Читать книгу The Islands of Divine Music - John Addiego - Страница 7

Rosari

Some came from the bottom of the boot to find a new life when theirs was unbearable, and some whispered the word America over and over among their prayers and sought to present themselves new before God in a new world. Rosari left Southern Italy and set sail into the unknown for an additional reason: in order to escape prosecution for her prodigality.

Her father, Lazaro Cara, was a gentle man, and some would say he was too gentle. When his wife left him he gave up the chase after a week of weeping and lugging his children from village to village in the hilly south of Italy. Rosari’s mother was a beautiful woman with wildly sad eyes, with thick black curls which played across her cheeks even when she tried to keep them bound in a scarf. She dropped the wash in Rosari’s arms one day, put on her nicest dress, and left. Friends and family lent her father a jackass and a shotgun, but he looked silly holding the firearm in his arms like a baby wrapped in bunting. He wept, and Rosari and her older sister wept, and they walked from town to town with the jackass and ate cold potatoes and handouts from strangers and milk from their nanny goat, then returned home.

Lazaro returned to his vocation, which was cutting the hair of the merchants and land barons and gossips in Reggio Calabria. Word came that his wife had run off with a man named Gulia. Then word was she’d dumped Gulia, or there had never been a Gulia, or that a fat butcher named Benedetti in Napoli, who already had a wife and seven children, was keeping her as a mistress, or that she had been seen among gypsies singing at a saint’s-day fair near Eboli. Then a cholera epidemic hit, and the stories about his wife got swept out the doorway with the hair and were replaced by stories of death.

The disease took the life of Rosari’s cousin Paolo and a newborn neighbor named Gino Emilio Ravetto. Lazaro had little work and less money, the village had more activity in the cemetery with its ornate crypts and sepulchres than it did in its piazza, so, two years after his wife had left them, he and Rosari and Claudia rode a freight train to Napoli, a crowded, filthy, dangerous place. Maybe they were going to beg her mother to come back from the butcher, Rosari thought, maybe they were looking for people who still cared about the condition of their hair, or maybe they were simply taking their grief to the open road as they had when her mother had left. They hopped onto the moving train and the father held his two girls and wept for miles along the steep and sooty coastline.

Every dark eye and flowing tress in the city made Rosari’s heart jump for want of her mother. Around the corner would come a young woman holding a basket filled with mushrooms or Swiss chard, and for a moment the girl would think it was she. Through the window of the barbershop where her father snipped hair and she cleaned the floor and shined shoes she might see a woman’s profile, somebody in a black dress with a load of firewood balanced on her head, and Rosari would almost cry out, Mama! Most of the time she kept her feelings to herself, and mostly because she didn’t want her father to get started and have him cry all over the head of some rich customer, but the keening for her mother overtook her now and then in the crowded apartment above the barbershop, and the fact that Claudia soon left them didn’t help.

Her sixteen-year-old sister was engaged to a Neapolitan stonemason within a month of their arrival. Plump, quiet, simple-minded Claudia got married and moved into her mother-in-law’s house the night of the wedding. Rosari, who had learned to read by age seven with the help of her father and the sisters at Santo Giovanni, her home church, lost herself in newspapers and books as a way to cope with the loss of her sister and the lost hope of finding their mother. She found many books to choose among in the big city, on racks in a tobacconist’s, in the houses of the merchants. The girl would run down the narrow streets, dodging carts and mules, and deliver clean linen to ladies who would lend her books about knights and damsels in distress. She was just eleven years old, a dark-skinned, scrawny girl with disheveled hair and her nose in a book, when Gratiano, a local criminal who liked a close shave and a shoe shine, studied her.

Debonair, articulate, yet hopelessly illiterate, Gratiano sat in the chair under Lazaro’s nimble fingers and watched the girl read a book half as big as she was. She reads and writes? he asked the barber. At that time only one of every ten Neapolitans could read.

Smart as a whip, Lazaro replied.

If I could do that I’d learn English and go to America. And the girl thought of how she would marry this handsome man with the dark eyes and sail to America, where he would earn an honest living trading prosciutto or pelts with Indians, and she would read books in Italian and English to him and their three children.

