Chapter 26
A CARRIAGE RIDE
Un Giro in Carrozza
Colin Chapin greeted Enza and Ciro on the platform of the train at Grand Central Station. Colin’s hair was completely gray now, and his suits were Savile Row, but his smile was as open as it always had been. He is a solid white brick of a man, Enza thought. Colin was the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and with the job had come speaking engagements and lucrative coproductions with opera companies around the world. Colin and Laura were in the top tier of high society in New York, but Enza wouldn’t have known it when he threw his arms around them. He acted like he was still the office runner in accounting that he had been when they first met.
Colin took their bags and led them to his car, a midnight blue and maroon Packard, custom made and the height of chic opulence. As he turned onto Fifth Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street, Enza saw Laura waiting in the lobby of the apartment building. Colin pulled up to the awning and Enza jumped out of the car and into the arms of her best friend.
“Autumn in New York,” Laura said.
“Our favorite time of year!” Enza took in her friend, who opened her velvet opera coat to reveal a pregnancy so advanced, it appeared the baby could be born that same evening.
“You’re having a baby!” Enza threw her arms around Laura. “And soon!”
“I know. Forgive me, Enza, I wanted to tell you. But it’s been a very difficult pregnancy. The last week things have been so much better, but we’ve been on guard the whole time. The doctor said I would never have a baby, but here we are. It was a shock to Colin, to me, to the doctor, to the entire medical community as it stands in New York City. But it’s true, and we’re thrilled.”
“I have sons in college, and soon we’ll have a baby in the crib. We don’t know whether to be thrilled or . . . cry,” Colin teased.
Laura was at the peak of her beauty, the contrast of her pale skin and red hair were now softly dramatic. Her lovely profile had taken on the lines of aristocracy, and the sharp angles of her youth were gone.
“You should be on bed rest,” Enza told her.
“How could I rest? My best friend was on her way.”
Ciro and Colin joined them, and Laura embraced Ciro. “All right, all right, upstairs with you,” Colin said. Ciro reached to help Colin with the luggage, but a bellman whisked it away. Ciro turned to see a valet drive the Chapin Packard to the parking lot. Ciro shook his head. They were a long way from Chisholm.
The elevator opened into the foyer of the penthouse apartment. Laura had decorated the apartment in soft greens and yellow, obeying the rule Mrs. DeCoursey always proclaimed back at Milbank House: paint your rooms the colors you look best in.
The spacious rooms were well appointed with polished Chippendale furniture, Aubusson rugs, crystal sconces, milk-glass chandeliers, and oil paintings of pastoral settings, including the farm fields of Ireland, the black rage of the North Sea tossing a boat in its milky foam, and tasteful miniatures of single flowers, a daisy, a hydrangea, and a gardenia.
“You’re a long way from Hoboken,” Enza said.
Ciro and Colin had gone out on the terrace. “Back in bed, Mama,” Colin called out.
“I am!” Laura hollered back. She showed Enza the guest room, a cheery room with a canopied bed covered in chintz. “Come with me.” Enza followed Laura to the master bedroom, a cool blue room with trellis-patterned wallpaper and a satin-covered bed. Laura pulled off her cape, revealing a nightgown underneath. She climbed back into bed.
“When are you due?” Enza fluffed the pillows.
“Any minute.”
“Where’s the nursery?”
“I haven’t put it together.”
Enza sat on the bed. “Superstitious?”
“The doctor is concerned.” Laura wiped tears from her eyes. “And I’m scared.” Laura cried because at long last, in the arms of her longtime and best friend, she could be honest.
“Before I had Antonio, I had terrible feelings of doom. I’m sure your baby is fine.”
“Do you think so?”
“I’ve learned one important lesson in my life, and I’m going to share it with you. Don’t worry about bad things that haven’t happened yet. It will save you a lot of anxiety.”
Colin brought a tray of tea in for the ladies. “You girls catch up, but as soon as you do, it’s bedtime for the little mother here.”
