A Heart Most Worthy (29 page)

42

She passed her office wondering if . . . but no. The jewels could wait until later. Until after she had determined what exactly the strega had to do with Luciana. She had turned the corner toward the back stairs when she realized something. She had dealt with the strega – ordered her out of the store even! – and she hadn’t needed a drink to do it. She felt absolutely fine. She felt as fine as she’d felt in over twenty years.

She almost stopped right there with her foot on the first stair and laughed. From the sheer exhilaration of it all. From the look of outrage on the strega’s face. If she lost everything she’d ever owned tomorrow, if Mrs. Quinn found out about the jewels, she’d still have done – still have said – the very same things.

Go ahead, cheer if you wish to. I did the same myself.

Madame walked past the second floor and on to the third. She stood in the doorway, surveying her girls. Which of them had lied to her? Though she’d been ready to ask each one, ready to put the theft of the jewels to rest, she put that matter aside. Concentrated on the question at hand.

“Is there something one of you wishes to tell me?” A flush simultaneously lit each girl’s cheeks, though none of them said a thing. Curious. “Something that pertains, perhaps, to one of my customers?”

Now, only Luciana’s eyes refused to meet her own.

“Something that concerns that customer
very
greatly?”

Luciana remained silent, yet she truly wanted to speak. The only thing she lacked was words. What words could she use to speak to Madame of treachery and betrayal? Of family lost and found? Of strangers’ kind help and astonishing propositions?

“I must know what’s going on!”

Luciana bowed her head. Of course, Madame should know what was going on. It concerned a customer of hers. In a way.

“Billy Quinn has asked me to marry him.”

Julietta’s eyes widened. Madonna mia! Billy Quinn? The strega’s son? Her gaze shot toward Madame, but the woman didn’t seem at all surprised. “Billy Quinn. He asked you to marry him.”

“And I told him no. At first. I told him that I couldn’t.

Because . . . well . . .”

“Because it would be better for him, for his family, if you didn’t.”

“Sì.” Yes. That was it exactly.

Madame looked back, alarmed that the girl would be so willing, so ready, to commit the same mistake that she had so many years ago. “But you
must
marry him.”

“Sì. And I – ”

Madame turned and rushed from the room, leaving her astonished third-floor girls with only one directive. “Don’t do anything – don’t say anything. I’ll be back. Just wait until my return.”

Madame let herself out of the shop, and instead of turning toward her home, she set out across Temple Place and then down the street, oblivious to both man and woman, carriage and car. She marched to Washington Street and then past it to the United Bank Building. There, she climbed the front steps, pushed through the door, got into the elevator, and told the attendant to press the button for the fifteenth floor. The top. That’s how far she was going. All the way to the top.

When the elevator stuttered to a stop at the fifteenth floor, she stepped out of the cage and walked down the hall in search of the president’s office. As she found the office and entered it, a man glanced up at her from behind a desk. He stood.

“Mr. Quinn, please.”

“The congressman? I’m afraid – ” He abandoned his customary excuse at the look she was giving him beneath her imposing hat.

“You may tell him that Miss De Luca is here to see him.”

“Miss De Luca. That’s fine, but really, he can’t be – ”

“And I’ll see him now.”

“I . . .” He surrendered to the iron resolve he saw in her eyes. “One moment, please.” He returned a minute later, surprised that his boss had agreed so readily to see a woman who had never, not once in the ten years he had worked for Mr. Quinn, come to see him before. If she had, he would have known it. He would have remembered. Like all those involved in the machinery of high finance and national politics, contacts were his currency and memory was his chief asset. “If you’ll follow me.”

If? She had no choice. Not really. If she did, she would still be in her shop, the haven she had built for herself after that morning in the church so many years ago. She would still be standing there on the shop floor, the shrieks of Mrs. Quinn still echoing in her ears. But she had been forced to come. So that Luciana would not make the same mistake that she had, trading love for reason. Practicality for passion.

Patrick Quinn glanced up from his desk when she entered his office. “Rosa.”

