Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  Maybe.

  I wrote Angelo that I wished I were in Florence and I was trying to save enough money to visit. (I already had more than enough, but it seemed wise to provide us both with an out.) He answered immediately, promising that if I could manage this, I wouldn’t need money to live while I was there. He had begun working as a bartender at Anna’s without giving up his vineyard jobs. We’d discussed the possibility of traveling together through Sicily. If only I would return to Florence, he said now, getting to Sicily would be easy. I resisted the increasingly strong pull of his letters for almost a year, perhaps sensing that if I went to Florence, I wouldn’t return.

  Anna’s 1973 Christmas card came in November and contained an invitation to visit during Christmas. She had room for me to stay in her apartment, but I should be warned that I would be put to work along with Angelo and the others. Trattoria Cherubini had been discovered by an American film crew, and had subsequently metamorphosed from a workingman’s restaurant into a fashionable café. The other fancy customers had remained when the film crew left. Then the family (the widowed Anna, her two sons, one of whom, Walter, was an engineer not active in the restaurant, and their wives) had been offered the opportunity to expand to the second story of their four-story building in the Oltrarno. With Angelo’s help and encouragement, they had installed a large bar on the ground floor that he purchased the wine for and tended along with Anna’s second son, Anthony, and which had become known for its extraordinary selection of Italian wines, many of which were not exported. They had nearly doubled the number of tables upstairs. This was all very well except that both daughters-in-law were pregnant, Delfina due in January, Genevra only a month later, and neither was much help. (Delfina was no good at the stove, anyway.) Anna couldn’t understand why they’d done this twice in a row now, one getting pregnant right after the other. It wasn’t even as though they were close.

  My parents, sensing that I was up to something, refused my request for round-trip economy fare to Florence as a Christmas-Hanukkah present, but they’d been paying me fifty dollars a week (I was cooking at least four nights a week, usually more, and doing the shopping) and I had plenty of money saved. On the first day of my Christmas recess I flew to Italy, where, after an intense reunion with Angelo in the airport, then the front of his car, then the back of his car, then the room he rented he brought me to the trattoria.

  My Italian, unused since my Gaiole summer, came back in such a way as to convey a sense of destiny about my return. The Oltrarno was a wonderful, lively mix of working people and tourists, expensive places and cheap ones, so that just to walk around it, when I could leave the restaurant for a few minutes, was a treat. (There was never time to travel farther.) I threw myself happily into work. Anna was pleased and grateful for my help and all the members of her family welcomed me in a way that made my visit feel like a homecoming.

  It had been arranged in advance that I would stay at Anna’s. I’m not sure how much the arrangement had to do with concern for her sensibilities, but as a practical matter, it worked for me to be there, two flights of stairs above the trattoria, able to come and go in a minute’s time. During the holiday, when every chair was always occupied and there were never fewer than a dozen people at the bar, most of them waiting for tables, Angelo and I had to steal our times alone. If the person who had written me lovely romantic letters about the beauties of Sicily and the pleasures of my body was not in evidence, there was barely time to make love, much less think about it, and I could believe that my romantic correspondent would become visible when the holiday crowds thinned.

  I used my diaphragm most of the time and I don’t know precisely when I got pregnant. Pregnancy wasn’t yet on my mind during the relatively slow day, December 30, when Angelo and I spent some morning hours in his room, and he laughed when I referred to my departure date, said he couldn’t believe I was going to do the same thing again.

  “What do you mean, the same thing?” I asked, though it had crossed my mind more than once that there was no law, other than the parental one, that decreed I had to return to New York and school.

  Angelo said I had evaded my destiny after our summer together by going home instead of staying and marrying him.

  I said, “I didn’t even know you weren’t married until I was practically gone.”

  He shrugged.

  The message of that shrug, perceived only much later, was that he, Man, could do what came naturally to him, while I, Woman, should do what was right for Us . . . for the Family . . . for the Species. At the time all it evoked in me was the guilty recognition that no matter what else was true, if I had been in love with him, I wouldn’t have left Italy the first time. I didn’t know if I was in love with him now. I might be in love with the man who’d written those letters.

  “How do you even know Anna would want me to stay?” I asked.

  “Of course she wants you to stay,” he said. “You help her much better than the wives.”

  “Okay. Anna wants me to stay. And you want me to stay. That doesn’t mean we have to get married. We can live together.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked in a whisper, this man whom I suspect was never faithful to me for a week at a time after the fourth or fifth month of my pregnancy. “Live together. You live together, you get married.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  You live together, you get married.

