by Chris Cander
May 10, 1927
The scent of tomato sauce clung to everything: the wallpaper, the crocheted doilies on the arms of the couch, their clothes in the narrow closets, even the weekly that his mother kept on the coffee table in spite of the fact she couldn’t read a word of it. To John, tomato sauce was equally the smell of comfort and the smell of conflict.
“What are you thinking, I want to know?” said Ciro Esposito, shaking the opened envelope and its contents with his one hand. His chest barreled beneath his thin undershirt, the tempest-tossed gray hairs poking out. “What’s this ‘Carnegie Mellon’?” He said the name as if it was something not only foreign but felonious, or, at the very least, not to be trusted. Squinting at the header address on the letter, he held it out at arm’s length so he could read it. “Carnegie. Institute. Of. Technology.” His English halted along with his aging eyesight. “Pittsburgh!” he bellowed, and shook the handful of paperwork at his son John as if he were strangling a chicken.
John stared at the old rug on the living room floor, heard his father’s voice boom with disappointment, smelled the sauce coming from the kitchen, the clothes, the wallpaper. “So?” he said, slumping his two strong shoulders, which diminished him by two or three inches and about ten years.
“What are you meaning, ‘So’?” His father took a step closer. Even though he was fully half a head shorter, with only a stump dangling from his left shoulder socket, in his mind — in his house — Ciro was Hercules.
John turned his face slightly away, as though from a slap. “I wanted to see if they would take me,” he almost whispered.
“Take you? Take you! For what? What you going to do at this Carnegie Mellon, huh?”
“Structural engineering,” John said. “Or architecture. I’m not sure yet.”
“Che l’inferno? Engineering? What, you want to drive the coal train?”
“No. Of course not.” John chuffed once through his nose, that unmistakable measure of contempt he’d learned from his father. “I want to design buildings. Tall buildings.” Then his enthusiasm strained against the tension and he couldn’t help but lift his eyes to meet his father’s. “Skyscrapers,” he said, and smiled.
He hadn’t even seen one. Until three months ago, when the Verra Bears were on their way home from a town close to the border of Pennsylvania, he hadn’t even known they existed. Some passenger on the train had left behind a copy of American Living magazine, and John was struck by the cover drawing of the Fuller Building in New York City stretching in triangular majesty toward the heavens. It was a giant among its neighbors, and John wondered who could even think up such a thing. Then he read the title — America’s Greatest Contribution to World Architecture, the SKYSCRAPER! — and spent the rest of the train ride reading about these magnificent structures and the men who designed and erected them. Architects and technical specialists and structural engineers. He imagined himself as one of them, weaving foundations and frames with threads of steel, bearing the burden of responsibility for stability and permanence and human safety. The article said that with no reasonable limit to the height of the steel frame building, skyscrapers a mile high were within the realm of possibility. A mile high! He leaned his head against the window and considered it. His very own Trist Mountain wasn’t a mile high, even if one counted from the peak down into the black depths from which his father mined a modest living. Oh, how much nicer it would be to work above ground, building structures that scraped the sky, than to toil underground like an ant, like a mole, only to come back up one-armed and mean.
“Di che lei parla, eh?” his father said. His face grew red, from anger or embarrassment John couldn’t tell. But he knew his father didn’t know what a skyscraper was. Ciro set his mouth and shook his head, darting his eyes across the far wall as though searching for words. Finally, Ciro walked over to his chair and dropped into it, the Carnegie Mellon paperwork crushed in his hand. “Giovanni, you wanted to go have big dreams, you should’ve stayed pitching baseball.”
“I got hurt, Papa.” It was a fact, but he couldn’t help but plead.
“You seem good to me.”
“I can’t throw anymore. Not without hurting.”
“Life is hurting, Giovanni. You think I don’t know about hurting?” Ciro raised his voice and lifted what was left of his arm, and John looked down. “I want I could throw a baseball,” his father said. “Just one more time.”
