The Lovely Shoes

by Susan Shreve

  He worked quickly, his fingers flying. He didn’t erase. When he had finished, he pushed the sketchbook across the table in her direction.

  “Now look,” he said.

  She looked.

  The girl she saw was herself — she could recognize that — but it was an exaggerated replication, her eyes larger on the page than she remembered them, her hair darker.

  This girl in pencil was actually beautiful, something Franny had never seen when she looked in the mirror.

  “What do you think?” Filippo asked.

  “Is that how I look to you?” she asked.

  “Oh exactly, exactly. Except this eye.” He pointed to the left eye. “I cannot quite get this eye right. Your eye is right on center and this one is a little crooked, you see?”

  “It looks okay.”

  “I’ll fix it so it’s perfect.”

  She got off the stool, ran her fingers through her long hair, shaking it so it fell full around her face.

  “Do I get to have a copy of this drawing?”

  “First I need it to make a painting. I’m going to make a painting of you just like this. You will be in a chair. Maybe I’ll add a book in your lap and you’ll be wearing something red to go with your black hair.”

  At the Duomo, Filippo showed her the mosaics, telling her about the dome and what it meant and how the light came through the stained-glass windows. They stopped to look at the scenes from the Bible on Ghiberti’s bronze doors and wandered the back streets fanning from the Duomo’s piazza.

  At first she wondered, did Filippo know that she was crippled? Had he noticed or was he so concerned with faces that he didn’t see her as she was?

  She wanted to ask him in self-defense in case he suddenly said, “What happened to you?” But maybe he had noticed and it made no difference. Maybe it was of no more interest to him than if she’d had red hair instead of black. She looked the way she looked and that was agreeable to Filippo del Santo.

  “Only some hours until you meet your mother and I have my drawing class,” Filippo said. “So I will show you now the heart of Firenze. Not buildings. Buildings you can look at in a book.”

  They weaved in and out of the pedestrian traffic on the narrow streets, among the people chattering back and forth in Italian, the slender ancient houses, a blue, blue sky spread like an umbrella over their heads.

  An older woman stopped them — white haired and small with a wicker basket hanging on her arm full of fruit and artichokes and a small yellow kitten.

  “Filippo, Filippo,” she said, taking his face in her hands, kissing him on the lips.

  “My grandmother,” Filippo said and then, after he spoke to his grandmother in Italian, she reached up and kissed Franny on the cheek, laying her face against one of Franny’s cheeks and then the other.

  Filippo laughed in response to something she had said to him.

  “She asked are you my girlfriend? And I said yes and so she kissed you because now you are in our family.”

  “But I’m going home tomorrow,” Franny said. “But it is today and you are my real girlfriend today.” Filippo’s grandmother took a mango from her basket and handed it to Franny.

  “She’s my father’s mother.”

  They wandered across a piazza with its modest fourteenth-century church and bell tower ringing a familiar melody.

  “Three o’clock chimes,” Filippo said.

  The church was surrounded by small shops and kiosks selling religious trinkets, crucifixes, pictures of the Pope and Jesus, bookmarks, and coins with the figures of saints. Franny picked up a child-size crucifix, fingering the beads.

  “Are you Catholic?” Filippo asked.

  “I’m nothing,” Franny said. “But we live next door to the Episcopal church. That’s the most I know about church.”

  “It’s worth it to be a little Catholic for the music and the chanting and incense and the wine at communion. That’s what I like about Roman Catholicism although I am supposed to also like the Pope and all the rules for behavior.”

  “I don’t know if my parents even believe in God. My father is a doctor and he believes in science, and my mother is a rebel and I think what she believes in is human beings although I’ve never asked her.”

  “Religion is like dinner in my family. I never had a choice.”

  He stood in a circle of sun, looking up at the simple rectangular bell tower so different from the brilliance of the bell tower of the Duomo.

  “So this is my church. We should go in.”

  He took her hand.

