Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; World War II; Family Saga; Italian immigrant family; WWII veteran; gay son; Vietnam War; Italian restaurant; infidelity; North End of Boston

Synopsis

When Navy Seabee Al Dante returns to Boston in 1945 after serving in World War II, his homecoming is not what he nor his wife imagined.

Although he survived the bombing of his destroyer in the South Pacific, his injuries left him with shattered bones, a withered arm and a crushed spirit. The two-and-a half-year-old son he has never seen runs away from him in fear.  His wife, only a girl when he left, has borne and nurtured their child and made her way in the world.  After three years of keeping to themselves the fear and loneliness and longing they had faced alone, they no longer know each other.

But a “For Sale” sign in the window of a restaurant in their Italian neighborhood of the North End convinces Rose that if she and Al are to have any hope of overcoming their challenges, she is the one who needs to put their dreams in motion.

“I believe in us—that we have a future together.  Look, we’re luckier than most.  I know you look at yourself and don’t see that yet.  But you will.  Believe in us, Al.”

Can a restaurant called “Paradiso,” the evocative power of food lovingly prepared, and the resilience of a passionate, street-smart Italian girl rekindle a love challenged by separation, infidelity and loss? Will it sustain and nourish her family as it lives through the upheaval of the last half of America’s twentieth century?

An unforgettable story of family and forgiveness, loyalty and love.

Release date: September 14, 2020

Publisher: Bellastoria Press

Print pages: 320

Sample

A Lifetime Ahead of Us

 

I heard the screen door slam shut against the wooden doorjamb and the crunch of Al’s work boots on the conch shell fragments that surrounded our cottage a quarter mile from the Chaguaramas airfield on Trinidad. It was 5:00 a.m. The tanagers that nested in the mamoncillo trees beyond the field where we enlisted men’s wives hung our laundry had just begun their morning song.

I rolled away from the empty hollow on the bed where Al had been sleeping only fifteen minutes before. The sheets were damp with his sweat. Nothing stayed dry in that climate.

I figured I might as well get up too, put on a pot of coffee and get started with the cooking before the temperature started to climb. Thanksgiving Day and it was already seventy-five degrees outside. It would rise to one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade before the day was over. Al had hung a thermometer for me just outside the bedroom window so I’d know as soon as I opened my eyes how hot it was. I’m not sure why it mattered to me so much, but it helped. Gave me a little piece of knowledge that let me feel some control over my life. Hah!

I wrapped myself in the navy blue embroidered kimono Al brought me last year when he was on furlough at Christmas and he managed to get back to Boston for ten days. It seemed like a ridiculously impractical gift at the time, the middle of winter in the Northeast. I was wearing flannel nightgowns and wools socks to bed, for God’s sake.

But then he’d asked me to marry him. Al and I had been keeping company since we were in high school. He was a year ahead of me, one of my brother Carmine’s friends.

 The ring was in the pocket of the gown.

“What’s this?” I asked, when I felt something hard and lumpy against my heart. I had just put the kimono on over my powder-blue sweater set in my parents’ living room.

I slipped my hand into the pocket and retrieved a velvet box.

“Open it, Rose.” He was sitting on the edge of his chair. He had his uniform on, the petty-officer stripe he’d earned a couple of months before neatly arrayed on his arm below his Seabees construction insignia. He looked sharp, my Al did.

I held my breath as I lifted the hinged top of the box. Inside was a diamond sitting high on four silver prongs. I let out a quiet gasp and my eyes filled up—for all the nights I’d lain awake, wondering how he was doing so far away, building an airbase as the world descended into war. Trinidad. Al told me the U.S. Navy had leased territory there from the British because of its strategic location in the Caribbean, a base for planes that escorted convoys and patrolled the sea lanes. I had to go to the library to look where it was.

My nose started to run. I was a mess. Tears streaming down my cheeks, me sniffling. Who knew this was what love does to you.

“Will you marry me, Rose?”

 

We didn’t have much time. There was no way I was going to let him go back to Trinidad for God knew how long before we could walk down the aisle at St. Leonard’s. Neither one of us wanted to wait. We talked to my folks that very night. They were wary about the rush.

Mama got me alone in the kitchen for a few minutes.

“Rosa, be honest with me. Are you gonna have a baby? Is that why you gotta go to the priest so fast?”

