The Queen of the Big Time

by Adriana Trigiani

  “Isn’t that what happened?” he presses.

  “No!”

  “That’s what Franco thought. I know that’s why you had to leave Our Lady of Mount Carmel for St. Elizabeth’s, and I have always blamed myself for that. The day they assigned me to Roseto was the worst day of my life. I begged them to send me anywhere else, but they were convinced I was the next Father DeNisco. For fifty years, the diocese looked for a priest with the talent, vision, and diplomacy of DeNisco. I told them there was only one Father DeNisco, and that man was a saint. They wouldn’t hear of it. They were sending me home, to Roseto. No arguments. And you didn’t disagree then; you would be thrown out. We did what we were told.”

  “But you were like Father DeNisco. You accomplished great things.”

  “Oh, the diocese and their big plans. A school, a hospital, a rest home. They were going to make Roseto the model for their highest Roman Catholic aspirations.”

  “They succeeded.”

  “In some ways. But I didn’t want to come back. I didn’t want to hurt you. I felt like I ruined your wedding.”

  “You didn’t ruin it. I loved Franco.”

  “Good.” Renato sits back, relieved.

  “I knew I could keep Franco interested for a lifetime, but you, I wasn’t so sure.”

  “You could have, Nella.”

  The waiter places small plates of local delicacies on the table. We sample lobster ravioli in truffle sauce, veal sautéed in wine with artichokes, and fresh greens. I ask Renato about his life now. As Renato talks about being a professor, and life at St. John’s University, and what it’s like to live in New York instead of a small town, I start to feel for him again. My heart, still healing from the deep wound of losing Franco, is longing for connection. I want to push through the grieving and feel like a woman again. But that is not right, and I know it. It would be like the night that Renato and I made love. We would connect out of sympathy and a need for comfort, not real love, not the kind Franco and I had all along. That love was authentic, and it took this long and even his death for me to realize it. Maybe I’m not so stupid, maybe I know a little more about myself than I let on. Maybe this evening at a romantic table in this old Italian fortress is the symbol of what Renato and I ultimately meant to each other; his love was just a flicker in time, a sparkle of a star far away that once guided me.

  “Why did you do it, Renato?”

  “Do what?”

  “Become a priest.”

  “Oh, that question.” Renato smiles. “Well, at first it felt as though I was led to it. I was living a pretty fast life without consequences—”

  “Except for me, of course.”

  “Except for you. And I looked around and wondered what I could do with my life. I prayed about it. For a young man in 1927 who loved to read and write and think, it was a perfect profession. I loved solitude, and yet I like serving people. I enjoy giving a good sermon. I can’t explain it; in a sense, it chose me.”

  “But you could have been a doctor or a politician or anything, really, if leading and serving people is what compelled you. Why that life? The priestly life?”

  “When I was in the seminary I would look around at my classmates and wonder what the one thing was that we all had in common. You would think it was a love of God and a desire to serve Him, but that wasn’t it. It was a detachment. It was as if we were comfortable being separate. I had my excuse; my mother died when I was a boy. I always felt that I was wandering through, unable to connect because I didn’t have Mama to teach me how. I can’t speak for my fellow seminarians; they had their own reasons for choosing a life that meant at its very core that you could not have intimacy with another person. That intimacy was reserved for God.”

  “And you were okay with that?”

  “It’s all I knew to be true. I learned that I couldn’t find myself in the arms of a thousand girls. I tried, but it didn’t work. I was never satisfied.”

  When Renato mentions other girls, I wince. I knew there were other girls before me, and after, but I wanted desperately to believe that I was special. Now I know I wasn’t special enough to keep him out of the priesthood. “I found that intimacy you speak of with my husband,” I begin. Maybe I shouldn’t confide these things to Renato, but I continue. “Franco and I were connected. I didn’t value that enough when he was alive. I took it for granted that there was someone to get me an aspirin in the middle of the night, that there was someone at the mill who could look across the desk and understand exactly what I was feeling when he heard a particular sigh. We didn’t just share a life, we grew it.”

