Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  Flora lived right across the street from the store, and Paolo allowed Nino to carry the letters when Flora couldn’t get over. Everybody knew he was my special boy, my little sweetheart. It was natural for him to dash into the store on his way to school to grab a peppermint. That he also slipped me a blue envelope with a wink and a grin—well, I took care to call him to the back of the store for our exchange.

  But Paolo’s life at that time was becoming one of nascondiglio, concealment. Not only were we hiding our love from my family, but he was also hiding his other life from the police. He was often gone, to New York City or upstate, as his work with the union consumed more and more of his life and put him in more and more danger.

  The newspaper of the Italian immigrant community—Il Progresso Italo-Americano—was filled with stories about the horrors in sweatshops and the brutality of the police and the bosses against workers who only wanted to put food on the table. The IWW was in the middle of the unrest, and the politicians and American newspapers were furious.

  I held my breath every time Paolo left Mount Vernon. I never knew if he was just going to a meeting or if the police had stopped him somewhere and found his papers with their incendiary words. It made him ill sometimes, the passion he poured into expressing his ideas about justice; and it frightened me. The risks he was taking, the enemies he was making.

  Claudio thought he was an idealistic fool, a Don Quixote jousting at windmills. But Claudio had no sympathy for workers. Claudio had never sat behind a sewing machine in a factory or worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines. His time with a pick and shovel in New York had been short. He prided himself on figuring it out—using his brains as well as his brawn. He saw quickly that he wasn’t going to reach his dream digging ditches for someone else. My mother’s jewelry had paid for more than his passage to America. He bought his first team and wagon with money from her. She put the reins in his hands.

  Paolo had no gems from his mother. But he had a degree from the University of Napoli and had worked on an Italian labor newspaper before he’d arrived in America. It was that experience and the people he knew from Il Germe that brought him into the IWW. Paolo was a man of ideas who threw himself into action.

  If I thought his feelings for me would slow him down, hold him back from doing something rash, I was wrong. Trouble was brewing in Schenectady at the General Electric plant and Il Progresso printed a story about the involvement of some of the men from the IWW. A knot grew in my heart with every word I read.

  One afternoon, Tilly and Pip had gone to do errands. It was lunchtime, a quiet lull when I could steal a few minutes with Paolo, face-to-face in the back of the store. With half an ear I listened for the bell on the front door. The heavy curtain between the front of the shop and the storeroom was closed.

  “Here, I have something for you,” he whispered as he emptied his pocket onto the counter to retrieve a new poem for me. He took my face in his hands as he kissed me and then began to read the poem. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw on the counter a train ticket to Schenectady.

  I let him finish his poem and kissed him again, but my mind and my heart were pulled in the direction of that ticket.

  “What takes you to Schenectady?”

  “Business. Don’t worry. It’s not another girl.”

  “I don’t worry about other girls. But I worry about business. Are you going because of General Electric?”

  “What do you know about GE?”

  “What I read in Il Progresso. Tell me you’re going for some other reason, not for the union. Tell me it’s just a coincidence that you’re going to Schenectady.”

  He looked away from my gaze and put the ticket and other loose papers back in his pocket. I pulled him toward me again and pounded my fists against his chest.

  “Don’t go! I can’t bear the thought of you in the midst of that trouble. You’ll be hurt. You’ll be arrested. I won’t sleep knowing you’re in danger. Don’t go!”

  He pushed my hands away.

  “I have to go. You don’t understand. It’s who I am.”

  The bell jangled in the front. He kissed me once again, hard, and went out the back door.

  The next day, he went to Schenectady.

  I couldn’t tell anyone of my worries. Instead, I retrieved Claudio’s crumpled copy of Il Progresso every night from the table where he tossed it after dinner. I took it to my bed and smoothed it out, looking for dispatches about the strike. I pored over the pages, hoping to catch a glimpse of Paolo’s face in the grainy photographs, but of course the workers were inside the plant, in the first sit-down strike in American history, and the newspaper only ran a photo of the building surrounded by police and soldiers. I didn’t know if Paolo was inside, giving courage to the strikers, or outside, making trouble for the authorities. I searched for any fragment of news that might reveal to me that Paolo was safe. I found nothing, only reports of brutality and fury.

