WILLOW VALE
Copyright © 2011, 2016 by Christine Alethea Williams
All rights reserved.
In memory of Nona:
Orsola Angeli
1899 – 1979
CHAPTER ONE
Faces wet with tears, Francesca Sittoni and her mother clung to each other one final time. Her mother’s bones felt as thin and fragile as those of a bird. With little enough to eat for any of them, Francesca knew her mother had been giving much of her own meager portion to her daughter and to her granddaughter, Elena, to build them up for the trip. Out of nothing, Maria Romallo somehow made do for her family. Pellagra scoured the valley, the poor surviving on cornmeal with a bit of meat perhaps once in a month, if a family were lucky enough to own a few scrawny cattle or a single hog. Neither Francesca nor her daughter displayed the telltale skin sores or nervous tics of the nutritional disorder, signs of disease that might have prevented them from entering America. In Francesca’s estimation her mother was a miracle worker; the daughter knew she didn’t possess her mother’s talents—or her faith. Francesca would never aspire to the place in heaven that surely awaited her saintly mother.
“Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye,” Francesca whispered, her throat tight.
“Come now, woman! Basta. That’s enough.” Francesca’s new husband, Cesare, broke into the sad farewell from his seat on the wagon, where he waited impatiently with her trunk and her small daughter.
Francesca’s father, Giuseppe, stood to one side, eyes averted. Though as a rule he did not show his children much outward affection, in this case Francesca thought he might at least bestow a rare hug upon her or his granddaughter before they left on their journey to the other side of the world. If she’d had time, or the inclination to examine anyone else’s feelings outside of her own, Francesca might have discerned that her rawboned father was ashamed. Besides inheriting the traditional mountain personality of aloofness and stiff pride, the distance Giuseppe put between himself and his children buffered him from his own failure. No matter how hard he worked or how much he sacrificed, he could never seem to get ahead. The Popular Party had the right of it, to his way of thinking: a man should be able to make a living, feed his family, and acquire land and beasts. But there was no way, hemmed in as their valley was by mountains to east, north, and south, to acquire any land, even if he had some way to find the money to purchase any. The aristocracy and wealthy businessmen owned what arable land that existed in the valley, and had begun replacing mediocre fields with apple and pear orchards. The new mechanized farming machinery was outrageously expensive, and fertilizers and the new varieties of seed were beyond Giuseppe’s ability to buy. His three scrawny cows could barely produce enough manure to fertilize Maria’s garden, let alone the golden fields he could only dream of owning.
In addition to the competition from the provinces of Lombardy and Veneto, steamships had made shipping from America and Australia so cheap, a poor man couldn’t compete with plunging worldwide prices. Then the war, the Great and Bloody War, and the resulting spiral of monetary inflation, had stripped him of what little he had possessed before.
He found himself arguing in his head once more with Maria about having married Francesca off to Cesare, and earlier even, when Francesca was only twelve, the terrible fight they’d had about lending their eldest daughter out to work like a serf for the rich Bolzanos to repay a debt he had incurred:
Well, what is a man to do, eh? Tell me that, wife! What would you have me do instead? I’m trapped here, snared like a rabbit. And you, with your pious whining, and the children, always with mouths open like a nest of begging birds, everybody always hungry. There’s nothing a man can do!
He glanced at his wife, her lips moving in silent prayer, wringing her hands while tears rolled down her dry, wrinkled cheeks and then at his daughter, dutifully climbing into the wagon beside her new husband and the child from her first, tragic marriage. So Cesare was nobody’s choice for a husband for Francesca. So what? Cesare had ambition, and had already made enough money in America to return to Val di Non for Francesca and Elena. Cesare, when compared to the Romallos, was rich.
Why, Cesare had made enough money in America to pay Giuseppe for Francesca. But that was enough of that. Giuseppe didn’t allow himself to think about having secretly bargained a bride price for Francesca. God forbid he might some day reveal that concealed humiliation to his long-suffering wife or, worse, one of his compatriots down at the local tavern, where a man could at least smoke a pipe or enjoy a glass of grappa and a plate of tripes in peace. But he wondered how Maria, the good Saint Maria, thought he had fed them all for the last year? Four grown sons and three almost grown daughters in addition to Francesca, himself and his wife and little Elena: so many demands and so little opportunity for anyone. There had been little work outside of a few weeks a year picking fruit for the rich landowners for a generation. For a lifetime. For an eternity. The industrialization that had gained a toehold in northern Italy had been withheld from the Austrian Tyrol, and especially from the backward valleys of the Trentino region.
