A Heart Most Worthy

by Siri Mitchell

  Madonna mia, this wasn’t what she’d meant to be doing! Why did her control always abandon her whenever she was with him?

  What she needed to do was talk to him. Not kiss him!

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. I have to go.” As she took a step from him, he reached out and spun her back to himself. Bent his head to her neck for one last kiss.

  Reflexively, she pushed his head away. He had just left her when she saw Mauro hurrying up the street from the other direction. Looking straight at her. At them. Unconsciously, she put one hand to her waistband to make sure that she’d unrolled it. And the other to her neck. Putting a smile on her face, she linked an arm through Mauro’s as he came abreast of her.

  “Is that him?”

  “Is who what?”

  “That man that . . . he was kissing you.” And it hurt like a twist in his gut for him to have seen it.

  She said nothing.

  He reined her in with a tug of his arm. “Who is he, Julietta?”

  “His name is Angelo Moretti. He’s new here. From Roma.”

  “And how long have you known him?”

  Not that long, really. But she certainly wasn’t about to let Mauro know! Who was he to tell her what to do? Or who to see? “Long enough.”

  His jaw tightened. Long enough? She’d known the man long enough to kiss him when he’d known Julietta for all of her eighteen years?

  She pulled her arm from his as they walked the rest of the way to the Giordanos’ building. She wished he would ask her what was wrong, the way he had when she’d been little. He’d always known back then when something was bothering her. And he’d always said just the right thing. That’s what she needed. She needed someone to know that something was wrong and she needed someone to tell her what to do about it.

  But Mauro was too overwhelmed by his own pain and confusion to be able to register hers. And too overcome by the thought of the epidemic he feared was being loosed upon the city. When she moved to walk up the stairs, he didn’t follow.

  30

  Julietta saw Mauro pause, one foot on the steps to the building. “Aren’t you coming up?”

  “Maybe.”

  Julietta raised a brow.

  “Later. I’ve two calls left to make.” And a broken heart to try to mend.

  “Two calls that can’t wait until after dinner?”

  He shook his head and continued on his way. She went up the stairs and into the apartment, warning Mama to keep something in the pot for him. As the Giordanos ate dinner that night, Julietta marveled at her family. At how loudly they talked and how opinionated they were. How often they yelled at each other.

  Just like Angelo’s friends.

  Only . . . his friends used such big words. Words she really didn’t understand. And they didn’t just laugh at each other when they were done with their yelling and go back to being brothers. They waged war with their words, as if they contained the powers of life and death. It made her question that Angelo actually called those people friends. Question that anyone would call them friends! She wondered if, like her brother Salvatore and Mauro, Angelo would give his life – if he would give anything at all – if one of them required it. And suddenly a terrible fog of loneliness swept over her, and she wanted to hide herself forever in her family’s warm embrace of fierce loyalty and fierce love. She wondered if this was what growing up was all about. And if being in love meant growing apart from all she used to know. If only we had been able to whisper into her ear, “No. It doesn’t mean that at all!”

  Mauro didn’t appear until after the table had been cleared. But even so, Mama just smiled and put a plate before him, patting him on the head and bending to kiss him on the cheek as if he were her own child. He didn’t linger long afterward. He tried, in fact, to duck out without Mama seeing.

  “And where are you going?”

  “Home.” He didn’t want to be anywhere near Julietta. And there was something out there in the city. Something new. And threatening. He’d been down to the wharves. There were sailors down there. All of them sick. Other doctors had insisted that it was the grippe. But when had the grippe ever knocked over a group of young, sturdy sailors as if they were bowling pins? It was the influenza. It had to be. And he could not sit there, in Mama Giordano’s apartment, trying to pretend as if he’d never seen Julietta kissing that man, while the disease found a way to threaten the very people he had worked so hard to protect.

  Mama tilted her head, squinted at him. Put a hand to his forehead. “You sick? You want some wine? You need some wine.”

