Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  When he saw me standing in the doorway, he stopped pacing, his face searching mine for some sign of change. I just shook my head quickly and looked down. If I let the fears burning behind his eyes leap across to meet mine, I would shatter like the wineglass my father had smashed the night Claudio had decided to come to America.

  “I’ll go wake Tilly to come and be with you. You shouldn’t be alone. What if the babies wake up?” He, too, needed something to do.

  “No! I do not want my sister in this house tonight!” I was adamant. “Go look for the doctor again, if you can’t wait with me.”

  I spit the words out, accusing, raging. There was no one I wanted by my side. I did not know if I could bear their anguish as well as my own.

  I listened with my forehead pressed against the ice-cool glass of the door to his footsteps, frenzied and urgent, racing down the stairs as he left me. Then I turned back.

  I checked first on the babies. Paolo was slipping out of my arms, out of my life, and my first impulse was to gather his children to me to fill my emptiness. I ached to smell their damp curls, to feel the tenderness of their skin, to crush their mouths in a kiss.

  Caterina lay on her back, arms stretched over her head, her body extended to its full length. Every time I saw her like this, I was struck by how much she’d grown, how sturdy and hardy she was. Only eighteen months since I’d pushed her out of my belly, and she was already racing ahead of me, into her own life. I brushed a wet strand of hair from her cheek and watched for a grateful moment, the rhythm of life, the ebb and flow of her dreams.

  Paolino, in contrast to his older sister, lay on his belly, restless, his impending hunger about to announce itself in a crescendo that would move from a tentative, mewling murmur to an insistent wail. I scooped him up and brought him with me to the chair by Paolo’s bedside. His body, beginning then at six months to fill out, molded itself to my own, yielding his hunger, his loneliness in the night, to the warmth and milk of my breasts.

  He fell back to sleep, sated, the last drops of milk sliding from his parted lips down his tiny, exquisite chin. I could not bear to put him down. Instead, I sat with him nestled in the crook of my arm. My other hand I rested lightly on Paolo’s chest. I felt the life seeping out of him with every shallow, uneven breath.

  I bent my head to his ear and began to whisper a litany. Not the prayers the old women mumbled in the church on Friday evenings—I had no use for their incantations.

  The litany I recited to him was the words he’d written to me over the years, the words that had recorded the tumult and passion and anguish and joy of our brief time together. I knew the words by heart. His dreams, his longing, his doubts that I loved him in return. They were all I could think of as I waited with him.

  Thoughts of you fill me to overflowing. I swear to you that if I do not see you often enough, I feel my heart breaking. If I had to be away from you for a week, I would go crazy with sorrow.

  You are my talisman of enchantment.

  I want to amuse you and keep you merry. I want to make you laugh, to hear your beautiful, charming laughter, which both eases and torments me.

  I cover your face with my tears, and I wipe them away with my kisses.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. I don’t know if he heard me.

  Claudio came back with the doctor at last, but there was little he could do except tell us that it was pneumonia.

  At six-thirty in the morning, Paolo died.

  I found the shirt later, forgotten in a heap on the floor. I tried to wash out the stains, my back bent over the washboard, my hand clutching the naphtha soap, my arm scrubbing in a rhythm that became frantic as I realized that it was too late. The blood had already dried.

  Chapter 44

  The Band of the Bersaglieri

  THEY WERE BEGINNING to assemble in front of the Palace, men and women in black waiting in the gray drizzle. My mother watched from the window upstairs, waiting for the sound of a wagon, for the sight of horses with black ribbons on their bridles. Behind her, resting on the table in my front room, was Paolo’s coffin.

  She put out one of the cigarettes Claudio’s oldest son had bought for her and straightened her hat in the mirror I kept by the door. They were simple, those rooms of mine, but well kept. She remembered the first rooms she and Papa had lived in, over the stables, with Giuseppina and Antonio snoring close by. No matter how hard she tried, she had not been able to rid those rooms of the pungent odors of horses and old woman’s medicine. My home was tinged with the scent of bleach, day-old flowers, talcum powder and the haze of the cigarettes Papa berated her for smoking. She waved her hand to dispel the evidence of the last one and turned to her girls, now gathering themselves for the descent to the procession forming in the street below.