Oh, why did he have to say her name? And why did he have to say it with such gentleness and . . . love? She wanted to say his name too, just once. To give it voice, to recall the life she might have had, the person she used to be. But she was the one who had let it all go. She was the one who had given up her rights to say it. And so, she simply carried on with the business at hand. “I’ve come about your son.”

“Billy?”

“He’s fallen in love with one of my girls. At the shop. I’m a . . . a gown maker. Have been for quite some time.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I want them to be able to marry. She’s a good girl. From a good family, as she’s a northern Italian.” At least, that’s what Madame supposed. “She’s . . . she’s perfect. For him. They deserve to be together.”

“In the same way that you and I did not?”

Is that what he thought? That it had been about what they deserved? “What I did – everything I did – I did for you.”

He folded his hands and placed them on the desk. But he was gripping them so hard that his knuckles had gone white.

“Please. Give them a chance.”

“You’re asking the wrong person. I was always willing to give you a chance.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I left you. I’ve always been sorry I left.”

“I didn’t care who you were or where you came from. Didn’t you know that? To me, you were always just . . . my Rosa.”

And now she was Rosa to no one. No one but this man remembered the daughter of Cosimo the Tailor. Rosa was gone. Madame had abandoned her, punished her. Killed her. She had exorcised the memory of that girl by trying to become the image of the woman that Patrick Quinn ought to have married. The woman she had stepped out of the way for him to marry. But her plan had gone wrong. He hadn’t married that woman at all. Sì, he had returned to the altar – just as she had intended – but he had come away with the strega, Mrs. Quinn. “But you married anyway. You found someone else.”

He shrugged. “I did. She wanted me. And I wanted no one.

But we shared the same dreams. The same goals. And I thought that at least I could make one person happy.”

But she wasn’t. Mrs. Quinn wasn’t happy at all.

“Didn’t you trust me? To love you?”

“I did. I wanted to.” She choked on her tears. “I didn’t trust myself. Why did you ever want me? What could I ever do for you?”

“You thought . . . that it was about what you could do for me?”

Or couldn’t. She didn’t dare to look him in the eye.

“It was about sharing our lives. Building a dream. Starting a family. Together. It was about life being so much richer, so much fuller, just because I knew you would be by my side.”

Oh, if only she had known! If only she had known that he had thought beyond her and beyond him. If she had known that he had thought chiefly of
them
– together – then she might have believed. Love had been there for the taking, and she’d pushed it aside. “Then why didn’t you come after me?”

A cough in the doorway made them both turn in that direction.

Mrs. Quinn.

Madame wasn’t surprised. She was a strega, after all.

Mr. Quinn’s past and present were together in the same room.

Two different lives; two different women. Neither of which had ever trusted him with their love. “Adeline. This is Miss Rosa De Luca.”

“Miss – Oh!
Rosa
. But – ” Mrs. Quinn was momentarily stunned by the realization of who, exactly, Madame Fortier was. She stretched out a trembling finger and pointed it at the woman. “She’s the one. She’s the one, isn’t she?” Mrs. Quinn searched her husband’s face, but his eyes revealed nothing. “And it’s one of her girls. It’s one of
her
girls, Patrick, who’s stolen Billy.”

“No heart can be stolen unless it wants to be.”

“The girl’s an Italian! A filthy, wretched Italian.”

“Whom Billy loves.”

“If you would just have told him to go to Mexico, this never would have happened! He’s only getting married because he got drafted. And she’s probably pregnant. He’s only trying to be a gentleman. Why should he have to ruin his life? Write the girl a check. Make her go away.”

Madame had gone white at the insult to Luciana’s character.

And her own.

“And what’s
she
doing here?”

“The Italians that I’ve met have only ever been decent and hardworking. I will be honored to welcome Billy’s bride into our family. And so will you. Miss De Luca came here to inform me of the wedding. Which will take place . . . ?” He turned his attention from his wife to Madame.

“Tomorrow at eleven o’clock.” At least, Madame hoped that it would. “At Saint Leonard’s Church.”

“Wedding? But that’s what I’m here to tell you. There will be no wedding. There can’t be. I won’t allow there to be one.”

“There can be no true marriage when two people don’t love each other, but in this case I don’t think there’s any cause for concern. This is Billy’s decision to make, and he should be allowed to make it.”

