by Ann Hood
Francesca did not like this part of the feast. It was hot and the men always grabbed at the teenage girls in the crowd. Already her thighs were bruised from their pinches.
She looked at her sister, Mary, beside her, shouting, “Ave Maria! Ave Maria!” and throwing her own pennies and nickels at the passing wagon.
Francesca turned and fought her way out of the crowd, away from the parade. After the Virgin and the old ladies there would be a band and some floats and the littlest girls dressed up like miniature madonnas. Today there was also going to be a march for Mussolini, the local men who were Fascists would hold a banner with Il Duce’s face on it and march, singing the Fascist anthem. Her grandmother had taught it to her and Mary, and no doubt Mary would want to stay until the very end to sing it. But Francesca had had enough.
She cut through the Contis’ yard to the street beyond, which was deserted, and pulled a cigarette out of her pocket. It was half-smoked, discarded by her uncle Carmine earlier. That was how Francesca got all her cigarettes. At least today she was dressed for the warm weather in a pale-yellow short-sleeved dress that her mother had sewn for her. It buttoned down the front and had a wide, sailor-style collar. Really, the dress was for a child, a younger girl, but the fabric was so thin and soft that Francesca was happy to have it. She kicked off her shoes and rolled down her stockings, then leaned against the stone wall that marked the end of the Contis’ yard.
With her eyes closed, she tried to think of what people in other places were doing today. In the newspaper she had seen a picture of San Francisco, where there was going to be a World’s Fair. She did not know what people who lived in San Francisco did, though her father had once told her about a terrible earthquake there, and Antonio the fish man had once been a fish man there. Fish and earthquakes, Francesca thought, trying to put them together into some sort of life.
Hands covered her eyes and she knew right away it was Bruno. He had probably followed her.
“Guess who?” Bruno said. Most of the people their age did not have the accents of their parents; but Bruno did. His family went back and forth, never satisfied in either place.
“Bruno,” she said flatly.
He released his hands and laughed. “I’m going to kiss you,” he said.
She shrugged. It didn’t matter to her if he kissed her or not.
His lips were on hers, hungry, his tongue pushing its way into her mouth. Almost immediately it happened; Francesca seemed to fly out of her body and into the air between this short squat boy and this girl in the yellow dress. The boy’s hands, square and thick, were running up and down the girl’s body and Francesca felt nothing. Bruno was breathing heavier.
What would he do, she wondered, if she sat up and unbuttoned her dress to her waist and let him touch her breasts?
The band was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” badly. Too much brass.
Francesca pushed Bruno away from her and began to unbutton her dress. She would’ve liked covered buttons, but they were too expensive. Instead, her mother had sewn on big, smooth black ones from an old dress of Nonna’s. They slipped easily through the buttonholes. This smooth, quick action brought a jolt of electricity to Francesca, the one she had when she wasn’t with Bruno, or any boy. It was a hum she wanted to keep going, to have a boy push forward like an accelerator in an automobile. A boy, she thought, could take her somewhere special if only he could keep that feeling going in her.
She unhooked her bra and shrugged it off her shoulders, letting her breasts fall free. Her breasts were large and full, and Bruno, when he beheld them, gasped. The hot, sticky air on her bare skin made her want to be touched even more, and it was Francesca who grabbed Bruno’s hands and placed them on her breasts. Almost immediately, she became that observer again, the one watching. How foolish they looked, Francesca thought. The boy’s hands as if they were kneading dough for pizza. The girl’s new dress in a rumpled heap around her waist.
The Fascists were singing. Soon the parade would be over and the streets would fill with people on their way to the church and the festa on its grounds.
Francesca, wanting to finish her cigarette, to get rid of Bruno, let him suck on her breasts briefly. He made loud slurping noises that disturbed her. When she roughly pulled him away, clutching his thick hair, he looked up at her, his mouth wet from his own spit.
“I’m going to marry you,” he said gruffly. “I’m going to marry you and do this to you every night.”
Those words in her ears made her cry uncontrollably as she stumbled home, trying to avoid the crowds of people returning to their houses for the food they would bring to the festa. Without a plan, she thought, her breasts sore from Bruno’s clumsiness. What hope did she have for anything different from the very life he had predicted? She was ashamed that she was so ignorant that she did not even know where else to go. She did not want to fall into a crevice in the earth and get swallowed up in San Francisco. She did not want to farm land in the Old Country. And she did not want this life.
When she walked into the kitchen at home, she stood in the doorway and looked at the dark wallpaper and badly laid floor, and heard the Italian words buzzing through the room, as if they were not in America. Her grandmother, smiling proudly, held a small sign with Mussolini’s face on it attached to a basket. The basket was brimming with gold. Francesca moved closer. She recognized earrings, crosses, thick chains, and on top, Nonna’s wedding ring. To be certain, Francesca looked at the woman’s left hand. Bare.
Her uncle Carmine was grinning at her as he added gold pins and his Army medals to the basket.
“What’s going on?” Francesca asked in English.
Her mother said, “There’s a drive at the church. Gold for Italy. Duce has asked all Italians to send their gold for the good of Italy.”
