The Proxy Bride

by Terri Favro

  “Good night, Cello,” Ida says in a small, tight voice before clattering up the fire escape. Marcello chest aches at the sound of her going up the stairs. He grabs his father’s arm, holding him in place on the stairway. “Pop, when were you planning to confess to Ida that you don’t own the Ponderosa?”

  Senior lifts his chin at his son. “She tell you about that, eh?”

  “Why the hell did you tell her you own horses?”

  Senior shrugs. “A little story to get her over here. She tell the marriage broker she want a husband with horses, so I tell her we got horses. She get used to things.”

  “That really stinks, Pop. Not to mention it’s a mortal sin.”

  “What, you a priest already? She got a roof over her head, ain’t she? She got no choice in the matter.”

  “You lied your way into marrying her. I bet a judge would say you weren’t even married.”

  “You want to be a lawyer now on top of a priest? I got a paper from the Italian government, another one from Canada and one from the church. All of them say Ida belong to me. That mean I can do whatever I want to her. Capisci?”

  “Lo ti disprezzo!” growls Marcello. “You make me ashamed to be your son.”

  Senior turns and heads up the stairway, scuffing Ida’s white suitcases on each step. As he climbs, Marcello makes one more effort to slow him down: “Pop, Angela and Maria said you should give Ida time to settle in – a month, at least – before you expect anything of her.”

  Senior stops and turns toward Marcello. “Ma che cazzo dici? Those old biddies can go fuck themselves.”

  Marcello heads to the Chevy and stretches out as best he can in the back seat, jeans stuffed behind his head for a pillow. The cicadas are as loud as an orchestra, their drums and fiddles predicting another scorcher tomorrow. He tries praying but the words are overtaken by visions of Ida. Her eyes, her lips, the way she moved her hands while haranguing him about the priesthood. He reminds himself that she belongs to Senior: yes, he lied to her but he’s probably not the first husband to do that.

  He touches his chest. The skin is tender, but not bleeding. He finally seems to be healing up.

  As he drifts off, he hears a quick, surprised intake of breath. When he opens his eyes, he can make out a small face peering into the open window. Sitting up, he smacks his head on the roof of the car.

  “What the hell you doing out here?” It’s Bum Bum’s voice. “Your Pop throw you out? I know a better place to sleep. Nice, soft grass in front of the church. Nobody bother you under the big cross.”

  Marcello rubs his head. It’s as though God has sent Bum Bum to remind him that yes, things could be worse. He’s about to send the kid away with a threat and a curse but stops himself: it’s not his fault he’s an outcast. And right now he seems to be trying to help.

  “It’s okay, Pasquale. I’m fine here.” Then adds, “Thanks.”

  “No problem, man. You need me bum something for you, you tell me. Us boys living outside, we gotta stick together. Gets dangerous some time.”

  Marcello looks at the kid: he can’t be more than twelve, tops. “Your folks have a house, don’t they? Why don’t you sleep there instead of at the church?”

  Bum Bum’s grin disappears; his face hardens into a tough little acne-scarred mask. “My Pop’s friends always there, bugging me, teasing me. And my Nonna, she yell too much.” He looks suspicious. “Why the hell you want me go home?”

  Marcello holds up his hands as if in surrender: “Most people would rather sleep in a bed than on the ground.”

  Bum Bum peers through the window at Marcello folded into the back seat.

  “Look who talks,” he says, walking backwards away from the Chevy.

  Marcello can hear the sound of the boy skipping all the way down the alley.

  4

  July 2

  Marcello wakes with the sun full in his face, his muscles stiff from sleeping on the Chevy’s cramped back seat. He reaches up and touches the goose egg on his forehead. At least the pain on his chest has disappeared. Gently probing the skin of his chest with his fingertips, he is relieved to find nothing unusual.

  Hunger and the need to urinate finally get him to his feet and drive him into the candy store. Neither he or Pop thought to lock up last night. Expecting silence, he is surprised to hear the usual television sounds coming from the storeroom.

