When the World Was Young

by Tony Romano

  “Hi,” she said.

  She seemed more puzzled than pleased, her usual state, and a surge of panic flashed through him. Her kind remarks earlier, he feared, had been a momentary lapse, a fluke, and he felt his confidence already slipping. Besides, he had to get back to the store—the last thing he needed was his father snooping into his affairs. Papa was generally passive, but he’d erupt over this craziness. And Santo couldn’t blame him. His persistence here was beyond comprehension.

  He blurted out what he’d rehearsed, and as the words left his lips he regretted them instantly. “I thought I’d cash in,” he said.

  She retreated a step.

  No, he thought. His thoughts hurtled back to the first time they met, how he had to convince her he wasn’t a stalker. Now here he was, back on his heels again. He pushed himself away from the pole. “Five minutes,” he said quickly. “You said, ‘I owe you five minutes,’ and I thought I’d cash in. On the five minutes.”

  She looked to the parking lot.

  “Well, I don’t have my uncle’s car, but I thought—”

  “You thought you’d cash in today while she’s in a good mood, huh?”

  Cash in dripped off her tongue like hot tar.

  “I didn’t mean to make it sound like that.” He wanted to move toward her but inched back.

  And then he saw it. The resignation. The scowl. And he understood that look. He saw behind the scowl. All her life she’d been the dutiful daughter, bitter in her role but isolated in her bitterness. The more she did, the less she was appreciated, so she cooked and cleaned and obeyed out of spite. The one time she ventured out to please herself ended in trouble, not the ordinary trouble that could be swiftly brushed away, but trouble of a magnitude that convinced her that nothing good would ever come to her. Others would get their fill while Ella suffered quietly. And while her son, conceived in shame, would offer joy, a brief respite from the harshness of her life, he was also a burden, a reminder of her shame, another reason to barricade outsiders from her world like Santo, especially Santo. When the years passed and her son finally left, not able to properly express the gratitude Ella deserved, she wouldn’t be surprised. Just like she wouldn’t be surprised if Santo marched away from her at this very moment with barely a nod. That’s what she expected. Maybe that’s what she wanted, for him to turn away before he could cash in as everyone else in her life had done and would do.

  She looked off down the block and muttered to herself. “He didn’t mean to make it sound like that, he tells me…” Then she turned and took a step toward him. “So tell me, how was it supposed to sound?”

  “Innocent, I guess.”

  “We’re way past that, I’d say.”

  “I guess I thought—”

  “What is it you want from me?”

  “I’m not sure. A chance maybe.”

  “A chance for what?”

  He needed to be careful here. “I guess I’d like a chance to be disliked for my own stupidity.”

  Her stern glare told him he was succeeding.

  He looked at his hands and said, “I know we haven’t gotten off to the best start. But I would’ve put money down that you wanted me to come back today.”

  “Does everything with you have to do with money?”

  He suddenly remembered the bank receipt in Uncle Vince’s strongbox and the talk about cashing in and he felt stupid all over again. Maybe he did deserve her disdain. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m nervous, I guess. And I guess I misread you by a mile in the store. The fumes from the dog food maybe…threw me off. Anyway. What did you mean when you said you owed me five minutes?”

  She loosened her grip on her smock and draped it over her arm.

  “What you thought,” she said.

  He considered this. “What I thought. What I thought…But?”

  “But I changed my mind. I talked myself out of it. What good are five minutes? What possible difference could five minutes make? And then you come along wanting to cash in.”

  “I don’t want to cash in. Really. I don’t. Forget that. Please. I just want to talk.”

  She moved toward the bus stop. “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay?”

  “We’ll talk.”

  “Well. Good. We’ll talk.”

  He walked with her toward the bus stop, lagging a step behind, shuffling quietly. He craned his neck, looking for a bus, hoping for a little time, not sure whether he would hop on with her when the bus arrived.

  “How’s your son?” he asked.

  “He’s good. He’s really good. I don’t know what I’d do…” She pulled a stick of spearmint gum from the hip pocket of her smock, placed the gum on her tongue, then pushed the crushed foil wrapper back in the pocket. “He makes us laugh.”

  “Us?” He pictured her with another man, a stab of worry gripping his chest.

