“A CALL TO ARMS”
JUNE 24, 1956
Scottie awakened and looked around with satisfaction. She had worked hard over the past two months to make their apartment into a home. Finally, the boxes were unpacked and pictures were on the walls and it was done. And almost without effort, from doorknob (maniglia) to coat hanger (gruccia), Scottie’s Italian had progressed fairly quickly, too, and she could now make herself understood in most situations, and follow the general lines of a conversation as long as the person didn’t speak too quickly. Robertino was a natural teacher, and she looked forward to their afternoons together. He was outgoing, peppy, always in a good mood, and perfectly confident of everything in his life.
In contrast, Scottie felt confused. She wondered if there was something wrong with her marriage to Michael, or if this was what marriage actually was. In the movies she liked, Holiday with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and The Awful Truth with Irene Dunne and Grant, couples teased and bantered and gave each other a hard time as a sign of affection. She and Michael were polite strangers. He did everything a good husband was supposed to do—he was kind, attentive, bought her presents, flowers, took her out to dinner, made love to her. But there was something missing. Maybe it was just that he worked so hard. He was often out late, and had to get up early. She had begun to suspect he didn’t really enjoy sex with her. Was that her fault? Should she be doing something different? Was she a nymphomaniac if she wanted it and he didn’t? Was he getting it from someone else, like the prostitute Gina down the road? These were questions she could not ask Robertino, or anyone, in any language.
She wanted to be an excellent wife. She applied herself in the same way she had applied herself to riding—with attention to detail, research, creativity, ingenuity and passion. She had become an excellent rider, but she felt that as a wife she was still a rank beginner, suitable for leadline only.
She was three months along. Soon she would have to tell him she was pregnant. She hoped he would be so happy that he wouldn’t suspect the truth. She felt that an engine of deception was always running inside her, a projector showing a film of how she needed things to be. She wished she could just tell him everything, apologize, throw herself on his mercy—but she feared it would ruin the fragile bond they had formed. What if he refused to love the child? In any case he would think less of her—he who was so good to her, and who worked so hard to support her. It would hurt him to think she had lied to him. He would never love her after that, and she so badly wanted him to.
Passion. That is what’s missing, she thought. Was that even something real, something to hope for?
She hoped having a child would bring them closer. She pictured a little boy, like Robertino, growing up confident and full of fun. Certainly Michael would like that.
If only Leona were here. Except Leona didn’t approve of Michael, and Scottie didn’t know how to explain everything she was learning about Italy to Leona. Their letters to each other had petered out. She felt an ache of nostalgia for her days at Vassar, and yet at the same time she saw that Scottie as young and shallow.
She moved the aqua sofa slightly to the left, then back to the right. She fluffed the throw pillows, yellow on the right, pink on the left. She stood back to assess the room.
And then she started to cry. She sat down, telling herself it was the pregnancy, that women were especially emotional during these months. For a moment it seemed like it was okay to cry; then she got irritated with herself for even wanting to. Was she living on the street? Was she starving to death? She was bored—hardly something worth crying over. In the midst of this back-and-forth, the doorbell rang.
“I hope I’m not disturbing.” It was Carlo Chigi Piccolomini, looking calm, cool, crisp. She wanted to hug him.
“Not at all,” she said. “Come in.” He looked closely at her face.
“You’ve been crying,” he said as he took his hat off, his face full of concern.
“I—”
“I’m sorry, it’s none of my business. The apartment looks beautiful—so different with all the furniture.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I spent about an hour deciding how to arrange those throw pillows, so please notice them. I’ll get us a drink.”
He wandered around as she went to the kitchen to pour them lemonades.
“Looks like your big day of shopping in New York paid off,” he called out.
“Yes, but it was fun to buy the rest here. Siena has wonderful little shops.” She returned to the living room, but it was empty. She set the tray down.
She found him in the bedroom, where she watched as he ran his hand over the nubbly pink chenille bedspread.
