Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons (28 page)

The restlessness of Paolino at night in his crib next to my bed. The books my mother lent me would have gathered dust at my bedside if I didn't have those private moments in the kitchen.

I waited in the parlor that Sunday afternoon .Waited for Salvatore to stil his hand, to clear his throat, to shift the weight of his daughter from one knee to the other. I couldn't keep myself from studying his face.

I must admit that when my mother first told me about him, I'd gone out of my way one afternoon to walk past his blacksmith's shop and peer in the half-open door. He didn't see me; he was crouched over the hoof of a tethered horse, intent on prying off a damaged shoe. His face had been streaked with sweat and soot, his hair fal ing over his forehead and periodical y swept away with the back of his hand. In the dim fight I couldn't discern with certainty the features of his face—I couldn't tel you if they pleased or repulsed me. But I watched him at his work, saw the strength in his arms, the solidity of his legs, and listened to him calm the horse. I moved from the doorway. Later that day, I let my mother know I would al ow him to cal on me.

On Sunday, not only the children had been scrubbed. The face opposite me was no longer disguised by his labor. His hair had been slicked away from his forehead, black and wet, the hands now fussing with the baby probably pressed to it a quarter of an hour before, smoothing out whatever unruliness he normal y lived with.

His mustache, equal y black, had been neatly brushed and waxed. It drooped and curved up again. Paolo had always kept his face clean-shaven.

"Don't make comparisons," my mother had said. "You'll never be able to decide if you haul up out of your heart these images that become more beautiful, more precious, the longer you live without him in the flesh."

So I tried not to hold up Paolo's exquisite face as I watched Salvatore in his unfamiliar feast-day clothes. I tried not to hear the poetry that Paolo recited to me as I listened to Salvatore speak of his situation, his prospects, the practical and substantial life he might be willing to offer me. I tried not to remember the piano at the Palace and the strains of Paolo's songs wafting up through the floorboards to our apartment as I studied Salvatore's accordion sitting between his sons and hoped that he would never play it for me.

CHAPTER 48

Ice Flowers

The panes of the windows in Angelina's pantry were thick with frost. If Caterina had been there, she would have carved flowers and stars with her fingernail, scraping away at the papery ice until her fingertips were numb.

But she wasn't there. She was asleep under a crocheted coverlet in Pip's house, her face resting against the porcelain cheek of her dol , her hair neatly braided, her fingers, instead of creating ice fantasies, firmly planted inside her mouth.

I moved the sack of onions on the floor to get at the semolina and the cake flour. I placed eggs into a bowl. I wanted to start the pasta, set the dough to rise for the cream puffs before the boys woke up. It was five in the morning.

There was no daylight yet. I worked by the dim overhead bulb in the kitchen, but I didn't real y need to see. I piled a hil of flour onto my board and made a hol ow in the top with my fist. One by one, the ten eggs slipped from their shel s into the hol ow. I plunged my hands into their liquid, working the flour little by little into a mass of dough, exactly as Giuseppina had taught me. I didn't think as my hands moved in a pattern that was as natural to me as planting seeds or weeding a garden. The echoes of Giuseppina's instructions had found their way into my muscles.

I shaped the dough, kneading and pushing it with the rhythm I'd learned from Giuseppina's singing. Now and then, I even found myself singing again. I took my rol ing pin, a thin, tapered stick that Til y's husband had shaped for me, and began to rol out the dough. It resisted at first, a thick slab of creamy yellow that I had to tame until it was a translucent sheet light enough to rise when I blew under it. With a sharp knife, I cut the sheet into strips and then hung the strips to dry on a wooden rack. Fettucini I would serve that afternoon, with porcini mushrooms sent from Salvatore's cousin in Connecticut.

I wiped my hands on my apron and started a pot of coffee. The rest of the house would be waking soon.

That afternoon Pip and Ernesto brought Caterina to Claudio's for dinner. She was dressed in the green merino wool coat and hat they'd bought for her. The conductor lifted her from the iron steps of the train onto the platform and exclaimed how beautiful she was, how perfect. Pip beamed and took her hand in her own gloved one and walked with her— proud, proprietary—out of the station to Claudio, waiting in his new automobile.

