“Claudio’s house is not my home anymore. I don’t want to share a roof with a man who acts like he did, even if he is my brother.”
“What do you want to do, spend the rest of your life not talking to your brother? Look at your uncle Tony and your papa. How many civil words have they said to each other in ten years? They can’t even live in the same country. Uncle Tony would never admit it, but believe me, it eats away at him. And over what? Some slight, some insult that I bet neither one of them remembers. It shouldn’t be like that, it shouldn’t. Not when it’s family.”
CHAPTER 23
Anna Directs from Afar
But no dinner of Yolanda’s was going to move my brother.
Only my mother could do that. She wrote to Claudio, as she wrote to al of us, every month. When she learned of what Claudio had done, she picked up her pen with a vengeance, and she sent me a copy.
Figlio mio,
Your last letter has arrived safely and the money has been put to good use, paying for Aldo and Frankie’s next semester of study with the Franciscans. Frankie, as I’ve written you before, is an especial y apt pupil.
Father Bruno says he will be ready for the university in two years. If only I had been able to offer you the same opportunity! I look at Frankie and I see you at that age—the same intel igence, the same ambition.
But you have put your sharp mind to good use nevertheless, as I never doubted. I shal always be grateful to you, Claudio, for what you now make possible for your brothers, and for the safety you have provided your sisters.
You know I have always trusted you, had faith in you. And you have never disappointed me. I could always hold my head high—with your father, with his sisters, with the gossips in this vil age—whenever your name was mentioned. I have been proud to say, “That is Claudio Alfonso Fioril o, my firstborn. A man of honor, of respect, of success. “Even when you left here, stubborn and embittered, I knew in my heart that you were doing the right thing, the thing I had raised you to do. Who, after al , found you the money to leave? Whose jewelry was pressed into your hand to buy you passage to your dreams?
That is why I cannot believe what I have learned in a letter from Til y that arrived the same day as your money. Why I cannot accept that my faith in you has been rewarded by behavior I would expect of a lowlife like your cousin Peppino, but not of my own son.
Tel me that the event Til y described to me did not take place. I would rather have her be a liar than know that a son of mine has laid a hand on his sister. The man who has done this is a stranger to me, cannot have my blood in his veins.
But if it is true, and you wish me to acknowledge you as my son, then go to your sister and beg her forgiveness. Give her back the safety and protection of her family. God knows what will become of her if you do not. Far worse than the laziness of which you accused her. And far worse than any pride you have to swal ow to go to her. Do not bring any further public disgrace upon this family by abandoning your sister to a life on her own. You know as wel as I do that she will not stay with Tony and Yolanda. Where wil shego? To some American boarding house where no one knows who she is or cares when she comes or goes? Do you want your sister to be seen as no better than the vil age whore?
Has America done this?
I shal wait to hear that both my daughter and my son have been restored to me. Your loving mother, Anna
CHAPTER 24
The Apology
I was helping Yolanda dry the dishes after supper. Uncle Tony had gone down the street to his neighbor Fat Eddie’s to play cards and Pepe had told his mother he was going to work at the Palace. We were alone.
The knock on the door startled Yolanda, and the pot she was scrubbing slipped from her soapy hands and clattered into the sink.
“Who, at this hour?”
“I’ll go, Zi’Yolanda,” I told her, wiping my hands on my apron. Before she could hold me back I was in the front room.
“Who’s there?” I asked through the door.
“Claudio.”
My hand flew to my head, to the slight ridge of the scar that had formed at my hairline, pressing the memory of that blow, that day, into my fingertips.
“Open up, Giulia. I’ve come with a message from Mama.”
I straightened my back, wil ing myself to be strong, to withstand the power on the other side of the door. I lifted my chin, seeing in my mind’s eye the stubborn tilt of my mother’s face defying the sun, defying the murmurs in her own house as wel as in the vil age on the day Claudio left for America. My hand came down from my head and touched Giuseppina’s amulet that I wore under my blouse.
Then I opened the door.
Claudio fil ed the room, taking possession of it without looking at me.
Zi’Yolanda was frozen in the kitchen doorway, twisting her hands.
“Claudio, Claudio. You’ve come. If I’d known, I would’ve had something ready. You hungry? I got some broccoli rabe and beans from supper. No? You want a drink? Some anisette? Uncle Tony, he’s not here. You want me to go get him? He’s “just down the street….”
“I came to talk to Giulia.”
I was stil standing by the door, my arms now folded across my breast, holding myself together. I waited.
“Mama has written. She says you belong at home with your sisters. With me. You’re my responsibility. No offense, Zi’Yolanda, but Giulia has a home with us. The boys, they ask for you every day. Angelina has her hands ful without you. Pip doesn’t know what to do with a runny nose and Til y spends al her time at the store counting straight pins as far as I can tel .
“People are starting to talk, to say you don’t live with us anymore. They think you’re on your own, with nobody watching out for you. No sister of mine should be the subject of such gossip. It reflects on the family. On me.”
“I’ve given them nothing to gossip about. I go to work. I take care of business, I come home and help Zi’Yolanda in the house. If people are whispering, Claudio, it’s not because of anything I’ve done.”