“You don’t mind that I snoop? It’s just fun for me to see what you have done with it. I remember my grandparents’ moldy old furniture. Here was an armadio we used to hide in as children. There is where I was slapped for saying ‘va fanculo’ to the nanny when I was six.” He rubbed the fabric of the aqua and pink striped curtains between his fingers. “Lovely,” he said. “Venetian silk.”
She glowed. No one had been here other than Michael, and he had seemed put off by all of the beautiful Italian things she’d found, as if he’d rather she just order from the Sears catalog.
“I found the armoire around the corner,” she told Carlo. “At that little store.”
“Yes, you have discovered that Italians do not believe in closets.”
“It took four men to carry it up the stairs in pieces. I think they’re still cursing me.”
“I doubt it,” he said, pausing by a stylish cylindrical table with a mirror top. She reached past him and clicked a button to reveal a hidden bar inside. He gave a whoop. “Che carino!”
“Fully stocked, of course. Unless you like vodka. My husband won’t have it in the house.”
“I see,” Carlo said. “No Russian liquor in an American house. What is your favorite drink?”
“Mine? I don’t know. I like gin martinis, and Scotch, and Kentucky bourbon.”
He nodded at her lasso from California on the wall. “You are ready to catch any stray cows that wander into Piazza del Campo.”
“Ready at all times.”
They returned to the living room, and he sat on the sofa, she on the chair. “It is a beautiful home,” he said.
“Well, that’s the problem, I think,” said Scottie. “Is it a home? I mean, it looks like something from a magazine because it is from a magazine. I read a lot of them and copied the pictures. It’s like a stage set.”
He frowned, looking around.
“You think I’m crazy?”
“No, I understand. It reminds me of those rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where you stand in a doorway behind a velvet rope, trying to imagine people laughing, dancing, playing cards in those silent, gloomy spaces.”
“Yes, exactly!” She mimicked a docent, “Bedroom, from the Sagredo Palace in Venice, eighteenth century. The Croome Court Tapestry Room, Worcestershire, 1700s. Apartment of Americans in Siena, 1956.”
He smiled. “I can see that you are tired of objects, of things.”
“Yes. I am.” She stood and threw open the shutters, leaned out the window and sniffed, catching, amidst the scent of coffee, bread, fish, exhaust and garbage, a sweet and lovely familiar aroma.
“Horses,” she said. “I can smell horses.”
He joined her at the window. “Yes. You know that in a few days, the Palio horse race will be run here, right under your windows. You will have the best seat in the piazza.”
“I can’t wait. Robertino, my Italian teacher, explained it all to me. He’s the groom for Porcupine.” Robertino had been talking nonstop about the race for weeks, the endless details, rules and traditions, the trivia: “In 1858, the Goose secretly switched out a bad horse for a good one in the dead of night and no one noticed,” or “There are six contrade that are still part of the Corteo Storico, the traditional parade, even though they were officially abolished in 1729 for breaking the rules. They are called the contrade soppresse.”
“He’s hoping to be a jockey in the August Palio,” she said.
“That will be an enormous honor for him. You know that a few nights before the Palio, you can stay up late and watch from here as every farmer and breeder with a cart horse comes to the prova di notte.”
“Yes, Robertino told me. It’s so the horses can learn the turns, and how to run on tufa.” Tufa was the ochre-colored earth laid down over the stones. Already, young boys in medieval regalia had begun marching up and down the streets beating drums. On July 2, horses representing ten of the seventeen contrade, would run. On August 16, the other seven would run, plus three more drawn by lot. Robertino had explained you didn’t pick your contrada—you were born into it, depending on where your parents were living at the time. That meant family members were often from different contrade, leading to intra-household conflicting loyalties. No one took it lightly.
“What contrada are you?” she asked Carlo.
“Tower,” he said.
“It’s all a bit hard to understand, the loyalties.”
“That’s because it makes no sense. In Siena during the Palio, you feel more loyal to the neighborhood where you were born than to your spouse, if he is from another. It’s pazzo, crazy.”
“I kind of get it, though,” she said. “Where you’re from, that’s deep.”
“Is primal.”