  Every morning I returned to the store, hoping this would be the day I would see Paolo again. Finally he returned. I saw him walking down the hill toward the Palace, looking as if he’d seen a ghost. A thin scab extended across his forehead and he was limping. His steps were measured and careful, not the usual swagger and energy that was so characteristic of him. I wondered about the bruises I couldn’t see.

  He did not come to the store that day or the next, and Nino did not appear with a message from him. Knowing he was back and not hearing from him was in some ways worse than when I had no knowledge of him at all. I didn’t know why he was ignoring me. I was afraid of what had happened to him in Schenectady.

  I attacked the dust on the floor as if my broom were a weapon. At home, I slaughtered onions with my knife, furiously chopping them into hundreds of pieces while the tears streamed down my cheeks. I swallowed my loneliness, unable to tell anyone of my fears. I cried myself to sleep thinking he had no more words for me.

  Finally, one morning at the store as I was sorting through the bills that had arrived in the post, I found a letter addressed to me and postmarked Schenectady. I tore it open, heedless of my sisters. I read the letter quickly, scanning it for the familiar words of passion and longing. I found those words, with relief. But then I read on.

  Forgive the smudges on the page, my beloved. My hand is bleeding from a scrape suffered when the police shoved me against the pavement and I haven’t had time to tend to it. I have seen too much today that I cannot describe to you—desperate men, impoverished but determined, making history here, but at great cost. I am tortured by what I am witnessing. This is everything I work for and believe in, but I fear I am asking too much of you to share in it. I have realized today that the life I have chosen is incompatible with loving a woman.

  I stifled a cry and shoved the letter into my pocket. I knew I had to see him, had to talk to him. But I also needed to understand in my heart what it would mean for me to stand by him, to know that the man I loved could face imprisonment or worse.

  I watched for Nino that afternoon as he returned home from school and slipped him a note for Paolo, along with a piece of chocolate. In the note, I begged Paolo to meet with me in the store at closing time. I waited anxiously as the day darkened, knowing that I could not delay my arrival home without arousing suspicion. Just as I was about to give up hope that he would come, I heard a light tapping on the back door.

  I let him in and turned out the light so no one could see us. I reached out for him, afraid he might not return my embrace, afraid I might hurt his battered body. But he took me in his arms, gently and tenderly.

  “I’ve missed you so much!”

  “I’ve missed you, too. Did you get my letter from Schenectady?”

  “This morning.”

  “It was agonizing to write. I adore you, Giulia. But I cannot ask you to love me in return when the path I am on is so precarious, so dangerous.”

  “I’ve thought about your words all day today, preparing myself for this conversation. I searched my soul to know if I could accept
this part of you. Paolo, I do not want to lose you. I know now that this is your life, that I can’t make you turn away from it because of my fears. I will stand by you, Paolo. I will never stand in your way or hold you back from your calling.”

  “Are you sure? I can never give you the kind of security Claudio provides for Angelina, or that your sisters expect.”

  “I have never wanted what my sisters want. What I want is you. All of you.”

  He kissed me lightly on the lips. “You have me.”

  The city-hall clock tolled faintly in the distance.

  “I have to get home or they’ll send someone to look for me.”

  “Addio. I’ll write you tomorrow.”

  He slipped out the back door and I locked it behind him. I left by the front door and made my way back to Claudio’s, my heart both light and solemn.