“He’s so bossy,” Enza teased as Colin went. “So what’s the gossip? You said you had a lot.”
“Vito Blazek left the Met, and now he works at Radio City Music Hall. He’s on his third divorce. ”
“Can’t be!”
Laura nodded solemnly. “The three stages of romantic love for a flack: marry a showgirl, divorce her, marry the daughter of a producer, divorce her, marry a younger showgirl, and divorce her once you’ve come to your senses.”
“How awful.” Enza sipped her tea.
“Don’t you want to know how he looks?”
“Every detail,” Enza said.
“Gorgeous.”
Enza laughed. “That figures.”
“He’s no Ciro Lazzari. Honey, in the sweepstakes of the acquisition of handsome men, you got the golden ticket. The man you married is one in a million. But you know that.”
“And I’m going to lose him, Laura.”
“He looks well,” Laura said hopefully.
“I pray for him. I keep hoping that maybe the whole thing is a mistake. And when I say to that Ciro, he looks at me like I’m crazy. He knows the truth, and he’s accepting it. He’s never been a religious man, but he has an inner strength that defies faith itself.”
“Maybe the trip will cure him,” Laura said gently.
“That’s what I tell him. And I’m going to say the same thing to you. Your baby is fine. Believe it, and all will be well.”
Colin woke early to go to the Met for an early call. New scenery for the production of La Bohème was being delivered. Ciro left Enza and Laura after breakfast and went for a walk. His plan was to walk through Central Park, but he found himself walking south, down Fifth Avenue toward Little Italy. He thought about taking the trolley, but he felt good, and decided to see how the city had changed in the twelve years since he left.
Broadway widened out in lower Manhattan. The sidewalks were full of fruit vendors, flower carts, and newsstands. When he reached Grand Street and took the turn into Little Italy, he remembered the buildings, and was surprised that while upper Manhattan seemed to change, his old neighborhood had stayed the same.
He found his way easily to 36 Mulberry Street. The Zanetti Shoe Shop sign was gone, as was the Italian flag. The storefront was empty, with a sign that said, “For Rent.” Ciro stood back and took in the place where he’d worked when he first came to America. He moved closer and looked through the window. The same bowed floors and tin ceiling remained, and he could see the place where his cot used to be. The privacy curtain was gone. The door to the back garden was open wide. Ciro peered through. The old elm that he loved had been chopped down. The tree that had given him comfort and hope was gone, and with that, Ciro left the past and returned to the present. He took the tree and its absence as an omen, and with a heavy heart, turned to walk back to the Chapins’.
Laura was taking a nap. Enza sat and waited for Ciro to return. When he came through the door, her heart leaped in her chest as it always had. Now, though, that joy was soon crushed by a feeling of impending doom. She went to his side and took his hands in hers. “I have a surprise for you,” she said. “Are you tired?”
“Not at all,” he said.
Enza grabbed her hat, coat, and gloves and pushed Ciro out the door.
Many nights when Ciro couldn’t sleep, Enza would tell him stories of her days at the Metropolitan Opera House. He had only been twice; once for a concert when he was young, and the second time when he saw Enza before he left for the Great War. Both visits burned in his memory, and for him, there was no greater thrill than to see those of wealth and privilege stand in awe of the Great Caruso, a poor Italian boy who’d made good.
Enza took Ciro’s hand as they climbed the steps into the entrance foyer of the Metropolitan Opera. Years later, she remembered in vivid detail what she and Laura had been wearing the day they came for their interviews. She remembered what she’d had for breakfast, and what it had been like when they walked into the theater together for the first time.
Enza took the same steps on this day with her husband. And when they entered the dark opera house, the lingering scents of expensive perfume, grease paint, lemon oil, and fresh lilies filled the air, just as they had the first time she set foot inside. She led her husband down the aisle and up to the stage, where the ghost lights glowed along the upstage brick wall. The scenery, delivered in bundles, was stacked against it like giant envelopes waiting for the mailman.
