The Good Left Undone(109)

“She wouldn’t,” Nicolina said. “She’s not that kind of person.”

“I wish he was more like Patrizia. My brother wanted more than jewelry, believe me,” Matelda began. “Nino wanted the shop. But there were issues. My father wanted Olimpio to manage the shop and have Nino work for him. You see, Olimpio was a craftsman, and that was the tradition in the shop. It was about making things—it wasn’t so much about selling them. Nino was a good salesman but a disaster at the wheel. When my brother saw what was happening, that’s when he decided to move to America. That’s when our Great Schism happened.”

“Maybe it bothered Uncle Nino when you became Cabrellis.”

“Don’t think so. We were Cabrellis before he was born.”

“I’m still a Roffo,” Olimpio offered as he joined them at the table, “but I did promise Silvio that I would not change the name of the shop. He hoped his son would return to Viareggio someday. The family tried to mend things with Nino. I know I did.”

“We all did. We went to visit them in America. What a trip that was. Nonna Netta, my mother, and me. We went to the shore in New Jersey. It was pretty, but my grandmother Netta said, ‘We have an ocean in Italy, and a beach too. We have to fly halfway around the world to sit in a different beach chair?’ We saw Nino’s factory. It was quite an operation. He was a successful manufacturer of—what would you call it, Olimpio?”

“Downscale costume jewelry. Known to the middlemen as a paste.”

“That’s it! Plated stuff. Not what we do here. He copied the fine jewelry we created here—Nino called them simulations. That’s why Nino wasn’t given the Speranza ruby. My father didn’t trust him to make it into something of value,” Matelda admitted.

“But he came around,” Olimpio insisted. “After your parents died, Nino warmed up and would call from time to time and ask me things, and I did what I could to help.”

“Did he still resent you for taking over the shop from Silvio?” Nicolina asked.

“He didn’t seem to—by then, the old wound was scar tissue. Nino had made a success for himself in America, so the little shop in the village in the old country no longer mattered to him.”

“The Cabrellis should have been united,” Anina said.

“You would think so, after all they had been through,” Olimpio agreed. “But the first thing that leaves in success is the memory of what it felt like to be poor. We shed that insecurity like an old pair of shoes the moment there’s money in the bank. We slip into fine leather and forget how badly our feet used to hurt.”


TREVISO

1947

Speranza spent two years working with the Americans in Berlin after the war. He provided them with the details of his work, the names of the men he had worked for, and the intelligence the Germans had hoped would die with him. When Speranza’s work was done, he decided to return to Italy. As the train rolled through the countryside, he saw what the Nazis and Fascisti had done.

There were scorched-black fields where villages had been burned to the ground. The train would continue down the tracks ten miles or so, and the next village would be bustling with shops, people, and flowers in window boxes, gracious living intact, as though the whole pathetic mess had never happened.

Speranza had been too exhausted to sleep. The war had given him another gift: permanent insomnia. He stood up, gripping the train’s luggage rack, and made his way to the sliding door. He opened it and stepped out onto the platform between the cars. He lit a final cigarette. The last miles of the journey home felt longer than the time he was away. Speranza barely felt the rumble of the train wheels as they sailed over the tracks. He was aware that most of the time he felt nothing. He had not wept much after the war, but the window boxes got to him. Life had gone on, but not his. Without Agnese, he walked the world like a ghost, and now he knew, they wept too.

Speranza had the clothes on his back and a rail pass back to Italy, a gift of the Americans. They had offered him a job in America. He politely declined. What good would that do him now? It was Agnese who had wanted to go to America. He would have followed her, of course, as was his habit. She made all the decisions; she was the architect of everything in his life that had worked.

Speranza’s feet ached when he stepped off the train in Treviso. He was pleased to see the buildings still standing and the black gondolas floating in the canals. Returning to the Veneto meant he could breathe and move in the place where he had met Agnese and been happy. He didn’t know what he would have done if they had leveled Treviso. It was the only proof he had that she had lived. Their romance began as they walked on the moss-covered streets of the city, along the pale blue canals. He would not return to the old shop or their apartment in Venezia. He knew it would break what was left of his heart.

As he walked through the streets of Treviso, Speranza did not recognize a single face and they did not know him. His world had the feeling of a graveyard now, nothing but stone markers and cold ground.

Speranza hitched a ride with a farmer to Godega.

The war had been a wily beast in Italy too; one side of the road, a house went untouched, and on the other side, for no reason other than bad luck, the Blackshirts had leveled the fences, barn, and farmhouse. It resembled the carnage of a tornado that blows through, there was no logic to the destruction. Speranza’s stomach churned.