The Shoemaker's Wife (55 page)

“Go help your wife with the purse,” Orlich said, studying his cards. His fingernails were rimmed in black from the last shift at Burt-Sellers. Coal dust had settled in the fine lines of his face. With his sharp features and small mouth, he looked like a pen-and-ink drawing.

“I am not going near her,” Emilio said.

Ciro had closed the door to the hallway, but through the transom, the men could hear the laughter and chatter of mothers and daughters, at least fifty of them, lined up on the stairs to go up to the apartment to pick up their patent leather dance shoes. Ida worked as Enza’s secretary, while Enza took the measurements.

Enza had far exceeded her goal of selling twenty-five pairs of shoes; she had sold 76 pairs since the announcement was placed in the Eastern Orthodox church bulletin.

A stout woman in a straw hat entered the shop with her daughter. Ciro looked up from his cards.

“I’m looking for the shoemaker’s wife,” the lady said. “You don’t look like Mrs. Lazzari.”

Ciro pointed through the door and up the stairs in the direction of the noise. The lady left with her daughter, and when she was out of earshot, Ciro said, “And you, ma’am, do not look like a dancer.”

Chapter 25

A LUCKY CHARM
Un Ciondolo Portofortuna

C
iro followed his son up the hill on their way to see Doc Graham. Antonio skipped up the steep incline like a gazelle.

The sight of his son reminded Ciro of the days when he and Eduardo were boys, and Ciro had to run to keep up with his older brother. There were other reminders of the past in the present moment. Antonio had his uncle’s dark good looks, his height, and dexterity.

At eleven years old, Antonio had grown to five foot nine, and showed no signs of stopping. Ciro shook his head and smiled as he watched Antonio, who had proven to be a prodigy in every sport he attempted, whether it was basketball, baseball, speed skating, or alpine skiing. Ciro remembered his strength as a young man, but it paled in comparison to his son’s natural athletic ability.

“Come on, Papa, we’ll be late,” Antonio chided him from the top of the hill.

Ciro wondered why he was winded as he took the hill. He smoked infrequently now, only one cigarette when he played poker, but suddenly he felt the full brunt of his years. He was shocked that the physical changes he had always noticed in men twenty years his senior had come on so fast.

“Go ahead, son, I’ll be right there,” Ciro said.

Antonio pushed the door open to Doc Graham’s office and took a seat in the waiting area. The nurse called for him. “Can you tell my father—,” Antonio began.

“Of course, I’ll let him know you’re already in with Dr. Graham.”

Antonio followed the nurse into the examination room. Antonio jumped on the scale, the needle of which finally came to rest at 152 pounds. When the nurse told him how tall he was, Antonio clapped his hands together triumphantly. Ciro joined them in the examination room, removing his hat.

“The doctor will be with you in a moment,” the nurse said, taking Antonio’s file.

“Papa, I’m almost five foot ten!”

“You’re going to hit six feet soon,” Ciro told him. “You’ll be as tall as your Zio Eduardo. He’s six foot three. I’m the short one at six foot two.”

“I want to be taller than both of you.” Antonio smiled. His resemblance to Eduardo was striking. The thick black hair, wide brown eyes, and straight nose were just the window dressing in their similarities. There was also the serene countenance, the sense of fair play, and the good heart. Ciro recognized that Antonio might have the name Lazzari on his file, but he was all Montini.

Doc Graham pushed the door open. At middle age, Doc had white hair and jet black eyebrows, and thin lips that parted to reveal a warm smile.

“So you want to play junior varsity basketball, Antonio?” Doc wanted to know.

“They say I’m good enough, even though I’m young.”

“Coach Rukavina knows talent when he sees it,” Doc Graham said as he took Antonio’s blood pressure.

“
Dottore,
I worry he’s growing too fast.”

“No such thing if he wants to keep up with the Finns,” Doc said.

The Scandinavian boys were known as power towers. Tall, strong, quick, and bright, they were stunning athletes. The sons of the local Italian immigrants had to work hard to compete with them.

Doc Graham checked Antonio’s lymph glands in his neck, then peered down his throat, into his ears and eyes, and took his pulse. “I pronounce you perfectly healthy.”

