Before the Sunday of that dinner arrived, Al decided to get help from Father Dom. Since bringing Manny to us he’d spent a few more years in Miami before being transferred back to Boston. He was working at a Spanish parish in the South End. Al invited him to lunch at the restaurant and we told him about Toni’s decision.
“She said she and Bobby had considered St. Leonard’s out of respect for us and had gone to Father Cavallo to talk about the wedding. But he’d berated them because Bobby isn’t Catholic. She said he’s opposed to mixed marriages and won’t perform the ceremony. She was furious. I can’t blame her. But I still want her to be married in the Church. Is there a way?”
“Some parish priests are more conservative than the orders. Let me talk to Toni and Bobby. If I’m satisfied that they’re entering into marriage as a sacred act, I’d be happy to marry them. And as far as a church, what about the chapel at Boston College? With all your boys educated at BC High, you’ve got a connection. I can make the call.”
Al and I looked at each other across the table.
“This works for me,” he said. “Let’s just hope it works for them. Dom, do us one more favor and come to dinner with them on Sunday. She’ll listen to you directly better than hearing this from us. She’s ready to leave the Church entirely.”
After Father Dom left, I threw my arms around Al. “I know it’s not over yet because we still have to talk to them, but thank you for coming up with a way to solve this. You’re the best!”
He kissed me hard. “I want this to work as much as you do, Rose. Married life is complicated enough without a problem like this casting its shadow on a couple.”
Toni had always loved Father Dom, especially as she got older and understood the work he did with the poor. I knew she’d hear him out. What I didn’t know was if Bobby had any idea how important it was to us—and if he loved her enough to give us this.
I tried to broach the subject as she and I set the table for Sunday dinner. We were using the good dishes, the silver and the embroidered tablecloth my aunt Cecilia had brought back from Italy as a twenty-fifth anniversary gift.
“Why are you going to so much trouble when it’s just family? I mean, Bobby’s part of the family now.”
“I’m setting a nice table because it’s family. I want this meal to be memorable for us all. A day we can look back on in years to come and say, ‘We got it right.’”
“What do you mean? What’s going on?”
“Your father and I are trying to give you the wedding you’ve dreamed of, but we also want you and Bobby to understand what’s important to us. A wedding isn’t just about the bride and groom. It’s about joining two families. You hope the families agree that what matters is the happiness of their children and that everybody works together to start the couple off right.”
“Do you think we’re not working together?”
“I didn’t say that. I just want to make sure that you and Bobby—especially Bobby—are open to listening to what your father and I have to say. We invited Father Dom to come, too.”
“What’s Father Dom got to do with it?”
“He wants to help us find a solution.”
“If that solution involves St. Leonard’s, I’m not interested.”
“Don’t worry. Daddy and I actually agree with you about St. Leonard’s. It breaks my heart that you won’t be married in the same church Daddy and I were, but that’s not important in the bigger scheme of things.”
“What is the bigger scheme?”
“I want you and Bobby to be willing to listen to our side today. Can you ask him to do that?”
“Of course.”
At two o’clock I pulled Manny and Mike away from the TV and the Red Sox game. Bobby and Father Dom had arrived in front of the building at the same time and had walked upstairs together—Bobby in his tailored, handmade suit towering over Father Dom in the brown robe and sandals of the Franciscans.
Father Dom said grace; Mike poured everyone a glass of Asti Spumante and we made a toast to Toni and Bobby’s future. Toni then surprised us by making another toast.
“To Mom and Daddy, for all they do for us and for bringing us together today. Salute.”
The first part of the meal was all small talk—Father Dom asking Manny about BC High, where he was already a junior and playing varsity baseball; Bobby complimenting me on the pasta and taking a second helping; Papa deciding to go have a nap after the salad.
When we’d finally cleared the table of the dinner dishes and were sitting with our coffee and biscotti, Father Dom turned to Toni and Bobby.
“I understand you’re having some challenges finding a church that everyone’s happy with?”
“No offense, Father, but if it weren’t for the close mindedness of the priest at St. Leonard’s, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Did he never hear of Vatican II?”
“Walking away from St. Leonard’s doesn’t have to mean walking away from the Church. I’m not one to promote cafeteria-style Catholicism, where you pick and choose what you want to believe. But there are some parts of the city where you might find a more welcoming reception.”
“That’s why we chose the Arlington Street Church,” Bobby interjected.
I could see the color rising in Al’s face and was about to jump into the conversation to steer it away from talking too soon about the one thing that could make him explode. But Father Dom turned to Bobby and spoke to him calmly but firmly.
“Bobby, the Arlington Street Church is a wonderful institution and has been a beacon of light and wisdom not only in the history of Boston but also of this country. I know the pastor well and he’s carrying on the traditions that were established in the nineteenth century. Al and Rose have great respect for the Arlington Street Church. But it’s not their church. The Dantes are Catholic. And unless I’ve missed something, Toni is still a Catholic.”
He looked at Toni and she nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“The Dantes want you and Toni to start your marriage off well, and to them, that means treating it as a sacrament and being married by a priest. They aren’t insisting on St. Leonard’s, even though the family’s history is tied to it. Toni and Bobby, I’d like you to consider being married by me, in a place that also has meaning for the family. The chapel at Boston College.”