  “You have a scarf?” he asked.

  “A scarf?”

  “A woman has to cover her head in the church or the priests will ask you to leave.”

  He took the long turquoise scarf draped like a stole around his neck and put it over Franny’s head.

  She followed him inside the beige Tuscan stone church, wooden pews, no decoration except a wood-carved Christ, his head hanging, his chin resting on his bony chest, nailed to a slender cross and hanging above the pulpit.

  It was cold inside the church and Franny wrapped Filippo’s scarf around her shoulders, feeling chosen to have been invited inside Filippo’s church, to be wearing his scarf.

  A young woman was coming out of a simple black box, large enough for two people, the priest and the confessor.

  “A confession box,” Filippo said. “Have you seen one?”

  “We have St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church in Easterbrook where I live but I’ve never seen a confession box there.”

  “You know what they’re used for?”

  “I think I do,” Franny said.

  “You go into this little box and there’s a priest on the other side and you confess your sins to him.”

  “My friend Boots is very Catholic so I suppose she does that. She’s just never mentioned it,” Franny said.

  “I go almost once a week.”

  “You have that many sins?”

  “I have sins, but not so many,” he said. “I go because it is important and makes me think about sin.”

  “I don’t think I ever think about sin,” Franny said.

  “That is too bad,” he said but he was smiling.

  Franny had never had so personal a conversation with anyone except her mother.

  Maybe this was what it meant to fall in love. Not the silliness of her crush on Mikey Houston talking about nothing in the cafeteria line, but a real conversation. She wanted to know Filippo del Santo’s life. She wanted to tell him hers.

  “You see that woman?” Filippo was saying.

  A curtain separated the confessor from the public, and the young woman had pulled back the curtain and was walking up to the front pew where she sat and knelt.

  “That is Maria Denasi.”

  “You know her too?”

  “I know many people in this part of Firenze because I am on the streets, painting or wandering to look at things, and here is where I went to school at the academy and where I have lived for three years.”

  He pulled back the black curtain of the confession box.

  “Do you want to see the inside?”

  “Has the priest left?”

  “He is gone. He comes, he listens to a confession, he goes.”

  Franny peered inside, at the seat where the confessor sat, at the sliding door that the priest opened to hear the confession of sins, just a part of his face showing, maybe only his chin and lips, or only his eyes and those in darkness.

  “I wanted to be a priest, like most boys growing up in Italy, but then I changed my mind,” he said, walking to the front of the church where Maria Denasi was still kneeling. “When I was young, what I liked about becoming a priest was the costume and the power.”

  “What kind of power?” Franny asked.

  “The power to forgive Maria Denasi her sins. Like this.” He assumed the posture of a priest, his hands folded, his ear turned toward the space in the confession box. “She goes into confession, a widow, only twenty-
four years old with an old husband who has died leaving her with no babies. And the listening priest gets to hear Maria’s confession and he can see her beautiful face and know her secrets.”

  “Why didn’t you become a priest then?”

  “Because in time I want a woman in my bed with me and children and that can’t happen if you’re a priest.”

  Maria stood from her prayers, bowed to the altar, nodded to Filippo, and walked out of the church, her heels clicking along the stone floor.

  “Maybe she is pregnant. Maybe she has stolen a scarf from the kiosk or lied to her mother,” Filippo said, shrugging. “Who knows? Only the priest.”

  “That is a lot of power.”

  They walked out into the sunlight, across the piazza, stopping for a raspberry gelato, leaning against the wall of a building, licking their ice cream. The sun was beginning to sink behind the buildings. Almost four o’clock.

  “One more thing I want you to see. We have time.”

  They crossed the street, in the direction of the river, walking single file on the narrow sidewalk until they reached the bridge.

  “We’re going to a shop, not on the Ponte Vecchio. Too many tourists. This is a real shop only Italians know. You will like it.”

  They walked along the front, almost the same height. He held her hand.