  He tried to smile. “No. I’m not sick.” But there were too many who were. And he needed to be out there. With them.

  She tried to press some on him anyway. When he wouldn’t take it, she pressed Julietta on him instead. “Go see him outside.

  Like a good girl.”

  Instead of protesting the way Mama was half expecting, Julietta simply slipped past Mauro, through the open door.

  They were downstairs and nearly to the door before she plucked at his sleeve. “Can I ask you something, Mauro?”

  Timidity? Uncertainty? In Julietta? This was something new.

  “Do you think I’m smart?”

  He cursed the man, that Angelo Moretti, who had put it into her mind that she was not. For who else could have done it? “I think you’re brilliant.” Though his sentiment was serious, he winked as he said it. He wasn’t quite sure how to read her mood.

  But she didn’t smile in return. “I’m asking because I know you’ll tell me the truth.” In fact, he was the only one she knew who would tell her the truth. She had turned to the only objectively honest person that she knew. Even though she also knew that she had hurt him.

  Seeing the worry and the trust in her eyes, he pushed his own worries and his own pain to the back of his mind. Set his bag at his feet and took up one of her hands. “The truth is, I do think you’re brilliant. I’ve never seen anyone with your ability to read people. To know what they want and then how, from that, to get what you want from them.”

  Julietta blinked. Then frowned. Was that a criticism or a compliment?

  “And I’ve never seen anyone with your style.”

  “That’s nothing. I work at a gown shop, Mauro.”

  “But that doesn’t signify that you have to know a thing about fashion. I walk through this city every day. And you’re years ahead of the fashions.” He was a doctor. He’d been trained to notice details. “That’s not nothing. That’s genius.”

  His own brilliance with words had assuaged her vanity just a little bit.

  Seeing the glow come back into her eyes, her chin begin to rise, remembering the possessive way that man had held her around the waist, led Mauro to say something that perhaps he should have kept to himself. “And I’ve never met anyone like you for making me fall in love.”

  That luminous glow was now tempered by sadness. Why did he have to go and ruin everything? Of course, she’d suspected he had such thoughts, but as long as he hadn’t spoken of them, she’d been able to pretend that she didn’t know. She could flirt with him when she wanted to and discard him when she didn’t, and she’d never had to answer to her conscience. But now . . . now that he had spoken the truth – he had changed everything.

  She took a step closer, tipped her head, and put a hand to his cheek. Why did she feel like crying? “I’m not the girl for you, Mauro.”

  “I was thinking . . . hoping . . . that you might be.”

  She shook her head. “You need someone kind and noble. And I’m terribly selfish. You need someone calm and patient, and I’m not. You need someone . . .” Older. Didn’t he? Someone much older than she. “You need someone who loves you the same way that . . .” There, her courage faltered. She didn’t want to talk about love. She didn’t want to talk about . . . well . . . certainly she didn’t want to talk about marriage. There was a restlessness deep inside her. There were so many things she wanted to do. So many things she wanted to
see. And how could she do any of them once she married? Mauro was offering his heart, and all she could see were chains.

  She put a hand up to her throat, which felt as if it were throbbing. She remembered the mark on her neck and moved to cover that instead. Why was there suddenly so much that she didn’t want Mauro to know? To see?

  Why was there so much to be ashamed of?

  She could think of nothing else to say but the simple truth. And so she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “You need someone better than me.” She turned and went back upstairs.

  He stood there watching her go. Better than her? But she was the best that he had ever found. And he wasn’t settling for anything less than the best. He never had.

  They’d told him he couldn’t go to medical school. Because when had they ever invited an Italian into their ranks? So he’d gone back to his books and studied. Two years later they’d let him in, and he’d graduated first in his class. They’d told him no Italian would ever be allowed to set up an office on Congress Street. He’d saved up his money, and he’d gone to city hall week after week and month after month, and a year later he’d hung his sign on that very avenue.

