Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons (27 page)

Ever since my wedding day, I had been petrified of horses. As a child, you couldn't tear me away from them. I was always out in the courtyard with my brothers, brushing away the layers of dust the horses had accumulated in their long hauls over the hil s, feeding them broken bits of carrots I had snitched from Pasqualina's kitchen garden. Now, I crossed to the other side of the street or backed up against the wal of the nearest building when I saw a horse. This time, as Aldo maneuvered Carl's best team behind the Bersaglieri, I stiffened and pressed my back against the Palace door, covering the Fioril o and Serafini, Proprietors etched in the middle of the frosted glass.

The wagon stood directly in front of us, draped in black, covered with pots of lilies. The men hoisted the coffin onto the platform. My mother was proud of her choice—a burnished wood, not cheap-looking. Papa had balked at first at the expense, but then, that was what he always felt he had to do. Complain about the extravagance, the unreasonableness of her request, and then, in a gesture of magnanimous generosity, buy not only what she'd asked for but also some additional item. This was why, after the men had positioned the box, Claudio placed a brass crucifix on top of it. Papa's contribution.

It was time for us to move into position behind the wagon. The men broke up their knots of conversation—

rumors about jobs about to open up or shut down, politics, especially news from the old country, about which they al had opinions. They had less to say about what went on here because they didn't understand or care about it. They took off their hats, put out their cigars, found their wives.

Paolo's sister Flora and her husband joined us. Flora, her face covered with a heavy veil, left her husband's side and approached me as I stood, stiff-backed and frozen, on the stoop. She touched her cheek to mine and whispered in my ear. Her fingers clasped black rosary beads, the silver cross dangling. With her free hand she pried open my fingers, stil cramped around Paolo's ring, and pressed the beads into my hand. I bent my head and raised the beads to my lips.

I am not a religious woman. Paolo's death hadn't suddenly converted me. I could not imagine that the next day would find me among the ranks of the women who attend Holy Mass every morning at 6:00 a.m., say the Rosary at noon, and wash and iron the altar's linen for the priest every evening, although, God knows, it's the path more than one widow has taken. But for the rest of the morning, I cradled the beads in my hand, along with the ring, at times rubbing a bead between my thumb and index finger. Not in prayer, no, but moving my hand the same way I'd been moving my foot back and forth in the bedroom.

After Flora spoke to me, she rejoined her husband among the family gathering behind the coffin. Paolo's associates from the union had arrived to march, my mother was glad to see. A sign of respect for Paolo, for the family. She nodded her head to their tipped hats, their deferential bows.

Claudio conferred with Aldo at the reins and then turned to check the presence of those in the procession. He was ready to give the signal to the bandleader. He glanced over at my mother, his eyebrows raised in a question. To anyone except my mother, it wouldn't have been a question. It would have been an order.

Claudio was used to being the boss, to saying, "Now we start to march because I've decided it's time." He did not see his sister paralyzed against the glass. He saw the restless horses, the band that was to be paid, the policemen waiting along the route, hired to clear a path for the cortege.

But because she was his mother, he waited.

She tightened her grip around my shoulders.

"Let's go, cara mia. Let's get through this day."

She urged me down the steps and out into the street, directly behind the bier. The fragrance of the lilies crept around us in the muggy air, surrounding us with the smel I have associated with the dead since I was a little girl.

My body was not under my control. My fingers rubbed the bead, and my eyes beneath the veil stared through the coffin, not at it. As slight as I am, my mother did not think she had the strength to support me al the way to Mount Carmel. She motioned to Papa to join us on the other side of me. He took my right arm, which I gave to him without resistance, in a daze.

Claudio strode to the front, signaled to the bandleader, and the Bersaglieri shifted to attention. In unison they raised their horns to their lips and took their first steps as they blew the first note.

The horses reacted to the music piercing the stil ness and tedium of the wait. I heard Aldo speak sharply to them as the wagon lurched abruptly forward. My head jerked up and I sprang back from the wagon, from the mournful tones of the music. I wasn't completely lost. I had some sense of what was going on around me.