“No, Mama, no! I swear on Nonna’s grave that I’m as pure as the snow that’s falling outside. It’s just—I can’t bear for him to go away again. The navy will let me go with him if we’re married.”

“He’s gonna take you away to that island! Your papa will not agree to that, Rosa. You belong here, with the family. It’s too far. Too strange. Another country.”

“Mama, you left your parents to go with Papa to another country when you got married. America was a lot farther away from Italia than Trinidad is from Boston. Please, Mama. Understand. I love him. I waited already, worrying about whether he’d come back alive. I don’t want to wait any longer. Talk to Papa. Give us your blessing!”

Mama put her hands on her hips and looked at me, measured me. She was from the old country, but she’d been in Boston a long time—thirty years.

“I didn’t want to leave back then. It broke my heart to say good-bye to my family. I was pregnant, don’t forget, with your brother Sal. But the last thing I wanted was to be separated from your papa. I had seen too many men leave the village alone and get lost in America, find another woman, forget the family they left behind. I was scared, but I knew I had Papa to depend on, protect me and the baby. With his skill as a stonemason, he knew he could find work in America. But when we left, my mother cried and cried as if it was my funeral. I won’t do that to you, figlia mia. I’ll talk to Papa.”

She made the sign of the cross on my forehead and went to talk to my father.

We got married on New Year’s Day. I wore my mother’s veil and my sister-in-law Cookie’s dress. My best friend, Patsy, stood up for me. It snowed the morning of the wedding. Huge flakes came in off the harbor and by the time we went to church there were three or four inches on the ground. I had to put on galoshes and hold my skirts up as we walked the two blocks to St. Leonard’s. Thank God, Father Giovanni had gotten somebody to shovel the front steps. My cousin Bennie, with the voice of an angel, sang the “Ave Maria.” Instead of his overalls covered in granite dust, Papa had on his good black suit and waited in the back of the church while I changed my shoes and Patsy fixed my veil. She licked her thumb and wiped away a fleck of soot that had settled on my cheek. I peeked through the little glass panes in the doors and could see Al up at the altar in his uniform.

I bit my lip, squeezed Patsy’s hand and then took Papa’s arm. I stepped across the threshold and headed into my new life.

After the Mass, we went to a restaurant on Salem Street that had closed for our private party. It wasn’t elaborate, the meal; after all, it was still the Depression, and the rest of the world was at war. But they did a nice job for us—escarole soup, manicotti, a cacciatore made with rabbit, fagiolini and broccoli rabe on the side. The wedding cake came from Caffe Vittoria, but the cookies Mama baked herself. It took her three days. Mostaciolli, anise cookies, pignoli cookies, honey fingers. She even managed to find sugar-coated almonds, and I sat up with Patsy two nights before the wedding and wrapped the pastel-colored nuts—blue, green, pink, lilac—in circles of white netting that we tied with thin strips of white satin ribbon as wedding favors.

Al and I spent our wedding night at the Parker House. They brought us a bottle of champagne and a fruit basket on the house because Al was a serviceman. I’d never had champagne before. It was New York State, not French, of course, because of the war. It wasn’t what I expected. But then, most of what has happened in my life wasn’t what I expected.

The hotel wasn’t far from the North End, but it might as well have been a foreign country. Very old Boston, with a snooty bell captain and a dowdy lounge. Not that we wanted to spend any time there. It was all we could do to get up to our room and get the key in the door we were so excited. I was nervous, with a lot of butterflies in my stomach. I’d hardly eaten anything at the reception. I’d been busy moving from table to table, kissing and being kissed, thanking everyone as they slipped their envelopes into my hand and I put them carefully into the satin and lace borsa that Mama had carried on her own wedding day. We didn’t count the money until the next morning. We had other things on our minds that night.

Although she’d given birth to seven children and therefore had to have known something about the sexual side of marriage, Mama had offered me nothing in the way of preparation. Her only advice to me was, “Don’t ever go to bed angry. When you fight, make up before you fall asleep.”

But right then, I couldn’t imagine fighting with Al. I’d known him since we’d been kids and never in all those years had we ever said a sharp word to each other.

My sister-in-law Cookie, in addition to handing me down her dress, had given me a smattering of advice, although I tried to avoid the image of my brother Carmine doing to her what she was trying to describe.

