“I must think about this for a few more days, Giulia. Find a solution that does not waste your gifts but doesn’t confine you, either. The answer is more difficult, of course, because the school here is far worse than the nuns, and Papa will not allow me to send you away again.”
I smiled to myself at my wonderful Papa, but my joy was short-lived, for my mother solved the dilemma of keeping me in Venticano by finding Signore Ventuolo. She enlisted the help of her lady friends who went with her to Ischia every summer—women she’d known since childhood whose lives revolved around salons and balls. It was Leonora Esposito, who had known Signore Ventuolo’s mother before she died, who suggested him. She made all the arrangements, assuring my mother of both his good background and needy circumstances. And so my mother took her summer money and hired me a tutor from the University of Napoli. Instead of soaking in the sulfur baths at Ischia the following August, she endured the mountain heat so that I might be educated.
I hated it when Signore Ventuolo arrived in Venticano. The nuns were by then only a bad taste in my mouth—a kind of suffocating taste, but well behind me. It was January when he first entered my parents’ house.
He had ridden home with Papa on the Monday evening carriage, carrying a scuffed and tattered satchel stuffed with books, a copy of the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera and a threadbare shirt.
I watched, sullen, from an upstairs window as the carriage rolled into the stable courtyard. Signore Ventuolo climbed awkwardly down from the seat, his short, stocky legs stretching tentatively for the hard-packed earth. Once on the ground, he backed quickly away from the panting, restless horses, who knew that they were home. The climb from the valley had been accomplished, and their grain bags were waiting in the stable.
For Signore Ventuolo, the climb was still ahead—convincing my mother that she had invested wisely, persuading Papa that a daughter’s education was worth this much trouble, and, most challenging of all, bringing me down from my angry perch.
I had been summoned from the warmth and familiarity of Giuseppina’s kitchen to greet Signore Ventuolo and have dinner with him and my parents. My hair had been freshly braided, my hands were scrubbed, my pinafore was starched. Zia Pasqualina had fed my younger brothers, Frankie and Sandro, earlier, and the older boys, Claudio and Aldo, had found some urgent work in the stables that required their attention (although not so urgent that they couldn’t leave it later to peer through the dining-room windows at our unusual guest). My sisters, of course, were all at Santa Margareta on their knees.
Having escaped the horses, Signore Ventuolo gratefully accepted the washbasin offered to him by Zia Pasqualina before greeting my mother, who waited in the parlor, with me called from upstairs to stand by her side. He managed to remove the grime of the journey, but not the beads of sweat that continued to trickle down the sides of his face and onto his frayed collar. Pasqualina’s water likewise had little effect on his unruly black hair and untrimmed beard. Shoving his handkerchief back into a pocket, he finally followed Zia Pasqualina out of the kitchen and into the parlor. When he approached my mother, he took the hand she held out and brought it to his lips. Papa had a carefully groomed and waxed mustache, and I watched for my fastidious mother’s reaction to the bristling, tightly kinked hairs surrounding Signore Ventuolo’s eager mouth. But I detected no distaste on her part.
“Welcome to Venticano, Signore Ventuolo. I’d like you to meet my daughter Giulia.”
I curtsied quickly, but kept my hands behind my back.
My mother inquired about the journey, the health of Leonora Esposito and the weather in Napoli. By the time my father appeared, I was sure there was no other topic to discuss and was grateful for his presence, which signaled that food was now on the dining-room table. Zia Pasqualina always orchestrated the serving of a meal with Papa’s readiness for it, and, sure enough, she was just setting a steaming bowl of rabbit stew on the table as we entered the dining room.
My mother directed Signore Ventuolo to sit at her right. My usual seat when I ate at my parents’ house put me directly across from Signore Ventuolo, where I had a clear view of him throughout the meal. Despite his shabby appearance, I recognized that Signore Ventuolo knew how to conduct himself at a table. I realized, to my dismay, that my mother would note his manners positively, as well. The more he did correctly in my mother’s eyes, the less likely he would be on the return carriage to Napoli the next morning.
