Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons (25 page)

He gathered the papers together and handed them to Papa. He poured them both another shot of grappa and lifted his glass.

"Salut!"

Claudio got more than he bargained for with Papa's investment.

They made their deal the next morning after Papa had slept, as he'd promised. In the morning the house was a chaos of smal children, hungry and noisy, the two boys being scrubbed and fed and sent off to school, the two girls observing their unfamiliar grandfather across the breakfast table with open mouths. Papa's own sons straggled into the room for coffee after a very late night, groaning with hangovers but eager to hit the sidewalks once again.

Claudio suggested to Papa a walk to the Palace. In the early morning it was deserted, as good a place to conduct business as any. Claudio paused at the front door to pul out his key, savoring the look on Papa's face as he took in the polished oak door, the glass etched with the Fioril o and Serafini names.

Once inside, Claudio realized how smart he'd been to suggest it as a meeting place. Everything about it spoke of Claudio's success—the marble-topped bar with its brass rail, the mirrors reflecting the shelves of liquor and the light filtering across the expanse of the room, the piano, the chandelier. It was a palace.

He pul ed out a heavy chair for Papa, offered him a drink, which Papa waved away, and sat down to deal.

Papa would give him the money he'd asked for, but wanted to be more than a silent investor. He wanted to be part of the day-to-day operation. He had intended to sel the business in Venticano anyway. It bored him. This, on the other hand, was greater than an investment. This was new life. Take it or leave it.

Claudio looked into his father's eyes, and took.

He named his new company after the state of New York, not after the family. No need to cloud his opportunities with the taint of Italy. He wanted the business of America. He wanted to be America.

CHAPTER 40

Giuseppina's Goodbye

Giuseppina was dying. Word came in a letter from my mother. She wrote that Giuseppina had suddenly grown tired, forgetful, unable to care for the simplest of her needs. Pasqualina moved into her house to care for her.

Giuseppina lingered in some shrouded corner of her brain. She wandered at night cal ing out the names of the dead, and when she was quiet sat by the stove unraveling the edge of her shawl. Like her shawl, she was shrinking. She forgot to eat unless Pasqualina fed her pastina in brodo with a beaten egg. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts. She wet her pants.

My mother was grateful that Pasqualina could nurse Giuseppina, although it left my mother, of course, with more to do in her own house.

I tried to deny these scenes that my mother described. But in my heart, I knew that Giuseppina had begun to die the moment Claudio took his first step off the mountain. My mother herself put the first nails in Giuseppina's coffin when she took me away from her and sent me to America.

That Giuseppina had lived this long was a miracle. My mother attributed it to her stubbornness as wel as to her own magic. The order had been reversed. Giuseppina should have been the one to leave first, to say goodbye to us, her blood and bone, as she departed this earth. In truth, Giuseppina stayed alive only to watch each and every one of us leave her.

CHAPTER 41

Homecoming

When Giuseppina died, only a few weeks after beginning her decline, Mama and Pasqualina tied up their hair in kerchiefs, donned their aprons and began to clean out Giuseppina's house of unidentifiable and odiferous objects.

"However did I al ow you to live in such squalor?" my mother wrote.

I hadn't remembered it as squalor.

Mama and Pasqualina swept, scrubbed, burned years of accumulated debris, whitewashed walls, and opened to air and light rooms that had been shuttered and forgotten. In al her years as mistress of her own house, I don't think my mother had ever engaged in such vigorous housekeeping. But taking a broom to Giuseppina's hearth seemed to release in her a newfound energy and a desire to sweep away not only the artifacts and shards of Giuseppina's existence, but her own as well.

Why should I stay any longer in Venticano? she wrote my father. Why should you come back? Most of our children are in America. Even Letitia and Rassina have decided to leave Italy. Now that Giuseppina is gone, there is nothing to hold us and everything to release us.

