“There’s got to be a better way to ride across town,” said Salvo.
“Across town?” Ben said. “Did you say across town?”
“Oh, no, mon dieu!” Harry exclaimed to the sooty heavens.
“Listen my children and you shall hear,” Ben recited loudly to no one in particular, “Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere/ On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five/Hardly a man is now alive/Who remembers that famous day and year.”
Gina listened intently. “What is this poem?”
“No, no,” Harry said to her over his shoulder. “Don’t interrupt him. Or he’ll just start from the beginning.”
Ben did start again from the beginning. It passed the time, though Gina faded in and out of listening. She kept hearing Italian being shouted down the streets, kept breathing in the smells of tomato sauce, watching women fishing with their hands for wet balls of fresh mozzarella, it was so familiar and reminiscent of the things she knew, and yet so strange. Though she was tired and hungry, she didn’t want any of it to end. Papa would’ve liked it, she whispered to herself under the strains of Ben’s, “A cry of defiance, and not of fear/A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,/And a word that shall echo for evermore!”
Chapter Four
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
1
IN a narrow alley, away from the bustle of Salem Street, the main artery of North End, they pulled up to a three-story building and Ben and Harry jumped down. Ben tied up the horse, while Harry helped Mimoo down from the carriage. He was going to help Gina down too, and she wanted him to, extending her hand to him, but Salvo intervened before Harry even came close to touching her. Salvo helped her down, too roughly for her liking.
“Thank you, young man,” Mimoo said in the meantime to Harry. “I hope we are on the first floor. I am very tired.”
“Unfortunately we are on the third.”
“Ah, but from the third floor,” Ben said, “you can see Boston Harbor if you lean out the window and look to the left.”
“Boston Harbor?” Salvo repeated contemptuously. “I lived a road away from the Adriatic sea. I was born and raised on the Mediterranean.”
“I’m sure it’s very nice,” said Ben. “But we don’t have the Mediterranean here. Just the harbor.”
Mimoo turned to Harry. “Forgive Salvo for squabbling. It’s been a long journey.”
“Nothing to forgive. He is in better spirits than most people we meet.”
Mimoo smiled. “You do this often?”
“Every week when the ships come in. If we have the space.”
Mimoo looked inside the front doors. A dark wide staircase ran up the center of the building like a spine. “How are we going to get our heavy trunks up three flights of stairs? We are such a burden. You shouldn’t have bothered with us.”
“It’s no bother,” Harry said. “None at all. This is what we do. We’ll get you upstairs, don’t worry.”
Mimoo appraised him, her face softening.
“Believe me, you won’t mind being on the third floor,” said Harry, helping her to the landing. “On the first floor you hear the sailors outside your windows all night in the summers. They tend to get rowdy by the docks.”
“You are so well mannered. How did you get into this line of work?”
“I’m not in this line of work,” Harry corrected her. “My father owns some apartment buildings. In the summers when we’re on a lighter load at university, we help him manage them. Ben and I see to the three he has here on Lime Alley.”
“He’s got more?”
“A few more.”
“Isn’t that the understatement of the decade,” Ben said, propping open the front door with a piece of driftwood. Harry glanced down the pavement at Gina, who in her blue dress and faded hat stood entranced by the little boys playing ball on the street. He watched her for a moment. Maybe two.
“She won’t like Lawrence,” Harry said to Mimoo, nodding to Gina. “It’s too sleepy. You’re sure you don’t want to stay? We can help you. We’ll find you work.”
Mimoo shook her head. “Too sleepy for her maybe, but ideal for her mother, who worries too much. I don’t need excitement in my life. I’ve had enough of it, thank you.” She shrugged. “Gia will be fine. She’ll be fine anywhere.”
“Gia?”
“It’s Gia when I love her,” said Mimoo. “My husband never called her anything but that. Me, I love her, but she drives me crazy. So headstrong. To call her stubborn like a mule is an injustice to mules. The mules are St. Francis compared to her.”
Harry laughed.
“It’s my husband’s fault, bless his soul,” Mimoo went on. “Now he was a saint. Adored her. And she took every advantage. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. You know what my husband used to say, may he rest in peace?” She crossed herself. “He said many wise things. Like your father, I imagine?”
“My father is mostly silent,” said Harry. “But if he did speak, perhaps he would say wise things.”
“Well, my dearest departed Alessandro, the second greatest man ever to walk this earth, and the greatest man to stand before the gates of St. Peter, said about his children, they find a life everywhere they look.”
Mimoo held on to Harry’s arm. He nodded politely, listening as if deep in thought. The day was waning and the shadows were long.
“But if that is true, señora,” Harry said, as they began slowly to walk up the stairs, with Ben carrying one of the trunks behind them, “why did you leave your homeland? You must have thought you could find a better life here, no?”
“No,” replied Mimoo. “That is not why we left.”
“Why then?”
The weary Italian woman nodded at her children behind her. “Where we come from, everybody lives only one kind of life. Alessandro said he wanted his children to choose the life, not the life to choose the children. And also,” she added, panting, slowing down and wiping her brow, “he said America is the only place in the world where even the poor can be smart.”
“Well, Harry wouldn’t know anything about that,” Ben cheerfully chimed in, hurling one of the trunks onto the landing. “Because he, unfortunately, is neither.”
2
Harry and Ben and a reluctant Salvo left to go get some dinner, while Gina and her mother nested in the two small rooms by putting fresh linen on the dining table. Mimoo ordered Gina not to take too many things out, since they would have to repack them before they left the following morning. Gina unpacked too much anyway. She was hoping her mother might change her mind and let them stay. “I’m not a child, Mimoo,” she said quietly, while fixing her hair, hoping her mother wouldn’t hear, but wanting her mother to hear.
“You are still a child,” said Mimoo, who heard everything. “And I want to keep you that way—for your father—as long as possible.”
“Papa would want me to be happy, no?”
“No, be a child