An Italian Wife

by Ann Hood

  On the third day, as he was dressing to leave, he caught sight of Eva in the mirror. She was sitting naked in bed, smoking a cigarette, watching him.

  “Should I just come over at seven?” he said. “Or do you want to meet me on the boardwalk? I can bring you for real Italian food.”

  That was when he saw she was crying. Not like Anna cried, but quietly.

  “I’m sorry. I am done with you now,” she said.

  Carmine turned to face her. “What?”

  “This war, it so bad and it kill my husband. And probably it kill you, too. But even that, I don’t care. I just wanted to see if I could feel alive again.”

  “What are you talking about?” Carmine said, kneeling beside her on the bed.

  “You good Italian lover,” she said. “Thank you.”

  He grabbed her by the hair, hard. “What are you telling me? You used me? You’re giving me the bum’s rush?”

  “Bum’s rush,” she said, as if filing it away.

  He yanked her hair even harder. “I’m coming back here tonight. I’m taking you for a real Italian dinner.”

  But Eva just shook her head. “I’m not alive. I’m dead too. Like Ivan.”

  Her hair felt smooth in his hands. “Please,” he said.

  She shook herself free of him and stood. “I go to toilet,” she said. “You please go.”

  He watched her walk away from him. He sat on the bed, trying to think. After a while, he stood and walked out the door, down the stairs. An old woman stirring something on the stove of the first-floor apartment glared at him.

  That night he went back, past that same woman at the stove, taking the steps two at a time. Surely he could change Eva’s mind. She was grief-stricken; he understood that. But he had made her feel alive. Inside, her clothes were tossed around the rooms, her bed was unmade, but Eva was not there. He waited, finally falling asleep on those cloudlike pillows. But when he woke in the morning, he was still alone.

  The old woman at the stove called to him as he sat outside on the stairs trying to figure out what to do next.

  “She won’t come back,” the woman said, peering up at him through the open slats.

  “She has to come back,” he said, hating how weak he sounded.

  The woman climbed the steps toward him. She smelled sour, like cabbage and boiled meat.

  “I know this girl,” she said softly. “Her heart is broken into so many pieces and now she’s broken your heart. That’s how the world goes.”

  Carmine licked his lips and glanced in the direction of the ocean. All he could see from here were rooftops, but he knew it was out there, glittering in the hot August sun.

  “Boy?” she said, as if trying to wake him from a deep sleep. “Boy!”

  He looked at her pasty, saggy face, hating her.

  “Eva is my daughter. She told me to let her know when you go away finally.”

  Carmine got to his feet and grabbed the woman roughly by her shoulders, shaking her. “Tell me where she is,” he said. He shook her harder. “Tell me!”

  She shrugged away from him, and made her way back down the stairs.

  Carmine thought about chasing her, making her tell him how he could find Eva. But there was something in the woman, a resignation, a sadness so deep that he understood her hopelessness.

  THE THING TO DO was to go to fight the war. But still.

  Back at home, Anna waiting for him so expectantly that he almost hated her. He enlisted with Angelo. They would save the world. But all he could think of was Eva Peretsky, those slanted blue eyes, that silky blond hair, her pale skin so smooth and translucent that the veins were like road maps, blue and complicated.

  His homecoming was also a farewell. His mother made large pans of eggplant parmesan, his favorite, and baked ziti, and sausage and peppers. Carmine went to the liquor store to buy vodka, but the man there only frowned.

  “That Russky stuff?” he said. “Don’t carry it.”

  He came in late to his own party. His mother and Anna stood in the kitchen together, heads bent, as they stuffed figs with walnuts and roasted chestnuts. A crowd had already gathered. He saw Angelo with Carla, her face puffy from kissing or crying or both; he saw his sister Giulia looking fat and tired, pregnant perhaps?; he saw the neighbors, all of them crowded in there, shoving food into their faces.

  Anna looked up at him.

  “Why don’t you go in?” she said.

