Originally appeared in The Tishman Review, October 2017
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Belle Ragazze
When Brooklyn still held elms along its pebbled sidewalks, and dappled horses mixed freely with cars and trolleys, Josephine Pagano lived with her parents, her grandparents, her stormy aunt and uncle and their tumultuous children in a three-story brownstone on Fort Hamilton Parkway, one block from the butcher and two blocks from Sessa’s funeral parlor.
The only grandchild who spoke Italian, Josephine was Poppy’s favorite. Banana curls the color of chestnuts framed her tiny face, and she could play La Tarantella on the piano. Aunt Aida called her Naso Cagna, Dog Nose, because Josephine’s nose sat flat like a pug’s. Aida said that Poppy preferred Josephine because she had been named after him—Giuseppe—in a clever move by her parents that would endear the child to him forever and insure her place in his will.
Poppy worked as a plasterer at the Metropolitan Opera House, where he fashioned mischievous angels into the empyrean ceiling and watched rehearsals of Aida from his wooden ladder during lunch. On Sundays, he sang parts of the opera and charmed his grandchildren with tales of the Princess Aida’s tragic love and the magnificent animals that filled the stage: a scarlet-headed Brazilian parrot flapping emerald wings; a golden snake coiled around a jeweled dancing girl, and an African elephant decked in purple velvet and silver tassels. He whispered to the children that the Opera House was his church, and that its music flowed through him, into the cherubs born from his callused fingertips: “I make angels that watch over the singers, the musicians, and all the fancy ladies and gentlemen of the audience. I, a poor plasterer, create the heaven of the rich.” Pouring a splash of anisette into his black coffee, he told his grandchildren that there was no need to share this information with their grandmother or with Sister Agatha, who already knew it and would be bored to hear it yet again.
Josephine’s mother, Emily, who was also Poppy’s daughter, did not mind her father’s tales, but she would not allow Aida’s cruelty to sit like a rat gnawing at her tender daughter, who had just turned nine, so one day she pulled Josephine onto her lap and said, “Aunt Aida is my sister, first and foremost, but she has always been a jealous person, even when we were children. Her kids all have potato noses. She wishes she could have a daughter like you.” Emily heaved the large black enamel pot filled with water and dried cecis onto the stove, threw in a scoopful of salt, then clamped the cover tight, so it could boil.
Emily’s words did not console Josephine, whose porcelain pride had suffered its first chip. “But is what Aunt Aida says true? Mama, I don’t want to have a dog’s nose! I don’t want it to be all runny and covered with whiskers. I want it to look like Shirley Temple’s,” Josephine protested, knowing better than to stomp her foot.
Josephine’s vanity worried her mother. Vain women ended up consuming themselves and everyone around them for a greedy spell of beauty that vanished like a kiss, leaving behind a few cruel traces of smudged lipstick. Vain women expected everyone to mourn the loss of their looks and to behave as if their beauty had not abandoned them. Women who were homely, though—or at least who thought they were—learned how to be useful and tried to be generous, so Emily cupped Josephine’s round little chin in her hand, looked into her teary brown eyes and said, “Be grateful that you have a nose, as well as arms that can lift and legs that can run. Remember what Grandma always says: Il diavolo è nello specchio. The devil is in the mirror.”
Josephine continued sobbing so hard that she melted one corner of Emily’s resolve to protect her daughter from the sins of the self-absorbed. She would compromise. Smoothing Josephine’s curls, she explained that dogs had magical noses that allowed them to understand another creature’s entire life story, through its own eyes, with just one sniff, and that a person who could do that got a glimpse of heaven because then they were free from the prison of their own mind. A dog’s nose, really, was a gift from God, if used in the right way. Then she told Josephine not to mention any of this to Sister Agatha because it was an advanced catechism lesson that they didn’t teach until the twelfth grade and Sister Agatha might get upset if she knew that Josephine was skipping ahead.
Josephine didn’t understand everything her mother had said, but she felt important being treated to a grown-up idea, especially because it involved keeping something, with her mother’s approval, from the terrifying Sister Agatha, who glided along the school’s polished halls in a starched white habit and had eyes in the back of her head. Having a secret meant having power, something Sister Agatha could never know, unless Josephine chose to tell her. Josephine decided to think more about what her mother meant, even though she still did not want to have a dog nose.
