“I could have gone home to Vilminore after the war. I stood on the road outside Rome and thought about going home, but I couldn’t bear the idea of the mountain without you.
“I don’t know what to say to make you believe me. I don’t believe in God so much. The saints have long ago left me. And the Blessed Mother forgot all about me, just as my own mother did, but none of them could give me what one thought of you could do. But if you come away with me, I promise to love you all my life. That’s all I have to offer you.”
Enza was so moved by his words, she couldn’t speak. She knew that a woman can only know two things when she falls in love: what she sees in the man, and what she believes he will become in the light of her care. But never once in the months of her betrothal had Enza felt for Vito what she felt when she looked at Ciro. Ciro’s height and strength reminded her of the mountain; she felt protected when she stood with him. Her body rose to meet his, and her spirit followed.
A group of children played stickball on Carmine Street. They chased the ball down the sidewalk in front of the church. They saw Ciro’s soldier uniform and gathered around. They inspected his helmet, his boots, and his backpack.
Enza’s desire for Ciro was so overwhelming, she put her head down so no one could read her thoughts. Her need to feel his body next to hers was so intense, it almost shamed her.
Enza knew that if she married Vito, she would lose her Italy forever. Even if she could have braved the ocean, Vito would hope to show her the island of Capri, the antiquities of Rome, and the enchantments of Firenze, not the mountains, lakes, and rivers of the north. She was from the land of the mandolin; the exquisite violins of La Scala were not hers to claim.
If Enza was going to create a new life, she had to build it with conviction, on her own truthful terms, with a man who could take her home again, even if that meant a new home of their own invention and not the mountain. Ciro had her heart; he was her portion of the mountain.
For Ciro, Enza would sacrifice, fight to put food on the table, worry and fret over babies, and live life in full. She had only one life to share, and one heart to give the man who most deserved it. If she took Ciro on, she was in for a struggle compared to her life with Vito, but the love of all loves was worth it.
Ciro pulled Enza close and kissed her. The children whistled and teased and fell away like sound across water. The taste of his lips was just as she remembered. His face against her own was warm; the touch of his skin healed her.
She would go to the ends of the earth for Ciro Lazzari, and she always knew it. Her wedding suit would become traveling clothes. It always seemed that her costumes were built for different intentions. The cinnamon suit was no different. She stuffed the violets Ciro had brought her into the waist of her suit jacket. They fit perfectly, as if the suit had been awaiting their finishing touch.
“I belong to you, Ciro,” she said. And with those words, Enza left one life behind to start a new one.
PART THREE
Minnesota
Chapter 22
A BUNCH OF VIOLETS
Un Mazzolino di Viole
A ribbon of light cut through the darkness into Laura and Enza’s bedroom window in the Milbank House. Enza, in her nightgown, shifted in her bed. “My mother said it was bad luck to sleep in the moonlight.”
“Too late for that,” Laura said, kneeling before the fireplace. “Luck took a powder today.” Laura stoked the fire with a poker, the small orange embers on the floor of the grid bursting into flames. She threw another log on the fire and climbed into bed. “This time last night, we were hemming the skirt on your wedding suit.” Laura lay back on her pillow. “So much for me coming home to a single. What in the Sam Hill were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry.” Enza moved the violets on her nightstand so their small velvet petals faced her.
“It’s Vito that deserves an apology,” Laura said.
“He’ll never forgive me, and he shouldn’t,” Enza said as she leaned back on the pillow. She couldn’t believe that she had made Vito so unhappy, when all she had done her whole life was put others’ happiness before her own. But something had shifted within her in a profound way. When a devout girl is about to make an irreversible, lifelong vow, she must be honest. When Enza searched her heart, she knew that she could only marry for love, and that meant choosing Ciro.
“Vito left Our Lady of Pompeii like it was on fire. Ran out of there like a shot.”
“ . . . After he let me have it. Did you hear what he said?”
“The doors of the sacristy at Our Lady of Pompeii aren’t very thick. But I couldn’t blame him for being angry.”