“But I – you – ”

“We’ll both be present at the church at eleven tomorrow.

Thank you so much, Miss De Luca, for coming.”

“Then we’ve lost him!”

“That’s absurd. It is only by refusing to believe in them that we lose the people we love.” He looked at Madame as he said it.

Madame hurried back to the shop, heart alight with wonder and the unexpected, magnificent gift of Patrick’s grace. She wanted to do nothing but revel in the meeting, commit every line that she had noticed on his face to her memory. But she couldn’t. There was work to do. So very many things that had to be done.

Once she arrived at the shop, she headed straight for her closet and pulled the wedding gown from it. She took it up to the third floor and draped it across the table. “There will be a wedding.

Tomorrow at eleven o’clock. And you will have a gown.”

Luciana smiled up at her. The wedding had never been in doubt. She had been filling out the various forms with Billy, supplying the information he needed, talking through their plans, laying the foundation on which they would build a life together.

Madame had simply misunderstood.

Julietta, looking at that confection of lace and beading, could only think that she had never deserved to wear it anyway.

Annamaria was the one who whisked it from the table. “If you’re going to wear it, then it will need a final pressing.”

Julietta was re-threading her needle even as Annamaria was speaking. “And a final fitting.”

Madame backed out the door, leaving the girls to their work.

43

Later, after they had readied the gown for Luciana and improvised a veil, encouraging Luciana to leave early – and sleep well! – Julietta accepted Annamaria’s help in cleaning up her space. And together they went out into the evening’s chill and October’s early twilight. They parted ways on Salem Street, and it was there that Julietta saw him. She would have recognized the truck even if she hadn’t recognized his voice.

“
Buona sera
.” He was beckoning to her from the cab. She could see one of his friends from the meetings sitting beside him.

She didn’t move from the curb.

“Come on. Get in.” He looked up the street and then down.

“We’ve a mission to undertake. Tonight.”

He must be truly crazy. To think that she would ever want to go anywhere with him again.

“Get in!”

He really thought she would? “No, Angelo.”

Sighing, he pushed open the door, got out, and came over to the curb to speak to her. “The other night – ”

“You’re a murderer and a thief. You asked me to betray one of my friends.” For each step he took toward her, she took one back.

“Did she tell you her father voted for the war? For death. And that he supported the king and all his mismanaged policies?”

“Does it matter?”

“Does it matter?! How will we ever have the chance for real change when people like that still live? When people like that are still in control?”

“You, and all those people at the meetings, can vote.”

“Vote? You want me to vote?
That’s
what you want me to do?”

“You. Me someday, maybe. That’s what they say.”

“Vote? You can’t be serious.”

“This isn’t just your country, Angelo, it’s everyone’s. You scoff at the king telling people how to do things, but how are you any different? He does it with rules and decrees, but you take away everyone’s choice with a bomb. That’s not freedom. That’s you deciding for everyone else. Why not take your cause to the people you say that you support? Let them decide.”

“Because they don’t understand us. They’ve never understood us. They don’t understand the reasons we do what we do.”

She stopped then. “And what do you do, Angelo?”

“What do you mean, what do I do?”

“What do you really do?”

“Whatever I want.”

“You destroy things. You’ve destroyed everything you’ve ever touched.”

He shrugged. Shoved his hands into his pockets. He didn’t destroy things. He struck blows for the cause. He made people listen. What was wrong with that? What was wrong with doing what he wanted, when he wanted to do it?

“You don’t even stay anywhere long enough to claim your actions.”

“That’s not really – ”

“That’s what you do. That’s what you all do. But what about the future? What about family? What about people?” What about love. That’s what she really wanted to say. What about love?

“There is no future. It’s an illusion. An illusion held out to you by the capitalists. Meant to – ”

“Leave those people, Angelo. Let them go. Let them make their own choices. Come home with me.” The man standing in front of her was contemptible and vile, but she knew that he was also searching for something. That he was . . . lost. And because of that, she took a chance. And a terrible risk. She reached out her hand toward him. “Come home with me.”

