The Shoemaker's Wife(83)

“You don’t know her like I do. I had to throw her out. She had men in this house at all hours. A real puttana. A disgusting pig of a girl, really.”

Fury rose within Ciro to hear Enza described in that way, but he could see that the old woman was drunk, and no protest on his part would have even registered. Besides, he was too devastated to think of anything but the love he had lost because he hadn’t expressed it in time. He had missed his moment with Enza, and there was no retrieving it. She had made her demands clear, but he was too late.

Ciro turned to go down the steps.

“You want a drink?”

“Excuse me?”

“Come in for a drink.” She opened the door wide. “It’s Christmas.” Inside, the house was a disheveled mess. She ran her hand down her thigh and lifted the hem of her skirt to show her leg.

Ciro leaped down the stairs and onto the street. He didn’t look back at the strange woman in the yellow house; instead he looked around to see if there was anyone who might know what had happened to Enza Ravanelli. He approached a neighbor, who turned away, and another who did the same. He stood there for a long time, until the beggar children surrounded him.

“Dolci! Dolci!” they cried when they saw the blue box covered in foil. More children gathered around, until they had encircled Ciro. He opened the box of chocolates, and one by one he placed a chocolate candy, wrapped in paper, in each outstretched hand, until he had given away every single sweet.

A girl with wide-set brown eyes looked up at Ciro, holding her chocolate. “Are you Santa Claus?” she asked before running off with the candy.

Ciro buried his hands in his pockets and made his way back to the ferry. If Enza had fled Signora Buffa’s house, why hadn’t she come to Mulberry Street? Had she returned to the mountain without him?

Laura pushed through the glass doors of the Horn & Hardart’s Automat on Thirty-eighth and Broadway, scanning the bustling eatery for Enza.

Enza and Laura were regulars at the Automat, centrally located in midtown, convenient for most of the random jobs they’d been picking up through leads, tips, and advertisements in the paper.

“It’s brutal out there.” Laura sat down next to Enza, peeling off her gloves and coat. “It’s freezing. Nice new year so far. Nineteen seventeen, the year of the tundra.”

“Anything from the agency?” Enza asked. The girls had registered with Renee M. Dandrow Associates before Christmas, looking for work.

“How do you feel about scullery work?”

“When you taught me English, you never once said the word scullery.”

Laura laughed. “I didn’t teach you old English. Scullery is kitchen work. Not rolling dough and making soup, but the rough stuff. Scrubbing pots, mopping, that sort of thing.”

“I can do that,” Enza said.

“Good, because we’re booked to work through the weekend at a private home on Carnegie Hill on the Upper East Side.” Laura spread the newspaper want ads on the table.

“What are they paying?”

“Fifty cents per shift,” Laura replied. “And we’re lucky it came through, since rent is due on Friday. You want to split a slice of pie? That’s always in the budget.”

“Would you like coffee with it?”

“Please,” Laura said without taking her eyes off the newspaper.

The scent of chicory, cinnamon, and cocoa gave the bright, shiny eatery a feeling of home. The coffee was a nickel, the pie was ten cents, and the girls left full. There were no waitresses at the Automat, which was self-serve.

Enza paid for the pie and coffee, scooped up four nickels from the bin, and placed two in the glass slot outside the serving wall. The serving wall was filled with single portions of everything from macaroni and cheese to a single black-and-white-iced cookie. The customer chose his portion, dropped the nickels in, and took the serving out himself. She grabbed two forks, took them with the pie over to their table, and returned to pour the coffee. The white ceramic cups and saucers with their gay green borders always managed to lift her spirits. She balanced the cups on saucers, black for Laura, with cream in her own.

“We’re doing fine, Enza,” Laura said when Enza served her coffee. “We’ve got a room at the Y, and we’re working.”

Enza was worried that she wouldn’t be able to send money home if they didn’t get permanent jobs. “Any sewing jobs?”

“I have a feeling Marcia Guzzi is going to come through at Matera Tailoring.”

“And I put our names in at Samantha Gabriela Brown,” Enza said. “They make children’s clothes.”

“Yeah, but they don’t pay. We can’t do day shifts for fifty cents. And they don’t give piecework until you’ve been there six months.”

“Maybe we could talk to the desk manager at the Y and get the room fee down,” Enza said.

“I know the Y isn’t plush, but it’s better than the basement on Adams Street. Or my four-to-a-room bedroom in Jersey.”

“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” Enza said softly.

“We’re wait-listed at the good boardinghouses—something will come through. Let’s look at this as an adventure instead of a chore. All of it. Being poor, looking for work, being scared, and going hungry is all part of the adventure. We’ve never been scullery, and now we have the opportunity. This will be educational. We’ll turn hell into swell.” Laura laughed.