‘One day, Bruno comes to the Reverend Mother and tells her he wants to marry me. There weren’t many Italian boys left, and I think the nuns saw it as an opportunity to get rid of me!’ For the first time that afternoon, Izzy laughed. ‘Bruno and I had fallen in love, of course, but I was only fourteen and too young to marry. Luckily one of the nuns had a brother who got me false papers. He was a printer who had helped hundreds of Jews escape the Germans. I didn’t have a passport, but this man provided a birth certificate for me that said I was born in 1928, not 1930. We used the certificate to get a passport saying I was sixteen so that we could get married and I could go back to the United States with Bruno as a war bride. I had to go for blood tests at the Red Cross, and present that certificate and other documentation to his captain in order to get permission to marry.’
‘What kind of papers did they want?’ Naddie wondered.
‘Some of the soldiers had what you would call “a wife in every port.” The army wanted to make sure Bruno wasn’t already married! But I knew he was an honest boy because he took my picture to send to his mother in Boston so she would know what her new daughter-in-law was going to look like.’ She laughed again. ‘I often wonder what she thought, Bruno’s mother, of Bruno’s “Little Bella”. I was a tiny speck of a thing back then, you can imagine, after so long with so little to eat. We had rations, like half a pound of bread a day, but if that’s all you have to eat it’s not much. I weighed ninety-eight pounds.
‘Then, we found out that Bruno was being shipped to Germany, and then back to America to be discharged, and the army doesn’t give a hoot that he has a fiancée in Italy. So I was thinking I’d never see him again. But, life goes on. I got a job working part-time in an alimentari. Then, one day months later, Reverend Mother came with a letter from Bruno. He’d gotten a two-week furlough.’ Izzy looked from me to Naddie and back again. ‘Everything was destroyed by the war, you understand. Everything. There was no electricity, no telephone, no railroad. It was very cold that winter, but Bruno hitchhiked from Monte Castello, where the army was helping the Brazillians push back the Germans, all the way to Rome! We got married right away. I didn’t even have time to rent a wedding dress. The next day we walked to the Red Cross where he signed me up as a GI wife so that I could get benefits, and then he had to leave and I didn’t see him again for almost a year. I got his letters, though. Every week he wrote me, although I’d get the letters in batches.
‘But then, time passed and I hadn’t heard from Bruno for several months. I was worried he’d forgotten about me when the Red Cross sent a letter telling me to go to a certain hotel where I would wait with other GI brides for a boat to take us to America. There were maybe five hundred war brides and over one hundred children all crowded together on that ship. Some of us were seasick for the whole ten days, but all the hardships flew straight out of my mind when we sailed into New York harbor and I saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time. I stood on the deck and bawled my eyes out.’
I scrabbled in my handbag, looking for a tissue. ‘Now you’ve made me cry,’ I sniffed, then blew my nose.
‘Bruno was there to meet me, and his mother, too. She was a wonderful woman! She’d sent me a dress to wear for my “homecoming.” Other than that, I really brought nothing with me.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Except for…’
We waited expectantly, but she didn’t finish the sentence. ‘Except for what?’ Naddie prodded.
‘Before Abba was forced to sell, he saved one thing. It’s a portrait of me, painted when I was around four, holding my kitten, Merlino.’
I was astonished. ‘How on earth did you get the painting out of Italy?’
Izzy smiled. ‘Abba carefully removed it from the frame, wrapped it in a special canvas, and my mother sewed it into the lining of my suitcase. The painting’s hanging in my living room now. I’ll show it to you sometime.’
‘I’d love to see it,’ I said.
‘It’s lovely,’ Naddie said. ‘I never knew its history. Fascinating.’ Turning to Izzy, she asked, ‘Is the painting valuable?’
Izzy shrugged. ‘It’s priceless to me, of course. I remember sitting for the artist, a flamboyant and rather scary woman named Clotilde Padovano. In the early part of the twentieth century, she was very much in demand as a portrait painter to the well-to-do. I don’t follow such things closely, but I read in the Times that one of her portraits was recently sold at auction in New York for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.’
I whistled.
‘I’ll never part with mine, of course,’ she said.
‘Nor would I, if it were mine,’ I said. ‘Not even if I were reduced to selling umbrellas on street corners.’
Izzy laughed then picked up her handbag, preparing to go. As we got up to join her, I turned to Izzy again. ‘Izzy, I have a rude question.’
‘Yes?’
‘For lunch just now, you had calamari. Isn’t squid a non-kosher food, treif?’
Izzy laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘I learned a long time ago, Hannah, that it is never safe to be Jewish. Maybe it was the years of living on the edge of being found out. Maybe it was the hours of kneeling on the cold floor of the convent at matins and prime. But, after I married Bruno, I converted. I’ve been a practicing Catholic ever since.’
I accompanied my friends to the entrance of Blackwalnut Hall, hugged them both goodbye then headed off in the direction of the parking lot to collect my car.
As I rounded the corner of the building I noticed two men squared off on the concrete apron outside the service entrance to the kitchen, looking for all the world like boxing bears. One had to be Raniero Buccho; nobody else at Calvert Colony had hair that impossibly blond. From his black-and-white uniform and the argument I’d overheard earlier, I guessed the other was probably the hapless kitchen staffer. I was too far away to hear what the men were saying, but from the way Raniero’s arms were flailing about I could tell he was giving the other guy a sizable piece of his mind. Raniero’s adversary stood his ground, his chin thrust forward, unflappably defiant. Curiosity aroused, I briefly considered moving to within earshot of the pair, but when I checked my watch I knew I had to hustle. I was due to pick up my granddaughter, Chloe, from her ballet lesson at three, and if I didn’t hurry I’d be late.
It was none of my business anyway, I thought as I climbed into my ancient LeBaron and slotted the key into the ignition. Raniero had a short fuse, no doubt about that. He was as likely to clobber someone over a dropped serving platter or a misplaced twist of lemon peel as he would, say, over a diner’s complaint about finding a hair in the vichyssoise. Besides, I thought, as I pulled out of the parking lot and into the drive, the other guy seemed to be giving as good as he got. I smiled. Poor Raniero.
SEVEN
‘As early as 1998, researchers were reporting that music could serve as an important tool for decreasing aggressive behavior in Alzheimer’s sufferers. In 2004, another paper suggested that memory for familiar music might remain intact in some dementia patients. “Music of the right kind,” neurologist Oliver Sacks said in a 2007 interview, “can serve to orient and anchor a patient when almost nothing else can. The past, which is not recoverable in any other way, is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can regain a sense of identity.”’