Widow. I turned the word over in my mouth, parched, aching with the memory of Paolo’s last kiss. I gagged on it. I wanted to spit it out, this sour, suffocating word.
There was a heaviness and an ugliness to this word that had now attached itself to my life. I saw that ugliness reflected in the eyes of my brother and sisters—eyes that averted, eyes that resented, eyes that blamed. I was weighed down, not only by the fact that Paolo had been ripped from my very being and by fears for my fatherless babies, but also by the anger of my family.
As Tilly and Pip danced with false merriment around the welcome my Caterina would find, a room of her own on Canal Street, I gradually gleaned the true reason she had to be separated from me at all. It was Claudio.
He was forbidding me to remain with the children in the apartment above the Palace. He was forbidding me to continue to work there or to hold Paolo’s share of the business.
“It’s unseemly. A woman alone. People will talk, make assumptions about you.” This from Pip, my most proper of sisters, who had never once set foot in the Palace. She was afraid of even the taint of impropriety. What did she think I would do, bare my breasts as I fried the eggplant? Serve up the macaroni with kisses on the side? Join Signora Bifaro’s girls on the back stairs of the hotel?
“You are no longer safe here. You’ve lost the protection of your husband.” I’ve lost much more than his protection, I wanted to scream at her. But what did she, married to an ignorant, desiccated old man, know of what I’d lost? Did she ever hear such poems as Paolo had whispered to me in the night, lips so close that his very breath was a caress, words so pure, so unrestrained, that their very utterance was something sacred? Did she ever feel such tenderness, such mystery, such surprise as I had felt in his embrace?
Not Pip, not any of them, understood my rage or powerlessness in the face of my empty bed, my empty heart. They only understood their own duty. It was a duty they’d carved out, apportioned among themselves, without asking me. Claudio was taking over my protection. He would house me; he would feed me. I would return to his house, as I had eight years ago when I’d first arrived from Italy. My parents had no room in their own apartment on Eighth Avenue with the three boys still living there. Papa’s investment in Claudio’s new business had not yet yielded the profits that would later enable him to build a house on the park. Pip was taking Caterina because Claudio’s wife said there wasn’t room for “all of them.” I could keep only one of my children—the baby—with me.
I was numb. I was weary. I had not slept for three days, since the night Claudio had brought Paolo upstairs, bloody and fevered, to die in my arms. I had buried him that morning. I had nothing left in me, neither the words or the strength, to say to Claudio, “No!”
Tilly helped me pack up Caterina’s things—a few dresses, stockings, a pair of shoes and the doll my mother had sent just after she was born. Once elegant, the doll had dainty porcelain hands and feet and a porcelain face with painted eyes as blue as Paolo’s, a pouty red mouth faded to a pale rose from Caterina’s many kisses, golden hair and a chipped ear. Its dress, smocked and cross-stitched in blue, revealed the expensive hand of my mother’s dressmaker. A rag doll would’ve been more appropriate for an infant, but what did my mother know? And Caterina loved that doll. She wouldn’t be separated from it. So into the valise it went, to make the journey downtown.
Claudio drove Pip and Caterina back to New York, while Tilly stayed behind to help me pack up my own things for the move to Claudio and Angelina’s house.
Chapter 46
Silence
AFTER PAOLO DIED, I stopped living, as well. I spoke to no one. When my sisters tried to cajole and coax and finally scold, I didn’t answer them. When Zi’Yolanda came by with pots of food or a dress for Caterina, I didn’t thank her. When my mother sat with me and made a list of what I must do to help myself and my children, I didn’t acknowledge her. Even when Caterina climbed into my lap whenever Pip and Ernesto brought her to visit, I could only rock with her as both arms reached tightly around me.
I didn’t hear the murmurs in the kitchen, the prayers recited before votive lights, the rising tune of late-night conversations. “What are we going to do about Giulia?”
My family had always been asking that question. She runs wild in the hills, she climbs out of windows, she daydreams, she loves the wrong man. We have to do something about her.
