I rol ed my eyes at Roberto to let him know how miffed I was by the interruption. “Okay, okay, I’ll be there in a minute,” I said and shooed her back to the dance floor. I turned back to Roberto. “She’s right, you know.
Claudio’s very strict. I don’t want to provoke him.” I got up off the sofa, but continued to hold his hand. I squeezed it and whispered, “I don’t want to lose the opportunity to be with you.”
I meant what I said. But I also didn’t want him to think I was going to be easy. I sat with him in the back parlor, but you wouldn’t catch me like some of the girls I knew from the factory. They went out with men alone; they didn’t just meet them at dances. They didn’t live with their families. They had no protection. Claudio’s vigilance irritated me, but because the men knew he was my brother, they didn’t try anything.
Roberto and I walked separately to the dance floor and I stopped to talk with his sister, who had introduced us.
Antonietta had talked incessantly about Roberto at work. He was the oldest of her brothers, the tal est, the handsomest. I hadn’t believed her until I saw him for myself. He was blond, with long arms and legs and powerful hands. When he danced with me (and by then, I was the only one he danced with), I felt the strength of his grip around my waist. I saw my hand disappear inside his. I’d always been smal for my age. Even then, at sixteen, I stil wore a child’s-size shoe and glove.
People watched us when we danced. Roberto was so big that everyone gave him room. But despite his size, he was very graceful.
Dancing at the Hil crest was different from dancing at Cucino’s. People were more watchful—of others and of themselves. They cared more about what other people thought than we had dancing in the dirt in our bare feet. In Mount Vernon, al the girls spent hours during the week talking about what they’d wear, who they hoped to dance with. We then spent more hours Saturday evening getting ready, borrowing from one another, coaxing our hair into the styles we saw in the magazines that got passed around at lunchtime, trying to find some happy medium in the way we were dressed so that we’d be al owed out of the house but stil look stylish.
So much energy went into these preparations! It made Til y giddy and brought nervous shrieks even to Pip’s serious countenance.
The other difference between Cucino s and the Hil crest, like everything else in America, was how big cliese dances were. At Cucino’s, we were maybe a dozen, and al of us had grown up together. Here, the bal room was a crush of people— fifty, a hundred sometimes. So many strangers. People came up from the city, from the Bronx mostly, because of the Hil crest’s reputation. The musicians were the best. Paolo Serafini played the piano. Claudio said it was a way for him to pick up a few extra dol ars every week, since he was never going to get rich working for “that union.” But the way Paolo played, you could hear that it wasn’t just for the money. He knew al the popular songs. Claudio said he even wrote songs himself, but I’d never heard him play them at the dances .What he did play was wonderful dance music, music that had people moving and laughing and clapping their hands. The bal room at the Hil -crest on Saturday nights was a blur of color, a haze of voices, a release of al that weariness and longing from the week before. What would we have done without those dances? Nothing to relieve the chil of my sister-in-law’s house, the loneliness of my new life, the tedium of broadcloth that faced me every day.
I felt a kick abruptly interrupt my thoughts, a warning from Til y, who sat at the machine behind me, that Mol oy was on his way back here. We had, each of us, already been caught dozing at our tables. Mol oy cautioned us not to do it again. So we took turns, one watching out and warning while the others slept.
We had other troubles with Mol oy as well. Getting to work on time was a struggle. There was no peace in my brother’s household in the morning. Claudio and Angelina’s babies clamored from hunger and dampness. Pip and Til y and I groped for clothing, for the hairbrush, for coffee. Stil in his bed, Claudio muttered at the noise, exhausted from a day at work and a night at the Palace. He stayed hidden until we were al gone and the boys were fed and dry. Pip would snatch the broom, Til y washed the dishes, I chopped the onions and the garlic for that night’s marinara and sliced bread and provolone for us to take to work.
One early November morning, I poured some olive oil into Angelina’s heavy pot. It was good quality oil, thick and green. Claudio got it from the DiDonato family, the ones with the importing business. Back then, Americans didn’t know what olive oil was. I got the onions started, then ran out to pluck some basilico. It was almost finished, al scrawny and leggy. Any night soon we’d have a frost. But even in the intensity of summer, this basil hadn’t grown. I hadn’t been in Mount Vernon long enough to figure out if it was Angelina or America.
