When the World Was Young

by Tony Romano

  When they sat down again, Angela Rosa wondered if she could adequately express any of this to her daughter. She looked to the hills and told her instead about Mussolini. Her class had been assigned an essay that was to be entitled “Believe, Obey, Fight,” and the winner would get to carry an effigy of Il Duce in a torchlight parade in his honor. Angela Rosa had seen the metal placard at the entrance of the school with the same three words stamped on it, and she’d seen the identical sign at the post office. But the words meant nothing to her. She asked Lupa, who understood fascism better than she ever would, to write the essay in her name. She won first prize, of course, and got to lead an entourage of local villagers and some Black Shirts from Naples around the school and to the main square. She’d felt phony and hapless the whole march, worried she’d be found out, this new child leader of the Fascist world.

  Angela Rosa’s father, Victoria’s grandfather, seemed worried, too. He frowned and scratched his chin when he read the essay. After the Black Shirts returned to the north, he tried to help her see through all the nationalistic chest-thumping. Mussolini may have improved some things now, he told her, but in the end he would ruin Italia with his brutal tactics. At the time, Angela Rosa didn’t understand most of what her father said, and she wanted to ease his worry, but she couldn’t tell him that Lupa had written the essay. Years later, when Agostino showed up looking for a wife, she finally understood her father’s concerns. And she understood why he was willing to let her go to another continent. They’d all seen too many young men and even women being torn from their families by the secret police. Her marriage to the Americano would be his daughter’s escape.

  Believe, Obey, Fight. Angela Rosa still didn’t understand entirely what those three words together meant. She didn’t understand the single-mindedness it required to live a life devoted to such a collective cause. She had a hard enough time worrying about her immediate family.

  There were other stories, of course, and Lupa joined in, too. But there was one Angela Rosa wouldn’t share. Even Lupa knew only sketchy details. The story reminded her of what it was like to be a girl and gave her hope that Victoria would turn out all right. When she could no longer stand her daughter’s obstinacy she remembered this story.

  Having won the writing contest in its inaugural year, Angela Rosa, wearing a black sash and waving a miniature Italian flag, became its celebratory masthead. The parade was all show to her, but she came to look forward each year to dressing up and preparing for the day’s events. In the parade’s fourth and last year, when she was seventeen, she met Giuseppe Conti, one of the Black Shirts from Naples. While all the other young men marched stoically as they’d been trained, Conti wiggled his eyebrows and stepped with a clownish hitch whenever he passed a group of children. Angela Rosa marched three columns ahead of him and wouldn’t have noticed any of this if it weren’t for the children’s giggling and their eager pointing. She widened the scope of her waving so she could turn and glance back at the source of all the amusement. Though he was several years her senior, when he saw her studying him, he stopped clowning immediately. She read remorse in his sheepish grin. If this was the girl who represented fascism in this hill country, he wasn’t about to fly in the face of that. The other uniformed men behind her were so regimented in their gazing that Angela Rosa realized that she and this young man with the bright eyes could privately exchange glances. She lifted her arm abruptly in a high wave to catch his attention and shot him a clownish look that at first astonished him then pleased him so much that he began to roll his eyes and stretch his grin for her entertainment.

  Milling around the sweet table later, Conti kept a respectful distance from her, but as he reached for a pastry he leaned into her and muttered wild things in her ear. What loveliness to lead a parade, he said. He had been in Rome, in Milan, throughout France, but had never witnessed such loveliness before. If they could disappear for an hour undetected he would take her on a picnic up in the hills and they would pick berries and find a stream where they could dip their feet—away from the parades and the Black Shirts and talk of Mussolini. He spoke this way, he said, because his patrol would depart within the hour, and because there was no other way to talk amid such beauty. Who was this Salvatore for whom they named the village? They should have named it after her. He spoke quickly and with such playful animation that she couldn’t object or take offense or even try to temper his praise with staged humility. All she could do was smile and try to contain her pulse.

  He left with the other men, of course, but said he’d meet her at one o’clock next Sunday afternoon a kilometer outside the village along the north road that led to the Appian Way. She never agreed to meet him—how could she respond so quickly—but when Sunday came she walked along the north road for twenty minutes until she finally felt so foolish that she simply stopped and sat down and waited without hope. The sun baked the back of her neck and the wind kicked up great swirls of dust all around her. After a while she began to make her way back, already resigned to never seeing again her impassioned suitor with the long lashes and straight nose. She didn’t get far. Behind her she heard the rumble of a truck and two friendly honks, and before she could fully turn around he was out of his little jeep and running to take her hand.

