Once Upon a Time in West Toronto

by Terri Favro

  At the breakfast table, she spreads out the pale blue pages. Riccardo explains that he is writing, in part, on Paolo’s behalf, who apologizes if he has upset her with his letters. He realizes now that her lack of response was a signal that she did not want to hear from him.

  Riccardo has only one request: could she, please, write back just this one time so that he can reassure Paolo that she is all right?

  You are so headstrong, Ida, I worried that you did not understand the situation you were entering. Just one word of reassurance and Paolo and Zara will be content and so will I. All of us will leave you in peace. But as a point of information, I have a bit of money now. With Zara retired, I sold the pensione and came here to London to work in a fine dining establishment—did you see my address? They are rather trusting in England; I told them I had “professional qualifications” and gave Zara as my reference. Imagine what she said—you would think I had trained at the Cordon Bleu! It’s troubling, how smoothly our mother can lie. Of course, I am much better at the stove than even the so-called “master chefs” here who know nothing more than how to fry a potato. They never suspected I’ve done nothing more than work in the kitchen of the pensione. Good enough training for the English, I suppose!

  I hear of Canada often here and always think of you. Toronto seems not so far away from London. I could make a trip to see you, perhaps arrange for Paolo to join me…

  Ida shakes her head at that one. No.

  From Marcello’s office, she fetches paper, a pen, and an envelope. She writes:

  Caro Riccardo:

  I am so happy to hear from you. But please understand I am only responding because it is you writing this time and not Paolo!

  First, let me assure you that I am very happy. I am married to a good man who I love very much, Marcello Umbriaco, a teacher of mathematics. In some ways, Rico, he reminds me of you! As I suspect Paolo knows, given that he has always addressed me by my correct married name, this is not my proxy husband: I left him long ago. We have a seven-year-old daughter and another on the way.

  You will be glad to know that Zara’s investment in my training was not wasted after all. I was a flight attendant (Air Canada) for a number of years. Now I train girls for them. It’s a good job, and I’m no longer away from home often. Sometimes I miss the travel.

  She pauses. Taps the pen on the sheet.

  Finally, she writes: Do not come see me, Rico. Especially, tell Paolo and Zara not to come. Perhaps, one day, I will bring my family to meet you. I still haven’t explained things to them. One day soon, I will, and then perhaps we will come to see you.

  She signs it and seals it, addressing it carefully. What in the world, she wonders, would entice Rico away from Venice, up to England? Such a long way!

  She smiles, thinking how far she herself has come.

  When Marcello and Sophia arrive at Esposito’s, the tables are already full of people in blue jerseys and Italian flags are everywhere. With the six-hour time difference between Toronto and Spain, the game starts early. Mike Esposito has set up a huge TV screen with a satellite feed—an extravagance, but it attracts customers, even from outside the community. Today it will probably more than pay for itself in food and beer.

  Marcello sits with Sophia on his lap, waving her flag and yelling Ros-si! Ros-si! Ros-si!

  “Where’s the Contessa?” asks Mike, dropping a plate of eggs and toast in front of Marcello.

  A man at a nearby table slaps Marcello’s back and laughs. “She’s probably home cheering for the tedeschi.”

  “Watch it!” warns Marcello, glancing pointedly at Sophia, but she hasn’t heard a word. She’s too focused on watching the game and eating Marcello’s eggs.

  After writing and sealing her letter, Ida finds a handful of stamps on Cello’s desk and affixes all of them—she’s never sure about postage. She hides the bundle of letters back in the closet, pulls on her sandals and heads off to the corner mailbox. In the distance, she can hear a blare of music; seconds later, a convertible pulls into view, packed with men waving a huge Italian flag. They’re shouting and singing as one of them dances on the back seat. Those idioti are going to kill themselves if they’re not careful, thinks Ida, heading for home.

