“I understand your sister fixed her up. God bless her. Giulia’s indebted to her and to you.”
“Flora would’ve done nothing less. It’s how she is. Look, I’ll try to talk to Claudio as soon as I see him. He listens to me…sometimes. Anyway, I just wanted you to know. I’ve got to get back to the Palace.”
“Keep an eye on my son. He hasn’t learned to control himself yet. Thinks the night should never end, you know what I mean?”
I heard the door latch, the lumbering of Tony’s feet back to bed with Yolanda, the brisk tap of Paolo’s shoes on the stairs that ran along the outside wall next to my bed.
I moved from the bed to the front window, reaching it in time to see him stride from the building. I pressed my palms against the glass, wishing he’d turn around and glance up. But he walked off into the night, his head down against the cold wind, his hands thrust into his pockets.
A blue envelope arrived at eight the next morning, delivered by Nino. He was on his way to school and had run to Yolanda and Tony’s in order not to be late.
He knocked on the door in a rapid, impatient-little-boy way. “Giulia? Giulia? I’m looking for Giulia Fiorillo. Is she here?”
I heard his voice on the landing, breathless, loud, for all the building to hear.
Peppino opened the door in his undershirt, sullen from being roused at too early an hour, from having to sleep on the sofa when he came in at four in the morning, since Zi’Yolanda had put me in his bed.
“Yeah, what do you want?”
“Is Giulia here?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“This is for her. Give it to her, please.” Nino tossed the envelope to Peppino and flew down the stairs.
Peppino took the envelope and studied it as closely as his sleep-heavy, wine-blurred eyes allowed. He turned it over in his hand, studied the inscription, checked to see if the envelope had been sealed. I watched from the archway of the dining room as he slid his grimy thumbnail under the flap.
“Is that for me, Peppino?” I crossed the room in two swift steps and put my hand on the envelope, my thumb pressing down on the flap Peppino had begun to peel open.
He kept his hand on the blue paper, not releasing it to me.
“Whose brat was that? And who’s sending you letters through him?”
“I won’t know that until I open the letter, Peppino.”
“Is this the reason Claudio hit you?” His hand tugged against mine.
“It’s none of your business. You’re not my brother. And neither one of you is Papa. Give me the letter.”
He still wouldn’t let go. The struggle over this piece of paper was waking him up.
“Something’s not right,” Peppino challenged me. “Some stranger early in the morning. What is it, a love letter? Why so urgent? And how did he know you were here?”
“Peppino, I told you. I have no idea who wrote this because you won’t let me open it. And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
But I did know, of course. I knew the blue paper. I knew the flourish of the pen. I knew Nino. I was desperate to read the words, but kept my longing to myself. I didn’t need to give Peppino, with his nosy questions and his big mouth and his loyalty to Claudio, the opportunity to learn such a secret about me. The secret was still so new that I’d lain awake all night, bewildered. What was I to do with this knowledge? This man who’d been a steady, silent presence in my life had now spoken, had now taken me into his arms. How could my understanding of him, my feelings for him, change so much in just one day? People around me thought my world had turned upside down because Claudio had hurt me so savagely. But they were wrong. I was not going to let my life fall apart because my brother couldn’t hold himself in check. He had made me angry but he had not made me afraid. What made me afraid right then were my feelings for Paolo. I was not looking for this; I had not asked for it in my prayers or even my dreams.
I had been thrown off balance by Paolo. I had no warning, no months of preparation and anticipation for the way I felt. This brought so much unease to my heart. I felt out of control, bobbing and diving among turbulent waves that washed over me with ever-increasing height. Volumes of emotion. Voices within my head expressing doubt, telling me this shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t feel this way—so suddenly, so differently. I was too confused. I needed to understand more. I needed to anchor myself, to keep myself tethered to something real….
I needed the letter, becoming tattered and smudged in Peppino’s hands and mine. We were scrabbling like two children over a chestnut. One taunting, the other clutching.