Home
. There had never been such a place in Angelo’s life. Not that he could remember.
With me
. He could hardly contemplate the thought. Him? Who would want him? Isn’t that what life had taught him? No one wanted him. Not for anything good or for any length of time. He was a man who had never gotten over being a boy, and so he worked up a sneer and tossed it at her.

“Who needs you anyway?” He was only saying what had been said to him a thousand times over the years.

She flinched as if she had been struck.

The anarchists needed him. They needed his truck. They needed his plans. And his courage. This girl, standing there looking at him with such sadness in her eyes – why did she care what he did? Why did she insist on clinging to her bourgeois values?

For hating him for his natural impulses? She’d wanted him just as much as he had wanted her. He knew she had. But it was over now. So why didn’t she just leave? She was bound to anyway.

“Come home with me.” She was almost certain that if she could just get him home . . .

He laughed at her. “What? Like some stray dog?” He turned his back on her, got into the truck, and drove away with his friend.

Mauro had been coming down the street when he saw Julietta stop along the curb. Walking closer, he realized to whom she was speaking. He’d been tempted to turn away, tempted not to even dine with the Giordanos that night, but indecision delayed him, and by the time he had decided to go, Julietta had already turned toward him and seen him.

Julietta blinked, eyes wide. But not wide enough to hide the tears that had collected in their corners. “Buona sera, Mauro.”

She seemed to have shrunk inside that sleek coat of hers.

He nodded.

“Are you coming for dinner, then?”

“I was . . . I don’t know . . . anymore.”

She looked at him, noticing that his face lacked a certain intensity it usually had. A certain interest it used to display whenever he had looked at her.

If truth be told, he was looking at her right then the way he looked at his patients. The way he looked when he was trying to decide how best to go about the treatment of a stubborn, if chronic, illness. It was, in fact, the very question he was asking himself. What was the best way to rid his heart of the ailment otherwise known as Julietta Giordano?

“Do you know, I saw that man today.”

He blinked. “Pardon me?”

“I saw Angelo Moretti.”

“You did.” Of course she had. Hadn’t he just seen him drive away in his truck? “And what did you say to him?”

“I asked him to come home with me.”

“And what did he say?”

She shrugged. Thought about attempting a laugh, but she realized she probably wouldn’t be able to summon one. So Julietta decided on telling the truth instead. She tugged on his arm until he looked right down into her eyes. “I made a mistake, Mauro.

A big one. A mistake I don’t ever know if I’ll be able to fix. He wasn’t the person I thought he was. The person I hoped he’d be.

He wasn’t . . . he didn’t . . . he wasn’t you.”

He gathered her into his arms as she began to cry. He wasn’t quite sure what to do, but he knew for certain where she ought to be. “Let’s go home.”

Julietta arrived at the Giordano apartment just in time for dinner, with Mauro on her arm. Mama Giordano’s heart soared as she saw the two of them walk in together. “You bring Mauro, Julietta?”

She glanced at the man beside her. “No, Ma. Mauro brought me.”

“Oh.” What was the matter with the two of them? Back in Avellino, when a girl met the man she was meant to marry, then she got on with the doing of it. Why couldn’t the girl see that she was meant for him? Like bread and cheese. Onions and garlic. But it was like making custard, she supposed. If you stirred too quickly, you made all sorts of bubbles. And if you took it off the stove too soon, it didn’t set at all. She shook her head as she ladled out some minestrone.

“Tell me about this influenza, Mauro. How many people died this week?”

All he wanted was to get Julietta alone so that he could talk to her. So he could make sure he understood what it was that he thought she had said. But he could see that there would be no privacy that night. So he scooped up a spoonful of the soup. Blew on it. Tipped it into his mouth. Mama Giordano might have thought he had nowhere else to eat, but people asked Dr. Vitali to dine with them all the time. And all the time he replied, “Thank you, but no,” for he was expected at home for dinner. The Giordanos’ was as much of a home to him as his own once had been. But his parents had moved out of the North End to Rox-bury five years ago. And the Giordano brothers were his closest friends. He went to visit his parents on Sundays, but during the week, when all he wanted was some time away from his work and a good bowl of soup, the Giordanos’ was where he came to eat. So when Mama Giordano asked him about his doctoring, he responded as he would have to his own mother.

