A Heart Most Worthy

by Siri Mitchell

  Children who were playing in the street below, liberated from the night’s chores by the festa, soon ceased their games. Passersby stopped to listen. Even the wind ceased its teasing gusts. One old nonna cheered as Rafaello finished his song. Insisted that he sing one song more.

  He did.

  And then he sang another. And another one after that.

  But long about midnight Mama Rossi came home, Theresa in tow, and insisted that Annamaria go to bed. “No good ever came from sitting in front of a window at this late hour. You’ll catch your death. Go to bed.”

  “I’m going, Mama.”

  But before she did, she pulled the flower from her hair. Held it out over the casement and let it fall three stories to the street below. She didn’t dare to look at Rafaello as she did it. She was much too timid for such obvious displays of affection.

  After Annamaria had left her window, Rafaello dashed down four flights of stairs and out into the street. Rescued her flower from the sidewalk and tucked it in his pocket. Flowers and amorous glances were not for him. They did well enough for the moment, for he was in no hurry. But he knew, son of a greengrocer that he was, that things happened for a reason. That nothing flowered and fruited and ripened except when it had a purpose. So he would sing, and he would watch, and he would wait. But he had no intention of surrendering such newfound love as was his to some ancient idea of honor. Not here. Not in America. Not when he had just come to discover the very meaning of life itself.

  The parade had long passed by. Night had fallen, and now even the drunks had stumbled home to their beds. At last Luciana could open her window. And leave it open for the rest of the night. She hadn’t wanted to do it when boisterous groups of young men and raucous throngs of boys had still been roaming the streets. Who knew what menacing elements lurked in those crowds?

  As she pushed at the window, it creaked in protest and then stubbornly jammed halfway up. Try as she might, she couldn’t get it to budge. But at least she could feel the cool of the outside air. Luciana pulled the contessa’s chair closer to the window, folded her arms atop the frame, and set her chin on them. She looked down into the shadowed street.

  At least the contessa slept soundly in their bed. That was one thing to be thankful for. And there was so little to be thankful for these days.

  What about in Roma? Had she ever once thought to be grateful for all those luxuries? All those things she had thought were necessities. Had she ever really appreciated them? What she wouldn’t give for . . . a down-filled pillow. Or her carved and gilded bed. For even one pair of pumps, one gown, from her closet filled with clothes. Clothes and shoes that had been replaced in their entirety twice a year. She could have clothed the entire tenement building with her castoffs. And maybe even the building next door.

  But they were alive, weren’t they?

  And there were some good things that had happened. Some things to be grateful for. There was . . . Madame Fortier. At least Luciana was getting paid. For something she didn’t mind doing. And there was . . . Julietta.

  Her lips quirked at the thought of the girl. How she’d hurried Luciana down to the Settlement House and signed her up for a class. And she’d been persuaded to make over the ivory gown. And the others ones as well. That was another thing to be thankful for. She didn’t have to wear the old yellow satin.

  Had she truly once thought it was pretty?

  She thought of other things too. Of the picture in the strega’s house. How lovely it had been to look upon a painting again. And to stand, for just a moment, in a place of elegance and refinement. She had not known how much she had missed the estate – the house itself – in Roma.

  And thinking of the estate led her again to the loss of the family’s jewels. How she could use them now! And she could put them to better use than adorning her neck and wrists and fingers for parties and receptions and balls. Magari! What a fortune a pile of jewels like Mrs. Quinn’s could fetch! And how long that small fortune could keep her and the contessa in food. And clothing. The old woman couldn’t go much longer wearing her peasant’s blouse and skirt. Not with autumn approaching and winter’s chill to follow soon after.

  What a price those gems would bring.

  She sighed, pushed back the chair, and went into the bedroom.

  Crawling into bed, she faced the contessa’s back and closed her eyes, vowing to think of other things. Things lovely and charming and gay. Things like . . . the strega’s son.

  When she’d been with him, she’d felt like her old self again. Such startling green eyes he had. And such a firm chin. With generous lips that seemed always to curve with good humor . . . though it often seemed his amusement came at her expense. But he did have the most noble of noses. A nose any Roman would be proud to claim. One that started from the spot between his brows and gradually curved to a decided tip at its end. An altogether agreeable son . . . born to an altogether disagreeable woman.

  She wondered: Had he approached her in Roma, would he have wanted to dance? Would he have asked to call. . . if he had known her as she was?

  She turned away from the contessa and curled into a ball. As she surrendered to sleep, she prayed that God would spare her, this one night, from reliving her memories of that night. That this night she would be able to sleep the sleep of the innocent.

  Or the dead.

  But several hours later, she awoke to the percussion of an enormous thud. A dozen smaller concussions followed on its heels, rattling the window.

  She knew the sound. She knew the vibrations. She knew exactly what it was.

  O God! Please, save us!

