Elizabeth Street

by Laurie Fabiano

  When she got to Lucrezia’s block, it felt as if nothing had changed. She could have been arriving after delivering a baby, or coming to visit her friend with a newspaper in hand. The same old woman sat on the stoop next door.

  “Did you come to see the signora?” She greeted Giovanna without missing a beat.

  “Yes. Is she upstairs?”

  “She is.”

  Giovanna started up the stoop but turned to ask, “Is her husband with her?”

  “I saw him leave. But her daughter’s up there.”

  As she opened the outside door, Giovanna became aware that she was visiting empty-handed. She’d been so determined to get there and unsure of whether she would even see Lucrezia that bringing something hadn’t crossed her mind. She hesitated, but knew that if she left now, she might never come back. Instead, breathing deeply, she walked up the stairs and knocked on Lucrezia’s door.

  “Yes?” said Lucrezia’s daughter, opening the door slightly.

  “Buon giorno. You must be Claudia. I am Giovanna, an old friend of your mother. I was hoping I could see her.” Claudia looked exactly like Lucrezia and was just as stately.

  “Come in, signora,” greeted Claudia, opening the door and looking at Giovanna’s work clothes. “Please have a seat.”

  Catching Claudia’s glance, Giovanna mentioned, “Your mother and I used to deliver babies together.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember her talking about you.”

  “How is she?”

  “Not well. The doctors think it is only a matter of days.”

  “I’m so sorry, Claudia. Can I see her?”

  “She’s resting. She gets so little sleep that I would appreciate it if you could return at another time.”

  Giovanna stood, ready to bolt out the door, embarrassed that she had come. “I’m sorry, I understand…”

  “Claudia, who are you talking to?” Lucrezia’s thin voice drifted from the bedroom.

  “An old friend of yours, Mamma.” Turning to Giovanna, Claudia said, “She’s awake. Would you like to see her?”

  Giovanna was waving her hand in an attempt to say, “No, I’ll go,” but Lucrezia’s daughter was leading her by the arm to the doorway of the bedroom.

  Lucrezia turned her head, and Giovanna felt like her shoulders fell to her knees. Lucrezia’s face and body were skeletal. Her body barely dented the bed.

  Lucrezia stared back at Giovanna and smiled. “Sit down next to me.”

  Giovanna looked to Lucrezia’s daughter’s face for permission, and when Claudia nodded and left the room, Giovanna did as she was instructed. Awkwardly, and without speaking, she took Lucrezia’s hands, which lay on top of the bedcovers, and held them in her own.

  “I bet you heard from Teresa,” kidded Lucrezia in a voice that sounded like it only fluttered over her vocal cords.

  In seconds, Lucrezia had cleared the air. Giovanna laughed hard and remembered why it was so easy to love this woman. “Yes, you’re right! She told me this morning.”

  “I’m glad you came, Giovanna.”

  Hearing Lucrezia say her name unleashed a torrent of emotion. Cupping and kissing Lucrezia’s hands, Giovanna said over and over, tears streaming down her face, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Lucrezia.”

  “Giovanna.” Lucrezia lifted her bony hand to Giovanna’s face and caught a tear. “I knew,” she said.

  Giovanna was not at all surprised but wept harder. “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “I wanted to help.”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Were you afraid of me?”

  “I was afraid of everyone. I was even afraid of myself.”

  Giovanna’s head collapsed onto Lucrezia’s chest, and Lucrezia entwined her fingers in her hair.

  “I don’t want to lose you again, Lucrezia,” moaned Giovanna.

  “You never lost me. And with the way you pray, you never will.”

  Giovanna’s laugh became a snort through her tears, and it brought Lucrezia’s daughter into the room.

  Claudia looked at them, surprised and concerned. “Perhaps you should rest, Mamma?”

  “Yes. Lie with me a while, Giovanna?” asked Lucrezia.

