Eduardo lifted the hood of his robe and placed it on his head. He opened the door, then turned back to Ciro. “I’ll write to you as soon as I know where they’re sending me. If you ever need me, I will come to you, regardless of what the church says.”
“And I’ll come to you, regardless of what the church says.” Ciro smiled. “That would be my pleasure.”
“I knew that.” Eduardo slipped out the door, closing it softly behind him. Ciro sat down on the bed and unfolded the letter from his mother.
Dear Eduardo and Ciro,
I am so proud of my boys. You have become a shoemaker, and Eduardo, a priest. A mother wants her children to be happy, and please know that’s all I ever wanted for you.
When I left you and Eduardo at the convent, I had planned to return that summer. But my health took a terrible turn, and I was unable to return to Vilminore. The sisters were good about sending your marks and updates about your life in the convent. I was happy to know that there was never a time that a single hearth was not prepared to be lit. The sisters said they had never known what it was like to have the fireplaces roaring at once, keeping the convent warm. I am so proud of you. I hope to be well enough to see you someday, and your brother too. Your mama loves you.
The charcoal clouds hung low over the Piazza di San Pietro as rain fell onto the cobblestones like silver stickpins. The piazza outside the Vatican was empty as the crowds sought shelter under the colonnade from the downpour, including a cluster of pigeons lined up on the joice overhead, perched like a row of musical notes.
Ciro stood by a red obelisk in his brown uniform as the rain jingled against his tin helmet. He took a final drag off his cigarette, tossed it away, and walked to the entrance of the church as a slew of black-and-white nuns, moving in an orderly cluster, entered the Basilica. Ciro took off his hat, bowed his head to the nuns, and walked with them as they entered the church. He smiled when he thought of Sister Teresa, who had advised him to look for the black-and-whites when he was unknown in a city. Ciro Lazzari felt unknown everywhere he went now.
He knelt in a pew behind the nuns. They bowed their heads in prayer, but Ciro looked around, taking in the architecture of the Basilica as though it were the church of San Nicola and he was assessing it for a spring cleaning. Even though his brother’s life was about to change forever, penitents and tourists meandered through the massive portals, stopping to pray at the sepulchers and shrines in a most ordinary way. There was not the feeling of something special in the air.
A group of African priests in gold robes walked up the left transept and disappeared into a chapel behind the main altar. The Vatican, Ciro thought, was like a train station, disparate groups peeling off from one another to go to various destinations, under one roof, leading where? he wondered.
The aisle soon filled with what seemed like hundreds of priests in the brown robes of the Franciscans, tied with white rope belts. Ciro watched the ordained priests glide by silently.
Following the brown robes, a choir of altar boys carried the brass-trimmed candles of acolytes. The candidates followed them, in starched white robes, in two long lines. They filed by the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the right transept, hands buried deep in their billowing white sleeves, heads bowed reverently.
Ciro had moved behind a rope attended by Vatican guards to get a better look at the seminarians’ faces. He made note of every face, one after another, until finally he found Eduardo, resplendent in white.
Ciro reached across the rope to touch his brother’s arm. Eduardo smiled at Ciro before two Vatican guards took Ciro by the arm, pulled him to a side aisle, then removed him to the back of the church. It wouldn’t matter if the guards had dumped Ciro in the Tiber; he had seen Eduardo on the most important day of his life. That was all that mattered.
Ciro whispered to the guards, explaining that his brother was receiving holy orders. They took pity on the soldier and allowed him to watch from the back of the pews.
Eduardo lay on the cold marble floor, arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, face to the floor, as the cardinal in his ruby red zucchetto leaned over him to administer chrism and holy oil. Tears sprang to Ciro’s eyes as his brother rose to his feet to receive his blessing. He had lost Eduardo for good as the sign of the cross was placed upon his brother’s forehead.
Ciro stayed in the Basilica long after the ceremony, hoping that his brother would make his way from the sacristy out into the church, as he had on so many mornings at San Nicola, to set out the Holy Book and the chalice and light the candles for mass.
