She lay on her narrow bed, staring out the window. She watched the pigeons on the fire escape, heard the rumble of Chicago waking up on a hot summer day. She felt old now. And very tired. She lay there quietly, looking at the black Crucifix on the wall, with a stalk of Easter palm stuck in the back. She and the murdered Christ observed each other calmly, not speaking.
She flet a coldness in her legs now, before she got up and the old arthritis in her hip had ceased to be a companion and had become an enemy. She breathed carefully, gathering strength. She had spent years hoarding pennies, scraps of cloth and ribbon, bits of string, ends of bread to make meatballs and crumbs. Now that habit must be used to save strength so no one would know that she was dying.
The body is a frail thing, she thought. And it will betray me in the end. If it will not work willingly, I'll drive it by my mind until it can no longer move. And the, she prayed, let my mind go. Do not let me be the witness of my own humiliation. The vison of people caring for her, helpless, made her angry.
I cared for may in their last days, when they had become like infants in a crib.
"But not me." she vowed silenly to the crucifix on the wall. Not me.
Carefully, slowly, deliberately, she wrapped her faded dressing gown around her and went into the kitchen. Her gray hair hung down her back in a long braid, her face was lined and unrelenting, her dark eyes watched the world with defiance and amused tolerance. She went to the old green stove with the claw feet and poured her coffee from the chipped enamel pot and thought of the pity of her relatives if they knew she was dying. "Pah," she said to herself. "They needed more help when they were young and well than I need now."
She heard Mrs. Costanzo's radio across the narrow dusty courtyard, she saw the #36 bus lumber by, hissing in the heat. She watched Mr. Schonberg open the hardware store. She sat at the wooden table with the red and white oil cloth cover and dunked her biscotti in her sweet, milky coffee, and listened to her city begin to awaken on this summer day. Her old radio was silent. If should couldn't have Stella Dallas, she would have nothinhg. Let Mrs. Costanzo listen to the modern noise. She would listen to her city.
She would listen to her city, and keep her contacts with Italy, the lifeline to Sambiase and the old contry. She walked slowly to her dresser where the picture of her dead brother and the lighted candle stood. She took the candy box from the center of the dresser top. She crossed herself at the little shrine with a picture of the Sacred Heart pierced with thorns above it, and took the old candy box of letters back to the kitchen table.
She looked inside at the letters from Italy. The thin blue paper was carefully folded, She drank the sweet coffee and reviewed her letters. They all had bright Italian stamps, and thin spidery handwriting, and the envelopes were thin and brittle. The all began "Cara Michaelangela."
At the bottom of the box was the paper that proclaimed her a naturalized citizen of the United States. With that paper she could vote. With that paper, she belonged here. She was pround of that paper, and brought it with her every time she voted, in case some smart young person at the polling booth questioned her. Her and her accent, from the old country. She smothed the paper written in 1918, the year of the Armistice, She smoothed it and put it back in its treasured place at the bottom of the candy box.
The next letters she brought out were the letters that told her that she had become an aunt. Her sister Isabella had given birth to a boy when Michealangela was 18. The ink was faded and the paper torn at the edges, but she still remembered the pride that she walked to work with that day in her black dress to the tailor's.
"I am an aunt," she said. "An aunt to a boy in Italy.
All the ladies in the tailor's shop were proud, and they had a new connection, a bloodline, to a male child in the old country. The old ladies chortled, relishing the news of the boy child's growth that they could carry with them, like warmed bricks, throught the coldness of their lives.
Her newest letters were there, at the top of the candy box, written on thin blue air mail paper, spidery handwriting all over the page to get the last messages into the alloted space. The old lady caressed the papers, put them carefully back in the box, stirred her sweet coffe, and waited for her beloved grandson.
It was hot and muggy as Pete rode the uptown bus from the Art Institute. He had the day off and had walked from Michigan Avenue and Adams Street, where the breeze off the lake is fresh and cool, down the gray canyons, past the El rattling above and waited on the corner for the #36 bus. He was 22 years old, tall and slender, a bit stoop shouldered, and he looked at the world through the lens of a camera.
