Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons (24 page)

She seemed unaware of what my life here was like. I had no employees in the Palace kitchen to help me prepare and serve fifty meals a day. I had no widowed, childless sisters-in-law as she did, to run my household. I had no mother-in-law to whisk away responsibilities and take them under her own roof while I languished, propped up on linen pil owcases.

Flora, God bless her, did what she could to al ow me some rest from day to day. Pip, in Manhattan with her husband, was a stranger to us. She had final y achieved her dream of a life as a lady. When she came to visit with her husband, Ernesto, she wore an elegant coat trimmed with fur. Her fingers, which a few short years ago had struggled with bobbins and pin and thread, were warmed in a matching fur-lined muff. Her hat, velvet, with a sweeping brim and a feather that arched down across her brow and grazed her left ear, reminded me of the hat my mother used to wear. Pip had a dressmaker to whom she gave meticulous instructions. Like Letitia, she was childless. But she made no pilgrimages. She and Ernesto traveled to Atlantic City. They went to the opera.

Til y lived only one street over, but she already had two daughters—Annunziata and Dora—and was pregnant as well when my time came.

As distant as I'd been from my mother, I wanted to write to her, "Mama, come now to me, as Giuseppina came to you when you were in need."

But I didn't. She stil had Papa and my three brothers at home. I don't think she was prepared to come to America, to leave her life of ease and comfort, her annual sojourns to the sulfur baths at Ischia, her shopping expeditions to Napoli, her correspondence with great minds at the university. What kind of life would she have found here? When she encouraged me to have others do for me, no, I don't think she had herself in mind.

I had made no preparations for this baby. Antonietta said the American girls had a party when someone was pregnant, bringing gifts for the baby before it was born. I shivered when she told me. Such bad luck! I had no cradle, no shirts, no gowns. Nothing to pack away again or stare at lying flat and empty in a corner. I tempted the fates with the white jacket I'd crocheted for Carmine and I got to use it as a shroud. Emilia I buried in a dress Til y gave me from one of her little girls.

I didn't have time to sew anyway.

In the mornings, I did the marketing and then went downstairs to the Palace kitchen and prepared whatever meal we served customers that day—lasagna, chicken salami, sausage and peppers. I often sat outside the back door to peel the vegetables. The cats came around for scraps and sometimes the girls who worked for Signora Bifaro at the hotel behind us were out on the steps. They smoked; they played cards; they were out there in their lingerie as if they didn't care who saw them. They didn't look after themselves very wel , those girls. Their peignoirs were dirty, the hems trailing in the dirt on the steps. Their feet and their necks weren't clean, and they wore makeup to hide their sal ow skin— bright patches of rouge on their cheeks and smeared kohl around their eyes.

Paolo and Claudio pretended I didn't see the men who, after a round of drinks at the Palace, slipped out the back door, past the crate where I sat with my garlic and onions, and climbed the stairs with one of the girls.

The girls leaned against the railing and looked the men up and down. But they didn't look them in the eye. And when they were chosen, they tossed their cigarettes over the railing. The cigarettes usual y landed at my feet, stil smoldering, stinking, a slash of dark red lipstick at one end.

Sometimes, when it was slow and the girls were bored with their card games, they joked with me.

"Hey, Giulia, you're so pretty. You should be up here with us instead of down there chopping onions and peppers."

"Giulia doesn't need to be up here. She's got that handsome husband to take care of her. And from the looks of her bel y, Paolo takes very good care of her. Isn't that so, Giulia?"

The girls laughed when I blushed.

One day Claudio came into the kitchen while I was frying some meatbal s. I was busy over the stove, but he wanted to talk.

"I don't like you sitting out back. It looks bad."

"What, you think somebody's going to mistake me for one of Bifaro's girls?" I turned so that my bel y was unmistakable.

"You know what I mean." Claudio thought I should've learned that time he threw the iron at me not to talk fresh to him. But I didn't let Claudio tel me what to do. He was not my father.

"You mean, when I sit there it makes the men uncomfortable.

