Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  I had not been to Pip and Ernesto’s house in many years. They didn’t entertain the family. When they wanted to see us, they came to us with a box of Schrafft’s chocolates. I had forgotten the grandeur, the opulence and the heaviness that Pip had surrounded herself with. The wood was dark, the carpets a deep purple-red, the color of Chianti. The draperies were fringed, tied back with tassels the color of dulled gold. They hid the soot that filmed the outside of the windows. They cut off the light. Even in the middle of the day, she had to light the lamps.

  The furniture in Pip’s parlor reminded me of my mother’s rooms. No comfortable place to sit, the texture of the upholstery unyielding against one’s skin.

  Her coffee, served in the gold-rimmed bone china my mother had sent each of us years before, was still bitter. Her cake was store-bought.

  “There’s a wonderful pasticceria in the neighborhood,” she boasted, as if this made her life better than mine. She reminded me that I was still the poor, widowed sister who did her own baking.

  Caterina was dwarfed in her room. There was a pale rose-colored carpet, a white bed, a doll’s house that had the instantly recognizable stamp of my mother’s extravagance.

  How could I take her away from this, you ask? Back to a bed she would share with a stepsister, to a table with clamoring brothers and a father she didn’t know?

  How could I not?

  At first, for Salvatore and me, there was only our gratitude for each other. I rescued his children, who’d been fed at one table or another since their mother’s death. With the baby, who’d never known her own mother’s milk, never felt the warm breath of a mother’s caressing lips placed in a kiss at the nape of her neck, it was easy to scoop her up into my arms. Paolino was already moving away from my skirts, eager to follow his new brothers.

  I balanced Mariangela on my hip while I stirred the gravy. I dressed her in Caterina’s outgrown dresses. I blessed and pinned a medal of the Virgin Mary on her undershirt.

  With the boys, it was harder. Eight and twelve years old, they eyed me suspiciously when I entered their house as their papa’s bride. The little one, Patsy, had nightmares and crawled sobbing and terrorized into our bed every night. The older one, Nicky, ignored me. He shrugged off my good-night kisses, claiming he was too old for such things. It was all I could do to make a quick sign of the cross on his forehead at night before he turned away from me in his bed.

  Va bene, I thought. I saw that he had enough to eat, clean clothes. I walked him down the street every morning to the corner across from No. 10 School and made sure he went in. In the afternoons, he went to the blacksmith shop and helped his father. When he came home with dirty clothes and a smudged face, I didn’t yell.

  Salvatore had rescued me. From a life as a burden to my family, from a place in my brother’s household as little more than a maid, from my silence.

  This gratitude that we felt for each other held nothing of the passion that had sustained Paolo and me. But it sustained us nevertheless. To be touched again, however awkward and unaccustomed the calloused hands, to be protected within the walls of my own home, to be thanked, with eyes that took in his well-cared-for children and my growing belly, was enough.

  Chapter 52

  The Great War

  OVER THE NEXT YEAR we began to build a life together. Salvatore created a garden out of nothing in the back of the house—a vacant lot filled with debris. I sat out there in the spring, braiding Caterina’s hair, a brown glistening with the red-gold lights of her father’s. The baby, Giuseppina, slept in her carriage beneath the arbor that Salvatore had built to shelter the oilcloth-covered table that sat fourteen. Grapevines planted at the same time had begun their ascent up the posts supporting the roof of the arbor. The leaves formed a delicate curtain around the baby. Next to the shed at the end of the garden, Salvatore had planted a cherry tree, its white blossoms hiding the sheet-metal wall of the garage that backed up against our property. We were content.

  Our first challenge together came when the American president brought our new country into the Great War that had been raging across the ocean, and Nicky ran away.

