“There she is,” Carmela replied.
Virginia’s beauty was not lost on Franco.
Carmela admired her work, if not the person wearing it. She hated to admit it, but Virginia was a woman who knew how to wear a dress. Some time ago, during the early days of Carmela’s apprenticeship as a young teenager, she had learned that a seamstress could only do so much. It didn’t matter how well she cut or finished a gown. If a customer, however wealthy and well bred, chose to shuffle with self-consciousness inside it, she would never be as beautiful as the model in the magazine she hoped to emulate. There were other young girls, however, who had visited Yolanda’s studio, sometimes for the first time, to have a gown made for them as a gift from a benevolent aunt or godmother, who might have walked in from the hills. Their lives in the relative wild, as opposed to the girls brought up in marble villas of counts and countesses, had instilled a feral royalty. Their backs were straight and proud. They moved with ease. Carmela marveled at their instinctive, unaffected grace; Virginia fell into this camp.
Carmela suspected the woman’s beginnings were more humble than she would like to have known. It wasn’t hard to picture her with long copper tresses, running barefoot down a creek, dangling a younger sibling upon her hip. Or out at dawn in the cowshed milking beside her older brothers. The vision that stood before the throng now, however, was grace personified: radiant and regal. All the rough edges were masked beneath a fragile veneer. There might have been a gasp or two, but Carmela couldn’t hear them. She ought to have felt proud to have everyone look at the gown she had created. But all she felt was piercing regret for having done such a good job. She caught the light in Kavanagh’s eyes as he gazed upon the gown and his wife. He studied her work with admiration. The feeling was akin to having him look up and down her own body. The dress was the best work of her career. Would he think of her every time he looked at his wife? A fizz of delight corroded any guilt.
Kavanagh passed through the crowd and took Virginia’s hand. Carmela wondered if his felt as hot and creased as Franco’s. He kissed her. Virginia lit up as if a lantern above had its cover lifted. Kavanagh leaned into her ear. Carmela doubted his whisperings involved slipping inside her under the cover of the moonlit pine trees. No, he would be telling her how proud he felt to have her by his side. Franco’s fervent desire for Carmela had once made her bristle with excitement. She clung to that memory as she watched Kavanagh coo over his bride, but the feeling slipped away, like water through her fingers. The beauty of the American couple filled her with the prickle of jealous heat and a brutal emptiness. It was impossible to shrug away the feeling that every part of her life now seemed meaningless, senseless even. She was beside the wrong man. A man whom she no longer desired, of whom she was no longer proud. Before her stood a woman who did not know the value of her husband. How could a Virginia love a Kavanagh the way he deserved? They were not kindred spirits. Neither were she and Franco. And maybe a life is wasted if it’s spent chasing the one soul, Carmela thought, that complements your own with startling, simple perfection. She longed to stand next to Kavanagh now, to feel exulted in his presence. Franco’s desire had little to do with helping her become the woman she deserved to be and everything to do with self-gratification. This was not love. This was ownership. That word again. It left her mind very little these days.
Why had she allowed herself to be acquired? Why could she not find the strength to object? And for where? For who? For a pipe dream. For a fantasy. The illusion she magicked in her mind was just as damaging as misunderstanding Franco’s fervor for love. There was no difference between her and the silly girls around her, gawking at Kavanagh’s handsome colleagues. No, she was worse. She fed her delusions before everyone, playing the part of the obedient fiancée and talented seamstress while basking in the light Kavanagh showered on her. How insipid, thought Carmela. How weak she felt now, having woven these lies to herself without the courage to repair the damage. Franco slipped his hand into hers. It was difficult to know whom she disliked more, him or herself. She took a breath and straightened her back. She would live the lie for one more night. It wasn’t hard to imagine it was Kavanagh’s hand in hers. Her chest felt tight and hot. It was reckless. She forced herself not to care, for a few hours more at least.
Virginia waved to the crowd, as if a kind queen to her people. She hadn’t earned that wave. She hadn’t visited one of the farmers or their families. She had done nothing to even attempt to communicate or ingratiate herself with the locals. And yet Carmela watched her fellow Simiuns fall under her spell, helpless subjects. The couple sashayed toward a table beside the podium where Casler sat.
