The Proxy Bride

by Terri Favro

  Marcello crosses his arms, mirroring Kowalchuck’s body language. “I hear you gave Pop the money to bring Ida over.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Pasquale told me.” When Kowalchuck looks puzzled, Marcello adds: “Bum Bum.”

  “That kid should learn to keep his mouth shut.”

  “Why’d you pay her way?”

  Kowalchuck shrugs. “Your Pop lost his get-up-and-go when your mother died a couple years back.”

  “It’s been fourteen years since my mother died,” Marcello reminds him.

  “No shit? Time flies. Anyways, he wanted to get back on the horse. I floated him a loan so he could marry a girl from home. Someone who does what she’s told. Not like the ball-busters here.”

  Marcello shifts uncertainly from foot to foot; he wants to understand exactly what his father’s gotten himself into. “Pop owes you, then.”

  Kowalchuck looks back to the street where one of the Andolini men has rolled his cards to the groans of his fellow players. “Everybody owes me. Which reminds me, Stinky says your account’s over two hunnert as of last night. I got a job for you. Be a good way to pay off your debts.”

  Marcello should have seen this coming. Remembering Father Ray’s advice to live a more saintly life, he says, “I’m not going to start scaring people for money.”

  “Come on, you’ll enjoy it. He’s a rich shit out in the country who won’t pay his bills. But this ain’t the time to talk. It’s a party, right?” he says, slapping Marcello’s back.

  The party draws neighbours from all along Canal Road. The Hryhorchucks arrive with a bowl of perogies and a bottle of homemade onion Vodka, Christie carrying a poppyseed cake she made herself. Even the Donatos show up: Claudia, her sport-jacketed husband Al, and Jane and Judy in their white boots and spangled shorts. Eyes lowered, Claudia hands Marcello a Jell-O salad with carrots and peas floating like sea monkeys in a thick lime ocean.

  It’s the first time he’s seen her since that day with the TV; looking at her now in her demure mini-dress and pumps, a white bow in her bouffant hairdo, he can’t help thinking of her rocking back and forth on his lap, riding him like a horse. Her nails are even painted that same creamsicle orange. An itchy warmth starts to spread over his chest: not here, not now, he prays, crossing his arms.

  “How are you?” he asks.

  “Lousy. You didn’t keep your promise,” she says in her soft, raspy voice.

  Marcello is starting to think Kowalchuck was right. Claudia made the mistake, not him. Stepping back he says: “Nothing more I can do. I’ll be leaving soon, to go into the priesthood.”

  Claudia waves a hand at him dismissively. “Priest, my ass. You’re as bad as the rest of them. If he touches the twins, it’ll be on your head, Lollipop.”

  She turns her back on Marcello to join her daughters. Feeling a warm trickle of blood under his shirt, he heads inside to apply a trail of Band-Aids to the scratches on his chest.

  The Impala pulls up in front of the candy store at exactly three in the afternoon with a small figure in the back seat, head erect. Senior, stuffed into his too-tight suit and out-of-date fedora, hauls himself out of the driver side door, face twitching with the effort to smile. He looks like someone out of the funny papers, a cartoon of a chauffeur holding open the back door of the car. He does everything short of salute.

  When Ida steps out of the Impala, Marcello hears a blast of Vivaldi’s “Summer” from The Four Seasons swirling inside his head and his eyes are dazzled by tiny sparks of light. He thinks that they might be from the heat wave, or glare off the chrome of the car, or perhaps an optical illusion caused by the refraction of sunlight through heavy particulates in smoggy air blown in from the American side of the border. Whatever the reason, Ida emerges onto the dusty sidewalk of Canal Road in a shower of what appears to be fairy dust. Marcello’s first thought is: What the hell is she doing here? To him, she looks like an angel – or maybe a goddess – who muddled her directions and went badly off course during her descent to Earth.

