by Maria Riva
“Is it very bad being blind?”
“Sometimes, when you want to see.”
Michael reached for her hand. “What?”
“Oh, things”—Morgana moved her hand to clasp his—to the boy its touch felt like a fallen autumn leaf.
“Why are you sad?”
“I am not sad, child—not really—just tired.”
“No, you are sad first!” Michael’s voice held the tone of masculine conviction.
Stroking his hand, Morgana smiled.
“I am the one who has visions, not you—you scamp.”
“If I give you a hug will that hurt you?”
“Why do you say that? How do you …” Morgana let the useless words trail.
Michael looked up at the haggard face that could not see its own destruction.
“I’ll be careful, Aunt Morgana—really I will, I promise.” Carefully his small arms encircled her waist. His head resting on her protruding rib cage, they sat—child and woman, and Morgana wept while Michael listened—feeling it was their moment of farewell.
When Morgana died in the agony of rapacious cancer everyone wondered why no one had guessed her suffering. Dry-eyed, Michael stood by the open coffin remembering Gregory, wondering why grown-ups felt it right to fix dead people into strangers. Looking up at his father beside him he whispered, “Papa?”
“Yes, Michelino?”
“Papa …” he hesitated.
“You’re disturbing people—what is it?”
“When I die don’t fix me.”
“Fix you?” John’s whisper held impatience.
“I don’t want to look funny like Gregory and Gloria and Aunt Morgana. Okay, Papa? Promise?”
“He means strange.” And taking Michael’s hand, Jane took her son out into the soft snow.
It was not because they had celebrated Hanukah-Christmas in July that when it was time for the real ones—it seemed like a memory no one wanted to remember. For Celestina and the children the rituals were re-created—the festive mood pretended—the prevailing sense of emptiness hidden from those whose lives were still in their beginnings. The sumptuous Victrola spun its lyrical magic—yet Ebbely spinning his piano stool would have been preferred.
On New Year’s Day, certain she would plunge and disappear, Celestina refused to set foot onto frozen water assuring her new friends in most passable American that watching everyone else slip and slide amused her far more. Somehow the old year was gone, as though it had never been.
John started off the New Year by looking for a man to marry his sister. Jane didn’t understand why this should be so vital a quest, so imminently necessary. Most willingly she had given up her sewing alcove, making it into a small but cozy and quite ample enough bedroom for Celestina to feel at home in. Basically a happy person, who loved children, ever eager to learn, willing to help about the house, Celestina was a joy to have around—so why this haste to get rid of her? When questioned, John patiently explained to his wife that a woman needed a man to protect her, feed her, house her, by the gift of his name assure her the respectability necessary to be accepted into the community and most importantly, fulfill her womanhood by giving her children. Certainly there was no quarreling with that. Even if one wanted to, which Jane most earnestly did, all such rebuttal would have fallen onto the stone-deaf ears of any early-twentieth-century man. Knowing that Celestina had a sharp mind of her own—Jane decided it would be prudent to wait and keep her mouth shut. No use getting a husband riled up over something that was obviously beyond his comprehension.
As head of the family, John took his duty of marriage broker very seriously. He felt it was his responsibility to set his sister on the proper path towards matrimony. It was time for Celestina to become a wife, care for a husband of her own. With his usual thoroughness he searched the Ford employment rosters, eliminating Latvians, Croatians, Turks, Dalmatians and other such fringe nationals for being too low on the wage scale. In view of the Red Scare and increased deportations, Russians were definitely out, as were those mostly from the Balkans. The really dependable Germans, these were either already married, about to be or since the war now eager to return to their beaten homeland. The Irish could read—but they drank, were known to beat their women on a regular basis—married their own kind and their hatred of papist Italians was known by all. Of course as a Torinese fond of his innocent sister, choosing a worthy Italian would have been the obvious choice, but this year with both Sacco and Vanzetti finally going to be tried for murder, John was worried. Why he couldn’t quite put his finger on, as he tried to explain to Fritz when discussing the somewhat shocking, even violent, reactions in the press to these two Italian immigrants.
