“Maybe you’re growing new bunions. Ever thought about that?”
“I forget that young people still want to take the trip, so I come off a little skeptical sometimes. I don’t ever want you to think I don’t want you to be happy. But if you think Peachy DePino is going to make you happy—”
“I do!”
“You may want to get down on your knees in a dark room and pray to the sweet Lord Jesus in heaven that He shows you a different path, because the road you’re about to go down is not going to take you home. And everybody wants to get home.”
“I want my own life. My own home.”
“Of course you do. But you also have to be careful. Contemplate, Nicky. Contemplate.”
“Seven years is not long enough to make a cautious decision?”
“Fifty years may not be long enough in some cases! You see, I can spot compatibility. It’s a gift. I know, on sight, who should go with whom. I can pair off people who belong together. I envision a kind of Noah’s Ark, except it’s for people looking for love, not animals seeking shelter. I can be anywhere—walking down Thompson Street, sitting on a bus going local on Broad—and I can look into any crowd and find two people who’ve never met but should.”
“Peachy’s a good girl.”
“For someone else.”
“She waited for me. Through the war. And ever since.”
“Patience demonstrated is not a good reason to marry a man, and guilt is not a good reason to marry a woman. You need to come up with something better, or all mysteries will be revealed on that wedding night and there’s no turning back. You’re a Catholic. There is no divorce. There’s only widowhood or sainthood.”
Hortense Mooney was right about that, Nicky reflected. Marriage was for life. Years ago, when Father Chiaravalle came to talk to his confirmation class about the sacraments, he told the boys that the church looked at marriage like permanent internment in one of Houdini’s steel boxes, dripping in chains, with five padlocks dangling like charms on a bracelet whose keys had been swallowed by an alligator in the Congo halfway around the world. You couldn’t get out of it once you were in. The finality of it all may be why Nicky had taken so long to marry.
Nicky would be certain about his wife, and there would be no disasters on his wedding night. He was not going to be one of those suckers who rolled the dice on a pretty girl he just met and ended up with snake eyes on the honeymoon. Nicky had heard awful stories of girls who wept through their wedding nights, and raced home to their mothers the next morning, vowing never to return to their new husbands. He’d heard tales of brides who were not pleased with their grooms: it turned out their veils weren’t to suggest virginity but to hide experience. He had heard plenty, with the moral of every story the same: find a good girl, because goodness would take care of any problems, financial, familial, mental, or sexual.
It had been Nicky’s observation that every girl who hoped to marry was a good girl; it was one of the requirements to secure the engagement ring in the first place. As soon as Nicky had given Peachy DePino a diamond, she’d been willing to be intimate in a certain way, which was reassuring. It showed Nicky that she wasn’t like Veronica Verotti, whose name filled every young Italian American male in South Philly with dread.
Veronica, the story goes, was so traumatized by what she saw on her wedding night, she abandoned her sleeping groom in the double bed at the Blue Lagoon Hotel in Atlantic City, left her rings in the ashtray on the nightstand, took the night bus to North Haledon, New Jersey, and the very next morning, joined the order of the Salesian nuns of Saint John Bosco, where she’d lived ever since as Sister Mary Immaculata.
Nicky admired Peachy’s fine qualities: she had demonstrated loyalty and trust over the years that he’d known her. But he also knew that no woman would have all the attributes of character and physical appearance he dreamed of. Nor, he knew, could he fulfill all the hopes a woman might hold for him. Peachy was an honest, ambitious girl with common sense and a warm smile. She had a steady job as a bookkeeper at a Wanamaker’s department store, she was handy, she could repair small appliances and stuff a nut roll with the same precision, and in Nicky’s mind, she was not only quick to learn, she was versatile. Even if all of that hadn’t been true, he loved Peachy, and she loved him.
Hortense folded a telegram neatly and placed it in an envelope, which she handed to Nicky. “Take this to Mr. Da Ponte on North Second Street.”
Nicky placed the Western Union cap on his head and went down into the garage, which was now in full sun. Soon his cousins would finish breakfast, jump in their cabs, and begin their shifts too.
As Nicky got into the No. 4 car, he remembered the milliner Da Ponte. He had bought Peachy a green velvet hat in the shop, and she’d loved it so much that she asked Mr. Da Ponte to make her wedding veil when the date was set. Nicky smiled at the thought. This might be what he loved most about South Philly—you didn’t have to go far to find anything you desired. Nicky couldn’t imagine ever living anywhere else.
As he backed out of the garage, he looked up and saw Mrs. Mooney standing in the window of the office, watching him. She had her hands folded at her waist, in a pose that reminded him of the statue of Saint Ann behind glass in the crypt of Saint Rita of Cascia. A shiver went through him as he remembered waiting on the kneeler for his turn to enter the confessional when he was a boy. Nicky wondered if that was a sign. Wasn’t everything?
* * *
The row of bachelor’s buttons, pansies, and daffodils that were planted along the porch in front of the Borellis’ home on 832 Ellsworth Street looked puny. The father and daughter who lived inside had planted them exactly as the lady of the house had always done, but since her death last summer, the garden looked sad.