  She appraised them, her fine-looking daughters. Letitia and Philippina carried themselves with pride—long, straight backs; well-made dresses provided by their husbands’ money; bodies untouched by childbearing. Tilly was softer, more sweet-faced than our older sisters, not as well dressed and beginning to thicken around her waist after three daughters. My mother made a mental note to suggest a shopping expedition to the corsetiere after the demands of that unsettling week were behind us. I was still in the back room, my face bearing the bruised signs of the last tear-soaked days. At least my hair had been brushed and neatly fastened and my dress had been pressed. Tilly had done that.

  My mother plucked a piece of lint from Letitia’s shoulder and adjusted the veil on her own hat one more time. She came into the bedroom to fetch me.

  I sat in the chair between the bed and Paolino’s empty cradle. Claudio’s wife, Angelina, was watching all the children over at their house until we got back from the cemetery. My feet were tapping out a pattern on the floor—making the motions of walking, as I would have to do soon, behind the coffin of my husband—but going nowhere. In my hand I clutched Paolo’s ring.

  “It’s time to go, Giulia. They are waiting for you.” This was not the first time my mother had said such words to me, sending me off to a new life on each occasion. First as a little girl to Giuseppina’s house, then to the convent and, eight years ago, here to America. Each time away, to a life she believed was better for me. What life awaited me now on the other side of this day? My mother had not known widowhood. Papa still sat at the head of our table, grumbling or roaring, but still there.

  “Here, put on your veil. I’ll help you pin it so it doesn’t blow off. And where are your gloves? Do you have a dry handkerchief?” She rattled off her list. These were the things she knew about, could guide me in. She was about to take me, one step at a time, with dignity, through the day.

  She got me up out of the chair and linked her arm through mine. She was determined to keep me moving, even though my will to put one foot in front of the other was locked inside that wooden box with the body of my husband.

  Claudio came up the stairs then, a man of boundless energy despite the onerous weight that his wagon would carry today, despite the stiff collar cutting into his neck. Behind him, moving more slowly and talking among themselves, followed Paolo’s two brothers, who had traveled from Pennsylvania, and my brothers-in-law.

  Not one of my sisters’ husbands had been friends with Paolo. Rassina, the jeweler; Gaetano, the carpenter; Ernesto, the businessman. My mother looked at them. Not men she would have chosen for herself—but then, she hadn’t chosen Papa, either. Gaetano was sleepy. Rassina had no heart. Ernesto was simply ugly. Paolo, however, she knew she would miss. An intelligent man, a man with compassion for a woman who would rather read books than pound dough.

  “Mama, Aldo should be turning the corner at North Street with the wagon at any minute. It’s time to go down.”

  The men moved past us to the front room and gathered around the table where the coffin had rested for two days. At Claudio’s count they hoisted the box onto their shoulders and edged through the passageway into the kitchen, where my mother waited with my sisters and me.

&n
bsp; They stopped for a moment to ready themselves for the long flight down to the street. My mother kept her grip on me in my silence as the muffled whimpering of my sisters began: the drone of Letitia’s whispered prayers, the plaintive questioning of Tilly’s little-girl voice. As the coffin crossed the threshold onto the landing, an anguished wail rose above the voices and the tears.

  “Oh, my God! Paolo! You’re leaving this house for the last time! The last time!”

  Pip’s screams released the cries of the others, shrieks that followed the men down the stairs. All except me, whose stricken face remained frozen, untouched by the abandoned wailing of my sisters.

  My mother was exasperated by the unconfined emotion working its way like an infection, or an insidious malaria, through my sisters. Her heart was aching, too, but Paolo was not her husband, not her lover, not her son. To tear her hair out with grief in public was a display she would not allow herself. My sisters did not have the same self-control.

