Hope's Angel (3 page)

Chapter Three

Sunday

The
entire family was up for seven o’clock Mass the next morning, making the most
of Papa’s and Mamma’s one day off each week. The five of them walked to and
from the church together, and when they returned home, Connie and Gianna made
Sunday breakfast while Angie set the table. After eating, Angie washed the
dishes and Connie wiped. Gianna had gone outside with the garbage.

“So,
angela mia
,” Connie said as she lifted a dish from the drainer, “Nonna
needs you to stay with Aunt Lucretia today while she goes to visit somebody in
the hospital.”

Angie
kept her attention on the glass she was rinsing. “Why me?”

“Because
you’re the only one available. Gigi has a date, and I promised a friend I’d go
with her to the museum. It’s not fair to ask Mamma or Papa to do it.”

“Gigi
has a
date
?” Angie’s voice was an excited whisper as she gave Connie a
devilish grin. “With who?”

“Some
seminary friend of Father Ianelli. A wannabe priest who couldn’t cut it. How
perfect is that?”

Angie
turned back to the sudsy water in the sink. “Good for her. Maybe it’ll actually
work out. And you said you, uh, you’re going with a friend to the museum? What
museum?”

“The
one in St. J.” Connie searched for the name. “Wadsworth? Wentworth?”

“Fairbanks.
Not even close.” She gave Connie a small, knowing smile. “You’re not really
going anywhere, are you? You just don’t want to be stuck with Aunt Lucretia.”

“That’s
not true. I did tell a friend I’d go to the museum with her.”

“Some
day.”

Connie
smiled. Angie knew her too well. “Come on, my little angel,” she said in her
most wheedling voice, “I did my duty this weekend.”

Angie
picked up another glass and concentrated on scrubbing it. “Well, I wish could,
Con, but I really do have plans for this afternoon that I can’t change. Sorry.”

“What
are you doing?”

“Visiting
somebody.”

“Who?”

Angie
kept her face turned away. “Just… somebody.”

A
stab of fear shot through Connie. “Why won’t you tell me?”

Angie
vigorously scrubbed the surface of the glass. “I promised I wouldn’t talk about
it.”

“Do
Mamma and Papa know?”

Angie
nodded.

“You’re
sure? Because if you’re in trouble, Angie, you know you can talk to me. Or any
of us.”

Angie
straightened her shoulders. “I’m not in trouble; somebody else is. And I can
help. I just can’t talk about it. I’m sorry, Con. I know you’re worried, but
I’m okay.”

“And
Mamma and Papa know, and they’re okay with it?”

Angie
nodded once more, her back to Connie. “Yes. I promise you. And I’m sorry about
Aunt Lucretia. I really am.”

“I’ll
survive.”Connie watched her with growing alarm. It wasn’t like Angie to be
evasive. Suddenly, babysitting Aunt Lucretia had become the least of Connie’s
concerns.

***

Connie
couldn’t get Angie out of her mind as she and Gianna strolled toward Nonna’s
duplex that afternoon.  “Do you know what this thing with Angie’s all about?”

Gianna
looked grim.“No. She won’t say, and neither will Mamma.” Her voice was
uncharacteristically breathy, and Connie knew it wasn’t from the exertion of
walking.

“Are
you okay?”

Gianna
nodded, her face tight, her gaze straight ahead. She appeared miserable.

“Are
you nervous?”

“Of
course,” Gianna said crossly. “Wouldn’t you be?”

An
urge to hug her swept over Connie, but she restricted herself to a reassuring pat
on the arm. “It’ll be okay. Even if you can’t stand him or he doesn’t like you,
it’s no big deal. It’s only an hour or so and it’s over, and you move on. At
least Father Ianelli will be there. You won’t be alone with the guy.”

Gianna
refused to look at her. “I’m not worried about being alone with him. It’s not
like I’m a child, you know.”

“I
didn’t mean that you were. But sometimes guys can give you the creeps. Not just
you—I mean anybody. I know that feeling.” She glanced at the long dark braid
hanging down the center of Gianna’s back and her bright yellow sundress. “Oh,
and you look nice, by the way. That’s a good color on you.”

A
small, appreciative smile softened Gianna’s expression. “Thanks. And, I’m
thinking about getting contact lenses.”

“Really?”
Connie’s excitement was genuine. “That’s great!”

“We’ll
see. So, what do you do when you’re out with a guy who gives you the creeps?”

Her
question pleased Connie. They were making progress. “Well, it only happened to
me once. The trouble was, I knew I should never have said yes in the first
place, because it didn’t feel right even then. I was just being nice to the
guy. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But that doesn’t work, so don’t do it.
If you don’t like this guy, and he asks you out, don’t feel like you have to
say yes because you’re being nice.”

“What
if I do like him, but he doesn’t ask me out?”

“Then
you ask him.”

Gianna’s
eyes widened playfully before her face broke into a grin. “Ha! How many guys
have you asked out?”

Connie
grinned back at her. “None.”

“How
many would you like to ask out?”

Connie
thought for a moment. Would she actually ask Paul Cefalu to go out with her if
she thought she had a chance with him? “Probably none. At least right now.”

“Uh-huh.
Nothing like sound advice from an expert.”

They
had turned the corner and were half a block away from the duplex.

“How
long will you be here?” Gianna asked as they approached their grandmother’s
house. “I mean, in case I’m done early.” She glanced toward the church in the
distance.