  Chapter 26

  Secrets

  SECRETS ARE HARD to bear, hard to conceal, when one is in love. We had continued to hide our feelings because my family, led by Claudio, had decided that my recklessness with men—first Vito in Venticano, now Roberto in Mount Vernon—had to stop. I had behaved once too often in a way that flouted the proprieties my family expected of its women. But despite Paolo’s and my efforts at discretion, my sisters began to suspect that something was going on and were furious with me. My emotions were written all over my face. If I hadn’t seen Paolo on the street early in the morning on my way to the store, or if Nino hadn’t come by on his way to school with a letter for me, I was desolate. I went through the motions of restocking the shelves or waiting on customers, but my mind was on the emptiness, the aching, the longing to hear Paolo’s voice or feel his lips on mine.

  We were like crazy people, addicted to each other. We continued to meet in the back of the store. A few moments behind the curtain, his arms around me, pulling me close, covering my face with kisses, pressing his body against mine. I was breathless; I was excruciatingly happy to be near him. I didn’t care what people thought.

  But my sisters cared. One morning, Pip noticed my flushed face and the disarray of my hair as I hastily smoothed back the loose strands when she called me from the front of the store. There were half a dozen customers waiting to be served.

  “What are you doing back there, Giulia? Daydreaming? Didn’t you hear the bell jangle five times?”

  She looked at me sharply when she saw two of our customers eyeing me up and down as if I’d walked out in my underwear.

  “She’s been unloading boxes all morning. We should’ve gotten my cousin Peppino to do it, but you know, the boys are never around when you want them for any heavy work.” Pip made up the story hastily to deflect the gossips.

  I took my place behind the counter and helped Josephina Simonetti find the fabric she needed to reline her husband’s coat, trying not to get lost in the memory of Paolo’s lips grazing my neck as he eased himself out the door to the alley.

  When the store was quiet again, Pip let me have it.

  “I don’t know what you were doing back there, but I pray to Jesus, Mary and Joseph that you were alone. If something’s going on behind our backs, Giulia, don’t think you can hide it forever. I guarantee you that within fifteen minutes of leaving here, that Simonetti woman was telling whoever would listen that you came out of the back looking as if you’d just gotten out of bed.”

  “I don’t care what Josephina Simonetti thinks of me.”

  “Well, I care, and Tilly and Claudio and Uncle Tony and Zi’Yolanda. People talk. This is America, with no mother and father to protect you, to show you how to behave. We don’t want people in the streets whispering about you, saying no one controls you.”

  Before I could respond, she went on.

  “If someone’s visiting you in the back, God forbid, it’s got to stop. Sooner or later somebody will see him and sure as hell won’t think it’s a delivery boy.”

  She grabbed a box overflowing with trim.

  “Stay up front and straighten this out.”

  Later that day I wrote to Paolo about Pip’s suspicions and her watchfulness. Every time I went to the back room, she moved in that direction, too, her ear cocked to catch the sound of the door opening or another voice. I felt like a caged bird, flitting from one end of its prison to the other without hope of finding a way out. By the time I got home, I was distraught, frantic at the thought that Paolo and I had no safe place to meet. I knew we could defy Pip, but that increased our risk of being discovered. And then what? Would my family forbid me to see him?

  Paolo saw the toll our secret was taking on me, how unhappy I was when I couldn’t see him, how worn down I was by the berating of my sister, her demand that I not bring shame to the family but act with propriety. My freedom to come and go was restricted. Pip or Tilly did the marketing in the early morning before we opened the store. Paolo and I had counted on those morning excursions as an opportunity, however brief and wordless, to feast our eyes on each other as we passed on the street. He had swallowed me with the piercing blue of his deep-set eyes. My pulse quickened as we passed within a few feet, the air between us stirring and our hunger for each other leaping across the chasm of the sidewalk. It was enough, that glance that took in all of me, embraced me with the pleasure and appreciation of his whole being. It got me through the day.

  But my family put a stop to even that. They didn’t know who was admiring me, but they believed if they kept me out of sight, whatever fire I had kindled would die down, cooled by my disappearance.

