The Laundress

by Barbara Sapienza

  “Olé!” Kinky is opening the door to the house.

  “Arriba, Kinky.”

  After many olés and clapping and stamping, they get up and begin to tap their feet and wave their arms, circling each other around the room as Mercedes sings her alegría. All thrilling! And Kinky is an incredible dancer, full of poise and attitude and soulfulness. She enchants Lavinia. What a pair, the flamenco artists, mother and daughter—la cantante Mercedes and the dancer Kinky.

  “All that is missing is the toque.” Mama and Kinky look into each other’s eyes.

  “Toque is the guitar,” Kinky explains, looking at Lavinia. “My father used to play for us.”

  Mercedes sings, “La puertacita, aah, oh, aah, way; da detta a da; ba-ma-pa-pa; pero, ma ma pa pa.”

  “She’s singing that he’s at the doorway, playing for us,” Kinky says. “I feel he’s right here.”

  “Mine, too.” A wide smile breaks across Lavinia’s face. “Oh, I have so much to tell you.”

  “Well, yeah, it’s been so long now,” Kinky says.

  “Yes, the long now.” Lavinia starts laughing, thinking about the Long Now Foundation and Zack Luce and all she has had going on since she last saw Kinky.

  “Comer, niñas!” Mercedes commands. She’s beaming, refreshing her face at the sink, washing her hands before preparing her famous tamales.

  “Hot tamales for lunch, Mamacita?” Lavinia beams.

  “Mijita, today you are our hot tamale, and a happy one, too.” Mercedes places two tamales on each of the girls’ plates.

  Chapter 25:

  THE UNFINISHED PIETA

  Early morning, Lavinia wakes to the sounds of birds. Convinced they are singing an alegría, she drops back to sleep with the humming of Mercedes on her lips and tastes the colors of the flamenco dance in her dreams. When she wakes again, she’s ready to see George. She dresses, leaves her place, and in fifteen minutes is standing at George’s studio door.

  He greets her with a large smile and those dark, penetrating eyes. “Come in, Lavinia. Tea? Coffee?”

  “Yes, thank you, but first I want to visit her again.”

  George moves aside as Lavinia lets herself into what she now thinks of as the Temple of Love. A sculpted casket, holding Angela, draws her attention. She kneels down on the padded knee rest in front of her mother, caught in repose. Lavinia can’t believe the detail he has carved into the clay. Softly creased folds flow like currents.

  Currents. She stares, convinced the folds are moving, the statuesque figure is breathing. She undulates. Lavinia squints at what seems like her mother’s pulsing heart radiating waves, or maybe breaths. She’s still alive. Lavinia rubs her eyes, her face, pinches her cheeks, and looks again to see the vibrating woman. Maybe she’s dreaming. So strong is her desire for this beautiful woman to be alive. George has created an homage to his love, and Lavinia wants her to wake up.

  But Angela sleeps in the folds of a beautiful garment, her hands resting on her full bosom, a rose between her long fingers. Lavinia touches the smooth face carved in clay and closes her eyes, letting her fingers find the raisin mole, so similar to her own—a kind of umbilical connection that grounds her. She cries into the folds; tears run down her cheeks. The soft-lit room is a memorial to her mother, another Taj Mahal. She cries, letting the beauty of the sadness soak through her pores.

  She doesn’t move away when she feels George’s strong hands on her shoulder. Instead, his touch grounds her further in the moment. Tears stream, but now they are tears of sadness for this man’s love for her mother. It occurs to her that they have shared this connection all this time: they both love and long for Angela. He’s never moved on from her. He too has been paralyzed in some block of stone, himself an unfinished pietá, solidified in time. She considers how she was perhaps on track to follow in this unwanted tradition, and she’s not interested in being encased in stone.

  She wipes her nose on her sleeve and turns toward George, He reaches for her hand and walks with her through the great sanctuary of love and death. The lights dim as they move toward a smaller light, where she sees a wooden table, two chairs, and a stovetop. George puts some water on the small burner, and they sit down.