But the Holy Roman Church had other ideas. As soon as Eduardo was made a priest, he was shuttled away swiftly. Eduardo was on his way to his assignment, and that could be anywhere! Sicily, or Africa, or as close as the gardens of Montecatini in the center of Rome. Near or far, it didn’t matter. Eduardo was gone. It was finished.
The arrangements made by the U.S. Army to return Ciro home to America were through the port of Naples. Ciro bought a one-way train ticket to Naples at the station.
As he stood on the platform, waiting for the train, Ciro imagined what it would be like to take the old Roman road, Via Tiberius, out of the city and up to Bologna to catch the train to Bergamo. He imagined taking the Passo Presolana up the mountain by carriage and looking down into the gorge, finding the brown brambles of late autumn every bit as beautiful as the spring flowers. Ciro imagined that he would appreciate everything about where he came from now, but the ache in his heart wasn’t about missing a particular place; it was about something else entirely. He knew he must return to America to put that ache to rest.
Enza turned the work light off on her sewing machine. She rose from her work stool and stretched her back.
“Hey, you.” Vito poked his head into the costume shop. “How about dinner?”
“How about yes?” Enza pulled on her coat and grabbed her purse.
“Where’s Laura?” Vito asked.
“Colin took her to see the boys tonight.”
With a twinkle in his eye, Vito hummed the wedding march. “Bum, bum, bum, bum . . .”
“Where are we going?” Enza pulled her coat from the closet. “Do I need gloves?”
“And a hat.”
“Fancy?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m a very fancy girl,” Enza said.
“When did this happen?”
“There’s a gentleman who keeps taking me places. And now I can’t drink out of anything but Bavarian crystal, and if the caviar isn’t cold, I can’t eat it.”
“Poor you.”
“I’m afraid I’ll never see Hoboken again.”
“You can wave to it from the first-class cabin of the Queen Mary.”
Vito took Enza’s hand as they left the Met. He guided her west; Enza figured they were going to one of Vito’s favorite bistros in the theater district, intimate rooms with glazed brick walls, low lighting, and rare steaks on the table. Instead, he kept walking, taking her to the west-side docks at Thirty-eighth Street.
A massive construction site greeted them, a surface of gravel plowed smooth over river silt and mud. Dump trucks were parked by the river’s edge, while a cement mixer was angled near the street. There were stacks of steel beams, enormous wheels of tubing, bins of picks, and large shovels resting in wheelbarrows.
Enza waited on the ramp outside the construction booth while Vito ducked inside. Enza chuckled to herself. Vito was always planning an adventure. If he wasn’t renting out the Ferris wheel at Coney Island just for the two of them, he was taking her to speakeasies where the jazz was as smooth as the gin. Vito was a man who knew how to live, and he wanted everyone in his life to live it up. After a moment, Vito emerged with two tin hard hats. He handed her one.
She removed her hat and put on the hard hat. “You said it was fancy.”
“You wait,” he said.
Vito helped Enza into the outdoor elevator. He snapped the gate and pressed the button that would lift them to the top of the const
ruction site. Enza held her heart as the elevator ascended up into the night sky. She felt as if she was flying, though Vito had a firm grip on her. Soon the panorama at her feet changed, and she looked out over New York City at night, rolled out beneath them like a bolt of midnight blue silk moire staggered with crystals.
“What do you think?” Vito asked.
“I think you’re a magician. You pull things from the ordinary and turn them into magic.”
“There’s something I want to give you.”
“I think this view is plenty.”
“No, it’s not enough. I want to give you everything. I want to give you the world.”
“You already have.” Enza rested her head on his shoulder. “You’ve given me confidence and adventure. You’ve given me a new way of being.”
“And I want to give you more—” Vito pulled her close. “Everything I am. Everything I dream. And everything you could imagine. It would be my purpose and joy to make you happy. Will you marry me, Vincenza Ravanelli?”
