Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons (26 page)

I stifled the scream that rose up in my throat. I didn't want to wake the babies, and I didn't want to rouse the curiosity of the old crone across the landing, although, God knows, she'd probably heard enough as Claudio and Peppino had struggled up the stairwell.

It was 2:00 a.m. Claudio sent Peppino to get Dottore Solazio, but no one knew where he was; we knew the American doctor wouldn't come in the middle of the night to the Palace's neighborhood.

Claudio helped me undress him. I washed him, trying to cool down his feverish body. He mumbled and thrashed at first. At one point, wild and out of control, he knocked al his books from the bedside table. Then he quieted.

As long as I had something to keep my hands busy I could keep the fears at bay. Claudio strode back and forth in the front room, his fist aching to pound Paolo's enemy as he used to when they'd defended each other on the streets in the early days. But this time the enemy was unseen. No mean-spirited bul y, but an incomprehensible demon eating away at Paolo. For the first time in my life, I saw my brother afraid, powerless.

When he saw me standing in the doorway, he stopped pacing, his face searching mine for some sign of change. I just shook my head quickly and looked down. If I let the fears burning behind his eyes leap across to meet mine, I would shatter like the wineglass my father had smashed the night Claudio had decided to come to America.

"I'll go wake Til y to come and be with you. You shouldn't be alone. What if the babies wake up?" He, too, needed something to do.

"No! I do not want my sister in this house tonight!" I was adamant. "Go look for the doctor again, if you can't wait with me.

I spit the words out, accusing, raging. There was no one I wanted by my side. I did not know if I could bear their anguish as well as my own.

I listened with my forehead pressed against the ice-cool glass of the door to his footsteps, frenzied and urgent, racing down the stairs as he left me. Then I turned back.

I checked first on the babies. Paolo was slipping out of my arms, out of my life, and my first impulse was to gather his children to me to fil my emptiness. I ached to smel their damp curls, to feel the tenderness of their skin, to crush their mouths in a kiss.

Caterina lay on her back, arms stretched over her head, her body extended to its ful length. Every time I saw her like this, I was struck by how much she'd grown, how sturdy and hardy she was. Only eighteen months since I'd pushed her out of my bel y, and she was already racing ahead of me, into her own life. I brushed a wet strand of hair from her cheek and watched for a grateful moment, the rhythm of life, the ebb and flow of her dreams.

Paolino, in contrast to his older sister, lay on his bel y, restless, his impending hunger about to announce itself in a crescendo that would move from a tentative, mewling murmur to an insistent wail. I scooped him up and brought him with me to the chair by Paolo's bedside. His body, beginning then at six months to fil out, molded itself to my own, yielding his hunger, his loneliness in the night, to the warmth and milk of my breasts.

He fel back to sleep, sated, the last drops of milk sliding from his parted lips down his tiny, exquisite chin. I could not bear to put him down. Instead, I sat with him nestled in the crook of my arm. My other hand I rested lightly on Paolo's chest. I felt the life seeping out of him with every shal ow, uneven breath.

I bent my head to his ear and began to whisper a litany. Not the prayers the old women mumbled in the church on Friday evenings—I had no use for their incantations.

The litany I recited to him was the words he'd written to me over the years, the words that had recorded the tumult and passion and anguish and joy of our brief time together. I knew the words by heart. His dreams, his longing, his doubts that I loved him in return. They were al I could think of as I waited with him.

Thoughts of you fil me to oveflowing. I swear to you that if I do not see you often enough, I feel my heart breaking. If I had to be away from you for a week, I would go crazy with sorrow.

You are my talisman of enchantment.

I want to amuse you and keep you merry. I want to make you laugh, to hear your beautiful, charming laughter, which both eases awl torments me.

I cover your face with my tears, and I wipe them away with my kisses.

I don't know how long I sat there. I don't know if he heard me.

Claudio came back with the doctor at last, but there was little he could do except tel us that it was pneumonia.

At 6:30 in the morning, Paolo died.