Every Saturday, Josephine and her older cousin Susie played opera and house on the fire escape, refugees from the explosions of Aida, who could go off like the Atomic Bomb, and the rough teasing of Susie’s toughened brothers, who were immune to Josephine’s charms. No pigtail or candy stick was safe from their greasy grasp; no imperfection was free from their taunts. Susie remained loyal to her little cousin, and yelled at the boys when they barked at Josephine and shouted “Naso Cagna” during their stickball games in the street. Josephine reciprocated by playing with Susie, whose plump legs and wheezing kept her from jump rope and hopscotch with other girls. Alone together, with the kitchen window shut safely behind them, the girls made their own Eden, entertaining princesses and Shirley Temple with songs and dinners of crumpled paper pasta and button cookies. Susie, her black hair cropped close to her round face, wore a fedora and puffed on a teaspoon for a pipe. She did not care much for her mother Aida, who did not cook, preferring instead the gentle attention of her Aunt Emily, who always kept a pot of garlicky ceci beans simmering on the stove and allowed Susie to dip a piece of crusty bread for a taste.
In their fire escape world, pretty Josephine wore her mother’s green-checked apron, fed the doll babies, and sang. She prepared for her performances by applying invisible rouge and primping in front of a tiny hand mirror, which sat on their wooden play table, next to the milk bottle. Susie, as man of the house, delighted in wearing Poppy’s giant Sunday shoes and fake-expectorating onto newspaper that covered the floor. She did not want to sing pretend opera songs or drag the stuffed bear by its ribbon rope, but she provided an enthusiastic audience for her cousin, in exchange for being head of the household.
“Josephine,” she chided, “the ashtrays are dirty; the papers need changing.” She waved her dimpled hand towards the rusty metal ladder and took a drink of water from her coffee cup.
“Yes, dear,” Josephine replied, gathering up the newspapers, just as Emily did.
“Josephine, there’s a hair in my salad.” Susie rolled her eyes towards the sky. Josephine plucked the offensive follicle from imaginary lettuce.
“Have you finished ironing my shirts?” Susie folded her arms.
“No, Dear, I have not. The baby was sick.” Josephine made the same apologetic face her mother made when her father complained that the pasta was overcooked. Then she added, “Darling, Shirley Temple is here; it’s time for the opera” and removed her apron. With the tomato garden below as a backdrop, and the pigeons on the roof above as a chorus, she clutched her brown stuffed bear and burst into a sad song about her true love’s betrayal.
Susie turned her wooden folding chair to watch, stomping and clapping enthusiastically when she grew bored with the singing, signaling that the show had ended.
In this way, the girls continued, but over time, Susie, two years older, maneuvered their play so that there was less opera and more house, a development that bothered Josephine, tired of the drudgery, too close to her mother’s life. She wanted to make her own stories.
One flat Lenten afternoon, Josephine tried a new tactic. “Let’s go to a picture show,” she suggested.
“We can’t. We don’t have any money, and Poppy gave us nickels for Mello rolls yesterday,” Susie replied.
“Not for real. For pretend,” she answered. “We’ll sit here, on the ladder, and play movie.”
“No. Movies are just a bunch of silly ladies wearing frilly nightgowns, drinking champagne. They don’t do anything.”
“We can make it Abbott and Costello painting the fire escape. Please, Susie, please. They’re so funny. ‘Hey Abbott,'” Josephine called, trying to sound like Costello.
“No. That’s dumb.”
“What if you’re the usher? You can hold the flashlight and tell me where to sit.”
“No. I want to play house. I like this game. I want my lasagna!” Susie thumped their little oak table with her fist.
Josephine sighed. She did not want to play house anymore, and her cousin’s recalcitrance annoyed her. As it was, Susie and her brothers took up too much of her mother’s time and affection. Because Aida always seemed to have one sort of an illness or another, Emily stepped in to take her place, spending most of her time cooking for them, washing their clothes and going to the school to plead with the nuns whenever one of the boys was failing or fighting—an almost weekly occurrence. Josephine felt the space in her mother’s heart shrinking, and worried she might someday be just a whisper against her mother’s ear, tiny and unsubstantial. She had tried to protest, to grow and keep her place in her mother’s kind eyes, but Emily would always say, “My sister does not know how to mother. Aida is not quite right in the head. You know how Uncle Joe treats her. Your cousins need me. We cannot begrudge them that, Josephine.” And then she would cup Josephine’s chin in hands that still felt smooth and gentle, despite all the work they did, and she would say, “Faccia brute,” and smile. “Sometimes you have the face of a brute, my dear daughter. Try not to grow a heart that matches.”
Thinking of her mother’s words, Josephine instantly felt a flush of guilt for arguing with Susie. She had heard the shouts and crashes from her cousins’ apartment. She knew that Aida flinched at the slightest sound. And she knew that the neighbors whispered about Uncle Joe and the Polish woman. She felt sorry for Susie and for a moment relented, saying, “Yes, okay, I’ll get more lasagna,” but something came over her–her grandmother would have said the devil slipped in while the Holy Spirit took a nap–and in a flash, before she knew it, as if she had swallowed a moth desperate to be free, she let it out by adding, “Vaccalini.”
Susie did not understand. She put down her teaspoon pipe. “Vaccalini? We’re having lasagna.”
