Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  “I’m a businesswoman. I understand business. How can you not talk to me about business, especially if it affects you? Don’t you trust me to understand?”

  I saw the pains shoot across his face, the color drain from his skin. Even his copper hair looked dull, leaden.

  “Are you in trouble? Do you owe someone? Tell me. Tell me.”

  I went to him, held his face in my hands. I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to caress him. Take away his pain. Take away his false pride. If I could help him, he had to let me.

  He took my hands and pulled them away.

  “I shouldn’t have come home. I’m going out.”

  He left the apartment. But when he left the building, he didn’t use the street entrance. Instead, he went through the Palace and out through the alley.

  He didn’t come home for supper that evening. I put a covered plate in the icebox and climbed into bed with one of the books my mother had sent. Around ten, I heard the piano downstairs in the Palace and knew it was Paolo. I was able then to sleep, listening to his melancholy music.

  Sometime around three, I heard him on the stairs and then in the kitchen. He ate the pasta e fagioli I had made for him, cold and in the dark, his spoon grazing the bottom of the bowl with every stroke. When he was finished, he put his dishes in the sink and left his shoes by the door.

  I waited, my back turned away from him, my breathing steady. I wanted no more words that night. He undressed slowly, placing his watch and cuff links in their box on the dresser, hanging his shirt and trousers methodically. When he lifted the covers to climb into bed, I could smell the wine, the homemade Chianti he and Claudio sold by the gallon downstairs. His body, normally so taut and strong, was slack and heavy as he settled beside me. He muttered my name as he buried his face in my hair. Within minutes, he was asleep. He slept fitfully, calling out unintelligible sounds and moving his legs uncontrollably. At five, as a gray light filtered over our bed, I could see that he was soaked in sweat, his face the same color as the early morning sky.

  I got up and took a soft towel from my linen cupboard. I filled the washbasin with water and brought it to his bedside. I washed his body. Although he stirred at first in protest, he subsided and submitted, finally drifting into a less troubled sleep.

  I dressed and made a pot of coffee. In the pocket of his jacket, hanging on the kitchen hook, I could see the papers, still there, crammed as they had been earlier.

  My mother would’ve taken those papers, studied them, deciphered them. She would have confronted Papa and then presented a solution. She was often furious with Papa, but they were always united. More than once, she’d accused him of generating disasters and then reached into her reserves of cunning and intelligence and will to rebuild from the ashes of my father’s failures.

  What failure was Paolo hiding? What loss could he not share with his wife? I believed he still saw me as a spoiled child, a privileged daughter, unused to financial uncertainty. I was determined to show him I was not fragile. That I could shoulder his pain, not just wipe the sweat from his troubled face.

  I could hear his breathing in the next room, the sounds of the street coming alive below us, the factory whistles starting their round, the trains heading for New York with New Rochelle businessmen aboard on their way to banks and shipping firms and law offices.

  I left the papers in his jacket. I didn’t need to spy to know it had to do with money. Money he didn’t have—that we didn’t have. I got dressed, not in my marketing clothes, but in my shop clothes. Clothes I hadn’t worn since my marriage and the family’s decision to sell the store. Pip had left to marry and move to New York, and Tilly’s husband, Gaetano, whom she had married a month after my wedding, made enough to relieve her, as well. Whatever profit Claudio had realized when the final papers had been signed he had kept for himself. Between Paolo’s salary from the union and his share of the profits from the Palace, we had thought there would be enough for us. But now I understood from Paolo’s fear that there wasn’t.

  I went downstairs and left word at the Palace that I wanted to speak with Claudio. Then I walked over to his stables and found him in his office. We spoke. I made my offer; he accepted.

  The next day, the Palace would begin serving lunch and dinner. I was to give Claudio twenty-five percent of the profits and keep the rest for my family.