  To the others gathered in front of the candy store, Ida looks like a short, pale woman with blonde hair scraped off her face into a tight little bun. Pretty enough, but no beauty queen. She wears her prim clothes – a beige knee-length skirt, white blouse, and square-toed peau de soie pumps – with the self-conscious posture of a department store mannequin. She looks like a woman carved out of ice. Everyone freezes in place like pieces on a chessboard rather than rushing forward to greet her warmly.

  Prima claps her hands to break the spell. “Brava, brava!” she says, untying her apron and pulling Ida into her arms. Ida laughs and pats the old woman’s shoulders, but doesn’t hug her back.

  Senior gently pulls Ida away from Prima and begins to lead her around, making introductions. The women kiss her carefully on her powdered cheeks. The men shake her hands by the fingertips, afraid to crush her.

  Marcello, still dizzied by the Venetian baroque music swirling in his head, comes back to life when he hears Gina muttering to Prima, “What is a girl like that doing with Senior?”

  Prima replies: “Non lo so. I don’t know. Maybe it’s business.”

  “Ah,” says Gina, as if this explains everything.

  Marcello watches as Senior introduces Ida to Niagara Glen Kowalchuck. The creep takes her hand and kisses it like some type of fricken Count from a horror movie. That’s who he reminds Marcello of: not Elvis. Dracula.

  “Pleasure,” Kowalchuck says, his husky eyes walking all over Ida, not just her face, but her body too. Ida’s smile disappears and she takes a step back.

  She’s afraid of him, thinks Marcello.

  “Piacere,” she whispers finally, then turns to be introduced to the next person.

  Finally, Senior escorts Ida to Marcello, her hand tucked into the old man’s elbow.

  “…And this is Marcello Junior,” says Senior, patting his son on the back. “Your stepson. As you see, he’s too big for mothering!”

  Ida’s eyes widen in obvious surprise – “Mah no, this is the child you wrote of?” – but she recovers quickly and gives a little laugh, covering her mouth in a strangely old-ladyish gesture, like a nonna hiding her dentures. “I expect a wee boy but you, Marcello, you are not little! But no one is too old to be cared for, yes?” She speaks a precise, softly accented, Britishy English, as if she learned to speak from the Queen. When she gets up on tiptoe and brushes his cheek with her lips, Marcello wonders if she can hear his heart beat.

  “I am so very happy to meet you,” she says, her hands on her stepson’s chest.

  Sweatered and slippered, Maria Cocco and Angela So-and-So, neighbourhood ladies of about Senior’s age, corner Ida. Angela seizes her hand: “Maria and I marry our husbands by proxy too.”

  “I cried the first time I saw Canada,” Maria chimes in. “And when I seen my new husband I cried even harder.”

  Angela keeps a bony grip on Ida’s wrist, drawing her close. “Tell your husband to let you settle in first,” she says, her voice intense. “He should not touch you for at least a month!”

  Maria nods. “Get used to things first. There’s plenty of time for the rest of it.”

  “Grazie, signora,” says Ida, glancing at Marcello, her discomfort obvious. She’s trying to move on but Angela won’t let go of her hand.

  “We here if you need us,” says Angela, finally letting go. “It’s hard, it’s very hard to marry a man you no ever meet and come to a country where you no have family. We be your family now.”

  Introductions made, Senior and the other men return to their beer and cards. Ida takes a seat with the women in a semicircle of kitchen chairs on the sidewalk in front of the store. She’s so cool and correct, so proper, crossing her legs demurely at the ankles, her hands overlapping carefully in her lap, that none of the women quite know what to make
of her.

  Christie asks where she learned to speak such good English and Ida shrugs and says, “I have what you call the ear for language.”

  Marcello can hear the whispers of the Andolini women – in their dialect, so there’s no chance the Venetian goddess will understand:

  “She doesn’t even look Italian! Swiss, maybe.”

  “They look like that, that bunch up north. Like Heidi.”

  “Have you ever heard an accent as strange as hers?”

  “And the way she speaks English – she sounds like a snob!”

  “She holds herself a little too high.”

  “Her husband will put her in her place, soon enough.”

