“Lena! Watch your language,” Marie said, weeping.
Now Lenny understood why the detective had asked about the cabdriver. As usual, his stomach tightened.
Frankie and Gennaro appeared with pizzas from Johnny Boo Boo’s, while Lena babbled on about why the judge would not release any of them on bail.
“Some nonsense about priors and risk of leaving the country,” she said. “Where the hell are they gonna go? Sicily? The lousy cops are arresting people there too, and they’re more crooked than the people they’re arresting.” She tossed paper plates and napkins on the kitchen table as if she were dealing cards in a casino. Since the boys seemed unfazed by what Lena was saying, Lenny assumed that they already knew about the murder accusations and that all four men, including Scungilli, were being held without bail. Gennaro took sodas from the refrigerator and Frankie grabbed paper cups from a cupboard as comfortably as if he were in his own kitchen.
Two pizzas sat on the table. One cheese, the other anchovy. Lena and Gennaro griped that their brothers and father had been unjustly arrested. The only thing unjust was that they hadn’t been arrested before they could cause so much harm, Lenny thought. He took a slice of the anchovy pizza and stared at it.
“My mother wouldn’t eat Johnny’s pizza,” Lenny said. His voice sounded distant. “She complained that Johnny’s mother used to change his diapers on the same counter where the dough rose. Mama turned up her nose every time I reminded her that it had been years since Johnny wore diapers.” Everyone around the table stared at Lenny, and he realized that his comments about Filomena must have seemed odd given everyone’s immediate concerns about the arrests, but he couldn’t bear listening to Lena and Gennaro whine about justice.
“Ma, eat something,” Lena said, and placed a slice of pizza on a paper plate.
Marie pushed it away. “I can’t.”
Lena was a younger version of Marie, the way Frankie was a younger version of Lenny, but she acted more like Big Vinny than any of her brothers. She sat there chewing her pizza and badmouthing the police without missing a beat, then briefly held the paper cup of soda between her teeth, ran her fingers through her long blond hair (same box ash blond as Marie’s), twisted it up in a scrunchie, and mumbled: “Those pig cops have no problem accepting tips from Big Vinny.” She mumbled this without spilling a drop of soda. When talking to her father, Lena called him Pops, but when talking about him, she often called him Big Vinny, as if it were a title of honor.
“You got that right,” Gennaro said.
Frankie ate his pizza and drank his soda without saying a word.
“Lenny, take another slice,” Marie said.
“No, I’m done. Thank you.” Lenny stood and carried his plate and cup to the trash container.
“Leave it, Lenny. I’ll clean up when the kids are done,” Marie said.
Lenny bent and gave Marie a kiss on the cheek. “I’m sorry you’re going through this.”
“Too much, Lenny. Too much.” Marie took a tissue from her sleeve and wiped her tears.
Lenny looked at Frankie. “You ready?”
“I’ll walk you out to the yard, Dad,” Frankie said, and Lenny could taste the anchovy repeat on him and the slight plume of acid in his throat.
Next to the dueling penises fountain, Frankie told Lenny that Gennaro was having a hard time and he was going to spend the night.
“I don’t like this, Frankie. Not with everything that’s going on. Don’t you think it might be better to give the DiCicos a little space?”
“Better for who?” Frankie said.
“Better for everyone,” Lenny answered and stuffed his hands into his pockets so Frankie wouldn’t see them shaking.
Frankie kissed Lenny on the cheek, told him that he’d be home in the morning, and went back into the house.
11
That night in the DiCicos’ basement, Gennaro no longer assumed his post-orgasm detachment, but instead, he spoke of Big Vinny, Michael, and Jimmy, and he even cried and told Frankie that he loved him and that he didn’t know what he would do without him.
Another time, under different circumstances, Frankie would have been ecstatic to hear Gennaro say this.
“I can be a real jerk sometimes. I wish things were different,” Gennaro said, and soon fell asleep, his naked body clutching Frankie’s.
Frankie didn’t ask Gennaro what he meant by different. He just lay there until Gennaro’s breaths turned rhythmic, and then he slid out from under Gennaro’s arm and leg, got out of bed, and sat in a leather chair facing one of the fish tanks in the game room. The leather felt cool against his bare skin. He didn’t know the names of the kinds of fish in the tank, but their colors were a brilliant Day-Glo fluorescent. Profiles of fluorescent yellows, blues, and greens darted from one end of the tank to the other, over and over, until the fish blurred into a memory of the cabdriver speeding away, and Gennaro writing the cab’s license plate number on his arm.