Sam Borelli didn’t have a green thumb, and neither did his daughter Calla, even though she had a name that would indicate otherwise. Their skills lay elsewhere, but they did their best to keep the sky blue clapboard two-story as Vincenza Borelli had liked it, and that included maintaining the flowerbeds.
Calla Borelli peered into the mirror of the medicine cabinet as she lifted a section of her hair that fell across her forehead in a feathered black fringe. She twisted it just so, snipped the ends with her nail scissors, and stood back to survey the results. Satisfied, she ran her fingers through the short layers that framed her face.
“Calla!” her father called from the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m coming, Pop,” Calla hollered back. She swiped bright red lipstick onto her mouth, smacked her lips together, and as she blotted them, ran water in the sink to rinse away the tiny black slashes from her haircut. She took a final look at the model in the Harper’s Bazaar magazine propped in the windowsill. The photograph of the long, lean Parisienne with a cigarette and an attitude whose chic, cropped hairstyle Calla had tried to copy had little in common with the Italian American woman in the mirror, but it didn’t matter. Calla wasn’t fussy and she certainly wasn’t French. She flipped the magazine shut.
The morning sun drenched the Borelli kitchen like a stage in full light. The air was filled with the scent of sweet tomato sauce simmering on the stove.
Sam Borelli stood over the skillet with a spatula, watching two fresh eggs poach in the bubbling sauce, Venetian style. A moppeen was slung over his shoulder. At nearly eighty, age may have robbed him of his height and hair, but his intense black eyes and Neapolitan features, especially his thick black eyebrows, were as sharp as they had been in his youth.
Calla twirled when she entered the room. “What do you think?”
“I like it all right.”
“I cut it myself.”
“You shouldn’t cut your own hair. That’s like building your own car.”
“Don’t have time to go to the beauty parlor.”
“Make the time.” Sam worried about Calla. She wasn’t like Helen or Portia, his other daughters, who made their appearances a priority, as well as marriage and motherhood. Calla seemed to skip over steps when
it came to being a woman. It came naturally to his youngest daughter to be selfless and put herself last. But while he couldn’t believe it, Calla was twenty-six years old, and he knew that the years burned away quickly like morning fog, and she’d soon be beyond the age of marriage. Sam thought it was time that Calla found someone to love, someone with whom she could build a future. But it was the father within him who worried about her, not the fellow artist. The fellow artist believed she was right on track.
“Where do you get the nerve to cut your own hair?”
“I style the wigs at the theater, so I figured, how hard could it be to do my own hair?”
“Wigs are not real hair.”
“An even better reason to do the job myself. If I make a mistake, it’ll grow back.”
“Wish I could say the same.” Sam rubbed his balding head.
“This is the rage in Paris. It’s called the French Cap.”
“But we’re in South Philly.”
“Maybe we need a little of the Left Bank on the banks of the Delaware.” Calla picked up the newspaper. “How was the review?”
Sam didn’t answer her. When he directed a play, he couldn’t sleep the night it opened, nervous about the reviews that would come the following morning. On her opening night, the previous evening, Calla had toasted the cast with champagne in paper cups after the show, swept the lobby, cleaned the restrooms, returned home, and gone to bed.
Calla flipped through the Philadelphia Inquirer until she found a short review of her first directorial effort at the Borelli Theatrical Company. “Talk about burying my lede. This is harder to find than an Italian American at the Philly Free Library.” She read aloud, “Mr. Carl Borelli . . .” She looked at her father. “Carl Borelli?”
“Strike one.” Her father sighed. “I should have named you Susie.”
“You should have had a son who became a director, not a daughter.”
“I only make girls, you know that.”
Calla continued to read aloud, “Mr. Borelli . . . ugh . . . attempts a grand feat with Twelfth Night, one that hits with the comedy occasionally, less so with the farce—” She looked up at her father again. “Isn’t farce comedy?”
“Of a stripe.” Sam flipped the eggs in the pan.
“He didn’t understand what I was doing with Feste at all. I used him as a narrator.” Calla plopped down into the chair and continued to read. “Who is this dolt?”
“That fellow likes his Shakespeare as it was at the old Globe.” Sam ladled the over-easy eggs onto two pieces of Italian bread toasted to a golden brown, then smothered them with the tomato gravy he had cooked them in, finishing the dish with a pat of butter, which melted over the fragrant mixture. He placed the dish before his daughter, who placed a napkin on her lap. “Don’t worry about the critics. Remember what Verdi said. He let a bad review ruin his breakfast, but never his lunch.”
“Thanks, Pop,” Calla said, not looking up from the paper this time. “If this wasn’t so ridiculous, I’d be furious. And I’d be even angrier if this were a good review. Some guy named Carl would be getting all the credit.”
“But you’re fine with him getting the blame?”
Calla threw down the paper. “I’m not going to read another word.” She picked up her fork and began to eat her breakfast, savoring every bite.
“Good idea.” Sam poured her a cup of coffee. “Are you all right?”
“I wasn’t expecting a good review.”
“Yes, you were.”