  Salvatore had taken us all up to Waterbury to visit his cousin Archimedes. Nicky and Patsy were going to spend two weeks on the farm helping Archimedes with the haying, and we decided to bring the whole family for the ride and a visit with their cousins. We borrowed Claudio’s car and drove up the Post Road, the children all in the back, squabbling and restless. By the time we got to the farm, I was happy to have them run off to play in the barn, climb trees, even splash in the muddy pond. We all needed to be in the country. Salvatore and Archimedes took the boys to the river to fish, while Estella and I stayed in the house with the little ones and cooked.

  Down at the river, the men talked about the War. Archimedes’s younger brother Sebastiano had enlisted in a regiment from New Haven that was mostly Italian, soon to sail to the front and fight for their new country. I don’t know what they said, but it was the kind of talk a fourteen-year-old boy, lying on a rock in the sun, bored with his life and feeling encroached upon by his father’s growing new family, would listen to. What was it—uniforms, guns, the adventure of sailing across the ocean, of taking part in the Great War? Whatever he heard that day, Nicky took it in and absorbed it, chewing on the idea as if it were a wad of tobacco.

  When they all returned from the river for dinner, I noticed how quiet he was, not taking part in the children’s banter. For several months, he’d been pulling away, his boy’s body shedding the chrysalis of childhood. He’d already begun to shave, and he wanted nothing to do with little-boy games with make-believe swords and guns. Real guns, that was a different matter. But he kept his own counsel at dinner that day, not sharing his fascination with the conflict.

  There was no sign of anything amiss when we packed up the car at the end of the day and prepared to say goodbye. The boys, together with Archimedes’s sons, were going to sleep in the hayloft in the barn and had picked out their spots earlier. We said our goodbyes and headed back to New York.

  It was sometime during the night that Nicky left the barn, seized by the pull of the War and eager to be free of his father’s rule. The younger boys were asleep when he left, and when they woke up and found his corner empty, no one suspected that he’d run away. So he had several hours’ head start on his journey to New Haven before Archimedes realized he was gone. He walked many of those miles in the dark and must have hitched a ride with a passing truck as dawn broke.

  Archimedes had searched every inch of woods and field, every nook and cranny in the barn and sheds and house, before he sent word to Salvatore that Nicky was gone. Salvatore stopped everything, shut down the forge and took the train back to Connecticut to look for his son. He spent three days combing the countryside around the farm. Sleepless, unable to eat, he was both frantic and furious. He finally gave up and came home without his firstborn, a man upon whom tragedy had descended too many times.

  A month went by. Every weekend, Salvatore traveled to Waterbury and walked the streets, questioning people. Archimedes put the word out in the Italian community, hoping someone would have seen Nicky or fed him. It was his own brother, Sebastiano, who finally gave us an answer, in a letter he sent just before his unit sailed for France.

  He had come across a young enlistee in his machine gunners’ squadron, a boy he thought he recognized. Although the boy had tried to conceal his identity, he eventually admitted to Sebastiano that he was Nicky. Nicky begged him to keep his secret. He had lied about his age and somehow convinced the army that he was eighteen. Thank God, Sebastiano did the right thing and got word to us before it was too late.

  Salvatore went to the camp where the men had been training, Nicky’s birth certificate in hand. With Sebastiano’s help translating, he managed to get Nicky released from service.

  I don’t think Nicky ever forgave Salvatore for that, robbing him of the chance to be a soldier, a man. He came home sullen and angry. Despite the discipline of t
he army, the regimentation and orders, he had felt free for that one month. The prospect of going to war had been a promise of excitement, not a fear of the horror and destruction that were too far away for him to understand.

  For Nicky, the war had been accounts of Eddie Ricken-backer and Francesco Baracca, the Italian ace who shot down fifty-seven German planes. It was glory and ribbons, not vermin-infested trenches and mustard gas. Sebastiano did not come back. He was killed four months later, along with sixteen other men in the New Haven battalion, on a bitterly cold December day. Nicky didn’t grasp that he, too, might have died that day, or another, if Salvatore had let him stay.