  Now she is ready to turn her attention to the cuttlefish. Getting to Chinatown on a Sunday by bus—beh. She’ll have to catch one bus along St. Clair, then switch at Spadina, then switch again to go south from Bloor. Who needs it? As she walks back to the semi, the refurbished chrome grille of the Chevy seems to grin at her, the car gleaming in the driveway with its fresh coat of cherry red paint.

  Ida crosses her arms and stands in front of the perfectly good car, thinking: He loves you more than he loves me. The Chevy would take her down to Dundas Street and back so fast, Marcello would never even know she’d been gone. Never know she’d “disobeyed” him.

  She fetches the keys.

  When she goes to unlock the passenger side door, she is surprised to find it open; it isn’t like Marcello to forget to lock up. Sliding behind the wheel, she notices something on the floor: a tattered, badly stained book. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Opening it, she sees a stamp reading Bramborough High Library and the name Marcello Umbriaco Junior carefully written in dark-blue cursive script. Did the book get pushed under the front seat years ago, only to be found again when Marcello was overhauling the car? She is surprised he didn’t bring such a valuable memento into the house to show her. Like the Chevy, the book is exactly the kind of touchstone with the past that Marcello treasures. The kind of thing that proves how far he’s come.

  Tossing the book on the passenger seat, Ida slides the key into the ignition. She can tell that the car has been recently tuned—the engine roars to life with more vitality than she remembers. As she pulls out of the driveway and accelerates, then slows again at the end of the street, she notices a sponginess when she applies pressure to the brake. The car stutters to a stop as though grinding through heavy mud. For a moment she considers turning around—perhaps Marcello was right—then thinks with irritation about obeying him. She’s used to the power brakes in the Dart; this is probably nothing more than forgetting the “feel” of the Chevy. She hasn’t driven it in years. Besides it’s just a quick trip, traffic is light on a Sunday and everyone is home watching the game.

  She heads west to Spadina, then swings south near Casa Loma, the road dipping over the edge of the Escarpment (“the shoreline of the giant inland sea that used to cover Toronto,” Marcello has pedantically explained to her many, many times in his teacher’s voice, as she rolls her eyes and thinks to herself, you only tell me about the Escarpment five hundred times before, beh!).

  As the Chevy descends the steep hill, Ida finds herself picking up speed even though she hasn’t touched the gas. Tires squealing, she winds past Walmer Road, still heading south, and presses the brake. This time she senses nothing at all beneath her foot. The car is not responding.

  She grips the steering wheel. As she approaches Bloor, she sees that the stoplight immediately ahead is turning from yellow to red and that same convertible, jammed with men, is nearing the intersection, their giant flag snapping. Goal, goal, goal, they’re shouting as they race toward the green light. When she realizes that a collision is inevitable, Ida cries out and throws her arms over her head, bracing hard against the steering wheel, as she’s been taught to prepare herself for an airline crash. She also makes a brief (and, she suspects, pointless) appeal to God.

  What she does not expect—what, later, the police report will point out—is that the force of the crash will knock loose the ignition wires, which the husband will freely admit to having tampered with in the past. No point in being caught out in a lie. He will confess to hotwiring the car when they interrogate him.

  “Why the hell would the guy jump his own ignition?” one officer will ask another, as they watch Marcello weeping on the other side of the two-way mirror.

/>   “Doesn’t quite pass the sniff test, does he?” the other will agree.

  In the classroom, Marcello always enjoys creating hypothetical situations to demonstrate physical laws.

  Assume that: two objects are moving towards one another on a frictionless surface. One object, a 1959 Chevy, is moving at a speed of sixty miles per hour (according to estimates from two eye witnesses). The other object, a 1970 Ford Fairlane convertible, is moving at sixty-five miles per hour (give or take). Using vector transformations, calculate their Relative Speed at Impact (RSI).

  The answer is eighty-eight miles per hour. Even taking into account the friction of the road, at that speed, fatality is probable.

  Like one of Marcello’s math problems, the forces of the two cars meet and combine. The Fairlane convertible slams into the Chevy, causing it to spin and collide a second time and rupturing rust spots in the older vehicle’s gas tank.