“It’s like one of your feelings, Fritz. I don’t know why, but something … something is going to happen from this. Something bad, very bad.” Of course Fritz had not taken him seriously, said he was only worried because he too was Italian—but John knew that wasn’t the reason.
Having exhausted most of the sixty different nationalities employed by the Ford Motor Company—at the end John was left with the stoic, nose-to-the-perpetual-grindstone Poles. Granted a boring lot at times, still on the whole they took care of their women, were frugal, hardworking men any woman could be proud to belong to.
While John was searching for an eligible Pole, Ford’s giant workforce waited out their seasonal layoff.
In Dearborn, the Rouge, that mastodon of production power in the making, was beginning to sap the creative strength from Highland Park. The continuously moving assembly line, such a revolutionary concept just a few years before, now an accustomed presence in most factories, requiring only unskilled laborers to feed its stupefying repetitiveness, Henry Ford began transferring his best men over to Dearborn and his industrial behemoth, the Mighty Rouge. Zoltan and Carl were reassigned—Fritz and Peter remained, while John divided his designing skills between the two factories.
For some reason Agnes didn’t show. Five months into her pregnancy, Zoltan’s wife still worked at her enviable post of trusted librarian without visually embarrassing anybody. Now that Celestina was there to look after the children, once a week come rain, sleet or icy storm, Jane took the trolley into Detroit to visit Agnes at the library. To have a friend in the big city, one who had unlimited access to books, was an anticipatory joy that Jane treasured. Zoltan’s Agnes, a gifted shepherd, led Jane to regions she would never have discovered by herself amidst the vast riches of beckoning shelves. Sometimes their tastes came into conflict as when the earnest librarian suggested Thackeray openly disapproving of Jane being stirred by Upton Sinclair.
“Jane, how can you?! You mustn’t read such shocking prose! Even I haven’t—The Jungle is not proper for a lady. A violent man, with violent ideas, violent places and so brutal! If you must like the macabre then at least read Edgar Allan Poe but not such a radical as Upton Sinclair!”
Seeing her friend so disturbed by her taste, Jane quickly snatched one of the sisters Brontë off the shelf hoping she would do—then took back Mr. Sinclair and his brutal reality as soon as Agnes’s back was turned. During this year of literary discovery, Jane became engrossed in what would become a lifetime interest in those, who using the weaponry of words, fought against the wrongs they perceived as such. Later this would aid her to endure her destiny—but for now it simply intrigued her view of life.
Jane was maturing, her self-awareness more stringent than when untried youth had governed her perception. Dutiful marriage had given her its grounding, motherhood its pride of achievement, sex its physical discovery, love though still in its infancy, an awareness of its necessity. Without realizing the implications, Jane was becoming herself; no longer wholly dependent on those categories that had made this transition possible. Though her era and its set priorities might demand obedience, even subservience, Jane would travel her own roads, seek her own horizons—ever convinced that freedom was
her quest though its applicable meaning still eluded her as it related to herself.
By spring, life and the living of it had settled into its accustomed patterns. Children grew, their expanding individualism separating them from homogeneous babyhood. Under the sheltering attention of a replaced mother—Carl’s little Rose shed her sorrow, reawakening the Irish joyousness that was her true mother’s legacy. Serafina’s Angelo honed his skill of truant of all authority that would shape his violent future. Jane’s sons simply embellished what they had always been. Michael—The Romantic; John—The Sullen; Billy—The Happy. Still childless and resigned, Peter and his Clara adopted a stray kitten and named her Lizzie.
It was summer when Agnes presented Zoltan with a daughter and transformed him into the young man he had never been when young. A spring in his step, a grin on his face—not a sneeze, cough or fidget in sight—he became actually handsome in the process.
