Lucia, Lucia Page 7

  “I’d like that.” Rosemary blows her nose.

  I close the door. Fazool says, “Pretty girl.” I turn to go up the stairs but instead go to my parents’ bedroom and knock on the door. I push it open without waiting for an answer. Mama is lying on the bed with her arm thrown over her eyes.

  “Mama?” I whisper.

  “I’m awake,” she says without moving.

  “I invited Rosemary to make zeppoles with us later.” Mama doesn’t respond. “Mama?”

  “I hope you never have a day like this one. The look on Father Abruzzi’s face. I wanted to die,” Mama moans.

  “Father Abruzzi is not an expert on marriage, and he doesn’t have a family.”

  Mama sits up. “Don’t ever say anything against a priest.”

  “I’m not saying anything against him. But he can’t understand what you’re going through. He didn’t raise four wild boys and a daughter. He doesn’t have any idea about your life. And by the way, it isn’t very Christ-like to judge our whole family based on one member’s moment of weakness. What kind of nonsense is that?”

  Mama turns away from me. An argument about the church is one I will never win, but the truth is, I simply want my mother to feel better. I can see this job will take a long time, and I have my own chores to do, so I move to go.

  “Lucia? You’re right. But don’t tell your father I think so.”

  At B. Altman’s, Fridays are Delmarr’s “planning days,” when he assigns clients and gives us an overview of the latest trends. We tell him what kind of progress we’re making, and he adjusts our workloads accordingly. If we’re done with most of our everyday duties—hemming, repairs, fittings, and building garments—he takes us on field trips to shop for fabric or trims. Ruth and I love to go with him, because he makes it fun. He buys us lunch, and at the end of the day he always takes us somewhere swell, like the Pierre Hotel, for cocktails.

  Friday is also when Maxine Neal from accounting hands out our checks every two weeks. When she walks into the Hub and gives me my envelope, she says, with a big grin, “Congratulations on your raise. You’re lucky. You have a good boss behind you.”

  Maxine’s lipstick is the new coral shade the girls are showing on the main floor. Her skin is a deep brown, she is dressed primly in a navy-blue wool skirt and white blouse, and her nails are always done. Whatever difficulties Ruth and I have had pushing ahead in our department, it has been harder for Maxine in hers. She graduated from City College with a degree in business and couldn’t find a job at any of the accounting firms in the city. Her uncle is in charge of shipping at Altman’s, and he recommended her to our accounting department. She is overqualified, but I know she will prove herself and advance.

  “Why don’t you come down here and work with us? Get on the gravy train!” I tell her.

  “I’m all thumbs when it comes to sewing, and besides that, I’m color-blind. You still want me down here?” Maxine walks over to Delmarr and places his check on the worktable in front of him.

  “Not to sew. Never! But you can bean-count,” Delmarr tells her as he pours his third cup of coffee for the morning. “And when we blow this joint, you’re coming with me, Max. I’m gonna need someone with a head for business when I set off on my own.”

  “I’ll be there!” Maxine says.

  “I’m glad to hear I’m not the only career girl who likes to work,” I tell her.

  “Oh, it’s not a matter of like,” Maxine says. “I have to work. When you see the M10 heading downtown at six in the morning full of brown faces, it isn’t because we’re career girls with a dream.” She heads out through the swinging doors to deliver the rest of the paychecks.

  Ruth, Violet, Helen, and I usually brown-bag our lunches. When the weather is good, we walk up to the open porticoes at the New York Public Library on Forty-second and Fifth, or head down to Madison Square Park at Twenty-third Street. Today, though, and on every payday, we meet at the Charleston Garden on the sixth floor of B. Altman’s for the employee-discount lunch with complimentary pie and coffee. The restaurant has a southern ambience, with floor-to-ceiling murals of rolling green Georgia hills dotted with magnolia trees in bloom.

