Francesca's Kitchen (4 page)

Francesca set the tray on a TV table and sat down on the sofa, listening all the while to the intensifying storm. For once, the weathermen had gotten it right; it was snowing like crazy outside. In fact, it had already started to come down quite heavily by the time she had left the library earlier that afternoon. The snowplows had not yet cleaned the roads, and it was a slick, jittery ride home after brushing off the car; she had regretted being so smug with Rebecca, the librarian. The wind now had started to howl and to toss great handfuls of icy snow, which sprittered against the windowpanes like grains of sand. The sound of it made Francesca shiver, and she pulled a throw over her legs and feet. As she contemplated her dinner, her thoughts drifted to Florida and Oregon and Australia, all of them nice warm places far from the cold and the whirlwinds of snow that were spinning wildly across her backyard like drunken dancers. She looked up and let her eyes scan the photographs of her children and grandchildren covering virtually every square inch of the den's walls. She gazed longest at a photograph from Christmas two years earlier. It was the last time that she had had everyone all together at the same time. It had been a wonderful day for her, and the memory brought a brief smile to her face.

Francesca reached over and popped the first of the language tapes into the cassette player on the table by the sofa. As the tape started to play, she lifted her wineglass to her family.

“
Salute,
” she told them. “Sleep tight tonight, my sweets.”

Then she took a sip of wine and began to eat her supper.

T
he telephone rang first thing the next morning. It was Rosie, of course, checking in to see if her mother had survived the big storm. It wouldn't be long before Alice awoke out west and called as well. Though she would never have let on to her daughters, Francesca had already been up since the crack of dawn. The moment she had gotten out of bed that morning, she had dressed quickly, pulled on her boots and coat, and headed outside.

The raucous winds of the previous night had diminished to barely a whisper earlier that morning when Francesca had stepped out the front door and surveyed the scene. It seemed to her then that the entire world had gone white, as if overnight the skies had chosen to blanket the earth and the roofs of the houses inches deep with baby powder. The low-lying bushes and shrubs to either side of the front stoop had disappeared, and the branches of the evergreens drooped beneath the weight of the snow that clung to them like enormous cotton balls. As she waded across the yard to the driveway, all was quiet and still, every sound softened in that way it usually is after a heavy snowfall. Even the engine of a passing sander was muffled to a low grumble, the sand whisking out the back sounding like the bristles of a shoe brush moving against leather. There was something peaceful and soothing about it all, the quiet and the frozen landscape. It was as if nature had chosen to take matters into her own hands and slow the world down, if only for a short while.

It was difficult to tell precisely how much snow had fallen. In some places, the wind had sculpted it into fanciful wavelike drifts that curled up as high as four feet, while in other spots, it had left patches of ground completely bare, hardly a flake to be seen. Francesca guessed that at least a foot or more of the white stuff had come down. One thing was for sure: There was far too much snow for her to shovel. The front walk was buried, and the passing plows had left a small mountain at the end of the driveway.

Francesca assessed the situation and let out a grumble at the thought of her son, who was off, at that moment, somewhere on the far side of the world, soaking up the warm Australian sunshine. Joey usually stopped by to dig her out on days like this. Arranging for someone to take over for him in the event of snow while he was gone was the one item she had forgotten to put on her list of things to do before she went to Florida. Francesca cast an annoyed glance at her driveway. It was obvious that she wouldn't be driving anywhere that day. Just the same, she brushed off the driver's side door, started the engine, and left it running to warm things up while she cleaned off the rest of the car.

By the time Rosie called, Francesca was already back inside, warming her toes by the kitchen radiator while percolating coffee on the stove.

“Yes,” Francesca told her after she answered the phone, “it really came down last night. There's definitely no school in Foster-Glocester. The Weather Channel said we got how much? Eighteen inches? Wow. I don't know. I think we got more than that around here, but it's hard to tell just from looking outside.”

Then, “No, now don't worry. I'll find someone to shovel me out. What? No, I haven't got anywhere to go today.”

Rosie was in a state, lecturing Francesca as if she were bundling up a child before sending her off to school on a cold, blustery day. How did she get to be such a bag of nerves? One would never have guessed that she had grown up in New England.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Francesca assured her daughter. “I'll probably just stay right inside today. The car's snowed in, so where would I go?”