  It had been easier to talk to Claudio than to Paolo. By the time I’d gotten back from the stables, Paolo was already gone, the bed a damp and rumpled pile of sheets. I changed out of my street clothes and stripped and scrubbed the bedding. Better to begin the evening with fresh linens, a fresh heart. I hung the sheets on the line above the alley, ironed the tablecloth that I’d soaked in bleach the day before. The ink spots had disappeared as if they had never marred it.

  In the afternoon, I made lists of provisions I would need for the Palace, rolled up the sleeves of my housedress and began to scrub the unused kitchen behind the bar. When Paolo stayed away again at dinnertime, I put his plate in the icebox and sat at the kitchen table writing menu cards in the hand the nuns had taught me at Santa Margareta.

  I heard no piano playing downstairs that night, so I was startled when the doorknob turned shortly after ten. I’d just spread the cards out to dry.

  “What’s this?” He thrust his chin at the table.

  “My answer,” I replied.

  “To what question?”

  “My own. How can I be a good wife, a woman, not a child? I don’t want to be your burden.”

  “You’re not a burden.”

  “I made you angry yesterday with my fears.”

  “I was angry with myself, not you.”

  “Do you think I can’t understand your problems?”

  “You shouldn’t have to.”

  “You admire Flora, don’t you?”

  “I love her. She’s my sister.”

  “But you approve of her, how she handles herself, her affairs?”

  “Yes, always. I have great respect for Flora.”

  “I want you to have respect for me, as well.”

  “I adore you, Giulia. That’s why I anger myself. That I can’t provide for you, for the baby—what you deserve. There. I’ve said it. I can’t provide.”

  He sat with his head in his hands.

  “The union is going out on strike again. We only organized the workers a few months ago, and the leadership is calling for a strike at the clockworks. What little steady income I brought in from the IWW will be wiped out.”

  “Paolo, look at me. Take your hands away from your eyes. Look at me. I am no precious china doll, with feet good only for dancing and hands made only for holding sweets. These feet are planted firmly on the ground. These hips have balanced laundry baskets and bolts of fabric and Claudio’s sons—and, soon, God willing, our own. These hands have harvested my grandmother’s garden and counted the till at the shop at the end of the day and kept the books. We’re going to survive, Paolo. Strike or no strike. The women in my family don’t sit fanning themselves while their men sweat.

  “Do you think I married you because of your job? Do you think I defied all the curses and the advice of my sisters and my aunts because of money? Do you think I gave you my heart and my soul because you bring home a steady paycheck?

  “You provide, Paolo. You provide nourishment for my soul. You provide music that makes me soar. You provide a joy in my life I did not know existed. Never, never tell me again that you can’t provide. We provide. For each other.”

  I was kneeling in front of him, holding his face in my hands. Praying silently to every saint I could remember to help me rescue him, rescue us. And I called upon my mother for her strength of purpose. Her stubbornness. Her unwillingness to accept defeat.

  That night I felt a shift take place between Paolo and me. For the first time, I understood what it meant to be a woman. It had nothing to do with the power I had discovered as a young girl in Italy—the hunger I could elicit in Vito’s eyes with a bared shoulder or a qu
ickening castanet. Nor was it the satisfaction I had gained in Paolo’s arms, from those first precious moments on Flora’s carpet of many flowers to our own marriage bed. It was not even my changing body as the child inside me grew and took shape.

  It was something entirely apart from my physical self. It was a recognition of my own serieta—my solidity, my strength, when confronted with the doubt-ridden soul whose face I held in my hands, whose future rested in my arms. Up until that moment, it was Paolo who’d been strong—Paolo who had caught me in my fall from my own family, Paolo who had snatched the burning veil from my head, Paolo who had lifted me from the carriage run amok. But Paolo’s courage—the courage of men—seemed limited to the physical dangers of the world. Soldiers in war, hunters, builders of bridges and tunnels. The courage of women is much more subtle. Builders of the home, protectors of the man’s image of himself. Feed the family without destroying his pride. Be resourceful without undermining his own faith in himself. Be the beating heart that fuels his hope.

