The Way of Beauty

by Camille Di Maio

  The date of eviction was immediate. They had four carpetbags and a suitcase and a promise from Papa that he would go back for the cuckoo clock that Mama’s grandfather had made years ago when she was a child in Germany—the one with the little girl who danced through a doorway while a bird chirped at the change of the hour.

  But he never did, as far as Vera knew.

  Outside, the street looked different than it ever had before. People spilled out onto the sidewalk, where they had to maneuver around putrid piles of horse droppings. Everyone had as much as they could carry—bags, trunks, crates. Some had pitched in to share carriages so they could load furniture, but Papa said that since they were going to a boardinghouse, they wouldn’t need what little furniture they had. Mama hugged some of her friends, not knowing where the evictions would scatter everyone. Papa and the other men shook hands, and the landlord, Mr. Percy, stood on the stoop with his arms folded, surveying this mass goodbye, while even one block away the sounds of demolition could already be heard.

  Months later, when errands took them nearby once again, Mama held Vera’s hand, and they walked toward the old neighborhood. But instead of the rotten bricks of the tenements, the corroded iron of the fire escapes, the signs that said G-I-R-L-S and B-A-R, there was nothing. For blocks and blocks, the sun shone down onto the sandy-colored dirt, and it was like a cavity in the landscape that Dr. Rankin’s Dental Parlor might need to fill.

  Then it was learned that the three men with all the cash worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad. That they’d quietly bought every building in that part of the Tenderloin.

  And that a magnificent train station was to be built on this very spot.

  Chapter Two

  1912

  Vera slung the market bag over her shoulder and began the five-story walk up to their apartment. Usually her legs felt leaden as she neared the top, and her breath became heavy from the effort.

  But today she could fly.

  Today was the day it would happen.

  She was still getting used to the vendors on Twenty-Ninth, having recently moved several blocks south when the boardinghouse they’d lived in burned down. The official report indicated an errant candle flame, but Vera was certain that it had been intentional. Their landlord refused to modify the dwelling to the new plumbing codes and was about to be fined. Now he’d likely collect his insurance money and gamble it away within a week.

  It was the one good thing about having little—there was little to lose.

  The only mercy was that the landlord had waited until all the residents were out of the building. Vera had taken her father out for a stroll on a rare morning when his legs didn’t betray him with the excruciating pain he’d first endured as a sandhog. Digging 135 feet underneath the East River for a decade did that and more to most of the men who’d been the manpower behind the tunnels of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

  The bends. Such a wretched ailment.

  Over the years, it had manifested itself in many horrible ways. Rashes. Memory loss. Paralysis. Fatigue. Every day was different, and Vera never knew what her father would suffer on any given day. Like a cruel roulette wheel.

  She had to be prepared for it all, as the sole caregiver of her father ever since Mama died.

  A few years ago, S. Pearson and Sons, the management company for the railroad station, laid off its air-lock tenders in an attempt to control costs. The tenders were responsible for monitoring the hydraulic shields and volatile explosives as well as the air pressure for the workers. But their absence left hundreds of men to fend for themselves in the compressed-air caissons, and more than fifty of them died in mere months. To avoid bad publicity, their bodies were secretly transported to other boroughs, and their death certificates indicated “natural causes.”

  All to save one hundred twelve dollars a day.

  A newspaper headline shouted:

  DEATH STALKS ALONGSIDE THE TUNNELS

  But what was the value of the life of a man when thousands of immigrants were desperate to take his place? Her father had been lucky to have any work at all.

  The straps of Vera’s bag cut into her shoulders. It was heavier than usual. The fruit seller made no secret of his interest in her, slipping extra apples without bruises into her bag along with the ones that she’d selected from the bin with the damaged offerings.

  But kind as he was, it was not the fruit seller she loved.

  Vera had become adept at choosing produce that was only moderately browned, cutting off what was truly rotten, salvaging what was merely softened. She’d learned from her mother to muddle the marginal parts into a juice, which tasted different day to day depending on the season and availability.

  She opened the bag, putting a strap across each shoulder, creating more of a knapsack as she started up the stairs.

  They’d been fortunate to get a place in this new building. It had one bedroom, a window, a sink, and a water closet. Luxury indeed. She whispered a prayer of thanks each evening for the legislators who had put new ordinances into place requiring those items. There were people living in the southern tip of Manhattan who were still sharing facilities with twenty others and whose faucets ran brown sludge.

  Park Avenue it wasn’t, but this was a place they could finally call home—twelve years after leaving the Tenderloin. She wished her mother had lived long enough to see it.

  As much as Angelo feigned innocence, Vera was certain that he must have arranged for them to have a place in this building. Angelo. Her angel ever since the first day they’d met.

  She checked her wristwatch. Two hours until she’d see him. Two hours until her life changed forever.

  He’d left a note by her door this morning.

  Meet me at our spot on the steps of Penn Station. 3:00 p.m. I have something important to tell you.

  It could mean only one thing. What she’d dreamed of ever since first meeting him when she was a little girl. I love you, Vera, she imagined him saying. I want to marry you.

