Hope’s Angel
by Rosemary Fifield
© Copyright 2013 Rosemary Fifield
All characters and locations are a work of fiction.
Any resemblance to individuals living or dead is purely coincidental.
Prologue
November, 1952
Papa tucked a thin blanket around the four-year-old’s body and lifted her from her bed.
Icy night air brushed her cheeks as he carried her outdoors and down the stairs, and she buried her face against the scratchy surface of his wool coat, too frightened to ask what was happening. He never spoke, even when he bent low into the blackness and set her on the cold back seat of a car. Her sister, wrapped in a blanket of her own, leaned into the far corner. Frosty wisps of breath, gentle and rhythmic, paced the older girl’s sleep. The child snuggled into her sister’s warmth and stared, wide-eyed, at the darkness around her.
Papa slid onto the front seat behind the steering wheel and pulled the car door shut. Mamma was already on the bench seat, a triangle of red and yellow cloth tied over her dark hair and under her chin, her jaw set as she stared straight ahead. No words passed between them.
A full moon traveled with them as their car wound its way through the Vermont countryside. The moon passed in and out of wispy clouds, its eerie silver light periodically illuminating the still woods and dormant fields that flanked the quiet back roads. The car hummed along for over an hour, lulling everyone within to a transitory state of calm.
The child drifted in and out of sleep, then startled awake; the car was no longer moving. Papa leaned forward, fidgeting with the key. Beside him on the bench seat, Mamma made the sign of the cross, then brought her curled index finger and thumb to her lips and kissed them as though she were holding the crucifix itself. The four-year-old fought to keep her eyes open, but the hour was late and she was exhausted.
The night chill worked its way into the car, penetrating the thin blanket around the child. She opened her eyes. Nothing in the darkness was familiar, except for the sound of her sister’s steady breathing. But they weren’t in the warm bed they normally shared. She sat upright and looked around, her small heart fluttering with fear. Faint light came through the squares of glass surrounding her.
“Papa?” She kept her voice low on the chance that someone else, someone unwanted, might hear her.
Silence.
“Mamma?”
Nothing.
Her heart pounded wildly against her ribs, and hot tears welled in her eyes. She was about to press closer to her sister’s reassuring presence when a glow from the window beside her sister’s head drew her attention.
A silvery angel with a serene, benevolent face stood outside the car, its eyes trained on the child. Flowing robes fell in soft, graceful folds about its bare feet, and a pair of glorious wings arched above its wide shoulders. It extended its arms to her in welcome, and the rapt child gaped. She had never seen anyone so beautiful, so perfect, and all the stories her nonna had told her about the Lord’s special creatures came back to fill her with wonder and awe. She opened her mouth to talk to the angel; she wanted to hear its voice, for she knew it would be wonderful, but—no!—the magnificent angel was silently slipping away, its haunting eyes fixed on hers as it receded into the darkness.
Something had frightened it away. The car door was opening.
Terrified, the child shrank back against her sister, making herself as small as possible behind the older girl.
A rush of cold air filled the car. Mamma appeared, bulky in her dark winter coat and wooly scarf. She settled onto the front seat without a word, and the door beside her closed. A moment later, the driver’s side door opened, and Papa slid behind the steering wheel. The car’s motor made a grating sound, then rumbled to a rhythmic sputtering. Gravel crunched beneath them as the car rolled forward. The child relaxed against her sister with a sigh of relief and closed her eyes; all was well once more.
A baby whimpered.
The four-year-old’s eyes popped open.
She scooted forward and peered over the seatback. Mamma was undoing the buttons of her winter coat with one hand. She held a bundle of blankets in the opposite arm, and when she brought it to the opening in her clothing, the sound of a baby suckling was unmistakable. The child’s heart pounded with excitement. “Mamma?”
“Go back to sleep, little one.”
She would never be able to sleep now. “Is that our baby?”
“Yes.”
