The American Lady(100)

No sooner had the fireworks finished, though, than Marie whispered to him that she was tired, so they went to their room. They were in bed a little after one o’clock.

While Marie sighed gently in her dreams, Franco was filled with nagging doubts that kept sleep at bay.

“You all think I don’t see what’s going on!”—his heart had almost stopped beating at those words! For a moment he had believed that she knew all about the special shipments. Thank God she didn’t! But her remark had shown him vividly, once again, how quickly the house of cards could collapse. The castle in the air he had built for himself and Marie. And if it did—what then?

Marie must never find out what all his bookkeeping and paperwork for the crossings was really about. Those records were so dangerous that he was the only one who could even look at them.

“Everything will be all right, mia cara. The new year belongs to us,” he had whispered into his wife’s ear shortly after midnight. How trustingly she had looked at him! It was up to him to make sure that her trust was not misplaced. And that meant no more people smuggling in the new year.

Marie spent too much time on her own and was lonely, he knew that. But how could he attend to his wife when he always had to listen to other people’s tales of woe? Farmers’ sons and poverty-stricken tradesmen came to him with their laments, all of them hoping to find their fortune across the sea in the promised land—and they ended up in a kitchen in Little Italy, enslaved by the same poverty they had fled in the old country. Meanwhile their parents back home lived on dry bread and rice because they had spent every last lira buying passage for their sons.

He knew too that Marie was disappointed that he still hadn’t made a start on his plans to replant and reinvigorate the vineyards.

He would go to his father this very week. Perhaps he should ask for an appointment, so that the old man knew he meant business. Yes, that would be good. The tension in his body eased a little.

He grew vines and he sold wines—that was who he was. And that meant that the next time he went to New York, he would sell wine. Not sour rotgut that the restaurants only bought because they got cheap labor with every shipment of wine they took off him. De Lucca wines had once enjoyed a good reputation; their bouquet had taken homesick immigrants back to the Italian sunshine, if only for an hour or two. And it could happen again! If only he could make his father see things his way, their wine would be a force to reckon with once more.

Marie turned in her sleep and lifted her knees to her belly. Their child was growing in her womb. Inside her, in the dark, a tiny human being was waiting to see the light of day. Gently, so as not to wake her, Franco ran his hand over the bedcovers.

There was still plenty of time. By the time the child was born, he would be the man he wanted to be. Then the future could begin.

He liked the idea. He wanted to become a father without having to worry that a wine barrel might slip its moorings somewhere in the belly of a ship and crush a stowaway beneath its weight. He didn’t want to live in fear because someone might block the airholes by loading the next piece of cargo and . . . enough of such thoughts!

Franco pressed both hands to his temples as though to chase the thoughts from his head.

Another ship had left Genoa two days earlier. In a week the Firenze would arrive in New York. If it were up to him, those twelve stowaways would be the last he ever smuggled out of the country.

If only it were over already.





13

New Year’s supper at the Steinmann-Maienbaum family home was a low-key affair. Johanna had made a pot of potato soup and did no more to mark the occasion than add an extra sausage for each person, and there was bread with the meal, as always. But the food was merely incidental that evening. As soon as the dishes were empty, the men cleared all the tables and chairs to the side of the room. Their neighbor Klaus Obermann-Brauner balanced his accordion on his knee, and everybody stood in a circle. Wanda learned that Klaus and his wife, Hermine, celebrated New Year’s Eve with the Steinmann-Maienbaum family every year, just like the rest of tonight’s guests. Klaus began to play, and the dancing began. At first Wanda felt clumsy trying to follow the unfamiliar steps—there was much stamping of boots and kicking up of knees, nothing at all like the dances she knew from the ballrooms of New York—but she found the good cheer so infectious that she was soon whooping more loudly than any of them, leaping in the air and swinging her skirts with gusto. She could have hugged the whole world tonight! Instead she spun around, following the order of the dance, and held out both hands to the man behind her. Her laugh died on her lips.