An Italian Wife

by Ann Hood

  Elisabetta stumbles slightly as she stands to get their valises from the compartment. The bottle of apricot brandy is empty, rolling about on the floor.

  Josephine picks up the book. “You forgot this,” she says, holding it out.

  But Elisabetta waves her away. “It’s too depressing,” she says. “Leave it.”

  The eyes on the book stare out at Josephine. It seems wrong to leave it there.

  “What?” Elisabetta says mockingly. “Are you going to read it?”

  “You said it was brilliant,” Josephine reminds her.

  “I changed my mind. All right?”

  By the flush on her daughter’s cheeks and the thin layer of sweat on her forehead, Josephine sees that she is drunk. She thinks back to the night Elisabetta arrived home, how she tripped coming up the stairs. And then last night, she fell asleep on the sofa, early, her mouth open, snoring lightly.

  They are in the aisle now, moving with the other passengers toward the door.

  “Elisabetta,” Josephine says softly, placing her hand on her daughter’s shoulder.

  Elisabetta turns around, shaking her mother’s hand from her.

  “Betsy,” she hisses. “I told you it’s Betsy.”

  “Betsy,” Josephine says. It comes out more like Bitsy when she says it. An ugly name, she thinks. Foolish-sounding. “You drank that whole bottle of brandy?” she asks.

  “It wasn’t full,” Elisabetta says.

  Their eyes meet briefly before Elisabetta continues down the aisle, the valise banging angrily against the seats she passes. The lies between them settle on Josephine. This is what happens, she thinks. Years pass. Wrongs are committed. Secrets take hold and the only way to protect yourself is to lie. A mother hopes her children don’t have to hide things from her. She watches Elisabetta’s green wool coat in front of her, the pleated back and fine workmanship in the stitches. She’s unhappy, Josephine realizes. The thought surprises her. This is the child who she knew was going to become something. Even as a little girl, Elisabetta was orderly, motivated. She used to write a little newspaper every week, full of stories about the neighborhood, with illustrations she drew accompanying them. Josephine imagined she might become a writer or a scientist. Someone important. Someone special.

  The urge to take her daughter in her arms overcomes her. But she knows that Elisabetta would resist such an impulse. She never hid how much Josephine and her sisters and brother embarrassed her. One Christmas she went all by herself to the five and dime and bought a bottle of cheap perfume for Josephine. She wrapped it in shiny blue paper and tied it with silver ribbon. Wear it, Mama, she’d said when Josephine opened it. Wear it every day. That was when Josephine understood that she repulsed her in some way. She’d done it too, for Elisabetta. She’d sprayed a big spritz of the overly floral perfume on herself each morning. But Elisabetta never seemed to notice.

  Josephine follows her daughter out of the train, carefully stepping down the steps onto the platform. It is cold here in Vermont, much colder than back home. The air cuts through her thin coat and makes her shiver. How did a mother keep a baby warm in the winter in such a cold place? She thinks of all the children she swaddled in blankets she’d knit for them. Even now she can feel the weight of them in her arms. But this daughter she never held, who had wrapped her in soft wool and held her close enough to let her own warmth spread to her?

  THE CONVENT IS STUCCO with ivy climbing on it. Inside, arched doorways, high ceilings, the smells of candles and bleach. No sounds, except a distant door shutting, perhaps soft voices.

  Josephine sits up straight, her purse in her lap. Elisabetta slumps beside her, asleep or passed out, Josephine does not know which, her head gently bobbing. So pretty, this daughter was. So smart. But now she looks smudged, like God took his thumb and tried to erase her. Footsteps approach, heavy and rushed. The door opens and there is Chiara, in her black habit and thick stockings and black shoes. This one, unattractive as a girl, looks almost pretty as a nun, her hair hidden beneath the wimple so that all you see is her face, round and smooth, her brown eyes framed in long lashes.

  Behind her is an older nun, stern-faced and bespectacled. Neither of them moves toward Josephine, so she gets to her feet and approaches them.

  “No physical contact,” the older nun says.

  Josephine struggles to understand.

  The nun puts a possessive hand on Chiara’s shoulder. “She belongs to God now,” she says.