The conversation went much the same when Alice called a little while later. While they talked, Francesca sipped her coffee and eyed the patches of blue breaking out across the morning sky. The sun was finally getting ready to show its face again.

“It's about time,” she said to herself, interrupting Alice, who was in the middle of warning her against trying to shovel the driveway by herself.

“Say that again, Mom,” said her younger daughter.

“Never mind. It was nothing,” replied Francesca. “Just talking to myself. You were saying…”



By late morning, the clouds had drifted away, leaving behind clear skies for as far as the eye could see. The January sun was not nearly strong enough to melt away any of the snow; it was still quite cold outside. Nonetheless, the brilliant sunshine reflecting off the snow and through the windows brightened even the rooms on the north side of the house, which were normally left in shadows throughout the day. It almost hurt to look outside.

Francesca sat in the living room, flipping through an old photo album. She was trying to find the pictures from the great Blizzard of '78, a vicious nor'easter that had struck the region with sudden and startling fury. Packing hurricane-force winds, the storm had unexpectedly hit with full power at midday, downing power lines and sending cars skidding into each other on the highways. There were dozens of accidents, stalling traffic in every direction and blocking roads all over the state before the snowplows had a chance to clear them. Stranded motorists were forced to abandon their cars wherever they happened to find themselves on the highways and take their chances trudging home through the gale. Several people died, and the entire state, for all intents and purposes, was paralyzed for the better part of a week. After all the years, that blizzard was still the gold standard, the storm by which all other winter weather was measured in Rhode Island. It was as deeply etched into the memories of Rhode Islanders as any great historical event. Those who lived through it could tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when the storm first blew into town.

Searching through the album, Francesca was curious to see if nature's latest effort measured up. One look at the first photograph she came to was enough to remind her that the previous night's storm wasn't even close. In the photograph, Leo was standing in the driveway up to his waist in snow. With shovel in hand, he gestured to an enormous snowdrift behind him that climbed all the way up the front of the garage to the bottom edge of the gutter. To the side of the drift, a single corner of the rear bumper of the car was the only evidence that anything at all lay beneath. It jutted out of the mound of snow like it was part of a giant piece of marble out of which a sculptor had just begun to chisel an automobile.

Francesca found other pictures from the storm, and even the yellowed front page of the newspaper she had saved from the day after. Reminiscing about the days that had followed, she recalled that, despite all the inconvenience the storm had wrought, it was still one of the most pleasant times she had ever experienced in the neighborhood. As so often happens, the worst of times brought out the very best in people. Neighbors, some of whom had rarely spoken to one another, had gone out of their way to help each other dig out of the mess. Children had frolicked without fear in the middle of the streets because the roads virtually everywhere had been impassable. With their cars all buried and the roads unplowed, people had actually started to walk from place to place near their homes, no small matter for those normally accustomed to automatically jumping behind the wheel for any trip farther than two doors over. Complete strangers had greeted each other with smiles, stopping in the street to chat like old friends as they passed one another. In an unexpected way, people who had lived in the area for years had rediscovered their neighborhood, their neighbors, and the warm feeling of community that came from acknowledging that they were all in it together.

Such would not be the case with this storm, Francesca well understood. While ferocious enough in its own right, it had not inflicted anywhere near the mayhem as that storm of 1978. School had been cancelled throughout the state, and many stayed home from work for the day; the weathermen had predicted the snowfall early enough so that this time, people had been well prepared when it hit. With the populace cooperating by staying off the roads, the snowplows and sanders had passed early and often.

It was something of a disappointment to Francesca.

Closing the photo album, she stood and gazed out the front window for a time. From outside, she could hear the scraping of snow shovels and the roaring of a power snowblower somewhere nearby. It might take most of the day to clean things up, probably well into the night, but as soon as people shoveled out their driveways, life would very quickly resume its former frenetic pace. Turning away from the window, she began to walk about the house, looking for something constructive to do to pass the time. All the while, the voices of Rosie and Alice kept echoing in her ears. They were right, of course. She shouldn't even think about going outdoors again. Just the same, Francesca had been born with what her own mother had called
una testa dura:
an exceedingly hard head. Such being the case, she was finding it very difficult to resist the temptation to take a stroll around the block, just to see how the rest of the neighborhood had made out after the storm. It occurred to her that the bill payments neatly stacked on the kitchen table provided a convenient excuse; it was time to put them in the mail. What harm would there be in a quick jaunt down the street and around the corner to the nearest mailbox?

