We came to each other with a twinge of sadness and a great hunger. The coldness and loneliness of the past weeks needed to be put behind us. And I was the one who’d raised the barriers with my silence. I just had to be sure I was taking Al back for the right reasons. Al seemed to understand that, by being so patient and by putting up with that lumpy couch as if it were penance Father Lombardi had doled out after confession.
I never asked Al if he’d confessed to the priest about Estella. It was none of my business. He had confessed to me, and that was all that mattered. And I never questioned him again about her, never wanted to know any more than he’d already told me.
“I’ve missed holding you,” he murmured to me as he wrapped himself around me that first night back in our bed. And then his hands moved over my body as if he were learning it for the first time.
ROSE
1961–66
The Last Full Table
THE WOUNDS INFLICTED by Cuba healed, and like the physical scars Al bore from the Pacific and I from childbirth, we were stronger because of it. Forgiveness is a balm, for the one doing the forgiving as well as the forgiven. We were both released from the burden of mistrust and able to lean on each other again, for ourselves and for our family. God knows, they needed our attention.
Al Jr. was a smart boy. Thank God Reverend Mother had picked up on the bad influences when he was still in sixth grade; after that, I watched him like a hawk. Straight home after school—homework, then chores in the restaurant. He got a scholarship to Boston College High and the Jesuits took over riding his tail to keep him out of trouble. They also taught him how to use that smart-aleck mouth of his for good and put him on the debate team. I wasn’t pleased at first that he was going all the way to Dorchester for high school, which took him so far from the neighborhood and its watchful eyes. But when he kept bringing home good report cards, I couldn’t complain.
One thing Al regretted was that he’d never taken advantage of the G.I. Bill after the war and gotten an education. He was certainly intelligent enough. But it wasn’t something Italian men of his generation did. There was no question for him about Al Jr. going to college. He was going. Period. We expected him to graduate from BC High and go right on to Boston College, even though there were a lot of O’Reillys and Kellys and not many names from our part of the city.
But Al Jr. had other plans. Oh, he still intended to go to college, but when he told us where, I could see Al’s mouth get that tight line…
Pennsylvania. He wanted to go to Villanova. At least it was Catholic. But for both Al and me, it was like he was going to the moon. This was a first for our family. Cookie and Carmine’s sons, Vincent and Anthony, hadn’t gone to college; and Bella’s kids were at St. Rose of Lima in Albany, where they lived.
I couldn’t imagine Al Jr. not home every night and not at the table every Sunday afternoon for dinner. But I also understood his wanting to get away from the neighborhood, and I gently reminded Al that we’d done the same thing at his age when we left for Trinidad. So grudgingly, in the fall of 1961, Al and I packed up the Ford station wagon and drove Al Jr. to Pennsylvania.
It was a time of change, not only for us, but for the country. The year before, a Catholic had been elected president. Even though he was Irish, we considered John F. Kennedy one of our own. His mother, Rose, had been born in the North End a few blocks away from Paradiso. Al Jr., after reading Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage during high school, had worked on his campaign, knocking on doors in the neighborhood to distribute flyers. It was the highlight of Al Jr.’s adolescence when Kennedy stopped by the campaign headquarters on Hanover Street to shake hands and thank the kids who were working so hard to get him elected. Kennedy’s inspiring words had set Al Jr. on the path he was following—to leadership, to accomplish something important in his life.
Like anyone who’s old enough to remember, I can tell you exactly where I was that afternoon in November of 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. The lunch crowd in Paradiso was thinning out and I was reviewing the reservations for that night, a Friday. The radio was on and I was only half listening. But when the words had sunk in, I went into the kitchen and found Al. We held on to each other in disbelief. Outside on the street, normally hectic as the weekend approached, all was still. All I could think to do was pray, so I put on my hat and coat and walked down to St. Leonard’s. I wasn’t alone. The church filled up with Catholics and non-Catholics alike, all seeking some solace for the incomprehensible.
That night, Al Jr. called us from Villanova. He was going to Washington for the funeral. We were all stunned, of course. But for young people like Al Jr., Kennedy’s assassination was an anguished turning point. Some of his college friends reacted by becoming cynical and bitter. But not our son. If anything, he became more committed to the challenge Kennedy had thrown out to that generation with his inaugural speech. We were so proud of him. He joined the navy ROTC, which couldn’t have made Al any prouder. Senior year he came home for Thanksgiving in uniform; when he walked into the restaurant, every head turned. He looked so much like Al.
I hold on to the memory of that Thanksgiving as though it’s etched in stone. That was the first time Al Jr. had ever brought a girl home. It wasn’t like in the old days when Al and I were keeping company and you couldn’t even go to the movies without the boy coming into the house to meet your parents. With him in Pennsylvania during the school year, who knew if he was even dating, let alone who the girl was. In the summers, when he came home and helped out in the restaurant, there’d never been anyone special. If it hadn’t been for ROTC, I’d have thought he was headed for the seminary.
So it was a big deal that he invited Marianne, a girl from New Jersey who went to Rosemont, the girls’ college down the road from Villanova. I liked her right away. She came into the kitchen, told me it smelled just like her mother’s and asked what she could do to help.