The next morning, as she was carrying pane rustico from the baker’s, the criminal and his friend stopped her. They were seated on the sidewalk before a bar, each man holding a demitasse. Gratiano waved her over and introduced her to the large, bald man in a blue suit. My friend doesn’t believe you can write. Would you be so kind as to demonstrate? He handed her a fountain pen, such as she’d never seen before, and she wrote the words he dictated to her on a piece of butcher paper which enveloped a pig’s leg. Both men clapped their hands and slapped their knees enthusiastically. Gratiano placed three lire on the table and said he’d like to pay her to write a letter for him, provided she could keep it secret. Rosari set down her loaves and straightaway put the criminal’s words to pen on a piece of parchment:

Esteemed Sir, it began, Please excuse this intrusion into your private affairs. Financial difficulties, as well as recent illnesses in my family, have forced me into the position in which I find myself. My associate and I must come to your hotel this afternoon and kidnap you. Be entirely assured that no harm will come to you, and that your freedom will be immediately reinstated once a ransom of five thousand lire, or the equivalent in your British pounds, has been transferred to you by wire from your most highly esteemed family in Great Britain. It is my greatest hope that, once I have received this money, you will continue your travels in the sunny South. Perhaps you will see the ruins at Pompeii? Of course, that is your affair, not mine. I only wish you the least inconvenience during this kidnap, as well as many happy returns to our beautiful city.

With Sincere Regrets and Fondest Hopes, Mr. Z

She read it back to the criminals, and they leaned back in their chairs and closed their eyes, Gratiano sighing now and then while the bald man nodded and murmured words of praise. She didn’t understand some of the words she’d written, and she wondered how an Englishman might decipher their idiom, but the robust approval of the two men made her chest puff out in its baggy, hand-me-down dress. What a prodigy! Gratiano exclaimed. A genius, the bald man said, and he added two more lire to the three. But he didn’t like the Mr. Z part and wanted it changed to The Shadow. Gratiano said Mr. Z was fine since nobody’s name began with a Z, and he pinched the girl’s cheek and winked at her. Rosari’s face colored. She took her bread and money and ran back to her father, resolved to tell him nothing of the adventure.

There was constant talk of America in her neighborhood, particularly in the barbershop and the piazza. Cholera and malaria, starvation and poverty, all manner of suffering were driving rural people to the crowded city or to caves in the mountains, and as they huddled before their fires they dreamed of America. The hill folk had used the ancient cave dwellings as goat stables for as long as anyone could remember, but now the goats were being eaten or turned out for miserable human families to reclaim. Rosari had seen them from the train, the little archways dug into pale limestone cliffs high above the coastline, the women in black shawls and head coverings squatting before them. In America there would be fresh air to prevent disease, work for good money, and open space to plant gardens and keep animals, people said. Lazaro, contrary to his neighbors, maintained that he was more apt to return to his hometown than to leave the country. Once the plague has passed, and all the rats have left the sinking ship, he told his daughter, we can return to our home. Perhaps your mother will come back to us, too, he added with a sniffle.

About three weeks after she’d written Gratiano’s letter a policeman came to the barbershop, and Rosari heard that an Englishman had been kidnapped from the local hotel. She swept the floor and averted her eyes. Her father told her to go upstairs and make the soup, but she wanted to hear the conversation, so she knocked over the glass filled with combs and spent another five minutes cleaning up after herself. She heard the men laugh, whistle, and cluck their tongues, but she didn’t catch much of what they said.

In the books beautiful women were sometimes kidnapped by scoundrels and rescued by knights or gentlemen. Gratiano was far from a scoundrel in her eyes, and some Englishman at the hotel was hardly a beautiful woman, so she hadn’t really sensed that her use of the word in the letter could amount to something like real kidnapping until now. It had seemed more likely that the word might have other meanings when used in other contexts. She prepared the soup with the wife of Fratelli the barber and brought it and the bread out to the steps where the three families usually ate in the heat of the day. There were twelve altogether, the wives and children of the two other barbers spread out along the shade of the busy street, and they all spoke of the kidnapping now, the three barbers, sworn to secrecy moments before by the carabinieri, having spilled the beans to their wives and children instantly.

