“Because I was planning to go with my aunt. She lives in Coatesville. Her husband worked in the mine, but there was an accident and he died, so now it is only her and my little cousin. She owns her house, and we always got on well, but . . .”
“But what?”
“But . . .” She picked up another ball of dough and slapped it to the marble. “Don Sebastiano says I shouldn’t bring life into a house so soon after someone has passed. He says time needs to find a new path after a great upheaval.”
Nonsense. “He was being philosophical.” The nuns at my school had loved philosophical.
“Maybe so, but when Don Sebastiano makes a suggestion, it is a good idea to take it.”
“Everybody seems to think that.”
The pregnant girl moved her hands toward her, fingers splayed, like she was gathering in the pieces. “Including Nicco.”
Men. Even when they think they know something, they don’t know anything. I cast about the room, looking for something, anything to distract the conversation, and latched onto a camera, what we called a Brownie, sitting on a shelf hanging on the wall behind a doily-covered parlor chair.
The Brownie was supposed to be affordable, a camera for everybody, but up until then I’d only seen one in magazines. I snatched it up, ran a finger along its stitched leather casing, along the slider the ads claimed I only needed to push to expose a frame. The lens, so like the grommets on Mamma’s curtain, the light flowing through the aperture. The image of the pregnant girl, her floured palm prints on her apron, captured on the film. A moment in time. Enshrined forever.
I held the camera and turned toward her.
She put her hands out, palms forward. “No. Don’t take a photo. It might be bad luck. Nicco says that camera is for taking photographs of the baby.”
Nicco sure had plenty to say for a guy who wasn’t even there. “Fine. We’ll take photographs after the baby is born, then. We’ll go to Atlantic City. Take a dozen photos for Nicco. The ocean is good for babies. The air is healthy.”
Her fingers moved over the rectangles, giving each a pinch to make the butterfly. They reminded me of little birds, pecking in the ground for seeds. “I can’t think about that right now. Maybe after the baby is born. Maybe when the war is over. Maybe when Nicco comes home. Maybe maybe maybe. Life is filled with so many maybes. So many wants and wishes.”
Her sentiment reached me from a far-off place, carried on a voice cloying and convincing and nothing like hers. I flicked at my ear. “What you can wish for, you can make true. Whatever you like.”
She tossed a handful of the strange wheat and rice mixture we had to use for baking in those days onto the marble. Dust rose in a happy puff. “Right now, I’d settle for some decent flour. I’ll swear the grocer’s substituting his wheat ration with talc. I don’t know if I should cook with it, or sprinkle it over my skin after a bath.”
I sneezed, then sneezed again, trying to keep both to the right, so the luck I was expelling would remain good.
She buried her face in a towel and sneezed with me. “My parents are still in Italy. I wish they could be here. I imagine what that would be like, all of us gathered around the table, talking about the future. Nicco says he will help them come over, but they don’t want to leave. My cousin told us he would care for them, but he is in the army, with the Italians, like your brothers, and with all the rumors . . .” Her hand flew to her mouth.
My heart hitched. “What rumors?”
“Oh. Nothing. With all the fighting, people go on about every little thing and I go on more than any of them. My grandmother used to tell me my tongue is like an unbridled horse.” She sat beside me, leaned toward me in a conspiratorial way. “I am a silly, fearful girl. My mother would be so ashamed. I bring you here, offer you coffee, hoping to attach a string. But I have no right.”
“Right to what?”
“Every little thing worries me these days.” She patted her stomach. “This little one more than anything. Will he be healthy? Will he be strong? Will I be a good mother? Will he even be a boy? The doctor can’t tell me. Nobody can. Except maybe you?” She said the last in a rush. “I . . . I can’t pay you. Except, possibly, in pasta.”
She was so earnest, so innocent, her offer of friendship so sincere. Never had I shared a confidence with another as I had with her. Mamma had warned against it. “You never know who might be listening.”