“Fuck me.”
“Cristiano!” Franco chided his cousin, who stood, salivating, beside him. “Watch your mouth! Is that how you speak in front of Carmela?”
“Sorry, Carmela, only I can’t see shit with Elizabeth Taylor here.”
Franco playfully pushed his cousin’s cheek with the palm of his hand. “No Yankee wife is going to give you a second glance—roll your tongue back into your mouth.”
“Can you make Maddalena a dress like that, Carme’?” Cristiano asked, breathless.
“Tell your girlfriend to come and see me. She’s the prettiest girl on Via Dante and you know it.”
“Ain’t no princess, though. Jesus, I think I just died.”
“Give me a Sardinian over a white Yank,” Franco piped. “I like my women with fire, not ice.”
Plural?
Cristiano shuffled toward the band to get a closer look.
“Where was I . . . ?” Franco said, sliding his hands over Carmela’s waist. As he leaned in to kiss her, applause erupted from the crowd. Carmela and Franco turned toward the podium. Kavanagh stood behind a large chrome microphone, his wife a few steps behind. He wasn’t as comfortable in the spotlight as she, that much was clear. She remembered how he had cocked his head to the side slightly when he spoke his pigeon Italian, an embedded modesty that had ingratiated him with the local farmers quicker than the arrogance of a Casler. There was simply something about his presence alone, assured but not arrogant, confident but not proud, that was enough to make the people around him want to help, impress him even. It struck Carmela that a lieutenant such as Kavanagh held the power to make or break the success of the base. And it was a man like this, so admired in such a short time, who had placed his wholehearted trust in Carmela to act as his voice. She felt a surge of pride.
“Buona sera, tutti,” he began. His cheeks flushed a little.
The crowd roared back, holding up their glasses.
“Per favore, chiamo, Signorina Carmela Chirigoni.”
The people before Carmela turned around. Now it was her turn for the blood rush to her cheeks.
“Best obey Mr. Sergeant’s orders,” Franco whispered, tapping her on the small of her back.
Carmela handed Franco her glass and began a cautious walk toward the stage as people moved aside for her. The lights were a little dazzling, shining behind Kavanagh much like the first time she had met his silhouette on the viccoli behind the piazza. Carmela summoned the coolness of professionalism, the way she would when a particularly difficult customer was exacting in the fitting cubicle. She reached the top step and turned to look at the sea of Simius’s faces below. Only then did she feel the earth rise up beneath her feet again, though her chest still rose with shallow breaths.
“Here, Carmela,” Kavanagh said, standing back from his microphone and placing a second one in front of her. She caught Virginia’s eye over his shoulder, but Carmela’s polite smile was not reciprocated. Kavanagh’s eyes caught the light of the side lanterns. The color reminded Carmela of the August sea, the day an uncle had taken her and Piera off the coast in his rowboat, the aquamarine water so clear you could see the sporadic tufts of seaweed and rocks at the bottom, like looking through glass.
“I’ll begin and leave spaces for you to do your magic, yes?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied, letting the
excitement of standing onstage, before a familiar crowd, in the most glamorous dress she had ever dared make for herself, ripple through her. It had taken hours to prepare, stitched in the twilight after the close of business, or before the doors of the studio opened as the sun slit pink across the valley for the dawn chorus. She’d cut the pattern from a picture of a French design in one of Mrs. Curwin’s magazines. The partial off-the-shoulder gown had a fitted bodice, for which she had used black satin. On one shoulder Carmela added a partial shoulder drape, ruched at the top of her arm and falling into a scarf that swung down her back. She ornamented the semi-fitted sheath with another draped panel that accentuated her hips and then swooped down to the hem.
With every stitch that pierced the heavy silence of the studio, she pretended not to rival the gown she created for Virginia. Her fingers raced over the fabric running away from her thoughts. In the quiet of that deserted room, she had stood before the three mirrors for clients in the half-made gown. She’d gazed hard at the woman who looked back at her. Sometimes she recognized the stare. Sometimes she saw the young woman everyone expected her to be. Most nights she saw a stranger, a woman who chased the shadows she fled. Even the cherubs on the frieze overhead seemed to mock her, their happy grins turnings to grimaces, their chubby hands playing harps to taunt her.
