Out of guilt? out of love?—he wrote her every day from then on, keeping his English simple but somehow trying to pay her back for the great harm he had done. As she struggled with writing back in a foreign tongue, he grew more and more fond of her, fond in the sense of liking this obviously remarkable person, and fond in the sense of becoming just plain nuts about her.
He looked over at his beautiful wife holding her cane in one hand and his son in the other. Though she was five years younger, he sensed she was older, so much older than he, from the age-old culture of her ancient hometown. Had he her education, he would have known these lines of Carducci:
Onde venisti? Quali a noi secoli
si mite e bella ti tramandarano . . .
Whence come you? What centuries
passed you on to us, so mild and lovely?
Their correspondence continued after his return to Texas. He lived his life in order to write her of it. Lunchtimes, he went home from the Feed Mill to check the mailbox, so impatient was he. He who had never written even a postcard in his life learned to write, expressively and well. And as her letters became more fluent and his more rich, the possibility of marriage became obvious. Would this now eighteen-year-old Italian, half-Jewish beauty, flower of the ghetto, this classical violinist with the Botticelli hands, this Old World, half-Sephardic treasure, give up her family in Ferrara for the blandness of Mansfield, Texas, or would George Hitler join her in the ancient land he had helped destroy?
The most difficult letter was the one he thought might end their relationship, the one in which he told her it was he, and he alone, who had crippled her. It took nine days for an answer. The first of those days were filled with letters from Ferrara he thought of as “she doesn’t know yet.” The last of those days were filled with letters he called “from before she knew.” On a Monday noon, a Monday after an excruciating Sunday of empty mailbox, he held what must be the letter in his trembling hand.
Giorgio, my dearest,
Do you think I didn’t know? Do you think you coming just after the blast, your loving concern, the way you wiped pumpkin off my face did not give you away? Do you think your love does not far exceed this accident of war? Do you think a woman needs two legs to love a man?
Have no fear, my beloved. I will write you again tonight when there is more time. But I answer this immediately, for I can imagine how you are fearful of what I will say. So I just say I am loving you.
Your Anna,
who, even though she loves you, will never eat a pumpkin pie on your Thanksgiving
They were married in June of ’48, she nineteen, he twenty-four. Her “assimilated” parents, her Jewish father, Jacobo, an ex-editor for the Corriere ferrarese (writing freelance, under a pseudonym, since the Nuremberg laws of ’35), her mother, Lucetta, a math teacher in the high school, thought it best Anna should see America. She and Giorgio could come back to Ferrara if she were unhappy. Perhaps she could send a little money to help them rebuild. Life would be easier in America.
Anna kept her name, Giardini, as a link to her old life in her old world, one of the first women of her generation to do so. George was concerned it was because she didn’t want his name. After all . . . No, she assured him, she knew who was Hitler and who was only “Hitler.”
Three
Arnold—named for his maternal grandfather—was born on Christmas morning two years later at Mansfield General Hospital, a nine-pound, twelve-ounce strapping, screaming newborn, at the top of the Apgar scale, as he would be at the top of all his classes from first grade on.
But the crying, the continuous crying! Colic? The distraught parents devoured Dr. Spock and tried it all. Troubleshooting: Was he hungry? Just ate. Dirty diaper? No. Would that it were. Safety pin? Never. Gassy, colicky? Belly quiet, and flat as a board. Nothing seemed to help. He cried as an infant, he cried as a toddler, he cried when, finally, at three he began to speak.
His first word was “yellow,” a sunshine word for a thunderstorm boy: “Yewwo.” He cried for his yellow Dr. Dentons if Anna tried to put him to bed in blue ones. He wanted to play in the yellow-walled kitchen no matter where his mother was in the house. He loved his yellow bear and his yellow-hatted clown, he loved the light streaming in the yellow-curtained windows, and he could sleep only with his yellow twinkle light at night. But most of all he loved yellow fire.
When he was four, he burned his hand, badly, third degree. Palmar burns are serious. Lots of nerves and tendons close to the surface, with little room for swelling. George and Anna had accepted Owen Barlow’s invitation to come out on his boat on Joe Pool Lake. It was a windy September afternoon, too early to go back but chilly enough for the crew to take refuge in the cabin.
“Arnie and Sam, no running!”
Sam was a year older and even more kinetic than his friend. He would be Mansfield’s High School’s greatest track star, faster even than the several black runners who joined the team in 1965. At his father’s call, Sam stopped short, and Arnie crashed right into him, falling backward and catching himself with his left hand, directly on the heater. A Southern smell of burning flesh. The grownups were horrified, in pain almost as great as that of the shrieking child. Anna, especially, was affected, ignited through her own agonies, her stump shrieking, her pity, her terror for her child. . . . She could only hold him wailing in her arms and repeat endlessly, “Bambino mio, bambino mio . . .”
Arnold’s hand was bandaged at the hospital, he was given pain meds and sent home to be shaped by a multidimensional trauma his parents little suspected. It wasn’t the pain that made him cry. It was the fact that he couldn’t move his hand inside the bandage. He was trapped. His hand was not uncomfortable, but he was trapped, and being trapped was the torture. He cried every time he wanted to move his hand and couldn’t. Worse, he was doubly trapped: he couldn’t leave the trap behind. He could go in the other room, and the trap would follow him. He could go to sleep and wake up the next morning: the trap would still be there. He could walk anywhere, run anywhere, and his hand would still be trapped. His parents couldn’t understand. They would offer to cheat on his Darvon schedule, but it wasn’t the pain. They didn’t get it, and he could not explain. So he was trapped in yet another dimension: he could not communicate what was wrong. Triply trapped. He cried a lot.
Anna tried to distract him: if he would put his left knee to his mouth, she told him, he could talk to Grandpa Jacobo in Italy. Grandpa Jacobo would feel a tickling in his left knee, and put his ear to it and listen, and he would be able to hear Arnold. Then, if Arnold put his ear to his knee and listened very carefully, he might hear Grandpa Jacobo talking back to him.
Could he talk English to Grandpa? Arnold asked. Would Grandpa talk English back? Anna assured him that since she had moved to America, Grandpa Jacobo had been studying English. She told him to try it and see. Curious, and ever wanting to please, Arnold gave it a go. He rolled up his pajama leg to expose his left knee (the left knee his mother lacked) and whispered into the joint, “Grandpa, can you hear me?”
“Now put your ear to your knee, and let me know what he says.”
Arnold listened very carefully.
“Close the window,” he told his mother, “so it will be more quiet.” She did, and he listened for two silent minutes.
“Well?”
“He says he can hear me, and he wants to know how everyone is, and if I go to school yet. He says he and Grandma Lucetta miss me and miss you and Daddy, and they want us to come visit them next summer. He says he will take us on a trip into the big mountains. And he says that Pepi died last week.”
“Our dog?”
“Yes. Pepi died last week from being old.”
This