“In the neighborhood? One or two hundred. And in the city? Eight hundred? Or nine?” He couldn’t be sure. No one was sure. “It’s better than last week.”

All those poor souls. Mama Giordano crossed herself. “You’ve been working hard.”

He hadn’t been working hard enough. Hadn’t worked long enough. Hadn’t worked smart enough to be able to save even a third of his influenza patients. It had come, this sickness, with such swiftness and ferocity that he couldn’t even say that it was influenza at all.

“You need sleep, son.” Papa Giordano saluted him with his spoon from the end of the table. “That’s what you need.”

“I’ll sleep when people stop getting sick.”

“Stay here tonight and you won’t be called out.”

He took a few more spoonfuls of soup. “I would if I could – but I can’t. What would my patients think? A doctor who’s not home to take calls?”

“They’d think you were out on a call.”

His smile was wry when it came. “Be that as it may, I really should go home.” They hadn’t been, none of them, to his house since he’d moved out of the North End. If they had, they might have been embarrassed at the accommodations they had just offered him. Unlike the Giordanos, he slept on an actual bed, in a room by himself. When he woke in the morning, hot water ran through his faucets. When he stepped out of his house onto the street, it was filled not with refuse but with young mothers wheeling their babies up and down the streets. And when he walked to the curb, it was to get into his own car.

Oh yes! He had one, though none of Julietta’s family knew it. He used it for making calls in the city proper and for visiting his parents, but he’d never driven it into the North End. He was too fond of the place, of its people, to want their opinion of him to change in any way.

And so the Giordanos continued to press their hospitality upon him, and though he wouldn’t have minded sharing the floor with Salvatore and Dominic, and though he would have liked to have spent more time with Julietta, he pushed from the table to his feet around eight o’clock, bid Mama good-night with a kiss on the cheek, and walked out the door.

But before he’d made it halfway down the hall, he heard the shuffle of footsteps behind him. Heard Julietta calling out his name.

“Grazie, Mauro Vitali. For bringing me home.”

He waved off her words. “It was nothing.”

“For understanding, then.”

Ah, now that was something he couldn’t reply to because he didn’t understand. Not at all. He didn’t understand what a girl like her saw in a boy like Angelo Moretti. He didn’t understand why she would allow herself to be so ill-used. And he didn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t have come home with her when she asked.

“I’m leaving, Julietta.” He said the words without intending to, but once he had, they felt right.

She bowed her head. Of course he was. What reason had she given him to stay?

“They’re sending all the doctors they can spare out to St. Louis and San Francisco. Seattle, even. Everywhere that’s been hit hard by the influenza.” He had meant to tell all of the Giordanos, but maybe his leaving now, at this time, meant something different than he’d thought it had. Maybe it was all for the best.

“I’ll miss you.” She stood on her toes and pressed a kiss to his cheek, hugged him fiercely, and then she turned and ran back to the apartment.

I’ll miss you.

What did it mean? What did she mean?

He wasn’t you. I’ll miss you.

He stood there for a long moment, then sighed and walked toward the stairs. What did a girl like her see in Angelo Moretti? He worried over the question all the way home. Realized, finally, that something completely irrational and unpredictable, something outside the boundaries of science and medicine, controlled the heart.

Not for the first time in recent weeks, he thought about giving in to despair. About conceding defeat. He’d first thought about giving up during the onslaught of the influenza, when he realized that his diagnoses were nothing more than death sentences. When he was shoved out of the way at the hospitals in favor of the orderlies and nurses. He’d been tempted to take up his doctor’s bag and go home. And then that evening he had been tempted again as he stood on the sidewalk, watching Julietta with Angelo Moretti, knowing that he had nothing to offer, nothing to say that would change her mind. Knowing that he could only stand and wait.

Well, he’d stood and he’d waited, and the scourge of influenza seemed as if it might be retreating. He’d stood and he’d waited and Julietta had bid that man good-bye. But he didn’t know. He really didn’t know how much longer he could stand and wait for her to see him. To love him.

Sickness and madness.

There was so much sickness and madness in the world. Didn’t a man have to fight for what he wanted? Didn’t a man have to do something about it?