L'America (17 page)

The gun was for shooting
uccellini,
the small birds in the bird arbor, which the Cellinis ate every Sunday for
pranzo
on top of polenta that Cesare's mother stirred for an hour. Gentle Elena's nature above all was to compensate for her husband's hardness. When Beth first started seeing Cesare in Città after Greece, Beth had a chronic stomachache. Elena oversaw her cure, taking the girl (because Cesare loved her) to all the finest doctors and specialists, paying the bills without letting the girl know. Elena was also refined; she peeled all her fruit before eating it (including the grapes, of course) with a small knife and fork designed especially for the task. The skin slipped off to reveal the glistening, wet body of the fruit. Beth found the skill amazing in its intricacy, like the fine art of carving filigree. She couldn't imagine peeling her fruit; her father had taught her that that's where the nutrients were and on their farm they carefully grew produce organically, precisely so that the skin could be eaten. Chefs drove all the way from New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington for Claire's produce just because of the care with which it was grown. She remembered the chefs, their hands especially, how important the chefs had seemed as they handled the fruit, turning it delicately, their big hands prizing each piece, connoisseurs of the exquisite.

Signora Cellini, who was always busy with social obligations and some sort of volunteer work, had several maids, one from Sri Lanka, one from North Africa, and one from Russia. The Russian was quite old, but had been with the family since the children were small. The Sri Lankan wore a sari at all times and tried to teach Beth and Cesare's sister, Laura, to put them on, wrapping them in yards and yards—nine to be exact, as in "the whole nine yards"—of silk. Beth knew how to wrap a sari; Preveena had taught her at Claire. But Beth did not let the Sri Lankan maid know because the lesson and the knowledge seemed to be something that she prized sharing. "You're the luckiest girls alive," she said to them, holding her life up to theirs, "freed by your fate."

Funny thing was, in some ways Beth felt like the Sri Lankan maid: that is, Beth felt that Laura was the luckiest girl alive. Beth didn't have Laura's privilege or Laura's funny beauty or Laura's sophistication or even Laura's intelligence. The first time Beth met her, she fell in love with her. Laura had just returned from America, overweight as she had promised her brother, from all the hamburgers. "Too many hamburgers," she had said, pulling Beth into an intimacy. It was the way Laura smiled as well, laughing at her newfound chubbiness. She was chubby, but Beth had not seen her before. Beth admired that she was amused rather than frightened by the extra weight: too many hamburgers, simple as that. Her blond hair was cropped short at her ears and she smiled and laughed and her good humor was infectious. Her funny stories of America—those girls to whom she taught English in the trailer; the cops who pulled her over, their
mirrored sunglasses; the fans at the Springsteen concert throwing themselves at the feet of the singer—animated Cesare in a way Beth had never seen before. "I owe all my adventures to Cesare," Laura said, giving her brother a big kiss on the cheek. "It was his idea for me to go to America." They were standing in the kitchen of the Città villa, smells of dinner heating up the room, the cook swishing in and swishing out, pinching Laura's cheeks between her fingers in a tender, familiar gesture. Beth marveled at this world of maids and service, a world which Laura and Cesare knew well how to negotiate, knew just how far intimacy could be pushed. Beth observed the Cellinis, every detail. She felt jealousy and yearning. She wanted more than ever to be a part of the family, to be Laura's sister. And because Cesare loved this funny little American, Laura adopted Beth, lending Beth her beautiful clothes (much more classic in style than Bea's of-the-moment fashions) and skis, inviting her to stay with her in Milan, including her with girlfriends on shopping excursions to Florence. Laura, too, was studying economics at the Bocconi. She was behind Cesare but catching up while also, simultaneously, studying fashion. Her ambition was to design stockings and tights for women. In her apartment she had dozens of mannequin legs dressed with sumptuous silk samples. She had an adoring boyfriend, whom her parents fawned over, sending them back to Milan with food enough to last a week so that they'd be well fed and not need to worry about interrupting their studies. Jackson would never have saved Beth from clowns—perhaps that was a good thing, but Beth couldn't help but envy the fact that Giovanni Paolo would drop everything for Laura. Beth watched their relationship, watched how this confident girl, filled with good humor, could melt the hardened man in a way that Cesare never could. Signor Cellini would never raise his voice with her; he would never doubt her abilities with her studies. Sometimes Beth wished that Laura could take the baton from Cesare and take over the family's march across time.

