Elizabeth Street (36 page)

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1909

“Get the kid,” ordered the older brother to his wife. She went into Angelina’s cell and pulled her off the straw and out the door.

“Can’t you clean her up a little?” asked the older man.

“What do you care?” answered his wife.

“At least wash the blood off her arms and legs.”

With a cold cloth, the woman scrubbed Angelina’s limbs. “We’re getting rid of you today,” she said.

Angelina felt relieved. Would they throw her in the trash? In the river by the bridge? It didn’t much matter.

“Who’s taking her?” asked the woman.

“They are,” said Leo, nodding to the brothers, who both now had beards.

Angelina imagined that the droopy-eyed man might hurt her before getting rid of her and wondered if the short men would try to stop him.

“Where’s the coat?” asked Leo.

“Here,” said the younger brother, tossing him a package. “Look at that color!”

“It’s not like the Calabresi. Very flashy,” commented the younger woman.

Angelina was happy that she was going to be warm before she died. She hugged the coat around her and played with the black braid at the waist.

“Go,” said Leo. “I’ll wait for you here.”

Angelina turned to wave at the children, who silently waved back.

They walked a long time. Angelina was so weak that she kept trying to sit, but the men with beards would yank her back up. After she fell a few times, the older man picked her up impatiently. Angelina couldn’t bear to be so close to his breath, which smelled of wine and cigars.

“I can walk. Put me down,” she commanded. She had lost all fear of them. Even the lupo bear didn’t provoke her anymore.

“Then stop falling,” barked the older man.

At the station, they climbed the stairs and waited on the platform. “They could be taking me to the ocean, not the river,” thought Angelina.

Once on the train, she was warm, warm enough to not want to end up in cold water. “I should scream,” she thought, “then someone will stop them from taking me to the ocean.” But right before yelling, she saw that they were heading over the Brooklyn Bridge to the city, not away from it.

“Where are we going?”

“You’re going home,” snarled the younger brother.

“He’s lying,” thought Angelina. “Besides, my parents don’t want me.” Watching out the window, she recognized the Bowery with the train tracks hugging the sides of the street and darkening the storefronts. They passed the big hotel with the name she could never pronounce. Gazing down at her new coat, she had another thought. One Sunday dinner she had heard the grown-ups talk about people selling children. They were making her look nice because they were going to sell her, not kill her.

At the next stop, the older brother yanked again at her arm, pulling her out of the train. “Walk fast or I’ll carry you.”

Angelina tried to keep up with them as they pulled her down the Bowery. Ahead of her she saw the black marble columns of the Germania Bank Building across from the brick building that looked like it was holding an ice cream cone. This was her old neighborhood.

“Where are we going?” Angelina asked again, this time more tentatively.

“I told you. You’re going home,” muttered the younger brother.

“But my parents gave me up,” she practically whispered.

They were on Spring Street, a block from the corner of Elizabeth.

“Do you know how to get home from here?” asked the older man.

Angelina nodded but was confused.

“Go, then, go!” commanded the younger brother.

They had let go of her hand. She could run.

“Go!” they shouted at her.

Angelina ran as fast as she could, which wasn’t very fast, down Spring Street. She looked behind her, but they were gone. She could go home! But what if her parents didn’t let her in? Where would she go? She turned onto Elizabeth Street, because she figured she would at least ask her mother why she gave her away. At the sight of her building in the distance, she ran faster, grabbed the brass handle on the door, ran over the little mosaic tiles and up the slate stairs.

The sound of little feet running up the stairs reached Giovanna. She dropped the baby in the bureau drawer that was his bassinet and lunged toward the door, throwing it open.

“Mamma! Mamma!” Angelina was halfway up the stairs when she saw her. In seconds Giovanna scooped her up and buried her face in Angelina’s neck. “Mamma, you’re hurting me!” called Angelina.

“Scusa, scusa, let me see your face!” Giovanna cupped her daughter’s face in her hands and sobbed.

