Claudio put two glasses and a bottle of grappa on the table, watching Papa’s hands. They were calloused and toughened, familiar with handling leather reins, lifting heavy freight, evaluating the muscled flanks of his horses. But they were also manicured, as carefully trimmed and buffed as his mustache. Claudio believed he understood Papa.
“So show me,” Papa said. “Show me this dream.”
Claudio pulled 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 carefully 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 mull 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.
“Salute!”
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 small 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 pull out his key, savoring the look on Papa’s face as he took in the polished oak door, the glass etched with the Fiorillo 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 pulled 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 sell 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 calling 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 well 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 allow 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 all 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 new-found 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 spilled 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 finally 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 he
r 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 tilled 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 allow 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, especially since she could be so helpful to Pasqualina in the household.
Mama gave Pasqualina and Vincente a wedding feast. She hired a small 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 collar. 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 brilliant 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 all went down to meet her. She would have expected nothing less. Angelina, Tilly and I with all the grandchildren she’d never held; Pip with her fine clothes; Claudio with his car for her trunks; Papa and the boys with arms full 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 delicate border of feathered blue stitches on the collar and the fluttering sleeves. I was up the night before ironing it, my belly—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 will were the very reasons we all 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 spells, when I could no longer taste her herbs or her fruit, I lost her.
But my mother never allowed 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 dolls 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 all 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 Fiorillo, 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 well.
But I did see her close her eyes and breathe deeply, as if to swallow 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 rolled 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 kill me—insisted that I could and would get through this birth alive. And it was she who, finally, 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, shelling peas or darning Paolo’s socks, with the baby beside me in his bassinet, and I was brought to a contemplative stillness. I gazed in awe at his blue eyes absorbed by the play of light upon the wall, his mouth shaping and reshaping nonsense syllables 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 racing 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 filled 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 trolley and he led me a few blocks.
“Only a trolley 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 p
ranced in a small fenced yard next to the pony’s shed. A bell hung around the neck of a goat, white bearded, looking to share the grass with the pony.
“Some day I will 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 all his books from the bedside table. 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 bully, but an incomprehensible demon eating away at Paolo. For the first time in my life, I saw my brother afraid, powerless.
Across the Table Page 44