He was working on a Master's in fine Arts but photography was his passion, his life. And now he was on his way to see Nonna, who never understood the mechanism of the F stop but who kenw exactly what made a great photograph.
"You look at something you want to hold." she told Pet once, "Look at it, how it tell you without words. You take a picture and you have that moment, always, Always, the telling without words."
Pete felt the blasting heat from the great buildings in the Loop, along with the cool beer smell of the open doorways of the bars. He smelled bread baking and steak frying, and bus exhaust.
He got off the #36 buss at Division Street, tacky and dirty as always. He walked in the steaming morning past 'J. Toguri, Imports,' and peered in the dusty window at Japan. Past the brass and the jade and the saki sets, back where no one could see from the street, was a tiny tea room, right in the middle of the store. He had sat many times on the tatami mats and drunk green tea from cups like eggshells, wondering why the noise of Chicago was so far away fron that tiny, tranquil place.
He walked past the hardware store and noticed with contentment that the display was exactly the same as he had remembered for two years. Mr. Schonberg did hang a Christmas tree in the window in December, but he never changed the arrangement of pots and pans and tools.
Pete walked past Pleezings Grocery, smelled the wood floor-butcher shop-fruit stand sharpness of the place. The Italian cheeses and fresh bread, and he waved to Sig, the Auschwiz survivor who kept the wine cellar. Sig always had a glass of sherry for Nonna in the winter, to warm old bone when the wind screamed outside.
He walked up the steps to the old apartment house and stepped inside. The vestibule smelled of cabbage and floor polish as usual. Mr Zigler had mended the worn carpet on the stairway very carefully, but the owners would never replace it, Someday, this old house would be torn down to make way for tall buildings, but not yet,
Pete thoughts wounded up the stairs. Not yet.
The smile that Nonna greeted Pete with was the old smile, tolerant of the way he came up the stairs two at a time, but she was very glad to see him. She had dressed in a stiff black material, her hair was combed an braided and put back in a bun, and she wore her prize possessions and only vanity: a pair of tiny diamond earrings in her pierced ears. It had taken a long time to get them right because her hands would not obey her. In her mind they kept saying "You are dying, old woman. Why dress up and waste energy on earrings and stockings?"
And she set her mouth and put her earrings on and said to herself: "Old woman, yes. Feeble, no." Pete would never know how long it took for her to get dressed and she would never tell him.
"Some coffee?"
He nodded, pleased by the sameness of their weekly ritual, and watched her put the chipped pot on the stove. He remembered that pot since childhood. It had half an orange flower on it. He watched Nonna take the plate with the bumpy flowers out of the cupboard for the anise biscuits. She added some others that he didn't recognize, and she said with a shrug,
"Mrs. Costanzo made them. They're Sicilian style, but they're pretty good."
Pete smiled. The pecking order of Calabria and Sicily was maintained on Clark Street. Pete drank the hot sweet coffee, waiting to see the faces in silhouette at the bottom of the cup. He could remember the soup bowls from this pattern, many years ago when he ate pastina in chicken broth until he could see the faces of the men, one smoking a pipe. Everything was so familiar, so comforting, so routine, that it took him a few minutes to realize how slowly Nonna was moving.
"Is your hip bothering you, Nonna?"
She lifted one eyebrow and shrugged, wordlessly. OK, go along with her. No noticing, he thought. And he began to tell her what they were going to do this morning. There was an art fair a block away on Wells, and all his friends were there. She needed to get out even in this heat.
"We can have a granita, they have a stand there, and they have pottery and pictures and ropes in the street. No cars, just people and kids running around." It was her kind of morning, watching, not saying much, moving slowly and carefully in the crowd, enjoying the icy lemony sweetness of the granita, letting the activity nourish her.