  The four of us are practically a club. We call ourselves the Flappers because we were all born in 1925. We’ve been devoted to one another since we met seven years ago at Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School, the first stop for any New York girl out of high school who wants to develop her business skills and put something official on her résumé. I knew I would sew for a living, thanks to the careful training of my grandmother, but I didn’t know the first thing about business. A few classes that included typing, accounting, and shorthand made me irresistible to B. Altman’s, which likes to hire a well-rounded girl. I was hired first, then I put in a good word for Ruth; Ruth recommended Helen, and then Helen recommended Violet.

  “How bad was it?” Helen asks, eager for all the details of Roberto and Rosemary’s quick wedding.

  “Awful. My poor mother. She’s still wandering around acting like she’s in the middle of the Blitz.”

  “Can you imagine? Mrs. Sartori is so proud of her family.” Ruth shakes her head.

  “Not anymore,” I tell her. “But I wish my parents could put aside their feelings and be nice to the girl. These things happen.” I stab a piece of lettuce.

  “I’d kill myself if I ever had to get married like that,” Violet says solemnly. “I’m Catholic, and the only girl in my family who had to get married was my third cousin Bernadette. They made her live in the basement until the baby was born, and then she was allowed in the yard. But only at certain times.”

  “How grim.” Ruth spoons her pie filling onto the plate, next to the crust. The crust, which will be forgone until Ruth has the final fitting for her wedding gown, looks like an empty beige shoe. “She should have talked to me. There’s no reason for a young woman to have a baby out of wedlock. She has to see a doctor and make a plan.”

  “My mother’s plan would be to shoot me,” Violet counters. “Aren’t your parents mortified?” she asks me.

  “Sure. But what can we do? The baby is coming. You can’t stop Mother Nature,” I say.

  “Do you like her?” Violet asks.

  “She’s very young.”

  “They always are,” Helen says, taking a drag off her cigarette. “The Sartoris have taken two big hits lately. First their only daughter calls off a respectable marriage to the son of the best baker in the Village, and then their eldest son brings home a bride with a baby on the way. What next?”

  “If you ask my mother, she’d say locusts. She believes she has failed as a mother. Nobody’s doing what she wants us to do. I feel guilty because I started it by ending my engagement.”

  “Trust me,” Ruth says, “you ending your engagement is not what got Rosemary pregnant. Right, Violet?” Violet blushes.

  “Your mother thinks Dante is the ultimate catch,” Helen says to me. “He’s a baker, so you’d never starve. He works in a family business, just like your brothers, which means that you have that in common. He’s Italian. If we were to invent someone for you, we couldn’t come up with anyone better. Shall I go on?” Helen loves to make lists, and she loves to be right. She’s getting to do a lot of both at this lunch.

  “Dante is a catch below Fourteenth Street, but Lucia has bigger fish to fry,” Ruth says in my defense.

  “It’s more complicated than that . . .” I begin, but then I stop. Good sense would tell me to go ahead and marry Dante because he’d be nice to me and provide well. But that’s not what I’m looking for. Maybe I want to be Edith Head and create costumes for the movies, or Claire McCardell and design sportswear for the masses. But these girls have heard all of that before, and they are as closed-minded about professional dreams as my mother.

  “And I can’t believe you gave the ring back.” Violet sighs. “It was the whitest and hottest stone I ever saw. Not a speck of carbon, just clean, bright white ice.”

  “I don’t care about th
e diamond,” I say, looking down at my hand, which seems downright juvenile with my garnet birthstone ring where a real diamond once was.

  “You should,” Ruth says with conviction. “When a man buys you a diamond, he’s investing in you. It makes no sense that men have all the money, because they have no idea what to do with it. They don’t know what’s good. The only way they find out what’s good is if a woman tells them. They know nothing about how to make life beautiful. They don’t decorate homes or make delicious meals or dress up with any level of creativity. Okay, they like their cars. What else is there to spend money on? What better cause for the average man than a wife who likes jewelry?”

  “If only men came made to order. It’s so hard to find a decent fellow.” Violet stuffs her handkerchief into the cuff of her charcoal-gray suit jacket. Then she smooths her unruly eyebrows. “If I ever met a good man and we fell in love, even if he was flawed or, say, had some physical defect like a clubfoot, I wouldn’t break it off. I would try to find the best thing about him and hold on to that. I would overlook the negatives. Of course, my mother believes all the truly nice boys died serving our country in World War II.”

