Or something very much like it.
You see, it’s all very well and good to judge and moralize, but there are some whose morale has been broken. And for these, sometimes, we just have to let them survive, in hopes that one day they will decide to do more than survive. That they will decide, in fact, to live, in which case they can cast off their own crutches and endeavor for themselves to face their problems directly.
But Madame Fortier had not yet reached that point, and we must not run ahead of her to the place where we would like her to be. And so, we will let her drink her grappa in private, and brood on the appointments of the day.
It was some time later that she climbed the stairs to the third-floor workshop, supporting her steps by placing a heavy, discreetly jeweled hand to the wall. Once she’d reached the top of the stairs, she paused a moment, hand against her chest, to catch her breath and to buttress the last of the quickly waning courage that still resided there.
Once she had collected herself, she walked across the landing to the workshop. “Luciana.”
The girls looked up from their work in surprise. It was not often that Madame paid them the favor of a visit. Least not midmornings.
“Sì?” There was something in Madame’s eyes, something in her demeanor that made Luciana reluctant to be singled out for that woman’s attentions.
“I would like for you to assist me at this afternoon’s fitting.”
A fitting? What did she know about fittings? “But – ”
“It will be at two o’clock.”
“I don’t – I can’t – ” She hadn’t taken the job with Madame in order to work in the shop’s window, visible to every passerby. She wanted to be hidden, not exposed.
Annoyance was beginning to creep into Madame’s eyes.
“I can’t – speak English.” There. Now Madame wouldn’t want her.
“Don’t worry. Mrs. Quinn won’t be conversing with you.” Luciana flushed from both the miscomprehension and the implication. “I don’t think – ”
“That’s right. You don’t! Because if you think that I’m giving you options instead of orders, then you can leave right now!”
Luciana flinched as if she had been slapped. She’d never been given orders as if she were a mere – an ordinary – working girl. She couldn’t bring herself to even think the word servant. But leave? She couldn’t – she wouldn’t! She would do whatever it took to be allowed to stay. Even if it meant creeping out of her third-floor hiding place. “I’m sorry – I didn’t mean – of course I’ll – ”
Madame was already regretting her words, though not her feelings of frustration. Mrs. Quinn was nearly on her doorstep. What she needed was an ally, not a recalcitrant employee. “Two o’clock.”
As Julietta and Annamaria had observed the conversation, their eyebrows shot up toward their foreheads. They hardly waited until Madame had gone before speaking. “Mrs. Quinn!” Julietta was already crossing herself. She couldn’t decide whether to bless her good luck or curse her misfortune. In the past, Madame had always asked her to assist with the clients. But there were clients and there was Mrs. Quinn.
Mrs. Quinn? Luciana already hated her. “Who is Mrs. Quinn?”
“A strega.” On that point, both Julietta and Annamaria were agreed.
A witch? Surely not. But Luciana, looking over at the other two girls, could not ignore their reactions. They couldn’t actually believe in witches, could they? Surely they were more educated, less ignorant, than that.
Mrs. Quinn herself would have been completely surprised and not a little hurt at that assessment of her person. She’d lived her life as an activist, after all. Those who knew her considered her to be remarkably and gratifyingly modern. A bastion of tolerance, a scourge against racism. She’d married an Irishman, hadn’t she? She had been hard at work in the National Women’s Party to advocate for women’s suffrage. And she patronized Madame Fortier’s shop.
It helped, of course, that the woman was the best gown maker in Boston. And it didn’t hurt that she was truly European instead of second-generation Irish. Most of the other dressmakers had Gallicized their names and sprinkled their sentences with French phrases. Madame’s accent, however, was authentic. And that counted for quite a bit in Mrs. Quinn’s mind. She could not have said for certain from where exactly Madame had come, but she presumed it was some place respectable.
Mrs. Quinn was a Champion for the Downtrodden and a Defender of the Meek. The poor, the weak, the destitute could have no better friend than she. A witch, she was most definitely not.
She did, however, have a blind spot on the topic of Italians, as did most people in America with any kind of intelligence. Especially southern Italians, whom everyone knew to be inferior in every way to northern Italians. They were no more than overgrown children, really. Of limited intelligence and questionable virtue. Intractable and stubborn. They seemed to always think much more highly of themselves than they ought. And their homes! They swarmed to the North End like rats from a sinking ship. What sort of intelligent people would live like that? Why would any kind of person live like that?
Justice, liberty, tolerance.
Those were the topics that employed Mrs. Quinn’s abundant energy and considerable intelligence.
If Mrs. Quinn had known the gown maker’s thoughts, however, she would not have been pleased. And she wouldn’t have used the word strega. She preferred to think of herself as clever. She had an uncanny nose for politics. She could sense a softening of resolve like a wolf sensed a change in the wind. She could ferret out a man’s hidden interests with nothing but a well-phrased question. And she could plot betrayal as if she herself held the knife. Most of her husband’s success in Boston and then in Washington was due to her instinctual mastery of the world of politics and her ability to call on just the right people, to do just the right thing, at just the right time.
