The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  Angela is only vaguely aware of martyrs, and has no idea what beseeching is. But she remembers the words, and wonders if they were on her mother’s lips when she died. If she said them before, or after, or at the same time that she whispered, “Angela.” And from then on, the prayer echoes in her head like bells.

  The words call her at sunset, and again at dawn. Sometimes she hears them in the rustling of the birds in the eaves, or in the clack and rattle of shutters opening and closing down the street, or in the low muttering of the wind as it kicks lost paper along the pavements.

  “Papa, are we Jewish?”

  Angela asks this one night, knowing full well the answer is no, but still half hoping it will be yes, although she is not quite sure why. Perhaps because they never go to mass. She is taken sometimes by the Ravallis downstairs, or by Nonna Franchi, who fears for her soul. But she does not go with her father. They never lean duck-toed, clutching a rosary, or have their foreheads smudged with ashes. So at least if they were Jewish, it would explain why, and mean they are something.

  But as she knows he will, her father shakes his head. Confirming their nothingness, he runs his hand across the top of her hair the way he always does, and says, “No, Kitten.”

  “Then why do we have this apartment?”

  From where she lies on the knobbly carpet, a book open in front of her, her father looks huge. Sitting in his armchair, he looks like a giant in a story.

  “Why do we live in the ghetto?”

  Angela knows that for some reason she shouldn’t persist with this, but she does anyway, and for a moment she thinks her father’s answering smile, which takes longer than usual to come, is sad. Which is strange because her father never looks sad.

  “Because lots of people live in the ghetto now, Kitten,” he says, finally. “Not just Jews. This apartment belonged to your grandpa.”

  “But why? If we’re not Jewish?”

  Her father regards her for a moment.

  “It was the war,” he says finally. “People needed places to live. They just needed a place to live.”

  Angela nods. This seems reasonable enough. But in some way she does not quite understand, it doesn’t answer her question.

  Her father got the apartment with the brown furniture and the knobbly rugs and the blue brocade sofa no one ever sits on after her grandparents died and before she was born and at the same time he inherited the butcher’s shop on Via Carlo Mayr. Angela knows all about it. And knows, too, that he and her mother never intended to stay. Because they had big plans.

  After they got married, Angela’s mother, Annabeth Who Was Good with Numbers, kept the books and started setting aside money to open a second butcher’s shop, one with what she called a deli counter, for sandwiches and cheeses and salamis. Then, after they had taken Ferrara by storm, conquered it with American-style corned beef and pastrami, her parents planned to open a third, and even a fourth shop in other towns. And after that, they would have so much money that they would rent out the apartment in the ghetto and move beyond the city walls, or up to one of the newer houses near the Angels’ Gate where the streets are wide and have trees.

  Angela’s mother missed trees. As he tucked Angela in, plumping the pillow with his chapped hands and squaring the edge of the blanket, her father told her that on the street where her mother was born, the trees were huge. They grew high as houses, and spread like giant umbrellas, and in the autumn their leaves turned as red as rubies.

  Angela didn’t really believe him, at least about the rubies. But as she grew older and was allowed to go on errands alone, she found herself drawn toward the Angels’ Gate. Like all children in Ferrara, she knew that it was one of five gates in the city walls, and the only one whose doors were always closed, and that they had been that way for almost three hundred years. Because when the last Este dukes were banished by the pope, when their carriage—windows curtained so they could look no more upon their city—had trundled down Corso d’Este for the last time, the doors of the Angels’ Gate had swung shut behind it. And the townspeople had locked them. And sealed them with tears. And vowed never to open them again, because their dukes were gone.

  Walking toward the gate, Angela felt herself growing smaller and smaller. The noise of the ghetto and the crowds in the piazzas fell away as she left the Castello behind her, and passed the Questura, and the palazzo opposite where the little fat boys sat holding the portico on their shoulders, their dimpled legs dancing in the air. Beyond the Diamante with its strange triangular stones, and the Parco Massari where adults rubbed the nose of Verdi’s statue and children were not supposed to run, the silence deepened until finally all she could hear was the slap and click of her shoes on the pavement that had begun to buckle and become slippery with leaves because of the trees.