And so now the war had made the residents here Italians instead of Austrians. The only difference Giuseppe could discern was that the war had cut off old outlets for the valley’s produce; the crops and fruit that hadn’t gone on the mule trains to feed soldiers dug into rocky trenches on the Alpine peaks lay rotting in the fields during the war, and now the valley’s inhabitants must find new avenues of getting their produce to market.
And Giuseppe was expected to start over, at his age, from nothing. Just what was a man to do with such forces arrayed against him? Cesare had been sending money from America with the understanding that he would soon come to claim Francesca. Anyone clever enough had already escaped Val di Non, all the young people deserting Trentino—those who hadn’t been slaughtered in the war, that is—leaving behind the old folks in the almost painfully green land of their birth. Giuseppe’s sons, by some miracle, had been spared. Now they, too, were of an age to marry, yet they had no resources to draw on to feed families of their own. Cesare had somehow gotten around the stringent American immigrant quotas in order to take Francesca and Elena away, two of only a few hundred from Italy allowed that year. Soon Giuseppe’s adult sons would find a way to go too, and he would be left with three useless daughters and an old, broken-down wife.
But who could blame the young ones for leaving, the “flower of Europe” with energy enough left to dream after the devastating war? And who could blame Cesare, who was smart enough to slip out of the country a little earlier than anyone else in order to escape compulsory military service? So he saw what was coming and fled before the war. Using his ties to the Socialists, he disappeared into Italy, and thence to America, before he could be conscripted into the Austrian army. It didn’t make Giuseppe’s new son-in-law a coward to have escaped becoming cannon fodder. It only meant Cesare had a head start on his fortune in America.
Cesare’s disappearing act ultimately meant that, because of Francesca, Giuseppe’s family had something to eat—at least a little—while the rest of the valley starved. The “dowry” Giuseppe had accepted for Francesca meant that she, and little Elena, and whatever other children of Cesare’s that Francesca would eventually bear, would also escape the soul-sapping poverty of Val di Non.
“Goodbye, Nona! Goodbye, Nono!” Elena’s high voice echoed back to them. Standing beside Giuseppe, Maria burst into a fresh torrent of tears, covering her face with her hands to block the sight of her daughter and granddaughter departing.
So Francesca will never thank me, Giuseppe thought. It’s just as well.
He watched the wagon until it rolled out of sight down the road, heading for Trieste, the port city Italy had wrested from Austria along with the Trentino region as the price of peace with her former ally. There Francesca, Cesare, and Elena would board the refurbished troopship President Wilson, bound for the new world and a new life.
And Maria, virtuous Santa Maria, he was certain would never thank him either. In fact, she’d probably cry for days to her God, until she wore out what little strength she had left. Let her. So what? A man did what he had to do, the best he could do for his family with no help from God. Giuseppe, for one, was almost certain the God that Maria prayed to so desperately had deserted Val di Non long ago.
Francesca, unaware of the machinations that had gotten her to her present situation, watched the only home she had ever known recede into the distance behind the swaying wagon. Her arm around Elena, she tried to hold back her tears, twisting the plain gold wedding band on her finger, certain her new husband would have little patience for a woman’s tender feelings.
Cesare, like most of the volatile males of Val di Non, angered easily and forgave with a slap, a lesson she had learned the first time they’d had a difference of opinion. As they descended from the sunlit upper valley, she kept her eyes on the road as they passed the once-mighty castles of the Thuns, some of them now in sadly neglected ruin. The acres and acres of orchards and vineyards belonging to a few wealthy families, deserted and untended during the war, were once again starting to green.
Francesca found it hard to imagine that most of the people in Val di Non, like her father, eked out such a meager living. For a place of breathtaking beauty, with emerald green lands jutting against white chalk cliffs and thick high forests concealing medieval sanctuaries high up the slopes, Val di Non for centuries had provided much for a few and precious little for the many.
