No Time to Wave Goodbye

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “You could wait forever for my dad to tell you this. But Jackie would have been proud of the movie,” she said.

  All the people in the film from out of town stayed in rooms at the Harrington Suites, just a block away. As Ben liked to say when anyone needed anything from a TV to a quick plane flight, Pat always “knew a guy” who had arranged a rate Vincent could, just barely, afford.

  The shower stopped. Beth imagined Pat dressing quickly, his shirt crisply tucked over the tiny potbelly he disguised with perfect posture. Hearing him cross their room to the hall, she moved her coffee mug and reached up to touch Pat’s trousered calf as he passed her. To her shock, Pat jumped. Beth jumped, too, and screamed, springing to her feet and spinning around. It wasn’t Pat at all.

  “Vincent!” Beth cried. He nearly turned and ran back up the staircase. “What are you doing?”

  “I was, ah, sleeping, Ma,” he said. “Now I am walking downstairs. You almost gave me a stroke.”

  “I thought you slept at Grandpa’s.”

  “No, I just hid out there for a while. My father seemed unpleased.”

  “Do you blame him? That loan from Charley Seven, Vincent, you knew he’d be furious.”

  Vincent dodged the comment and said instead, “Can I have coffee? Is Pop still here?”

  “I guess he’s already gone,” Beth said. “He usually wakes up before me and goes outside to check the pool and stuff. I thought it was him in the shower. There’s a whole fresh pot. I’ve been sitting here drinking coffee and waiting for you since the sun came up!” Beth followed him into the kitchen. “Pop must have left early because he missed work last night.”

  “Jesus, him, Ben, and Grandpa. The way they act. Like, the restaurants probably blew up and Kenny stole everything out of all the registers.”

  Beth asked, “Do you want eggs or something?” She already knew the answer. Vincent barely ate at all.

  “I want cornetti with cream. I didn’t get any. Are there some left?”

  “Vincent, people ate like locusts.”

  “And Auntie Monica cut it too close, too. She brought thirty for fifty.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Beth, not wanting to wade into that pit: Monica ran Gold Hat, the catering arm of the family business, and bitched if she had to provide pastry-wrapped asparagus and Asti for family gatherings if there were “real customers” out there. Monica also had no use for Beth and never had. So instead, Vincent thawed a bagel and put it into the toaster, where Beth knew she would later find it, stiffened.

  “Where’s the bear?” Vincent asked. Both he and Ben had called Kerry Ker Bear since she was born.

  “She has a speech coach on Saturdays,” Beth said. Kerry was a voice-performance major at Northwestern, whose major professor scolded her for her flat vowels. She spent two hours every Saturday morning literally with marbles in her mouth.

  “School on Saturday,” Vincent said. “What’s this generation coming to?”

  “It’s her love,” Beth told him. “She’s auditioning for Suzuki in Madama Butterfly next summer with the Atlanta Opera. Can you believe that? At twenty-one years old. Twenty-two by then,” Beth said.

  “She’s pretty amazing. I don’t think I’d ever really listened to her sing—I mean, with her voice the way it is now—until the movie.”

  “Do you want to sit outside?” asked Beth. The morning was exquisite, a bowl of honeyed weather that, in Chicago in the autumn, could collapse into a chill as dull as lead in an instant. They settled on a pillowed iron bench that would soon be put away for the winter.

  “I have to ask,” Beth began.

  “Do I have to answer?” her son replied.

  “Yeah,” Beth told him, gently giving Vincent an elbow. “What did Dad say about Charley Seven loaning you the money for this project?” Beth had learned about the loan only last night, after everyone left. Pat told her in tones so soft even Beth was scared. It was rare for Pat to become outraged, but the quieter he got, the more danger there was of an explosion.

  “Mom, I gotta tell you. I don’t know what Pop thinks. Hence my staying at Grandpa’s until two a.m. I know I’m going to have to find out eventually, but eventually could be a long time, right?”

  “He really was, ah, unpleased,” Beth said and Vincent smiled at her use of his pet phrase.

  Charley Seven (whose name was actually Charley Ruffalo) was the youngest of the seven children of Grandpa Angelo’s oldest friend.

  In exchange for Vincent’s giving Charley’s worthless nephew Marco a job on the shoot, Charley Seven had fronted Vincent the money.

  Although the real mob era in Chicago had truly ended when Beth and Pat were little more than teenagers, no one had yet told Charley Seven, who didn’t really import olives … despite what his business card said. He made loans. He also owned a certain interest in a huge, lurid casino. What else he did, no one asked. And though Charley Seven loved Vincent and would never have charged him cruel interest, any loan he made at all to Pat’s son would give Pat hives until it was paid off. Pat’s fatherly pride over the movie was affronted by Vincent’s disregard for him. Vincent had borrowed real money this time, tens of thousands of dollars.

  A few years ago, when Charley Seven fronted Vincent three grand for Alpha Female, Pat had laid down the law—not that laying down any law ever discouraged Vincent from anything. Just the credit sequence for No Time to Wave Goodbye had cost more than all of his first film. And postproduction work, before the formal release date in December, was yet to come. Kerry said they’d hired an L.A. editor. Ka-ching!

  At the reception, of course, you wouldn’t have known that Charley Seven and Pat weren’t the best of friends. Despite being a wiseguy, Charley Seven was, after all, a good guy, with a face that looked carved by erosion rather than by the usual passage of a human lifetime. Despite his craggy nose and his bulk, Charley Seven was handsome, commanding, the real heir to Charley Two, the closest friend among Angelo’s crew, friends from forever, friends from off the boat—sharp old men who wore black cashmere suits with tiny rose boutonnieres and played seven-card draw in Angelo’s backyard. Under their cotton T-strap undershirts, their shoulders were tufted with soft white hair but still strapped with real muscle.

  In fact, Charley Seven’s father, who was so close to Beth and Pat that the Cappadoras and the Ruffalos had raised their children nearly as cousins, could walk on his hands, and, after a certain amount of homemade wine, often did. The old man was called Charley Two—although never to his face—because of his habit of saying everything twice (Pat, Bethie is pretty enough to be your second wife, your second wife). Between the older Charley’s eldest son and Pat, the absolutes of family history made the ice strong but slippery: They were the front and back of a single coin. Charley Two was Pat’s godfather; he would have cut off the tip of his thumb before disrespecting the old man. Pat was actually closer to Petey, a year older than Charley Seven. Pat and Beth were, in fact, godparents to Petey’s pretty daughter, Adriana, a little doll who had worked summers at the older restaurant until Petey moved the whole brood to California where he was an entertainment lawyer.

  “You know, I hate to bring this up, but I was …ah, unpleased also,” Beth said. “I didn’t like it that a certain police chief of your acquaintance, and mine, knew about this movie and I didn’t. Especially since you told me once that Candy was the mother you never had.” Vincent examined his hands.

  “Ma, when I said that, I was eighteen. And you know why I told her?”

  “You needed the interview.”

  “No,” Vincent said, and related how, just after Candy had oiled Vincent’s first and last DUI (compounded by a joint in the glove box) down to a simple ticket for doing fifty in a thirty, she poked him in the chest with one perfectly manicured nail and said, “Listen, Spanky. This is the last time. If you spent as much time doing something other than trying to show Mommy what a bad boy you are, you could do something amazing.” Six months after that lecture, Vincent, the talent guy, and Rob, the mone
y and advertising half of Pieces by Reese, made their first national commercial. It was for the chocolatier Tutu Amore, and it was still their cash cow. But even chocolate-commercial residuals wouldn’t have paid for No Time to Wave Goodbye.

  “Let’s change the subject. Subjects. From Mafia money and mad mothers.”

  “That could be an acronym,” Beth said. “Mad Mothers Against Mafia Money. Okay. How did you get Ben to do it?”

  She expected the usual: Piece of cake, or Call me irresistible.

