“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “I ate some street food. It gave me the distress. And then we were caught in the lightning and forced to wait at Uncle Albert’s.”
Porzia crossed her arms and eyed him. Cicci adopted the same skeptical pose.
Their mother looked to Mimo. “Is that true, Domenico?”
Pino glanced warily at his brother.
Mimo bobbed his head. “I told him the sausage didn’t look right, but he would not listen. Pino had to stop in three cafés to use the toilet. And there was a Gestapo colonel at Uncle Albert’s shop. He said the Nazis are taking over the Hotel Regina.”
His mother paled. “What?”
Pino grimaced and bent over even more. “I need to go right now.”
Cicci still looked suspicious, but Pino’s mother’s anger had moved on to worry. “Go. Go! And wash your hands afterward.”
Pino hurried down the hall.
Behind him, Porzia said, “Where are you going, Mimo? You’re not sick.”
“Mama,” Mimo complained, “Pino gets out of everything.”
Pino did not wait to hear his mother’s reply. He rushed past the kitchen and the incredible smells and climbed the staircase that led to the second floor of the apartment and the water closet. He went inside for a respectable ten minutes and spent it thinking about every moment he’d had with Anna, especially how she’d looked back at him in amusement from across the trolley tracks. He flushed, lit a match to cover the lack of foul odor, and lay on his bed, the shortwave tuned to the BBC and a jazz show that Pino almost never missed.
Duke Ellington’s band was playing “Cotton Tail,” one of his recent favorites, and he closed his eyes to marvel at Ben Webster’s tenor sax solo. Pino had loved jazz from the first time he heard a recording of Billie Holiday and Lester Young performing “I Can’t Get Started.” As heretical as it was to say so in the Lella household—where opera and classical music reigned supreme—from that moment forward, Pino believed jazz was the greatest musical art form. Because of that belief, he longed to go to the United States, where jazz was born. It was his fondest dream.
Pino wondered what life in America would be like. The language wasn’t a problem. He’d grown up with two nannies, one from London and another from Paris. He’d spoken all three languages almost from birth. Was there jazz everywhere in America? Was it like this cool curtain of sound behind every moment? And what about the American girls? Were any of them as beautiful as Anna?
“Cotton Tail” wound down. Benny Goodman’s “Roll ’Em” began with a boogie-woogie beat that wound up into a clarinet solo. Pino jumped up off the bed, kicked off his shoes, and started dancing, seeing himself with beautiful Anna doing a crazy Lindy Hop—no war, no Nazis, only music, and food, and wine, and love.
Then he realized how loud the music was, turned it down, and stopped dancing. He didn’t want to bring his father upstairs for another argument about music. Michele despised jazz. The week before, he caught Pino practicing Meade Lux Lewis’s boogie tune “Low Down Dog” on the family Steinway, and it was as though he’d desecrated a saint.
Pino took a shower and changed clothes. Several minutes after the cathedral bells tolled 6:00 p.m., Pino crawled back on the bed and looked out the open window. With the thunder clouds a memory, familiar sounds echoed up from the streets of San Babila. The last shops were closing. The wealthy and fashionable of Milan hurried toward home. He could hear their animated voices as one, a chorus of the street—women laughing at some small joy, children crying at some minor tragedy, men arguing over nothing but the sheer Italian love of verbal battle and mock outrage.
Pino startled at the apartment bell ringing downstairs. He heard voices bidding hellos and welcomes. He glanced at the clock. It was 6:15 p.m. The movie started at seven, and it was a long walk to the theater and Anna.
Pino had one leg out the window and was feeling for a ledge that led to a fire escape when he heard a sharp laugh behind him.
“She won’t be there,” Mimo said.
“Of course she will,” Pino said, making it out the window.
It was a solid nine meters to the ground, and the ledge was not very wide. He had to smear his back to the wall and shuffle sideways to another window that he climbed through to gain access to a back staircase. A minute later, though, he was on the ground, outside, and moving.
The cinema’s marquee was unlit due to the new blackout rules. But Pino’s heart swelled when he saw the names of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth on the poster. He loved Hollywood musicals, especially those with swing music. And he’d had dreams about Rita Hayworth that . . . well . . .
Pino bought two tickets. As other patrons filed into the theater, he stood searching the street and sidewalks for Anna. He waited until he started to suffer the empty, devastating knowledge that she was not coming.
“I told you,” Mimo said, sliding up beside him.
Pino wanted to be angry but couldn’t. Deep down, he loved his younger brother’s guts and bullishness, his brains and street smarts. He handed Mimo a ticket.
The boys went inside and found seats.
“Pino?” Mimo said quietly. “When did you start to grow? Fifteen?”
Pino fought a smile. His brother was always fretting that he was so short.
“Not until I was sixteen, really.”
“But it could be earlier?”
“Could be.”
The houselights went down and a Fascist propaganda newsreel began. Pino was still depressed by Anna’s standing him up when Il Duce appeared on the screen. Dressed the part of the commanding general in a medal-strewn jacket with waist belt, tunic, breeches, and gleaming black knee-high riding boots, Benito Mussolini walked with one of his field commanders on a bluff above the Ligurian Sea.
The narrator said the Italian dictator was inspecting fortifications. On-screen, Il Duce’s hands were clasped behind his back as he walked. The emperor’s chin pointed at the horizon. His back was arched. His chest puffed toward the sky.
“He looks like a little rooster,” Pino said.
“Shhhh!” Mimo whispered. “Not so loud.”
“Why? Every time you see him, he looks like he wants to go, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo.’”
His brother sniggered while the newsreel went on to boast of Italy’s defenses and of Mussolini’s growing stature on the world stage. It was pure propaganda. Pino listened to the BBC every night. He knew what he was watching wasn’t true, and he was happy when the newsreel ended and the movie began.
Pino was soon swept up in the film’s comic plot and loving every scene where Hayworth danced with Astaire.
“Rita,” Pino said with a sigh after a series of spiral moves had swept Hayworth’s dress about her legs like a matador’s cape. “She’s so elegant, just like Anna.”
Mimo’s face screwed up. “She stood you up.”
“But she was so beautiful,” Pino whispered.
An air raid siren wailed. People began to yell and jump up from their seats.