The Sri Lankan maid was in love with a middle-aged Italian man who still lived with his mother. Because of her brown Sri Lankan coloring, the mother forbade the marriage. They married anyway at a small church in the town of Porta dei Miracoli (Gate of Miracles) near the train station. Cesare served as witness and then paid for the banquet he had arranged in the station's
trattoria.
Bottles of wine were opened as trains rumbled by; the wedding party celebrated amid a flurry of passengers, everyone smoking. They dined on
risotto con funghi porcini. A
man played some romantic music on a guitar. Cesare presided with grace and like a brother because the Sri Lankan maid had had no one else. He lifted a glass of champagne to the bride and groom. "To outsmarting fate," he said. The train station had been the bride's choice; she wanted to be able to flee should her husband's mother try to intervene.

Elena, with her friends—Cat in particular, skin permanently tanned and bejeweled—spoke of the American, making predictions on the course the relationship would run. Elena was lovely with Beth because she was Cesare's girlfriend, but the possibility of Beth scared her, too. She was not afraid of Beth remaining in Cesare's life so much as of Beth somehow being capable of taking him away. What mother wants to lose her child? "She is a kind girl," Signora Cellini said. "Though her manners are atrocious." Elena felt at once bad and liberated for saying that. The girl would start eating before everyone else, catch herself, and stop; she would sop her sauce with a piece of bread; she would pull apart her bread so that crumbs left a mess at her setting. "Perhaps she doesn't understand the way we do things here."

"This relationship will pass," Cat said, identifying Elena's concern with the same precision and authority with which she identified the passion in Valeria's eyes in the Cellini fresco. "And if it doesn't pass, I assure you that son of yours will never leave Città. He is not capable. He has everything here. He is someone here. Do you think he wants to be an immigrant starting from nothing with nothing? Who wants to do that but unfortunates with nothing to lose?"

"
Si, si, é vero,
" Elena would admit, encouraged by her friend. But Cat and all the friends wondered what it was that drew Cesare to the American girl, who was cute, perhaps, though a bit awkward, with features just a little too big for the face that held them.

From the finely spun and colored glass of the Venetian chandelier suspended above the Cellini's dining table dangled an ugly plastic buzzer that Signora Cellini pressed when she needed service. Service, Beth would come to understand, had a higher status than aesthetics. There was also a button hidden beneath the table that she could push discreetly with her foot. "
Prego?
" the maids would ask when beckoned. Accidentally, they were called when Signora Cellini learned that Beth was not christened. A nervous gesture, the button-pushing, and the maids descended and Signora Cellini crossed her chest and promised Beth that she would help her fix things. "
Cara mia, cara mia,
" she kept saying. All the commotion scared Beth, who hadn't quite understood (or couldn't quite believe) that christening could be this significant. "But what's wrong?" she asked, pushing her chair back from the table, truly stricken as if Cesare's mother had spotted the devil emerging from her. "Mamma, please," Cesare said, standing up to calm his mother with a wide embrace.

Beth was as susceptible as any girl to the desire to please a potential mother-in-law. Simply put, Beth wanted Elena to love her, love her like a daughter the way that Bea's parents did. But for all her generosity and innocence, Elena had a strong reserve. She didn't let people in very easily. Beth wanted to be let in. She wondered, once alone with time to think, if Elena would warm to her more if she were christened.

"I might like to be christened," Beth said to Cesare. When she really thought about it though, she realized that she didn't even know the difference between christening and baptizing (perhaps it had something to do with full immersion?) or if there was even a difference. Beth was woefully lacking in any religious education. And it is said that America is the most religious country in the world! She did know that babies were christened, in the Catholic Church anyway, to absolve original sin and that concept she couldn't abide by or get around. A little baby, sinful? And she told Cesare so.

"It's only a metaphor," he said, stroking her hair, wishing she wouldn't take this all so seriously. He didn't. He never went to church or thought much about being Catholic.

"A metaphor for what?"

"
Non importa
," he said. "This is not important. Just think, her name is Elena. Elena was the mother of Constantine who because of her made Christianity legal." What Beth didn't tell him was that she wanted to find a way to make Elena love her. Then she thought about her father, about his love for her, how he loved to allow her her freedom to shape herself, to see what emerged on its own. She missed her father. Sometimes she missed him so absolutely she thought she would fly home to Claire and never leave. Sometimes she hated Jackson for his stubborn inability to leave Claire and visit her. She wondered if she were to die would he come to her then?

