“I don’t know how to sew.”
“You don’t – but – ?” What did the girl do every day but sit at the end of the table, beading?
“I know how to bead. I don’t know how to sew.”
“Like . . . like this . . .” Julietta made a motion with her hand as if she were doing just that.
Luciana, poor girl, stretched to the limits of humiliation, decided that Julietta was exactly the wrong person to ask for help. She bundled the pink and white messaline up into a ball and determined to take it home with her that night. She’d figure something out.
Julietta, seeing her dreams about to be whisked away, threw out a hand toward the girl. “I’ll help you!” She tore the gown from Luciana’s hands.
“You’ll . . . what?”
“Help. I’ll help you.” Julietta set the gown down on the table and went to Madame’s pile. Digging through the gowns, she pulled out a navy moiré, an ivory messaline, an aubergine wool challis, a dark green crepe de Chine, and a wine-colored crepe poplin. “You could fix these.”
“Don’t you think the moiré is a bit heavy?”
“It’s nearly autumn.”
“And this ivory messaline . . . ?” Luciana looked over at the table where the pink and white messaline lay, discarded. “It doesn’t seem quite so . . .”
It wasn’t. It wasn’t nearly as elegant as Madame’s design. The ivory messaline had been ordered readymade from a dressmaker in New York City for a client. “The color is better, though. For you.”
Luciana sighed. She supposed that it was. “But what would I do with it?”
Do with it? Why, Julietta could imagine a dozen things! “You’ll 64 want to clip the collar away from that rosette at the bustline and let it hang down a bit at the corners. And lower the inset at the neckline.”
Sì. Of course. Luciana could begin to see it. Much better.
“And then shorten the hem of the tunic. And cut away the bottom of the skirt.”
Luciana nodded.
“And you could use those pieces to lengthen the sleeves.
See?”
“You don’t think the pink and white messaline would be better?”
“For you? No.” Julietta shook her head with all the confidence she had acquired in her eighteen years.
“I see what can be done, but . . . I still lack the skills.”
“I could do it. I could do them all for you.”
“You would?”
“I could . . . for the right price.”
The right price. That’s what Mama Rossi had had to calculate. What was the right price? What would make Papa change his mind, yet spare him complete humiliation? A man had a reputation to uphold, after all. As she set his dinner before him that night, she prayed that she’d made the right choice. That she’d done the right underhanded thing.
He smiled. “That looks like parmigiana di melanzane.”
“It is.”
“Made with tomatoes.”
“Indeed.”
Papa sniffed at it with all of the delicacy of a connoisseur. This now – this! – was what a parmigiana di melanzane was supposed to look like. And smell like. He wasted no time in tucking into the eggplant, scooping some tomato gravy onto it, and putting it into his mouth. But just as promptly, he spit it out. “What kind of garbage is this?!”
“The kind made with rotten tomatoes from Maglione’s frutta e verdura.”
He picked up his glass of wine and poured the remainder down his throat. “No more tomatoes from Maglione’s. Do you hear?”
Mama folded her hands beneath her apron. Nodded as demurely as she was able to. “I could get them from Zanfini’s. Annamaria could get them for me.” She slid a look at her daughter as she said the words. She knew that she was asking the girl to sacrifice her virtue for the family. But hadn’t her family been sacrificing their reputation to the Magliones for generations? They’d been played for fools long enough. Wasn’t the sacrifice of a daughter a small price to pay for shaming the man? For letting all the neighborhood know that the greengrocer was so detestable that the Rossis preferred to buy their tomatoes from a Sicilian instead? It was the Magliones’ turn to be shamed.
Had she been less stubborn, had she not already committed to her course, she might have realized that the disturbance she felt in her stomach was not indigestion but rather the pricking of her conscience. But Mama had long treated her conscience the same way she treated Papa. And over time they had both decided it was much easier to simply acquiesce than to try and argue with her. Besides, it was the family’s honor at stake, and sometimes honor had the habit of masquerading as righteous indignation.