  Opening the door, he sees Senior sitting on the cot in his bathrobe with a pillow and one of the freshly laundered sheets. “What are you doing down here?”

  Senior lifts his chin at him; he’s got a bag of Freezies on his head. “What kind of man you think I am?” he asks gruffly. “I’m giving my wife time to settle in. You can’t just jump all over a woman like that. She’s not some puttana.”

  Marcello sits down next to his father. The odour of rye is strong in the room but Marcello isn’t sure whether it’s coming from Senior or from whatever he spilled on the floor last night. “How long?”

  “Ida say, a month is traditional for a proxy marriage.” Senior stretches and grins. “It’s good to have a nice, traditional Italian wife. Like your mamma, rest in peace. Ida even feel bad that you lose your bed cause of her.”

  “Very considerate of her,” agrees Marcello. “I’ll go upstairs and see if she needs anything.”

  “Good, good,” says Senior, his attention returning to the TV.

  Marcello climbs the fire escape to the flat. Through the screen door, he sees Ida, her hair loose to her shoulders, sitting at the Formica table with one of the chipped china cups in front of her. Her face is in her hands: Marcello realizes she is crying. He considers turning around and going quietly back downstairs, then reminds himself that she’s far from her family; she’s probably just homesick and could use a shoulder to lean on. He knocks at the door.

  When Ida looks up at him, he expects to see her face streaked with tears, but she looks like he’s interrupted her deep in thought: a sheet of paper is spread on the table in front of her. It takes a moment to register that she’s looking at a map. When Ida sees Marcello, she quickly folds and stuffs it into the pocket of her robe.

  “Buona mattina,” he says, wishing her good morning through the screen very formally.

  “Good day!” she says brightly, not afraid to answer his Italian with her formal English. Marcello is beginning to suspect she’s not afraid of much of anything.

  “Okay if I come in?”

  Ida gives a quick nod, smoothing her hands over her hair. “Certo! This your home, too.”

  Despite this little reassurance, Marcello walks in quietly and sits down across from her slowly, as if she’s an animal he’s met in the wild, ready to bolt at one wrong move.

  “You found coffee,” he says.

  She peers into the cup. “I think so, but when I try to brew it on the stove, it tastes bad.”

  “That’s Nescafe. Instant coffee. You just boil water in the kettle and mix it up in your cup.”

  Ida’s face collapses into an expression of disgust. “Beh! This is sacrilege.”

  Marcello bursts out laughing. “I can help you choose some good coffee later, if you like, after ten when the stores open. Okay?”

  “D’accordo,” says Ida, checking her wristwatch. “I forget to change time.”

  “What time is it in Italy right now?” he asks.

  She yawns as she slips the watch off her wrist. “One in afternoon. Time for lunch. My brother Rico will be getting ready to serve the guests. My Nonno will be missing me. He goes to chase away the stragglers at this hour so that I can make beds.” She twists the stem of the watch again and again, going backwards six hours; Marcello suspects she would like to go even further back in time. After a night in Senior’s sagging bed, in the windowless bedroom of the two-room flat, she probably wishes she had never left home.
/>   “Your family runs a hotel?” asks Marcello.

  Ida waves her hands as if trying to pull words from their air: “A pensione, more correctly.”

  “What did they think of your marriage to Pop?” he asks, curious about why such an attractive young woman, working in a pensione in a city like Venice, full of history and churches and art, would ever want to leave for a place like Shipman’s Corners.

  Ida looks down into the whiteness of her lap and presses her fingers to her eyes. The gesture reminds him uncomfortably of Claudia rubbing her contact lenses. Ida’s forthrightness seems to have drained out of her overnight.

  “Non lo so,” she mumbles through her fingers. “I leave a note two days ago, before I take the train for Milano where is the plane. My Nonno must find it, must have found it, by now.”

  “You mean, you didn’t get their permission to leave?” Marcello is deeply shocked. How could a woman disregard her family’s feelings and just disappear? Perhaps something is wrong with Ida. How else to explain running away from her own blood, leaving nothing behind but a letter?

