Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  I got Claudio to drive me into Manhattan the day the children were to arrive by train. Always looking for ways to appear as prosperous as the American bankers who disdained his success, he had bought one of Henry Ford’s Model T town cars the year before and was happy to show it off in Manhattan.

  I had packed a basket with some bread filled with peppers and eggs, and I’d collected some warm clothing—coats and mittens and socks—that Flora’s children had outgrown. I was unprepared for the spectacle that greeted us. Thousands of socialists from the Italian Federation had gathered to welcome the children. Bands played, banners were flying. I worried about finding the children in the confusion. But somehow, despite the presence of so many supporters, I found them, thanks to the good planning of the women who’d conceived of and organized the children’s exodus.

  As we drove back to Mount Vernon, they sat in the backseat of the car, wrapped in the too-big coats and devouring my sandwiches. A brother and sister, Tino and Evelina, their pale but clean faces took everything in—Claudio’s car, the city outside the windows, the strange lady in the front seat speaking their language.

  When we got to Mount Vernon, Claudio left us at the Palace. I led them upstairs to the apartment, where I’d made beds for them in the front room. They had nothing with them, not even a paper bag with a nightshirt or a hairbrush.

  The first thing I did was draw them a hot bath in the tub in the kitchen. Their bodies were so scrawny, so undernourished. I put them in two of Paolo’s old nightshirts, gave them each a hot bowl of minestrone and put them to bed. The younger one, Evelina, was only five. She sucked her thumb and barely spoke, but she was trembling and close to tears. I took her in my lap in the rocking chair Paolo had bought me to rock our own children in and that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to use. I sang her every children’s song I could think of. She finally fell asleep, her head heavy and damp against my breast. The baby inside me had not yet begun to flutter and kick. Instead, I held this silent little girl and dreamed that one day I’d hold my own daughter like this.

  Tino and Evelina stayed for a month, until the strike was settled. It was sending the children away that had turned the tide. There was so much public sympathy for them that the mayor of Lawrence ordered a halt to the trips. The next time a group attempted to leave, the police attacked the mothers and children, beating them back from the train station. It was a horrific scene, captured by newspapers all over America.

  After that, the workers of Lawrence were not alone. Protests and outrage spread around the country, and the mill owners had no alternative but to settle.

  The children of Lawrence went home as Paolo returned. They were well fed. I had stitched each of them some warm clothing. I’d learned how to keep a child still long enough to braid her hair and had taught them both the letters of the alphabet and how to write their names.

  By the time Paolo walked in the door again, my belly was rounded with our own child.

  Chapter 38

  Waiting

  THERE WAS NO HIDING that I was pregnant again. But this time, no other woman carrying a child would look at me for fear that her own baby would follow mine into death. If they had to pass me on the street they’d walk to the other side. Old women offered me advice. Eat this. Don’t drink that. Don’t climb. Don’t bend. Don’t carry. Pray to Saint Anne. Pray to Saint Jude.

  Paolo walked around in a haze of guilt.

  “Giulia will die next time!” Pip screamed at him the night we let them all know another was on the way.

  He was afraid to touch me, convinced that his passion for me, undiminished after more than three years of marriage, was to blame for the babies’ not surviving. We slept separately—I alone in our bed, crying myself softly to sleep, Paolo on the sofa in the front room, tossing fitfully. It was a lonely time. Most nights, he stayed downstairs at the Palace till early in the morning, playing cards with my cousin or writing music to keep from facing sleep alone. I had no such refuge. I fell into bed exhausted from the routines of the day, from the growing heaviness of my body, from the fears of what still lay before me. I listened for the sound of life within me. I measured the vigor of a kick.

  Worry filled my nights. The racket of clattering wagons from the street outside, the tinkling of glass and murmured voices downstairs, the shouting from the Colavitas’ apartment across the alley—all kept me awake and thinking. This wasn’t good for the baby, I thought, lying on my pillow, tears trickling in rivulets down my neck.

  During the day, the other women tried to make little of my experience.