From my point of view, that first evening could not have gone worse. Papa’s suspicions of a man who was eking out a living as a scholar had already been expressed in the house before Signore Ventuolo’s arrival, and I was hopeful that he’d be even more dismissive once the man was under his roof. But Signore Ventuolo had clearly read the newspaper that day.
“Signore Fiorillo, has the unrest on the waterfront affected your business? Are you finding it difficult to reach the port?”
Papa’s eyes narrowed as he measured a man he had previously imagined in a ruffled shirt, smoking opium and reading Robert Browning. That this scholar could possibly understand the obstacles standing in the way of a businessman’s success was unsettling. But even he could hold Papa’s attention for just so long, and Papa went off to his card game as soon as he had finished eating.
Signore Ventuolo did not accompany Papa to Auteri’s tavern. He stayed behind with my mother and me, drinking black coffee and anisette, entertaining her with stories about the plays he’d seen over the weekend and the art exhibit at the National Gallery. Pasqualina remained in the kitchen after she’d washed up, listening to their conversation with the door half-opened. I was supposed to be listening in the dining room, but I had come into the kitchen for more cookies and something to drink.
“Why are you so interested in what they’re saying? It’s so boring,” I told her.
“It’s what they’re not saying that interests me,” she answered, watching intently through the crack in the door. My mother laughed and inclined her head as she poured Signore Ventuolo more anisette.
My mother finally excused me for the evening, and Claudio accompanied me back to Giuseppina’s house across the piazza. The next morning, the work for which Signore Ventuolo had been hired began in earnest. I grudgingly retraced my steps to my parents’ house, sullen and resistant. I was grouchy and tired the first morning. I didn’t like going from the bustle and activity of Giuseppina’s house to the stiff-backed chairs and silence of my mother’s parlor.
“It is too distracting at Giuseppina’s house,” said my mother. “Too many people going in and out, too many questions about the stranger.”
My mother hovered in the corner with her spectacles, reading while I learned, but listening to every false word I uttered. Signore Ventuolo, after acknowledging her presence, focused all his attention to me. When he read aloud, he used different voices for each character. Listening to him was like watching an entire company of actors on a stage.
After that first week, I had lessons with Signore Ventuolo every Tuesday and Wednesday in my parents’ parlor. I began to look forward to them.
In my whole life, I had never spent so much time with my mother. She was full of sparkle those days, smiling, sitting up with Signore Ventuolo both nights talking instead of going to her room in silence when Papa left for Auteri’s. She ordered crates of books from Napoli and began to paint. She set up her easel and her parasol on the balcony and painted the hills or arranged a bowl of peaches on the dining-room table and fussed with the lace at the window until the light slanted across the bowl “just so.”
On the days Signore Ventuolo wasn’t there, she listened to me read or had me practice my multiplication tables. Pasqualina took the little ones for a walk so my mother and I could study.
My mother said that Signore Ventuolo lived alone in rooms in Napoli, with no mother or wife to cook and wash for him. She told him to bring his laundry when he came, and Zia Teresia starched and ironed so that his shirts, though old, were neat and white.
Zia Pas
qualina and Zi’Yolanda, my uncle Tony’s wife, sat in the courtyard at Giuseppina’s house peeling eggplants one day, several months after Signore Ventuolo had become my tutor.
“Anna would adopt Signore Ventuolo if she could. I don’t know what else he’s good for. Who ever heard of making a living teaching little girls? Why isn’t he out working for his father? I know for a fact that his family is in the textile business. So why is he here instead of in the mill? Did they disown him? Is he one of those anarchists, throwing bombs at his father’s factory? Is that why Anna brought him here?” Zia Pasqualina jabbed at the skin of the eggplant as she continued.
“He feeds his belly on my cooking, dumps his dirty clothes in Teresia’s wash bucket, drinks Felice’s wine. All for such nonsense as teaching Giulia to read and write. Why couldn’t they leave well enough alone when the Reverend Mother sent her home? Couldn’t they see Giulia wasn’t meant to be schooled? Wasn’t it enough that the sisters think she’s uncontrollable? Do they want her to run away from here, too, for the entire village to see? How long does Anna think Giulia will sit still for these lessons she’ll never use? She should be in the kitchen with me, or better yet, here in Giuseppina’s garden, helping her grandmother who needs her eyes, her ears and her sturdy legs.”