“This has gone on long enough. You’ve made your point. I lost my temper. I throw things al the time when I get angry enough. And that day you made me plenty angry and you happened to be in the way when I let go.
“But I’ve calmed down. I can live with a little dirt in the store. But I won’t put up with your stubbornness about not coming back to my house. I’ve come to take you home.”
I looked at Claudio. Al the time he’d been talking, his eyes had been somewhere else, not meeting mine.
“Mama wrote to me, too,” I said. This time he looked at me.
“She told me that when you came to me asking forgiveness, I should be ready to give it.”
“So, I’ve come.”
I shook my head. “She didn’t say I should forgive you when you came to me. She said I should forgive you when you asked me to forgive you.”
Zi’Yolanda gasped.
I knew from the copy of the letter she’d sent me that my mother had told Claudio to ask me for forgiveness.
Did she do this for me? Or to restore the image of Claudio that she burnished every day, held up to the light of my father’s disdain and my aunts’ clucking. Claudio her star, her salvation, her reward. It didn’t matter to me why. She had done it. Had been the only one in the family with the wil to confront him and the wits to corner him.
I forced myself to move away from Claudio. I turned my back to him and crossed the room to sit in Uncle Tony’s chair. I struggled to stil my voice, to stil my trembling hands. I had always been the chatterbox in our family. The one who always had something to say—a joke or a riddle in the chapel at Santa Margareta when I should have been whispering the rosary, or my insistent interruptions at the dinner table at my parents’ house, my chattering stories.
But this was not the time to distract my audience. I bit my tongue, nearly drawing blood, as I waited for Claudio
—to erupt, to leave, or to listen.
He began to mutter dismissive curses, throwing
his hand in the air, gesturing at no one except perhaps our distant mother.
The trol ey clattered by on the street below.
Zi’Yolanda retreated to the kitchen—in fear, in confusion, or perhaps hoping to find some morsel she could offer Claudio to appease him. When Claudio realized we were alone, he looked at me, not with the eyes of a cornered animal, but with those of a shrewd one. He hissed the words at me, in a barely audible voice.
I m sorry.
His tone wasn’t one of defeat, but of dismissal. As if the apology wasn’t important to him. As if he could afford to be magnanimous, generous. But he had said the words.
I stood up.
“I accept your apology,” I said.
CHAPTER 25
In Hiding
I went back to live at Claudio’s house after he apologized. It meant that I was under more scrutiny at home as well as at the store. But as our love deepened, Paolo and I began to take more risks. We continued to write to each other every day and found ways to meet, sometimes openly on the street, engaging in a few minutes of polite conversation while we stared hungrily into each other’s eyes, sometimes secretly in the back of the store.
One Sunday afternoon when I’d gone down to the store by myself to unpack a shipment of fabric, Paolo surprised me. He had brought a smal cake for us from Artuso’s bakery. He told me he wished he could have brought the piano from the Palace, too, because he had a song he wanted to play for me. I asked him to sing it. At first, he protested. He was a piano player, not a singer. But I coaxed him—how else would I ever hear it?
I asked. Claudio certainly wasn’t about to let me come to the Palace some night. So Paolo relented and began to sing for me. As he did, I lifted my arms and began to dance around him. Then he reached out for me and took me in his arms. We continued to dance around the storeroom, his lips close to my ear, fil ing it with song.
Flora lived right across the street from the store, and Paolo al owed Nino to carry the letters when Flora couldn’t get over. Everybody knew he was my special boy, my little sweetheart. It was natural for him to dash into the store on his way to school to grab a peppermint. That he also slipped me a blue envelope with a wink and a grin—well, I took care to cal him to the back of the store for our exchange.
But Paolo’s life at that time was becoming one of nascondiglio, concealment. Not only were we hiding our love from my family, but he was also hiding his other life from the police. He was often gone, to New York City or upstate, as his work with the union consumed more and more of his life and put him in more and more danger.
The newspaper of the Italian immigrant community—II Progresso halo-Americano—was fil ed with stories about the horrors in sweatshops and the brutality of the police and the bosses against workers who only wanted to put food on the table. The IWW was in the middle of the unrest, and the politicians and American newspapers were furious.
I held my breath every time Paolo left: Mount Vernon. I never knew if he was just going to a meeting or if the police had stopped him somewhere and found his papers with their incendiary words. It made him il sometimes, the passion he poured into expressing his ideas about justice; and it frightened me. The risks he was taking, the enemies he was making.
Claudio thought he was an idealistic fool, a Don Quixote jousting at windmil s. But Claudio had no sympathy for workers. Claudio had never sat behind a sewing machine in a factory or worked in the Pennsylvania coalmines. His time with a pick and shovel in New York had been short. He prided himself on figuring it out—
using his brains as wel as his brawn. He saw quickly that he wasn’t going to reach his dream digging ditches for someone else. My mother’s jewelry had paid for more than his passage to America. He bought his first team and wagon with money from her. She put the reins in his hands.