At lunch, Julietta pulled a package from her sack, along with a length of bread and a wedge of cheese. “Here.” She slid the package across the table in Luciana’s direction.
Luciana opened it and held up the contents, exclaiming with something quite near delight. Her gowns! Several of them, in any case. New gowns had been in such generous supply at the estate in Roma, even in spite of the war, that their presence had never come close to eliciting that lift of delight in her spirit that these did.
She pushed aside her lunch and rose to her feet, holding one of the gowns up to her shoulders.
Julietta tried to look at it with an appraiser’s objective eye. She’d worked harder than she’d meant to on it. On all of them. Dedicated more time on Saturday and Sunday nights than she had intended. But the results had been quite astonishing. Gone were the awkward, overwrought, over-decorated silhouettes. They’d been replaced by svelte, clean lines. No dowdiness, no stuffiness remained within their folds. The gown Luciana held in particular exuded charm, and grace. And the fresh, carefree joie de vivre of summers gone by.
Before the war.
And before the anarchists.
Annamaria smiled as she watched Luciana. “Try it on.”
Oh, how she wanted to! But . . . “Now?”
“Sì. Now.” Julietta had gone to help Luciana from her old gown. “Please! To spare us both another look at that old rag you’ve been wearing.”
Rag? That was hardly fair to the handiwork of the preeminent Parisian modiste Luciana had patronized before . . . everything . . . but she didn’t quibble; she was too grateful. And she didn’t even pause to consider what had happened to the pink and white messaline she’d given over to Julietta that past Friday. Or the lavaliere that had accompanied it. Though she hadn’t minded the absence of the one, she truly missed the other. More than she thought she would. Its rubies and diamonds had been formed in the shape of her family’s crest.
If Julietta noticed the fine weave of Luciana’s corset cover or the quality of the detailing on its yoke, she didn’t say so. She simply held up the gown as Luciana stepped inside it and th
en stood off to the side as the girl fastened it in the front. But her pride of workmanship was unmistakable, and she looked quite like Madame did whenever the shop owner had accomplished a particularly fine piece of work or an especially difficult draping. She quietly picked up Luciana’s old gown from the floor and dropped it into the wastebasket.
Annamaria was watching the transformation with undisguised good cheer. She had never been the beneficiary of any of Madame’s castoffs, had never expected to be, but that didn’t keep her from sharing in the happiness of the girl she was starting to consider a friend. “Che bella!” How beautiful. How beautiful Luciana was.
There was a moment when Luciana wondered if she ought to thank Julietta. And another moment when Julietta wondered if she ought to be bothered by Luciana’s failure to offer up gratitude. But Luciana couldn’t settle on the correct words, so Julietta counted it against her as one more instance of arrogance. Exchanging wary glances, they sat down to lunch, not as friends but as prospective enemies.
Just before the hands of Julietta’s clever little pendant watch pointed out two o’clock, Luciana descended the back stairs. She did it with trepidation and no little reluctance. She didn’t want to assist Madame Fortier. She didn’t want to meet the woman’s customers. She only wanted to be left alone.
But Madame had been good to her. Mostly. She had offered Luciana a job. She had provided clothing and money during a time when such things had been difficult to come by. If Madame required her assistance, then assist she would do. She’d just pray that nothing bad would come of it.
Pray. As if God were listening!
As she came toward the shop floor, she saw Madame escort a woman to a seat behind the screen. The very seat in which Luciana herself had collapsed two weeks before.
The woman was tall. She carried herself with confidence, if rather a bit too much dignity. She ought to have been beautiful; she had every feature required for the task. Her hair glowed with soft highlights that might have reminded you of the best of summer’s butter. The kind Luciana hadn’t seen for months. And the curve of her lips brought to mind the bow of the moon; there lay upon her cheeks a healthy glow that had nothing to do with artifice.
Yes, she ought to have been beautiful, but she wasn’t.
It is an old and tired motto that would have us believe true beauty lies beneath the skin. You might have suspected, as have I, that it is only the truly gorgeous who must think so. But as Luciana looked on Madame’s client, she came to discover that no light, save that of intelligence, shone forth from that woman’s soul. No warmth emanated from within. Those beautiful features with which God had chosen to bless her responded not to need nor to fellow man, but to principles and honor and duty.
At that moment, just as Luciana was appraising the strega, the woman looked over at her and did the same. Through narrowed eyes.
10
Luciana stepped back, for an instant, behind the protection of a doorframe and made the sign of the cross. She might have said a prayer for the woman, but she did not know, not at that point, what ailed her. And it was always a dangerous business to pray for a witch. But Luciana, from the depths of her own fear and unhappiness, had responded to a soul in pain in a way that Mrs. Quinn never had. Luciana had perceived; she had felt. She had sympathized.
It was only when she stepped into the shop once more that she realized the woman had been accompanied. By a man. A man who was handsome in much the same way as the woman, though he exuded a vivacity of spirit that the strega didn’t seem to possess.
He sent a smile in Luciana’s direction.
She cast her gaze to the floor and stepped toward the screen, placing herself at its side where Madame could see her.