Connie
scrunched up her nose. “I don’t know. A couple hours, I suppose. I hope she
sleeps.”

“Give
her a glass of wine. Or two.”

Connie
laughed. Hope for Gianna might exist after all.

***

Aunt
Lucretia fell asleep in her recliner after only one glass of wine.

Connie
sat on the sofa in the flat’s deathly quiet living room with its Venetian
blinds drawn tight against the sunny August afternoon. She studied the
eighty-something woman across from her. In some ways, Aunt Lucretia, Aunt
Mariana, and Nonna were very much alike. All three wore only widow’s black day
in and day out since the deaths of their husbands, and Connie had never seen
any of them in anything but a shapeless black dress, summer or winter. They
wore black cotton stockings and identical black, laced-up, old-lady shoes with
thick heels, and each kept her steel-gray hair long and tight to her head in
either a bun or a pinned-up braid. The similarities ended there, however. Where
Aunt Lucretia was tall and bony and in ill health, Nonna and Aunt Mariana were
stout, relatively healthy, and definitely possessed of better dispositions.

Connie
pondered the possibility of ending up that way in her old age—living  quietly
with Gianna and Angie, their husbands passed on, their children scattered
across the country—and knew it would never happen. These women held onto ways
that Connie’s generation would never espouse. Still, it was intriguing, and
somewhat frightening, to think about how she might end up some day. Would she
be the gaunt and sickly middle sister, asleep in a recliner in the middle of
the day, snoring loudly with her mouth hanging open? If so, she’d most likely
be in a nursing home surrounded by strangers, not at home with one of her
sisters’ grandchildren.

The
thought softened her annoyance at being there. Lucretia might be grouchy and
difficult to tolerate, but she probably had her reasons. And if Connie could
ease her great-aunt’s last years by showing up once in a while to keep her
company so she could stay in her own home, that wasn’t so much to give.

Connie
stood up and traversed the small living room, looking for something to read.
Most of the books were in Italian, and their content looked less than exciting.
The Aunts and Nonna were not readers of magazines, and they didn’t possess any
newspapers that Connie hadn’t already seen. In desperation, she picked up a
worn Bible lying on the table next to Aunt Lucretia’s recliner and carried it
back to the sofa where stripes of light peeked through the slats of the blinds.
A piece of yellowed, ragged-edged paper, folded into quarters, protruded from
within the Bible. She lifted the book’s thick cover and carefully unfolded the
fragile sheet fastened to its interior by a strip of crackly yellowed tape.

The
paper held a family tree, carefully drawn out in black India ink, handwritten
in old-fashioned script using a fountain or quill pen. At the top were the
names of Connie’s great-great-grandparents, followed by lines leading to the
names and birth years of their many children. A line joined the son and daughter
who eventually married each other and produced eight children of their own,
including Giovanna, Lucretia, and Mariana. Five of those children were now
deceased, as indicated by a simple cross added next to their names. Three had
died without marrying, possibly as children. The others were linked to spouses,
and each had produced several offspring.

Connie’s
eyes skipped to the ones of most interest to her—the children of her grandparents.
Giovanna Albanese and Mario Balestra had produced five children, Papa being
number three. Connie knew the story well. Her father’s two older brothers had
immigrated to the U.S. during the nineteen thirties to work in the steel mills
in Pittsburgh. Twenty-two-year-old Pietro had joined them shortly before World
War II began, bringing with him his bride, Sophia. But she hated Pittsburgh,
and so they had moved on to Vermont where Papa’s two aunts lived with their
stonecutter husbands. Papa worked for a green grocer and found it to be a trade
that interested him enough to eventually invest in a store of his own.

Mamma’s
maiden name was written there—Sophia Cruscenti. Connie didn’t know her maternal
grandparents, even though she was named after that grandmother. They were
already elderly and in poor health when Mamma emigrated, and they had never
left Italy. Connie had seen fuzzy pictures of them, but that was all. Two of Mamma’s
sisters lived with their husbands in California and occasionally came to visit
with their children, but three other siblings remained in Puglia, on the heel
of the Italian boot. Someday, Connie hoped to make enough money to send Mamma
back to Italy to reunite with them.

Connie’s
eyes rested on the line indicating the union of Pietro Balestra and Sophia Cruscenti
and the names that branched off from there. Her parents had followed the
Italian tradition of naming their children for their ancestors. The first
daughter was named after the father’s mother, the next after the mother’s
mother. Additional children were then given the names of the father’s and mother’s
siblings in order of their birth. Thus, every generation bore and perpetuated
the family names. As one might expect, this resulted in cousins with the same
names, and Connie had a younger cousin in California who was also named
Concetta.

Her
eyes drifted downward to her own generation.

Gianna
Maria, 1945

Concetta
Anna, 1948

Mario
Carlo, 1950
U

Lucretia
Mariana, 1952
U

Hope
Marie, 1952

Connie
puzzled over the names before her. She knew that her mother had delivered a
stillborn boy between Connie and Angie; it was a tragedy from which Mamma had
never fully recovered, and she still visited the baby’s grave on the
anniversary of his death. She also knew that, two years later, her mother had
delivered twin girls, and the one they named Lucretia had died shortly after
birth. Her small headstone rested beside little Mario’s. But she had never
really thought about Angie’s given name, that it didn’t conform to family
standards. Why had one twin been given two family names and the other a name
that had no precedent on either side—a non-Italian name right down to the
“Marie” instead of “Maria”?