Ciro turned and looked out at the red velvet seats and up into the mezzanine. Enza took him center stage. Ciro stood on the exact spot where the Great Caruso had sung the night before Ciro left for New Haven. He closed his eyes and imagined the send-off all over again.
Enza led him backstage and down the stairs to the costume shop, which buzzed with activity. No one noticed them as they walked through. Enza stopped to point out the places she remembered. The fitting room where Geraldine Farrar had tried on the first gown Enza ever made, the ironing boards where she and Laura would gossip long into the night, and finally, her sewing machine, the sleek ebony Singer with the silver wheel and the gold trim. A young seamstress was busy sewing a hem at Station 3, Singer machine 17. She might have been twenty years old; watching her, Enza was a girl again. She saw herself on the work stool. When she looked up at Ciro, she was certain he did too.
After a few days of visiting their old haunts, including having pie and coffee at the Automat, Ciro was packed and ready to depart for Italy. His suitcase rested by Laura’s front door. Ciro was asleep, but Enza could not bear to close her eyes. She felt the great ticking of the clock: every moment that she slept was one less awake with Ciro.
If she could just delay the worst, if she could savor these moments, when Ciro still felt good enough to walk to Little Italy and back, and enjoy a meal, and smoke a cigarette, she believed it would be all right. She didn’t want to imagine what it would be like when he couldn’t do the things he wanted to do. That was why the trip to Italy was urgent. Enza believed that it would change the course of Ciro’s life, just as it had changed his life to leave it. It might not save his life, but it would shore up his soul.
Sometimes Enza tried to imagine what life would be without Ciro, believing it would help her accept it when the time came, but she couldn’t. The well of pain was too deep to imagine. There was a rap on the door, an urgent one that woke Ciro. Enza went to the door and opened it.
“It’s Laura.” Colin entered the bedroom. “She’s in labor.”
“Call the doctor,” Enza told Colin calmly. “Tell him to come here.”
“She should go to the hospital,” Colin said in a panic.
“Send him here.”
Enza abided with her best friend and gently coached her through the labor pains. Soon the doctor arrived, with a nurse assistant, who took one look at the space and began to transform it into a birthing room.
The doctor asked Enza to wait outside, but Laura cried out for her to stay. Enza took a seat next to Laura and gripped her hand, just as she had her own mother’s on the night that Stella was born. The memory of her baby sister’s birth came flooding back with every grip, heave, and sigh that Laura endured. Tears began to flow freely down Enza’s face as she stayed in the moment while holding the memory of what she remembered from the mountain.
Laura’s body soon opened up, and her son slipped into the hands of the doctor, who skillfully cut the umbilical cord, followed by the nurse, who took the baby to clean and swaddle him.
“You have a son, Laura. A son!” Enza told her joyfully.
She heard the nurse speaking with the doctor. The nurse left the room with the baby, and Laura cried out to her to bring her son back. The doctor went to Laura’s side. “We’re taking the baby to the hospital.”
“What’s wrong with the baby?” Laura cried out, and as she did, Colin came into the room.
“They have to take him, Laura. He’s having trouble breathing.”
“Go with them, Colin,” Laura cried.
Enza could see Ciro behind Colin in the hallway. “Go with him, Ciro. I’ll stay with Laura,” Enza said.
Ciro followed Colin out the door as Laura leaned against Enza and wept, then, depleted from the birth, fell asleep. Enza straightened the room, changed the sheets, bathed Laura, dressed her, and covered her in warm blankets. She lowered the lights, pulled up a chair, and sat by her bed. Enza began to pray the rosary. She held Laura’s hand, and soon she found herself on her knees, begging God again to change the course of events for someone she loved. Every prayer was a plea to bring good news by morning.
