Windy City Blues Read Online Free Page B

thought of that hot unhappy summer, the summer the city burst into riot-spawned flames and my mother lay in the stifling front bedroom oozing blood. She and Tony had one of their infrequent fights. I’d been on my paper route and they didn’t hear me come in. He wanted her to sell something which she said wasn’t hers to dispose of.
    “And your life,” my father shouted. “You can give that away as a gift? Even if she was still alive—” He broke off then, seeing me, and neither of them talked about the matter again, at least when I was around to hear.
    Lotty squeezed my hand. “What about your aunt, great-aunt in Melrose Park? She might have told her siblings, don’t you think? Was she close to any of them?”
    I grimaced. “I can’t imagine Rosa being close to anyone. See, she was the last child, and Gabriella’s grandmother died giving birth to her. So some cousins adopted her, and when they emigrated in the twenties Rosa came to Chicago with them. She didn’t really feel like she was part of the Verazi family. I know it seems strange, but with all the uprootings the war caused, and all the disconnections, it’s possiblethat the main part of Gabriella’s mother’s family didn’t know what became of her.”
    Lotty nodded, her face twisted in sympathy; much of her family had been destroyed in those death camps also. “There wasn’t a schism when your grandmother converted?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s frustrating to think how little I know about those people. Gabriella says—said—the Verazis weren’t crazy about it, and they didn’t get together much except for weddings or funerals—except for the one cousin. But Pitigliano was a Jewish cultural center before the war and Nonno was considered a real catch. I guess he was rich until the Fascists confiscated his property.” Fantasies of reparations danced through my head.
    “Not too likely,” Lotty said. “You’re imagining someone overcome with guilt sixty years after the fact coming to make you a present of some land?”
    I blushed. “Factory, actually: the Sestieris were harness makers who switched to automobile interiors in the twenties. I suppose if the place is even still standing, it’s part of Fiat or Mercedes. You know, all day long I’ve been swinging between wild fantasies—about Nonno’s factory, or Gabriella’s brother surfacing—and then I start getting terrified, wondering if it’s all some kind of terrible trap. Although who’d want to trap me, or why, is beyond me. I know this Malcolm Ranier knows. It would be so easy—”
    “No! Not to set your mind at rest, not to proveyou can bypass the security of a modern high rise—for no reason whatsoever are you to break into that man’s office.”
    “Oh, very well.” I tried not to sound like a sulky child denied a treat.
    “You promise, Victoria?” Lotty sounded ferocious.
    I held up my right hand. “On my honor, I promise not to break into his office.”

III
    It was six days later that the phone call came to my office. A young man, with an Italian accent so thick that his English was almost incomprehensible, called up and gaily asked if I was his “Cousin Vittoria.”
    “Parliamo italiano,”
I suggested, and the gaiety in his voice increased as he switched thankfully to his own language.
    He was my cousin Ludovico, the great-great-grandson of our mutual Verazi ancestors, he had arrived in Chicago from Milan only last night, terribly excited at finding someone from his mother’s family, thrilled that I knew Italian, my accent was quite good, really, only a tinge of America in it, could we get together, any place, he would find me—just name the time as long as it was soon.
    I couldn’t help laughing as the words tumbled out, although I had to ask him to slow down and repeat. It had been a long time since I’d spoken Italian, and ittook time for my mind to adjust. Ludovico was staying at the Garibaldi, a small hotel on the fringe of the Gold Coast,