CHAPTER 49

Caterina Dances

Pip and Ernesto wanted to adopt Caterina.

She danced in the parlor when they came to visit, twirling in a circle with her arms outstretched. We clapped our hands to the music on the gramophone.

I remembered Salvatore's accordion and thought, He could play for Caterina. She could dance in his parlor.

My parlor, if I marry him.

I could give her a home again.

I could give me a home again.

I sank into the chair in the corner and watched my daughter, my sister, my mother.

My mother sat in the center of the room, cooing and praising. She touched the edge of Caterina's exquisite dress. She pressed a coin into her tiny hand and Caterina held it high as she continued to circle the room. The coin glinted in the late- afternoon light; it adorned her, like a jewel on her finger or a ribbon in her hair.

Pip did not take her eyes from Caterina. She leaned toward her as Caterina laughed and floated away. There was a hunger, a longing in Pip's body. I saw her reaching out for my daughter, stroking her hair, adjusting the bow on the sash at her waist. Caterina slithered from her grasp and danced some more.

She stopped in front of me.

"Dance with me, Mama."

She stretched out her hands.

I wanted to refuse. My body had given up that lightness and freedom since Paolo's death. I had no reason to dance, I told myself. My feet trudged to the market, bore the weight of laundry baskets and sleeping children, curled up at night in an empty bed, seeking warmth and finding none. I shook my head and held up my hands in refusal.

"Dance with me. Per favore. The way you used to."

Caterina grabbed my hands, holding the coin between us, and tugged at me to get out of the chair.

Pip stopped clapping. She sat back and wrapped her arms tightly in front of her.

I got to my feet and smiled at Caterina as we spun around each other.

CHAPTER 50

Gardenias

Flowers. Gardenias. White with dark, glossy leaves. Salvatore bought them for me to carry at the wedding. Pip gave me a navy-blue silk dress of hers to wear. My mother offered me her ruby earrings.

In a smal cigar box on my dresser lay al the letters Paolo had written me. They were much more precious to me than the jewels Papa had showered upon my mother in appeasement, as substitutes for his attention and love.

I took the box on the morning of my wedding day and wrapped it in one of the embroidered trousseau linens I'd brought from Venticano. I buried the shrouded box out of sight in the bottom drawer with my scapulars and extra votive candles, amid the packets of dried herbs and the cotton towels for my time of the month. Salvatore didn't concern himself with these things, and he had no need to know, to see the letters, to understand why I kept them, cherished them, took them in my hand to feel the weight and smoothness of the paper and to run my fingers over Paolo's words as I'd once run my fingers over Paolo's body.

Salvatore never knew those letters existed.

CHAPTER 51

Gratitude

Marrying Salvatore brought five children to sleep under his roof—Salvatore's three, no longer motherless and neglected; Paolino, and Caterina, restored to me despite Pip's bitter disappointment; and a sixth growing inside me within a few short months.

Pip knew, in giving Caterina back to me, that she stared ahead at a childless life.

"You have so many to take care of, Giulia. Why take her back when Ernesto and I can give her so much?"

But how could I not take her back? Not only my own flesh and blood, but Paolo's? Did I want her to grow up distanced from me, as I'd grown up separated from my own mother? Not only the distance from here to Manhattan—the train ride measured not in the clack of the rails, the minutes from Mount Vernon to Grand Central, but in the journey that separates two households as different as New York and Venticano, as far apart as my mother's parlor and Giuseppina's kitchen.

Before the wedding, I took the train down, to visit Caterina and to get the blue silk dress Pip was lending me because I refused to wear the ivory wedding gown from my first marriage. What kind of an omen was that, I thought, to put on that dress again? I wanted to cut it up, burn it, throw the ashes on Paolo's grave.

I had not been to Pip and Ernesto's house in many years. They didn't entertain the family. When they wanted to see us, they came to us with a box of Schrafft's chocolates. I had forgotten the grandeur, the opulence and the heaviness that Pip had surrounded

herself with. The wood was dark, the carpets a deep purple-red, the color of Chianti. The draperies were fringed, tied back with tassels the color of dul ed gold. They hid the soot that filmed the outside of the windows.

