Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons (9 page)

The aromas of rosemary and garlic mingled with the red wine she had poured over the lamb. Despite my sadness and my unwil ingness to eat at midday, my body now gave in to hunger.

I devoured the meal, savoring every mouthful. Giuseppina sat across from me, watching me eat silently.

I helped her clear away the meal and wash up. By the time we finished, the darkness was spreading and deepening. My brothers would be arriving soon. She took me into her room. We stood in front of her shrine, before the flickering candles in their red pots, the faces of Mary, the Sacred Heart, Saint Anne, Saint Joseph

—her own saint—glowing and gazing out at us. She blessed me and whispered her strongest spel of protection.

Then she kissed me, unfastened the clasp of the amulet she wore and draped it around my neck.

There was a knock at the door. I began to shake and my tears returned.

Aldo and Frankie were here, neither of them understanding my grief and both wishing it was they who were on their way to America and not their sisters. Giuseppina had decided not to come to my parents' house. As the boys hoisted the trunks onto their shoulders, she cast one final blessing upon my things and then took me in her arms.

I wanted to col apse at her feet, throw my arms around her knees and not let go. But she held me up—for an old woman she had moments of surprising strength.

"Figlia mia, don't do this to yourself. Don't shame yourself in front of your brothers, who wil only drag you to your father's house. Go now. Remember everything I have taught you. My blessings are with you. You wil find what you long for in your life. Cherish it. Protect it. You carry my gifts within you, too, not just the blood of your mother."

It was the first and only occasion Giuseppina had openly countered my mothers words to me. She released me into the protection of my brothers.

We walked silently across the piazza. Aldo kept one hand in his pocket, closed over a bulge I soon recognized as my father's gun. Both boys kept glancing from side to side. Frankie's baby face twitched every time we heard a cat wail or a bucket of dishwater splash upon the stones. But we met no one else. Before we left the piazza, I glanced back. Giuseppina stood in the light of her doorway, stil watching us. I could no longer see her face, only the outline of her body standing sentinel until we turned the corner. I lifted my arm in farewel and saw hers go up in response.

At my parents' house, a brittle calm fil ed every room, every face. Pip twittered nervously, remembering every five minutes yet one more item she'd forgotten. She babbled about the outfit she was going to wear tomorrow, couldn't decide which hat, fretted about her tendency to become nauseated when traveling. Til y sat in the kitchen, baffled and frightened by this extraordinary change in our lives.

In contrast to Pip's chatter and Til y's confusion, I was sul en. The boys joked and teased, but their resentment was unmistakable. My aunts—Pasqualina, the childless widow who wasn't sure whether she adored Papa or my brother Sandro more, and Teresia, the one whose mind had never grown beyond childhood—hovered anxiously, saying their prayers and jumping every time they heard a noise outside. I secretly hoped that one of those noises was Vito, somehow aware of my predicament, emboldened to rescue me. But I was not al owed near a window, and they were al shuttered anyway.

My mother, stil tense, sent Pip and Til y and me to bed with the admonition that we were to be up and ready to depart at 4:00 a.m. I slept very little without the solace of Giuseppina and with my own heartache. I awoke to a smoky lamp in my face, my mother's voice urging me to get dressed. Til y's side of the bed was already empty.

I moved unwil ingly, but I moved, remembering Giuseppina's warning not to disgrace myself. I dressed in the dim light, half listening to Pip's whimpering from her bed. Sil y Pip, whose thoughts had been fil ed with fashion the night before, had suddenly realized what was going to happen today. So it was Pip my mother had to struggle with, had to coax, and soothe and final y order out of bed. Til y and I were at the kitchen table, forcing down cups of Pasqualina's coffee and a slice of bread, when Pip came downstairs, her eyes swol en and red, her nose running, her shoes unbuttoned.

My father and Aldo, who was to accompany us to Napoli, were out in the courtyard preparing the horses and loading the carriage. Teresia wiped the tears from her face with the edge of her apron. Pasqualina finished wrapping the provolone she was adding to a basket densely packed with provisions—salami, soprasatta, olives, bread, figs, even a glass jar of last year's eggplant. She handed it over to me, rattling off a list of instructions that began with when and what to eat, but rapidly advanced to the dangers that lay ahead of us among strangers and how we were to protect ourselves.

