Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  Back to Work

  I WENT BACK TO THE store after two weeks. Pip had been ill and Tilly had her hands full managing alone. She’d always been the backroom person, content to count spools and organize piles of merchandise. She liked to climb up on her stepladder and restore order to a shelf I’d been haphazardly emptying and refilling. She found satisfaction in those tasks. But as soon as a customer entered the shop, the little bell over the door tinkling, Tilly ducked her head, descended from the ladder and retreated to the back of the store to fetch me and then hide. She was desperately shy, barely able to whisper a greeting.

  I was good in the front of the shop. I chatted with customers, discovered what was going on in their lives, found ways to encourage them to buy things they hadn’t thought of when they’d arrived at the store.

  After two weeks of confinement in Yolanda’s house, I saw the store as an opportunity. I wanted Paolo to walk through the door. There was no Yolanda to rush off to Angelina’s with a report. Tilly would be mildly perplexed by his visit, but would not be able to hear what was unsaid.

  I spent the first day back alternating between reverie and commerce, longing for Paolo to appear but often too busy to notice that he wasn’t there. I was a dreamer, but not when doing business. The last customer of the day was indecisive. I took down half our supplies before she made up her mind. She chose six buttons and complained about their price, their quality. When she finally left, I had a pile of boxes on the counter to replace and a throbbing headache. I wanted to leave the mess for Tilly but when I turned to ask her for help she was already putting on her hat and primping in front of the mirror. Shy Tilly had a suitor—Gaetano Novelli. He was as round as she was and his cheeks and nose were chafed a permanent red in the bitter chill of that winter. He had invited her to coffee.

  She was gay with anticipation, and I hadn’t the heart to make her stay and help me clean up. As soon as she left, I pulled the shades and started putting away boxes. I was on the stepladder, shoving the last carton onto its shelf and imagining myself walking, not back to Yolanda and Tony’s that night, but to the Palace to find Paolo, when the bell sounded. I thought I’d locked the door!

  “I’m sorry, but we’re closed…” I swiveled on the ladder to face the door. It was Peppino.

  “Pop sent me down to walk you home. Don’t expect this every night. I’ve got more important things to do than be your nursemaid.”

  “You don’t even have to do it tonight, Pepe. I can get myself to your house just fine.”

  “Yeah, and if I show up without you, I’ll have to listen to my old man rag on me about family responsibility and I’ll have to pick my mother up off the kitchen floor where she’ll have fallen in a faint, screaming, ‘I knew it! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted him.’ No, cousin. Spare the family at least one night of hysteria. Come home like a good girl, keep Tony and Yolanda happy and out of Pepe’s hair, and Pepe will stay out of your business in return.”

  “I have no business for you to keep out of, Peppino.”

  “Right. That’s why you’re in so much trouble with Claudio, why you have to come running to your uncle Tony to protect you. You’ve got some business, girl. Seems to me this family spends too much time straightening out Giulia’s escapades, protecting the almighty Fiorillo name and reputation.”

  “It’s your name, too, and I don’t see you doing all that much to keep it untarnished. How much money do you owe, Pepe, to keep playing cards at the Palace every night? Does my brother pay your debts for you? I’ll bet it’s not your father. Does he even know about the gambling? Or does Yolanda protect you?”

  “You have a big mouth, Giulia. But I can hurt you more. Pop would get angry about the gambling, but in the end he’d have to give up, say, ‘Boys will be boys,’ and ‘Let him ruin his own life.’ But a daughter with a reputation, that’s another story. Nobody wants a whore in the family, Giulia. Least of all the Fiorillos. So get your coat and lock up. My mother’s got dinner waiting.”

  I slammed the last box onto the shelf. Pepe and I trudged home in silence.

  Chapter 22

  Unwelcome

  AFTER A MONTH, my welcome at Yolanda and Tony’s was growing thin. Uncle Tony had not confronted Claudio, and Claudio, of course, did not come to Uncle Tony. If Claudio was upset that I hadn’t come back to his house, he didn’t show it. Instead of yelling and hitting, he acted as if I didn’t exist. He had wiped me away, like some fly on one of his horses’ flanks. Like the dust he’d dragged his finger through on the counter just before he’d hit me.