“Robertino said that in time of war, which is what the Palio is, you stick with your tribe. Always.”
Carlo looked away, and she saw a shadow on his face. “That kind of loyalty—blind, based not on reason but on fate—I find it very frightening.” He was speaking quietly but intensely, as if he needed her to understand. “So many times I have asked myself why do people draw these arbitrary distinctions, why do they separate themselves this way? Countries are no different—just arbitrary lines drawn on maps. This is mine, that’s yours. What makes sense for a boy like Robertino—‘my soccer team, my school’—it becomes grotesque and frightening in the mouths of adults.”
“So you’re not coming to the Palio?”
He shook his head and stood. “I must go. I just thought I would stop by and make sure everything was all right with the apartment. You’re okay?” He peered at her.
“I’m fine. We love the apartment,” she said, wishing he could stay, that they could go out and have lunch. The apartment felt better with him in it.
I wish I were married to Carlo … Stop it, she told herself. Jesus. She remembered the vision of a happy foursome she’d had. “I would love to meet your wife sometime.”
“Yes, sometime,” he said. Then, with a tip of his hat, he was gone.
* * *
Robertino was busy with Palio preparations in his contrada and had said he couldn’t meet her this afternoon, so the day stretched ahead of Scottie, empty. The loneliness she had felt before Carlo’s visit was amplified by the sight of the indentation he had left in the sofa cushion. She was filled with a longing, a yearning that she could not express. A yearning for what? She wished there was one person she could tell everything to, someone who would love her despite her background, her flaws, her mistakes. Wasn’t that what all the novels and movies had promised? A one true love?
She washed the lemonade glasses and went out to see what was happening in the streets. Even after two months of walking through the piazza every day, and gazing out over it at night, the spectacle still fascinated her. Today, she saw a teenage boy with a green tie holding hands with a shy girl in white tulle, a small wine-stain birthmark on her face. Two men in hats walked arm in arm, smoking short cigars. Six women standing near the fountain were clearly gossiping about each other’s waistlines and dresses. There was nothing like this in America, she thought as she walked past. Times Square was busy in a commercial way, with its huge colored billboards, but during the day it was full of hordes of people in dark suits hurrying to work, eyes down. Piazza del Campo was Technicolor.
She left the piazza and walked up Via di Città. Because she was tall and blond and clearly not Italian, everyone she passed on the narrow street stared openly at her. She had one label here, as if she were a character in an allegory, or a tarot card: La Straniera, the Foreigner. She had gotten used to this odd form of celebrity, and accepted that it meant she had to be careful of her appearance, since she was effectively stepping onto a stage every time she left the apartment. Today she was wearing a pale pink cardigan over a white full-skirted dress embroidered with a row of large strawberries, small hoop earrings, a pearl choker, white gloves and a simple hat. Gone were the plaid Bermuda shorts and kneesocks that were practically a uniform at Vassar.
Michael had laughed when she’d said she was tired of being a foreigner. She didn’t bother explaining to him her dislike of people noticing differences rather than similarities. He just wouldn’t get it. She wanted to meet Italians, be immersed in Italian culture the way Robertino was. Everything about it fascinated her—the way food was revered, treasured rather than seen as an inconvenience to be packaged in a way that made it as easy as possible to prepare and consume. Nothing in Italy was “instant” or “new and improved.” There were no tray tables to eat off of while you were doing something else, or diners with lunch counters so you could eat in a hurry, and though you could get a panino in a bar, they were new and strange and filled with things like a veal cutlet or just boiled spinach, and if you didn’t sit at a table to eat it, it was considered barbaric. She had explained to Robertino about carhops and drive-ins in California.
“You eat dinner in your car?” he asked, as if she had suggested eating in the manure pile behind the barn. “With your hands?”
She strolled through little Piazza Postierla. She could hear drums somewhere close by, and remembered that Michael had told her to stay in today. The warlike Palio energy worried him, she could see. A militia of nine-year-olds was waving snail flags and chanting as she walked down the Via della Diana toward Porta San Marco, passing women getting their water from a well, bucket by bucket. She decided to stop in and see Signor Banchi.
