I didn’t have time to sew anyway.
In the mornings, I did the marketing and then went downstairs to the Palace kitchen and prepared whatever meal we served customers that day—lasagna, chicken salami, sausage and peppers. I often sat outside the back door to peel the vegetables. The cats came around for scraps and sometimes the girls who worked for Signora Bifaro at the hotel behind us were out on the steps. They smoked; they played cards; they were out there in their lingerie as if they didn’t care who saw them. They didn’t look after themselves very wel , those girls. Their peignoirs were dirty, the hems trailing in the dirt on the steps. Their feet and their necks weren’t clean, and they wore makeup to hide their sal ow skin— bright patches of rouge on their cheeks and smeared kohl around their eyes.
Paolo and Claudio pretended I didn’t see the men who, after a round of drinks at the Palace, slipped out the back door, past the crate where I sat with my garlic and onions, and climbed the stairs with one of the girls.
The girls leaned against the railing and looked the men up and down. But they didn’t look them in the eye. And when they were chosen, they tossed their cigarettes over the railing. The cigarettes usual y landed at my feet, stil smoldering, stinking, a slash of dark red lipstick at one end.
Sometimes, when it was slow and the girls were bored with their card games, they joked with me.
“Hey, Giulia, you’re so pretty. You should be up here with us instead of down there chopping onions and peppers.”
“Giulia doesn’t need to be up here. She’s got that handsome husband to take care of her. And from the looks of her bel y, Paolo takes very good care of her. Isn’t that so, Giulia?”
The girls laughed when I blushed.
One day Claudio came into the kitchen while I was frying some meatbal s. I was busy over the stove, but he wanted to talk.
“I don’t like you sitting out back. It looks bad.”
“What, you think somebody’s going to mistake me for one of Bifaro’s girls?” I turned so that my bel y was unmistakable.
“You know what I mean.” Claudio thought I should’ve learned that time he threw the iron at me not to talk fresh to him. But I didn’t let Claudio tel me what to do. He was not my father.
“You mean, when I sit there it makes the men uncomfortable.
I know who they are. I know their wives. And if they feel too uncomfortable, maybe they’re not going to go through the door and up the stairs. Maybe they’re not going to spend their money with Bifaro. And if they don’t spend their money with Bifaro, then you don’t get your cut.”
I turned over the meatbal s. What did he think, I was some little girl who didn’t know what those women did?
Did he real y believe that I didn’t see a connection between him and Bifaro’s convenient location?
“You insult me, and you insult Signora Bifaro with your suspicions.
Do your cooking in the kitchen, Giulia. You look like some goddamn cafona out back with your knife, feeding the cats. Act respectable. Don’t give people a reason to talk.”
“The only ones who talk, Claudio, are the whores.”
My daughter Caterina was born in early November. The late-afternoon light was reaching over the rooftops and through the lace curtains in the bedroom, stretching across the floor and onto the bed. I heard the tiny wail, the first gasp of air and life. Flora lifted her into my arms and I felt the slippery warmth, the fluttering movements that signaled she was alive.
Paolo had retreated downstairs to the Palace, pacing, waiting, not even playing the piano for fear it would disturb me. But when he heard Caterina cry he came bounding up the stairs, a man bursting with hope and pride.
CHAPTER 39
Z’Amalia’s Inheritance
A few weeks before Caterina’s birth, Papa decided to visit New York. He took the mountain road from Venticano, just as he had the predawn morning he drove Pip and Til y and me to our destinies. Just as he had, since then, carried more and more of our countrymen away from the vil age and toward America.
At Avel ino, he joined the regional road that leads through the val ey to Napoli. At the outskirts of the city, he wove his way through streets, past market stal s and pink-walled tenements, until he reached the wide expanse of the Via Caracciolo. When he arrived at the harbor, however, he did not discharge his passengers and return to the mountains.
He boarded the ship himself.
“I’m coming for a few months,” he said. “I do not intend to stay. I come only to decide if Claudio’s business warrants the money Claudio, swal owing his pride, has asked me to invest.”
