“Peachy’s a good girl.”
“For someone else.”
“She waited for me. Through the war. And ever since.”
“Patience demonstrated is not a good reason to marry a man, and guilt is not a good reason to marry a woman. You need to come up with something better, or all mysteries will be revealed on that wedding night and there’s no turning back. You’re a Catholic. There is no divorce. There’s only widowhood or sainthood.”
Hortense Mooney was right about that, Nicky reflected. Marriage was for life. Years ago, when Father Chiaravalle came to talk to his confirmation class about the sacraments, he told the boys that the church looked at marriage like permanent internment in one of Houdini’s steel boxes, dripping in chains, with five padlocks dangling like charms on a bracelet whose keys had been swallowed by an alligator in the Congo halfway around the world. You couldn’t get out of it once you were in. The finality of it all may be why Nicky had taken so long to marry.
Nicky would be certain about his wife, and there would be no disasters on his wedding night. He was not going to be one of those suckers who rolled the dice on a pretty girl he just met and ended up with snake eyes on the honeymoon. Nicky had heard awful stories of girls who wept through their wedding nights, and raced home to their mothers the next morning, vowing never to return to their new husbands. He’d heard tales of brides who were not pleased with their grooms: it turned out their veils weren’t to suggest virginity but to hide experience. He had heard plenty, with the moral of every story the same: find a good girl, because goodness would take care of any problems, financial, familial, mental, or sexual.
It had been Nicky’s observation that every girl who hoped to marry was a good girl; it was one of the requirements to secure the engagement ring in the first place. As soon as Nicky had given Peachy DePino a diamond, she’d been willing to be intimate in a certain way, which was reassuring. It showed Nicky that she wasn’t like Veronica Verotti, whose name filled every young Italian American male in South Philly with dread.
Veronica, the story goes, was so traumatized by what she saw on her wedding night, she abandoned her sleeping groom in the double bed at the Blue Lagoon Hotel in Atlantic City, left her rings in the ashtray on the nightstand, took the night bus to North Haledon, New Jersey, and the very next morning, joined the order of the Salesian nuns of Saint John Bosco, where she’d lived ever since as Sister Mary Immaculata.
Nicky admired Peachy’s fine qualities: she had demonstrated loyalty and trust over the years that he’d known her. But he also knew that no woman would have all the attributes of character and physical appearance he dreamed of. Nor, he knew, could he fulfill all the hopes a woman might hold for him. Peachy was an honest, ambitious girl with common sense and a warm smile. She had a steady job as a bookkeeper at a Wanamaker’s department store, she was handy, she could repair small appliances and stuff a nut roll with the same precision, and in Nicky’s mind, she was not only quick to learn, she was versatile. Even if all of that hadn’t been true, he loved Peachy, and she loved him.
Hortense folded a telegram neatly and placed it in an envelope, which she handed to Nicky. “Take this to Mr. Da Ponte on North Second Street.”
Nicky placed the Western Union cap on his head and went down into the garage, which was now in full sun. Soon his cousins would finish breakfast, jump in their cabs, and begin their shifts too.
As Nicky got into the No. 4 car, he remembered the milliner Da Ponte. He had bought Peachy a green velvet hat in the shop, and she’d loved it so much that she asked Mr. Da Ponte to make her wedding veil when the date was set. Nicky smiled at the thought. This might be what he loved most about South Philly—you didn’t have to go far to find anything you desired. Nicky couldn’t imagine ever living anywhere else.
As he backed out of the garage, he looked up and saw Mrs. Mooney standing in the window of the office, watching him. She had her hands folded at her waist, in a pose that reminded him of the statue of Saint Ann behind glass in the crypt of Saint Rita of Cascia. A shiver went through him as he remembered waiting on the kneeler for his turn to enter the confessional when he was a boy. Nicky wondered if that was a sign. Wasn’t everything?
*
The row of bachelor’s buttons, pansies, and daffodils that were planted along the porch in front of the Borellis’ home on 832 Ellsworth Street looked puny. The father and daughter who lived inside had planted them exactly as the lady of the house had always done, but since her death last summer, the garden looked sad.
Sam Borelli didn’t have a green thumb, and neither did his daughter Calla, even though she had a name that would indicate otherwise. Their skills lay elsewhere, but they did their best to keep the sky blue clapboard two-story as Vincenza Borelli had liked it, and that included maintaining the flowerbeds.
Calla Borelli peered into the mirror of the medicine cabinet as she lifted a section of her hair that fell across her forehead in a feathered black fringe. She twisted it just so, snipped the ends with her nail scissors, and stood back to survey the results. Satisfied, she ran her fingers through the short layers that framed her face.
“Calla!” her father called from the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m coming, Pop,” Calla hollered back. She swiped bright red lipstick onto her mouth, smacked her lips together, and as she blotted them, ran water in the sink to rinse away the tiny black slashes from her haircut. She took a final look at the model in the Harper’s Bazaar magazine propped in the windowsill. The photograph of the long, lean Parisienne with a cigarette and an attitude whose chic, cropped hairstyle Calla had tried to copy had little in common with the Italian American woman in the mirror, but it didn’t matter. Calla wasn’t fussy and she certainly wasn’t French. She flipped the magazine shut.
The morning sun drenched the Borelli kitchen like a stage in full light. The air was filled with the scent of sweet tomato sauce simmering on the stove.
Sam Borelli stood over the skillet with a spatula, watching two fresh eggs poach in the bubbling sauce, Venetian style. A moppeen was slung over his shoulder. At nearly eighty, age may have robbed him of his height and hair, but his intense black eyes and Neapolitan features, especially his thick black eyebrows, were as sharp as they had been in his youth.
Calla twirled when she entered the room. “What do you think?”
“I like it all right.”
“I cut it myself.”
“You shouldn’t cut your own hair. That’s like building your own car.”