Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons

by Linda Cardillo

  CHAPTER 53

  Dancing On Sunday Afternoon

  Over time, Salvatore and I experienced more than gratitude.

  Salvatore, with his reserve, his bashful admiration, never asked me what he truly wanted to know: Do you he in our bed at night dreaming of this hand brushing against the beauty of your body? Do you long for me in ways you find indescribable, every centimeter of your skin crying out to be touched? Salvatore did not know that he had these questions, simmering beneath our everyday discussions of money and household and children. I did not know that, eventual y, my answers would be “Yes.”

  I’d thought we would share a table in the noisy, crowded kitchen fil ed with our children and never feel that we were the only two people in the world, seeing and hearing only each other. I had thought I could watch him with his workhardened hand around the cup of black coffee I made for him every night and not imagine that same hand taking shape around my breast. Or see him bring the cup to his lips and not expect to trace with my eyes and my heart every crack in that winter-chafed mouth, envisioning that mouth on my lips.

  I was mistaken.

  One Sunday afternoon about three years after we were married, Salvatore took out his accordion after we’d eaten dinner and I was cleaning up the kitchen. Until then, he’d let the instrument gather dust, only bringing it down to his club occasionally or taking it along in the summer when we visited Archimedes out in the country.

  I’d never said anything to him about not wanting to hear him play but, without asking, he had refrained from using the instrument in the house.

  But that Sunday, he went down to the cel ar with an empty jug. I thought he was going to fil it with wine from one of the casks that lined the wall in the storeroom. He’d begun making wine from the grapes that grew over the arbor in the garden. But instead of coming back upstairs with a ful jug, he carried the accordion, retrieved from its case under the stairs.

  I think he’d intended only to clean it, because he took it into the parlor with a rag and was wiping the keys when the girls, Caterina and Mariangela and even Giuseppina, began clapping their hands and begging him to play them a song. He ran his fingers quickly over the keys in a children’s tune and the girls bounced with delight.

  I put down my dishrag in the kitchen and stood in the doorway of the parlor, my arms folded across my breasts, listening and watching as he played and they jumped around the room. When they saw me, they screamed, “Mama, dance!”

  I looked across the room at Salvatore, who had stopped playing. He looked back, then put his head down and began to play “Starai con me.” Not a children’s song, but a love song. I stepped into the room and began to glide around my daughters. I raised my arms and coaxed the air with them, swaying my hips.

  Salvatore stood and walked across the room. I sensed the strain in his body as he approached me, every muscle poised, held back from an embrace by the tautest wire of will. The air between us became heated, churning, col iding with the unspoken.

  I continued to dance, not for the children, but for him.

  CHAPTER 54

  San Giuseppe Moscati at Night

  Cara Serafini Dedrick

  Giulia had spent most of that Monday before her surgery recounting to me the hidden story of her love for my grandfather. Throughout the day, despite the interruptions of nurses and preparations for her operation the next morning, she had continued her outpouring, as if this were the only opportunity she’d have to make sure someone else knew what she’d kept in her heart for so long.

  I thought she’d be exhausted when evening came and her words ended, her hands making a final graceful gesture in the air, echoing the dancing that had captivated so many on those Sunday afternoons years before.

  But that night she couldn’t sleep. The hospital had slipped into dim light and muted sounds—the swish of Sister Annunziata’s rosary beads against her habit as she moved down the corridor, the click and hiss of respirators, the flicker of green lights casting water-like reflections on the linoleum floors. Above these muted sounds and through the pale, unearthly light of her IV monitor, I could hear Giulia’s moaning and muttering and could see her arms, ghostly, flailing about the sheets.

  I sat up in my cot and put my bare feet on the floor. It was cool and smooth. I went to Giulia’s bedside. With her right hand she was attempting to pul the IV tube out of her arm. Her lips were parched and chapped.

  I placed one hand on her arm and stil ed her frantic jerking. With my other hand, I pressed the bel for the nurse and waited for her to respond.

  “Are you in pain, Nana?”

  She tossed her head back and forth on the pil ow, not in denial, but in a repetitive, ritualistic movement. She seemed not to be aware of me. Her eyes were closed and she was reciting some kind of litany.

  When Sister arrived, she assessed her condition and checked her chart.

  “Unfortunately, she’s had the maximum dose I can safely administer tonight. Perhaps you can sit up with her for a while to calm her and help her fal asleep. Let me know if she remains agitated. I don’t want to restrain her, but if she tries to pul out her IV again, I’ll need to restrict her movement.”

  I grabbed my sweater, put it on over my nightgown and then resumed my position at Giulia’s bedside. I began to stroke her arm to quiet her and keep her from reaching for the IV. I tried to listen to the words she was uttering. At first, it sounded like gibberish, or an incantation. I bent my head close to her lips and listened.

