The House at the Edge of Night Read Free Page A

deposited in the previous year alone—the director, the chief nurse, and her staff had resorted to changing one or two letters at a time to fashion each child a surname: Thus tonight’s five babies had become Buonareale, Buonarealo, Buonarala, Buonarola, Buonarolo. And “Amedeo” for a first name would suit this giant infant—a solid, God-fearing name. The director added it, then closed the book.
    The baby woke again and sucked at Rita’s teat, this time with a sense of purpose. Already unfurling within him was the great ambition of his life: to live, to grow up, and to find a home and a family.
    —
    NOT ONLY WAS HE the largest baby the foundling hospital had ever seen, he also grew twice as quickly as the babies Buonareale, Buonarealo, Buonarala, and Buonarola. It took two wet nurses to feed him, and a special cot had to be purchased and placed between their beds, rather than the usual white-starched cradle, because Amedeo fretted whenever he was placed in the cradle, already straining against its sides. He grew up by great leaps: “an ungainly little thing,” his second nurse Franca said (“a blessed angel” was what Rita called him). Rita held him on her knee and sang “
Ambara-
bà,
cic-
cì,
coc-
cò,” so that sometimes he forgot that she was not his real mother.
    When he was a little older, Rita told his fortune from a torn pack of
tarocco
cards. The director caught her and forbade it. Amedeo remembered nothing about the fortune, but he remembered the cards and loved the stories furled within them: the Hermit, the Lovers, the Hanged Man, the Devil, the Tower. He begged for others. Instead of the card stories, Rita taught him a tale about a girl who became an apple, became a tree, became a bird. She taught him a story about a cunning fox. Afterward he longed for a little fox to sleep beside him on the stone floor of the dormitory. His thirst for stories grew. Franca taught him two: the first about a demon named Silver Nose and the second about a sorcerer named Body-No-Soul. After these stories, Amedeo had to shut himself uncomfortably up in Rita’s bedside locker, in case the demon and the sorcerer should come for him, but he still loved the tales.
    When he was not yet quite grown, Rita went away, and no one said anything more about her. For a while he was sent to the country, to a little house with a dirt floor, where he had a new foster mother and foster father. If you stood on the seat of the latrine and peeped through the window, you could see the bowl of smog that was the city of Florence, where he had been born, and the shiny serpent that was the Arno.
    It cost too much to feed him, his foster mother said; she claimed the boy grew out of his clothes. He was sent back.
    By the time he was six, there were mostly girls left in the foundling hospital, and Amedeo. The window where he had been delivered was shut up now. Babies had to be brought to an office in a basket, because that was what his nurse Franca called “civilized.” Otherwise, she said, bad people abandoned their babies out of convenience. Amedeo, as he grew, wondered if he had been abandoned
out of convenience
(he took the phrase to mean “by accident”). He developed the habit of stationing himself on the steps beneath the closed-up window, in case his real mother should ever come back for him.
    —
    ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY, the visiting doctor found Amedeo there on his way to inspect the babies. Always, the visiting doctor had kept a special eye on Amedeo. The boy’s abnormal size caused him pains in his legs and made him prone to all kinds of accidents, bringing him under the visiting doctor’s care more often than the doctor would have wished.
    “Now, my little man,” said the doctor (who had difficulty addressing the children sensibly once they passed nine months), “no injuries in the past few weeks, eh? That’s good progress. But what’s to become of you?”
    Amedeo, on this particular afternoon, had been troubled by a vague