  As if reading his mind, Ida puts her hand over her mouth and gives what sounds like a hiccup but is actually, Marcello realizes, a sob. “Scusci, scusi,” she whispers, pressing the cloth belt of her robe to her eyes.

  Marcello looks at her uncomfortably, uncertain what to do: go get one of the other proxy brides to talk to her? They’d probably be as confused as he is by an Italian woman with no regard for either the church or her family. She might as well as come from Mars. He supposes he could comfort her himself, maybe wrap his arms around her, let her cry against his chest? Sensing danger in these thoughts, he stands up: “I’m going to go get Pop and then fix you something to eat. Okay? You’ll feel better if you eat something.”

  Ida shakes her head and stands up too. She’s wearing a long white cloth robe; these light colours seem to be all she wears, making her seem even paler. “No, no, I am the wife and mother and now, I will make the breakfast for the two of you. You are my family, this is only proper. If you have eggs, I make omeletti.”

  “Okay then,” agrees Marcello, relieved. He doesn’t really know how to cook: all he would have done was spread some Nutella on bread toasted over a stove burner. He runs down the stairs to get Pop; the heat and humidity has already started to build, the air so thick you can taste the grit in it. In the distance, Marcello can see the glow of flaring smokestacks.

  By the time he gets downstairs, Senior is almost dressed; he’s pulled his suspenders over a reasonably clean shirt and managed to wet and comb his hair at the storeroom sink. He looks like hell, though, his face haggard and stubbled, his eyes bloodshot.

  “She up?” mumbles Senior, adjusting his suspenders. “How I look?”

  Marcello turns Senior’s shirt collar right side in. “She’s awake, but she’s feeling a little homesick. She’s going to make us breakfast. Give her a few minutes to get dressed, then we’ll go upstairs.”

  Senior smiles. “Breakfast! See? Didn’t I tell you it would be good to have a woman to do for us again?”

  “Yeah, Pop, you did. Now let’s see if we can make you a little more presentable.”

  After running a comb through his father’s hair and giving him a shave, Marcello digs out an ancient bottle of Old Spice from under the sink. Patting it on Senior’s face, Marcello judges him as ready as he’ll ever be to greet his bride.

  They go to the fire escape and he gestures to his father: “You first.”

  In the flat, they find Ida looking crisp in a white blouse and capri pants, her hair tugged off her face with a yellow hairband. Having dried her eyes and dabbed on a bit of lipstick, she’s tying on a ruffled apron the Andolini women left behind for her. Good, thinks Marcello. She’s getting used to things.

  “Good morning! Mangiare,” says Ida; she’s set three places at the table using chipped china plates and threadbare cloth napkins that date from Sofia’s time. Hoisting a battered frypan, she slides an omelet onto each plate. There’s coffee, too: Ida has grudgingly boiled water and made the instant coffee according to Marcello’s instructions.

  Marcello doesn’t think he’s ever sat at the old Formica table properly set before; it’s all amazingly civilized. He cuts a perfectly browned corner of the omelet and tastes it while Ida stands beside him, waiting for his reaction.

  “Oh man. This is probably the best thing anyone’s made in here since, since…” Since my mother died, he thinks, but leaves the thought unfinished. “Grazie, Ida.”

  “Prego. If you want to thank me, perhaps take me some place to buy the good coffee.”

  “I’ll ask Maria Cocco where to go. Pop and I pretty much make do with what we sell in the store.”

  After cleaning up from breakfast, Marcello takes a few bucks from the till and tells his father that he’s taking Ida shopping. “For some kitchen things. Things she needs to, you know, be a good wife.”

  “Good, good,” says Senior, waving them off.

  Their first stop is at Maria Cocco’s, who is weeding her garden in a black one-piece bathing suit and straw hat. She sends them to the Groceteria, where Ida directs Marcello to buy espresso, fresh pasta, Arborio rice, cornmeal, fresh basil, oregano leaves, mint, garlic, onions, mushrooms, fresh crusty bread, two types of cheese, dried beans, a Genoa salami, a gallon of olive oil, a small bag of sugar and a half-bushel of tomatoes. Ida pronounces the merchandise “adequate” because the store carries real Italian food, made “back home,” not the stuff with Italian names manufactured in New Jersey or Toronto. “I make penne for the evening meal,” she says.