  When Ida complains of thirst, Marcello jumps up and goes into the store for a Coke, Christie following him inside. “How old is your stepmother supposed to be?”

  Marcello winces at the word ‘stepmother’. “Thirty-four.”

  Christie whisks the bottle out of his hand and snaps off the cap on the cooler’s opener. “Wake up, Cello! Senior robbed the cradle.”

  When Marcello goes back outside and offers the overflowing Coke to Ida, she accepts it with a smile worthy of a toothpaste commercial: “Grazie, Marcello! But your father is Marcello also. How does one know both of you apart?”

  “We call him ‘Cello’ because he likes classical music,” volunteers Christie.

  “Cello? A splendid name for you, I think!” says Ida, but her words are interrupted by the blast of a siren: “Cosa succede? What goes on?”

  Marcello points toward the superstructure of a saltie gliding quietly above the fields backing onto Canal Road. “Guarda. It’s the siren for the bridge going up so a ship can pass. They sail through here from all over the world.”

  “Andiamo! Let’s go!”

  Surprised by her eagerness to leave the party, Marcello tells Senior that he’s taking Ida for a walk. He expects his father to object, but Senior, intent on his poker hand, waves them off: “Yeah, sure, go ahead!” Kowalchuck is the only man who looks up from the game, his eyes flicking over Marcello, then back to his cards. Dismissing him.

  Marcello can feel the women’s eyes on Ida and him as they walk along Canal Road. The moment they are out of sight of the store, Ida stops and stifles a huge yawn. “Allora!” she says to the sky. “Is good to be away from all those people!”

  Marcello is surprised by her rudeness: does she not realize how much trouble they went to for her? He guesses that you’ve got to make allowances for someone who just crossed the ocean.

  “You must be beat,” he suggests.

  Ida frowns, not understanding. “Beat?”

  “Tired. Jet-lagged. Stanchi.”

  Ida nods and gives another huge yawn, this time not bothering to cover it. “Si, but is very good to stretch my legs.”

  At the top of the embankment, the two find themselves facing the rusty steel wall of the Koningin Juliana, a saltie out of Amsterdam, loaded to the plimsoll markings and leaking ballast like a bloated steel whale. The ocean-going tub is having a hard time lining up with the lift lock. Whistles, catcalls, chewing gum and cigarette packages rain down on them from above – on Ida, really.

  “Sorry, Ida,” says Marcello, picking up the cigarettes. “They’ve probably been at sea for awhile.”

  “Is okay, I’m used to. Men the same from everywhere,” she sighs, unwrapping a stick of gum and popping it into her mouth.

  Marcello helps her across a patch of gravel to a bollard for tying up ships, where she seats herself to watch the Koningen Juliana slide by. The ship is so close they could almost touch her. Ida pats the flat iron surface of the bollard: “Sit with me, Cello.”

  He likes the way she pronounces his name with a little trill: Chay-llow.

  There’s plenty of room, but they rest against one another, hips touching. He is convinced his heartbeat is echoing straight through his body into hers. He lights up one of the cigarettes: it’s the usual Russian crap the foreign sailors like to throw down to the locals, but at least they’re free. He offers Ida one but she shakes her head.

  “Why the sailors throw us gifts?”

  “The guys on salties always do that when they sail through the canal. Cigarettes, gum, candy, sometimes little toys. I figure it’s some kind of offering to protect them when they’re back on the open sea. Like lighting a candle in church.”

  “Ah, magic!” says Ida. “How you say – superstition.”

  “More like faith,” Marcello corrects her.

  With the sunshine streaming down, Marcello gazes at Ida’s upturned face and considers what Christie said about her age. It’s true that she appears almost childlike. Especially with a mouth full of chewing gum.

  “Your father seems very nice,” says Ida slowly and not very convincingly. “How old, he is?”

  “Forty-five,” says Marcello, suspecting that Pop lied to her about his age.

  “And you – you are quite the surprise!” she volunteers. “I come here expecting a little one. A child to care for. Is there some other son?”

