An Italian Wife Read online

  “Mama,” Giulia was saying, “we can’t wait. We can’t.”

  Josephine pressed her temples with the palms of her hands. So many worries, these daughters gave her. Only Concetta was easy. She worked at the mill. Helped at home. Stayed out of trouble. Her mind flitted back to her baby girl, Valentina. What was it like in Vermont? she wondered. Cold. Snowy. She thought there might be mountains there.

  “I want my scholarship,” Elisabetta said. “I need to study Latin to get into college.”

  “Mama, are you listening?” Giulia said. “We can’t wait.”

  Josephine frowned at her.

  “Mama,” one of them said.

  “You’ve brought shame to this household?” Josephine said to Giulia. Hypocrisy rose in her throat but still she said the words as if she did not know about desire and sin and the babies that come from that.

  Giulia bent her head.

  “But who is this boy? This Mario?”

  Giulia shrugged. “A foreman at the mill,” she said again. “I love him.”

  “He’ll marry you?” Josephine said. Tommy Petrocelli’s face appeared in her mind.

  Giulia nodded, her head bent.

  Josephine sighed and looked at Elisabetta. “Go there now. Learn your Latin. Get to college.”

  “But it’s late,” Elisabetta said, even though she was grabbing her pink sweater and slipping on her shoes.

  “Go to him now,” Josephine said. This daughter would get out of here. She had a good head on her shoulders. She would be a scientist, like Madame Curie.

  Chiara watched her sister hurrying to the church, to Father Leone, to some future that Chiara could not even begin to imagine. Last Tuesday, Elisabetta had whispered to Chiara in their dark bedroom, “Did you know Father Leone’s name is John?” Her sister’s words had pierced her. He had chosen Chiara to become a nun. It was Chiara who was special, not Elisabetta. “Giovanni,” Chiara had corrected her.

  “Go!” Josephine was shouting as Elisabetta gathered her things: Latin book and spiral notebook filled with verb conjugations. “Get away from here! Run to him, Elisabetta. Run!”

  Chiara felt frightened and jealous and desperate. She fumbled in her pocket for her rosary beads, but when she found them, she was unsure what to pray for.

  Coney Island Dreams

  ALL WOMEN WERE PUTTANAS. CARMINE KNEW THIS. But still.

  Still at night, to calm the images of that day in France in 1918, he summoned Eva Peretsky. Eva Peretsky was only six years ago, right before he left for the war, but she seemed a million years ago. Too much had happened since that weekend in Coney Island and tonight, lying in his bed in his mother’s house. He had to work hard to summon her, reach back before the thing that happened in the war. Back to Coney Island. First, Carmine closed his eyes and counted to three, picturing each number clearly before moving on to the next. The straight line of the 1 with its small hook at the top, like the hook at the end of a fishing pole; then the 2, swanlike and elegant; and finally the 3, its curves as round and bulging as Eva Peretsky’s breasts.

  But he could not think of them yet. No. First he had to count backward: 3, 2, 1. Again picturing each number clearly, the breasts of 3, the swan of 2, the fishing pole 1. Sometimes, he was already growing hard at this point. Sometimes, he had to place his hands beneath his ass to keep from touching himself. He counted backward and his hands twitched, begging for Eva Peretsky.

  “Not yet,” Carmine sometimes scolded himself out loud. His room was small and narrow, a former storage closet. His bed was also small and narrow, not even really a bed. More like a cot, like the one he’d slept on during Army training. If he thought about Army training, he would think about France, and then he would lose Eva. He made himself take a slow, deep breath, the way the Army doctor had taught him when he came home. He made himself count backward: 3, 2, 1.

  Then he imagined a lemon. He imagined a lemon the size of his hand, the hand fighting for release beneath him. He imagined the yellow of that lemon. It was a yellow all its own, not the yellow of butter or egg yolks or Eva Peretsky’s hair. It was the yellow of this lemon. Sometimes he could almost smell the citrus over the sour smell of his sheets and his small room. When this happened, Carmine smiled. If he could free his hands, he would have made the sign of the cross in thanks to the Virgin for helping him get this far: Eva Peretsky’s hair. But he could not free his hands because he knew where they would go and what they would do and he had not earned that yet. He had not yet worked his way back to Eva Peretsky.