  I told Paolo the next morning that I was growing bored without the store. Claudio had mentioned how hungry the men were who came to the Palace—how he could keep them longer, attract more to the bar if he could offer a meal now and then. Sonny behind the bar knew how to pour a drink, but couldn’t even light the stove. It would give me something to do during the day, if I cooked for the Palace customers. Claudio was willing to let me try. We’d see if these Americans would eat my sausage and peppers.

  I slipped into the kitchen as the watchmakers began their strike. It kept my mind off the fury surrounding the clockworks, the picket lines, the shouting, the cops. Paolo came home at night exhausted from shuttling back and forth between the owners and the workers, between the local and the national union. One time, he arrived with a bloody head, a bruised arm.

  He was too tired, too preoccupied, to notice the money filling the jewelry box in my top drawer. He was simply grateful for the warm meal I put in front of him and the warm body I welcomed him with every night.

  Chapter 33

  Carmine

  WHEN THE PAINS started one afternoon I dismissed them, ignored them, went on with preparing the evening meal for the Palace. But the pains didn’t stop, didn’t fade away as they had in the past. I managed to serve dinner to the men who’d come to depend on my cooking, who had helped my business flourish in only a few short months. But when Paolo arrived to play the piano, I told him it was time to fetch Flora and Tilly. He had rushed, white-faced, to bring them to me.

  I had tried to appear calm when I’d told Paolo, but I was so frightened. I wasn’t ready. It was too soon. This baby was not due for two more months.

  I should have remembered. Somewhere in me should have been Giuseppina’s wisdom, her healing, her hands on my belly. But nothing. I searched frantically, calling her name, wandering through the past as if through the rooms of her house. Where was she?

  Oh—another one…too long…no rest.

  I was cold, my body was shaking, the sweat ran down my cheeks, my neck. I heard the voices of Tilly and Flora.

  “She’s so tiny. How will she ever manage?” someone whispered, thinking I couldn’t hear.

  If Giuseppina had been there, she would have shown me, guided me. Why couldn’t I remember? Why hadn’t I paid attention?

  How long had this been going on? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t take another minute, another pain. The light—I saw the light through the window—was it morning already? Why didn’t it stop? Why didn’t the baby come?

  “The head, here’s the head.” A voice, agitated. A flurry of activity around me.

  “Just a few more minutes, Giulia. It’s time to push.” Tilly bent close to my ear.

  I couldn’t bear this pain for a few more minutes. It was tearing me apart. Giuseppina!

  A darkness, a silence. It was over.

  I turned my head to Tilly; my hands reached out, beseeching, for the life that had just struggled and ripped its way through me.

  But Tilly came toward me empty-handed, empty-eyed.

  I released a wail that came from no place I had known before, not even in those lost moments of pain from the last hours. In that agony had at least been hope, life.

  There was no other sound except mine—blood-soaked, emptying, the howling of a she-wolf in the mountains above our village.

  Someone tried to hold me, to comfort me with chamomile tea and a cool cloth pressed to my forehead—as if the pain were in my belly or my head, as if there were some simple remedy to restore me.

  But I was broken, shattered as though I’d been hurled from a bridge onto stones below. My body lay curled in on itself, hollow.

  In the corner I saw Tilly fumbling with a match and a red glass. She lit the votive candle and set it down on the dresser. I heard her droning prayers to saints I no longer remembered, to a God who had, in this moment, turned away from me.

  I turned away, as well, from Tilly’s piety. In the other corner I saw Flora at the table with a basin. She was washing the baby’s body with great tenderness.

  I did not even know if it was a girl or a boy. I begged Flora for the child. She faced me. Without hesitation, with understanding, she carried the swaddled corpse over to me.

  I raised myself up, felt the blood leaving my body, leaned back against the pillows. I took the silent, still-warm body into my arms and unwrapped it.

  A son. Paolo’s son. “Carmine,” I said.

  His skin was a purple-blue. His eyelids were nearly transparent. His hair was the color of a sunset. He had all his parts—nothing missing, nothing damaged. The only thing missing was breath.

