Children of Liberty Page 4

  Gina wasn’t sure how to respond. “Doesn’t your mother want you to become someone, Ben?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “She doesn’t say to me, son, you must follow in my footsteps.”

  “Yes, she does,” said Harry. “And my father doesn’t say this either. He says, whatever you do is fine with me. Which is even worse. Aside from being wholly untrue.”

  Gina really pondered that one. “That’s worse?” she said at last. Was it the language barrier that made comprehension of this insurmountable? What were they actually saying?

  “Yes, it’s worse,” Harry said. “Because action on my part is implied and required. Do what you like, he says, but do something.”

  “Ah.” There was a significant pause—it was late at night, after a long day. “But you do want to do something, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure.” Harry half-smiled at her. “What if I don’t?”

  “Harry is joking,” Ben said.

  “A man has to do something,” said Gina.

  “What about a woman?” Harry’s fog-colored eyes twinkled a little.

  “A woman’s role is clear. She must keep house, raise children.”

  “What if she wants to work?”

  “She is working.”

  “Work outside the home.”

  “In Italy, there is no such thing,” Gina said. “If she sells fruit at the market or sews for other people or cleans big homes, she must do it between hours. First her own house, her own children. Then everything else.”

  Ben gazed at her in appreciation.

  Pensively Gina stared at Harry. “Are you an only child?”

  “I am an only son,” he replied, not looking directly at her. “I have a sister.”

  Ben made a dismissive sound. “Esther is invisible to your father.”

  “Just to my father?”

  “What?” When Harry didn’t elaborate, Ben shrugged with a dismissive chuckle. “It’s like royalty at Harry’s house. Only the male offspring can inherit the throne.”

  They were joking! Except that really was how it was. Gina’s father was an anomaly among Sicilian men. He adored his sons, but believed his only daughter too could become anything. Gina wanted to tell these two boys about her remarkable father, but decided not to. She was losing the power to make sense in her new alien language. Silently she thanked her father for being a relentless taskmaster, for teaching her English for so many years even when she had seen no sense in it.

  “Our father believed,” she said cautiously, unsure of her English words, “that those who lived without expectations were not blessed but cursed.” She looked across the table. “Right, Salvo?”

  “I know nothing,” Salvo said in Italian, “except that it’s late and I’m tired.”

  “Your father wasn’t the only one who believed this,” said Harry, in reply to Gina, not Salvo. “My father, too. And Alexander Pope.”

  “Who?”

  “The poet.”

  “No, Harry,” said Ben. “Pope thought a life lived without expectations was the ninth beatitude. Blessed are they who expect nothing, was what Pope wrote.”

  “You completely misunderstand Pope,” Harry said, yanking up Ben by the arm, and glancing around for his jacket and hat. “As if you have any idea what a beatitude even is.”

  “As if you do.”

  “At least I’m not quoting him incorrectly! We must go.”

  “Actually you did quote him incorrectly,” said Ben, as they bade their goodbyes to a battle-fatigued Gina.

  “I didn’t quote him,” Harry said. “I was merely being polite in a conversation with our new friends. Goodnight. We will see you tomorrow. Please give our regards to your mother.”

  “Pope ended it with ‘for they shall never be disappointed.’”

  “Let’s go!”

  They tipped their hats before they put them on and bowed politely.

  Gina could see Salvo would have loved to have refused their help, but he didn’t know where the train station was and couldn’t get the three trunks downstairs without them. To pay her back he stood between her and the young men so they couldn’t take her hand, couldn’t treat her like a lady when they wished her goodnight.

  After Ben and Harry left, Gina and Salvo retreated to separate windows from which they both looked longingly at the sea beyond, but for different reasons: Salvo because he yearned to be back home; Gina because she wanted never to leave the big city. She hoped Lawrence would turn out to be a little bit like a big city, only smaller. But no matter what it turned out like, it wouldn’t have Ben and Harry in it.

  “A fine pair they are,” Salvo said to her at last.

  “Aren’t they just,” echoed Gina. Especially the sand-haired, laconic one.

  He sighed with exasperated disdain. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think you forget what Papa said to you.”