  “Me and Mama.” Ella told him about her father passing away nearly two years ago, how her father would never see his grandson. Which may have been fortunate. Since learning about Joey would have pained him. “I don’t think I could have faced him,” she said. She peered down the street, searching for a bus as she talked. “Anyway, now it’s just me and Mama and Joey in that small house. That’s why I started working. To get out.”

  “I know what it’s like to be cooped up like that. Nowhere to turn to.” He looked at his sneakers. “You and your mother get along okay?”

  “About as good as you might expect. I’m still an embarrassment to her, I think, with her friends. When they’re over for their coffee cake she’ll fuss over her grandson and show him off, but he’s always her grandson, never my son. I’m nothing when they’re over. I’m the dirty stain on the carpet that no one looks at.” She tried to make a bubble with her gum, but it wasn’t the right kind for that. “So yeah, me and Mama get along swell. Everything’s A-OK. Couldn’t be better. Every day’s like a vacation on the Riviera.”

  They didn’t say anything for a while.

  “And how is your family?” she asked. “How are you all getting along?”

  They were two people waiting for a bus, discussing their lives. A surge of relief and something like elation coursed through Santo, followed almost immediately by a flurry of concerns that dampened his excitement. Was she really asking about his father? Did she have feelings for him still? Had she softened toward Santo in order to become closer to Agostino? Or did she want her own money now? The mother moves in for $10,000 and then the daughter…She had started working. She could use the money. Who couldn’t? Who wouldn’t take an easy ten grand if it were laid out on a platter? She’d earned it, deserved it. Uncle Vince had always warned Santo about owning a business and the vultures who circled for their cut. After all, Santo didn’t know anything about Ella. He knew her wary eyes. He knew she could be shrewd. He knew she was the only child—more importantly—the only daughter of a first-generation European couple who would manage her life and breed the contempt required to give rise to thoughts of extortion. Beyond that, he knew nothing.

  “Why do you ask?” he said.

  “It’s not a trick question,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “I meant, how are they dealing with, you know, your brother’s passing?”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t have to—if you’d rather not.”

  “No no. It’s okay.” He thought about this for a few moments. “Everyone walks around it, I guess. I’m hoping this year will be better. We got through the first year, and that was tough, the first Thanksgiving without him, the first Christmas. He was only a baby, but it’s hard to remember how we celebrated before him. I’m thinking this second year will be better.”

  He wanted to add that his father was particularly haggard. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he wanted to hear regret pouring from her lips. He’d seen her anger, her mistrust and bitterness, but never any trace of regret over her little affair with his father. Not that she’d caused his father’s sorry state. Santo didn’t want that on
her shoulders. He just wanted her to realize she’d gotten involved with an old man, his father. In some sense, Ella had betrayed Santo, too, his entire family. He wanted to hear regret over that. Santo had long ago resolved his bitterness toward his father’s repeated betrayal to the family, mainly because he felt powerless to feel otherwise, but with Ella, Santo held out hope for raw, anguished regret.

  She looked off toward the ash trees reaching across Ohio Street and shook her head.

  “What,” he said.

  “I just had a crazy thought.”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking…about Joey. And how he sort of saved us after my father was gone. He gave us something to laugh about. We hadn’t laughed in that house for so long. And I was thinking that it’s too bad you don’t have—this is crazy—that it’s too bad you don’t have another baby in the house. I don’t mean to replace your brother. But to give you someone to care for. It’s a crazy thought, I know.”

  She hugged her smock nervously.

  “That is hard to imagine,” he said.

  Three or four blocks away, a bus finally emerged.

  “So Joey saved you?” he said.

  She reached for the purse slung over her shoulder and unsnapped the pocket inside and retrieved two coins. “Maybe saved isn’t the right word. I don’t know. Maybe it is. I guess maybe he did.”

  The bus was moving now, looming larger, its giant headlights carving a path in the dusk.

  “So without him…” he said. He dug into his pocket for a dime but didn’t have any change. “Do you ever, you know, regret—”

  “Every day,” she said. “Not a single day goes by—but then I look at Joey, my little boy, and feel this shame that’s so black my insides hurt. How can I think about regret? I wonder. When I feel like that I usually go over and hug him and pretend and forget about what I’ve done with my life, but the regret always comes back. Like one of those jackhammers that rip up the sidewalk.”