  They met nearly every Sunday for the rest of that summer, sometimes just driving, sometimes pulling off to a grassy field for an afternoon picnic. Most often they drove to a neighboring farmer’s shed where enormous tobacco leaves were strewn about for drying. They discovered that a pile of these leaves, though initially pungent, provided ample cushion for their heads. Conti seemed content with the limits she placed upon their touching, and she was happy just to be lying next to him. She didn’t allow herself to fall in love with him because she knew he’d be gone, and she couldn’t begin to imagine explaining this Black Shirt jester to her father. She couldn’t keep this promise to herself for long, though. She would have defied her father, she would have run away with him, but those urges, finally, only drove Conti away sooner than he would have left anyway.

  Sitting on the edge of a hard-backed chair, forcing down a few bites of breakfast, fried egg whites and some kind of steak, Victoria stared at the brass hands of the alarm clock on the fireplace mantel. When she’d gotten up twenty minutes ago, she wound the clock as tightly as it would go, and she now imagined the little windup tab on the back loosening with each tick. The loosening wasn’t something she could see, but she could feel it. She could hear it.

  She spent most of her days now calculating Chicago time, subtracting six hours and imagining the intensity of the Midwest sun or the brightness of the moon illuminating the streets so familiar to her. The things she longed for sometimes surprised her—the sight of a mailman, cracks in the sidewalk, the scent of newspaper ink on her fingers, pushing clothes through the ringer washer in the basement, the sound of coins jingling in her father’s pockets, his Brylcreem scent. These things would flash before her without warning and she’d have to stop and catch her breath, and for those few moments she could block out the faint but persistent scent of salami and mortadella that seemed to have permeated the farmhouse walls. That smell she could bear, but there was another odor, too, that she couldn’t quite place when she first arrived, a stench from the cellar, where, she later learned, butchered meat once hung from iron hooks. She ventured down there once, the bloodstained hooks still hanging from the ceiling, and had to turn and race outside, where she let loose her breakfast in the frozen field.

  She pushed her eggs away and glanced at the clock again without realizing she was doing so. She counted back to when she’d last seen Richie, around Christmastime, and then counted back further to September, five months and four days ago, an ordinary Tuesday evening. She’d been walking around after dinner, hoping she would run into Willie, that maybe he’d have some news about his brother back at school. Richie had been gone nearly three weeks, and her heart still fluttered when she thought about him. But she hadn’t gotten any word from him, no
t even a postcard. After walking around aimlessly for a while, she began to make her way to Darlene’s, and she remembered now the sense of clarity that overcame her about this minor certainty. Knowing where she was going, she began to move more deliberately, as if she were gliding across a slick sheet of ice. And that’s when she saw him, felt his car creeping up alongside her. His aunt’s car actually. He was still driving his aunt’s boat of a car, the copper-colored DeSoto. He nodded his crooked nod and leaned into the passenger seat and called through his far window.

  “Hey, good lookin’,” he said.

  “Hey, Eddie.”

  She kept walking, and the car inched alongside her, a slow creep.

  “Need a lift?”

  “Not really. I’m just going to Darlene’s.”

  “Need a smoke?”

  She knew he could be persistent, and Darlene wasn’t expecting her this early, and she could use a cigarette. She could really use a cigarette. Getting cigarettes most nights was a game for Vicki and Darlene, the two of them taking turns guessing where the night’s cigarettes would come from. Lately the game was getting old, though, and Vicki was tired of the scheming, and here it was, a cigarette right in front of her, an easy invitation. So she nodded and went to his car and pulled open the heavy door, listening to the deep click of the latch as she pulled the door shut behind her. She took the cigarette from Eddie’s extended hand and let him light it with his chrome lighter, the butane flame licking the air blue. Suddenly the lighter was closed and tucked away in his pocket, but she couldn’t remember the precise movements that made this happen. In one moment the flame danced before her eyes and in another the flame was gone with a thumb click.

  His arm rested along the top of the seat, his body leaning toward the middle. He looked her full in the face with his blue eyes, nearly the color of the flame, she thought. And that smile. She remembered licking the corners of his mouth, one side and then another, the warm taste of his lips.

  “I don’t see you around much anymore,” he said.

  “Yeah. My mom got me a job at Zenith. Secretary stuff.”

  After a few deep puffs, she already felt more relaxed. She watched his foot ease off the brake, and they began to move.

  “You can drop me off by Darlene’s,” she told him.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

  They both blew smoke out their windows, Victoria grateful for the cigarette, grateful for the ride, glad that Eddie was being so agreeable. She watched the houses glide by her window and heard the whining of tires under the car. Then, without warning, Eddie’s hand reached for hers, his fingers lacing around her fingers.