Sometimes Cesare would look at Beth and try to imagine her on her farm with her father. Who would she be there? What would her father be like? Who would Cesare become there? He knew Jackson was a big man with a big presence, that he liked fun and drama and would loan his land to groups of people who would stage reenactments of battles from the Revolutionary War. Troops in red coats and blue coats shot off cannons and artillery in Claire's fields as all the people living there sat on the deck, cheering for one side or the other. Beth's grandmother cheered for England. Jackson always wanted to barter for the loan of the land the way he bartered with the Amish for butchering his livestock. Plenty needed doing at the farm. Beth, instead, would make the reenactors pay. It had been her job since childhood to see to it that her father didn't give too much away.

Jackson wrote his daughter twice a week without fail, sending her small things from the farm: a dried soybean, a chicken feather, a red maple leaf in the fall. She knew the only way to have a relationship with him that was deep and meaningful would be for her to make her life at Claire, and she knew as well that she could never do that; for her that choice was not freedom, and she knew as well that her father understood this quite clearly. As it was with the others who came and left Claire, the decision was hers, and he would not judge it or interfere with it. Not returning to live at Claire, Beth realized, was as clear a path to her as not leaving Città was for Cesare, though neither could fully admit that yet.

 

On Sundays, Signora Cellini stirred the polenta herself, tending the hot molten mass of bright yellow mush, stirring and stirring and fussing. They served it as a first course with either milk or cheese and then as a second course with the
uccellini
(bones and all). The first time Beth joined them for the Sunday meal she learned the subtleties of polenta. Trying to be polite and proper and to do everything right because she wanted terribly to impress and be something other than a silly (threatening) American who entertained them with stories of her eccentric family, Beth used both milk and cheese. Cesare laughed, then Laura, then the parents—an endearing lovable laugh that seemed to want to embrace this silly American. Beth blushed even so, embarrassment welling up from her toes. (On polenta, milk and Parmesan do not go together.) No matter what she did in Italy, Beth seemed to always get everything wrong. On her second-course plate, the tiny birds lay whole and butter fried, staring up at her, their eyes now like dulled silver. This was the first time she had ever eaten
uccellini
and she didn't know what to do and didn't want to watch the others or ask. The
uccellini
were delicious. The bones added texture. No one said a word, so she assumed the bones were meant to be eaten. The heads however were not.

And the black glove: it was not really a glove. Rather it was a hand. His father had lost his hand as a young man when firecrackers exploded in it. He had been studying to be a doctor, the first of the Giovanni Paolos and Cesares to study something other than economics. After losing the hand, he reverted to finance. Beth understood that he was a hard man, hard on his son who was not interested and thus slow with his studies, hard even on his beloved daughter for her fancy, silly dreams. But his desire to be a doctor and the loss of his hand would always soften him for Beth simply because it seemed that he, too, had once had the desire to step outside the plan. She had her father send her pumpkin and corn seeds from America so that she could give them to Giovanni Paolo, who spent hours in his garden. Those vegetables were exotic here and thus would be a challenge. The seeds brought him a patch of bright orange pumpkins and a row of sweet Silver Queen so bizarre and delicious he could not help but fall in love with
l'Americanina.

***

This morning of the kissing in the summer grass, Beth had sat in a chair while Giovanni Paolo gardened, keeping him company. Signora Cellini hung up some laundry on the line and spied on her husband and Beth as he told her that Cesare had failed two more exams. "This is not good, not at all good," he said, looking into the dirt. He could never look Beth in the eye. Even so, each time he spoke to her she felt she was gaining acceptance, becoming real for him. He was telling her of Cesare's failure, she understood, because he assumed that she was the reason for Cesare's continued distraction. And if there were good reason for the distraction (say marriage) then he would abide as long as she helped Cesare get back on track. He plucked at weeds and snapped branches awkwardly with his left hand using the gloved hand to steady himself. She wondered what his stump looked like. She wished she could ask him about his dashed dream. She remembered the little Amish kids stealing apples from the gala trees at home. How they held the apples in their hands, turning them over and over like a discovery, before they bit into them and ran away.