“Neither could I. Then, it was so strange, he got very quiet and sat down. And then he said, ‘I never really had you. And I knew it.’ ”
“This is so unlike you, Enza. You’re not impulsive. This is the act of a flighty girl.”
“But I’ve loved Ciro since I was fifteen years old. He’s had my heart all along. I tried to create a kind of happiness with Vito by putting Ciro out of my mind. But he came for me, Laura. Today, he came for me. He chose me.”
“But you have a choice in the matter.”
“You know, back on our mountain they have tried to build dams to harness the power of the waterfalls. But sooner or later, there’s always a leak or a flood or something else to make the structure come crashing down. The water seems to have a will of its own. The engineers can’t figure out a way to stop nature. That’s exactly what it was like when I saw Ciro this morning. I can’t fight the power of it.”
“And you don’t want to try.” Laura sighed. “What was wrong with the life Vito offered you?” she asked as she sat up and pulled the blanket around her.
“Nothing,” Enza said quietly.
“Then why would you throw it away? Are you sure about Ciro? When we were working in Hoboken, you talked about him. And when we saw him on Columbus Day so many years ago, you told him your feelings, and he never came for you. I remember how miserable you were for months after that. I thought he was a heel. Doesn’t that worry you? Is he reliable?”
Enza sat up in her bed. “He has a plan.”
“Oh joy,” Laura said, lying back on her pillow. The tone of her voice made Enza laugh for the first time that day.
“Ciro is ambitious,” Enza continued. “He talks about opening his own shop someday. He’d like to learn how to make women’s shoes. But he’s not just a shoemaker, Laura. Spending time with him today, I realized he has an artist’s view of the world.”
“So do you! Does he have any idea of what you can do? Has he ever seen your work up close, like I have, or from a distance, from the diamond horseshoe, like a society matron? You’re a masterful seamstress. You make the rest of us in the costume shop look like a pack of amateurs. Signor Caruso may like the way you boil macaroni, but that’s not why you were chosen to work for him. He saw how you built a costume, and that’s why he selected you to head up his crew. You’re inventive. You’re the artist! You took scraps from the floor during the war rationing and made them into glorious capes and suits for Caruso! Does Ciro know who you are and how far you’ve come since he left you on the roof?” Laura pummeled her pillow into a fluffy circle and rolled onto her side to face Enza.
“I’m not going to stop working,” Enza vowed.
“I hope you like making shoes.”
“I’ll help him, and he’ll help me.”
“Really. A man is going to put your work on a par with his? I can’t believe what I’m hearing!”
“I have hope, Laura.”
“Yeah. Hope is wonderful thing. It has no memory. It fills you with possibility. Whatever your imagination can conjure, hope will design and deliver.”
“You just don’t like him,” Enza said.
“I don’t know him. But it’s not about liking Ciro. It’s about loving my friend and wanting the best for her. You have no idea what you’re getting into. You’ll be living on Mulberry Street, doing his boss’s laundry. I
don’t know how he convinced you to change your life, one that you created over years, in a matter of minutes. He must have made some pretty big promises.”
“He promised to love me. And for once in my life, I’m going to do the impractical, unwise, ill-advised thing. I’m going to make a decision based upon the feeling I have in my heart, and not what looks good on paper or makes anyone else happy. I’m going to do something for me, and I’ll live with whatever Ciro brings into my life and be happy that I did.”
Laura sighed. “You’ve gone over the cliff. He’s got you. I have to hand it to him. For a woman, love is the highest dream, and if a man promises to build a ladder tall enough to reach it, she believes him, hikes up her skirt, and follows him to the stars. Now it’s my turn to hope. I’m going to hope Signor Lazzari doesn’t disappoint you.”
Laura rolled over in her bed, pulling the blanket up to her chin.
Enza didn’t sleep that night. She spent the late night hours thinking about Vito and Ciro and the life she had chosen.
The fire threw a soft glow onto the walls, illuminating the cracks in the old paint. There were no shapes or strange shadows to portend Enza’s future, no signs whatsoever. On what should have been the happiest day of her life, Enza cried silent tears so as not to wake Laura.