  Lemons.

  Carmine imagined a knife slicing into the lemon, cutting through its yellow flesh to the skin below. Then he imagined lifting that lemon to his mouth and biting into it. If he had done everything exactly right, the counting, the lemon, the cutting, when he took that bite, his mouth would fill with saliva and the glands behind his jaw would ache and his lips would pucker. And Carmine would smile and release his hands finally and reach for his cock, which was by now hot and throbbing. He could actually feel it throbbing from inside, could feel the blood coursing through it.

  Still, he could fail. Sometimes, as soon as he wrapped his hands around his cock, he came, too fast. Then the night would stretch ahead of him with its smells of sweat and dirt and dead bodies left in the sun. Instead of Eva Peretsky, he might remember his buddy Angelo Mazzonni. They had signed up together and traveled by train all the way to Kansas for basic training. Angelo was going to marry Carla Zito, and Carmine was going to marry her cousin Anna. The girls had seen them off at the train and pressed white handkerchiefs soaked in rose water into their hands as the train pulled away. This was to remind the men of them while they were at war.

  “Have you kissed her?” Angelo had asked as the train headed west, smack into the sunset with all of its pink and red and orange. Carmine felt both excited and terrified. He thought the train might take them right into the sky. His heart pounded, and he shook his head, lying.

  “You might be dead in a few months,” Angelo said. “You should have done it.” He leaned forward. “If you tell anybody this, I’ll cut your throat, but Carla gave me a farewell present.”

  He pointed to his crotch and grinned. They were eating provolone and salami and good hard bread that their mothers had packed for them. When they unwrapped it, two men already in uniform walking past their seats had said, “Shit, wops, they sell real American food in the next car.” The men had laughed, patting each other on the back and shaking their heads. “Stupid wops,” one said.

  “She took all of it in her mouth,” Angelo said, lowering his voice. His chin was shiny with oil. “She sucked until I exploded.”

  The strange thing was that Angelo really had exploded, right beside Carmine. His head had opened up like a melon, spitting gray juice and pieces of bone and flesh all over Carmine. Without thinking, Carmine had grabbed his friend’s hand, and told him in Italian that he would be all right. When Angelo squeezed his hand, Carmine thought maybe he still had a chance, so he kept talking to him, promising him things. Even when he saw that the thing that he thought was an egg in his lap was actually one of Angelo’s eyes; even when he lifted his free hand and wiped brain and blood off his face; even when he realized that what he was looking at was a fragment of Angelo’s head—no face, some hair curling around an ear—even then Carmine whispered about Carla waiting at home for him, about the French whores in the next town, about how right then the grapes hung heavy on their vines, ready to be picked.

  This was what happened if he came too soon. If he was lucky, if he had done everything right: the counting first, 1, 2, 3, seeing the numbers clearly, then 3, 2, 1; the lemon; the cutting into its flesh; the biting; the salivation; allowing his hands to be set free; grasping his hot cock; then waiting, not coming yet, not moving, nothing but being still; only then did he get to Eva Peretsky.

  NO ONE COULD UNDERSTAND why a man like Carmine Rimaldi, a man who had everything, would leave home for Coney Island. Here, in this small village of Italian immigrants in t
he middle of Rhode Island, no one saw what Carmine saw—that beyond this place lay opportunity. To Carmine, that opportunity was waiting for him in Coney Island. A person, any person, could go to Coney Island and make more money than this entire village could imagine. A person could find shops to open, products to sell, men looking for partners, investments to be made. Coney Island was ocean and beach and glittering lights, and all of it was calling to Carmine Rimaldi.

  This was in the summer of 1918. He was about to turn eighteen years old and had just gotten engaged to Anna Zito, arguably the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood. Anna was fifteen, so small that Carmine could lift her one-handed like a barbell, and easily move her up and down, up and down, in the air, Anna screaming the whole time for him to stop. But he knew this thrilled her, just as he knew that when he and Angelo went swimming, the cousins Carla and Anna sitting on a blanket on the stones by the quarry, peeling apples and pears or making sandwiches of mozzarella and tomatoes, she liked how he came out of the water, sleek and wet and cold, and wrapped his arms around her, making her shiver and scream. He had seen her tracing the damp outlines his hands made on her waist and smiling.

