Eight panels, tarnished brass and flashes of amber, make up the church door. But it’s locked. And there’s no priest. In back of the church rises the cemetery where she has promised her father to go. Perhaps that’s where the priest is. Touching the rings—someone else’s unhappiness and joy, not mine—Floria starts up the stone path, counts twenty steps till she reaches a landing. The rest of the steps are deeper. Thirty-nine. Then three more to the side, where a gate is set into the cemetery wall.
Inside, watering cans hang from a rack next to a faucet. Floria pictures mourners in black coming here alone to visit a dead spouse or child. Filling those cans from the faucet and carrying them to the niches for the dead that are built into the walls, sealed cubicles identified by plaques and photos of the dead: a woman whose lips are thin and whose white hair is pulled into a severe bun; a man in a black suit and a tall hat sitting on a horse; a woman in her fifties who looks like a good-time girl. Quite a few of the dead have photos that don’t match the years they’ve been alive: unlined faces and full hair, yet a lifespan of seventy or eighty.
Though some of the flowers are fresh, most are fake, their petals so faded by weather that they seem wilted, real. A few cubicles are still empty, long enough for a body. That cavity waiting for you. Not in the earth like Bianca. What is worse, to be buried or to be sealed off? Darkness, either way. Confinement. Do you buy these final cells ahead of time, the way you buy burial plots back home? Do you visit your still-empty cubicle, staring inside whenever you climb up those steps to visit your already-dead? Do you pick the photo you want on your plaque once you’re sealed within? Which one of Bianca’s pictures would you choose? So hard to separate her from Belinda. Always together: in your womb; in the crib; touching each other as they sleep.
Most Sundays, Floria takes the train to Gate of Heaven and sits on the stone bench across from Bianca’s grave. Malcolm goes seldom, Belinda almost never, though she used to come with her.
A bare-chested man grins from his plaque, an aging gigolo type with a golden chain on his tanned chest. I’m the only one here who is alive. No mourners. No priest. She stops in front of a plaque with photos of an old man and a young man—both named Giulio Mastino. Although one Giulio was born in 1891 and the other in 1945, their death years were the same: 1972. A grandfather and grandson? Did the two Giulios die together one day? In an accident? From the same illness? Or did their deaths merely occur the same year? And if so, then, who died last? It’s crucial for Floria to know. Because of her father and Bianca. Because it’s far more tragic for a grandfather to live through his grandchild’s death. She hopes the Giulios were spared the loss of each other, that they died together.
And then she finds the plaque her father described to her. “A landmark…easy to find because it’s so fancy.” Chiseled into white marble, a sailor rides a dolphin toward a cross in the sky. “Once you see the sailor, count three plaques toward the gate. That’s where your great-grandparents rest. They met when he was hiking through Liguria, and they got married a week later in Nozarego. And stayed there forever.” A joint plaque with one photo of a woman and a man, both old; but his image is right above her engraved name, and her image above his name. For eight years he survived her, certainly long enough to have the negative reversed so the photo would match the names. Did he consider doing that? Or did he enjoy the switch?
When Floria walks back down to the church, she finds an alcove with two statues in the low wall near the brass door: a girl kneeling in front of a Madonna, who has two rosaries dangling from her folded hands. Floria pulls the rings from her finger, lays them at the feet of the Madonna statue. Someone, she expects, will see the rings and—in a village this small—recognize them. She imagines that person telling others. And others yet.
And out of imagining, then, rise troubling questions. What if a woman dropped those rings on the path because she was done with her marriage? What if that woman mistook the rings in front of the Madonna as a sign that she’s meant to stay in her marriage? What if the entire village interpreted this as a miracle?
Floria doesn’t want the burden of a miracle.