Pressing her hands together, Nonna said happily in Italian, “Duce will make Italy strong again so we can all go home.”
Francesca took a step back, and then another, until she was standing at the door. All that gold, she thought, all that gold could buy their way out of here, could buy Mary her glasses, could be used as a down payment for one of the larger stone houses being built in town, on the flat land away from the mill and the river.
“What are you, crazy?” she shouted. “We have nothing and you send these valuables to a dictator? A Fascist who’s killing people in the streets?”
Nonna frowned. “Eh?”
“Tu sei pazza,” Francesca said. “You’re crazy.”
The old woman’s face crumpled.
“You and Mussolini are crazy!” Francesca shouted. “We need that gold. We have nothing here. You stupid, stupid people.”
She ran out of the house, leaving them behind, all of their faces blank. She wished she could keep running until she reached the ocean. She had never seen the ocean, though she knew it was not too far from here. Francesca tried to picture a map, to see what lay beyond this town, but she could not find its shape.
In the distance she could hear the sounds of the festa. Music and laughter and Italian and French; the French Canadians always came to the Italian parties. But she had run the long way, and was on the dark road leading away from town.
A car passed, then stopped, backed up, and stopped again, this time beside her.
She immediately recognized the blond boy driving.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Yes,” she lied. She put her hand to her chest to slow her pounding heart. “I’m on my way home.”
He studied her face. “You look familiar.”
She smiled and shrugged, hoping her face did not have the red blotches it sometimes got when she cried.
“I guess you live back there,” he said, pointing in the direction of her house.
“No,” Francesca said. “I live this way.” She pointed too, toward the newer houses made of stone, the ones where the town’s doctor and undertaker and some of the teachers lived.
The boy laughed. “I took you for one of those wops,
” he said. “The ones that work as slaves at the mill down there. Stupid guineas.”
Francesca forced a laugh.
“Well,” he said, “hop in. I’ll give you a lift.”
He leaned across the seat and opened the door for her, extending his arm to help pull her up. Inside the car smelled of leather and mint and something else, something foreign that Francesca could not identify.
“Name’s Mac,” the boy said.
“Priscilla,” Francesca told him, giving the most American name she knew. In Mrs. Miller’s English class they had read The Courtship of Miles Standish, and it had seemed to Francesca that Priscilla was the most wonderful woman ever.
“Priscilla?” he said laughing. “That’s a mouthful.”
She could feel him giving her sidelong glances.
“Hey,” he said finally, “there’s a big wop festival at their church. There’ll be great food to be sure. Want to go? With me?”
Francesca gripped the edge of the seat hard, digging her nails into the soft leather. “No,” she said. “I don’t like that sort of thing.” She did not want him to go away. “But I’ll go for a ride with you.”
“Okay,” he said.
Francesca began to tell him things, how her father was a dentist and her mother had infantile paralysis and was confined to her bed now. She told him that she had been to San Francisco and would like to go back. The whole while she talked, that humming grew in her gut. Mac told her things too. He lived in East Greenwich and went to the Catholic boys’ school there. His mother wanted him to become a priest but he knew he would end up breaking her heart and doing something else.
“I like pretty girls too much,” he said. “Like you. I guess I’ll just have to be a lawyer like my father.”
She was glad it was too dark for him to see her blush. None of the boys from the neighborhood, not even the ones who had kissed her, or Bruno who had sucked on her breasts, had ever told her she was pretty.
Mac stopped the car and the night was completely still. There did not seem to be any air.
“Where are we?” Francesca whispered.
“Lake Mackinac.”
“Oh,” she said. She had never heard of it. But now that she knew they were near water she could hear it lapping against the shore. “Funny,” she said, “just today I was thinking of how much I’d like to go to the ocean.”
“This is better,” Mac said. “Not so wild. Safer.”
“Hm,” Francesca managed. How could she tell him that she wanted that other, wilder thing? That her body ached for something unnamable, unreachable?
“If I kissed you, would you slap my face?” Mac asked her.
She thought of how Michele had started kissing her one Christmas Eve after they’d gone into her yard to beat the fig trees that hadn’t bloomed that year. She still had a bit of cookie in her mouth and he had not even bothered to let her swallow first.
“You may kiss me,” Francesca said.
Mac laughed softly. “You’re so regal,” he whispered. “You’re like a princess.”
Then he had his soft lips on hers and he was prodding at her mouth with his tongue and Francesca was not leaving her body. She was in it. That surge of electricity kept humming inside her. Anything could happen with this boy, she realized. She thought of the name of the town where he lived and decided it was far enough away for her to go.
“I think I could kiss you forever,” Mac whispered into her ear.
It took everything she had in her to say, “We’ll have to see about that.” And for her to make him stop and take her home.
This time on the ride she sat so close to him that she could feel the muscles in his legs when he moved the pedals.
“Stop here,” she told him when they reached the fork in the road where he had first picked her up.
“I can’t leave you here,” he said. “It’s late.”
“My father would kill me if he thought I was with a boy. He thinks I’m at my friend’s house studying, which was where I was coming from.”
“I’ll only let you out if I can see you again.”
