Please tell me, she begged again in her mind. She had to hold firm on the exterior. Inside, she was shattering and didn’t know how to pick up the pieces.
The room was spinning. She slid down the wall onto the floor so as not to faint.
He looked up but didn’t approach her. “Oh, Vera, is that something you’d want to hear? Would that be good news to you?” He began to stand but looked at William asleep on the bed and sat back down.
She put her face in her hands. She didn’t know how to answer.
“No, don’t answer that,” he said quietly. “Because I don’t think I want to hear your answer, whichever way it might be.”
Yes, it would be good news, she thought. But she wouldn’t say it.
Angelo seemed to deflate like a balloon that had lost its air. This trip that was supposed to be so exciting—they were in the nation’s capital!—had brought nothing but strife. She didn’t know who she, he, they were anymore.
Her instinct was to run. To run sooner than she’d expected to.
But what did he mean—that he wasn’t married?
Angelo crept off the bed and sat next to her on the floor. He moved like one who was tiptoeing around glass. She didn’t move away. It was far less romantic to be in this spot than on the bed, and she felt like she could keep her head about her.
“Yes, I think it’s best. Because what I feel is irrelevant unless you’re telling me the truth, and if you are, then there is a lot more that you need to tell me.”
He ran his fingers through his hair and exhaled a deep breath. “Oh, I know. I know. I’m confused, Vera.”
She folded her arms. “Angelo, this is not a difficult question. Are you married or are you not? There are only two possible answers.”
“I don’t know.”
He stood up before offering an explanation. She had never seen Angelo like this. He was always so unflappable. But then, they’d never been alone like this. She could understand now all the taboos placed on the conduct of unmarried men and women. It guarded them against the kind of proximity that could tempt you to lose yourself in the moment.
He paced around the room and rubbed his hand across his cheeks. His stubble was thicker than she’d ever seen it, and her heart ached for how handsome he looked.
“Vera, I know I am risking any regard you might have for me, but we have been friends for a long time, and you deserve the truth.”
Angelo’s words made her tremble. What terrible thing was he going to confess?
“You’re worrying me,” she said.
He stopped moving and looked at her.
“I don’t mean to.” He crouched down until they were eye to eye but still kept his distance. “I’m sorry.”
“I think you had better just say whatever it is you have to say. I’m not a child anymore, Angelo.”
He attempted a smile. “I know that. If you only were a child.”
“You’re stalling.”
He sat all the way down, and despite this void between them, it felt almost like old times. Like they were sitting on the steps of Penn Station and talking.
“I’m not. I promise. Vera . . . I don’t know if you’ve ever lost your head over someone, but I lost mine over Pearl.”
This much she knew.
“I could tell. You seemed pretty smitten when you first introduced us.”
“Smitten. That’s a good word for it. Innamorato in Italian.”
“I don’t need the lesson, Angelo.”
“You’re right. You’re right. So. I met Pearl at the voter registration down on the Lower East Side. She was dazzling. I probably don’t need to tell you that.”
“No. I think just about anyone with eyes might say that about her.”
“Imagine this, Vera. You’re the first son born to an Italian immigrant. I don’t know how it is in Germany, but in Italy, that is a role that comes with a lot of responsibility. My father started the newsstand when I was a kid myself, and when I was old enough to take over, he gave it to me and started another of his own ten blocks up.”
She didn’t know what this had to do with Pearl.
“All your life, you’re told that this is what you are going to do. You are going to run a newsstand. You don’t even get a chance to imagine that you will go to college, and there is no time to think about anything else you might be interested in doing.”
Vera could understand this. She was a factory girl. Her mother was a factory girl. When you were born five paces behind the rest of the world, you weren’t going to catch up quickly.
“Then you read an article during a slow hour. It talks about registering voters. It convinces you that no matter what else holds you down, being able to vote puts you on equal footing with the millionaires of the world. They have one vote. You have one vote. And every one counts.”
Her sweet Angelo, always the optimist. Even she knew that ballot boxes got stuffed and those millionaires could buy votes. But she liked his idealism.
“It excited me, Vera. I hadn’t been excited about anything in a while. I’d just been running the newsstand, and except for when you would come by to visit, the day was pretty mundane. But I read this article, and I thought for the first time that I could be someone. That I could matter.”
“You always mattered to me.” She had to say that. Soon, she would be leaving, and she wanted him to know this much. “You saved me, Angelo.”
You’ve been everything to me for most of my life, she thought. But she dared not say that. She might cry.
“Aw, Kid—Vera.”
Kid. It was the first time she liked hearing it from his lips. It put them back in their old places. It made it easier to continue this conversation.
“Anyway, I told my old man that I was going to play bat-and-ball with some guys one night. But instead, I went to the meeting that I’d read about. And there was Pearl. Running the show, as she does. She handed me a registration form before she even said hello.”
Vera couldn’t help a laugh. “That does sound like her.”
