THE FIRST LADY
THE following night, and every night of the week, Signor Di Bello
held forth ecstatically in the box at La Scala. But the warmth of his
demonstrations for Juno was unable to melt the frost that her dreadful
voice had caused to settle on the audience--a frost that grew thicker
with each new display of her copious self. From his bench under the
gallery Bertino was a witness of his uncle’s frantic courtship, and
the green fever fairly consumed him, for he had decided that Juno was
made for him, and that neither his uncle nor any one else should have
her for wife. In the matter of courting he too had not been idle,
though he was young enough to know better than to make a public show
of his addresses. More than once it had occurred that while Signor Di
Bello took his ease in the Caffè of the Three Gardens of an afternoon,
Juno and Bertino passed a quarter of an hour together in the grocery.
With a black mantilla of cheap lace thrown over her head, instead of
the accustomed shawl that maids of Mulberry wear on working days,
she visited the shop for her supply of _salame_, lupine beans, or
the goat’s-milk cheese of which she told Bertino she was very fond.
The first time she entered, his heart leaped and he began stammering
excuses for the spot of yellow he had given her cheek at their last
meeting. Would the beautiful signorina believe that it was all an
accident, clumsy calf that he was--a mishap most stupid? He begged her
to forgive him. Would she not? Oh, how happy it would make him!
“Bah!” she answered, looking him over. “Give me good weight of _salame_
and free measure of beans.”
Clearly, the weight and measure that he gave suited her, for she came
every afternoon thereafter, but never when Signor Di Bello happened to
be in the shop. One day he said to her:
“Every night I dream of you.”
“Ah, _si_?” she replied, arching her rich brows. “And every night I
dream. Shall I tell you of what?”
“Of me?” breathed Bertino.
“Of you? Simpleton! I dream of getting out of this hogpen. Blood of San
Gennaro! Do you think I came to America to live a life like this? Wait
until I have money in the Bank of Risparmio.”
“But, signorina, I love you.”
“Love! What good is that? It may do for these animals to live on. For
me, no. When I marry I shall become a grand signora.”
On the fifth day of their acquaintance she told him her troubles. Five
dollars a week was all she got at La Scala, and Signor Grabbini--a
man most stingy--kept back two of that for the dress, the scarlet
slippers, and the pink tights. Don’t talk to her of America as a place
to make money. What a pigsty was Mulberry! Her room, which she hired
of Luigia the Garlic Woman, was smaller and darker than any she ever
had in Naples. And what did it cost? A whole dollar every week! Five
_liras_ for a room! Merciful Madonna!
“Listen,” said Bertino, coming from behind the counter and walking with
her to the door; “I want you for my wife. Marry me, and you shall live
in the finest house in Mulberry--in Casa Di Bello.”
“What have you to do with that house?” she asked quickly.
“I live there.”
“But it belongs to Signor Di Bello.”
“Yes; I am his nephew.”
A new interest awoke in her wary and artful eye. “They say he is very
rich,” she mused, looking toward the patch of green in Paradise. “He
admires my singing very much.”
“Your singing! Bah!” Bertino’s love was not deaf. “Don’t you know why
he makes a baboon of himself when you are on the stage? You have turned
his old head with your beauty.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said absently, while there came into her
mind an extravagant avowal of love that Signor Di Bello had made to her
behind the scenes the night before. “Well, he is rich,” she went on,
“and you--are poor.”
“True; I am not rich now, but I shall be soon. Ha! Do you know how I am
going to make money? I do not tell everybody--not even my uncle--but I
will tell you. I have a friend in Italy, at Cardinali. Do you know the
place? No matter. My friend is what is called a sculptor, and he is
going to make statues--oh, so fine!--of great people in this country.
Now, it is I who am to tell him what to make. When I have made up my
mind, I shall send him the picture of some great American--some famous
man--and from this he will make a marble bust. The marble is all ready.
When it is done he will send it to me, and I shall--well, perhaps I
shall put it in some fine gallery like our Palazzo Rosso in Genoa. Ah,
what a place that is! I was there once on the Feast of the Child. Now,
my friend is a sculptor most wonderful. I know what he can do. You
should see his beautiful Juno and the Peacock. If you----”
“Juno and the Peacock?” she broke in. “What is that?”
“Ah! a lady most beautiful, without any clothes, and a great bird with
a long tail. Oh, how beautiful--as beautiful as you!”
“_Veramente?_”
“I tell you the truth. Now, when the people of America see the bust
that he shall send, what do you think they will do? Why, they will be
mad for it, and some rich man will buy it. I have not yet made up my
mind how much I shall make him pay. Not less than a thousand _liras_,
of that you may be sure. But this will be only the beginning. After
that Armando will make more busts, the rich ladies and gentlemen
will continue to buy, and--who knows?--Bertino Manconi may become a
millionaire. _Now_ will you be my wife?”
