The Proxy Bride

by Terri Favro

  The Proxy Bride

  Terri Favro

  Contents

  Copyright Info

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Acknowledgements

  Other Quattro Fiction

  Copyright © Terri Favro and Quattro Books Inc., 2012

  The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise stored in an electronic retrieval system without the prior consent (as applicable) of the individual author or the designer, is an infringement of the copyright law.

  The publication of The Proxy Bride has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

  Author’s photograph: Ayelet Tsabari

  Cover image: Terri Favro

  Cover design: Diane Mascherin

  Editor: Luciano Iacobelli

  Typography: Grey Wolf Typography

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Favro, Terri

  The proxy bride / Terri Favro.

  Issued also in a print format.

  ISBN 978-1-927443-15-6

  I. Title.

  PS8611.A93P76 2012 C813’.6 C2012-903890-3

  Published by Quattro Books Inc.

  382 College Street

  Toronto, Ontario, M5T 1S8

  www.quattrobooks.ca

  Printed in Canada

  For Ron

  The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. – Umberto Eco

  1

  June 20, 1969

  Shipman’s Corners, Ontario

  The red-and-blue-striped AEROPOSTE envelope arrives not long after Marcello unlocks the front of the store. He can see the postman working his way, door by door, along Canal Road. Across the street at Kowalchuck Flowers, a few foundry and slaughterhouse workers, up all night at craps, lounge on the front stoop drinking coffee and playing rock, paper, scissors to rouse themselves enough to survive the morning shift. Their foreman, Stinky, raises a cup, saluting Marcello with his one good arm: a friendly reminder of the twenty bucks he’s still owed from the game two nights ago. Marcello nods back, the new debt still fresh and painful. Despite a quick prayer to St. Anthony of Padua every time he rolled the dice, Marcello lost, and lost, and lost. As usual.

  Opening the sweet shop is supposed to be his father’s job but Senior has fallen asleep in front of the television again; Marcello can hear the buzz of the test pattern. The way he’s going, Pop is sure to blow the picture tube. Marcello walks into the storeroom, turns off the overheating TV, and tries to shake his father awake.

  “Pronto,” Senior grunts, rolling over on the cot. As Marcello tugs the blanket up over his father’s hunched shoulder, his foot hits an empty Hiram Walker bottle, sending it rolling across the floor into a wadded up copy of Oggi. A laughing Gina Lollabrigida gazes up at him, her lovely face a stained and wrinkled mess. Marcello frowns: Pop is usually more careful with the gossip papers, neatly refolding them for paying customers after he’s finished with them. He doesn’t want to think about what his father has been up to with this copy.

  Beh. Just another beautiful morning at Italian Tobacco & Sweets.

  He drops the ruined Oggi into the trash bin, stuffs a rolled-up Popular Science into the back of his jeans, and takes his breakfast of instant coffee and Nutella on white bread out into the sunshine on the front stoop. With his nose in the magazine, he can ignore the assholes across the street. He flips to an article called “Generation Moon,” sips his Nescafé and reads:

  By 1980, the Sea of Tranquility will be home to a teeming lunar metropolis, complete with apartment houses, schools, hospitals, hydroponic farms, and places of worship, all under geodesic domes powered by solar energy.

  ‘Places of worship’ – like churches, thinks Marcello. A Catholic president launched the space program. It stands to reason that not long after Apollo 11 lands, NASA will start sending settlers into space, priests among them. Life as an astronaut-priest might make even celibacy bearable.

  In the fall, Marcello will be off to the seminary – that is, if he can win back the money he lost to Stinky for his novitiate fee. But with three months to go, there’s still plenty of time to hit a winning streak. Bound to happen, sooner or later.

  Next door, Christie Hryhorchuck, lanky and beautiful in her kilt and white blouse, lets herself out of her house to go to school. She blows a kiss to Marcello that he’s just about to return when the postman appears.

  “Looks like something from the old country,” he says, handing Marcello the envelope. “Hope nobody passed away.”