  “You have built a temple of love for her.”

  He pauses. “You have seen my heart.” He places his hand on his chest.

  “Your heart?” Lavinia searches his eyes.

  “Yes. She rests in my heart, and these are the stations of my love.”

  Lavinia thinks of the scenes on the church walls on Good Friday when Christ is on the road to his crucifixion. She shudders, thinking of the times she must have sat beside her mother in the church as a toddler on Good Fridays, and then with Sal and Rose in front of all the mortifications of the dead and dying Christ. It leaves her cold. She shivers.

  Responding to what must be a morbid look on her face, George says, “I don’t think about this as the stations of the cross but as stations of my love for her . . . and you.” His face is soft and relaxed.

  “For me?” she says, feeling the sting of betrayal again. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were when you first saw me? Why did you wait so long?”

  “I don’t know,” he confesses. “I couldn’t grasp the reality of it.”

  “Which part?” she asks.

  He fumbles with the teapot cover, not answering.

  Lavinia continues, “But you knew it was me, and I didn’t know it was you. That was unfair.” She hears a demand for answers in her own voice.

  “I had been thinking of you for so long, thinking I might never meet you, and then when I did, I felt lost. Afraid.” His eyes drop. The crease between his brow intensifies.

  “Afraid?”

  “Terrified you might reject me!” He opens his eyes.

  “Why have I been so excluded from all of this?” she cries.

  “I agonized over it for years.” George looks sheepish, like a dog with ears that hang down to his side. When he comes up for air, he says, “It wasn’t until Uncle Giovanni told me Sal was returning to Naples and Sal called me himself that I seriously decided to find you.”

  Lavinia couldn’t understand why he waited so long. If he had only come to her in San Francisco, she would have known her dad: he would have taken her to school and picked her up; he would have told her of her beautiful mother’s love; she would have known her grandparents from New York. They would have loved her. He had the power to make her life different. What kept him away? Another family? The curse Giovanni mentioned? Was everyone’s lips sealed?

  Fear? George said he was afraid. Maybe all he could do was hold the torch for her mother so he could keep her alive. Was all this obsessive creating related to his guilt about not returning for her? Lavinia can’t help but wonder how her life might be different if he had returned to Naples the next summer to see his new baby, to spend that summer with them, even take them back with him to New York.

  Her mother would be alive in real flesh, instead of this damn stone.

  He was making up excuses!

  “Sal called me and asked me to wait until he left. He said he would arrange for you to call me. He said he wanted to tell you first.” George sits down again. “I guess he didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you insist he introduce us before he left?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it would be better if he did, but he said he couldn’t do it. When you called, I realized you didn’t know.” He fumbles with the cups and saucers.

  “Why didn’t you tell me then?”

  “I thought it would spill out. It didn’t. Then I thought you might cut me out of your life. At least this way, I could see you twice a week. I know it was cowardly.”

  “I’m pissed at you!” It feels good to admit this out loud to him. She looks into his dark eyes, which soften her outburst.

  “I’ve known you all your life, Lavinia Lavinia. I’ve imagined how you look, your smile, your eyes, your gesture—but when I first saw you I was stunned! I froze when you were rig
ht here in my home.”

  She tries to remember that first moment, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary to her. She knows that Sal and Rose also kept their emotions from her, and now she understands how she learned to keep her own feelings packed in stone.

  “I wanted to tell you how beautiful you were; how you looked like your mother; how sad I was when she died; how I went to look for you in Naples as soon as I heard about her death; how I found a shrine with her picture; how I visited your nonna, pining away in a darkened room. But everyone was sworn to silence. No one would tell me what happened or where you were!”

  “That seems to be the story of my life,” Lavinia cries. She wants to break something—the cup, the saucer she holds—but realizes what she really wants is to break this pattern of keeping secrets.

  “I’m sorry, Lavinia.”