  She pushed from the bed, ran to the window, and peered out into the dark. Above the roof of the building across the street she could see a ghostly cloud rising to blot out the moon. A cloud that was soon lit with the flames of a fire beneath it, glowing as it hung there, suspended in the sky. Her nose wrinkled at the acrid odor. She saw people pour from the tenements into the street. Trembling, she wrestled with the window. Banged on it with her elbow. Finally managed to pull it down. Then she went back into the bedroom and shut the door. Got into bed and wrapped her arms around the still-sleeping contessa. She did not need any more information to know what the sound had been.

  A bomb.

  A bomb just like the one that had changed her life forever.

  That night had begun like a hundred others before it. There was nothing to suggest to Luciana that anything had been about to change. There had been a dinner at the prime minister’s mansion, dancing in the ballroom afterward. A ride in a motorcar back through town beneath the pale glow of a spring moon.

  And there had been a man lurking in the bushes by the house.

  She had blushed when she’d seen him; she knew him. He was one of the people her father had brought home. The count collected eccentrics and artists, scholars and zealots. She’d been flattered by the newcomer’s attentions. Who would not have been? He was young. He was handsome. And he had existed apart from her world of society and balls. Her fascination with him, her attraction to him, had been all the greater for it.

  It made her want to retch now.

  But she hadn’t known anything, any of it, that night, so she had looked at him as they had passed by in the motorcar. As he touched a hand to his heart.

  She had been thinking of him still, of how the moon had lit the planes of his face when her father had escorted her and her grandmother to the steps of the house. But she’d paused before climbing them. She’d actually taken a step backward, thinking that she might be able to steal away, unnoticed, to spend a moment with the man. At least to steal a kiss.

  But he had already begun to stroll away.

  She had sent one last lingering look out into the night as she began to walk up the stairs. As she looked up toward the house, the silhouettes of her father and her grandmother had been thrown into high relief.

  She had felt a sudden, scorching heat.

  And then she saw.

  She saw . . . she sa
w the flames shoot up over the top of her father’s neck – his neck! – for his head was no longer there. And then his body had pitched forward into that consuming blaze. Grandmother had stood there for one long moment, outlined in flames, and then had crumpled into a heap.

  Luciana remembered running up the last of the steps, taking up her grandmother’s arm, and pulling her down into the drive. And then she remembered no more. Remembered nothing more until she had awakened in the home of a family friend.

  She was told that her father had been assassinated.

  Assassinated!

  Just like their beloved King Umberto. Just like the Russian Tsar, Alexander II. Like the French president, the American president, and two Spanish prime ministers. Elizabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. The king of Greece and Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. Just like them, her own dear papa had become a victim of the anarchists’ rage.

  They told her the resultant fire had swept through the main floor of the house. That her grandmother, though bowed by grief, was alive. That the house could be repaired, although technically it now belonged to her father’s cousin, the new Count of Roma.

  She had lain there in that bed for a week, trying to grapple with the life that had been left her, a girl orphaned and title-less, without inheritance or means. Trying to determine which of her sometime suitors might still be persuaded to ask for her hand. And whether her cousin might be coaxed into supplying a dowry.

  But though she had lain there for the week, her cousin had never sent a motorcar to collect them. Or offered any other sign of largesse. He’d never bothered to contact them at all. She had finally recovered strength enough to go to the estate and beg a meeting with him when the letter had found her.

  Written on pink paper it was addressed to Luciana. And it was brief.

  There will be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder; we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; never hope that the carabinieri and your hounds will ever succeed in ridding the country of the anarchistic germ that pulses in our veins. . . . Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny.

  And to the letter he had signed his name. That was how she’d known it was him. And that was when Luciana had decided to flee.

  The anarchists were everywhere. They were as numerous as fleas and as insidious as the plague. From them, there was no recourse. There was no place to hide when someone could snuff out the life of a person simply by blowing them up with a bomb. There were no policemen that could be called for protection, no guards that could make any difference when an anarchist was bent on murder.

  What grievous sin had her father committed, had she harbored, that she had been targeted by such a murderer? Was it because they had been born to their positions? To wealth? Was it because they had the gall to socialize with others of the same station? Or the unforgiveable impudence to be inclined to keep the government the way it was? To retain power in the hands of the people who could manage it? To support the monarchy?

  Luciana knew all about the anarchists’ philosophies. She had learned them from her association with him. That murderer! She had almost started to believe that he was right. And, most damning of all, she had thought him mysterious and charming and handsome. But she had not known that he had intended to blow them all up.

  What would have happened if she’d spurned his advances from the first? Would he have gone away? Left them alone? Perhaps not. He’d entered their circle at her father’s invitation, after all. Papa had thought the man brilliant, if misguided. But if she were given just one wish, she would use it to refuse him. To rebuff that very first smile he had given her.

  If only she had known!

  There was only one way she had known to survive: She needed to lose herself, to hide her identity. To go somewhere he could never find her. And so she did what a million of her countrymen had already done. She and her grandmother had plunged into the great emigration. She had disguised them as peasants, and they had slipped around whatever watchmen had been posted and they had escaped, through steerage class, to America. Once onshore, she had simply immersed them in the disembarking throngs and followed along until they had arrived in the North End. And that was where she had planned on staying.