But this was not a garden I knew. When I had stood in the middle of Giuseppina’s garden, I found myself in a fresco, like the one imbedded in the wall of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Al around me was color: the red tomatoes and peppers, the purple eggplants and fava beans, six different shades of green—zucchini, broccoli rabe, basilico, artichoke, esczrole, fagiolitti. Perhaps it was the sun, which was so different from the sun in America. I asked myself, isn’t it the same? How can the light, the warmth, be so alien to me? In Italy, the sun released, set free the growing things, splurged itself in unrelenting generosity. In America, the sun was wan, stingy, exacting. It was no wonder these basil plants had to stretch themselves, strain for their meager ration.
I pul ed my sweater tighter around me against the cold morning and raced back to my onions. Til y had, thankful y, finished washing up and was crushing and straining the tomatoes.
“Be careful that no seeds get through. You know how bitter they’l make the gravy and I don’t want to listen to Claudio complain after I’ve had a long day at work.”
“Maybe you want to strain, to make sure it’s perfect?” There was an edge to Til y’s voice. As sweet as she was, she didn’t like to take direction from me. But they al knew I was the better cook. Giuseppina had taught me. In my mother’s house, Pasqualina had hoarded her skil s, unwilling to share Papa’s appreciation for a wel -cooked meal. And my mother believed there were better things to learn than how to cook.
Of course, here in America, Pip and Til y had no Pasqualina to bury her arms in flour and eggs every Saturday morning to make the pasta. In fact the three of us were Angelina’s Pasqualina.
The sisters of her husband, given refuge, a roof, in exchange for our domestic services.
I chopped the basil and threw it together with the tomatoes into the pot. I jumped back as the contents of the pot flashed and sizzled, sending up a hot red spray. I didn’t want to have to change my blouse. A flick or two with my spoon and I set the pot on the back burner for Angelina to watch during the day.
I raced upstairs to wash and run a brush through my hair.
“Hurry up! We’re going to be late again and Mol oy wil be furious! He’ll go right to Claudio, too. Why can’t you ever be ready when it’s time to leave?”
Pip and Til y waited for me in the front hal . I slipped in the last hairpin on my way down the stairs, the soles of my boots slapping urgently against the wood as Claudio grumbled in annoyance. Coat and hat, a last glance in the mirror by the door, and we were off—coffee and tomato and warm stove left behind in Angelina’s kitchen, a ten-block walk ahead of us, Mol oy and his clock waiting.
I hated that walk. I hated the dim early morning light and the chil that put an ache in my toes. I hated leaving the familiar streets of the neighborhood. We walked down to the corner, past Our Lady of Victory and the tenements on the other side. Then the houses started to dwindle as we approached the New Haven Railroad line. Because there was no bridge at the bottom of this street, we had to turn left down by the tracks and walk east to the bridge at Fourth Avenue. On the other side of the tracks, we had to walk two blocks west again and then another three blocks south to the factory.
Sometimes we walked with a couple of other girls from the n
eighborhood and then it was not so bad. We joked along the way about Mol oy or talked about the dance, or even stopped to look in the window of the Tabu dress shop on the corner. But this morning we were so late that Annunziata and Carmen hadn’t waited for us and we were trudging alone, our steps quickening to a run when we passed the clock in the window of Ruggierio’s Shoe Repair.
“We can’t be late again. Molloy said—”
“I know what Mol oy said. Don’t talk. Keep moving.”
Just then we heard the screech of the five-to-seven whistle. From this side of the tracks we wouldn’t make it in five minutes.
Til y, Pip and I looked at one another and agreed without speaking to take our shortcut. Instead of turning toward the fourth Avenue bridge, we wriggled through the fencing and raced down the rocky slope toward the railroad tracks. We had done this many times before. Milkweed and the shriveled blossoms of goldenrod and thistle caught and clung to our skirts and sleeves. My boots skidded on the crumbled dirt and gravel, and I slid the rest of the way down on my backside. Til y and Pip reached the bottom ahead of me and started over the tracks. We were a few blocks west of the station, where the tracks branched out five across. I brushed myself off and fol owed them.
