“I want to get as far from the city as possible,” Luigi insisted. “I want land. Fresh air. Don’t you?”
Ciro had given a lot of thought about where to live during his endless nights in France. When Enza embraced him that afternoon, she had no idea the gift she had given him. Ciro was ready to make a life for her that he had never dared imagine alone. With Luigi as a partner, they could go anywhere. “How about California?”
“Half of Calabria is in California. There are more shoemakers than feet out west.”
Ciro nodded. “There are mines in Kentucky and West Virginia. Maybe they need shoemakers,” he offered.
“I don’t want to go south,” Luigi said. “I’m from southern Italy, and I’ve had enough heat and humidity to last me a lifetime.”
“We could go north. I’d love a place like Vilminore. Someplace green, where there are lakes.”
“There are plenty of lakes in Minnesota.”
“That’s where my father went to work,” Ciro said quietly, an expression of unresolved pain crossing his face. “And he never came back to us.”
“What happened?” Luigi asked gently.
“We don’t know. And you know what, Luigi? I don’t want to know. They say he died in a mine, but all we know is that he never came home. It broke up our family, ruined my mother’s health, and split up my brother and me.”
“All right. We’ll never go to Minnesota.”
“No, no, we should consider every possibility,” Ciro said slowly. Minnesota had always had a mythical quality to him. It was the place that had swallowed up his father without apology. Yet it held a certain fascination for Ciro because his father had chosen it. Would it be fate or sheer folly to offer up another Lazzari to the Iron Range? Choosing Minnesota might tempt fate—or maybe it could redeem the loss of his father.
“I heard some men talking at Puglia’s,” Luigi continued, oblivious to Ciro’s internal struggle. “The iron ore mines operate around the clock. Lots of guys are heading up there. We should think about it. The mines employ thousands, and somebody’s got to build the boots and repair them. We could make a good living. And you’d certainly have your lakes.”
Perhaps it was the memory of all the places Ciro had been during and after the war—the romantic hills of England, the pristine vineyards of France, and the stately antiquities of Rome—that gave him the desire to leave New York City. Or maybe it was sleeping in the same cot behind a thin privacy curtain, as he had done since he was a teenager, that made him long for a home of his own. Suddenly the old ways, the way things had always been, were not enough. He intended to give Enza a good life and a home of her own. He needed to be bold in his thinking, open to new ideas; and he hoped she, too, might think beyond the borders of Manhattan Island. He shook his head at the odds of his plan succeeding. “Enza will never leave New York City,” he said finally.
“Who?”
“Enza Ravanelli,” Ciro announced. “I’m going to marry her.”
“Marry her?” Luigi was stunned. “Enza . . .” He remembered. “The nice girl from the Alps? I can’t believe it. She’s a glove-and-hat girl. She’s not like any of the girls you used to see.”
“That’s the point.”
“You’re like every other doughboy home from the front. You turned in your rifle and went shopping for wedding rings. How did you pull this off so fast?”
“I don’t know,” Ciro lied. He had planned to return to New York and win Enza’s heart from the first moment his boots hit the ground in France. The complete chaos of war had helped him think clearly and to define life for himself in a plain way. It was either yes or no, life or death, love or loneliness. War had taught him that everything was absolute. So he too began to think like a general, even when it came to his own heart. He had nothing to gain by taking more time to make what was, for him, an obvious decision. “She wants to be with me,” Ciro said.
“So does every other girl between here and Bushwick. But you never gave Enza a tumble. Why now?”
“I’ve changed, Luigi.”
“I’ll say. Did you get hit on the head in France? You’re the man who always got the girl. Any girl. All of them,” Luigi marveled.