Useful.
The tailor’s wife was a robust woman, with cheeks chunkier than a chipmunk’s. Her skirt was dark enough for a funeral, twice the necessary width, and so out-of-style my fingers ached to transform it into the modern slim-fitted fashion. I told her so, adding, “I’ll sew the extra material into a very useful sack. Suitable to stuff things, starting with your bluster.”
The tailor’s wife took on the look of somebody who needed to eat more roughage. She stepped toward me, and I thought I might get to make good on my offer, but the old man stepped between us. He led the signora onto the landing, his voice conspiratorial and constricted.
I tried, I really did, even stooping to put my ear to the keyhole, but I couldn’t hear a thing.
The church tolled the seventh hour. I reached for the old man’s Big Ben, the move reflexive, and wound it.
The old man stepped back inside, cloth piled under his arm. The left side of his mouth took a downturn. He took the clock from me and set it on the table. “What were you doing?”
Every answer seemed obvious, so I kept them to myself.
He handed me the pile of cloth. “Mending. With the parade only two days away, the Lattanzis cannot keep up. The signora will pay you what her customers pay her if you will help them keep their good reputation.”
I flashed on Poppa’s upholstery scissors, as long as my forearm and worth the earth, lying on Mamma’s kitchen table beside his box of threads and cording, forfeited in the landlord’s haste to evict me. A flash of the dress form in the old man’s attic, the piles of fabric, followed. The old man seemed to apprehend my train of thought because he pointed to a basket on the bench. “You can’t do proper work without proper tools. My wife was a seamstress. You may use hers until we get back your own.”
“But . . .”
“What the landlord did was illegal. What’s yours is yours. Maybe this afternoon, we will take a walk and speak with him.”
“He said it was to pay for the extra days.”
“Why didn’t you pay him from the money you had?”
“Poppa told me rents are climbing everywhere. If the landlord had known about the money, he’d have charged me for every little thing until it was gone and put me out anyway.”
That made the old man smile. It crinkled across his face like crepe fabric across a doorway, the corners stretching all the way to his eyes. He set a bottle of milk on the table, the cream layered at the top. “It’s chilly today. I’ll warm this for you.”
I now know he meant to be kind, but at the time he made me feel like a baby needing a bottle. I half-expected him to hand me a bib.
We ate sliced bread and espresso, mine swimming in the warmed milk. Then we worked.
Hem. Button. Button. Button. Another hem. Patch. Torn pocket. Pulled lining. Frayed collar. Cuff. Every stitch even, as regular as the old man’s Big Ben. Every stitch money in the pocket, a pebble on the path toward freedom. I tied off a knot.
The tailor’s wife had found me on the street corner, teeth chattering, my coat soaked through. She was the only one of the dozens who passed me who stopped to ask if I were okay. Because none of them saw a girl in need, all they saw was somebody who could be a threat to their family.
Not Signora Lattanzi. She saw me as somebody who could be a threat if she didn’t help me. Maybe her thinking went against her. I was doing her work, earning her money, because the old man told her. Because she didn’t dare refuse. Because she called him don. I tied off another knot.
I bet she was sorry she didn’t take a different route home that night.
The Big Ben’s seconds ticked into minutes, the minutes into hours. The sun climbed. I envisioned it streaming into my attic as the moon had on the previous night, unfettered, without direction, the light splashing across the slope on the opposite wall.
Button. Button. I bet the signora would collect an extra nickel on each repair. An extra nickel wasn’t much. The old man would never know.
Seam. Hem. Button.
I stood. “If we do go back, I need my mother’s curtain.”
I put down my needle and went downstairs to use the toilet.
The landlord proved reluctant, rubbing at a poorly washed ear. “She took what she could carry. I am not a warehouse. It seemed fair. Her parents should have been in the hospital. It cost me plenty to disinfect the place after she left.” His gaze slid over the top of my head, then down my side to my shoes. He put out his hands. “Had I known she’d go to you, Don Sebastiano . . .”