So once again they tried to do something, but I didn’t let them. It wasn’t that I stopped doing everything. I still got out of bed in the morning, washed myself, dressed. I knew there were women who, after their husbands died or left, turned into pigs who refused or forgot to care for themselves. Whose hair became matted and caked, whose bodies acquired layer upon layer of dirt and odor. Whose houses became infested with bugs and filth. I wasn’t one of them. Every morning, I brushed my hair and secured it at the nape of my neck with two long hairpins. I kept my fingernails clean. I bathed and dressed Paolino in clothes I’d washed and ironed. I swept the floors. I aired the bed linens. I lined Paolo’s books up neatly on the night table.
But I did all these things in silence. I had nothing to say to anyone. Most of the time, of course, there was no one there except the children. Claudio was at work and Angelina, leaving me to watch her brood, went off to New York to shop and eat lunch at Schrafft’s. What was I to do, talk to myself? Become like Crazy Fabiola in Venticano, who wandered the streets talking to the pigeons?
My words simply disappeared. Words had been life between Paolo and me—the breath, the food that nourished us. Without Paolo, the words stopped.
Chapter 47
Rescue
IT WAS MY MOTHER who rescued me. My mother—pampered, powdered, constantly in stately motion, her life swirling in constellations far removed from us, the children she’d borne and then handed over to someone else. My mother, more familiar with the drape of silk, the poetry of Boccaccio or the variations of azure in Capri’s grotto than she was with the terrors that beset her own children. It was my mother who recognized the dark circles under my eyes, who watched me scrubbing the clothes not only of my own son and my nephews, but Angelina’s, too, who observed Angelina returning from one of her shopping expeditions laden with boxes of finery for herself, toys for her sons, and not even a piece of candy for my children.
It was my mother who heard my silence and found a way to end it.
“It’s so pathetic,” she reported one afternoon when she and Tilly and her girls had stopped by. “The little girl—what’s her name? Mariangela, that’s it. Mariangela he has tied to a chair in the blacksmith shop while he’s working so she won’t toddle into danger. It’s absolutely harrowing—all those tools, all that dirt. So she sits there with those enormous brown eyes, watching, nobody bothering to wipe her nose. She can’t be more than eighteen months old. And the two boys, well, half the time they’re running around God knows where. I heard that Barbara Nardozzi cooks for them, but I can assure you, nobody’s washing them.”
“They need a mother.” It was Tilly, nodding solemnly in agreement with my mother, who revealed the purpose of their visit to me today. My mother’s depiction of the circumstances of the widower Salvatore D’Orazio and his motherless children was intended to do more than just elicit my sympathetic nods.
My mother, continuing her orchestration of what she hoped would be a convincing portrayal of desperate need, cast an expectant look at me.
Salvatore D’Orazio played the accordion. He brought it with him when he first came to call on a Sunday afternoon. He also brought the children. Someone had given them a bath, starched the boys’ shirts, put a bow in Mariangela’s wispy curls.
He set the accordion down in the parlor and the boys took up positions on either side of it, like little soldiers or altar boys. Mariangela he held on his lap, smoothing her dress with his left hand, the one he used to stroke the buttons of the accordion that play the harmony.
It was March 19, the feast of Saint Joseph. I served him coffee an
d cream puffs that I’d made earlier that morning, before anyone else was up. It was the only time I was alone, those moments by a hot stove before dawn. The frantic scurry of early morning life when Tilly and Pip and I were working at the factory so many years ago had given way to a different tempo. We were no longer four women straining to fit our lives under the same roof. It was only Angelina and me, and God knows I didn’t have to worry about sharing the kitchen or the laundry with her. The difference was the children. The clamor of hungry bellies, the tug of sticky hands. The restlessness of Paolino at night in his crib next to my bed. The books my mother lent me would have gathered dust at my bedside if I didn’t have those private moments in the kitchen.