Bottled up as the residents were in the valley, what land was available was divided, after feudalism finally died, until none remained to divide. Young suitors had nothing to offer their even younger lady loves, and they resented the mean lives they were forced to lead and the constant narrowing of their choices. Radical political parties and plots flourished in a reunited Italy. Irredentists who had succeeded in gaining back Trentino for Italy after centuries of Hapsburg rule the Catholic Party; Socialists; nationalists, the Popular Party supported by agriculturalists; they congregated, and plotted, and schemed.
The Great War, “the war to end all wars,” had advanced not much of anything in the way of economic prospects for the common man in Germany, either, nor calmed expansionist tendencies. Europe still roiled in the aftermath of the strife. But the winds of war had exhausted themselves, for now, and the human chaff blown about by its raging winds lived on to struggle with their small, ordinary lives.
Suddenly Cesare stopped the wagon, startling Francesca. “Get out,” he told her, and she scrambled to comply, leaving Elena wide-eyed on the seat. Cesare yanked Francesca’s trunk to the rear of the wagon, unbuckled its straps, and began dumping her clothes out on the road.
“Stop,” Francesca cried, appalled enough to question her husband despite the fact that she risked a clap to the ear for her trouble. “Stop, please, Cesare! What are you doing?”
“No wife of mine...” Cesare panted, wresting her dresses from the wooden trunk, heedless of the material catching on its metal clasps, “...will embarrass me.”
“My mother made those!” Garbed in the thin printed cotton dress and leather shoes Cesare had bought her, Francesca scrabbled in the dirt, trying to save her frocks. She had left her zoccoloni, her wooden clogs, for everyday wear for her sisters. But her dresses—all her mother’s work, sewing by lamplight when she could get the oil, the tiny, careful stitches in the difficult material—ruined! She couldn’t bear it. She sank to her knees in the road.
Cesare immediately seized her arm, hauling her upright. “I said leave them, woman,” he growled. “Dresses made out of army tents. It’s a disgrace.”
His fingers dug into the flesh of her upper arm, but she persisted in trying to pull away, unable to bear the sight of such waste, her clothes abandoned like garbage in the road. She couldn’t understand Cesare’s fury, the canvas dresses were little different than the thick, twilled fustian that had traditionally clothed the poor of Val di Non. “It was all we had! My sisters, at least, could wear them, could get some use—”
“Basta.” Her husband’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and Francesca began to tremble as he raised an open-palmed hand.
She hadn’t noticed Elena alighting from the wagon, but suddenly the little girl appeared at her side. Fists cocked, head tilted back, Elena fearlessly warned the stepfather who had so recently entered her life, “Don’t you hit my mama, you.”
Cesare turned burning eyes on the little girl. His hand still upraised, he snarled, “Maybe I hit you instead, eh?”
“No!” Francesca jerked Elena’s small body behind her. “I’m sorry, Cesare,” she pleaded. “Please don’t be angry.”
“Get in the wagon,” he said in a dangerously soft voice. “And that worthless brat. Tell her to shut her mouth and get in the wagon, too, or maybe we’ll leave her in the road with your mother’s rags.”
At last he let go of her arm, and Francesca hurried to comply with his demands. “Don’t make Papa mad, please, Elena,” she whispered as she hustled the little girl back around the side of the wagon.
“That’s not my papa,” Elena whispered back furiously as Cesare slammed the lid of the trunk. “I never had a papa, and I don’t want him.”
“Don’t start, Elena. Of course he’s your papa. Now I warn you, get in the wagon and be good.”
She lifted her daughter up on the high seat as Cesare climbed in from the opposite side. Elena’s lower lip protruded in a pout, but at least she had sense enough to keep quiet.
They started off once again, and Francesca stared determinedly straight ahead. She wouldn’t look back at all she was being forced to leave behind. Her life was inextricably entwined with this man’s now. She didn’t understand why Cesare behaved as he did; a woman didn’t question her man, even though he puzzled and frightened her. She had no alternative except to make the best of it. She wasn’t a fighter like Elena, or a paragon like her mother. She was only a woman, on her way to an unimaginable new life in America.
Francesca lay in her bunk for the whole of the two weeks it took to cross the ocean. Elena hovered near her mother for the first few days, complaining about the smell of vomit in the bowels of the ship where they were confined, and about the crowding and the miserable quality of the food. But Francesca could barely move, let alone restrain her daughter when Elena began to wander among the other passengers belowdecks, looking for some companionship and entertainment.