“It was the first time I’d ever even seen one,” she said of her wedding night. “You’d think, growing up with five brothers, that sooner or later I’d have caught a glimpse. So it was kind of a shock. Try not to react too strongly when you see it, ’cause men are very sensitive about that. Try not to worry or build the whole experience up into something that’s got to be perfect the first time. More than likely it won’t be. But it does get better.” And she smiled this knowing, secret smile and patted her belly. She was just starting to show.

So we made it into the hotel room with these goofy smiles on our faces. We looked at each other and then Al swooped in, picked me up and carried me to the wing chair by the window and sat down with me on his lap. We looked out at the city, coated now in a thick blanket of snow that softened the edges of everything and hid the shabbiness.

It was magical, that whiteness. The world seemed fresh, unmarred by weary footprints. A good omen for us, I thought.

Al nuzzled my neck in the spot he had discovered when we were sixteen and he first kissed me. He had started with my lips, but then moved to cover my face with his kisses—my eyelids, my cheeks, my earlobes and then, right below my ear. It sent shivers through me then and he’d known ever since that was how to make me melt.

He lingered there for a few minutes and I leaned back against his chest. All the nervous energy that had gotten me through this frantic week dissolved into his tenderness and strength.

“Oh, Rose,” he whispered.

And then he began to unbutton the twenty satin-covered buttons that ran up the back of the dress from below my waist to my shoulder blades. I knew he wanted that dress just to slide off me like the waterfall in the middle of the island he’d described for me—heart-stopping ice- cold water plunging from cliffs so green you thought they’d been colored by a child-giant with a box of crayons.

But there were so many buttons! Not only up my back, but on the sleeves as well, marching up to my elbows. Painstakingly, one by one, he slipped the loop fastener over each button to release it. While he unbuttoned, he continued to nuzzle my neck, his breath hot and urgent against my skin. Finally, the buttons were all undone and he drew the bodice off my shoulders. I stood and let the whole thing drop to the floor and then turned around to face him in my bra and slip and panties.

I had a negligee in my suitcase that I’d bought at Filene’s the day after Al proposed, all filmy white nylon with pale blue flowers embroidered around the neckline. But I could see in Al’s eyes that I wasn’t going to put it on that night.

Those eyes swept over me from head to toe and back again, coming to rest on my breasts. He broke into a broad grin.

“You’re beautiful, Rose!”

It brought tears to my eyes, how adored I felt at that moment.

He picked me up again and carried me to the bed. Nothing Cookie had told me prepared me for the rest of that night—for how I felt lying against the pillows, watching him undress; for all the revelations about my body and his that followed; for the absolute peace of sleeping in his arms.

As he stood by the bed, removing layer after layer of his uniform, the stiffness and formality gave way to the soft curl of black hair against the smooth browned muscle of his arms and chest. The work he had been doing on that tropical island had given him a sleekness and a strength I’d never seen in him before, not even when we’d gone to Revere Beach during the summers we were in high school. He wasn’t a boy anymore, not in his body, not in the way he wasn’t embarrassed to have me watch him, not in the way he touched me when he slipped into bed next to me. I wondered—fleetingly—if he’d gained that confidence from being with another woman. But he dispelled any doubts I had about being the only one in his life from that moment on by his tenderness and his passion. His patience with the buttons had only been the beginning of his willingness to take it slow for me.

We didn’t sleep much that night. It was as if we had to fill ourselves up with each other, fill that emptiness that had gnawed at us all the time he’d been away. We finally fell asleep early in the morning, the sheets twisted around us. I woke up first, disoriented by the strange bedroom. I eased myself out of the bed to wash up. There was a bit of blood, but not as much as I thought there would be. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. The bride who had anxiously bit her lip and walked with nervous hope down the aisle was still there. We still had a lifetime of unknowns ahead of us. But one of the questions had been answered for me during the night. I had that certainty—don’t ask me where it came from—that if things were okay in bed, a couple could weather whatever else life threw at them. We were going to do alright, Al and I.

We couldn’t afford more than one night at the Parker House, so we spent our last night in Boston and the second night of our married life at Al’s parents’ apartment. My mother-in-law, Antonella, invited my parents over for dinner. We had spent the day walking around the city, arm in arm, Al helping me over the snow banks, as we talked about the life ahead of us. God willing, the war would end before the United States got sucked into it, and we could have a life.