  The Angels’ Gate itself was crumbling, but the houses below it looked new. Or at least new compared to the houses in the ghetto. Some sat in gardens ringed by fences. If no one was around—and it seemed no one ever was—Angela would cross the road and peer through the iron railings and tell herself that her mother lived there, and that if she looked closely enough or waited long enough, she would see her. Coming down the steps with a handbag on her arm. Or moving like a shadow behind the glass of an upstairs window.

  She understood, of course, that this was not really possible. That it was not, in the way adults meant it, likely to happen. Because, like the old Jewish men in their soft leather shoes, her mother was dead. Angela knew that. And knew that what was left of her, if anything at all, was not behind a newly painted door or a silvery pane of glass, but lying under the feet of the stone angel in the cemetery where once a year she and her father left a bouquet of flowers. Not that it mattered. Because she could no more stop herself from walking up the Corso d’Este and looking through the railings than she could stop herself hearing the prayer in the rustle of birds’ wings and the run and clack of the shutters.

  Neither of which she ever told anyone about. Not Nonna Franchi, nor Signora Ravalli from downstairs who sometimes braided her hair. Not even her father, who was a big man who wore a cap and whistled tunelessly and whose face always seemed on the edge of smiling and whose plans grew less and less ambitious, until by the time Angela was twelve and went to what she thought of as the grown-up school, he could barely bring himself to open the shop on Saturdays, much less imagine an empire built on corned beef and prosciutto.

  * * *

  It was more than six years before Angela spoke to Antonio again. She saw him, though, from time to time. Once, she spotted him in a group of boys who hung about the Piazza Trieste on weekends, loitering near the record store, trying to look dangerous and failing because they were too young and too skinny and everyone knew who they were. Another time she found herself standing almost next to him waiting to cross the street, but was too afraid to catch his eye or say anything. And one Saturday afternoon, as she walked home with her father after he had closed the butcher’s shop, Antonio appeared ahead of them in the Via delle Volte.

  It was winter and very cold. White ice stippled the eaves of the buildings and lined the brackets of the streetlights. Antonio came out of nowhere like a ghost, pushing a bicycle with one hand and carrying a sack of groceries with the other, and Angela noticed that he was wearing only sneakers and not boots like everyone else, and that his coat hung from his shoulders.

  She didn’t dare call his name, but she wanted him to look back and see her, to reach into the shopping bag and hand her an apple. He didn’t. Head bent, he seemed intent on the spinning wheel of his bike. It had a loose fender, and when he turned off into an alley, she heard the click and rattle as he crossed the broken cobblestones.

  Listening to the sound grow smaller and smaller, Angela remembered the apartments that looked like so many shoe boxes, all stacked one on top of the other. And the long, low shops below them that were fronted with plate glass. As they passed it, she stared into the blackened mouth of the alley that had swallowed him and was so narrow you
could stretch your arms and almost touch both sides, and felt again the wide, empty street beyond the Darsena where she and her friends had been nothing but little boats drifting on an open sea. Angela reached for her father’s hand, which was warm and broad as a bear’s paw. As they walked on, she scuffed the toes of her new boots and felt sad for Antonio, wheeling his bike out beyond the walls into what the TV called “The New Italy,” with its crosshatching of railroad tracks and highways, depots and factories that popped up overnight like mushrooms.

  It is almost a year after that, late one afternoon in early October, when she sees him again. Summer has stayed too long. It makes the air thick and turns the sky mauve and everyone knows it will leave any day now and all at once, like an embarrassed party guest. So while it is still warm, Angela dawdles.

  She has already made one loop around the castle on her way home. Now she stops to stare down into the moat and wonder if Lucrezia Borgia—whom her class is studying—was really as beautiful as everyone said or if she was gap-toothed and had bad breath, and what will happen if she drops her school bag into the still green water, if it will sink or float. She’s lifting it up, resting it on the warm stone of the balustrade and toying with the idea in a way that is tempting but guarantees she’ll never do it, when she hears someone call her name. Well, not exactly her name.