I was almost across the third track when I stumbled, fal ing to my knees as I tripped over the hem of my skirt.
Va Napoli, I muttered to myself as I heard it rip. Something else to mend, as if there weren’t enough of Claudio’s shirts and my nephews’ overal s in the basket that waited for me every night. I pul ed myself to my feet. My hands stung from where they’d slammed against the gravel bed and my chin felt wet and raw. I knew Mol oy would send me to the washroom to clean my bloody face—and dock my pay before he’d let me near his blouses. For the second time that morning, I brushed myself off and started off. But I couldn’t move. My left foot remained rooted to the ground, like an unfamiliar weight at the end of my leg when I tried to lift it and take a step. I raised my skirt.
My boot heel had become wedged in the space between the ties, clutched by the resin-soaked wood. A chil climbed its frantic way up my back. My hand reached without thought for Giuseppina’s medal around my neck.
Then I pul ed at the boot with al my strength and wil , but it wouldn’t budge. I tried wriggling my foot as if I were about to dance. I was so distracted, so consumed by my entrapment, that I didn’t notice Til y and Pip, who’d already made it to the other side and begun to scramble up the embankment. Suddenly, I heard Pip’s voice, but not in the scolding tone she used when I lagged behind and she was nervous about Mol oy’s clock.
“Giulia! Giulia!” she shrieked, a knife edge of hysteria, a bow drawn across a tightly strung violin. “The train!
The train!”
I jerked my head up, first in Til y and Pip’s direction, then to the left, where Pip was frantical y gesturing. A locomotive was heading toward me from the station. I couldn’t see if it was traveling on the middle track.
I grabbed Giuseppina’s medal once again as it dangled over the boot, kissed it and rapidly mumbled a prayer.
Then I placed both my hands around my ankle and struggled again to lift the boot free. But it stil wouldn’t come loose.
“Untie the boot! Untie the boot!” Pip’s hands stabbed the air in a pantomime.
But I didn’t want to. My boot! My mother had sent them, exquisite butter-yel ow boots with black trim and laces.
They fit me perfectly, narrow and graceful around the ankles, the leather as soft as the satin bags my sisters and I embroidered to hold our wedding tributes. Those boots were my memento of al that I’d left behind in Italy.
The locomotive was looming; I could feel the tracks starting to heave; I could hear the hiss and clang. My fingers somehow found the ends of the laces and pul ed them loose. I lifted out my foot and hobbled to the other side where Pip and Til y waited, white-faced. I flung myself into the bushes at the edge of the southern slope as the train passed.
CHAPTER 13
The Keys to the Store
Things happen for a reason. My scratched and bleeding face, my lost boot, cost Til y and Pip and me our jobs with Mol oy. Claudio roared for a few days—first at our insanity in crossing the tracks, next for our inability to get to work on time and keep Mol oy happy. Angelina sulked to have us back in the house al day, but I think she was also secretly pleased that my boot had been destroyed. I kept busy, washing and starching the curtains, beating the carpets, emptying the cupboard of al the glassware and dishes and washing everything til it gleamed. The house reeked of ammonia and lemon oil.
By that time, wooed by Claudio’s success and his own disaffection with Papa, my uncle Tony had brought his wife, Yolanda, and their son, Peppino, to America. Claudio had found both Tony and Peppino jobs on a construction crew and they lived not far from us in Mount Vernon.
On Sundays they always joined us for dinner, recreating a smal piece of Venticano life. A few weeks after Mol oy fired us, Claudio settled into his Sunday pasta with more than his usual appetite.
“I bought another building,” he announced, “down on Fourth. There’s a store on the ground floor. The old lady who ran it died last month. Her sons don’t want it—it’s ful of buttons and thread and dress patterns. What do they know about dressmaking?”
He turned to Til y and Pip and me.
“It’s yours. Since you girls can’t seem to work for somebody else, work for yourselves. I don’t want to hear another Molloy complaining to me. And I don’t want you crying to me if you fail. This is the last job I’m gonna dig up for you. Don’t let the vendors charge you too much or convince you to buy anything you don’t need.