Henry Heery Chapin was placed in an incubator at Lenox Hill Hospital as soon as Colin arrived at the hospital with him. Through the muslin, Colin could touch his son’s pink fingers and brush his cheek. At five pounds, Henry was big enough, but his lungs weren’t clearing as he breathed. The doctor had suctioned his tiny lungs. Soon, they were working on their way to full capacity. It seemed to Colin that the baby was getting better as the hours passed.
When dawn came, the doctor checked the baby, and told Colin that the worst was over. They would keep the baby for a few days, to make certain that he was well enough to go home. Ciro stayed with the baby so Colin could go home with the news. The hospital was close to their apartment, but he stopped at the nurse’s station and called. Enza woke Laura up to tell her. She shed tears of joy at the news of her baby’s health. Enza tucked her rosary into her suit pocket, a believer once more.
The ship was leaving the port in lower Manhattan late that afternoon. Ciro thought about canceling his trip, but now that Henry was better, he felt he should go.
Ciro had watched baby Henry through the night, and as he watched the nurses in the hospital tend to him in his tiny, well-lit tent, and as he observed Colin, a new father again, yet alert to every detail of the infant’s progress, Ciro decided that life would go on. The baby, Henry, had survived. Maybe it was a sign.
That afternoon, when Ciro said good-bye to Enza on the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, before going to the pier to board the ocean liner for Italy, they held one another a long time.
“I want you to sleep on the boat. Take the fresh air and eat. Promise me you’ll eat,” Enza pleaded with him.
“And I’ll drink whiskey and smoke.” He laughed.
“You can have anything you want but the dance-hall girls.”
“But they’re so much fun,” he teased, pulling her close. “And they like me.”
“You don’t have to tell me.” She laughed. “Now, I want you to memorize every detail of my mother’s house. I want you to visit Stella’s grave and kiss the blue angel for me. Can you do that?”
“Of course,” Ciro promised.
“And will you look up at Pizzo Camino? I’ve forgotten it, and I want you to see it for me.”
“I’ll be your eyes and ears and heart in Schilpario. Take care of Laura, she needs you. Make the nursery. Help her with the baby. And don’t worry. Our mountain is a miracle,” Ciro said as he kissed her good-bye.
Ciro practically spent the entire voyage on a chaise longue on the second-class deck of the SS Augustus. At any other time, he would consider it lucky that his middle name was the same as the ship’s. But not this time. Whenever he heard the horns blow at sea, he remembered shoveling coal in the belly of the SS Chicago. He remembered meeting Luigi, and how no matter how much he scrubbed, his skin was gray from the coal dust after a week in the pit.
Now, he was an older man, and he led the life of one who has earned his way out of steerage. Ciro was not in first class, where the passengers were pampered, but his room in second class was comfortable, and the windows were above the waterline. He smiled to himself when he went to sleep the first night. He had never traveled across the ocean above the waterline.
Every moment of the journey brought back memories. When he heard his native Italian as the ship docked in the port of Naples, he was surprised to find that it moved him so deeply that he wept. When he boarded the train to go north, he couldn’t get enough of the people; he took in every detail of them and remembered when he too was Italian. He realized he had missed them, and his heart ached with the knowledge that he would not die in the country where he was born. Now he was neither Italian nor American; he was a dying man on a mission to make whole what never had been, and to heal a wound for which there was no salve or balm.
Ciro decided to climb the last bit of the Passo Presolana on foot. He sent his duffel ahead on the carriage to the convent of San Nicola, where the nuns had prepared the guest room for him.
Ciro buttoned his coat as he hiked up the hill to the entrance of Vilminore. He stopped at the top of a cliff and looked down into the gorge, where the green leaves of late summer had fallen away, leaving behind a tangle of gray. From his vantage point, the branches looked like a mass of childhood scribbles, a charcoal nest of intersecting lines and curves, made when a boy was just learning to write.
Ciro smiled when he remembered the girls he would woo to walk with him along the cliffs, and how it was the perfect excuse to hold a girl’s hand where the road narrowed. He remembered the day Iggy had brought Eduardo and him down the mountain, how they didn’t say much, but Iggy let him smoke a cigarette. Ciro had been fifteen when he was sent away. One transgression against the priest in the Church of Rome had changed the course of his life.