For a moment she said nothing, thinking of how tired she would be after such a morning, but then she set her jaw and a light glinted at the bottom of her dark eyes, and she thought, "Yes, better to wear our where there are people and children than waiting in the silence of this room."
"We'll finish our coffee," she said, "and I'll get my letters. I must mail two letters to Sambiase, one to Isabella and one to Jennie's oldest granddaughter. Her third child was just baptized. "
She brought out the candy box full of letters and sat at the table, smiling over them.
"Here, look at this." She showed Pete one letter, very recent. "It's from Isabella, all about the wedding of her niece's youngest daughter. She wore the veil that I wore when I was married ... and this, Angelina's baby was baptized in the dress I made him last year."
"Here was one about the dissolute life of a handsome lad in a neighboring town, this about the battles with the local mayor about the pigs in the street. "
The letters were a saga, a chronicle and as a part of Nonna's life as the radio in Mrs. Costanzo's apartment, or her daughter who lived in Wilmette and rarely came to Clark Street. And Nonna had not seen Sambiase since she left at twenty, nearly sixty years before. She had never danced at the weddings or drunk a toast to the birth of a baby. She could not hear the laughter nor comfort the tears of all those people who lived in the letters. She had lived for fifty years in Chicago, but if someone had asked where her hometown was, she would say with surprise, "Why, Sambiase, of course." Not Chicago, nor New York, where she had come from the ship to the old gray uncle who kept the candy store. No, it was Sambiase where her father had been the mayor, and her uncles were the doctor and the baker. She had come from a fine house, with servants, and land. Her memories had been kind to her. Sixty years and two world wars had not been kind to Sambiase. But she never went back, and she never forgot.
Nonna put the letters away, thin as leaves, into her candy box, and took up the ones she was to mail. Then she looked at Pete, and said, "What's that noise, it sounds like wind. Pete, there's a wind inside my head ... "
Pete ran for a washcloth and ran cold water on it, and rubbed Nonna's neck and forehead. She was pale, and quiet. She sat in the chair, not moving, feeling the cold creep up her legs.
"I'll go to bed, Pete, and rest. Wait here, and we'll go to Wells Street when I get up."
Pete helped her to the bedroom, and she waved him out impatiently.
In her room, the old lady undressed, slowly. It took her a long time to unfasten the buttons, remove the stockings, hang the dress in the closet, and find her nightgown. It took a long time and she heard Pete pace around the apartment, wondering what to do.
"No one is going to do this for me ... " she unrolled her nylons and put them carefully away, folded the underwear, combed her hair. She sat on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily, looking like an ancient child waiting for sleep.
Pete knocked, "Can I get you anything, Nonna?"
"A little whiskey, in my glass."
And then she fell.
Pete stood at the window looking down at the wet pavement as the city was washed by summer rain. It was close to supper time and people were hurrying home, carrying newspapers over their heads as gray rain poured down. There was thunder in the air, and silence in the room except for the ticking of a clock. Pete walked into the bedroom where his grandmother lay, and pulled the bedclothes up over her shoulders. The two of them, the old lady and the young man, stared at each across a void of years.
Her eyes, bright and alive, were the only evidence of her struggle. Her hands moved restlessly, but her eyes burned with a fever to live, burned against the creeping coldness in her legs, raged in silence at the helplessness of her body. And Pete stood in the doorway watching her brown lively eyes and he turned away and wept. He could not watch her struggle, so he turned away and left her battling alone.
Nonna's brother, Giovanni, was the only one who could be there that night, so Pete stood by the wet window and waited for his uncle, short fat Uncle Giovanni, the butt of jokes and kindest of them all.
Giovanni had been a little boy when they came to this country, holding tightly to his tall sister's hand. He never understood her, never felt at home with her sharp anger and pride, but he came in the pouring rain and put his arm around Pete.
"I called everybody, so by tomorrow .... " he shrugged and poured a glass of wine, glancing into the room where Nonna lay. How she would hate the gathering of the family, he thought. She would laugh at them, and tell them to mind their own business. If she could.