She pretended to consider this. “Monday night?” she said.
“Three whole days away? No. It has to be sooner.”
Francesca shook her head. “I’ll be right here on Monday night at nine o’clock.”
She didn’t let him kiss her again. She slid across the seat and out of his car, dizzy.
BY THE TIME she walked in the direction of the new houses and then backtracked to the church, the festa was almost over. The men were drunk and sloppy on their homemade wine. Arms linked, they swayed and sang together in Italian, some of them growing weepy as they sang. The women were sitting together, holding sleeping babies or sipping grappa. Some of the children still played, kicking the ball around the grass. Everyone Francesca’s age had gone, found private spots in the alley and fields that made up this part of town. She imagined those boys, Bruno and Michele, with their rough hands and clumsy kisses; the girls wanting something from them that they could not name.
On the table near the statue of the Virgin sat baskets heaped with the town’s gold. Posters of Mussolini were lined up everywhere like soldiers. Francesca stepped back, into the shadows, watching these people she would leave behind. These Catholics, these immigrants, these Fascists—displaced, lonely, scared. And her heart, for the first time she could remember, filled with a love so strong for them that her arms reached out for an embrace she was already too far away to give.
Waiting for Churchill
FROM THE WINDOW OF HIS STUDY UPSTAIRS, NIGEL Smith watches his daughter-in-law leave every morning. The girl, Martha, dressed like a man: pants, button-down shirt, thick shoes. Only her hair, blond and wavy, falling loose to her collarbone, gave away her gender. She walks with a light but determined step. In another time and place, not London 1943, she would be a girl going somewhere. Even with the windows closed, Nigel can smell war in the air around London. It smells of fire, of dust, of blood.
“Ask her where she goes,” his wife says.
He promises he will. But he never does.
She is a child on her parents’ farm in Vermont. It is autumn. October. The leaves are just changing color, mostly at the tops of trees. Fistfuls of red, bright yellow, orange. Martha can smell the apples, ripe, ready to be picked. Macintosh. Golden Delicious. Granny Smith. Around the trees the air is heavy with the smell of rotting leaves, fruit going bad, the earth. But the apples, when she holds one to her nose, smell clean. They are so crisp that when she bites into one she can’t hear anything but its crispness.
Tonight, Diana has made lamb. It is tough, dry. But there is mint sauce and roasted potatoes. The girl has brought home apples, shiny red ones that looked obscene when she held them out to Nigel. Then she went into the kitchen and began to peel and slice them, working hard, her face wrinkled with concentration.
As always, dinner is silent. There is the scraping of forks and knives against china. The clock ticking. Nothing more. Until the girl breaks the silence. She always does.
“You worked hard on this lamb, didn’t you Diana?” she says. Nigel’s wife cringes at the familiarity, not even Mrs. Smith, but Diana.
“Do you know what my mother back in Vermont used to do? She would sear the meat first with garlic and rosemary. That infused the meat. She always made a moist, tasty lamb.” Martha smiled then, as if she hadn’t just insulted her mother-in-law.
Diana stops chewing and looks at Martha, this stranger in her home, this interloper when she most needs to be alone and private in grief.
“Wait until you taste the apple pie I’ve baked,” Martha continues cheerfully. “I’ve been saving flour for weeks to have enough. Aren’t rations just the worst possible thing?”
No, Diana thinks, but doesn’t say it. They all know the worst possible thing because it happened to them.
Martha sighs and leans back in her chair. “Robin loved my apple pie,” she says.
His name seems to hang there, bounc
ing between them, a light thing, a magical thing.
Nigel clears his throat. The dry lamb is caught there, unable to be swallowed.
Martha gets to her feet and clears the plates of uneaten food. She brings out the pie. Holding it out to them like a gift. It is so high, and lightly baked with a fluted crust and the smell of apples and cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, an exotic thing really.
She gives them each a fat wedge of it, the steam escaping, rushing the aroma into the air. Diana wants to hate this girl’s pie, but the taste is so alive that she cannot hate it. She must eat it. She cries as she eats it, but she cannot stop.
NIGEL GETS THE news of the war from the radio and from his friend John who comes to visit every Tuesday for tea.
They know war, these men. They’d fought in the last one together. John was with Nigel when he lost his leg. He stayed with him, holding a cloth to the place where Nigel’s leg had been to keep him from bleeding to death. When a man has done that for you, he is in your life forever.
Today with the tea, Nigel serves slivers of what is left of the girl’s pie. “Apple pie, eh?” John says. “That’s what Americans eat, isn’t it? And hot dogs?”
He tells Nigel the news. Germany is winning this war. There is no doubt about that.
AT NIGHT SHE PLAYS the same record over and over.
Missed the Saturday dance . . . heard they crowded the floor . . .
“Why doesn’t she go home?” Diana asks from her side of the bed. She has a book open but she is not even pretending to read it. “Back to Vermont?”
Nigel is facing the wall. “I don’t know,” he says.
“I don’t want her here,” Diana says with conviction.
Nigel doesn’t answer.
“Did she say where it is she goes every morning?” Diana asks him.