They cut off the light. Even in the middle of the day, she had to light the lamps.

The furniture in Pip's parlor reminded me of my mother's rooms. No comfortable place to sit, the texture of the upholstery unyielding against one's skin.

Her coffee, served in the gold-rimmed bone china my mother had sent each of us years before, was stil bitter.

Her cake was store-bought.

"There's a wonderful pasticceria in the neighborhood," she boasted, as if this made her life better than mine.

She reminded me that I was stil the poor, widowed sister who did her own baking.

Caterina was dwarfed in her room. There was a pale rose-colored carpet, a white bed, a dol 's house that had the instantly recognizable stamp of my mother's extravagance.

How could I take her away from this, you ask? Back to a bed she would share with a stepsister, to a table with clamoring brothers and a father she didn't know?

How could I not?

At first, for Salvatore and me, there was only our gratitude for each other. I rescued his children, who'd been fed at one table or another since their mother's death. With the baby, who'd never known her own mother's milk, never felt the warm breath of a mother's caressing lips placed in a kiss at the nape of her neck, it was easy to scoop her up into my arms. Paolino was already moving away from my skirts, eager to fol ow his new brothers.

I balanced Mariangela on my hip while I stirred the gravy. I dressed her in Caterina's outgrown dresses. I blessed and pinned a medal of the Virgin Mary on her undershirt.

With the boys, it was harder. Eight and twelve years old, they eyed me suspiciously when I entered their house as their papa's bride. The little one, Patsy, had nightmares and crawled sobbing and terrorized into our bed every night. The older one, Nicky, ignored me. He shrugged off my good-night kisses, claiming he was too old for such things. It was al I could do make a quick sign of the cross on his forehead at night before he turned away from me in his bed.

Va bene, I thought. I saw that he had enough to eat, clean clothes. I walked him down the street every morning to the corner across from No. 10 School and made sure he went in. In the afternoons, he went to the blacksmith shop and helped his father. When he came home with dirty clothes and a smudged face, I didn't yell.

Salvatore had rescued me. From a life as a burden to my family, from a place in my brother's household as little more than a maid, from my silence.

This gratitude that we felt for each other held nothing of the passion that had sustained Paolo and me. But it sustained us nevertheless. To be touched again, however awkward and unaccustomed the cal oused hands, to be protected within the wal s of my own home, to be thanked, with eyes that took in his well-cared-for children and my growing bel y, was enough.

CHAPTER 52

The Great War

Over the next year we began to build a life together. Salvatore created a garden out of nothing in the back of the house—a vacant lot fil ed with debris. I sat out there in the spring, braiding Caterina's hair, a brown glistening with the red-gold lights of her father's. The baby, Giuseppina, slept in her carriage beneath the arbor that Salvatore had built to shelter the oilcloth-covered table that sat fourteen. Grapevines planted at the same time had begun their ascent up the posts supporting the roof of the arbor. The leaves formed a delicate curtain around the baby. Next to the shed at the end of the garden, Salvatore had planted a cherry tree, its white blossoms hiding the sheet-metal wal of the garage that backed up against our property. We were content.

Our first chal enge together came when the American president brought our new country into the Great War that had been raging across the ocean, and Nicky ran away.

Salvatore had taken us al up to Waterbury to visit his cousin Archimedes. Nicky and Patsy were going to spend two weeks on the farm helping Archimedes with the haying, and we decided to bring the whole family for the ride and a visit with their cousins. We borrowed Claudio's car and drove up the Post Road, the children al in the back, squabbling and restless. By the time we got to the farm, I was happy to have them run off to play in the barn, climb trees, even splash in the muddy pond. We al needed to be in the country. Salvatore and Archimedes took the boys to the river to fish, while Estel a and I stayed in the house with the little ones and cooked.

Down at the river, the men talked about the War. Archimedes's younger brother Sebastiano had enlisted in a regiment from New Haven that was mostly Italian, soon to sail to the front and fight for their new country. I don't know what they said, but it was the kind of talk a fourteen-year-old boy, lying on a rock in the sun, bored with his life and feeling encroached upon by his father's growing new family, would listen to. What was it—