“Unhand her at once,” the gentleman called Marshall said, tone firm. “She’s done nothing to offend us.”
Distress crossed the waiter’s face. “Sir, she shouldn’t be here—”
“I said, unhand her.” Marshall’s jaw set into a hard line.
The waiter dropped Francesca’s arm and scurried away, red-faced.
Marshall motioned to her canteen. “Please, madam. Allow me.” He unscrewed the lid, reached for the pitcher.
Eager to return to Maria, and to escape his mother’s obvious disgust, Francesca willed him to move faster. Mustn’t snatch it from his hands, she reminded herself. He was kind, in spite of his wealth, and that seemed a rarity.
He smiled at Francesca as he held out the full canteen. “There we are.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you care to join us?” he asked, motioning to the table. As he sat, something slipped from his jacket and fluttered to the floor. A card of some sort.
Stunned by the invitation, Francesca stood awkwardly without replying, her eye on the card he’d dropped. In her experience, men were never generous without wanting—or taking—something in return. She didn’t need his fancy food that badly, even as her stomach protested wildly.
“Please don’t take offense”—he paused as a flash of embarrassment crossed his features—“but you look rather hungry.”
She reddened. She’d eaten porridge, stale bread, and bowls of watery stew for days, and little of it. Her mouth watered at the thought of clams and a little pasta, or lemon and olive oil on bread. Even salted fava bean stew sounded like a king’s feast.
He cleared his throat. “What I meant to say is, we will have plenty as soon as we’re served. Please, do join us.”
She touched the buttons of her dress at her throat. The gentleman might be kind, but his mother wasn’t, and the other women being seated at the table looked just as terrifying in their shimmering dresses and jewels. And there was Maria. Her sister needed her.
“No, sir,” she said, regretting the plate of elegant foods she’d never have a chance to taste. “I go. My sister needs me.”
He nodded, sending a lock of graying hair over his brow. “Very well then. I hope your sister recovers quickly.”
She nodded. “Grazie mille.” Before leaving, she pointed to the card beneath his chair. “You lose it.”
“Ah, my visiting card.” He scooped it up and, after a moment’s hesitation, gave it to her. “I hope you will consider me your first friend in America.”
Blushing from her neck to her hairline, she glanced at the card. Marshall Lancaster, Park Avenue. Did he think she was that sort of woman?
“I am not prostitute,” she said, sticking out her chin.
Mrs. Lancaster barked out a laugh before exchanging meaningful looks with her friends at the table.
This time Marshall blushed to the tips of his ears. “Oh, my! No, that is… I didn’t mean to…” When he saw her confused expression, he said once more with emphasis, “Friend in America.” He held out his hand to shake hers, his face deepening to the shade of a ripe tomato.
“I am sorry,” she said, her accent thick over the rolling r.
“Never mind.” He smiled warmly. “Good evening, Miss… What is your name?”
“Francesca Ricci.”
“Good evening, Miss Ricci.”
Mrs. Lancaster glared at them both. “Yes, good evening.”
Cheeks flaming, Francesca curtsied for the signora’s benefit and headed for the exit.
One day soon, in America, she’d make sure she never had to beg for charity again.
2
Alma always obeyed.
She followed a clockwork schedule of chores each day, ticking them off the list one by one. Without complaint, she strung wet clothes on the laundry line stretching across the front room of their tenement apartment and swept the back step overlooking the outhouse. A rickety fence divided the yard from the street, but soon it would need to be replaced to keep out the vagabonds in their neighborhood who seemed to multiply by the day. The influx of “those people” made her parents anxious about her comings and goings, in spite of her twenty-one years. One never knew what an immigrant might do to a young American lady of superior standing. As the stink of the outhouse hit her nose, Alma coughed and her eyes watered. The sooner they left the neighborhood, the better.
Indoors, she made sure no one was watching and opened the cupboard, fishing behind the baking soda for her journal. A place where her stepfather would never find it. She hugged it to her chest, cradling its treasured contents: lists of foreign words and rules and slang, and page after page of Italian. She slipped outdoors again to steal a few minutes practicing the words the kindly priest, Father Rodolfo, had taught her when she managed to get away from the bierhaus for an hour or two on Sunday afternoons. Perhaps she could sneak away for a little while later today, since her stepfather was out on business.
Alma obeyed, most of the time.
After a few precious minutes of study, she’d need to help her mother in the kitchen for the bulk of the day’s work. They prepared food for their family of seven and for the German customers who might happen upon their bierhaus beneath the apartment on the basement level. Their tenement sat on Orchard Street, crammed into a row of similar four-story buildings made of red sandstone and brick in the heart of Kleindeutschland. Little Germany. Two blocks north sat a neighborhood of Russians and Poles, many Jewish; four blocks to the west was the Bowery, a flourishing Irish neighborhood; and six blocks north, the Italians. The communities were together but separate and understood their roles. The Jewish and Italian populations floundered at the bottom as the newest to arrive on American shores, the Irish fought their way from the middle, and the Germans, Dutch, and English perched at the top. Alma’s family and friends steered clear of the other groups when they could, knowing they didn’t belong among the thieving Irish or amid the squalor the newly arrived immigrants brought to the city.
Alma had never questioned her parents’ views. In fact, they’d instilled their own unease within her, so she turned to the one thing that helped quell it: she learned their languages, those who infiltrated the neighborhood and took their jobs. Those who turned familiar streets foreign and made the citizens of Kleindeutschland uncomfortable in their homes. In the process, she’d discovered that language was a tool—and a weapon. A means to disarm adversaries, or perhaps something she had yet to admit, even to herself. It was a means to understand them.