  Nicky dropped out of school that fall, calling it a place for infants, not men. I thought it was a mistake, but kept my mouth shut. Salvatore’s family didn’t believe in education the way my mother had. Salvatore’s only concern was that Nicky not become a bum. He put him to work at the forge, taught him how to beat and shape metal, made him sweat and ache, and let him pound out his anger with a heavy mallet on hot iron.

  Chapter 53

  Dancing On Sunday Afternoon

  OVER TIME, SALVATORE and I experienced more than gratitude.

  Salvatore, with his reserve, his bashful admiration, never asked me what he truly wanted to know: Do you lie in our bed at night dreaming of this hand brushing against the beauty of your body? Do you long for me in ways you find indescribable, every centimeter of your skin crying out to be touched? Salvatore did not know that he had these questions, simmering beneath our everyday discussions of money and household and children. I did not know that, eventually, my answers would be “Yes.”

  I’d thought we would share a table in the noisy, crowded kitchen filled with our children and never feel that we were the only two people in the world, seeing and hearing only each other. I had thought I could watch him with his work-hardened hand around the cup of black coffee I made for him every night and not imagine that same hand taking shape around my breast. Or see him bring the cup to his lips and not expect to trace with my eyes and my heart every crack in that winter-chafed mouth, envisioning that mouth on my lips.

  I was mistaken.

  One Sunday afternoon about three years after we were married, Salvatore took out his accordion after we’d eaten dinner and I was cleaning up the kitchen. Until then, he’d let the instrument gather dust, only bringing it down to his club occasionally or taking it along in the summer when we visited Archimedes out in the country. I’d never said anything to him about not wanting to hear him play but, without asking, he had refrained from using the instrument in the house.

  But that Sunday, he went down to the cellar with an empty jug. I thought he was going to fill it with wine from one of the casks that lined the wall in the storeroom. He’d begun making wine from the grapes that grew over the arbor in the garden. But instead of coming back upstairs with a full jug, he carried the accordion, retrieved from its case under the stairs.

  I think he’d intended only to clean it, because he took it into the parlor with a rag and was wiping the keys when the girls, Caterina and Mariangela and even Giuseppina, began clapping their hands and begging him to play them a song. He ran his fingers quickly over the keys in a children’s tune and the girls bounced with delight.

  I put down my dishrag in the kitchen and stood in the doorway of the parlor, my arms folded across my breasts, listening and watching as he played and they jumped around the room. When they saw me, they screamed, “Mama, dance!”

  I looked across the room at Salvatore, who had stopped playing. He looked back, then put his head down and began to play “Starai con me.” Not a children’s song, but a love song. I stepped into the room and began to glide around my daughters. I raised my arms and coaxed the air with them, swaying my hips.

  Salvatore stood and walked across the room. I sensed the strain in his body as he approached me, every muscle poised, held back from an embrace by the tautest wire of will. The air between us became heated, churning, colliding with the unspoken.

  I continued to dance, not for the children, but for him.

  Chapter 54

  San Giuseppe Moscati at Night

  Cara Serafini Dedrick

  GIULIA HAD SPENT most of that Monday before her surgery recounting to me the hidden story of her love for my grandfather. Throughout the day, despite the interruptions of nurses and preparations for her operation the next morning, she had continued her outpouring, as if this were the only opportunity she’d have to make sure someone else knew what she’d kept in her heart for so long.

  I thought she’d be exhausted when evening came and her words ended, her hands making a final graceful gesture in the air, echoing the dancing that had captivated so many on those Sunday afternoons years before.

  But that night she couldn’t sleep. The hospital had slipped into dim light and muted sounds—the swish of Sister Annunziata’s rosary beads against her habit as she moved down the corridor, the click and hiss of respirators, the flicker of green lights casting waterlike reflections on the linoleum floors. Above these muted sounds and through the pale, unearthly light of her IV monitor, I could hear Giulia’s moaning and muttering and could see her arms, ghostly, flailing about the sheets.