Ciro stretched out on his cot at the Zanetti Shoe Shop. He crossed his arms and stared up at the squares of the tin ceiling, as he had done for many nights before he left for the war.
Remo and Carla had gone to bed after a supper of steak and onions, fresh bread, coffee, and cake. Ciro talked for hours about the war and his travels to Rome. He thought about telling them about Enza, but decided not to, as Carla seemed to expect him to get back to work immediately. Her bank purse was never so thick as when Ciro made excellent-quality work boots at the pace of a machine. Signora wanted the old profits back, the sooner the better.
Ciro heard a key turn in the front door of the shop. He stood and looked out from behind the curtain.
“Don’t shoot,” Luigi said, holding up the key. He looked at Ciro. “My God, you’re thin,” he said as he embraced his friend.
“You’re not. How’s married life?”
“Pappina is expecting.”
“Auguri!”
“Grazie. Grazie. We’re living on Hester Street.”
“How is it?”
“It’s no good. It’s noisy. There’s no garden. I want to get Pappina out of here.”
“Where would you go?”
“We thought about going home to Italy, but there’s no work there. The war made it worse.” He lowered his voice. “And I’m tired of making money for them.” He pointed upstairs. “I work seven days a week, and she pays me for five.”
“Signora wants me back on the machines in the morning—at the same salary. Says times are tough.”
“For us. Not for her,” Luigi said. “She couldn’t wait for you to return. I’m surprised she didn’t rent a mule and do a search for you in the fields of France. Did she make you steak?”
Ciro nodded.
“That’s how she keeps us under her thumb.” He patted his stomach. “When she expects double time at the same rate, you get tenderloin. We need to make a break.”
“Remo says he wants to go home to Italy.”
“And you think they’ll sell us the business? It will never happen. Signora loves the cash too much. She’ll work him to death and then spend the rest of her time counting the money.”
“I’ve thought about opening our own shop,” Ciro said. “What do you think?”
“We work well together. I’d love it.”
“Where should we go? Brooklyn? New Jersey?”
“I want to get as far from the city as possible,” Luigi insisted. “I want land. Fresh air. Don’t you?”
Ciro had given a lot of thought about where to live during his endless nights in France. When Enza embraced him that afternoon, she had no idea the gift she had given him. Ciro was ready to make a life for her that he had never dared imagine alone. With Luigi as a partner, they could go anywhere. “How about California?”
“Half of Calabria is in California. There are more shoemakers than feet out west.”
Ciro nodded. “There are mines in Kentucky and West Virginia. Maybe they need shoemakers,” he offered.
“I don’t want to go south,” Luigi said. “I’m from southern Italy, and I’ve had enough heat and humidity to last me a lifetime.”
“We could go north. I’d love a place like Vilminore. Someplace green, where there are lakes.”
“There are plenty of lakes in Minnesota.”
“That’s where my father went to work,” Ciro said quietly, an expression of unresolved pain crossing his face. “And he never came back to us.”
“What happened?” Luigi asked gently.
“We don’t know. And you know what, Luigi? I don’t want to know. They say he died in a mine, but all we know is that he never came home. It broke up our family, ruined my mother’s health, and split up my brother and me.”
“All right. We’ll never go to Minnesota.”
“No, no, we should consider every possibility,” Ciro said slowly. Minnesota had always had a mythical quality to him. It was the place that had swallowed up his father without apology. Yet it held a certain fascination for Ciro because his father had chosen it. Would it be fate or sheer folly to offer up another Lazzari to the Iron Range? Choosing Minnesota might tempt fate—or maybe it could redeem the loss of his father.
“I heard some men talking at Puglia’s,” Luigi continued, oblivious to Ciro’s internal struggle. “The iron ore mines operate around the clock. Lots of guys are heading up there. We should think about it. The mines employ thousands, and somebody’s got to build the boots and repair them. We could make a good living. And you’d certainly have your lakes.”