I waited in the parlor that Sunday afternoon. Waited for Salvatore to still his hand, to clear his throat, to shift the weight of his daughter from one knee to the other. I couldn’t keep myself from studying his face.
I must admit that when my mother first told me about him, I’d gone out of my way one afternoon to walk past his blacksmith’s shop and peer in the half-open door. He didn’t see me; he was crouched over the hoof of a tethered horse, intent on prying off a damaged shoe. His face had been streaked with sweat and soot, his hair falling over his forehead and periodically swept away with the back of his hand. In the dim light I couldn’t discern with certainty the features of his face—I couldn’t tell you if they pleased or repulsed me. But I watched him at his work, saw the strength in his arms, the solidity of his legs, and listened to him calm the horse. I moved from the doorway. Later that day, I let my mother know I would allow him to call on me.
On Sunday, not only the children had been scrubbed. The face opposite me was no longer disguised by his labor. His hair had been slicked away from his forehead, black and wet, the hands now fussing with the baby probably pressed to it a quarter of an hour before, smoothing out whatever unruliness he normally lived with. His mustache, equally black, had been neatly brushed and waxed. It drooped and curved up again. Paolo had always kept his face clean-shaven.
“Don’t make comparisons,” my mother had said. “You’ll never be able to decide if you haul up out of your heart these images that become more beautiful, more precious, the longer you live without him in the flesh.”
So I tried not to hold up Paolo’s exquisite face as I watched Salvatore in his unfamiliar feast-day clothes. I tried not to hear the poetry that Paolo recited to me as I listened to Salvatore speak of his situation, his prospects, the practical and substantial life he might be willing to offer me. I tried not to remember the piano at the Palace and the strains of Paolo’s songs wafting up through the floorboards to our apartment as I studied Salvatore’s accordion sitting between his sons and hoped that he would never play it for me.
Chapter 48
Ice Flowers
THE PANES OF THE windows in Angelina’s pantry were thick with frost. If Caterina had been there, she would have carved flowers and stars with her fingernail, scraping away at the papery ice until her fingertips were numb.
But she wasn’t there. She was asleep under a crocheted coverlet in Pip’s house, her face resting against the porcelain cheek of her doll, her hair neatly braided, her fingers, instead of creating ice fantasies, firmly planted inside her mouth.
I moved the sack of onions on the floor to get at the semolina and the cake flour. I placed eggs into a bowl. I wanted to start the pasta, set the dough to rise for the cream puffs before the boys woke up. It was five in the morning.
There was no daylight yet. I worked by the dim overhead bulb in the kitchen, but I didn’t really need to see. I piled a hill of flour onto my board and made a hollow in the top with my fist. One by one, the ten eggs slipped from their shells into the hollow. I plunged my hands into their liquid, working the flour little by little into a mass of dough, exactly as Giuseppina had taught me. I didn’t think as my hands moved in a pattern that was as natural to me as planting seeds or weeding a garden. The echoes of Giuseppina’s instructions had found their way into my muscles.
I shaped the dough, kneading and pushing it with the rhythm I’d learned from Giuseppina’s singing. Now and then, I even found myself singing again. I took my rolling pin, a thin, tapered stick that Tilly’s husband had shaped for me, and began to roll out the dough. It resisted at first, a thick slab of creamy yellow that I had to tame until it was a translucent sheet light enough to rise when I blew under it. With a sharp knife, I cut the sheet into strips and then hung the strips to dry on a wooden rack. Fettucini I would serve that afternoon, with porcini mushrooms sent from Salvatore’s cousin in Connecticut.
I wiped my hands on my apron and started a pot of coffee. The rest of the house would be waking soon.
That afternoon Pip and Ernesto brought Caterina to Claudio’s for dinner. She was dressed in the green merino wool coat and hat they’d bought for her. The conductor lifted her from the iron steps of the train onto the platform and exclaimed how beautiful she was, how perfect. Pip beamed and took her hand in her own gloved one and walked with her—proud, proprietary—out of the station to Claudio, waiting in his new automobile.