“No,” Josephine said. “Vaccalini. Little Cow. That’s your name. It’s what your mother calls you, isn’t it?” There. She had said it. Basta. She was not as good a girl as her mother would have wanted.
Susie teared and opened her mouth but no words came. Her tongue flapped, a blind worm, gasping for truth. She stood and overturned the toy table, crashing the porcelain teapot and the little hand mirror onto the metal grate. The pigeons roosting on the ledge above them flew up with a low, rumbling coo.
Josephine had hit her mark with more sting than the lash of her father’s belt, but her mouth tasted as if she had bitten into the fuzzy part of an artichoke heart.
“You’ve wrecked our home sweet home! Why did you do that?” Josephine wailed.
“Naso Cagna, you made me,” Susie said, throwing open the window to crawl back from the fire escape, into the kitchen.
“Your father goes with the Polish woman!” Josephine called after her.
“Your mother isn’t fit to wipe up my father’s spit!” Susie’s reddened face looked as if it would pop.
“At least I have a mother,” Josephine screamed.
“Your MOTHER,” Susie said, suddenly calm, “Is not as saintly as she pretends. She does things with Mr. Sholly. My mother told me. That’s a lot worse than my father. Men are allowed.”
Josephine shook her finger in Susie’s face. “You are a liar. A fat, ugly liar!”
“Your father drives a cab at night.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“So what? You’re making up stories!”
“Josie, everyone on the block knows.” Susie stepped through the open window, then slammed it shut so hard that the glass rattled in its wobbly frame. Across the alley, Mrs. Castaldo’s sheets flapped on the line, indifferent white flags waving on the world.
Josephine picked up a shard of the rose-colored teapot, leaving the mirror where it had fallen, and drew back her arm, ready to launch the shrapnel at her cousin. But she was too late. Susie had disappeared and Josephine was left with the sting of her cousin’s words, which sat in her stomach as if she had swallowed a giant and cold raw egg.
Mr. Sholly, a banker, and his wife, came from Switzerland. Unlike the other men in the neighborhood, Mr. Sholly wore polished black shoes and a suit, with his hat tilted slightly to the side, every day. He had a bloodstone pinky ring and a gold pocket watch that chimed. When he walked with his wife, he carried her under the elbow, as if he were afraid she might tip over. Mrs. Sholly, who had been an actress in Switzerland, seemed much older than him, with streaks of silver running across her brown hair, which she kept piled in an elegant bun pinned with tortoise shell combs. She wore ruby lipstick even during the day and basil green velvet suits in winter and crisp vanilla linen in summer. She smelled of lavender. The Shollys knew five languages and whenever they came to visit the Paganos, they asked the family to speak in Italian so they could take a rest from English, which Mr. Sholly said was practical for business, but did not warm his heart the way Italian did.
The Shollys brought the kind of Europe that the Fort Hamilton families had never lived. Some people said they were taken with themselves; Emily said the people down the block were ignorant. The Shollys were refined and good-hearted. They marveled at Josephine’s lilting pronunciation and gave her small bundles of caramels wrapped in wax paper. She had found herself studying the way they cut their meat, passing the fork to the right hand before taking a bite, and the way they did not gulp their orangeade, even on the hottest of days. Mrs. Sholly begged her to play the piano, and Mr. Sholly told her German fairytales and smiled a lot with his broad, white teeth. He had a reddish blonde cowlick that he kept trying to smooth, without success. It made him look boyish, playful even, despite his serious blue eyes. Then one day Mrs. Sholly got sick and did not come to visit anymore, but Mr. Sholly still called, sometimes for dinner, sometimes after dinner, bringing pastries in a green cardboard box tied with white and red string and playing gin with her mother while her father dozed before he left for work.
All this ran through Josephine’s mind as she ran down the steep concrete steps into the basement, where her mother was scrubbing her father’s undershirts on the metal washboard in the big iron laundry sink. Behind her were five jugs of chianti that her father had made.
“Mama!” she shouted. “Mama!”
“What is it Josephine?”
The words burst from her chest as if pushed by her pounding heart: “Susie! Susie said you did bad things with Mr. Sholly. She said everyone knows.”
Emily stopped her scrubbing and wiped her hands on the pockets of her faded apron. “Come here, Josephine.”
Josephine approached the sink and lifted her face so her mother could brush the wisps of hair from her eyes. Emily’s hands smelled of bleach. “Josephine, Mr. Sholly is our friend. So is his wife. I have known them since before you were born.”
“Yes. But is it true, what Susie said? Do you do things with him because Dad isn’t home?”
A small flicker of anger passed across Emily’s face. “What are you talking about? What “things” do you mean? Mrs. Sholly had heart trouble. For awhile, I brought her lunch every day because Mr. Sholly could not come all the way home from New York. He was very grateful. Then she got worse and had to go to the Norwegian Home. He cannot take care of her anymore, and they do not have any children. We are the closest thing to family that they have in this country. You know all this.” Louis had thought Emily angelic in her uncomplaining generosity, but in truth she and Louis had saved each other, in ways that neither the Church nor a child could fathom.