  “Subdue yourselves.” She spit out the words in a fury. “It’s time to follow the men with some semblance of dignity. You are Fiorillos, every single one of you, no matter what your last names are now.”

  She moved out first, supporting me as I stumbled and faltered, unable to take even a step without assistance. My condition forced her to turn her attention—reluctantly—from the excesses of her other daughters. They continued their keening as they descended behind us to the street.

  The wagon was nowhere in sight, Aldo delayed somehow in the few blocks between Claudio’s stable and the Palace. Everyone waited restlessly, the men still shouldering the coffin.

  My mother wanted to light another cigarette, but she didn’t smoke on the street. She held firmly to my arm. The drizzle had let up, leaving a dampness that curled the edges of my hair, a heaviness that muted the shuffle of impatient feet. My sisters, thank God, quieted themselves, resuming their muttered prayers. I stared numbly at the cobbled pattern of the road.

  Directly in front of us—waiting as we all were—stood the Band of the Bersaglieri. At ease in military fashion—feet slightly apart, arms clasped behind their backs, eyes straight ahead—they looked off at some distant point, not at us. Their horns floated in silence, suspended across their chests from a tricolor braided cord slung over their left shoulders. For all their military exactness and their remote bearing, the Bersaglieri were flamboyantly plumed birds.

  This was no ragtag jumble of musicians Claudio had collected from some dance hall, with fraying jackets and wrinkled shirts, faces still bearing the traces of too much whiskey. The Bersaglieri were a fanfara, the brass band attached to one of the most elite infantry units in Italy. They were touring the East Coast and my mother had managed to engage them for the funeral. They wore well-cut black wool suits trimmed with polished brass buttons and red epaulets that seemed about to take wing, starched white shirts and broadly knotted red ties. This costume alone was enough to turn heads during a procession. But atop their heads, tilted sharply over their right eyes, were wide-brimmed black hats. Exploding from the front of the crown was a red feathered plume of such exuberance that it defied the grayness, the enclosed and suffocating air of grief.

  There were those in the neighborhood who found this display ostentatious. There were people like them in Venticano as well, people who have nothing better to do than to pick away at their scabs of discontent and jealousy.

  Paolo and I had next to nothing, so Papa and my mother paid for this. I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t—I had barely enough to pay the priest for a Mass or the grave diggers who made room for Paolo next to our babies’ graves in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in New Rochelle.

  I had hardly left Paolo’s side in the three days since his death. After sitting with him during the night in death watch, I had washed his body and dressed him for burial. During the wake, I had been willing to leave his coffin only to feed Paolino. No one could dissuade me. “Have something to eat, Giulia. Keep your strength up.” “Rest, Giulia, put your head down for a few minutes.” I had ignored them all, all of their ministrations, their offers of assistance. No one could take my place. So my mother took over what I had no heart for. She put everyone to work to prepare for this day. Hired the band, arranged with the priest and the cemetery, organized the women for the food afterward, explained to Claudio how to set up the bier, ordered the lilies from Barletta’s. She knew it was easier when it wasn’t your own. Your son-in-law instead of your son.

  Her final responsibility came that morning as she stood with me on the stoop of the Palace, keeping me upright, feeling the tremor of fear ripple through me as Claudio’s wagon rounded the corner at North Street, clattering over the cobbled pavement.

  Ever since my wedding day, I had been petrified of horses. As a child, you couldn’t tear me away from them. I was always out in the courtyard with my brothers, brushing away the layers of dust the horses had accumulated in their long hauls over the hills, feeding them broken bits of carrots I had snitched from Pasqualina’s kitchen garden. Now, I crossed to the other side of the street or backed up against the wall of the nearest building when I saw a horse. This time, as Aldo maneuvered Carl’s best team behind the Bersaglieri, I stiffened and pressed my back against the Palace door, covering the Fiorillo and Serafini, Proprietors etched in the middle of the frosted glass.

