Mama gave Pasqualina and Vincente a wedding feast. She hired a smal band to play in the courtyard and a photographer to record the couple so that those of us in America could imagine our aunt in her new life. In the photograph, Pasqualina is wearing her black silk dress, its starkness relieved by the addition of a crocheted white col ar. Pasqualina’s face is also relieved. The panic that she’d felt at the prospect of leaving Italy had been replaced by the promise of her familiar routines— cooking, cleaning, laundering and ministering to the needs of someone else’s children.
My mother left Venticano the very next day.
When she landed in America, she stood on the deck of the Principe di Piemonte exactly as she’d stood on our balcony more than ten years before, when Claudio had left Venticano. A plumed and silken bird, a bril iant explosion of color amid the drabness and weariness of the other travelers. She had traveled alone.
On the day the Principe di Piemonte docked, we al went down to meet her. She would have expected nothing less. Angelina, Til y and I with al the grandchildren she’d never held; Pip with her fine clothes; Claudio with his car for her trunks; Papa and the boys with arms ful of flowers and Hershey’s chocolates; Paolo with a book of poetry.
I had dressed Caterina in the outfit Mama had sent for her first birthday. Cream-colored linen, smocked, embroidered with tiny ducks marching around the hemline, a dehcate border of feathered blue stitches on the col ar and the fluttering sleeves. I was up the night before ironing it, my bel y—large again, hopeful—pushing against the ironing board. I was tired, but the thought of my mother’s judgment kept me awake until the dress was perfectly pressed. How I dressed my daughter, how I cared for the clothes Mama herself had provided, how I showed respect to the woman whose drive and ambition and wil were the very reasons we al stood there—this was what she’d be looking for as she scanned our faces. Faces she hadn’t seen in years; faces she had never seen.
There wasn’t a single one of my brothers and sisters whose life had not in some way been directed from across the enormous distance between New York and Venticano by the diminutive, elegant woman approaching us now.
Her decisions, her advice and her control had been conveyed
in thousands of words over the years. How does one person amass so much influence? For my mother, it was her ability to sustain her presence in our lives through her words. Like Paolo, her letters had been an extension of herself. I saw what had happened to me and Giuseppina, separated from our daily contact. When I could no longer see her penetrating eye or the jut of her chin moving me in one direction or another, when I could no longer hear her prayers or her spel s, when I could no longer taste her herbs or her fruit, I lost her.
But my mother never al owed us to lose her.
This was no stranger on the boat, not even to the grandchildren.
Each of them had something extraordinary from her. For the girls, exquisite dol s and expensive dresses; for the boys, sets of painted soldiers or toy sailboats. And the repeated message,“This is from your Nonna.
Remember your Nonna.”
My mother was a master of the grand gesture. Whatever she sent, it always stood out. Made people notice.
Just as people noticed her.
While the other passengers looked anxiously for a familiar face in the crowd, or in total exhaustion and bewilderment at the enormous city rising up beyond the pier, my mother’s gaze took it al in like a queen surveying her kingdom. Her gloved hand, raised as if in blessing, was her only acknowledgment that she’d seen us.
If she searched the children’s faces for some glimmer of Fioril o, I didn’t see it. Had I been her, I think I would’ve devoured those children with my eyes, surrounding them with the fierce protectiveness of a she-wolf for her blood, her line. If she looked with another kind of hunger at my father, whom she had not seen in over a year, I missed that as wel .
But I did see her close her eyes and breathe deeply, as if to swal ow the city, her waiting family and the air of the New World.
CHAPTER 42
Paradise
When my son was born, it was my mother who rol ed up her sleeves and got me through my labor.
“I’m not Giuseppina, with her potions, and her mumbo jumbo,” she said to me when I raised my eyebrows at her suggestion that she stand by me when my time came. “But I bore nine children, Giulia. Each birth different.
I think I know how to do this.”
So it was she who mopped my brow, who rubbed my back, who made me walk when the pains slowed, who—
when I screamed that I could take no more, that this baby would be the one to kil me—insisted that I could and would get through this birth alive. And it was she who, final y, eased the head of her grandson into the light of day and then caught his tiny body in her own hands.
When she handed him up to me, I saw tears in her eyes that she quickly brushed away.
We named the baby Paolino. He was the image of his father. There were times during the day when I sat at my kitchen table, shel ing peas or darning Paolo’s socks, with the baby beside me in his bassinet, and I was brought to a contemplative stil ness. I gazed in awe at his blue eyes absorbed by the play of light upon the wall, his mouth shaping and reshaping nonsense syl ables in response to my own, his tiny fingers reaching for the light.
Caterina would climb into my lap and stroke my cheek, pushing past the bowl of peas or the pile of mending, past my own reverie, to find warmth and comfort.
In the evenings, when he returned home from the union office to eat dinner before heading downstairs to the Palace, Paolo surrounded himself with his children. Caterina would squeal with delight when he walked through the door and he always bent to scoop her up. He wrote poems for her now, little rhymes that he acted out for her with his fingers facing up her arm or tickling her behind the ear. Paolino heard his voice and began to coo and kick his legs. I was able to finish cooking while he fil ed the room with the children’s laughter.
