“You’re beautiful when you smile,” he said gently.
He wasn’t awful, Josephine decided. And it was only three days. He asked her to lie down, and she did. Then he unzipped his pants, lifted her nightgown, moved about jerkily three or four times, quivered, and collapsed on her. It was so ridiculous that Josephine had to work on not laughing out loud.
Over the next three days, he did this every six or seven hours. In between, he brought Josephine food, and let her sit and draw. It was so silly, that her mood improved greatly, and by the time he left, he was certain he had married the most good-natured, lighthearted girl in all of Italy.
Josephine walked him to the edge of her village, where the cobblestones ended and a winding dirt path began. That path, she had been told, went all the way down the mountain to a bigger road that eventually worked its way to the city of Naples.
“Good-bye then,” Vincenzo said.
Josephine nodded at him and smiled.
He touched her cheek lightly. “You are a treasure,” he told her. “I only hope I’ve given you a son. That when I send for you, there will be two coming to America.”
Josephine waved to him, and practically ran back home. The entire thing felt like a dream already. In her house, she hummed as she punched down the dough that had just finished its first rising, and brought a platter of small perfect tomatoes outside to sit in the sun.
NINE YEARS LATER, her mother came running into the house, out of breath, and grinning broadly.
“Finally,” she said, “Vincenzo has sent for you.”
Josephine frowned, trying to remember this man who was her husband. But in the years that had passed between them, his face had faded into a smudge, and she could not remember what his voice sounded like. From time to time, she had received a letter from him, telling her how hard he was working and all of the things he was doing to prepare for her arrival. He rented a house, and then he bought that house. He planted the fields around it and he began to save money. She read his letters as if they were chapters in a serial novel. They seemed to have nothing at all to do with her life, which was moving along pleasantly at home. There was no baby produced from those long-forgotten three days after the wedding, and Josephine continued on just as she had before the interruption of marriage.
But now, it seemed, she really would have to go.
A week later, she, too, had traveled the cobblestones to the dirt path down the mountain. She had ridden a cart all the way into Naples, where water sparkled more brilliantly than any rocks she had found. Excitement rose in her as she boarded the big ship. For a long time, she stood at the railing, watching the lights of Naples twinkle at her until they finally disappeared. By then, the ship was in the ocean. There was nothing but endless sky, water, and stars.
Josephine shivered in the cold, damp air. But still she did not move. She stood, waiting for her life to unfold. She stood, ready.
The Summer of Ice
YEARS LATER, JOSEPHINE WOULD THINK OF THAT SUMMER of 1918 as the summer of ice. Already, it had become the summer of the Great War. People blamed everything on the fact that the world had gone mad. Dogs howled into the night. Hail as big as plums fell from the sky, not once, but twice that summer. Father Leone held special Masses to pray for the boys going off to war. The village filled the church for those Masses, crying as Father Leone, with his head of slick, wavy hair and his large, drooping handlebar mustache, invoked the names of the town boys who had gone. It was said that the Virgin Mary cried real tears after these Masses. A special representative from the Boston Archdiocese was coming to investigate. But for Josephine, even with the howling dogs and brutal hail, even with the weeping Virgin, and her own son, Carmine, being old enough to join the Army, that summer was ordinary, until Alfredo Petrocelli, the ice man, got the Spanish Influenza.