Among the more urbane of the criminal society, particularly la mano nera of Napoli, a prekidnapping note such as Rosari had written was common practice. The wealthy victim was given a chance to put his things in order, prepare his family and finances for the inevitable, perhaps even pack a few necessities. Resistance was, essentially, futile. Organized criminals of the South could afford to extend this courtesy with little risk, and the families of victims generally paid the ransom, which was never exorbitant, immediately. But this Englishman’s father hadn’t followed custom; rather, he’d sent twice the ransom to local military and police, who had arrested Gratiano and his partner in the bar where they and the Englishman had been sharing a chianti and playing pinochle. The word on the street was that they would soon hang from a tree in the piazza, but that the judge was waiting to arrest a third conspirator first because, clearly, neither of these men could write their names, let alone the kidnap note found on the victim.

Rosari felt sick and asked to be excused.

For three days she didn’t eat, and Lazaro sent for one of the local fortune-tellers to diagnose her illness. The old woman poured olive oil into a bowl of water and gasped at the shape it took on the surface. Lazaro, Claudia, Fratelli the barber’s wife, and two of her children gasped and cried out as well, although none of them knew what the shape signified. Herbs, entrails, and other measures were recommended, but before Lazaro went to get a few coins for remedies the girl pulled him close and, weeping bitterly, confessed.

The room fell silent. Then the fortune-teller shrugged and said, Well, that would do it.

Lazaro applied for work permits to America and Argentina that very day. He would work in a steel foundry, a coal mine, a gaucho ranch, a fort surrounded by Indian tepees, anywhere, yes. And he could read and write, and he was a highly skilled barber trained by the army outside Roma when he was a youth, and he had no physical ailments, and no, he had no . . . He paused, then reported that he had no wife, that the woman had died two years previous, but that he did have one child still living with him, just a little girl. Only a simple little girl who tried to help out around the barbershop, but, bless her heart, she was very slow and stupid, poor thing.

For the next few weeks Lazaro forbade his daughter to hold a book or a newspaper. When she delivered the linen she had to turn down the romances offered by the merchants’ wives, and sometimes she told the ladies that she couldn’t read and had only been looking at the drawings. Articles about the kidnapping and the trial lay curled on the barbers’ chairs, tempting her like the serpent in the garden, and opinions about the case were aired by the magistrates of the piazza and the orators of the street corners while their hair sloughed off their heads and fell onto the floor, but Rosari kept her mouth shut. Some said that the Englishman wanted to drop the charges and had found the experience a lark rather than an ordeal, but that his father and the police saw the matter differently. Others claimed that the police, emboldened by the infusion of money and the rhetoric of a British prefect from Rome, had suddenly remembered that Gratiano and Umberto were already under suspicion for previous crimes, particularly for perforating the bodies of a dishonest landlord and a known child molester with butchers’ knives and dumping the same into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The day before their departure two remarkable things happened, the first of which came in the form of a court summons. Father and daughter had just packed what they could into a trunk and two sheets made into shoulder sacks when a scrawny officer told them to follow him. They walked on stiff and trembling legs behind the little man’s quick strides, a train of the other barbers’ children, some nosy neighbors, and a few unemployed curiosity-seekers hitching behind. The little man ordered the others to stop at the foot of the steps, then led Rosari and Lazaro into the courthouse.

They descended a dank, smelly stairwell to the row of jail cells. The top of Umberto’s bald head could be seen at the end of a blanket where the big man slept with his face covered. A stink of piss and excrement came from one end of the dark corridor, and Rosari pulled her scarf across her nose. The little officer had them raise their arms and, begging their pardon first, he patted their clothes, then led them to Gratiano.

The criminal sat in sleeveless shirt and suspenders, an unlit, hand-rolled cigarette between his lips. He put on his coat and fedora after he looked up and saw the visitors. Even in the squalid jail cell, with his rumpled clothes and the bruised and swollen skin about his eye and nose where the interrogators had left the mark of their work, he looked, to Rosari, the most handsome man in the world.

I wanted to thank you for your kindnesses to me. They are letting me say all the farewells I wish, he said in a husky voice. His eyes darted to the policeman, who stood a few yards off, then turned to Rosari’s. He continued in a whisper, You should never worry about nothing, and he made a gesture indicating that his lips were sealed. Then, in a louder voice, he told Lazaro to be thankful for having such a little jewel of a daughter, and he tapped his forehead with his index finger. What I would give for such a mind.

