the brilliant light and noise of Naples, and drying their eyes when they got back to the barbershop, where the second remarkable thing happened. A scrawny, hunched woman sat on the steps beside Fratelli the barber’s wife. The woman’s black dress and head covering hung about her bones, and though her drawn face was vaguely familiar, her eyes were the most foreign things Rosari had ever seen. These eyes had lost most of their hue, as if some brush with the sun had singed them. Nevertheless, Lazaro knelt beside the woman and repeated the word Eleonora, Eleonora. This was the name of Rosari’s mother.
She seemed a kind of zombie. Her gestures were stiff and slow, her eyes more in the world of the dead than that of the living, and Rosari was scared of her. There was some debate that evening about whether she should stay in Naples with Claudia, whose mother-in-law clearly didn’t want her, or come with her husband and youngest girl to America. The mother, sitting stiff as a mannequin on Lazaro’s bed, said very little during the debate. Fratelli, who threw his weight around the shop and apartment, said in a loud voice that if he were Lazaro, he’d throw the woman back out on the street, and Lazaro stood with arms folded and said that he was considering doing just exactly that. He assumed an uncharacteristic air of severity, standing with arms crossed and chin thrust out. At one point he paced with hands behind his back, a soldier wearing a barber’s apron as his uniform, and turned suddenly to point his scissors at his wife. I have not yet decided, he told her, what we shall do with you.
In the morning they started for the wharf. No decision had been made, except that Lazaro allowed Eleonora to carry one of the bundled sheets. She trailed behind her husband and daughter, bent under the burden. When they reached the gate, Lazaro produced papers, and the agent snorted at him.
It says here your wife is dead.
A mistake, Lazaro said. Look, I have our marriage certificate, and that’s her. You don’t believe me, ask her. Ask our daughter.
The agent stared at Eleonora. She looks wrong, he said. She looks touched in the head. They might not let her into New York.
Rosari suddenly cried and clung to her mother’s arm while the woman stood stiff as a statue. The line pressed them from behind as people leaned close to witness the drama.
I don’t know if she’s touched in the head. I’m a barber, Lazaro said, I’m not a doctor. Are you a doctor?
The agent lifted his head toward the ceiling and asked no one in particular why he had to deal with lunatics.
Look, she disappears and comes back two years later like this. What am I supposed to do?
The agent shrugged and shook his head. Then he stamped their papers and sent them aboard.
They sat in the perpetual racket and stink of the ship’s engine and the closeness of too many bodies. When allowed, Rosari went on deck with Lazaro while the mother remained seated on their belongings in the steerage hold, her knees drawn up and her face resting on her arms. It was late fall, and the Mediterranean sky glimmered like the gold-leaf dome of some Byzantine temple, but after they passed Gibraltar into the ocean a seasonal change took hold. Sky and sea turned coal gray, and North Atlantic winds stabbed them with invisible blades of ice.
Against reason, the mother now stood on deck and stared into the green-and-black face of the deep until husband and daughter found her and led her back to the hold. Sometimes she took off her head scarf and revealed the thick curls of what had once been waist-length hair now chopped to her earlobes. For a moment she might weep and let her family hold her, but more often she sat cold as marble or pushed their arms off her body. She might say a word or two about America, but mostly she’d stare off in silence with eyes that reminded Rosari of those on the sun-faded frescoes painted many generations ago on the walls of Santo Giovanni back home.
Somewhere beyond the British Isles, after days of sky dark as the sea, the ocean began to push the boat like a child on a swing. Water splashed against the high portals. The several hundred strangers sat upright like children awakened from a nightmare, barely daring to move or speak, as the ship swung from side to side. The vessel’s joints creaked, and the engine wheezed like an asthmatic. Moans and prayers started to mingle with the ship’s complaints, and for hours Rosari clung to her father and tried to engage her mother’s cold arms as well, but Eleonora sat like a stone, and in the brief flashes of lightning her face appeared rapt, as if absorbing a beautiful music from afar.
At dawn Rosari awoke to her mother’s gentle voice. She sat up and let Eleonora lead her through the softly swaying floor of bodies to the dark and icy stairway. Her mother spoke to her as she had years ago, in a sweet and animated voice. She spoke of their great adventure, their journey to a new world, and when she thrust open the door to the deck it seemed that Rosari was either deep within a dream or that she and her mother had indeed just crossed into some other world.
Eleonora stood on deck with her head uncovered, her face radiant, and the sky fell as white jewels onto her black hair. She lifted Rosari’s hand, and they danced slowly through the snow, a substance Rosari had never seen before, a phenomenon which seemed to her then the flight of a million angels come to guide her mother and herself to a new life. And as the snow fell a celestial music, as of glass rubbing on silk, came down from the sky and lifted her heart.
For the remaining days of their voyage Eleonora spoke and moved with great animation. Lazaro stared at her in astonishment. The woman tended sick children and seemed equipped with special insight regarding all manner of ailments, prescribing various foods and administering healing treatments with her hands. Her beauty shone among the frightened and weary passengers like a fountain of snow in a black and leafless forest, but her eyes remained faded, as if buffeted by some otherworldly light, and her words made little sense in conversation. Often as she spoke father and daughter exchanged looks, and more than once fellow passengers touched their foreheads and nodded to each other.
The ship chugged through a fog that occasionally conjured a few gulls or even the voices of seals, and then one day the engine’s racket stopped and the passengers gathered on the deck. America, they whispered to each other, was just over there, and they stood on deck a long time waiting for America to appear, the families clutching bundles, pressed together for warmth. After several hours a small launch appeared, and then others. The people were loaded onto them and carried into the fog.
Rosari’s first view of America was nothing like the savage wilderness filled with Indians or the modern skyline of New York in her imagination. What she saw through the gauzy fog looked like a Russian castle trimmed with an icing of snow. The striped towers of Ellis Island made her think that they might soon be riding huge sleighs pulled by reindeer across America. Her father would cut the hair of a Russian prince while she and her mother helped the czarina choose which satin dress and which broach to wear, and Gratiano would escape from his jail and join them in America, where they would all dance in the snow with the Russian royalty.
They squeezed through a narrow entryway and climbed to a cavernous room where they were herded by beefy, pink-faced men into something like a gigantic pen for goats. Rosari could see that the room was filled with pens in which people of various look and language were placed with their fellows, people with small, flat noses, with furry caps, with eyeglasses and skullcaps. Most all of them, like her family, were wrapped in black clothing and weariness while their eyes searched the high windows for the source of the little bars of light.
Lazaro tried to coach his wife on ways to look and act, but the woman couldn’t sit still for a minute. She’d pace, her mouth moving as in speech, her hands gesturing to nobody, then sit again beside her daughter. A pale-skinned man with white-blond hair opened the gate to the pen and waved his arm, and the Italians grabbed their things and followed him, but as they walked a few of them were stopped by another man in a blue suit who examined their eyes with some sort of hook. Rosari was scared to death he’d look at her mother’s eyes and know she was touched, so she pulled on Eleonora’s hand and yanked her into the thick of the mob.
They stood in line after line. They were asked by men in suits to open their mouths, cough, run up a stairway, as they moved along. A few weak-legged people were led to another room, and Rosari supposed they were going to be shipped back as unfit for America. When Eleonora and Rosari were