“He has made one Juno,” she said, her thought set on a single phase of
his chimera--that whomever he chose for the subject, after that person
a bust would be fashioned. “Since he has made one Juno, why not let
him make another?” She said it seriously, without guile. “Oh, so many
photographs I had taken in Naples! Here, none; I am too poor. Next week
I shall have some. But how fine I should look in marble! I have thought
of it many a time. Ah, _proprio bella, neh_?”
“You would make the finest bust in the world,” he said ardently.
“I think so myself,” she nodded, drawing the mantilla under her chin
and moving away with her package of freely weighed codfish. He watched
her until she turned into the mouth of the Alley of the Moon, whereon
her lodgings looked, and the idea that she had put into his head took
deeper hold.
“Why not?” he asked the tub of olives at the door. “Is there a more
beautiful woman in America? It is settled. To-morrow I shall say to
her, ‘_Carissima_ Juno, when you are my wife I will send your picture
to Armando, that you may be the first bust.’”
He stood in the doorway gazing out on the park, assured now that she
must be his--for what greater honour could man show to woman?--when
his eye met the bronze presence of Italy’s liberator. A withered
wreath of laurel, with which the Italian societies had crowned their
hero on his last birthday, had dropped over the head and become a
lopsided necklace. Bertino saw the half-drawn sword, the bared arm, the
conquering air, and his promise to Armando came back:
“It shall be some one as great as Garibaldi.”
Thus it fell out that the following afternoon, when Juno came to the
shop for garlic and spaghetti, and told him that of all things she
would like to see herself in marble, he said: “No; it would be false to
my friend.”
“And you say you dream of me?”
“By night and by day.”
“And you love me?”
“Ah, _si_; Madonna knows.”
“Still you will not do me this favour?”
“But it is to be the bust of a man.”
“Bah! Why not a woman?”
“No, no; I can not. It would be treachery to Armando.”
None the less, she had spoken the words that sealed the fate of the
bust. “Why not a woman, indeed?” Bertino asked himself when she had
gone. “But it must be the greatest as well as the handsomest woman in
America.” He thought of the picture of the President’s wife that he had
seen one night at an illustrated Italian lecture in the Hudson Mission.
“By San Giorgio!” he exclaimed, astonished at the grandeur of his own
idea. “A bust of her Majesty, the First Lady of America! This is the
best thing I ever thought of.”
The next day was one of vast import. Not only did it witness the
purchase by Bertino in a Bowery store of a small photograph of the
President’s wife, warranted genuine, but it brought to the ears of Aunt
Carolina news that made her tremble for Casa Di Bello. From the market
place Angelica bore the gossip that was fast reaching every niche and
turn of Mulberry--the great tidings that Signor Di Bello and Juno the
Superb had been seen the night before in the Caffè of the Beautiful
Sicilian sitting at the same table eating a ragout of spiced pigskin.
“It must be stopped!” declared Carolina, setting her gold-patched
teeth. The old bugaboo of a wife arose, as it did with any woman to
whom the running voice of the colony linked her brother’s name. “He
shall never bring that Neapolitan baggage to Casa Di Bello.”
That night, after dinner, from which her brother was absent, she
hung long gold pendants in her ears, fastened her lace collar with
a large cameo brooch, and, her puce-coloured silk all arustle, went
to reconnoitre, as she always did when the sky of her dominion was
threatened with a wife. It was a rare sight to see Signorina Di Bello
abroad at night, afoot in the heart of Mulberry, and people stared in
wonder or bowed reverently as she passed by. A half-hour afterward,
when the Bay of Naples and smoking Vesuvius made way for Juno on the
stage of La Scala, three shoots of the Di Bello stock were intent
beholders--Giorgio in the box, Bertino on his bench under the gallery,
and Carolina in a seat directly overhead, where her brother could not
see her. With ears stopped, but eyes wide open, the priestly dame
surveyed with alarm the expansive glories of Juno, and regarded with
dismay the rhapsody of Signor Di Bello. If she knew her brother, and
she was confident that she did, here was a woman who could have him
for a husband. Thoughtfully she walked home, and thoughtfully she
sought her pillow.
* * * * *
From the land of sleep there came no helpful message, and in the
morning she sat before her sanctum window still pondering what to
do. Over the forest of gray shafts that marked the sepulchres in
St. Patrick’s Churchyard she gazed sadly at the broad windows of
the rectory where she had lived those years of sweetest order and
tranquility, where husbands and wives had no part in life’s economy,
where marrying woman and wedlocking man jarred not the placid liturgy
of her days. Suddenly the door swung wide, and Angelica panted into
the room. As fast as her short legs could waddle she had come from the
market place with a basket full of fresh vegetables and a head full of
dewy scandal.