  “Well, now, that makes me feel much better.” I dump sugar into my iced tea.

  “I don’t want to be mean, Lucia. But you made a big mistake,” Violet says piously. “There is nothing wrong with Dante DeMartino. I think you’re going to regret what you did.”

  “Oh, please, Violet. I will not. I felt like invisible hands were trying to choke me when we talked about the wedding plans.”

  “Those hands weren’t invisible. They were his mother’s.” Helen sips her coffee. “Who doesn’t feel a little claustrophobic when they get engaged? I did. You give up a lot. Thank God I’m still working. How many times can you scrub the four rooms in your railroad apartment? It takes me all of a half hour on Saturday morning. I need my job.”

  “You are not a romantic,” Violet says to Helen.

  “Okay, okay, I’m making it all sound like drudgery and boredom, but it’s not,” Helen says. “Marriage is wonderful. Bill is a terrific husband. But I was nervous right before we got married. I thought, I actually have to live with this man, and it scared me a little. I like to be alone. I used to love to wake up in the middle of the night to read, and I figured that was over. I made a list of the things that I was giving up in exchange for a husband, and the list of what I thought I was losing was longer than the list of what I thought I was getting. But then I got married, and all the things I was worried about never happened. I like him being there when I come home from work. It doesn’t disturb me when I’m doing something and he walks into the room. I like sharing my bed. Sorry, Violet, I know that’s crude. But I do. He holds me all night like a rag doll. I feel safe. I love that. “

  “Yeah, but don’t you love Sunday night, knowing the next morning is Monday and you get to come to work?” No one answers me.

  After a while, Violet speaks. “I do like working here. The job I had at the carpet company, before Helen got me in here, was horrible. First of all, I wasn’t even me when I was working there. I was Ann Brewster, because the last girl who worked at Karastan got married, and all the accounts she handled got mad and went elsewhere when she quit, so the boss decided instead of losing accounts when girls got married, he’d come up with a name, a character, really, who sells the carpet. This way, if I got killed or married, Mr. Zaran would hire a new Ann Brewster in my place. What a racket! I prayed every day that I would meet a man and fall in love and get married so I could go into Mr. Zaran’s office and say, ‘Find yourself another Ann Brewster!’ My wish came true, more or less, when Helen asked me to cut patterns here. So maybe it’s not so much that I love my job; I just love it a lot better than the last one.” Violet sighs.

  “Having a boyfriend doesn’t even compare to working,” I insist. “When my future in-laws came to dinner and were sitting there looking me over, I’m sure Dante’s mother wondered how well I could iron, and his father wondered if I could run the cash register at the bakery on Saturdays. I could see the wheels turning in their heads. That’s when that little voice inside me said, ‘Don’t do it. I don’t care how much he looks like Don Ameche. Don’t do it! That’s not the life for you!’ ”

  Violet looks at me solemnly. “If that little voice was being honest, it would have said, ‘Lucia Sartori, you’re twenty-five years old, and you should get married, because there will be no men left when you come to your senses and decide you need a husband.’ ”

  “God, Violet, you are such a sad sack.” Ruth pats me on the back like a display item. “Just look at Lucia. She won’t have any trouble finding a nice man.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t talk to strange men in the street,” Violet warns me. “One time my sister Betty talked to a man in the street, and he took her around a corner, clubbed her, and stole her purse.”

  Whenever we have a few moments after lunch, Ruth and I spend them in the Interior Decoration Department and imagine what our lives would be like if we lived in the designer-showcase rooms with their period furniture and beautiful art. Ruth stops at a Louis XVI dining room table set for an elegant party, with beige linens and pale yellow china that has a pattern of small bluebirds on the rim. “This china is downright posh!” Ruth says excitedly.

  “Do you think crystal stemware makes the wine taste better?” I hold up a goblet and twist it in the light of the overhead chandelier. “At eight dollars a glass, it should,” I answer my own question. “I love beautiful things.” Why do I have to get married to have them?