She had never gone there alone before, and it felt very adventurous to make her way solo through the streets. When she went there with Robertino, Banchi was always delighted to explain the calendar of Italian country life, in which every month had its labors and rewards. He had a saying for every situation, from “A cavallo giovane, cavaliere vecchio” (A young horse needs an old rider) to “A goccia a goccia si scava la roccia” (Drop by drop the rock is carved).
His small, verdant farm was just outside the walls of the city, walls that sharply delineated urban from rural. In fact, the caper plants colonizing the ancient gate made it look like the country was slowly ambushing the city. Banchi had taught her how sheets and tarps were set out in November to collect olives, nasty to taste unless cured in brine, and most of which were then crushed under a huge stone at the communal press. He explained that the oil must be protected from light and heat or it would go rancid. He had shown her the tiny grapes now growing into pale green orbs, beginning to blush, and explained how you tasted for sugar when deciding when to pick. He showed her how to find wild asparagus and borragine, and promised her that in the fall he would show her where to find truffles, which she had never tasted, and which mushrooms in the surrounding forests were edible (“Mushrooms and poets: One in ten is good”). In his garden he showed her how to tend artichokes, tomatoes, basil, potatoes and arugula (“Who doesn’t labor reaps nettles”), leaving enough for the wild creatures and insects who would do their tithing no matter what measures you took to stop them.
“You could spray the bugs and poison the moles,” Scottie had said helpfully.
“Plant enough for everyone,” he said. “And no one has to be greedy.”
Yes, a visit to Banchi was just what she needed.
* * *
Scottie pushed open the gate and walked down the stone path toward Banchi’s front door, which was at the top of a flight of stairs. Before heading up, she peered through an archway into the cool darkness of the ground floor, where a milk cow named Lodovica lived alongside the two enormous oxen who had rescued their car. Their names were Lapo and Cecco, two poets who were friends of Dante; Banchi could quote long stretches of all three writers’ works by heart. Utterly good-tempered beasts, the oxen let her lean against them and inhale their sweet smell as they ate fresh hay. When Banchi had made fun of her for tickling their ears and spoiling them, she gave him a proverb in return: “Who pets the mule doesn’t get kicked.”
“Ciao, ragazzi,” she said, then climbed the stairs to the front door of the farmhouse, open but with a striped cloth hanging in the doorway to deter flies.
“Signor Banchi?” she called. “Permesso?” She saw comic books on the kitchen table, some in Italian, some American. Batman. Tex Willer. Lash Lightning.
From the back room came Robertino, a scrap of bread in his mouth, pulling a straw cap onto his mop of blond curls. His azure eyes in olive skin startled her, even though she saw him nearly every day.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “We have no lesson?”
“I know,” she said. “It’s stupid, I was lonely and bored, and I thought…”
“You were lonely? You missed me?”
“Yes. It’s silly, I know.”
She was about to say that she’d come to see Banchi when Robertino took a quick step toward her, grabbed her arm and kissed her on the mouth.
“No!” she said, pulling away. He was just a boy! But when she looked at him, she saw that he wasn’t just a boy, that she had misread everything.
He was confused, and angry. “You said you missed me. You came here to find me.”
“No, I meant … No, Robertino, I do miss you, but not in that way. I miss our lessons.”
“Oh. I am just a boy to you.” He was sulky, put out. Everything was ruined, just like that, in an instant. She was an idiot.
“It’s not that. You know I’m married,” she said, hoping to save his pride at least. “In America, we’re faithful to our husbands.”
“Always?” He seemed mystified by this.
“Always. And,” she added, the words tumbling out of her mouth even before she had thought them through, “I’m pregnant.” Sono incinta.
“Oh!” he said, his manner changing, brightening a little. She had saved his pride. And something else, she saw—she was no longer an object of sexual desire. She had transformed in his eyes, with those two words, from a woman to a mother. Whore to Madonna. It angered her to see how quickly his attitude changed.
