The Shoemaker's Wife (58 page)

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.