typically start.
“Si, Papa?”
“Your report card. You got a B in English!” he would say, always speaking in his native tongue.
“Yes, Papa, but it’s only a mid-term grade.”
“I don’t care. It’s not good enough!”
He sometimes would raise his right hand to strike the boy, who would wince reflexively, and then put it down slowly if he noticed his Anna was watching.
“Antonio, don’t hit the boy!” his mother would call across the room.
“He must learn, Anna. He must always do his best.”
He would turn and walk from the room, his wife following in his wake like a shadow.
“Antonio, why are you so hard on him? He is a good boy.”
“Cara mia, you know what we went through in the old country. Look at me. Am I a hard man? I do it to give him a better life than we have. I don’t want to see him sweat away in the mill, grinding metal, coughing up soot. He should not be like the other boys, hanging out on corners, trying to get in with those Sicilianos and their made men. Not my boy! Never!”
You don’t have to worry about me, Papa, he would think as he listened to them talking about him. I know what I want for my life.
He would remember his first friend, Angie, now dead from a knife to the throat. He had tried to save him, but the wound was too severe. The boy’s blood had spilled onto the street and into his lungs even as he had tried to stop its flow. So many others, his classmates from grammar school, were now dead, in jail, or hanging out. Not him. He knew what he wanted and was willing to work for it, no matter what.
When his father would smile at him, radiating happiness even through the mill-furnace darkness of his face, the boy would feel so proud, almost as if his father was treating him as an equal.
“Berto, go in, your father is waiting for you.”
“Si, Mama.”
He hesitated, then walked into the small front room of their tenement apartment and waited for his father to recognize his presence.
“Figlio mio.”
“Si, Papa?”
His father was standing near the window in a typical pose, facing away from him, then turning his head toward him without shifting his body. It had taken Berto a long time to realize this was the parent-to-child posture of superiority used in the old country. He also knew that he had now grown old enough for his father to speak to him about something he considered a concern.
“Berto, Dottore Agnelli tells me you are spending a lot of time around his clinic. Are you sick, my son?”
“No, Papa.”
“Good. He tells me you ask to watch when he works.”
“Si, Papa.”
Oh yes, Papa. It is like poetry to watch the dottore as he goes from one person to the next, his hands moving to set a broken bone, his fingers singing like Mama’s sewing bobbin as he puts the cut skin back together. And how the little ones laugh as he taps their knees and runs his hand across their bellies to find out where it hurts!
His father had turned around to him and was smiling.
“What do you want to do with your life, son?”
“I want to be a doctor, Papa,” he responded without hesitation.
The father stared at his son, looking so much like himself at that age, eager to meet the world but not understanding what it would do to him.
Tonio, do you remember how you also wanted to be a dottore?
Indeed he did, but war, lack of money, and his class had blocked him at every turn. Now he wanted to be sure his son was tough enough to deal with the realities of life, not the dreams. He and Anna had come to America for that very reason. So he was determined to administer a dose of hard truth to his young son’s heart and mind, difficult as it would be to do so.
“You make my heart glad, my son. I am sure that you will be a fine doctor, just like Dr. Agnelli. But one question: How will you pay for it?”
His inquiry startled Berto. As he waited for an answer, Antonio Gallini noticed his beloved Anna standing in the doorway, the woman for whom he would do anything. They had crossed an ocean together. He could refuse her nothing.
Even now, as he looked at the timeworn rounded face of his wife, he remembered her sunlit smiles in the old country, her auburn hair glowing against the blue Mediterranean sky. He heard once more the voice that had sung the prayers next to him at Mass so long ago.
...
December 2, 1899, was bitterly cold in the small village in upper Tuscany, but the man was sweating in the candlelit room.
“Easy, Pietro, easy! It will be all right.”
Pasquale Gallini felt the tension in his son’s shoulders and understood. He already had lost one child and now Maria was having trouble again. The women were busy in the other room doing what women were supposed to do when another woman was ready. It was a mystery to the men—except the dottores, and none were here tonight.
“I can’t lose her, Papa. You know she almost died when little Pasquale ...”
“Si, figlio mio, I know.”
The old man remembered when the child who would have had his name had died quickly after birth. It was a double grief piled on both him and his son: losing the baby so soon after their beloved Antonella had died suddenly.
Pasquale was alone now with his memories of her.
No more, caro Dio, no more!
Both men started reflexively as they heard screams in the back room, followed by a deathly stillness that exposed the rasps of their own fearful breathing.
“Dio mio!” Pietro sobbed.
Pasquale held his son, his own heart crying out.
“Antonella, help me!”
Then they heard a second, higher-pitched cry shattering the brief silence, the gasping, angry cry of an infant suddenly ejected from the security of the womb. They stood transfixed as the old wooden door opened and the bent midwife waddled out holding a red-faced crying baby in her hands.
“You have a son, Pietro!”
Father and grandfather rushed into the birth room, followed by the midwife carrying the baby and returning it to the exhausted woman who forever thereafter would be called Mama.
“Maria!” the younger man called out, and the tired young woman turned her face to him.
“We will call him Antonio,” she half-whispered.
Pasquale Gallini smiled at the