“Auguri! Congratulations!” he pumped her hand in a chaste handshake. “Mr. Messina is delighted, I’m sure.”
“He doesn’t know yet,” she said. “It’s a surprise.”
“Of course, of course, I will keep your secret.”
“Do you think—do you think he’ll be happy?”
“Of course he’ll be happy,” Robertino said. “Nonno is with the rabbits.” He grabbed a peach from a bowl on the table and was out the door and down the stairs before she could even ask what the latest Palio gossip was. She followed him out, feeling relieved but also stupid. He disappeared, then reappeared from behind the house atop a bay mare with two socks.
Scottie had seen the occasional cart horse in the city, but this was the first saddle horse she had seen up close since arriving in Italy. Her eyes traveled over the mare’s legs, seeing how her pasterns angled into her fetlocks, gauging the angles of her croup. She was beautifully put together. Her head wasn’t classic Arab—too straight a nose—but Scottie guessed she was an Arab-Thoroughbred cross. Short, strong back, balanced neck, good bone and big round feet. A real athlete. She had white lines on her front legs where someone had clearly hobbled her with something thin and painful, like wire. She had more white irregular marks right across the most sensitive part of her nose, which Scottie guessed was from a nail-studded noseband. All the scars were old and long healed, but still Scottie felt rage rise in her. She pointed to the scars. “What happened?”
“Only she knows,” said Robertino. “She came from Sicily. They are hard on horses there.”
Scottie sighed. At least the horse was well taken care of now. “She’s fast, isn’t she, and springy?” she called out. “Is this the famous Camelia?”
“Yes,” he said, obviously proud.
“Where are you training today?”
“Near San Galgano.”
She reacted to the name—that was where Ugo Rosini had offered to take her.
“Is it bella?” she asked.
“Bello,” he corrected, his power restored. “Un bel posto.”
He loosened the reins, sending the horse into motion. She watched him ride off. He floated above the ground, bareback, his small body seemingly an extension of the horse, itself a liquid, fiery phantasm. Formally trained riders would have scoffed at the half-out-of-control riding style, but it reminded Scottie of Indians she had seen in California whose barely broke horses retained their feral energy, all the more beautiful for their high heads and wild eyes.
He would be all right. He would find a girl, many girls, and forget he had ever had a crush on her. She, on the other hand, felt earthbound and jealous, but not of love, just of riding. She was a wife now, and soon to be a mother. Horses would have to come later, if ever. She fought back tears again. She walked over to the rabbit hutch, but didn’t find Banchi.
She was filled with a terrible despair, a sense that, as in a board game, she had landed on the wrong square, and would never find her way home again.
Maybe she would go surprise Michael at work.
* * *
Michael was not in the office, which was all locked up. She had only been down to the industrial zone once before. A man from across the way was staring at her, leaning in the doorway of a warehouse, smoking a cigarette.
“Buongiorno, signora,” he called out. “You want to buy a tractor from me instead?” He leered at her.
What an awful man, she thought. She hurried off, wondering, if Michael was not at work, where was he?
* * *
By one o’clock, she was back in Piazza del Campo, where in preparation for the Palio a corps of twelve-year-olds was tossing orange and green Selva flags featuring a rhinoceros high into the sky. They jeered a boy who missed his catch and called him a coglione, which meant both “stupid” and “testicle.”
Nothing was making any sense to her. She decided to subdue her emotions with a giant bowl of pasta. Having been raised to think Italian food was all baked ziti and overcooked spaghetti with watery red sauce, she had been happily exploring the menu of Ristorante Il Campo every day for lunch before her afternoon lessons with Robertino. The headwaiter, Signor Tommaso, had taken to always giving her the same table, so she had a good view of the goings-on in the piazza.
“You are dining alone, signora?” he asked her today as he did every day, pouring her acqua frizzante. He loved to share all the local gossip about the Palio, as well as Italy’s headline news, usually about gruesome deaths—MAN FIGHTS WITH WIFE, THROWS SELF IN WELL—and which American movie stars were visiting Capri and Rome.
“Have you seen the paper today?” Signor Tommaso asked. “Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier are having a baby.”
