Mary Russel - A Thread of Grace

He speaks without facing her. “Go back to bed?”

“That’s a plan,” Lidia admits drily, “though not quite as ambitious as I had envisioned.”

His fingers curl into a fist that he touches to the woodwork, once, twice, gently. He backs away from the window and stumbles over a low table covered with books. “This place is a mess!”

“Signor Mussolini is welcome to clean it himself.”

When he returns from his bedroom, the remains of the ashtray have disappeared, and she is back to her mending as though nothing has happened. “That shirt came out well,” she observes. It was his father’s. Renzo lost weight in prison, and she had to cut it down, but the fabric was a pleasure to work with. Checking the collar in the credenza’s mirror, Renzo knots his tie. “You’re rather overdressed for a nap,” she notes.

He shakes out a linen jacket. “I’m going to apply for a job.”

“Really?” she remarks, brows lifted. It’s illegal for Catholics to employ Jews, and for Jews to own businesses, but getting around the race laws is a popular Italian sport. “What sort of job?”

He jerks his shirt cuffs down to provide a centimeter of reveal. “I met a man in prison whose cousin is a member of the Dairy Association. They need drivers. If you can keep a truck with a gasogene rig running, the foreman won’t ask questions.”

“Get him to pay you in cheese. I can trade it on the black market.” She peers over her spectacles. “You do realize that milkmen are expected to be out of bed before noon?”

He turns from the mirror and smiles at her brightly. “Mamma, you and I have two additional tasks before us this morning, and you may have your choice: clean this apartment, or seduce a priest.”

Serenely, she surveys the domestic chaos around her. “How old is the priest?”

Downstairs, the rabbi’s wife props her aching back against the open door and bids each member of the minyan a good day as he leaves. “ Buon giorno, ” the first seven say, adding, “ B’sha’ah tova! May the child be born at a lucky hour!”

Bald and bent, the eighth to leave is Giacomo Tura, but he takes his time about it. With hands twisted by a lifetime of gripping pens and brushes, the widowed scribe waves arthritic fingers over Mirella Soncini’s swollen belly. His rheumy eyes rise slowly, lingering on her breasts before arriving at her wry and smiling face. “Mirella! Chè faccia bella! ” he sings in a raspy tenor. “If you weren’t a married woman, O Dio! I’d make you mine!”

Mirella waves off his randy gallantry. In her own clear eyes, the war and her third pregnancy have rendered her shopworn and middle-aged at twenty-six, but she knows what others still see when they look at her: an early Renaissance life model, Botticelli blond, demeanor demure, but with a direct and level gaze.

Reaching into the entryway, she grabs a broom and sweeps the night’s grime from the low stone steps. “ ’N giorno, Signor Loeb,” she says, when the minyan’s ninth finally appears. “Is your brother-in-law all right? Angelo said he was ill.”

Tranquillo Loeb pushes both hands at the air, miming rejection of Renzo Leoni and all his affairs, and stalks away from the synagogue talking to himself. Mirella decides to go to the source. “Renzo!” she calls loudly. A moment later, he steps onto the Leonis’ small balcony. He’s dressed, but… “Your hair seems to have exploded,” she informs him helpfully. “You look like an alarmed cartoon character.”

“And you look like a brood mare,” he replies. “When you pass small children, it must seem like an eclipse of the sun.”

“Diogenes, put down your lantern!” she cries. “I have found an honest man!”

“How are you feeling?” he asks more seriously.

“Huge.” She widens her stance and presses her hands against her lower back. “But everything’s going well, grazie a Dio! Except—” Casting her eyes toward her own door, and then ever so slightly upward, she mouths, “The noise…” Every morning, a minyan packs her dining room, waiting for Iacopo to make the tenth. The congregation’s secretary and treasurer arrive next. They’ve had desks in the Soncinis’ salon since the synagogue’s business offices were converted to a school in 1938. They’re followed by refugees queuing for relief money. “Angelo said you had morning sickness!” she tells Renzo.

“An acute but temporary condizion,” he tells her with a German doctor’s accent. “ Die Prognose ist gut. ”

He’s handsome, in a rather world-weary way, but it’s increasingly difficult to tell world-weary from hungover. “I still have a headache powder saved up,” she offers.

“What he needs is a smack in the head!” Catarina Dolcino mutters, emerging from the apartment lobby. For fifty years, Rina’s been the neighborhood portiere; old age and widowhood have merely increased the amount of attention she can devote to stern surveillance. Left fist on a pillowy hip, right wielding a broom like a bishop’s crozier, she scowls upward. “You’re a disgrace, Renzo Leoni! Everyone in this building heard you come in!”

“ Santo cielo! ” Renzo’s mother cries, coming to stand at his side. “Who is that dreary old woman shouting like a fishwife in the street?”

“And who raised such a boy?” A gold crucifix dangles between ample breasts swaying under a cotton housedress as Rina sweeps the sidewalk. “Some other old woman, whose son is a public nuisance! Five in the morning, he came in! He woke the whole neighborhood up!”

“You should have been on your way to Mass by then anyway, you lazy thing! I’ve already been to the market, and I got the only decent pears in Sant’Andrea!”

Renzo rolls his eyes and backs off the balcony in a strategic retreat. Lidia Leoni and Rina Dolcino have been bickering for decades. One thin, the other round— Stick and Ball, the neighborhood children call them. Once the game’s begun, it’s impossible to tell who’s hitting whom.

Mirella sets her own broom aside, in too good a mood to be drawn into even the most affectionate of arguments. The war is over, she thinks for the fiftieth time this morning. The bombing will end. The king will repeal the race laws, and Angelo can go to school with the other children. Soon it will be Rosh Hashana, and life will start fresh. Everything will be as it was before. Except for Altira…

Her eyes fill, but she blinks away the tears. Altira is gone, but the new baby will arrive with the new year. It is time, she thinks resolutely, to be happy again. “Have either of you been able to find soap?” she asks the older women. “All this smoke! I’m dying to wash the walls.”

“She’s getting close,” Rina says shrewdly. “I always washed walls the night before I went into labor.”

“I have three weeks to go, Signora Dolcino.”

“Verdi’s had soap two days ago,” Lidia says.

“They charge too much,” Rina counters. “Try Alesci’s instead.”

Shops, prices, and the availability of necessities are the topics of the next squabble. It continues long after the rabbi’s wife has gone back inside, until Rina runs out of opinions and gazes at the Soncinis’ doorway. “Oh, Lidia, I hope the new baby is all right! Mirella went through so much with Altira, poor little thing. You know, I thought at the time it was a mistake to keep that child at home—”

“Don’t be morbid, Rina. Mirella has moved on, and so should you!” Lidia leans over the balcony and lowers her voice. “Do you know that new man down at the archbishop’s office?”

“Don Osvaldo? Yes, yes. A Triestino. Stuffy, but a good heart.”

Lidia hesitates. She would trust Rina Dolcino with the lives of her grandchildren, but an unknown priest Renzo barely knows? “I’m coming down,” she tells her neighbor. “ Cara mia, we need to talk.”