Zi’Yolanda nodded her head in agreement. “All these books will give her too many ideas, make her lazy and useless. Look at Anna, for heaven’s sake!”
I had been in my room, reading one of the books from Napoli. I wanted to tell them that I did sit still. I was back in Giuseppina’s house, but now a desk stood under the window, stacked with texts and copybooks and ink pots.
“Look at me now, turning the pages of this book, laughing at the stories, going far away in my mind to the places I read about,” I wanted to shout at them.
But Pasqualina and Yolanda moved on to another topic, their opinions of my mother and her passion for education falling in a heap with the eggplant skins at their feet.
I wanted to tell them that Signore Ventuolo was not at all like Sister Philomena. He brought me sweets from the conditoria in his neighborhood in Napoli. After I read my lessons to him with no mistakes, he rewarded me with a bonbon. Every week he had something different in the white-and-gold bag. Sugarcoated almonds in pale colors of pink and green and lilac, cherries dipped in chocolate, colored fruits and flowers made of almond paste.
The only thing I didn’t like about Signore Ventuolo teaching me was the look on Giuseppina’s face—her annoyance when I left with my packet of books to walk to my mother’s house and her pain when I returned, full of lightheartedness and excitement that I could not share with her.
Chapter 6
A Game Called “America”
THE CHANGES MY MOTHER initiated by educating her daughters were only the beginning. Within two years, the foundation upon which we based our lives began to shift, creating tremors as real as the earthquakes that sent whole villages toppling down the mountainside in our valley. My brother Claudio decided to leave Venticano right after the feast of the Ascension, as soon as he turned eighteen. He wanted to be someone other than what Papa wanted for him. He told us all, in that voice of his that was always so sure, so smart, that there was no better place for him than New York.
In the last months before his leave-taking, Claudio and Papa had done nothing but argue with each other—thunderous shouting matches that began out in the courtyard and carried into the house at dinner.
“Small potatoes,” he called Papa’s business.
“The world is wider than the road from Venticano to Napoli,” Claudio told him. “This is the twentieth century, for God’s sake. This region is dying. Pretty soon you’ll only be hauling caskets to the graveyard.”
“Hasn’t this life given you enough?” Papa demanded. “You, with your fancy suit and the respect you get just because of your name. What do you think bought you that respect? Who built this house that stands higher than any other in Venticano, so that you, too, can hold your head higher? From living over a stable with your grandmother’s herbs hanging from the rafters, I have brought all of you to this. Stone by stone, this house was built because every day I traveled that road to Napoli—that road you say is so narrow. Every morsel you put in your mouth, every thread on your body…”
“And just as living over a stable wasn’t enough for you, staying here in Venticano isn’t enough for me! Every day I drive into Napoli I hear the same stories at the docks—the opportunity, the immensity and fertility of the land—that’s what I want for myself, a future in America!” Claudio shouted back at Papa.
“You think America is going to give you this and more? You think you’re not going to have to work hard? You think you can turn your back on your family, on your heritage, and succeed? Then go. Get out of my sight!”
Papa slammed his fist on the table, my mother caught his flying wineglass, and Claudio grabbed his hat and bolted out the door and down the hill to Auteri’s for a glass of grappa. The rest of my brothers and sisters watched wide-eyed and swallowed silently, not wanting to draw Papa’s notice and take Claudio’s place as the object of his wrath.
“There will come a time he won’t come back,” warned my mother, mopping up spilled wine.
“Then good riddance. Let him go.” And by the middle of June go he did, driven by his own dreams, my Papa’s stubbornness, my mother’s pride. It was my mother who paid for his passage, selling some of her jewelry to finance his journey.
On the day he left, my mother dressed in her most elegant gown, put on her ruby earrings and stood on the balcony over the front door of her house—the balcony that looks out on the main street of our village and beyond, to the entire valley below. The balcony from which anyone can see and be seen.