  “I envy that,” Renato says quietly. “And now I wish I had it. I don’t think any good comes from separating yourself from people. Ultimately, it is the least blessed state.”

  “Celibacy?”

  “Oh, it’s not just celibacy. It’s knowing that for your whole life, you have promised not to become close to anyone because it will interfere with your work, your relationship to God. When I was young, that separation made sense to me. Now it seems foolish.”

  “Why do you stay?”

  “I’m an old man.” Renato laughs. “What do I have to offer a woman now?”

  “I see what you mean. I feel the same way. I had what I had with Franco, but I feel done. I had one good marriage, two excellent children, and a life. What else is there for me? I had the best. I can’t top it.” I throw my hands up.

  “I love teaching. First and foremost, I’m a teacher. The students are terrific. I take a group from Queens to Italy every year, and they see the real art, the inspiration behind it. It opens up their world.” Renato looks away. “But every day when I get up, I think, Is today the day I leave? And then I go on with my day, and there are things about the life that still work, so I stay in.”

  “I didn’t think you’d have such doubts.”

  “Constantly. That’s why I signed up.” He shrugs. “Maybe I thought I’d find the answers giving them to others. Not so.”

  “What about women?”

  “What about them?” He smiles. “Do I miss it?”

  I nod.

  “I’m not perfect,” he says slowly. “I’ve made mistakes.”

  “Oh.” How naive I am. I thought there was some secret ingredient in the holy oil that keeps a priest celibate, but obviously I was wrong.

  “You’re shocked?”

  “No, but I assumed as a priest, you’d give all that up. Don’t you have to?”

  “You try. But that’s the whole nature of sin: you try and fail, and try and fail. That’s how it works. There would be no redemption without sin.” He pours me another glass of wine. “But as time goes on, it isn’t the physical contact you miss so much, it’s the emotional part. The intimacy. The deepest level of love. The knowledge that someone understands you, is rooting for you, is sharing your life. Even though I feel I’ve deepened my faith as a priest, I’m well aware of what I’ve lost.”

  “If it’s any comfort to you, I still struggle. I always feel alone. Maybe that’s my cross to bear.”

  Renato reaches his hand across the table and takes mine. “And mine too.”

  Renato walks me home to my uncle’s house. Maybe at fifty years old, all you get from an old love is a window of what you were when you were young. Maybe a first love exists to reaffirm the best parts of yourself, the choices you made when you didn’t worry about the consequences. Maybe a first love exists to remind you to be brave in the moment, to stand up for your feelings, instead of shrinking back in the face of potential loneliness. It’s old-fashioned guts that we gave each other, I think as I hold Renato’s hand and feel the warmth of him near me. When we reach the doorway, there is a small light on in the window. It is very late, and everyone is in bed.

  “Thank you,” Renato says to me as we face each other. The moon must be closer to the land in Italy, because it’s so bright outside it’s like blue daylight. I wish it weren’t so, but Renato is still as dashing and handsome as he was in his youth. How diffi
cult it is when you’re young to think about being old. When it finally happens, you can’t believe it. But we have not changed, not really. I am still trying to let go, and Renato is as elusive a priest as he was a poet.

  “You never told me …”

  “What?” he says after a long pause, searching my face.

  “Why you left me.”

  Renato takes a moment and looks away. “I was afraid.”

  “Afraid I’d gobble you up and make you work in a mill?”

  “No.” Renato looks over my shoulder and off into the distance. “I left you before you could leave me.”

  Renato leans down and kisses me on the cheek. He turns to go, and while I want to stop him, I don’t. Now that I understand Renato, I don’t need him to stay. He belongs out there in the world doing the thing he loves, and I have to invent a new life alone. If only I had known to treasure my moments with Franco. If only I had known the first day he loaned me his handkerchief that the clock was ticking. Alas, I didn’t hear it.

  Celeste’s fingernails dig into me, making small half-moon impressions on my hands. “Push, honey, you can do it, push!” My Celeste is having her first baby in Easton Hospital. Giovanni is outside in the waiting room with the other nervous fathers. I came as soon as I heard she was in labor. As the contractions came faster and faster, my daughter grabbed my hand and said, “Stay.”