  “You’re not the first to lose a baby, Giulia. Look at Maria Fanelli, at Rosa Spina. Every time they’re pregnant they miscarry. Face it. It happens. What are you going to do, stop making love to Paolo? It’s life.”

  “You can’t dwell on these things, it’ll make you crazy, like Jenny DeVito, remember her? That girl never carried a baby past three months. Started talking to herself, cut off all her hair. They say her husband got some putana in Napoli pregnant because he wanted a son and was convinced Jenny would never give him one. At least you’re holding on to them, Giulia. They grow with all their parts. You’ll get there. And if you don’t, you don’t. It’s what God gives you.”

  I tried to keep in my head what it had been like in Venticano with Giuseppina. I knew that not all the babies she birthed actually lived. I knew this was a part of a woman’s life. But the fear that I’d never be able to bear a living child consumed me. I listened to the way other women talked about childless neighbors. How pitiful! God spare me from the fate of my own sister Letitia—eight years married and never even pregnant, praying novenas and making pilgrimages to bless her with a child.

  Sometimes I thought that if Giuseppina had been here she’d know what to do. She knew how to help my mother. My mother bore nine children, all living, breathing, whole. Frankie’s twin was three months old when he died, so it wasn’t like dying at birth. What had Giuseppina done? What secrets? What herbs? I didn’t remember anymore. The older women here, women like my Zi’Yolanda, I did not trust. They didn’t have the secrets, the knowing that Giuseppina did. They offered a mishmash of household remedies. The nurses from the Social Service came and tried to teach them about germs and hygiene and they half listened. Partly they didn’t understand, especially when the nurses shouted at them in baby English and made pantomimes with their hands. After the nurses left, the women laughed at their naïveté, their modern ideas. But sometimes, in spite of their disdain for American ideas, those ideas crept into what they did and they started to forget the old ways. Or they never learned the old ways in the first place.

  Yolanda wasn’t very smart. She “dropped” her babies, she said, without a thought, without a worry. She could not understand my sleeplessness.

  My mother wrote me with advice.

  “Get into bed,” she cautioned, when she learned of my third pregnancy. “Let the others do for you.”

  She seemed unaware of what my life here was like. I had no employees in the Palace kitchen to help me prepare and serve fifty meals a day. I had no widowed, childless sisters-in-law as she did to run my household. I had no mother-in-law to whisk away responsibilities and take them under her own roof while I languished, propped up on linen pillowcases. Flora, God bless her, did what she could to allow me some rest from day to day. Pip, in Manhattan with her husband, was a stranger to us. She had finally achieved her dream of a life as a lady. When she came to visit with her husband, Ernesto, she wore an elegant coat trimmed with fur. Her fingers, which a few short years ago had struggled with bobbins and pin and thread, were warmed in a matching fur-lined muff. Her hat, velvet, with a sweeping brim and a feather that arched down across her brow and grazed her left ear, reminded me of the hat my mother used to wear. Pip had a dressmaker to whom she gave meticulous instructions. Like Letitia, she was childless. But she made no pilgrimages. She and Ernesto traveled to Atlantic City. They went to the opera.

  Tilly lived only one street over, but she
already had two daughters—Annunziata and Dora—and was pregnant as well when my time came.

  As distant as I’d been from my mother, I wanted to write to her, “Mama, come now to me, as Giuseppina came to you when you were in need.”

  But I didn’t. She still had Papa and my three brothers at home. I don’t think she was prepared to come to America, to leave her life of ease and comfort, her annual sojourns to the sulfur baths at Ischia, her shopping expeditions to Napoli, her correspondence with great minds at the university. What kind of life would she have found here? When she encouraged me to have others do for me, no, I don’t think she had herself in mind.

  I had made no preparations for this baby. Antonietta said the American girls had a party when someone was pregnant, bringing gifts for the baby before it was born. I shivered when she told me. Such bad luck! I had no cradle, no shirts, no gowns. Nothing to pack away again or stare at lying flat and empty in a corner. I tempted the fates with the white jacket I’d crocheted for Carmine and I got to use it as a shroud. Emilia I buried in a dress Tilly gave me from one of her little girls.