  “Are you an only child?” Franny asked.

  “I am not. I have many brothers but I am the oldest and my parents live in a very small village in Umbria. They sent me here to live with the del Santos and go to the academy for painting.”

  “Are you homesick living away from your family?” Franny said.

  “Oh no. The del Santos are also family. Besides, I am a happy person. I like to look at things, to talk to people, to do my work and help my uncle with his pensione. And I love Firenze.”

  “I would like to come back,” Franny said. “Maybe to live.”

  “You will be back,” Filippo said. “Of course you will be back. I will insist.”

  The shop was a tiny hole-in-the-wall on the other side of the river, up a long, dusty hill, down some steps into a cave lit by candles, smelling of incense.

  No one could have come upon it by accident.

  Lia was the proprietor. She sold jewelry that she made herself and material that she wove in silk in the colors of Tuscany, taupe and tangerine and mustard and raisin, colors of the earth.

  “We come to Lia for special presents, never to the Ponte Vecchio.”

  Lia poured a glass of something very hot that flew straight to Franny’s head when she drank it. She cut up pomegranates, squeezing the tiny seeds.

  “You eat and drink,” she said. “Then I give you a present.”

  Lia looked in one of the boxes stacked on the floor of the tiny shop and took out a slender silver bangle, shining it with a cloth.

  “It’s very beautiful,” Franny said. “How much?”

  “No cost to you,” the woman said. “A present to you from Filippo. He pay when he sell a painting.”

  She slipped it on Franny’s wrist.

  “That’s what Filippo told. Find something beautiful for you.”

  They were on their way to the Uffizi to meet Franny’s mother when Filippo kissed her. The street was narrow, only wide enough for a motor scooter and empty of traffic, so they walked in the middle of it.

  “Tonight I go to Umbria to visit my parents and tomorrow night when I come back to Firenze, you will be gone.”

  He stopped in the middle of the winding, narrow street, lifted her chin, and kissed her on the lips.

  Four

  AN ORDINARY DAY

  Franny sat up in bed with a copy of Mademoiselle magazine looking at shoes. Next to her on the bed were the letters she was writing to Filippo. Twelve of them so far, eight written on the airplane home, none good enough to send.

  When she left for Italy, she had thought that she wanted loafers with a penny in the pocket on the front. Penny loafers were essential among her friends. Most of the models in Mademoiselle in casual clothes were wearing them, with or without pennies in the pocket of the shoes. They wore them with jeans and blouses with Peter Pan collars and matching sweater sets and plaid skirts with kneesocks.

  But what Franny liked best in the issue of Mademoiselle were the ballet flats she had seen on the young women in Florence.

  It was very early, before dawn, and the first school day since she’d returned from Italy. Her sense of time was confused. In Easterbrook it was five in the morning; in Rome it was noon, and she was still on Roman time. Everyone in the house was asleep except Pickle, who was downstairs scratching the furniture, his claws making a bristly sound along the couch, which was his particular favorite. A toilet flushed in her parents’ room and she guessed her mother was also up early.

  She went downstairs with Mademoiselle under her arm and stationery she had bought in Florence. She set the water on for tea, opened the front door and picked up the morning paper, opened the fridge and took out milk for cereal.

  Melancholy was what she felt, as if it were the day after Christmas or the last day of summer vacation before school started. Some combination of excitement for what was coming and sadness for what was gone.

  She tore a photograph of black ballet slippers on the feet of a young girl in a jumper and turtleneck sweater out of the May Mademoiselle to send to Signor Ferragamo.

  “Choose three pairs and send the pictures in the mail to me,” he had suggested.

  Three seemed excessive to Franny since she had never, except for the doomed silver shoes, had more than two pairs of shoes, her frequently refurbished orthopedic monsters, one black, one brown.

