The Shoemaker's Wife(168)

“The truth is, I’ve loved Antonio since I was a little girl. I prayed that someday he would come back to me, and I would be old enough, and he wouldn’t have fallen in love with someone else. I prayed he would wait for me. I know it sounds crazy—”

“No, it doesn’t. Not at all. Sometimes a childhood dream is the best dream of all.”

Enza embraced her son and her new daughter-in-law. She thought about Ciro and how she’d loved him from the first moment she saw him, and how tradition, properly cared for, nurtured, honored, and respected, continues to feed the soul of a family. Antonio saw love so he could eventually choose it. So had Angela, and she, too, recognized it and waited for it to find her just as it had found Luigi and Pappina.

Enza wrote to Luigi Latini with the news. He had remarried in his village and was, by all accounts, happy. This letter would delight Luigi; he learned that Antonio and Angela would take their honeymoon in Italy and visit him and his sons and their families. Luigi would remember to tell Antonio all the stories about how Ciro became his partner, but in fact, Ciro had been the leader, and Luigi would have followed him wherever he wanted to go.

Enza smiled when she thought of her son joining the Latini family, with its growing numbers, and climbing the Passo Presolana to see Vilminore and Schilpario, where Enza and Ciro’s story had begun. Enza would write to Eduardo and Caterina, who would know Antonio upon first sight, as Ciro always called his boy a Montini.

“You wanted to see me, Zenza?” Angela stood in the doorway of Enza’s bedroom in her robe. Enza looked up at her and for a moment saw Pappina’s face, as she was the first time she’d met her on Mulberry Street. Enza remembered Angela as a little girl, and could hardly believe she was a woman now, and her son’s wife.

“Yes, yes, honey, come and sit with me.”

Angela sat on the edge of the bed.

“I couldn’t be happier for you.”

“I know.” Angela put her arms around Enza. “That means everything to me.”

“I want to give you something.” Enza gave Angela a small velvet box.

Angela opened the box and lifted out a delicate blue cameo, suspended on a string of pearls. “It’s exquisite.”

“It belonged to my husband’s mother. She was once a privileged girl from a good family, and when she was widowed young, they lost everything. But through all her troubles, she managed to hang on to this necklace. This is the family you have married, Angela. They are strong, and resilient, and they hold on. Wear it and think of them.” Enza fastened the necklace on to Angela’s neck.

“And I’ll wear it and think of you,” Angela said.

“What are you girls talking about?” Antonio appeared in the doorway. Enza patted the bed next to her. Her son sat down beside her and watched his new bride look at her reflection in the mirror.

“Zenza, I mean, Mama . . . gave me this cameo. It belonged to your grandmother.”

“I don’t know if it’s beautiful on its own or lovely because you’re wearing it,” Antonio said.

Angela kissed her mother-in-law on the cheek. “I’ll take good care of it,” she promised. She touched Antonio’s face before leaving the room.

“You’ll never know what it means to me to see you so happy,” Enza said.

“I want you to be happy, Mama.”

“I’ve had so much.” Enza smiled.

“I promised Papa that I would take you home to the mountain someday. Angela and I are planning a trip to Italy. She wants to see her family and then we planned a trip north to meet my grandfather and aunts and uncles. Papa’s mother. Papa’s brother. I have so many cousins.”

“You go for me.”

“Mama, they have medication now. During the war so many men got seasick, and they took a pill. You’d be fine.”

Enza imagined the thrill of seeing her father and brothers and sisters again, but it wasn’t the Passo Presolana, or the lake at Endine or the stone bridge over the Stream Vò where the waterfall meets the rocks that she missed. It was the air on the mountain. The crisp, fresh Alpine air, that brought the scent of spring with fragrant freesia, or the scent of autumn with the pungent juniper nettles, or the scent of snow before the storm began in winter. That was what she missed, the air that filled her with possibility and yearning, the air that she breathed with Ciro the first night they kissed. That blue air. The night air as rich as a treasure chest of lapis, shimmering, inviting and made smooth over time.

To breathe the mountain air would make the final days of her own life sweet in memory. It would be a priceless gift to look back on the trip with her son and daughter-in-law someday, when she too would breathe her final moments on this earth.

“Please, Mama? Will you come with us?”

Enza put her arms around her son. “I’d do anything for you. Yes, I’ll go with you.”

Antonio kissed his mother good night and went to bed.

Enza sat in the chair in her room and tried to read, but her thoughts interrupted the words on the page, and she imagined the past, and tried to make some sense of all the moments of her life that had built the days that became the years she shared with Ciro. She remembered that she had always felt an underlying urgency when she was with him, she never thought there was enough time. She had felt it that night on the pass when she drove him back to the convent. The trip went too fast, and there was so much more to say. In the years that followed, when they were apart, she’d see something that reminded her of Ciro, and she’d make a note to tell him about it someday, even when he’d fallen in love with another girl and she thought she’d never see him again. And once she married Ciro, and Antonio was born, the years sped by even faster, like the overtime clock in any of Antonio’s basketball games. When Ciro died, he was so young, but then again, so was she. And in the years since, she had not met a single man who could turn her head. The memory of Ciro had not faded. While she would like to think that she could return to the mountain, in her heart, she wondered if she could climb the pass without the man who had been and would remain her true love.