The Infinite Now

by Mindy Tarquini

  The old man scratched under his right cheek, at a mole near lost amid the fine-grained cracks of his skin. “Very modern. But those girls don’t get married.”

  “Who says I have to get married?”

  “Don’t you want children?”

  What did he care if I wanted children? What did anybody? The world had plenty of children. It’d do fine without mine. “You sound like Mamma.”

  “But not like your poppa.” He tied off a length of thread. “Do you speak English?”

  In those days, not everybody did. “Oh yes. I went to school. Poppa placed great importance on education.” I placed my hand over my heart, as the nuns had taught us, and swallowed to get my mouth ready to form all of English’s harsh angles. “I pledge allegiance to my flag . . .”

  I had been born in Italy, but I pledged to America, because to me, the bel paese, the beautiful country, was a distant tangle of torturous closed-in streets filled with dogs and donkeys and people. So many people. Living wall to wall, exploding out of every corner, filling every chair, crowding every fire, and scraping every last bean from the pot.

  I pledged to America, with an accent that still had plenty of trailing “uhs” and “ohs,” because my parents had scrimped and saved to make the long voyage. I pledged to America, because America was where my loyalties lay, where my hopes were forged, and where my dreams would realize. I pledged to America, because America was my future, and that pledge made me American, no matter what the immigration said.

  The old man listened to my recitation with a grave respect. “You may need to know that for the examination. For citizenship.”

  He glanced at the clock, then at the signora’s pile of mending. “So, Fiora Vicente, will you go to school today?”

  I headed out and into a hustle and bustle bountiful with possibility. School? Ha. I was a woman on my own, free of encumbrances, and I had ambitions.

  The trolley approached, trundling past storefronts and stalls. Each bore a poster reminding of the next day’s parade, the parade for which the tailor and his wife so busily prepared. I stepped aboard, handed my fare to the conductor, and found a place among the tight pack of people, my plan to head to parts of the city I’d never been. I’d stayed up late to peruse the classifieds in the old man’s newspaper and found a school that would teach me skills. Skills that would let me travel that trolley into the future, my braid looped into a twist at the back of my head, like the other typewriter girls.

  It was a beautiful day. Sunswept. Overflowing with life.

  And while I didn’t know it then, soon—swift, swift, swift—it would all steamroll to a stop.

  Four

  Saturday, September 28, Parade Day, dawned clear and cool. Planned for weeks, the parade was to launch the fourth issue of Liberty Loans. Without the money those loans generated, we were told, we couldn’t finance the war against the Kaiser. So everybody bought a subscription—Poppa had one, tucked somewhere in those papers the old man had checked—and everybody was going to the parade.

  Except, it seemed, the old man.

  I pointed to a lineup of shoes, half-disassembled. “Aren’t you going?”

  “No.”

  “But . . .” There would be bands and Boy Scouts and even a sham airplane battle fighting in the skies above Mifflin Street. Veterans and war workers marching shoulder to shoulder. Four Minute Men making short and stirring patriotic appeals to the spectators. To support our doughboys, beat back the Hun, and buy those Liberty Loans. A closed-in crowd, lining the banks of Broad Street. Singing the same songs. Shouting the same slogans.

  Breathing the same air.

  The old man removed a stitch. “The DiGirolamos ordered a new pair of shoes for their oldest and would like the rest resoled before Monday. They are bringing the children by so I can measure them before the parade begins.” He gave me an address. “Do you know where that is?”

  “Of course.” Mamma had been there a few days before she got sick.

  “Give the druggist my name. He will know what is needed. It’s already paid for. I meant to send Young Carlo, but perhaps Parade Day has him busy. Maybe you could go for me now.”

  The DiGirolamos were shuffling the shoes, passing them down, and putting away the smallest pair for the next baby. And the old man did not want me, Rosina Vicente’s daughter, making them nervous. I clutched at a brochure stuffed deep in my pocket and squeezed until my knuckles hurt. A brochure picked up during my disappointing journey downtown, a brochure detailing the high cost of typewriter school and how little time I had to earn enough money before the next session began.