  Giovanna got up and rearranged the blankets around her friend and then went to the other side of the bed and lay on top of the covers next to her. Lucrezia reached for her hand, and Giovanna held it tighter than she should have.

  Giovanna left that evening after Lucrezia had fallen asleep. She returned the next day as she had promised, but Lucrezia had died that morning with her husband and daughter by her side.

  “She asked that I give you this,” said Lucrezia’s daughter, holding out her hand and crying. Giovanna took the small medal of Saint Anthony from Claudia’s palm. “It’s odd, because my mother wasn’t religious. But she said this would be meaningful to you. She also said to tell you that when people love each other, they always find each other in the end.”

  That night, Giovanna closed the store near nine o’clock but didn’t get upstairs until after ten. Not yet ready for bed, she leaned out her first-floor window into the late summer heat.

  The store looked so quiet, yet only a few hours before, there’d been a line around the block. Lorenzo was talking about opening his own ice cream business and going to Newark, which was a good thing, because now that Clement was married, there were so many adults in the business that they were stepping on one another’s toes. Domenico still helped in the store, but he had started working at the German-named factory on Third and Grand that raised spiders in the basement to supply the crosshairs for submarine periscopes. He had also become a fixture around Hoboken’s many social clubs.

  Rocco came up behind Giovanna and put his arm around her waist. “I can’t sleep either. Let’s go downstairs and play cards.”

  Giovanna smiled. “You set up the table, and I’ll be down in a minute.”

  A moment later, Angelina was in the room. “Mamma, I can’t sleep. It’s too hot.”

  “Come here by the window with me.”

  Angelina was too big for her mother’s lap, but she sat on it anyway. Giovanna ran her hands through her daughter’s hair.

  Below on the sidewalk they could see Rocco setting up the card table and pouring two glasses of wine.

  “Mamma, will you rub my back like you did when I was little and had nightmares?”

  “In a minute. First I want to give you something.”

  “What?”

  “I know you are responsible, so I am going to ask you something important. I want you to promise me that when I die, you will put this in my coffin.” Giovanna reached into the pocket of her dress and handed Angelina the Saint Anthony medal that Lucrezia had left her.

  Angelina looked at the medal and then at her mother. “Mamma, you’re scaring me. Why are you saying this?”

  “Nothing is going to happen to me, Angelina. You won’t have to do this for many, many years.”

  Angelina looked at her mother with tears welling in her eyes. “Promise me you’ll never die.”

  “I promise I’ll never leave you. That’s the reason I want you to bury me with Saint Anthony.” Giovanna put her hand over Angelina’s, which now clutched the medal. “When I’m gone, if you need me, or if your children need me, or even their children, you’ll always know that I am there. You see, Angelina, people who love one another always find each other somehow.”

  EPILOGUE

  HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY, 1985

  “Nanny, why is Uncle Anthony called Cakey?”

  “Because when he was a kid, he liked cake. Aren’t you hungry?”

  As soon as I graduated college, ignoring my mother’s disbelief that I was moving back to the ghetto, I rented an apartment in Hoboken that Uncle Cakey helped me find. Uncle Cakey had also shown me the best places to shop, and now, five years later and a regular, I had visited each and every one to prepare the feast that was in the kitchen.

  “I made shrimp scampi.” I put another tape in the video camera.

&
nbsp; “How did you know how to do that? You don’t cook.”

  “I used a recipe.”

  “They have recipes for that?”

  “Nanny, do you remember when I was about twelve, we were watching this movie and you got really upset. That’s the day you told me about the kidnapping.”

  “Don’t put that down. I’ll make you stop.”

  Although Nanny had begun to share memories, this was one topic that remained off-limits. I finally realized she was still afraid. I left the video camera and sat next to her on the couch. “They can’t get us, Nanny.”

  “No, no, I don’t tell nobody. I don’t even tell my friends. You shouldn’t tell. That’s the way it is.”