John had pitched a no-hitter right after he’d read the article on the train, throwing slider after slider that hooked sharp outside the strike zone and confused the batters every time. But in the bottom of the eighth, he felt something snap. He dropped his glove and grabbed his pitching shoulder. Even as the pain shot through like lightning he thought, Maybe I won’t have to do this anymore.
“I want to go to college,” John said to the floor.
“How you going to pay for some fancy college, I want to know? You think your papa going to pay? I can’t pay.”
John couldn’t look at his father, so he looked at the couch. At the doilies his mother had crocheted to cover the threadbare armrests, the uneven wear on the cushions. The couch had belonged to the family who lived in the company house before them; they’d never had the money to replace it with something nicer.
“That University of Kentucky offered to pay if you came to play baseball. But not this Carnegie Mellon. If you not gonna swing a bat, then you swing an ax like your papa.”
“It’s too late. My arm is bad now. They wouldn’t give a scholarship to someone with a bad arm.”
“When you finish with high school in a couple weeks, then you come down with me.” Ciro slapped down the letter and the envelope with its fine, embossed Pittsburgh address. “Your arm gonna be fine by then.”
Later that day John’s mother, Lia, knocked softly on his bedroom door. It was their private signal: two knocks followed by three followed by two. John jumped off his small bed, still made, to answer. There she stood, holding a plate of biscotti and a cup of tea, a tender half smile on her face. Under her arm was tucked the Carnegie Mellon catalog. John took the offering and stepped aside to allow her passage. She closed the door behind her and sat down on his bed.
“Giovanni.”
John shrugged. He set down the plate and cup and dropped onto his brother’s bed, empty because he was out on a date.
“Amore, I sorry your father so hard like this on you. He loves you. You know it?”
John nodded.
“I love you. You know it?”
He nodded again.
“I save your drawings, you know it? All of them.” Her eyes lit, as though from a memory or a dream. “You always such good painter, since you were little boy. Always making pictures of something! Your buildings drawings, oh I love them. How you think of such things, Giovanni?” She clasped her hands together and sighed. “Some kind of artist.”
“That’s what I want to do, Mama,” he said. “I want to design buildings.”
“But what about a family, eh? You don’t want to go so far away now, you thinking about a family soon.”
“No, Mama, I’m not. Not yet.”
“But what about that nice girl you seeing now? Beatrice? No, no. Lucinda, yes?” She tapped her forehead with two fingers. “I keep them … come lei dice … confused.”
John raised an eyebrow. “So do I.”
Lia turned her head and smiled. John knew she didn’t understand, and so he explained it: “All the girls are alike, Mama. They don’t do anything. They don’t yearn for anything. Beatrice and Lucinda and Dot and Patricia — they all want the same thing: marriage and babies.”
“So what’s a matter with babies?”
“Niente, Mama. I want a family, too. But not yet. Not yet,” he said. He reached out for a biscotti and took a bite. “When I’m ready,” he said between bites, “I can find a girl. An interesting girl. A smart girl.” He shrugged. “Then I’ll have a baby.”
“Long as she good Catholic girl. Italian girl.” Lia
thought for a moment, then smiled. “So maybe not Italian girl. It no matter to me. Long as she good Catholic girl, like your mama.” She let her gaze drift past him to the window and — by the look on her soft, round face — through it, beyond the other houses and over Trist Mountain and across the Atlantic, and backward through the years to a country that had once been her home.
After a few quiet moments, she sailed back and landed again in the only other home she’d ever had, and smiled at him. “Giovanni, do you really want to study this … structure … engineer …”
“Structural engineering.”
“Even the name is hard!” She laughed quietly. “Maybe it would be better to stay home, eh? Why go so far away where you don’t know anybody? And for what, eh? Structure engineer seem like very hard job. Very complicated. Must be, studying for such hard job be very hard, too.”
John hadn’t thought much about whether it would be difficult or not. It didn’t matter; he’d always done well in school. Maybe he wasn’t the smartest student in his class, but he never struggled. Anything artistic came naturally.
