The Godmothers

by Camille Aubray

  But Mario had kept his promise to Petrina and hadn’t told his brothers what he saw. He only came to her and asked, “Why did they kill that guy who was playing cards?”

  “It’s like there’s a war going on,” Petrina told him. “The big fish are fighting with one another, because they all want to be in charge of the pond.”

  Mario had absorbed this with his usual intelligent seriousness. “Is Pop a big fish?” he asked, a little worried now.

  She’d patted his head reassuringly. “No, not that big.”

  Apparently this had satisfied him, because he seemed fine tonight. Everyone in this house had the ability to forget unpleasant things. So Petrina closed the door to her bedroom, where she could finally think her own thoughts without having her mother watch her face and guess every idea that crossed her mind.

  Actually, Petrina had not lived in this bedroom for six years. When she was fifteen, the local teachers had called her “wild and independent,” so her parents sent her away to a strict convent boarding school in Massachusetts, with no intention of having Petrina continue her education any further than high school. But away from the family, she discovered her love of learning. The teachers liked to get a high percentage of their students accepted by good colleges; and with Petrina’s excellent grades, her adviser was able to help her obtain a scholarship, making it clear to her parents that they could not possibly turn it down.

  The idea of returning to New York yet still living apart from her family appealed to the rebellious Petrina. It sounded so sophisticated. Her mother believed that Petrina herself had somehow deliberately engineered this whole feat.

  “What did you say to the teachers?” Tessa had asked suspiciously. “Did you tell them we were poor, when your father is one of the richest men in our neighborhood?”

  “No, Mom, of course not! They just like to help their smartest students get into college.”

  “Smart,” Tessa had muttered. “One day, maybe, you’ll wise up for real.”

  Indeed, Petrina felt she had wised up at college, for it was such an eye-opener to live among girls who were more privileged and so easygoing, who expected to get the best out of life. Music, art, dance, history, literature, languages. These were like the keys to the kingdom for Petrina. She felt she could go anywhere, be whoever she liked, leave the past behind, escape from her mother’s limited ideas. The art world especially beckoned her, with museums and galleries full of wisdom and beauty. People treated Petrina as if she had a bright future.

  Thinking about it now, Petrina opened her pocketbook, pulled out her diploma, and ran her fingers over her name and her degree. “Magna cum laude,” she whispered to herself.

  She hadn’t bothered to show this to her parents, and they didn’t ask to see it. She wondered what you were actually supposed to do with a diploma; probably frame it and put it on a wall, like doctors and dentists did. But it felt safer to keep it in a small drawer in her dresser, which had a lock. So she deposited it there, locked it, and hid the key on a chain beneath all her best silk slips and chemises in her lingerie drawer.

  “Mom and Pop think I’m just going to climb back into this bed and become their little girl again, until they marry me off,” she muttered as she turned off the light and leaned on her windowsill, gazing at the moon above the treetops.

  Richard was surely in Rye, New York, by now, dancing at his country club under this same moon. She had played tennis with him and their friends up there in the suburbs. Then they’d eaten especially good hot dogs at a popular stand in Mamaroneck, where the yachting set liked to stop when they were hungry. These were graceful, serene towns by the Long Island Sound in a county called Westchester. Even the beaches there were quieter, less crowded.

  “One more week,” she whispered to the rustling leaves in the trees. “And then I’ll have my own home and my own life, and nobody here can ever boss me around again.”

  5

  Filomena

  Capua, Italy, 1935–1943

  By the time Filomena was sixteen-about-to-be-seventeen, she had ceased to pray. She still believed in “the other side”—a heavenly place beyond the blue sky and bright sun and stars where God and the saints and angels lived—but she had stopped believing that the poor and the meek and the honest would be invited to join them.

  Being forced to do exhausting, dirty work, carrying heavy baskets from the fields and farms, and then cleaning up the kitchen, from four in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, was bad enough, but she was beaten for small transgressions by whoever happened to be bossing her around and given food that wasn’t even good enough to feed the pigs. On Sundays she served the signor and signora and their five spoiled children, who spent their idle hours getting pleasure from crushing their workers under their pampered feet like grapes.