  “Butcher’s Daughter.”

  The words are like a hand on the back of her neck. Angela looks around. A man walks by, head bent, following his dog, which strains at its leash. A police car rumbles over the cobbles and disappears around the corner into Via Frizzi. She pulls the bag back, snagging the skirt of her uniform on the wall, and begins to think she imagined the voice, when he appears beside her.

  At sixteen Antonio is almost as tall as her father. His black hair is still curly, but wilder. If Nonna Franchi saw it she would come after him with scissors the way she came after Angela when she was little, stalking her through the apartment brandishing the blades that glinted, bright and sharp as the knives that hung along the back wall of the butcher’s shop.

  “What are you doing?”

  Angela shrugs. A dark fuzz shadows Antonio’s chin and cheeks, but his eyes and smile are exactly the same, and she’s suddenly flustered by the idea that he can look straight in and read her mind. See every thought as if it’s written down, just as he had the day she was hiding in the orchard, and that he knows perfectly well she was thinking of dropping her books into the moat.

  “Nothing.”

  Antonio looks at the sky. Then he looks back at her.

  “I got a place,” he says, “at the Liceo Classico.”

  Angela notices he is wearing smart clothes. A pair of dark trousers, leather shoes, a long-sleeved white shirt. Nothing like the canvas sneakers and thin coat she saw him in last winter. The exams for the Liceo are difficult. Already the threat of them sits like a big ugly bird perched on the windowsill of her class. It caws when the teacher’s back is turned. It cackles and whispers that the weak and the stupid will be sacrificed, plucked off the path that leads to university and everything that goes with it. Job. Car. House with trees. When the bird looks at Angela, she sees in its yellow eye the scrubbed counters of the butcher’s shop and feels the meaty breath of the cold room.

  “I didn’t thank you,” she says suddenly, pushing the bird away. “I never thanked you. For the apple.”

  For a moment Antonio looks confused. Then he laughs.

  “Come on,” he says. “I’ll walk you home.” And he reaches out and takes her bag and slings it over his shoulder.

  Although Angela has been told how her mother chose her name before she was born because she already knew Angela would be her beautiful angel, and although her father assures her she is prettier than any princess in a book, she knows it isn’t true. She knows that she will never look like the girls on television or in films or on the fronts of magazines. But she is not too tall, or too fat, or scrawny either. Nor is she loud, or stupid. Her greatest achievement, in fact, is that she isn’t anything. She understands when to be quiet and when to laugh and how to get along without drawing much attention to herself the same way a chameleon understands when to turn brown or green.

  This shell of ordinariness has been a project. A quiet little vocation she has worked on the way Signora Ravalli works on the ugly decoupage trays she sells in the market, adding layer after layer of lacquer to cover the talk of devil’s thumbprints and dead mothers. But now, walking next to Antonio, who is carrying her bag, and who has remembered, if not exactly her name, at least who she is, and who is actually talking to her—telling her about the Liceo and his friends and the football club he’s joined—Angela feels her shell melting. It’s perilous and terrifying, and part of her wants to turn and run. The part of her that does not feel him burning around her like a halo.

  They turn toward the Duomo. Pink-gray light feathers the roofs and chimneys of the old town. One by one the windows of the municipal offices turn yellow. As they drift across the wide lozenge of the Piazza Trieste, Antonio tells her that he has an exception that waives some of his book fees, but that it won’t be renewed if he fails to live up to his promise.

  “It’s hard,” he says.

  They pause before the brightly lit window of a shop, and Angela notices that his cheeks are thin. His nose is sharper than she remembered.

  “But do you like it?”

  Antonio shrugs, as if liking it or not liking it has little to do with anything, and Angela’s suddenly afraid the question was so dumb that he’ll give her bag back and walk away.