  Life was simpler here. . . . And of course that simplicity had its appeal. I was nineteen years old. Nobody I’d gone to bed with had suggested we live together, much less marry. Not only was life simpler, but marriage would make it more so. Give me chapters and a verse I could bear to live by.

  “You know I’m Jewish, don’t you?”

  It had never come up in our conversations, but then, it seldom came up at home, except in connection with holidays, or something one of my parents was studying—a German Jew’s experiences during the war or the way some Italian’s Jewish background came to the foreground in his paintings. We were Assimilated American Jews, all of us quite certain that the two A words came before the J one. If Angelo viewed me as more American than Jewish, this wasn’t different from the way I viewed myself.

  Angelo laughed shortly. “Jewish. What’s Jewish?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m it.”

  “You go to Jewish church on holidays?”

  “No.”

  “Your mama and papa go?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t cook Jewish.”

  “You mean kosher?” I asked, though I’m not certain that was what he had in mind. Anna had told me that carciofi alla giudia, artichokes Jewish style, were on the menu at most of the trattorias in season, but that was as close as anyone came to a Jewish cuisine.

  Angelo nodded.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not a kosher Jew.”

  “Where does a Jew get married in Rome?” I asked a few days later, though it wasn’t what was uppermost in my mind.

  Angelo shrugged. “The courthouse. A Jewish church. Wherever Jews get married.”

  I said, “You’re not a Jew.”

  He shrugged again. “A church, if you want.”

  “I don’t want. I’m not a Catholic.”

  The issue bored him. A ceremony that doesn’t matter formalizes a marriage that doesn’t matter, but my period was a week late and I had begun to suspect I was pregnant. Roe v. Wade was not quite law, but I had a friend who’d gotten an abortion in Pennsylvania, and if I returned to New York, I’d surely go about finding one. That was my choice. I could return to New York, a place where an abortion and an education awaited me. Or I could remain in lovely Florence, surrounded by a family whose quarrels and problems had nothing to do with my own, and cook, and get married, and have a lovely, cuddly baby who would be like a grandchild to Anna. I could have something recognizable as a life.

  When I told Angelo that I thought I was pregnant, he grinned, shrugged, and said he guessed that settled it.


  So it did. I was due back in New York three days later. I called my parents to tell them I was getting married. Their reaction was such that I wrote only to ask them to ship me some cookbooks and clothes. I did not mention the immediate reason for the marriage. I told myself I might have chosen to remain with Angelo anyway.

  Anna was pleased that we were getting married, delighted that I’d continue to work with her. There were no further warnings about Angelo. It would be three months before she was forced to notice that I was incubating yet another infant to interfere with the workings of her kitchen, and by that time, Genevra would be able to give her some help. I proceeded to fit myself as well as possible into Angelo’s room and, with the time and energy left me after cooking at Anna’s, to settle into Florentine life.

  Actually, Anna’s was my Florentine life, or, you might say, the trunk of that life, the branches being the various merchants the family dealt with, whom I was gradually getting to know, and of course family and friends of Anna and her children. By the time Olivia was born, on October 24, I felt almost like one of the family. The Cherubini family, if not the Ferrantes, for the first time I asked Angelo about Sicily, he said we’d best wait until the baby was born. At the time I assumed he didn’t wish to offend them with our impropriety. Later, observing the distance he kept from most of his family when we were together, I came to think this had not been the only reason.

  I waited six months to send my parents an announcement of Olivia’s birth. (Angelo had begun chain-smoking in my presence, but he never smoked in Livvy’s.) They called to congratulate me, wanted to know if they could visit their first grandchild during Easter vacation. I asked them to wait. If I was happy with my daughter and more comfortable than I had reason to be with the man I’d married, I feared my contentment would not hold up under their scrutiny. I had no sense of the extent to which grandchildren alter the attitudes of parents far more intractable than mine, muting disapproval and softening the ties that bind. When, weeks later, my father called to say they would love to visit during the summer, I told him—not, I’m happy to say, without crying—that I really needed more time. I knew all too well, I said, what they would think of my life.

  Whether because of Anna’s warm, steady presence, or because Delfina and I had grown close and she was always available for consultations about the baby and gossip about life, my early months with Olivia (whom I always called Livvy, my unthinking recognition that she was half American) were easy to the point of being idyllic. If she had been born red-faced, limb-wavy—ipertesa, hypertense, as the family doctor had announced to my righteous rage—it seemed to me that a long and difficult birth was enough to make anyone hypertense for a while, and I was determined to make her happy. I nursed her at the hint of discontent, slept when she did after breast feedings, held her in one arm if she awakened while I was doing chores, sang to her, kissed her, chattered with her when we were alone. No academic mother would I be—dry, distant, without intense feeling. This child would know how much I loved her, would take for granted her importance to me.