  Slowly, I began to recognize syllables and familiar Italian words.

  I started to repeat the sounds as I heard them, setting up an echo, a reverberation of whatever, whoever, she was cal ing down to help her.

  “Madre Mia, protect me. Form a ring around me to wall out evil. Cast off my pain.”

  Soon, I no longer had to imitate her, but could recite the words with her in unison. It was a kind of music, rising and fal ing in a rhythm. Pul me close to you. Throw off this suffering. Pul in. Cast off.

  Without intention, I lifted my hand to her forehead and with my thumb, blessed her with the sign of the cross.

  My fingers spread out to stroke her brow in a gentle massage. Some ancient memory informed my hand; it seemed to know what to do without my direction.

  I don’t know how long I sat with her, my voice joining hers and my fingertips smoothing her pale temple. But at some point I heard the quiet, steady breaths of sleep. Her arms were no longer rigid and agitated, but relaxed.

  Her mouth formed a smile, as if whatever images were forming in her dreams were bringing her joy.

  I fel asleep myself, in the chair. I was afraid to slip back into the cot for fear that she’d wake again and I wouldn’t hear her. But she slept through the rest of the night.

  In the early morning, just as a thin line of pink-hued light appeared at the window, I felt her stroking my hand.

  “Piglia mia,” she whispered and then brought my hand to her lips and kissed it. “Do you know what serafini means in Italian?”

  “Yes, Nana. It means seraphim, the highest order of angels.”

  She leaned her head back on the pil ow.

  “And you are my angel.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Life After Giulia

  Giulia died a little more than a year later. Oh, her hip operation was a success, and she and I flew back to New York within two weeks of her surgery on a special Alitalia flight arranged by the American ambassador to the Vatican, a childhood friend of my cousin.

  She stayed with my parents at first, unable to navigate the stairs in her own home. Giulia approached her rehabilitation with the same steely drive that had kept her alive into her nineties. Every time I went to visit her, she had painstakingly made a little more progress toward walking on her own. She was determined to get back to her home.

  She and I did not mention the letters again. “They are for you,” she told me before we left Italy. “You alone.

  You are the only one who knows what to do with them.”


  By Christmas, Giulia was back in her own house, giving orders to al my aunts and my mother as they hustled around her kitchen on the morning of Christmas eve, preparing the feast of the seven fishes for that evening. I had left Andrew and my kids at my brother’s house so that my sister-in-law Jeannie and I could help. But even though we were grown women, we were relegated to setting the table, Giulia pointing with her cane at the drawer where the embroidered linen tablecloths were kept or instructing us to polish the silver before we laid it on the table.

  It was the last Christmas eve the whole family spent together, the last Christmas eve Giulia was alive. I remember that night more vividly than her funeral, which, despite her long life, stunned us into an empty, hol ow silence.

  But that Christmas eve we were stil together, talking over one another, raising glasses of pinot noir, my cousins and I keeping our kids from climbing the wal s in anticipation of Santa Claus, our husbands—most of them not Italian—trying to avoid the baccala and octopus. And over it al presided Giulia at the head of the table, her oldest son—my father Paolino— and her youngest son, Sal, on either side of her. Three of her children had already passed away before her, and Mariangela had moved to Florida. Only her sons, Caterina, and the baby of the family, my aunt Elena, were stil there, held together, as we al were, by the threads that bound us to Giulia.

  During the fol owing winter, a bitterly cold January and February fil ed with record snowstorms, Giulia began to deteriorate.

  She rarely left the house, and Caterina moved in to take care of her. Once a month I drove up from Jersey to spend a Saturday afternoon with her, stopping first at Artuso’s bakery to pick up a cannoli. We sat at the little table in the kitchen to drink our espresso and then she led me into the living room, pushing a walker ahead of her.

  The family had ordered a hospital bed and had it set up in the living room so she didn’t have to climb the stairs anymore, but she stil got up every day, dressed and held court with whoever stopped by to visit her.

  Our ritual was the same every time I came. She sat in her chair in the corner, near the votive candles she’d moved down from her dresser in the bedroom. The Metropolitan Opera broadcast played softly on the radio. I sat in front of her as she closed her eyes and I reached up and began to circle her brow.

  She was the only one I dared touch in that way, the only one who’d heard me recite the ancient incantations that had sprung from my lips that night in the hospital in Avel ino. I didn’t trust that what happened when I touched her was anything more than a granddaughter comforting a grandmother.

  I didn’t think it was anything I was doing. It seemed only to be Giulia placing her trust in me and feeling better simply because I was there.

  I remember once watching a movie about a young woman who marries into a California wine family with an incredibly powerful matriarch who becomes the young woman’s nemesis. Ultimately, the young wife triumphs, replacing the matriarch, but in doing so she takes on a striking resemblance to the older woman, even wearing her long, flowing hair in the severe wrapped braids that had been the matriarch’s signature. It was as if the older woman had inhabited her.