Papa sighed. “If the Sicilians are the only ones who sell good tomatoes, then buy your tomatoes from the Sicilians.” A man couldn’t eat his pride, after all. And it made him want to weep, thinking of all that good parmigiana di melanzane gone to waste.
Julietta fairly wept herself the next morning. She was late. If she didn’t reach Zanfini’s frutta e verdura in time, she wouldn’t be able to see the man. And if she didn’t see him today, then she wouldn’t see him again until Monday.
Dio ce ne scampi! God forbid!
In her haste she stepped right out of her shoe. Shoving it back on to her foot, she started up once more. She rounded the corner onto North Street and then stopped. He wasn’t there. He’d already gone. A wave of disappointment and regret swirled through her stomach.
He was gone.
“Buon giorno.”
She nearly jumped right out of her flimsy shoes. The voice was male, so she fixed a smile to her face before she turned.
It was him!
In all his handsome glory. Dark, curling hair. Thick, dramatic brows. He was perfect. Bold and daring. She knew he had to be. He wore colored shirts, didn’t he? Instead of the boring white ones propriety always demanded? And what he didn’t wear was a hat. Or a tie. She flipped a look toward him that was both bold in its directness and demure in its brevity. “Where’s your truck?” A strange question to ask, perhaps, but Julietta had always been one for going directly after what she wanted, and the truck was part of the man’s great appeal. She’d never been in a truck before. Or a car, for that matter. And she wanted to go for a ride.
He smiled. “I gave it to my friend.”
She couldn’t know it, but her face had fallen.
“For the day. I gave it to him for the day.” He shrugged. “And night.” And now that he was finally standing here, talking to this girl that he’d been watching, he began to wish that he’d kept it. There were such wonderful discoveries to be made at the end of dark alleys, in the cab of a truck.
“Oh. Well . . .” She looked up at him once more. Smiled. “Arrivederci.”
Good-bye? “But – ” He was already talking to her back. “Wait!” Wait? Did he have to sound so desperate?
She turned on her heel. Stood there, hand on her hip. “Do you have a name?”
“It’s Angelo. Angelo Moretti. But – ”
“Then good-bye, Angelo Moretti.”
“But I don’t – hey! – what’s your name?”
He was speaking to a phantom. She had already turned the corner. She was gone.
Laughter erupted behind him as a second man emerged from the alley. “But, but, but – ” He snorted. “You sounded just like your backfiring truck.”
Angelo shoved a fist into the man’s chest and a sheaf of pink papers into his hand. “Shut up, Armando. And go distribute these.”
“Sure. Anything you say.”
“And be on the lookout.”
They always were. They may have kidded around while they went about their business of distributing produce, but they were dead serious about their true calling. And as they made their way through the North End distributing leaflets, they left a pink blizzard of terror in their wake.
That Sunday, Luciana tried to coax the contessa to church. They hadn’t been since they’d come to America, and she didn’t want to give God any more r
easons to punish them. Besides, church was the one place she was absolutely certain her father’s murderer wouldn’t be.
“No, ragazza.”
“But you used to in Rom – I mean . . . it’s Sunday.”
“You must learn to speak more clearly, girl.”
Luciana took up the old woman’s hand and knelt in front of her. “It’s Sunday.”
“Sunday.” The contessa said the word as if it were foreign.
As if there were no responsibility, no obligation inherent in its meaning.
“Sunday. On Sunday we – you – go to mass.”
“Mass.”
“We’ll be late.”
The old woman looked up from Luciana’s hand and into her eyes.
What Luciana saw in that gaze chilled her to the core. There was nothing – no one – there. She might have said the woman was absent her soul. And so, she did the only thing she could do. She pushed to her feet. “I’ll be back when it’s over.”
“When it’s over . . .” The old woman had already turned her face toward the window, her profile dismantled by the interplay of shadow and of light.