  “You didn’t even tell me your last name.”

  “I know. I agreed to keep that secret, too.”

  George gets up, walks to the cupboard, and returns with a cookie tin full of a dozen chocolate-covered biscotti. She takes one and dips it into her hot tea before biting into it. She lets the chocolate melt on her tongue.

  “Your mother loved dark chocolate, too.”

  “Bittersweet.”

  “But her life was sweet, too. It was filled with joy and love for you and me and everyone she touched.”

  “But then she died at twenty-one.”

  “I know it’s not fair, Lavinia.”

  “It’s not fair. We both lost her.” Now it seems she is grieving for the man, her father, who lost his love and his daughter, too. Lavinia tenses up; her rib cage seems to float up toward her shoulders as her neck stiffens, and now her jaw feels contorted. Her mouth twists in some weird, silent cry. But she does not cry.

  “Angela has always been with me, maybe even before I set eyes on her at the well.” He looks out in the distance. “And she’s with us now.”

  “I don’t see her.”

  “You will see her through me. I’m not going anywhere now that we have reunited.”

  She feels a damp clump of breath emit from a hidden vault inside her.

  “We knew when we made love that you were there with us. Your mother felt you deep inside her womb. We saw you before you were born.”

  Lavinia fidgets in her chair.

  “And I feel her presence as if she’s deep inside me, guiding me to you, Lavinia.” George looks off in the distance again, as if he is seeing Angela still alive. He is no longer speaking to Lavinia but to Angela, to the memory of her. “You placed my hand on your smooth olive skin and kept it there. You wanted me to feel the pulse of her sweet blood. Bless you, Angela, for giving me a daughter. She’s here, can you see her, Angela? She’s beautiful like you. Lavinia Lavinia is twenty-six now.” George is smiling, tears of joy collecting in his eyes.

  Lavinia sits stunned by George’s words, enthralled by the images they evoke. When he sees her looking at him, he smiles.

  “You lit up your mother’s life.”

  They sit in silence for a long moment. But still she wonders why he never came back to Italy to see her as an infant.

  “Why didn’t you come back to Naples? You knew she was pregnant. Why didn’t you come to meet me?”

  “It’s the biggest regret of my life,” George says.

  Lavinia looks in her tea for the answer, but the tea leaves are gone. All she sees is the biscotti floating, a ball of mush. Everything that might have been was interred in a mausoleum. Her mother, who might have seen her daughter grow up, lived in cement. Angela had missed the first grader reading both Italian and English; the girl who made her first Holy Communion with bubblegum in her mouth. What if, as a preadolescent girl, Lavinia had walked hand in hand with her mother in Manhattan, heading toward her artist dad’s studio in Greenwich Village? What if they had taken the boat to the islands near Naples?

  Now Lavinia sits at her father’s small wooden table, mourning her losses, all the little deaths, thinking how she missed her mother’s baking. Angela would have baked to celebrate Lavinia’s milestones. Her mother would have made her famous honey-topped struffoli, and cakes with patisserie cream, and hard biscotti that would be worthy of a hearty bite, not like these soft ones George served. There would have been many celebrations, including her graduation from college; she would have made meals for Kinky and Lavinia.

  Here in her thoughts she smiles, reminded of Mamacita Mercedes, who has done a good enough job.

  When she gets up to leave, George says, “I’d like to walk you home. I need some fresh air.”

  “Okay, we can walk the few blocks together.”

  They silently walk to the Mission toward Valencia Street. In step with her father, she stops and turns; she’s silently asking him not to disappear. She lifts a finger to tell him that, but feels faint, dizzy. He guides her as she wobbles toward her flat. When they get there, he holds a hand on her shoulder lovingly.

  “Lavinia, I’m sorry for not coming back . . . for you and her.”

  She feels sad, not sure of her ability to forgive him, though she wants to. She points him away.