Now she felt the lights hot on her cheeks. When would she ever get this close to feeling like a star again? Might as well enjoy this fleeting moment. It would be nothing but a hazy memory before too long.
Kavanagh told the crowd how grateful he and his senior officers were for their hospitality. How the party was a meager offering in return and, he hoped, the first of many. He told them how he wanted to share some of their American traditions with them and how he couldn’t wait to help in the Vendemia in the coming months—the vineyard owners had been joking when they’d invited him to assist in the grape harvest, but Kavanagh was determined to show goodwill. Carmela had to pause her interpreting at this point for the crowd’s laughter. At the end of his speech, Kavanagh invited the crowd to applaud Carmela for her untiring assistance throughout the past month. She felt embarrassed at this and more than a little awkward when she caught Franco’s crooked smile beyond the applauding guests. If Franco had anything to do with it, hers was a position she would not keep for long—that much was clear. It didn’t matter that she was working with a decent, married man and not a desperate, oversexed Simius singleton. Kavanagh was a man: That was threat enough.
She was lucky, she knew, to have held the job down this long, somehow having dodged Franco’s uncertainty, shielded by the cachet her work with the base had given her. For a month she had reassured Franco that she was his personal link to the base, one way he and his family could keep careful taps on the Americans’ intentions and, more important, know how best to exploit them. Both her and Franco’s families owned several acres of land that had drawn particular interest from Casler and Kavanagh, and they were ready for some steep negotiations on how much they would charge the Americans to rent it. Carmela consoled herself with the thought that in the four weeks of working alongside Kavanagh, they had visited all but one farm and forged friendly relations with all of them. Even if her interpreting didn’t go beyond tonight, she could look back on this month as one of the happiest of her life, topped with this grand finale of sharing the spotlight, facing the adoring expressions of the people who had known her since she was toddling the cobbled streets of Via Gallura.
Surely that was enough. Enough to pass on beautiful stories to her children, who would feel proud that her mother was instrumental in facilitating wealth and regeneration for their town and beyond. She wasn’t performing life-saving surgery, or flying a plane solo, granted, but she would leave a soft imprint on the town’s history. A sliver of immortality was hers.
Kavanagh signaled for the band to resume. A brassy jive began, and the bodies on the dance floor leaped back into action. As Carmela walked down the steps, she caught sight of a private rushing in from the back doors, waving what looked like a telegram in the air toward Kavanagh. She watched the lieutenant hurry toward the private, unfolding the paper with haste. His face dropped. The private left. Kavanagh turned toward Virginia. Carmela looked back up at the podium to see Virginia being helped by Casler down the steps, both basking in one another’s glow. Kavanagh interrupted their joke and led Virginia by the elbow toward the quieter end of the room. Beyond the spiraling revelers Carmela caught sight of a frantic Virginia and a tussled Kavanagh. In between twirling skirts, Carmela watched a gray Virginia being ushered out through the doors that lead to the hospital wing. An anxious Kavanagh followed close behind. The doors swung shut behind them.
“Quite the performance, my love,” Franco said, turning her away from the back of the hall toward him. “Don’t be getting any ideas about Hollywood. We need you to be the star of our family here!”
He planted a hot kiss on her mouth. His lips were fleshy. It was one of the things she had first loved about him. No sixteen-year-old Sardinian girl could resist lips like those pressing up against her own in the shade of a laden cherry tree. He tasted a little like ash tonight, but it didn’t matter. Carmela pulled away and looked into the dark pools of Franco’s eyes. She ached to know what news had befallen Kavanagh, but her adrenaline was fast shifting to desire. “Let’s go outside.”
When Carmela hung her gown the next morning, she made a mental note to repair the tiny tear to the lower end of the skirt. A souvenir from Franco, from when he had pressed her up against the trunk of an ancient oak. She hadn’t fought the image of another man when it flashed in her mind, nor Franco’s racing hands. This time, she had allowed herself to undulate toward ecstasy imagining this other. Carmela knew, as Franco slipped his fingers away and led her own down into his trousers, that he believed it was her shuddering desire for him alone that had brought her to tears.