  I didn’t have time to sew anyway.

  In the mornings, I did the marketing and then went downstairs to the Palace kitchen and prepared whatever meal we served customers that day—lasagna, chicken salmi, sausage and peppers. I often sat outside the back door to peel the vegetables. The cats came around for scraps and sometimes the girls who worked for Signora Bifaro at the hotel behind us were out on the steps. They smoked; they played cards; they were out there in their lingerie as if they didn’t care who saw them. They didn’t look after themselves very well, those girls. Their peignoirs were dirty, the hems trailing in the dirt on the steps. Their feet and their necks weren’t clean, and they wore makeup to hide their sallow skin—bright patches of rouge on their cheeks and smeared kohl around their eyes.

  Paolo and Claudio pretended I didn’t see the men who, after a round of drinks at the Palace, slipped out the back door, past the crate where I sat with my garlic and onions, and climbed the stairs with one of the girls. The girls leaned against the railing and looked the men up and down. But they didn’t look them in the eye. And when they were chosen, they tossed their cigarettes over the railing. The cigarettes usually landed at my feet, still smoldering, stinking, a slash of dark red lipstick at one end.

  Sometimes, when it was slow and the girls were bored with their card games, they joked with me.

  “Hey, Giulia, you’re so pretty. You should be up here with us instead of down there chopping onions and peppers.”

  “Giulia doesn’t need to be up here. She’s got that handsome husband to take care of her. And from the looks of her belly, Paolo takes very good care of her. Isn’t that so, Giulia?”

  The girls laughed when I blushed.

  One day Claudio came into the kitchen while I was frying some meatballs. I was busy over the stove, but he wanted to talk.

  “I don’t like you sitting out back. It looks bad.”

  “What, you think somebody’s going to mistake me for one of Bifaro’s girls?” I turned so that my belly was unmistakable.

  “You know what I mean.” Claudio thought I should’ve learned that time he threw the iron at me not to talk fresh to him. But I didn’t let Claudio tell me what to do. He was not my father.

  “You mean, when I sit there it makes the men uncomfortable. I know who they are. I know their wives. And if they feel too uncomfortable, maybe they’re not going to go through the door and up the stairs. Maybe they’re not going to spend their money with Bifaro. And if they don’t spend their money with Bifaro, then you don’t get your cut.”

  I turned over the meatballs. What did he think, I was some little girl who didn’t know what those women did? Did he really believe that I didn’t see a connection between him and Bifaro’s convenient location?

  “You insult me, and you insult Signora Bifaro with your suspicions. Do your cooking in the kitchen, Giulia. You look like some goddamn cafona out back with your knife, feeding the cats. Act respectable. Don’t give people a reason to talk.”

  “The only ones who talk, Claudio, are the whores.”

  My daughter Caterina was born in early November. The late-afternoon light was reaching over the rooftops and through the lace curtains in the bedroom, stretching across the floor and onto the bed. I heard the tiny wail, the first gasp of air and life. Flora lifted her into my arms and I felt the slippery warmth, the fluttering movements that signaled she was alive.

  Paolo had retreated downstairs to the Palace, pacing, waiting, not even playing the piano for fear it would disturb me. But when he heard Caterina cry he came bounding up the stairs, a man bursting with hope and pride.

  Chapter 39

  Z’Amalia’s Inheritance

  A FEW WEEKS BEFORE Caterina’s birth, Papa decided to visit New York. He took the mountain road from Venticano, just as he had the predawn morning he drove Pip and Tilly and me to our destinies. Just as he had, since then, carried more and more of our countrymen away from the village and toward America.

  At Avellino, he joined the regional road that leads through the valley to Napoli. At the outskirts of the city, he wove his way through streets, past market stalls and pink-walled tenements, until he reached the wide expanse of the Via Caracciolo. When he arrived at the harbor, however, he did not discharge his passengers and return to the mountains.