  Chiara smiles. “Isn’t it wonderful, Mama?” she says. “Sister Gregory is my mentor. She stays by my side almost all day and night.”

  The older nun is frowning. “A long trip?” she says.

  Josephine follows her gaze to where Elisabetta slouches on the bench.

  “Very long,” she says.

  The three women stare at Elisabetta in an uncomfortable silence.

  “Elisabetta,” Josephine says finally, her voice sharper than she intends.

  Slowly, Elisabetta opens her eyes and looks around, confused.

  “Chiara is here to greet us,” Josephine says, unable to take the edge out of her voice.

  Elisabetta licks her lips, shifts her heavy-lidded eyes from face to face as if she is trying to place everyone.

  Sister Gregory makes a clucking noise. Like a hen, Josephine thinks, and as she thinks it she decides that the nun even looks like a hen with her big, round bottom and narrow chest, the soft folds of her neck above her habit trembling slightly.

  “We’ll go to our motel,” Josephine says firmly, taking charge now. “And we will see you tomorrow morning at the chapel.”

  “You can take this with you,” Sister Gregory says, holding out a large sack. “It has all of her worldly goods in it,” she explains as Josephine takes it from her. “She won’t be needing any of it any longer.”

  Chiara beams at this.

  Josephine resists the urge to open the sack and see what her daughter has given up. She doesn’t need to look really; she knows Chiara has given up everything. For God, she reminds herself. But that thought doesn’t comfort her.

  THEY EAT DINNER in a small café on the main street in Montpelier. Elisabetta has ordered something called an open-faced sandwich—turkey smothered in gravy on top of two pieces of toast. It looks nothing like an open face.

  “Elisabetta,” Josephine begins.

  “Betsy,” she says in a tired voice.

  “Why are you so . . .” Josephine struggles for the right word. Unhappy? Angry?

  “How should I be?” she says before Josephine finishes. “I am trying to finish my degree, but we have to keep moving because Kip can’t keep his pants on.”

  Josephine frowns. Can’t keep his pants on?

  “Oh,” Elisabetta moans, “I’m such an idiot.”

  Josephine chews the stringy pot roast, considering what to say. But her mind stays blank.

  “I should have married John Leone,” Elisabetta says unbelievably.

  “Father Leone? How could you have married a priest?”

  “I could have,” Elisabetta says in her drunken sleepy voice. “I had my chance.”

  “Blasphemy,” Josephine mutters, and she makes a rapid sign of the cross.

  Outside the window, beneath a streetlamp, a family walks past. The father is tall and lean and wears a red knit hat with a pom-pom on top. The mother has a long, blond braid down her back, and giant fuzzy earmuffs, and she holds the hand of a girl in a powder-blue coat. A light snow begins to fall, and Josephine feels like she is watching a movie of a family walking down a street in the snow in Vermont.

  The girl stops, and slowly turns and faces the café. Josephine holds her breath. The girl seems to be looking right at her. Josephine stares back. I am here, she thinks, willing her words to leave the café and float out into the street, where they could settle on the girl.

  “A pretty moon,” Elisabetta says in that way she has that seems like she is talking to herself and not Josephine.

  Still, Josephine nods. The
moon is a perfect crescent, her favorite, silver in the blue-black sky.

  Now the girl smiles. At me, Josephine thinks. She is smiling at me. Her heart lurches and she gets to her feet. Without thinking she is moving toward the door, and then she is out the door, standing in the cold night air.

  But the family has continued walking, and the father is saying in a loud voice with a strange accent, “That’s a good one. Tell it again.”

  The girl’s high-pitched voice drifts in the air. “Why shouldn’t turkeys do math?”

  Turkeys? Math? Josephine starts walking after them.

  “Because if they add five plus three, they get eight!” the girl says, and the three of them burst into a fit of giggles.

  The street is slippery with snow, slowing Josephine down. At the corner, they have vanished. She looks in every direction but the streets are empty. Did she imagine them? Did she imagine that girl staring at her, finding her in the café window?

  “Valentina?” she says softly.