  By now, too, Filomena no longer wondered where her parents and siblings were, because it was clear that they did not want her back. When she’d turned twelve, she’d written them a heartfelt letter, asking how much longer she had to stay here to repay Papa’s debt, but the letter was returned to her, accompanied by a short note from a neighbor saying that Filomena’s family had gone away, farther north, to start a new life. So now she could never find them.

  But why? What could she have done, when she was only a child, to make her own parents despise her so much that they never wanted to see her again? Forever?

  Then one day, the other servant girl, Rosamaria, finally explained it all to her.

  “Your parents sold you, just like my parents sold me. We can never go home. It’s not about what you did or didn’t do. Good girl or bad, they’d have sold you anyway to pay off their debt. No matter how hard we work, nobody is ever going to come back for us. Everyone has to pay tribute to somebody. We are the payment.”

  Filomena trusted Rosamaria to tell her the truth because during that awful first week, when Filomena had sobbed herself to sleep every night, Rosamaria had been her savior. One night, Rosamaria had crept downstairs into the kitchen like a phantom in her nightgown, carrying a candle. When Filomena saw the female figure in white approaching her with a light in her hand, she thought it was the Madonna at last, coming to take her away to heaven, and she stretched out her hand imploringly.

  But when she saw that it was only the other kitchen girl, Filomena flung herself at Rosamaria’s feet and burst into hysterical sobs, begging her to go get a kitchen knife and kill her, tonight, so she could die and go to be with God in his heaven.

  Rosamaria said, “Hush, you fool!” and quickly clasped Filomena to her skinny chest, just to smother her cries. “You silly girl. You’re exactly the way I was when I came here, and look at me now. Nobody can make me cry! Yes, I was just like you, I even looked like you. We are cousins, didn’t they tell you? Now, quiet down.”

  Filomena whispered, “You are my cousin? But where did you come from?”

  “Tropea,” Rosamaria said.

  “Where is Tropea?” Filomena asked.

  Rosamaria stuck out her foot. “Italy is shaped like a boot,” she said, running her hand down her right shin, stopping at the top of her foot, “and Tropea is like a button on the boot, here, on the beautiful blue sea. Haven’t you heard of Tropea onions? No? They are red, and so sweet that we even have ice cream made of them! Oh, but we were so poor, we had to pick the pockets of the church mice!”

  It took Filomena a moment to smile at the joke. “I hate this kitchen,” she whimpered. “I lie awake all night listening for the rats. They come right up to my feet.”

  “I know. This was my bed once. Look, if I let you sleep upstairs with me, you must promise to be quiet and not let Cook know you’re there,” Rosamaria whispered.

  They tiptoed upstairs to an attic room, where they huddled together in one narrow bed, down the hall from the cook and other servants.

  “But every morning you must come back downstairs earlier than everyone else,” Rosamaria warned, “and you must lie on your mat as if you’ve been sleeping in the kitchen all n
ight. Work hard, be good, and one day I’ll ask her, officially, to let you sleep in my room, and Cook will act as if she is a great lady and say yes.”

  This was exactly what happened, because Rosamaria was right about everything. She was the only person on earth whom Filomena cared about now, this cousin who shared the same destiny so bravely. Rosamaria had been a good student, too, in her few years of school; and in an act of utter defiance, she had continued to read and learn. Even now, she sneaked off to the library in Naples to read books and then tell Filomena what she found out. She helped Filomena understand that Italy was one country made of the fragments of old kingdoms, which was why there were various regional ways of speaking. When Rosamaria got angry or excited, she slipped back into the dialect of Tropea, which Filomena, fascinated, learned to mimic when teasing her new friend.

  “But why are so many families like ours in debt to these Bosses?” Filomena asked.