Once, unfortunately with Cesare in hearing distance, the child flounced up to inform her mother, “Mrs. Como says we mustn’t admit we used to be Austrian. When they ask us in America where we’re from, we’re to say we’ve always been Italians, ‘cause Austrians and Germans are bad guys.”
In truth, the Tyrolean Alps residents were neither Germans nor Italians but a unique bloodline descended from ancient Etruscans and Raethians. The valleys of the newly liberated Trentino leaned more toward the German in architecture and dress and cooking, but the residents of Val di Non spoke an Italian-influenced dialect. Cesare’s family, a proud, haughty bunch descended from long-ago nobility and who thought themselves better than their neighbors even though they were just as poor, tended toward the Germanic in demeanor.
“Bunk,” Cesare spat in answer to his stepdaughter’s announcement. “You want people to think you’re Italian—Mafia, eh? You should tell Mrs. Como to keep her stupid mouth shut. Or better yet, you keep yours shut and don’t repeat everything you hear from ignorant women.”
But even Francesca, deathly sick in her bunk, overheard enough from the other passengers to realize the Trentini people faced an uneasy situation in America, neither German nor Italian but suffering discrimination against both. So alongside acute claustrophobia and miserable seasickness, Francesca lived in constant fear that Elena would enrage her stepfather with Red Scare scuttlebutt and she would be too ill to intervene. She cautioned the child over and over again to keep silent in Cesare’s presence, but Elena was only four-years-old. How could she know what would anger a man such as Cesare, when Francesca herself was never quite certain.
Finally they disembarked in the shadow of the huge Statue of Liberty, alive and well despite fourteen miserable days of terror and nausea. Francesca, pale and with shaky legs, barely negotiated the gangplank.
At least they didn’t have to deal with Ellis Island. Once an immigrant’s nightmare, with physical exams where a doctor could refuse them entry to the United States on the pretext of red eyes or an unexplained rash, and a night spent among the babbling, baffled crowds of immigrants alighting in New York Harbor, now exams were conducted in one’s home country. Now all they had to do was present their official documents stamped REGNO D’ITALIA, and answer a few questions. Francesca was speechless to hear Cesare, after his lecture to Elena, readily admitting to the officials that they were Italian. She watched openmouthed as her cocksure husband suddenly turned submissive and servile.
“Yes, yes, born in Italy, all of us,” she overheard him saying with an unctuous smile as he gestured to her and Elena. “Friends of America during the war.” As if he had anything to do with Italy switching sides to the Allies!
“I have a job,” Cesare continued. “Here’s a letter to prove it. On the condition that I’m married, see—so that’s why I went to get her.” He indicated Francesca with a thumb over his shoulder.
It was the first she had heard of a condition being attached to her husband’s new job. Maybe she had misunderstood what Cesare told the immigration man, her English was so poor. She trembled in fear that after all they’d been through, Cesare would say something wrong and get them deported. She shuddered. If they were denied entrance to America, she would be bustled right back to that wooden shelf on the wretched prison of a rocking boat.
“But, Mama,” Elena said loudly, “what he said…” Francesca clapped her hand over her daughter’s mouth at the same moment her husband briefly turned to her with hot warning in his hooded eyes.
Unable to solve the riddle of her husband’s sudden nationalist versus socialist tendencies, which should have been at opposite ends of the political spectrum, Francesca was coming to realize Cesare was above all an opportunist: when his answer really mattered, he wasn’t naive about anti-German feeling in America. Once upon a time, it had been better for Trentini immigrants to say they were Austrian, what with Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s decree of literacy for all a guarantee of entrance to America. For the moment, it was apparently safer to identify with the despised criminal Italians.
Her new husband was a smart man, if not a warm one. He had solved the complicated tangle of requirements necessary to get her this far, he already knew his way around America, and the best she and Elena could do was to remain silent and let Cesare do all the talking.
At last they were officially admitted, documents stamped, and free to find the train station to head west. Francesca’s head spun. Dizzy with all the changes, she clung to Elena squirming in her lap on the narrow seat. Afraid the child would annoy her stepfather beyond his scant patience, she clutched all the tighter. In response, Elena wriggled even more vigorously and began to whine.
Finally the train began to move, the conductor collected their tickets, and then Cesare, rising abruptly and giving the two females a last glance of supreme disgust, adjoined to the smoking car. Soon most of the other males in the swaying passenger car followed Cesare’s example, leaving frightened women and children to fend for themselves.