I found the shirt later, forgotten in a heap on the floor. I tried to wash out the stains, my back bent over the washboard, my hand clutching the naphtha soap, my arm scrubbing in a rhythm that became frantic as I realized that it was too late. The blood had already dried.

CHAPTER 44

The Band of the Bersaglieri

They were beginning to assemble in front of the Palace, men and women in black waiting in the gray drizzle.

My mother watched from the window upstairs, waiting for the sound of a wagon, for the sight of horses with black ribbons on their bridles. Behind her, resting on the table in my front room, was Paolo's coffin.

She put out one of the cigarettes Claudio's oldest son had bought for her and straightened her hat in the mirror I kept by the door. They were simple, those rooms of mine, but well kept. She remembered the first rooms she and Papa had lived in, over the stables, with Giuseppina and Antonio snoring close by. No matter how hard she tried, she had not been able to rid those rooms of the pungent odors of horses and old woman's medicine.

My home was tinged with the scent of bleach, day-old flowers, talcum powder and the haze of the cigarettes Papa berated her for smoking. She waved her hand to dispel the evidence of the last one and turned to her girls, now gathering themselves for the descent to the procession forming in the street below.

She appraised them, her fine-looking daughters. Letitia and Philippina carried themselves with pride—long, straight backs; well-made dresses provided by their husbands' money; bodies untouched by childbearing. Til y was softer, more sweet-faced than our older sisters, not as well dressed and beginning to thicken around her waist after three daughters. My mother made a mental note to suggest a shopping expedition to the corsetiere after the demands of that unsettling week were behind us. I was stil in the back room, my face bearing the bruised signs of the last tear-soaked days. At least my hair had been brushed and neatly fastened and my dress had been pressed. Til y had done that.

My mother plucked a piece of lint from Letitia's shoulder and adjusted the veil on her own hat one more time.

She came into the bedroom to fetch me.

I sat in the chair between the bed and Paolino's empty cradle. Claudio's wife, Angelina, was watching al the children over at their house until we got back from the cemetery. My feet were tapping out a pattern on the floor—making the motions of walking, as I would have to do soon, behind the coffin of my husband—but going nowhere. In my hand I clutched Paolo's ring.

"It's time to go, Giulia.They are waiting for you."This was not the first time my mother had said such words to me, sending me off to a new life on each occasion. First as a little girl to Giuseppina's house, then to the convent and, eight years ago, here to America. Each time away, to a life she believed was better for me. What life awaited me now on the other side of this day? My mother had not known widowhood. Papa stil sat at the head of our table, grumbling or roaring, but stil there.

"Here, put on your veil. I'll help you pin it so it doesn't blow off. And where are your gloves? Do you have a dry handkerchief?"

She rattled off her list. These were the things she knew about, could guide me in. She was about to take me, one step at a time, with dignity, through the day.

She got me up out of the chair and linked her arm through mine. She was determined to keep me moving, even though my wil to put one foot in front of the other was locked inside that wooden box with the body of my husband.

Claudio came up the stairs then, a man of boundless energy despite the onerous weight that his wagon would carry today, despite the stiff col ar cutting into his neck. Behind him, moving more slowly and talking among themselves, fol owed Paolo's two brothers, who had traveled from Pennsylvania, and my brothers-in-law.

Not one of my sisters' husbands had been friends with Paolo. Rassina, the jeweler; Gaetano, the carpenter; Ernesto, the businessman. My mother looked at them. Not men she would have chosen for herself—but then, she hadn't chosen Papa, either. Gaetano was sleepy. Rassina had no heart. Ernesto was simply ugly. Paolo, however, she knew she would miss. An intel igent man, a man with compassion for a woman who would rather read books than pound dough.

"Mama, Aldo should be turning the corner at North Street with the wagon at any minute. It's time to go down."

The men moved past us to the front room and gathered around the table where the coffin, had rested for two days. At Claudio's count they hoisted the box onto their shoulders and edged through the passageway into the kitchen, where my mother waited with my sisters and me.