And she isn’t certain enough about her own marriage to impose a life sentence of wedlock on someone else. To think that a simple fact—like finding these rings and placing them in front of the Madonna—may be misinterpreted as a miracle. She reaches for the rings. Stops herself from picking them up. Maybe that’s what miracles really are: misinterpretations. But what if there were no misinterpretations? What if finding the rings made her part of the miracle? And what, then, are miracles? Events we can’t plan or maneuver to suit us? Events that wrest belief from us and make us pay with our devotion?
Miracles…
Restoring something lost: health; life; two silver rings.
In bed that night, Floria wishes she’d left the rings where she found them. Perhaps someone placed them there intentionally. Still, why then on an overgrown path away from the village? Not the kind of place where you keep what you value. Unless, of course, you no longer value it. But then a foreigner finds your rings, puts them in front of the Madonna, and you now have to believe that it’s a damn miracle, a miracle you don’t want, a miracle that, because of witnesses—your entire village—obligates you to stay with this man you’ve been wanting to get away from.
Early the next morning, she hikes once more to Nozarego, determined to retrieve the rings from the Madonna and return them to the olive grove. But the paths all look alike, fig trees and olive trees and mossy stone walls. When she gets to the church, the rings are no longer at the feet of the statue. Startled, she looks around, up. Someone has hung them around the Madonna’s neck by a golden ribbon, the kind of skinny ribbon used in stores for free gift-wrapping. As she touches the rings, Floria can feel the possibility of miracles. Maybe that’s all faith is: the belief in the possibility of miracles. Even if you become the instrument of that miracle, that doesn’t make it a false miracle: it just comes together from different elements. And perhaps, then, the real miracle is what it turns in you, what it evokes, changes.
Faith was the breath of her childhood, and miracles were as ordinary as weather or speech or hunger. If you fall into faith that early, you can never totally free yourself. You may dismiss the rules of the church, but mysticism will stay in your blood. Because that is how it all began, where all religions touch—within that mysticism, within that kernel of knowledge of something greater than you. It goes beyond belief, beyond doubt, beyond your objections even. And maybe that is good because it moors you in an awareness beyond your own, a communal awareness fed by centuries of belief that withstood challenges and doubts. But how then—within that tradition of belief—to account for the death of a child? How you tried to lose your voice to God, raged against the habit of belief that enveloped you like a nun’s habit. The habit you didn’t choose for yourself. Odd. Habit. The habit of belief that courses through your body, more potent than the habit of sexual desire. Because it is far older, has lived within you longer.
Above her a sudden movement—a tiny gray-haired woman sweeping the balcony of the parsonage. Avoiding Floria’s gaze, she slowly pushes her broom across the same surfaces. Then the front door of the parsonage opens, and an old priest emerges, walks across the mosaic in the churchyard. Though he pretends not to look at Floria, he’s probably making sure she’s not stealing the rings. For an instant, she wants to ask the priest if he knows about their owner; but that question belongs to yesterday, and too much has happened since yesterday: the rings have been absorbed into the legends of the village, the religious lore. To disturb them would be sacrilege. She’s done the part assigned to her by some capricious God, and all she can do now is let the impact of the miracle sweep forward without her.
That night, the sudden blush of her body is strong enough to wake her, and she throws off her covers. Her calves ache from climbing the hills. Lying bare, still drowsy, she rotates her ankles, flexes her toes, lets her sweat cool on her skin. Staying calm makes it
pass sooner. It stays the longest high on her forehead, where the roots of her hair meet her skin. In the early years of marriage, she and Malcolm were often awake at this hour, one of them murmuring, “Are you awake, too?”
How she remembers his persistence—tender and laughing and rough—the first night they were together, at the hotel where Malcolm was staying because his landlady was furious at him for trading her bicycle for a set of golf clubs. Floria took off her brassiere, but she kept on her girdle that entire night, even though part of her longed to strip it off in the heated back-and-forth between them.