  Inside, Lavinia goes into her room and pulls her blankets over her head against the daylight, then closes her eyes to nap, as she smells Raggedy and whispers to her doll, “I think everything’s going to be okay.”

  Chapter 26:

  MOURNING

  At the first dull light, Lavinia wakes to the sweet black of sadness, like the rich espresso she has come to love. So full is the bittersweet feeling that it’s almost a delicious yearning.

  Peeking out from her cave, she sees it’s still dark; she has slept through dinner and into the night. She doesn’t want artificial light. She has to plant each foot securely on the floor in order to get up. That accomplished, she makes her way into the dark room to find her jeans, shirt, and jacket.

  Pulling her clothes on feels challenging today. Why these straight-legged jeans? Why can’t they make stylish pants for women be more comfortable? she asks herself as she contorts her feet and extends herself to get into the tight legs. She promises herself some new flowing clothes soon. She’s only ever worn black, but maybe now it’s time for something with a splash of color.

  Finally dressed, she finds her way out to the fig tree and sits in contemplation with a gentle wind on her face, thinking of George. She has let him touch her heart, seeing his love for her mother. Again she experiences their shared love and sorrow. She bows to the tree for holding her in these moments of clarity. When she opens her eyes, a spider web glistens in the first rays of light. Tiny drops of dew cling to the web, bursting with the light of dawn, dripping from the threads of silk. Lavinia lets her eyes jump from one diamond to the next, convincing herself they hold the image of the tree, her mother, the sun, and her face, reflecting them like the facets of a diamond.

  When she leaves her apartment, the street is quiet with early dawn just arriving. The shops are closed on 16th Street; few people are about. She walks. A screeching trolley on Market startles her. She pictures herself, not her mother, sprawled out on the pavement. She flinches as the trolley comes to a stop, covers her eyes, not wanting to see these pictures—and a desire to live bursts forth.

  Sunrise brings with it an orange glow to the day. She walks down California to Market and then up Grant to Chinatown, where shopkeepers are opening up stores or moving garbage bins to the rear of their places. One man is hosing down the sidewalk. In North Beach, the cafés open early, with patrons straggling in before work. The smell of coffee soothes her mind. She can taste it and feel the rush of her favorite medicine.

  As soon as she enters Falcone, her own falcon, Mario, looks up. “You’re out early.”

  “Couldn’t wait to see you.” She leans across the bar and kisses him.

  He sets to work making her a double espresso and a plate of fresh croissants.

  “I was up this morning contemplating by my tree,” she tells him.

  “Wish I could’ve been with you
.”

  “Me, too,” she says.

  He smiles and reaches out a hand.

  “George told me about their love for each other. My mother was in love with life, and me, and him, until she died on the day she planned to leave with me for New York to be with him.” She sighs. “My nonno pushed her, and they both fell under a moving trolley.”

  “Oh, no! Man, was he some kind of wacko?” Mario moves in closer. “Come here.”

  Lavinia lets him hold her. She sobs on his shoulder, saying, “Why’d they have to die together on that day, Mario?”

  “A waste. How could he do that?” He pulls her in closer. “What happened, exactly?”

  “They were fighting. He pushed and grabbed and they stumbled, fell into the oncoming trolley. He didn’t want her to leave him.” Her eyes widen. “It’s all some kind of dark magic steeped in secrecy, and loyalty. They didn’t tell anyone because they wanted to keep my grandfather’s honor intact.”

  “That’s why they didn’t tell you?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, gazing off. “Giovanni said people were scared. They thought a curse had been put on them with these horrible deaths. They didn’t want to further tempt the gods.”

  “I’m so sorry.” He kisses her wet cheeks and hugs her. She bends her head and neck into his chest.

  “What if my mother lived here and could meet you and Kinky and Mercedes and Zack, and live with my father, and see me so happy?” She laughs, realizing she’s wetting his shirt with her tears. She answers her own question silently, feeling the tragedy deep within her but also the sense of resolution in having spoken about what happened with George and feeling gratitude for her own angels.