The man her father had found had already seen her photograph, for which she had borrowed her sister’s wedding dress. It was a piece of ingenuity of her father’s, so that no one could mistake the photograph for the kind men pass in trenches at suppertime. But she had not believed that the picture would work until today, when her father revealed that it had achieved its purpose. The man was two years in the union, could read and write, although not yet in English. A bricklayer from the countryside east of Naples whose one eye lazed. Fear not the mother, her father said, meaning the man’s mother. The mother would stay in Europe. Lina would be the mistress of her own house.
Someone in a double-breasted coat, with the flag of America stuck in his hatband and in his horse’s harness bells, drove past and told the street it must try his brand of soda pop. And a thin-lipped girl slouched on the seat next to him, dourly waving to the crowd that did not pay her any mind.
A woman stood on a plow while a man behind the wheel of a flivver dragged it through the remains of the charity vegetable garden.
A man sold potatoes from a steam cart in front of the pharmacy. Lina had never needed to enter the pharmacy, because her health was excellent. All her pieces worked, her father had told the man, whose name was Vinciuzzo — but she shouldn’t use dialect names or presume affections.
Her husband-in-waiting was a latecomer. Her father said that when he showed the man proof of her penmanship and her addition and subtraction, the man had noted that she didn’t draw a line across her sevens, as Europeans did. In other words, her skills would be her dowry. Her father would not have to pay him to have her married, as he had Mr. Schaeffer to take Antonietta off his hands. He had sold her by not having to pay, so now he and Mother could go and live on a grape farm in the country, as he had always wanted. And in this respect, Lina was proud.
She hoped the new man would let her wear her skirts above her shoes so that the hems didn’t need so often to be mended. She wasn’t finicky, but she hoped his teeth were sound. She wondered which language they would speak in the house and with the children.
Her life had been like the clay that she and her mother and her sister dug out of the creek bed and molded around a turkey or a capon at Christmastime, careful to make the mold in the shape of the bird inside, like a sarcophagus; and they baked it all slowly, and took it out to cool, and painted feathers on it with whitewash — and eyes with shoe polish, and its wattle with her mother’s lipstick — and waited for her father to come to the table and say that he blessed it, and the three of them, and Saint Joseph, his patron, and for him to hold the hammer and smash it. While they cheered and the steam came out.
She would meet the man-in-waiting on Saturday. And if she accepted him — she could not see why she would not accept him — then he would be the one, a month from now, for whose sake she would paint the case around herself and let him smash her.
Everything was going to commence at one time with a smash. It was fitting, it seemed impossible and right, that she would be introduced to her completion by something that otherwise was a crime.
Donna Costanza was not at home and so could only be making the passage in the street, pacing monkishly, as she did. Lina’s feelings were so severe now, and she knew there were some disclosures Donna Costanza had held back, waiting for today, about what she must do for her husband and what she mustn’t ever do to him. Her mother wouldn’t do that. Her mother watched more and spoke with her face. But sometimes Lina was betwixt and between, and Donna Costanza could be trusted to explain.
Her father had met with this man, and even kissed the sides of his face, as he must have done to seal the agreement — even though the man was saying in so many words that he was going to lift her clothes off her and touch her underneath. Her mother had given a look that said, It is this way. And nothing else. As though for her father to have to watch as people greeted her on the arm of this man with the horrible laughing knowingness in their eyes, as though her father’s simply agreeing to it because it was this way, because it had always been this way, would alleviate his shame.
She could move about freely only because everyone knew to whom she belonged, like a bicycle you might leave unchained anywhere you pleased because a thief would have no place to ride it without being called a thief by everyone who saw him. But now there was a middle time that Donna Costanza, she hoped, might help her with, when her father had relinquished his claim to her and she didn’t belong to her father or yet to anyone else.
The married women shouting to each other in the street, and the ratty laundry flapping over her head, and the spoiling fruit in the carts, were all so filthy and pure and perfected because they had all met now. And her mother had shown with her face today that now all of Lina’s parts would come suddenly into order, as though a rope was pulled tight.
Once, when she was a child, her mother had sent her to Donna Costanza’s garden to pick some leaves off the laurel tree for a stew, but she had misunderstood and had come back with a branch as long as her arm, saying she had been asked for only a little, but, look, she had found so much. And her father had scolded her mercilessly and held her by the scruff of her neck as he conveyed her along Chagrin Avenue with a brush and a pot of tar and showed her how to graft the branch onto the tree again. His intention was to instruct her that as much as possible she must strive to keep things from going to pieces.
On this corner the smoke of coal in a furnace was predominant, on this next corner the smoke of nuts being cooked on a charcoal grill, on this next one the smoke of a barrel of rubbish that the leather-faced madman named Pierangellini was burning to warm himself.
The air was dank and stimulating, and the smallest pellets of water darted through it and pricked her face.
That woman there, hawking a cage of puling piglets from the back of an ice wagon, carried her fat in front of her, in the middle, like a man.
He would put his fingers, washed or unwashed, on whatever part of her he pleased, whenever it pleased him to do it, for the rest of her life, until he should die. Despised by her or no. The fingers intolerable, while she made a face for him to see of something sweet in her mouth. Her body filth-smeared, the body she had scrubbed and polished and hidden away to give only to him.
She needed to say to Donna Costanza, as her mother would, with her face, Everything is coming together at once, yes; but also, Everything has gone to shameful pieces.
Once Lina had explained what had happened and explained her feelings with her face, then Donna Costanza’s lips began to twist as though she was struggling to smother a rising sneeze, and her gray and mottled teeth were exposed to the air. It was a face of hatred. But for whom?
Lina wanted to go inside, but Donna Costanza made her stay out, although it had become dark and was cold, and told her to walk along the trench, where the men continued digging in the muck, now by the light of hurricane lamps.
With a look, Lina said she was frightened and ashamed.
But Donna Costanza said that, even so, she must walk along the trench, where the men looked up at her, a pretty young thing at night, accompanied only by a widow carrying a purse and a string of songbirds, tied together at their necks, that she had bought from a boy in the street for their supper.
Now, as she did this, Lina felt no less frightened or ashamed, and with her face she said so. And Donna Costanza, who always spoke aloud and rarely needed to speak with her face, nonetheless this time seemed to say with only the slightest raising of the lids of her eyes: Carmelina, it is this way. You must break. He will recline, perhaps even stinking of alcohol through his skin, and point to a piece of clothing you will be wearing. And you will take it off.