Madame Fortier had asked the strega a question, and the woman was answering as she pulled off her gloves and folded them into her lap. “The same. The same as every other autumn. How many of these seasons have there been?”
“Twenty-one.” And Madame could recount them all in painful detail. “And how is the congressman?”
The woman turned her head away from Madame as if she couldn’t be bothered to answer. But then she sighed. Turned back. “Mr. Quinn? The same. The same as every other autumn. The same as every other year. He works all day.” She lifted a slim shoulder. Let it fall back down. “We entertain at night. I scarcely have time to think of him, let alone speak to him.”
“He is an important man. He is doing great things. You must be very proud to be married to him.”
Mrs. Quinn considered that statement.
“I’m sure any woman would give her . . . how do you say it? Her right arm? . . . to be married to him.”
At that, Mrs. Quinn scowled. She knew for a fact that was true. Knew for certain that there had been someone, some mysterious woman, that her husband had been in love with before they had married.
“It’s not what they might expect. . . .” She said it in a tone so low that Madame could scarcely hear her.
It’s not what Adeline Quinn, née Howell, had expected. He’d been so utterly charming, despite the melancholy she saw hiding behind his twinkling eyes and his quick smiles. And he’d been so ambitious. He’d spun visions of a new kind of city. A city where men and women could work together and immigrants could be encouraged to improve their plight.
The right sort of immigrant. The smart, hardworking, intelligent kind.
How they’d talked back then! Of anything. Of everything. As they’d shared their dreams for the future, she’d talked herself into believing that the difference in their backgrounds hadn’t mattered. That her blueblood parents would accept her marriage to an Irishman. She’d thought of it as the first step in their plan. Their first advancement for the cause.
It was to be a marriage of minds and goals.
Encouraged by their shared passions, she had hoped for love and companionship. But she had tumbled from those glorious daydreams after the wedding, straight into the treacherous seas of matrimony where she’d found herself sailing alone.
Oh, she’d known of the other woman before she’d married. Patrick Quinn was nothing if not honorable. She knew she’d turned his head and captured his imagination, and she’d told herself that she could also heal his heart. But still, after twenty-one years, she hadn’t been able to expunge the memory of that ghost. The toll that it had left on her, the weight that it had caused her to carry, had become debilitating. For how could she live up to a memory, an ideal, of some other woman when she didn’t even know who that person was?
An immigrant.
That’s all Patrick had ever told her. Knowing he had been raised in the North End, it wasn’t difficult to guess what kind of immigrant, what sort of woman it had been. And at this point, with dreams of romance behind her, she could admit that the thought of it disgusted her. Patrick had fallen in love with an Italian.
Madame could read her client’s face as easily as she could read the pull of a thread against the grain. The best cure for both was to smooth things out. “Nobody ever said marriage was easy. Perhaps a smile when he arrives home. A pleasant word or inquiry about his day?” Isn’t that what any man would want?
“You think I don’t do those things?” Adeline Quinn had taken to hovering near the door every evening until his return. Even when that hour kept creeping ever later. It was crass, undignified, and completely out of keeping with her class and station in life . . . and still, she could not seem to control herself. She just wanted . . . desperately craved . . . something. Some vitally important, nameless, missing thing.
Mrs. Quinn took the sample book that Madame Fortier offered. Began to flip through it. Black, brown, taupe. Wool jersey, wool tricotine, wool poplin. Buttons and beads and braids. Why should a new gown make her feel any more pleased, any more happy than the last one had? And if it did, how long would that satisfaction last? Until the season’s first ball? Until Thanksgiving? Or Christmas? Until Patrick passed by her bedroom door again without stopping to say good-night? How sick to death she wa
s of expectations! And hope! And the city and the war and people not knowing what they were meant to do or how they were to act!
She shut the book and shoved it back into Madame’s hands. “If I wanted to order what everyone else has, then I would patronize Madame Connolly’s. Please tell me you’ve something to offer other than what I’ve already seen half the other women in Boston wearing.”
Madame had grown round-eyed at the diatribe, causing a swell of perverse pleasure in Mrs. Quinn’s breast. It made her despise herself all the more. And it made Madame Fortier try all the harder. She knew from experience the strega would be contrary about her gowns until she had become satisfied, once more, with her life in general. “Perhaps . . . sometimes men seem to shrink from obligation. Men are contrary that way. They crave attention, but they don’t want to think that they are your sole occupation.”
“Do you think so?” Mrs. Quinn looked at her with an appraising eye. Madame’s advice always sounded so sensible. So eminently reasonable. Mrs. Quinn had actually been tempted to think, once or twice, that the gown maker actually knew the man. With a nudge in this direction or a push in that one, Mrs. Quinn’s marriage had been steered from perilous shores, on more than one occasion, by the skillful hands of Madame Fortier. And that thought, that knowledge, galled her to no end. “I suppose it’s easy for an old maid like you to dispense advice about marriage. It doesn’t cost you anything, does it? And you haven’t the ability to experience the consequences of your advice.”
Madame Fortier tried to smile. “No. It does not. But then, an old maid like me does not have the pleasure of sons, either.”
A Heart Most Worthy Page 7