One Sunday afternoon, Paolo surprised me with an excursion up to Bronxville.
“I want to show you something, cara mia. A dream I have, for us, for the children.”
It was enough for me to be out in the open air, away from the city. We got off the trol ey and he led me a few blocks.
“Only a trol ey ride from the city, Giulia, and look—look at this little paradise.”
I looked. I saw a pony nibbling on a tuft of grass, its ears pricking up as I approached the fence. I saw more: an apple orchard, a stone house with green shutters, pots of begonias lining the window ledges. On the side of the house was a garden, with row upon row of beans, potatoes, onions, cabbage. In the back, a glimpse of laundry—not strung between tenement windows, but stretched out in fluttering rows like the beans.
Chickens pranced in a smal fenced yard next to the pony’s shed. A bel hung around the neck of a goat, white bearded, looking to share the grass with the pony.
“Some day I wil buy this for you, Giulia. This is my dream—to see on your face every morning the look you have right now. To bring you this land, this happiness.”
CHAPTER 43
Litany
They brought Paolo to me in the middle of the night.
Claudio and Peppino carried him up the stairs and laid him on our bed. The blood was trickling out of his mouth and staining the front of his white shirt.
I stifled the scream that rose up in my throat. I didn’t want to wake the babies, and I didn’t want to rouse the curiosity of the old crone across the landing, although, God knows, she’d probably heard enough as Claudio and Peppino had struggled up the stairwell.
It was 2:00 a.m. Claudio sent Peppino to get Dottore Solazio, but no one knew where he was; we knew the American doctor wouldn’t come in the middle of the night to the Palace’s neighborhood.
Claudio helped me undress him. I washed him, trying to cool down his feverish body. He mumbled and thrashed at first. At one point, wild and out of control, he knocked al his books from the bedside tab
le. Then he quieted.
As long as I had something to keep my hands busy I could keep the fears at bay. Claudio strode back and forth in the front room, his fist aching to pound Paolo’s enemy as he used to when they’d defended each other on the streets in the early days. But this time the enemy was unseen. No mean-spirited bul y, but an incomprehensible demon eating away at Paolo. For the first time in my life, I saw my brother afraid, powerless.
When he saw me standing in the doorway, he stopped pacing, his face searching mine for some sign of change. I just shook my head quickly and looked down. If I let the fears burning behind his eyes leap across to meet mine, I would shatter like the wineglass my father had smashed the night Claudio had decided to come to America.
“I’ll go wake Til y to come and be with you. You shouldn’t be alone. What if the babies wake up?” He, too, needed something to do.
“No! I do not want my sister in this house tonight!” I was adamant. “Go look for the doctor again, if you can’t wait with me.
I spit the words out, accusing, raging. There was no one I wanted by my side. I did not know if I could bear their anguish as well as my own.
I listened with my forehead pressed against the ice-cool glass of the door to his footsteps, frenzied and urgent, racing down the stairs as he left me. Then I turned back.
I checked first on the babies. Paolo was slipping out of my arms, out of my life, and my first impulse was to gather his children to me to fil my emptiness. I ached to smel their damp curls, to feel the tenderness of their skin, to crush their mouths in a kiss.
Caterina lay on her back, arms stretched over her head, her body extended to its ful length. Every time I saw her like this, I was struck by how much she’d grown, how sturdy and hardy she was. Only eighteen months since I’d pushed her out of my bel y, and she was already racing ahead of me, into her own life. I brushed a wet strand of hair from her cheek and watched for a grateful moment, the rhythm of life, the ebb and flow of her dreams.
Paolino, in contrast to his older sister, lay on his bel y, restless, his impending hunger about to announce itself in a crescendo that would move from a tentative, mewling murmur to an insistent wail. I scooped him up and brought him with me to the chair by Paolo’s bedside. His body, beginning then at six months to fil out, molded itself to my own, yielding his hunger, his loneliness in the night, to the warmth and milk of my breasts.
He fel back to sleep, sated, the last drops of milk sliding from his parted lips down his tiny, exquisite chin. I could not bear to put him down. Instead, I sat with him nestled in the crook of my arm. My other hand I rested lightly on Paolo’s chest. I felt the life seeping out of him with every shal ow, uneven breath.
I bent my head to his ear and began to whisper a litany. Not the prayers the old women mumbled in the church on Friday evenings—I had no use for their incantations.
The litany I recited to him was the words he’d written to me over the years, the words that had recorded the tumult and passion and anguish and joy of our brief time together. I knew the words by heart. His dreams, his longing, his doubts that I loved him in return. They were al I could think of as I waited with him.
Thoughts of you fil me to oveflowing. I swear to you that if I do not see you often enough, I feel my heart breaking. If I had to be away from you for a week, I would go crazy with sorrow.
You are my talisman of enchantment.
I want to amuse you and keep you merry. I want to make you laugh, to hear your beautiful, charming laughter, which both eases awl torments me.
I cover your face with my tears, and I wipe them away with my kisses.
I don’t know how long I sat there. I don’t know if he heard me.
Claudio came back with the doctor at last, but there was little he could do except tel us that it was pneumonia.