  He shrugged, unable to answer. “Do you want to come for a walk?” he asked her. Something like fear crept across her face. “I just need air.”

  “Air?” his mother said. “You just got here. You go and talk to everyone and take a walk later.”

  Anna waited to see what he would do. He felt so tired that he wanted to curl up and sleep, until after the war, maybe. Or after his wedding, which had been put on hold until he came back. He wondered if he left here and went back to Coney Island if he could find Eva Peretsky, if she would take him back into her arms. Sometimes he felt he had dreamed her.

  “What are you waiting for?” his mother said, without turning around. She elbowed Anna. “Go in there with him. You’re going to be his wife.”

  Anna took off the apron she was wearing, and touched his elbow, urging him forward. He’d known these people forever, but when he walked into the room, they all seemed like strangers. Anna stood on tiptoe but still had to tug on him to bend down.

  “After,” she whispered in his ear, “we can do it if you want.”

  Carmine nodded.

  He didn’t want to. But how could he tell her that he was a different person from the boy he had been on the riverbank just a couple months ago?

  She grabbed his hand and held on tight, pulling him into the crowd.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE HE LEFT, they went down to the river, to the same spot. It was colder now, and already dark.

  “Come here,” he whispered. It was so easy to lift her onto him that he did it in one motion.

  “Don’t you want to do it?” she said.

  “Like this,” he told her.

  To his surprise, he entered her without any problem.

  Anna gasped. “It hurts like this,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Relax.” He tried to get her to rock back and forth on him. But she started to cry again. Carmine thought of Eva Peretsky, the way she’d thrown her head back and moved on him. “Just bounce on it,” he said impatiently. “It will make you feel good.”

  “What am I?” Anna said. “A whore? It doesn’t feel good. I hate it.”

  “It isn’t bad to like it,” he said. “I want you to like it too.”

  “What happened to you in Coney Island?”

  He looked at her face and imagined she was Eva Peretsky. “Come here,” he said, pulling her face down to meet his. He kissed her, and tried on his own to simulate that movement that had made Eva say, “I am here.” He clutched onto Anna’s ass, trying to get her to that same place. But she didn’t. When he came, he thought of Eva, and groaned so loud that Anna told him to shut up.

  The next morning, as he lay in bed, he heard her calling him. Carmine went to the window and saw Anna, still in her nightdress, shivering. She had the same brown sweater on as before, and her shoes and stockings. The sky was still dark, with distant hints of pink and red. He pulled on his pants and a shirt and met her outside under the cherry tree. He lit a cigarette and offered her one, but she shook her head.

  “Please don’t die,” she said.

  “I won’t,” he told her. She was the type of girl who took comfort in empty promises like this. Girls around the world were asking this same thing of men, knowing there was no choice in it. Perhaps Eva had asked her husband not to die, but he had anyway, killing her, too.

  “Promise?” Anna said.

  Carmine nodded.

  “I thought,” Anna said, working out a snarl in her hair, “I thought you might want to do it one more time before you go. Men like it, I know that.”

  It struck him that perh
aps she believed he would die, to offer herself again like this.

  Carmine took her face in his hands and kissed her. He knew a man and woman could kiss for hours. He knew that kissing built passion. Maybe if he kissed her until the sun came up fully, she would enjoy it too. But she was fidgeting, eager to get it done.

  He unbuttoned her sweater and reached his hand inside her nightgown to touch her breasts.

  He pushed her against the cherry tree too roughly, and bent her over, moving his hand under her nightgown. There. The Garden of Eden. He found the spot and began to rub, slowly and methodically.

  She protested, but he kept up the same rhythm. He felt her growing wet. He heard her breathing come in small, short breaths. Carmine pressed against her and kept rubbing.

  “Stop,” she said, and as soon as she said it, he felt it, that shiver running right through her. She pressed against his hand, as if begging for more.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he heard her say. “What happened to you on Coney Island?”

  Smiling, Carmine pushed into her.

  EVA TOOK HIM in her hands and began to move up and down. Carmine closed his eyes and gave a final thrust, coming at last.

