As we approached the wide expanse of the Bay, we were stalled 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 small children clinging to their skirts, dressed in several layers of clothing. Lining the avenue to the harbor were food vendors of all 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 all 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 smelled raw fish, roasting chestnuts, rotting fruit, horse droppings, grilled sausages and peppers, the sweat of a thousand people. I could not yet smell 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—laughing, coaxing, teasing. I saw him dancing, his bare arms raised above his head, clapping out the rhythm. I saw him 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 hills, 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 all 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 call: 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 all out in the back of Claudio’s house in Mount Vernon—Pip and Tilly 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 rolled up and knives flailing, great mounds of purple-black eggplants fell victim to our energies. Like Paolo’s mother in Napoli, like our aunts up in the hills, 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 Flora—and held it out to me.
I turned my face toward him, for the first time registering his presence, and swallowed him with my eyes without once losing the rhythm of my laughter.
Una bella figura. 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 all 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 hills, 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, all 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. Claudio 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 pulled 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 Tilly.” Paolo took in the funhouse-mirror images of my two sisters. Pip was all bony and angular, a skeleton on which her clothes fluttered, and Tilly was as lumpy and pasty as gnocchi—but they both had the square-jawed Fiorillo face. Tilly 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 all.
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 Ellis Island. The other women in the group, all worldly veterans of two or three years here, teased us newcomers for our wide-eyed wonder. But not without a tinge of homesickness, an evanescent longing that all of them, even Paolo, at one time or another experienced, and sometimes denied. For him, it was the memory of walking along the jetty at Santa Lucia; ahead of him was the light—lavish and prodigal upon the Bay—and to the east, over the city, the shadow of Vesuvio, hovering.
I said almost nothing as the others talked. But my eyes, glistening with interest and amusement, never left Paolo’s face—a caress, I knew, that was as deft as that of my fingertips.
Not only was he unlike Claudio, there had been no one in all of Venticano to compare to him. Not even my father—the coddled brother of his widowed and never-married sisters, the successful businessman, the product of my mother’s ever-intensifying drive for betterment—not even he possessed Paolo’s elegance. Claudio said that Paolo was an educated man, a man of letters, with piles of books in his rooms and the manner of a scholar. But it was more than his culture and refinement that set him apart from the life that had surrounded me in Italy. He was also different in the way he returned my gaze. Neither red-cheeked and flustered nor swaggering like the boys back home, who teased or made crude jokes when they thought you were
interested in them. Paolo looked at me deeply, without embarrassment, with candor. I could tell that he admired me. I enjoyed such attention.
But what would I do with it, with him? He was older than Claudio, almost thirty, a man of the New World. Too old for me. Letitia’s husband was much older than she was, and that had brought her only dissatisfaction.
I looked, but I was not ready to feel. There was too much of this new life to understand. The voices were so strange and raucous, the streets so numerous and confusing. There were so many people whose faces I didn’t know, who did not even nod in greeting. I laughed in the garden with the women during the day; I poked fun at Angelina and her proprieties. But at night I was still terrified. I missed both the stillness and the music of Venticano; the faces of Giuseppina and my little brothers; and I missed Vito Cipriano—the roughness of his coarsely shaven cheek and the apple scent of the pomade he wore too thickly on his curly black hair.
I didn’t want to be here.
The morning was passing rapidly, and the pile of eggplants had not diminished noticeably since Paolo had appeared in our midst. He could sense, once again, Angelina’s slightly veiled impatience. He knew he was going to need Angelina on his side. So he rose from his perch, ready to make his farewell, and with a grin and a flourish, invited all of us sisters for a stroll and then the band concert in Hartley Park on Sunday. Pip and Tilly beamed and giggled. Angelina shot a look of gratitude at Paolo for the gift of a Sunday afternoon free of her sisters-in-law. And I, a smile of acknowledgment spreading across my face, leaned my head back and laughed.
As Paolo walked away, he slipped his hand inside his pocket and clutched the handkerchief, still damp with my laughter.
Chapter 10
Hartley Park
PAOLO TOOK US THREE sisters to Hartley Park, as he had promised. On Sunday afternoons the footpaths in the park were crowded, the crunch of leather on stone a backdrop to the German and Yiddish and Italian conversations wending their circuitous way to the band shell.
That Sunday, the musicians were performing selections from Scott Joplin and George M. Cohan. Paolo picked us up promptly at three. Angelina had not invited him to Sunday dinner, which I thought was ungracious, but I was learning after only a few weeks in America that customs were different here.
Paolo lived alone in a rooming house a few blocks from Claudio’s. His married sister Flora also lived in Mount Vernon, and he’d borrowed a blanket from her that she did not object to our spreading on the grass. He had also stopped at Barletta’s on the way to Claudio’s and picked up three small nosegays of lilies of the valley and forget-me-nots—identical, except that he’d asked Vinnie Barletta to put a single red rose in the middle of one.
When he got to the house, Tilly and Pip were waiting, gloved and anxious. He swept off his hat and presented them with the bouquets, careful to hold back the one with the rose.
“Oh, Paolo! Grazie! How thoughtful! What a gentleman!”
A few minutes later I came down the stairs.
“Come sta, Paolo! You’re here so soon! You don’t give a girl a chance to take off her apron.”
Paolo turned to me with the flowers. I noticed that my bouquet was unusual—not a match to the others now in the hands of my sisters—but I didn’t react. Instead, I took it with a smile and a curtsy. Although I’d flirted with him yesterday over the eggplants, I couldn’t imagine him as anything more than a simpatico friend of my brother’s, a man who was showing me some kindness in this strange new land.
We walked down to the park, Paolo in the middle between my sisters, me on the periphery, laughing, almost skipping, relishing my freedom from Angelina’s kitchen and laundry and damp babies.