“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?” He grinned. It was nice to talk like this again. She could pretend things were as before.
“So, she hands you the form, she doesn’t say hello, and you decide you need to marry her?”
“That’s below the belt, Kid!”
“Well, you’re taking an awfully long time to get to the point.”
“But it’s important. I had to set the scene for you. Besides the newsstand, I was supposed to marry a nice Catholic Italian girl. They even had one picked out for me—Constanza Benapoli. Yeah, it’s not only the rich folks who get set up like that. Not that there were any firm expectations. We Italians don’t go for the arranged marriages like the Greeks do. But still. It was made known that it would make the family very, very happy if I settled down with her. Good birthing hips, my grandmother would say.”
Vera blushed. She’d never heard anything like that before.
“So there we are,” he continued. “Me and Pearl. I start helping her with the forms. I can speak Italian and she can’t, so afterward, she offers to buy me a drink to say thanks. We registered thirty people that night. Twice what she’s done at that same location previously. It was heady, I’m telling you. I didn’t need the drink. I was already feeling pretty high just from the excitement of it.”
Vera could understand that. To do something that mattered. She’d started to feel some of that when she worked alongside Pearl. Pearl made you feel like what you were doing was important.
“What happened next?”
“I was head over heels, like I said. We went out a few more times, usually after a rally or some event. My pops was at home riding me to work more hours, bring in more money, get married, start a family. And Pearl was telling me that I could do more than that. That I could make a difference in the world.”
“It’s what you’ve always told me,” said Vera. “You didn’t believe that for yourself?”
“Not when your pops is saying the opposite. I�
��m telling you, Vera. You don’t want to be the disappointing son of an Italian father. So, no. I didn’t believe it about myself.”
He stretched his legs out and looked up at the ceiling. “Anyway, I’m not proud of myself for this. But things with Pearl got—involved, if you know what I mean.”
Vera shifted on the floor. She might not know much about these things, but it was not difficult to understand what he was implying.
“I wrestled with it. Here was this beautiful woman who liked me for some reason, and we had this understanding about how our families pressured us. But maybe it’s how I was raised. I didn’t think we should carry on like that without being married.”
“So you asked her to marry you?”
“It wasn’t anything formal. Or even planned. It just kind of came out one night. To tell you the truth, it felt like I had to convince her of something. I even made the case that her son needed a father.”
“But she loves you, Angelo. I can see that.” It was difficult to say these persuasive words but important to stand up for Pearl.
He shrugged. “I think she just loves people. Have you noticed that about her? Don’t tell me you haven’t seen that, even with William, she’s not the motherly type. She’s restless. Always got to be doing something. Going somewhere. She’s got a big heart for people in need, and she’s really earnest about it. But you can’t tie her down. She isn’t going to stay in one place for long.”
He had a point. It wasn’t a character flaw so much as a trait. Pearl was made for big things. It was just who she was.
“You don’t think—Angelo, she’s not with someone else, is she?” It would be too hard to believe.
“No, no. It’s not that I think she’s with one person. It’s just that she doesn’t really belong to me. She belongs to the world at large. And without realizing it, I was trying to make her into something she’s not. To what end? To calm my conscience? I can’t say I was doing that intentionally. But deep down? Maybe. At least it makes sense.”
“But this still doesn’t explain what you mean. About not being married. Because you did marry her, right?”
“Well, yes. The state of New York recognizes our holy union. But we didn’t get married in the Church. And what’s the higher authority? The government or God? The state says we’re married. The Church says we aren’t. And that’s what I grew up believing. I told you, I’m wrestling with these things. It’s not an excuse. I hope you know that. I’m not looking for some kind of loophole. Some easy ticket out.”
She could tell he felt the need to explain that. To convince her that this was not just a ploy. But he needn’t have tried so hard. Her Angelo was honest to the bone.
“Anyway, I told her that I thought we ought to get married. I didn’t want to live in sin anymore. But she resisted the idea of doing it in a papist church. So we compromised. We went to the courthouse and signed the licenses. It’s why no one came. We didn’t invite anyone. Even you.”
Vera had always wondered about that, and now it made sense. They were just suddenly married. No fanfare. She’d thought it was Angelo who wouldn’t have wanted all that pomp and circumstance. But it was Pearl.
What must his parents have thought? But that was not relevant right now.
She felt like there was a jigsaw puzzle in front of her and only some of the pieces were coming together. There was no good guy here, no bad guy. A marriage but not a wedding. A wife and mother but not one who was in the home. Nothing about what he was saying was part of the traditional world that they’d both grown up in.
But times were changing. Wasn’t that the very point of all that Pearl advocated for?
“Angelo, are you telling me that you and Pearl fell out of love? Because that’s not a reason to—to do whatever you’re trying to do.”
A piece of her wanted to hear this. That Angelo wasn’t in love with Pearl and that she felt the same way about him and that a path was cleared for him to fall in love again. But she didn’t want to be a part of something where the changing of affections was rationale enough to flit in and out of a commitment that was made. Even if it worked to her advantage.