  I wasn’t about to start wearing my hair in the style Giulia had favored ever since I’d known her. In a photo taken on my first birthday, Giulia hovers over me as I blow out the candle, her wavy hair pul ed back in a bun at the nape of her neck. In fact, true to my baby boomer quest for perpetual youth, I stil wore my hair the same way I’d worn it in my high-school yearbook photo. No, I had no intention of imitating my grandmother’s looks. But I was also uncomfortable taking on this most mysterious aspect of her life. Like my great-grandmother, who’d dismissed the spel s of Giuseppina as so much mumbo jumbo, I did not beheve that Giuha’s power had anything to do with me.

  I wasn’t with Giulia when she died. It was 8:00 p.m. on a Thursday night in early August when my mother cal ed me. I had just read my four-year-old twins, David and Matthew, their nightly chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Joshua, my ten-year-old, was trying to teach my husband, Andrew, how to play Zelda on his new Nintendo, and my only daughter, Julia, was engrossed in dressing the Barbie dol my mother had insisted on giving her for her sixth birthday.

  “It didn’t do you any harm, so I see no reason why I can’t give her one, too,” she’d told me over my objections in May.

  I sat alone with the news of my grandmother’s death, perched at the top of the stairs, remembering the lines of her face under my fingertips.

  We buried Giulia in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in New Rochel e, with Paolo and the two babies she had lost, Carmine and Emilia. The grave is far in the back, against a crumbling wall covered with ivy on the northern edge of the cemetery. The plot, though remote, had been wel tended. My father told me that after Salvatore had died, Giulia had arranged for him to be buried in Connecticut with his first wife, the mother of Patsy and Nicky and Mariangela.

  Giuha made annual visits to that grave but, in her second widowhood, it was to Paolo’s grave she returned almost monthly, restoring it from its overgrown and forgotten condition to a neat patch of grass and flowers.

  She had left instructions with my father and Caterina that it was there she wished to be buried.

  The dates on the headstone tel a striking story. Giulia outlived Paolo by seventy years. Carved under their names is a phrase I recognized from his letters:

  Per la vita. For life.

  That was twenty years ago. Although I resisted taking on Giulia’s persona and her gift for healing in those last months of her life, I found I could not escape the connection that had been forged between us in our lives together. I look back now and see Giulia’s imprint.

  Like my grandmother, I had two husbands. Although the first one didn’t die as my grandfather Paolo had, like Paolo, Jack Peyton left me with an infant and disappeared quite emphatical y and final y from our lives. He might as wel have been dead.

  And like Giulia, I turned my culinary skil s into a business, opening a catering company to support Joshua and myself. I had absorbed the drive and seriousness of purpose Giulia had cal ed upon to survive the loss and hardship in her’ life, and I became as successful a businesswoman as she’d been.

  When I met Andrew Dedrick, we were both trying to rebuild our fives after difficult divorces and were as tentative and cautious of new love as Giulia and Salvatore had been in their courtship. But we plunged ahead nevertheless and created a family, bringing three more children into the world—Julia, Matthew and David—to join Joshua.

  Although he didn’t play the accordion, Andrew brought music into my life in other ways. He fil ed our home with his eclectic col ection of Mozart and Dylan and later, Loreena McKennitt and Jesse Cook and obscure singers from remote corners of the world whose music he’d heard on equal y obscure NPR broadcasts. He encouraged Joshua to play the violin and go on to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

  And he enthusiastically endured the twins’ experimentation with drums and electric guitars. A rock band performed in our family room throughout their years in high school, with Andrew ever at the ready to haul equipment to a gig on a Saturday night.

  Although I resisted taking on Giulia’s mantle as a healer, I learned something about the power within myself when David and Matthew were born early and spent the first weeks of their lives hovering precariously between life and death, health and impairment, in a state-of-the-art neonatal intensive-care unit. I sat with them every day between their Isolettes, holding one or the other in my arms, the wires attached to their many monitors draped across my lap. The NICU nurse on duty drew my attention to the monitors one afternoon. The irregularities in their heartbeats and the unevenness in their respiration disappeared as I stroked and murmured to them. When they were released a month after their births, the pediatrician told me, “I’m sending home two normal, healthy babies, and I’m not entirely sure how that happened.”

  The last echo of Giulia that emerged in my life came about when An
drew taught me how to dance the tango.

  In his arms I shed one layer of my grandmother’s influence—my reserve— to discover another. Her passion for dancing.

  Now, when the children return home at Christmas, after we’ve finished decorating the tree and before we sit down to the feast of the seven fishes, they insist on a tango. Joshua plays a haunting and vibrant tune on his violin, and Andrew and I glide across the floor as our children watch.

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  Document Outline

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  Table of Contents

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