The Shoemaker's Wife(116)

“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 giving 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.

He wondered what she would say about giving up her position at the Metropolitan Opera, and he had doubts about asking her to do so. But he also knew that if he could make a success of himself in a place that needed his services, they would have the freedom to decide where they would live in the years to come. He would be able to return to Italy and offer her life on the mountain once his pockets were full of American dollars. It was time for Ciro to become a padrone; nothing less would do, and there was not enough he could do for Enza.

Thoughts of the Iron Range played through his mind. Minnesota was like the title of an unread book he knew he would eventually pick up and devour by lamplight. Here in America, his father had died. The fortunes of his family had been changed by events in that distant state. Perhaps it was time he finally cleaned the wound of his father’s death. Perhaps he would find peace if he walked in his father’s steps along the shorelines of Minnesota’s crystal lakes. Maybe that’s where he belonged, where they could be happy.

As Ciro put out the cigarette, he thought of Eduardo. His brother would see to it that their mother was taken care of. What Ciro needed to do was simple: make a good living to take care of his wife and their future children. For him, that meant embracing a new chapter, while filling the void the absence of his father had made. It meant Minnesota.

Laura, dressed and ready for work, joined Enza at the breakfast table in the dining room of the Milbank House. Enza had woken early, bathed, and dressed before Laura had risen. Enza was having her third cup of coffee when Laura joined her.