Papa had money to invest because Z’Amalia, Giuseppina’s wealthy sister, had final y succumbed to her many ailments, her loneliness and her arrogance. She had left everything—her vil a on the perimeter of the Parco di Capodimonte in Napoli, her paintings, her piano, her gold accumulated over years of hoarding—to Papa.
The cousins were furious, but Papa said, “Where were you when I visited her every week? Who sat with her in her rooms smel ing like death and listened to her complaints? Did any of you bring her a piece of cake or take her for a walk in the garden?” He ignored their outrage. He bought a new suit and sat in the front row at the funeral.
So Claudio, who as a little boy used to endure with Papa his visits to Z’Amalia, her desiccated fingers pinching his cheeks and offering him stale chocolates that had turned dusty white in their satin box, now thought it was time to expand his business. He wanted to build the roads, not Just haul the stone for the builders.
But he needed Papa, Papa’s money, to do that. I know what it took Claudio to put aside his own bitterness to ask. Greed. Ambition.
And it was my mother who had interceded. A business opportunity, she told Papa. Make the money grow, don’t hide it under the bed the way your aunt did. You’re no old woman. You’re an astute businessman. You said yourself your bones are getting too old to travel these roads day after day And, even if it’s Aldo at the reins, he carries fewer and fewer passengers, except to take them to the ships.
So go see if this is the right business. Decide for yourself. And take the boys with you. They’re old enough now, and will give me no peace if you go without them. I can manage here myself while you make up your mind about Claudio’s business. Somehow, perhaps appealing to Papa’s own greed, she had convinced him.
They were more alike than they cared to admit, Papa and Claudio. Even though they’d parted ten years before without a word between them since.
On the morning of Caterina’s birth, Papa arrived in America. He brought with him Z’ Amalia’s money, my brothers Aldo and Frankie and Sandro—no longer willing to be left behind—and a gift from Giuseppina for the baby she was sure would be born alive.
Their arrival stunned me, emphasizing the passage of time since my own departure. The boys were al tal and strong, their faces the faces of men. Aldo, almost twenty-four, had cultivated his imitation of Papa so well that, from a distance and in dim light, one could be excused for mistaking the two. He had even put on weight and affected the three-piece suits that Papa’s tailor in Napoli must have fashioned for him. Our altar boy, Frankie, not even shaving when I’d left, now turned his sixteen-year-old face to me with a finely trimmed mustache. Not the voluminous, waxed statements of Papa and Aldo and al the other men of my family, but an outline, like the charcoal sketch made by a da Vinci before creating a masterpiece in ful color. Sandro, at fourteen not yet taking a razor to his face, was nonetheless tal er than al of them, his little-boy energy transformed into muscle and bone.
They tumbled into Claudio and Angelina’s house and into our lives, breathing American air, listening to American voices, walking on American pavement as if they were once again in the hil s playing the games inspired by Claudio’s letters. They had rehearsed this scene before. They knew their lines. Papa, however, was a stranger in the home of his oldest son.
Angelina did nothing to ease his discomfort, her sense of being put upon evident in the firm
ness with which she placed every additional plate on the table. After dinner the evening of their arrival, she herded her brood—
Alberto, now eight, Armando, six, Vita, four, and Magdalena, two—up to bed…but first she opened the windows of the dining room to air out the smoke from not only her husband’s noxious cigar, but now that of her father-in-law as wel .
What took place that evening Claudio shared with me many years later, because I was able to listen with the ears of a businesswoman, not the ears of his youngest sister.
Claudio sent the boys down to the Palace that night and turned to an impatient father, waiting at the recently cleared table, fingers taking the measure of the damask tablecloth, comparing it to his own.
Claudio put two glasses and a bottle of grappa on the table, watching Papa’s hands. They were cal oused and toughened, familiar with handling leather reins, lifting heavy freight, evaluating the muscled flanks of his horses. But they were also manicured, as careful y trimmed and buffed as his mustache. Claudio believed he understood Papa.
