“Not at all. I’m grateful to you, Signorina.”
Very few young men had addressed her as Signorina.
That night, Aldo waited under Giuseppina’s mulberry tree and watched me lower myself over the ledge of the window. When my feet touched the ground he sprang forward and tackled me, knocking me breathless into the flower bed. I shrieked and kicked, not knowing it was my own brother. Our scuffling, of course, roused Giuseppina, who threw open her shuttered window, muttering and cursing the disturbance until she saw who it was and—more pertinently—how I was dressed. I was no longer in the nightgown I’d been wearing when I’d said good-night to her an hour earlier, but rather in my flounced skirt and bodice, with no blouse underneath. My arms and shoulders were bare. My hair, now unbraided, tumbled loosely down my back, somewhat unkempt thanks to the tousle with Aldo. As Giuseppina took in my appearance and realized what it meant, she began to wail and keen as if it were my stiff and lifeless corpse lying beneath her window. It might as well have been, given the catastrophic aftermath of Giuseppina’s discovery.
In the midst of her lamentation, she ordered me into the house. But she could not prevent Aldo from running to fetch Papa. I cursed at his retreating footsteps. Papa arrived from his card game in a frenzy.
“You whore,” he roared and slapped me twice, once on each cheek. “I forbid you to go to Cucino’s again. If you disobey me, I swear I’ll bring you back to my house and keep you under lock and key.”
I spent the rest of the night in Giuseppina’s bed with her. When she finally fell asleep, I crept over to the window. Not to escape again, but merely to catch a glimpse of the night and hope that Vito was hovering somewhere in the shadows.
The next morning my mother made her entrance. (No one had dared wake her the night before.) Her outrage was focused not so much on the dishonor that had provoked my father’s anger as on the company I had chosen to keep and the manner in which I’d chosen to keep it.
“Dancing in the mud with a Cipriano! Haven’t I taught you to expect more? Will you throw your life away to bear the squalling babies of an uneducated peasant, just because you admire the shape of his buttocks?” she shrieked at me. Then she quieted and narrowed her eyes as a question—more a demand—formed in her head.
“Are you pregnant?”
“Mama! I’ve only danced with him!” I protested quickly, knowing that dancing alone was enough to anger her, hoping it was enough to keep her from suspecting more.
“Well, thank the Blessed Virgin for that.”
My mother did not know—and I did not reveal to her—what I felt when I danced. She could never have known the force of the yearning and urgency that propelled me. She shifted her fury to Giuseppina, not for failing to guard me or seal me in, but for making me susceptible to the night.
“It’s you who’ve cultivated this wildness in her! You’ve encouraged her to befriend these people, to partake in their primitive pleasures. You let her go off into the hills alone to gather your weeds and look what she brings back! She should’ve been reading books, not mixing potions for the lovesick.”
Giuseppina was no less upset with me than my mother was, but for other reasons. Giuseppina understood the longing. She had taught me the power of the feelings, the dreams that burned inside of people. She believed that to disown what you felt made you sick—sick at heart, sick in the head.
Over the years, most often in arguments about me, Giuseppina and my mother had done their own dance around each other. This time was no exception. My mother, normally decorous and contained, unleashed her words, her pitch, her pace. She brimmed with uncontrollable passion. Giuseppina, on the other hand, became impassive, impenetrable. My mother shrilled her words as if they were fists beating, hammering in futility at the wall of Giuseppina’s silence. When my mother finished her tirade, Giuseppina dismissed her with the peremptory gesture of impatience she reserved for the truly stupid with whom she wouldn’t even deign to speak. Once again, my mother was forced to retreat.
When she was gone, Giuseppina said, “Before you find yourself pregnant, come to me first.”
She turned away from me without her customary penetrating glance. I was expected to understand; she would protect me, as she’d been unable to protect me the night before from Aldo’s spying and its consequences. She was angry with me for exposing her lapse, for making her look like a fool and for taking risks with my reputation. But she was also letting me know that she forgave me.
My parents, however, were not ready to forgive. My mother, especially, was determined to protect me in her own way from the dangers she saw lurking behind the eyes of every young man in the village, and within my own emerging womanhood.
Her solution came quickly.
My sister Pip had made a rash promise to a young man in Pano di Greci. She was nearly twenty, but she had no experience of men, as I did. Her embroidery stitches were neat; she followed all the rules at the Convent of Santa Margareta; she would make someone an obedient, if foolish wife. But not this someone in Pano di Greci, my mother decided. Not knowing her own heart, Pip was relieved at my mother’s intervention. She floated this way and that, always doing what she was told. The family of the young man, however, was enraged, raining curses and threats upon Pip’s empty head.
My mother and father conferred noisily, Papa at first resisting my mother’s radical suggestion. Ever since Claudio had left, Papa had refused to even read any of the letters from America, let alone respond. But my mother, summoning all her emotional power, prevailed. A letter was hurriedly sent to Claudio.
Pip, in the meantime, was kept at home, not even allowed to go to the market for fear she would be kidnapped in broad daylight crossing the piazza.
To all outward appearances, life in the Fiorillo households—my parents’ and my grandmother’s—remained as it had been, except for Pip’s and my confinement. But my mother’s days had taken on a kind of silent intensity as she worked out in elaborate detail what she considered to be the rescue not only of Pip, but of me and Tilly, as well.