  A chain reaction ensues. Energized by the car key, sparks from the exposed copper ignition wires create an electrical charge that speeds through the twisted car frame to the spilled fuel. The resulting fire scorches away any evidence of rubber skid marks from the road surface and burns off what remains of the fuel.

  Little will be left for the police to investigate. Without skid marks, there is no way for them to conclusively determine speed and direction, or to test whether the gas had been tainted with an accelerant or the brake fluid siphoned off, crimes that the husband, out of his mind with rage and grief, keeps insisting must have happened. The investigator listens patiently to his wild theories, even going so far as to follow up on his accusations against two men in the Niagara Region: Marcello Trovato Senior and Stanley Mancuso. Both have solid alibis: they spent the day with fifty other men in a sports bar in Thorold, watching the World Cup.

  The investigator can see no motive for mechanical tampering unless the husband did it himself. They bring him in and question him, but it’s hard to believe the man’s intense grief isn’t genuine. As one detective says, “If he’s faking it, someone should give him an Academy Award.” In the end, the investigator can find no motive for the husband to go to such lengths to kill his wife and unborn child.

  More to the point, a pedestrian crossing Spadina Road that Sunday morning witnessed the woman running the red. The investigator suspects the accident is what it appears to be: a housewife in a hurry to get to the grocery store. Sad, sure, but what can you do?

  “Typical woman driver,” the investigator says behind closed doors to his assistant, shaking his head as his secretary types up the report. “Maybe they shouldn’t get behind the wheel when they’re pregnant. The hormones make them crazy. Considering that a guy in the other car broke his neck, we might’ve had her up on charges, if she’d lived.”

  “Speaking of crazy, what’ll we tell the husband?” asks the assistant.

  “That he’s off the hook. The husband might be a bad mechanic but he’s not a killer. The report will say he lost his wife in a speed-related accident, answers the investigator. He’s going to have to accept that and move on.”

  14. TEST

  BARRIE AVE., 1991

  SOPHIA UMBRIACO HAS FAILED a math test. Again. She knew she would fail. Although her father sits with her most evenings, drilling her on integers and algebra and all that number stuff he loves so much, it just doesn’t go in. He’s always patient, he’s used to having to explain things over and over to his students. He never loses his temper or gives up on her. He keeps telling her that there are patterns in the numbers, just like in music.

  Sophia wants him to give up. She hates math. Her father can’t understand how this is possible. “You’re my daughter. There’s no reason for you not to be good at math.”

  “Was my mother good at math?”

  At the mention of my mother, Sophia’s father pauses, rubs his eyes, and carries on: “Your mom was good at everything. Now, Soph, let’s go over this again…”

  At sixteen years of age, Sophia is a serious-looking girl, with large black eyes and long legs. Her reddish-brown hair curls loose to her shoulders, making her look like a Renaissance angel. One thing that strikes people about Sophia: she’s solemn. She doesn’t laugh easily or make friends quickly. She practices the piano every night, but plays joylessly. It’s like an athletic event for her. Put your fingers here, here, here, faster, faster, faster, finished.

  “Yes, Dad, I practiced,” she tells her father, but like numbers, the music never goes into her heart.

  Sophia’s heart is in sports, her trophies and medals turning the basement into a shrine to hockey, soccer, and basketball. She enjoys watching the long graceful arc of a football leaving her father’s hands and the satisfaction of snatching it out of the air and drilling it back at him with a spiral that Dad says reminds him of Brett Favre’s. “Too bad ladies can’t play football,” he likes to say, just to get a rise out of her. She always responds with an imperious look: “That’s discrimination, Dad. And it’s ‘women’ not ‘ladies.’”

  They go for long runs together, sprinting down and then charging back up steep hills, challenging one another; these days, Sophia’s father can just barely stay ahead of her.