  The old man handed me a few coins. “In case you get hungry.”

  I put the coins in my pocketbook, then shrugged into my coat and wrapped my scarf under my chin. “Be sure to deduct this money from what I gave you when I arrived.”

  He rapped the table, the angles along his cheekbones going sharp. “When I need your money, I’ll ask for it.”

  Somebody knocked at the door. The old man handed me another coin. “Pick out a couple of peppermints. If you like them.”

  I headed out, sparing the briefest of nods to the crowd that waited for entrance: a mamma, a poppa, and five children, two girls and three boys, the littlest no more than three.

  The parents shielded their children’s eyes from me.

  I caught the signora’s and signore’s gazes and held them.

  The old man had handed me money. For candy. So I could be gotten out of the way. And then I went and did the thing he most wanted me not to do.

  I raced down the stairs, chagrin charging after. And ran headlong into the pregnant girl. She stepped aside, hand held protectively over a bulge rising beneath her apron like dough on a summer day. She smelled of fresh bread and roses, and I wondered when the baby was due. Soon, I supposed.

  I couldn’t ask. She’d think I was putting a curse on her.

  I dropped my gaze, ashamed to have given her a fright, ashamed of my behavior with the DiGirolamos, like maybe she’d seen and worried I’d hurt her.

  She retreated to her apartment, rapping on the jamb to get my attention. She gave me a shy smile, then closed the door with a solid click. I continued down, my pace more sedate. Something whizzed past my nose and crashed into the wall beside me.

  A wooden biplane, the kind powered by a rubber band.

  I picked it up. “You can come out now,” I said good and loud— much like the tone Mamma would use—to let the little troublemakers know I had no intention of moving until they did.

  Something rustled in the open space beneath the stairs, a place I’d noticed the tailor’s family had commandeered for storage. I peeked around the railing.

  Two well-dressed urchins plastered themselves against the wall beside a collection of galoshes. The tailor’s children, I presumed. I held up the airplane. “Is this yours?”

  The younger one pointed to his brother, coal-colored gaze directed into mine. “He did it.”

  “It was an accident.” The older grabbed a hunk of his brother’s dark-brown mop and tilted his head down. “Don’t. Mamma said.”

  Don’t look the girl on the third floor in the eyes. Don’t let her look into yours. If you do she will steal your soul.

  The little one swept his brother’s hand off his hair. “Stop. Maybe she’s the good witch.”

  I didn’t know much about children. Few people let the fortune-teller or her daughter near theirs. We’re fine for telling them if they would find a husband, or if their future would be bright, but there was the uncooked side of the crespelle, the assumption anybody who can see so clearly may see more than they should, and may use that knowledge against them. The part of me I kept tight-wound and secret, the part too wrapped up in myself to understand the boys were parroting the behavior they’d been taught, wanted to grab both by the chins, force them to look me in the eye. “Good witch?”

  “Like in the book.” The bigger one brought it from behind his back.

  I knew that book, kne
w the green cover. We’d read it in school. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

  The smaller boy took the book and paged through. He pointed to an illustration of the Emerald City, rising beyond a field of scarlet poppies. “Someday, we will fly an airplane there.”

  The older one put a hand over the illustration. “Don’t be ridiculous. We can’t fly there. Poppa says this kind of book isn’t real.”

  Poppa sounded very practical. “You read English?”

  The older boy shook his head. “The lady on the second floor does. She gave us that book.”

  I handed him the airplane. “Next time, watch where you launch this. Somebody might get hurt.” I slipped out the side exit. I wasn’t the good witch. I was Dorothy, tossed out of my familiar surrounds by an act of nature. Still, the little one’s generous estimation had me turning right at our stoop, to avoid upsetting Signora Lattanzi by casting my shadow on the window of the tailor’s shop. I headed to the heart of the market, careful not to catch my heel on the trolley tracks.

  The market seemed twice as busy as it had the day before, bustling by at double speed: a hailing whistle, answering shout, the rappa-tat-tat as one merchant after another dragged out metal poles to raise their awnings.