  “Nanny, I shut off the camera. I just need to know.”

  “They were so mean and lazy. What they did was wrong. They shouldn’t have done that. I was just a little girl.”

  I watched my grandmother transform before my eyes. The bossy eighty-year-old shrunk into her blouse. Her huge hands didn’t flail around excitedly anymore; they clutched at her sides or covered her mouth as she spoke. I could barely breathe as my grandmother talked about the kidnapping in detail for the first time. I would gently ask questions when she slowed down, but I avoided looking at her because I felt like she would snap out of what resembled a trance.

  “…Our neighbor Limonata took me to her brother; he had a butcher store. Maybe it wasn’t her brother, I don’t know. Then she said she had to go to the dentist, and he took me to the kidnappers.”

  “How did he get you there?”

  “I was a smart little girl. I said to him, ‘This isn’t the way we came.’ We were going over the Brooklyn Bridge…”

  “If I cried too much they would put this teddy bear at the window to the door and say, ‘You be quiet or il lupo will get you.’ I thought they were so stupid, because ‘lupo’ in Italian is ‘wolf,’ not ‘bear’…”

  An hour later, she had recounted every detail of the ordeal including the color of the blind across the street.

  “When I ran up those stairs, they were so happy to see me, everyone was crying, especially my mother. They disinfected me in a tub all night long. And for weeks they brought me toys, a doll, a carriage, a little piano…”

  “Nanny, did they ever catch the guys who kidnapped you?”

  “No! I told you, you couldn’t tell nobody. After I got back, the newspapers started to bother us. When I went out with my mother, sometimes a reporter would stand in front of us and say, ‘We heard your daughter was kidnapped by the Black Hand.’ My mother would yank my hand and we would run away. They would run after us and ask me questions: ‘Little girl, did bad men take you?’ My mother was so mad, she would yell at them to leave us alone. When we got home she would make me promise to never answer any questions from anyone. Never talk to strangers. Never to tell anyone.”

  “So that was it? You don’t know what happened to the people who kidnapped you?”

  “No, not the people who kept me. But my mother found Limonata in Brooklyn.”

  “And?”

  “Eh, what do you think? She nearly killed her. She kicked her and threw her down four flights of stairs.”

  “Did Big Nanny tell you about that?”

  “No, I told you, we never talked about it. My cousin Dominick told me. Dominick, bless his soul, was smart. He was tough too. When they found us again in Hoboken, he scared them away.”

  “Who found you—what do you mean?”

  “Eh, these were bad people. They didn’t stop even after I was returned. My brother Clement found a bomb before it went off outside our apartment on Elizabeth Street. So we moved to Hoboken. My parents and uncle opened our ice cream store in Hoboken, Siena’s French Ice Cream.”

  “French!?”

  “It sounded fancy. They tried to blackhand us again, but Dominick found the guy. He took the guy by the neck. I think he even cut him. Dominick had Hoboken friends by then. The names probably scared them, because that was the end of it. No more Black Hand. Let’s eat. If you made the scampi sit all this time it won’t be good.”

  I dished out the pasta and brought the reheated pan of scampi to the table. When I put the pan on the table, Nanny scowled.

  “That don’t look nice,” reprimanded Nanny, bringing it back to the kitchen.

  I let her rummage around my kitchen for a serving bowl. My head was swirling with images of my great-grandmother accosting kidnappers, beating up Limonata, and running from reporters.

  Putting the bowl on the table, she tasted the sauce with her finger. “The shrimp likes more garlic than this.”

  When she finally sat down, I said, “Nanny, I wish I had known Big Nanny better.”

  “My mother was a beautiful woman. Strong. Smart.”

  “I remember her a little. I remember her skin was like silk. And she had strong hands like you. But I especially remember her eyes. There was a whole story in those eyes.”

  Nanny passed me the grated parmiggiano. “Here, take some and we’ll say grace.”

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