  “Okay, here’s what I want.” Ruth pulls me over to the display case and points at the place settings. “See there? Spode buttercup china. Royal Crest sterling silverware in wildflower . . .”

  “Pure silver. Look at that trim.”

  “Ma says it will be a bear to polish, but that’s okay. And by the way, that is real twenty-four-karat gold in the finish.”

  “For somebody who isn’t too excited about becoming Mrs. Goldfarb, you’re pretty excited about your dishes.”

  “I’m trying to walk on the sunny side.” Ruth goes to look at the linen tablecloths and napkins displayed in an étagère in the corner. I become transfixed before a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The top of the frame is a gilt wood flower basket with ribbons that drape the glass. It belongs in the foyer of a Park Avenue town house with black-and-white-checked marble floors. For a moment I see myself in the entryway of one of them, greeting my dinner guests.

  “Do you come with the mirror?” a man’s voice says with just the right touch of humor.

  “No, I come with the china. I’m the best little dishwasher in Greenwich Village.”

  The man laughs heartily, so I turn to see the owner of the voice. “Oh . . . hello . . .” If I were walking, I’d stumble, but I’m speaking, so I stutter until I find the grace to close my mouth entirely.

  “Hello,” he says, looking at me as though he can see through to the wheels that spin like the works of a timepiece in my head. “You look familiar. Do you work here?”

  I search for a witty comeback, but I’m too busy sizing him up to think of a good line. Ruth comes up behind me and says clearly, “On another floor,” answering for me.

  My feet feel like they’re melting into my shoes. I can’t take my eyes off him. He must be six foot two. He’s slim, with broad shoulders and big hands. I notice the hands immediately because his shirt cuffs rest on the correct breaking point over the wrist. The suit, a warm gray tweed, is a European cut, so it fits without pulling or creasing the material anywhere, and the pants land precisely at the middle of his polished oxblood lace-ups. I know these shoes, they’re a fine Italian leather; I’ve seen them displayed on the main floor. His shirt is crisp and white, with a wide collar fastened by a gold hook and eye at the top button, and his tie is a bold stripe of black and white. His black hair is parted on the side and neatly combed. His eyes are gray, exactly the color of his suit, and the thick black eyebrows, smooth and neat,
taper off, framing his chiseled face. The jaw is square and strong; I’m sure by evening he could use a second shave. But it’s his smile that has frozen me like a lump of tundra in the Arctic Circle. His white teeth and ever so slight overbite give him, if I can say the word—even think the word—a seductive smile. I have never seen a man like this, not in person, anyway. And neither has Ruth. I hear her babbling about china and silver, but it all sounds like the low drone of a sewing machine. He nods politely and acts interested in what she’s saying.

  When I was a girl, Papa took me to a play on Broadway, and an actress stood in the middle of the stage, a street scene jammed with buildings and people, city life in full swing. The music changed, and the city began to pull away piece by piece, wall by wall, person by person, until the girl was alone in a vast expanse of darkness, save the spotlight shining from the rafters. I remember thinking that she looked like a pink pearl on a black evening glove.

  This is how I feel. The world has gone away. There are no display cases or dressing rooms or mirrors. Not even Ruth. There is only him and me.

  “Lucia? We need to get back to work,” Ruth says, yanking my elbow.

  “Right, right.” I look up at the handsome stranger. “We have to go back to work.”

  “Don’t let me keep you,” he says lightly.

  Ruth and I lock arms and step onto the escalator. The handsome stranger leans over the half-wall as we descend.

  “Lucia di Lammermoor. Like the opera.” He grins.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ever since I met the handsome stranger, I have found every possible excuse to return to the Interior Decoration Department in the hopes of getting another glimpse of him. Now I can understand criminals returning to the scene of the crime. I need to relive the thrill, no matter how brief. And there’s an up side to my curiosity: I’m buying all of my Christmas presents in one place. Linens for Mama, leather cuff-link boxes for my brothers, a satin duvet cover for Rosemary, and a small marble statue of Garibaldi on a horse for Papa.