  But the longing only increased, the fire raging even stronger because we were denied one another. Somehow, despite our loss of those precious moments of public contact, we managed to sustain the private exchange of words. The letters continued, written in secret on my part, passed with a packet of fine-gauge cotton to Flora or left under a rock behind the store for Nino to retrieve and bring to his uncle.

  We filled the letters with our dreams and our tears. He wrote to me:

  I cannot explain in words how my heart beats for you. I dream of you all the time…. When I write, I am so happy because I have your image in front of me. I’m crazy about you, Giulia. You are home cleaning the house, but I feel you next to me. I was suffering terribly earlier today when I had to go to work and didn’t see you. I needed to tell you I love you. How much longer do we have to wait? Our hearts are suffering, and for me, it’s painful to stay away from you.

  The torture of separation was too much. Paolo watched the store whenever he could get away from work early and waited for my sisters to leave. One day Pip went to New York to shop for new stock. I offered to close the store at the end of the day so Tilly could go home and start supper. I was sweeping up when I heard a tap on the back door.

  I thought it might be Claudio or Peppino checking up on me again, but when I looked through the glass and saw that it was Paolo, I dropped the broom and leaped into his arms. Tears filled my eyes as he held me.

  “Listen to me, Giulia. I’ve made a decision. Flora has convinced me that this secret we carry in our hearts is dangerous. To go on hiding like this could end in disaster with your family if they find out. I’ve decided to speak to Claudio, to tell him I want to marry you.” He stepped away from me for a moment to see my face and watch my reaction. I saw a flicker of doubt in his eyes. He was questioning whether I’d heard him clearly, whether I believed him, whether I would accept him in front of my family.

  “You would tell Claudio that? I am bursting with joy, Paolo. But what if he says no? What will we do?”

  “Believe me, Giulia. It’s the best way. We act honorably. We can be honest about how we feel in front of the world instead of this concealment. I will present myself as a respectable man, calling on you at your home instead of hidden in back rooms. As much as I desire you, it shames me that I have to treat you like this, sneaking behind your family’s back, risking your reputation. No, I’m determined to do the right thing. I’ll convince Claudio that I respect him and your family. I’m not a stranger. Let me do thi
s for us.”

  He promised to come to my house the next night to speak to Claudio. I was agitated the whole day, jumping every time the bell rang over the door, dropping a whole tray filled with spools of thread and having to get down on my hands and knees to retrieve them. When I got home that night, I washed up and combed my hair after supper.

  “Who are you primping for?” Pip wanted to know. “What’s going on? Don’t think you’re leaving the house at this hour of the night.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’m expecting a visitor who’s coming to talk to Claudio.”

  It was Pip’s turn to be agitated. I picked up a stack of shirts that needed darning and calmed myself by threading a needle and starting to stitch while I waited for the doorbell to ring.

  At eight o’clock, I heard a familiar voice at the door, and Angelina called out from the hall.

  “Claudio, Paolo Serafini is here. If you want a cup of coffee, ask one of your sisters to make it. I’m still putting the children to bed.”

  Pip looked at me. “I don’t believe it! Not him. No. No. No! What a mistake. This must be a joke or a bad dream. He’s nothing but trouble, him and his union. You’d be better off in a convent than keeping company with him.”

  Pip fretted in the kitchen, banging pots on shelves and furiously scrubbing the sink, muttering some kind of litany under her breath while she anxiously eyed the closed door to the parlor, where Paolo and Claudio were drinking their coffee. I strained to hear their words over the angry din Pip was making. Finally, Angelina yelled from upstairs that she couldn’t get the kids to sleep because of the noise. The baby started wailing. I kept my head down over the mending, trying not to prick my finger.

  I worried that Paolo’s plan to be open was a mistake. As difficult as it had been to hide from my family, to write my letters in secret, to sneak an embrace in the back room, at least I hadn’t been forced to confront their anger. What if Claudio said no? What if that provoked my sisters to an even stricter watch over me? I might not be allowed out of the house at all, not even to go to the store.