“I can play?”

“You can play.”

Antonio thanked the doctor and pulled on his shirt. “I’ll see you at home, Papa. I have practice.” Antonio bounded out the door quickly. Ciro stood, placing his hands on his lower back.

“How’s your back?” Doc Graham asked.

“Not any better than the last time,” Ciro said. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do. I take the aspirin, I lie on the floor with my legs in the air, and I soak in Epsom. I just don’t get any better, and sometimes it’s manageable, but the pain is always there.”

“Let me take a look.”

“
Grazie, Dottore
.” Ciro slipped back to his Italian, as he often did when a kindness was extended to him.

Doc Graham had Ciro remove his shirt. He pushed pressure points on Ciro’s back. One, right above the kidneys, caused Ciro to cry out.

“How old are you, Ciro?”

“Thirty-five.”

“Were you in the war?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Mostly in Cambrai.”

“Were you hit with mustard gas?”

“It was not significant.” Ciro straightened his back as best he could and pushed his shoulders back. He had long avoided discussing the war, and the last place he wanted to do it was in a doctor’s office. “I saw the men badly burned from it. My platoon was not. We died in more traditional ways. Stray bullets and barbed wire.”

Dr. Graham studied the skin on Ciro’s back, and followed it with a small blue light. He stopped and asked Ciro to breathe. “Ciro, I want to send you down to Saint Mary’s Hospital in Rochester. It’s part of the Mayo Clinic. They’re experts when it comes to health problems with veterans. I’ll call them, and call my friend in the clinic. He’ll see you right away.”

Doc Graham ripped the sheet from his pad and handed it to Ciro:

Dr. Renfro, oncologist

Saint Mary’s Hospital, the Mayo Clinic

Enza couldn’t sleep the night before Ciro went for his tests in Rochester. She was nervous for so many reasons. Ciro had never complained of pain in his body, just the occasional ache that comes with hard, repetitive work. But lately he had been hurting. There was a night a month ago when she had to help him out of the bathtub. There was another time when he woke up in the middle of the night with shooting pains radiating down his leg. She didn’t know if this was typical of growing older, though he was not yet forty, but all of it was of deep concern to her. She didn’t know where to put her feelings and she didn’t want to alarm her husband, so she wrote a letter to the doctor at the Mayo Clinic.

September 6, 1930

Dear Dr. Renfro,

Thank you for seeing my husband Ciro Lazzari. He will not give you much information, so my hope is that my letter might answer any questions you have. We have a young son and a shop to keep open, or I would have made the trip with my husband.

He has been suffering from back pain since we were married in 1918. Over the past year or so, the pain has escalated. The old remedies of camphor packs and Epsom salt soaks no longer bring him much relief. He is a shoemaker, so he often works on his feet ten hours a day, and that may contribute to the problem.

My husband is very intelligent. He will not, however, ask you important questions, nor will he inquire in any detail about how to follow whatever treatment you might prescribe. So please, if you don’t mind, send him home with an explicit list of things, and I will make sure they are done properly.

Sincerely yours,

Mrs. Lazzari

Rochester, Minnesota, was built on a raging river whose behavior was so precarious it took Franciscan nuns to defy the natural habitat and have the guts to build a hospital.

Saint Mary’s Hospital, operated by the Mayo Clinic, had grown from a small operation into the best medical center in the Midwest by the time Ciro Lazzari entered its pristine lobby. The stately red-brick campus, with new additions hiding beneath wings of scaffolding, was filled with state-of-the-art labs and examination rooms and the most sought-after doctors in the country. It resembled a bustling honeycomb.

The nuns, their black-and-white habits so similar to those of the sisters of San Nicola, gave Ciro a feeling of familiarity that completely relaxed him and gave him confidence. He joked with the sisters as they put him through the arduous tests.

Ciro was handed a file, and throughout the day he was moved from one small examination room to another. X-rays were taken, dye was drunk, he was poked and prodded and placed on a gurney, blood was drawn, bones were scanned; there was not a cell in his body that the doctors did not examine or discuss, or at least it seemed that way to Ciro.

