This piece was completed in response to an assignment for my senior seminar class, where our theme over the course of the semester was "The Investigator." It now stands as an early draft for one of the pieces in my senior thesis, which will re-imagine stories of betrayal in the ancient world.
**
Becoming Penelope
The piano is out of tune. The black and ivory keys are dusty with disuse, and no one has sat down to play in months. Perhaps it’s been years. I’ve begun to lose count, to be honest.
I used to count the hours. I woke up alone and dressed in the silence of our empty bedroom, wondering if at any moment I’d hear a rider galloping to the door, letter in hand, with news of my husband inked safely inside. But the sun rose and lingered in the sky, and still no rider came. The light faded and the crickets shouted at one another in the tall grass under the porch. The fireflies sashayed around the azalea bushes, and I’d always sigh and turn away from the empty dirt road that led up to the house, and shuffle my way upstairs to lay in our bed that seemed so vast and uncaring.
Counting hours was too hard after 816 of them had passed (I was never much good at arithmetic anyway), so I began to count the days. Later it was the months. Now it is the years. Who knows? Perhaps someday I shall be shriveled and gray, and will tell you of all the decades that have passed in silence.
In the early months, my name was a mockery. Patience, I thought miserably. I wanted satisfaction, not patience. But I was all I had, and so I adopted it as a mantra. Patience, I chanted inwardly. You are Patience. I am Patience.
I met Oliver when I was fifteen. He was tall and dark and clever and charismatic and completely irresistible. As I closed my hymnal, he turned around in his pew and smiled at me.
“Your voice is wasted on these simple songs. Opera is what you want.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “Have we met?”
“We haven’t had the pleasure,” he replied, pressing his hat to his chest and bowing slightly. “I have met your father. He said I might walk you home, if you wanted.”
I stared up at him dumbly, but he only smiled again. He touched my back, propelling me toward the church doors.
“May I walk you home, Patience?”
I was nodding as we walked out into the cool autumn morning, transfixed, merrily unaware of the power he already held over me. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back, and gave a courtly bow of farewell when we stopped at the front gate. I blushed; my stomach plummeted, and my unknowing heart soared.
I accosted my father that night and demanded information.
“Where is he from? Why haven’t I seen him before?”
“Because your head is always in the clouds, little one,” he told me, and chuckled. “You sew and you sing and never listen to a thing I say until it suits you to do so.”
“Well I’m listening now,” I said. He was seated in his large armchair by the fireplace and I was perched on a stool at his feet. I scooted closer and arranged my skirts around my feet as demurely as possible, then looked back up at my father expectantly.
His eyes were warm and he hid a smile behind his beard. “Here,” he said. He reached into the basket sitting beside his chair and pulled out my latest project. “Work, and I will tell you about the man who wants to marry you.”
I stabbed myself with the needle and cried out. “Marry me?”
“Yes, you little fool, so listen calmly. Stop bleeding.”
I sucked on my finger as Papa talked, and when the blood stopped trickling from the prick on my finger, I threaded my needle and focused on forming perfect, tiny stitches. I was going to make perfect stitches while my father told me about the perfect man with whom I would live my perfect life.
Oliver’s father was a merchant who had left Italy to seek his fortune in America. Cotton, he said, was the future. The way of the world. The rest of his family had remained in Milan. Some of his brothers had aspirations to return to Italy to join the family business, but Oliver had loved the States since he was a child, and desired only to visit Italy someday, but never to linger far from home.
He showed up on our doorstep later that week, holding a stack of music books. “Will you sing for me, bella?” he asked.
My interest in his background died as he smiled and stepped into the house. I was tripping over my petticoats as I trailed after him into the parlor and watched him settle in at the piano, his swarthy Italian hands summoning life from our quiet, slightly out-of-tune instrument.
Now my only investigation was of us—of the life we could have together, singing and laughing and merry-making for all our days. He trained my voice, coaxing from my throat songs that soared. He refined my Italian, teaching me words that coaxed my heart out of my possession and into his waiting hands.
“Caro mio ben,” he would sing in his flawless tenor, “credimi almen. Senza di te languisce il cor.”
Thou, all my bliss, it meant, believe but this: when thou art far, my heart is lorn.
I knew nothing of the desolation of being forsaken then.
We were married in the spring, almost a full year before the war broke out. When we heard the news, he assured me that he would have nothing to do with the violence that swirled in the east. But the war came for us all the same, and when it arrived at our doorstep, we found that we were powerless to resist. He delayed as long as possible, but I eventually found myself standing before him, trembling as I handed him his kepi and his canteen.