Toni, who’d been watchful and tense throughout the meal and now this conversation, seemed to relax a little, as if we weren’t asking for more than she could give.
She turned to Bobby. “What do you think? This would work for me, if you’d be comfortable with it.”
I held my breath and waited to see what Bobby would do. It was a test of how much he cared for my daughter and how willing he was to bend. In my eyes, you needed to be flexible to make a marriage work.
“I thought you had your heart set on Arlington Street—the Tiffany windows, the hand-rung bells.”
“The beauty of the church is one thing, but if it causes my parents pain to have us marry there, I’m willing to go to BC.”
Bobby shrugged. “Then I guess it’s fine with me. However we do it, whatever prayers get said over our heads, it doesn’t matter to me. What do we need to do to make it happen?”
“I’ll want to spend a few moments talking to just the two of you. I’m still bound by the rules of the Church, but let’s say I have a more open interpretation of Vatican II than Father Cavallo does.”
Al and I and the boys left the three of them in the dining room and cleaned up in the kitchen with the door closed.
“God bless Dom. I think he’s saved this family a lot of grief,” I said to Al.
“Let’s hope this is the end of it. The world’s changing too fast for me.”
He smiled at the boys. “Do us all a favor and marry Catholic girls when the time comes. I don’t want to have to go through this again.”
“Don’t worry, Pop. I’ve already got one picked out.” Manny grinned.
“And who might that be? That cute girl who always s
its over by third base at your ball games?” Mike started in on him.
“You’re just jealous ’cause nobody comes to watch you when you’re sitting on a bar stool at the Rusty Scupper.”
The two of them went at it, teasing each other while they dried the pots, and Al and I felt that life was getting back to normal.
With the decision about the church behind us, I felt like I could put my heart into making a beautiful wedding for Toni. She asked me to handle the details for her.
“I have so much to do between now and the end of school, Mom. If you’d organize everything, it would take such a load off me.”
I was happy—no, overjoyed—to do it. She asked if she could wear my wedding dress; it needed hardly any alterations. She and Bobby picked out an invitation and I took care of getting them printed and addressed. The invitation list was huge—three hundred people. That’s why we couldn’t hold the reception at the restaurant. We wound up at Al’s cousin’s golf course in Chestnut Hill, near Boston College. I told him I didn’t want any skimping on the meal, only the best, and he came through for us.
The ceremony itself, which we had struggled so much with, seemed to fulfill everyone’s expectations. St. Mary’s Chapel at Boston College didn’t have the Italian flair of St. Leonard’s, but the stained-glass window of the Madonna and the white marble altar made us feel right at home, and I could tell that the unadorned stone walls fit Toni’s idea of beauty. They didn’t have Mass or Holy Communion, but the service and the prayers were straight out of the Catholic missal. Bobby followed along without stumbling; Toni appreciated Dom’s simplicity in the homily; Al and I were grateful for the familiar words of the blessing and for the dear friend who was raising his hand in the sign of the cross over their heads.
Like Toni, the ceremony had a quiet grace. The reception, on the other hand, was the kind of party Al and I know how to throw when we have something important to celebrate.
During the cocktail reception it took your breath away—two huge carved ice swans with their necks entwined like love-birds. Hollowed out between their wings were jumbo shrimp, chunks of lobster, and clams and oysters on the half shell. The dinner was three courses. Pear and arugula salad with balsamic dressing; for the pasta course, spinach tortellini with pesto sauce; and for the entrée, filet mignon with green beans and roasted rosemary potatoes. The wedding cake came from La Venezia on Hanover Street.
Of the three hundred guests about two dozen came from Bobby’s side. He had no family at all except his mother, his sister, Sandra, and her husband. Both his parents were only children, so no aunts or uncles, no cousins. I felt bad that, compared to them, we had so much in the way of family and tried to welcome them. Some of Hazel’s friends made the trip from Indiana, and they seemed stunned by the celebration. I guess weddings in the Midwest were more subdued than the parties we were used to giving.
You should’ve seen the dining room just before we threw open the doors. I did everything in gold—the tablecloths and napkins, the cutlery and the rim around the cream-colored dishes. With all the candles lit, the room shimmered.
I watched Al on the dance floor with Toni as the band played “Daddy’s Little Girl,” and I remembered a handsome soldier who’d put his arm around my waist more than thirty years before as he led me in our first dance as a married couple.
I said a little prayer that my daughter was stepping into a marriage that would be as solid and as deeply loving as ours. I wished I could shake the feeling in my heart that, despite the gaiety and lightness surrounding her, she and Bobby had a long way to go and a lot to learn if they were going to make it.
I was starting to feel like my mother, God rest her soul, who saw things the rest of us missed or overlooked in our rush through life. She could cut through appearances and find the core of truth in a situation. My fear for Toni was that she’d wrapped herself in a gauze of illusions. Like my wedding veil, which had disintegrated in its box in the closet when we took it out, I was afraid her dreams for this marriage would crumble.
I hoped I was wrong.