Angelina was confused and angry. Hitting her mother, she shouted, “Brutta Mamma! Brutta Mamma! Brutta! Brutta! Why didn’t you come and get me? Why did you give me away?”

Angelina’s confusion was only magnified when she saw her mother, who was crying, start to laugh. “You talk like a little Sicilian!”

Rocco and the girls burst through the door.

“Angelina! My Angelina!” Rocco took her from Giovanna’s arms and kissed her face many times over. The child was completely bewildered. Her father never kissed her. And then he kissed her mother.

Mary and Frances pulled at her shouting, “You’re back!”

Angelina struck out at her father and sisters too, her little fists raining down on them. “Why didn’t you get me! Brutti! Brutti!” Her cries became louder when they, too, laughed with joy.

“My baby, my baby, don’t cry. We are so happy to have you back.” Giovanna stroked her face. “If we had known where you were we would have come at once to get you.”

“You didn’t know where I was?”

“No, bambina.”

“But you sent me away with Limonata.”

“She was a bad woman.” Turning to Frances, Giovanna said, “Go to Zio Lorenzo’s house and tell them Angelina is back.”

Word had already spread that people had seen a little girl in a red coat running through the streets. Teresa and her children arrived before Frances made it down the stairs.

Angelina had a hard time understanding all the crying and the laughing. There wasn’t a moment when she wasn’t being kissed and thrown in the air. Arms were everywhere, and her head was alternately pressed into someone’s body or cupped in someone’s hand. The happier they all were, the angrier Angelina got. “If they like me so much, why didn’t they find me?” she thought.

Her mother broke away, and Angelina saw her and Zia Teresa heating water and pouring it into a big tub by the stove. Frances, who Angelina hadn’t even noticed was missing because of all the commotion, returned from the pharmacist, her arms brimming with bottles. At one point in the mayhem, her mother brought her into the bedroom and said, “Angelina, this is your baby brother, Anthony.”

“I’m glad you didn’t give him away.”

Giovanna hugged her tighter.

“Let’s get these clothes off,” ordered Teresa. Teresa cut the clothes from Angelina’s body and handed them and the red coat to her oldest daughter, Concetta. “Burn them, they’re infested.”

Angelina was dipped in the hot tub. It was the first time in three months her body was immersed in water. The heat actually made her shiver; something inside was thawing.

“My baby, my baby,” Giovanna was crying, but there was no laughter as she gently washed her daughter’s emaciated body, which was covered in open wounds, scabs, and vermin.

“I’ll start on her hair,” offered Teresa. Taking a thin-toothed comb, she separated each strand, capturing and killing lice and nits. By then all her cousins were in the apartment as well. Everyone was laughing, and her cousins, especially Domenico, kept trying to ask her questions. But her mother would shush them, “Not now, not now.”

Concetta, who had left to burn Angelina’s clothes, returned an hour later with food. Soon everyone was eating, including Angelina, who ate in the bath while her mother and Teresa continued to minister to her body. Frances had emptied and filled the tub nearly ten times, and Mary was feeding her sips of hot tea and bites of meatballs.

Hours later, when Angelina was lifted out of the water, her mother wrapped her in a towel and her father poured wine. Someone held a little glass to Angelina’s lips as everyone drank.

On the bed, Giovanna removed Angelina’s towel and kissed every square inch of her daughter’s body, using the towel to wipe the tears that fell on Angelina’s clean skin. Uncapping bottles, she dabbed lotion and salves on the cuts, bites, and wounds, muttering prayers the entire time.

“I bought you a new nightgown,” said Giovanna, pulling a soft flannel dress over Angelina’s head. She picked Angelina up off the bed and knelt with her before her makeshift altar. “I prayed every minute to Saint Anthony to bring you home, Angelina. He answered my prayers.”

Giovanna retrieved a brown paper package from under her pillow that was tied with string. “I have something to open with you. I waited for you,” she whispered, crying and gently ripping the paper to reveal a photograph with three views. “Look how beautiful you are!” exclaimed Giovanna, crying even harder. “I want you to forget everything from the day after this picture was taken until this moment,” she said, placing the photo on her makeshift altar.