  “Eva,” he said.

  He reached out for her, but nothing was there.

  “Eva?” he said, hearing the panic rise in his voice. Sticky and hot and wet, he got out of bed. The sun had started to rise. He could see it from here.

  In the hallway, he saw his niece, Francesca. So many people lived in this house. So many women. He hated them all.

  “Puttana,” he snarled at her.

  She wrinkled her face as if she might cry.

  “Puttana,” he said again, softer now.

  His mother appeared, pushing the girl out of his way. “Basta, Carmine,” she told him. “Enough.”

  He went downstairs to the sink and began to wash the brains and bones and bits of skin from his face. He scrubbed with the rough towel and the fat bar of soap. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get clean.

  Moonlight in Vermont

  VERMONT COMES FROM THE FRENCH—VERT MONT. Green mountain. Josephine knows this because her daughter, Elisabetta, the one so smart that she got to go to college, where she slept with her English professor, got pregnant, dropped out to marry him, and became a faculty wife, tells her things like this. Elisabetta lives in Iowa now. Iowa, which was named for the Iowa River, which was named for the Ayuhwa Indian tribe, which the English called the Ioway, which means one who puts to sleep.

  “This is an appropriate name for Iowa, Ma,” Elisabetta writes to her. “It is dull, dull, dull here.”

  Elisabetta calls herself Betsy, her husband Kip and her son Eugene. The boy peers out at Josephine from a black-and-white photograph, its edges cut in a zigzag pattern like someone put garden shears to them. He is too skinny. His black glasses appear to be taped together on one side. He is holding a rabbit or a fat cat, Josephine can’t be certain. Behind him, a lot of grass and a barn in the distance. This is Iowa, the place that puts you to sleep.

  But Vermont. Green Mountain. Josephine goes there to visit her daughter Chiara, the one who is becoming a nun. This is how she has come to think of her daughters. Concetta, the responsible one who has moved her family in with Josephine; Giulia, the one who can’t stop having babies even though her husband is not a good provider; Isabella, the slow one who married a man who is also not quite right; Valentina, the one she lost, the daughter she gave away.

  Is it a coincidence that of all the convents where Chiara could have been placed, she ended up at this one near Montpelier, Vermont? Montpelier, which means nothing except that it is the capital of Vermont. When Josephine got the letter from Chiara telling her where she was being sent, Josephine thought it was a sign. The daughter she gave away, the one lost to her, her Valentina, is somewhere in Vermont. That is all she knows about the girl, but surely it is no accident that Chiara is there too. Surely Josephine is meant to find her daughter.

  “IOWA IS CALLED the Hawkeye State,” Elisabetta tells Josephine. “After the scout, Hawkeye, in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans.”

  They are on a train to Vermont for Chiara’s graduation from postulate to novice. Elisabetta has come home, without Eugene or Kip, for an unspecified amount of time, claiming vaguely that she wants to accompany her mother on this trip. It is early autumn and as they travel north the leaves are more vivid, scarlet and persimmon and gold.

  “Do you think children who grow up in Vermont are happy?” Josephine asks.

  Elisabetta gives her a quizzical look. “As happy as anywhere, I suppose,” she says.

  She pours herself another small glass of apricot brandy from the flask she keeps in her purse and stares out the window at the landscape rolling slowly by.

  “It looks a lot like Iowa here,” she says in a resigned way.

  “They have fresh cheese in Vermont,” Josephine says. “And green mountains. And maple syrup right from the trees.”

  “I guess,” Elisabetta says, as if she has stopped listening.

  When the college learned that Kip had gotten a student pregnant, he was let go. But he keeps finding new positions, first in North Dakota and then in New Mexico and Tennessee and now Iowa. Because he’s an adjunct, Elisabetta told her mother angrily when Josephine asked her why they were always moving here and there and not staying still. He can’t find a tenure-track position after what happened. Josephine had no idea what any of this meant, but she’d nodded thoughtfully and said, Ah, I see.