Pasqualina, who had never ventured farther than Avel ino in her entire thirty-eight years, was giving us travel advice.

My father's command from the courtyard interrupted her, and we al scrambled to gather together the last of what we were taking with us, to put on our hats and gloves, to kiss one another goodbye. Frankie and Sandro, sleepy-eyed and not completely dressed, had tumbled down the stairs for a final hug. My mother handed me the keys to my trunks.

"Your father has al the papers. He will give them to you at the pier. Claudio wil be waiting for you in New York. Go with no one else, no matter what they say to you. Stay in your cabin except for meals. We've bought you first-class tickets so there's no need for you to have anything to do with the unfortunates in steerage. Take care of one another. Don't venture anywhere without the others. Do us honor when you arrive. Be good girls.

You know that we'll hear about it if you are not. Write to us. Now, off you go. God be with you."

She held each one of us in a strong, swift embrace.

Pip's chin began to tremble again, but my father barked his final order and she climbed into the carriage. The first pink streaks of dawn were edging over the horizon and my father wanted to be well over the mountain by daylight.

Aldo hopped up onto the seat next to my father in front. I parted the curtain in the carriage to grab one last look at my family before we headed out of the courtyard and onto the Avel ino road. My mother shed no tears, just as she hadn't four years ago when Claudio had left. She closed the gate after us, a look of satisfaction, the fulfil ment of a dream, on her face.

I drew the curtain back and settled into a numbing doze. I was in a temporary state of resignation, fol owing my parents' wishes by sitting in this carriage, but unable to bring myself to feel any emotion other than a silent rage.

My mother's plans were so careful y constructed, my father's carrying out of them so thorough, that we arrived in Napoli early that afternoon without incident. My mother later wrote us that no one in the vil age even suspected we were gone until nearly a week had passed.

We ate with my father at a restaurant run by a friend of his and then drove on to the harbor. I had never been to Napoli before. By this time, safe from curious eyes, we were al owed to open the curtains and glimpse the city. It was huge, teeming, loud, confusing. Everywhere there were people. Soldiers on horseback with plumed hats, ladies with brightly colored faces, beggars.

As we approached the wide expanse of the Bay, we were stal ed in a river of wagons, carts, men on foot with awkwardly shaped bundles strapped to their backs or bulging valises in their hands, women struggling with wailing babies in their arms and smal children clinging to their skirts, dressed in several layers of clothing.

Lining the avenue to the harbor were food vendors of al sorts, men in suits and hats offering their assistance with the paperwork required for passage, capos shouting for able-bodied men who wanted work on the rails, on the roads. Pip cowered in her corner of the carriage. "They're al so dirty!" She acted as if merely looking at them would defile her.

I leaned forward at the window, straining to see ahead, to catch a glimpse of bay or smokestack, but nothing was visible. I smel ed raw fish, roasting chestnuts, rotting fruit, horse droppings, gril ed sausages and peppers, the sweat of a thousand people. I could not yet smel the sea.

The carriage suddenly lurched forward. Wagons and carts ahead of us had begun to move. I leaned back and closed my eyes to shut out what I could of my anger. I saw Vito's face— I laughing, coaxing, teasing. I saw him dancing, his bare arms raised above his head, clapping out the rhythm. I saw him I coming in from the fields, wiping his face with a large blue bandanna. I saw him at the feast of the Madonna, dressed in a starched shirt, hoisting the statue onto his shoulder in the piazza. I saw him lying in the meadow with me.

The carriage jolted to a halt, and I heard the voice of my father in heated discussion with someone on the street. I opened my eyes, returned to the present, to the aching in my heart, the aching between my legs.

We had reached the pier. Ahead of us loomed the steamship, swarming with activity. Beyond it shimmered the dazzling vastness of the light upon the Bay. Behind us towered Vesuvio, the layered hil s, my own dreams. I opened the carriage door and stepped out, setting one foot ahead of the other in the direction of America.

CHAPTER 9

Laughter

Paolo Serafini heard my laughter before he saw me—a cascade of joy, he told me later, rising above the jabbering of the women behind the house of my brother Claudio, his friend and business partner, the man he loved more than a brother. That I was laughing at al was a miracle. It protected me from the desolation I felt at being uprooted from Italy.