“You could have taken her to the Holy Sisters, or spoken to the priest.”
“I am a busy man. She’s old enough to take herself and I told her so. But she insisted her brothers were coming.”
Exasperation opened my mouth. “My brothers are coming. The moment the war is over they will return.”
“Return? How? They are fighting with the Italians.”
“What do you mean how? On a ship, same as everybody.” The sound of squabbling, high-pitched and tinny, wafted from his open door. I tilted my head, eyes narrowed, shoulders tensed. “You have children?”
Silly question, my family had lived there since before my brothers went to fight in the war. Of course I knew he had children. And of course he knew I knew.
He jerked back, like I was delivering bad news. He partway closed the door until only his bulbous nose and beady eyes, perched atop the middle rectangle of his body, were visible. “I only meant . . . your brothers are in the Isonzo, no?”
The old man laid a hand on my hair. “Fiora, wait outside. I will settle things here.”
“But my mother’s curtain.”
The landlord sucked in a breath, his neck going bulgy around the top button of his collar. “Impossible. The apartment is already rented.”
“Fiora.” The old man’s voice grew stern. “Please.”
He disappeared into the landlord’s apartment. I climbed the stairs, as I used to, two at a time with a little kick-step on the third bounce.
Go to the Holy Sisters. I can imagine the reception I’d have receive there. They’d have gone through my things, Mamma’s things, with much muttering of prayers and pleas to the Virgin. The items they didn’t understand they’d have tossed on the fire.
The moment the war was over, my brothers would return. They’d march up the steps to the old man’s attic, medals bright across their chests, and want to see our mother’s curtain.
I stood outside the door, the door that led to my home until the landlord closed it on me and shoved me down the stairs.
My brothers were brave. So brave. Something quavered above my breastbone.
I wanted to be brave, too. I knocked on the door.
A signora answered in a haze of tomato gravy. She was young and tired-looking with a baby on one arm, a wooden spoon in the opposite hand, and two little ones clutching at her skirt. She looked past me when she answered. Up the stairs, and down. Like maybe she’d expected somebody else.
No. Not expected. Worried. “Can I help you?”
“I used to live here,” I told her. “I left a curtain in the bedroom.”
“The beautiful velvet one? With the embroidery?” Dismay filled her voice, whiny and weak. A flush crept past her collar. “But the landlord told me . . .”
“It doesn’t matter what the landlord told you.”
“Of course it matters. That curtain goes with the lease. It will cost a week’s rent to replace it. Food from my children’s mouths.”
A week’s rent. A month’s rent. A year would not replace what that curtain meant to me. I peeked past her to a kitchen in the midst of meal preparations, then grabbed hold of her arm. “It will cost you a lot more to keep it. Your husband is fighting in the war, correct?”
The signora stepped back, like the landlord, her expression shifty and suspicious. “How could you know that?”
Because dinner was on the table and there was no plate at the table’s head. “Because the signora who lived here before you was Rosina Vicent
e.”
The signora’s hand flew to her mouth.
I didn’t care. That signora slept in Mamma’s room, cooked on Mamma’s stove, ate at Mamma’s table. Mamma’s curtain hung surrounded by objects it did not recognize, handled by people it did not know. Dormant. And dangerous.
Besides, Mamma always said I liked to be dramatic.
“Nobody is blaming you,” I lied, letting my voice get resonant and round, “but I must have that curtain. My name is Fiora. Rosina Vicente was my mother. The curtain was her burden, now it is mine. Because I’m the fortune-teller’s daughter.”
Almost as ancient as the land that birthed it, Mamma’s curtain was black, of the heaviest velvet, and embroidered over in signs and symbols that shifted with the circumstances. Mystical shapes, mysterious markings. Restitched and patched the moment a thread frayed, or color faded.
The curtain told stories, of yesterday and today, tomorrow and beyond. Stories not of when, but if, not why, but how. Stories of the heart, the soul, that moved to a unique rhythm, sang a unique song, and swelled into an imagining reserved for the angels.