“O signorina! The shame!” she gasped. “Truly a disgrace tremendous!
Mulberry talks of naught else. I speak of what I know, for it comes
straight from the lips of Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods, who had it
first from Simone the Snail Boiler.”
“What?”
“A grand shame! Signor Di Bello is betrothed to the Neapolitan singer!”
“Juno the Superb?”
“_Si, signorina._ Oh, the disgrace!”
“_Misericordia, Santa Maria!_”
“And the day is set. Luigia the Garlic Vender says it, and----”
“For when?”
“The Feast of Januarius.”
“The baggage!” said Carolina, her austere calm all gone. “That’s her
doing. A Genovese to be married on the Feast of St. Januarius! By the
mass, we shall see!”
Even as the bottled blood of Naples’s patron saint boils once a year,
so did the corked emotions of Carolina begin to bubble. Clearly the
hour for action had come. It was not the first time that a war cloud
of matrimony had darkened her sky, and she buckled for the onset with
a veteran heart. She plumed herself on having outwitted and driven to
retreat more than a dozen pretenders to her brother’s hand. Once it was
the daughter of Pescoli the Undertaker, a ripe maid of barn-owl face
and sinewy pattern, famed for settling disputes with the neighbours
_pugnis et calcibus_; but Carolina pitted brain against brawn, and this
terror bit the dust. Next came the red Milanese, widow of Baroni the
merchant in secondhand bread. In her hand she brought her husband’s
ten years’ savings for dowry, and on her apricot face, still fresh,
her everblooming smile; she, too, was outgeneralled by Carolina, as
were many other would-be wives as fast as they showed their heads. At
least, so it seemed to Carolina. That she held her place as mistress of
Casa Di Bello, she firmly believed, was due solely to the fact of her
never-flagging vigilance. But it may be guessed that her brother’s side
of the story would have dimmed her self-glory as a match-breaker. Once
he said to her, spicing the sentiment with a dry laugh:
“Do you think I can’t admire a fine woman without giving her a wedding
ring?”
But from the watchtower of her ever-present dread the petticoats that
she espied were always signals of real danger, however he might laugh
them to false alarms. Wherefore she felt that she must take up the
cudgels against Juno as she had raised them against other women, and
that without delay. The teeming line and colour of the Neapolitan were
clear in her memory, and she knew a stronger siege than ever had been
laid to her brother’s taste. Henceforth eternal alertness would be
the price of Signor Di Bello’s bachelorhood and her own reign, which
she took as a most serious matter. Alas! it was the same old battle.
Would the struggle never end? And this ever-returning necessity of
standing watch and ward, of fighting away aspirants for wedding rings,
rose before her now in an unwonted light, as a penance that ought not
to be laid upon her, as one that she would like to put off. She could
see herself all her days beating back would-be wives from the portals
of Casa Di Bello, and the troubled outlook weighted her spirit with
despair. A yearning for peace entered her soul, and with it came the
thought of a startling alternative for war--a voice telling her to do
the very thing that she had fought so long against her brother’s doing.
Take a wife! But her taking a wife, she mused smugly, should be quite a
different matter from his taking one. The maid of her choosing would be
no menace to the _status quo_ of Casa Di Bello. She would be a person
of right notions, not puffed with the foolish conceit of being able to
govern the household; a _ragazza_ with good sense enough to see that a
wife’s place under the connubial roof is far inferior to that of her
husband’s sister. Ah! the wife of her choice, she told herself fondly,
should be her creature, not a ruler; a subject, not a trampler, of her
parish-house laws. It never struck Carolina’s mind to seek her ideal
among the girls of New Italy; that would be calling for aid to the camp
of the enemy. Her fancy took wing over seas to old Italy, to Apennine
maids untinged of the craft and airs of Mulberry; to some maid of clay
that would shape easy in the mould of her wish. When Bertino came in at
noon from the shop, she began:
“You have a sister?”
“_Si_; Marianna.”
“Very well. What kind of a girl is she?”
“A fine girl.”
“Is she sound in health?”
“Ah, _si_; very sound.”
“How big is she?”
“Medium size.”
“Gentle and kind?”
“Yes, very gentle.”
“How old?”
“Let me think. She will be seventeen come the Feast of the Mother.”
“Any bad traits?”
“Not a single one, except that she eats too much molasses.”
“What work does she?”
“Straw-plaiting.”
“Do you think she would like to come to America?”
“Not unless--unless----”
“Well?”
“Not unless Armando came.”
“Armando? An _amante_, I suppose?”
“Yes, aunt; her _amante_.”
“Bah!” Her spinster mind did not count this a serious matter. “Perhaps
I shall send for her.”
“She wouldn’t leave Armando.”
“Then I might go and bring her.”
“What do you want of her?” ventured Bertino.
“Some day you shall see.”