The Shoemaker's Wife (44 page)

“Ciro, what are you doing here?”

“I made it.” He managed a smile, knowing he was not too late. The girls at the Milbank had filled him in. “I went to the Milbank House. They said you’d be here. You’re always in church. Is it a Holy Day of Obligation?” He asked knowing for sure her purpose in attending church that morning.

She shook her head that it wasn’t.

He saw the worry in her eyes. “You’re so beautiful.” Ciro leaned forward to embrace her, and she stepped back.

“I’m getting married,” she said.

“I know.”

“I should go inside,” Enza said. “The priest is waiting.”

“Padre can wait. He has nowhere else to go. It’s a Monday. Who gets married on a Monday?”

“There’s no opera tonight,” she explained. “We . . .” Enza stopped herself.
We
suddenly sounded selfish, as if to exclude Ciro.

They stood and looked at one another. Laura pushed the church door open, but they didn’t hear it. Enza didn’t hear Laura when she whispered her name. Ciro took his hand out of his pocket and motioned for her to close the church door. Laura slipped back inside and quietly pulled the door behind her.

“You can’t do this,” Ciro said.

“I most certainly can. I’m getting married.”

“He’s not the right man for you, Enza. You know it.”

“I made a decision, and I’m going through with it,” she said firmly.

“You make it sound like you’re taking a punishment.”

“I don’t mean it to sound that way. It’s a sacrament. It requires thought and reverence.” Enza wanted to walk away, but she couldn’t. “I have to go.” She checked her wrist. She had forgotten to wear her watch. Ciro reached into his pocket and opened his watch. He showed her the time. “There’s no rush,” he said calmly.

“I don’t want to be late.”

“You won’t be,” he promised. “Let him go.”

“I can’t,” Enza replied, but she couldn’t look at Ciro when she said it.

“I said,
let him go
.”

“I made a promise.”

“Break it.”

“What am I to you, if I break my word to him?”

“You would be mine.”

“But I’m his.” Enza looked to the door. Where was Laura? Why didn’t she come outside and take her into the church, where she belonged? “I belong to him.”

“Don’t say it again. It’s not true.”

“This ring says I’m his.” She showed him her hand, the ruby and diamond ring sparkled in the sunlight.

“Take it off. You don’t have to marry me, but you can’t marry him.”

“Why not?” Her voice cracked beneath the strain of emotion.

“Because I love you. And I
know
you. The man in that church knows the American Enza, not the Italian girl who could hitch a horse and drive a carriage. Does he know the girl who sat by her sister’s grave and covered it with juniper branches? I know that girl. And she’s mine.”

Enza thought of Vito, and wondered why she’d never told him about her sister Stella. Vito only knew the seamstress to Caruso; he didn’t know the Hoboken machine operator or the eldest in a poor family who made it through the winter eating chestnuts, praying they would last until the spring came. She hadn’t told Vito any of her secrets, and because she hadn’t, Vito was not really a part of her story. Perhaps she had never wanted Vito to know that girl.

“You can’t come back here and say these things to me.” Enza’s eyes filled with tears. “I have a life. A good life. I’m happy. I love what I do. My friends. My world.”

“What world do you want, Enza?” Ciro said softly.

Enza could not fight the past. Life is a series of choices, made with the best of intentions, often with hope. But she knew in this moment that
life
, the life she’d always dreamed of, was about the family, not just two people in love. It was a fresco, not a painting, filled with details that required years of collaboration to create.

A life with Ciro would be about family; a life with Vito would be about her. She would have the apartment with the view of the river, a motorcar to take her places, beautiful gowns to wear, and aisle seats to every show. There would be such ease to life with Vito! But was she a woman meant for that life? Or was she meant to be with a man who understood her, down to her bones?

For a fleeting instant, her heart filled with affection for the girl she had once been. The girl who’d left her village, and worked hard, and week after week faithfully sent the largest portion of her pay to her mother, enough money, over time, to build the family home, a gift in honor of the gift of her very own life. And she would do it all over again. Didn’t she deserve a prize for it? Wasn’t the prize a New York City life with all its sophistication and shine, on the arm of a man who loved her?

Why couldn’t she marry Vito Blazek?
He was a good man.