At the end of the day, he was brought into an office to meet with Dr. Renfro. When a young man of thirty came into the room, Ciro was surprised. He had been expecting an older man, like Doc Graham.

“You’re a young man,” Ciro said.

“Not in this job. You feel every day of your age.”

“Why did Doc Graham send me here?”

“He saw a place on your back that concerned him. You’d never notice it yourself, but under your shoulder blades the texture of the skin is different from that of the surrounding area. Only a doctor who was looking for it would have seen it.”

“See what exactly,
Dottore
?”

The doctor laid out the reports on the desk, flicked a light board, and put up X-rays of Ciro’s spine. Ciro looked with wonder at the shadowy gray picture of the inside of his body, without any inkling of what the doctor was seeing.

“That is me?” Ciro asked.

“It’s your spinal column.” The gray shadows of Ciro’s spine looked like a string of black pearls on the X-ray. The doctor pointed to the darker areas. “Here’s your trouble.” He circled a black area with the eraser of a pencil. “This black pool is a tumor. It’s small, but it’s cancerous.”

Dr. Renfro pulled the shadowy images from the board and put up more. Ciro’s lungs resembled the black leather bellows he used to use to make fire in the convent kitchen.

“Mr. Lazzari, as a veteran of the Great War, you were exposed to mustard gas.”

“But I didn’t burn like the other soldiers.” Ciro’s voice caught.

“No, but this particular kind of cancer is insidious. The mustard gas you inhaled has a long incubation period, usually ten to twelve years. The poison causes a slow cellular burn that alters the very nature of how the human body fends off disease. I can show you . . .”

“No—no, thank you,
Dottore
. I have seen enough.” Ciro stood.

“We do have a few promising treatments,” the young doctor said eagerly.

“How much time will your treatments give me?”

“It would be hard to say,” Dr. Renfro said.

“Ten years?”

“No, no, not ten years.”

“Ah, so I have very little time.”

“I didn’t say that. But the prognosis isn’t good, Mr. Lazzari. I think you should try our course of treatment.”

“Given all you know, from everything you took from my body today, do I have months?”

“A year,” Dr. Renfro said quietly.

Ciro stood, pulled on his coat and then his hat. He extended his hand to Dr. Renfro, who took it. “Thank you,
Dottore
.”

“I’ll send your reports to Dr. Graham.”

On the train north to Duluth, Ciro settled back in his seat. He watched the flats of southern Minnesota turn inky blue in the twilight. Somehow—Ciro thought this silly—as long as it was daylight, he could handle the bad news; somehow, the idea of knowing the truth in the dark made him panic. The train could not go fast enough. He wanted to get home, where life had order and made sense. He didn’t know how to tell Enza, and certainly had no idea what to say to Antonio. It was as if an old enemy had shown up to ambush him. He thought he had buried all traces of the Great War and the horrors he had witnessed. He sensed that Dr. Renfro could have talked for hours on the subject, but Ciro wasn’t interested in the countless variations of being poisoned by mustard gas that the good doctor wanted to share. As in war itself, the outcome was the only thing that counted. It turned out Ciro had not survived the war, he had just been given a brief reprieve.

His soul had fended off the spiritual damage of war; the beauty of his life with Enza had erased the terrible images of loss. But his body had sustained the harm that Ciro believed he had spared his psyche. Ciro sighed. There was no winning. The pain of losing Enza and Antonio overwhelmed him.

As he took the stairs up to his home at 5 West Lake Street, Ciro loosened his tie and inhaled the scent of sage and butter. He saw a pool of light pouring from the kitchen, and heard his wife humming inside. He stopped on the landing and leaned against the wall, knowing that he was about to bring incalculable sadness to his wife and son.
Let them be happy a few moments longer
, he thought. He leaned against the wall, summoning his strength, before he went in to face them.

Ciro dropped his duffel at the top of the stairs.

“Ciro!” Enza called out. She came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a moppeen. She was wearing a new dress she had made, a simple navy-and-white polka-dot shirtwaist. She had done her hair, and her cheeks were pink with a sheen of rouge. She was more beautiful in this moment than she had been the moment that Ciro married her.

“What did the doctor say?” She smiled hopefully.