  Banners draped across storefronts, celebrating the parade, celebrating the Sons of Italy, celebrating our part in this great American achievement. Naval workers, shipbuilders, welders, riveters, craftsmen, laborers from every corner of my homeland, the end of the war in their sights, and working day and night to bring that day forward, finish our tasks so our boys could finish theirs. And come home.

  Already, trash blew down the alleys. Pyramids of honey jars and canned tomatoes, peach preserves and sweet potatoes beckoned, the air redolent with spicy sausage and Parmesan. Merchants in billed caps and ladies in aprons, skirts swishing, were eager to conclude their business before the procession started on Broad Street. They leaned over their boxes and crates, calling to passersby dressed in Sunday clothes, starched and ironed to hold their shape, how their quality was high, their prices the best.

  This was a simpler time, when even the window stiles were made one by one in a factory peopled with men, not machines. The parade was a major event. Anticipation swelled like overcooked lentils, squeezing me past barbers. Lacemakers. Confectioners. Flower sellers.

  I applied at them all, or so it seemed, moving from shop to stall to stand. At each, the excuse was the same: Business is slow. Maybe next week. Talk to me in a month.

  “But you have a sign saying you’re looking for help.” I pointed, again and again, to where the sign was posted: in a window, tacked to a table, by the register.

  Smack of palm to head. “How silly of me to leave it there. I filled that position last week, last night, this morning.”

  And always the averted eyes, the whispers behind hands, the veiled politeness, despite the need for help because of the worker shortage caused by the war and the influenza.

  Finally, finally, the fishmonger seemed tempted. “Don Sebastiano is a friend, but . . .” He rubbed at his neck, “I need somebody more permanent.”

  “I will be here a long time. Even if the war ends tomorrow, it will be months before my brothers return.”

  “Women always say that, but look at my daughter. I thought she’d stay close, be here to help in the shop, then she married and she and her husband moved to Camden.”

  He went back to his work.

  I pushed on, but the spring went out of my step, the stuffing out of my spunk. Shoppers swept past me, an outgoing tide heading for Broad Street. Band music wafted down the cross streets.

  A group of boys wrestled a cart along the road, the wheels picking up speed as momentum bumped them over the cobbles. A little girl separated from the crowd and darted past me. I didn’t think, not like in a real thought, “Oh, I’ll go do that now,” after I weighed all the options, pro and con. A deeper part of my brain determined my next action, a part which calculated the little girl would enter the street exactly when the cart moved past. A calculation which responded with reflex. A reflex that grabbed the girl by the skirt, and dragged her back from the curb. A reflex that would have left her on the curb while I moved on except the girl looked up at me with big dark eyes very much like the tailor’s sons, and I thought as I had with them, Kids don’t think much past their noses. “Careful,” I told her. “You’ll get run over.”

  A woman pulled the girl from my hands so hard, the little girl’s doll dropped to the sidewalk. The woman buried the girl’s face in her skirts. “Did you say she’d get run over?”

  I had, so I saw no reason for agreeing. The woman crossed herself. She spit over her left shoulder, then addressed a clot of people standing around a nearby stall. “Rosina Vicente’s daughter said my daughter would get run over. My little Grazia. Run over. God forbid. And after what happened to Rosina Vicente.”

  People turned, stared, muttered to one another, stared some more. Grazia’s mother extended her pinky and forefinger to make the sign of the horn. Protection from the evil eye. From me.

  My mother’s reputation descended. My spirit shrouded, my appetite to join the festivities quashed. What did the everyday people have to do with me? I was like the curtain, separated from them by superstition and fear.

  My gaze swept the receding throng, seeking something to distract me from my awful solitude, and picked out a display of apples piled prettily in wooden boxes under a green-striped awning. Last of the local harvest, in a week, maybe two, they’d be coming in from places with names like Georgia, and Carolina, and prices would double. I thought of the cinnamon sticks in a tin on the metal shelf behind the old man’s stove, the jar of cloves beside, and picked out six large fruits of variegated red and yellow. I could cook them down like Mamma used to, serve them on a cold autumn evening, maybe not feel so alone.