When we got to my in-laws, my cheeks were red from the cold and I took a lot of ribbing from both families about being the blushing bride. Al just took me in his arms with a grin and planted a big one on my lips in front of everybody. Then everyone had to kiss me.

We finally sat down to eat. Al’s mother is Calabrese, so her cooking is slightly different from Mama’s. She made tripe in a pizzaiola sauce and her own fettucine. Papa had brought a jug of Chianti filled from the cask in our basement, the wine made from my uncle Annio’s grapes that he grew in his garden in Everett. The toasts were endless, each family raising their glasses to our safe journey, long life and many babies. The meal was raucous, a celebration but with an undercurrent of melancholy as the evening wore on and our mothers, especially, anticipated our departure the next day. Nobody wanted to say goodnight. But at last, Antonella, Mama and I cleared the table and began washing up and putting the kitchen back in order. By eleven, with another round of kisses, and, by now, tearful embraces, my family headed down the stairs. I went to the front windows, Al’s arms around my waist, and watched them walk down the block. Before they rounded the corner, Mama turned around and looked back. I threw her a kiss, but I don’t think she saw me.

We sailed early the next day, first to Miami and then on to Trinidad. Off in the distance we could see the escort ships protecting us. We weren’t allowed to photograph them, a reminder that even on this side of the Atlantic, the world was a dangerous place. I was seasick the whole twelve days of the trip, throwing up in the cramped stainless steel toilet in our cabin. When we had a practice emergency evacuation drill I crawled up to the deck with my life jacket on, but at that moment, I didn’t care whether I lived or died, I was so sick. When I finally heard the tug horns indicating we were in the harbor, it was the most beautiful music I’d ever heard.

Little by little, I made a home for us on Trinidad. The first thing to adjust to was the heat. We were practically sitting on the Equator. But I pinned my long hair up on top of my head and made a few sundresses out of some cotton I found in a shop in Port of Spain. But before I sewed the dresses, I cleaned.

The cottages assigned to the married couples were newly built, like the airfield Al and his platoon were carving out of the peninsula. But left empty for even a few months they became overrun with wildlife, large and small. Our cottage had two rooms, plus a small kitchen and a lavatory. The shower was outside. When I first saw our home, I hadn’t held down any food to speak of in over a week and I was covered in a layer of dust from the open jeep ride from the harbor to the base. The sweat was pouring down my neck, leaving a trail of narrow brown rivulets.

Inside the cottage cobwebs hung from every corner, the husks of giant beetles and unidentifiable insects trapped in the sticky silk. Something had made a nest under the kitchen sink. Geckos slithered along the edges of the floor. If there had been a clean place to lie down, curl up and cry, I would’ve done so in a heartbeat. But there wasn’t. So I put my bags down on the porch, dug out a housedress and a bandana to tie up my hair and put my hands on my hips.

“You got a broom, some rags and a bucket?” I said to Al.

God bless him, he scrounged around while I changed and came back with some basic necessities. He told me he had to report to his commander and then left me for the afternoon.

I put all my years of Mama’s training as a housekeeper in use that afternoon and for days afterward, sweeping and scrubbing that place till it was something I could be proud of. It was my first home, after all; but let me tell you, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever imagined.

The blue of the sea, the purple of the bougainvillea, the red of the chaconia trees—I’d never seen anything like them. The colors of the land, the smells of the sea and the flowers, everything was heightened by the heat and the moisture. The same was true of the food—the tastes were both strange to me and exaggerated, when I set out to find us something decent to eat.

The base had a commissary where we could get tins of evaporated milk, peas, potted beef and Spam. But I longed for fresh, so soon after I arrived I walked down to the little village that was halfway up the hill between the base and the harbor. I’d seen chickens pecking around a yard the first day, and vegetables I didn’t recognize growing in a field. I knocked on some doors, talked to the old Mama who had the chickens, and walked away that first day with a basket of greens, some eggs, and a packet of spices—cardamom, cilantro, some dried chili peppers.

They eat spicy in Trinidad. I knew Al was used to Calabrian cooking and that was spicy, so I gave a try with the local things. If I had to open another can of Spam and make it into something recognizable, I thought I would shoot myself. Or we’d both starve.

But fresh eggs I knew what to do with. I had some potatoes and onions and made a nice pan of frittata, with the greens on the side. Al came into the house and smelled the familiar aromas. He ate that night with gratitude and pleasure.

