Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [48]
After one month of working together, Lucrezia had insisted that Giovanna should take on her own patients. Lucrezia showed Giovanna how to take notes and keep them in order, and on more than one occasion demonstrated their importance by using the previous information to help solve a current problem. Although they each had their own patients, they tended to work together on deliveries, when the other wasn’t called away, simply because they enjoyed each other’s company so much.
The two women became confidants. While Giovanna was serious and hardworking, she also had a quick, biting wit that amused Lucrezia to no end. Once, when Giovanna worried out loud that the relationship was too one-sided, with Lucrezia passing on all the advice and knowledge, Lucrezia exclaimed, “Nonsense! You teach me about all those smelly things in your old bag. Besides, you make me laugh.”
After Giovanna met Lucrezia’s husband, she understood her need to laugh. Signore LaManna fulfilled every southerner’s expectation of an arrogant northerner. He was humorless, cold, and officious. Giovanna looked for signs in her older friend that would explain the mystery of their union, but she couldn’t find them. For the first time, instead of feeling sorrow about Nunzio, she realized how lucky they were to have shared something so few people ever have. Memories of laughing together, running, and swimming flooded her mind. With all Lucrezia’s gifts, she had not been given this one.
Giovanna spoke with Lucrezia of things she had never spoken with any woman. The difference in their age allowed her a certain freedom, and the fact that they were not family allowed her even more. Giovanna told Lucrezia of her problems with Teresa. She knew she frightened and intimidated her sister-in-law, but she didn’t know how not to, and sometimes she was resentful that she should even have to try.
Discussion of her relationship with Teresa became a stepping-stone to other issues. While a mother rested between contractions, they often discussed in spirited whispers the role of women in Italy’s north and south, Italian men, their perceptions of Americans, or the education of women. Lucrezia told her that she believed her own entry into university and medicine was destined when her mother named her Lucrezia after the seventeenth-century Venetian Lady Elena Lucrezia, the first woman to receive a university doctorate. After learning this fact, whenever Giovanna said Lucrezia’s name, she felt it carried with it the strength of history.
In one of these conversations, Lucrezia questioned Giovanna about wanting children and marrying again. Normally, this was not the type of question a woman would ask openly; instead, it would be gossiped about by neighbors on a stoop. When Giovanna got over her initial embarrassment, she was relieved to tell Lucrezia about her failed attempts to get pregnant with Nunzio and her deep desire for children. As far as marriage went, all Giovanna could say was, “I could never love another as I did Nunzio.”
Giovanna asked Lucrezia about her own courtship and marriage. Lucrezia wasn’t very forthcoming, but Giovanna was able to piece together that Lucrezia’s education set her apart and made her less of a marriage prospect. She had resigned herself to a life alone when she met her husband at the university. At first theirs was a professional relationship, but when Signore LaManna’s fiancée broke their engagement, he asked Lucrezia to marry him.
Another recurring topic of conversation was Nunzio’s accident. Giovanna had told Lucrezia in detail about Mariano Idone’s visit. Lucrezia filled Giovanna in on the conditions of workers and the world outside of Little Italy. She recounted stories she read in the newspaper about Italians being used as slave labor and the many deaths in the tunnels they were building for the underground trains. Lucrezia said her husband told her that Italians were dying at a greater rate than any other ethnic group building New York because there were so many of them, and because they didn’t have the power to do anything about