  Elisabetta runs up behind her. “What the hell?” she says when she reaches her mother.

  “I thought I knew them,” Josephine tells her.

  “Knew them?” Elisabetta shakes her head, confused. “Like you know people in Vermont?”

  Josephine could not know it that night, but for many years to come, whenever she visited Chiara in Vermont, she would chase girls like this one, girls of a certain age. She would lean in closer to hear them talk. She would memorize their faces, their clothes, the sounds of their voices. She would search crowds at Masses and train depots until she found one who might be hers. But in the end, they always disappeared, swallowed up as if they never existed in the first place. Perhaps this was the fate of mothers who lose their children: they spend the rest of their lives trying to find them, even though they know it is impossible. But isn’t that faith? Isn’t that hope? That maybe one of them will pause under a perfect moon on a snowy night and, when she hears her mother’s voice, will turn toward it?

  Dear Mussolini

  “DUCE,” FRANCESCA’S GRANDMOTHER BEGAN.

  Rat face. Francesca wrote. Turd.

  Her grandmother folded her hands, brown-spotted and blue-veined, into her lap and considered. She wore a thin cotton dress, black, and beneath it a white slip, white bloomers, a white camisole. Over it she wore an apron in a gaudy floral pattern. Francesca hated her. She had lost several teeth, and as she spoke air whistled through the spaces.

  “I am writing to tell you of my gratitude and the gratitude of the Italians who are here in America, away from the homeland that you will once again make strong . . .” her grandmother dictated.

  Josephine only spoke very basic English. Although she had been in America for over thirty years, she still mixed up please and thank you, still looked like she was drowning when she tried to piece together an entire sentence. Even her grandmother’s Italian embarrassed Francesca, with its dropped final vowels and bastardized words.

  You Fascist pig, Francesca wrote. We living under the democracy of the United States of America despise you . . .

  It was warm for April, and Francesca sweated under her wool sweater. She wished she could take it off and run bare-chested through the yard, the way she used to when she was a little girl. Now she was fifteen years old. She had been kissed by four boys; all of them shorter than she was. One of them, Bruno Piazza from down the hill, loved her. She hated him. She hated every boy she had kissed.

  Her grandmother’s voice droned on, blending with the bees that buzzed around their heads, dictating her letter of loyalty to Il Duce.

  Francesca sighed.

  “Your devoted servant,” her grandmother said.

  May you burn in hell, Francesca wrote.

  “Josephine Rimaldi.” Her grandmother grinned at her, not even caring about her missing teeth, or the long, silver hairs on her chin. She picked up the small sharp knife in her lap and began to cut a pear that had fallen to the ground.

  “Do you know you’re supposed to wash that?” Francesca told her in English. “The ground is full of germs.”

  “Bella,” her grandmother said, not understanding. “Grazie.”

  “You stupid old woman,” Francesca said in English.

  “Eh,” her grandmother said, shrugging.

  Francesca folded the letter into thirds and put it into an envelope. On the front she wrote, as she always did:

  Benito Mussolini

  Italia

  On the back, she wrote her grandmother’s name and Natick, Rhode Island.

  “Go mail it,” her grandmother said. Juice from the pear dribbled out the corner of her mouth.

  Relieved, Francesca stood to go. Robert Torre mailed all the letters back to the Old Country. His store was at the bottom of the hill, near the mill, a long enough walk to get some of this nervous energy out of Francesca. On the way to Torre’s, she would pass Bruno’s house, and Michele’s, another boy she sometimes kissed. Maybe she would see one of them and they would walk together to the river first. She would lie beside them and let them kiss her, let their tobacco-tasting tongues explore inside her mouth, and their hands grope at her. Today she would take off her shirt, surprising whichever boy she ran into, and let them touch her breasts. Touch only, not kiss. These were things that the ancient priest, Father Leone, would not understand, these lines girls drew, the way girls felt desire too.

  Her uncle came into the yard.

  “Hi, Uncle Carmine,” she said, trying not to sound nervous.

  “You puttana, going to get laid?” he asked, a terrible thing to say to his fifteen-year-old niece, but ever since Anna Zito married someone else he called almost every girl a puttana.