  Marcello laughs. “You kidding me? All they do in Italy is die and send us snapshots of the funerals to cheer us up.”

  The postman chuckles and pats Marcello’s back.

  He can feel the weight of the photograph in the envelope; probably a black-and-white glossy of yet another ancient relative nestled in a shroud. The translucently thin airmail paper is addressed to Trovato, Marcello, 10 Via Canale, Shipmans Corners, Ontario, CANADA.

  Reluctantly, Marcello leaves the sunshine to go back into the shop. “Letter for you, Pop,” he calls, flipping it onto the counter between the dusty box of two-for-a-penny caramels and the grubby bag of licorice cigars.

  Senior shuffles out of the storeroom. He’s still in his bathrobe but has managed to wash his face and slick his hair straight back from a forehead as deeply furrowed as the fields bordering Canal Road. He picks up the envelope without looking at his son, returns to the storeroom and slams the door. A fug of body odour follows him.

  How did I ever come out of you? wonders Marcello, eyeing the disappearing wreck of his father. The television seems to have swallowed him whole.

  Like just about everything they own, the TV is second-hand; Marcello found it at the curb in front of the Donato house a couple of weeks earlier. It was a Westinghouse, a good make. He squatted down to inspect the set but could see nothing wrong with it. Finally, he decided to knock on the door.

  Claudia Donato answered in slippers, housedress and apron, a kerchief knotted over her lacquered dome of black hair, a cigarette drooping between two fingers, bright orange nails filed to lethal points.

  He gave a respectful nod. “Sorry to bother you, Missus. Just wanted to ask about that TV on your curb.”

  Claudia squinted past him into the street, then refocused on his face. “Thought you was one of those damn Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or the Fuller Brush guy again.” Softly, she added: “You from Kowalchuck’s Flowers? I thought he said, tomorrow. I just done my nails.” She shook a hand in the air, the tips of her fingers tiny creamsicle daggers.

  Marcello tried to make sense of all this. “I’m from nowhere, Missus. I was just walking along, and saw the set, and wondered if it was up for grabs.” Truthful to a fault, he added: “I work for Kowalchuck sometimes, though.”

  Claudia took a long drag on her cigarette, shading her eyes from the sun. “Okay, I get it. Thought you’d be older, is all. You look like an overgrown kid.”

  A bit hurt by the overgrown, Marcello said: “I’m nineteen, Missus Donato.”


  “Don’t call me ‘Missus’. Makes me sound like a nonna. I’m only thirty-four. Call me ‘Claudia’.”

  “Claudia, then,” said Marcello, uncomfortable calling an adult woman by her first name. “That TV – is the picture tube okay?”

  She exhaled a thin stream of smoke and gave an indifferent shrug: “Far as I know.”

  “So why’re you throwing it out?” he asked, hoping she’d say – just take it, for Christ’s sake. Instead she tossed her half-smoked cigarette at Marcello’s sneakers and swung the door open for him: “We got a new RCA colour console, that’s why. See for yourself.” Wishing he had just taken the set without asking, he stepped inside.

  The interior of the house was in shadow, the windows covered by thick sheers and Roman shades. In the gloom of the living room, Claudia gestured for him to make himself comfortable on the plastic-covered brocade couch. Without a cigarette, she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands: she blew on her nails and fiddled with the hi-fi, until finally she unknotted her kerchief and apron and tossed them onto a chair.

  “Lemme put some music on and we can get this the hell over with,” she sighed.

