Tillie and the Tailor

by Tillie

  Chaste kisses. To calm her.

  ‘You didn’t want to be hurt,’ I said. ‘You didn’t need to be hurt. I couldn’t hurt you.’

  Now she was sobbing, her head against my chest, sobbing and trying to get out words.

  ‘But always before. Whenever I. They always, they always.’

  I held her and let her cry. What was I unleashing?

  She began kissing me and told me she wanted me. ‘Please,’ she said.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Tell me everything.’

  ‘Please be in me first, then I’ll tell you.’

  ‘No, like this. Tell me like this.’

  She went cold. To get her back, I said, ‘And I did enter you, know you. I entered you a different way, and that’s why you’re here now.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But all the others hurt me. I didn’t understand what they wanted. I didn’t know why they wanted to do that to me. You didn’t. You were the first one who didn’t.’

  It was coming out confused and disordered now. I couldn’t unravel it; I had only an ominous sense of where it might be leading.

  ‘You know I tried, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You saw how hard I was trying. I wanted so much to be yours, to give myself to you.’

  ‘You were lovely,’ I told her.

  Her fingertips touched my face tenderly. She waited a long time before going on, then she said, ‘But the way I am you wouldn’t put up with me for long.’

  I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to convince me or herself. The emotion had evaporated. She was now talking reason and trying to get me to reason.

  ‘What way are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Just think about it,’ she said.

  ‘Why do you say I wouldn’t put up with you?’

  ‘Think about it,’ she repeated.

  What was I was supposed to think about? I didn’t want to think about anything. If something was about to be illuminated, I wanted to stay in darkness, to stay blind. In blindness there was hope. In darkness there was comfort. I was besotted with her and whatever was going on in her head I wanted to lie to myself and believe in the lie.

  At our age we all wanted the same thing – love. Or something we could label love. Yet I knew that something labeled love might not be love. What was love? Always before I had been filled with lust, and I was aware that that was not love. I was also aware that with Patricia it wasn’t lust.

  I said I’d written her a love letter, but in it there was no declaration of love. I never told her I loved her, though every time I thought of her I wanted to so much I ached. The truth is in our twenties it’s the idea of love that we love. Telling a girl you love her becomes an easy tool of seduction. That’s why the word trips so easily off a young man’s lips. But I was not letting that happen.

  The Italians have a saying that l’appetito viene mangiando. You don’t come to the table hungry; it’s the table that makes you hungry. Mediterranean Zen. Plunging headlong into love is coming to the table hungry. While love, when it’s the real thing, grows on us.

  Early the next morning, she and I made love again. She insisted on it, and I wanted it too, but I knew it was going to be a doomed act. It was. The bliss was gone.

  She did try to tell me about herself, but with a leaden cloud now between us I found her words hard to take in. Her life had been an ongoing struggle to be independent of a domineering mother, she said. She’d been sent to a Catholic boarding school at an early age. The nuns were strict and severe. Her education consisted of being taught to be good, taught to conform, taught never to rock the boat. Choosing Yale to study art had been the start of an unending family battle, with skirmishes every time she came home to visit her parents. She had won some degree of independence but at the price of endless bickering. Her biggest fear was of slipping back, of being dragged back, of not being able to control her own destiny.

  I applauded her determination and told her so, but I was still in the dark as to what any of this had to do with me, with us.

  She said that her independence was fragile, that she had been trained and groomed for dependency. The future laid down for her was a good husband, kids, a nice life in the suburbs.

  ‘I can see that I could all too easily give in to you,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘You would take over my life – and I would let you, just as I would let you shepherd me through Italy. But it would be at the loss of my independence, don’t you see?’

  She spoke coolly, without a trace of emotion. It was as though we had been happily traipsing along, hand in hand, when suddenly she was a mile down the road without me. I couldn’t understand how she’d got there. I couldn’t understand why she was anticipating problems, maybe inventing them when I was still in my comfortable bliss.

  I wanted to beg her not to send me into the tangled wilderness. Yes, only a fool would fall for a woman he could not make his. That’s the tangled wilderness. She was doing her best in the kindest, gentlest way to drive this home to me. Patricia the unwitting seductress, I now the fallen prey.

  In my mind I turned over what she was saying. Was I not in an analogous position? What I was trying to do with my life, writing, no income, no real job – nothing was going to make me change that. I had no interest in marriage or the suburbs. I just wanted to carry on as we were, enjoying time together, neither of us wanting anything else of the other, no plans, no looking ahead. Any anticipation of the future seemed crazy as we barely knew each other.

  At South Station, where she was catching a train back to New Haven, I couldn’t muster the courage to ask when we’d see each other again. I don’t think she could either. All I felt was her iron determination. Then, just before climbing aboard, she turned and put her arms around me in a fraternal embrace, pressing a stranger’s cheek to mine. I was left reeling.

  Over the next weeks, we exchanged two or three perfunctory letters, each briefer than the one before. In the last she said she wanted to see me again, but I knew the words were empty. After that, nothing. Only the beginning of a gnawing endless nothing from which there is no relief.

  lxxix

  Can that be what Tillie told the tailor? Words that no would-be lover ever wants to hear? That between them it won’t and can’t work, that through no fault of either it wouldn’t and couldn’t work?