Don’t give your customers too much credit. Work hard. I’ll check the books once a month.”
He threw the keys on the table, finished his wine and left for the Palace.
Til y, Pip and I looked at one another. We were proprietors now, over thread and yarn and buttons and lace.
We were respectable.
Our mother would be proud.
CHAPTER 14
“Divina e Bel a”
Paolo wrote poems. His little nephew, Nino, brought one to me.
I saw Nino almost every day, on the Avenue when I went down to do the marketing. He was so funny. A skinny little fel ow, ful of energy, always running, playing. His mother, Paolo’s sister Flora, kept him very clean, his clothes always wel mended. The first time he saw me, he cal ed out, “Bel issima!” and clutched his heart and fel in a swoon at my feet. He won me over. I couldn’t resist him. After that, he fol owed me around from shop to shop, carrying my basket, offering his advice on the quality of the vegetables, babbling about his American teacher at the No. 10 School. He was learning English. He showed off his new words like a new toy.
I often bought him a peppermint at Artuso’s.
“I’ll tel Zio Paolo I saw you today,” he said whenever we parted on the corner—Flora didn’t al ow him to leave the block. “He’ll be jealous. He’ll wish he could be me, walking by your side and making you laugh.”
I always laughed in spite of myself and shooed him back to his games. He started to bring me little presents. A flower plucked from the vacant lot across from the school; a drawing he’d sketched on the back of an envelope; a piece of his mother’s coconut cake neatly wrapped in a cloth. Then one day, he greeted me with a careful y folded sheet of blue notepaper.
Al this time, he’d been as if an emissary from his uncle. “Zio Paolo did this, and Zio Paolo did that…” Paolo’s name and deeds were never far from Nino’s lips.
I didn’t have time on the street to read what Nino had given me, so I took it home and opened it in the kitchen.
On the blue notepaper were words written in Paolo’s strong and elegant hand. I recognized the handwriting from the papers Claudio sometimes brought home. It was a poem, entitled “Divina e Bel a.”
I was so lost in thought this morning. I could not take another step but Found myself rooted, waiting, Hoping that Giulia would
pass by And bestow upon me The dazzling beam of her smile. But my Beauty does not show herself! Thoughts of her crowd out al else, Throng around me with doubts. Perhaps she feels nothing of what I feel for her? I swear, if I do not see her My heart wil shatter.
I folded the note and placed it inside my blouse. I didn’t tel my sisters, and I didn’t tease Paolo. I was afraid Nino had stolen the poem. Paolo certainly hadn’t asked him to give it to me. The next day, when I saw Nino, I gave it back, scolding him that he must replace it in Paolo’s papers undisturbed, that he had no right to let me have it.
Paolo’s poem set off such confusion in my head. I was flattered by the intensity of his feelings for me. But I was unused to men who hid their emotions behind words written in silence and locked away in a drawer. I preferred to be whirled around a dance floor, to feel Roberto’s desire for me in the press of his hand on my back. But I was beginning to see that, except for those moments on the dance floor, Roberto and I had little else to share with each other.
I returned the blue notepaper to Nino, but I didn’t forget the poem. I kept the words enclosed in my heart.
CHAPTER 15
The Christening
On a Sunday in February, my friend Antonietta christened her firstborn, a little boy she had named Natale.
Half the neighborhood turned out for the celebration. Her husband, Giacomo DiDonato, was wel known in Mount Vernon. People didn’t ignore his invitations. Not even the police ignored this event, although it was hard to believe they’d been invited by Giacomo. But they were there, standing outside Our Lady of Victory during the Mass and later, more of them, down the block near the hal . Somebody must have warned them that there might be trouble, that there were those in both Giacomo’s and Antonietta’s families who would’ve preferred that such a cause for celebration never come to pass.
People were lined up outside the hal waiting to get in, clutching their envelopes, their medals, their blessings for the baby boy. The priest had done his work in the church, but now the old women with powers were ready to add their voices, murmur their spel s that would protect the boy in ways the Irish priest couldn’t even imagine.
Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Page 9