Papa, reluctantly seduced by the opportunities that spil ed out of every vacant lot where he could envision a building, every rutted path where he imagined a paved road, made a few loud noises, retired to Claudio's dining table to make calculations in a notebook, and final y sent Mama a telegram directing her to come to America.

Pasqualina, who had waited patiently for Papa's return, reacted with panic to the news that he would not be coming back. She adamantly refused to come to America, a place that for her embodied not dreams but nightmares. She was too old to begin again, she said. And what about Teresia? What if they arrived on American shores only to have the authorities refuse her entry because of her simplemindedness? She had heard stories. She knew these things could happen. That one's future and hope could hang on the whim of some uniformed guard with a chip on his shoulder, looking for any reason to keep someone out. No, she didn't want to risk that humiliation. To be sent back. And to what? The house sold to strangers, the land til ed by someone else? And even if they let Teresia in, how would she survive in such a hostile and unwelcoming place? No. Venticano was where she'd been born, and it was where she, like her mother, would die.

My mother, instead of arguing with her or enlisting my father's authority to order her to join the rest of the family, looked instead for a way that would al ow Pasqualina and Teresia to remain in Venticano and my mother to leave.

It was another death that gave her what she needed. Silvana Tedesco, the mother of seven children, had died of malaria the year before. Vincente Tedesco, her husband, was ready to seek a new wife for his motherless sons and daughters. He wanted no more children, so a woman of childbearing age was of less importance to him than a robust housekeeper who could tame his unruly sons and comfort his lonely daughters. Mama presented the idea to both Pasqualina and Vincente, separately of course, and won their approval. Teresia was welcome, as well, especial y since she could be so helpful to Pasqualina in the household.

Mama gave Pasqualina and Vincente a wedding feast. She hired a smal band to play in the courtyard and a photographer to record the couple so that those of us in America could imagine our aunt in her new life. In the photograph, Pasqualina is wearing her black silk dress, its starkness relieved by the addition of a crocheted white col ar. Pasqualina's face is also relieved. The panic that she'd felt at the prospect of leaving Italy had been replaced by the promise of her familiar routines— cooking, cleaning, laundering and ministering to the needs of someone else's children.

My mother left Venticano the very next day.

When she landed in America, she stood on the deck of the Principe di Piemonte exactly as she'd stood on our balcony more than ten years before, when Claudio had left Venticano. A plumed and silken bird, a bril iant explosion of color amid the drabness and weariness of the other travelers. She had traveled alone.

On the day the Principe di Piemonte docked, we al went down to meet her. She would have expected nothing less. Angelina, Til y and I with al the grandchildren she'd never held; Pip with her fine clothes; Claudio with his car for her trunks; Papa and the boys with arms ful of flowers and Hershey's chocolates; Paolo with a book of poetry.

I had dressed Caterina in the outfit Mama had sent for her first birthday. Cream-colored linen, smocked, embroidered with tiny ducks marching around the hemline, a dehcate border of feathered blue stitches on the col ar and the fluttering sleeves. I was up the night before ironing it, my bel y—large again, hopeful—pushing against the ironing board. I was tired, but the thought of my mother's judgment kept me awake until the dress was perfectly pressed. How I dressed my daughter, how I cared for the clothes Mama herself had provided, how I showed respect to the woman whose drive and ambition and wil were the very reasons we al stood there—this was what she'd be looking for as she scanned our faces. Faces she hadn't seen in years; faces she had never seen.

There wasn't a single one of my brothers and sisters whose life had not in some way been directed from across the enormous distance between New York and Venticano by the diminutive, elegant woman approaching us now.

Her decisions, her advice and her control had been conveyed

in thousands of words over the years. How does one person amass so much influence? For my mother, it was her ability to sustain her presence in our lives through her words. Like Paolo, her letters had been an extension of herself. I saw what had happened to me and Giuseppina, separated from our daily contact. When I could no longer see her penetrating eye or the jut of her chin moving me in one direction or another, when I could no longer hear her prayers or her spel s, when I could no longer taste her herbs or her fruit, I lost her.