The glow from the tank reflected Frankie’s green eyes, their color made more brilliant by his tears. He climbed back into bed, and Gennaro stirred. Frankie pressed his lips to Gennaro’s, his hand clutched the moist soft of Gennaro’s groin, which immediately grew hard, and everything beyond their entwined bodies vanished.
12
The following morning brought the usual last minute Sunday dinner shoppers into Lasante’s — a steady flow of customers after each Mass. No one mentioned Big Vinny or the arrest. News about Lenny’s behavior yesterday had traveled up and down 104th Street, which was fine with Lenny, and promptly at 2:00, he closed the store — the usual Sunday closing time. Not a minute earlier for fear of drawing attention.
Lenny sat at his desk in the office staring at the glow from his computer and stewing over Frankie not being home yet from the DiCicos’. He opened his email and typed in Dr. Violetta Geski. Vi’s work email address appeared. She had once been a flowerchild wannabe who had missed Woodstock by about 20 years — at least that was Angie’s assessment of Vi. Tony had been a little less harsh. He thought she was pretty enough. “For a chubby girl,” he said. But to Lenny she was his beautiful alter ego. She had been Carmen to Lenny’s Don Jose. He was 11 years her senior, but lifting cases of olive oil and canned tomatoes had kept him in good form. His full head of curly hair was jet black, and his jaw was strong. Vi drifted into the store and his life wearing a low-cut blouse and long skirt, sheer and crinkly like tissue paper, and there were silver bangles, including tiny bells strung through her toes and around her ankles. She had recently dumped her California boyfriend, was staying with friends in Glenhaven, and was in want of a little distraction. Lenny became her distraction, and given that his youngest sibling, Tony, was soon leaving for college, which meant the beginning countdown for Lenny’s own liberation, he was more than ready to celebrate.
It began with her smile as he handed her change. Her eyes held his until Lenny blushed like a 32-year-old teenager. An hour later she returned to the store for something or other that she had forgotten to buy. She returned again when Lenny was alone in the store boning a prosciutto, and this time she said that she was in search of keys that she claimed to have dropped while shopping earlier. He handed her a thin slice of the salty ham. “Just a taste,” she said, and as she licked the salt from her fingers, Lenny asked her if she wanted more.
That night, after Filomena and Tony were asleep, Lenny met Vi at the back door of the warehouse where she giggled as he fumbled with the keys. The warehouse was dark and smelled of olives in brine and aged imported cheeses, but as he drew Violetta close and inhaled her citrus cologne, the cool of the warehouse turned warm then hot, and Lenny took Vi on a bed of risotto in 50-pound bags. So began their clandestine romance. Being secretive was their aphrodisiac, as if the danger of discovery made sex that much more intoxicating and addicting, and Vi gave Lenny a crash course in the college social life he had missed, while funny smoke and much moaning ascended the citadel of the warehouse’s dry goods.
Filomena
pursed her lips whenever Lenny said that he had to make space for another delivery. She found his sudden preoccupation with the warehouse curious — that was until the hapless deliveryman exposed Vi and Lenny.
The Ronzoni deliveryman had interrupted Filomena while she was talking to her friend Rosa: “Excuse me, Mrs. Lasante, but I have 50 cases of macaroni your son ordered.” Filomena handed him the padlock key for the warehouse’s overhead door and waved him out of the store as if he had interrupted a summit conference.
He left the store, turned the corner and walked down 104th Street where his truck was parked at the driveway to the warehouse. After he unlocked and raised the door, a flash of sunlight illuminated the contents of the previously dark warehouse, including Lenny’s bare buttocks and Vi’s bejeweled toes. The stunned lovers fumbled to hide themselves amid the surrounding cases of confectionaries, which came tumbling down and framed them in cardboard stamped Fragile and Imported.
Dumbfounded, the deliveryman stammered: “I’m s-sorry to disturb you, M-Mr. Lasante, but where would y-y-you like the macaroni?” Lenny mumbled something while he stood, pulled up his pants, and tried to block the Ronzoni deliveryman’s clear view of Vi.