  She bristled. “I don’t forget anything.”

  “Then why do you act like you do?”

  Gina turned away. She didn’t want to hear it. Leaving the room where her brother was making her defensive, Gina went into the room where Mimoo was snoring and sat in a wooden chair by the open window. She still heard horses clomping outside, a distant bell of a trolley car, noises from sailors, laughter, a city alive, pulsing and thumping into the night. Never forget where you came from, Gina Attaviano, Alessandro said to her before he died. Then it will always be easy.

  I think it will be easy, Papa, she whispered, gulping the night air. In thrall to the new city, the old life for Gina had vanished with the tide.

  Chapter Five

  SUMMER STREET

  THERE was Boston, and then there was Lawrence. The steam train connecting the heart of the revolution with the immigrant town thirty miles north was modern, and the stations from which it arrived and departed had electricity and stone walls and wood doors and a ticket-taker. But besides the station and the lonely trolley car running down Broadway across the Merrimack River, Lawrence might as well have been Belpasso under an active volcano, a town to which electricity and plumbing had yet to come—though magma came, lava came, every year a rumbling, every five a smoke eruption, every ten a pouring of liquid rock. At least that’s how Lawrence felt to Gina, who had briefly breathed in the rarefied air of civilization and now once again was left with the cows. Yes, both sides of the burly river on which Lawrence was built were flanked by long, spread-out mills and tall smokestacks, one after another, but otherwise the town was unpaved dust and horse carriages. It wasn’t even like Belpasso, Gina complained to Salvo as they waited on the bench for Angela. In Belpasso, the streets were paved!

  “Yes, paved with the red blood of martyrs, as your father would say,” said her mother, looking around. “Paved with the igneous lava remains of the sinners’ post-apocalyptic bones. No volcanoes in Lawrence. So much the better.”

  “Are you sure?” Gina said sullenly. “How do you know?” Where Boston had manicured grasses and landscaped parks, where the North End steamed with noise and life, Lawrence on this Friday afternoon was like a drawing room—peaceful and singularly uneventful. Gina sauntered from the bench to Broadway, where she stood watching a few women carrying packages and pushing baby prams, just like in the old country. Salvo called her back. A carriage clomped by, without Angela.

  Gina wanted to cry. This is where women retired to have children! Her life was over. She had had Boston at her fingertips, she had by a stroke of fate met two men, a warrior and a revolutionary, who could help her—help all of them. But no. Oh, dear merciful Jesus, what was she going to do?

  “This isn’t like Boston,” said Mimoo.

  “No, no it isn’t,” Gina grimly agreed.

  “Look, Salvo, your sister is sulking.” Mimoo found that amusing. Gina turned away.

  Harry and Ben had used the wrong metaphor about this town. Lawrence was like Boston only in the way an infant was like an adult. They shared some fundamental characteristics, but not any of the important ones. Gina, flagrantly dis
appointed after the joy of yesterday, focused instead on the brown plainness of her summer clogs while they waited for Angela.

  They came from Sicily—where beauty was embodied in blue water and rolling hills, in vivid grasses and trees, in sailboats and dramatic coastlines, in sandy beaches, with Mount Etna in the background of every memory, hissing smoke all day long. Gina wasn’t a painter. She wasn’t disillusioned because she wanted to render Lawrence in oil on canvas. But she had promised her father she would make something of herself in America. How could she make anything of herself in Lawrence?

  “Angela has done all right for herself here,” Salvo said. “Why can’t you? What, you’re too good for it?”

  “Too good for what?” Gina snapped back, but finally there appeared a horse and a wagon with a waving Angela in it.

  “Gina! Salvo! Mimoo!”