  “Remember this?” he said. “Holding hands, cruising? Seems like a long time ago, huh? Whatever happened?”

  She could have taken her hand away, but he got her thinking about their cruising, and for a few minutes she was back there again, more naive maybe but still in charge, even then. She remembered the thrill she felt when she discovered the power she could have over men by letting them take her hand or smell her hair, small gestures that turned them into boys. She decided to let Eddie hold her hand for a while and have something to talk about when she got to Darlene’s.

  “I don’t know what happened with us,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Your asshole brother didn’t help.”

  “That’s his job, I guess.”

  “What? To be an asshole?”

  “Yeah. I guess so. In a way.” Santo hadn’t bothered her about Richie, and she’d been feeling generous toward him lately. “He means well,” she added.

  Eddie took his hand away and rested it loosely along the top of the steering wheel. He stayed leaning toward the middle of the seat. “Yeah, he meant well when he slugged me in the face. He meant well all right.”

  “I shouldn’t have gone there that night. Or I should have left when I saw him at the club.”

  “Oh, so it’s your fault I got slugged?”

  She gave him her best pout. “Poor Eddie.”

  “Exactly. Poor Eddie. So how’re you going to make it up to me, Vicki?”

  She knew this was a line, a rock-solid Eddie bullshit line that he knew wouldn’t get him in trouble with her. She wouldn’t ask him to stop the car so she could storm out. But she might, she just might come back with her own line. He was exploring possibilities, Eddie possibilities. And though she realized all this, though she heard the hollowness of his exactly—whatever you want, she still felt a faint stirring somewhere within her that she couldn’t ignore. Here was the man or the boy she’d been most intimate with in her short life, an arm’s length away, the smell of night descending upon them, his cologne scent making her feel light-headed, and here she was aching to hold someone—there would never be enough touching in this life—with little chance of ever hearing again from the one she really wanted to hold. A sense of unfairness gripped her for an instant, but she was used to that by now. She expected unfairness. No surprises there. She refused to hold on to that, though. Not this time. She wouldn’t gripe. She wouldn’t let her true desires interfere with the heat rising inside of her. She felt light. She felt a restlessness in her legs.

  “So?” he said.

  A low laugh rumbled from the back of her throat. A devious little chuckle.

  “You’re bad,” she teased.

  “Who? Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “What did I say?”

  “It’s what you didn’t say.”

  “You see. I didn’t say anything.”

  They went back and forth like this, both of them waiting for the night to envelop them more fully so they could park and follow through on what they knew would happen now. She didn’t recall the driving to the woods or the parking or how they got in the backseat, but she remembered the trembling and the warmth she felt on her upper lip beforehand. She remembered the anxious tugging of clothes. This time she pushed him below her, determined to take her time, riding him slowly, building up to what she wanted until she let herself go in final hungry thrusts and desperate gasps. She felt primitive and powerful all at once.

  Two days later she got Richie’s letter, the Wisconsin postmark emblazoned across the top, mocking her. In the letter he offered a sweet apology for not writing sooner, light but direct. He said he’d been thinking about her a lot and that he missed her more than she could imagine, and he told her when he’d be home. He said they could walk to Jimmy’s and have a beef and fries and that he really did miss the fries but not as much as the company.

  She hadn’t promised him anything when he left but believed now with the letter in her hand that she’d betrayed him in the worst way. She could have waited, she told Father Ernie in the confessional later that week. She spent fifteen minutes in there one morning asking her priest friend if there was any difference between two times and three times in the backseat. Was the third time worse for some reason?

  “I won’t condone any of this. You have to know that,” he said. “I’m not going to attribute different values to different sins.”

  “Don’t pull that on me now. Isn’t that what you do? Three Hail Marys versus five Our Fathers. Isn’t there some chart you use?”

  “I would have you consider this. Did you believe you loved the boy each time?”

  She felt Father Ernie’s warm breath float across the dark curtain now.

  “That’s the big question, isn’t it, Father? How can I answer that? How am I supposed to know about love?”

  “Given that, maybe you should have waited. But you’ve already said that.”

  His words always sounded more priestlike in the confessional. She should have tried to catch him outside.

  “Yes, I did say that,” she said. “And I could have. I could have waited. Don’t you think I know that? What’s worse…” Her voice broke as she knew it would, just as it did when she explained everything to Darlene.

  “What’s worse?” he whispered.

  “I didn’t love him. I
guess I know that. It was a selfish thing.” She wrung her hands together. “What’s worse, though…is that, at the time, I cared for someone else.”

  “I see,” he said gravely.

  “You must think—”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  She heard the strain in his voice, the measured restraint, and this restraint was her reprimand. She wiped her eyes.