  The bus clanked to a stop in front of them. It was one of the newer, more streamlined buses that didn’t run on a trolley line. The double doors hissed open, and the driver gazed down on them, two more passengers on a slow Wednesday evening in September. Ella looked at Santo, and her eyes asked, What do we do now? With a slight nod, he motioned for her to step on, then followed her up the three short stairs, knowing he had no dime to drop into the driver’s open palm and that he’d be late getting back to Mio Fratello, but none of that mattered much to him right now. If he could whistle, he thought, that’s what he would do. He’d whistle and let the airy tune guide them through the narrow aisle to their seats at the back of the bus, apart from the others. He’d whistle, and the others would pull in their bags to let them pass. But he couldn’t whistle and Ella had to lend him a dime and they sat up front near two chattering old women who looked at them disapprovingly, the smell of dog food and stale liquor from their work rising up between them. They both stared at the back of the driver’s head. The bus chugged along, Santo and Ella rocking quietly to the rhythmic jostling of the bus, surrendering to its sway and pull.

  7

  Angela Rosa gazed out at the tall stand of cypress trees lining the base of the Apennine hills and wondered how she could have forgotten this remarkable view. She’d been gone twenty years, of course, and the trees may have been mere saplings then, but even the hills themselves, ice-capped and cobalt blue at their peaks, ridged and runneled from centuries of rain and snow, seemed more magnificent than she remembered. How could she have forgotten? And how could she ever return to Chicago?

  Though it was February and cold, she walked each day to this spot before the hills just beyond her family’s fields so she could escape the stale air of the old farmhouse where she, Lupa, and Victoria would reside for the rest of the winter and spring. The farmhouse, rough-hewn stone walls and mortar, had been abandoned by Angela Rosa’s family shortly after her father died some ten years ago. Her mother couldn’t keep up with the farming, so she sublet the land to a neighbor and moved the two kilometers to San Salvatore. The village was nothing more than sixty or seventy squat houses along three winding roads that all led to a cobblestoned square of storefronts—a food market, two bars, a seam-stress, a barber, and a tiny post office with a telegraph. Angela Rosa’s mother invited the three of them, the three Americans, to stay with them in the village, where they at least had electricity if not indoor plumbing. But Angela Rosa insisted on the rustic farmhouse. She told her mother there was no room in the house in the village, what with Angela Rosa’s widowed aunt and her kids living there. Besides, she wanted to teach Victoria about hardship, real hardship. She wanted to knock out all the American nonsense that filled her head. Victoria’s time in Italia would be hard, Angela Rosa said. Only then would Victoria realize how good she had it on Superior Street in America, and only then would she learn to obey.

  At the farmhouse, they had a fireplace, cooking supplies, candles, basins for water, and a deep well. Only Lupa complained about the conditions, as if she’d forgotten where she came from. She agreed that Victoria needed to be taught some lessons, but why must Lupa sacrifice, too? Why should Victoria’s wildness translate into Lupa’s punishment? she argued. Angela Rosa invited her sister to leave. She didn’t have to come along, Angela Rosa reminded her. Only two tickets had been bought—originally intended for Angela Rosa and Agostino—with Lupa’s airfare added at the last minute at her own insistence. No one had shoved a ticket in her face. Lupa would always back down, of course, because her sister was right, but she couldn’t hide the fury building inside her. She would pace the four rooms of the farmhouse muttering to herself, cursing one thing after another.

  Victoria largely ignored her aunt’s ranting and remained, in Angela Rosa’s eyes, remarkably calm. Maybe their trip was already doing some good, she thought. Victoria padded around each room mostly silent, either tired or repentant, Angela Rosa couldn’t tell which, completing chores that hadn’t yet been doled out to her. Having seen her mother’s village and the square and the clapboard schoolhouse, the only clapboard building in the entire village, Victoria even had questions about her mother’s childhood.

  Sometimes, with the day’s chores done and with bread baking in the fireplace, the three of them would sit before the flames and forget their squabbles, an air of domesticity descending upon the room unexpectedly, as if the three of them had always occupied this space. Angela Rosa would lean back then, aware of her contentment, and recount the stories of her youth to her daughter.