  Now she didn’t know what to do.

  She had thought, she had hoped, that being an immigrant in Boston might be the perfect disguise. But the bombs had found her again, and she had seen him walking down her own street. There was no other place to which she could run. She would just have to be very careful. And perhaps she might even have to pray.

  23

  Madame Fortier, living as she was outside the North End, had forgotten that there was even such a thing as a festa for Saint Marciano. She had long ago put such country ways behind her. No respectable woman would take part in such things, pinning money onto a statue and parading it through the streets. It was all just a little too undignified.

  A little bit too Italian.

  She had tried, with a zeal that bordered on obsession, to erase every trace of her parentage. Being Italian had cost her . . . everything. But that morning the streets were aflutter with news of a bomb. Another one. Planted by the fiendish anarchists. Probably fiendish Italian anarchists.

  Right there. In their very midst.

  It was bad. Very bad, indeed.

  Those anarchists could cost her everything she had gained. If her clients became afraid to come downtown . . . well, perhaps she would have to change her policies. Perhaps she would have to go to them. It defeated the purpose of having established herself on Temple Place, but she might not be left with any other choice.

  As she sat in her dining room drinking tea, she heard the sound of church bells giving warning of the approaching hour. She hadn’t been to mass in a great number of years. Too many years to think of. Too many years now to be able to venture back inside the church. What had been done was done. Why regret it, after so many years? Except that . . . she almost . . . missed it. Almost missed the sound of the priest chanting, the smell of incense as it rose from the censer. She missed the old and familiar liturgy. Missed being surrounded by friends, by neighbors. There was a certain confidence, a sense of community gained, in knowing every person in the pews.

  Indeed, she missed herself. She missed the person that she had been all those years ago. The person she had tried so hard to forget. But that was an anathema to all that she had become since then, and so she did not dare to recognize that emotion for what it truly was. She simply turned her back on all those people, all those memories, and took another sip of tea.

  On Monday morning, after all her girls had filed up the back stairs and the sound of the morning’s chatter had given way to the whir of sewing machines, Madame opened a wardrobe in her office to search for an old sample book. She had to rummage back into the depths of it, and in doing so she brushed up against a gown.

  The gown.

  And she did something she had rarely ever done. She pulled it from the closet and brought it out into the light of the room. Examined it in the same way she would have examined any of her other creations. It wasn’t bad. Not for her first attempt at a wedding gown. In fact, it was rather good. Inspired, she might have once said.

  Her lips twisted at the thought.

  Now that it was revealed in all its splendor, she felt a bit foolish for having hidden it away for all those years. It was only a gown after all. What harm could it do anyone now? And why shouldn’t it be allowed to do some good?

  Why shouldn’t it?

  Clutching the hanger in her hand and draping the heavy material over an arm, she began the climb to the third floor workshop.

  “I have a proposition.”

  The girls looked up at the sound of Madame’s voice.

  “I have, in this shop, a wedding gown that has never been worn.” She held it up in front of them as she spoke, and then walked forward to lay it on the table before them.

  Julietta swept her embroidery out of the w
ay. It was gorgeous. And oh, how she wanted to touch it! It was old. She knew it at a glance. Overlaid with silk-embroidered net, the gown was a confection of lace and beaded braid that must have cost Madame a hundred hours’ work. But really, with a few tucks here and there, it wouldn’t look too old-fashioned. It had only the slightest suggestion of puffed sleeves, and if the lace around the throat were removed, leaving only the v of the lace collar, it could look decidedly elegant.

  Madame read their faces, each one of them, and she was pleased. “I will offer it to any of you. To all of you. To whichever one of you marries first.” Sì. That’s what she would do. So that some good could come from all the bad. From all the disappointments and regrets.

  Annamaria looked upon the gown as Luciana had looked upon Mrs. Quinn’s painting. She admired the gown and appreciated the handiwork, but she did it with the detachment of a person without means. A person who is forever looking without one hope of possessing. She liked it, but she did not allow herself – not for one moment – to imagine what it would be like to wear it.

  Julietta, of course, did quite the opposite. She could barely restrain herself from trying it on. In Julietta’s mind, it was already hers. She could see herself in it. She could feel herself in it. If she could have possessed it through sheer force of will and wishful thinking, she would have done it right then.

  Luciana was the only one who spoke. “It’s lovely.” Such a beautiful, ethereal thing. It was meant for the happiest of occasions, the most felicitous of celebrations. “Whose was it?” And why had it never been worn?

  At once Madame realized her mistake. She had let her guard down, had cracked open the door of her heart to these women – forgetting that in doing so, she had no choice but to reveal herself. “Does it matter?” She tried to smile as she swept the gown from the table. “It’s never been worn.” Never been worn. The saddest of tales. A wedding gown that had never seen its own wedding.