Angelina’s eyelids fluttered, and her head swayed groggily. Giovanna lay down on the bed with one arm wrapped tightly around her daughter as if she would never let go. Stroking Angelina’s hair, Giovanna whispered, “Sleep, child, you’re safe. You’re home.”

When they moved to Hoboken, there was no doubt in Giovanna’s mind what type of business they would establish. Since that day in Coney Island, she was infatuated with ice cream and ice cream cones. Her passion paid off. They had become masters.

Teresa and Giovanna were in the factory behind their ice cream parlor. Sacks of sugar lined the walls, and in the center of the room sat wood barrels. Inside the barrels, a ten-gallon tin can was surrounded by ice, and the top of the barrel was covered with rock salt.

Over the years, despite their prickly start, Giovanna and Teresa had bonded. Teresa was not someone whom Giovanna would reveal secrets to, but she had come to love her sister-in-law, and they worked well together. Giovanna could read Teresa’s moods. Today, making ice cream, she knew there was something on Teresa’s mind that she wasn’t talking about. Giovanna also knew that Teresa was incapable of holding something in for long, so she waited patiently.

“Teresa, could you bring me another gallon of cream?”

Giovanna filled the silence. “The nights are becoming chilly. Soon we won’t need to make so much. Rocco was already talking about switching to selling chestnuts.”

When Teresa handed Giovanna the cream, their eyes met, and Giovanna’s curiosity got the best of her. “What is it?”

“You know I still see my friends from Elizabeth Street.”

“I know. You went this weekend, yes?”

“They told me that Lucrezia is dying.”

Giovanna shut her eyes, put down the gallon of cream, and turned from Teresa.

“Giovanna, I didn’t know whether to tell you. I know that you don’t see her anymore, but I thought you should know.”

Giovanna could never explain to Teresa. When she had lied over and over again to Lucrezia during Angelina’s kidnapping, she felt that she had violated their relationship and that it could never be the same. It was as if Lucrezia was her lover and Giovanna had cheated on her. She did love Lucrezia, in fact she knew that she still did, but she had forsaken the friendship because she was overwhelmed by fear. When Angelina was returned, she was embarrassed to confess and admit that she hadn’t trusted her.

“Why don’t you go see her, Giovanna?” suggested Teresa softly.

“I want to go for a walk. Can you finish up?”

“Of course.”

Giovanna hugged Teresa and walked into the parlor. Mary was on her hands and knees cleaning the black-and-white checkered floor. Her baby sister, Concetta, was asleep in a cradle braced against one of the wire-backed parlor chairs.

“Mary, that’s clean enough!”

“I like it to gleam, Zia.”

No one took as much pride in the ice cream parlor as Mary. She had become an artist at making sugar cones. In fact, she did it with such flair that Giovanna had set up her cone-making apparatus in the window, and she never failed to draw a crowd.

“I must go out. I fed Concetta. And please, when Angelina and Anthony get home from school, see that they do their chores.”

Giovanna walked a full lap around Hoboken’s square mile. She headed up First Street, passing what she called her hometown fish market—the one with a swordfish for a sign. She went north along the waterfront, past the ships, which were being loaded and unloaded by swarms of dockworkers. She shivered at the sight of the big German ship that had just been seized by the Americans at the pier. Her nephew Antonio was already fighting for Italy in the war. She prayed every day for his survival, because she knew that either fate or her will would bring Antonio to America to marry Angelina.

Turning west at the north end where the ships were in dry dock for repair, Giovanna avoided the hustle and bustle of Washington Street by walking south on Willow Avenue. She passed the library with its copper dome and the new high school that Mary had just graduated from. When she walked back east toward the river, this time she kept walking straight onto the ferry.

She was shaking, in part because she was going back to New York City for the first time in five years, and in part because she didn’t have a clue what to say to Lucrezia or whether she would even see her. She didn’t even know if Lucrezia was in a hospital.