Claudio and Paolo were partners in one of Claudio's business ventures—a saloon that provided them both with some income. Claudio had told Paolo that his three unmarried sisters had arrived from Italy, but Paolo had been so busy that he hadn't gotten over to make his "welcome to America" speech until we'd been there almost a month. He did not knock on Claudio's door panting with expectation, or even curiosity. It was purely a duty cal : offer his services to the family of his best friend as if they were his friends. Before that day, he believed that he would have done anything for Claudio. But he had not realized that "anything" could include loving his sister.

We were al out in the back of Claudio's house in Mount Vernon—Pip and Til y and I, Claudio's wife, Angelina, her sister and a couple of her cousins—sitting on a little spit of stone between the kitchen door and the pathetic garden Angelina had tried to plant. With our sleeves rol ed up and knives flailing, great mounds of purple-black eggplants fel victim to our energies. Like Paolo's mother in Napoli, like our aunts up in the hil s, we were slicing and salting, laying up melanzane in big crocks that Angelina had somehow managed to cram onto that tiny terrace.

I had my back to him, my whole body relaxed with mirth, wisps of my hair escaping from its clasp. When I lifted my right arm—the one without the knife—and wiped away tears of merriment with my outstretched palm, Paolo watched the soft curve of my breasts beneath my flower-sprigged cotton dress.

He reached his hand into his pocket, withdrew his handkerchief—freshly laundered by his sister Hora—and held it out to me.

I turned my face toward him, for the first time registering his presence, and swal owed him with my eyes without once losing the rhythm of my laughter.

Una bel ajigura. A handsome man with hair the. color of Zia Pasqualina's polished copper pots and eyes a transparent, dreamy blue. He was dressed in a brown suit, and his fingernails were clean. Not at al like Claudio.

"Ooh, Paolo!" shrieked one of the others, but I didn't hesitate or even lower my gaze.

I took the handkerchief, brushing my eggplant-stained fingertips along his hand—lightly enough to escape the notice of the others, but long enough for him to recognize that it was deliberate.

He was not a man from the hil s, with little experience of the world and even less to say about it. And he was no greenhorn—he'd been in America for ten years. He knew the life, he knew the streets, he knew women. He knew the words they liked to hear.

But he stood before me, watching me press my face into his handkerchief, and imagining himself taking that same handkerchief in his hands and drinking in my fragrance, tasting the salt of my tears—and every sound he had ever uttered to a woman failed him. This is what he told me later.

"So you're Paolo. Claudio wrote us about you. I'm Giulia."

"Claudio's baby sister," Angelina put in, wiping her hands on her apron, about to take charge. Angelina didn't like him. She jumped up, al tense and formal and placed herself between us. So just to give her a little more agita (as if she didn't create enough for herself every day), I played up to him with my eyes. Didn't say anything. Just looked. Boldly. It made the other girls giggle and Angelina furious. Clatlclio had told her why I'd been sent away by my mother, so Angelina believed that if she didn't watch me every minute, I would disgrace her.

Paolo saw from Angelina's stance that she would have built a fortress around me, the same way she pul ed her baby boys close when danger was near. Angelina, whether she wanted to be or not, was mother-in-absentia to us, and she had just realized that, with me, this was going to be no easy task. Keep away, Paolo, she was ordering him.

"This is Philippina." Angelina laid her hand on Pip's shoulder. "And this is Til y." Paolo took in the funhouse-mirror images of my two sisters. Pip was al bony and angular, a skeleton on which her clothes fluttered, and Til y was as lumpy and pasty as gnocchi—but they both had the square-jawed Fioril o face. Til y seemed planted in her seat, as if she wanted to take root in her corner of the terrace like a waxy palmetto, not move out into the world at al .

By then, Paolo had regained his words. He upended one of the empty eggplant crates and sat down—to Angelina's visible relief—across from rather than next to me. He, too, needed some distance. He chatted with everyone, asked the expected questions about the land left behind, the journey completed, the strange new world encountered since we'd set foot on El is Island. The other women in the group, al worldly veterans of two or three years here, teased us newcomers