“Pepe, what are you doing up so early?” Zi’Yolanda shoved her head out the kitchen door. “You wanna cup of coffee? Who was that at the door?”
Her hair was still down in a graying braid behind her back, her cotton housedress protected by a flowered apron. My own mother, her hair still black, never appeared even for morning coffee without her hair smoothly pinned in place.
“What’s that? You two look like you’re fighting over the last piece of cake. Did someone bring a message? From Claudio?”
“It’s for me, Zi’Yolanda. But I don’t know who it’s from because your son won’t let me have it.”
“If it’s from someone in the family, why didn’t they come in person?” Peppino jumped in. “And if it’s from a stranger, it’s not right….”
“Since when did you become a judge of what’s proper and what’s not? You with your American girlfriend who stays out with you half the night like a putana?” Zi’Yolanda was warming to my side.
“Look, why don’t you give me the letter and I’ll open it right here in front of your mother and you.”
Zi’Yolanda gestured to Peppino to let go of the letter. She was as curious as he, but for more benevolent reasons—romance, gossip.
“Maybe it’s about Roberto,” she ventured with a mixture of hope and fascination.
Peppino reluctantly loosened his fingers and I slipped the envelope out of his grasp. I opened it calmly, careful not to tear the paper, not to betray my mounting agitation.
Inside the blue envelope lay a folded sheet of blue paper, covered on all four sides with writing. I didn’t want to read the entire letter in front of Peppino and Yolanda. Even if I read silently, I was afraid that the emotions expressed on paper would spill over into my eyes, my face, betraying me to those I was least willing to reveal myself to.
“Oh, look, it’s from Flora! How sweet!”
Peppino and Yolanda nodded in satisfaction. Yolanda couldn’t read a word beyond her own name. Peppino thought he could read, but I’d seen him struggle with simple words. They probably wouldn’t know, had they taken the sheet from me and pored over it, heads together, whether it was a grocery list or a death threat.
A friendly note of concern, asking whether I’d spent the night comfortably, hoping the bandages had served me well. That’s what I told Yolanda and Peppino. And that was, in part, what the letter said. Except that it had been written by Paolo and not Flora. The rest of the note I resolved to read in private, so I refolded it, replaced it in the envelope and tucked the envelope inside the sleeve of my blouse.
Peppino, deprived of the opportunity for outrage, sulked into the kitchen, Zi’Yolanda padding behind him to serve him a cup of coffee.
Later in the morning, on her way back from doing the marketing, Yolanda decided to stop by Angelina and Claudio’s to get me some fresh clothes. Uncle Tony didn’t want me out of the house yet. He didn’t want me running into Claudio alone before someone—preferably Uncle Tony—had had a chance to talk to him.
Zi’Yolanda was gone a long time. Long enough, I’m sure, to have a cup of coffee with Angelina and fill her in on all she, Yolanda, was privileged to know. Angelina must have been relieved to learn that she’d lost one of her boarders, even if only temporarily. But after a few days without my cooking and entertaining her sons, she might come to appreciate me. God knows, she hadn’t yet.
I wondered if Angelina was surprised. Had Cla
udio ever hit her? I’d never seen or heard anything in all the time I lived with them. A lot of gruff words, shouting matches at the table, Angelina petulant and whining and ultimately punishing Claudio by leaving him to brood alone while she went upstairs to be by herself. Leaving us with the dishes and the sweeping and picking up the broken pieces of whatever Claudio had flung from the table. Not so different from my parents’ house.
But I never saw him hit her. And I never came home from work to find her with a swollen lip or a bruised face. Not that she would’ve confided in me if he had hit her—in some place covered up, hidden by her skirt or blouse. But I don’t believe he ever did.