  What once seemed impossible had, of late, appeared imminent. Angelo had begun to say things about the future. Even telling her that he wanted to buy an apartment that looked right over Penn Station, with a second bedroom for children.

  A man didn’t talk to a girl like that unless he was planning to share it with her. The certainty of this had warmed her through the frigid winter.

  She’d turned seventeen just two weeks ago and had begun wearing her hair in a loose bun. Surely he’d noticed that she was no longer the child in braids who’d scraped her knee in front of his family’s newspaper stand all those years ago. He’d finally seen her for the woman she was becoming.

  Vera Bellavia, she’d write out on scraps of paper. Mrs. Angelo Bellavia. Angelo and Vera Bellavia.

  It was so much prettier than Keller. It meant “beautiful way” in Italian. A harbinger of their future together.

  Vera arrived at her door and slipped the key into the lock. That was another luxury. The boardinghouse had had no locks, and more than once the lecherous landlord had accidentally made his way into the apartment as she dressed for the day.

  Something blocked the door. She gave it a shove, toppling a chair that had apparently been tipped underneath the handle.

  A sense of dread flooded her stomach. Papa must be having one of his spells of paranoia, another manifestation of the bends. There was no part of the body that it didn’t affect.

  She dropped the bag of produce on the wooden floor and called out to him.

  “Papa,” she said, knowing that he must be in the bedroom, for he wasn’t in the small parlor that functioned as sitting area, dining area, and kitchen. The sink water ran furiously, a violation of their tight restrictions. He’d forgotten to turn it off three other times this week, and she feared they’d receive a hefty fine for it. It was miraculous that it hadn’t flooded anything.

  “Gehen Sie weg!” he shouted. Which she recognized as Go away! But she was relieved just to hear his voice. She flew to the bedroom, where he huddled w
ith his knees pulled to his chin.

  “Shh,” she comforted, gently rubbing a hand across his bony shoulders. She felt him flinch, but only a bit. A good sign. His episodes had worsened since they moved to this apartment, but she hoped that they would subside as he became familiar with their new surroundings. She’d drawn him a picture of the cathedral in Munich after seeing a picture of his hometown in a book. It was pinned above his bed in the hopes that he would recognize it. Any sense of sameness.

  Vera laid her head against her father’s back as soon as she felt she could do so without alarming him. Even if staying with him meant missing her appointment with Angelo, she would. She didn’t know what her father might do if left alone in this state.

  “Vater,” she whispered in his native German. “Ich liebe dich.” I love you. She repeated the words until his breathing returned to normal, and she wiped away the wetness that pooled around his eyes.

  “Prinzessin,” he responded at last, calling her his princess as if she were still five years old. That told her that everything was all right. Her own heartbeat slowed.

  Papa looked at her with apology etched across the untimely crevices of his skin. “Vera,” he said as he placed his hands on her cheeks. “Vera, my darling, it happened again, didn’t it?”

  The English was an even better sign. He was returning to himself.

  Vera nodded. She might cry if she spoke too soon.

  “Second time this week?”

  “Third,” she whispered.

  His shoulders slumped. “I’m too much of a burden on you.”

  Vera pursed her lips and shook her head, still encased in his rough worker’s hands. “Never.”

  “It will pass,” he promised. “I—I just need to get used to being here.”

  “That’s what I thought.” She pulled a small package out of her bag. “Look. I brought you your favorite. Pumpernickel.” Another touch of the familiar.

  His face brightened, and he took the bread from her hands before bringing it to his nose. He closed his eyes as he inhaled its pungent scent. That variety had never appealed to Vera, but it always seemed to remind him of the old country. She’d even been experimenting lately with her mother’s Rouladen recipe, but she never seemed to cut the flank steak thin enough. And pickled gherkins were expensive and difficult to find.

  Papa pulled back the waxed paper delicately, as if it were worth more than the spare coins Vera had used for it. He held it out for her, but she declined.

  Crumbs got caught in his ever-graying beard. “Weren’t you going somewhere this afternoon?”

  He remembered. All was well at last.

  “Yes. I’m meeting a friend.”

  She’d never told him about Angelo, who was nine years older than Vera. And though she loved her father, it was times like this when she felt most acutely the lack of having a mother.

  Just a year ago, Vera had feared that any romantic thoughts about Angelo lay squarely in her imagination. But recently his hand would brush against hers and he would not pull away. Maybe it was her naïveté—he was Italian, after all, and from a family that was overtly physical in their affection for one another.

  She went back and forth, convincing herself that every gesture meant something, or, alternatively, that it was merely in her head. For all she knew, Angelo might still see her as the child she was when they’d met.

  He had done what any kind person would do faced with a little girl with a scraped knee. When she’d told him through sobs that she and her parents had just moved to the boardinghouse across the street, he’d seemed to understand how that might be frightening. When she returned from school the following day, Angelo had called over to her from his post behind the magazines. A boy stood steps away—a younger sibling, she guessed—bellowing headlines that Vera didn’t understand: “McKinley wins reelection in landslide victory!”