The girl put her palms on her cheeks. “Take the pasta, anyway. I make so much because I’m not supposed to eat it. I’m getting fat.” She threw her hands in the air. “My mother told me the only time a woman can eat all she wants is when she is having a baby, and the doctor tells me I shouldn’t.” She tapped her head, the movement exaggerated so I would know she was imitating me, and she was only doing it in fun. “Modern thinking.”
I put my hand over hers in the companionable way I’d seen Mamma do so many times. The girl’s hand was soft, but strong, and I wished I could gather it close as the young man in the market had mine. I concentrated, but all I got was a glimmer around her edges, peaceful, and . . . powerful.
I released her.
She clenched at the collar of her shirtwaist, her eyes taking on the alarm of a trapped rabbit. “What is it?”
“Nothing. I got a cramp.” I flexed and unflexed my fingers, uncertain what to make of the jolt that had coursed through them, then stood and gathered my scarf. “Do not worry. About anything. I am not my mother, but sometimes I get an idea. If I do, I will let you know.”
She let go of her collar. “Then I will wait, Fiora Vicente. And be patient.”
I was back upstairs and in my attic before I realized. She knew my name, but never offered hers.
Mamma said the power in her curtain rose with the sun. “For the light exposes everything.” I put a finger on the thick velvet and traced a pattern of leafless branches in the lower left corner that sometimes reminded me of summer, sometimes of autumn, then closed the flaps as had the old man, spiraling through, outer to inner, as he had done, the room darkening with each closure, until the last final miracle when sunlight expanded through the final aperture to splash the upside-down market at midday across the opposite wall.
Now what?
Swish of the finger, twist of the wrist . . . who had said that? I searched my memory, found nothing. No matter. I tried.
Swish. Twist. Swish. Twist.
Swish and . . .
TWIST.
Nothing.
Mamma used to tell me, “Approach the simplest of acts with great purpose, imbued with your deepest emotions, and you will have success. All else can wait. Except burning food and crying babies.”
Beautiful words. Useless words. How does one see the future when the present feels so hopeless?
I crossed to the wall, my shadow looming in the light entering from the grommet, noting, without noticing, how the upside-down clock in the fishmonger’s upside-down window and Mamma’s Big Ben here in the attic showed the same time. I pressed myself to the plaster, the attic’s behatted and fabric-covered dress form to my right and a projection of the grocer and his stand to my left, and imagined myself part of the scene. Imagined myself seeing as Mamma had, concentrating on the pregnant girl, on her baby, on what might happen next.
Big Ben ticked off a minute. Then another. Five minutes that felt like ten.
I grew twitchy. No great purpose propelled me, no deep emotion drove my act. Just a desire to please my new friend, and a vague notion somehow, someway, Mamma’s curtain would help me where Mamma hadn’t.
The wall remained hard, the plaster cold. I rubbed at my temples, head achy, cheeks hot, wishing I’d told the pregnant girl no.
No. I cannot tell when you will deliver, have no idea if the baby will be healthy, haven’t a clue whether it’s a boy or a girl. And as to your mothering abilities, the only thing certain is you would be better than me. A turnip would be better than me.
Me. Rosina Vicente’s daughter.
Unremarkable. Un
gifted. Unable to look at a sky filling with clouds and predict so much as a rainy day.
All my talk of typewriting school and train trips to the seashore.
I couldn’t even get a job sweeping floors.
I smacked at the projection, aiming my frustration at a collection of crates stacked alongside the grocer’s upside-down stand. I hit the wall hard, my fist seeming to sink into the plaster. A shiver, like electricity, hopscotched up my arm.
A clatter, a crash, another clatter like a giant game of dominoes, clackety-clackety-clacked beside me. I whirled, my hand coming away from the plaster with a sucking sound. The dress form was fine, standing prim and proper, but in the projection, something had changed. The collection of crates, stacked so neatly, had toppled, scattered in a confusion beside the grocer’s stall.
Coincidence. Somebody must have happened by while I wasn’t looking. Except I noticed something strange. The fishmonger’s clock, the one in his window, showed a time five minutes further along than Mamma’s, like it had moved two minutes for my every one. Pushed by my impatience.
