Turkeys? Math? Josephine starts walking after them.
“Because if they add five plus three, they get eight!” the girl says, and the three of them burst into a fit of giggles.
The street is slippery with snow, slowing Josephine down. At the corner, they have vanished. She looks in every direction but the streets are empty. Did she imagine them? Did she imagine that girl staring at her, finding her in the café window?
“Valentina?” she says softly.
Elisabetta runs up behind her. “What the hell?” she says when she reaches her mother.
“I thought I knew them,” Josephine tells her.
“Knew them?” Elisabetta shakes her head, confused. “Like you know people in Vermont?”
Josephine could not know it that night, but for many years to come, whenever she visited Chiara in Vermont, she would chase girls like this one, girls of a certain age. She would lean in closer to hear them talk. She would memorize their faces, their clothes, the sounds of their voices. She would search crowds at Masses and train depots until she found one who might be hers. But in the end, they always disappeared, swallowed up as if they never existed in the first place. Perhaps this was the fate of mothers who lose their children: they spend the rest of their lives trying to find them, even though they know it is impossible. But isn’t that faith? Isn’t that hope? That maybe one of them will pause under a perfect moon on a snowy night and, when she hears her mother’s voice, will turn toward it?
Dear Mussolini
“DUCE,” FRANCESCA’S GRANDMOTHER BEGAN.
Rat face. Francesca wrote. Turd.
Her grandmother folded her hands, brown-spotted and blue-veined, into her lap and considered. She wore a thin cotton dress, black, and beneath it a white slip, white bloomers, a white camisole. Over it she wore an apron in a gaudy floral pattern. Francesca hated her. She had lost several teeth, and as she spoke air whistled through the spaces.
“I am writing to tell you of my gratitude and the gratitude of the Italians who are here in America, away from the homeland that you will once again make strong . . .” her grandmother dictated.
Josephine only spoke very basic English. Although she had been in America for over thirty years, she still mixed up please and thank you, still looked like she was drowning when she tried to piece together an entire sentence. Even her grandmother’s Italian embarrassed Francesca, with its dropped final vowels and bastardized words.
You Fascist pig, Francesca wrote. We living under the democracy of the United States of America despise you . . .
It was warm for April, and Francesca sweated under her wool sweater. She wished she could take it off and run bare-chested through the yard, the way she used to when she was a little girl. Now she was fifteen years old. She had been kissed by four boys; all of them shorter than she was. One of them, Bruno Piazza from down the hill, loved her. She hated him. She hated every boy she had kissed.
Her grandmother’s voice droned on, blending with the bees that buzzed around their heads, dictating her letter of loyalty to Il Duce.
Francesca sighed.
“Your devoted servant,” her grandmother said.
May you burn in hell, Francesca wrote.
“Josephine Rimaldi.” Her grandmother grinned at her, not even caring about her missing teeth, or the long, silver hairs on her chin. She picked up the small sharp knife in her lap and began to cut a pear that had fallen to the ground.
“Do you know you’re supposed to wash that?” Francesca told her in English. “The ground is full of germs.”
“Bella,” her grandmother said, not understanding. “Grazie.”
“You stupid old woman,” Francesca said in English.
“Eh,” her grandmother said, shrugging.
Francesca folded the letter into thirds and put it into an envelope. On the front she wrote, as she always did:
Benito Mussolini
Italia
On the back, she wrote her grandmother’s name and Natick, Rhode Island.
“Go mail it,” her grandmother said. Juice from the pear dribbled out the corner of her mouth.
Relieved, Francesca stood to go. Robert Torre mailed all the letters back to the Old Country. His store was at the bottom of the hill, near the mill, a long enough walk to get some of this nervous energy out of Francesca. On the way to Torre’s, she would pass Bruno’s house, and Michele’s, another boy she sometimes kissed. Maybe she would see one of them and they would walk together to the river first. She would lie beside them and let them kiss her, let their tobacco-tasting tongues explore inside her mouth, and their hands grope at her. Today she would take off her shirt, surprising whichever boy she ran into, and let them touch her breasts. Touch only, not kiss. These were things that the ancient priest, Father Leone, would not understand, these lines girls drew, the way girls felt desire too.
Her uncle came into the yard.