The Marcoli Bunch, maybe. No, that was too sedate. The Seven Screwballs. No, that wasn’t fair to Giovanna—which wasn’t just natural prejudice on Frank’s part. Even Ron would admit that when God had been passing around common sense to the Marcolis, he’d given all of it to the one and only female in the pack. Giovanna and the Six Loose Cannons on the Deck.
Alas, no. The problem with that title was that it implied that Giovanna was in some sense the captain of the crew.
Alas, no. The Marcoli males, revolutionary firebrands or not, were every bit as mired in some customs as any Italian. Listen to what the girl says? Nonsense! Practical matters are for men.
Besides, the title omitted the biggest goof in the bunch—Marius, the handyman. Whatever the Marcolis didn’t mismanage, the hired help would invariably make good the lack.
Oh, well. Frank went back to his favorite pastime, which was watching Giovanna. She was something to watch, too, scampering around with her usual energy and giving constant advice to her father and uncle and their assorted sons—to which, of course, they paid no attention whatsoever.
It went well enough until they started to haul out one of the big boxes with the propaganda in it. The boatmen had been about to simply toss them up onto the wharf one by one, two men to a box, but Massimo would have none of it. He had a better idea. He insisted that the whole operation would be smoother and easier if they rigged up a tripod of spars on the wharf and swung a block and tackle off it. They could sway up the boxes onto the wharf without any effort, that way.
Thus spake Archimedes. And so he and Messer Marcoli fell to work, using materials from the boats that were lying around as well as such things as are wont to be found on wharves, even small river wharves like Padua’s.
Frank stood to one side with Ron while Massimo and Messer Marcoli fiddled with their jury-rigged crane. Michel had wandered off somewhere. Giovanna had finally given up trying to inject reason into madness, and had found a seat on a barrel. The barrel was close to Frank, but just far enough away so as not to incite the territorial instincts of her family watchdogs. Had the matter not concerned Frank himself, he would have been mightily amused. No matter how enthusiastically preoccupied the Marcoli males got with one of their projects, they never got so preoccupied as not to notice where Giovanna was in relation to Frank. It was downright weird—as if they possessed some kind of automatic daughter navigation radar.
They were never nasty about it, he had to admit. By their own light, he supposed, they could even be considered tolerant. They did not object to Giovanna sitting next to Frank at the dinner table, and never made any attempt to look under the table to see if their daughter and her enamorata were playing footsie. (Which, they invariably were. By now, Frank’s ankles were almost callused.) Nor did they object if she and Frank held hands whenever there was the slightest excuse for them to do so—such as helping Giovanna negotiate a street she had been walking since she was two years old. They didn’t even object when Giovanna kissed Frank every time he left—although, after enough time had passed, comments would be made. Jocular ones, initially, rising steadily in serious timber thereafter. Frank and Giovanna had learned exactly how long they could maintain the kiss before Antonio would rise huffily to his feet.
They even made earthy jokes about the matter in Frank’s presence—so long as Giovanna wasn’t around to hear them. On one occasion, they’d been repairing the printing press and had had to fit a new drive shaft into its appointed slot. It proved difficult to get it in, as was often the case when mating a brand-new part to a used one. The Marcolis had lightened the burden with fifteen minutes’ worth of ribaldry on the subject of how much more difficult it would be to mate two brand-new parts together—especially in the dark. Grinning at Frank the whole time. Frank’s ears were red by the end of it.