Enza looked out over the shimmering lights of Manhattan. She couldn’t believe she had come this far, and climbed this high. She thought of a thousand reasons to say yes, but she only needed one. Vito Blazek would make sure she had fun. Life would be a party. After years of taking care of everyone else, Vito vowed to take care of her. Enza had worked hard, and now she was ready to experience life with a man who knew how to live.
“What do you say, Enza?”
“Yes! I say yes!”
Vito kissed her, her face, then her ear, then her neck.
He placed a round ruby surrounded by diamond chips on her hand. “The ruby is my heart, and the diamonds are you—you’re my life, Enza.” He kissed her, and she felt her body weaken in his arms. “I would make love to you right here, if you’d let me,” he whispered in her ear.
“I’m afraid of heights, Vito.”
“Will you change your mind on the ground?” he teased.
“Let’s get married first.” Enza had traveled far from home, but her parents’ hopes lived within her. She was a proper young woman, raised in a religious home by pious parents. She would continue to follow their rules, even though she had earned the right to make her own decisions long ago. Enza believed there was a beauty in the sacraments that brought grace to living. She wanted a life of refinement and serenity, and certainly Vito, with his grand vision of the future, understood that. He believed Enza deserved the best because she was, without a name, education, or position, the embodiment of true elegance. Her natural grace had been born in her. It could not have been manufactured or bought. It simply was.
The crisp autumn air was cold and sweet, like vanilla smoke. High above the city, Enza was no longer the Hoboken factory girl, but a hardworking American woman of Italian birth who had risen to a new station in life, a climb not to the second floor on the service stairs but to the penthouse via the elevator.
Enza would marry Vito Blazek.
As a team, these two young professionals, one an artisan, the other a liaison to the talent, would continue to work at the Metropolitan Opera House, eat breakfast at the Plaza Hotel, and dance at the Sutton Place Mews. They had fine friends; they wore silk, drank champagne, and knew where to buy peonies in the winter. They were on their way up.
Chapter 21
A GOLD BRAID
Una Treccia d’Oro
As Ciro stood on the deck of the SS Caserta, the Atlantic Ocean was the color of green carnival glass. In the distance the depths turned a charcoal gray as the waves ruffled the surface in iridescent silver.
This was an entirely different view than it had been upon his passage from New Haven almost two years ago. Ciro was now twenty-four years old, a veteran of the Great War. The family he once knew was gone, the mother he longed for still absent, and his only brother, his last connection to Vilminore di Scalve and his dream of a house on the mountain, had left the comfort of the ordinary world and become a priest.
Ciro’s desire to remain a lifelong confidant to Eduardo and an uncle to his brother’s unborn children had disappeared into the air like puffs of smoke from the urn of burning incense with which the cardinal blessed the seminarians, who were turned into men of God with a drop of holy oil.
Eduardo was a far better person than any of the priests that Ciro knew. Eduardo was generous where Don Martinelli was stingy and chaste where Don Gregorio was not. Eduardo had the best heart that Ciro had ever known—man or woman—fair, competent, and contemplative. The seeds of wisdom were planted deep within Eduardo, just as an appetite for life—good food and beautiful women—was planted deep in Ciro.
Ciro mourned Eduardo’s new life, because it meant that he had lost his brother for good. Perhaps they would see each other a few times in the decades to come. There would be letters, but they would be infrequent. For two boys who had been inseparable, two brothers who were completely simpatico, to lead such separate lives was a terrible sacrifice. Ciro couldn’t help but feel cheated by the church; after all, with the recommendation of Don Gregorio, it had broken up two brothers who were the only living family each had. So much for the healing love of the Sacred Heart.
Eduardo’s devotion to Ciro would now be given instead to the priests of the order of Saint Francis of Assisi, and whatever was left beyond that would go to the Holy Church of Rome. Eduardo had given up any possibility of finding a wife and making a family when he became a priest. Ciro had wanted so much more for his brother. He wished that Eduardo could know the comfort, ease, and abiding serenity that came from the company of a good woman, and how the appetite for love and its simple but glorious connections made a man seek more in the world, not less.