When he was very young, he wanted to be a painter, but his father said that only girls wasted time on art. He’d hoped his father would think structural engineering a masculine compromise.
His mother raised her eyebrows. “It would be too hard for me for sure. I’m good for cooking, but not so good for school. When I was girl, I wanted to be teacher so much! I used to make my brothers and sisters sit down in the ground like it was school and I was teacher, told them so many things!” She glanced out the window again. “But I couldn’t learn to read. All the letters, so complicated. So I stay home and help my mama with cooking and then I meet your papa and we come here.” She smiled and shrugged. “I never could be teacher, but still my life is good. I have your papa, and my children.”
Soon she was gone, and John sat back down on his narrow bed. He picked up the Carnegie Mellon catalog. There were dark gray smudges on the cover, prints from his father’s coal-stained fingers. Everything his father touched turned dark; he never could get all the coal off his hand without the other one to scrub it. And there in the corner was a red splotch of tomato sauce. There were tiny blots of red all over their house. His mother often carried a spoonful of it out into the living room for his father to taste — more basil, not so much sugar — or else it dripped off the splatters that covered her aprons. It was as if she was always bleeding, one tomato-red drop at a time.
He flipped open the catalog and looked at the pictures of the buildings, so sturdy and proud. It brought his mind back to the Fuller and the Woolworth, those woven pillars of steel that looked as if they could punch holes in the heavens. He’d read about plans for two more skyscrapers in New York City that would become the tallest in the entire world, possibly even taller than Trist Mountain. John closed the catalog with a sigh, lay back, and closed his eyes. He could hear the low voices of his parents speaking in their mother tongue: his mother, who was not a teacher because she couldn’t read, and his father, who would never play baseball because he was missing an arm. They lacked abilities, both of them, but they were brave. He felt as if it was the opposite for him.
He slowly sat up. Looked at the cover of the catalog once more. Then he rolled it up like a set of blueprints and dropped it in the trash.
April 17, 1928
By the time she got home from school, all three of Alta’s brothers and her father were at work. She finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes that had been left undone so she wouldn’t be late, harvested some vegetables from their garden, and chopped up some meat for their dinner stew. She read a chapter from her tenth-grade history book on how cotton influenced the slave trade, economic policies, the Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution. Then she took off her shoes, lay down on her narrow bed, and closed her eyes against the slaving, both historical and present-day, and began to drift off into a rare and brief and blissful respite — until she remembered that it was Tuesday. Mail day.
She was already three houses down her street, which had been screed with machine-laid asphalt just the previous year, before she realized that not only was she running, she was also still barefoot. She stopped and straightened her long back, and glanced sideways from underneath her lashes to see if anyone had been watching. It wasn’t in her nature to take such objective notice of herself, but she’d overheard a comment made several months ago, just before her sixteenth birthday, by a friend of her younger brother: “Your sister gallops like a horse. Kind of looks like one, too. Maybe you could enter her in the Kentucky Derby next spring.” Marek had boxed him flat, and the boy stopped coming around, but in that moment she’d painted an unsightly image of herself as a galloping quadruped, fifteen hands high at the withers, and it hung thereafter in her mind no matter how hard she tried to take it down.
She walked casually home, trying to ignore the road emulsion tacking her feet — hooves, she thought, and closed her eyes against the image of herself as a Centaur — then went inside and buttoned up her worn, low-heeled leather boots. She would have liked to wear something nicer, perhaps with an elegant Boulevard heel, but her feet were too long to find anything that fashionable, and besides, her father said tight shoes destroy character.
She walked slowly, then, past the row of houses and up to Main Street, where the company store, the barbershop, the jewelry store, and other fronts lined up facing the arterial tracks that chugged coal from the Blackstone tipple out of town and all the basic, daily-life goods in, including the mail. Just past the hardware store, where a few older men were swapping gossip, was the brick-front post office. She pulled open the door and stepped inside the tiny lobby.