God bless you, Gratiano, Lazaro exclaimed through his tears. He made the sign of the cross and kissed the criminal’s hand. Tomorrow I take this little jewel with me to America.

Ah! Gratiano’s eyes filled with tears. America!

They were crying when they stepped into the brilliant light and noise of Naples, and drying their eyes when they got back to the barbershop, where the second remarkable thing happened. A scrawny, hunched woman sat on the steps beside Fratelli the barber’s wife. The woman’s black dress and head covering hung about her bones, and though her drawn face was vaguely familiar, her eyes were the most foreign things Rosari had ever seen. These eyes had lost most of their hue, as if some brush with the sun had singed them. Nevertheless, Lazaro knelt beside the woman and repeated the word Eleonora, Eleonora. This was the name of Rosari’s mother.

She seemed a kind of zombie. Her gestures were stiff and slow, her eyes more in the world of the dead than that of the living, and Rosari was scared of her. There was some debate that evening about whether she should stay in Naples with Claudia, whose mother-in-law clearly didn’t want her, or come with her husband and youngest girl to America. The mother, sitting stiff as a mannequin on Lazaro’s bed, said very little during the debate. Fratelli, who threw his weight around the shop and apartment, said in a loud voice that if he were Lazaro, he’d throw the woman back out on the street, and Lazaro stood with arms folded and said that he was considering doing just exactly that. He assumed an uncharacteristic air of severity, standing with arms crossed and chin thrust out. At one point he paced with hands behind his back, a soldier wearing a barber’s apron as his uniform, and turned suddenly to point his scissors at his wife. I have not yet decided, he told her, what we shall do with you.

In the morning they started for the wharf. No decision had been made, except that Lazaro allowed Eleonora to carry one of the bundled sheets. She trailed behind her husband and daughter, bent under the burden. When they reached the gate, Lazaro produced papers, and the agent snorted at him.

It says here your wife is dead.

A mistake, Lazaro said. Look, I have our marriage certificate, and that’s her. You don’t believe me, ask her. Ask our daughter.

The agent stared at Eleonora. She looks wrong, he said. She looks touched in the head. They might not let her into New York.

Rosari suddenly cried and clung to her mother’s arm while the woman stood stiff as a statue. The line pressed them from behind as people leaned close to witness the drama.

I don’t know if she’s touched in the head. I’m a barber, Lazaro said, I’m not a doctor. Are you a doctor?

The agent lifted his head toward the ceiling and asked no one in particular why he had to deal with lunatics.

Look, she disappears and comes back two years later like this. What am I supposed to do?

The agent shrugged and shook his head. Then he stamped their papers and sent them aboard.

They sat in the perpetual racket and stink of the ship’s engine and the closeness of too many bodies. When allowed, Rosari went on deck with Lazaro while the mother remained seated on their belongings in the steerage hold, her knees drawn up and her face resting on her arms. It was late fall, and the Mediterranean sky glimmered like the gold-leaf dome of some Byzantine temple, but after they passed Gibraltar into the ocean a seasonal change took hold. Sky and sea turned coal gray, and North Atlantic winds stabbed them with invisible blades of ice.

Against reason, the mother now stood on deck and stared into the green-and-black face of the deep until husband and daughter found her and led her back to the hold. Sometimes she took off her head scarf and revealed the thick curls of what had once been waist-length hair now chopped to her earlobes. For a moment she might weep and let her family hold her, but more often she sat cold as marble or pushed their arms off her body. She might say a word or two about America, but mostly she’d stare off in silence with eyes that reminded Rosari of those on the sun-faded frescoes painted many generations ago on the walls of Santo Giovanni back home.

Somewhere beyond the British Isles, after days of sky dark as the sea, the ocean began to push the boat like a child on a swing. Water splashed against the high portals. The several hundred strangers sat upright like children awakened from a nightmare, barely daring to move or speak, as the ship swung from side to side. The vessel’s joints creaked, and the engine wheezed like an asthmatic. Moans and prayers started to mingle with the ship’s complaints, and for hours Rosari clung to her father and tried to engage her mother’s cold arms as well, but Eleonora sat like a stone, and in the brief flashes of lightning her face appeared rapt, as if absorbing a beautiful music from afar.

