At two o’clock, Father Ianelli led the ceremony that concluded with the carrying of the statue of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel from the church to its outdoor pedestal. Papa was among the men selected for the honor of carrying the Virgin, and he stayed just long enough to do his duty and buy two cannoli from his daughters, then headed back to the store.
Suppertime brought in some families and many couples, including young people ready for an evening of food, games, and music provided by Cousin Tony’s accordion band. Other women from the church came to spell Gianna and Connie, and they took the opportunity to mix with their friends and eat their way from vendor to vendor. Angie had relinquished her spot at the children’s booth long before to join her own friends as they milled about the grounds.
Connie paired up with Nino’s sometimes-girlfriend, Tina, for a game of bocce against Nino and Frankie, while Paul Cefalu stood on the sidelines with a group of rowdy friends and bet on Connie and Tina to win. When they did, he gallantly put his winnings into the mason jar for the benefit of the church, then gave each of them an extended hug and a kiss on the lips. Connie knew that kissing her was something he wouldn’t remember the next day—she had seen his glassy eyes and smelled the beer on his breath—but she savored the sensation of being wrapped in his arms and the coveted pleasure of his lips on hers and breathlessly kissed him back.
He lingered for a moment, his eyes roaming over her face as he gave her his slow, seductive smile, and Connie’s heart sped up. But then Frankie grabbed Paul’s arm to pull him away, and he and his friends moved on. Connie chided herself for thinking that anything more might have come from that meaningless kiss and went off to find Gianna.
Daylight was waning. Mamma and Papa arrived, smiling and laughing as they mingled with their friends and neighbors. Gianna went home with a headache brought on by the day’s festivities, and suddenly Connie found herself standing alone to one side, watching the people around her.
The intense loneliness that overwhelmed her came as a surprise. How could one be surrounded by friends and family and still feel so terribly alone? She might reproach Gianna for her lack of a boyfriend, but the reality was, Connie had no one special, either. She went out now and then, she had plenty of friends, but she had no one in her life whose presence brought her true excitement, no one to look forward to being with at an event like this. For a brief moment, she regretted turning Nino away, but he wasn’t the answer. Neither was Paul Cefalu.
Darkness had descended. The priest distributed boxes of sparklers and asked people to pass them around. The strings of colored lights hanging from booth to booth swayed gently against the night sky as the revelers lit their sparklers with cigarette lighters or matches or ignited them from one sparkler to another. Brilliant silvery light illuminated the happy faces of the festa-goers around her, eliciting in Connie an uncomfortable moment of disquiet she couldn’t explain. Alone and melancholy, she slipped away from the crowd and headed for home.
Chapter Three
Sunday
The entire family was up for seven o’clock Mass the next morning, making the most of Papa’s and Mamma’s one day off each week. The five of them walked to and from the church together, and when they returned home, Connie and Gianna made Sunday breakfast while Angie set the table. After eating, Angie washed the dishes and Connie wiped. Gianna had gone outside with the garbage.
“So, angela mia,” Connie said as she lifted a dish from the drainer, “Nonna needs you to stay with Aunt Lucretia today while she goes to visit somebody in the hospital.”
Angie kept her attention on the glass she was rinsing. “Why me?”
“Because you’re the only one available. Gigi has a date, and I promised a friend I’d go with her to the museum. It’s not fair to ask Mamma or Papa to do it.”
“Gigi has a date?” Angie’s voice was an excited whisper as she gave Connie a devilish grin. “With who?”
“Some seminary friend of Father Ianelli. A wannabe priest who couldn’t cut it. How perfect is that?”
Angie turned back to the sudsy water in the sink. “Good for her. Maybe it’ll actually work out. And you said you, uh, you’re going with a friend to the museum? What museum?”
“The one in St. J.” Connie searched for the name. “Wadsworth? Wentworth?”
“Fairbanks. Not even close.” She gave Connie a small, knowing smile. “You’re not really going anywhere, are you? You just don’t want to be stuck with Aunt Lucretia.”