The child clutched her blanket to her chest and bounced lightly in place, unable to contain her exuberance. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
“A girl.”
“What’s her name?”
“Hope. Hope Marie.”
The child leaned forward in the darkness as the car rumbled down the gravel road. “The angel smiled at me,” she said, certain that her mother would be pleased.
Mamma’s head turned toward the rear seat.“What angel?”
The child blinked in confusion. What was Mamma thinking? “The one who brought the baby.”
“You dream.” Mamma sounded weary. “Go back to sleep.”
The child shook her head, sure of what she knew. “I saw it. It smiled at me.”
“Silence!” Papa’s voice traveled from the front seat, forceful and uncharacteristically gruff, and the child jumped. She immediately slid back against the coldness of the seat and pulled the blanket to her chin, trembling and confused.
She didn’t understand. They had waited so long for God to bring this baby. Nonna had come from far away to cook and clean, to take care of the family while Mamma stayed in bed day after day, waiting and praying. And now the baby was here. Brought by an angel.
“Go back to sleep, little one.” Mamma’s voice came from the darkness, as gentle as a lullaby. “Go back to your dream.”
Chapter One
Friday, August 23, 1968
“You don’t know how blessed you are, Pietro. You have only daughters. Nobody’s going to send them to war.”
Connie Balestra looked up from bagging the customer’s purchases and glanced at her father.
Papa continued arranging the kohlrabi on his outdoor stand, his back to the customer. “They should not send anyone. If President Kennedy, he’s not to die, we would not be there.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. I just know they’ve called up my son.” The man gave Connie a nod of thanks as he reached out to take the bag of vegetables and fruit from her outstretched hands.
His facial features resembled those of her father—chestnut brown eyes and a luxuriant salt-and-pepper mustache beneath a prominent nose. But while Italian by heritage, the man spoke English without the accent that characterized most of the people who patronized her family’s neighborhood grocery store.
Papa scowled as he turned to look at his customer. “Mi dispiace, Signor Altuna. I will say the prayer for him. Come si chiama?”
“Thomas.”
“We will light the candle for Thomas.”
“Grazie.” The man nodded to Connie once more, then to Papa, and walked out from under the striped awning.
Papa moved on to straighten the bulbs of fennel displayed beside the kohlrabi. “Where is your sister?” he asked.
“Which one?”
Papa lifted one bushy black eyebrow in an exaggerated gesture of incredulity. They both knew where Gianna would be. Gianna was so predictable, she made you want to cry; Angie was the impetuous one.
“She’ll be here soon,” Connie reassured him, although she wasn’t sure at all. “Don’t worry.”
“I worry.”
Connie smiled to herself as she refilled the supply of brown paper bags beside the carton of tomatoes. Papa might not have any sons to lose to the war in Vietn
am, but his three girls provided him with plenty to fret about.
She climbed cement steps to the open doorway between the shop’s large front windows. A heady Mediterranean perfume greeted her—a pungent mix of baccalá , strong cheeses, and fresh herbs. It was the smell of home, a smell she knew she would miss some day when she finished college and moved away to find a job.
She strolled through the old-fashioned store with its dark wood trim and low tinned ceiling, past the imported pasta and the old deli cooler displaying cured meats, to the door at the rear marked “Employees Only.” The storeroom held extra cases of dry goods and a tiny corner office where Gianna kept the books and placed her orders.
An unmarked door opened into the large laundry area at the back of the building. Mamma sat in the brightly lit room, running freshly washed sheets and pillowcases through the rollers of a mangle, folding and ironing other people’s whites into neat, warm piles fragrant with the smell of detergent and bluing agent.
“Papa’s looking for Angie,” Connie said.
Mamma kept her attention on her work as she folded a flat bed sheet in half and fed it into the rollers. “She’s at the library.”
“She’s supposed to be helping Papa. I promised Nonna I would come to the church to cook for the festa tomorrow.”