As a young man, Malcolm was restless, full of schemes and enthusiasm, and while that made him an exciting lover, it also made him irresponsible. After they married, she found he was always reaching beyond what he had at home and at work, reaching beyond the law till the law punished him. Still, each time he returned from jail, he snared her, charmed and embarrassed her with his eagerness—initially just eagerness for her, but soon eagerness for the next scheme that would guarantee him the easy forever-money. But though he was an operator, Floria knew he was faithful to her. For years she tried to keep him within the laws while he searched for openings. What she wanted was a husband without that restlessness, yet with the same ardor; and for years she didn’t understand that his ardor and restlessness sprang from the same impulse, and that without them his blood would thicken, clot. It came about gradually, a quieting altogether, and she was so pleased by how dependable Malcolm was becoming, how settled as a husband and father, that she tried not to mind that he turned to her less often. After all, he was willing enough when she started the sex. After all, he was working harder. After all, he came home to her every evening. Until, gradually, she was the one who became restless.
Floria straightens the sheet that has tangled itself around her. She could easily be the kind of woman who strips her wedding ring from her finger. Who flings it on some overgrown path. Who leaves her husband behind. Who sets out for the life she wants. Who implores God and all angels that some fool won’t come along and find her ring and try to restore it to her. She isn’t quite sure yet what it is, the life she wants for herself, only that now—here, alone—she feels closer to it than she has in years.
To think that the husband of her youth would have been the ideal partner for this middle span of her life—a man who would hold his palm beneath her breasts, rub the cooling sheen toward her aureolas. But perhaps only another woman would do that, would take joy in a moment like this. For an instant she imagines a woman’s hand on her breast and feels aroused. The first time she felt drawn to a woman was in eighth grade, when she had a crush on Sister Francine and couldn’t concentrate in class because she was imagining the Sister walking toward her, touching her hair. Always her hair—nothing below her forehead. Her fantasies wouldn’t go lower than her forehead. That was her sweetest crush ever, because it brought her some knowledge about being a woman. Nothing physical happened, of course.
And nothing physical happened with Emily-from-the-fabric-store. It all happened in Floria’s fantasies. At first she enjoyed going to the fabric store, getting Emily’s opinion on her sketches of styles; but then Emily nested herself in her soul, a danger to Floria’s concept of herself, to her marriage. To evict Emily from her soul, she bought fabrics from different stores, got rid of Emily’s patterns, aimed for what was familiar and safe within her family, familiar and safe within herself. But Emily’s absence was stronger than her presence: it hollowed Floria out, nested deeper, as though a greater space had been cleared for her. Now, dancing with Leonora felt confusing. What if she sensed Floria’s longing for Emily? What if she misread it as being directed toward her, God forbid? Worse yet, what if—once triggered—that longing were to leap from Floria like a flea and attach itself to any woman, including her brother’s wife, God forbid.
Outside the hotel window, night is fuller than at home with its street lights and neon signs. Floria touches herself, lets herself sink into the fantasy of a woman’s hand on her breast—that’s-me-that’s-me-that’s-me—and suddenly wonders if it’s like that for Aunt Camilla and Mrs. Feinstein. And is amazed she hasn’t wondered before. Maybe because the entire family seems determined to see the relationship between the two as a friendship, a convenience of sharing space and interests. A friend to live with. To go to the movies. To restaurants.
The one man Floria would like to touch is Julian Thompson, and the instant her mind veers toward him, it’s his hand on her belly, on her breast, touching her sweat with pleasure, with reverence. What would Julian think if she were to send him a postcard from Italy? Or if she were to call him once she got back home to the Bronx? Would he say: “Oh, yes, I remember you,” or: “I fell in love with you the day you married Malcolm.” But that won’t happen until after she leaves Malcolm—and she suddenly knows that she will. In time.
Another dusk, and Floria waits for the old woman who feeds the pigeons. When she emerges from her stairwell onto the roof—slowly; achingly—Floria is careful not to move. The old woman does not linger, just feeds those birds without haste or fondness, as if she were ironing handkerchiefs, say, or setting plates on her table. Soon, she disappears down the well, only to return with a watering can. She tilts its long spout to fill several bowls. And then she’s gone once again. Another chore completed until tomorrow. Her days funneling into a sequence of days just like this day.