  Except for the ear-to-ear smile, Angela didn’t look like the girl who had left Belpasso two years earlier. She had put on weight and makeup. At seventeen, she looked decades older than Gina. She hugged them profusely. “I’m so happy you’re here! You must be exhausted! Where did you stay last night? I have been waiting for your telegram all week, your boat took so long to get here, mine too of course, nearly killed Aunt Pippa, but wait till you see her now, she’s doing well. I’m so excited to see you! You will stay with us until you get work, there is plenty of room, and we’ll find something for you. It would’ve been better if you’d come two months ago, because Everett just hired forty people, but Washington might be hiring. You must be starved! Salvo, do you need help loading? We made bread, fresh mozzarella, I made it myself last night, I’m so sorry about Papa Sandro, I can’t believe he is not here, all he talked about since I was a baby was coming to America. Oh, I’m not Angela Tartaro anymore, I’m Angie LoPizo.” She chuckled. “Annie LoPizo, actually. It’s a long story, but a good one. I’ll tell you the whole thing in detail. But the short version is, I couldn’t get overtime work unless I lied about being fourteen, so I lied about being fourteen, we got a work card for me with another girl’s name, and now I’m Annie LoPizo, and eighteen! I’m on sixty hours a week as a weaver, not a spinner in those horrible humid rooms, you know, Gia?”

  “I know.”

  “All the kids are there. You might have to start there too, but it’ll only be for a little while, Gia, my peach.”

  “I don’t want to change my name,” said Gina. “I—”

  “She is going to go to school,” Mimoo said. “It’s what her father wanted.”

  “She needs to work, Mimoo,” said Salvo. “I’m not going to school. I’m going to work.”

  “You are, yes.”

  “She is, too.”

  “Maybe I can get something part-time, Mimoo?” said Gina.

  “You’re going to school full-time,” said Mimoo. “It’s what your father—”

  “Hold on, Mimoo,” Salvo said. “Let’s see if we can pay our bills first.”

  “You stay with us,” Angela said. “Not so expensive. My English is so good now,” she continued, “I can pass for a native, almost. I say I’m second generation, and it’s my Aunt Pippa who came from Italy. Everyone believes me.”

  “I want to work,” Gina said, “but I don’t want to start my life with a—”

  “And go to school,” Mimoo said.

  “—lie,” Gina finished.

  “Hey, Salvo,” Angela called to him as he loaded their heavy trunks onto the wagon. “Want me to introduce you to Pamela, my friend at work? She’s a real nice blonde.” She giggled. “You like blonde girls?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never met one.”

  “Wait till you see this one. I’m sorry you and Viola split …”

  “We didn’t split. She refused to come.”

  “… But it’s better to begin your life anew. Right, Mimoo? How are you feeling? Good? Gina, my friend Verity is dying to meet you.”

  “This Verity is a girl?” Salvo asked.

  Angela giggled. “You silly boy. A girl, of course. You don’t need to worry about me, Salvo, I’ll be Gina’s permanent chaperone, I promise. And Verity is studying to become a nun.”

  It was all Gina could do to not scream.

  “Are we loaded up?”

  “Angie,” said Mimoo, “it’s nice to see you haven’t changed a bit.”

  “But I have, Mimoo, I have.”

  “You might not look the same, but everything else …”

  “No, I’m grown up now. I help with the rent, I go to the bank. I buy my own clothes. I’m a young lady.”

  “Yes …”

  “You can work with Aunt Pippa, Mimoo, cleaning houses up in Prospect Hill. That’s where the mill managers live. Pippa said she’ll split some of her pay with you until you get your own customers.”

  “That’s not going to help me meet expenses, splitting Pippa’s pay. I can also sew,” Mimoo said, “and cook.”

  The horse had taken off; Gina held on to the wooden armrest. On top of everything, the dust from the road was blowing up into her face, making her choke.

  The houses were simple Victorian, doors closed, no one sitting on stoops. They rode down cobblestoned Essex Street. Angie said it was the main shopping street in Lawrence. Gina rolled her eyes. One little Salem Street in North End was four times as busy.

  “What do you think of Lawrence, Gia? Nice, isn’t it? Mimoo, Aunt Pippa sews too. Many Americans can’t sew. They rely on us to do it. But she takes in the work, because it’s getting too hard for her to clean. You’re going to help her a lot. She has her own sewing machine. Her legs have swollen up.”

  “Because of the sewing machine?” said Gina.

  “Mine too,” said Mimoo. “But why hers?”

  “You’ll see. But what will Salvo do?”

  “Don’t you worry about me, Ange. I’ll take care of myself.”

