The next morning I spent ten lazy minutes watching the upside-down market wake with me—vendors setting out stalls, carts making deliveries, street cleaners and cops making their rounds. Ten minutes stretched into twenty, and would have stretched into thirty, except my stomach grumbled. Loud.
I hopped out of bed and got in close to the projection. The cat from yesterday had returned, sleeping beside a barrel. I ran a finger along its projected back, as the old man had done, but the cat didn’t react. I tapped the wall beside its projected paw. The cat didn’t stir. I poked my nose right next to its projected whiskers. “Boo.”
The cat slumbered on.
I opened the curtain and let sunshine displace my discontent.
What the old man knew about the curtain, he’d kept to himself. I dressed and headed downstairs, determined to wheedle the information out of him.
He sat at his workbench, face drawn, shoulders drooping, like he’d lined his sleeves with iron. He shook a pill from a paper packet and slid it under his tongue.
Something cold and crampy clamped my midsection. “Are you sick?”
He swept his opened palm over his forehead, down his cheek, and across his mouth, an actor donning his mask for the performance. He slipped the packet into his shirt pocket. “Sometimes, I get a little tired.”
He turned over the newspaper at his elbow, hiding a headline which started with the word DISASTRO, then slid a plate of polenta— left over from the previous night’s dinner and provided by the tailor’s wife—across the table. I shoveled piece after piece into my mouth, my mood again set to a rolling and optimistic boil.
The old man watched me, fork suspended over his plate. I looked to my blouse, ran a hand down my braid, searching an undone button, a ribbon trailing in the cream, some reason for his scrutiny. “What is it?”
“I went through your father’s papers last night. I cannot find his Petition of Intent. That’s the document he would file to say he intended to become a citizen.”
It felt odd to hear the old man speak English. “How do you say it?”
“Pe-ti-shun a In-ten.” He found a pencil among the flotsam on the table and wrote the words on the top of a box of tacks. He showed them to me. “I can write the immigration and ask if your father ever filed one, but if I do, they will know about you.”
I stopped dribbling honey into my bowl. “Know what?”
“That you are orphaned. With the Petition of Intent, that is not a problem. You could take the test for yourself and make your own oath of citizenship. Without it, you cannot make a claim until you are twenty-one. But I do not know what would happen in the meantime, and I do not want to ask anybody. You have no guardian, and they may move you.”
He meant to an orphanage. I’d read about them in stories. There’d be many girls, our hair tied with bows starched stiffer than our pinafores. We’d sleep, one cot after the other, like a tray of canneloni. Eat at tables arranged in rows. Stand in orderly files, littlest to biggest, when prospective parents came to look us over.
The prospective parents decided me. “You could be my guardian.”
“I am an old man and I am not a relative.”
“Then my brothers. Everybody says the war will be over soon. If we write to them, they can say you can take care of me until then.”
“I already wrote to them. Yesterday, before you were up. Young Carlo took the letter to the war office for me.”
Young Carlo. Probably a neighbor kid. “I won’t be a bother. You’ll see. I’ll cook and clean.”
“You can cook?”
“Not a lot.” Not at all. What for? Mamma had done all the cooking. “But I could learn. All kinds of things. I could even iron your clothes.”
The old man shoved aside dishes still sitting on the table from the night before. I snatched them, circumscribed a wide arc around the signora’s pile of mending, and set the dishes in a sink already piled to overflowing. I turned on the tap.
He arranged a set of spats, their buttonholes stretched and useless. He placed them inside out, lay snippets of leather over the holes, I presumed for reinforcement, then threaded a needle, one that curved more than his pinky. “Signor Lattanzi irons my clothes. He has a press downstairs in his shop.”
The heat crept up my neck, reminding me of what I might do with an old scarf. I looked to the door, picturing the tailor’s wife on the other side, listening, as I had.
Pompous old pincushion. Let her iron clothes. I was meant for bigger things. “Poppa wanted me to take a secretarial course. So many girls are learning the typewriter now. They dress up every day and go to offices. I see them sometimes. They take the trolley.”
The old man scratched under his right cheek, at a mole near lost amid the fine-grained cracks of his skin. “Very modern. But those girls don’t get married.”
“Who says I have to get married?”
“Don’t you want children?”
What did he care if I wanted children? What did anybody? The world had plenty of children. It’d do fine without mine. “You sound like Mamma.”
“But not like your poppa.” He tied off a length of thread. “Do you speak English?”
In those days, not everybody did. “Oh yes. I went to school. Poppa placed great importance on education.” I placed my hand over my heart, as the nuns had taught us, and swallowed to get my mouth ready to form all of English’s harsh angles. “I pledge allegiance to my flag . . .”
I had been born in Italy, but I pledged to America, because to me, the bel paese, the beautiful country, was a distant tangle of torturous closed-in streets filled with dogs and donkeys and people. So many people. Living wall to wall, exploding out of every corner, filling every chair, crowding every fire, and scraping every last bean from the pot.
I pledged to America, with an accent that still had plenty of trailing “uhs” and “ohs,” because my parents had scrimped and saved to make the long voyage. I pledged to America, because America was where my loyalties lay, where my hopes were forged, and where my dreams would realize. I pledged to America, because America was my future, and that pledge made me American, no matter what the immigration said.
The old man listened to my recitation with a grave respect. “You may need to know that for the examination. For citizenship.”
He glanced at the clock, then at the signora’s pile of mending. “So, Fiora Vicente, will you go to school today?”
I headed out and into a hustle and bustle bountiful with possibility. School? Ha. I was a woman on my own, free of encumbrances, and I had ambitions.
The trolley approached, trundling past storefronts and stalls. Each bore a poster reminding of the next day’s parade, the parade for which the tailor and his wife so busily prepared. I stepped aboard, handed my fare to the conductor, and found a place among the tight pack of people, my plan to head to parts of the city I’d never been. I’d stayed up late to peruse the classifieds in the old man’s newspaper and found a school that would teach me skills. Skills that would let me travel that trolley into the future, my braid looped into a twist at the back of my head, like the other typewriter girls.
It was a beautiful day. Sunswept. Overflowing with life.
And while I didn’t know it then, soon—swift, swift, swift—it would all steamroll to a stop.