  “You’re going to simmer sauce in this heat?”

  “Is not hot compared to Italy,” answers Ida with a shrug. “Even Venezia is hotter. Always we must eat only good food, yes?”

  “Absolutely,” agrees Marcello, starting to realize the wisdom of his father’s decision. Yes, things seem to be a little distant between Senior and Ida right now, but over time they surely will get used to one other. They say couples in arranged marriages always do. Senior must have something going for him; after all, Marcello’s mother Sofia married him. And what choice does Ida have? Having bought her a one-way ticket to Canada, it’s unlikely Senior could afford to send her home no matter how much she begged, unless he puts himself more deeply into debt to Kowalchuck. Sure, she’ll shed a few tears and write some sad letters home, but eventually she’ll have a baby or two with Pop, maybe start going to mass again, plump up a little, and before you know it, she’ll be just like Angela So-and-So and Maria Cocco, making bitter jokes about husbands they don’t care for and spending all their time in the kitchen and the church. After Marcello is ordained, he’ll come home to visit, put aside his clerical collar and play road hockey with his little half-brothers, say grace at meals, bless the flat with Latin words and holy water before he leaves. Maybe one day Pop will even be able to afford to move the family off Canal Road into a decent home, if he can save enough to get out of the dirty magazine business. Marcello finds comfort in this dream of domesticity which, deep inside it, holds the hope that he will no longer feel attracted to his father’s wife, that he will stop imagining Ida, her white clothing strewn on the floor, straddling him the way Claudia did. He can’t get this picture out of his mind. Even if he never acts on his desire, he is flirting with a sin so forbidden, it’s almost beyond God’s forgiveness. Never mind coveting your neighbour’s wife, coveting your father’s wife is sin of a Biblical proportion, the kind of stuff they banished you for in the Old Testament.

  Despite his lingering sense of guilt, Ida’s first morning in Shipman’s Corners passes more contentedly than Marcello would have thought possible. Downstairs, Senior mans the store, putting on a show of industry for his bride. As Ida searches in the cupboards for knives and pots, Marcello takes out the Frankenstein hi-fi and his mother’s opera records. “Maybe you’d like to listen to s
ome music while you work?”

  Ida laughs with delight, looking at the 78s. “Antiquities! Do you have perhaps something more modern? The White Beatles?”

  Marcello raises his eyebrows. He’s never bought a record of his own. He either listens to his mother’s or turns on the radio. But he isn’t about to disappoint Ida: God knows Pop’s already done enough of that. “I think I know where to borrow one.”

  At the Hryhorchucks’ front screen door, he peers in and knocks. He can see Christie’s mother, moving through the back room with a cleaning cloth; there’s a smell of lemon wax and cooking with a different assortment of spices than the ones Ida is using. He can hear Engelbert Humperdinck on the stereo, Mrs. Hryhorchuck’s favourite.

  When she notices him, she comes to the door; she’s wearing a bikini, a silver scar on her stomach winking out of her bottoms, a kerchief around her head. She shows no sign of being embarrassed being caught cleaning house half-naked.

  “Excuse me, Missus – Christie home?”

  It takes a moment for Mrs. H. to decipher what he’s asking and to put together an answer: despite living in this country since before Christie was born, her English is almost non-existent. She gestures toward the back of the house: “Girl sit in sun!”

  Marcello slips along the outside of the house to the back yard. It isn’t a yard at all, but a concrete slab. No one knows why Christie’s father cemented over the grass, although there is a rumour going around that he tunneled through their basement to build a bomb shelter and the slab is there to protect against atomic radiation. Christie has always denied this story, saying her father was just tired of mowing the lawn and a buddy of his gave him a good price on the concrete.

  He finds not only Christie, but Jane and Judy Donato, poured into brightly coloured Sea Queen bikinis, lying on beach towels to soak in radioactivity from the hazy Niagara sky. Christie’s transistor radio blasts: