by Terri Favro
Marcello doesn’t sleep that night. He stares into the darkness and thinks about Ida, the letters, Senior, Kowalchuk, and the incomplete curriculum outline, draft four, due tomorrow, sitting in his briefcase.
The next morning, he signs Sophia’s test. “Tell Mr. Lennon I’ll talk to him about the remedial program. And stop worrying.”
In the staff room the next morning, Marcello sits slumped at a work table, trying to wake himself with very strong, bitter coffee, when Walt Kipps walks in. One of the older math teachers who was passed over for department head in favour of Marcello, Walt is working with him on the new curriculum. Walt also has the thankless job of being the liaison between the committee of teachers and the Board office.
Walt sits down across from Marcello and gets right to the point: “Did you finish the draft? I’ve got the Board breathing down my neck.”
“I need a little more time,” answers Marcello wearily.
“I thought … you said you were working on it last night!”
“Something came up last night.”
Walt snorts. “What, did Barb come over so you could play hide the salami?”
Marcello stands up, leans over the table, grabs Walt by the knot of his tie with one hand, and punches him, hard, in the face with the other. He hits him again, and again. The blood is fearsome. Walt’s face turns into Kowalchuk’s, then Senior’s, then the faceless lover in Ida’s letters. When Marcello finally realizes what he’s doing, he lets Walt drop to the floor.
Walt is screaming. Marcello staggers back and sits down in his chair. He even closes his eyes. Maybe this will turn out to be a dream. He’ll wake up, find himself in bed and this will be over.
The music teacher runs to the fridge and gets a can of pop, which she holds to Walt’s nose to try to stop the bleeding. The principal calls 9-1-1 and requests an ambulance and a police car. Thirteen division.
The officers who answer the call are not MacKay and Oleski. Marcello is grateful for that, at least. They cuff him and walk him to the squad car, passing quite a few of his students. Marcello can feel their eyes catching on him as he passes, the cuffs on his wrists, the blood on his shirt. Strangely, he feels nothing. No shame, not even embarrassment. All that will come later.
When they get to the Don Jail for processing, the intake officer asks him if he knows the phone number of a lawyer off by heart and is unsurprised when Marcello says yes. Ed Ceci appears at the jail an hour later in a blue suit, dressed for court.
“You in trouble, brother?” he asks Marcello.
Marcello looks up at Ed. His exhaustion is so great that all he does is nod.
15. AMOR AND PSYCHE
MARCELLO’S CAFE (FORMERLY ESPOSITO’S SOCIAL CLUB), 1992
MARCELLO’S FINGERS SLIDE along the grain of cherry wood, sweet-smelling and smooth to the touch. The lumber is young, fresh, and light in colour. Over time, it will age to the deep reddish-brown of Sophia’s hair.
Brushing sawdust from his overalls, he steps back to look at his work: a double-curved bar with a zinc countertop undulating along one side of the café. He designed it to suggest the shape of a reclining woman propped on her elbow, one hip thrust seductively forward. The empty bar stools are tucked tight against her like children.
He loves working with cherry wood. The bar is his wooden woman, created with his own hands. An eternal, unchanging Ida who will never die, or hoard love letters, or have an unfaithful thought. Projecting again. His doctor has warned him not to do this, but it pleases him to turn the bar into Ida, or Ida into the bar, even if it’s bad for his mental health.
The carpentry started as therapy, part of the treatment that followed the court-ordered psychiatric assessment that kept him out of jail. Although diagnosed with depression, the assessment noted that Marcello Umbriaco may also have experienced a psychotic break during the attack on Walter Kipps. In answer to a question about whether he ever heard voices, he admitted that occasionally he conversed with his late wife.
At first, his psychiatrist, Dr. Athena Drakopolous, suggested art therapy, but the paints and clay made Marcello feel like an overgrown child. Then music therapy; Marcello explained to her that if listening to music could cure him, he would already be the most mentally healthy man in Toronto. Finally, she suggested trying something more physical. And she was right: pounding nails and sawing two-by-fours quieted his mind. At least he felt like he was doing something a man was supposed to do.
Dr. Drakopolous took getting used to. Ever since he had started teaching, every younger person except Sophia had addressed him with an honourific. Even Sophia’s friends called him Sir or Mr. U. He wasn’t sure whether times had changed or this was just how therapy worked, but in the doctor’s office, he was simply Marcello. The psychiatrist, on the other hand, never invited him to call her anything but Dr. Drakopolous. This helped him feel younger than his forty-three years, making it easier to go back in time. That seemed to be the whole purpose of therapy, to take him back, and back, and back. To figure out what had happened in the past to make him crazy.
Not that Dr. Drakopolous ever used the word “crazy,” but Marcello was no fool. It was crazy to grieve for his wife for ten years, crazy to feel a black-mouthed void yawning beside him, sometimes threatening to swallow him whole. Sometimes the void shrank to a tiny lead dot at the end of a pencil eraser; at other times, it canyoned into a gullet into which people fell and never came out. He often dreamed of climbing down the dark throat; hearing Ida call his name, he would reach for her fingers, as familiar as his own, and start to climb, pulling her up behind him. But when he reached the mouth of the void, he would turn and see that his hand was empty.
“Why do you turn?”
“To see if it’s really her.”
“You think you’ve taken the wrong woman’s hand?”
“I’m not sure if it’s Ida or just someone who feels like her.”
For the first time in his life he was on medication, a new drug called “Prozac,” which, he reluctantly admitted to Benny, made him feel better, then guilty about feeling better. But one side effect of the drug was that he could no longer hear Ida’s voice speaking to him.
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” suggested Benny. “Maybe that means you’re getting better.”
“If that’s ‘better,’ I’m not sure I want it,” answered Marcello.
He weaned himself off Prozac after six months.
Where do you think your guilt comes from, Marcello?
How do you feel about Sophia growing up and leaving you?
The aggression toward your colleague—was it directed at him or do you think you trying to attack someone else? Your father, perhaps?
Dr. Drakopolous asked a lot of questions but never answered any of them. She always wanted to know what he thought.
Once, as he was leaving the office, he said, “Psychiatry seems like a pretty soft racket, Athena. You make me do all the work.”
A tiny smile softened her lips. Triumphantly, he returned to calling her Dr. Drakopolous.
The only other time her mask slipped was the day Marcello described falling in love with Ida when she first arrived as his father’s proxy bride. Pausing in his story, he heard Dr. Drakopoulos mutter a single word to herself: “Oedipus.”
“What’s that?” asked Marcello, turning his head in her direction from where he lay on the couch.
Dr. Drakopolous looked up in surprise, as if she hadn’t realized she’d spoken. “Oedipus. A tragic hero from Greek literature. I assume you’ve heard of him.”
“I studied math and sciences. I didn’t read many of the classics, even in high school. Or if I did, I don’t remember. What does this guy have to do with me?”
Dr. Drakopolous hesitated, then proceeded. “He was a king who killed his father and slept with his mother. Unknowingly. It’s where the term ‘Oedipus complex’ comes from.”
Marcel
lo swung his legs off the couch and sat up to look straight into the psychiatrist’s eyes. “Let’s be clear: Ida wasn’t my mother. And I didn’t kill my father. Although I’d like to.”
“Let’s move on,” suggested Dr. Drakopolous, dropping her gaze.
Of all the questions Dr. Drakopolous put to Marcello, he answered only one without thinking about it. “You’re a relatively young man. Do you want another relationship?”
Marcello almost laughed. What would be the point? What woman wants to sleep with a dead man?
A silence ensued. Marcello was surprised to find himself crying. “Sorry. Where the hell did this come from?” he mumbled, wiping his eyes with his sleeve.
The silent woman handed him a box of tissues.
Despite Dr. Drakopolous telling him that he still had work to do, Marcello wrapped up therapy after the one year mandated by the court. Instead of returning to the classroom, he bought out Mike Esposito. Now he could run the café—and continue sanding, smoothing, and perfecting his Ida-shaped bar—full-time.
At their last session, Dr. Drakopolous handed him a book: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “There’s a myth in it about a great Greek tragic hero. One of the classical stories your ancestors stole from mine.”
“Oedipus again?” frowned Marcello, flipping through the book.
“No, not Oedipus. Orpheus, son of Apollo. He loved his wife so deeply that after she died, he went to the Underworld to bring her back.”
“Did he pull it off?” asked Marcello with interest.
“Find out for yourself. I know you didn’t care for art therapy. Think of this as reading therapy.”
“Grazie, Athena.”
“Parakalo, Marcello,” she answered and bestowed a smile on him.
16. SHOWDOWN IN SHIPMAN’S CORNERS
QUEEN ELIZABETH WAY, 1992
HE PICKS AN AFTERNOON in early December. Snow starts lashing the windshield as he crosses the Burlington Bay Bridge, the steel mills of Hamilton welcoming him with their grubby grey towers and catwalks. Passing through Bramborough, he keeps his eyes on the road. The Andolini farm is now lost in a tangle of subdivisions. At Shipman’s Corners, he takes the Niagara Street exit off the Queen Elizabeth Way. In minutes he can see the high dome of the Ukrainian Catholic church. A few more blocks and he’s on the street where he grew up.
He’s shocked by his old neighbourhood on Canal Road. The decline in what used to be an ordinary, working-class neighbourhood is something he should have expected, given what’s happened to the factories and the decline in shipping through the Seaway. It’s a ghost of a street with little left of the old immigrant families who lived and worked here, raising kids, and burying their first generation. Most of the houses are empty, and the few still occupied are surrounded by weeds and junk. The roadbed is cracked and deeply potholed.
He parks in front of Kowalchuk’s flower shop. The windows are dark, the concrete stoop crumbling. He peers through the front window, but all he can see are the bright feral eyes of an animal scuttling away inside. For a moment, he thinks he hears the sound of voices, but it’s just the rising wind.
Wet snow is falling thickly now, piling into soggy drifts. Lake effect snow. Typical of Shipman’s Corners, almost unknown in Toronto. Nearby Buffalo must be getting hammered. He should have worn boots.
He turns to look across the street at the wreck of the candy store. The main floor window is boarded up, the scorched Italian Tobacco & Sweets sign barely readable. He’s surprised to see the second floor is inhabited. There’s a light in the window.
He goes to the side of the building and climbs the rickety fire escape. At the top he comes face to face with a windowless grey steel door, the kind seen in institutions, looking new against the building’s blackened wooden walls. He hesitates, listening; he can hear the rise and fall of voices inside.
He knocks. No response. Knocks again. Nothing. Just as he starts to turn to leave, the door opens. Voices pour out as Senior stares at Marcello without recognition.
He has shrunk into a skinny, sagging tortoise, his hair completely gone. The only things Marcello recognizes are his large, slightly protruding eyes and the stink of rye and body odour. Inside the flat, a television blares.
“Pop?”
Senior furrows his brow. “So, you come back, eh? She kick you out?”
Marcello opens his mouth, then closes it. What the hell is he doing here? “Can I come in?”
“Free country,” mutters Senior and steps aside.
The furnishings in the flat have not changed in twenty-three years. The only additions are a small microwave oven sitting on top of the burners of an old Moffatt stove and a portable television. On the screen, colour images waver, pulled in by a pair of rabbit-ear antennae. As the music swells, a gaunt woman dripping jewels and clutching a highball glass implores a man in a suit and tie to make a deal with someone named Victor.
“You come right at the start of The Young and the Restless,” Senior complains, sitting down on a chesterfield. He immediately turns his attention back to the screen.
Marcello stands, uncertainly, in the middle of the flat. He feels as if he’s eighteen again and has just run up the stairs from the store to check where Senior wants the guys to unload a delivery. He sits down on the couch next to Senior, trying to put together some sort of opening question when Senior asks, “What you do with my wife?”
“She’s gone.”
Senior turns toward Marcello. “She run away on you, too?”
“No, she was killed in a car accident. A long time ago.”
Senior nods. He’s smiling now. “God’s judgment.”
Marcello stares at the screen. A tall man with a mustache is gripping a blonde woman by the shoulders and shouting, What did you do with the baby, Nikki?
“I need to ask you something,” says Marcello.
“I got no money or jobs, if that’s what you’re here for,” says Senior.
“I don’t need money or a job, Pop. Just information. What do you know about Ida’s life before she came to Canada? Was there a man, back home? Someone she was running away from?”
“The father,” grunts Senior, staring at the show.
Marcello hesitates at this news. “I thought Ida’s father died in the War.”
Senior is seized by a coughing fit. It takes a second for Marcello to realize that he’s laughing. “Her father was no soldier. He was a priest, and her mother was a puttana! This is why her blood is bad, why she run away. Beh!” He gestures at the screen. “She almost as bad as this one, Nikki, who take her baby and run off from her husband.”
Marcello looks at Senior in astonishment. Ida’s parents, a priest and a prostitute? For a moment, Marcello is so stunned he can’t decide what to do or ask next. One thing is clear: Senior will answer any question, just to get him to shut up and let him watch his show. Marcello forces himself to wait for a commercial break.
When a Tide ad comes on, he asks: “Was the father’s name Paolo?”
Senior shrugs. “Somethin’ like that. Why the hell you ask me? I read about him in one of those Italian gossip papers we sell back in the sixties. What you call it?—Oggi. That how I find her.”
Marcello stares at Senior. He doesn’t seem all there. Surely he must already have known Ida was dead. Especially if he had a hand in it. Dementia? Maybe.
“Pop, did you kill Ida? Rig her car?” asks Marcello. He tries to keep his voice steady.
Senior barely reacts. “Not me,” he answers, without emotion. Unexpectedly, he adds, “Stan figure it out on his own.”
Marcello tries to stay calm. There’s no sense in doing anything to Senior anymore. Time and old age are doing a good job of finishing him off. “Where’s Stan now?”
“Grantham Gardens. Old folks’ home downtown.” Senior taps his forehead. “He had a stroke. Can’t talk so good no more.”
Marcello gets off the couch and buttons his coat, looking down at this father who dumped him on the Andolinis like a sack of potatoes. “You said once that I wasn’t your son. Is that true?”
Senior doesn’t look up. The show has started again.
“Well?”
“Your mother show up here with you. I got no idea who your father was,” grunts Senior. “You probably un’ figlio d’una buona donna.”
Son of a good woman—by which Senior really means son of a whore. Marcello feels the old anger at Senior building, poisoning his brain, infecting his blood. “Go fuck yourself, Pop.”
“You wanna fight, come back after my show,” mutters Senior, not looking at Marcello. “Otherwise, go to hell.”
Senior’s attention remains on the television. Marcello feels a sudden desire to kick the screen in. Instead, he walks out the door and runs down the fire escape. Beneath his feet, the rusty metal stairs tremble. Ida, Ida, Ida! they shout as Marcello descends.
There was no deception, no violation of the heart, just shame. Ida was as true as the curve of the café bar that he’d plotted and sawed and sanded so carefully. He’s so relieved that he hardly notices he’s up to his ankles in wet snow.
Marcello drives downtown —the “good” section of Shipman’s Corners. It always seemed a world away from Canal Road, when he was a kid. Now it’s just another seedy street, a ten-minute drive from the candy store. Where once there were tearooms and china shops and bookstores and a small but serviceable Woolworths, the main street is now mostly boarded up storefronts. A couple of adult video stores flash out their attractions on pixilated screens. Even the old movie theatre has been turned into a second-hand furniture store.
Grantham Gardens turns out to be easy to find, right off the main street, built into what used to be an elementary school. The sandblasted yellow brick façade greets him with an air of antiseptic indifference. When he walks through the sliding glass doors, he finds himself in a small lobby full of elderly men and women staring at a TV bolted to the wall. They are watching the same show as Senior, The Young and the Restless. A dusty artificial Christmas tree squats beneath a sagging banner reading BUON NATALE / HAPPY HOLIDAYS, a few unconvincingly wrapped gifts scattered around to suggest the false cheer of a family gathering. Care providers in brightly-coloured sweats and scrubs call out to their charges at the tops of their lungs. “Hello, Mrs. Benedetti! How are we today?”