  “Aunt Pippa is seeing a gentleman, who doesn’t care about her swollen ankles. Maybe he can help you, Salvo. He is a glazier.” Angela squeezed Gina. “There are lots of young men, managers, at the mill, and they looove Italian girls.”

  “Yes,” said Salvo. “Girls other than my sister.”

  “Come on, Salvo. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Basta, Ange.”

  “I’m saying to help her get a job.”

  “We are not asking any men to help my sister get a job.”

  “Basta, Salvo.” That was from Gina.

  At Canal Street, the horse made a right and stopped in front of a narrow row house amid four or five blocks of narrow row houses. Pippa was waiting for them in a chair right outside the door. Canal Street had no trees and the view across from the row houses was only of the long wall of the textile factory stretching half a mile in each direction. The mill workers got up at dawn, rolled out of bed, stepped outside their little homes, walked fifty feet and were inside the factory doors.

  “You live here?” said Gina.

  “For five years now!”

  Gina pointed. “Is that where you work?”

  “Yes,” Angela said happily. “The Washington Mill. So convenient and close, right?”

  Gina saw the reason Pippa had swollen ankles—she had gained a hundred pounds. It wasn’t swelling that was on her ankles. Mimoo and Salvo failed to hide their shock.

  “America has been good to you,” Mimoo said, hugging her cousin.

  “She has a gentleman caller?” Salvo whispered to Gina. “Aunt Pippa! So nice to see you! You haven’t changed a bit!”

  “Salvo, you’ve always had a silver tongue. But don’t waste it on me, I already have a man.” She swallowed him in her skirts.

  “Aunt Pippa, how you kid. Please let go. I’m suffocating.”

  Pippa herself had no children, but had raised Angie as her own after Angie’s mother died ten years earlier.

  “Will there be room for us?” Mimoo asked. “We don’t want to impose.”

  “Don’t be silly. There’s plenty.”

  But it was Pippa who wa
s silly. There wasn’t plenty. There was barely any. She and Angie lived in two small rooms on the second floor.

  “It’s really two and a half rooms,” said Pippa, pointing to half a closet in which an oven stood.

  Salvo looked around. “What is your plan?” he asked.

  “I know it may not look like much,” said Angela, “but it’s cheap and it’s close to work.”

  “So is that boat on the canal,” said Salvo. “But we don’t live in it.”

  “Salvo!” That was Mimoo. She sat down heavily in the chair in the living room and took Pippa’s hands. “This is very good and kind of you, Pippa,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Of course we will be,” Pippa said. “As soon as you find work, we will look for a bigger place, perhaps a proper house, like they have over by the Common.”

  “I like being close to work, Aunt Pippa,” Angela said.

  “You can stay here. Why do you have to come?”

  They bickered but all squeezed in: the four women piled into the bedroom, with Gina and Angela on the floor, while Salvo took the couch in the living room.

  “Salvo is not complaining, Pippa,” Mimoo said. “He’s just in a bad mood.”

  “He’s been in a bad mood for a year,” said Gina. “What’s your excuse now, Salvo?”

  “I need an excuse?” He spread out on the couch with the small window ten feet from him. “In Belpasso, I had my own room, my own space. Now I’m next to the dining-room table.”

  “Gina, if you want, you can stay with Verity,” Angela said. “She lives a few blocks from here, across the river on Ashbury. Her parents have a little house. She said you could stay with her.”

  “How would Gina staying somewhere else help me?” Salvo snapped.

  “It’s not all about you, Salvo,” Gina said.

  “No, it’s all about you, Gina.”

  “Stop it, you two,” said Mimoo. “Maybe Gina should stay with Verity.”

  “No,” he said. “The family stays together.”

  “Fighting every minute?”

  “Together.”

  “Cheer up, Salvo,” Angela said, pinching him. “You’ll get work, we’ll find a bigger place. In the meantime, upstairs there is a young lady I can introduce you to. She’s nineteen but not blonde. She’s not blonde or Italian.” Angela tickled him, kissed him. “I’m just joking with you. Come on, it’s not so bad. You can take her out for ice cream. Gina, you want some ice cream?”