“It did? I have seen one. When Papa had his bad chest, I had to travel down to Torino to deliver our lace and I saw a street all smooth like that. But I didn’t know those came about because of the bicycle. It must be exciting to ride on one of those.”
“The cycle has its uses, but it takes human energy. It is slow … solitary transportation. But a motorcar—that is true liberty! It makes any man who can own one the master of his time and destination. Only the rich had such luxury of choice, until my boss made his dream come true. ‘I shall build an auto for the masses,’ he vowed and we did! It’s not sleek—no racing lines, no ornamentation. You can’t even say the design is beautiful, and since last year, only black can be its color … but you should see that little car go! Nothing stops her. Climbs the steepest grade like a mountain goat, then comes down just as sure-footed. She is so light, rides so high on her special chassis, impassable country roads, mud, ice, snow—nothing stops her. She can even cross rivers without getting bogged down. She’s more dependable than the best horse ever born! That’s why the first men to buy her were country doctors. They knew that nothing could stop her once she made up her mind!”
“Why do you say ‘she’?”
“We all do. She’s ‘our girl’! Something about it just seems alive, as though it has a heart. It is strange how she makes you proud and not just us who build her but the everyday people who own her. She’s America’s Sweetheart!”
“What’s that?”
“An American expression … it means a girl your heart likes.”
“Do you have one?”
“Someday I will—and I’ll take her everywhere. But first we must find a faster way to produce her! We are working on it to meet the huge demand.”
Giovanna thought to correct him, then thought better of it and asked, instead, “But the horses—what will happen to them?”
“Oh, they have already disappeared from the big cities and their stinking manure with them! They still work the land and are the aristocrats’ playthings, as they always have been.” Her eyes had not left his face. What an extraordinary new world he believed in. Still, she just had to ask and so ventured a hesitant, “You’re not making all this up, are you?”
“No. It has happened and I … I am part of it.”
He said it like a vow and she believed him. He sat looking across the valley as though alone. Hardly breathing, not wanting to disturb the moment, she watched him.
After a while he remembered she was there. “The men that I work with say, ‘Never get John Ricassoli started on his love affair with Tin Lizzie’!”
“Who’s that?”
“She’s now so famous, people give her names.”
“You mean your wondrous motorcar is made of TIN?”
“Of course not! They only say that because she is so light—we use a special steel. The Americans like to joke!”
“It all sounds very exciting, what you do,” Giovanna, newly awed, said, adding, “your landlady, the one who owns the … no, no, don’t help me … I’ll get it …’izz boite.’”
“Pretty good! What about my landlady with the marvelous wooden boite?”
“You live there, in her house?”
“Yes, I rent a room and take my evening meal downstairs with the other lodgers. She’s a good woman. She likes me … ‘So tell me … what is my Italian baby boy up to?’ she always says. I’m her youngest lodger—so she calls me her baby. Her husband brought her with him when he came over from Germany. He and I work together … that’s how I found a place to live.”
Giovanna felt relieved. For a young man alone, it was so much more fitting to live under the roof of a married lady whose husband was also in residence.
Streaks of orange glowed across the fading sky, touching mountains turned silhouette, a tiny bat flitted by on its first twilight foray; an awakening owl announced the beginning of its darkening day. Giovanna rolled up her bobbins. “It’s late! I must go! Papa gets angry if his meal isn’t ready waiting for him. And I haven’t done my lace … and now I won’t be able to finish it in time and Papa expects the money! I’ll have to work on it after he’s gone to sleep … I must hurry …”
Giovanni slid off the ledge and reached up to help her down.
“Will you come tomorrow?” he asked, not knowing why he did.
“Yes,” she answered, not knowing why she wanted to so badly.
She had rushed and the sauce had not had enough time to thicken properly, so her father had been angry. Of course, he had had every right to be, for it was her fault for being late.
She banked the embers in the iron stove, moved the candle over to the low sideboard, began wiping down the long wooden table … seeing her mother’s form as it lay upon it. This happened every evening. Over the years she had come to terms with it—accepting it as one of the hurting things that belonged to her.
She rolled up the threadbare rug, knelt, dipped the brush into the leather pail, began scrubbing the stone floor when suddenly she remembered her father’s cup. In the summer, he drank his coffee outside their door, and tonight she had forgotten to collect it! He must be wondering what was wrong with her. Wiping her hands on her apron, she hurried outside to fetch it.
His chair tipped against the rough stone of his house, black hat cushioning the back of his head, her father’s scarecrow frame sat balanced, smoking his pipe. Knowing how he hated being disturbed during what he called his “interlude of digestion,” she looked for the cup, but being a moonless night, she couldn’t find it in the gloom and had to ask, “Papa—the cup?”
“On the ground, by my foot! Eyes are for looking!”
“Sorry, Papa.” She bent to retrieve the small cup and turned to take it inside.
“Wait!” He spoke without removing his pipe. Over the years, it had become a part of the configuration of his stone-cut face. “Why was my meal not ready on time? What were you doing?”
“I said I was sorry when I explained about the sauce …”
“You seem to be ‘sorry’ about a lot of things tonight! Well? Out with it, girl. Answer me!”
“I walked up to the oleanders to do my work … the Ricassoli boy … the one who ran off to America and now has returned … he was there waiting …”
Her father’s jeer stopped her. “For you?”
“No, of course not me … for Antonia.”
“So, he’s after our saintly doctor’s pretty daughter, is he? She’ll make him dance to the Devil’s tune! Runs off to be a fancy man in America but when he needs a wife, he comes scurrying back!”
“Oh, no, Papa! It is said the old nonna, the grandmother’s illness brought him back.”
“No, the only reason that young rascal came back here was to find himself a good Italian wife to service him—in more ways than one.” Chuckling behind his pipe, he rocked his chair with the heel of his boot.
A sharp crack startled him. “What the Devil …”
“I’m sorry, Papa—I dropped it.” Giovanna gathered up the pieces of the broken cup and went inside.