She loved Pearl and she loved Angelo and she loved William, and whatever happened in the future, she would not be the one to change it.
“Vera, look at me.” Angelo scooted a little bit closer and put his hands on her arms.
She looked at him. At the pleading in his eyes.
“I told you that I was risking any regard you have for me. Let me just say this clearly. Because I’m not the man I’m somehow portraying myself to be.”
He cleared his throat. “It’s not about being in love or being out of love. I pushed something that never should have been. For all the best intentions. And she said yes. Also for good reason. I think we were two people who needed to get out of what we were in at home and we liked each other, and this is just where it went. It filled in the holes that we both had. And it is a nice thing. When she comes home, we have good talks. I love her. You love her. What’s not to love about her? But, no. I’m not in love with her, nor she with me. It just—happened.”
Vera’s heart beat faster. This morning on the train if you’d told her that Angelo would be revealing all this to her—that the door would even be open for them to have a future together—she might have done a cartwheel down the aisle. But now that it was here—almost hers for the taking if she pressed it—it didn’t feel right.
“You don’t slip on the ice and get up and find yourself married, Angelo. You can’t say it just happened.”
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have said it like that. But I guess I understand a little better why, as a Catholic, you have to go through so many months of preparation before the priest will give his approval. This is not something to undertake lightly. I get that now. I get what’s important about marriage. I thought I was doing the right thing by suggesting it, by being a gentleman.”
“You almost kissed me.” Vera whispered this part, but she knew he’d heard her. This didn’t change her plans to leave. But she couldn’t leave wondering if she were some kind of next-in-line choice. It didn’t work out with Pearl, and there was Kid. All grown up. That didn’t sound like the Angelo she knew, but right now she didn’t know anything.
She felt numb.
But the way he looked at her. It was love. She knew it without his having to say the words. And not the kind that was fleeting. The kind that had been planted years ago, disguised by the span of their age difference, pulling ever closer like gravity as the years passed. While he’d been speaking to her as the adult that she now was, she’d learned things about him that she’d never known, and she loved him all the more for his sincerity and even his naïveté.
Silence balanced between them, teetering on the pull that each felt, neither tipping it one way in their favor.
He spoke at last. “Yes. I almost kissed you.” He slid his hands down to hers, and there was something in the gesture that suggested the goodbye that had haunted her all day. He knew. He knew just as she did what had to be.
The Angelo she loved would always do the right thing. And in this case, he would stick with his marriage and find a way to make it work. If he did anything less, he wouldn’t be the man she knew.
He pressed her hand to his lips and closed his eyes tightly. Her own were fighting the tears that had started as an ache in her chest.
“I love you, Vera Keller, and I always have. For all my mistakes and my distractions, I can tell you that a more true thing has never been spoken.”
All her life, she would hold on to these words, even if he could never speak them again.
He opened his eyes and brushed his hand down her cheek, tracing the path of the tears that would no longer be contained. They burned her skin where they fell and ached with the kind of singe that would scar if they’d been fire.
People walked around every day with wounds that were not visible, and this one would be hers.
Angelo helped her to her feet. He turned
around to the bed and pulled the coverlet over William and kissed the boy on the forehead. Then he took a pillow and walked around to the other side and set it on the floor. He lay down, curled up, and didn’t speak again.
Vera stood at the window, already frosting over with the coldness of the winter night. She waited until she heard his heavy breathing that told her he was asleep. She looked at the bed. How cozy it would be to cuddle up to William. But she was not his mother.
William had a mother. And Angelo had a wife.
She gathered her coat in her arms and tiptoed to the door, escaping into the cold night.
Chapter Eleven
1916
“Hold on, Vater! Please! I have to lock the door behind us.”
Her father pulled at his hair and tried to rip his coat off. She had just resewn the buttons last week and was fatigued at the thought of having to do it again.
Vera’s father had never been worse. It had been days since he’d resembled anything close to himself, and she’d lost precious hours at the factory to stay home with him.
“Stop. Please.” She finally managed to secure the door—not that they had much to steal—and ran down the hall to pull him back toward the stairs.
“Nein! Nein!” he shouted, pushing her away. Her own father didn’t even know who she was.
She had no choice but to give up.
The time between his episodes was decreasing. It used to be weeks before a really bad spell would hit him again. Then days. Hours.
Now it seemed to be here for good.
She’d let it go too long. She should have handed him over to the state years ago, but this was her father. He was her only family left.
She managed to link her arm through his, and one by one, they walked down the four flights of stairs. Several times he pulled and turned back up, but she never let go and got him down to the street at last.
However was she going to get him all the way to Penn Station?
She walked slowly, which seemed to calm him, but just two blocks up he started into a fit again. She found a bench next to a tea shop and spent half of what she had in her purse on a steaming mug.
The Way of Beauty Page 11