Or so Mamma always said.
The old man and I left the landlord with the curtain folded under my arm and the landlord’s promise he’d send the rest of my belongings. I walked beside the old man, my manner solemn, bearer of the burden, all but bursting to be back in the attic, get the curtain hung, and see if I could make it work.
I couldn’t.
The curtain refused to cooperate, making the rod droop under its weight.
So I nailed it to the window frame, first to one side, then the other. The first nail fell. So did the second. I tried again, using two nails to a side. And again, using three.
The old man took back the shoemaker’s hammer. “Next time, ask permission before you use my tools.” He studied the setup. “This rod is iron, plenty strong to hold the material. The supports need reinforcement.”
He went to work, turning screws deep into the studs. I fumed, nostrils flared, embarrassed I hadn’t thought of the simple solution myself.
Ten minutes later, the old man stepped back to admire his handiwork. The knotty place inside my stomach unwound, giving my relief somewhere to settle. “The curtain fits.”
It didn’t always.
Iron grommets spiraled at set intervals from the curtain’s center, each fitted with a flap, which, when buttoned, prevented even the tiniest bit of light from exiting its aperture.
The old man traced one of the grommets.
I reached past him and undid most of the flaps, repeating the explanation I’d heard Mamma give the few times a visitor strayed into her bedroom and caught a glimpse. “To let in the light, but maintain privacy.” I raised the window sash an inch. The breeze set the curtain fluttering. Sun-filled pinpoints danced across the room. “See? Like fairy lights.”
The old man didn’t find what I said adorable, didn’t say, “How charming,” the way the biddies who came to Mamma for advice always did. Instead, he closed the flaps, spiraling down, outer to inner, heading toward the centermost grommet.
The fairy lights dimmed, one by one.
I fixated on his fingers in the artificial dusk, how his pinky and ring finger crabbed, and waited on the coming night, but the old man did not close off the centermost grommet. He stepped away.
The room stopped its descent into twilight. The light entering the final grommet strengthened, concentrated by the single aperture.
My heart did a thumpety-thump louder than any Big Ben. I’d had no idea, would never have thought it possible. How could more come from less? Light from darkness? I swiped by my ear, confused by a low-pitched buzzing sound. We were almost to October. It was too late for mosquitoes. Drawn by an incomprehensible pull, I turned away from the curtain. And caught my breath.
A projection of the Ninth Street Market splashed across the opposite wall. Every cobble exact, every roofline distinct, every red-and-orange-turning treetop bright in autumn sunshine.
Except upside-down and reversed, the signs all backward, like the old man and I stood on our heads, scarves dragging across the trolley tracks and feet in the clouds.
I traced the outline of the grocer’s awning, sweeping upward like a giant coal bin beneath piles of tomato and zuchetta squash fixed to crates suspended from tables which appeared tacked to the ceiling. I placed my palm over the single grommet; the scene disappeared into the dark. I opened a second grommet; the scene bleached to nothingness. I returned to the single aperture, watched the scene again develop, and remembered something. “This isn’t magic. It’s science. I learned about it at school. That single grommet is like the lens on a camera.” I patted the ceiling slope. “And this wall is like the film.”
“I know the principles.” The old man crossed to the curtain’s far end and peered into the topmost corner. An upside-down cat curled beside an upside-down barrel. He traced along the cat’s back. The cat arched, like it could feel the old man’s touch.
I went to stand behind the old man. The mosquito buzzing swelled to a swarm. I traced along the cat’s back, too. Nothing happened. “How did you do that?”
The old man studied me for what felt like a forever minute. “You have no idea how to use this, do you?”
The buzzing stopped, along with my wonderment. Thorny prickles of indignation clawed their way up my throat. “Do you?”
Three
The next morning I spent ten lazy minutes watching the upside-down market wake with me—vendors setting out stalls, carts making deliveries, street cleaners and cops making their rounds. Ten minutes stretched into twenty, and would have stretched into thirty, except my stomach grumbled. Loud.