Chapter 49
Caterina Dances
PIP AND ERNESTO wanted to adopt Caterina.
She danced in the parlor when they came to visit, twirling in a circle with her arms outstretched. We clapped our hands to the music on the gramophone.
I remembered Salvatore’s accordion and thought, He could play for Caterina. She could dance in his parlor. My parlor, if I marry him.
I could give her a home again.
I could give me a home again.
I sank into the chair in the corner and watched my daughter, my sister, my mother.
My mother sat in the center of the room, cooing and praising. She touched the edge of Caterina’s exquisite dress. She pressed a coin into her tiny hand and Caterina held it high as she continued to circle the room. The coin glinted in the late-afternoon light; it adorned her, like a jewel on her finger or a ribbon in her hair.
Pip did not take her eyes from Caterina. She leaned toward her as Caterina laughed and floated away. There was a hunger, a longing in Pip’s body. I saw her reaching out for my daughter, stroking her hair, adjusting the bow on the sash at her waist. Caterina slithered from her grasp and danced some more.
She stopped in front of me.
“Dance with me, Mama.”
She stretched out her hands.
I wanted to refuse. My body had given up that lightness and freedom since Paolo’s death. I had no reason to dance, I told myself. My feet trudged to the market, bore the weight of laundry baskets and sleeping children, curled up at night in an empty bed, seeking warmth and finding none. I shook my head and held up my hands in refusal.
“Dance with me. Per favore. The way you used to.”
Caterina grabbed my hands, holding the coin between us, and tugged at me to get out of the chair.
Pip stopped clapping. She sat back and wrapped her arms tightly in front of her.
I got to my feet and smiled at Caterina as we spun around each other.
Chapter 50
Gardenias
FLOWERS. GARDENIAS. WHITE with dark, glossy leaves. Salvatore bought them for me to carry at the wedding. Pip gave me a navy blue silk dress of hers to wear. My mother offered me her ruby earrings.
In a small cigar box on my dresser lay all the letters Paolo had written me. They were much more precious to me than the jewels Papa had showered upon my mother in appeasement, as substitutes for his attention and love.
I took the box on the morning of my wedding day and wrapped it in one of the embroidered trousseau linens I’d brought from Venticano. I buried the shrouded box out of sight in the bottom drawer with my scapulars and extra votive candles, amid the packets of dried herbs and the cotton towels for my time of the month. Salvatore didn’t concern himself with these things, and he had no need to know, to see the letters, to understand why I kept them, cherished them, took them in my hand to feel the weight and smoothn
ess of the paper and to run my fingers over Paolo’s words as I’d once run my fingers over Paolo’s body.
Salvatore never knew those letters existed.
Chapter 51
Gratitude
MARRYING SALVATORE BROUGHT five children to sleep under his roof—Salvatore’s three, no longer motherless and neglected; Paolino, and Caterina, restored to me despite Pip’s bitter disappointment; and a sixth growing inside me within a few short months.
Pip knew, in giving Caterina back to me, that she stared ahead at a childless life.
“You have so many to take care of, Giulia. Why take her back when Ernesto and I can give her so much?”
But how could I not take her back? Not only my own flesh and blood, but Paolo’s? Did I want her to grow up distanced from me, as I’d grown up separated from my own mother? Not only the distance from here to Manhattan—the train ride measured not in the clack of the rails, the minutes from Mount Vernon to Grand Central, but in the journey that separates two households as different as New York and Venticano, as far apart as my mother’s parlor and Giuseppina’s kitchen.
Before the wedding, I took the train down, to visit Caterina and to get the blue silk dress Pip was lending me because I refused to wear the ivory wedding gown from my first marriage. What kind of an omen was that, I thought, to put on that dress again? I wanted to cut it up, burn it, throw the ashes on Paolo’s grave.
Across the Table Page 46