Francesca pondered the answer to that question a short while later while picking herself up out of a snowbank on the side of the main road. The walk down her hill had proven to be more treacherous than she had imagined. True, the road had been plowed well enough, but the snow had been pushed up onto the sidewalks, forcing her to walk along the road's edge. When she rounded the corner at the bottom of the hill onto the main street, she had found that the cars and trucks were already whizzing along, often within inches of her elbow. Determined to reach the mailbox a few hundred yards or so down the road, Francesca had been looking back over her shoulder for approaching cars when she had suddenly lost her footing and toppled sideways into snow. She had landed in a snowbank with a less-than-graceful flop and let out a string of Italian epithets she had learned from her mother. As she stood and tried to brush herself off, furious at the conditions of the roadways, no public official save the Pope was spared her wrath. She trudged on, the snow caked on her hat and up and down her entire backside so that, to motorists overtaking her, she appeared to be a very grumpy walking snowman.

The humor of the sight was not lost on a group of teenaged boys milling about on the front steps of a tenement house as Francesca trod by on her way to the mailbox. They all looked to be of Asian descent, some wearing similar jackets, which suggested they were part of a gang. Fuming as she was, Francesca took little note of them when she first passed. She dropped the bills into the mailbox and turned to go back the way she had come. As she passed the boys once more, one of them stepped closer to the old woman and gave her an impertinent look. He held out his hand, as if asking her for money, then he turned to his friends and said something that made them laugh. Francesca had no idea what the young man had said, but she was reasonably sure that it was not a compliment.

Now, an onlooker to the scene would certainly have been forgiven for thinking that perhaps a very unpleasant confrontation of some sort was about to take place. Francesca herself considered the possibility, but she was not one to be easily cowed. She stopped in her tracks and faced the young toughs.

“
Cam on ong, toi manh
,” she said, eyeing them sharply. It meant, “Thank you, I am fine.” It was the only phrase she could remember from the language tapes she had been listening to the night before. Judging by the startled, wide-eyed looks on their faces, she knew that she had guessed right that the young men were Vietnamese.

Clearly mortified at the prospect that the old woman might have understood what he had said, the boy who had made the remark that so amused the others flushed with embarrassment. The others, even the gang members, bowed their heads or tried to look in the other direction. Seeing that she had managed to chase some of the bravado out of the boy and his friends, Francesca walked right up to them. She wasn't about to give up the initiative now that she had seized it.

“You speak English?” she asked of the boy who had first addressed her. He was standing there now with his hands in his pockets, trying hard to avoid the gaze of Francesca's blue eyes, which had lost none of their piercing inquisitiveness in her old age.

“At school,” he replied sheepishly. Then, trying his best to regain his lost self-assuredness, he rushed to add, “But here we speak our own language.”

“There's nothing wrong with that,” said Francesca in a mild voice. “It's good that you speak your own language sometimes. It keeps you from forgetting your roots. That's important.” Then she looked past him to the house. “You live here?” she asked.

The boy gave a nod. “Second floor,” he said.

“Tell me,” said Francesca, “does the dining room still have that nice cabinet built into the corner, and that pretty crystal chandelier hanging over the table?”

Suspecting that perhaps he had unwittingly crossed paths with some sort of witch, the boy gaped at the old woman, as did the others.

“How—how do you know this?” he asked warily.

“Ayyy, because I've been in your house a thousand times,” Francesca told him. “This house used to belong to Doctor Ricci and his family. I was good friends with his wife, Dee.”

“A
doctor
lived here?” said the boy incredulously.

By now, the other boys had started to gather around to listen more closely to what Francesca had to say.

“Of course,” she went on. “Doctor Ricci had an office on the other side of the city, but sometimes he would come to our houses when one of us was sick, or we'd come by to see him right here. He never charged anyone a penny.” Francesca paused and looked about at the surrounding houses. “You'd be surprised; all sorts of important people have lived in these houses,” she told them. “Like there, across the street.”