  Francesca held up the letter. “Going to mail this to Mussolini,” she said, and quickly closed the gate behind her.

  FRANCESCA’S SISTER, MARY, always made a point of finding something beautiful here. If Mary were walking beside her right now, she would say, “Look at the pink blossoms on that cherry tree!” She would stop at the Galluccis’ to admire their new shrine to the Virgin Mary, taking the time to open its glass door, to gasp at the lovely face of the Madonna, perhaps even to light a candle at her feet. Mary would know whose cat these drunken-looking kittens zigzagging on the street belonged to and that Old Man Conti’s wine was ready to drink. Mary, who was twelve, loved everything about this town. She loved everything as much as Francesca hated it.

  “Where would you go if you left?” Mary asked, but only at night when the two of them lay together on the iron bed they shared upstairs. The ceilings slanted so that they could reach up and touch them easily, something Francesca often did, pressing her fingertips against the eggshell-colored paint as if she could break through to the roof and beyond.

  “I don’t know,” Francesca answered. She was embarrassed that she knew so little of the world that she could not even name a place to run to.

  “Providence?” Mary asked.

  “No!” Providence was awful, a jumble of carts and peddlers and shouting, without any of the exciting things a city might offer. Francesca had gone there once with her father, to buy cheese.

  “Back to the Old Country?” Mary asked. She wouldn’t stop until she had an answer, and Francesca had no answer to give her.

  “Yes,” Francesca whispered. “I would go to Italy and be Duce’s mistress.”

  Mary giggled. “Then you’d have to take Nonna with you so she can be his mistress too.”

  Later, after Mary would fall asleep, Francesca would press her fingertips to the ceiling, pushing, pushing, unable to move anything even a little.

  NO ONE WAS OUT TODAY except Francesca. Poor Bruno, she thought as she approached Torre’s store. Tomorrow she might not feel the same way, she might keep her breasts to herself. She saw the men from the neighborhood across the street. They had set up tables on the sidewalk in front of the store. The acrid smell of cigars already reached her, the medicinal smell of their homemade wine sitting in glass jugs on the sidewalk. The men were playing ca
rds, laughing, shouting in Italian. She saw her own father among them, gambling away their money, money they needed for Mary’s new glasses and pencils for them to do their homework.

  In the distance she heard the whirring of a car engine. Automobiles were no longer strange on the street here even though most people couldn’t afford them. Walking, Francesca always had to sidestep horse shit. But the DiGiornos didn’t have a car and they still held a certain fascination for her. She paused to watch it pass. A bottle-green Ford.

  To her surprise, the car stopped and a man’s voice called out, “Excuse me?”

  Francesca looked around, but she was the only one on the street except the men a half block away. Swallowing hard, she walked toward the automobile. She was aware of how she must have looked in her dull wool sweater, too heavy for such a warm day, and the thick black boots and unevenly hemmed skirt. Still, she smoothed her hair, trying to flatten the strands that insisted on springing up.

  She peered into the car. The driver wasn’t a man. He was a boy, not much older than she was. His hair was so blond it seemed almost white in the sunlight and his face looked pink, like a baby’s.

  “I’m looking for Jerry Piazza. Do you know him?”

  Francesca shook her head. The letter to Mussolini grew damp in her sweaty hands.

  The boy sighed, exasperated. “Do you speak English?” he asked her.

  Insulted, she said, “Yes, I speak English.” She was trembling. She smelled mint, as if it grew in the backseat of that car.

  “Sorry,” he said. “You never know. There’s so many wops in this part of town.”

  She could’ve said something about how ignorant he was, how he should try to call one of those men across the street wop and see what happened. One of those men was, in fact, Gennaro—Jerry—Piazza.

  ON THE FEAST DAY of the Virgin, the men of the town took the statue from the church and wheeled it through the streets on the giant platform they built new each year. The girls covered the platform with roses, working all morning, their fingers bloodied from thorns. Then they joined the throngs of people in the street, pressing against each other to throw coins at the Virgin as she passed. The old women, dressed in black, walked slowly behind the Virgin, praying, their voices so soft they sounded as if they were humming.