But my mother never al owed us to lose her.

This was no stranger on the boat, not even to the grandchildren.

Each of them had something extraordinary from her. For the girls, exquisite dol s and expensive dresses; for the boys, sets of painted soldiers or toy sailboats. And the repeated message,"This is from your Nonna.

Remember your Nonna."

My mother was a master of the grand gesture. Whatever she sent, it always stood out. Made people notice.

Just as people noticed her.

While the other passengers looked anxiously for a familiar face in the crowd, or in total exhaustion and bewilderment at the enormous city rising up beyond the pier, my mother's gaze took it al in like a queen surveying her kingdom. Her gloved hand, raised as if in blessing, was her only acknowledgment that she'd seen us.

If she searched the children's faces for some glimmer of Fioril o, I didn't see it. Had I been her, I think I would've devoured those children with my eyes, surrounding them with the fierce protectiveness of a she-wolf for her blood, her line. If she looked with another kind of hunger at my father, whom she had not seen in over a year, I missed that as wel .

But I did see her close her eyes and breathe deeply, as if to swal ow the city, her waiting family and the air of the New World.

CHAPTER 42

Paradise

When my son was born, it was my mother who rol ed up her sleeves and got me through my labor.

"I'm not Giuseppina, with her potions, and her mumbo jumbo," she said to me when I raised my eyebrows at her suggestion that she stand by me when my time came. "But I bore nine children, Giulia. Each birth different.

I think I know how to do this."

So it was she who mopped my brow, who rubbed my back, who made me walk when the pains slowed, who—

when I screamed that I could take no more, that this baby would be the one to kil me—insisted that I could and would get through this birth alive. And it was she who, final y, eased the head of her grandson into the light of day and then caught his tiny body in her own hands.

When she handed him up to me, I saw tears in her eyes that she quickly brushed away.

We named the baby Paolino. He was the image of his father. There were times during the day when I sat at my kitchen table, shel ing peas or darning Paolo's socks, with the baby beside me in his bassinet, and I was brought to a contemplative stil ness. I gazed in awe at his blue eyes absorbed by the play of light upon the wall, his mouth shaping and reshaping nonsense syl ables in response to my own, his tiny fingers reaching for the light.

Caterina would climb into my lap and stroke my cheek, pushing past the bowl of peas or the pile of mending, past my own reverie, to find warmth and comfort.

In the evenings, when he returned home from the union office to eat dinner before heading downstairs to the Palace, Paolo surrounded himself with his children. Caterina would squeal with delight when he walked through the door and he always bent to scoop her up. He wrote poems for her now, little rhymes that he acted out for her with his fingers facing up her arm or tickling her behind the ear. Paolino heard his voice and began to coo and kick his legs. I was able to finish cooking while he fil ed the room with the children's laughter.

One Sunday afternoon, Paolo surprised me with an excursion up to Bronxville.

"I want to show you something, cara mia. A dream I have, for us, for the children."

It was enough for me to be out in the open air, away from the city. We got off the trol ey and he led me a few blocks.

"Only a trol ey ride from the city, Giulia, and look—look at this little paradise."

I looked. I saw a pony nibbling on a tuft of grass, its ears pricking up as I approached the fence. I saw more: an apple orchard, a stone house with green shutters, pots of begonias lining the window ledges. On the side of the house was a garden, with row upon row of beans, potatoes, onions, cabbage. In the back, a glimpse of laundry—not strung between tenement windows, but stretched out in fluttering rows like the beans.

Chickens pranced in a smal fenced yard next to the pony's shed. A bel hung around the neck of a goat, white bearded, looking to share the grass with the pony.

"Some day I wil buy this for you, Giulia. This is my dream—to see on your face every morning the look you have right now. To bring you this land, this happiness."

CHAPTER 43

Litany

They brought Paolo to me in the middle of the night.

Claudio and Peppino carried him up the stairs and laid him on our bed. The blood was trickling out of his mouth and staining the front of his white shirt.