  “Because the Bosses own everything! You can’t get work without their favors. And if they do you a favor or make a loan, you have to pay back more than they gave you, every month, whether you caught any fish or not. If you can’t pay, you owe them your life and the lives of your children.” Rosamaria patiently explained the old feudal system that had started the whole thing, creating a world where a few powerful men reduced everyone else to pawns. Even the signor and the signora seemed less important than the kings and dukes who had once ruled over everybody.

  “But nowadays, it’s the big criminals who run the world,” she declared. “They pay off the judges, the politicians, even the clergy, to do their bidding.”

  And just when Filomena thought they’d figured out history and the way the world worked, along came a braggart called Mussolini, who took all the men away to fight for his demented dreams, filling the sky—God’s home—with death.

  Whenever people talked to one another these days, it was to ask which towns had been bombed yesterday and which were likely to be bombed today. Everyone knew of relatives who’d died, sometimes whole families, even whole villages razed to the ground. So now, when Filomena lifted her eyes to the heavens, it was only with dread.

  “What’s going to happen to us? If we don’t get killed by the bombs, must we work on this farm until we die?” Filomena asked when they were on their way back to the house after a backbreaking day in the fields. The air was buzzing drowsily with flies flitting in the tall grass. Here and there a plow horse led by a barefoot boy tiredly plodded back to his stable.

  Watching one, Filomena said dolefully, “I don’t want to drop dead here, like an old horse that the signora has worn out.”

  “We’ll find a way to get out. Leave it to me,” Rosamaria said firmly.

  “Think fast,” Filomena warned, explaining that just yesterday, the signor’s youngest son had grabbed her and fondled her breasts. “So I picked up a kitchen knife and said I’d kill him! He just laughed.”

  Rosamaria reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out a small but impressive-looking knife. Its handle was black and gold, its blade sheathed in leather. She unsheathed it, revealing a fierce-looking blade.

  “My father,” she said proudly, “could hit a mark fifty feet away. He showed me how. You should learn, and then the signora’s son won’t laugh anymore. Never make an empty threat. Here, I’ll show you.” She held the knife aloft fearlessly, from the blade end, then aimed and hurled it at a tree. The knife flew swiftly in the air before slicing neatly into the tree and remaining there, handle-side out. “You try it now,” she said, retrieving it.

  Filomena took the knife, listened to her friend’s instructions, and tried, over and over. Each time it landed either in the grass, or on a rock, or even lodged in the earth, until it finally hit its mark.

  “See?” Rosamaria said triumphantly. “When you know you can do it, your threats sound real.”

  They resumed walking toward the farmhouse. Filomena said apprehensively, “I heard the signora say she might ‘give us away’ soon. What does that mean?”

  Rosamaria said darkly, “Hah! The signora doesn’t want her husband and sons to hunger after us, now that we are getting prettier. She does this all the time when her little kitchen girls grow up. The last girls were sent off to a whorehouse. Too many curves, too much flirting, and that’s what happens. Oh, but I’m still so skinny! I wish I had your curves.”

  “No, you don’t,” Filomena said. “Men are worse than pigs. I’m glad that so many of the field hands were sent off to the war. What’s the point of marrying and having many children if we’ll only give our daughters away to pay debts, like our mothers did?”

  “It’s different in America,” Rosamaria declared. “That’s the place to go.”

  “America!” Filomena scoffed. “Aren’t they the ones who are bombing us now?”

  “Everybody’s bombing us. They call themselves the Allies. Don’t expect war to make sense. It never has and it never will. But nobody’s bombing New York. And that’s where I’m going!” Rosamaria said confidently. “I went to a matchmaker in Naples, and she said she would find me a husband. Well, it took her forever, but at last, she did! I had to give her my gold and pearl rosary beads that my grandmother gave me just before she died. But I did it, just to make sure that the matchmaker picked me to send to New York. Now she says I must go soon to America, or that family will find someone else for their son to marry.”

  “Don’t they have Italian girls in America?” Filomena asked.

