is waiting for you.”
“Si, Mama.”
He hesitated, then walked into the small front room of their tenement apartment and waited for his father to recognize his presence.
“Figlio mio.”
“Si, Papa?”
His father was standing near the window in a typical pose, facing away from him, then turning his head toward him without shifting his body. It had taken Berto a long time to realize this was the parent-to-child posture of superiority used in the old country. He also knew that he had now grown old enough for his father to speak to him about something he considered a concern.
“Berto, Dottore Agnelli tells me you are spending a lot of time around his clinic. Are you sick, my son?”
“No, Papa.”
“Good. He tells me you ask to watch when he works.”
“Si, Papa.”
Oh yes, Papa. It is like poetry to watch the dottore as he goes from one person to the next, his hands moving to set a broken bone, his fingers singing like Mama’s sewing bobbin as he puts the cut skin back together. And how the little ones laugh as he taps their knees and runs his hand across their bellies to find out where it hurts!
His father had turned around to him and was smiling.
“What do you want to do with your life, son?”
“I want to be a doctor, Papa,” he responded without hesitation.
The father stared at his son, looking so much like himself at that age, eager to meet the world but not understanding what it would do to him.
Tonio, do you remember how you also wanted to be a dottore?
Indeed he did, but war, lack of money, and his class had blocked him at every turn. Now he wanted to be sure his son was tough enough to deal with the realities of life, not the dreams. He and Anna had come to America for that very reason. So he was determined to administer a dose of hard truth to his young son’s heart and mind, difficult as it would be to do so.
“You make my heart glad, my son. I am sure that you will be a fine doctor, just like Dr. Agnelli. But one question: How will you pay for it?”
His inquiry startled Berto. As he waited for an answer, Antonio Gallini noticed his beloved Anna standing in the doorway, the woman for whom he would do anything. They had crossed an ocean together. He could refuse her nothing.
Even now, as he looked at the timeworn rounded face of his wife, he remembered her sunlit smiles in the old country, her auburn hair glowing against the blue Mediterranean sky. He heard once more the voice that had sung the prayers next to him at Mass so long ago.
...
December 2, 1899, was bitterly cold in the small village in upper Tuscany, but the man was sweating in the candlelit room.
“Easy, Pietro, easy! It will be all right.”
Pasquale Gallini felt the tension in his son’s shoulders and understood. He already had lost one child and now Maria was having trouble again. The women were busy in the other room doing what women were supposed to do when another woman was ready. It was a mystery to the men—except the dottores, and none were here tonight.
“I can’t lose her, Papa. You know she almost died when little Pasquale ...”
“Si, figlio mio, I know.”
The old man remembered when the child who would have had his name had died quickly after birth. It was a double grief piled on both him and his son: losing the baby so soon after their beloved Antonella had died suddenly.
Pasquale was alone now with his memories of her.
No more, caro Dio, no more!
Both men started reflexively as they heard screams in the back room, followed by a deathly stillness that exposed the rasps of their own fearful breathing.
“Dio mio!” Pietro sobbed.
Pasquale held his son, his own heart crying out.
“Antonella, help me!”
Then they heard a second, higher-pitched cry shattering the brief silence, the gasping, angry cry of an infant suddenly ejected from the security of the womb. They stood transfixed as the old wooden door opened and the bent midwife waddled out holding a red-faced crying baby in her hands.
“You have a son, Pietro!”
Father and grandfather rushed into the birth room, followed by the midwife carrying the baby and returning it to the exhausted woman who forever thereafter would be called Mama.
“Maria!” the younger man called out, and the tired young woman turned her face to him.
“We will call him Antonio,” she half-whispered.
Pasquale Gallini smiled at the wisdom of his daughter-in-law.
“Come on, Tonio, we’re going to the festival.”
“No, Sal, my father needs me.”
He was the son and grandson of stonemasons. After school he worked side by side with his father and grandfather, cutting, chipping, measuring—whatever was required for the repairs to the great cathedral. From the time he could walk, he had carried the water to wet the stones to keep the dust down, until they had begun to teach him the craft itself.
When they rested, he would sit at his grandfather’s knee and ask the old man about the great days when Garibaldi and Mazzini united the country, and how the old man had fought to free the land from foreign influence.
His grandfather would show him the two gold medals for bravery that hung above the straw-filled bed along with the black paper silhouettes of Mazzini and Garibaldi ... and Antonella.
Antonio first saw Anna at Mass on Easter Sunday. Like the other girls, she wore a white dress and had blossoms in her hair. But there was a difference to her.
He was twelve and he was curious.
He was noticing things he had never noticed before. Her face did not seem like those of the other girls. It lit up the church more than the candles that stood row on row in front of the statues of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus. Her voice was sweeter than the spring birds now trilling the Resurrection of Christ.
After Mass, she walked outside and sat in the back of a little donkey cart waiting for her family.
He was twelve and he was bold.
“My name is Antonio Gallini. What’s yours?”
“Anna. Anna Abrescia.”
He liked the name.
She thought he looked strong for just a boy.
As their childhood romance flowered in the little Tuscan village, another flower was beginning to bloom that soon would stain the earth red.
Pasquale could feel it in the air. The young men were restive, just as they had been almost fifty years before. The blood lust was rising, even in his son Pietro.
Antonio was now fourteen—almost a man.
Pasquale began to plan.
The town priest knew how to speak and write English, so he called in a favor—the church repairs he had performed but never charged for—and arranged for the priest to teach the boy. He would not permit his grandson to be sucked into the maw of war.
“Tonio, you don’t spend time with us anymore. All you do is moon over the carpenter’s daughter.”
His friends knew him too well.
She would be coming into town today. He would wait for her. It was going to be a busy day. The farmers from the outlying areas would be bringing the cattle to the town for sale. There would be festivities.
He