Perhaps it was the memory of all the places Ciro had been during and after the war—the romantic hills of England, the pristine vineyards of France, and the stately antiquities of Rome—that gave him the desire to leave New York City. Or maybe it was sleeping in the same cot behind a thin privacy curtain, as he had done since he was a teenager, that made him long for a home of his own. Suddenly the old ways, the way things had always been, were not enough. He intended to give Enza a good life and a home of her own. He needed to be bold in his thinking, open to new ideas; and he hoped she, too, might think beyond the borders of Manhattan Island. He shook his head at the odds of his plan succeeding. “Enza will never leave New York City,” he said finally.
“Who?”
“Enza Ravanelli,” Ciro announced. “I’m going to marry her.”
“Marry her?” Luigi was stunned. “Enza . . .” He remembered. “The nice girl from the Alps? I can’t believe it. She’s a glove-and-hat girl. She’s not like any of the girls you used to see.”
“That’s the point.”
“You’re like every other doughboy home from the front. You turned in your rifle and went shopping for wedding rings. How did you pull this off so fast?”
“I don’t know,” Ciro lied. He had planned to return to New York and win Enza’s heart from the first moment his boots hit the ground in France. The complete chaos of war had helped him think clearly and to define life for himself in a plain way. It was either yes or no, life or death, love or loneliness. War had taught him that everything was absolute. So he too began to think like a general, even when it came to his own heart. He had nothing to gain by taking more time to make what was, for him, an obvious decision. “She wants to be with me,” Ciro said.
“So does every other girl between here and Bushwick. But you never gave Enza a tumble. Why now?”
“I’ve changed, Luigi.”
“I’ll say. Did you get hit on the head in France? You’re the man who always got the girl. Any girl. All of them,” Luigi marveled.
“There’s only one girl for me. And that’s Enza.”
“A masher no more. Va bene. I hope you know what you’re givin
g up. When you were gone, there wasn’t a day in this shop when the bells on the door didn’t jingle and some ragazza come to the front desk and ask where to write to you.”
“I didn’t get a single letter,” Ciro said with false indignation.
“That’s because Signora told them you were in Tangiers.”
“I never went to Tangiers.” Ciro threw his hands in the air. “I doubt I could find it on a map.”
“Yeah, well, there’s some tent in Tangiers filled with love letters to Ciro Lazzari drenched in rosewater that will never see the light of day. What a shame.”
Later that night, after Luigi left, Ciro lit a cigarette under the old elm in the courtyard. He propped his feet on the trunk of the tree and leaned back in the chair just as he had done every night before he left for the war. He had always enjoyed a hard day’s work in the shoe shop, followed by a smooth, sweet cigarette under the tree after supper. But since he returned, it wasn’t the same. It seemed to Ciro that everything had changed in Little Italy while he was away, including the tree. The old bark on the trunk had begun to peel away, revealing a layer of gray underneath with deep rivulets in the surface that looked like old candle wax. The autumn leaves had skipped their brilliant golden phase; instead they’d turned a dingy brown and fallen to the ground, leaving barren, dry branches.
Ciro acknowledged how important this old tree had been to him; it had given him a cover of green in a city of stone, a place to prop his boots and have a smoke, but now he knew it had never been beautiful in its own right. It had only given him pleasure because he leaned against it to remind him of home.
In the time it took to smoke one cigarette, Ciro realized that he wanted to take Enza to live and work in a new place that would be wholly their own. They needed land and sky and lakes. Fertile earth can produce many crops. If a man walks in beauty, he will create, and when he creates, he prospers. He and Enza did not belong on Mulberry Street. He could not offer her a grand apartment on the Upper East Side, as Vito Blazek might have, and he did not want to join the Italians in Brooklyn and Queens. Nor could he picture them in New Jersey, Rhode Island, or New Haven, Connecticut, all filled with every manner of Italian craftsmen. The best Ciro could hope for would be to work for one of the many established shoemakers in one of those places. But why trade a position at Zanetti’s for a similar one? Besides, it was the city life that Ciro wanted to leave behind. One tree in a concrete courtyard would not satisfy him any longer, and he hoped Enza felt the same.