“So show me,” Papa said. “Show me this dream.”
Claudio pul ed open a drawer in the sideboard and withdrew a brown folder bound with string. He retrieved several pages from the folder and spread them out on the table. Those pages were his translation of what Papa had defined as a dream—a word Papa used to describe the fairy tales of fools, the deluded fiction of those not rooted in reality.
Claudio had first listed what he’d gleaned from fragments of conversations, minutes of municipal meetings, obscure references in the Daily Argus. Land that was to be developed. Roads that would need to be paved.
Bridges that would need to be erected. Tunnels that would need to be dug. Next, he’d gathered the names and prices of the equipment required to pave and erect and dig. Then he’d calculated the number of men necessary to run the equipment, hold the shovels, heave the picks. He had factored in his relationship with Paolo, his business partner and brother-in-law. If the construction industry became unionized, he’d use that relationship to influence
any deal he might be forced to make with the union. And last, he’d predicted what the city of Mount Vernon and the state of New York—what America—would pay to extend its reach, turn woods and fields into city. A great deal, he said. Far more than it would cost him to build.
“There’s something missing in your costs,” Papa said, looking up over his spectacles from the numbers he’d examined, “unless business is done so differently here that you don’t need it.”
Claudio removed another sheet from the folder.
“I didn’t forget.”
He pressed his lips together in a smile of victory. The price of influence was careful y noted on the last sheet, with cryptic initials and amounts, annotations as to what might be required: liquor, women, a cash donation to a campaign chest, a funeral wreath at a mother’s untimely passing.
“I’ll take the numbers up to bed with me to study, and then sleep on it. How much are you asking me for to underwrite this venture? What are you prepared to give me in return?”
Papa made a few notations in his notebook and took a long draft on his cigar.
Claudio, sure of Papa’s interest, but knowing him well enough to understand that he had to come out feeling the victor, made an offer that he was willing to negotiate, but presented as firm. Let Papa mul and calculate and pare and refine. He, Claudio, felt his father’s blood in his veins, heard the pace of his breathing in his own breath. After ten years, he had learned that he could not escape his father in himself, and so turned that to his own advantage. That Papa would win something was irrelevant to Claudio because he would win more. An empire. Carried first on his own back, but then on the backs of his sons.
He gathered the papers together and handed them to Papa. He poured them both another shot of grappa and lifted his glass.
“Salut!”
Claudio got more than he bargained for with Papa’s investment.
They made their deal the next morning after Papa had slept, as he’d promised. In the morning the house was a chaos of smal children, hungry and noisy, the two boys being scrubbed and fed and sent off to school, the two girls observing their unfamiliar grandfather across the breakfast table with open mouths. Papa’s own sons straggled into the room for coffee after a very late night, groaning with hangovers but eager to hit the sidewalks once again.
Claudio suggested to Papa a walk to the Palace. In the early morning it was deserted, as good a place to conduct business as any. Claudio paused at the front door to pul out his key, savoring the look on Papa’s face as he took in the polished oak door, the glass etched with the Fioril o and Serafini names.
Once inside, Claudio realized how smart he’d been to suggest it as a meeting place. Everything about it spoke of Claudio’s success—the marble-topped bar with its brass rail, the mirrors reflecting the shelves of liquor and the light filtering across the expanse of the room, the piano, the chandelier. It was a palace.
He pul ed out a heavy chair for Papa, offered him a drink, which Papa waved away, and sat down to deal.
Papa would give him the money he’d asked for, but wanted to be more than a silent investor. He wanted to be part of the day-to-day operation. He had intended to sel the business in Venticano anyway. It bored him. This, on the other hand, was greater than an investment. This was new life. Take it or leave it.
Claudio looked into his father’s eyes, and took.
He named his new company after the state of New York, not after the family. No need to cloud his opportunities with the taint of Italy. He wanted the business of America. He wanted to be America.