  Julietta may have refused him, but she hadn’t told him she didn’t love him. He was too much of a pragmatist not to have noticed that. But she hadn’t said that she loved the other man either. What she had said was that she didn’t think she was worthy. But she was. He had made his decision long ago, and there was nothing he’d seen since then to make him change his mind. He’d just have to wait a little bit longer until she could see it for herself. He’d never minded a wait. Not when he could see the end so clearly.

  And so, when she had disappeared from sight, he picked up his bag, pushed open the door, and walked down the street. Forgetting for just a moment the specter of the influenza, he even whistled as he went.

  Billy Quinn sat that very night in a mansion up on Beacon Hill that hemorrhaged light from its purple-tinted windows. Surrounded by eligible heiresses, he ate from a shockingly bright-colored Sèvres plate that had just recently replaced all of the staid, but embarrassingly German, Meissen tableware. Quite an extravagance for such an old Yankee family! But he hardly credited the incongruent luxuries nor the demure beauty of the girls sitting beside him. All he could think about was Luciana.

  The girl on Billy’s left was trying to flirt with him. She was a Cabot and actually quite pretty. At any other time he would have put his mind to flirtation, to flattering her, pushing her to see exactly how thoroughly he could make her fall in love with him. But she didn’t have the cachet of a foreign accent or dark exotic looks. She didn’t have the regal arrogance or the flashing eyes. She was rather dull, really.

  “Do you think it’s truly the grippe that has stricken all those sailors down at the pier?”

  Who knew. Or cared.

  “Some people think it’s the influenza.” She smiled, then abruptly pulled her lips together. Was there something caught between her teeth? Is that why Billy Quinn was behaving so oddly? Usually she didn’t have to work so hard at conversation. “What about the war – do you think it will end soon?”

  Didn’t everyone hope so?

  He smiled and gave her some sort of answer and then he busied himself with a dinner roll. Who was she? Where had she come from? Truly? She lived in the North End, but she couldn’t be Italian, could she? She couldn’t be. She was nothing like the Italians he’d seen before. She spoke German . . . although something in her diction hinted that she wasn’t actually from that country. She wasn’t Irish and she wasn’t a Slav. He threw out every possibility until he was left with just one conclusion.

  She was a goddess. Or a fairy.

  Though it pleased the Irish in him and his sense of the poetic, he knew it couldn’t be so. She had to have come from somewhere. And he decided that he would find out who – and what – she was.

  Billy began his investigation the very next day, a Friday. He pulled a cap down to his eyes and stole away down Beacon Hill before it was light. He strode through a city that was largely asleep, save the deliverymen and the newspaper printing presses. Once he’d reached Luciana’s street, he stood near the corner, watching delivery trucks rumble by and observing an exodus of men from the tenements, trudging off to their jobs, pails swinging from their hands. He stood in the shadows, watching the entrance to her building, waiting for her to come out.

  She never appeared.

  He spent all day puzzling over it and decided to try again on Monday. But it only produced the same result. Unless she had become quite suddenly ill . . . there was nothing else for him to think but that he’d remembered the building wrong.

  Taking himself back up Beacon Hill, he spent the remainder of the day lounging in the shade of the back porch and playing tennis at the club. As he motored home through the streets, dodging pedestrians returning from work, he realized that Luciana would have to return to home from her job – and if he didn’t know where she lived, he was quite certain that he knew where she worked! He drove past the Quinn mansion, pointed the car down the hill, and wedged it, a few minutes later, nose first into a spot between a waiting carriage and a Pierce-Arrow.

  He got out and passed the time pacing back and forth in front of the shop. He waited longer than he thought he’d have to. She didn’t appear until six o’clock. And even then, he nearly missed her! She’d come out a back door by way of the alley.