“Gianna can do it. She’s upstairs.”
Connie knew Gianna wouldn’t take well to covering for Angie, but she also knew better than to say what she was thinking. Instead, she turned on her heel and headed out the side door into the glare of the sunny August afternoon. The staircase that led to their second floor apartment clung to the side of the building, and she took the stairs two at a time.
Gianna was in the upstairs kitchen, standing at the gas stove, stirring a steaming pot of macaroni and bean soup with a wooden spoon.
Connie sighed in dismay at the sight of her. Gianna had plaited her dark hair into two long braids, then pinned them in concentric circles around the crown of her head—a hairstyle popular with their grandmother and her ancient sisters, Lucretia and Mariana.
“Ma wants you to take Angie’s place downstairs ‘til she gets home.”
Gianna frowned at Connie from behind her tortoise-shell glasses. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I have to help Nonna at the church.” Connie surveyed her older sister’s wardrobe with disdain—the usual tired apron over the shapeless sundress. “Are you trying to look like you just came over on the boat?”
Gianna looked down at her clothes, then back up at Connie, her forehead creased in irritation. “What? I should wear bell bottoms like your hippie friends?”
“At least get rid of the Buddy Hollys.” Connie shook her head. “Even a pair of granny glasses would look better. Plus they’d match the hairdo and the housedress. You look like Nonna, for God’s sake.”
“It’s a sundress, smart mouth, and don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.” Gianna gestured toward Connie with the wooden spoon like one of the elementary school nuns with the dreaded yardstick. “You need to go to Confession. You’re turning into a real heathen.”
“Ha! Well, at least I have something to confess. It must be awfully boring being you.”
“Madonna! Voi mi fate impazzire!” Mamma’s angry voice came from behind Connie as the screen door slapped shut.
“English, Mamma.” Connie moved out of her mother’s way as the latter brushed past to wash her hands at the kitchen sink.
“You girls make me to be crazy, so stop!” Mamma wiped her wet hands on the ever-present apron she wore over her housedress and turned to Gianna with blazing dark eyes. “You! Help your papa. His feet hurt. I see it.” Her gaze shifted to Connie. “You! Go cook at the church.”
Gianna slid past them both, her eyes narrowed in anger as they met Connie’s. When Gianna was safely on her way down the back stairs, Connie turned to her small, dark-haired mother. “She’s going to live with you for the rest of your life, you know.”
Mamma rolled her eyes. “I begin to understand why we—come si dice?— give to the marriage at birth.”
“Betroth. She’s not bad-looking, you know, if she would just drop the ugly glasses and do something decent with her hair.” Connie rethought that for a moment and sighed. “Of course, she’d still have to leave the house once in a while for some guy to actually notice.”
Mamma crossed the kitchen to the stove and picked up the wooden spoon. “Maybe she meets a nice boy in the church.”
Connie doubted that. “She hangs in the choir loft with the nuns.”
Mamma’s brow furrowed. “She hangs?”
“It’s an expression. Never mind.” Connie stood for a moment, watching her mother stir the soup. Was it the right time to bring up Greg? Considering that she and Mamma were rarely alone, this was probably as good an opportunity as any. “Mammina, I have something to ask you. I need your help.”
Mamma’s wary gaze shifted to Connie’s face, her unsmiling countenance a mixture of misgiving and concern.
“It’s nothing bad, Mamma. It’s good. I mean, it could be as long as Papa lets it happen.”
“Aha. A boy.”
Connie grimaced. “Not exactly. Well, sort of. You remember I told you I talked to this guy, Greg Fairchild, the one I see at school all the time? The one who lives in town here? He commutes every day, like I do. And he asked if I wanted to ride in together sometimes and, you know, share the cost. It’s not like a date. He’s got a girlfriend. It’s just a thing—like a convenience. It could save us both money. And I wouldn’t need to take the car every day.”
Mamma looked skeptical. “You ride in his car with this boy every day?”
