Free Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons by Linda Cardillo Page B

pregnant, come to me first."
    She turned away from me without her customary penetrating glance. I was expected to understand; she would protect me, as she'd been unable to protect me the night before from Aldo's spying and its consequences. She was angry with me for exposing her lapse, for making her look like a fool and for taking risks with my reputation. But she was also letting me know that she forgave me.
    My parents, however, were not ready to forgive. My mother, especial y, was determined to protect me in her own way from the dangers she saw lurking behind the eyes of every young man in the vil age, and within my own emerging womanhood.
    Her solution came quickly.
    My sister Pip had made a rash promise to a young man in Pano di Greci. She was nearly twenty, but she had no experience of men, as I did. Her embroidery stitches were neat; she fol owed al the rules at the convent of Santa Margareta; she would make someone an obedient, if foolish wife. But not this someone in Pano di Greci, my mother decided. Not knowing her own heart, Pip was relieved at my mother's intervention. She floated this way and that, always doing what she was told. The family of the young man, however, was enraged, raining curses and threats upon Pip's empty head.
    My mother and father conferred noisily, Papa at first resisting my mother's radical suggestion. Ever since Claudio had left, Papa had refused to even read any of the letters from America, let alone respond. But my mother, summoning al her emotional power, prevailed. A letter was hurriedly sent to Claudio.
    Pip, in the meantime, was kept at home, not even al owed to go to the market for fear she would be kidnapped in broad daylight crossing the piazza.
    To al outward appearances, life in the Fioril o households— my parents' and my grandmother's—remained as it had been, except for Pip's and my confinement. But my mother's days had taken on a kind of silent intensity as she worked out in elaborate detail what she considered to be the rescue not only of Pip, but of me and Til y as well.
    She told none of us, for fear of alerting the enemy in Pano di Greci or arousing the rebel in me.
    She did not tel me, in fact, until she had the passage booked, the steamship tickets in her hand, my father's horses practical y bridled and ready to drive me to the pier.
    "Aiuta me!" I wailed to Giuseppina when my mother marched to her house and ordered me to pack my trunks.
    Help me.
    "She cannot help you this time. Your sister will be kil ed or worse if she remains here, and she can't go alone.
    She and Til y can't manage such a journey by themselves. You re the only one with enough sense to see you al safely to Claudio. Venticano is no life for any of my daughters, but believe me, Giulia, it is especially no life for you. You are going now, before you're ruined by what you have clearly never learned to control."
    She stood over me while I gathered my belongings together. The tears flooded my cheeks, spil ing over onto my clothes. Giuseppina wandered around the house, muttering her incantations, burning incense, tucking her blessings among my possessions as I packed.

    "You'll leave before sunrise tomorrow, on your father's normal run to Napoli, so as not to arouse suspicion.
    The boys will come this evening after dark to take your trunks to the house, and you will come with them. You'll sleep with Til y in her bed tonight. I forbid you to breathe a word of this to anyone, especial y Cipriano or any of the Cucinos. If you do, you threaten not only your sister's life, but your own as well."
    My mother's voice was taut; her face revealed the sleeplessness and strain of the last few weeks. But just below the surface of her exhaustion, her rigid instructions, I thought I saw a kind of rejoicing—that she was going to be successful in getting us out of here, this vil age and this life that had been such a trap for her. And I hated her for it.
    "I don't want to go!" I screamed at her. "What about