  Sometimes, at night, she rummages under her mattress and pulls out the squishy packet of letters that she found stashed in the spare room closet. Ida’s Magic Words. She likes to sleep with them under her pillow, as if the dense, handwritten paragraphs will drift into her head while she’s asleep, giving up her mother’s secrets. She makes sure the letters are back under her mattress in the morning so that her father doesn’t find them. She wants the letters to remain a secret because any mention of Ida can send him into a dark mood that imprisons him for days on end.

  Sophia was eight when she discovered Ida’s Magic Words during a game of hide-and-seek with her friend Pasqua. As soon as she saw the name Umbriaco, Ida she knew who they belonged to. Ida wanders on the fringes of Sophia’s memory, a pale, powerful presence rich with the mingled fragrances of garlic, onions, basil, and oregano—everyday kitchen smells that Sophia associates with home and loss. Every bite of home cooking tastes like her mother. Sophia has been living in an atmosphere of grief for so long that it surprises her when a friend’s house simply smells of cat pee or cabbage or dirty laundry.

  When she and Pasqua were little girls, they pretended that Ida’s letters had been dropped from heaven, a magic charm for them to untangle. Ida was like a fairytale princess, except there was no poisoned apple to cough up and no prince handsome enough to wake her with a kiss, not even Sophia’s father. Pasqua and Sophia imagined that, if they could figure out how to crack the code, Ida would come back to life and break The Spell of Eternal Sadness that kept Sophia’s father in its grip.

  Most of Ida’s Magic Words were written in Italian in an elaborate looping script that Sophia found hard to decipher. By sixteen, she had had enough Saturday morning Heritage Language classes from the Board of Education to recognize many phrases. Strung together, they came out sounding like a corny Italian love song— amore, cuore, tristezza, memoria, dolore, mi dispiace, mi manchi, ti voglio bene. Love, heart, sadness, memory, pain, I’m sorry, I miss you, I love you.

  Two letters were even more mysterious, written by a different hand, in an unrecognizable language, each one starting: Draga moja kći, tvoj otac i ja smo toliko zabrinuta za tebe, and ending with the signature, Zara—intriguingly, one of Sophia’s middle names.

  Sophia stared and stared at the words. Regret and loneliness wafted from the pages, but the meaning of the sentences refused to knit itself together for her. Even though she didn’t believe in charms and spells anymore, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the day she finally understood the letters, her father would come fully to life again, like a prince waking up from a dream. Eventually she moves the letters from under her mattress to inside her desk, making it easier to study them when she should be doing homework.

  Sophia’s fa
ther spends a lot of time alone, even though he has many friends: Ed the lawyer, Mike who runs the social club, Lou next door, and Dave who used to be a priest and now sells hockey equipment. Even when Dad’s with these men, Sophia can see that he feels alone. He’s always looking somewhere else in the room.

  When the Spell of Eternal Sadness falls over her father like a heavy black blanket, only one friend is powerful enough to lift it: Uncle Benny. He drives up from New York every couple of months and sleeps in the spare room. When he arrives, the first thing he does is ride over to Blockbuster to rent a bunch of movies. He and Dad like to watch James Bond best. Sometimes they’ll turn on a hockey or football game; when that happens, Sophia will curl up between them, pretending to be a cub between two lions, comforted by the deep masculine rumble of their voices.

  Benny used to be in the entertainment business. That’s how Dad describes his job to Sophia, although every time he does, Benny grins in a way that suggests this is not quite true. These days, Benny owns a bookshop in Greenwich Village, sometimes selling comic books that people make themselves. He brings copies to Toronto for Sophia and Marcello. One, a comic book called Maus, is one of Dad’s all-time favourite books.

  Benny is good-looking, even more so than Dad. He’s younger, too, which makes it surprising that so many of his friends have died. One, a man he calls Scott, was a writer Benny knew in Toronto who moved down to New York to be with Benny. That’s when he got sick, Benny said, and eventually died in a hospice. From what Sophia understands from overheard conversations, Benny was worried about getting sick, too, until he took a test and found out he was okay. Now he says he’s playing it safe.