  It was my turn to bathe him now. My tears came, huge drops that fell from my eyes to his fragile chest. I felt as if I would lose my own breath, my grief came so fast, so relentlessly. I clutched at Carmine, unable to accept that in these last seven months I had been unable to give him life.

  He had kicked me two nights before. So resounding, so full of himself that Paolo had felt it, too, lying next to me. Paolo had cradled my belly in his hands, then, pressing his ear to it, listened for his child. I had always felt cherished by Paolo, but this pregnancy had turned me into an object of such adoration and desire it had been almost impossible to fathom the depth of his feeling for me. Whenever my mother was pregnant, I remember my father’s eye wandering farther and farther away the bigger her belly grew. But Paolo had been drawn closer and closer with each passing month. He found me so beautiful.

  Paolo…Paolo. Where was he? Had someone told him? Or had they all been so preoccupied here with me, with death?

  Flora came and gently took the baby away from my grasp.

  “I’m going to dress him now, Giulia, before he—” She stopped, not wanting to say what would happen, what would take him farther away from the living child I thought I’d be holding now. He would grow cold. He would stiffen. He would rot.

  I released him to her. The clothes I’d made for him lay wrapped in tissue paper in the top drawer of the dresser. A jacket, a gown, booties, a hat. Crocheted with a 00 hook and the finest gauge cotton. My aunts had written with suggestions for more useful things, without ornamentation, that would stand up well to repeated washings. Practical quilted kimonos and plain muslin gowns. I had made those, too, dutifully.

  The stitches on the baby’s jacket were tight and smooth. When I brushed it along the side of my cheek, it glided like silk. There were no mistakes, no dropped stitches or uneven edges. If I had discovered a problem as I was working, I ripped out what I’d done and redid it. It was perfect.

  But it was too big. He would never grow into it.

  There was a small cross and a medal to pin to his shirt, in the wooden box next to Tilly’s candle. “Say a prayer when you put them on him,” I told Tilly. “I can’t.”

  Tilly did not know my emptiness. She fussed, she prayed, she changed the sheets.

  Paolo wasn’t there in those early morning hours to hear my screams and then the baby’s silence. Flora had sent hi
m away during the night to sleep at her apartment when she’d realized how much farther I’d had to go in my labor. He returned home around eight in the morning to a desolate quiet. Tilly had already gone; Flora had put on a pot of coffee and was sitting at the kitchen table. I could see her through the door as Paolo walked in. No words passed between them. A question in Paolo’s eyes was answered by the mute shaking of Flora’s head. Then a sound emerged from Paolo’s throat, a sound of such despair and abandonment that I wanted only to rise from my own pain to comfort him.

  “Giulia! Giulia! How could God have taken her from me!”

  He’d mistakenly thought from Flora’s gesture that he had lost me.

  Flora quickly got up from the table and put her arm around her brother, directing him toward the bedroom. “No! No! Giulia’s here, Paolo. Weak, but alive. It’s your son we’ve lost.”

  Paolo stumbled into the bedroom and knelt at the side of the bed, resting his head on my empty belly. He put his arms around me and I found the strength to return his embrace, feeling his relief and gratitude that I had survived. For all the comfort and solicitous care I’d received from Flora and Tilly in the last few hours, they hadn’t shared my grief the way Paolo now did. We mourned our dead son together, holding one another until our tears subsided.

  Chapter 34

  Milk

  CARMELLA COLAVITA ACROSS the alley had no milk. Flora told me this the morning after Carmine’s birth and death, when she came over to help me do the wash. She was elbow-deep in soapy water scrubbing the bloody sheets Tilly had set to soak in bleach the day before.

  I waited. Was this neighborly concern or an attempt to demonstrate to me that others, within sight of my own windows, had their problems, too? But Flora did not seem to be concerned about my sinking into misery. She looked at me directly, matter-of-factly.

  “So will you help?”