They stopped for a moment to ready themselves for the long flight down to the street. My mother kept her grip on me in my silence as the muffled whimpering of my sisters began: the drone of Letitia's whispered prayers, the plaintive questioning of Til y's little-girl voice. As the coffin crossed the threshold onto the landing, an anguished wail rose above the voices and the tears.

"Oh, my God! Paolo! You're leaving this house for the last time! The last time!"

Pip's screams released the cries of the others, shrieks that fol owed the men down the stain. Al except me, whose stricken face remained frozen, untouched by the abandoned wailing of my sisters.

My mother was exasperated by the unconfined emotion working its way like an infection, or an insidious malaria, through my sisters. Her heart was aching, too, but Paolo was not her husband, not her lover, not her son. To tear her hair out with grief in public was a display she would not al ow herself. My sisters did not have the same self-control.

"Subdue yourselves." She spit out the words in a fury. "It's time to fol ow the men with some semblance of dignity. You are Fioril os, every single one of you, no matter what your last names are now."

She moved out first, supporting me as I stumbled and faltered, unable to take even a step without assistance.

My condition forced her to turn her attention—reluctantly—from the excesses of her other daughters. They continued their keening as they descended behind us to the street.

The wagon was nowhere in sight, Aldo delayed somehow in the few blocks between Claudio's stable and the Palace. Everyone waited restlessly, the men stil shouldering the coffin.

My mother wanted to light another cigarette, but she didn't smoke on the street. She held firmly to my arm.

The drizzle had let up, leaving a dampness that curled the edges of my hair, a heaviness that muted the shuffle of impatient feet. My sisters, thank God, quieted themselves, resuming their muttered prayers. I stared numbly at the cobbled pattern of the road.

Directly in front of us—waiting as we al were—stood the Band of the Bersaglieri. At ease in military fashion—

feet slightly apart, arms clasped behind their backs, eyes straight ahead—they looked off at some distant point, not at us. Their horns floated in silence, suspended across their chests from a tricolor braided cord slung over their left shoulders. For al their military exactness and their remote bearing, the Bersaglieri were flamboyantly plumed birds.

This was no ragtag jumble of musicians Claudio had col ected from some dance hal , with fraying jackets and wrinkled shirts, faces stil bearing the traces of too much whiskey. The Bersaglieri were afanfara, the brass band attached to one of the most elite infantry units in Italy. They were touring the east coast and my mother had managed to engage them for the funeral. They wore well-cut black wool suits trimmed with polished brass buttons and red epaulets that seemed about to take wing, starched white shirts and broadly knotted red ties.

This costume alone was enough to turn heads during a procession.

But atop their heads, tilted sharply over their right eyes, were wide-brimmed black hats. Exploding from the front of the crown was a red feathered plume of such exuberance that it defied the grayness, the enclosed and suffocating air of grief.

There were those in the neighborhood who found this display ostentatious. There were people like them in Venticano as wel , people who have nothing better to do than to pick away at their scabs of discontent and jealousy.

Paolo and I had next to nothing, so Papa and my mother paid for this. I don't know what I would have done if they hadn't—I had barely enough to pay the priest for a Mass or the gravediggers who made room for Paolo next to our babies graves in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in New Rochel e.

I had hardly left Paolo's side in the three days since his death. After sitting with him during the night in death watch, I had washed his body and dressed him for burial. During the wake, I had been willing to leave his coffin only to feed Paolino. No one could dissuade me. "Have something to eat, Giulia. Keep your strength up." "Rest, Giulia, put your head down for a few minutes." I had ignored them al , al of their ministrations, their offers of assistance. No one could take my place. So my mother took over what I had no heart for. She put everyone to work to prepare for this day. Hired the band, arranged with the priest and the cemetery, organized the women for the food afterward, explained to Claudio how to set up the bier, ordered the lilies from Barletta's. She knew it was easier when it wasn't your own. Your son-in-law instead of your son.

Her final responsibility came that morning as she stood with me on the stoop of the Palace, keeping me upright, feeling the tremor of fear ripple through me as Claudio's wagon rounded the corner at North Street, clattering over the cobbled pavement.