  Anna Zito, Carmine learned, was a girl who said no when she meant yes; who said stop when she meant go. Maybe all girls were like this. Carmine wasn’t sure. He asked Angelo if Carla meant yes when she told him no, but Angelo laughed. “Carla says yes and she means it,” he said. “I ask her if I can touch her breasts and she says yes and then she takes my hands and places them, one hand on each breast, and tells me to pinch.” Carla’s breasts were famously large. Even in a bra with bones and stays, her breasts swayed and rose magnificently.

  More than once, Anna had caught Carmine sneaking glances at Carla’s breasts, and swatted him and pouted. But they were breasts that demanded attention. The nipples, Angelo had confided to Carmine, were pink. They had both assumed, for reasons neither could explain, that nipples were brown. “And,” Angelo had continued, “a big pink circle surrounds the nipples that pucker when you touch them.” Whenever Carmine looked at Carla after that, he tried to imagine it: those breasts like dough that has just risen, still warm from lying under the cloth; the big pale pink circles; then the hard nipples, also pink, jutting from them. Then Carmine would put his arm around Anna, and she would slap his knee and say, “No!” which meant he should hold her closer still.

  EVERYTHING WAS IN CONEY ISLAND. This was what Carmine told everyone who tried to talk him out of going. In Coney Island, you’d find a wooden ride that plunged thirty feet down a wooden track. You’d find freaks, women with beards and men with feet where their hands should be and giants and midgets and even a person who was both a man and a woman. You’d find fine white sand and the blue Atlantic Ocean and women in woolen swimsuits running along the shore, showing their legs and arms to anyone. On the other side of that ocean, Carmine knew, lay Europe, and a war that would soon beckon American men. It would call him, too, if America didn’t get in there and win it, fast. Coney Island could be his only chance for something more, something big.

  “Why would I go all the way to Coney Island when any day now, right here, Carla is going to let me put my thing inside her?” Angelo said.

  “In Coney Island,” Carmine said, “girls will do that without any promises. They like to do it.”

  “Those girls,” Angelo said, “are called whores.”

  Carmine shook his head. “They’re not Catholic,” he explained. “That’s all. Girls who aren’t Catholic like it. They want to do it all the time.” He had no evidence of this, but Carmine believed that Anna’s nos and stops came from her fervent belief in Jesus Christ.

  “Puttanas.” Angelo laughed. “You’ll see.”

  ALL DAY, CARMINE worked on machines that tore fingers from hands or broke arms or sent fumes into the air that made you cough and turned your eyes red. The noise in the mills was loud enough to get inside your head and stay there even after you had gone home. The mill was dark inside, and damp, and by the end of a shift you felt like your back could break and you might lose your mind if you didn’t see sunlight.

  Carmine had worked in the mills since he was seven years old. The pinky finger on his left hand was flat above the first knuckle from an accident when he was nine. His ears rang on and off all day, even when he was asleep or out of the mill. From where he stood that summer, seventeen years old, a war about to claim him and all the other boys he knew, his only hope was Coney Island.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE he left, Carmine took Anna for a walk beside the river. It was eight o’clock, but still light, and the river flowed by them fast and murky from a spring heavy with rain. She let him hold her hand as they walked, and he liked the feel of her small smooth one in his big calloused one. They didn’t speak, but Carmine kept sneaking looks at her. She was beautiful; that was for certain. Her hair wasn’t curly or straight but fell in thick, luxurious ripples all the way past her shoulders and down her back. Most girls tied their hair into braids or buns, but Anna showed hers off, letting it hang loose like that. Her eyes were so dark that when he stared into them, Carmine couldn’t distinguish the pupils from the irises. But everything about her was small. Her tiny waist, her almost boyish breasts, her hands. As he held her hand now, Carmine slowly massaged it, as if he could count each thin bone.