  Was life as Patricia saw it, a tug-of-war between being tied to another and fiercely holding on to one’s independence?

  lxxx

  One morning, finding it hard to concentrate, I left off staring into the Olivetti and began to rummage through a sheaf of pages. Among them was a sketch about anarchists. In it, I suddenly glimpsed the nugget, the promising thread, I’d been looking for. I reread the piece and asked myself what could possibly have taken place to bring the three characters in the story to the point I had depicted? A novel would tell. Here’s what I uncovered and copied out:

  Everything was planned. They sent the woman of the house away, placed a rickety wooden ladder against the two-story building and strewed tools over the roof and ground. In the cellar, waiting in preparation, were a short piece of two-by-four and a heavy woolen blanket folded double.

  Then they were ready. Rosatti, the compagno, was ready with the piece of timber and Saverio, the father, was ready with the thick blanket. Lastly Ribelle, called Reb, home on leave from the army and unwilling to go back. He steeled himself.

  They were in the cellar and Saverio, the wadded blanket padding his son’s back, held Reb tight around the shoulders, forcing on himself an executioner’s detachment. The compagno took no practice swings but struck Reb twice, all on one side, hard and sharp and sure. He barely breathed a cry and blacked out. Rosatti motioned with his head toward the stairs.

  ‘Take his feet,’ Saverio said.

  ‘Let me remove the blanket,’ Rosatti said.

  Saverio held Reb under the arms, Rosatti held him by the legs.

  ‘I asked him if he wanted to go to Mexico or if he wanted a passport to Sweden,’ Saverio said in Italian. ‘Svezia
!’ Rosatti said gruffly. ‘Un giovanotto italiano in Svezia? Brrr. Too cold in Svezia.’

  They struggled up the stairs with Reb between them and made it outside, where they lay him on the ground at the foot of the ladder. They then sent the ladder flying and almost falling on him.

  The mother returned, gave her husband a condemning glance, avoided the compagno altogether, and flung herself down beside her son. Rosatti phoned the hospital. The next-door neighbor, who said she’d seen Reb fall off the roof, joined the scene to clasp the mother and help her to cry.

  Then the two old men and the young man – still out – were driven off in a howling ambulance.

  Eventually, many years later, this became a novel called What About Reb.

  lxxxi

  Here’s a coda:

  For years after I left Dave’s employment and even after I left the North End I had regular dreams about the shop. In them, the place was no longer a shop with walls and a ceiling but had turned into a strange, ghost-like open-air affair, a kind of shambles. It was as if the premises had been razed by aerial bombardment. What remained of the walls stood only a foot or so high and were like the stumps of teeth, black and broken, in an old man’s mouth. From first to last, the dream had about it something of Walpurgis Night.

  Brimming with eagerness, I would arrive – the long-lost son – anticipating a warm and noisy welcome. Dave, Johnny, Frankie, each was stooped over a small table, on his own, unconnected, busy with something. They were all much older. One rummaged in a crate of wilting vegetables. It was Frankie. One wielded a sturdy knife, removing the bone from a whole prosciutto. Johnny. He wore a long dirty apron soiled with old blood. Dave wore a dirty apron too, but it was never clear what task he was engaged in.

  Frankie was always the first to spot me. ‘Look who’s here,’ he would say without a trace of enthusiasm.

  The others would lift their faces, give me a reluctant, lukewarm grunt of a greeting, and quickly return to their work.

  Then, abruptly, the dream ended – always in sadness and disappointment.

  Of Eve I did not dream, but a year or so after the episode of the curtains and the near disaster I ran into her on the back of Beacon Hill, where she had an apartment. Seeing that I’d noticed the gold band on her ring finger, she held up her hand to admire it, saying, ‘Yes, I’m married.’ That was the last time I laid eyes on her.

  Of Patricia, I never saw or heard anything again. Then a year or more ago, rummaging in a box of old papers, I came across her note. Two lines, signed with a simple P. I turned and turned the folded page between my fingers, about to throw it away. Then I reconsidered. The memory of her, vivid as ever, haunts me still.

  I also came across a copy of the words the boy Luigi had recited to her in the middle of North Square. I’d taken them down from his dictation the week after Patricia returned to New Haven. For another fifty cents. Of Sacco and Vanzetti, in 1964 I met the latter’s younger sister Vincenzina at her home, in Cuneo, in the far north of Italy; with her, I visited her brother’s birthplace in the nearby town of Villafalleto. On the same pilgrimage, I paid homage to Sacco’s remains in a cemetery in Puglia, in Torremaggiore. In 1977, on the anniversary of their execution, the governor of Massachusetts issued a proclamation, in English and Italian, stating that the two men had been unfairly tried and convicted. The finding came fifty years too late.

  lxxxii

  This is another coda:

  Psalms 94:3. ‘Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?’ The cry for justice. The cry of every Jew. The cry, when you come to think of it, of us all.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by Lucerna

  This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  57 Shepherds Lane

  Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © Norman Thomas di Giovanni, 2014

  The moral right of Norman Thomas di Giovanni to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781911591146

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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