CHAPTER 40
Giuseppina’s Goodbye
Giuseppina was dying. Word came in a letter from my mother. She wrote that Giuseppina had suddenly grown tired, forgetful, unable to care for the simplest of her needs. Pasqualina moved into her house to care for her.
Giuseppina lingered in some shrouded corner of her brain. She wandered at night cal ing out the names of the dead, and when she was quiet sat by the stove unraveling the edge of her shawl. Like her shawl, she was shrinking. She forgot to eat unless Pasqualina fed her pastina in brodo with a beaten egg. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts. She wet her pants.
My mother was grateful that Pasqualina could nurse Giuseppina, although it left my mother, of course, with more to do in her own house.
I tried to deny these scenes that my mother described. But in my heart, I knew that Giuseppina had begun to die the moment Claudio took his first step off the mountain. My mother herself put the first nails in Giuseppina’s coffin when she took me away from her and sent me to America.
That Giuseppina had lived this long was a miracle. My mother attributed it to her stubbornness as wel as to her own magic. The order had been reversed. Giuseppina should have been the one to leave first, to say goodbye to us, her blood and bone, as she departed this earth. In truth, Giuseppina stayed alive only to watch each and every one of us leave her.
CHAPTER 41
Homecoming
When Giuseppina died, only a few weeks after beginning her decline, Mama and Pasqualina tied up their hair in kerchiefs, donned their aprons and began to clean out Giuseppina’s house of unidentifiable and odiferous objects.
“However did I al ow you to live in such squalor?” my mother wrote.
I hadn’t remembered it as squalor.
Mama and Pasqualina swept, scrubbed, burned years of accumulated debris, whitewashed walls, and opened to air and light rooms that had been shuttered and forgotten. In al her years as mistress of her own house, I don’t think my mother had ever engaged in such vigorous housekeeping. But taking a broom to Giuseppina’s hearth seemed to release in her a newfound energy and a desire to sweep away not only the artifacts and shards of Giuseppina’s existence, but her own as well.
Why should I stay any longer in Venticano? she wrote my father. Why should you come back? Most of our children are in America. Even Letitia and Rassina have
decided to leave Italy. Now that Giuseppina is gone, there is nothing to hold us and everything to release us.
Papa, reluctantly seduced by the opportunities that spil ed out of every vacant lot where he could envision a building, every rutted path where he imagined a paved road, made a few loud noises, retired to Claudio’s dining table to make calculations in a notebook, and final y sent Mama a telegram directing her to come to America.
Pasqualina, who had waited patiently for Papa’s return, reacted with panic to the news that he would not be coming back. She adamantly refused to come to America, a place that for her embodied not dreams but nightmares. She was too old to begin again, she said. And what about Teresia? What if they arrived on American shores only to have the authorities refuse her entry because of her simplemindedness? She had heard stories. She knew these things could happen. That one’s future and hope could hang on the whim of some uniformed guard with a chip on his shoulder, looking for any reason to keep someone out. No, she didn’t want to risk that humiliation. To be sent back. And to what? The house sold to strangers, the land til ed by someone else? And even if they let Teresia in, how would she survive in such a hostile and unwelcoming place? No. Venticano was where she’d been born, and it was where she, like her mother, would die.
My mother, instead of arguing with her or enlisting my father’s authority to order her to join the rest of the family, looked instead for a way that would al ow Pasqualina and Teresia to remain in Venticano and my mother to leave.
It was another death that gave her what she needed. Silvana Tedesco, the mother of seven children, had died of malaria the year before. Vincente Tedesco, her husband, was ready to seek a new wife for his motherless sons and daughters. He wanted no more children, so a woman of childbearing age was of less importance to him than a robust housekeeper who could tame his unruly sons and comfort his lonely daughters. Mama presented the idea to both Pasqualina and Vincente, separately of course, and won their approval. Teresia was welcome, as well, especial y since she could be so helpful to Pasqualina in the household.
Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Page 19