A Heart Most Worthy (7 page)

That Sunday, Luciana tried to coax the contessa to church. They hadn’t been since they’d come to America, and she didn’t want to give God any more reasons to punish them. Besides, church was the one place she was absolutely certain her father’s murderer wouldn’t be.

“No, ragazza.”

“But you used to in Rom – I mean . . . it’s Sunday.”

“You must learn to speak more clearly, girl.”

Luciana took up the old woman’s hand and knelt in front of her. “It’s Sunday.”

“Sunday.” The contessa said the word as if it were foreign.

As if there were no responsibility, no obligation inherent in its meaning.

“Sunday. On Sunday we –
you
– go to mass.”

“Mass.”

“We’ll be late.”

The old woman looked up from Luciana’s hand and into her eyes.

What Luciana saw in that gaze chilled her to the core. There was nothing – no one – there. She might have said the woman was absent her soul. And so, she did the only thing she could do. She pushed to her feet. “I’ll be back when it’s over.”

“When it’s over . . .” The old woman had already turned her face toward the window, her profile dismantled by the interplay of shadow and of light.

Luciana locked the door behind her. She took one step into the hall and then stopped. She wasn’t sure she should leave the contessa by herself. She’d done it every day for work, of course, but that didn’t make her worry any less about the old woman. Luciana had actually found her standing a time or two, in the middle of the room, when she’d come home from work lately. She didn’t have to work very hard to imagine the contessa going to the door, turning the knob, and walking right out of the apartment.

And what would happen then?

Her throat constricted, and she felt her nostrils flare in compensation. She closed her eyes as she struggled to breathe. It had begun to happen quite often, this problem with breathing. But now she recognized the signs. The fluttering of panic in her stomach, the grip of fear in her bowels, the stranglehold of dread around her throat.

What would happen then?

How could she, a destitute heiress, alone and friendless, manage to make a life in this strange country? For both her grandmother and herself?

She didn’t know.

As she stood there wheezing, as her vision began to tilt, she pressed her fingernails into her palm, desperate to feel something besides the cold clutch of fear. Sometime, someday, she would have to figure out what to do. Soon. But today was Sunday and Sunday was for mass. If nothing else, she wanted the satisfaction of confronting God in His own house.

Once at church, Luciana pushed herself into the corner of the back pew. Looking at the crowd of people crammed together in the pews in front of her, she knew it wouldn’t do them any good. It wouldn’t do them any good at all to try to sit so close to the altar.

God didn’t care.

He didn’t care whether you went to confession every week of your life, or if you only went to mass on Easter. It didn’t matter.

It hadn’t mattered that in Roma, Luciana slid into the very front row every Sunday that she could remember. It hadn’t mattered that she held parties for the ladies’ parish organization, or that she had given a donation every month to the orphans and widows fund. That she had wrapped bandages for countless soldiers or that she had kissed the ring of the Holy Father himself. On several occasions.

Why hadn’t it mattered!

It was supposed to matter. God was supposed to care.

But He’d allowed her father to be murdered and then, when she’d found herself turned out of her own estate, He hadn’t even bothered to help her. He’d abandoned her. She’d always been there for God, just like she was supposed to be. Why wasn’t He there for her? Where was He?

Where are you?

She stood when she had to and kneeled when she was supposed to. She even prayed along with the priest. But she couldn’t bring herself to partake in Communion. And so she sat in the back pew like a heathen, watching the parishioners stream to the front of the church. She ought to have left, but there was only hopelessness waiting for her at the tenement. Had she been able to be completely honest with herself, she might have admitted that the fact that her grandmother depended upon her so completely frightened her. But you know as well as I how fear can make even the eloquent inarticulate.

So that’s where Father Antonio found Luciana after church. In the back pew, still pressed into her corner, after the rest of his parishioners had melted away.

“You are new?” He spoke in the synthesis of dialects that the immigrants, of all regions, relied upon to make themselves understood.

Luciana glanced up at him and then inclined her head, unwilling to lie to a priest, but unwilling also to reveal any particular knowledge of herself.

“Are you well, my child?”

Well? No. She was hardly well, but she was healthy. She was not hungry. She was alive. And she recognized that in spite of all her previous assumptions to the contrary, those things were not assured to any person in this new county. She nodded.

“May the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”

Peace. Sì. Peace would be a start. “Grazie, Father.”

“You are from the north?”

Once more, she inclined her head.

“What is your name, child?”

“Luciana.”

Light. Child of light. Then why did her eyes seem so shadowed by darkness? She should be singing. Or dancing. Laughing.

“How can I help you?” For it was quite clear to the father that she was in great need. Of something.

Help? Her? “No one can help me, Father.”

“Perhaps it seems that way to you, but God can do the impossible.”

She wanted to laugh. Oh, how she wanted to laugh! God had already done the impossible. He’d killed the one person she’d loved the most and taken her away from everything she’d ever known. But she didn’t laugh. She smiled. A very bleak, very sad smile. “My problems are too difficult, even for Him.”