  Instead, Vincent was strangely forthcoming. He said, “Ma, I had to literally get down on my knees. Ask Kenny at the restaurant. It was last winter. I had all the B-roll done and Rob and I did all the pre-interviews with the families. But it still … didn’t fit. They knew about us. They weren’t going to open up to me the way they would to Ben.”

  “They knew about us?”

  Vincent stared at her. Was she kidding?

  “Yeah, Ma. Ben is like, one of the great legends of kidnapping, no offense.” Either these people knew because they had joined that family of the probably damned no one wanted to join or because the story of “little Ben Cappadora” had captured the affection of glossy magazines for years, with a huge new transfusion of press after Ben was found. That alone opened the door, as Vincent had always known it would, for all the years—and it seemed like a hundred years—he had thought about making the picture. If Ben had never been taken, Vincent would never have conceived of it. Hell, he would never have been a filmmaker. Vincent would have been doing exactly what his brother was doing—unless he was doing time.

  “Cappadora,” people would say, rolling his last name around in their mouths like a taste. Even girls at college, once they mentioned him to their parents or someone older, would ask, “Are you … that Cappadora?”

  “Actually, I’m the other Cappadora,” he would tell them. It was his shtick. “My brother is the miracle boy.”

  His family minded that people couldn’t forget their past—the thing that made them who they were. But more than anything, they minded how Ben treated them, which was totally nice … like a good friend of the family or something. He was different with Vincent and Ker, but except for Grandpa Angelo, he sometimes barely gave the rest of them the time of day. Basically, it killed the parents and the grandparents that Ben never gave an inch when it came to his insistence that he was not the same kind of Cappadora the rest of them were. Ben didn’t remember. And he wouldn’t pretend to.

  Vincent remembered … probably more than he would admit.

  It wasn’t the stuff people expected him to remember: All the magazine covers, Kerry cutting off all her hair, his father sitting him on the bar at his uncle Augie’s restaurant. He knew all these things only from his ma’s forty-two thousand albums of black-and-white pictures with their little black paper corners. A whole wall of identical albums with little labels on the back to show the year, except some years were missing entirely and some didn’t match and had hardly any pictures in them and what there were had the oversaturated, loopy carnival quality that proved they’d been reprints given to them by relatives.

  His mother’s pictures were severe, classical compositions, in which even the shadows were characters: Stairways looked like the inside of shells and a car lot like a mess of gumballs. Beth’s were gallery-worthy photography, at least to Vincent’s eyes. Ma’s head was a lens. One of the pictures of the three of them walking away from her was in the Art Institute, another in the Similet Museum of Photography in Boston. He had a print of that one. It was taken on a street back up where they used to live in Wisconsin, on the Fourth of July. He and Ben were holding Kerry’s hands and virtually dragging her behind them. Ma caught them just as Kerry went airborne, one of her rubber sandals dangling from a toe. He remembered that day for the fight that Ben had had with their parents because he didn’t want to go.

  He wanted to stay with George, with “Dad.”

  Vincent remembered that day entirely. Of the rest, it was just small images. He seemed to have no memory before Pierce Street in Parkside, where they moved when he was about eleven so Dad could start the restaurant with Grandpa.

  That was where he’d first spotted Ben, playing street hockey, at the red house two blocks from the house to which Beth and Pat had moved. And he’d known it was Ben, his brother. Vincent was still uneager to enlighten them on that point. But Ben was happy! Ben was freaking happy—more than Vincent was. You could tell. Why would he want to bring back the kid he’d already done so wrong, the kid that he, Vincent, lost when he let go of Ben’s hand in the hotel lobby, although his mother carried the guilt for that forever? Why would he want to bring him back to the zombie village at the Cappadora house? Where Vincent, his betrayer, lived.

  Maybe, he thought, this film was half Vincent’s not knowing about his own stuff. Tom Kilgore, the therapist his parents had forced him to see when they found out he had started a pretty good bookie operation at the age of thirteen, would have told him how to figure it. But Tom had moved to freaking Michigan a couple of years ago. He had a card, somewhere, and a note Tom once sent to him. Where? Maybe he should even interview Tom and tack it on. The psychologist in the film was sort of lame…. Tom had been great. No bullshit.

  The only real relic of that time was that he still thought of Ben as Ben even while he called him Sam.

  His grandmother called all of them caro (Italian for “sweetie”), and his grandfathers both called Ben Champ or Sport or some shit. But you could tell it still ripped his parents up. This one thing about Ben was … the worst. And Ben had to know it. Ben, who would no sooner hurt you than burn his own hand.

  “Where were you just then?” Beth asked Vincent.

  “When?”

  “When you were a million miles from here. When you were telling me how you asked Ben to help out?”

  “It was the Sunday after Christmas. The only people at the restaurant were the two old ladies.”

  “Brandy and Alexander.”

  “Right,” Vincent said, of the two-hundred-year-old sisters who came every Sunday to The Old Neighborhood, ordered a Brandy Alexander each, and then giggled about how they were going to be picked up for drunk driving before they got back to La Grange. Kenny, the bartender, who’d worked with Angelo for thirty years, never even put any brandy in their drinks.

  That day, Vincent remembered pleading, “Sam, what else have I asked you to do for me in my life? To be my best man? No. To teach me to play ball? No …”

  “Uh, who taught who? I’m having trouble remembering.”

  “Ben, come on. Don’t be an asshole,” Vincent said. “I get down on my knees.” And he did.

  “Get up, fool. You’re not going to guilt me into it.”

  “I’m not trying to guilt you. I’m trying to embarrass you,” Vincent said. Kenny laughed.

  But Vincent started to freak out a little. If the goddamn restaurant got in the way of this … The urgency began pounding at the base of Vincent’s throat, like when he was a kid and had fucking panic attacks. It was like a thousand seagulls lifting their wings to take off, just like he’d told Tom Kilgore.

  He gave Beth an expurgated version of what he said next, which was, “Are you going to let them run you like this all your life? I mean, it’s your fucking life. But did they let you go to the prom? Did they let you drive?”

  The restaurant. The restaurant. Always the restaurant. Now, two restaurants for three generations to obsess over.

  When Ben graduated from high school, Pat took the family to Rome—they would have taken Vincent to Rome when he graduated as well, except that he never did. It was there, at the original Cappadora’s Ristorante, that Ben announced that he’d decided to major in culinary arts. Everyone was so drop-over thrilled they lit a candle at St. Peter’s! An heir! Like white smoke from the chimney! Another Cappadora behind the steam tables, fighting with people over tomatoes on the dock downtown, driving a Caddie, wearing a nice dark Italian suit with a blue shirt and a red tie. And, just like
the script, once Ben was back from the woodsy-artsy eastern college, Grandpa and Dad immediately demanded their pound of flesh—a hundred and seventy pounds, to be exact. And Ben-good-boy had to forsake his softball team and even his girl to twitch the corners of the tablecloths, take away the one knife that had a spot on it, to lay just one bay leaf on the gravy that didn’t need even a single extra grain of salt to be perfect—gravy from Grandma Rosie’s recipe made the way it was eighty years ago by her mother, a recipe guarded like the step-by-step plans for a nuclear weapon.

  To Beth, Vincent said, “That’s when Ben said, I have a surprise for you. You’re going to be an uncle.”

  Kenny brought Vincent a Campari and soda, which Vincent stared at in contempt until Kenny, laughing again in the soundless way he did, replaced it with two flutes of champagne. Vincent felt a huge lump in his throat. He had to chug the bubbly and ask for the bottle to get over the urge to start bawling. Finally, he said, “How long have you been married, Sam? A week?”

  “Long enough,” Ben said.

  “You’re a kid.”

  “I’m a kid whose parents had a kid by the time they were my age. Although the jury’s still out. That could have been a mistake.”

  “We know it was a mistake. Dad was in grad school.”

  “I mean a lifelong error, Vincent. Not a failure of technology.” They both laughed then.