The Shoemaker's Wife(78)

Ciro thought of the girls he had known. It didn’t feel as though he had had an abundance of experiences. In fact, he worried that he had been too guarded with his feelings. He wondered if he would ever know what it was to be truly devoted to one woman. “What did you think of Enza?”

“The girl from the roof? She was nice.”

“Beautiful?”

“I’m not allowed to look,” Luigi said. “But when I did, I thought she was.”

“We’re here to pick up our boots.” A sturdily built Irishman leaned on the counter. “John Cassidy.”

“And I’m Kirk Johannsen.” A muscular blond, around Ciro’s age, joined him. “I got the retreads.”

Ciro looked through the finished bundles, finding the boots.

Cassidy examined his boots, impressed. “They look new.”

“Mine too,” Kirk said. “Not that I’ll be needing them.”

The men reached into their pockets to pay.

“Are you quitting the bridge?” Ciro asked.

“I joined the army,” Kirk said. “Gonna do my bit.”

Ciro and Luigi looked at one another. They would join if they could, but they weren’t American citizens. “Put your money away. This one is on us,” Ciro said.

“Thanks,” Kirk said. “You guys with accents can get in, too. If you sign up and serve, you get your citizenship when you return. Automatic. The army needs ten thousand recruits a week. Right now, they’re getting most of them from Puerto Rico.”

“We know we can lick the Germans in France,” John Cassidy added. “If I were young, you’d find me in the trenches of Cambrai. I’d be itching to go.”

John Cassidy looked at Ciro and then Luigi. It was as if his observation was a challenge to the young men to step up and engage in defense of the country that was doing so well by them. It was a look Ciro had seen before, established American to tender immigrant, like the passing glance from a government worker processing the permit for the cart, or the expression of the woman who sold him a standing-room ticket to the opera. There was a fleeting cold front, the slight judgment that said immigrants were a necessary fact of life, one that must be tolerated but never truly accepted. The only way to ever become a permanent part of America’s greatness would be to defend it.

Cassidy and Johannsen took their boots and climbed the hill to the bridge, joining the workers who poured on to the plaza from the train platform below.

“Did you mean it?” Luigi asked.

“I’ve been lucky here,” Ciro said.

“So have I.”

“Do you believe in signs?” Ciro asked him.

“That depends. Does it require my own bloodshed?”

“Maybe.” Ciro looked at Luigi. “We’re pretty strong, we’re tough.” He shrugged. “We could take the Germans.”

The night sky over Astoria was speckled with a few small yellow stars that looked like chips of citrine. Luigi was fast asleep in his sleep roll, next to the cart. Ciro finished the last of the sweet sausage calzone packed in the food tin by Signora Zanetti. The boys planned to stay two weeks in Queens before Remo returned to take them back to Mulberry Street, hauling the cart behind them like plows on a tractor.

Ciro and Luigi closed down the cart after nightfall, when the final shift of the last crew from the bridge had departed for home. Ciro hooked the flaps shut and locked the entrance door; Luigi went to sleep as soon as he finished his supper.

Ciro leaned against the cart and wrote a letter. Writing did not come easily to him, perhaps because he did so little of it. Because Eduardo had been such a good student and a beautiful writer, both in penmanship and content, he’d handled any correspondence the boys had to do. Ciro had difficulty finding the right words.

Ciro was writing to Enza Ravanelli on Adams Street to explain that he wouldn’t be able to see her as soon as he had hoped. There was his obligation to the Zanettis, of course, his tireless work with the cart to earn his freedom from apprenticeship. But there were other concerns, as well, before Ciro could offer Enza what she needed. He still saw Felicitá, and they both had found it difficult to end what they had started.

There was also the war, the urge to finish what the English and French had begun and take back Europe for the good people, including his own on the mountaintops of northern Italy. Thoughts of becoming a soldier were never far from a young man’s mind. Luigi and Ciro wanted to “do their bit,” but they also wanted to stand up for something and flex their might.

Ciro didn’t know how to begin to tell Enza he was about to join the army. She had made her feelings regarding Ciro absolutely clear. When he went to her, it must be to surrender his heart, to pledge himself to her in total. By writing this letter, he had hoped to simply buy time. He was sure that with a few months at his disposal, the mist would lift, the road would become clear, and he would be able to offer to walk it with Enza.

The early December snow over Hoboken was not of the storybook kind, but rather big wet flakes that melted and caused leaks in roofs, improperly patched and hardly built to withstand the harsh winters. Enza placed buckets under the leaks on the top-floor storage room of the Meta Walker factory. She looked up, finding more rusty circles overhead. There aren’t enough buckets in Hoboken, she told herself as she took the metal stairs down to the main floor of the factory. If the water leak hit the electrical system where the girls worked, someone could be badly hurt.