By the time Thanksgiving arrived, I’d had almost a year to poke around the markets of Port of Spain and find things that were close enough to what we’d known in Boston or learn how to cook what was totally unfamiliar. We weren’t going to have turkey, for instance, but I’d gotten a nice capon the day before, all plump and with lots of flesh on its breast even after I’d plucked all the feathers. I used breadfruit instead of sweet potatoes. I found a sausage maker, and even though the taste wasn’t like my uncle Sal’s fennel sausage back home, it was still pork and hot. I couldn’t make lasagne, like Mama always did for Thanksgiving, because I couldn’t find any cheese close enough to ricotta. But I got some cornmeal and made pastelles instead, an island dish we had one night in a local tavern and Al liked so much I got the owner’s wife to show me how she made it. I used the sausage and a bit of beef I was able to get my hands on, chopped up and browned with onions and garlic and carrots and then simmered in broth and the local spices Imelda, the old lady in the village, supplied me with. At the end of the simmer you toss in olives and raisins. With the cornmeal you make dough with water and shape into egg-shaped balls that you flatten with your hand. You put a spoonful of the meat mixture in the middle and mold the cornmeal dough around it, then wrap each little pie in banana leaves coated with oil and annatto powder. You tie up the leaves like a package and then steam the packets. Oh, when you unwrap those leaves, those pastelles are just bubbling with red juices and that spicy flavor that wafts through every kitchen in Trinidad.

There was a lot of homesickness on the base, and the only way I knew how to dispel those kinds of feelings was with food. I invited all the married couples in the compound and the single guys in Al’s platoon to Thanksgiving dinner. Each of the girls offered to bring something. Some had gotten packages from home and so we had a real feast that afternoon. We set up two long tables out in the courtyard between the cottages and covered them with bed sheets. Each family brought its own chairs and dishes, since nobody had enough to set a table for eighteen.

I think it was the first holiday any of us had spent away from our families. But you know, that day, sitting across the table from one another, we were a family.

Despite the heat and the strangeness, I got used to tropical life. I found an office job working for the navy and rode my bike to the base every day, along roads lined with pale blue and yellow shacks with rusty corrugated tin roofs and curious children in the yard watching me as their mamas spread laundry out to dry in the sun.

Children. Al and I both wanted a family. Who didn’t? But two years went by in Trinidad, two years of lovemaking in the humid night, breezes wafting over us carrying the fragrance of frangipani or the roar of the night rains. Two years of waking up every month to renewed disappointment. I’m not one to dwell on missed opportunity. When the milk spills, I mop it up and refill the pitcher. But as time wore on, when I was washing blood out of the sheets for yet another month, I couldn’t help myself. I cried. I wondered what was wrong with me.

I didn’t think it was the tropics. If anything, the heat seemed to make everything and everyone around me more fertile. Two of the girls who lived in our compound had already given birth and three more were pregnant.

One day when I was in the village picking up my eggs and greens from Imelda, I had to wait for her because she had another customer. But instead of filling the young woman’s basket with provisions, she pressed a packet wrapped in brown waxed paper into her hands.

“Remember, make a tea, let it steep for five minutes, and then drink the whole cup. Every morning.”

I watched the young woman take the packet nervously with a shy smile. Imelda patted her belly.

“You’ll be carrying something in there in no time.”

A sharp longing filled me, and desperation to try anything—even Imelda’s potion. I didn’t tell Al. I didn’t think he’d understand. Besides, I didn’t want him to feel inadequate—that somehow, because we hadn’t been able to make a baby, I wasn’t satisfied with my life with him.

So I bought the packet of herbs from Imelda in secret that day along with okra and onions and made myself a tea of hope.

The next morning the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. We’d known we were preparing for war, but the horror of the attack and the chilling reminder of our own vulnerability as yet another navy base on a tropical island, brought urgency and renewed sense of purpose to the work at Chaguaramas.

For the next three months the construction crew made an intense push to finish. Al worked long hours, coming home at night and collapsing into exhausted slumber after supper. He had no energy for lovemaking, and I was so afraid that I was barren it was all I could think of on those few nights when we managed to reach out for each other in the bed. I can’t say that our lovemaking wasn’t passionate. But it wasn’t the same as the early days when we couldn’t get enough of each other. Besides my own worries, which I kept to myself, we had others as well. My brothers Carmine and Jimmy had both been drafted. And with the completion of the base we knew that meant new orders for Al soon, God only knew where.