Giovanna had seen the Madonna in the harbor four times. The last time was when they moved to Hoboken. She remembered wondering whether the watery distance created by the river would keep them safe. It was like looking from Scilla across the Strait of Messina at the black smoke of the volcano. On the Hoboken shore, New York became a distant but visible threat.

New York City had never been her choice. And possibly because of that, she didn’t trust the place. How could one piece of land support so much weight? How could they keep digging tunnels and not have the streets collapse? How long would it take before one of those trains fell from the overhead tracks? In her search for Angelina, she had traveled all over the city without really seeing it. With her daughter abducted, Giovanna felt every square inch of New York had become inhospitable. Even after Angelina was returned, the metropolis continued to overwhelm her, and she could no longer take comfort in the privacy of its crowded streets because she knew how many eyes were really watching. She had come to, and left, New York City as a foreigner. Hoboken was her home now. She had chosen it.

Pacing the perimeter of the ferry, she tried to sort through her conflicting emotions, starting with guilt but always ending in deep sorrow. She came to the heartbreaking realization that this might be the second time she would lose Lucrezia.

Walking off the boat, Giovanna was struck by how accustomed she had become to life in Hoboken. New York City seemed so crowded and fast—far more than she remembered—possibly because there seemed to be so many more automobiles competing for street space with the trolleys and horses. Anxious to escape the streams of people surging through downtown and exhausted from her walk in Hoboken, Giovanna took the train.

When she got to Lucrezia’s block, it felt as if nothing had changed. She could have been arriving after delivering a baby, or coming to visit her friend with a newspaper in hand. The same old woman sat on the stoop next door.

“Did you come to see the signora?” She greeted Giovanna without missing a beat.

“Yes. Is she upstairs?”

“She is.”

Giovanna started up the stoop but turned to ask, “Is her husband with her?”

“I saw him leave. But her daughter’s up there.”

As she opened the outside door, Giovanna became aware that she was visiting empty-handed. She’d been so determined to get there and unsure of whether she would even see Lucrezia that bringing something hadn’t crossed her mind. She hesitated, but knew that if she left now, she might never come back. Instead, breathing deeply, she walked up the stairs and knocked on Lucrezia’s door.

“Yes?” said Lucrezia’s daughter, opening the door slightly.

“Buon giorno. You must be Claudia. I am Giovanna, an old friend of your mother. I was hoping I could see her.” Claudia looked exactly like Lucrezia and was just as stately.

“Come in, signora,” greeted Claudia, opening the door and looking at Giovanna’s work clothes. “Please have a seat.”

Catching Claudia’s glance, Giovanna mentioned, “Your mother and I used to deliver babies together.”

“Oh, yes. I remember her talking about you.”

“How is she?”

“Not well. The doctors think it is only a matter of days.”

“I’m so sorry, Claudia. Can I see her?”

“She’s resting. She gets so little sleep that I would appreciate it if you could return at another time.”

Giovanna stood, ready to bolt out the door, embarrassed that she had come. “I’m sorry, I understand…”

“Claudia, who are you talking to?” Lucrezia’s thin voice drifted from the bedroom.

“An old friend of yours, Mamma.” Turning to Giovanna, Claudia said, “She’s awake. Would you like to see her?”

Giovanna was waving her hand in an attempt to say, “No, I’ll go,” but Lucrezia’s daughter was leading her by the arm to the doorway of the bedroom.

Lucrezia turned her head, and Giovanna felt like her shoulders fell to her knees. Lucrezia’s face and body were skeletal. Her body barely dented the bed.

Lucrezia stared back at Giovanna and smiled. “Sit down next to me.”

Giovanna looked to Lucrezia’s daughter’s face for permission, and when Claudia nodded and left the room, Giovanna did as she was instructed. Awkwardly, and without speaking, she took Lucrezia’s hands, which lay on top of the bedcovers, and held them in her own.

“I bet you heard from Teresa,” kidded Lucrezia in a voice that sounded like it only fluttered over her vocal cords.