Faces wet with tears, Francesca Sittoni and her mother clung to each other one final time. Her mother’s bones felt as thin and fragile as those of a bird. With little enough to eat for any of them, Francesca knew her mother had been giving much of her own meager portion to her daughter and to her granddaughter, Elena, to build them up for the trip. Out of nothing, Maria Romallo somehow made do for her family. Pellagra scoured the valley, the poor surviving on cornmeal with a bit of meat perhaps once in a month, if a family were lucky enough to own a few scrawny cattle or a single hog. Neither Francesca nor her daughter displayed the telltale skin sores or nervous tics of the nutritional disorder, signs of disease that might have prevented them from entering America. In Francesca’s estimation her mother was a miracle worker; the daughter knew she didn’t possess her mother’s talents—or her faith. Francesca would never aspire to the place in heaven that surely awaited her saintly mother.
“Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye,” Francesca whispered, her throat tight.
“Come now, woman! Basta. That’s enough.” Francesca’s new husband, Cesare, broke into the sad farewell from his seat on the wagon, where he waited impatiently with her trunk and her small daughter.
Francesca’s father, Giuseppe, stood to one side, eyes averted. Though as a rule he did not show his children much outward affection, in this case Francesca thought he might at least bestow a rare hug upon her or his granddaughter before they left on their journey to the other side of the world. If she’d had time, or the inclination to examine anyone else’s feelings outside of her own, Francesca might have discerned that her rawboned father was ashamed. Besides inheriting the traditional mountain personality of aloofness and stiff pride, the distance Giuseppe put between himself and his children buffered him from his own failure. No matter how hard he worked or how much he sacrificed, he could never seem to get ahead. The Popular Party had the right of it, to his way of thinking: a man should be able to make a living, feed his family, and acquire land and beasts. But there was no way, hemmed in as their valley was by mountains to east, north, and south, to acquire any land, even if he had some way to find the money to purchase any. The aristocracy and wealthy businessmen owned what arable land that existed in the valley, and had begun replacing mediocre fields with apple and pear orchards. The new mechanized farming machinery was outrageously expensive, and fertilizers and the new varieties of seed were beyond Giuseppe’s ability to buy. His three scrawny cows could barely produce enough manure to fertilize Maria’s garden, let alone the golden fields he could only dream of owning.
In addition to the competition from the provinces of Lombardy and Veneto, steamships had made shipping from America and Australia so cheap, a poor man couldn’t compete with plunging worldwide prices. Then the war, the Great and Bloody War, and the resulting spiral of monetary inflation, had stripped him of what little he had possessed before.
He found himself arguing in his head once more with Maria about having married Francesca off to Cesare, and earlier even, when Francesca was only twelve, the terrible fight they’d had about lending their eldest daughter out to work like a serf for the rich Bolzanos to repay a debt he had incurred:
Well, what is a man to do, eh? Tell me that, wife! What would you have me do instead? I’m trapped here, snared like a rabbit. And you, with your pious whining, and the children, always with mouths open like a nest of begging birds, everybody always hungry. There’s nothing a man can do!
He glanced at his wife, her lips moving in silent prayer, wringing her hands while tears rolled down her dry, wrinkled cheeks and then at his daughter, dutifully climbing into the wagon beside her new husband and the child from her first, tragic marriage. So Cesare was nobody’s choice for a husband for Francesca. So what? Cesare had ambition, and had already made enough money in America to return to Val di Non for Francesca and Elena. Cesare, when compared to the Romallos, was rich.
Why, Cesare had made enough money in America to pay Giuseppe for Francesca. But that was enough of that. Giuseppe didn’t allow himself to think about having secretly bargained a bride price for Francesca. God forbid he might some day reveal that concealed humiliation to his long-suffering wife or, worse, one of his compatriots down at the local tavern, where a man could at least smoke a pipe or enjoy a glass of grappa and a plate of tripes in peace. But he wondered how Maria, the good Saint Maria, thought he had fed them all for the last year? Four grown sons and three almost grown daughters in addition to Francesca, himself and his wife and little Elena: so many demands and so little opportunity for anyone. There had been little work outside of a few weeks a year picking fruit for the rich landowners for a generation. For a lifetime. For an eternity. The industrialization that had gained a toehold in northern Italy had been withheld from the Austrian Tyrol, and especially from the backward valleys of the Trentino region.