At dawn Rosari awoke to her mother’s gentle voice. She sat up and let Eleonora lead her through the softly swaying floor of bodies to the dark and icy stairway. Her mother spoke to her as she had years ago, in a sweet and animated voice. She spoke of their great adventure, their journey to a new world, and when she thrust open the door to the deck it seemed that Rosari was either deep within a dream or that she and her mother had indeed just crossed into some other world.

Eleonora stood on deck with her head uncovered, her face radiant, and the sky fell as white jewels onto her black hair. She lifted Rosari’s hand, and they danced slowly through the snow, a substance Rosari had never seen before, a phenomenon which seemed to her then the flight of a million angels come to guide her mother and herself to a new life. And as the snow fell a celestial music, as of glass rubbing on silk, came down from the sky and lifted her heart.

For the remaining days of their voyage Eleonora spoke and moved with great animation. Lazaro stared at her in astonishment. The woman tended sick children and seemed equipped with special insight regarding all manner of ailments, prescribing various foods and administering healing treatments with her hands. Her beauty shone among the frightened and weary passengers like a fountain of snow in a black and leafless forest, but her eyes remained faded, as if buffeted by some otherworldly light, and her words made little sense in conversation. Often as she spoke father and daughter exchanged looks, and more than once fellow passengers touched their foreheads and nodded to each other.

The ship chugged through a fog that occasionally conjured a few gulls or even the voices of seals, and then one day the engine’s racket stopped and the passengers gathered on the deck. America, they whispered to each other, was just over there, and they stood on deck a long time waiting for America to appear, the families clutching bundles, pressed together for warmth. After several hours a small launch appeared, and then others. The people were loaded onto them and carried into the fog.

Rosari’s first view of America was nothing like the savage wilderness filled with Indians or the modern skyline of New York in her imagination. What she saw through the gauzy fog looked like a Russian castle trimmed with an icing of snow. The striped towers of Ellis Island made her think that they might soon be riding huge sleighs pulled by reindeer across America. Her father would cut the hair of a Russian prince while she and her mother helped the czarina choose which satin dress and which broach to wear, and Gratiano would escape from his jail and join them in America, where they would all dance in the snow with the Russian royalty.

They squeezed through a narrow entryway and climbed to a cavernous room where they were herded by beefy, pink-faced men into something like a gigantic pen for goats. Rosari could see that the room was filled with pens in which people of various look and language were placed with their fellows, people with small, flat noses, with furry caps, with eyeglasses and skullcaps. Most all of them, like her family, were wrapped in black clothing and weariness while their eyes searched the high windows for the source of the little bars of light.

Lazaro tried to coach his wife on ways to look and act, but the woman couldn’t sit still for a minute. She’d pace, her mouth moving as in speech, her hands gesturing to nobody, then sit again beside her daughter. A pale-skinned man with white-blond hair opened the gate to the pen and waved his arm, and the Italians grabbed their things and followed him, but as they walked a few of them were stopped by another man in a blue suit who examined their eyes with some sort of hook. Rosari was scared to death he’d look at her mother’s eyes and know she was touched, so she pulled on Eleonora’s hand and yanked her into the thick of the mob.

They stood in line after line. They were asked by men in suits to open their mouths, cough, run up a stairway, as they moved along. A few weak-legged people were led to another room, and Rosari supposed they were going to be shipped back as unfit for America. When Eleonora and Rosari were examined the mother laughed gaily, and the child heaved a sigh of praise to Santa Maria. Through gates, in more lines, with Lazaro before them producing papers, they proceeded, until they sat in a smaller room filled with people speaking a dozen languages with boisterous, triumphant inflections. At the end of one long day they left the castle of Ellis Island and floated across a greasy channel of water to New York.

