was so loud, Enza closed the drapes in the front room and closed the bedroom door. She climbed on the stool and snapped the open skylight shut. “It’s too cold, Ciro,” she said as she placed another blanket over his body. He was growing thinner by the day.
“Grazie,” he said. “What would I do without you?”
Enza lay in bed next to him. “You would have married the May Queen. What was her name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Philomena? It sounded like that.”
“I said, I don’t remember,” Ciro teased.
“Felicitá! That’s it. The Sicilian bombshell. She would have made you buy her diamonds. No, no. That wouldn’t have been good enough. She would have made you dig for them, and when you brought her the biggest stone, she’d look at it and say, ‘I said a rock, Ciro. Not a pebble. A rock.’ ”
“You would have married Vito Blazek.”
“I would have been his first wife. He’s had three since.”
“Really?”
“Laura keeps up with him. So see, you saved me from a life of glamour and sophistication. I was rescued by the shoemaker.”
“I feel sorry for you,” Ciro said.
“Don’t you dare,” Enza said, leaning over to kiss him. “I have my dream.”
On his deathbed, Ciro realized he’d chosen Enza because she was strong alone; she did not need him, she wanted him. Enza had chosen Ciro, forsaking her own sense of security, which, he had come to know, was the need that drove her. Everything his wife did, and every decision she made, was about holding life together, and creating safety in a world where there was little.
Ciro was sad that he and Enza would never know what it might have been like to love each other their whole lives long, but the gift of what had been, the risks taken and endured, would have to be enough. They had received their portion. It was useless now to have hoped for more time.
But what about their son?
Ciro was bereft that his own son would live with the grief he had known all of his life. The loss of his own father had never left him.
A man needs his father more as life progresses, not less. It is not enough to learn how to use a lathe, milk a cow, repair a roof; there are greater holes to mend, deeper wells to fill, that only a father’s wisdom can sustain. A father teaches his son how to think a problem through, how to lead a household, how to love his wife. A father sets an example for his son, building his character from the soul outward.
Ciro sought his father in the face of every man he met—Iggy at the convent, Remo in the shoe shop, and Juan Torres during the war. Each man gave what he could, but none of them, despite their best intentions, could be Carlo Lazzari.
In the last moments of his life Ciro realized that a truly good man is a rarity, a speck of gold in a mountain of slag. All around him during the war, Ciro saw men lie, engage in acts of cowardice, create feeble attachments to women, only to leave them—men acting in pursuit of their own comforts, men behaving without grace. And now Ciro was about to do to his son the terrible thing that had been done to him—die without raising him properly to adulthood. Ciro could not forgive himself for failing his son.
“Thank you for taking care of me, Enza.”
She turned to him. “You’ve been a terrible patient.”
Ciro laughed. “I know. Come and sit with me. I just want to look at you.”
Enza sat next to Ciro on the bed. He reached out and took both of her hands. She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of them. Enza loved Ciro’s beautiful hands; for all the hard labor he had done all of his life, he still had the long, lovely fingers of a musician or a painter.
His hands had created art. She had watched when he measured leather, suede, and silk, cut patterns, sewed shapes, and pressed the assembled boot he had sewn against the brushes. She could spend hours watching him make shoes. It was theater to her; every movement of his mastery had meaning and magic to it.
His hands had fed them. She had watched as he deftly carved stelline in delicate quick movements to make soup for their baby. Sometimes he made cheese, an elaborate operation that turned milk and rennet into ropes of mozzarella.