  “My father thinks it’s stupid,” he says. Antonio’s studying a jacket in the window. “He says I’ll end up in the factory anyway. So what’s the point? He says I’m trying to be too good for what I am. Not like him and my brother. My mother’s happy.” He stops studying the jacket and looks down at Angela. “You don’t have a mother,” he says.

  She shakes her head.

  “Do you like your father?”

  Angela nods. Although like does not seem to be a possible word when it comes to her father. Like is a small word, and everything about her father is too big for it.

  “You’re lucky,” Antonio says. Then he adds, “I’m going to university. I don’t care what my father says. I’m not going into the factory. I’m not going to be him. Or my brother. Work like that, so you can lose everything. Like my nonno’s farm. I’m not doing that. I’m going to university.”

  The words are a challenge, clipped and angry, and before she can stop herself Angela reaches out and touches the back of his hand.

  “Me, too.”

  She has never said this before, not even to herself, but the minute she does, she knows it’s true. She’s not going to be plucked off by the bird. Antonio looks down at her fingers. Then he twines his own in hers. She doesn’t know how she expects his skin to feel, but she isn’t surprised that it’s as smooth and cool as the skin of the apple.

  They turn away from the shop and wander into Via Mazzini. As they get closer to Angela’s apartment, the streets narrow. Huddled shoulder to shoulder, houses slice the purple sky. Streetlights smudge dirty walls. The smell of cooking and the tinny voice of a television or a radio waft from open window to open window. Snatches of conversation snag and tangle in lines of drying laundry.

  Antonio stops outside her door. Their light is broken. In the shadows he looks different. The past has padded itself back onto his cheeks and softened the sharp line of his nose, making him a leopard again—nine years old and standing in long grass. His fingers leave Angela’s. He hands her the bag of books. Then he reaches out and brushes the fringe of curls off her forehead.

  “It’s pretty,” he says. “Your hair.”

  * * *

  It was not long after that—after the night when Angela, watching the street lamps pick out Antonio’s white shirt, stood on the step for so long with her hand raised to her face that Signora Ravalli finally poked her head out her kitchen window and asked if she had lost her
key again—that she was adopted by Barbara Barelli.

  She thought of it that way because Barbara’s choice of her as a friend seemed as arbitrary as picking out a stray cat or dog from the animal shelter. And because the dedication Barbara applied seemed, even to Angela at the time, more suited to something like a new pet or a cause than a friendship.

  Barbara was a year older. Her family had moved to Ferrara at the end of the summer because her father was teaching at the university. She was tall for her age and slightly snaggle-toothed and very good at sports. Which, Angela thought, made the fact that she was Barbara’s chosen friend even more unlikely.

  Still, Barbara began to wait for her between classes and at lunchtime. At the end of the day, she sought Angela out from the throng that poured through the school gates into the freedom of the afternoons. Crossing the Corso Giovecca and meandering down toward Via Mazzini, the two girls window-shopped, keeping up a running commentary on the clothes they would buy or not buy—a fantasy significantly less real for Angela than for Barbara, who with two older sisters, one already working in Milan, and a professor for a father and a mother teaching at the music conservatory, lived in a house with three floors that looked onto the Parco Pareschi.

  By the time winter arrived, Angela was used to finding Barbara leaning against the wall of the Spanish Synagogue in the mornings, as often as not holding a bag from the bakery on the corner, jam melting through the thin paper onto her gloves, powdered sugar sprinkling the cuff of her coat. They ate the pastries on the way to school, talking between mouthfuls, brushing crumbs from one another’s sleeves and chins like monkeys picking lice.

  In the evenings, after they finished their homework, Barbara wheedled Angela off to the Corso Martiri. Striding past the lit walls of the castle and statue of Savonarola that Angela had been afraid of when she was little, Barbara would push open the door of a café and herd Angela before her into the fog of cigarette smoke. They always sat in the same corner, on spindly chairs, and sipped hot chocolate bought with Barbara’s pocket money while Barbara dispensed beauty advice, giving Angela tips on what she should wear and how she should do her hair.