Don't Sing at the Table Read Online Free PDF Page A

challenge for him, and I’m sure he sometimes hoped for a more traditional wife. At least, this is what Viola told me.
    Viola, despite her proud demeanor, had a heart , and in her own way she could articulate the details of the rooms in it in a way that an artist might, in one brushstroke in a single perfect shade. She had regrets, she’d later share, but she knew what they were and why she had them. She told me she had made many mistakes, with her husband, her children, her grandchildren, and her employees. Those regrets often kept her up at night, and when I would visit, she’d wake me up to talk them through. She believed in atonement, but mourned that she could not atone once those she loved had died. Viola never practiced self-deception; she was as clear in her thinking as the cloudless sky. Viola owned up to her shortcomings—or at least, she did to me.
    I was lying on the grass, next to her in the chair, a summer snow angel at this point, stretched out and one with the earth beneath me, as though I was carved into it. My arms were behind my head, pretzeled to make a pillow. The crystal tumbler rested in the grass like a jewel.
    Suddenly there was a great whooshing sound. I sat up and surveyed the sky. There was another blast of this strange sound I’d never heard before, but no movement. We looked in the direction of the forest, a expanse of green trees beyond the property line, but the leaves on the trees were still.
    The noise grew louder.
    I looked up at Viola; she was more curious than scared. She wasn’t always so trusting of the universe. When I was a girl, she made us stay indoors one summer when it was reported that bits of Skylab had broken off from the lunar station. NASA determined that errant shards of metal might drop into the earth’s atmosphere, through the clouds, and onto children playing outside in northeastern Pennsylvania. That was the summer I learned how to embroider.
    But this day she didn’t run into the house, nor did she advise me to seek cover. She sat there calmly and looked to the origin of the sound. I followed her gaze up and over the trees.
    Suddenly, in the purple sky, the edge of something massive, round, and strawberry red rose from the green forest. It grew larger and larger, towering over the height and breadth of the tree line below it.
    This mighty red thing cleared the treetops and revealed itself. It was a hot air balloon, with a dangling gold basket suspended on cords, climbing higher and higher into the sky. As it sailed over us and then out of sight, I looked up at her.
    â€œAre we drunk?” I asked her.
    And she said, “No. Just lucky.”

Chapter Two
Lucia
    The Spada children surround their mother, Giacomina, in Schilpario, Italy. Lucia stands behind her mother.
    L ucia Spada was born in Schilpario, Italy, on Christmas Day, 1894. The Spada family lived high in the Italian Alps, above the city of Bergamo, which is north of Milan in the Lombardy region. Lucia stood five-seven and was trim, with strong legs. She had refined northern Italian features—an oval face with large, dark brown eyes, accented by thick, well-shaped eyebrows, a razor-straight nose, full lips, and high cheekbones.
    Lucia was the eldest of eight children. Her childhood was marked by tragedy, when her beloved five-year-old sister Margarita (Rita) died suddenly of an illness. The family that remained struggled to survive, as did all families at the turn of the twentieth century in the mountains of Italy. Her father, Marco, looked for work to supplement the income he made from running a horse-and-buggy service from Schilpario to Bergamo. Marco was stern, a perfectionist with a creative streak that made him a bit of an inventor with a hunger for world travel. His wife, Giacomina, was a sweet and tender mother who made a comfortable home life despite their poverty.
    The notion of Marco running a buggy service in the Alps was enchanting until I went up the mountain