I put her to work peeling and chopping garlic for the stuffed mushrooms and artichokes and then had her rolling prosciutto and salami for the antipasto. I liked the way she joked with Al Jr. and took some of the wind out of his sails when he started talking like a senator instead of a college boy. And she was nice to Toni, who at fourteen was still a kid who looked up to her big brother.
I watched as Al Jr. brushed her fingertips when he passed her the breadbasket at the table, or put his hand on the small of her back when he slid past her in the kitchen. Just like his father.
When I had him alone for a few minutes behind the bar opening wine bottles for me, I asked him straight out. “So, is she the one?”
“The one what?” He was keeping his eyes on the corkscrew, not looking at me.
“You know what I mean.”
The cork slid out of the bottle of Ruffino—not Papa’s wine anymore. The younger generation, even though they’d grown up on his Chianti, mixed with water, wanted imported wine from Martignetti’s at the corner instead of our own cellar.
“I guess that’s up to her.”
“And you want her to say yes?”
“What is this, Ma, the Spanish Inquisition?”
I lifted my hands. “I won’t ask any more questions. But if she is the one, you’ve made a good choice.”
I kissed him and went back to the thirty-four people sitting around the table, a wine bottle in each hand and a smile on my face.
What can I say? For a mother to see her son grown into a handsome, thoughtful young man in love with a woman she likes and approves of—what more could I ask?
I could ask that they be allowed to enjoy a life together, like Al and me. I could ask that a war on the other side of the world not cast its bombs and flames in the middle of my restaurant and my family. But I didn’t know that then.
By the fall of 1964, with Al Jr.’s graduation only a few months away in the spring, the nightly news was sprinkled with reports from Vietnam. We had a TV in the bar now, and you couldn’t avoid hearing Walter Cronkite every night. But I didn’t understand until Al Jr. mentio
ned his commission at the dinner table that Thanksgiving.
“Looks like I’ll get my papers in July, about a month after I graduate.”
It wasn’t like it had been for Al and me, when the whole country mobilized after Pearl Harbor. Unless you had a son in the service, Vietnam wasn’t on your mind.
I thought of all the times I’d let Al Jr. go, sometimes sooner than I was ready for. I can still remember the ache in my heart when he stepped into his kindergarten class that first day, and certainly the moment Al and I drove away from Villanova in his freshman year. I cried the whole length of the Jersey Turnpike.
But I never dreamed I’d ever have to watch my son go to war. Not after the war his father had fought. Not when he had a life of promise ahead of him.
Until November 1964, only a handful of Americans had been killed in Vietnam—advisers to the South Vietnamese army, pilots flying bombing missions. But just before Election Day an air base near Saigon had been shelled and seventy-six young Americans were wounded. I heard that as I was making a batch of meatballs. I stood there in the kitchen, my hands deep in one of our big stainless-steel bowls. I mix the meatballs by hand, and I use dried bread that I’ve softened in water and squeezed out—again by hand—instead of bread crumbs like some of the bigger places in the neighborhood do. I don’t skimp when it comes to the quality of the food I serve. I also use ground round, not chuck, for my meatballs. They’re tender and moist, not dense or heavy. That night, listening to the news as I cooked, I completely lost track of what I was doing. My hands came to a standstill and no meatballs took shape.
I thought of Al and all he’d suffered and could not believe we were once again putting our young men in harm’s way. But it wasn’t until Thanksgiving dinner, with Al Jr. sitting there in his uniform next to Marianne, that I began to understand what was at risk. My son. My firstborn.
The food and wine were as abundant as they’d always been at our table. You wouldn’t have known we were at war. We still had everyone there, with us. My parents and Al’s, in their places of honor, their bodies shrunken and wrinkled but their minds and tongues still sharp. My sister-in-law Cookie balancing her youngest grandchild on her lap while she ate.
“I don’t want to let her go,” she protested when her son Vincent offered to hold the baby so she could eat her soup.
My son Mike, a senior in high school, freshly showered after his football game, basking in the aftermath of a victory he’d secured with his field-goal kick and devouring every course—piling his plate high with manicotti after the antipasto and the escarole soup, followed by two servings of turkey and sweet potatoes. Al, his face flushed from the morning in the kitchen and then two hours on the football field, but his back straight and his eyes clear as he took in the scene. Even Toni, taking tiny bites because her braces hurt—how stupid of the orthodontist to put them in right before Thanksgiving—was making an effort to enjoy the meal and the family.
I describe them all now because it’s important to me to remember that meal and that moment when we were all together and didn’t yet know what was ahead for our family, for our country. Because by the next Thanksgiving, two places at the table would be empty.
Loss
MAMA WENT FIRST. She was seventy-seven, coping with the diabetes that Dr. Tucci had diagnosed the year before. I had learned how to give her insulin shots and went over to my parents’ place every morning after Mike and Toni left for school. Usually she was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for me. Like most of the old women I knew, she was up at the crack of dawn, had the apartment cleaned and the laundry hung on the line by the time the rest of the world was turning off the alarm clock.