And so now the war had made the residents here Italians instead of Austrians. The only difference Giuseppe could discern was that the war had cut off old outlets for the valley’s produce; the crops and fruit that hadn’t gone on the mule trains to feed soldiers dug into rocky trenches on the Alpine peaks lay rotting in the fields during the war, and now the valley’s inhabitants must find new avenues of getting their produce to market.
And Giuseppe was expected to start over, at his age, from nothing. Just what was a man to do with such forces arrayed against him? Cesare had been sending money from America with the understanding that he would soon come to claim Francesca. Anyone clever enough had already escaped Val di Non, all the young people deserting Trentino—those who hadn’t been slaughtered in the war, that is—leaving behind the old folks in the almost painfully green land of their birth. Giuseppe’s sons, by some miracle, had been spared. Now they, too, were of an age to marry, yet they had no resources to draw on to feed families of their own. Cesare had somehow gotten around the stringent American immigrant quotas in order to take Francesca and Elena away, two of only a few hundred from Italy allowed that year. Soon Giuseppe’s adult sons would find a way to go too, and he would be left with three useless daughters and an old, broken-down wife.
But who could blame the young ones for leaving, the “flower of Europe” with energy enough left to dream after the devastating war? And who could blame Cesare, who was smart enough to slip out of the country a little earlier than anyone else in order to escape compulsory military service? So he saw what was coming and fled before the war. Using his ties to the Socialists, he disappeared into Italy, and thence to America, before he could be conscripted into the Austrian army. It didn’t make Giuseppe’s new son-in-law a coward to have escaped becoming cannon fodder. It only meant Cesare had a head start on his fortune in America.
Cesare’s disappearing act ultimately meant that, because of Francesca, Giuseppe’s family had something to eat—at least a little—while the rest of the valley starved. The “dowry” Giuseppe had accepted for Francesca meant that she, and little Elena, and whatever other children of Cesare’s that Francesca would eventually bear, would also escape the soul-sapping poverty of Val di Non.
“Goodbye, Nona! Goodbye, Nono!” Elena’s high voice echoed back to them. Standing beside Giuseppe, Maria burst into a fresh torrent of tears, covering her face with her hands to block the sight of her daughter and granddaughter departing.
So Francesca will never thank me, Giuseppe thought. It’s just as well.
He watched the wagon until it rolled out of sight down the road, heading for Trieste, the port city Italy had wrested from Austria along with the Trentino region as the price of peace with her former ally. There Francesca, Cesare, and Elena would board the refurbished troopship President Wilson, bound for the new world and a new life.
And Maria, virtuous Santa Maria, he was certain would never thank him either. In fact, she’d probably cry for days to her God, until she wore out what little strength she had left. Let her. So what? A man did what he had to do, the best he could do for his family with no help from God. Giuseppe, for one, was almost certain the God that Maria prayed to so desperately had deserted Val di Non long ago.
Francesca, unaware of the machinations that had gotten her to her present situation, watched the only home she had ever known recede into the distance behind the swaying wagon. Her arm around Elena, she tried to hold back her tears, twisting the plain gold wedding band on her finger, certain her new husband would have little patience for a woman’s tender feelings.
Cesare, like most of the volatile males of Val di Non, angered easily and forgave with a slap, a lesson she had learned the first time they’d had a difference of opinion. As they descended from the sunlit upper valley, she kept her eyes on the road as they passed the once-mighty castles of the Thuns, some of them now in sadly neglected ruin. The acres and acres of orchards and vineyards belonging to a few wealthy families, deserted and untended during the war, were once again starting to green.
Francesca found it hard to imagine that most of the people in Val di Non, like her father, eked out such a meager living. For a place of breathtaking beauty, with emerald green lands jutting against white chalk cliffs and thick high forests concealing medieval sanctuaries high up the slopes, Val di Non for centuries had provided much for a few and precious little for the many.
Bottled up as the residents were in the valley, what land was available was divided, after feudalism finally died, until none remained to divide. Young suitors had nothing to offer their even younger lady loves, and they resented the mean lives they were forced to lead and the constant narrowing of their choices. Radical political parties and plots flourished in a reunited Italy. Irredentists who had succeeded in gaining back Trentino for Italy after centuries of Hapsburg rule the Catholic Party; Socialists; nationalists, the Popular Party supported by agriculturalists; they congregated, and plotted, and schemed.