I shook out my shoulder, snatched up the Big Ben. And checked again.
Impossible.
“Everything is possible, Fiora. Except for all that is not.”
“Mamma?” I swung around, expecting to see her, hands on hips, dark waves coiled atop her head, their red highlights glinting in sunlight the same way she always said mine did. I looked up, presuming Mamma would tower, though, in life, she stood an inch shorter than me, even in shoes.
The attic was empty.
But I was not alone.
Something laughed at my elbow. Strident. And shrill. And not at all friendly.
I bolted for the stairs, Mamma’s Big Ben in hand, and out the old man’s door, leaving my coat, my hat, and the last of my composure. I hurled myself down the steps and onto the street, into the scene that danced across the walls of my attic, except three-dimensional and right-side-up and stinking of horseshit and straw.
The grocer’s stand looked as it had, a collection of crates stacked to its side.
I headed over, meaning to examine the stack. See if it matched the specifications I’d noted when I first saw it in the projection, for height and twist and order of the crates, six in all, with the topmost upended sideways into the fifth.
A crack, and a thud, like the sound of a fist smacking plaster, stopped me shy of the trolley tracks. The grocer whipped around. He threw up his hands. I followed his gaze.
The collection of crates had toppled, just as they had in the attic. Mamma’s Big Ben pinged.
I held the clock to my chest and did a few calculations. How many readings? How much should they pay? How fast could I get the curtain working the way I wanted?
I was going to make a fortune.
The old man ate early that evening, scooping beans into his mouth with the same precise movements he used to cut shoe leather. I watched, looking for the least indication anything other than a collection of crates had toppled, worried because I did not use things properly.
I cleared the dishes, accidentally knocking over the first in a file of shoes, each beside its shoe form, lined up at the table’s end. I set the footwear back into place. Red descended in a choking cloud. The cloud spread out until it filled all my vision and made obvious the sound of sobbing, deep, heaving gasps. I snatched my hand back.
The old man looked up. “What did you see?”
“See? Nothing. I . . . I thought the DiGirolamos wanted these today.”
He picked up the shoe, ran a finger along the buttons, his face pensive. “They did, but Carlo forgot. He’ll deliver them tomorrow. Then he can check the fit.”
And make sure the DiGirolamos don’t risk another eye-to-eye encounter with Rosina Vicente’s daughter. So, Forgetful Young Carlo had shoemaking skills. I guessed that was why he was the old man’s heir. “Why does everybody do what you want?”
“Almost nobody does what I want.” The old man put the shoe back with its form. “Some do what I say. Most don’t listen to me at all.” He removed his napkin from his collar, and pushed his plate aside. He put on his sweater. “Come. Let me show you something.”
He led me to a door I’d presumed led to a fire escape, but opened onto a flat rooftop. I took the time to figure out the geometry. “We are over the second-floor bathroom.”
Boards crisscrossed the space to provide walkways. Quilts, ragged and weather-beaten, draped beneath the edges of a lineup of old sashes, panes intact. The panes topped a wall of wooden crates. Inside the crates were a collection of clay pots, planted with tomato and zucchini, basil and oregano, summer sage and rosemary, and, of all things . . . strawberries.
I’d seen this in a schoolbook. “A greenhouse. These windowpanes, the quilts, make a special world. Protect the plants from the outside.”
The old man seemed pleased I understood. He removed a sash. A row of candles squatted in the dirt, one to a pot. He pulled a box of matches from his pocket, struck one against the bottom of his shoe, cupped his hand around the flame, and lit the candles, one after the other. “The warmth keeps the plants from freezing. Soon it will be too cold, no matter what I do. For now, they thrive. Long after summer has withered.”
I put my fingers under a strawberry, large and red and ripe enough to pick, closing my fingers around its comforting weight. The old man turned to me, his gaze meeting mine, and I saw another hand making the same movement in his mind’s eye—a woman’s, gentle, but worn with work and years, the veins on its backside prominent.
