Francesca found other pictures from the storm, and even the yellowed front page of the newspaper she had saved from the day after. Reminiscing about the days that had followed, she recalled that, despite all the inconvenience the storm had wrought, it was still one of the most pleasant times she had ever experienced in the neighborhood. As so often happens, the worst of times brought out the very best in people. Neighbors, some of whom had rarely spoken to one another, had gone out of their way to help each other dig out of the mess. Children had frolicked without fear in the middle of the streets because the roads virtually everywhere had been impassable. With their cars all buried and the roads unplowed, people had actually started to walk from place to place near their homes, no small matter for those normally accustomed to automatically jumping behind the wheel for any trip farther than two doors over. Complete strangers had greeted each other with smiles, stopping in the street to chat like old friends as they passed one another. In an unexpected way, people who had lived in the area for years had rediscovered their neighborhood, their neighbors, and the warm feeling of community that came from acknowledging that they were all in it together.
Such would not be the case with this storm, Francesca well understood. While ferocious enough in its own right, it had not inflicted anywhere near the mayhem as that storm of 1978. School had been cancelled throughout the state, and many stayed home from work for the day; the weathermen had predicted the snowfall early enough so that this time, people had been well prepared when it hit. With the populace cooperating by staying off the roads, the snowplows and sanders had passed early and often.
It was something of a disappointment to Francesca.
Closing the photo album, she stood and gazed out the front window for a time. From outside, she could hear the scraping of snow shovels and the roaring of a power snowblower somewhere nearby. It might take most of the day to clean things up, probably well into the night, but as soon as people shoveled out their driveways, life would very quickly resume its former frenetic pace. Turning away from the window, she began to walk about the house, looking for something constructive to do to pass the time. All the while, the voices of Rosie and Alice kept echoing in her ears. They were right, of course. She shouldn’t even think about going outdoors again. Just the same, Francesca had been born with what her own mother had called una testa dura: an exceedingly hard head. Such being the case, she was finding it very difficult to resist the temptation to take a stroll around the block, just to see how the rest of the neighborhood had made out after the storm. It occurred to her that the bill payments neatly stacked on the kitchen table provided a convenient excuse; it was time to put them in the mail. What harm would there be in a quick jaunt down the street and around the corner to the nearest mailbox?
Francesca pondered the answer to that question a short while later while picking herself up out of a snowbank on the side of the main road. The walk down her hill had proven to be more treacherous than she had imagined. True, the road had been plowed well enough, but the snow had been pushed up onto the sidewalks, forcing her to walk along the road’s edge. When she rounded the corner at the bottom of the hill onto the main street, she had found that the cars and trucks were already whizzing along, often within inches of her elbow. Determined to reach the mailbox a few hundred yards or so down the road, Francesca had been looking back over her shoulder for approaching cars when she had suddenly lost her footing and toppled sideways into snow. She had landed in a snowbank with a less-than-graceful flop and let out a string of Italian epithets she had learned from her mother. As she stood and tried to brush herself off, furious at the conditions of the roadways, no public official save the Pope was spared her wrath. She trudged on, the snow caked on her hat and up and down her entire backside so that, to motorists overtaking her, she appeared to be a very grumpy walking snowman.
The humor of the sight was not lost on a group of teenaged boys milling about on the front steps of a tenement house as Francesca trod by on her way to the mailbox. They all looked to be of Asian descent, some wearing similar jackets, which suggested they were part of a gang. Fuming as she was, Francesca took little note of them when she first passed. She dropped the bills into the mailbox and turned to go back the way she had come. As she passed the boys once more, one of them stepped closer to the old woman and gave her an impertinent look. He held out his hand, as if asking her for money, then he turned to his friends and said something that made them laugh. Francesca had no idea what the young man had said, but she was reasonably sure that it was not a compliment.
Now, an onlooker to the scene would certainly have been forgiven for thinking that perhaps a very unpleasant confrontation of some sort was about to take place. Francesca herself considered the possibility, but she was not one to be easily cowed. She stopped in her tracks and faced the young toughs.
“Cam on ong, toi manh,” she said, eyeing them sharply. It meant, “Thank you, I am fine.” It was the only phrase she could remember from the language tapes she had been listening to the night before. Judging by the startled, wide-eyed looks on their faces, she knew that she had guessed right that the young men were Vietnamese.
Clearly mortified at the prospect that the old woman might have understood what he had said, the boy who had made the remark that so amused the others flushed with embarrassment. The others, even the gang members, bowed their heads or tried to look in the other direction. Seeing that she had managed to chase some of the bravado out of the boy and his friends, Francesca walked right up to them. She wasn’t about to give up the initiative now that she had seized it.
“You speak English?” she asked of the boy who had first addressed her. He was standing there now with his hands in his pockets, trying hard to avoid the gaze of Francesca’s blue eyes, which had lost none of their piercing inquisitiveness in her old age.
“At school,” he replied sheepishly. Then, trying his best to regain his lost self-assuredness, he rushed to add, “But here we speak our own language.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Francesca in a mild voice. “It’s good that you speak your own language sometimes. It keeps you from forgetting your roots. That’s important.” Then she looked past him to the house. “You live here?” she asked.
The boy gave a nod. “Second floor,” he said.
“Tell me,” said Francesca, “does the dining room still have that nice cabinet built into the corner, and that pretty crystal chandelier hanging over the table?”
Suspecting that perhaps he had unwittingly crossed paths with some sort of witch, the boy gaped at the old woman, as did the others.
“How—how do you know this?” he asked warily.
“Ayyy, because I’ve been in your house a thousand times,” Francesca told him. “This house used to belong to Doctor Ricci and his family. I was good friends with his wife, Dee.”
“A doctor lived here?” said the boy incredulously.
By now, the other boys had started to gather around to listen more closely to what Francesca had to say.
“Of course,” she went on. “Doctor Ricci had an office on the other side of the city, but sometimes he would come to our houses when one of us was sick, or we’d come by to see him right here. He never charged anyone a penny.” Francesca paused and looked about at the surrounding houses. “You’d be surprised; all sorts of important people have lived in these houses,” she told them. “Like there, across the street.”
“That’s my house!” exclaimed a small boy who, until this moment, had been hiding behind the others. He looked no more than nine or ten.
“Well, that’s