“How did you know?”
“You’re an optimist.”
“Not anymore.”
Sam laughed. “It’s your first show. And you did a fine job.”
“You think so?”
“You created some inspired stage pictures.”
“I learned that from you.”
“You cast the show well. You directed the actors with sympathy. You got a performance out of Josie I never could have gotten.”
“Less ham and more mustard, I told her. It worked.”
“It all worked. The actors related to one another with an ease. That’s all you up there.”
“I think they were open to me because of their relationship with you over the years. You built the company, and they’re loyal to you.”
“No, you know what you’re doing. And I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah, well, we needed to pack them in, and a great review in a big newspaper would’ve done it. So much for high hopes.”
“How’s the house for tonight?” Sam sat down at the table and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“About half full and we’re really short for the matinee tomorrow.”
“You have to cut staff.”
“I know.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I figured I can do the accounting myself. I can lose the costume assistant.”
“You can do the wigs.”
“I can cut the prompter, too.”
“That’s too bad. I like that Nicky Castone. He’s a good employee.”
“I know. But I don’t have enough money to pay him.” Calla looked out the kitchen window as though the answer to the theater’s financial problems lay in the gnarl of branches that covered her mother’s grape arbor. “I have to find creative ways to make budget. Maybe I can get Mario Lanza to be in a play.”
“Every time somebody needs something in South Philly they ask Mario Lanza. How much can one man do?”
“He’s loyal to the old neighborhood. I’ll write him a letter,” Calla said, placing her dish in the sink. “I can turn this around.”
“Maybe you don’t have to. Maybe the place has run its course.”
“Don’t talk like that, Pop. What would this city be without Borelli’s? It’s your legacy. Have a little faith.” Calla kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll be home for supper. Now don’t do anything crazy.”
If Calla noticed that her father’s color was off and that he was not himself, she didn’t let on. She was worried about his theater, the troupe he founded, and not so concerned about the man himself that morning.
“No ladders. No step stools. No heavy lifting. Wait until I get home.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“I mean it, Pop.”
Calla grabbed her purse and keys before leaving the house. “I’ll call you at lunchtime.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Want to,” she called out, before closing the front door behind her.
Once Calla was outside, she went down the porch steps at a clip, even though she wasn’t late for work. When she reached the gate at the end of the walk, it wouldn’t open. She yanked on it, becoming more frustrated when it wouldn’t budge. She jostled the handle again, then kicked it, loosening the rusty latch.
Her neighbor, Pat Patronski, a petite Polish beauty around her age, was on her way to work when she saw Calla struggling with the fence. “I guess you read the reviews,” Pat said apologetically.
“Only one. And that was enough.”
The gate opened. Calla went through it, turned out onto the sidewalk, and began to walk quickly toward Broad Street. Her feet were moving too slowly for her liking, and soon she broke into a run.
Calla had lied to her father. She was devastated by the review. The paper had told her press agent they wouldn’t be running it until the weekend, so she believed she had time to brace herself for the worst. Calla had planned to scan the paper and, depending upon whether the review was good or bad, either leave it in the kitchen for her father to enjoy or burn it in the marble birdbath in the backyard—something her father had done through the years whenever he received bad press. The only way for her to cope with the humiliation now was to outrun it.
Calla had done her best directing her first play, but of course she had ideas about how she might have done better. She had her own style, but she was very much her father’s protégé, in that she had devised a concept, created an approach, and cast the play, directing it beat by beat, moment to mo
ment, making each scene as visually interesting as she could. She helped the costumer build the costumes stitch by stitch and assisted the set designer as he painted the sets. She had even helped build the island of Illyria with chicken wire, burlap, and buckets of real sand. Had the critic built anything but a tower of bad adjectives to describe what he obviously did not understand?
As Calla ran, her flat shoes began to flap against her heels, and the bottoms of her feet began to burn. She felt like she was in some kind of hell now, consumed in flames of rage, that began at her feet. She was a failure; she had directed a lousy production of a good play. At the library, historians called Twelfth Night foolproof. They hadn’t met this fool, who proved them wrong. Calla’s debut wasn’t a triumph, it was a soft landing, bringing with it nothing more than her name misspelled in the city paper and her gender revoked to dismiss her.
She couldn’t bear the idea of looking into the sad eyes of her crew and actors, who would need reassuring that it wasn’t their work that had caused the negative ink. She would get them through it, she had to, that was also her job. But who would get her through it? Her father wasn’t joking when he said that directing was the loneliest job in the theater.
Worst of all, and this is what stung the most, the bad review meant any hope for advance ticket sales had evaporated. Calla could handle the pummeling of her ego, but not at the expense of the box office. Her father had given her the keys to the theater creatively, but he’d handed her a mess financially. Her eyes were burning at the thought of it when she heard a wolf whistle. Why was it that men always chose the worst possible moment to get a woman’s attention? Calla ignored the whistle and ran faster still.
“Hey, Miss Borelli!” The man shouted as Car No. 4 glided slowly along next to her. She slowed down to a brisk walk when she recognized Nicky Castone behind the wheel.