“Italian Stallion” had almost replaced “Hard Luck Lenny,” but then Vi missed her period and Hard Luck Lenny became permanent. Wedding photographs taken in the Lasante’s yard showed Violetta barefoot — a plump wood nymph draped in cream-colored layers of gauze, her hair crowned with miniature violets and baby’s breath. Lenny was also barefoot, by Vi’s design, and dressed in a tan linen suit, but in the photographs he looked more proletarian than mythical. His black eyes, thick blue-black curls and olive complexion contrasted Violetta’s green eyes, straight blond hair, and creamy complexion. Under an arbor heavy with ripe grapes — the fruit of the seedlings Leonardo had planted years earlier — Vi and Lenny were married.
Six months later, long after the grapes had been picked and pressed into wine, Lenny coached Vi through her labor and Frankie’s birth, but the following morning, when Lenny returned to the hospital to bring his family home, a nurse handed him a note that she had found pinned to Vi’s pillow. Violetta was gone.
Lenny hadn’t expected that his lust for Vi would become love, but neither had he expected to take over the family business years before or help his mother raise his siblings. After Vi said that she was pregnant and finally agreed not to abort, Lenny allowed himself to hope that his luck had finally changed and that he’d make a new life with Vi beyond the store. Once his brother graduated from college — the last of his siblings to graduate — he would have fulfilled his father’s wishes, and he’d be free to leave. His family could have sold the business or paid someone else to work it. Or they could have burned it down for all Lenny cared. He promised Vi he would leave. Only three more years, and then he’d go wherever she wanted to go. Anywhere, he promised, but he didn’t blame her or begrudge her leaving. In fact, he wasn’t even surprised when the nurse handed him the note.
Within three months, he received divorce papers from a lawyer in San Francisco. He signed and returned them to the lawyer’s address. There was no mention of child custody or visitation rights, and Lenny wondered if the lawyer even knew that there was a baby.
Frankie was about to graduate from elementary school when Lenny first searched the Internet for information about Vi and came upon Dr. Violetta Vitkus, professor of religious studies at UCLA. She was teaching courses with titles like Religious Ethics in Comparative Perspective, Love and Its Critics, and Modern Roman Catholic Ethics. Lenny found her chosen profession and the titles of coursework amusing, especially Love and Its Critics, but he also thought that Frankie’s obsession with religion may have been influenced by more than Filomena’s brainwashing. Maybe he inherited more than his green eyes from Violetta.
Since discovering Vi’s address, Lenny had written and deleted countless emails to her, and that morning after Big Vinny’s arrest, Lenny began another email — rehashing his concern about Frankie’s attachment to the DiCicos, especially to Gennaro — with every intention of deleting it:
Last night I left Frankie at the DiCicos. He’s still not home. Maybe I should have dragged him out of there. Frankie’s an excellent student, Vi, and could get into most any college, but I’m afraid that something terrible is going to happen to him before he has the chance to get away from here, especially from Big Vinny’s youngest son, Gennaro. Vi, I’m sure this email comes as a shock, but I’ve tried writing to you hundreds of times. He’s a good kid, Vi. I’m sure you’d be proud of him. No hard feelings about us, Vi. I’m just running out of steam. I don’t want Frankie to wind up like me, or worse.
Lenny read and reread the email until he was startled by a rap at the dining-room door behind him.
“Sorry, Mr. Lasante, I knocked so we wouldn’t scare you,” Gennaro said.
Lenny closed his laptop, forced a smile, ignored Gennaro’s comment, and looked at Frankie. “Is everything alright, Son?”
Frankie shrugged his shoulders and Gennaro answered, “No, nothing. I just wanted to ask you something and Frankie came along.”
Lenny stood and followed the boys into the dining room.
“I’ve got to get something from my room,” Frankie said, but Lenny knew that Frankie didn’t need anything from his room. He was just following DiCico orders.
With Frankie gone, and Gennaro leaning against the back of a dining room chair, Lenny felt as if he were on DiCico turf rather than in his own home, despite the familiar picture of the Last Supper over the credenza that his brother, Tony, had scratched his name into its frame, or the oriental jardinière near the window with the sansevieria that Lucia had rooted from a cutting, or the knickknacks in the corner curio, favors from Lasante family weddings. Pictures, plants, and knickknacks yielded to Gennaro’s presence, as if to say, Listen up, a DiCico is about to talk.