As he walked in the grooves of the cinnamon-colored earth, he thought of Enza, and the life they would have had on the mountain. Maybe she would have been able to have more children here, away from the pressures of making a living. Maybe he would have built the house on the hill that he had imagined in his dreams.
It had been twenty years since Ciro stood in the piazza of Vilminore. As he surveyed the colonnade, he realized that not much about it had changed. Some of the shops had been handed down to the sons, but mostly the village was just as he left it, houses of stucco surrounding the San Nicola church and rectory, and anchored across the way by the convent. The chain of command appeared to be what it always had been; the feeling of the place was familiar.
Ciro rapped on the convent door, then pulled the chain to ring the bell. When the door opened, Sister Teresa gently took Ciro’s face in her hands. She still had the face she had twenty years ago; only a small web of lines around her eyes like spider silk betrayed her age.
“Ciro Lazzari!” she exclaimed. “My boy!” She threw her arms around him.
“I’m an old man now. I’m thirty-six years old,” he told her. “Look at my fingers. See the scars from the lathe? I’m a shoemaker.”
“Good for you. Enza wrote to me. She told me if she waited for you to write a letter, I would be waiting until Judgment Day.”
“That’s my wife.”
“You’re a lucky man.” She folded her hands into the sleeves of her habit. Ciro thought he was anything but lucky. Couldn’t Sister Teresa see that he was running out of time? The nun took him by the hand into the convent.
“Did you make me pastina?”
“Of course. But you know, I work in the office now. Sister Bernarda is the new cook. They brought her up from Foggia. You never met her—she came a couple years ago. She knows her way around a tomato. And she is so much better with the baking than I ever was.”
“You were a good baker!”
“No, I was good at the pot de crème and the tapioca—but when it came to cakes, they were like fieldstones.”
The nuns had gathered in the foyer. The young faces of the novitiates were new to him, but a few of the nuns who had been young when he was a boy were still there. Sister Anna Isabelle was now the Mother Superior, Sister Teresa her second in command.
Sister Domenica had died soon after Ciro left, and Sister Ercolina recently. The black-and-whites were family to him—a crew of dotty aunts, some funny, most well-read, some brilliantly intelligent, others survivors like him, who used their wits, their quick humor, or their stubborn natures, but all of them, unlike him, when they knelt before the altar, were pious. In hindsight, Ciro could appreciate their goodness and their choices. When he was a boy, he had been confounded why any woman would choose the veil over the expanse of the wide world, a husband, children, and a family of her own. But in fact they were making a family inside the walls of the convent; he just hadn’t recognized it for what it was when he was young.
“Ciao, Mother Anna Isabelle,” Ciro said, taking her hands and bowing to her. “Grazie mille for Remo and Carla Zanetti.”
“They said wonderful things about you. You worked very hard for them. They moved back to their village and had a happy retirement before they died.”
“That was Remo’s dream.”
Sister Teresa took Ciro down the long hallway to the garden and the kitchen beyond. Ciro remembered every polished tile in the floor and every groove in the walnut doors. The garden was covered in burlap for winter, the grapes having been harvested. When he looked ahead to the kitchen door, propped open with the same old can, he laughed.
“I know. We change very little here. We don’t have to.”
Sister Teresa took her place behind the worktable and threw on an apron. Ciro pulled up a work stool and sat. She reached into the bread bin and brought out a baguette, slathered it in fresh butter, and gave it to him. Instead of pouring a glass of milk, she poured him a glass of wine.
“Tell me why you’re here.”
“My wife didn’t say in the letter?”
“She said you needed to come home. Why now?”
“I’m dying.” Ciro’s voice broke. “Now I know in a convent, that’s good news, because you ladies have the key to eternal life. But for me, the skeptic, it’s the worst news. I try to pretend that the moment won’t come, and it buys me time. But then the clock ticks, and I remember what’s true, and I panic. I don’t pray, Sister, I panic.”