They had been warned by the translator on the island, but Rosari knew that her softhearted father would be no match for any vultures waiting for them on the dock. The carrion-eaters slid out of the crowd and attached themselves to the immigrants, shouting personal questions at Lazaro in a strange sort of gobbledygook Italian dialect, seeming tremendously interested in her father’s background. A barber! What a beautiful occupation, but there is no money for it here, I must tell you in all honesty. Nearly as dirty as Naples, New York had the added feature of a freezing wind which sailed up Rosari’s dress and made her dance under her burden as she followed her parents and the one particular shyster who’d seemed to lay claim to her family and discouraged a couple of others with his elbows. A barber! The man was huge and smelled of cigars and perfume and sweat. A barber in America gets paid nothing, even though his fingers are fast. I have a suggestion for you, Lorenzo.

Lazaro, her mother corrected the man. She seemed to be hanging on the man’s words.

If I told you I know how you could make more money in one month than you made in all of last year just by using your fast fingers for something different from cutting hair, what would you say?

Both her parents chirped excitedly like small children. The man’s strangled Italian seemed to Rosari a language of the new world, a tougher and more chaotic way of speaking to match the rough-and-tumble of America. In a matter of a few minutes this giant of a man, whose tongue made a kind of mechanical racket in the way it chopped Italian words and whose suit smelled a bit like the prostitutes in Naples, had arranged for jobs and an apartment for her parents, if they would only follow him. He tried to carry her mother’s burden, but she wouldn’t let him, so he grabbed Rosari’s. A horseless coach roared past, the first motorized carriage the family had ever seen, and as they gasped and exclaimed the man laughed. He laughed like a drunk and leaned close to her father, who smiled broadly. You won’t regret this, Lafcadio.

Lazaro, Eleonora said again. They pushed through the crowd.

Suddenly a woman yelled at them, a young woman who spoke their idiom as if she’d just stepped beside Eleonora to wash clothes in Reggio Calabria. Beside her was a stout Italian priest, and what the two of them said about the giant with the cigars made the serpent in the garden sound like an altar boy in comparison, but by the time Rosari had heard their accusations the giant had disappeared into the mob on the waterfront, and so had the bundle of possessions she’d been carrying.

The priest and the young woman led them to a filthy neighborhood full of desperate Irish, Poles, and Italians, some of them their fellow voyagers. Rosari thought of the women before the caves in Southern Italy as she stared at these women taking down frozen wash, trousers stiff as planks, between the brown walls of an alley. In the church there was a floor to sleep on, and as the new world was turning their fingers blue, and as they’d just lost one-third of everything they owned, they accepted the church’s generosity with many thanks.

It was as if they’d returned to the ship, crowded as they were on the floor with the other immigrant families, and Rosari could feel the rocking motion of the ocean as she lay down. She heard the hissed tones of strange tongues as she drifted in and out of sleep. Her mother paced among the pews and peered out the windows of the door. At times she returned to her husband and child, and Rosari could hear her chastise Lazaro for not accepting the great opportunity offered them by the giant on the waterfront. Before her weary father could get a word in edgewise from his spot on the floor, her mother would be off again, pacing among the sleepers, gesticulating as if in the middle of a heated conversation with herself. Once Rosari woke and found her mother kneeling before a statue of the Virgin, and in the morning, as her father and another paisan spoke in hushed tones about breakfast, Eleonora stood above Rosari, rocking back and forth as if still aboard the ship, hugging her elbows, and staring with those singed eyes in the direction of a stained-glass window.

Rosari found Italian children to play with on the streets of New York, as well as kids who spoke English and other languages. They communicated through gestures and guesses and a kind of onomatopoeia which bespoke the explosive noises of the new world. They threw snowballs at the noisy motorcars and followed the horse-drawn produce wagons, hoping to snag an apple. They made kissing sounds and pointed at their body parts, grabbed and hit and chased each other whenever they weren’t sitting stiff as frozen laundry in the classroom, and occasionally shared a cigarette one of them had stolen from a parent. Among these children she sloughed the end of her name and started referring to herself as Rose, or Rosie.

She read the news sheet she found in front of an Italian bakery, and she tried to read the English primer and newspapers. By the time her parents had found work at sewing machines in the garment district and moved into an apartment with two other families, Rosari was able to read a few hundred words in the new language.

Her mother lasted only two days as a seamstress. The other wives asked her and Rosari to care for the bambini in the apartment, an infant named Guido, two toddlers, and four other children aged between three and seven, but the job fell to the girl because her mother kept pacing and leaving the building to walk the snowy streets, ostensibly to hawk oysters with a fishmonger named Piero Balducci.