Claudio had a violent temper, but until that day he had exercised it with his voice, his words, his smashing of objects that had sentimental worth to Angelina, like the china fruit bowl she’d kept on the sideboard, carried with her from Abruzzi, wrapped in layer upon layer of bedding. It had survived the land journey to Napoli, the ocean crossing, the trolley to Mount Vernon. But it had sat there by the dining table for three years, ever ready, ever in Claudio’s view, within reach when he was provoked to new heights of anger. Who knows? Claudio was so adamant about his disdain for Italy. He believed he’d escaped a place of fools and losers. He had no good memories, no lingering doubts about his decision to leave. So maybe Angelina’s bowl had sat there all those years shouting Italy to him. And when the moment had come—some disappointment, some failure he could throw off onto the deficiencies of our homeland—he’d picked up this symbol of Italy accorded a place of honor in his own house and thrown it out the window. Which fortunately had been open, so we didn’t have to replace the glass. But the bowl had fallen to the stone terrace behind the house, smashed among the begonias withering in clay pots and the toys belonging to his sons.
Angelina hadn’t spoken to him for two weeks. Had Claudio possessed an object of equal emotional importance to him, I’m sure she would have smashed it with a furious pleasure. But what was important to Claudio? His horses? They were his livelihood, but I don’t remember him speaking affectionately about a single one of them. He called them “the bay,” “the chestnut,” “the gray.” He didn’t even give them names.
What mattered to Claudio were his deals—getting something worth more than he’d had to pay for it. But Claudio treasure something, preserve it, keep it? I didn’t think so. He would tell you that he was always facing forward. He didn’t look back—not to the business he would’ve joined with Papa, not to the early days here in America with no horses, no money.
“I keep my eye on tomorrow,” he said. “I keep my eye on the other guy. Where’s he going, how’s he going to make his mistake.”
But this time, it was Claudio who’d made the mistake.
Maybe I should’ve sat at Yolanda’s table considering my own mistake as I shelled the peas Yolanda had left for me. Maybe I should’ve whimpered for Claudio to forgive me for being lazy. Wasn’t that what he’d said in the store, tracing his finger through the dust on the counter? Or maybe for dancing with Roberto? Couldn’t I see he’d be the kind to get mixed up with the law in a way that brought too much attention upon himself, upon me, and then upon Claudio? Or maybe, like Angelina’s china bowl, for just being around in Claudio’s life. Standing there in the store, provoking him to rage simply because he had to look at me every day and be reminded of something he couldn’t control.
I didn’t think so. I didn’t think it was my mistake. If Claudio opened my head with a flat iron, it was Claudio who had done something wrong. And who was going to tell him that? Uncle Tony was full of big words, calling Claudio a son of a bitch, but not to his face. Paolo? As much as he loved me, was he ready to choose between Claudio and me? Or did he think he could be the go-between? The man of honor who restored peace to our family?
I didn’t want peace right then. I wanted people to look at the horror on my forehead and feel the anger that I felt. But who could I count on for that?
Even Yolanda, concerned as she was and unable to understand how this could happen, was afraid of Claudio. I could hear it in her voice when Paolo came to the door. The tremor, the crack, the waiting in anxiety for hell to break loose or break down the door. Tilly was also afraid. From the first moment, when Claudio had heaved into the store, she’d hidden in the back, making herself small. When we were children and Papa was yelling at the dinner table, Tilly and I had closed our eyes fiercely tight, believing that if we couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see us and make us his next target.
Everyone here still seemed to believe the same magic. They closed their eyes to Claudio.
But I looked my brother in the eye.
Chapter 20
Paolo’s Words
THE GASH CLAUDIO put in my head put a rift between him and Paolo. After Claudio hit me, Paolo’s friendship with him became strained. He spent less and less time with Claudio. In the past, they’d often stayed late together at the Palace, closing up the place with a few glasses of grappa and a card game after they’d counted up the till. But after, it was all business between them. Paolo continued to keep an eye on the place in the evenings from the piano and he did the books, but he left as soon as the money was counted for the night. If Claudio wanted to smoke a cigar and play a few rounds, he did it with Peppino and his ruffian friends.