Sister Teresa’s expression changed, her face filled with a deep sadness. “Ciro, of all the people I have known and prayed for, of all of them, I hoped for you to have a long life. You earned it. And you always knew how to be happy, so it isn’t a waste for you to be gifted a long life. You would spend the time wisely.” And then, like the good nun she was, she wrapped the sad news in her beliefs like a warm blanket. Sister wanted to assure Ciro of the promise of eternal life. She wanted him to believe, hoping that faith would change his prognosis. “You must pray.”
“No, Sister.” Ciro smiled weakly. “I’m not a good Catholic.”
“Well, Ciro, you’re a good man, and that’s more important.”
“Don’t let the priest hear you.”
She smiled. “Don’t worry. We have Father D’Alessandro from Calabria. He is nearly deaf.”
“What happened to Don Gregorio?”
“He went to Sicily.”
“Not Elba? He wasn’t banished like Napoleon?”
“He’s a secretary to the provost of the regional bishops.”
“His cunning got him far.”
“I think so.” Sister poured herself a cup of water. “Do you want to know what happened to Concetta Martocci?”
Ciro smiled. “Is it a happy story?”
“She married Antonio Baratta, who is now a doctor. They live in Bergamo and have four sons together.”
Ciro looked off and thought about how life had changed for him and those he knew. Even Concetta Martocci had found a way to redeem the worst thing that had happened to her. This made Ciro smile.
“Concetta Martocci still makes you smile.” Sister laughed.
“Not so much, Sister. There are other things. I am anxious to see my brother. My heart fills at the thought of seeing my mother. I want to visit my wife’s family. I promised Enza I would go up the pass to Schilpario. Has much changed on the mountain?”
“Not much. Come with me,” Sister said. “I want to prove to you how well I keep a promise.”
Ciro followed Sister Teresa behind the kitchen to the convent cemetery. She stopped at a small headstone near the end of the gate.
“Poor Spruzzo,” Ciro said. “He wandered these trails like an orphan, until he found an orphan.”
“No, not poor Spruzzo. He had a happy life. He ate better than the priest. I gave him the best cuts of meat.”
“Saint Francis would approve.” Ciro smiled.
The convent had finally been given the old carriage when the priest graduated to having a motorcar. The current horse, Rollatini, was donated by a local farmer. Ciro hitched the horse and thought of his wife, who would do a better job with the harness, hitch, and reins than he could ever do.
He climbed up into the seat and took the Passo up the mountain to Schilpario. He remembered the first time he’d kissed his wife, when she was just a girl and he a boy. He took in every daisy, cliff, and stream, as though they were precious gems in a velvet case that only he could open. How he wished Enza could be on the mountain with him!
It was a relief to be in a horse-drawn cart after days on the open sea, and after the long train ride north from Naples. A cart and horse had a certain rhythm, and there was something soothing about the company of a horse. Ciro felt less alone.
Enza had told Ciro where the new house had been built, and to look for the color yellow.
As he made his way along the main street past the spot where he’d first kissed Enza, a flood of memories washed over him. He remembered Via Scalina as he passed it, and the stable where Enza had hitched the horse to take him home the night he buried Stella. The wooden window shutters on the stable were closed.
Ciro proceeded up the road slowly, as the hill grew increasingly steep. He spotted the yellow house on Via Mai, standing out against the mountain like a leather-bound book. A feeling of complete recognition pealed through his body; the house before him was the same house he had seen in his mind’s eye as a boy, and had hoped to build for the woman of his dreams. How ironic, now, that the house Enza had worked to build for her family was the very one that had occupied the deepest wells of his imagination as a boy! It was almost detail for detail the house of his dreams. He couldn’t wait to tell Enza how magnificent the Ravanelli homestead she had helped build was in completion.
