An Italian Wife by Ann Hood Page B

here.
    In the hallway, he saw his niece, Francesca. So many people lived in this house. So many women. He hated them all.
    â€œPuttana,” he snarled at her.
    She wrinkled her face as if she might cry.
    â€œPuttana,” he said again, softer now.
    His mother appeared, pushing the girl out of his way. “ Basta , Carmine,” she told him. “Enough.”
    He went downstairs to the sink and began to wash the brains and bones and bits of skin from his face. He scrubbed with the rough towel and the fat bar of soap. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get clean.

Moonlight in Vermont

    V ERMONT COMES FROM THE FRENCH— VERT MONT . Green mountain. Josephine knows this because her daughter, Elisabetta, the one so smart that she got to go to college, where she slept with her English professor, got pregnant, dropped out to marry him, and became a faculty wife, tells her things like this. Elisabetta lives in Iowa now. Iowa, which was named for the Iowa River, which was named for the Ayuhwa Indian tribe, which the English called the Ioway, which means one who puts to sleep .
    â€œThis is an appropriate name for Iowa, Ma,” Elisabetta writes to her. “It is dull, dull, dull here.”
    Elisabetta calls herself Betsy, her husband Kip and her son Eugene. The boy peers out at Josephine from a black-and-white photograph, its edges cut in a zigzag pattern like someone put garden shears to them. He is too skinny. His black glasses appear to be taped together on one side. He is holding a rabbit or a fat cat, Josephine can’t be certain. Behind him, a lot of grass and a barn in the distance. This is Iowa, the place that puts you to sleep.
    But Vermont. Green Mountain. Josephine goes there to visit her daughter Chiara, the one who is becoming a nun. This is how she has come to think of her daughters. Concetta, the responsible one who has moved her family in with Josephine; Giulia, the one who can’t stop having babies even though her husband is not a good provider; Isabella, the slow one who married a man who is also not quite right; Valentina, the one she lost, the daughter she gave away.
    Is it a coincidence that of all the convents where Chiara could have been placed, she ended up at this one near Montpelier, Vermont? Montpelier, which means nothing except that it is the capital of Vermont. When Josephine got the letter from Chiara telling her where she was being sent, Josephine thought it was a sign. The daughter she gave away, the one lost to her, her Valentina, is somewhere in Vermont. That is all she knows about the girl, but surely it is no accident that Chiara is there too. Surely Josephine is meant to find her daughter.
    â€œIOWA IS CALLED the Hawkeye State,” Elisabetta tells Josephine. “After the scout, Hawkeye, in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans .”
    They are on a train to Vermont for Chiara’s graduation from postulate to novice. Elisabetta has come home, without Eugene or Kip, for an unspecified amount of time, claiming vaguely that she wants to accompany her mother on this trip. It is early autumn and as they travel north the leaves are more vivid, scarlet and persimmon and gold.
    â€œDo you think children who grow up in Vermont are happy?” Josephine asks.
    Elisabetta gives her a quizzical look. “As happy as anywhere, I suppose,” she says.
    She pours herself another small glass of apricot brandy from the flask she keeps in her purse and stares out the window at the landscape rolling slowly by.
    â€œIt looks a lot like Iowa here,” she says in a resigned way.
    â€œThey have fresh cheese in Vermont,” Josephine says. “And green mountains. And maple syrup right from the trees.”
    â€œI guess,” Elisabetta says, as if she has stopped listening.
    When the college learned that Kip had gotten a student pregnant, he was let go. But he keeps finding new positions, first in North Dakota and then in New