The Great War, “the war to end all wars,” had advanced not much of anything in the way of economic prospects for the common man in Germany, either, nor calmed expansionist tendencies. Europe still roiled in the aftermath of the strife. But the winds of war had exhausted themselves, for now, and the human chaff blown about by its raging winds lived on to struggle with their small, ordinary lives.
Suddenly Cesare stopped the wagon, startling Francesca. “Get out,” he told her, and she scrambled to comply, leaving Elena wide-eyed on the seat. Cesare yanked Francesca’s trunk to the rear of the wagon, unbuckled its straps, and began dumping her clothes out on the road.
“Stop,” Francesca cried, appalled enough to question her husband despite the fact that she risked a clap to the ear for her trouble. “Stop, please, Cesare! What are you doing?”
“No wife of mine...” Cesare panted, wresting her dresses from the wooden trunk, heedless of the material catching on its metal clasps, “...will embarrass me.”
“My mother made those!” Garbed in the thin printed cotton dress and leather shoes Cesare had bought her, Francesca scrabbled in the dirt, trying to save her frocks. She had left her zoccoloni, her wooden clogs, for everyday wear for her sisters. But her dresses—all her mother’s work, sewing by lamplight when she could get the oil, the tiny, careful stitches in the difficult material—ruined! She couldn’t bear it. She sank to her knees in the road.
Cesare immediately seized her arm, hauling her upright. “I said leave them, woman,” he growled. “Dresses made out of army tents. It’s a disgrace.”
His fingers dug into the flesh of her upper arm, but she persisted in trying to pull away, unable to bear the sight of such waste, her clothes abandoned like garbage in the road. She couldn’t understand Cesare’s fury, the canvas dresses were little different than the thick, twilled fustian that had traditionally clothed the poor of Val di Non. “It was all we had! My sisters, at least, could wear them, could get some use—”
“Basta.” Her husband’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and Francesca began to tremble as he raised an open-palmed hand.
She hadn’t noticed Elena alighting from the wagon, but suddenly the little girl appeared at her side. Fists cocked, head tilted back, Elena fearlessly warned the stepfather who had so recently entered her life, “Don’t you hit my mama, you.”
Cesare turned burning eyes on the little girl. His hand still upraised, he snarled, “Maybe I hit you instead, eh?”
“No!” Francesca jerked Elena’s small body behind her. “I’m sorry, Cesare,” she pleaded. “Please don’t be angry.”
“Get in the wagon,” he said in a dangerously soft voice. “And that worthless brat. Tell her to shut her mouth and get in the wagon, too, or maybe we’ll leave her in the road with your mother’s rags.”
At last he let go of her arm, and Francesca hurried to comply with his demands. “Don’t make Papa mad, please, Elena,” she whispered as she hustled the little girl back around the side of the wagon.
“That’s not my papa,” Elena whispered back furiously as Cesare slammed the lid of the trunk. “I never had a papa, and I don’t want him.”
“Don’t start, Elena. Of course he’s your papa. Now I warn you, get in the wagon and be good.”
She lifted her daughter up on the high seat as Cesare climbed in from the opposite side. Elena’s lower lip protruded in a pout, but at least she had sense enough to keep quiet.
They started off once again, and Francesca stared determinedly straight ahead. She wouldn’t look back at all she was being forced to leave behind. Her life was inextricably entwined with this man’s now. She didn’t understand why Cesare behaved as he did; a woman didn’t question her man, even though he puzzled and frightened her. She had no alternative except to make the best of it. She wasn’t a fighter like Elena, or a paragon like her mother. She was only a woman, on her way to an unimaginable new life in America.
Francesca lay in her bunk for the whole of the two weeks it took to cross the ocean. Elena hovered near her mother for the first few days, complaining about the smell of vomit in the bowels of the ship where they were confined, and about the crowding and the miserable quality of the food. But Francesca could barely move, let alone restrain her daughter when Elena began to wander among the other passengers belowdecks, looking for some companionship and entertainment.
Once, unfortunately with Cesare in hearing distance, the child flounced up to inform her mother, “Mrs. Como says we mustn’t admit we used to be Austrian. When they ask us in America where we’re from, we’re to say we’ve always been Italians, ‘cause Austrians and Germans are bad guys.”
