The Shoemaker's Wife(53)

“Is there anything a machine can’t do?” Signora Braido asked.

“Fall in love,” Enza replied.

“Or die,” Signora Braido mused.

“Oh, they can die all right,” Signora Sabatino said as she entered from the back of the shop. “I had a buttonholer give out last week. Enza and I have the bloody thumbs to prove it.”

Signora Sabatino held up the dress, a simple pale yellow sheath overlaid with organza embroidered in a pattern of small daisies around the hem.

“I did all the stitchwork by hand. No machines touched your gown,” Enza assured her.

“I like it,” Ida Braido said. “It’s fitting for a send-off.”

“I thought you were going to wear it to your son’s wedding.”

“I am. After the wedding he and his bride are leaving for Naples, where they are taking the SS Imelda to America. I am losing a son, gaining a daughter-in-law, and then losing them both.”

Signora Braido opened her change purse and handed the seamstress full and final payment for the daisy dress. She went out into the street, where her son awaited with a horse cart to take her home.

“All these pazzo people and their dreams of America,” Signora Sabatino said. “What do they think? If every Italian leaves to find a job in America, pretty soon there will be too many workers in America lining up for a few jobs. And then what? They’ve lost their home here, and any possibility of returning. Crazy dreams.”

Signora Sabatino lifted the bin of finished mending and went to the back room.

Enza pulled her small notebook and pencil from her apron and calculated her pay against what the girls made in America. She would have to work several years for Signora Sabatino to make what she could save in one year in America. Enza tucked the notebook with the figures back into her pocket.

Enza adjusted her work lamp over the needle of her sewing machine.

She flipped the bobbin switch and fed the fabric under the needle, guiding it with her hands. The silver needle pumped up and down along the chalk line of the placket. She released the bobbin switch, pulled the fabric away gently from the gears, and snipped the threads with her shears. She examined her work. She had created one flawless seam, quickly, with a sure hand, just like a master.

She had sat back in her work chair when she saw Eliana tap on the window. Enza went to the door.

“Andiamo!” Eliana said urgently.

“Is it Mama?” Enza’s heart sank in her chest.

“No, no. The stable.”

Enza called out to Signora Sabatini that she must go. She ran with Eliana from the shop to Marco’s stable.

Giacomina stood by the worktable, holding Alma, who cried into her apron.

“Mama? What is it?” Enza asked, fearing that something terrible had happened to her father. She turned and saw Marco kneeling in Cipi’s stall. Battista and Vittorio fought back tears as they stroked Cipi’s mane.

The grand old horse lay still on the clean straw as Marco covered him with a blanket. The day they dreaded had come. Cipi was old, and finally his heart had given out.

“He’s gone,” Papa said, tears in his eyes.

Enza went into the stall, Vittorio and Battista moving aside as she knelt next to Cipi, whom she had known all of her life. His shiny mane was still warm, and his brown eyes, even in death, had a sweet expression, one of surrender, where there once had been one of abiding patience. Enza remembered climbing up on his back when she was a girl, grooming him as soon as her hand had grown large enough to hold the brush, and, when she grew tall enough, feeding him slices of apples from her hands. She remembered loading the carriage lamp with oil in the winter, and making bouquets of fresh flowers to attach to the carriage in summer. Cipi had pulled the carriage that carried Stella’s coffin, and had taken every bride and groom from Sant’Antonio down the mountain to Bergamo after their weddings. She remembered braiding Cipi’s mane with ribbons on feast days—red on Christmas, white on Easter, and pale blue for Santa Lucia. She remembered leaving the house on the night of a snowstorm and going to the barn to throw an extra blanket over him. She remembered shaking the sleigh bells on the carriage at Christmastime as Cipi pulled the children through the streets while the snow fell. She had taken excellent care of this horse, and in return, he had served her family loyally and well.

The long shadows of her brothers, sisters, mother, and father looked like tombstones against the stable wall as they stood around Cipi. Enza rested her body against the horse she had loved all of her life, taking in the clean scent of his lustrous coat.

“Thank you, Cipi,” Enza whispered. “You were a good boy.”

Besides having been May Queen at Our Lady of Pompeii Church, Felicitá Cassio was also the privileged daughter of a grocer in Greenwich Village who had emigrated from Sicily with his bright, sturdy wife and built a small empire that began with a fruit stand on Mott Street and eventually spread to every corner below Fourteenth Street.

As her father loved peddling fresh fruit, strawberries and cherries, Felicitá loved boys. Ciro pursued Felicitá in the weeks after the festival, but he didn’t have to work too hard to win her; just as he had chosen her, Felicitá had chosen him.

She arranged to stop by and visit with her friend Elizabeth Juviler at the cheese store on Mulberry on a regular basis, with the goal of running into Ciro. When she discovered that Ciro made deliveries of boots and shoes he had repaired to the factory workers in the West Village, she made sure to take a walk across Charles Street when she knew she might run into him. Felicitá had a serious attraction to the mountain boy. She was taken with Ciro’s light hair and eyes, and he was enamored of her bella figura, the envy of every girl in Little Italy.