“Hi, Uncle Carmine,” she said, trying not to sound nervous.
“You puttana, going to get laid?” he asked, a terrible thing to say to his fifteen-year-old niece, but ever since Anna Zito married someone else he called almost every girl a puttana.
Francesca held up the letter. “Going to mail this to Mussolini,” she said, and quickly closed the gate behind her.
FRANCESCA’S SISTER, MARY, always made a point of finding something beautiful here. If Mary were walking beside her right now, she would say, “Look at the pink blossoms on that cherry tree!” She would stop at the Galluccis’ to admire their new shrine to the Virgin Mary, taking the time to open its glass door, to gasp at the lovely face of the Madonna, perhaps even to light a candle at her feet. Mary would know whose cat these drunken-looking kittens zigzagging on the street belonged to and that Old Man Conti’s wine was ready to drink. Mary, who was twelve, loved everything about this town. She loved everything as much as Francesca hated it.
“Where would you go if you left?” Mary asked, but only at night when the two of them lay together on the iron bed they shared upstairs. The ceilings slanted so that they could reach up and touch them easily, something Francesca often did, pressing her fingertips against the eggshell-colored paint as if she could break through to the roof and beyond.
“I don’t know,” Francesca answered. She was embarrassed that she knew so little of the world that she could not even name a place to run to.
“Providence?” Mary asked.
“No!” Providence was awful, a jumble of carts and peddlers and shouting, without any of the exciting things a city might offer. Francesca had gone there once with her father, to buy cheese.
“Back to the Old Country?” Mary asked. She wouldn’t stop until she had an answer, and Francesca had no answer to give her.
“Yes,” Francesca whispered. “I would go to Italy and be Duce’s mistress.”
Mary giggled. “Then you’d have to take Nonna with you so she can be his mistress too.”
Later, after Mary would fall asleep, Francesca would press her fingertips to the ceiling, pushing, pushing, unable to move anything even a little.
NO ONE WAS OUT TODAY except Francesca. Poor Bruno, she thought as she approached Torre’s store. Tomorrow she might not feel the same way, she might keep her breasts to herself. She saw the men from the neighborhood across the street. They had set up tables on the sidewalk in front of the store. The acrid smell of cigars already reached her, the medicinal smell of their homemade wine sitting in glass jugs on the sidewalk. The men were playing cards, laughing, shouting in Italian. She saw her own father among them, gambling away their money, money they needed for Mary’s new glasses and pencils for them to do their homework.
In the distance she heard the whirring of a car engine. Automobiles were no longer strange on the street here even though most people couldn’t afford them. Walking, Francesca always had to sidestep horse shit. But the DiGiornos didn’t have a car and they still held a certain fascination for her. She paused to watch it pass. A bottle-green Ford.
To her surprise, the car stopped and a man’s voice called out, “Excuse me?”
Francesca looked around, but she was the only one on the street except the men a half block away. Swallowing hard, she walked toward the automobile. She was aware of how she must have looked in her dull wool sweater, too heavy for such a warm day, and the thick black boots and unevenly hemmed skirt. Still, she smoothed her hair, trying to flatten the strands that insisted on springing up.
She peered into the car. The driver wasn’t a man. He was a boy, not much older than she was. His hair was so blond it seemed almost white in the sunlight and his face looked pink, like a baby’s.
“I’m looking for Jerry Piazza. Do you know him?”
Francesca shook her head. The letter to Mussolini grew damp in her sweaty hands.
The boy sighed, exasperated. “Do you speak English?” he asked her.
Insulted, she said, “Yes, I speak English.” She was trembling. She smelled mint, as if it grew in the backseat of that car.
“Sorry,” he said. “You never know. There’s so many wops in this part of town.”
She could’ve said something about how ignorant he was, how he should try to call one of those men across the street wop and see what happened. One of those men was, in fact, Gennaro—Jerry—Piazza.