GUTS GUNPOWDER, the crowd was chanting.
The truth of the matter—he had never told her—was that he had thought . . . of something. Charlie restrained her while he pushed up her coat and dress, tied up her thigh, stopping the blood flow, twisted the tourniquet—not too much—was she comfortable? Her thigh, the thigh of a young woman considered one of the most beautiful in town, her thigh, with no underwear in this clothing-short time. Cool hand on warm flesh, her blond pubic hair. Even in a pool of blood, even with Charlie there, this young, lonely, cold, wet, muddy young George from Texas felt his heart jump to his throat and his penis rise. He had never told her.
And she, Anna Giardini, had never told him that just four days earlier, she had been raped—gang-banged by four German teenagers wanting to get some in before getting the hell out. She looked like a German Mädchen—the blond Mädchen of their pinup dreams—why not? She had put up a fierce struggle.
George sent Charlie to find transport. Anna calmed down, beyond fatigue, partly from trusting this boy so intent on caring for her but mostly from blood loss and its attendant faintness. Before she lost consciousness, she was able to tell him that the Ospidale Sant’Anna was up on the Corso della Giovecca, only three blocks away. That was her name, too—Anna, she said. Too impatient to wait for an ambulance that might never come, George picked up her limp body and carried her through the streets to the crowded emergency room.
After bringing her out of shock with IV fluids, they sent her on to the bigger Nuovo Ospidale on the east side of town, where George was able to visit her during the two days his unit remained in Ferrara before pushing on to the Po and the victorious end of the war.
Out of guilt? out of love?—he wrote her every day from then on, keeping his English simple but somehow trying to pay her back for the great harm he had done. As she struggled with writing back in a foreign tongue, he grew more and more fond of her, fond in the sense of liking this obviously remarkable person, and fond in the sense of becoming just plain nuts about her.
He looked over at his beautiful wife holding her cane in one hand and his son in the other. Though she was five years younger, he sensed she was older, so much older than he, from the age-old culture of her ancient hometown. Had he her education, he would have known these lines of Carducci:
Onde venisti? Quali a noi secoli
si mite e bella ti tramandarano . . .
Whence come you? What centuries
passed you on to us, so mild and lovely?
Their correspondence continued after his return to Texas. He lived his life in order to write her of it. Lunchtimes, he went home from the Feed Mill to check the mailbox, so impatient was he. He who had never written even a postcard in his life learned to write, expressively and well. And as her letters became more fluent and his more rich, the possibility of marriage became obvious. Would this now eighteen-year-old Italian, half-Jewish beauty, flower of the ghetto, this classical violinist with the Botticelli hands, this Old World, half-Sephardic treasure, give up her family in Ferrara for the blandness of Mansfield, Texas, or would George Hitler join her in the ancient land he had helped destroy?
The most difficult letter was the one he thought might end their relationship, the one in which he told her it was he, and he alone, who had crippled her. It took nine days for an answer. The first of those days were filled with letters from Ferrara he thought of as “she doesn’t know yet.” The last of those days were filled with letters he called “from before she knew.” On a Monday noon, a Monday after an excruciating Sunday of empty mailbox, he held what must be the letter in his trembling hand.
Giorgio, my dearest,
Do you think I didn’t know? Do you think you coming just after the blast, your loving concern, the way you wiped pumpkin off my face did not give you away? Do you think your love does not far exceed this accident of war? Do you think a woman needs two legs to love a man?
Have no fear, my beloved. I will write you again tonight when there is more time. But I answer this immediately, for I can imagine how you are fearful of what I will say. So I just say I am loving you.
Your Anna,
who, even though she loves you, will never eat a pumpkin pie on your Thanksgiving
They were married in June of ’48, she nineteen, he twenty-four. Her “assimilated” parents, her Jewish father, Jacobo, an ex-editor for the Corriere ferrarese (writing freelance, under a pseudonym, since the Nuremberg laws of ’35), her mother, Lucetta, a math teacher in the high school, thought it best Anna should see America. She and Giorgio could come back to Ferrara if she were unhappy. Perhaps she could send a little money to help them rebuild. Life would be easier in America.
Anna kept her name, Giardini, as a link to her old life in her old world, one of the first women of her generation to do so. George was concerned it was because she didn’t want his name. After all . . . No, she assured him, she knew who was Hitler and who was only “Hitler.”
Three
Arnold—named for his maternal grandfather—was born on Christmas morning two years later at Mansfield General Hospital, a nine-pound, twelve-ounce strapping, screaming newborn, at the top of the Apgar scale, as he would be at the top of all his classes from first grade on.
But the crying, the continuous crying! Colic? The distraught parents devoured Dr. Spock and tried it all. Troubleshooting: Was he hungry? Just ate. Dirty diaper? No. Would that it were. Safety pin? Never. Gassy, colicky? Belly quiet, and flat as a board. Nothing seemed to help. He cried as an infant, he cried as a toddler, he cried when, finally, at three he began to speak.
His first word was “yellow,” a sunshine word for a thunderstorm boy: “Yewwo.” He cried for his yellow Dr. Dentons if Anna tried to put him to bed in blue ones. He wanted to play in the yellow-walled kitchen no matter where his mother was in the house. He loved his yellow bear and his yellow-hatted clown, he loved the light streaming in the yellow-curtained windows, and he could sleep only with his yellow twinkle light at night. But most of all he loved yellow fire.
When he was four, he burned his hand, badly, third degree. Palmar burns are serious. Lots of nerves and tendons close to the surface, with little room for swelling. George and Anna had accepted Owen Barlow’s invitation to come out on his boat on Joe Pool Lake. It was a windy September afternoon, too early to go back but chilly enough for the crew to take refuge in the cabin.
“Arnie and Sam, no running!”
Sam was a year older and even more kinetic than his friend. He would be Mansfield’s High School’s greatest track star, faster even than the several black runners who joined the team in 1965. At his father’s call, Sam stopped short, and Arnie crashed right into him, falling backward and catching himself with his left hand, directly on the heater. A Southern smell of burning flesh. The grownups were horrified, in pain almost as great as that of the shrieking child. Anna, especially, was affected, ignited through her own agonies, her stump shrieking, her pity, her terror for her child. . . . She could only hold him wailing in her arms and repeat endlessly, “Bambino mio, bambino mio . . .”
Arnold’s hand was bandaged at the hospital, he was given pain meds and sent home to be shaped by a multidimensional trauma his parents little suspected. It wasn’t the pain that made him cry. It was the fact that he couldn’t