  I sat up in my cot and put my bare feet on the floor. It was cool and smooth. I went to Giulia’s bedside. With her right hand she was attempting to pull the IV tube out of her arm. Her lips were parched and chapped.

  I placed one hand on her arm and stilled her frantic jerking. With my other hand, I pressed the bell for the nurse and waited for her to respond.

  “Are you in pain, Nana?”

  She tossed her head back and forth on the pillow, not in denial, but in a repetitive, ritualistic movement. She seemed not to be aware of me. Her eyes were closed and she was reciting some kind of litany.

  When Sister arrived, she assessed her condition and checked her chart.

  “Unfortunately, she’s had the maximum dose I can safely administer tonight. Perhaps you can sit up with her for a while to calm her and help her fall asleep. Let me know if she remains agitated. I don’t want to restrain her, but if she tries to pull out her IV again, I’ll need to restrict her movement.”

  I grabbed my sweater, put it on over my nightgown and then resumed my position at Giulia’s bedside. I began to stroke her arm to quiet her and keep her from reaching for the IV. I tried to listen to the words she was uttering. At first, it sounded like gibberish, or an incantation. I bent my head close to her lips and listened. Slowly, I began to recognize syllables and familiar Italian words.

  I started to repeat the sounds as I heard them, setting up an echo, a reverberation of whatever, whoever, she was calling down to help her.

  “Madre Mia, protect me. Form a ring around me to wall out evil. Cast off my pain.”

  Soon, I no longer had to imitate her, but could recite the words with her in unison. It was a kind of music, rising and falling in a rhythm. Pull me close to you. Throw off this suffering. Pull in. Cast off.

  Without intention, I lifted my hand to her forehead and with my thumb, blessed her with the sign of the cross. My fingers spread out to stroke her brow in a gentle massage. Some ancient memory informed my hand; it seemed to know what to do without my direction.

  I don’t know how long I sat with her, my voice joining hers and my fingertips smoothing her pale temple. But at some point I heard the quiet, steady breaths of sleep. Her arms were no longer rigid and agitated, but relaxed. Her mouth formed a smile, as if whatever images were forming in her dreams were bringing her joy.

  I fell asleep myself, in the chair. I was afraid to slip back into the cot for fear that she’d wake again and I wouldn’t hear her. But she slept through the rest of the night.

  In the early morning, just as a thin line of pink-hued light appeared at the window, I felt her stroking my hand.

  “Figlia mia,” she whispered and then brought my hand to her lips and kissed it. “Do you know what serafini means in Italian?”

 
“Yes, Nana. It means seraphim, the highest order of angels.”

  She leaned her head back on the pillow.

  “And you are my angel.”

  Chapter 55

  Life After Giulia

  GIULIA DIED A LITTLE more than a year later. Oh, her hip operation was a success, and she and I flew back to New York within two weeks of her surgery on a special Alitalia flight arranged by the American ambassador to the Vatican, a childhood friend of my cousin.

  She stayed with my parents at first, unable to navigate the stairs in her own home. Giulia approached her rehabilitation with the same steely drive that had kept her alive into her nineties. Every time I went to visit her, she had painstakingly made a little more progress toward walking on her own. She was determined to get back to her home.

  She and I did not mention the letters again. “They are for you,” she told me before we left Italy. “You alone. You are the only one who knows what to do with them.”

  By Christmas, Giulia was back in her own house, giving orders to all my aunts and my mother as they hustled around her kitchen on the morning of Christmas Eve, preparing the feast of the seven fishes for that evening. I had left Andrew and my kids at my brother’s house so that my sister-in-law Jeannie and I could help. But even though we were grown women, we were relegated to setting the table, Giulia pointing with her cane at the drawer where the embroidered linen tablecloths were kept or instructing us to polish the silver before we laid it on the table.

  It was the last Christmas Eve the whole family spent together, the last Christmas Eve Giulia was alive. I remember that night more vividly than her funeral, which, despite her long life, stunned us into an empty, hollow silence.