When the orders came, I should’ve been glad that I’d at least be going home. I hadn’t seen my family in two years and the timing meant I’d get to see my brothers before they shipped out. But leaving Chaguaramas also meant leaving Al. I wasn’t going with him on his next assignment, because he’d be on a ship heading across the Pacific and into war.

I was so busy packing up that I didn’t notice when my period was late. I wasn’t very regular anyway, so I didn’t give it a thought. The navy flew us out of Trinidad to Florida instead of transporting us by ship. It was my first time in a plane. Al made me sit by the window and, oh my God, what a sight as we lifted off and circled the island. There was Al’s work below us, the long, straight landing strip, crisscrossed by two other runways, and a complex of hangars and administrative buildings and barracks. A small city in just two years. I squeezed his hand and then threw up into a waxy bag.

 

We had two weeks in Boston before Al shipped out. We arrived in time for a combined party—welcome home for Al and me, farewell for Carmine and Jimmy. Our mothers cried; the boys got drunk; Cookie, with my two-year-old nephew Vincent and another baby on the way, sat at the table rocking her toddler and trying to hold back her tears.

The next morning Carmine and Jimmy got inducted at the base in South Boston and were on their way to Fort Dix in New Jersey for basic training. Al and I had a little time to talk about where I’d live and what I’d do once he was gone. I told him it didn’t make sense for me to rent an apartment just for myself. I’d move back in with my parents and get a job. After two years of working for the navy, I knew I had what it took to make a living. I was going to be okay, I assured him, remembering the haunted look on Cookie’s face and vowing to myself I wouldn’t be a burden to anyone while Al was away.

We got back some of what we had lost in those last months of exhaustion and worry on Trinidad. Spring was arriving in Boston and we made excuses to our families and got ourselves outside.

We walked all the way to the Esplanade on the Charles River.

“It’s going to be different now, Rose.”

“It’s always been different for us, Al. And we’ve been apart before. I didn’t forget what you looked like then. Or felt like.” I grinned and put my hand on his chest, pushing him gently. I was trying so hard, you know, to let him go without worrying about me.

He grabbed my hand. “I’ll never forget what you feel like.”

 

I dressed in my best suit, put on stockings and high heels, gloves and a hat the day his ship sailed. I wanted Al’s last look, his memory of me, to be special. I hadn’t worn clothes like that since we’d left Boston two years before. The suit was a little snug, and I thought, that’s what married life does to you—rounds you out. I stayed on the dock with the other wives as the ship left the port, taking some comfort in our numbers. But I got on the trolley and went home very much alone.

I fought the loneliness by staying busy. I got a job right away at the Shawmut Bank, as a secretary to one of the vice presidents. When I took the typing and shorthand tests I did the best of all the candidates. I’d learned a lot on Chaguaramas. You make opportunities where you find them. I put my hair up, knew how to address the higher-ups with respect and saw right away what I needed to do to make my boss look good. It wasn’t long before the bank promoted me to office manager. I even had a nameplate on my desk, “Mrs. Dante.” I was twenty-one years old and felt like I knew something.

April I missed my period again and this time I didn’t ignore it. But I was afraid to hope. I tried to put it out of my mind, busied myself with work so that I could bear the moment when, as always before, I started to bleed. But May arrived and I finally allowed myself to believe I might be pregnant. I kept my suspicions to myself until I saw the doctor, as if confiding in someone else might make it disappear. I’m not a superstitious person. I don’t go in for the mal’occhia that my mother’s generations brought from the old country. But I did break down in Trinidad and let myself fall under the spell that despair sometimes drives us to, and I wasn’t willing, just yet, to go back to being a totally rational person.

I found a doctor at Boston Lying-In Hospital. I didn’t want to ask Cookie who her doctor was because I knew it would set off a chain reaction that would ripple through the family and only compound my grief if I was mistaken. I had to wait two days for the answer. I didn’t give the doctor my phone number because my mother might have answered. I made sure I was the one to pick up the mail from the box in the vestibule every morning. When the envelope finally arrived I stuck it in my apron pocket and brought everything else—a letter from Carmine and some bills—to the kitchen. I went to my bedroom, the same room that I’d shared with my sister Bella as a girl, and sat down on the narrow bed. All my senses seemed sharper that morning—the feel of the chenille bedspread against my bare legs, the rumble of city traffic on the elevated highway a few blocks away, the aroma of onions and garlic from Mama’s cooking, the bitter taste of bile rising in my throat. I opened the letter and held my breath as I read the results of my pregnancy test. And then I cried.

