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Chapter 19: Remembering Italy

            Teresa takes her hands off the keyboard of her laptop and lets them fall heavily in her lap.  While Cousin Alberto was being arrested and charged, Teresa was in Italy.  She remembers when Debo called her in Florence with the news.

            “Father is taking it really hard,” Debo told Teresa.  “Maybe you should come home.”

            The trip to Italy was Teresa’s graduation present from Angelina and Father.  Teresa had obtained her master’s degree in May.  She had sublet her apartment for three months and signed up for courses in Italian and Renaissance art in Florence. 

            After she said goodbye to Debo, and hung up the phone, Teresa went to the balcony of her pensione and leaned on the railing.  She felt guilty about the noncommittal reply she gave to Debo.  The thought of returning home to New York made her feel sick with fear, almost as nauseated as she felt each morning, for Teresa was pregnant.

            The father of the child she carried was Giancarlo, a friend of her cousin, Amalia.  At the news of her pregnancy, Giancarlo had put up his long-fingered artist’s hands as if he were warding off evil.  “No baby,” he said in English.  Teresa wept; he kissed her on both cheeks, went to his studio and didn’t answer his phone.  He never responded to another one of her calls.  Two days later, Teresa finally was able to contact her cousin. 

            “But didn’t he tell you?” Amalia said.  “Giancarlo went to Poitiers.  He’s working in a sculpture studio.  Some famous sculptor I’ve never heard of.”

            Looking out of her window at the Manor House, Teresa can almost see the street in Florence.  She recalls the scent of lemon blossoms on the tree in the courtyard of the pensione.  Depending on the weather, the fragrance of lemon traded places with the odor from the outdoor toilet.  Beyond the courtyard wall was a winding cobbled street lined with narrow houses of tan and golden stonework.  Every house had a balcony, and most were festooned with hanging baskets of flowers: pink geraniums, trailing purple petunias, blue lobelia, and fuchsias like ballerinas in white and magenta tutus.

            Teresa spent several days in an agony of indecision.  Finally the fear of giving birth alone in a foreign country was greater than the fear of facing her family.  She called Angelina.

            “Oh, my darling Teresa!” Angelina said.  “Of course you must come home.  We’ll make Debo’s old room into a nursery.  How soon can you get a flight?  Oh, Maria madre di Dio, I’m going to have a grandchild!”

            “Should I tell Father?”

            “Don’t say anything yet.  Let me think about it first,” Angelina said.  “Maybe it’s best to wait until you start to show.”

            “God bless Angelina,” Teresa says out loud. She was right to conceal Teresa’s condition. King Olive was embroiled in the scandal whirling around Cousin Alberto and Salerno Enterprises.  In the end, he died before Teresa began wearing maternity clothes.