  The signore held up seven fingers. I shook my head and held up two. The signore dropped the hand holding two. A second later, he folded the thumb on the other hand, then added two more apples to the purchase.

  Perhaps he felt bad for not hiring me. Or thought I deserved some recognition for saving the girl from the cart. He dropped the apples into a paper bag, and I counted out the coins, leaving them by the cashbox, lest my fingers touch his palm.

  Hooves clip-clopped over the cobbles. The signore slid his cap off his head. The din of pushcarts and peddlers, deal making and dickering quieted. Even the breeze dropped off. A wagon trundled past, three boxes, one atop the other two stacked in its back, their shapes unmistakable—coffins.

  The murmuring picked up. A lady examining a display of handkerchiefs crossed herself. “And on Parade Day. How could they?”

  The grocer’s wife drew her children close. A man at the stall beside muttered something to his friend. He nodded in my direction.

  One by one the bystanders fixed on me. Nervous. Wary. Their silent accusation pressing in. My heart went heavy and my feet sore, but I couldn’t return to the old man yet. I still had his errand to complete. I moved on toward the pharmacy, one block, then two, wishing I were back in my attic, back with Mamma’s curtain, wanting to lay my forehead on its smooth black velvet. And cry.

  A snatch of song pulled my self-pity up short. A bit of opera beloved by my poppa. I turned and found myself staring into eyes of the lightest blue, an unusual color, even in our village, which had many blue-eyed men. These shone like sunlight on the Adriatic, or how I imagined the Adriatic to be from Poppa’s stories, with green and yellow flecks near the pupil and irises rimmed in indigo. The eyes were large and honest and perfectly distributed on either side of a strong nose above lips, full and smooth, set into a face the color of cappuccino.

  Beautiful eyes, housing a beautiful soul, a soul filled with music, and truth, and the conviction life is best when lived.

  An eternity passed. Then another. I tore my gaze from his, turned to continue on my way. And tripped on a cobblestone.

  The grocer’s bag flew from my hand. The apples scattered. I
dove after them.

  The young man dropped his satchel and dove after them, too, corralling one after the other. He returned the fruit to their bag, helped me up from the sidewalk, his fingers strong and sure around mine. He gathered them close.

  “What cold little hands,” he said, echoing the Puccini he’d been singing, then released me and gave the apple bag back. He slid his cap off a shock of soft curls, brown as dried fava beans, and bowed, foot extended, an exaggerated arm across his midsection. “I am at your service, Fiora Vicente.”

  He straightened, hoisted the satchel back onto his shoulder, and went about his business, whistling a happy tune. I watched his progress through the crowd streaming its way toward the parade, my jaw agape, so dumbfounded he’d spoken to me when no other would, I never wondered how he knew my name.

  The bell over the pharmacy entrance jingled. The sign tacked to the door clattered:

  HALT THE HUN.

  OUR BOYS DEPEND ON YOU.

  YOUR LIBERTY BOND SUBSCRIPTION PAYMENTS CAN BE RECEIVED HERE.

  The druggist, mouth and nose white-masked against the influenza, looked up. “Yes?”

  “Don Sebastiano sent me. I am here to pick up his order.” I peeked around a display for cough drops and cold elixirs. “I am also looking for work. I’ll stock shelves. Mop. Do windows. Anything.”

  A white-masked lady swept over before the druggist answered. “But you are so much more talented than that, aren’t you, little one?”

  Behind the woman’s eyes, dark and doe-shaped and twinkly as stars at midnight, lay a bed of moss, soft and spongy, begging me to come forth, find a comfortable spot within, and yield all my secrets. I shook myself. “Who are you?”

  She tapped a finger to my brow, soft and smooth and smelling of cinnamon. “Silly, you already know.”

  Suddenly, I did. “You’re the guaritrice.”

  The village healer.

  The apples of her cheeks lifted, and even though she wore the mask, I knew the lady smiled. I also knew her teeth were white and even and her cheeks dimpled. She put a finger to where her lips would be. “We don’t talk about such traditional things here. This is America.” She tapped a finger to her temple. “Only modern thinking.”