Enza realized that she was meant to be married; it wasn’t her fate to be alone, she wasn’t like Gloria Berardino or Mia Grace Lisi or Alexis Rae Bernard or any of the girls who worked in the costume shop at the Met. She was not to grow old over a sewing machine, making costumes for fantasy characters, building capes, fastening collars, and gluing wings, nor was she meant to live with her mother until the day she died, in service to the family, devoted to the whole instead of her own piece of it.

Enza would not be the meticulous aunt, steam-pressing dollar bills with starch to place inside greeting cards for baptisms, missalettes for first communions and confirmations. She would never sign a card, “With love, Zia Enza.” She was not destined to wear the small, simple hat or the gold knot pin, the marker of the single woman, the spinster, the unadorned and the unloved, good enough for the gold but not the diamond chip.

Enza lived to love.

But she hadn’t known it until she saw Ciro Lazzari again.

Enza was meant to carve out her own way, and be with a man who loved her. She thought it was Vito, with his kind heart and good taste. Vito would give her a proper address, friends of his social standing, and a view from the heights. Until this moment, she’d thought every need she had was met, and all roads to possible happiness had been mapped out; all she had to do was put on her best shoes and follow him.

Vito would not count on her to have children, or fill his world with anything but the joy that comes from two careers, quiet breakfasts in the morning, dinner on the town at night, and glorious Mondays, when the doors of the Metropolitan Opera House would be closed, the stage would be dark, and they could walk in the park and have a late dinner in one of those glazed brick rooms lit by candlelight, its shadows punctured by the scarlet tips of cigarettes.

That was meant to be her life, the sole focus of a man who adored her, in a city that celebrated the best life had to offer. Why would she leave the stability of the world Vito had created for her, to go back in time to the man who’d claimed her heart before he even knew her? What did Ciro Lazzari know about the woman she was now? It seemed reckless to believe Ciro all over again, foolish to consider his pleas, and ill-advised to do as he wished.

But Enza thought that was the nature of love, to catch you unaware and play the notes of your past in a haunting melody over and over again, until you believe it is your aria, your future, too.

But how could she break Vito Blazek’s heart?

And yet she knew that the only thing that had got her this far was listening carefully to her own heart and keeping her own counsel in every situation. When Enza dug deep within herself, she always found the truth. So, as if it were a rope slipped off its mooring, dropping without a sound into the water, setting the boat free, Enza quietly took off Vito Blazek’s engagement ring. She held it between her fingers and looked down at the blood red ruby as it gleamed in the morning light.

The truth was, Enza had never stopped loving Ciro Lazzari from the first moment she saw him, surrounded by four walls of earth in the cemetery at Sant’Antonio. She’d let him go and mourned him when he loved other girls, thinking he wanted something altogether different, and who was she to present herself as an alternative? Enza had grieved for what might have been, and turned away from the pain of it by inventing a new self.

New York City, the enchantments of the opera, the friendships she made, the homes she was welcomed into—why would she ever leave the satisfying and wide-open world Vito had shown her to fall into the arms of Ciro Lazzari? This poor, penniless, motherless soldier, with nothing to recommend him but his words—why would she ever gamble her future on Ciro Lazzari? What thinking woman would?

Enza looked down at the ring in her hand.

Ciro took Enza’s face in his hands. “I have loved you all of my life. I was a boy who knew nothing, but when I met you, somehow I understood everything. I remember your shoes, your hair, the way you crossed your arms over your chest and stood with one foot pointed right and the other left like a dancer. I remember your face over the pit of your sister’s grave. I remember that your skin had the scent of lemon water and roses and that you gave me a peppermint from a dish on the table in your mother’s house after your sister’s funeral. I remember that you laughed at a silly joke I made about kissing you without asking. I remember when you received communion at Stella’s funeral mass and how you cried because you missed her already.

“I took in every detail of you, Enza. I know I disappointed you when I didn’t come for you, but it wasn’t because I didn’t love you, it’s because I didn’t know it yet. I never once forgot you. Not for a single day. Wherever I went, I hoped to find you. I’ve looked for you in every village, train station, and church. I once followed a girl in Ypres because she wore her braids like you. When I sleep, I imagine you there, beside me. And if I was ever with another, the purpose wasn’t to love her, but to remember you.

“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.