Raising Sons
I BECAME A GRANDMOTHER a little under a year later, when Toni gave birth to her son, Joseph Albert. I was both thrilled and relieved. I had no idea how overwhelmed I’d feel when I first took that baby in my arms. I understood then why my mother would hold up each of her grandchildren when they were presented to her and utter, “Il mio sangue.” My blood.
You begin to feel immortal when you have a grandchild, like you’ll live on in them.
I was relieved for two reasons. The first was that she had been married longer than nine months before Joey made his appearance. I didn’t have to endure any more raised eyebrows or suspicions that she’d been pregnant when she walked down the aisle. As soon as she’d announced she was pregnant back in September, tongues had started to wag that one of Rose’s “perfect” children wasn’t so perfect. As it was, the family had wondered why they were in such a hurry to get married, only a few months after he gave her the ring. “Because they’re in love,” I told everybody. “Just like Al and me. Remember, we got married a week after he popped the question.” Joe was born a full eleven months after the wedding, and that shut everyone up.
I was also relieved that she’d been able to get pregnant so quickly, instead of suffering as I had with doubts that I was barren. I wasn’t sure she would’ve kept trying if it had been difficult for her—not because she gives up easily but because I’d worried that she might not want kids at all. Or rather, that Bobby might not want kids and Toni would go along with his decision.
Who knows? Maybe the pregnancy was an accident, a glitch in the carefully orchestrated life they’d laid out for themselves. But Toni adapted with grace. She had Joe close to the end of the school year, so she had the whole summer with him before she went back to teaching art at Bedford High School in September. If they’d lived closer I would have watched Joe for her, just as Mama had done for me after Al Jr. was born. But I couldn’t leave the day-to-day needs of the restaurant or Papa, who, at eighty-nine and nearly blind, needed almost as much attention as an infant. And Toni felt it was too far to drive the baby to me in the city every morning before she went to school.
So she hired somebody, a stranger, to take care of her child. Oh, she had her interview checklists and talked to everybody’s references before she made her decision. But to me, it was yet another sign of how far apart her generation and mine were. I accepted that times were changing. It was harder for Al.
“I don’t understand why she can’t take a few years off and stay home with her baby.”
“Al! I worked when the kids were babies.”
“Yeah, but that’s because I was away at war and then in a VA hospital for a year. Her husband’s an able-bodied guy with an engineering degree.”
“She wants to work, Al. It’s why she got an education, why we paid for that education.”
“I knew if they moved out to Bedford it was going to be too easy for her to forget about her family.”
As much as it hurt me that I didn’t have them close, I’d learned long ago not to question the decisions made by my daughter and her husband.
While Toni was starting her life as a mother, I still had my own two boys at home to deal with. In Manny’s junior year of high school, our bright student and star athlete slid into a funk after he broke his arm one afternoon horsing around stupidly with his buddies at the playground. One of them came running into the restaurant yelling, “Mrs. D! Mrs. D! Come quick. Manny’s hurt himself.”
Both Al and I raced down the street. Manny was writhing on the asphalt, badly scratched up, with his arm at an alarming angle and the bone sticking out.
Al blanched, terrible memories of his own damaged arm flooding back. I sent him home to call the ambulance while I stayed with Manny.
If only it had been a simple broken bone. But it was so badly shattered the orthopedist didn’t think Manny would be able to pitch again, and certainly not with the skill and strengt
h he’d shown. His dreams of getting a baseball scholarship to college and aiming for the major leagues began to unravel. He lost interest in everything—his schoolwork, the team, even helping out in the restaurant. We’d excused him from his regular duties downstairs for a couple of weeks to give his arm a chance to heal. The doctor at Mass General had told us no lifting, no unnecessary motion. The arm had to rest. But that inactivity cost Manny. He’d been such an active kid, always on the move. He had practically danced on the ball field. And when he was a base runner, the other team had to watch him constantly or he’d steal a base. He didn’t know what to do with himself, cooped up in the apartment with Papa, who slept most of the afternoon. He was angry with himself and with his buddies and couldn’t bring himself to suit up and sit on the bench to cheer his teammates on. I didn’t realize soon enough exactly what was bothering him. By the time I did, he was locked in his room with headphones on, listening to the Grateful Dead and getting Fs on his papers because he wasn’t handing them in.
When we got his midterm grades it was our turn to be angry. Al was beside himself.
“Do you think a broken arm is an excuse to become a bum? Where do you think I’d be if I let what happened to this determine my whole life.” He pointed to his own arm.
“You don’t understand.” Manny pushed back. “Without baseball, I have nothing. I am nothing.”
Later that night, after a fruitless discussion with Manny that resulted only in frayed tempers, Al and I tried to come up with a way to get through to him.
“Al, if anyone can reach him, you can. Put aside who you are now and remember the young man who was released from the VA hospital and could barely make it up the stairs. You’d lost hope. Everything you thought you’d do or be felt out of reach. If you can let Manny know that you’ve been where he is now, maybe it’ll help.”
“But, Rose, I managed to climb out of that hole because I had you. You showed me how. Made me believe I could be somebody despite my broken body.”
Across the Table Page 13