  The doctor is not happy that I am here. But when I saw that my daughter wanted me, it would have taken killing me to break me away from her. No woman should be alone at this moment, and if at all possible, her mother should be with her. After Assunta died, Mama made sure she was with each of her girls when she gave birth. This modern doctor is not going to keep me from my daughter. “I’m here, honey. I’ll never leave you,” I tell her.

  Celeste is a trouper; she pushes for close to an hour. Then the moment comes. Celeste pushes, then cries out; her belly ripples like the surf of the ocean, and out with another mighty push the baby appears. “It’s a girl!” I holler.

  The nurses move in and take her, doing a thousand routine things in a matter of moments. “How is she?” Celeste asks.

  “Perfect. Just perfect.” I hold Celeste’s hand and wipe her face with a damp cloth; for an instant, I remember Assunta and her terrible, fateful moment. Not so for my daughter; she is rosy and beaming, as though she just came back from an exhilarating hike up a mountain. The nurse gives Celeste her daughter. Celeste cries as she holds her. “She’s so beautiful. Isn’t she, Ma?”

  “Like you were. Just like you were,” I tell her.

  “I’m going to call her Francesca. For Papa. Okay?”

  I can’t help it. I cry. Celeste looks up at me.

  “I love you, Celeste,” I tell her.

  “I love you too, Mama,” she whispers. “And you, Francesca.”

  Who knew it would take the birth of my granddaughter for me to understand faith? I never had it, but now I see it in her. Even giving birth to my own children did not move me to this place—only the face of my granddaughter. Maybe because she is part of me without being the hardware of me; that makes me see faith in a context. All faith is a belief that life is meant to be, and that beyond it, we never die. We go on and on and on. Francesca has only been here for a moment, but she has given us all an everlasting gift.

  I check my watch as I close my front door to walk up Garibaldi to Mary Bert’s, Roseto’s best and only diner. As I walk up the street, I see that little has changed since I was a girl. Our town is still mostly Italian, though we now have one Greek family of candy makers. Our Lady of Mount Carmel still sits at the top of the hill like a castle; the nearby schools give our town a youthful energy. My friend Barbara Renaldo always says, “Roseto is now for the newly wed or the nearly dead.” Sometimes I think she’s right.

  “Over here, Auntie!” My niece Assunta waves from the back booth. She kisses me as I sit down.

  “So, tell me about the wedding plans.”

  “I know it’s corny, but I want Francesca to be my flower girl. I’m not having any other attendants. Just her,” Assunta tells me over coffee. “For crying out loud, I’m forty-one years old, I should elope! Fanfare is for youngsters.”

  “Oh, please. Go for the trumpets and the rose petals and the rice. You deserve a beautiful wedding. And take it from your old aunt who’s fifty-six: forty-one is damn young.”

  Assunta throws her head back and laughs. “It took Michael eleven years to pop the question. Schoolteachers, and I include myself in this generalization, are slow learners.”

  “But eventually you get it right. That’s why God invented erasers, don’t forget it.”

  “Sorry I’m late.” Elena joins us at the table. My sister is heavier than she was when she got married, but she still has the same sweet countenance. “Did you tell Aunt Nella about the Hotel Bethlehem?”

  Assunta turns to me. “We booked it. Ma, you got the small room, right?”

  “The President’s whatever it’s called …” Elena hands her the brochure. How natural it is to hear Assunta call Elena “Ma.”

  “I want everybody there, Aunt Dianna, Aunt Roma, all the cousins. I want to do something special to honor Nonna and Grandpop.”

  On a bright and perfect morning, April 26, 1966, Assunta Maria Pagano marries Michael Castigliano at Our Lady of Mount Carmel before a small but happy group of family and friends. She asked my parents to precede her and Alessandro down the aisle. They were so honored to be a part of the wedding processional.

  How proud I am of my niece, a schoolteacher at our parish high school, Pius X, and now a new bride. My four-year-old granddaughter, Francesca, drops her rose petals on cue, and watches the service with rapt attention.