  Good riddance! I’m sure he thought. One less mouth to feed, one less mouth to listen to in his household of women.

  Tony avoided my face when he came home at night. His gaze no longer took in the fading bruise on my forehead. He scrubbed the dirt from his hands but he was never able to get all of it out. His palms seemed permanently crazed with thin black lines of embedded grit from his work as a laborer on a road construction crew. He also could not wash from his face the years of exposure to sun and wind, and here in America, bitter cold. After he washed, he sat at the table, already set by me. Yolanda’s things weren’t as fine as my mother’s. Cotton tablecloth, not damask. But starched and ironed. Heavy, plain stoneware dishes, not painted bone china. Yolanda served Tony immediately, the steam rising off the mounded food on his plate. He ate his macaroni in silence, drank his two glasses of wine and fell asleep in the chair in the front room.

  Pepe watched me from across the table. Glowering with resentment, searching for secrets. Pepe was annoyed by my presence in his house, so he made himself as annoying to me as possible. He scratched his bare chest in my face, his pale skin soaked in sweat. He threw to the floor the few clothes Yolanda had fetched for me when he was looking for something that he claimed I’d misplaced. I took all of Paolo’s letters with me when I went to the store. I was afraid that Pepe would find them if I left them at Yolanda’s—not accidentally, but deliberately. I didn’t trust him. He was a violator. Careless of himself, careless of his mother’s devotion to him, her only son. He mocked her behind her back. Ignored her pleas that he make something of his life. Took her money—that she slipped to him when Tony wasn’t around—to pay off the debts he never seemed to be free of.

  I knew that Pepe had begun to complain to Yolanda about my presence. I had taken his bed, I knew his games, I heard his lies. I didn’t hear him talking to Yolanda, but I heard his words coming out of Yolanda’s mouth. After Claudio had left them alone, she’d begun to convince herself that his silence was reconciliation. If Claudio wasn’t breaking the door down, then everything must be okay. She didn’t see his refusal to talk to Tony or me as the smoldering fire it could very well be. A few more weeks of my defiance and Claudio’s refusal to acknowledge it, and we could’ve had a conflagration, a fireball that would probably have been seen back in Venticano.

  But Yolanda, fed by Pepe, chose to see the fire banked, muffled, maybe even extinguished by the other, more important concerns in Claudio’s powerful life. I was a speck. Blown away by the wind, washed out of Claudio’s eye, brushed off by a preoccupied hand. Yolanda saw what she wanted to see. Life goes on. Everybody make nice like nothing happened. See, the bruises are fading, the cut is healing. In a few weeks you won’t even know anything happened.

  “So, sweetheart, you miss your sisters?” she asked me one morning, a month into my stay. “You wish you could be back with them? Maybe we should have a family dinner. I’ll invite them all, make a nice antipast’. A little minestrone, some manicott’. Mercurio’s got some good breast of veal this week. I could stuff it with alice and hard-boiled eggs. What do you say? We’ll fill their bellies, raise a few glasses of Uncle Tony’s Chianti, clear all of this up. Then you could go home.”

  “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 all 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 especially 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 intelligence, the same ambition. But you have put your sharp mind to good use nevertheless, as I never doubted. I shall 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 village—whenever your name was mentioned. I have been proud to say, “That is Claudio Alfonso Fiorillo, 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 all, 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 Tilly 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.

  Tell me that the event Tilly 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 be come 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 swallow 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 well as I do that she will not stay with Tony and Yolanda. Where will she go? To some American boardinghouse 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 village whore?

  Has America done this?

  I shall 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, willing 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 well as in the village 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 filled 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 still 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 full without you. Pip doesn’t know what to do with a runny nose and Tilly spends all her time at the store counting straight pins as far as I can tell.

  “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 all 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. All 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 will 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 still my voice, to still 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 trolley 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 rea
lized 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 small 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, filling it with song.