“That’s not true. I did tell a friend I’d go to the museum with her.”
“Some day.”
Connie smiled. Angie knew her too well. “Come on, my little angel,” she said in her most wheedling voice, “I did my duty this weekend.”
Angie picked up another glass and concentrated on scrubbing it. “Well, I wish could, Con, but I really do have plans for this afternoon that I can’t change. Sorry.”
“What are you doing?”
“Visiting somebody.”
“Who?”
Angie kept her face turned away. “Just… somebody.”
A stab of fear shot through Connie. “Why won’t you tell me?”
Angie vigorously scrubbed the surface of the glass. “I promised I wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Do Mamma and Papa know?”
Angie nodded.
“You’re sure? Because if you’re in trouble, Angie, you know you can talk to me. Or any of us.”
Angie straightened her shoulders. “I’m not in trouble; somebody else is. And I can help. I just can’t talk about it. I’m sorry, Con. I know you’re worried, but I’m okay.”
“And Mamma and Papa know, and they’re okay with it?”
Angie nodded once more, her back to Connie. “Yes. I promise you. And I’m sorry about Aunt Lucretia. I really am.”
“I’ll survive.”Connie watched her with growing alarm. It wasn’t like Angie to be evasive. Suddenly, babysitting Aunt Lucretia had become the least of Connie’s concerns.
***
Connie couldn’t get Angie out of her mind as she and Gianna strolled toward Nonna’s duplex that afternoon. “Do you know what this thing with Angie’s all about?”
Gianna looked grim.“No. She won’t say, and neither will Mamma.” Her voice was uncharacteristically breathy, and Connie knew it wasn’t from the exertion of walking.
“Are you okay?”
Gianna nodded, her face tight, her gaze straight ahead. She appeared miserable.
“Are you nervous?”
“Of course,” Gianna said crossly. “Wouldn’t you be?”
An urge to hug her swept over Connie, but she restricted herself to a reassuring pat on the arm. “It’ll be okay. Even if you can’t stand him or he doesn’t like you, it’s no big deal. It’s only an hour or so and it’s over, and you move on. At least Father Ianelli will be there. You won’t be alone with the guy.”
Gianna refused to look at her. “I’m not worried about being alone with him. It’s not like I’m a child, you know.”
“I didn’t mean that you were. But sometimes guys can give you the creeps. Not just you—I mean anybody. I know that feeling.” She glanced at the long dark braid hanging down the center of Gianna’s back and her bright yellow sundress. “Oh, and you look nice, by the way. That’s a good color on you.”
A small, appreciative smile softened Gianna’s expression. “Thanks. And, I’m thinking about getting contact lenses.”
“Really?” Connie’s excitement was genuine. “That’s great!”
“We’ll see. So, what do you do when you’re out with a guy who gives you the creeps?”
Her question pleased Connie. They were making progress. “Well, it only happened to me once. The trouble was, I knew I should never have said yes in the first place, because it didn’t feel right even then. I was just being nice to the guy. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But that doesn’t work, so don’t do it. If you don’t like this guy, and he asks you out, don’t feel like you have to say yes because y
ou’re being nice.”
“What if I do like him, but he doesn’t ask me out?”
“Then you ask him.”
Gianna’s eyes widened playfully before her face broke into a grin. “Ha! How many guys have you asked out?”
Connie grinned back at her. “None.”
“How many would you like to ask out?”
Connie thought for a moment. Would she actually ask Paul Cefalu to go out with her if she thought she had a chance with him? “Probably none. At least right now.”
“Uh-huh. Nothing like sound advice from an expert.”
They had turned the corner and were half a block away from the duplex.
“How long will you be here?” Gianna asked as they approached their grandmother’s house. “I mean, in case I’m done early.” She glanced toward the church in the distance.
Connie scrunched up her nose. “I don’t know. A couple hours, I suppose. I hope she sleeps.”