Paolo removed himself from Claudio’s presence because otherwise he would have attacked him for what he’d done to me. He wrote to me that he could not control the anger that rose in him when he remembered finding me that day on the street. It blinded him, the thought of my blood and my pain. The only reason he didn’t go after Claudio was to protect our secret, to keep our love from those who would try to drive us apart.
Each morning a letter had come for me since that first one I’d wrested from Peppino’s filthy hand. But even though I’d received a letter every day, I had not seen Paolo since I watched from the window that first night at Yolanda and Tony’s as he’d walked away into the darkness.
He had attempted to keep what was happening between us as private as possible. He did not want to cloud the situation between Claudio and me—did not want to give Claudio more ammunition. It wouldn’t take much for Claudio to accuse me of being a whore. God knows, I had demonstrated neither the propriety of Pip nor the innocence of Tilly in my history with men.
Only Flora had Paolo’s confidence. After the first day, he did not send Nino with the letters. Flora brought the others, stopping by for a brief daily visit, passing the blue envelope to me when Yolanda’s attention was occupied elsewhere, taking the white envelope that enclosed what I had written in secret in response to Paolo’s letter of the day before.
Flora brought me Paolo’s letters with such discretion that Yolanda never suspected. I don’t think she could even imagine that a man would court a woman in such a way. It was not within her experience of life.
I don’t think I imagined it myself before I began to read Paolo’s words and was engulfed by them. Signore Ventuolo had taught me the power of words on a page—but those were words written for many eyes. Paolo’s words were written only for me.
My mother wrote letters. I remember, on the days the post came, how Mama’s face would light up at the stack of envelopes—from her friends in Benevento, her own mother and later, from Signore Ventuolo. She would retreat to her room and only emerge when all the letters had been read and answered. She might say twenty words to Papa all week, but she filled pages in her letters. The envelopes going out in the next day’s post were always thick, heavy with whatever it was she found the need to say.
Paolo’s letters spoke for him as my mother’s did for her.
In them, I began to discover the complex man who had been hidden from me. In them, he began to reveal himself. I learned of his passions—for me, for his work, for his music.
He wrote to me that he’d never loved another woman with such intensity, that my beauty and gentleness brought him so much happiness—happiness that he wanted only to give back to me. He told me tha
t I owned his heart.
He wrote to me about his work with the union. Other unions, like the Knights of Labor and the AFL, kept the Italians out. But the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World, had opened its doors to men like Paolo, and he went barreling through that door brandishing his pen like a sword and pouring his outrage at the injustices suffered by laborers into speeches and strikes. He was the secretary of the union. It sounds so quiet, so innocuous—recording the minutes of meetings and writing the broadsides that were handed out to workers and sent to newspapers. But I knew that the words Paolo was writing were not so quiet.
He wrote to me about what he did late at night at the Palace. When things quieted down and everybody had a drink, he stole a few minutes at the piano, composing a song he wanted Caruso to sing. As he composed, he heard the notes sung in Caruso’s inimitable voice and knew that only Caruso could bring the music to life. Paolo carried a sheaf of creased staff paper in his coat pocket, folded up at the end of the night after he locked the Palace. Each evening, he retrieved it, unfolded it and placed it on the top of the piano. He studied the marks he’d made, replaying their pattern lightly on the worn keys and then fingering the next measure. Around him were murmurs or shouts, the splash of whiskey in glass, the scrape of heavy boot on oak floor. Still, he listened and called up the voice he’d only heard once but held in his memory like a mother recognizing the cry of her newborn infant. And then he wrote, furiously, passionately, his hand moving as if guided by Caruso himself.
These were Paolo’s words; this was Paolo’s world.
If I had not had his letters, I would have felt abandoned. But I knew that he kept away, sending the letters as his substitute, to protect me from prying eyes and damaging rumors and to protect us in this fragile state of early love from the interfering words and innuendo that can pull lovers apart.
Chapter 21
Across the Table Page 36