At 6:30 in the morning, Paolo died.
I found the shirt later, forgotten in a heap on the floor. I tried to wash out the stains, my back bent over the washboard, my hand clutching the naphtha soap, my arm scrubbing in a rhythm that became frantic as I realized that it was too late. The blood had already dried.
CHAPTER 44
The Band of the Bersaglieri
They were beginning to assemble in front of the Palace, men and women in black waiting in the gray drizzle.
My mother watched from the window upstairs, waiting for the sound of a wagon, for the sight of horses with black ribbons on their bridles. Behind her, resting on the table in my front room, was Paolo’s coffin.
She put out one of the cigarettes Claudio’s oldest son had bought for her and straightened her hat in the mirror I kept by the door. They were simple, those rooms of mine, but well kept. She remembered the first rooms she and Papa had lived in, over the stables, with Giuseppina and Antonio snoring close by. No matter how hard she tried, she had not been able to rid those rooms of the pungent odors of horses and old woman’s medicine.
My home was tinged with the scent of bleach, day-old flowers, talcum powder and the haze of the cigarettes Papa berated her for smoking. She waved her hand to dispel the evidence of the last one and turned to her girls, now gathering themselves for the descent to the procession forming in the street below.
She appraised them, her fine-looking daughters. Letitia and Philippina carried themselves with pride—long, straight backs; well-made dresses provided by their husbands’ money; bodies untouched by childbearing. Til y was softer, more sweet-faced than our older sisters, not as well dressed and beginning to thicken around her waist after three daughters. My mother made a mental note to suggest a shopping expedition to the corsetiere after the demands of that unsettling week were behind us. I was stil in the back room, my face bearing the bruised signs of the last tear-soaked days. At least my hair had been brushed and neatly fastened and my dress had been pressed. Til y had done that.
My mother plucked a piece of lint from Letitia’s shoulder and adjusted the veil on her own hat one more time.
She came into the bedroom to fetch me.
I sat in the chair between the bed and Paolino’s empty cradle. Claudio’s wife, Angelina, was watching al the children over at their house until we got back from the cemetery. My feet were tapping out a pattern on the floor—making the motions of walking, as I would have to do soon, behind the coffin of my husband—but going nowhere. In my hand I clutched Paolo’s ring.
“It’s time to go, Giulia.They are waiting for you.“This was not the first time my mother had said such words to me, sending me off to a new life on each occasion. First as a little girl to Giuseppina’s house, then to the convent and, eight years ago, here to America. Each time away, to a life she believed was better for me. What life awaited me now on the other side of this day? My mother had not known widowhood. Papa stil sat at the head of our table, grumbling or roaring, but stil there.
“Here, put on your veil. I’ll help you pin it so it doesn’t blow off. And where are your gloves? Do you have a dry handkerchief?”
She rattled off her list. These were the things she knew about, could guide me in. She was about to take me, one step at a time, with dignity, through the day.
She got me up out of the chair and linked her arm through mine. She was determined to keep me moving, even though my wil to put one foot in front of the other was locked inside that wooden box with the body of my husband.
Claudio came up the stairs then, a man of boundless energy despite the onerous weight that his wagon would carry today, despite the stiff col ar cutting into his neck. Behind him, moving more slowly and talking among themselves, fol owed Paolo’s two brothers, who had traveled from Pennsylvania, and my brothers-in-law.
Not one of my sisters’ husbands had been friends with Paolo. Rassina, the jeweler; Gaetano, the carpenter; Ernesto, the businessman. My mother looked at them. Not men she would have chosen for herself—but then, she hadn’t chosen Papa, either. Gaetano was sleepy. Rassina had no heart. Ernesto was simply ugly. Paolo, however, she knew she would miss. An intel igent man,
a man with compassion for a woman who would rather read books than pound dough.
“Mama, Aldo should be turning the corner at North Street with the wagon at any minute. It’s time to go down.”
The men moved past us to the front room and gathered around the table where the coffin, had rested for two days. At Claudio’s count they hoisted the box onto their shoulders and edged through the passageway into the kitchen, where my mother waited with my sisters and me.
They stopped for a moment to ready themselves for the long flight down to the street. My mother kept her grip on me in my silence as the muffled whimpering of my sisters began: the drone of Letitia’s whispered prayers, the plaintive questioning of Til y’s little-girl voice. As the coffin crossed the threshold onto the landing, an anguished wail rose above the voices and the tears.
“Oh, my God! Paolo! You’re leaving this house for the last time! The last time!”
Pip’s screams released the cries of the others, shrieks that fol owed the men down the stain. Al except me, whose stricken face remained frozen, untouched by the abandoned wailing of my sisters.
My mother was exasperated by the unconfined emotion working its way like an infection, or an insidious malaria, through my sisters. Her heart was aching, too, but Paolo was not her husband, not her lover, not her son. To tear her hair out with grief in public was a display she would not al ow herself. My sisters did not have the same self-control.
“Subdue yourselves.” She spit out the words in a fury. “It’s time to fol ow the men with some semblance of dignity. You are Fioril os, every single one of you, no matter what your last names are now.”
Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Page 20