  In the time it took Jack Jones to sing “Wives and Lovers,” Claudia relieved Marcello of his tee shirt, jeans, underwear, and virginity. Everything happened so fast that when he thought about it later, all he could remember was a waterfall of still images, like the postcard packs of panoramic views of Niagara Falls they sold in a rack at the candy store: his briefs puddled under a glass end table covered with china figurines of dancing shepherdesses; his thighs, thick with black hair, pressed against the plastic couch cover, as Missus Donato (Claudia, for Christ’s sake!) rolled a condom down his awestruck penis and straddled him, her puckered brown nipples dancing on his lips, her nails gouging tangerine trails into the skin of his chest. All against a soundtrack of her hoarse little grunts and the lush voice on the stereo singing Hey little girl comb your hair fix your makeup. After crying out in a voice he didn’t recognize, he was almost immediately ready to do it again but Claudia was up and off him in a flash, ordering, “Get dressed, Al gets off shift early sometimes and the twins are due home any minute now from drum majorette practice.”

  As he reached under the glass table for his briefs, Marcello – having just done it for the first time, with a woman who, if not quite old enough to be his mother, could certainly have been his big sister – struggled to find the right words to mark the occasion. He settled on: “Was I okay?”

  Crouched on the floor as she wiped the plastic couch cover with her panties, Claudia squinted up at him: “What? Why do you care?”

  He hesitated, then confessed: “Because I’m not the guy you were expecting.”

  “Not the guy?” Claudia stood up, her brows forming a long, dark line like storm clouds on the horizon. “I know you now. The twins talk about you. You’re the candy man’s son. The one who’s gonna be a priest, right?”

  Marcello nodded.

  “Non fa niente, Lollipop. We’ll call it even trade, so long as you do something for me.” She jabbed an orange-tipped finger in his face: “Tell Kowalchuck what we just done. Tell him that that as far as I’m concerned, our debt is settled. He has to leave us alone, now – me, Al and the twins. Especially the twins. If another guy turns up at my door tomorrow looking for a freebie, he’ll get it slammed in his fucking face.” Claudia started rubbing her eyes, as if trying to push back tears: “Damn contact lenses.”

  Despite the unladylike language and smudges of black mascara and orange nail lacquer all over her face, Marcello thought Claudia as glamourous as Elizabeth Taylor. He wished he had something to give her. Having nothing else to offer, he gave her his word.

  “Claudia,” he said, gently. “I promise I’ll tell Kowalchuck to leave you alone. First chance I get. If he’ll listen to me. But in the meantime, can I take the TV?”

  She got shakily to her feet and made a feral sound, a cross between a sob and a growl, as she caught sight of something: “Oh Jesus. Oh shit shit shit.” It was the condom, lying empty on the rug.

  Accusingly, she picked it up and handed it to Marcello. It looked like a long white leech that had shriveled in the sun.

  “Must have fallen off,” he admitted. “Never used one before.”

  Claudia put her hands over her face. Her manicure was a mess. “Get out of here. And take the goddamn Westinghouse with you.”

  He dressed rapidly, in silence – underwear, shirt, jeans, sneakers, like a movie running backward. By the time he stepped back into the sunshine of the front stoop, no more than twenty minutes had passed since he’d knocked to ask about the TV.

  As Marcello lugged the set home, cradled in his arms like a baby, the pressure of the load caused a pleasantly painful sensation against the crosshatch of orange lacquered scratches on his chest. Stung like hell but he found himself saying a blasphemous prayer that they would never heal, that they would just keep bleeding as a lasting physical reminder of ecstasy.

  He would have to confess this sin, eventually, although right now, he wasn’t sorry: everyone had to do it some time, and at least he got it out of his system before taking a vow of celibacy. God the Father Himself was a guy; Marcello was pretty sure He’d understand.

  Passing Senior at the counter, he said, “I got us a TV today, Pop.”

  Senior followed his son into the storeroom and watched as he hooked up the set and adjusted the rabbit ears.

  “What it cost you?”

  “Not much. A little sweat. Now we can watch ABC Wide World of Sports. The thrill of victory, the agony of….”

  “They don’t have sports in this country,” Senior interrupted in Italian. “No soccer. Only hockey, and baseball from l’America.”

  Clicking the dial, all they could find was channel after channel of women in luxurious living rooms, weeping in front of handsome men in suits. Everyone was drinking tumblers of Scotch in the middle of the day.

  “Soap operas,” sighed Marcello. “I guess that’s all that’s on TV in the afternoon.”