Father Antonio was used to speaking to the wounded of the faith, but he’d never before encountered one so set on God’s impotence. Usually people were longing to be reminded of His great power and great love. But the words he’d meant for cheer seemed only to deepen the girl’s despair. He reached out a hand to touch her, to bless her, but she slipped away from him and was gone.

9

Twenty minutes earlier and fifteen pews up, Julietta had been nursing a smile that had nothing to do with the rites of mass or the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Angelo.

Angelo Moretti.

Such a nice name was Angelo. For such a nice handsome face. For such nice thick hair that curled so delectably over his ears. And such nice brown eyes that had glowed as he’d looked at her. And his lips . . .

Julietta bit her own lip.

His lips were . . . divine. They were large and . . . and . . .

The word that she wanted was sensuous, but even she couldn’t quite bring herself to think it while the father was conducting mass under the patronage of God’s all-seeing, all-knowing eyes. There was something about his lips. Something about the way they curled up at one corner. In almost a kind of . . . It wasn’t a sneer, really. Not quite. It was just that . . . he didn’t seem quite . . . nice.

Julietta’s lips suddenly curved into a full-blown smile. She’d figured it out.

He wasn’t quite nice.

And that was exactly the reason she liked him so much. Who better to rescue her from the chains of propriety and the shackles of decency than a man who wasn’t quite nice? She couldn’t wait to see him again. And again.

And again.

Madame Fortier sat behind her desk on Monday, pulling her appointment book from some cards of buttons and a pile of trimmings. The twenty-ninth of July.

Mrs. Quinn.

A painful, insistent thumping began in Madame’s head. And heart.

She had known this day was coming; she just wished it hadn’t come so soon.

Mrs. Quinn.

What days and weeks and years had gone by that Madame hadn’t wished for, hadn’t hoped to hear, the glad tidings of that woman’s death? But then, what days and weeks and years had gone by that she hadn’t looked forward, with anticipation, to the client’s next visit?

The woman was a witch. A
strega
.

A real, true witch, born at midnight on Christmas Eve, an occasion which an annual birthday ball had been conceived to commemorate. Who but a strega would think of celebrating something like that? Mrs. Quinn’s Birthday Ball had been the event of the season before the war. It used to be that Madame Fortier had worked for months on Mrs. Quinn’s gown for that gala occasion. These days, with the concussion of guns resounding from Europe and extravagant expenses abandoned for the cause of patriotism, the ball had been converted into a small dinner party with an influential guest list. And for it she would need a simpler, but no less brilliantly fashioned, gown.

Which in no way made up for Madame’s loss of income from events like the Ace of Clubs Ball or the Junior League’s Gala, which had been indefinitely postponed until the end of the war; until victory had been won and freedom wrested from the cruel, warmongering Boche.

Madame put a hand to her aching head and sighed.

A strega she was and a strega she would always be. Ever since Mrs. Quinn, née Howell, had chosen Madame Fortier to make her wedding gown, the woman had been a constant and abiding thorn in the gown maker’s flesh.

Madame opened a drawer in her desk and pulled a flask from it. Reached further back to retrieve a glass. Poured herself two fingers’ worth of clear, strong grappa.

Perhaps you might have been inclined, until that moment, to sympathize with Madame Fortier. To, at the very least, tolerate Madame Fortier. She was not an easy woman to like; she did not, in fact, even like herself very much. Though that last bit, of course, is a secret, and we must do her the courtesy not to mention it, not even to think of it too often before she can realize it for herself. But before you convict her for fortifying herself with liquor, consider for one moment that you have not yet met the woman she was fortifying herself against. And consider for a second moment that if you had to work for Mrs. Quinn, if you had to satisfy that voracious and unslakeable thirst for the highest, most distinctive of fashions, if you had to hear her speak of her husband, the congressman, over and over and over again, you also might feel a great and sudden thirst for grappa.

Or something very much like it.

You see, it’s all very well and good to judge and moralize, but there are some whose morale has been broken. And for these, sometimes, we just have to let them survive, in hopes that one day they will decide to do more than survive. That they will decide, in fact, to live, in which case they can cast off their own crutches and endeavor for themselves to face their problems directly.

But Madame Fortier had not yet reached that point, and we must not run ahead of her to the place where we would like her to be. And so, we will let her drink her grappa in private, and brood on the appointments of the day.

It was some time later that she climbed the stairs to the third-floor workshop, supporting her steps by placing a heavy, discreetly jeweled hand to the wall. Once she’d reached the top of the stairs, she paused a moment, hand against her chest, to catch her breath and to buttress the last of the quickly waning courage that still resided there.

Once she had collected herself, she walked across the landing to the workshop. “Luciana.”

The girls looked up from their work in surprise. It was not often that Madame paid them the favor of a visit. Least not midmornings.

“Sì?” There was something in Madame’s eyes, something in her demeanor that made Luciana reluctant to be singled out for that woman’s attentions.