  He boarded the ship himself.

  “I’m coming for a few months,” he said. “I do not intend to stay. I come only to decide if Claudio’s business warrants the money Claudio, swallowing his pride, has asked me to invest.”

  Papa had money to invest because Z’Amalia, Giuseppina’s wealthy sister, had finally succumbed to her many ailments, her loneliness and her arrogance. She had left everything—her villa on the perimeter of the Parco di Capodimonte in Napoli, her paintings, her piano, her gold accumulated over years of hoarding—to Papa.

  The cousins were furious, but Papa said, “Where were you when I visited her every week? Who sat with her in her rooms smelling like death and listened to her complaints? Did any of you bring her a piece of cake or take her for a walk in the garden?” He ignored their outrage. He bought a new suit and sat in the front row at the funeral.

  So Claudio, who as a little boy used to endure with Papa his visits to Z’Amalia, her desiccated fingers pinching his cheeks and offering him stale chocolates that had turned dusty white in their satin box, now thought it was time to expand his business. He wanted to build the roads, not just haul the stone for the builders.

  But he needed Papa, Papa’s money, to do that. I know what it took Claudio to put aside his own bitterness to ask. Greed. Ambition.

  And it was my mother who had interceded. A business opportunity, she told Papa. Make the money grow, don’t hide it under the bed the way your aunt did. You’re no old woman. You’re an astute businessman. You said yourself your bones are getting too old to travel these roads day after day. And, even if it’s Aldo at the reins, he carries fewer and fewer passengers, except to take them to the ships.

  So go see if this is the right business. Decide for yourself. And take the boys with you. They’re old enough now, and will give me no peace if you go without them. I can manage here myself while you make up your mind about Claudio’s business. Somehow, perhaps appealing to Papa’s own greed, she had convinced him.

  They were more alike than they cared to admit, Papa and Claudio. Even though they’d parted ten years before without a word between them since.

  On the morning of Caterina’s birth, Papa arrived in America. He brought with him Z’Amalia’s money, my brothers Aldo and Frankie and Sandro—no longer willing to be left behind—and a gift from Giuseppina for the baby she was sure would be born alive.

  Their arrival stunned me, emphasizing the passage of time since my own departure. The boys were all tall and strong, their faces the faces of men. Aldo, almost twenty-four, had cultivated his imitation of Papa so well that, from a distance and
in dim light, one could be excused for mistaking the two. He had even put on weight and affected the three-piece suits that Papa’s tailor in Napoli must have fashioned for him. Our altar boy, Frankie, not even shaving when I’d left, now turned his sixteen-year-old face to me with a finely trimmed mustache. Not the voluminous, waxed statements of Papa and Aldo and all the other men of my family, but an outline, like the charcoal sketch made by da Vinci before creating a masterpiece in full color. Sandro, at fourteen not yet taking a razor to his face, was nonetheless taller than all of them, his little-boy energy transformed into muscle and bone.

  They tumbled into Claudio and Angelina’s house and into our lives, breathing American air, listening to American voices, walking on American pavement as if they were once again in the hills playing the games inspired by Claudio’s letters. They had rehearsed this scene before. They knew their lines.

  Papa, however, was a stranger in the home of his oldest son. Angelina did nothing to ease his discomfort, her sense of being put-upon evident in the firmness with which she placed every additional plate on the table. After dinner the evening of their arrival, she herded her brood—Alberto, now eight, Armando, six, Vita, four, and Magdalena, two—up to bed…but first she opened the windows of the dining room to air out the smoke from not only her husband’s noxious cigar, but now that of her father-in-law, as well.

  What took place that evening Claudio shared with me many years later, because I was able to listen with the ears of a businesswoman, not the ears of his youngest sister.

  Claudio sent the boys down to the Palace that night and turned to an impatient father, waiting at the recently cleared table, fingers taking the measure of the damask tablecloth, comparing it to his own.