The Black Madonna by Louisa Ermelino Page A

thought Nicky would fall. She wanted to protect him, to save him. “No,” Dante said in her ear.
    The undertaker had stepped down from the chair. He moved to the front of the room to direct the mourners. He pointed them to the velvet kneeler in front of the coffin, holding their hands in his for a moment as they passed by on their way to pray before the body. “A miracle,” he told them as they moved through the aisles. He smiled, thought about expanding . . . selling relics. He kissed his fingers and touched the feet of the statue of the Madonna that stood on a pedestal in a corner of the room.
    Nicky knelt at his father’s casket. “I knew it,” he said to the body. “I knew you’d come back and I’d walk again.”
    Donna Rubina Fiore from Bedford Street called out and made the sign of the cross on her forehead, her lips, her heart. She told the people near her that she had cast this spell. She had made Nicky Sabatini walk. The undertaker implied that the funeral parlor was blessed. “Ask yourself,” he said. “Why has God chosen this place?”
    When Nicky got up from the casket, everyone clapped and cheered. The men came and slapped him on the back, the women covered him with kisses. The children gave him gum and marbles and sucking candies they had hidden in their pockets. Jumbo gave him half a Hershey bar, the mark of his fingers imprinted in the chocolate. He had stolen it from Sam & Al’s candy store only that morning.
    Teresa took places and that night she collected the envelopes the undertaker had provided. They were stuffed with money. Everyone was hoping for some of her blessing, her luck, to rub off on them. The number runners didn’t get home until midnight that night and every night of Angelo Sabatini’s wake. Everyone played the date of the miracle, the time of the miracle, the street number of the funeral parlor. Everyone went to sleep determined to remember their dreams. Every night of the wake the mourners dug deep into their pockets and filled the envelopes with money, a token of their sorrow and respect and hope for a score.
    He left her alone in life, they said about Angelo Sabatini, but he worked a miracle for her in death.
    Teresa insisted that Nicky sit in the first chair, the chair of honor, and greet all the people who filed past the coffin. They kissed his hands and pressed them against their foreheads.
    Nicky took Salvatore on the side and told him it was creepy and he would be glad when it was over. Salvatore told him to enjoy it. He had been touched by God, Salvatore told him. Even Magdalena had said it and she knew these things. It was a once in a lifetime.
    The night before the funeral, Teresa made Nicky sit at the kitchen table and then she went to all the windows and pulled down the shades. She locked the door and hooked the chain, and then she took out the white envelopes that she had collected every night at the wake and put them on the table. She gave half of the envelopes to Nicky, and the two of them unfolded the money from inside the envelopes and put it into piles, stacks of ones, fives, tens, and twenties. There was even a hundred-dollar bill from the undertaker and Nicky held it up and turned it over in his hands until his mother slapped his face and told him to put it down. “It’s only money,” she said. “First comes honor.”
    There were hardly any ones. She told him he could keep the few there were. Then she made him stand up. To look at him, she said. She made him walk around the table, to see his legs work. “Tomorrow’s the funeral,” she told him. “Tomorrow, in the morning before church, we go say goodbye to your father. You stay in the room with me when they close the box. You watch with me.”
    â€œWhy?” Nicky asked her.
    â€œTo make sure they don’t take nothing. You think they care? They strip you naked before they close the box if nobody’s