  Marcello shakes his head, mentally noting another one of Senior’s lies: a child to nurture. No wonder Ida came to Shipman’s Corners. She had no idea what she was getting into.

  “Cose fai, Cello? What do you do in your life?” asks Ida, waving to the sailors who continue to shout to her from above.

  “I help my father run the store. But I’m going to be a priest.”

  Ida’s eyebrows shoot skyward. “Pfff! Davvero? You want this?”

  “It’s not a question of wanting. Ever since I was little, I knew it was my calling. And the Order will send me to university.”

  “Ah. A practical decision. To get an education.”

  “It’s a spiritual decision, too. I want to serve God and help the less fortunate.” Marcello’s words sound hollow even to himself, but he would rather not give his real reasons: guilt, obligation, and a desire for escape. Too much to tell a woman he hardly knows.

  “You try to convince me or yourself?” Ida shoots back.

  Marcello is surprised by the strength of her reaction: she hardly knows him but already demands that he account for himself. Old Prima had a word for girls like this: sfacciata. Nervy. Not a desirable quality in a woman.

  “You’re not religious?”

  Ida shakes her head emphatically. “Growing up, I know many priests. Many of them were not religious either.”

  Thinking it’s time to change the subject, he gets up off the bollard. “Let’s watch the water pumping out of the lock. That’s how the ships get around Niagara Falls.”

  “I have seen canals before, coming from Venezia,” she murmurs, absently. “But I am wondering – where are the horses?

  “Horses?”

  She waves her tiny hands impatiently in the air. “This is why I tell the marriage broker to seek me out a husband on the frontier. Like in the cinema. ‘Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo’. L’hai mai visto?”

  “Sure, I’ve seen The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. A spaghetti western.”

  Ida laughs and shakes her head. “Spaghetti?”

  “Never mind.” Marcello struggles to gently tell her the truth. “Why did you call this the ‘frontier’?”

  Ida sits straighter, removing her gum and sticking it to the underside of the bollard. “I read, read, read. I consult my Nonno’s atlas. Shipman Corner is part of the Niagara Frontier.”

  Marcello would laugh at Ida’s misinterpretation if it hadn’t landed her in so much trouble. “That’s what the Americans call it. But the word ‘frontier’ doesn’t just mean hinterland. It can also mean being on a border. Niagara is where America turns into Canada. Capisci?”

  Ida stares at him, her disappointment obvious in her difficulty getting out the words: “No horses?”

 
; Marcello shakes his head. “The candy store is pretty much all my father owns.”

  Ida looks past Marcello at the disappearing stern of the Koningen Juliana. Her smile has turned into a cramped little frown, her hand twisting and untwisting the bow on her blouse. “Ah, I see,” she says bitterly. “Too good for truth. Of course. Like always.” She looks toward Lake Ontario: “Where can one go, if the boat sails that way?”

  “Toronto, then Montreal, through the St. Lawrence Seaway. All the way to the Atlantic.”

  “‘The St. Lawrence Seaway’,” she says in her very precise English. “Allora.”

  “We should probably head back,” he suggests, feeling the weight of Ida’s disappointment. She’s only just arrived and has already been let down. Now he has to return this lovely woman – who looks more like a girl – to his lying buffone of a father. It’s disgusting. But she’s Senior’s wife. There’s no choice.

  Back at Italian Tobacco & Sweets, the food is eaten, the wine and beer is drunk, the songs are sung, the women have washed up, the neighbours have drifted home and the Andolinis have gotten back into their flotilla of cars for the drive back to the farm. As the light dims and the party breaks up, Canada Day fireworks can be seen exploding over the lake.

  While Senior fetches the luggage from the trunk of the Impala, Ida waits at the bottom of the fire escape leading to the flat. In the fast-falling darkness, Marcello can’t make out the expression on her face but he can see that she’s twisting her wedding ring round and round on her finger.

  Senior bustles up with the bags, swaying slightly; he’s drunk again. “Avanti, Ida! You go on up. I join you in a minute. Gotta talk to your son first.”