Overjoyed, Hannah couldn’t get over that a baby had been born in a hospital—a place designated only for sick people who were going to die.
“Can you imagine—a new life in such a place. What will dey tink of next! Dat Agnes I have to admit—courage she has! You going to do dat too next time, Ninnie?”
Jane preparing to help lay the table for a Sunday supper smiled, “There won’t be a next time.”
“Aha—you sure?”
“Yes—Hannah, I’m sure.”
“Well, la-di-da, you getting to be like one of dose real so modern ladies who know so much but don’t tell—keep dere secrets so dere figures stay?”
Blushing, Jane admitted she had been reading the latest writings by Mrs. Sanger.
“You know, Vifey—I tink someday that lady maybe right—but nature is nature—maybe not so smart for people to play around wit it. God he knows—but plain people? I am not so sure.”
“Don’t worry—it’s simple and not at all dangerous.”
“Aha …” Hannah poured the creamy soup into her cavernous tureen. “But … a woman’s body is for making life—so maybe not good to stop it.”
“A woman’s body belongs to her. She decides what to do with it!”
And that shut up Hannnah forever on the subject of birth control.
Finally having found a worthy candidate that suited a brother’s strict requirements—a strapping Pole whose bulging muscles attested to his awesome skill as a smelting boss—one late summer evening John brought him home for supper.
Jane had arranged Celestina’s hair in a more becoming way, made her a new blouse of finest muslin, its small blue flowered pattern repeated in the piping on collar and cuffs, splurged on a chicken roasted with three vegetables—even some store-bought cheese from Mr. Hirt’s in the city. The two for whose benefit all this finery was displayed never so much as looked at each other nor said more than two words—these being good followed by evening which two hours after excruciating intermittent silences became good and night.
John stormed into the kitchen where the women were washing up.
“Cillie! What the hell got into you? You the chatterbox—I go and find someone suited—you think perhaps that is easy? There are more than twenty thousand men I had to go through! Ninnie works, decks you out, puts a festive meal on the table fit for a king and you, what do you do? You just sit there—as dumb as the village idiot. I’m going to bed!” Disgusted he turned to go.
Celestina’s “He wasn’t bad” stopped him. “His neck was huge and with those shoulders he looked like an ox—but … he wasn’t bad.”
“Then why? You could have at least smiled—once!”
“Actually, if you must know, I was trying very hard not to giggle.”
“You what?”
“Just what I said … giggle.” An unperturbed Celestina began putting away the dried dinner plates.
“I don’t understand you,” spluttered her brother.
“Oh, I know you don’t. You never have you know, not really. Gina, yes—but me, no.”
“And what is that supposed to mean? I suppose you think being an old maid will satisfy you? Well, let me tell you my fine girl—” John got no further.
“Well, let me tell you my so important Mr.! I did not come across a whole ocean to become a wife of an ox—as a matter of fact, I didn’t come all the way to America to be a wife to just anybody—especially someone my brother has to get for me. If I marry and please note the if—I will marry a man I have found, that I want to marry who really wants to marry me! And if he doesn’t work for your Mr. Henry Ford—who cares!” And with that last salvo, Celestina marched out of the kitchen.
Stunned John looked at Jane, who absolutely delighted, was trying very hard not to laugh.
“Ninnie—did you hear that? That ungrateful urchin has the gall to tell me off!”
“You must admit, John—she does have a point—Mr. Polansky may be nice, but attractive he is not.” Jane busied herself setting out the breakfast dishes.
“Attractive? What’s that got to do with finding a good provider?”
“Oh—you know, marriage is frightening enough without also having to do it with an ox.” And this time Jane couldn’t stop the laughter as her exasperated husband flounced out of the kitchen.
Determined to find herself a husband, within the month Celestina had one. A roly-poly Bavarian who owned a tiny candy shop not far from her brother’s house. A childless widower who being already broken in, a practiced milquetoast, he suited Celestina’s managerial character to perfection. He, craving a determined woman who could tell him what to do, she being one, looking for a man to manage, for both of them it was congenial need at first sight.