Luciana locked the door behind her. She took one step into the hall and then stopped. She wasn’t sure she should leave the contessa by herself. She’d done it every day for work, of course, but that didn’t make her worry any less about the old woman. Luciana had actually found her standing a time or two, in the middle of the room, when she’d come home from work lately. She didn’t have to work very hard to imagine the contessa going to the door, turning the knob, and walking right out of the apartment.
And what would happen then?
Her throat constricted, and she felt her nostrils flare in compensation. She closed her eyes as she struggled to breathe. It had begun to happen quite often, this problem with breathing. But now she recognized the signs. The fluttering of panic in her stomach, the grip of fear in her bowels, the stranglehold of dread around her throat.
What would happen then?
How could she, a destitute heiress, alone and friendless, manage to make a life in this strange country? For both her grandmother and herself?
She didn’t know.
As she stood there wheezing, as her vision began to tilt, she pressed her fingernails into her palm, desperate to feel something besides the cold clutch of fear. Sometime, someday, she would have to figure out what to do. Soon. But today was Sunday and Sunday was for mass. If nothing else, she wanted the satisfaction of confronting God in His own house.
Once at church, Luciana pushed herself into the corner of the back pew. Looking at the crowd of people crammed together in the pews in front of her, she knew it wouldn’t do them any good. It wouldn’t do them any good at all to try to sit so close to the altar.
God didn’t care.
He didn’t care whether you went to confession every week of your life, or if you only went to mass on Easter. It didn’t matter.
It hadn’t mattered that in Roma, Luciana slid into the very front row every Sunday that she could remember. It hadn’t mattered that she held parties for the ladies’ parish organization, or that she had given a donation every month to the orphans and widows fund. That she had wrapped bandages for countless soldiers or that she had kissed the ring of the Holy Father himself. On several occasions.
Why hadn’t it mattered!
It was supposed to matter. God was supposed to care.
But He’d allowed her father to be murdered and then, when she’d found herself turned out of her own estate, He hadn’t even bothered to help her. He’d abandoned her. She’d always been there for God, just like she was supposed to be. Why wasn’t He there for her? Where was He?
Where are you?
She stood when she had to and kneeled when she was supposed to. She even prayed along with the priest. But she couldn’t bring herself to partake in Communion. And so she sat in the back pew like a heathen, watching the parishioners stream to the front of the church. She ought to have left, but there was only hopelessness waiting for her at the tenement. Had she been able to be completely honest with herself, she might have admitted that the fact that her grandmother depended upon her so completely frightened her. But you know as well as I how fear can make even the eloquent inarticulate.
So that’s where Father Antonio found Luciana after church. In the back pew, still pressed into her corner, after the rest of his parishioners had melted away.
“You are new?” He spoke in the synthesis of dialects that the immigrants, of all regions, relied upon to make themselves understood.
Luciana glanced up at him and then inclined her head, unwilling to lie to a priest, but unwilling also to reveal any particular knowledge of herself.
“Are you well, my child?”
Well? No. She was hardly well, but she was healthy. She was not hungry. She was alive. And she recognized that in spite of all her previous assumptions to the contrary, those things were not assured to any person in this new county. She nodded.
“May the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”
Peace. Sì. Peace would be a start. “Grazie, Father.”
“You are from the north?”
Once more, she inclined her head.
“What is your name, child?”
“Luciana.”
Light. Child of light. Then why did her eyes seem so shadowed by darkness? She should be singing. Or dancing. Laughing.
“How can I help you?” For it was quite clear to the father that she was in great need. Of something.
Help? Her? “No one can help me, Father.”
“Perhaps it seems that way to you, but God can do the impossible.”
She wanted to laugh. Oh, how she wanted to laugh! God had already done the impossible. He’d killed the one person she’d loved the most and taken her away from everything she’d ever known. But she didn’t laugh. She smiled. A very bleak, very sad smile. “My problems are too difficult, even for Him.”