He watched Pete, sitting with his head in his hands, looking at the letters from Italy in the candy box.
"How can I take pictures, with her gone?" Pete stood up and started pacing again. "Do you know she's seen things I've never seen, in lights on the street, in the tracing of a fire escape in the snow, in buildings in fog and smoke. She sees children in the part, old women in the markets as no one else sees them. I've used her eyes for three years and watched where she told me to watch, saw what she told me to see. Remember my photograph that won the Newman prize at the Institute last year? The old man watching the boy sail his boat? She saw it at Lincoln Park and said 'there's a good picture. Take it.' Just like that. She saw everything, she saw through fakery, put-on, she could spot a phony a mile away. And now she's dying." The tears came, and Pete looked away, through the window at the rain.
Giovanni took Pete's arm as though he would force ideas into his bones. "As far as I can see, she's given you a damn good lesson in your craft. Remember how she did it, pull her into yourself, into your own vision. And then she won't die."
Pete sat moving crumbs around the table, looking very young and defeated. His uncle jabbed a hard fmger at his chest.
"What do you want me to do, call a doctor, or a priest? She'd kill me. She'll put the evil eye on both of us if we do that. She thinks doctors mean death, and she loves her church and despises the priests. Don't ask me to figure it out. You know why she insisted on going to the six o'clock Mass and not the later one? She said she didn't think it was right to have guitar music in the church. I told her the Pope said it was OK, and she said, 'what does he know, he's only the Pope. No guitars in the Mass.'"
Giovanni took one of the letters with the spidery handwriting in his hands, and read the return address and felt the pale blue paper with his fmgers. "You never saw Sambiase, did you Pete?"
Giovanni sat down heavily and poured another glass of wine, and watched the light reflected in it.
"What did you find there, Uncle Giovanni?"
"Find? Poverty, I found poverty like I hope I never see again. Poverty so deep it will never come away from the earth. Poor ground that grows nothing but fennel and bitter rice, and many poor thin children with enormous eyes and thin little hands. And we're supposed to remember the big house and the servants, and the family of the mayor. When I was there, living with them, I knew that every plate of macaroni I ate meant that someone went without a meal. Poverty, that's what I found. Not poverty so bad anyone should inform the United Nations, you understand. But just enough poverty to kill ambition, to kill any feeling for the goodness of change, any trust in tomorrow and faith in your own hard work. Some of them get out, to Naples or even Rome, but most of them stay and slowly starve in Sambiase, writing to my sister the litany of la familigia."
He drank some more wine and his voice shook. "And how can we help them? Better to stop writing the letters, to forget them. If she had seen the children .... "
He looked at the room where she lay so still. He knew there would be no more letters, no more telling of young girls in wedding gowns and young men in priests vestments and births and deaths and ebb and flow of lives.
"They will all know when Michealangela dies, I will tell them that. But nothing more. No more letters. And then maybe I can forget the lovely eyes of all those thin children ... "
He put his head in his hands and Pete leaned against the table and the clock ticked, and the rain fell.
And in her room, Nonna watched the light begin to fail. Night would come, dull and gray and wet over her city.
"I love Chicago in the rain," she thought."The hiss of taxi wheels, the whistles of the doormen at the hotels, footsteps hurrying by."
"But I won't see it anymore," she thought fiercely. "I'll die and I won't see it."
She listened to the mumble of voices and knew that Giovanni and Pete were talking, and she clenched her teeth and thought of the letters.
"Giovanni never learned to write the real Italian," she thought. "He took up English and forgot Sambiase. He clung to my hand when he was ten years old and we got off the boat, and he doesn't remember how they called our father "Don Luigi" . No one remembers, no one but me."
" Let me go fast," she prayed, "Don't give them time to pity me."
She looked at the old crucifix on the wall, with the dry stalk of Easter Palm behind it, and with bright defiant eyes she dared the mild and suffering Christ to deny her prayers.