  Papa and Mama dance at the Hotel Bethlehem until the orchestra calls it quits. They are back in Roseto for the summer, splitting their time between Italy and Pennsylvania, as they have done since Papa retired. They would not think of missing the annual Big Time at the end of July.

  “Papa, I have an idea,” I tell him over breakfast the next morning. “Your tenants are leaving Delabole farm.”

  “We can’t keep anybody out there. What’s the matter with people? I’ll tell you what. Nobody wants to work like that anymore,” Papa grouses.

  “I’d like to move out there.”

  “What? All your life you wanted to live in town.”

  “I know, but I’ve had enough. I miss the quiet,” I say.

  “What about the mill?” he asks.

  “The Menecolas made me an offer.”

  “A good one?”

  “The best I’ll get. I want to take it. I want to sell this house and move back home to Delabole farm. I’d like you and Mama to live out there with me, too, if you’d like. What do you think?”

  Papa smiles. I can see that he wants to go home. “It’s what Mama thinks that counts.”

  The farmhouse needs an overhaul, so I take a little money and have the wiring redone and the whole place painted. It needs a new furnace, so I put that in too. The bathroom was never big enough, so we renovate and put in one of those deep, four-legged tubs like Uncle Domenico had in Italy. My parents are so happy to move back in. We put everything where it used to be, and we laugh about where the television set should go. We never had those worries when I was a girl.

  The creek by the front gate still gurgles; it’s not as deep as it once was, but the stones in the water still glitter like coins. When I walk the fields collecting dandelion leaves for salad, and yank Queen Anne’s lace to fill the vases, I think of Assunta and how she loved nice things. The old barn needs some shoring up, but with the cows gone, it’s just an old red monument to what we used to be around here.

  With a nice cushion in the bank, I can be a full-time grandmother, running to Allentown whenever I wish to be with Francesca. Sometimes I go to Jersey and spend the night with Frankie and his wife, Patricia (they have two sons, Frankie the Third and Salvatore, for Papa). Patricia is of Welsh descent, and I couldn’t ask for a better
daughter-in-law. When my son gives her trouble, she teases him and lets him know that she’s a Johnny Bull.

  I am so happy that my parents have a secure old age. They have Italy in the winter and their girls back home the rest of the year. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have brought them pride and peace, both of which they richly deserve after a lifetime of hard work and caring for their daughters.

  I had new soil brought in to cover the strawberry field where Mama and my sisters and I used to pick berries. I’ve made a garden of tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, and basil; when the fall comes, I grow pumpkins. I love getting up early in the morning like I used to when I ran the mill. I make my gabagule, eat a crusty slice of bread with butter, and head out to weed and hoe and water as the sun comes up.

  I still analyze the sun just as Papa taught me to do when I was girl, taking every hue and slight change as a signal: pink sun for planting, yellow sun for picking, always trusting it, as all good farmers do, to bring the right amount of light and warmth to the garden. It is a wonder to me as I grow older that living things, small living things like the plants I grow, and the stray mutt that came to stay (we named him Rex), show me how to live. Like Rex, I rest a lot, and like the plants in my garden, I press on.

  I miss my husband more as the years go by, not less. It’s a secret we widows share. I still pat his side of the bed expecting to find him there, and imagine what his kisses would feel like now. In memory they are so sweet, I can taste them. I miss his skin, especially when I buried my head in his neck, which smelled of vanilla and thyme. I never forget how lucky I was to be his wife, and how hopeful I am that I will see him again. I try not to be greedy. I had him for twenty-seven years, and that’s a nice stretch of road.

  Sunlight streams into Our Lady of Mount Carmel through the stained-glass windows, throwing a gold hue over the Communion railing. Four altar boys prepare the church for the funeral Mass. It is a warm April day, so they prop open the windows, stack the prayer books, and place programs on the end of each pew.

  Two ladies from the sodality lift starched white linens out of a long dress box and carefully place them on the altar. The florist arrives from the back of the church carrying a large crystal vase of three dozen long-stemmed white roses. The arrangement is so lush, he has to peek through the bouquet to see where he is going. Two of his workers follow with identical vases overflowing with roses. The sodality ladies take the flowers, placing two vases behind the altar and one at the foot of it.