your father.”
“Just to my father?”
“What?” When Harry didn’t elaborate, Ben shrugged with a dismissive chuckle. “It’s like royalty at Harry’s house. Only the male offspring can inherit the throne.”
They were joking! Except that really was how it was. Gina’s father was an anomaly among Sicilian men. He adored his sons, but believed his only daughter too could become anything. Gina wanted to tell these two boys about her remarkable father, but decided not to. She was losing the power to make sense in her new alien language. Silently she thanked her father for being a relentless taskmaster, for teaching her English for so many years even when she had seen no sense in it.
“Our father believed,” she said cautiously, unsure of her English words, “that those who lived without expectations were not blessed but cursed.” She looked across the table. “Right, Salvo?”
“I know nothing,” Salvo said in Italian, “except that it’s late and I’m tired.”
“Your father wasn’t the only one who believed this,” said Harry, in reply to Gina, not Salvo. “My father, too. And Alexander Pope.”
“Who?”
“The poet.”
“No, Harry,” said Ben. “Pope thought a life lived without expectations was the ninth beatitude. Blessed are they who expect nothing, was what Pope wrote.”
“You completely misunderstand Pope,” Harry said, yanking up Ben by the arm, and glancing around for his jacket and hat. “As if you have any idea what a beatitude even is.”
“As if you do.”
“At least I’m not quoting him incorrectly! We must go.”
“Actually you did quote him incorrectly,” said Ben, as they bade their goodbyes to a battle-fatigued Gina.
“I didn’t quote him,” Harry said. “I was merely being polite in a conversation with our new friends. Goodnight. We will see you tomorrow. Please give our regards to your mother.”
“Pope ended it with ‘for they shall never be disappointed.’”
“Let’s go!”
They tipped their hats before they put them on and bowed politely.
Gina could see Salvo would have loved to have refused their help, but he didn’t know where the train station was and couldn’t get the three trunks downstairs without them. To pay her back he stood between her and the young men so they couldn’t take her hand, couldn’t treat her like a lady when they wished her goodnight.
After Ben and Harry left, Gina and Salvo retreated to separate windows from which they both looked longingly at the sea beyond, but for different reasons: Salvo because he yearned to be back home; Gina because she wanted never to leave the big city. She hoped Lawrence would turn out to be a little bit like a big city, only smaller. But no matter what it turned out like, it wouldn’t have Ben and Harry in it.
“A fine pair they are,” Salvo said to her at last.
“Aren’t they just,” echoed Gina. Especially the sand-haired, laconic one.
He sighed with exasperated disdain. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think you forget what Papa said to you.”
She bristled. “I don’t forget anything.”
“Then why do you act like you do?”
Gina turned away. She didn’t want to hear it. Leaving the room where her brother was making her defensive, Gina went into the room where Mimoo was snoring and sat in a wooden chair by the open window. She still heard horses clomping outside, a distant bell of a trolley car, noises from sailors, laughter, a city alive, pulsing and thumping into the night. Never forget where you came from, Gina Attaviano, Alessandro said to her before he died. Then it will always be easy.
I think it will be easy, Papa, she whispered, gulping the night air. In thrall to the new city, the old life for Gina had vanished with the tide.
Chapter Five
SUMMER STREET
THERE was Boston, and then there was Lawrence. The steam train connecting the heart of the revolution with the immigrant town thirty miles north was modern, and the stations from which it arrived and departed had electricity and stone walls and wood doors and a ticket-taker. But besides the station and the lonely trolley car running down Broadway across the Merrimack River, Lawrence might as well have been Belpasso under an active volcano, a town to which electricity and plumbing had yet to come—though magma came, lava came, every year a rumbling, every five a smoke eruption, every ten a pouring of liquid rock. At least that’s how Lawrence felt to Gina, who had briefly breathed in the rarefied air of civilization and now once again was left with the cows. Yes, both sides of the burly river on which Lawrence was built were flanked by long, spread-out mills and tall smokestacks, one after another, but otherwise the town was unpaved dust and horse carriages. It wasn’t even like Belpasso, Gina complained to Salvo as they waited on the bench for Angela. In Belpasso, the streets were paved!
“Yes, paved with the red blood of martyrs, as your father would say,” said her mother, looking around. “Paved with the igneous lava remains of the sinners’ post-apocalyptic bones. No volcanoes in Lawrence. So much the better.”
“Are you sure?” Gina said sullenly. “How do you know?” Where Boston had manicured grasses and landscaped parks, where the North End steamed with noise and life, Lawrence on this Friday afternoon was like a drawing room—peaceful and singularly uneventful. Gina sauntered from the bench to Broadway, where she stood watching a few women carrying packages and pushing baby prams, just like in the old country. Salvo called her back. A carriage clomped by, without Angela.
Gina wanted to cry. This is where women retired to have children! Her life was over. She had had Boston at her fingertips, she had by a stroke of fate met two men, a warrior and a revolutionary, who could help her—help all of them. But no. Oh, dear merciful Jesus, what was she going to do?
“This isn’t like Boston,” said Mimoo.
“No, no it isn’t,” Gina grimly agreed.
“Look, Salvo, your sister is sulking.” Mimoo found that amusing. Gina turned away.
Harry and Ben had used the wrong metaphor about this town. Lawrence was like Boston only in the way an infant was like an adult. They shared some fundamental characteristics, but not any of the important ones. Gina, flagrantly disappointed after the joy of yesterday, focused instead on the brown plainness of her summer clogs while they waited for Angela.
They came from Sicily—where beauty was embodied in blue water and rolling hills, in vivid grasses and trees, in sailboats and dramatic coastlines, in sandy beaches, with Mount Etna in the background of every memory, hissing smoke all day long. Gina wasn’t a painter. She wasn’t disillusioned because she wanted to render Lawrence in oil on canvas. But she had promised her father she would make something of herself in America. How could she make anything of herself in Lawrence?
“Angela