Facing the street was the newly installed Formica counter, which, according to the papers, signified economic progress. There were green metal combination-lock boxes on either side of a barred window behind which the postmaster, Mr. Kiser, sold stamps and sorted deliveries and hand-canceled the outgoing mail. At that moment, his place was empty. She walked up to the small ledge and peered in between the green bars, but he must have been at the rear, receiving or disbursing the mail for the trains and rural routes. Ah well, she thought, and turned around on her boot heel, propping her sharp elbows atop the smooth plastic counter to wait. And there, against the east wall of the shallow room, bent over a tall worktable, his back to her, was John Esposito.
That broad back was unmistakable. She’d watched it from afar for the past three years, since he was a high school freshman playing baseball with the Bears. His back was still young and rectangular then, bony shoulder blades poking out of his uniform. But as he grew, his shoulders had broadened while his waist stayed slim, and new brawn concealed his blades and the archipelagic knots of spine that showed when he bent over to pick up a foul ball or a girl’s dropped schoolbook. And now, as he leaned over with an expression she couldn’t see but imagined as one of thick concentration, she saw that his back had filled out yet again, muscles straining against his work shirt as he wrote. After a moment he stood back up and folded his letter. She wondered to whom he was writing, and why here, at the post office instead of home, and what his handwriting looked like — was it deliberate and masculine, like his voice, based on the few times she’d overheard it? Then she allowed the thought, the feeling — but only fleetingly — that whatever he’d written was meant for her: a love letter, a plea, an apology, a proposal.
She forced herself to stop and looked down at her too-long, boot-clad feet. The floor that was so far down. She felt the stab of her elbow joints jammed against the Formica. And in her mind, she heard the rude, unchanged voice of a thirteen-year-old boy, suggesting she run in the Derby. Someone like John Esposito would never bet on a horse like her. He wouldn’t even see her at the gate.
“Miss Alta!” Mr. Kiser said. She spun around and faced the window. “Today’s a good day, ain’t it? Beautiful spring weather we got! And …” He winked at her. “And I got a special package for you. Just came in today, got it right here waiting.
I know you been expecting something awhile now.” He stepped away and she followed him with her eyes, standing on her toes to see the size and shape of the long-belated birthday parcel from New York City that would, in some way, make up for the privation of her aunt Maggie’s glamour from her own unimportant life.
Mr. Kiser’s high-pitched and cheerful voice pulled John’s attention out of his thoughts and to the counter. He still held his half-licked envelope to his tongue. And there, with her back toward him, was Alta Krol.
She was stretched up on her toes, leaning forward on the counter. The hem of her skirt came just above the backs of her knees, which lengthened even further her long, slender legs. Her uncovered calf muscles were flexed and lithe. He quickened at the little swell of flesh inside the delicate curve there. More leg, hidden beneath pleated cotton, a narrow but sturdy waist, a graceful back, an appealing curve of neck, plain but not unattractive hair. She settled, flat-footed again, and the knees were hidden. But the skin between hem and boot was not.
He’d seen her around town, of course. It wasn’t a metropolis, after all. She had three brothers; two of them played baseball for the Bears, and he would graduate with one next month. When had she become so … graceful? He tried to think whether he’d ever had a conversation with her in all the years they’d lived in the same small town, gone to the same school, passed each other on the street or in a store.
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Kiser,” she said. John listened for the qualities of her voice, surprised by his own interest.
“You’re mighty welcome, Miss Alta. Mind if I ask — can’t blame me for my curiosity, now, can you — what’s got you so excited you been coming down here every week, anticipating?”
Alta smiled and held the package, touching it along the sides as if weighing and measuring the contents or volume or value within. “It’s from my aunt in New York City,” she said. “She’s a society lady. A ‘patron of the arts.’ ” Her eyes grew wide as she said it, as though it were something really important. “She made acquaintances with an artist, someone named Leighton Macrae. She said she was going to send me some new paints and one of his original watercolors for inspiration.”