  Leaving the car behind, Billy shadowed her all the way up to Cross Street. It wasn’t very difficult. She’d pulled that detestable scarf down nearly over her eyes so that when she glanced behind her, which she did quite frequently, she never saw him.

  After crossing the street, he expected that at any moment she’d turn into one of the ramshackle buildings that lined the crumbled sidewalks.

  But she didn’t.

  She walked past the first and the second buildings, past the whole block entirely, plunging them both deeper into the filth and decay of the North End.

  He hid his nose in the crook of his elbow.

  Deeper and deeper they went into the maze of streets and alleys that so confused every visitor to that dismal place. But finally she turned left, onto another street entirely, and began to walk up the stairs of a building he hadn’t even known existed.

  “So this is where you live!”

  Luciana’s heart stopped in her chest, and she very nearly coughed from the sudden absence of its beating. She looked down at the shadowed canyon that was the street and saw Billy Quinn standing there, one foot on the stoop beneath her.

  How dare he stand there, skulking in the shadows! She wouldn’t have it. Not anymore! “You followed me, Herr Quinn?”

  He nodded.

  “For how long?”

  “From the shop.”

  From the shop? And she hadn’t even known it? She cast a frantic glance up and down the street. Anyone could have followed her and she would never have known it.

  “I waited Friday morning and yesterday morning at the place where I dropped you off. And I never saw you. I just . . . wanted to know where you lived.”

  “You want to know? You want to see?” She was coming dangerously close to leaving behind German altogether and berating him in Italian. The improper kind. “Come.”

  She whirled around, pushed open the door, and took to the steps with great strides, pounding up the stairs. Four flights of them. By the time she reached the top, he was lagging three flights behind. “Wait! Stop!”

  “You wanted to see? Well, then, look!”

  Her neighbors, hearing the shouts, had come to their doors. They stood there, clad in dirtied aprons, children on their hips and behind their skirts. Nothing much ever happened up on the fifth floor, and this Signorina? She hardly ever spoke, though they’d assumed she was Italian. So to hear her yelling? In some strange language? Well, that was just too good to miss!

  Luciana turned her key with a violent wrench and threw the door open, disappearing within. But still she shouted, thou
gh only Billy could understand. “Here. This. This is where I live. This is where I am from!”

  By then he’d jogged up to the fifth floor, leaving a trail of slack-jawed immigrant women in his wake. By then she’d realized he wasn’t behind her and so she’d gone back out into the hall for him. He wanted to see? Then she’d drag him in by the ear if she had to! “You wanted to see where I live? Then come in and look!”

  He’d stopped, not so certain now what he wanted. He’d thought – he’d hoped! – to see pleasure, delight even, in her eyes. Not anger. But he was here now. There was no point in turning around.

  “This,” Luciana said, walking to the sideboard, gesturing toward it with a sweep of her hand. “This is where I make our meals.” She spun to the table. “And this is where we eat them. And there is where the c – my grandmother sits all day while I work. And in there” – she pointed to the door – “is where we sleep.”

  “Stop that racket, ragazza! Can’t an old woman sit in peace?”

  “And that is my grandmother.”

  “Who is it, ragazza?”

  “It’s a gentleman. Herr Quinn.”

  Upon hearing his name, Billy stepped forward, bowed, took up the contessa’s hand, and kissed it.

  She smiled slightly, her eyes suspiciously clear. And then she gave him a wink!

  Hiding an answering smile, he straightened, looking back at Luciana. He might have laughed, but his mirth died the instant he looked into her eyes.

  If she’d had the luxury of privacy, she might have sunk to the floor and wept. She would have wept for herself. For her father and her grandmother and for all that had been lost. She would have wept for her future as well. A future that could never include a man like the one who now stood before her. But you see, her breeding did not allow for such selfish displays of emotion, and certainly not in front of a man like Billy Quinn. So she stood by her bare sideboard and stared straight into his eyes, and she dared him to say what she had known all along: She was not worthy of him. Not any longer.