The Shoemaker's Wife(89)
“You got in?” Luigi asked.
“Yeah.”
Ciro was gratified that the army had accepted him, knowing that it was the fastest route to earning his citizenship. But there was also a sadness, a gnawing anxiety that he was running from something he couldn’t name. It was in moments like this that he thought of Enza and wondered about the different path his life might have taken had she been waiting for him on Adams Street.
“I wanted to go fight.” Luigi kicked a pebble off the sidewalk into the gutter. “Maybe I ought to take Pappina and go home to Italy.”
“And what will you do there?” Ciro asked.
“I don’t know. I got no place to go. When the U.S. Army doesn’t want you, you don’t have a lot of choices.”
“You keep working on Mulberry Street. By the time I get back, you’ll be a master.”
“Signora takes all our profits. You’d think she’d cut us in. You invented the cart, after all.”
“Remo taught me a trade. I owe him,” Ciro said firmly. “But I think we have generously paid off the marker. We need our own company, Luigi. And I’m going to count on you to pull all the pieces together while I’m overseas.”
Ciro’s wise offer seemed to assuage Luigi’s feelings of failure at the recruitment office. For young fellows like them, the war was a chance to become men, to see the world and save it and return home as American citizens. It didn’t occur to either of them that lives would be lost, that the world they were to defend would shift under their feet and never be the same again. They only dreamed of the adventure.
A flower cart parked on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street overflowed with bouquets of white lilies and pots of pink hyacinths tied with gold bows. Glassy, bright green boxwood hemmed in the front gardens of brownstones. Windowboxes sprouted with purple and pink bachelor buttons, red impatiens, and bright yellow marigolds. Enza breathed deeply as she walked to Tenth Street. As she climbed the steps to the entrance of the Milbank House, Miss DeCoursey was sorting the mail in the vestibule. She handed Enza an envelope. The return address read: The Metropolitan Opera House. Enza sprinted up four flights of stairs to open it with Laura.
“It came,” Enza said. Laura pulled a hairpin from her chignon and handed it to Enza, who carefully opened the envelope.
Dear Miss Ravanelli,
Miss Serafina Ramunni would like to meet with you and Miss Laura Heery on April 29, 1917, at ten o’clock in the morning. Please bring your sewing kits and further samples of your workmanship, in particular with foil paillettes, silk trims, and crystal beading.
Very truly yours,
Miss Kimberly Meier
Company Manager
The girls immediately ran to the church of Saint Francis Xavier and lit every candle at the foot of Saint Lucy, the patron saint of seamstresses. The girls needed this job. The temporary kitchen work was not enough, and they were one week away from losing their room at the Milbank.
The morning of their interview, they ate a hearty Milbank breakfast of scrambled eggs, coffee, and toast before loading their sewing kits and samples into their purses for the walk from Tenth Street, thirty blocks uptown, to meet Serafina Ramunni, the head seamstress of the costume shop. Enza and Laura wore their best skirts and blouses. Enza wore a Venetian gondolier’s straw hat with a bright red band, while Laura wore a straw picture hat with a cluster of silk cherries for adornment.
The girls spent the night developing a strategy for the interview. If Miss Ramunni liked one of them and not the other, the one offered the job should take it. If there were no immediate openings for seamstresses, they agreed to take whatever starting positions were available. They both dreamed of working in the costume shop eventually, but they knew it could take years to earn a spot there, if they were lucky enough to be hired in the first place.
The Metropolitan Opera House, built of native yellow stone hauled from the valleys of upstate New York, took up a full city block on West Thirty-ninth Street. Its architectural grandeur was evident in its details—ornate doors, embellished cornices, and Palladian arches. The opera house had the massive dimensions of a train station.
On the ground level, a series of doors capped by brass scrollwork emptied the theater in minutes. The wide carriage circle accommodated every mode of transportation on wheels: motorcars, cabs, and horse carriages had plenty of space for dropoffs before curtain and pickups after the final ovation.
The main entrance doors, attended by footmen, were hemmed by velvet ropes. Enza and Laura entered through the lobby, where a handyman buffed the white marble floor with a motorized brush machine.
A swirling staircase rose before them, carpeted in ruby red, with a high polished brass railing. A crystal chandelier, dripping in shimmering glass daggers in the shape of a wedding cake, had been lowered on delicate wires to eye level for cleaning, and a maid dusted the crystal drops gently with flannel mitts.
The box office door was propped open. Inside, the ticket sellers were smoking and taking a coffee break. Laura walked up to the window. “We’re looking for Serafina Ramunni. We have an appointment.”
A young man in shirtsleeves and brown tie ashed his cigarette and nodded. “She’s onstage.”
Laura and Enza passed a series of Renaissance paintings framed in gold leaf in the inner lobby. They pushed the doors open, entering the dark theater, an enormous jewelry box trimmed in gold. The scents of fresh paint, linseed oil, and the lingering gardenia of expensive perfumes created a heady mix. Rows of seats swathed in red velvet tilted toward the downstage lip of the cavernous stage like rose blooms. Enza thought that church was the only other place where such hushed reverence was required.