In seconds, Lucrezia had cleared the air. Giovanna laughed hard and remembered why it was so easy to love this woman. “Yes, you’re right! She told me this morning.”

“I’m glad you came, Giovanna.”

Hearing Lucrezia say her name unleashed a torrent of emotion. Cupping and kissing Lucrezia’s hands, Giovanna said over and over, tears streaming down her face, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Lucrezia.”

“Giovanna.” Lucrezia lifted her bony hand to Giovanna’s face and caught a tear. “I knew,” she said.

Giovanna was not at all surprised but wept harder. “I couldn’t tell you.”

“I wanted to help.”

“I was afraid.”

“Were you afraid of me?”

“I was afraid of everyone. I was even afraid of myself.”

Giovanna’s head collapsed onto Lucrezia’s chest, and Lucrezia entwined her fingers in her hair.

“I don’t want to lose you again, Lucrezia,” moaned Giovanna.

“You never lost me. And with the way you pray, you never will.”

Giovanna’s laugh became a snort through her tears, and it brought Lucrezia’s daughter into the room.

Claudia looked at them, surprised and concerned. “Perhaps you should rest, Mamma?”

“Yes. Lie with me a while, Giovanna?” asked Lucrezia.

Giovanna got up and rearranged the blankets around her friend and then went to the other side of the bed and lay on top of the covers next to her. Lucrezia reached for her hand, and Giovanna held it tighter than she should have.

Giovanna left that evening after Lucrezia had fallen asleep. She returned the next day as she had promised, but Lucrezia had died that morning with her husband and daughter by her side.

“She asked that I give you this,” said Lucrezia’s daughter, holding out her hand and crying. Giovanna took the small medal of Saint Anthony from Claudia’s palm. “It’s odd, because my mother wasn’t religious. But she said this would be meaningful to you. She also said to tell you that when people love each other, they always find each other in the end.”

That night, Giovanna closed the store near nine o’clock but didn’t get upstairs until after ten. Not yet ready for bed, she leaned out her first-floor window into the late summer heat.

The store looked so quiet, yet only a few hours before, there’d been a line around the block. Lorenzo was talking about opening his own ice cream business and going to Newark, which was a good thing, because now that Clement was married, there were so many adults in the business that they were stepping on one another’s toes. Domenico still helped in the store, but he had started working at the German-named factory on Third and Grand that raised spiders in the basement to supply the crosshairs for submarine periscopes. He had also become a fixture around Hoboken’s many social clubs.

Rocco came up behind Giovanna and put his arm around her waist. “I can’t sleep either. Let’s go downstairs and play cards.”

Giovanna smiled. “You set up the table, and I’ll be down in a minute.”

A moment later, Angelina was in the room. “Mamma, I can’t sleep. It’s too hot.”

“Come here by the window with me.”

Angelina was too big for her mother’s lap, but she sat on it anyway. Giovanna ran her hands through her daughter’s hair.

Below on the sidewalk they could see Rocco setting up the card table and pouring two glasses of wine.

“Mamma, will you rub my back like you did when I was little and had nightmares?”

“In a minute. First I want to give you something.”

“What?”

“I know you are responsible, so I am going to ask you something important. I want you to promise me that when I die, you will put this in my coffin.” Giovanna reached into the pocket of her dress and handed Angelina the Saint Anthony medal that Lucrezia had left her.

Angelina looked at the medal and then at her mother. “Mamma, you’re scaring me. Why are you saying this?”

“Nothing is going to happen to me, Angelina. You won’t have to do this for many, many years.”

Angelina looked at her mother with tears welling in her eyes. “Promise me you’ll never die.”

“I promise I’ll never leave you. That’s the reason I want you to bury me with Saint Anthony.” Giovanna put her hand over Angelina’s, which now clutched the medal. “When I’m gone, if you need me, or if your children need me, or even their children, you’ll always know that I am there. You see, Angelina, people who love one another always find each other somehow.”