We fel into step behind the bier, and the others took their places behind us. My sisters embraced their wailing once again. I remained silent.

CHAPTER 45

Widow

After the funeral, Pip got ready to go back to New York.

"I'll take Caterina," she informed me. "Ernesto and I have plenty of room."

"It's better for you both," chimed in Til y, with Claudio watching tensely from the other side of the room, waiting, letting my sisters do the work of convincing me. Sharing the burden of their widowed sister and her children, that was what this careful y rehearsed scene, this artifice of concern and generosity, was al about.

Widow. I turned the word over in my mouth, parched, aching with the memory of Paolo's last kiss. I gagged on it. I wanted to spit it out, this sour, suffocating word.

There was a heaviness and an ugliness to this word that had now attached itself to my life. I saw that ugliness reflected in the eyes of my brother and sisters—eyes that averted, eyes that resented, eyes that blamed. I was weighed down, not only by the fact that Paolo had been ripped from my very being and by fears for my fatherless babies, but also by the anger of my family.

As Til y and Pip danced with false merriment around the welcome my Caterina would find, a room of her own on Canal Street, I gradual y gleaned the true reason she had to be separated from me at al . It was Claudio.

He was forbidding me to remain with the children in the apartment above the Palace. He was forbidding me to continue to work there or to hold Paolo's share of the business.

"It's unseemly. A woman alone. People wil talk, make assumptions about you. "This from Pip, my most proper of sisters, who had never once set foot in the Palace. She was afraid of even the taint of impropriety. What did she think I would do, bare my breasts as I fried the eggplant? Serve up the macaroni with kisses on the side?

Join Signora Bifaro's girls on the back stairs of the hotel?

"You are no longer safe here. You've lost the protection of your husband." I've lost much more than his protection, I wanted to scream at her. But what did she, married to an ignorant, desiccated old man, know of what I'd lost? Did she ever hear such poems as Paolo had whispered to me in the night, lips so close that his very breath was a caress, words so pure, so unrestrained, that their very utterance was something sacred?

Did she ever feel such tenderness, such mystery, such surprise as I had felt in his embrace?

Not Pip, not any of them, understood my rage or powerlessness in the face of my empty bed, my empty heart.

They only understood their own duty. It was a duty they'd carved out, apportioned among themselves, without asking me. Claudio was taking over my protection. He would house me; he would feed me. I would return to his house, as I had eight years ago when I'd first arrived from Italy. My parents had no room in their own apartment on Eighth Avenue with the three boys stil living there. Papa's investment in Claudio's new business had not yet yielded the profits that would later enable him to build a house on the park. Pip was taking Caterine because Claudio's wife said there wasn't room for "al of them." I could keep only one of my children—the baby—with me.

I was numb. I was weary. I had not slept for three days, since the night Claudio had brought Paolo upstairs, bloody and fevered, to die in my arms. I had buried him that morning. I had nothing left in me, neither the words or the strength, to say to Claudio, "No!"

Til y helped me pack up Caterina's things—a few dresses, stockings, a pair of shoes and the dol my mother had sent just after she was born. Once elegant, the dol had dainty porcelain hands and feet and a porcelain face with painted eyes as blue as Paolo's, a pouty red mouth faded to a pale rose from Caterina's many kisses, golden hair and a chipped ear. Its dress, smocked and cross-stitched in blue, revealed the expensive hand of my mother's dressmaker. A rag dol would've been more appropriate for an infant, but what did my mother know? And Caterina loved that dol . She wouldn't be separated from it. So into the valise it went, to make the journey downtown.

Claudio drove Pip and Caterina back to New York, while Til y stayed behind to help me pack up my own things for the move to Claudio and Angelina's house.

CHAPTER 46

Silence

After Paolo died, I stopped living as well. I spoke to no one.

When my sisters tried to cajole and coax and final y scold, I didn't answer them. When Zi'Yolanda came by with pots of food or a dress for Caterina, I didn't thank her. When my mother sat with me and made a list of what I must do to help myself and my children, I didn't acknowledge her. Even when Caterina climbed into my lap whenever Pip and Ernesto brought her to visit, I could only rock with her as both arms reached tightly around me.