“I would like for you to assist me at this afternoon’s fitting.”

A fitting? What did she know about fittings? “But – ”

“It will be at two o’clock.”

“I don’t – I can’t – ” She hadn’t taken the job with Madame in order to work in the shop’s window, visible to every passerby. She wanted to be hidden, not exposed.

Annoyance was beginning to creep into Madame’s eyes.

“I can’t – speak English.” There. Now Madame wouldn’t want her.

“Don’t worry. Mrs. Quinn won’t be conversing with you.” Luciana flushed from both the miscomprehension and the implication. “I don’t think – ”

“That’s right. You don’t! Because if you think that I’m giving you options instead of orders, then you can leave right now!”

Luciana flinched as if she had been slapped. She’d never been given orders as if she were a mere – an ordinary – working girl. She couldn’t bring herself to even think the word
servant
. But leave? She couldn’t – she wouldn’t! She would do whatever it took to be allowed to stay. Even if it meant creeping out of her third-floor hiding place. “I’m sorry – I didn’t mean – of course I’ll – ”

Madame was already regretting her words, though not her feelings of frustration. Mrs. Quinn was nearly on her doorstep. What she needed was an ally, not a recalcitrant employee. “Two o’clock.”

As Julietta and Annamaria had observed the conversation, their eyebrows shot up toward their foreheads. They hardly waited until Madame had gone before speaking. “Mrs. Quinn!” Julietta was already crossing herself. She couldn’t decide whether to bless her good luck or curse her misfortune. In the past, Madame had always asked her to assist with the clients. But there were clients and there was Mrs. Quinn.

Mrs. Quinn? Luciana already hated her. “Who is Mrs. Quinn?”

“A strega.” On that point, both Julietta and Annamaria were agreed.

A witch? Surely not. But Luciana, looking over at the other two girls, could not ignore their reactions. They couldn’t actually believe in witches, could they? Surely they were more educated, less ignorant, than that.

Mrs. Quinn herself would have been completely surprised and not a little hurt at that assessment of her person. She’d lived her life as an activist, after all. Those who knew her considered her to be remarkably and gratifyingly modern. A bastion of tolerance, a scourge against racism. She’d married an Irishman, hadn’t she? She had been hard at work in the National Women’s Party to advocate for women’s suffrage.
And
she patronized Madame Fortier’s shop.

It helped, of course, that the woman was the best gown maker in Boston. And it didn’t hurt that she was truly European instead of second-generation Irish. Most of the other dressmakers had Gallicized their names and sprinkled their sentences with French phrases. Madame’s accent, however, was authentic. And that counted for quite a bit in Mrs. Quinn’s mind. She could not have said for certain from where exactly Madame had come, but she presumed it was some place respectable.

Mrs. Quinn was a Champion for the Downtrodden and a Defender of the Meek. The poor, the weak, the destitute could have no better friend than she. A witch, she was most definitely not.

She did, however, have a blind spot on the topic of Italians, as did most people in America with any kind of intelligence. Especially southern Italians, whom everyone knew to be inferior in every way to northern Italians. They were no more than overgrown children, really. Of limited intelligence and questionable virtue. Intractable and stubborn. They seemed to always think much more highly of themselves than they ought. And their homes! They swarmed to the North End like rats from a sinking ship. What sort of intelligent people would live like that? Why would
any
kind of person live like that?

Justice, liberty, tolerance.

Those were the topics that employed Mrs. Quinn’s abundant energy and considerable intelligence.

If Mrs. Quinn had known the gown maker’s thoughts, however, she would not have been pleased. And she wouldn’t have used the word
strega
. She preferred to think of herself as clever. She had an uncanny nose for politics. She could sense a softening of resolve like a wolf sensed a change in the wind. She could ferret out a man’s hidden interests with nothing but a well-phrased question. And she could plot betrayal as if she herself held the knife. Most of her husband’s success in Boston and then in Washington was due to her instinctual mastery of the world of politics and her ability to call on just the right people, to do just the right thing, at just the right time.

At lunch, Julietta pulled a package from her sack, along with a length of bread and a wedge of cheese. “Here.” She slid the package across the table in Luciana’s direction.

Luciana opened it and held up the contents, exclaiming with something quite near delight. Her gowns! Several of them, in any case. New gowns had been in such generous supply at the estate in Roma, even in spite of the war, that their presence had never come close to eliciting that lift of delight in her spirit that these did.

She pushed aside her lunch and rose to her feet, holding one of the gowns up to her shoulders.

Julietta tried to look at it with an appraiser’s objective eye. She’d worked harder than she’d meant to on it. On all of them. Dedicated more time on Saturday and Sunday nights than she had intended. But the results had been quite astonishing. Gone were the awkward, overwrought, over-decorated silhouettes. They’d been replaced by svelte, clean lines. No dowdiness, no stuffiness remained within their folds. The gown Luciana held in particular exuded charm, and grace. And the fresh, carefree
joie de vivre
of summers gone by.