How little I know about her, Floria thinks when she goes out to buy her dinner. At the corner shop, where dried fish hang on hooks behind the counter, a white cat—sleek and well fed—nudges past Floria’s legs and through the door before she can close it. The proprietor shakes her head, tosses slivers of food to the cat. Behind the glass display simmer long trays with pesto lasagna, broccoli rabe, breaded veal filets, layered slices of melanzana…. Floria points to the tiny sautéed zucchinis. To cheese focaccia. To torta di acciughe—baked anchovy pie.
In her room, she unpacks her food, peels off her black stockings, and unbuttons her dress. Feeling deliciously decadent, she sits on her mattress in her black slip, eating, while watching the Italian shopping channel: bracelets, frying pans, gowns, a set of knives.
When she first considered taking this trip, she was fearful of being alone. That’s why she had to go—it’s that easy; that complicated—to prove to herself that she can still enjoy traveling alone; to learn once again to let her aloneness clothe her; to remind herself not to cling to her surviving daughter; to fill the pockets of time with herself, not others as she can at home, stopping at Victor’s Festa Liguria, marketing with her mother on Castle Hill Avenue, having coffee with Leonora at Sutter’s.
With her fork she pushes the anchovies aside. Too salty. She drinks a glass of water. Pulls the pins from her black bun and lets her hair fall down. Switches to a channel that’s showing rescues. Though she can’t understand the words of the newscaster—concerned eyes, bug eyes—she patches the stories together from images of people who are stranded: stranded on shipwrecked boats; stranded in burning buildings; stranded in snowbound cars. Though each hazard is different, the people are alike, because they survive situations that could have killed them. Not just simple survivals by averting disaster. No. These are survivals of disasters that have happened. The kind of disasters that have killed others. Who then chooses? I would have done that for Bianca, taken her death for myself. In whatever form. Like the mother superior in Dialogue of the Carmelites, who dies a long and terrifying death though she has meditated on death all her life. Yet, she bears it, because she believes it’s a death that belongs to someone else, and—in return—that person will have a peaceful death. Floria saw the opera with her father, who flinched each time one of the nuns walked toward the platform of the guillotine.
She sets her food aside. Leaning against the headboard, she rubs her arches with her thumbs, implores the newscasters to bring her the story of a child—any child will do—who has survived falling from a sixth-floor window. She has heard of incidents like that, and she yea
rns for evidence that the story of her daughter could have ended differently.
My own story, too.
What would I be like if I were living the life of a mother whose two daughters grew up and moved out? Perhaps I’d be impatient with them to find their home in a world outside my walls, to return to me only for celebrations and emergencies.
As it is, she has to be so careful not to do too much for Belinda, not to expect confidences from her. That would only make Belinda bolt. Belinda has kept her dead twin present for Floria, for everyone in the family, especially Anthony. At family gatherings, when Floria catches him observing Belinda, she knows in her gut he’s really seeing Bianca, and it’s that focus she and Anthony share—not being able to see Belinda without seeing Bianca. Moments like that, she’s afraid to know what he’s thinking, in case he’s in one of his talking moods, as frightened as she was of the psychic Leonora sent her to the summer before Bianca’s death, an olive-skinned woman from some mid-European country, who could see Bianca’s death by touching one thumb to Floria’s throat, but refused to forewarn her.
When Floria turns off the television, the screen glows for a few seconds, then dims. She takes her dirty laundry into the tub with her. Like long grasses, blouses and stockings and underwear float past her hips, between her thighs, light, so light. Scooping shampoo foam from her hair, Floria rubs it into her clothes, rinses till she can no longer squeeze any foam from them. Overnight, they will dry, and come morning, they’ll smell of apples, like her hair.