  In Italian she told Victoria about the old schoolhouse, not the clapboard one built after the war but the solid two-room fortress of a stone building that housed all the grades. She’d only completed seven grades because she had to help around the farm, feeding chickens, shelling peas, small chores that, if not backbreaking, made her bone weary by the end of the day. When she was in sixth grade, her teacher, Mrs. Alligretti, would lead Angela Rosa to her home at lunchtime and make her sweep and scrub the floors, threatening her with a failing grade if she ever told anyone. She didn’t fail. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed, counting the minutes until the lunch hour ended so she could get back to school and push down a few bites of the sandwich her mother had prepared for her.

  Angela Rosa looked at her daughter. She hadn’t intended to convey some lesson or evoke the pity she saw in Victoria’s eyes; she was simply telling stories, the only ones she knew. In their kitchen on Superior Street, such stories elicited blank stares, even anger if they were followed by moral directives. But here in her native land, the tales resonated. Victoria shook her head and rubbed the side of her face, and in that moment Angela Rosa saw how her daughter would look in five or ten years. For the first time, she saw her daughter as a woman.

  Victoria turned to her and asked about coming to America, how she came to adjust.

  Those first few months, she said, were burned in her memory. Lupa nodded but didn’t interrupt. She didn’t know the language, she didn’t know how to act,
she didn’t even know her husband. She walked around like a shell, afraid to let anyone see how afraid she was. She’d stand before the mirror each morning practicing a big American smile to face the world, but that kind of smiling didn’t come easy to her, so she lowered her head and kept to herself. Thank God for Lupa, who stayed with them that first month. She did like how Americans always moved, not slowing even at midday. This she could do. Work was not foreign to her. She walked twenty minutes each day to the Zenith plant because she worried about getting on the wrong bus. Everyone there spoke Spanish or Italian, which was reassuring, but where would she learn English? She retreated further into work, putting in overtime—she enjoyed the piecework—then washing and painting the apartment on weekends. “It feels like I’ve never stopped.”

  She and Lupa took turns removing the bread from the fireplace, lightly fanning the blue embers. Reaching for the pan, her face flush from the heat, Angela Rosa wondered how she could miss those hard days, struggling to please her husband, learning a new job, fending off yearnings for home. Agostino did his utmost to please, courting her, reassuring her with his questions about what she wanted. In bed his touch was tender and patient, though she would have been content to lie next to him. She knew she couldn’t refuse him, though, and learned how to please him, Agostino making efforts to learn the same about her. But then he’d fall fast asleep, and she’d be alone again.

  She began waking earlier, at first because she was restless, but then because she wanted to stop at St. Columbkille before work to light a novena candle and sit in solitude. There were other women, but their eyes were downcast and their mouths solemn. One morning when she forgot her rosary, she prayed directly to Jesus and Mary, crafting her own prayer, pleading for strength. Why such a simple gesture would mark for her the bedrock of her faith, she couldn’t say. Maybe she was fatigued and prone to seek meaning in any misstep. Maybe the other women, curled around their rosaries and scapulars, inspired devotion. Maybe her loneliness had become unbearable. Or maybe, and she was most inclined to believe this notion, the light pouring in that morning from the high windows fell so softly upon the oak pews, illuminating the rich grain and honey brown, that she had to believe in God. A shaft of light held motes of dust that went ordinarily unseen. She’d seen such a constellation of light and dust before, she’d learned rudimentary science in school, she knew that things unseen do exist, but the enormity of that possibility hit her like revelation. The next day she remembered her rosary and prayed the beads, but the words seemed less rote. She came to recognize the beauty in repetition, in ritual. She came to believe that religion was nothing more than that, an acknowledgment of all the beauty in the world. Which is why mass sustained her. The slow flurry of ritual—the purple vestments during Advent, the raising of the chalice, the incense shaken from gold canisters, the ointment pressed onto foreheads on Ash Wednesday, the, solemn chanting during Holy Week, the genuflecting, the kneeling, the crossing, the dipping of fingertips into holy water—all this was proof of God to her. She wondered if these ideas had been unwittingly passed on to her through her grandfather, who in winter, when he couldn’t plant or plow, painted landscapes of fertile fields on stone walls. Maybe her staunch faith, her rapture with beauty, was merely an expression of love and longing for her grandfather, whom she would never see again. When Benito passed, she suffered doubt about all this, of course. How could God take such beauty from her? And she refused to see light anywhere. But to refuse God like that meant abandoning her son as well. Battered, she forced herself back to church, losing herself in ritual. Nothing else could comfort her.