“Yes, but he still visits. I see you laughing with him when we eat. He even got you to sing that Mario Lanza song. You don’t sing with Dad.” Josephine grabbed her mother’s hand and squeezed it. She tried to picture Mr. Sholly holding her mother’s hand; she wondered if they had ever kissed like Greta Garbo; she wondered what her father would say. She had seen her parents dance together only once, at her cousin’s wedding, flying across the wooden floor, like a big, happy bird born by the blue chiffon wings of her mother, steadied by the sturdy coal black legs of her father. Surely they loved each other. Surely her father would not allow Mr. Sholly to steal her mother. Surely her mother would not allow herself to be stolen.
Her mother suddenly looked beautiful. She had bright jade eyes and a perfectly round dot of a beauty mark on her left cheek. Even when she was angry, as she was now, her lips were full.
Emily offered a plate to everyone who came to her door, but she refused to nourish the gossips. “The ‘things’ we do are between your father, Mr. Sholly and me; they are none of anyone else’s business.”
Josephine thought her mother meant to embarrass her, but the desire to understand overpowered her shame. “Aunt Aida said.”
Denying Josephine true understanding meant putting her at risk of transmogrifying into Aida, so Emily tried to open a window into her own soul. “Mr. Sholly and I keep each other company. We discuss music, books and the movies.” She did not know how else to explain to her daughter something that lived outside the bounds of Heaven and of Hell: that a woman could want more than daily bread and calloused caresses along the small of her back.
Emily returned to her scrubbing, thrashing the shirt in the water with loud splashes. “Ignorant people spackle the gaps in their heads with poison. My sister has too much time on her hands. I am starting to think that maybe you do, too. Remember: tomorrow is cemetery day.” Her daughter would need to come to this understanding in her own way; this particular lesson evaded the maw of simplicity.
Josephine, confused, wanted to press her questions, but she did not. In an instant her mother—her round, familiar mother—who fed her warm milk with cinnamon and sugar, who draped flannel blankets over dining room chairs so she could build a castle, who told her stories about Stub, the dog that they had owned in Caserta—transformed into a mysterious woman that she could not fully understand. What was she really thinking? Josephine had never had to decipher her mother’s mind; Emily spoke with the direct, blunt force of a cleaver. It hurt, but Josephine had always understood what she meant. Now, she was an angry Sphinx forbidding Josephine to approach.
The next day, Emily and Aida took their daughters on their weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery. Emily peeled and divided a tangerine between the girls, who ate it as flies buzzed around them, through the beating sun. While the mothers laid bouquets on the graves and prayed, the cousins squatted on a graveled path, poking at ants. Then they ran among the headstones, apart, but each still keeping an eye on the other, until they reached a mausoleum where Aida stood with Emily, black mourning dresses draping their heavy shoulders like tired uniforms, their eyes ringed by ashen gray crescents. The air sat heavy with lilies.
“This is ours,” Aida explained, pointing to the granite wall. “Everyone has a place so that in heaven we’ll all be together, we’ll all be the same. No one will be better than anyone else.”
Nodding, Emily added, “Forever.”
Josephine and Susie eyed one another. The day of the broken teapot weighed on Josephine, making her wonder if she had lost her cousin as well as her mother, but she pushed the idea to the back of her mind, where she kept her memory of the night sky during the blackout, when she and Susie had climbed to the roof to look out at a city frightened by darkness, and seeing nothing where lights of life should have been, looked upward to the millions of stars in a blue-black ceiling, angels watching a human pageant.
Josephine watched her mother and her aunt, one leaning against the other, their reflections partial in the cool gray granite, next to her own and Susie’s. She felt the heaviness of the day against the sheer muslin of her dress and the light pink of Susie’s cheeks, flushed from running. They had battled boys together; they had dreamed of husbands; they had made the fire escape safe. Almost. There were things, Josephine knew, that they could never keep on the other side of the window, thoughts that shattered even the twinkling memories of the night sky and the taste of a sweet lemon ice melting on her tongue.
A few words had transformed her beloved mother into a woman with secrets.
Reaching toward Emily, Josephine lifted her mother’s soft, strong hand to her own face and inhaled, trying to smell the tangerine on her skin.
~
Lisa Lebduska teaches academic writing and works with colleagues to incorporate writing into their teaching at Wheaton College, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in such publications as Lunch Ticket, The Gateway Review, bioStories, Narrative, and Nature’s Healing Spirit: Real-Life Stories to Nurture the Soul. Her short story “Waiting for Steven Spielberg” was awarded first place in the 2017 Stories through the Ages short story contest. She lives in Salem, Connecticut, just off Witch Meadow Road.