Paolo had no gems from his mother. But he had a degree from the University of Napoli and had worked on an Italian labor newspaper before he’d arrived in America. It was that experience and the people he knew from II Germe that brought him into the IWW. Paolo was a man of ideas who threw himself into action.
If I thought his feelings for me would slow him down, hold him back from doing something rash, I was wrong.
Trouble was brewing in Schenectady at the General Electric plant and II Progresso printed a story about the involvement of some of the men from the IWW. A knot grew in my heart with every word I read.
One afternoon, Til y and Pip had gone to do errands. It was lunchtime, a quiet lul when I could steal a few minutes with Paolo, face to face in the back of the store. With half an ear I listened for the bel on the front door. The heavy curtain between the front of the shop and the storeroom was closed.
“Here, I have something for you,” he whispered, as he emptied his pocket onto the counter to retrieve a new poem for me. He took my face in his hands as he kissed me and then began to read the poem. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw on the counter a train ticket to Schenectady.
I let him finish his poem and kissed him again, but my mind and my heart were pul ed in the direction of that ticket.
“What takes you to Schenectady?”
“Business. Don’t worry. It’s not another girl.”
“I don’t worry about other girls. But I worry about business. Are you going because of General Electric?”
“What do you know about GE?”
“What I read in H Progresso. Tel me you’re going for some other reason, not for the union. Tel me it’s just a coincidence that you’re going to Schenectady.”
He looked away from my gaze and put the ticket and other loose papers back in his pocket. I pul ed him toward me again and pounded my fists against his chest.
“Don’t go! I can’t bear the thought of you in the midst of that trouble. You’ll be hurt. You’ll be arrested. I won’t sleep knowing you’re in danger. Don’t go!”
He pushed my hands away.
“I have to go. You don’t understand. It’s who I am.”
The bel jangled in the front. He kissed me once again, hard, and went out the back door.
The next day, he went to Schenectady.
I couldn’t tel anyone of my worries. Instead, I retrieved Claudio’s crumpled copy of II Progresso every night from the table where he tossed it after dinner. I took it to my bed and smoothed it out, looking for dispatches about the strike. I pored over the pages, hoping to catch a glimpse of Paolo’s face in the grainy photographs, but of course the workers were inside the plant, in the first sit-down strike in American history, and the newspaper only ran a photo of the building surrounded by police and soldiers. I didn’t know if Paolo was inside, giving courage to the strikers, or outside, making trouble for the authorities. I searched for any fragment of news that might reveal to me that Paolo was safe. I found nothing, only reports of brutality and fury.
Every morning I returned to the store, hoping this would be the day I would see Paolo again. Final y he returned. I saw him walking down the hil toward the Palace, looking as if he’d seen a ghost. A thin scab extended across his forehead and he was limping. His steps were measured and careful, not the usual swagger and energy that was so characteristic of him. I wondered about the bruises I couldn’t see.
He did not come to the store that day or the next, and Nino did not appear with a message from him. Knowing he was back and not hearing from him was in some ways worse than when I had no knowledge of him at al . I didn’t know why he was ignoring me. I was afraid of what had happened to him in Schenectady.
I attacked the dust on the floor as if my broom were a weapon. At home, I slaughtered onions with my knife, furiously chopping them into hundreds of pieces while the tears streamed down my cheeks. I swal owed my loneliness, unable to tel anyone of my fears. I cried myself to sleep thinking he had no more words for me.
Final y, one morning at the store as I was sorting through the bil s that had arrived in the post, I found a letter addressed to me and postmarked Schenectady. I tore it open, heedless of my sisters. I
read the letter quickly, scanning it for the familiar words of passion and longing. I found those words, with relief. But then I read on.
Forgive the smudges on the page, my beloved. My hand is bleeding from a scrape suffered when the police shoved me against the pavement and I haven’t had time to tend to it. I have seen too much today that I cannot describe to you—desperate men, impoverished but determined,
making history here, but at great cost. I am tortured by what I am witnessing. This is everything I work for and believe in, but I fear I am asking too much of you to share in it. I have realized today that the life I have chosen is incompatible with loving a woman.
I stifled a cry and shoved the letter into my pocket. I knew I had to see him, had to talk to him. But I also needed to understand in my heart what it would mean for me to stand by him, to know that the man I loved could face imprisonment or worse.
I watched for Nino that afternoon as he returned home from school and slipped him a note for Paolo, along with a piece of chocolate. In the note, I begged Paolo to meet with me in the store at closing time. I waited anxiously as the day darkened, knowing that I could not delay my arrival home without arousing suspicion.
Just as I was about to give up hope that he would come, I heard a light tapping on the back door.
I let him in and turned out the light so no one could see us. I reached out for him, afraid he might not return my embrace, afraid I might hurt his battered body. But he took me in his arms, gently and tenderly.
“I’ve missed you so much!”
“I’ve missed you, too. Did you get my letter from Schenectady?”
“This morning.”
“It was agonizing to write. I adore you, Giulia. But I cannot ask you to love me in return when the path I am on is so precarious, so dangerous.”
Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Page 13