He was sitting alone on the wooden back steps and he was playing the blue guitar. The guitar was the blue of spring skies, the blue of postcard skies, the blue of the Aegean. The sounds he made were sorrowful and melancholy, and when he began to sing to himself, his voice ached with loss. Widow Musmanno did not understand the words, but she felt that somehow they were aimed directly at her and they made her ache, too. She stepped back from the window, and from the shadow behind the curtain looked down at the beautiful young man. She watched for almost a minute. And then she began furiously to scrub the table, to clean the refrigerator, to polish glasses and dust bureaus. When, a few hours later, her son came up from the street, he found her lying on her vast bed and when her eyes opened to look at him, they were sore and red.
“He’d come in every Monday morning,” said Marie from the dry cleaner. “Always six shirts, medium starch, and a suit, always nice and polite. One day, one shirt. One week, one suit. He didn’t flirt. He was the kind didn’t know how good-lookin’ he was. He told me he worked nights in a restaurant over New York, and he used to laugh at his bad English. He was a Greek, the kid. And tell the truth, it was hard to keep your eyes off him.”
On the morning of her thirty-first birthday, after her son left for Coney Island with his Uncle Frank, Widow Musmanno was hanging wash while Vlastopolous played in the yard below. She heard the aching notes. Her thick body trembled. Suddenly, a piece of wash slipped from her hands and fell three stories into the yard. Vlastopolous glanced at the fallen piece, then up at Widow Musmanno, frozen in her window frame, and he smiled. He walked over and picked up the fallen piece. It was a woman’s slip. He waved it like a wet silky pink flag at Widow Musmanno and explained with a gesture that he would bring it up to her. She shook her head no, almost desperately pointing to herself and then to him, meaning that she would come down. But Vlastopolous just smiled and went into the back door of the Griffin house with the wet woman’s slip and his blue guitar. He went out into the street and found her building on the avenue and went up the hot dark stairs to the top floor and she came to the door, her hair swiftly brushed, her cheeks swiftly powdered, and she looked at him and that was the beginning of that.
There were few secrets in that neighborhood, and soon many people knew about Widow Musmanno and the beautiful young man with the blue guitar. They knew from the look on her face, the freshness of her color, and the way she began to dress again as she had before the death of her husband, in mauve and pink and yellow summer dresses. They knew when she stopped going to Mass. They knew from the drawn shades in the afternoon while the six-year-old was off at a ball game with his uncle. Somebody saw them in the hills above the Long Meadow in Prospect Park. Sitting under a tree, eating sandwiches while the young man played the blue guitar. And one hot night, Sadie Genlot climbed to the roof for air and saw them a few tenements away, leaning on a chimney, holding hands and staring at the glittering towers of Manhattan.
Of course, the old women gossiped about Widow Musmanno; it was too bad, they said, that she had gone “that way”; she sure wasn’t showing proper respect for her poor husband. But most of the younger women approved, and a few were envious. There was nobody in any of their lives who announced himself with a blue guitar.
“The trouble was, how long could it go on?” Mrs. Caputo said. “It was the husband’s brother was the problem. Frank. He took over when the brother died. He paid the bills. He was like a father to the kid. That was the trouble.…”
Late one Saturday night, Vlastopoulos came out of Widow Musmanno’s building. At the corner, as he turned toward Mary Griffin’s house, he saw two men in gray hats sitting in a Cadillac. They were staring at him. A few days later, he came up from the subway and saw the same two men peering at him from behind the café curtains of a bar called Fitzgerald’s. One of them nodded. Late that night, after the boy was long asleep, Vlastopolous mentioned the two men to Widow Musmanno.
“Oh, my God,” she said, the words more prayer than exclamation. And then, after a long silence, she told the young man that it was all over between them and she could never see him again. He protested; she insisted. He said that she was grown up, she lived in a free country, she could do what she wanted with men. He said that if marriage was the problem, then they would get married. But Widow Musmanno turned her face and whispered that there were some things he would never understand. And Vlastopoulos answered that no matter what she said he would be around to see her again the following night. She took his beautiful face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth.