  I would not be obliged to cook at the Trattoria Cherubini for three months, but our room was only two blocks away, so most afternoons I brought Livvy to the restaurant for a visit. Often I took over at the stove while Anna played with her. Although there was little to do at the vineyards during those cold months, Angelo was seldom around in the afternoon, nor had I begun to wonder where he was.

  If there had been a change I didn’t like when Angelo became my husband, if sex had survived the wedding but physical affection had not, if he seldom talked to me about what concerned him, and never mentioned Sicily or the wine business that had also intrigued me, he was such an adoring father as to silence any complaints I might have had. No need ever to ask whether he’d mind keeping an eye on his daughter; if he was around and unoccupied, that was where his eyes were. When he talked to me, it was likely to be about her beauty and charm. If I wanted to leave the house, all I had to do was check on his plans. If I asked him to take care of her, he’d want to know what I thought he was doing.

  As time wore on, although I didn’t allow myself to dwell on it, I grew resentful. If Angelo still turned to me in bed on nights when we came up the stairs together or mornings when there was no rush to go downstairs, nothing in his behavior or actions could have been described as lovemaking. He was like the boys I’d known in early adolescence who weren’t yet dope-mellowed and needed only to get off in something alive.

  When Olivia was six months old, Doctor Corrado said that Anna, now sixty-two, was showing problematic coronary symptoms and should slow down. I didn’t believe him—he was the idiot who’d said my beautiful baby was hypertense—but I wasn’t any more willing than the others to take chances. Anna shouldn’t be walking up the two long flights from the trattoria to her apartment, so would move in with Genevra and Anthony, who’d drive her to the restaurant every day. Angelo and I would move into Anna’s apartment, and I would resume my six-day schedule in the restaurant. There’d be no problem in keeping the baby there. Angelo cleared out and painted the tiny room, separated from the bar by a curtain, that had always been used for storage and in which there was now a fold-away cot. We added a small crib and a comfortable chair to turn it into Olivia’s room, the place where she would rest and sleep during the hours when Angelo and I were working, and where Anna would be able to rest when she was tired.

  Genevra couldn’t imagine a baby sleeping peacefully down there, was sure Livvy would be better off upstairs, being checked on frequently, but I had no anxiety on the subject of keeping an infant in such a lively, noisy place. I’d spent my early years in a household I remembered as deathly quiet because everyone was reading or writing all the time. We hadn’t even owned a TV set until the second Kennedy was shot. My daughter would grow up with the lively noises of people laughing and glasses clinking, and with two loving parents right nearby, ready to give her whatever she needed.

  You will recall that a Sicilian trip had been (unnecessary) bait on the line that pulled me back to Italy. If I was disappointed when Angelo was in no hurry to bring me there, I was much too absorbed in my daughter, my work, and my new family to think much about it. But on the weekend before I was to take over at the restaurant, when Livvy was just past six months old, Angelo brought us to Sicily for her baptism.

  His parents were well into their seventies by this time. They had nine children, twenty-six grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren and remembered few of their names. I doubt they knew I was Jewish, but they surely knew I was a foreigner. What seemed clear, as they kissed the baby, pronounced her beautiful in a ceremonial manner, and were as pleasant to me as they might be to a casual friend brought to some affair, was that Angelo was a foreigner, too. Whether this was the cause or an effect of his living so far from them, the family’s easy camaraderie excluded him. When I asked him later about family favorites, he gave me one of his You-Americans-have-such-crazy-ideas looks, so I asked no further.

  The baptism itself was neither long nor objectionable (two other family babies were baptized with Olivia). I remember little of the ceremony because there was so much else to take in. I’d had ample experience of Angelo’s Sicilian chauvinism; often, holding Livvy, he would croon to her not the words of a song but a sort of extemporaneous ode to the island. I’d reacted with amusement or irritation, depending on my mood, but I’d never appreciated the legitimacy of his words.

  If Sicily is not the most beautiful place on the face of the earth, it was, is, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. As we drove on country roads bordered by gullies of wildflowers, past small farms where newborn goats and lambs were grazing, and craggy mountains with water trickling down their sides, I told myself I could never again be away from Sicily for any length of time. But that reaction was milder than the one I had at the market in Palermo.