  “How do I know that you won’t meet a girl in Coney Island and fall in love with her and marry her and never come home?” Anna said finally.

  “Because I love you!” Carmine said, surprising both of them. Once he said it, he knew it was true. What else could it be when he thought about her constantly? Dreamed about her? Tried to see her every day, at least once?

  “If you love me—”

  “I do!” Carmine said, feeling giddy with it. “I do love you.”

  They had stopped walking and Anna was peering up the length of him, frowning. Shouldn’t she be smiling? He loved her. But no, Carmine realized. This was that thing again. Frowning when really she was happy. He bent and lifted her up so that her mouth reached his, and then he kissed her harder than he had ever kissed her before. He kissed her with his mouth open and his tongue finding hers with such delight that he groaned.

  Anna pulled away. “Stop!” she said, but Carmine knew that meant go, so he kissed her again, harder still. He knew that the way he held her to him, she could feel his cock straining, and boldly he pressed it against her.

  Anna gasped, a small sound of surprise.

  For some reason, when she did that, Carmine slowly lowered her to the ground. The river whooshed by them and his ears began to ring with the mechanical sounds of the mill.

  “Why would you leave me if you love me?” she said. She had her arms folded across her chest, as if it were cold. But it was a beautiful June night. The moon was yellow and full above them, bright even in the still-light sky.

  “In Coney Island,” Carmine said, breathless with possibility, “I’ll make a fortune and come back and marry you.” He could suddenly imagine this: marrying Anna. Kissing her until he grew too old to do it any longer.

  “You want to marry me?” she said, hugging herself.

  “Yes.”

  “Are we engaged then?” she asked him. She was fifteen years old and, standing there like that in the dying light, she looked like an absolute child.

  “Yes,” Carmine said again, marveling at how simple this all was.

  “An engagement is a promise,” she said.

  Carmine considered her words. “Of course.”

  “So you are promising to come back and marry me?”

  He laughed. All he wanted was to kiss her some more. The sky behind her was darkening. Carmine liked dusk, the inky swirls of blue and black that seemed to gobble the sky.

  “This is my favorite time of day,” he said softly. Usually he was still in the mill at dusk and missed it. Instead, he walked out the big double doors into night.

  They had walked far enough that the mill was not in sight. The river made a gentle bend, and they had walked
along that elbow of soft grass to this spot. Everything was in bloom. White blossoms covered trees. Buttercups and black-eyed Susans dotted the grass. The air smelled of the river and fresh grass and flowers.

  “What’s your favorite time of day?” Carmine whispered. He realized he knew nothing about this girl.

  “When the sun comes up,” she said. “I like lying in bed and having the sun come through the window and warm my skin.”

  Carmine nodded. He could see her in a bed, with white sheets and a white coverlet, her dark hair spilling everywhere, and warm sunlight touching her.

  “I want to make sure you come back,” Anna said.

  “But I promised,” he told her, impatient.

  Anna slowly sat on the grass and patted beside her. It was damp from being so close to the river, but he sat anyway.

  “If I give myself to you and you don’t come back, no one else will have me,” she said. “I’ll be a puttana.”

  He tried to think of what to say, but Anna was slowly unbuttoning her dress. It was a navy-blue cotton dress with two big pockets, long and shapeless, not a very pretty dress. She wore it often. Carmine watched as she stood and stepped from it. Beneath it she wore white bloomers and a cotton shirt like children wore and long white stockings that came just above her knee. She took those off first, then the bloomers. While she rolled the stockings together and folded the bloomers, Carmine tried not to stare at the thick patch of hair she had. Somewhere in there was what Angelo called the Garden of Eden. Angelo had not yet been there, but he told Carmine that Carla let him reach under her skirt, into her bloomers, and stick his fingers inside. Carmine wondered if this was what he should do now, pull her down beside him and stick his fingers beneath all that hair.

  But now she was lifting off the shirt, pulling it over her head, and folding it neatly too. She had no breasts really. Her chest was almost completely flat, with just two bumps, and hard brown nipples poking out at him. He felt like he was dreaming. The moonlight, this offering, his ringing ears, made Carmine dizzy.