  Senior sat down on the army cot and watched with interest; the show was called Secret Storm. After it finished, there was a station break and another show began with a deep voice saying: Like sand through the hourglass, so go the days of our lives. Marcello reached out to change the channel.

  “Leave it,” said Senior, catching his son’s arm.

  Ever since then, Marcello has been marooned at the candy counter, listening to the tears and accusations, infidelities and love affairs, cases of amnesia and mistaken identity leaking through the storeroom door.

  Just yesterday, Marcello went in for a box of candy cigarettes and found his father slumped on an army cot, weeping, his thick hands spread over his face. Marcello knelt down next to him, genuinely concerned. “What’s the matter, Pop? You sick or something?”

  “It’s Denise! Her husband has been stolen away by that rich puttana, Serena.”

  “You’re crying over a soap opera? These people aren’t real, Pop!”

  Senior wiped his face with the back of his hand. “You have no passion in your soul,” he told his son fiercely in Italian. “You’ve lived in this cold country so long, you can’t feel anything anymore. At least in my stories, people really live!”

  The only thing that gets Senior away from the TV is the arrival of ‘special customers’, guys who turn up at all hours, asking for what’s under the counter in the detergent box printed with the words Cheer! THIS END UP.

  The magazines come from many different lands but the girls on the covers are interchangeable: she’s always a blonde with her head thrown back, red lips parted, half-closed eyelids painted ice blue. Sometimes she squeezes her enormous breasts, the red talons of her fingernails pinching erect nipples.

  The magazines started as a sideline but quickly became bigger moneymakers than
wax lips and creamsicles. Now sailors from the canal boats come to the candy store when their ships dock to take on supplies. Neighbourhood men drop in after Sunday mass to pick up some smokes and a little reading material. Some nights, the craps players show up with their winnings, wanting a woman from the back of the pool hall but ready to settle for one of Senior’s glossy paper whores. As Stinky once pointed out to Marcello, crouched in the alley behind Kowalchuck’s Flower Shop: Your Pop’s girlies don’t try to cheat you and they won’t give you the clap.

  Like the DPs who climbed out of the wreckage of postwar Europe to settle on Canal Road, the Cheer girls are stateless and many-tongued: We got ’em in Italian, Polish, Yugoslavian, German, Russian and Dutch, brought in special from over-the-river, Senior tells his customers proudly. Hard core, the way Europeans like it, not that arty American ‘Playboy’ crap. But he is careful who he brags to; smuggling obscene material across the Niagara River could land both Marcello Senior and Junior in jail. But they’ve never been caught, not once, because Kowalchuck – a successful businessman – runs the show.

  “No shitboxes! Shitboxes are a dead giveaway!” Kowalchuck warned when Senior tried to smuggle the magazines inside Marcello Junior’s ’53 Chevy, a salvaged demolition derby car. Instead, the goods are hidden inside a gleaming white 1966 Impala registered in Niagara Glen’s elderly mother’s name, a sticker affixed to the bumper from a tourist attraction in upstate Pennsylvania called Holyland USA.

  From time to time, Kowalchuck polishes the chassis to a sheen with Turtle Wax and crosses the Rainbow Bridge to Niagara Falls, New York, and back, with old Mrs. K. in the passenger seat, a box of Bibles in her lap bearing the imprint of a conservative Buffalo priest whose Latin masses are televised on both sides of the border. Mrs. K. religiously declares the full purchase price of the Bibles to the boys at Canada Customs who see the little-old-lady car so often that they wave it through without a second look. Which, of course, is the point. Sometimes the magazines are slipped under the Bibles (simple plans work best, preaches Kowalchuck) but the Impala is a honeycomb of hiding places, the most salacious ladies rolled and stuffed inside the rocker panels, twelve at a time – Like the Apostles, as Senior points out. For those few guards smart enough to notice something fishy about the white car, Kowalchuck invests some of the venture’s profits in a little wheel greasing.