When we got to the park, we looked for a comfortable patch of grass. I wanted to be near the music and strode toward the band shell, stepping carefully around the early arrivals sprawled around their picnic baskets.
Pip didn’t want to sit on the ground, not even on Flora’s blanket; she didn’t want to be so close to other people—to the smells of their food and their unfamiliar bodies, to the sounds of their unrecognizable tongues. She hung back near a bench by the path. Tilly was torn between my pleasure in the outing and Pip’s fears and disdain. She was following me, somewhat breathlessly and clumsily, when Pip’s bony hand stretched out to hold her back.
Paolo was coming up in the rear, carrying the blanket as well as a cardboard box tied with multicolored string and filled with cannoli from Artuso’s bakery. Pip stood in rigid exasperation; Tilly in flustered confusion.
“Oh, Paolo, stop her!” I heard Pip say. “Look at her parading up there. Who does she think she is? A child at a carnival? Isn’t there some quiet bench we can sit on out of the way? Look, over there under the trees.”
I was up ahead, waving to indicate that I’d found a spot.
Paolo moved toward me, not seeming to care if Pip stood waiting on the path, arms crossed and foot tapping, for the entire concert.
“Paolo, Paolo, over here,” I called. “This is a good spot, don’t you think? Let me help you with the blanket. I’m so excited! This is the first time I’ve heard music since I left Italy—what a wonderful idea! Claudio doesn’t think of things like this. He doesn’t understand that people need more than work, more than money. Did you know that he almost didn’t let us come when Tilly told him you’d invited us? We’ve been so cooped up in that house, barely allowed out to do the marketing. He’s worse than my Zia Pasqualina with his worries and warnings.”
I couldn’t stop babbling, I was so thrilled to be away from everything that had oppressed me since coming to America. I shook out the blanket with a vigorous snap.
“Oh, I’ve been longing for a day like this! To be outdoors among the trees and flowers, to smell the air, feel the sun, to put on my fine dress instead of trudging around day after day in a housedress and apron with my hair tied up in a rag. Angelina thinks we’re her servants. She either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know what we came from, how we lived in Venticano.”
I finally noticed that my sisters were still not as eager as I was to embrace the day in the park in the midst of strangers.
“Pip, Tilly, over here!” I stood again and waved. Pip, red-faced, lips set in a taut line, came gingerly toward us.
“Giulia, this is not appropriate. I will not stay here in front of all these strange people and I do not want to sit on the ground. And why must you always bring such attention to yourself—chattering and waving like a silly child. You continue to be an absolute embarrassment to me, no matter where we are.”
She turned to Paolo to seek his agreement.
“Paolo, I expected you, of all people, to behave in keeping with the trust Claudio placed in you as our escort,” she said sternly.
I was annoyed. “Oh, Mother of God, Pip, sit down and enjoy yourself and leave Paolo alone. If it really disturbs you to sit on the blanket, go find a bench. You do manage to drain the last ounce of pleasure out of your life, don’t you? Why did you even come? To torment me?”
The people seated around us were beginning to notice. Although they probably couldn’t understand a word Pip and I were saying, they could surely hear the scolding in our voices. The concert was about to begin. People were coughing, resettling themselves, gathering their children into quiet heaps, and packing away the remnants of cold chicken and pickles.
Tilly, an expression of hopefulness on her face, piped in blithely, “So we’re sitting here after all, are we? I do think we’ll hear the music better. Oh, look, there’s the concertmaster already. We’d better all sit down or we’ll block the view of the people behind us.”
Paolo and I took the opportunity of Tilly’s timely arrival to find our places on the blanket and join in the overall hushing that whispered across the lawn. Paolo took care not to sit too close to me and made space for Tilly, who seemed relieved to finally be at rest.
Pip remained standing, her defeat spreading up her face. She took a half turn, looking back over her shou
lder at the bench, now half-occupied by an elderly couple with cane and parasol. There was room for Pip, but it was unthinkable that she’d sit alone.
From her stance of rigid refusal, Pip crumpled into an awkward pile on the blanket. She sat as far apart from us as she could, first brushing away small flecks of dried leaves and tiny pebbles before she arranged herself, smoothing her skirt over and over. She did not speak to us for the rest of the afternoon, not even to take a cannoli when Paolo finally opened the box during intermission.
I quickly forgot about the unpleasantness and absorbed myself in the music. In contrast to my sisters, I couldn’t sit still. I was in motion even as I sat, legs tucked under me. My hands lightly tapped out a rhythm at times on my thigh, at times on the blanket beside me. I swayed, my shoulders loose, fluid, an elixir of life running beneath my clothing, animating the dress like some puppeteer bringing a costumed marionette to life.
My fingers played the blanket like a keyboard or the strings of a guitar; my body danced; I breathed the music into my lungs and exhaled it as joyous movement.
Once or twice I glanced at Paolo, acknowledging his presence and sending him a smile of appreciation. He had chosen well: the music wafting through the early September air, the afternoon sunlight filtering through the trees, the aromas of freshly mowed grass and chrysanthemums filling our lungs. Not Italy, no, I can’t say that it resembled closely any Sunday memory that I carried. But the afternoon held some familiarity for me, some joy, some spark that reunited me with home. Paolo had given me a small gift by bringing me here.
Chapter 11
The Palace
ABOUT A YEAR BEFORE Pip and Tilly and I arrived in America, Claudio and Paolo had stumbled across a building. It was a place nobody had wanted then—filthy, abandoned, something without any value to those who saw it only with the eyes of realists, not with the eyes of dreamers. But Claudio and Paolo were dreamers. That was why they’d come to America.
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