  Angelo had shouted her name again, and Vera could still feel the flush that had come over her when she realized that he’d remembered it at all. She’d stepped in a mud puddle racing over to him, dirtying the brown leather boots she’d received in the charity box full of castoffs. But she didn’t care. They were two sizes too big for her, anyway, and the laces were frayed at the ends.

  “Ah, Kid,” he’d said in the accent that she immediately loved. “Your knee. It’s better today?”

  She’d lifted up the hem of her dress to show him.

  “Bene,” he’d said, inspecting it. “But you know what would make it heal faster?”

  “Nein,” she’d answered, slipping into her native tongue.

  “Gelato! You’ve had ice cream, right?”

  She’d nodded.

  “Eccellente. Then you have to try gelato. Italian ice cream. Much better. Come?”

  He’d held out his hand, and she slipped her tiny palm into his large one. Angelo told the boy to mind the newsstand and walked Vera around the corner where he said his nonna made the best ice cream she would ever taste.

  And he’d been right. She’d tried the pistachio like he suggested while he told her about the first time he’d had gelato, right around her age. In the Piazza Navona in Roma, where he’d grown up before coming to America. He’d made it sound so exotic and told her that she would have to go someday.

  As they exited the shop, Angelo had stopped in front of a large pebble that lay on the sidewalk. He kicked it down the street and invited Vera to take a turn. Her little legs carried her swiftly to where it rested, and she gave it a try, sending it only a few feet. Angelo caught up and sent it soaring, grazing the top hat of a man walking toward them, garnering an ugly retort. Vera stifled a giggle, mirrored by Angelo, and they’d continued their game until returning to his stand.

  “Here we are, Kid,” he’d said. She’d winced at the nickname, already wishing that she were fourteen just like him. Practically an adult. “Back to work for me, and home for you. Glad your knee is better. Come back and see me sometime. You’ll have to try the stracciatella. No one makes it like my nonna.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “And how do you say that in German?”

  Her eyes widened at his encouragement of the language she knew so well. Everyone else tried to make it go away. As if there were something bad about it. Bad about her.

  “Danke.”

  “Danke,” he’d repeated. “And it’s grazie in Italian.”

  Vera remembered how she’d had to strain her neck to look all the way up at him. How tall he’d once seemed to her, although now she’d nearly caught up.

  Meet me at our spot on the steps of Penn Station. 3:00 p.m. I have something important to tell you.

  Today might be the first time he would kiss her, and she would only need to raise herself slightly on her tiptoes to meet him. She’d pictured this moment for so long, and now it was upon her. Them.

  The pumpernickel nearly slipped out of her father’s hand as he began to fall asleep. Vera took it from him and laid it on the bureau. She guided him down to his pillow and tucked a blanket around his sides. She glanced at the clock. Two thirty-five. He should be good for a few hours.

  Vera brushed her fingers through her hair and rearranged the silver clip. She’d always liked how it looked against her blonde hair. In contrast, Angelo seemed so exotic to her, with his dark wavy hair and deep brown eyes.

  What might their children look like?

  She smiled. She was getting ahead of herself.

  Vera pinched her cheeks, a poor girl’s rouge. She bit her lips to redden them and slipped on a wool sweater. Her feet barely touched the wood stairs as she hurried down to the street.

  It was only four blocks and one avenue to the other side of the train station. Penn was a microcosm of the city with its ocean of steps, towering columns, hurrying commuters. It had allowed people with money to move out of the city into Long Island and Connecticut. It was the fourth-largest building in the world, seventy acres of floor space. And people who knew about such things said that its grand concourse was the
size of the nave of Saint Peter’s church in Rome. Vera enjoyed watching the well-dressed men sidestep the flower sellers and the coiffed women cling to their handbags as they walked next to beggars.

  She might never be able to see the world, but all the world came to her through the tunnels of Penn Station. She and Angelo liked to sit on the steps and guess the nationalities of the people who would walk by speaking languages they couldn’t decipher. Sometimes they spoke in British accents or made up words altogether just to pretend that they were from somewhere else, and it was among her favorite of their games.

  Angelo understood this about Vera, and they had this in common—that as big as they could dream, they could be just as happy amusing themselves with these simple pastimes.

  As Vera approached the station, she saw one of the elegant sorts of ladies from afar. Her long pale-pink coat screamed quality even from this distance. She wore tall boots and a hat with lace trim that stopped just short of her eyes. Vera was about to look for Angelo when he suddenly appeared near the woman. Vera quickened her steps, tingling with anticipation.

  She raised her arm to wave, but Angelo wasn’t looking at her. He was still looking at the woman. Walking toward her.

  Why wasn’t he walking toward Vera?

  The woman smiled when she saw Angelo and slipped her gloved hand through his arm. His smile matched hers—wider, even. Only then did he turn and see Vera.

  Her heart sank like lead. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  “Hey, Kid,” he shouted. She cringed.

  “Kid,” he repeated as she walked up to them. The woman had not let go of his arm, and Vera was appalled to see that she was even more beautiful up close. Perfect white skin, lips that looked as if a gifted artist had stenciled them. Eyes that seemed translucent.