The person I was when I’d left Boston for Trinidad was not the woman who returned. I thought at first that it was my pregnancy, the change in the weather and being without Al that made me feel so different. I heard all kinds of stories from aunts and cousins about the discomforts of carrying a baby, but for me, it wasn’t that. My body felt strange—not my own, that was for sure. But the strangeness I felt had more to do with my head than my growing belly.

I was noticing things—about Boston, about life—that I hadn’t seen before I’d lived in Trinidad. I hadn’t just stood on the wharf at the edge of my neighborhood staring out at the harbor and wondering what lay beyond the ocean’s horizon. I’d sailed that ocean. Been out of sight of land and all that was familiar. Some people—a lot of people in the North End, I discovered—don’t even wonder or ask what lies outside the concrete and brick boundaries of their corner of the city. It’s enough for them, the daily routine of waking up in their comfortable bed, drinking a cup of Maxwell House coffee with two sugars and cream, getting on the MTA with their lunch pail filled with a pepper-and-egg sandwich and keeping the circle of people they know tight around them, not letting anyone or anything new in.

Maybe that was what Chaguaramas changed about me. I didn’t have those routines to fall into. Sometimes on my day off on Chaguaramas, especially towards the end when Al was working nonstop to finish the airbase, I climbed by myself to the top of the plateau beyond the housing compound. From the top I could see the Caribbean and forget myself in the endless vista of sea and sky. Close in, of course, were the battleships and tenders, an ominous reminder that we were at war. The harbor was as busy and as congested as Boston. But if I looked up and off to the right, beyond the gray metal hulls and camouflage netting disguising the glint of guns, I saw only open sea, and it opened up my heart.

If only the rest of the world could feel this, I thought, instead of bombing cities.

There were other things at Chaguaramas that I experienced. Imelda and her family, for instance: her husband Buddy, who played drums at a club in Port of Spain and delivered ice in his wooden wagon; their daughters Jane and Margaret and their children, who ran around Imelda’s garden and climbed into her ample lap.

I’d never been around black people before; had never seen them with their families. The first time Imelda offered me a cup of coffee, I have to admit, I hesitated. A lot of the merchants in Port of Spain treated the navy people like invaders, intruders. But Imelda, up in her village, after her surprise at my sudden appearance in her garden the first time I went looking for fresh vegetables, took an interest in me. Maybe I needed some mothering in those early months away from my family and she understood that. She didn’t push me the first time she offered and I made an excuse not to stay and sit with her. But then I felt foolish. What was I afraid of? That someone would see and think I was doing something wrong? Most of the time I don’t care what other people think. So the next time she asked, I said yes.

Imelda’s coffee was strong and sweet, like Mama’s. Black coffee—espresso—Mama made for Papa after dinner. One demitasse with a shot of anisette and a twist of lemon peel is how he liked it. But in the afternoons, after she finished the laundry, the cleaning, and the marketing and before she started dinner, Mama sat with her cup of “American coffee.” She learned how to use the grinder at the A&P and brought home a bag that took her a month to use up. Sometimes she sat with her sister and visited. But more often than not, she enjoyed the cup alone listening to the radio.

At Imelda’s table I felt like I was in my mother’s kitchen. If I told anyone back home that, they would’ve thought I was crazy. Even the girls in the compound never went to the village.

“Rose, honey, have you written to your Mama lately? If Margaret or Jane and my grandbabies were so far away from me I don’t think I could stand it.” She fanned herself with an old catalog while she poured us both a cup.

Mama never learned to read, but I wrote her a letter every week. My brother Jimmy read the letters to her. She sent me photographs each month holding up one of my letters. It was how she let me know she’d gotten one.

Her not being able to read made me realize how cut off she must have been from her own family when she left Italy. At least I knew we weren’t going to be in Trinidad forever. But I wondered if I could’ve done what she did—leave everything and build a new life from nothing.