“You’ll wait for me, won’t you?” he asked.
“Forever,” I promised blithely. “I’ll wait forever.”
And so I did.
I waited through the hot, miserable summer, reading and rereading the only letter he sent. I waited, but nothing else did. My stomach swelled with the little girl growing inside, the cotton grew tall in the fields, and as the months went on, devastation marched closer to our safe little Mississippi town.
The world was darker, but I was determined that it would not fall silent. I played piano until I went into isolation, and on those hot, lonely summer nights, I lay awake and stared at the moon and hummed Italian arias to myself and Oliver’s daughter, where she waited safely inside of me.
I felt a bit like a failed investigator, thinking back on my childish fantasies of the life we would have together. Never once in all my planning and daydreaming had I envisioned that we’d be separated by so much violence, by so many miles, by so much time. But it was only the beginning.
He wrote to me after he’d had news of Tabitha’s birth. He was overjoyed, delighted, ecstatic, deeply impatient to see his wife and meet his daughter—but he was at Gettysburg, far from the symphonic safety of our small, muggy house. He wrote more in the two years that followed, always tender, always eager to return. And then, one day in April, when I had been a married woman for five years but only known my husband for two, everyone lowered their rifles and wheeled away the cannons and shuffled back to their ravaged farms to piece their lives together again.
Oliver was coming home.
Tabitha and I sat by the big window at the front of the house and waited together for hours, giddy as schoolchildren. She smiled at me toothily and asked me to sing. So we waited, and we sang. We sang hymns and silly children’s songs, and when the sun began to set each night and there was still no sign of him, she’d crawl into my lap and rest her head on my chest.
“Sing the sad song, Mama,” she said. “Sing the sad song about the Mama who misses the Papa, but it’s all right because he’ll come back soon.”
Caro mio ben, I crooned to my beautiful daughter, thou, all my bliss, without you I am lorn.
Then came the letter from New York, where Oliver was prepared to board a ship and go even farther than before. He would be home soon, he promised, but there was urgent business in Milan, and he had to go.
It had been almost four years since I had seen him. It was difficult to see him in my mind’s eye sometimes, despite the detailed descriptions I offered to Tabitha of her father. I still laid awake some nights and stared at a sliver of the moon, suspended in the sky, and tried to remember the curve of his mouth when he smiled, the way his eyes narrowed in concentration, his specific gait. I pulled my legs close to my chest, twirling the ribbons on my chemise, and agonized guiltily over the lack of specificity in my memories.
I didn’t hum the arias anymore.
The music helped less with each passing month, but Tabitha still needed to hear my voice. I began to read to her instead. My father had read Homer to me long before I was able to understand it, and I thought that perhaps Tabitha would grow to love it as well.
I chose the Odyssey over the Iliad, thinking of a cunning man far from home, still separated from his wife and his son even though the Trojan War was long over. At first, it was like a game, thinking of Oliver as Odysseus, tossed about by capricious gods and unfortunate turns of fate, driven far from home, but it was a game that lost its appeal quickly.
Rumors began to reach my waiting ears.
Business in Milan had been summarily concluded, yet Oliver lingered in Italy. There was a woman, they said—a singer—that Oliver’s family had decided to sponsor in her blossoming career.
That was apparently not the only thing that was blossoming.
Oliver wrote to me that he could no longer stay with his family; he was too much of a burden, he said, and so he had decided he would find someplace else to reside while he continued to work in Milan.
I set the letter aside and used the remaining daylight to read to Tabitha of Odysseus’ continued ramblings:
I climbed to a rocky point of observation and stood there,
and got a sight of smoke which came from the halls of Circe
going up from wide-wayed earth through undergrowth and forest.
Then I pondered deeply in my heart and my spirit,
whether, since I had seen the fire and smoke, to investigate. (Homer, 10.148-152)
I left off reading for a long time, but Tabitha’s breathing had slowed, and she was sleeping contentedly with her head in her arms, dark eyelashes fluttering.
I imagined Oliver walking through the streets of Milan, watching the smoke rise from the chimneys of the houses where Italian families gathered together. It all seemed so far away. I didn’t know what houses in Italy might look like. I imagined brightly-painted shutters and flowers in the windows, and dark-haired babbling babies and women wearing kerchiefs on their heads. I imagined Oliver investigating where he was to live, since he could not stay with his relatives. I did not know what to imagine, though, so I used Homer to help me.