The old man hadn’t made the garden.
She had.
The fine grain of the old man’s skin smoothed. “My wife wanted strawberries when she was expecting our last. Ate so many, she started to itch. The midwife said she’d developed an aversion. There’s only a few plants here, not enough to harm the pregnant lady. In two days, maybe three, they will be ready. Perhaps, you could bring them to her. With my compliments.”
So, he knew I’d met the pregnant girl. The tailor’s wife must have told him. The only material she stitched was black. “I thought Signora Lattanzi was sick.”
“Her hearing is fine. And so is her tongue.”
“Tell the signora I left my broomstick on the pregnant lady’s landing. All we did was drink coffee.”
“How much did you charge her for making predictions about her baby?”
And he knew about that, too. Maybe from picking up the shoe after me. Maybe I’d left that knowledge with my touch. But who cared? And how dare he anyway? I was a modern woman, able to think for myself. Who was this . . . this old man to tell me what to do?
I lurched. The strawberry fell away from the vine.
The old man retrieved it. “Fiora.”
“Nothing. All right? Not a penny. I didn’t charge her anything. Because I can’t tell her much of anything. Except she’s not delivering in the next five minutes.”
The old man tilted his head, expression quizzical.
“The curtain’s . . . stuck. On the market. Five minutes into the future.” No matter what I did, no matter what I tried. No matter how many times I reset Mamma’s Big Ben, or punched the projection, or imagined myself there, or here, or later, or earlier. Mamma’s Big Ben always reset to five minutes more than every other clock I checked, and the market was always five minutes ahead.
The old man went to work replacing sashes, and draping quilts, shutting the plants away for the night. “The curtain’s not stuck. You’re stuck. Because you think you need the curtain to follow your plan.”
“I need to make some money to follow my plan. I have to be able to take care of myself. My mother collected money for her readings. Did that make her bad?”
“Your mother was good. She collected only what the client needed to pay her. Not a penny more.”
“So she was powerful.”
“She was good. Good is better than powerful. Good is the most powerful power there is.”
“Ha. A lot of good her goodness
did her.” I headed back to the kitchen.
The old man followed. He put the strawberry by the sink. “I had a visit this afternoon from the Children’s Bureau. Somebody must have informed them.”
Everything warm inside me went cold. “The landlord?”
“Perhaps the undertaker who collected your parents. It is no secret you are here.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That your brothers have given permission for me to be your guardian.” He handed me a letter. “I picked this up from the war office this morning. The notice arrived via the Italian army.”
“This isn’t either of my brothers’ handwriting.”
“It’s transcribed from a wireless transmission.” He flicked his fingers toward me. “Read.”
I did so. Out loud. “‘. . . and handle any other circumstances as you deem fit, acting in every way as if you were our sister’s grandfather.’” I looked up. “What do my brothers mean? What circumstances?”
The old man took the letter back. “Whatever should arise. It may be months before your brothers return home. Unfortunately their permission may not be enough for the Children’s Bureau.”
The old man’s tone pulled my spine taut. “How can my brothers’ permission not be enough?”
“Your brothers are not yet of age themselves, neither are they citizens. The people from the Children’s Bureau accepted the letter. For now. But with so many sick, the orphanages are understaffed. A strong girl, an older girl, like yourself, to help with the younger children . . .” He drew himself up. “In difficult times adults don’t always make the best of decisions. So we must be ready, in case the Bureau comes back.”
“Be ready. How?”
He pulled a wooden box from under his cot. He set it on the table and opened it. About the size of the Oxford dictionary the Reverend Mother kept in her office, the box had a carved lid like the blanket chest. It was stuffed with papers. He took back my brothers’ letter and placed it among them. “Until your brothers’ return, this is your home. That makes us family. And as family, we must accept. I am old. Sometimes I do not feel so well. That means we must prepare. I have your approval to act as your guardian. Tell me, Fiora Vicente, do I also have your trust?”
The Infinite Now Page 5