Father Antonio was used to speaking to the wounded of the faith, but he’d never before encountered one so set on God’s impotence. Usually people were longing to be reminded of His great power and great love. But the words he’d meant for cheer seemed only to deepen the girl’s despair. He reached out a hand to touch her, to bless her, but she slipped away from him and was gone.
9
Twenty minutes earlier and fifteen pews up, Julietta had been nursing a smile that had nothing to do with the rites of mass or the sacrament of the Eucharist.
Angelo.
Angelo Moretti.
Such a nice name was Angelo. For such a nice handsome face. For such nice thick hair that curled so delectably over his ears. And such nice brown eyes that had glowed as he’d looked at her. And his lips . . .
Julietta bit her own lip.
His lips were . . . divine. They were large and . . . and . . .
The word that she wanted was sensuous, but even she couldn’t quite bring herself to think it while the father was conducting mass under the patronage of God’s all-seeing, all-knowing eyes. There was something about his lips. Something about the way they curled up at one corner. In almost a kind of . . . It wasn’t a sneer, really. Not quite. It was just that . . . he didn’t seem quite . . . nice.
Julietta’s lips suddenly curved into a full-blown smile. She’d figured it out.
He wasn’t quite nice.
And that was exactly the reason she liked him so much. Who better to rescue her from the chains of propriety and the shackles of decency than a man who wasn’t quite nice? She couldn’t wait to see him again. And again.
And again.
Madame Fortier sat behind her desk on Monday, pulling her appointment book from some cards of buttons and a pile of trimmings. The twenty-ninth of July.
Mrs. Quinn.
A painful, insistent thumping began in Madame’s head. And heart.
She had known this day was coming; she just wished it hadn’t come so soon.
Mrs. Quinn.
What days and weeks and years had gone by that Madame hadn’t wished for, hadn’t hoped to hear, the glad tidings of that woman’s death? But then, what days and weeks and years had gone by that she hadn’t looked forward, with anticipation, to the client’s next visit?
The woman was a witch. A strega.
A real, true witch, born at midnight on Christmas Eve, an occasion which an annual birthday ball had been conceived to commemorate. Who but a strega would think of celebrating something like that? Mrs. Quinn’s Birthday Ball had been the event of the season before the war. It used to be that Madame Fortier had worked for months on Mrs. Quinn’s gown for that gala occasion. These days, with the concussion of guns resounding from Europe and extravagant expenses abandoned for the cause of patriotism, the ball had been converted into a small dinner party with an influential guest list. And for it she would need a simpler, but no less brilliantly fashioned, gown.
Which in no way made up for Madame’s loss of income from events like the Ace of Clubs Ball or the Junior League’s Gala, which had been indefinitely postponed until the end of the war; until victory had been won and freedom wrested from the cruel, warmongering Boche.
Madame put a hand to her aching head and sighed.
A strega she was and a strega she would always be. Ever since Mrs. Quinn, née Howell, had chosen Madame Fortier to make her wedding gown, the woman had been a constant and abiding thorn in the gown maker’s flesh.
Madame opened a drawer in her desk and pulled a flask from it. Reached further back to retrieve a glass. Poured herself two fingers’ worth of clear, strong grappa.
Perhaps you might have been inclined, until that moment, to sympathize with Madame Fortier. To, at the very least, tolerate Madame Fortier. She was not an easy woman to like; she did not, in fact, even like herself very much. Though that last bit, of course, is a secret, and we must do her the courtesy not to mention it, not even to think of it too often before she can realize it for herself. But before you convict her for fortifying herself with liquor, consider for one moment that you have not yet met the woman she was fortifying herself against. And consider for a second moment that if you had to work for Mrs. Quinn, if you had to satisfy that voracious and unslakeable thirst for the highest, most distinctive of fashions, if you had to hear her speak of her husband, the congressman, over and over and over again, you also might feel a great and sudden thirst for grappa.
A Heart Most Worthy Page 6