In truth, the Tyrolean Alps residents were neither Germans nor Italians but a unique bloodline descended from ancient Etruscans and Raethians. The valleys of the newly liberated Trentino leaned more toward the German in architecture and dress and cooking, but the residents of Val di Non spoke an Italian-influenced dialect. Cesare’s family, a proud, haughty bunch descended from long-ago nobility and who thought themselves better than their neighbors even though they were just as poor, tended toward the Germanic in demeanor.
“Bunk,” Cesare spat in answer to his stepdaughter’s announcement. “You want people to think you’re Italian—Mafia, eh? You should tell Mrs. Como to keep her stupid mouth shut. Or better yet, you keep yours shut and don’t repeat everything you hear from ignorant women.”
But even Francesca, deathly sick in her bunk, overheard enough from the other passengers to realize the Trentini people faced an uneasy situation in America, neither German nor Italian but suffering discrimination against both. So alongside acute claustrophobia and miserable seasickness, Francesca lived in constant fear that Elena would enrage her stepfather with Red Scare scuttlebutt and she would be too ill to intervene. She cautioned the child over and over again to keep silent in Cesare’s presence, but Elena was only four-years-old. How could she know what would anger a man such as Cesare, when Francesca herself was never quite certain.
Finally they disembarked in the shadow of the huge Statue of Liberty, alive and well despite fourteen miserable days of terror and nausea. Francesca, pale and with shaky legs, barely negotiated the gangplank.
At least they didn’t have to deal with Ellis Island. Once an immigrant’s nightmare, with physical exams where a doctor could refuse them entry to the United States on the pretext of red eyes or an unexplained rash, and a night spent among the babbling, baffled crowds of immigrants alighting in New York Harbor, now exams were conducted in one’s home country. Now all they had to do was present their official documents stamped REGNO D’ITALIA, and answer a few questions. Francesca was speechless to hear Cesare, after his lecture to Elena, readily admitting to the officials that they were Italian. She watched openmouthed as her cocksure husband suddenly turned submissive and servile.
“Yes, yes, born in Italy, all of us,” she overheard him saying with an unctuous smile as he gestured to her and Elena. “Friends of America during the war.” As if he had anything to do with Italy switching sides to the Allies!
“I have a job,” Cesare continued. “Here’s a letter to prove it. On the condition that I’m married, see—so that’s why I went to get her.” He indicated Francesca with a thumb over his shoulder.
It was the first she had heard of a condition being attached to her husband’s new job. Maybe she had misunderstood what Cesare told the immigration man, her English was so poor. She trembled in fear that after all they’d been through, Cesare would say something wrong and get them deported. She shuddered. If they were denied entrance to America, she would be bustled right back to that wooden shelf on the wretched prison of a rocking boat.
“But, Mama,” Elena said loudly, “what he said…” Francesca clapped her hand over her daughter’s mouth at the same moment her husband briefly turned to her with hot warning in his hooded eyes.
Unable to solve the riddle of her husband’s sudden nationalist versus socialist tendencies, which should have been at opposite ends of the political spectrum, Francesca was coming to realize Cesare was above all an opportunist: when his answer really mattered, he wasn’t naive about anti-German feeling in America. Once upon a time, it had been better for Trentini immigrants to say they were Austrian, what with Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s decree of literacy for all a guarantee of entrance to America. For the moment, it was apparently safer to identify with the despised criminal Italians.
Her new husband was a smart man, if not a warm one. He had solved the complicated tangle of requirements necessary to get her this far, he already knew his way around America, and the best she and Elena could do was to remain silent and let Cesare do all the talking.
At last they were officially admitted, documents stamped, and free to find the train station to head west. Francesca’s head spun. Dizzy with all the changes, she clung to Elena squirming in her lap on the narrow seat. Afraid the child would annoy her stepfather beyond his scant patience, she clutched all the tighter. In response, Elena wriggled even more vigorously and began to whine.
Finally the train began to move, the conductor collected their tickets, and then Cesare, rising abruptly and giving the two females a last glance of supreme disgust, adjoined to the smoking car. Soon most of the other males in the swaying passenger car followed Cesare’s example, leaving frightened women and children to fend for themselves.
Willow Vale Slide Show