He had come to the house of Circe, I thought with dread, with its well-polished stones. Circe’s house was surrounded by lions and wolves from the mountains, but they had all been drugged by the goddess and were harmless. I imagined these were men—tall and rangy and a little ragged, with empty eyes and restless feet that paced the polished stones.
Outside, the men were trapped and a little sad and desperate. Inside, they were pathetic. Beneath Circe’s cold, watching eyes, they turned into pigs. They forgot everything. They forgot their mothers and their fathers and the happiness of their boyhood. They forgot the war. They forgot their homes.
And Oliver? Oliver was no different. He was the best of men, but beneath the witch’s gaze he was swine like all the rest. He forgot me and my swollen stomach where I had housed our daughter all the months he was gone. He forgot our bed, with its sheets and quilts I’d sewed with my own hands, where he loved me and promised me everything.
She was a singer. She had many admirers. And Oliver had no family business to tend to, so he joined their ranks.
What was I to do? Patience, I thought, sewing uneven stitches with unsteady hands. I am Patience.
The next letter was not from Oliver.
Signorina ----,
I am writing to you concerning the debts of Oliver DeTucci. He has incurred a negative sum in my establishment over the last several months in a persistent bout of gambling. His mistress was unable to pay the balance on his behalf, and so Signore DeTucci has requested that I write to you in America and ask you to send the money. Please comply without delay. The balance is enclosed.
Signorina No Name. That’s who I was in Milan—an unmarried woman with no name, no husband, no hope.
This was a mistake. Surely this was a mistake.
This was a mistake or a cruel joke or an outright lie. All my nightmarish fantasies about the house of Circe and my husband rooting around in her bed like a whorish hog surely were only the miserable musings of lonely wife.
But I was wrong.
His letter came two days after the note from the debt collector. Tabitha brought it to me. She tugged at my skirts and smiled up at me, delighted.
“Mama,” she said. “Mama, they told me it was from Papa. They said it came all the way from Italy from Papa and I could bring it to you to read. Will you read it to me?”
Her eyes were dark and warm like his and I felt a little sick as I pulled my daughter into my lap and tore into the letter.
Mia bella,
I heard they wrote you from the boarding house. You ought not to worry. All is well here.
Give my love to Tabitha.
- Oliver
“What does it say, Mama?” she asked, tapping the page. Her chubby finger crinkled the paper and she jerked her hand back, horrified that she might have ruined the missive from her father.
“It says that he loves you very much,” I heard myself saying calmly. “And misses you every day.”
“When is he coming home?” she asked, again turning those torturously similar dark eyes upon my face.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. He didn’t say.”
I sent her off to play. Sitting behind the desk, I realized that my hands were shaking.
The boarding house.
I ran outside, and, clutching the side of the house for support, emptied my stomach onto the dirt. The boarding house. It was a brothel. He had spent our small, simple, hopeful fortune on whiskey and women that were not me.
I stopped singing.
I read aloud to Tabitha, and tapped my fingers in time when she sang to me, but I no longer touched the piano where Oliver had taught me the arias, and I refused to let a syllable of Italian pass through my lips.
I sewed like a woman possessed, thinking of Penelope’s tireless fingers weaving a shroud of fidelity for her father-in-law. I contemplated sewing a shroud for myself. I was a little horrified at my own morbidity when the thought first slinked through my mind, still reeling from betrayal and pain, but as yet another summer faded into autumn and then into the short, dark days of winter, the idea began to seem more reasonable after all.
I have failed. Oliver had gone off to find himself and the world and how he would fit there, and I had lost my part in his world. He fooled me, or perhaps I only fooled myself. I had chosen to love a man too vain and ambitious to be contented with our quiet, little house and the tinny piano in our parlor. I can sing the words, but in the end I am just a girl from Mississippi, not a worldly Milanese singer.
There are two comforts left to me: Tabitha, the daughter he fathered but will never know, and the truth. She looks like him, but she is all me. And I know now. I do not like where my investigation has led, but the truth is still the truth, and I am still a jilted woman and I still have to sing.
Thou my bliss, indeed. They were not my words. They were written in the language that had betrayed me, and likely sung better by the woman who had detained my husband for years. They were words that mocked me, taunted me, haunted me, gave me only misery.
But when Tabitha sat beside me on the piano bench and smiled her sweet, unknowing, little smile, I had no resistance left to give.
“Sing the pretty one, Mama,” she said. “Please sing the pretty one about the sad lady.”
And so I sang. I am Patience no more—I am Penelope.
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