Ciro imagined that Eduardo would try to save the world one soul at a time, but why would he want to?
Before the war, Ciro had thought he too was capable of great things. But now, with the landscape of France carved up and scarred forever by the trenches, filled with the broken dead, Ciro wanted no part of government and the men who ran it. Rome had been a great disappointment to him. The Italians were losing their way, he thought. There was something fragile about his Italy now. The Italian people had been poor for so long, they no longer believed they had any power to change the country they lived in. Even in the wake of victory, they couldn’t see better times. They no longer believed these were possible. They would grasp the next ideology that came along, just as a drowning man grabs at any sliver of wood. Anything is better than nothing, the Italians would shrug, an attitude that cleared the way for despots and their reigns of cruelty, for wars and their blighted landscapes.
Ciro had learned that life was never better after a war, just different.
He would always long for the Italy he knew before the war. The borders were soft; Italians traveled to France without papers, Germans to Spain, Greeks to Italy. Nationalism had now replaced neighborliness.
As a soldier, Ciro had learned that good men can’t fix what evil men are intent on destroying. He had learned to choose what was worth holding on to, and what was worth fighting for. Every man had to decide that for himself, and some never did. He had not survived the Great War to return home the same man.
Ciro had faced death. This was when a man was most likely to turn to the angels for intercession. Instead, Ciro had turned inward. He’d endured moments of paralyzing fear. He’d felt dread deep in his bones when the scent of the mustard gas permeated the fields in the distance, a pungent blend of bleach and ammonia that at first note seemed like something decent and familiar, the garlic herb simmering in Sister Teresa’s kitchen pot, rather than a death warrant as the cloud of gas snaked its way to the trenches that formed a border across France.
He remembered diluting bleach and cleaning the crevices of old marble with a small brush to remove stains from the stone. That same scent, stronger and more pungent, would linger over the battlefield with a thick stillness. Sometimes Ciro would be relieved when the wind carried the poison away from the front instead of toward it. But he also learned that a
soldier could not count on anything—his commanding officer, his fellow infantrymen, his country, or the weather. He only had luck, or didn’t.
Ciro had discovered that he could go for days without much food; he’d learned to erase the image of a rare steak and potato, a glass of wine with purses of gnocchi and fresh butter, from his mind. Hunger too, it seemed had little to do with the body, but everything to do with the mind.
He didn’t imagine gathering eggs, as he had as a boy back at the convent, or the egg gently whisked in the cup with sugar and cream in Sister Teresa’s kitchen. He tried not to think of Sister Teresa, or write to her to pray for him. He was so hungry he did not want to imagine her in her apron, kneading sweet dough or chopping vegetables for stew. There was no comfort in happy memories; they just made it all seem worse.
Ciro had also thought every day at the front about women. What had soothed him in the past comforted him even more during the war. He remembered Sister Teresa in the convent kitchen at San Nicola, how she fed him and listened to him. He thought about Felicitá’s soft skin, the rhythm of her breath, the sleepy satisfaction that enveloped them after making love. He remembered women he had not met but had only seen on Mulberry Street. One girl, eighteen years old in a straw hat, had worn a red cotton skirt with buttons down the back from waist to hem. He thought about the curve of her calf and her beautiful feet, in flat sandals with one strap of pale blue leather between the toes, as she walked past the shoe shop. He imagined, over and over again, the power of a kiss, and he thought that if he made it out of these trenches, he would never take a single kiss for granted. A woman’s hand in his was a treasure; if he held one again, he would pay attention and relish the warm security of a gentle touch.
When his fellow soldiers visited a village known for their belles femmes, he’d made love to a girl with golden hair braided to her waist. Afterward, she had loosened her long braid and let him brush her hair. The image of her head bowed as he stroked her hair would stay with him for the rest of his life.
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