CHAPTER 15
On the following Monday, there was a hint of autumn in the sea breeze that swished the parched brush. Carmela took large strides, clopping downhill in her red leather shoes that scuffed against the white dust. Her uncle Raimondo, Tomas’s younger brother, had made them for her twenty-first birthday. He had let her choose the color and the style. She loved the smell of leather inside his narrow shop beneath the cobbled arches just beyond the piazza. When they had been young children, she and Piera would often hover at the back of his store where he kept the scraps. Raimondo would set down a small crate full of them and let the girls play. Sometimes he might give them some to take home to make garments for their dolls, only Grandmother Icca would confiscate them and put them in a large box above one of the kitchen cabinets to keep them safe. From what, Carmela never found out. As a child she succumbed to the belief that transparent elves hid beneath their high, metal-framed beds and snuck out at night to plunder their home. The same fate befell the candied delights cousins would bring over on feast days.
This morning, those shoes filled her with childlike energy. She felt light, expansive. The world was in her grasp. She and Kavanagh were to visit the last farm on their list, the Toiedda family, several miles away. She cast aside the little voice reminding her that after today she may never again ride beside Kavanagh in his rattling jeep, with the wind flying through her hair, while the high summer sun blazed down on them.
Instead, she remembered the numerous times she had walked past the Toiedda land with her family, during the annual pilgrimage to Castro, a medieval church that stood high upon a hill in the middle of the plains. The walk would begin before dawn. Hundreds of Simiuns would trek under the stars, come rain or shine, until the pink sun rose and the spring wind swept through the valley. When the pilgrims finally arrived at the summit, they would huddle in and around the church, most of them in the courtyard, for the stone sanctuary only accommodated a minuscule congregation. They would murmur the rosary in unison, as they had throughout the ten-kilometer pilgrimage from Simius. After celebrating mass, the women would unwrap packages of fresh bread a
nd cheese. The men would eat and drink together on one side of the church. The women would sit and swap tales of past pilgrimages on the other, drawing inventories of how many elderly had perished during the arduous walk in the past, who had given birth upon the hill, and what kind of summer they could expect based on the direction of the wind that day, the blossoms, or the hue of the sunrise. The walk back felt shorter. Carmela’s sleep on those nights was always deep and dreamless.
These pictures replayed in her mind as she reached the main entrance to the base, once again a place of work, no longer ringing with festivities. She pushed open the glass door and greeted the receptionist. Although she had heard Kavanagh refer to her by her first name on several occasions, Carmela felt it an imposition to assume such familiarity. “Good morning.”
“Good morning, ma’am,” Mary-Anne replied, flashing her white teeth in a smile that lit up her platinum-hair-framed face.
“I’m here for Lieutenant Kavanagh.”
“He’s not here.”
“It’s okay, I can wait.”
Carmela walked over to the gray plastic seats. She smoothed her linen skirt down. Piera had commented on her outfit that morning. It was impossible to share a small room and not expect her younger sister to offer unwanted opinions. Besides, this might be her last outing for some time. Why not wear an impeccable linen two-piece suit? Who cared if it got dirty on the farm? Who cared if the Toieddas would wonder what on earth she was doing wearing her Sunday best on a Monday morning? Kavanagh might take a moment to notice the cut, her fine embroidery along the front of the skirt of delicate bougainvillea and vines in a cream palette. He might enjoy the way her olive skin was enhanced by the crisp white of the linen. He might even think her lips suited the deep coral of the lipstick she had borrowed from Aunt Rosa’s dressing table. After all, what would Aunt Rosa want for lipstick where she was? Idling at the farm in quarantine, passing her secret confinement with only her mother for company. Rather be kidnapped by bandits and tied up in a damp cave, Carmela thought, than sit with four bare walls, an unwanted baby gnawing at your insides, and a mother before you to make sure you couldn’t bury your guilt. A shiver zigzagged down her spine.
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