She told none of us, for fear of alerting the enemy in Pano di Greci or arousing the rebel in me.
She did not tell me, in fact, until she had the passage booked, the steamship tickets in her hand, my father’s horses practically bridled and ready to drive me to the pier.
“Aiuta me!” I wailed to Giuseppina when my mother marched to her house and ordered me to pack my trunks. Help me.
“She cannot help you this time. Your sister will be killed or worse if she remains here, and she can’t go alone. She and Tilly can’t manage such a journey by themselves. You’re the only one with enough sense to see you all safely to Claudio. Venticano is no life for any of my daughters, but believe me, Giulia, it is especially no life for you. You are going now, before you’re ruined by what you have clearly never learned to control.”
She stood over me while I gathered my belongings together. The tears flooded my cheeks, spilling over onto my clothes. Giuseppina wandered around the house, muttering her incantations, burning incense, tucking her blessings among my possessions as I packed.
“You’ll leave before sunrise tomorrow, on your father’s normal run to Napoli, so as not to arouse suspicion. The boys will come this evening after dark to take your trunks to the house, and you will come with them. You’ll sleep with Tilly in her bed tonight. I forbid you to breathe a word of this to anyone, especially Cipriano or any of the Cucinos. If you do, you threaten not only your sister’s life, but your own, as well.”
My mother’s voice was taut; her face revealed the sleeplessness and strain of the last few weeks. But just below the surface of her exhaustion, her rigid instructions, I thought I saw a kind of rejoicing—that she was going to be successful in getting us out of here, this village and this life that had been such a trap for her. And I hated her for it.
“I don’t want to go!” I screamed at her. “What about Giuseppina? Who will help her?”
“Don’t make me laugh! You don’t want
Giuseppina’s life any more than I do! I know you, Giulia. Giuseppina may have taken you from my side, but she can’t take me out of you. You are my blood. Your tears are not for Giuseppina, but for something walking around out there with bulging pants. Believe me, you’ll find a hundred just like him in America. And—like your brother Claudio—they will have money, they will have a future, they will have a life to offer you.”
Giuseppina’s mutterings became louder, more intense.
My mother simply could not understand my heartache. I didn’t want a hundred other boyfriends. I wanted Vito.
When my trunks were packed, my mother had no patience to listen to my sobs for the rest of the day. She locked the trunks herself after she was satisfied that they contained everything I’d need in the life she was sending me to. She took the keys and added them to her own ring of household keys, telling me she’d return them to me before we departed in the morning. What did she believe? That I would forget them? That I would add unsuitable items to the trunks after she left—talismans and powders from Giuseppina’s trove? That I would dump the contents of the trunks in the mud of the piazza in a fury of final rebellion? Perhaps that was it. But I felt her taking the keys as another slap.
The trunks sat all day in the middle of my bedroom as an affront, an immovable reminder of my mother’s resolve.
I could not stop my tears. At times they were simply silent streams, slick on my cheeks, trickling down my neck. At other times they were wild sobs, engulfing my entire body, starting in some place so deep inside me that I’d never felt it before—deeper even than the longing that had entered me this summer when I’d danced with Vito. I did not know myself. Did not know I could feel such sorrow, such fear.
Giuseppina fed me broth at midday, holding me in her arms like a baby, spooning the warmth into my mouth where it mingled with the salt of my sorrows.
She put me in her own bed at siesta to keep my emotions from being heightened by the massive trunks near my bedside. She lay with me, murmuring the words of her simplest spell.
In her bed, awaiting the evening and its further agonies, I didn’t think I’d be able to let go of the thoughts crowding my head. But her words washed over me until they were no longer words. Her hands stroked at the pain until they were no longer hands. I fell asleep.
When I woke it was nearly dusk. Giuseppina was gone from the bed and I heard her in the kitchen, clattering pots and pans. I smelled the extraordinary smells of roasting lamb and freshly cut oranges. I went into the kitchen and then helped Giuseppina in silence, slicing tomatoes and unwrapping the mozzarella. A small bowl of figs sat on the table. She must have walked down to the orchard to pick them in the afternoon, while I’d slept. She was now trimming the shank of prosciutto, shaving thin slices from the cut end. The kitchen was stifling from the fire in the oven, combined with the oppressive July heat. No one cooked like this in summer. The aromas of rosemary and garlic mingled with the red wine she had poured over the lamb. Despite my sadness and my unwillingness 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 spell 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 collapse 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 will only drag you to your father’s house. Go now. Remember everything I have taught you. My blessings are with you. You will 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 mother’s 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, still 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 farewell and saw hers go up in response.
At my parents’ house, a brittle calm filled 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. Tilly sat in the kitchen, baffled and frightened by this extraordinary change in our lives.
In contrast to Pip’s chatter and Tilly’s confusion, I was sullen. 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 allowed near a window, and they were all shuttered anyway.
My mother, still tense, sent Pip and Tilly 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. Tilly’s side of the bed was already empty. I moved unwillingly, 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. Silly Pip, whose thoughts had been filled 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 finally order out of bed. Tilly 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 swollen 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 Avellino in her entire thirty-eight years, was giving us travel advice.
My father’s command from the courtyard interrupted her, and we all 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
all the papers. He will give them to you at the pier. Claudio will 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 Avellino 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 fulfillment 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, following 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 carefully 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 village 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 allowed 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.
Across the Table Page 31