I hopped out of bed and got in close to the projection. The cat from yesterday had returned, sleeping beside a barrel. I ran a finger along its projected back, as the old man had done, but the cat didn’t react. I tapped the wall beside its projected paw. The cat didn’t stir. I poked my nose right next to its projected whiskers. “Boo.”
The cat slumbered on.
I opened the curtain and let sunshine displace my discontent.
What the old man knew about the curtain, he’d kept to himself. I dressed and headed downstairs, determined to wheedle the information out of him.
He sat at his workbench, face drawn, shoulders drooping, like he’d lined his sleeves with iron. He shook a pill from a paper packet and slid it under his tongue.
Something cold and crampy clamped my midsection. “Are you sick?”
He swept his opened palm over his forehead, down his cheek, and across his mouth, an actor donning his mask for the performance. He slipped the packet into his shirt pocket. “Sometimes, I get a little tired.”
He turned over the newspaper at his elbow, hiding a headline which started with the word DISASTRO, then slid a plate of polenta— left over from the previous night’s dinner and provided by the tailor’s wife—across the table. I shoveled piece after piece into my mouth, my mood again set to a rolling and optimistic boil.
The old man watched me, fork suspended over his plate. I looked to my blouse, ran a hand down my braid, searching an undone button, a ribbon trailing in the cream, some reason for his scrutiny. “What is it?”
“I went through your father’s papers last night. I cannot find his Petition of Intent. That’s the document he would file to say he intended to become a citizen.”
It felt odd to hear the old man speak English. “How do you say it?”
“Pe-ti-shun a In-ten.” He found a pencil among the flotsam on the table and wrote the words on the top of a box of tacks. He showed them to me. “I can write the immigration and ask if your father ever filed one, but if I do, they will know about you.”
I stopped dribbling honey into my bowl. “Know what?”
“That you are orphaned. With the Petition of Intent, that is not a problem. You could take the test for yourself and make your own oath of citizenship. Without it, you cannot make a claim until you are twenty-one. But I do not k
now what would happen in the meantime, and I do not want to ask anybody. You have no guardian, and they may move you.”
He meant to an orphanage. I’d read about them in stories. There’d be many girls, our hair tied with bows starched stiffer than our pinafores. We’d sleep, one cot after the other, like a tray of canneloni. Eat at tables arranged in rows. Stand in orderly files, littlest to biggest, when prospective parents came to look us over.
The prospective parents decided me. “You could be my guardian.”
“I am an old man and I am not a relative.”
“Then my brothers. Everybody says the war will be over soon. If we write to them, they can say you can take care of me until then.”
“I already wrote to them. Yesterday, before you were up. Young Carlo took the letter to the war office for me.”
Young Carlo. Probably a neighbor kid. “I won’t be a bother. You’ll see. I’ll cook and clean.”
“You can cook?”
“Not a lot.” Not at all. What for? Mamma had done all the cooking. “But I could learn. All kinds of things. I could even iron your clothes.”
The old man shoved aside dishes still sitting on the table from the night before. I snatched them, circumscribed a wide arc around the signora’s pile of mending, and set the dishes in a sink already piled to overflowing. I turned on the tap.
He arranged a set of spats, their buttonholes stretched and useless. He placed them inside out, lay snippets of leather over the holes, I presumed for reinforcement, then threaded a needle, one that curved more than his pinky. “Signor Lattanzi irons my clothes. He has a press downstairs in his shop.”
The heat crept up my neck, reminding me of what I might do with an old scarf. I looked to the door, picturing the tailor’s wife on the other side, listening, as I had.
Pompous old pincushion. Let her iron clothes. I was meant for bigger things. “Poppa wanted me to take a secretarial course. So many girls are learning the typewriter now. They dress up every day and go to offices. I see them sometimes. They take the trolley.”
The Infinite Now Page 2