“Sit down, Gennaro,” Lenny said and pulled a chair away from the table.
Gennaro placed a small white envelope on the table. On the front was Lenny’s name written in Big Vinny’s third-grade script.
“This was on my pillow,” Gennaro said. “I’m not sure how it got there, but a lot of my old man’s friends have been in and out of the house all day. I don’t know who left it. Maybe my old man had put it there when he saw the police coming. I don’t know.”
Lenny glared at Gennaro. “You don’t know how it got there?” It was a rhetorical question and said with sarcasm. Lenny surmised that Gennaro knew more than he admitted. After all, he was Big Vinny’s son. Lenny picked up the envelope. “Does Frankie know about this?”
“No. I swear. Last night, me and him slept in the basement. I just found this upstairs in my bedroom. Frankie didn’t see it. I just told him I wanted to ask you something. I don’t even know what’s in it myself.”
“You just happened to go in your bedroom?”
“Yeah. I had to get something.”
Lenny’s hands shook as he opened the envelope. The note was also written in Big Vinny’s script:
It’s that rainy day. Sunday night at 9:00 p.m., last stop, Lefferts Blvd. Station.
He placed the note face down on the table, and the ragged edge of a callus on his pinky caught on a thread of the embroidered tablecloth. Without warning it can be a rainy day. Lenny heard Big Vinny’s words from last Christmas Eve.
“I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Lasante, but are you going to do it?” Gennaro asked.
“Do what? You said you don’t know what’s in the envelope.”
“No, no. Of course I don’t.”
Gennaro wasn’t as convincing a liar as his father. Lenny thought that it was careless of Big Vinny to have involved a 19-year-old in this, even if Gennaro was family.
“It’s just that I figured, since there was a note, my old man must want you to do something,” Gennaro said.
“Well you figured wrong, so I guess we’re done talking here, except for one thing. Frankie is to know nothing about what you claim you do
n’t know. Nothing.”
“Sure, Mr. Lasante. Whatever you say.”
Lenny pushed his chair away from the table, slipped the note into his pocket, stood, walked into the living room, and called up the stairs. “Frankie, no need to look for whatever it is you’re pretending to look for. Gennaro and I are done.”
Lenny stared at Frankie as he walked down the stairs, but Frankie kept his eyes lowered, and Lenny worried, that like Gennaro, Frankie was concealing what he knew. Back in the dining room, Frankie and Lenny found Gennaro admiring his reflection in the glass-covered picture of the Last Supper, like Narcissus gazing at his reflection in the pond. “We got one of these pictures in our dining room too,” Gennaro said. “I think my grandma gave this to your mother, Mr. Lasante. Isn’t that right?”
“I don’t remember,” Lenny said. Now it was his turn to lie.
“Our families got a lot of history.”
Lenny was out of patience.
“I always thought it was a weird picture to hang in a dining room,” Gennaro said.
“Why’s that?” Frankie asked.
“I don’t know. It’s kind of like when you’re sitting at the dinner table and you look at the picture, you wonder if someone is trying to tell you something. You know like bad news or something. You know like there might be a Judas at the table.”
Lenny had all the DiCico drama he could handle for one day. “I’m going upstairs for a nap,” he said and asked Frankie what he was doing even though he knew he’d be leaving with Gennaro. He reminded Frankie that tomorrow was school and that he wanted him home early, then he left the boys and went upstairs to his bedroom.
After he heard the front door close, he pulled Big Vinny’s note from his pocket and crushed it into a ball while his eyes scanned the photographs on his dresser. First, a studio portrait of his parents, siblings, and himself, where Filomena held baby Tony on her lap, Lenny stood next to Vincenzo, and Angie, Irish, and Amelia stood in front of them. Next, Lenny looked at the photograph of Vi and him taken on their wedding day. After Vi had left, Filomena told Lenny to burn the photograph, but that wasn’t his way. Keep the facts open, simple, and real. If nothing else, Frankie always knew what his mother looked like, plus he grew up hearing Lenny tell stories about Vi as candidly as he shared other family stories. Finally, he looked at the snapshot of a rearview shadowy silhouette of him holding Frankie on his shoulders, while the surf splashed at their feet, and the Atlantic met a violet sky.
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