“How lovely,” she said, her hand going to her own belly.
“An enormous quantity of diamonds was stolen in London.”
“I’ll be on the lookout.”
“In Lucca, a woman ran over her husband with a tractor.”
“Oh dear. Bad for business. Or good for it.”
He suggested the specials—penne arrabbiata, and a trout with almonds, but they sounded light, and she wanted weight to tamp down her emotions. “Pici cacio e pepe,” she said, longing for the heavy hand-cut pasta dripping with cheese. “And figs with prosciutto.” The figs—black and sweet—went so well with the salty prosciutto. “And cake,” she added. “Torta della nonna.”
She watched Signor Tommaso work. Waiting tables in America was a student’s job, a stepping-stone on the way to another career. Here, being a waiter—a job for men only, never women or mere boys—was a career, a profession elevated to an art form. Orders were never forgotten, and diners all felt pampered. Dishes were recommended, but whisked away if an ingredient was less than perfect.
“You will have a good view of the tratta two days from now,” he said, bringing her a glass of cool Vernaccia. “Everyone wants a window on the piazza for the week of the Palio.”
Scottie was taking a forkful of cake when she saw the woman again. The mean, angry woman with the donkey who had yelled at her and called Robertino a traitor. The woman was across the piazza, staring at her, eyes blazing. Scottie, feeling bold, waved. The woman turned away and disappeared into the crowd.
* * *
Scottie stopped in Via Salaria to pick up a loaf of bread for dinner. She had walked around the city all day, but had barely spoken to anyone. She missed female company. Italian women were polite but did not seek to make friends. Maybe her baby would be a girl.
At first it had been annoying not to be able to buy everything she needed in one place, but now she was enjoying the daily routine, chatting with the owners, buying only what she and Michael would eat that night. Turned out she didn’t need that large American refrigerator, which was fortunate since it still didn’t work, and the power went out regularly. What was the point of storing food when you could buy it fresh? Due etti di mortadella, un mezzo pane, un po’ di insalata, grazie, e un chilo di pomodori.
At the panetteria, she waited her turn, looming head and shoulders over the crowd of tiny Italian women, who pulled away from her instinctively, leaving a circle of space around her like a demilitarized zone. She stared at the huge, thick, crusty loaves. When she first saw them, she had laughed out loud. Unsliced bread! So old-fashioned. The store did smell good, though. The bread, when she managed to hack through the thick crust, narrowly avoiding cutting her arm off, was chewy. It had a funny taste, too.
“Bread of Tuscany have no salt,” explained the lady who owned the store.
“Why?” Scottie asked.
The woman shrugged as if the question were absurd.
Today the steady military rat-a-tat of the Palio drums in the street outside was beginning to give her a headache. A woman standing near her nudged another and whispered. Scottie pretended they weren’t talking about her. This happened all the time.
Suddenly she felt a terrible tightening in her belly, an agonizing twisting sensation. She dropped the bread she was holding, and her purse, and gave an involuntary groan.
* * *
None of the women spoke English, but Scottie felt well looked after, as if a troop of strong-armed dwarves from a fairy tale had taken her under their wing. They had surrounded her, held her up, and she had been led by several of the women through the back room of the bakery into an adjacent apartment. Small, dark, warm, it felt like a bread oven itself. As she started to vomit, a woman held her dress back so it did not get soiled, while another quickly mopped up the floor.
“Troppo bello per rovinarlo,” the woman said, smoothing the dress, and the others clucked in agreement.
They led her to a small bathroom, but didn’t close the door. “C’è sangue, sangue?” They pointed to her private area.
Blood. They were asking if there was blood.
I’ve lost the baby, she thought.
It was like having six mothers at once—she didn’t feel embarrassed to be in the midst of these women. She felt the terrible cramping again.
A hush fell over the room as, in front of all of them, she checked her underwear.
“No sangue,” she said.
A cheer went up in the room. The women beamed and held their hands together in joy.
She had not lost the baby.