  “Are there any Italians in Vermont?” Josephine asks.

  Elisabetta doesn’t look at her. She gives her thin shoulders a little shrug and says, “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  Every day, Josephine tries to not think about her lost daughter. But every day she finds herself unable to do this. She wonders if the girl is tall, if she eluded the outbreak of infantile paralysis last summer, if she likes to read or draw or climb trees. She wonders if the girl even knows that she, Josephine, exists. Or does she believe she is the true daughter of this woman who took her home from a hospital in Providence before Josephine got to kiss her good-bye?

  Once, Josephine took the streetcar to Providence and walked almost two miles to that hospital. She waited while they found someone who spoke Italian, and then she told her story to this blank-faced stranger, this doctor in a rumpled suit, this man who listened without hearing.

  “Records like this,” he said finally, his Italian awkward and halting, “are sealed.” He made a motion with his hands like he was zipping something shut. “Capito?” he said.

  “Then unseal them,” Josephine told him. “I am her mother.”

  The man frowned and Josephine could almost see him translating in his brain.

  “Uh . . .” he said. “Actually, you’re not.”

  Josephine took a step back, away from him. How could he say this? She had carried that baby inside her, felt the first butterfly-wing flutterings of life, pushed her out into the world.

  “I want to speak to someone who understands Italian,” she said, because surely this man in his wrinkled suit did not.

  “You see,” he said, “you signed the papers. You gave her up. You—”

  “Stop saying you did this and you did that!” Josephine said, raising her arms in the air and flailing them about. “I made a mistake! I want her back!”

  “You can’t,” he said, his eyes growing wide. “You gave her up.”

  With each accusation he made, Josephine grew wilder. She pushed him. He was a small man, a nothing man. She pushed him again and this time he lost his balance.

  “Where is she?” Josephine screamed.

  When he didn’t answer, she fell on top of him, her fists landing on his shoulders.

  “Where is she?” she screamed over and over.

  Two men came, maybe policemen, she wasn’t sure, and they lifted her up so that her legs kicked at the air and her hands fell on nothing.

  “Just get her o
ut of here,” the doctor who spoke terrible Italian said as he got to his feet and smoothed his suit.

  “Crazy wop,” one of the men said, laughing.

  “Oh, they’re crazy,” the other one said, gripping Josephine harder than was necessary. “That’s for sure.”

  Later she found four angry bruises above her collarbone where he’d held on to her so tightly. She watched them turn from purple to green and then yellow until they faded away. But sometimes, even after they were gone, Josephine thought she could still see their imprint there, like the man had marked her.

  “HOW MANY PEOPLE LIVE IN VERMONT?” Josephine asks Elisabetta.

  The train is almost in Montpelier. They have been on it for a long time, changing in Boston and eating the provolone and salami and fresh bread that Josephine packed. Elisabetta has only nibbled, wrinkling her nose at the sharp smell of the cheese and steadily sipping her apricot brandy.

  “Not a lot,” Elisabetta says. Her eyes have grown heavy-lidded and her mouth looks puffy.

  Josephine smiles. Maybe she would walk down the street in Montpelier, Vermont, and catch sight of a six-year-old girl, who looks like her, a girl on a bicycle, smiling with her hair blowing in the breeze. And then Josephine would walk up to that girl and say: You are mine.

  “What’s funny?” Elisabetta asks, frowning.

  She’s had a book open on her lap for a long time now, but she hasn’t even glanced at it. The book has a blue cover with a woman’s eyes looking out from it. When Josephine asked what the book was, Elisabetta said: Only the most brilliant book published this year. And when Josephine sounded out the title—The Great Gat-sby—Elisabetta rolled her eyes at her mother.

  “I’m imagining wonderful things,” Josephine says.

  Elisabetta grunts. “Such as?”

  But Josephine just shakes her head.

  Or maybe, she thinks as the train slows, the girl would look nothing like her. Maybe she looks like her father. Even thinking this makes Josephine’s heart lurch. What would it be like to see that face again?