  “Yes, but they are too independent, she says,” Rosamaria replied, reaching into the bosom of her dress to retrieve a letter from America that the matchmaker had given her. “This lady in New York came from Tropea, like me, so that helped! She wants her son to marry a girl just like her, so she’s paying my fare there. It’s all arranged. I’m going as soon as they can get me my ticket.”

  “Wait a minute!” Filomena said. “Who is this boy you’re going to marry? Do you know what he looks like? Does he know what you look like? Does he love you?”

  “He’s rich, so I don’t care what he looks like. They didn’t send a picture, they’re not trying to impress me! They don’t care what I look like, either. It’s more important that I’m a good girl who will be loyal to him and obey his parents. Love will come or not, but I’m going.”

  Filomena, still shocked by all this, gave her a skeptical look. Rosamaria said stoutly, “It’s just a way to get me there. If I don’t like him, I’ll find someone else.”

  Filomena noticed that Rosamaria had been saying I and not we. The thought of losing her only friend was too terrifying to bear. “Can I come, too?”

  “Yes, but not right away,” Rosamaria said. “It’s not so easy anymore to get into America. You have to have a sponsor or some such thing, like I do. And you have to be careful, because sometimes these sponsors are bad people who make you their slave until you pay them back, just like here on this farm. But my matchmaker knows who to trust. Do you have anything you can give to her, so you’ll be next in line? Everyone wants to get out of Italy, away from the war. So her price is higher now.”

  Filomena shook her head and gulped back a sob. Rosamaria hugged her fiercely and said, “Listen, when I get to America, I will find you a husband and you won’t have to pay anybody for it. I’ll be your sponsor and send for you. Don’t you worry.” She squeezed her hand to calm her. “You have to be brave, Filomena. You have to trust me.”

  “Promise that you’ll get me out of here!” Filomena gasped, for she couldn’t allow herself to cry. “Swear to God you won’t make me wait so long.”

  “I promise,” Rosamaria said solemnly. “You know I will find a way. And here, just to prove it, look at this book I borrowed. You and I are going to learn to speak English, because that’s what they speak in New York.”

  And so, their English lessons became their shared secret, and when weeks went by and nothing happened, Filomena was secretly glad, having convinced herself that time would provide a way for them to make this journey together.

&
nbsp; But one hot August day, Rosamaria pulled her aside and said exultantly, “It’s done, I’m going! I have to go to Naples and pick up my ticket and my documents. I have so much to tell you! You come with me and meet my matchmaker.”

  “I have nothing to give her,” Filomena said dully.

  “She knows that. But I can introduce you to her, and she’ll see what a nice girl you are. Then, when I send her the money to get your documents, she will know it’s you she’s supposed to help, because she’ll remember you from this visit.”

  Filomena only dimly recalled the city of Naples, since her mother had rushed her through it when they’d arrived at the train station. “Okay, let’s go,” she said.

  * * *

  Naples was gigantic, terrifying, yet exhilarating and energetic. Amid roaring traffic, ancient stone buildings, pushcarts, and bustling shoppers, everyone seemed hell-bent on getting from one place to the next, as if their lives depended on this frenetic pace. Nobody was more determined than Rosamaria, who took Filomena’s hand and dragged her through the maze of twisty streets and the crush of people. Overhead, laundry fluttered from intricate clotheslines, and exhausted mothers shouted out the windows at raggedy urchins who were shrieking and scampering in the courtyards below.

  But the first thing that went wrong was that the matchmaker wasn’t home to meet them and be introduced to Filomena. The woman’s grizzled, elderly husband opened the door of their tiny apartment, then shuffled inside and handed Rosamaria a brown envelope with her name on it, and he wished her “buon viaggio.”

  “What’s in the envelope?” Filomena asked when they were back on the street.

  “My ticket! I don’t want to open it out here where someone might snatch it from me. Let’s go into that church and we’ll look at it there,” Rosamaria said, grasping her by the hand again. “Wait until you see the inside of this place. It’s the most beautiful church I’ve ever seen! It’s called Santa Chiara. A king built it for his wife.”