She stood there without tears while everyone else wailed and sobbed, her face shielded from the scorching sun by her wide-brimmed silk hat with the blue feathers, as Claudio walked out of the village and down into the valley on his way to America. She stayed there hours after he was no longer visible to us, but I think she saw him in a way no one else could—his safe journey, his arrival, his triumph. I remember the look on her face, her belief in the rightness of what Claudio was doing.
For Papa, however, Claudio’s leaving was a defeat. Claudio walked away because Papa refused to take him in his own carriage. Papa spent the day in a darkened corner of Auteri’s tavern and spit on what he called Claudio’s worthless dreams. Claudio had wanted nothing that Papa could give him.
My parents’ house was very quiet in the days after Claudio went.
But his going left a hole in our lives. My family had been in Venticano for nearly five hundred years. How many times had I heard Giuseppina recite the litany that began with Alessandro Fiorillo, the crossbowman who’d sailed from Barcelona to invade Napoli under Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon? He never returned to Spain. Instead, he fell in love with the beautiful Maria and remained to cultivate a patch of earth and father her babies.
Giuseppina could not comprehend Claudio’s leaving Italy. When he set off from Venticano, Giuseppina had taken a lock of his dark hair, his fingernail clippings and a milk tooth she’d saved since his babyhood. She kept them in a pouch, blessing them every year on the anniversary of his departure.
For us children, the pain of Claudio’s departure had been much simpler. We could not understand, could not forgive his leaving us. The only people before Claudio who’d left Venticano, never to return, were the dead. What was this place America—farther than Avellino in the valley, farther than Napoli on the sea—that had swallowed up our brother?
In America, Claudio was successful right away. The money began arriving that August. I think my mother knew how well it would go for Claudio—how well it would go for all of us. When Claudio started sending us money, he also sent us letters filled with stories. He recreated for us the streets of New York, teeming with people and commerce. It was the commerce, especially, that fascinated Claudio and presented him with opportunity. In Little Italy,
he saw the pushcarts laden with vegetables and fish and shoes and pots that provided the daily necessities to the tenements. Uptown, he saw the glass-fronted shops, their shelves filled with goods—goods he knew had to come from somewhere outside the city. Goods that had to be hauled from where they were made to where they were sold. And so, after a few months of laboring for someone else, Claudio turned in his shovel, and with the money he’d saved, together with what remained of the money my mother had given him, he bought a horse and wagon and began hauling everything the city needed. He had found a place that, unlike Venticano, was not shriveling in the sun but was expanding, exploding.
What we gleaned from Claudio’s letters was the sheer immensity of America. So many people, so many streets, long vistas that stretched as far as the eye could see or dream. And one by one, my brothers—first Aldo, and then Frankie and Sandro, who are even younger than me—begged to join him. The hole created by Claudio’s departure did not close. Instead, it widened, tearing apart the life my family had known.
My oldest sister, Letitia, had married six months before, a marriage arranged by my parents with the jeweler Samuel Rassina, the son of one of Papa’s business associates. She was eighteen and already bitter. She seemed to spend most of her time in the church, “praying for babies, instead of staying home making them,” her mother-in-law complained.
I knew, from observing other girls in the village, what lay ahead for me. A year or two of meeting stiff and boring boys at gatherings with families like ours, always under the extremely watchful eye of my mother. And then, after the families nodded and whispered, the women sitting on the sofa and hiding their conversations behind painted fans, the men out on the porch with their cigars and their eyes narrowed, estimating the worth of the girl’s family or the boy’s land—then, the banns of marriage would be announced in both churches. A string of novenas would follow, the girl’s grandmothers and aunts praying that no unforeseen obstacles would tumble into the couple’s path, like the loose boulders that had slid off the mountain, crushing five of the village goats and blocking the road to Pano di Greci for three days. Praying that the wedding would take place before the girl had a chance to disgrace the family with a baby born too soon, like Constanza Berti. She’d come to the doorstep of my cousin Arturo’s house and thrown the baby into the arms of Arturo’s mother, screaming, “Here, this is yours!” My aunt and uncle had made Arturo marry her and take her and the baby away.
Across the Table Page 29