  The wagon stood directly in front of us, draped in black, covered with pots of lilies. The men hoisted the coffin onto the platform. My mother was proud of her choice—a burnished wood, not cheap looking. Papa had balked at first at the expense, but then, that was what he always felt he had to do. Complain about the extravagance, the unreasonableness of her request, and then, in a gesture of magnanimous generosity, buy not only what she’d asked for but also some additional item. This was why, after the men had positioned the box, Claudio placed a brass crucifix on top of it. Papa’s contribution.

  It was time for us to move into position behind the wagon. The men broke up their knots of conversation—rumors about jobs about to open up or shut down, politics, especially news from the old country, about which they all had opinions. They had less to say about what went on here because they didn’t understand or care about it. They took off their hats, put out their cigars, found their wives.

  Paolo’s sister Flora and her husband joined us. Flora, her face covered with a heavy veil, left her husband’s side and approached me as I stood, stiff-backed and frozen, on the stoop. She touched her cheek to mine and whispered in my ear. Her fingers clasped black rosary beads, the silver cross dangling. With her free hand she pried open my fingers, still cramped around Paolo’s ring, and pressed the beads into my hand. I bent my head and raised the beads to my lips.

  I am not a religious woman. Paolo’s death hadn’t suddenly converted me. I could not imagine that the next day would find me among the ranks of the women who attend Holy Mass every morning at 6:00 a.m., say the Rosary at noon, and wash and iron the altar’s linen for the priest every evening, although, God knows, it’s the path more than one widow has taken. But for the rest of the morning, I cradled the beads in my hand, along with the ring, at times rubbing a bead between my thumb and index finger. Not in prayer, no, but moving my hand the same way I’d been moving my foot back and forth in the bedroom.

  After Flora spoke to me, she rejoined her husband among the family gathering behind the coffin. Paolo’s associates from the union had arrived to march, my mother was glad to see. A sign of respect for Paolo, for the family. She nodded her head to their tipped hats, their deferential bows.

  Claudio conferred with Aldo at the reins and then turned to check the presence of those in the procession. He was ready to give the signal to the bandleader. He glanced over at my mother, his eyebrows raised in a question. To anyone except my mother, it wouldn’t have been a question. It would have been an order. Claudio was used to being the boss, to saying, “Now we start to march because I’ve decided it’s time.” He did not see his sister paralyzed against the glass. He
saw the restless horses, the band that was to be paid, the policemen waiting along the route, hired to clear a path for the cortege.

  But because she was his mother, he waited.

  She tightened her grip around my shoulders.

  “Let’s go, cara mia. Let’s get through this day.”

  She urged me down the steps and out into the street, directly behind the bier. The fragrance of the lilies crept around us in the muggy air, surrounding us with the smell I have associated with the dead since I was a little girl.

  My body was not under my control. My fingers rubbed the bead, and my eyes beneath the veil stared through the coffin, not at it. As slight as I am, my mother did not think she had the strength to support me all the way to Mount Carmel. She motioned to Papa to join us on the other side of me. He took my right arm, which I gave to him without resistance, in a daze.

  Claudio strode to the front, signaled to the bandleader, and the Bersaglieri shifted to attention. In unison they raised their horns to their lips and took their first steps as they blew the first note.

  The horses reacted to the music piercing the stillness and tedium of the wait. I heard Aldo speak sharply to them as the wagon lurched abruptly forward. My head jerked up and I sprang back from the wagon, from the mournful tones of the music. I wasn’t completely lost. I had some sense of what was going on around me.

  We fell into step behind the bier, and the others took their places behind us. My sisters embraced their wailing once again. I remained silent.

  Chapter 45

  Widow

  AFTER THE FUNERAL, Pip got ready to go back to New York. “I’ll take Caterina,” she informed me. “Ernesto and I have plenty of room.”

  “It’s better for you both,” chimed in Tilly, with Claudio watching tensely from the other side of the room, waiting, letting my sisters do the work of convincing me. Sharing the burden of their widowed sister and her children, that was what this carefully rehearsed scene, this artifice of concern and generosity, was all about.