As usual Celestina wasted no time, informed her smitten candy man that a lengthy courtship was unnecessary and holding his hand marched him into her brother’s parlor fully confident that his wrath would have no effect on her decision.
“John, this is Mr. Josef Ritter. He is the proprietor of his own shop, already a citizen of l’America and I will be his wife. I will sell his candy, make American change. He has promised to teach me everything I need to know and be good to me.”
That left nothing more to say. Jane brought glasses, John secretly relieved, uncorked the bottle of illegal spirits, toasted the betrothed. Later that evening a slightly dazed Josef returned to his rooms above the store, content that soon they wouldn’t seem so lonely.
The wedding was brief, a honeymoon nonexistent. It took no time at all before the new Mrs. Ritter had the corner candy store organized for optimum efficiency.
Soon her jolly manner, her welcoming smile that lit her whole being whenever a child’s entrance activated the tinkling bell above her door, became the magnet that drew children to Aunt Cillie’s sugared heaven. They would stand transfixed before the wonders displayed, undecided—hesitant what to choose from amongst the endless bounty. Celestina loved these moments of indecision—of mittened fingers clutching precious pennies—eyes staring in profound concentration—small mouths already making sucking sounds in delicious anticipation.
Sometimes, with those she knew had walked the distance from poorer sections, she would make up a special, and announce that today one penny had the buying power of two. Every child in Highland Park adored Celestina and she loving them—became a mother every afternoon when school was out.
Now that she had her sewing room back, Jane was able to resume her private dressmaking business. She had missed the work she loved and now that everything cost twice as much as before, more than ever its financial rewards were welcome. So rarely was John at home that Jane could pin and sew far into most nights without being needed by anyone.
21
Today John was homesick. Italy—that malleable illusion when all else pales; he knew her for what she was, yet longed for her. She was so easy to love. Her generous beauty, her power to treat time as mere interruption—decadence without guile. The touch of ancient stone, t
he sudden stillness of an empty square, the light—that unrelenting light that forced all color to be true, shadowed sienna, empowered umber. The scent of rosemary growing wild—its pungent oil the bane of seductive witches. What was it really that he missed to such a degree as to feel a sudden disloyalty to the country of his choice? It confused John that he found no satisfactory answer to the question he asked of himself. It was not like him to accept loose ends. He found himself wondering if Jane would understand.
Protesting their complete and provable innocence which they had done both verbally and in print since their arrest and imprisonment without bail the year before, in July both Sacco and Vanzetti were judged guilty of premeditated murder and under heavy guard taken back to prison to await sentencing. International as well as national newspaper headlines predicted that these foreign anarchists would surely be given and deserved the electric chair. In Italy and France as crowds demonstrated against the guilty verdict, in America anti-immigrant feeling accelerated, especially against those of Italian origin. As John had intuitively felt, in the prevailing atmosphere of get rid of all foreigners this case of two immigrants could easily develop into a scapegoat trial. Though none of the Ford men actually believed that these men would ever be put to death—still they agreed with John that if ever this should be proven to be the case, not only would it be a travesty of American justice, it would do irreputable harm to both the nation and what America stood for in the eyes of the world.
When a letter finally arrived bearing a Louisiana postmark the call went out for everyone to come have their supper at the Geigers’ and attend the public reading of Ebbely’s news.
Knowing full well that Hannah would share his letter, with an audience in mind—he gave his already theatrical style added flourish.
Dearest Hannah and all such friends who having congregated to hear the latest from him who though gone amidst the bayous, yearns for sight of them,
Let it be known that one Ebb (remember as in tide) Fish safely arrived in New Orleans, first bedded down his valiant Tin Lizzie, then his most congenial traveling companion in a lodging house unmentionable here …