Ciro guided the horse to the side of the house. The barren garden, surrounded by fieldstones, looked like an abandoned campfire when the wood had burned to ash. Ciro followed the stone path up to the front door. Before he could knock, the door swung open, and Enza’s family moved toward him to greet him.
Enza’s mother Giacomina, nearing sixty, was plump, her gray hair worn in a long braid. Ciro could see Enza’s fine bone structure in her mother’s face, and certain of her mannerisms were instantly familiar. Giacomina embraced her son-in-law. “Ciro, welcome home.”
“This kiss is from Enza. She is well. She is in New York, helping Laura Heery with her new baby.”
Marco stood up in his chair. He was now more robust than Ciro remembered; returning to the mountain had been a tonic for him. Ciro embraced him, too. “Enza sends her love to you too, Papa.”
As Giacomina introduced each of her children, Ciro took careful note of any news that he could share with Enza. The boys, now men, were running a carriage service, now with a motorcar, and business was booming.
Eliana was close to thirty-five, expecting her fourth baby. Her straight brown hair was worn loose down her back, and she wore a work smock, skirt, and brown boots. She introduced her sons—Marco, eleven years old, Pietro, nine, and Sandro, five. Her husband, she explained, worked in Bergamo at the water plant, and was sorry he could not be there.
Vittorio was married to a local girl, Arabella Arduini, cousin to the town padrone.
Alma was twenty-six, and hoped to go to university. She wanted to become a painter, as she had a talent for fine art; she had painted a gorgeous fresco of sunflowers on the garden wall. She took Ciro’s hands into hers. “Please tell my sister that I thank her for everything she did for us. Because of her, I can go to university.”
The door pushed open, and Battista entered. Lanky, dark, and sinewy, he was thirty-six years old, had yet to marry, and showed no signs of interest in it. He had a sullen expression, and Ciro noticed that he seemed resentful of the family, and that his presence caused tension in the room. Ciro embraced him anyway, and called him fratello.
Eliana, who lived down the hill now, showed Ciro the house. It was not grand, but it was exactly enough for the family—five bedrooms, a loft, the kitchen, and the living room. Four windows along the front of the house gave beautiful light within. Ciro remembered the windows he’d wanted in the house of his dreams, and here they were, letting in the pale blue light of the Italian afternoon.
Vittorio and Marco showed Ciro the smokehouse, built of fieldstone and set into the side of the mountain. Another small structure served as a spring house; fresh, cold water from the mountain stream pulsed through it through two open troughs into a pool lined with stones.
Giacomina prepared a meal just like one Enza would serve: soup, followed by gnocchi, with a dish of greens and cake and espresso for afterward.
Eliana poured her brother-in-law a cup of espresso.
“Alma, do you think you could draw the house for me? I think Enza would love to see it on paper.”
“I would be happy to. How long are you staying?”
“A week.”
“It took you as long to get here as your visit will be.”
“It’s very hard to be away from Enza and Antonio.”
“I understand,” Giacomina said.
“I’m sure she explained about my health.”
Giacomina and Marco nodded that she had.
“Antonio is a wonderful son. You would love him.”
“We love him already,” Vittorio said. “He’s our nephew.”
“He’s an athlete. But he’s intelligent too. I hope you will find a way to visit Enza and Antonio in Minnesota sometime.”
Ciro did not want to make the pleasant visit somber in any way. He told funny stories about Enza, and described New York City, and living on Mulberry Street. He talked about the Great War and the decision to go to Minnesota. He told a few stories about Antonio, and what a wonderful young man he was. They shared photographs, and stories of Enza’s youth. After dinner, the entire family took la passeggiata and went to the cemetery, where Ciro did as Enza had requested, kneeling to kiss the blue angel marking Stella’s grave. He stood back and put his hands in his pockets. As the sun began to set, the sky turned the exact blue it had been the night he’d first kissed Enza, after digging the grave. It seemed so long ago, and yet, standing in this place, he felt as though it were happening all over again. It seemed to Ciro that so much of life was about not holding on, but letting go and in so doing, the beauty of the past and the happiness he felt then came full circle like a band of gold. The night sky, the cemetery, the memory of places past and the people who had been there to bear witness, provided all the constancy his heart required. This is what it means to be part of a family.