“Give her a glass of wine. Or two.”
Connie laughed. Hope for Gianna might exist after all.
***
Aunt Lucretia fell asleep in her recliner after only one glass of wine.
Connie sat on the sofa in the flat’s deathly quiet living room with its Venetian blinds drawn tight against the sunny August afternoon. She studied the eighty-something woman across from her. In some ways, Aunt Lucretia, Aunt Mariana, and Nonna were very much alike. All three wore only widow’s black day in and day out since the deaths of their husbands, and Connie had never seen any of them in anything but a shapeless black dress, summer or winter. They wore black cotton stockings and identical black, laced-up, old-lady shoes with thick heels, and each kept her steel-gray hair long and tight to her head in either a bun or a pinned-up braid. The similarities ended there, however. Where Aunt Lucretia was tall and bony and in ill health, Nonna and Aunt Mariana were stout, relatively healthy, and definitely possessed of better dispositions.
Connie pondered the possibility of ending up that way in her old age—living quietly with Gianna and Angie, their husbands passed on, their children scattered across the country—and knew it would never happen. These women held onto ways that Connie’s generation would never espouse. Still, it was intriguing, and somewhat frightening, to think about how she might end up some day. Would she be the gaunt and sickly middle sister, asleep in a recliner in the middle of the day, snoring loudly with her mouth hanging open? If so, she’d most likely be in a nursing home surrounded by strangers, not at home with one of her sisters’ grandchildren.
The thought softened her annoyance at being there. Lucretia might be grouchy and difficult to tolerate, but she probably had her reasons. And if Connie could ease her great-aunt’s last years by showing up once in a while to keep her company so she could stay in her own home, that wasn’t so much to give.
Connie stood up and traversed the small living room, looking for something to read. Most of the books were in Italian, and their content looked less than exciting. The Aunts and Nonna were not readers of magazines, and they didn’t possess any newspapers that Connie hadn’t already seen. In desperation, she picked up a worn Bible lying on the table next to Aunt Lucretia’s recliner and carried it back to the sofa where stripes of light peeked through the slats of the blinds. A piece of yellowed, ragged-edged paper, folded into quarters, protruded from within the Bible. She lifted the book’s thick cover and carefully unfolded the fragile sheet fastened to its interior by a strip of crackly yellowed tape.
The paper held a family tree, carefully drawn out in black India ink, handwritten in old-fashioned script using a fountain or quill pen. At the top were the names of Connie’s great-great-grandparents, followed by lines leading to the names and birth years of their many children. A line joined the son and daughter who eventually married each other and produced eight children of their own, including Giovanna, Lucretia, and Mariana. Five of those children were now deceased, as indicated by a simple cross added next to their names. Three had died without marrying, possibly as children. The others were linked to spouses, and each had produced several offspring.
Connie’s eyes skipped to the ones of most interest to her—the children of her grandparents. Giovanna Albanese and Mario Balestra had produced five children, Papa being number three. Connie knew the story well. Her father’s two older brothers had immigrated to the U.S. during the nineteen thirties to work in the steel mills in Pittsburgh. Twenty-two-year-old Pietro had joined them shortly before World War II began, bringing with him his bride, Sophia. But she hated Pittsburgh, and so they had moved on to Vermont where Papa’s two aunts lived with their stonecutter husbands. Papa worked for a green grocer and found it to be a trade that interested him enough to eventually invest in a store of his own.
Mamma’s maiden name was written there—Sophia Cruscenti. Connie didn’t know her maternal grandparents, even though she was named after that grandmother. They were already elderly and in poor health when Mamma emigrated, and they had never left Italy. Connie had seen fuzzy pictures of them, but that was all. Two of Mamma’s sisters lived with their husbands in California and occasionally came to visit with their children, but three other siblings remained in Puglia, on the heel of the Italian boot. Someday, Connie hoped to make enough money to send Mamma back to Italy to reunite with them.
