk barefoot in the procession to 115th Street with a lighted candle. I’ll go on my knees. Then we’ll get our miracle. You wait. Have patience. I promise you.”
    She cut him a piece of bread and covered it with butter. She poured him a glass of milk and held it while he drank. When he was finished she made him spit on a corner of the handkerchief she pulled from under her sleeve and then she wiped the corners of his mouth.
    Nicky told all this to Salvatore, who came now to see him almost every day after school unless he had to work for his father. Salvatore’s father was an important man, a
padrone.
He had a shelf of books in his house and could add columns of numbers in his head. The neighborhood was always talking about just what he was worth.
    If Salvatore saw Nicky in the front window, he would go up and knock on the door. But usually in the afternoon when school got out, Nicky’s mother sat him in the back. “You don’t want them to see you in the window all the time with your tongue hanging out,” she said, and Nicky didn’t complain because he knew Salvatore would see him in the back window and would climb up the back fire escape and sit outside the window and they would talk. Teresa never objected to Salvatore. When he would come to see Nicky in the window, she would bring them glasses of water tinted with wine. Nicky would ask him about the rope, but Salvatore always said he couldn’t find one, not the right kind anyway, the kind Nicky said he needed, but he said he would try and figure something out. What Salvatore figured out was a platform on wheels that Nicky could sit on and pull himself around the apartment. Salvatore got the idea from the go-carts they would make with a crate and a two-by-four piece of wood and a roller skate. Teresa was not unhappy about Nicky’s new freedom. She said as long as no one saw him wheeling himself around like a circus freak, it was not a bad thing. When Salvatore arrived with the contraption under his arm, Teresa had nodded her head and raised her eyebrows, secretly pleased at Salvatore’s cleverness. Nicky kept his “chair” under the bed and out of sight, and used it when his mother was not around.
    T eresa came downstairs one night after supper when the weather was starting to get warm. The women made room for her on the stoop. They asked about Nicky’s legs. They had seen Donna Rubina come and go. Nicky’s mother shook her head. “Bad luck