I know who they are. I know their wives. And if they feel too uncomfortable, maybe they're not going to go through the door and up the stairs. Maybe they're not going to spend their money with Bifaro. And if they don't spend their money with Bifaro, then you don't get your cut."

I turned over the meatbal s. What did he think, I was some little girl who didn't know what those women did?

Did he real y believe that I didn't see a connection between him and Bifaro's convenient location?

"You insult me, and you insult Signora Bifaro with your suspicions.

Do your cooking in the kitchen, Giulia. You look like some goddamn cafona out back with your knife, feeding the cats. Act respectable. Don't give people a reason to talk."

"The only ones who talk, Claudio, are the whores."

My daughter Caterina was born in early November. The late-afternoon light was reaching over the rooftops and through the lace curtains in the bedroom, stretching across the floor and onto the bed. I heard the tiny wail, the first gasp of air and life. Flora lifted her into my arms and I felt the slippery warmth, the fluttering movements that signaled she was alive.

Paolo had retreated downstairs to the Palace, pacing, waiting, not even playing the piano for fear it would disturb me. But when he heard Caterina cry he came bounding up the stairs, a man bursting with hope and pride.

CHAPTER 39

Z'Amalia's Inheritance

A few weeks before Caterina's birth, Papa decided to visit New York. He took the mountain road from Venticano, just as he had the predawn morning he drove Pip and Til y and me to our destinies. Just as he had, since then, carried more and more of our countrymen away from the vil age and toward America.

At Avel ino, he joined the regional road that leads through the val ey to Napoli. At the outskirts of the city, he wove his way through streets, past market stal s and pink-walled tenements, until he reached the wide expanse of the Via Caracciolo. When he arrived at the harbor, however, he did not discharge his passengers and return to the mountains.

He boarded the ship himself.

"I'm coming for a few months," he said. "I do not intend to stay. I come only to decide if Claudio's business warrants the money Claudio, swal owing his pride, has asked me to invest."

Papa had money to invest because Z'Amalia, Giuseppina's wealthy sister, had final y succumbed to her many ailments, her loneliness and her arrogance. She had left everything—her vil a on the perimeter of the Parco di Capodimonte in Napoli, her paintings, her piano, her gold accumulated over years of hoarding—to Papa.

The cousins were furious, but Papa said, "Where were you when I visited her every week? Who sat with her in her rooms smel ing like death and listened to her complaints? Did any of you bring her a piece of cake or take her for a walk in the garden?" He ignored their outrage. He bought a new suit and sat in the front row at the funeral.

So Claudio, who as a little boy used to endure with Papa his visits to Z'Amalia, her desiccated fingers pinching his cheeks and offering him stale chocolates that had turned dusty white in their satin box, now thought it was time to expand his business. He wanted to build the roads, not Just haul the stone for the builders.

But he needed Papa, Papa's money, to do that. I know what it took Claudio to put aside his own bitterness to ask. Greed. Ambition.

And it was my mother who had interceded. A business opportunity, she told Papa. Make the money grow, don't hide it under the bed the way your aunt did. You're no old woman. You're an astute businessman. You said yourself your bones are getting too old to travel these roads day after day And, even if it's Aldo at the reins, he carries fewer and fewer passengers, except to take them to the ships.

So go see if this is the right business. Decide for yourself. And take the boys with you. They're old enough now, and will give me no peace if you go without them. I can manage here myself while you make up your mind about Claudio's business. Somehow, perhaps appealing to Papa's own greed, she had convinced him.

They were more alike than they cared to admit, Papa and Claudio. Even though they'd parted ten years before without a word between them since.

On the morning of Caterina's birth, Papa arrived in America. He brought with him Z' Amalia's money, my brothers Aldo and Frankie and Sandro—no longer willing to be left behind—and a gift from Giuseppina for the baby she was sure would be born alive.