“Medico?” she asked. She hadn’t seen a doctor since arriving in Siena. They must have them. She’d heard ambulances now and then.
One of the women pulled in a little girl of about ten, with huge brown eyes, her blue flowered dress way too large for her, who was apparently studying English in school.
“You have … cramp,” she said to Scottie, after the women had shouted at her for a while, gesticulating. Scottie was sitting at a tiny table on a rickety little chair. A single lightbulb swung over her head, dressed up with a frilly pink halo of paper. A hunk of bread was in front of her, and a glass of water. She felt drained and still crampy.
Just a cramp, she thought. The women were trying to tell her something about a muscle, that her uterus was a muscle, that it had a cramp because it was growing. Incinta, incinta, they said.
“Pregnant,” said the little girl.
“Yes,” said Scottie.
“They say you should eat, get strong again,” said the little girl.
“What is the address of the doctor?” asked Scottie.
“No need for doctor. Mamma send for herbs.”
Scottie was worried, suddenly guilty that she hadn’t seen a doctor yet. “But when you’re pregnant, the doctor?”
They all shook their heads. “The doctor is for when you’re sick.”
“You take the herbs,” the girl translated for a sensible-looking woman in a simple blue maternity dress. “She has seven bambini, I mean children,” said the girl.
“Herbs?”
“Yes. You must—” Here the girl paused, her “Dick and Jane” vocabulary exceeded. “You must drink the tea to calm the cramps, so they do not get worse and you do not lose the baby. And you must eat.”
The women talked over each other in their eagerness to get the girl to transmit their messages. Scottie could tell they were derisive about the doctor, a man. Clearly the women felt they knew their bodies better than he did.
“This happens many times. No need for doctor. You eat. You drink tea. It will help, but the baby is coming when it’s coming,” they said with a glorious obviousness that flew in the face of all the conflicting articles in American women’s magazines obsessing about pregnancy. She had read one in McCall’s that said a woman should hardly gain any weight during her term at all. She doubted this group would agree.
A slump-shouldered woman came in, eyes down, with a small packet wrapped in white paper and handed it to Scottie. “Tea,” she whispered. “Buono.”
“Where did you get this tea? What is it?” Scottie asked in Italian.
The woman, not understanding her, nodded and said, “Sì, té.” Scottie recognized her, suppressing a gasp—it was the prostitute.
“Thank you,” Scottie said. The woman blushed and rushed out again.
“Ah, Gina,” murmured the women, as if they were a Greek chorus. There was much eye rolling and sighing.
The little girl filled the awkward silence. “Herbs come from mountain. Monte Amiata. Woman there, how you say, healer. Better than doctor.”
She drank the tea, felt it wash down inside her. After a couple of minutes she stood up. The cramps were gone.
“Thank you, grazie, grazie,” she said. She took out her wallet and tried to hand the bakery owner some money, but the woman staunchly refused it.
“Fa niente,” she said over and over. It’s nothing.
The tribe ushered her back through the room behind the store, past flour sacks and mixing bowls. A light snow of flour was on every surface. There were glass French doors standing open with a beaded curtain drifting slightly in the breeze. Beyond was a courtyard where a large domed brick structure stood, a huge pile of slim pieces of wood next to it, a wooden paddle leaning nearby.
“That’s where the bread is made?” Scottie asked.
“Sì sì, forno a legna.” A wood-fired oven. Scottie thought of the field trip her fourth-grade class had made to the Helms Bread Factory on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles. All gleaming stainless steel, huge industrial ovens, workers in white paper hats and hairnets, laboratories and conveyor belts. The latest in modern technology.
They passed back through the store, and the woman unlocked the door and turned the sign from CHIUSO to APERTO, and Scottie was back on the street, a loaf of bread under her arm.
A baby. It was no longer just an idea. It was real. It was coming, like a hurricane bearing down on her.
If she had lost the baby, she could have left. Women did this, and sometimes it wasn’t the end of the world. Clare Boothe herself had been divorced, and Henry Luce had still married her.
Would she leave Michael, if she could? He was a good man. Did a husband have to be more than that?