When Ciro went to hitch the horse that night, to return to Vilminore, Eliana went outside to help him. Ciro climbed up into the bench of the cart.
Eliana handed him a small leather-bound book, with endpapers of Florentine paisley. “This belongs to Enza. Will you take it to her?”
“Of course,” he said.
The ride down the mountain to Vilminore filled Ciro with a deep longing for his wife. How he wished he could have made her come on this trip! But there had been no convincing her. As he put Rollatini in the barn and unhitched the cart, hung up the reins, and unbuckled the harness, he began to weep. He was ending where he began, and the irony was not lost on him.
Sister Teresa made up the bed in the guest room near the chapel. Ciro saw a nun kneeling inside, but he walked past the glass doors and into his room, closing the door gently behind him. He undressed, sat on the bed, and opened Enza’s book.
As he turned the pages, he saw his wife’s youth blossom all over again. She sketched dresses, wrote silly poems, and attempted to draw all the members of her family. As Ciro turned the pages, he smiled at her rudimentary attempts at portraiture.
He stopped when he saw “Stella” written at the top of the page. Enza had been fifteen when she wrote,
Stella
My sister died, and her funeral was today. I prayed so hard for God to save her. He did not listen. I promised God that if he spared her, I would not ask Him for children of my own later. I would give up being a mother to keep her here. But he did not listen. I am afraid that Papa will die from a broken heart. Mama is strong, he is not.
I met a boy named Ciro today. He dug Stella’s grave. I wasn’t afraid of him even though he was tall and twice my size. I felt sad for him. He doesn’t have a father, and his mother left him. Someday I’ll ask the sisters at San Nicola why his mother left him there.
Here’s what I can tell you about him. He has blue-green eyes. His shoes were too small, and his pants were too big. But I never met a boy more handsome. I don’t know why God would send him up the mountain, but I hope there’s a purpose in it. He doesn’t believe in God very much. He doesn’t seem to need anyone. But I think if he thought about it, he would realize he needs me.
My Stella is gone, and I will never forget her because I see how it goes when someone dies. First there are tears, then there is grief, and soon, the memory fogs and they disappear. Not Stella. Not for me. Not ever. E.
Ciro closed the book and placed it on the nightstand. He felt the hollow of his back, and it wasn’t tender. Sometimes his pain was intense, and then, without explanation or warning, it would go, and there would be a reprieve. And in the moments without pain, Ciro believed he could heal.
Ciro lifted his hand to make the sign of the cross, something he had not done in years. He hadn’t done it once during the war. He hadn’t done it when his son was born. Enza would make a cross on the baby’s forehead with her thumb, but not Ciro. He hadn’t blessed himself when he left Enza for this trip. He felt it disingenuous to call upon God in desperation. But tonight, he wasn’t making the sign of the cross so that God might grant him a wish, might have mercy and save him; he made the sign of the cross in gratitude.
Enza had loved him from the moment she met him, and he had not known it. He thought he charmed her on Carmine Street on the morning she was to marry another. He believed all his experience with beautiful girls had somehow formed a romantic confluence, so he might win the most beautiful girl of all, if only he chose her. Ciro thought it was he who had won his true love’s heart. Now he knew that her heart was there for the taking all along.
No wonder she had been so hurt when he hadn’t tried to find her, and no wonder she’d never come for him after she told him her feelings. She would never have wanted to make him uncomfortable. In fact, Enza’s mission all along had been to give Ciro comfort, and in every way, she had succeeded, including making him go on this trip. He knew that if anything would heal him, it would be the mountain. As he turned over in the bed, he felt no pain in his body. As always, Enza knew best.