“Not every day. Just when our schedules work. And he’s not a boy. He’s in college.”
“You are alone in a car with this… man.” The tenor of Mamma’s voice left no doubt about her disapproval.
“No, I would just be in the car. It’s not about being alone with him.”
“How is this not the same?”
Connie did her best not to roll her eyes. “Mamma, right now I drive an hour to school and an hour back every day. I drive in the snow. I drive in the dark. That’s when you should worry about me being alone. If I rode with somebody, I wouldn’t be alone. I’d be safer.”
“No girls go to the UVM?”
“Not from here. They live on campus. In the dorms.”
Mamma frowned. “You don’t know this boy. He could be… un violentatore.”
Connie’s skin flushed with heat at the thought of handsome Greg Fairchild attacking her in the front seat of his car. “I know him well enough. He’s nice. His father’s a lawyer. They’re a good family.”
“Aha.” Mamma nodded and turned to stir her soup. “L’alta società.”
Connie let her eyes roll.“I don’t know about high society. I just know he’s a good person. Besides, he’s got a girlfriend. He’s not interested in me.”
“To be the girlfriend is more safe. You are nothing to him.”
“Aiee!” Connie waved her arms in exasperation as she stared at her mother. “I could have just met him at the Park and Ride, and you never would have known! But I wanted to do it right!”
Mamma set the wooden spoon down on the stovetop and turned to look at Connie. Her expression was stern. “You invite him to meet your papa. That is all I say.”
Connie groaned. “Mamma, it’s not a marriage proposal. All I want to do is bum a ride!”
“Sì. This means it is no big work.”
Connie let out a defeated sigh. “Big deal. It’s no big deal.”
A small smile played about Mamma’s lips as she turned away. “This is what I say, Concetta. It’s no big deal.”
***
The women of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic church were preparing for the annual festa in honor of their parish’s patron saint, and Connie spent the remainder of the afternoon working beside them in the windowless basement kitchen. They stood side by side at the long counter against the wall or bent over the
wooden table in the middle of the room, cutting up peppers and onions to be fried as accompaniments to pans full of grilled Italian sausage, forming the stuffed and breaded rice balls known as arancini, and making the sweet ricotta filling and the deep-fried shells for cannoli.
As they worked, they talked about the same things Americans everywhere were talking about—the war in a country none of them had heard of just five years before; the war that came into their living rooms every day via the evening news, making it impossible to ignore; the war that threatened to take their sons and grandsons, husbands and boyfriends, as it continued to escalate in spite of President Johnson’s promises to end it. They also talked about the upcoming national convention, where Hubert Humphrey was sure to become the Democratic candidate for President, a position that should have been held by Bobby Kennedy, God rest his soul.
When they finished their work in the kitchen, Connie and her grandmother left to walk home together. As they passed the vacant lot between the church and the rectory, they saw several men putting the final touches on wooden booths erected for the sale of the food—pounding in the last of the nails and stringing colored light bulbs across the booth tops. Others were setting up a station for dartboards or building temporary bocce courts among the few trees. A small, covered stage festooned with banners and lights occupied the far end of the grounds. As part of the festivities on the following day, men of the church’s Holy Name Society would carry the life-sized statue of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in procession from the church to a special dais on the outdoor stage.
Connie and her grandmother walked the four city blocks to the turn-of-the-century duplex Nonna shared with her two elderly sisters. The three widows occupied both levels, Nonna living upstairs with her sister Lucretia, while Mariana lived downstairs with her unmarried forty-something son, Tony.
When they reached the house, Nonna invited Connie inside, but Connie declined with an apologetic smile. Her mother would have supper on the table as soon as the store closed at six, and anyone who planned to eat was expected to be on time.
“First you come to the garden.” While she understood English, Nonna refused to speak it, conversing only in Italian. No one challenged her; as the matriarch of the family she commanded their respect.
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