Their arrival stunned me, emphasizing the passage of time since my own departure. The boys were al tal and strong, their faces the faces of men. Aldo, almost twenty-four, had cultivated his imitation of Papa so well that, from a distance and in dim light, one could be excused for mistaking the two. He had even put on weight and affected the three-piece suits that Papa's tailor in Napoli must have fashioned for him. Our altar boy, Frankie, not even shaving when I'd left, now turned his sixteen- year-old face to me with a finely trimmed mustache. Not the voluminous, waxed statements of Papa and Aldo and al the other men of my family, but an outline, like the charcoal sketch made by a da Vinci before creating a masterpiece in ful color. Sandro, at fourteen not yet taking a razor to his face, was nonetheless tal er than al of them, his little-boy energy transformed into muscle and bone.

They tumbled into Claudio and Angelina's house and into our lives, breathing American air, listening to American voices, walking on American pavement as if they were once again in the hil s playing the games inspired by Claudio's letters. They had rehearsed this scene before. They knew their lines. Papa, however, was a stranger in the home of his oldest son.

Angelina did nothing to ease his discomfort, her sense of being put upon evident in the firmness with which she placed every additional plate on the table. After dinner the evening of their arrival, she herded her brood—

Alberto, now eight, Armando, six, Vita, four, and Magdalena, two—up to bed...but first she opened the windows of the dining room to air out the smoke from not only her husband's noxious cigar, but now that of her father-in-law as wel .

What took place that evening Claudio shared with me many years later, because I was able to listen with the ears of a businesswoman, not the ears of his youngest sister.

Claudio sent the boys down to the Palace that night and turned to an impatient father, waiting at the recently cleared table, fingers taking the measure of the damask tablecloth, comparing it to his own.

Claudio put two glasses and a bottle of grappa on the table, watching Papa's hands. They were cal oused and toughened, familiar with handling leather reins, lifting heavy freight, evaluating the muscled flanks of his horses. But they were also manicured, as careful y trimmed and buffed as his mustache. Claudio believed he understood Papa.

"So show me," Papa said. "Show me this dream."

Claudio pul ed open a drawer in the sideboard and withdrew a brown folder bound with string. He retrieved several pages from the folder and spread them out on the table. Those pages were his translation of what Papa had defined as a dream—a word Papa used to describe the fairy tales of fools, the deluded fiction of those not rooted in reality.

Claudio had first listed what he'd gleaned from fragments of conversations, minutes of municipal meetings, obscure references in the Daily Argus. Land that was to be developed. Roads that would need to be paved.

Bridges that would need to be erected. Tunnels that would need to be dug. Next, he'd gathered the names and prices of the equipment required to pave and erect and dig. Then he'd calculated the number of men necessary to run the equipment, hold the shovels, heave the picks. He had factored in his relationship with Paolo, his business partner and brother-in-law. If the construction industry became unionized, he'd use that relationship to influence

any deal he might be forced to make with the union. And last, he'd predicted what the city of Mount Vernon and the state of New York—what America—would pay to extend its reach, turn woods and fields into city. A great deal, he said. Far more than it would cost him to build.

"There's something missing in your costs," Papa said, looking up over his spectacles from the numbers he'd examined, "unless business is done so differently here that you don't need it."

Claudio removed another sheet from the folder.

"I didn't forget."

He pressed his lips together in a smile of victory. The price of influence was careful y noted on the last sheet, with cryptic initials and amounts, annotations as to what might be required: liquor, women, a cash donation to a campaign chest, a funeral wreath at a mother's untimely passing.

"I'll take the numbers up to bed with me to study, and then sleep on it. How much are you asking me for to underwrite this venture? What are you prepared to give me in return?"

Papa made a few notations in his notebook and took a long draft on his cigar.

Claudio, sure of Papa's interest, but knowing him well enough to understand that he had to come out feeling the victor, made an offer that he was willing to negotiate, but presented as firm. Let Papa mul and calculate and pare and refine. He, Claudio, felt his father's blood in his veins, heard the pace of his breathing in his own breath. After ten years, he had learned that he could not escape his father in himself, and so turned that to his own advantage. That Papa would win something was irrelevant to Claudio because he would win more. An empire. Carried first on his own back, but then on the backs of his sons.