Children of Liberty

“How is this relevant?” Harry demanded. “Why would this young lady and her brother care? Look how bored they are.”

Ben laughed.

They continued to talk and joke and drink while Gina faded into the stiff wooden chair, trying to sit like a lady, to keep her elbows off the table, her bare damp arms straight. But her back hurt, her neck hurt, her legs hurt from being up so long—on the boat, on the docks, walking through North End, and now sitting here with these smart men. Salvo was smoking, trying to stay vigilant and awake. Mimoo was soundly sleeping. Salvo needn’t have worried. Gina policed herself. With a slight tremor she realized how infantile she was to think even for a moment that she could hold a conversation with actual men. That’s how she knew she was infantile. Because she thought she could. To think that a curl of her brown hair or a sway of her long girlish skirt, or the sheen of her tanned Sicilian soft skin could make up for the fact that when she opened her mouth she was nothing more than a contadina from the rural outskirts of a Sicilian town, where they milked the cows and took the olives off the trees in season. They fished all summer and hoped the volcano wouldn’t erupt, again. Oh, the fallacy of herself!

Reluctantly she withdrew from the conversation, hoping they would interpret her intimidation as exhaustion. One side of her hair bun had come loose and was dangling a long wavy strand down the side of her neck. Her brother kicked her chair. She ignored him. He kicked the chair again, harder. She looked over at him. What, she mouthed with irritation. He gestured to her hair with his eyes.

You want me to tie up my hair, she rhetorically mutely asked him. Fine, here you go. Raising her hands to her head, she pulled out all the pins and laid them on the table, in front of her plate. Her hair was now out of the bun and fell down her back and over her shoulders, chocolate, wavy, ungainly. Completely ignoring what she knew with delight was her brother’s appalled expression, she lifted her hands to her head and section by section proceeded to pin the hair back in a high chignon. The three men watched her; no one moved; only her bare arms moved.

Salvo croaked, “It’s getting late …”

Harry and Ben ignored him.

“What does your friend Angela do in Lawrence?” Ben asked, gaping at Gina in the near dark from across the table as the candlelight flickered out.

She wouldn’t allow herself a glimpse at Harry. “She works in a textile factory.”

“Is that where you want to work?” Ben smiled. “On the looms?”

“No,” she replied. “Too hot on the looms. I want to work in the mending room. It’s more refined.”

“No,” Salvo cut in. “Gina and I are going to open our own business like true Americans.”

“Salvo, be quiet,” Gina snapped. “Who has money to open their own business? We don’t have money to pay these kind gentlemen for staying here. We have to find work first, save a little money. Then maybe we can boast about what we plan to do.”

“That is what I’m going to do, sister. No use arguing me out of it.”

Harry and Ben appraised the sister and brother.

“A business is a good idea,” Ben said.

Harry said nothing.

Sticking his fingers in Harry’s ribs, Ben tried to explain his friend’s silence. “My friend is conflicted about business.”

“Not at all,” said Harry. “I know exactly how I feel about it.”

“Yes—conflicted.” Ben chuckled. “Harry is burdened by his father’s expectations. Now some might argue it’s better to have a father, even a demanding one, but Harry disagrees.”

“It’s better to have a father,” Gina said quietly, “even a demanding one.”

“Oh, I agree with you, Gina,” said Ben. “But Harry struggles every day against unfulfillable projections, while I run scattershot from hobby to hobby, having no burdens placed on me whatsoever.”

“Except by your radical mother,” said Harry.

“Where is your father?” Gina asked Ben.

“I don’t know. I’ve never met him.”

Gina pondered that—not to know your father. It was inconceivable. In Sicily, every child knew who his father was.

“I, on the other hand,” said Harry, “have met my father, but I know him even less than Ben knows his.”

Gina wasn’t sure how to respond. “Doesn’t your mother want you to become someone, Ben?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “She doesn’t say to me, son, you must follow in my footsteps.”

“Yes, she does,” said Harry. “And my father doesn’t say this either. He says, whatever you do is fine with me. Which is even worse. Aside from being wholly untrue.”

Gina really pondered that one. “That’s worse?” she said at last. Was it the language barrier that made comprehension of this insurmountable? What were they actuallysaying?

“Yes, it’s worse,” Harry said. “Because action on my part is implied and required. Do what you like, he says, but do something.”

“Ah.” There was a significant pause—it was late at night, after a long day. “But you do want to do something, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure.” Harry half-smiled at her. “What if I don’t?”

“Harry is joking,” Ben said.

“A man has to do something,” said Gina.

“What about a woman?” Harry’s fog-colored eyes twinkled a little.

“A woman’s role is clear. She must keep house, raise children.”

“What if she wants to work?”

“She is working.”

“Work outside the home.”

“In Italy, there is no such thing,” Gina said. “If she sells fruit at the market or sews for other people or cleans big homes, she must do it between hours. First her own house, her own children. Then everything else.”

Ben gazed at her in appreciation.

Pensively Gina stared at Harry. “Are you an only child?”

“I am an only son,” he replied, not looking directly at her. “I have a sister.”

Ben made a dismissive sound. “Esther is invisible to 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?”