“I’m going to marry you,” he said gruffly. “I’m going to marry you and do this to you every night.”
Those words in her ears made her cry uncontrollably as she stumbled home, trying to avoid the crowds of people returning to their houses for the food they would bring to the festa. Without a plan, she thought, her breasts sore from Bruno’s clumsiness. What hope did she have for anything different from the very life he had predicted? She was ashamed that she was so ignorant that she did not even know where else to go. She did not want to fall into a crevice in the earth and get swallowed up in San Francisco. She did not want to farm land in the Old Country. And she did not want this life.
When she walked into the kitchen at home, she stood in the doorway and looked at the dark wallpaper and badly laid floor, and heard the Italian words buzzing through the room, as if they were not in America. Her grandmother, smiling proudly, held a small sign with Mussolini’s face on it attached to a basket. The basket was brimming with gold. Francesca moved closer. She recognized earrings, crosses, thick chains, and on top, Nonna’s wedding ring. To be certain, Francesca looked at the woman’s left hand. Bare.
Her uncle Carmine was grinning at her as he added gold pins and his Army medals to the basket.
“What’s going on?” Francesca asked in English.
Her mother said, “There’s a drive at the church. Gold for Italy. Duce has asked all Italians to send their gold for the good of Italy.”
Pressing her hands together, Nonna said happily in Italian, “Duce will make Italy strong again so we can all go home.”
Francesca took a step back, and then another, until she was standing at the door. All that gold, she thought, all that gold could buy their way out of here, could buy Mary her glasses, could be used as a down payment for one of the larger stone houses being built in town, on the flat land away from the mill and the river.
“What are you, crazy?” she shouted. “We have nothing and you send these valuables to a dictator? A Fascist who’s killing people in the streets?”
Nonna frowned. “Eh?”
“Tu sei pazza,” Francesca said. “You’re crazy.”
The old woman’s face crumpled.
“You and Mussolini are crazy!” Francesca shouted. “We need that gold. We have nothing here. You stupid, stupid people.”
She ran out of the house, leaving them behind, all of their faces blank. She wished she could keep running until she reached the ocean. She had never seen the ocean, though she knew it was not too far from here. Francesca tried to picture a map, to see what lay beyond this town, but she could not find its shape.
In the distance she could hear the sounds of the festa. Music and laughter and Italian and French; the French Canadians always came to the Italian parties. But she had run the long way, and was on the dark road leading away from town.
A car passed, then stopped, backed up, and stopped again, this time beside her.
She immediately recognized the blond boy driving.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Yes,” she lied. She put her hand to her chest to slow her pounding heart. “I’m on my way home.”
He studied her face. “You look familiar.”
She smiled and shrugged, hoping her face did not have the red blotches it sometimes got when she cried.
“I guess you live back there,” he said, pointing in the direction of her house.
“No,” Francesca said. “I live this way.” She pointed too, toward the newer houses made of stone, the ones where the town’s doctor and undertaker and some of the teachers lived.
The boy laughed. “I took you for one of those wops,” he said. “The ones that work as slaves at the mill down there. Stupid guineas.”
Francesca forced a laugh.
“Well,” he said, “hop in. I’ll give you a lift.”
He leaned across the seat and opened the door for her, extending his arm to help pull her up. Inside the car smelled of leather and mint and something else, something foreign that Francesca could not identify.
“Name’s Mac,” the boy said.
“Priscilla,” Francesca told him, giving the most American name she knew. In Mrs. Miller’s English class they had read The Courtship of Miles Standish, and it had seemed to Francesca that Priscilla was the most wonderful woman ever.
“Priscilla?” he said laughing. “That’s a mouthful.”
She could feel him giving her sidelong glances.
“Hey,” he said finally, “there’s a big wop festival at their church. There’ll be great food to be sure. Want to go? With me?”
Francesca gripped the edge of the seat hard, digging her nails into the soft leather. “No,” she said. “I don’t like that sort of thing.” She did not want him to go away. “But I’ll go for a ride with you.”