Connie’s eyes rested on the line indicating the union of Pietro Balestra and Sophia Cruscenti and the names that branched off from there. Her parents had followed the Italian tradition of naming their children for their ancestors. The first daughter was named after the father’s mother, the next after the mother’s mother. Additional children were then given the names of the father’s and mother’s siblings in order of their birth. Thus, every generation bore and perpetuated the family names. As one might expect, this resulted in cousins with the same names, and Connie had a younger cousin in California who was also named Concetta.
Her eyes drifted downward to her own generation.
Gianna Maria, 1945
Concetta Anna, 1948
Mario Carlo, 1950 U
Lucretia Mariana, 1952 U
Hope Marie, 1952
Connie puzzled over the names before her. She knew that her mother had delivered a stillborn boy between Connie and Angie; it was a tragedy from which Mamma had never fully recovered, and she still visited the baby’s grave on the anniversary of his death. She also knew that, two years later, her mother had delivered twin girls, and the one they named Lucretia had died shortly after birth. Her small headstone rested beside little Mario’s. But she had never really thought about Angie’s given name, that it didn’t conform to family standards. Why had one twin been given two family names and the other a name that had no precedent on either side—a non-Italian name right down to the “Marie” instead of “Maria”?
The phone rang, and the noise threatened to awaken Aunt Lucretia. Connie folded the paper shut and tucked it back into the Bible, then set the book on the table beside the sofa and hurried into the kitchen where the wall-mounted phone hung.
The caller wanted to speak to her grandmother. Connie scribbled the woman’s phone number on a piece of paper she found on the kitchen counter and hung up the phone. Aunt Lucretia called for a glass of water, her nap apparently over. Connie went to the sink, took a glass from the cupboard overhead, and filled it from the tap. She returned to her aunt’s side and was handing the water to her when she heard a sound in the kitchen. Someone was attempting to open the locked kitchen door.
Let it be Nonna. Connie hurried into the kitchen once more, ready to welcome her grandmother home. The noisy bolt made a jarring sound as she slid it open before pulling the solid door inward.
A grim-faced Gianna stood in the small upstairs hallway.
Connie stepped back to let her in, unsure what her stricken expression meant. Gianna brushed past and stopped in the center of the spotless linoleum-covered kitchen floor, then rotated to face Connie.
Connie closed the kitchen door and turned to her, her spirits pl
ummeting. “What happened, Gi?”
Gianna’s words were barely audible. “I liked him, Connie. And I think he liked me.”
“Whew!” Connie let out a sigh of relief. Why did everything with her have to be so difficult? Connie widened her eyes in an effort to inspire some excitement in her older sister. “Cool,” she said with an enthusiastic smile. “Did he ask you out?”
Gianna’s troubled expression didn’t change. “Sort of. He wants to. Except… there’s a problem.”
“What?”
Gianna shoved her hands into the pockets of her sundress and stared at the floor. “He’s… not white.”
Connie hoped she had misheard. “Did you say he’s not white?”
Gianna nodded.
Connie frowned at her. “What is he? Black? Asian? What?”
“Black.”
Confusion overtook Connie; nothing about that made sense. “Father Ianelli set you up with a black guy?”
Gianna nodded once more, her eyes clearly showing her misery as they met Connie’s.
Connie did her best to remain composed. “He knows that people around here are not all that tolerant, right?”
Gianna shrugged. “I don’t know what he knows. He just likes the guy, and so do I.”
Gianna was obviously distressed, and Connie knew her sister would simply withdraw if she sensed the situation was hopeless. Connie drew a deep breath, then rallied and smiled at Gianna. “What’s his name?”
Gianna’s face immediately lit up. “David Thomas.”
“And he’s thirty-two?”
“Yes, but he doesn’t seem that old. I mean, he’s mature and everything, but he’s not like old and stodgy or anything. He’s very funny. He’s got a great sense of humor. And he’s very nice. And he looks young. Tall and slim. You know, kind of… ageless.”
Hope's Angel Page 3