  On their last night in Florence, Franny and her mother had come home early after a quick dinner around the corner from Ferragamo’s showroom. Just as they were sitting down in the café in a table next to the window, Franny, watching the street traffic, thinking of Filippo, saw Signor Ferragamo hurry by the window wearing brown trousers and a sweater, his thin hair lifted in the light wind and drizzle.

  She could run after him, easily catch up to him, but what would she say except another good-bye, another thank-you, maybe a double kiss on each cheek, and so she simply watched as he rushed ahead and disappeared in the crowd of shoppers.

  She had thought that she might tell her mother about Filippo del Santo but she did not. Maybe later at home she might say he had kissed her on the street as they were walking. Maybe not.

  Ana Maria del Santo was in the kitchen on her mother’s lap when Franny and her mother got back to the pensione to pack for an early departure. She was small, maybe three or four years old, with long black curly hair and round dark eyes, one flat without expression.

  She reached out her arms to Franny.

  “You want to hold?” Signora del Santo asked.

  The child wound her arms around Franny’s neck so tight she had to release them, and she felt the child’s heart pounding like drums against her chest.

  Later, back in their room at the pensione, their suitcases packed, gifts they had bought stuck in little corners around their clothes, Franny retrieved the silver bracelet she had gotten for Eleanor from her suitcase.

  “I’d like to give Ana Maria a gift,” she said, heading back to the kitchen where Ana Maria was dozing in her mother’s lap, Signor del Santo putting supper on the table.

  “I have a present for Ana Maria.”

  “You like Ana Maria?” Signora del Santo asked.

  “Oh yes, she is beautiful,” Franny said.

  Tears came to Signora del Santo’s eyes.

  “You say Ana Maria is beautiful,” Signor del Santo said. “It make my wife happy and she cry.”

  “Will you say good-bye to my baby?” Signora asked.

  “I would like to,” Franny said.

  Signora lifted Ana Maria into Franny’s arms.

  “You kiss?” she asked.

  Franny kissed her sleep-warm cheeks, the top of her head. Then she took the silver bracelet and put it
in her chubby hands.

  The child giggled, a funny little half giggle back in her throat, and reached out, pushing the silver bracelet in Franny’s mouth.

  Franny poured cereal and made tea, listening upstairs to hear if it was Zeke who had been walking around on the hardwood floors. She wasn’t ready for Zeke’s endless questions so early in the morning.

  Dear Signor Ferragamo,

  I am back in the United States now, in my hometown of Easterbrook, Ohio, and I wouldn’t invite you to visit me here because you’d hate it. No one drinks wine. No one has heard of caffè con latte or gelato, and the girls in Easterbrook only wear loafers with pennies in the pocket on top.

  So this is the shoe I have chosen, thinking three is too many for the first time. I don’t know how the ballet shoes will look with my heavy lift but I’m sure you’ll figure out a way to make them look beautiful.

  In the meantime, I love Italy and especially Florence and you.

  Your friend,

  Francine Hall

  She reread the letter, crossing out “… and you” which seemed presumptuous, stuck the letter in the envelope, and put it on the kitchen counter for her mother to mail.

  The headline on the front page of the Easterbrook paper reported: President Eisenhower a strong favorite in Ohio for a second term. Underneath the headline was a photograph of the Easterbrook High baseball team opening its season, Mikey Houston in the front row, number thirty-seven.

  Zeke came downstairs in his pajama bottoms, no top, and his red hair, longer than he usually wore it, was wet and combed to the side. He padded barefoot across the linoleum floor and sat down on a chair across from Franny.

  “Mama says you are changing your name to Francine,” he said.

  “It’s not a change. That’s my real name.”

  “I don’t want to call you Francine.”

  “You don’t have to call me that but it’s the name I’m using now. And maybe when you’re my age, you’ll decide to be called Ezekiel instead of Zeke.”

  “I won’t decide that.”

  He reached across the table and took a Cheerio from the top of Franny’s bowl and put it in his mouth, resting his chin on his hand.