But one morning in January, when I let myself in the apartment, she wasn’t in her chair. The coffeepot was empty instead of perking gently. I walked down the hall to her bedroom and peeked in the half-open door. Papa was on his back, snoring loudly, which was no surprise. He often slept late. But it wasn’t like Mama to still be in bed, and it also wasn’t good for her blood sugar if she had her shot late. I tiptoed into the room and reached for her.
As soon as I touched her I knew she wasn’t going to open her eyes. I couldn’t find a pulse. Still, I called to her, the daughter in me, the wishful thinker, not wanting to accept what my hand on her cold and stiffening cheek was telling me.
My cry of “Mama! Mama!” woke Papa.
“Que fa?” he asked, confused, his eyes cloudy with cataracts, his brain registering the unusual situation—me in their bedroom, his wife not yet up—but he hadn’t quite connected what it all meant.
“It’s okay, Papa,” I found the strength to say to him, then slipped out of the room. They didn’t have a phone in the bedroom, which was just as well. I didn’t want him to hear what I was going to be saying, or how upset I was.
My hand and my voice were shaking as I dialed the operator and asked for an ambulance. I tried to explain, without breaking down, but it was all I could do not to wail.
I phoned Al and asked him to call my brothers and sisters. Then I went back to Papa.
He was sitting on the side of the bed next to Mama, stroking her hair and rocking back and forth, muttering a low litany.
The ambulance came just as Al and Carmine ran up the steps. Helplessly, we watched the futile efforts of the emergency crew.
“I’m sorry,” one of them said, turning to me. “From the state of rigor mortis, she probably passed away during the night.”
The remaining hours of that day were a blur, as the rest of my family arrived, the doctor came to sign the death certificate and we called my father’s cousin Severino, the undertaker.
Somehow I held myself together, the way I always do in a crisis. I was most worried about Papa, who seemed paralyzed. I made him eat something, but I practically had to spoon it into him, as if he were a baby. He finally pushed the spoon away and just sat in his chair, staring out the window.
We closed the restaurant for the week and hung black bunting on the windows. Al Jr. took the train up from Philadelphia to attend the wake and the funeral. I thought about keeping Toni away from the funeral parlor. I didn’t know if she’d be ready for an open casket. I had bad memories of when I was a kid and the wakes were held at home, with the body in the living room, and didn’t want to inflict that on my baby. But she made a fuss, as only a teenager can, about not being a baby anymore. If her brothers were going to the wake, then she was, too. Frankly I was too exhausted to argue with her. I’d slept, badly, at Papa’s the first night, not wanting to leave him alone. I don’t know, maybe I was afraid I’d wake up to find him gone, too. I’d heard that sometimes happened—people dying of a broken heart when their wife or husband passes away. Mostly it was in dramatic stories from the old country—the kind of superstitious fable you had to take with a grain of salt. I remember one that Mama and my aunt Cecilia used to bring up about a distant cousin, Lucia, who had been barren. She’d once turned down a proposal of marriage because she had fallen in love with someone else. The mother of the rejected suitor had gone into the village piazza, bared her breasts and cursed Lucia, calling down upon her “a life full of misery.” Given the sad state of Lucia’s existence after that, Mama and Aunt Cecilia were convinced the curse had been the reason.
“Watch out who you harm with your choices” had been their warning.
As far as I knew, no one had placed a curse on either of my parents. But nevertheless, I made sure Papa took his blood pressure medicine and I checked on him several times during the night.
My sisters-in-law, God bless them, took over the kitchen at Paradiso during the week of the wake and the funeral and had a meal ready for us at five o’clock every day between the afternoon and evening calling hours. Cookie knew best what the family needed, especially Papa, and had pots of soup and some simple chicken—nothing heavy—simmering on the back burner as we came back from Severino’s to take a break. Everybody was numb. Such a shock, we all said. One minute Mama was there—with her wisdom and her energy a
nd her cut-through-the-bullshit observations—and then she was gone, without warning or a chance to say goodbye.
It was hardest on my sisters Bella and Lillian, who no longer lived close enough to see her every day, the way those of us still in the neighborhood had. They hadn’t seen her since Christmas, and who knows what their last words with her had been. Everyone has regrets, the “woulda, shoulda, coulda, if I’d only known” kind of thoughts. It’s why I still hug and kiss my kids, my Al, every time they walk out the door.
For me, besides the shock of finding her that morning, the pain was the empty place in the kitchen. The knives hanging unused instead of wielded by gnarled fingers chopping two dozen cloves of garlic or five bunches of parsley. The dwindling supply of mason jars on my cellar shelves that wouldn’t be replenished come August when the tomatoes and eggplants were ripe and she, churning with industry, would’ve been canning for the winter.
We buried her in the lilac dress we’d bought for her to wear to my nephew Vincent’s wedding. It broke my heart that she didn’t live to see Al Jr. graduate from Villanova, but he stood with his cousins as pallbearer alongside her coffin at St. Leonard’s. When he hoisted that box on his shoulder, with his white gloves and navy uniform—that’s when I finally fell apart. Al held on to me as we followed behind the casket.
But Mama’s funeral was a dress rehearsal for what was to follow.
Broken Glass
Across the Table Page 8