By spring her mother was a zombie again, sitting most of the day at a table in the noisy apartment, and Rosari was kept out of school to care for the little ones as well as to make sure Eleonora didn’t do something harmful to herself or others. Her mother sat still hours on end, but she was known to smack her forehead against the wall, and once she gouged the palm of her hand on purpose with the butcher knife. Her father came home late evenings through slush, cold and weary, his hands barely able to move, and complained to his catatonic wife. He was not a tailor, and neither were the other men in the factory, he said. He just pushed the legs of pantaloons under a machine all day and handed them to the next guy, who sewed cuffs onto them and passed the work to still another guy, and his ears were ringing from the machines, and his lungs were full of catarrh from the cold, and he was sick to death of New York. Rosari was certain that all of these problems were her fault, all the result of a letter she’d written for a man who, in her evening reveries, had broken out of the jail cell in Naples, was currently hiding in a lifeboat on an America-bound freighter, and would come strolling down Mulberry Street some spring day and invite her to sit with him at a sidewalk table for an espresso.

One morning the mother was gone. Lazaro went to work and Rosari cooked for the bambini and asked the other mothers, who sold matches and sweet potatoes in the neighborhood, to look for Eleonora while they were on the streets. Word came that evening that she’d run off with Balducci the fishmonger, but by a kind of fire-escape telegraph from building to building Balducci’s wife let them know that this was hogwash.

Lazaro left his job to search, once again, for his wife. He and Rosari walked the island of Manhattan and described her to the foodmongers and flower girls on the corners. They cried and wore the soles of their shoes to paper on the streets and asked each other why God would do this sort of thing to them, to Eleonora, to people who had done nothing to deserve misfortune. A week after the disappearance, they came home and knew by the face of the baby’s mother that she’d been found.

Father and daughter trudged to the morgue, but only Lazaro was shown the corpse, which had been found naked in the Hudson by the fishermen who supplied Balducci. Never seeing made it impossible for the girl to believe, even after the bleak funeral the church arranged for indigents, even after the river of tears shed by her father and her neighbors. Her mother was merely wandering somewhere, making men’s heads turn, stooping over sick children in such beauty as the romances could never describe. Even as an old woman, sitting among the cherry trees behind her California bungalow seventy years later, she would see the breeze toss their blossoms and picture her mother dancing on the snowy deck of the ship, her beautiful mother letting her know, in this way, that she was right: that she had never died.

Without much discussion, the family of two decided it was time to leave again, to look for another new beginning. This time they took to the rails and crossed the North American continent, the swollen rivers and ocean-like prairies, the jagged mountains and frosted deserts. There were Italians working in San Francisco, where it never snowed. There were factories needing men, women, and children with fast hands and strong backs, and rumors of little island neighborhoods where their countrymen sat on the sidewalks and spoke their idiom.

Her father wheezed and slumped over their belongings during most of the journey, a man folding into himself as if preparing for his own death, while she observed the passing world with a certain detachment and imagined her heart encased in the ice of North America. Lazaro seemed too weak to walk on the hilly streets of San Francisco, but somehow they both found work in a leather tannery their first week in California among dozens of other Italians. A year and a half into this miserable job, when Rose had just turned fifteen, they joined a strike, and father and daughter stood among their countrymen while a cavalry of mounted police trotted toward them. After the first screams and deadly blows the crowd scattered, and Rose tried to pull her father along, but he fell and wouldn’t get up and told her to leave him there. She knew that his broken heart was no longer strong enough for America, and that the horses would soon crush him, and she cried with impatience, Papa, get up! Then she saw a man coming to help, and she thought he was Gratiano, the criminal of her childhood reveries, stooping to support her father. A dark-eyed and agile man, tall and angular in an old-country-style coat and fedora, threw Lazaro over his shoulder and ran as if delivering potatoes to a king. Rosari struggled to keep up with him, the man she would marry later that year, a peasant newly arrived from Calabria named Giuseppe Verbicaro, the man she would have seven children with; and as she ran a sudden breeze came off the bay and tossed her hair loose from its braid, and a sudden heat melted the ice around her heart, and the sound of the horses’ hooves faded away, and her lungs filled with the sweet and mischievous air of the new world.