I didn't hear die murmurs in the kitchen, the prayers recited before votive lights, the rising tune of late-night conversations. "What are we going to do about Giulia?"

My family had always been asking that question. She runs wild in the hil s, she climbs out of windows, she daydreams, she loves the wrong man. We have to do something about her.

So once again they tried to do something, but I didn't let them. It wasn't that I stopped doing everything. I stil got out of bed in the morning, washed myself, dressed. I knew there were women who, after their husbands died or left, turned into pigs who refused or forgot to care for themselves. Whose hair became matted and caked, whose bodies acquired layer upon layer of dirt and odor. Whose houses became infested with bugs and filth. I wasn't one of them. Every morning, I brushed my hair and secured it at the nape of my neck with two long hairpins. I kept my fingernails clean. I bathed and dressed Paolino in clothes I'd washed and ironed. I swept the floors. I aired the bed linens. I lined Paolo's books up neatly on the night table.

But I did al these things in silence. I had nothing to say to anyone. Most of the time, of course, there was no one there except the children. Claudio was at work and Angelina, leaving me to watch her brood, went off to New York to shop and eat lunch at Schrafft's. What was I to do, talk to myself? Become like Crazy Fabiola in Venticano, who wandered the streets talking to the pigeons?

My words simply disappeared. Words had been life between Paolo and me—the breath, the food that nourished us. Without Paolo, the words stopped.

CHAPTER 47

Rescue

It was my mother who rescued me. My mother—pampered, powdered, constantly in stately motion, her life swirling in constel ations far removed from us, the children she'd borne and then handed over to someone else. My mother, more familiar with the drape of silk, the poetry of Boccaccio or the variations of azure in Capri's grotto than she was with the terrors that beset her own children. It was my mother who recognized the dark circles under my eyes, who watched me scrubbing the clothes not only of my own son and my nephews, but Angelina's, too, who observed Angelina returning from one of her shopping expeditions laden with boxes of finery for herself, toys for her sons, and not even a piece of candy for my children.

It was my mother who heard my silence and found a way to end it.

"It's so pathetic," she reported one afternoon when she and Til y and her girls had stopped by. "The little girl—

what's her name? Mariangela, that's it. Mariangela he has tied to a chair il the blacksmith shop while he's working so she won't toddle into danger. It's absolutely harrowing—all those tools, al that dirt. So she sits there with those enormous brown eyes, watching, nobody bothering to wipe her nose. She can't be more than eighteen months old. And the two boys, wel , half the time they're running around God knows where. I heard that Barbara Nardozzi cooks for them, but I can assure you, nobody's washing them."

"They need a mother." It was Til y, nodding solemnly in agreement with my mother, who revealed the purpose of their visit to me today. My mother's depiction of the circumstances of the widower Salvatore D'Orazio and his motherless children was intended to do more than just elicit my sympathetic nods.

My mother, continuing her orchestration of what she hoped would be a convincing portrayal of desperate need, cast an expectant look at me.

Salvatore D'Orazio played the accordion. He brought it with him when he first came to cal on a Sunday afternoon. He also brought the children. Someone had given them a bath, starched the boys' shirts, put a bow in Mariangela's wispy curls.

He set the accordion down in the parlor and the boys took up positions on either side of it, like little soldiers or altar boys. Mariangela he held on his lap, smoothing her dress with his left hand, the one he used to stroke the buttons of the accordion that play the harmony.

It was March 19, the feast of Saint Joseph. I served him coffee and cream puffs that I'd made earlier that morning, before anyone else was up. It was the only time I was alone, those moments by a hot stove before dawn. The frantic scurry of early morning life when Til y and Pip and I were working at the factory so many years ago had given way to a different tempo. We were no longer four women straining to fit our lives under the same roof. It was only Angelina and me, and God knows I didn't have to worry about sharing the kitchen or the laundry with her. The difference was the children. The clamor of hungry bel ies, the tug of sticky hands.