Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  “And now Manny has both of us, Al. But he’s not going to listen to me. He assumes I won’t understand what it means to him not to play baseball.”

  The next day we told Manny we expected him to return to work in the restaurant. He wouldn’t be able to bus tables with one arm immobilized, so we put him on a salad station, arranging plates of ingredients that had already been cut. It was close to Al, who could keep an eye on him, but who also was going about the complex work of cooking. Manny couldn’t help seeing Al’s swift movements, adapted over the years to compensate for his weak arm. Al said nothing for a couple of days, other than to let Manny know what needed to go on the plates, depending on what salad a diner had ordered.

  “You can arrange the plate any way you want,” he told Manny.

  At first, it was all he could do to throw a handful of romaine, some sliced onions and a couple of carrot slices on a plate just to keep up with the orders. He was frustrated, but he was at least doing something instead of lying on his bed.

  Most of the time as a busboy he’d been moving in and out of the kitchen so quickly he hadn’t paid much attention to what was being created there. The plates he’d seen were the ones he was clearing off the tables, either wiped clean by a piece of bread to soak up the last bit of gravy or, worse, filled with picked-over remnants a diner had pushed around with a fork but not savored or enjoyed.

  We wanted to keep him busy and have him absorb the silent message of Al’s success. But we got something unexpected.

  After a few days, Al noticed that when the kitchen was slow, the salads were looking less like a pile of greens dumped on the plate and more like the artist’s palettes Toni had used at the Museum School. Manny was fanning the tomato or pear slices. Placing olives strategically like punctuation marks. Still, Al said nothing.

  You can’t force a message on someone who’s not ready to hear it.

  One night during a lull between the turnover period, when the early diners were eating their cannoli and tiramisu and before the next wave had arrived, Manny was on a break. He was rubbing his shoulder on the broken arm. I fought back the urge to let him off early. I knew he’d done his homework in the afternoon, so if I sent him upstairs, he’d retreat into his headphones. Not a good place, as far as I was concerned. He stood around, watching Al at the stove finishing off some rabbit with olives that had been simmering in wine.

  “Dad, how’d you learn how to cook?”

  “Mostly by doing and by watching Mama Rose and her mother.”

  “Was it what you always wanted to do?”

  “Me? Nah. I was a builder before the war. I figured cooking was women’s work. When I got out of the VA hospital I thought my life was over because I couldn’t work at what I’d been trained to do. You can ask Mama Rose. I was one angry guy. Here, stir this a minute while I check on the lamb in the oven.”

  He handed Manny the wooden spoon and left him at the stove. I watched Manny plunge the spoon in the pot and imitate the scraping motion Al had been using to loosen bits of meat and onions from the bottom. He wasn’t great at it, but he shoved the spoon around enough to keep the meat from sticking.

  Al came back with an order slip in his hand. “Manny, we just got two orders for the rabbit. Plate them up with some potatoes and broccoli rabe.” And then he walked away.

  Manny took two plates from the warmer and spooned out a couple of pieces of rabbit onto each. One at a time he carried them over to the vegetable trays and arranged the potatoes and rabe, then put them under the infrared lamp for the waitstaff to pick up.

  “You want me to plate anything else, Dad?” he called over to Al.

  “Keep an eye on the orders as they come in. I’ve gotta go down to the cellar for some olive oil.”

  Now, I knew very well there were at least two gallons of oil in the cabinet. Al was deliberately leaving Manny on his own. I saw Manny straighten his shoulders. Whatever ache had bothered him earlier seemed to have disappeared. He pulled order slips off the shelf as they came in from the dining room and started arranging plates of linguine with shrimp scampi and eggplant parmigiano. By the time Al came back upstairs he’d plated six different orders.

  He was fast and sometimes a little careless, but he looked as if he was enjoying what he was doing.

  I nodded to Al as he came back into the kitchen. “I think you unlocked a tiger from his cage,” I whispered.

  Al smiled. “I can live with a few screwed-up orders if the kid finds himself.”

  Over the next few weeks Al kept giving Manny more responsibility in the kitchen. It wasn’t always easy. Al could overlook a dropped plate of chicken piccata or a forgotten side of string beans, but he blasted Manny if he got lazy or didn’t clean up any messes he made. Al wanted to do well by this boy to make up for all the years he hadn’t known about him. But he wasn’t going to spoil him or let him get away with anything.

  Manny, for his part, would go into a sulk whenever Al caught him slacking off; he’d scowl and slam heads of lettuce on the counter until he cooled off. But little by little I could see Manny trying harder, picking up little tips Al gave him, taking on extra work when we got really busy.

  You know, even though all three of our other kids had worked in the restaurant as teenagers, none of them had shown the slightest interest in the back of the house. They’d waited tables or bussed, did setup, ran the cash register. The other boys had been helpful with unloading deliveries. But nobody had ever stuck a spoon in a pot except to grab a taste of something for themselves.

  I guess we should’ve seen it coming the day Manny said to us, “I don’t want to go to college.”

  “What is this, you think college was just a place for you to play baseball? Of course you’re going to college.” As far as Al was concerned, there was no discussion.

  “You’re a smart boy, Manny. You got your grades back on track. Dad’s right. Colleges are interested in your mind, not just your pitching arm.”

  “But you always said to us how important work is. Mike and Toni, they’re doing jobs they needed to go to college for. The work I want to do, I don’t need a college education.”

  “What do you want to do?” Al asked him, but we already knew the answer to that.

  “Work in the business with you.”

  There was probably nothing that could have made Al prouder than to have his son say he wanted to join the business. But we both realized the world had changed since we’d started out. You needed a lot more than hard work and street smarts to survive in our business these days.

  “You need an education, Manny.” Al’s voice was firm, but I knew Manny could hear the love underneath his gruff tone.

  “Why not let him go to a college that offers restaurant management?” That was Mike’s suggestion, trying to bridge the gulf between Manny and us. “He doesn’t have to study medieval art or philosophy to get a college degree.”

  “He wants to cook.”

  “Then check out places that’ll let him do both. He knows by now it’s a business, not just a place for making a delicious veal scallopine. Let me look into it, ask around. I’ll see if I can find out what the good schools are.”

  It was a big help to have Mike step in. Because he was still living with us, he understood his brother. He knew what baseball had meant to Manny. If Manny was willing to replace that dream with being a chef, we didn’t want him to be disappointed a second time. But not going to college was out of the question. To Al and me, it was like treating him as a second-class citizen compared to his siblings.

  What if, God forbid, the restaurant failed? We’d survived our mistakes in the past, but who was to say the place would still be thriving for Manny to take over? No, he had to have something to fall back on. But you can’t tell a seventeen-year-old, even one who’d made it out of Cuba, that you need to be prepared for anything life threw at you.

  Al still wanted him to go to Villanova.

  “You can’t ask him to replace Al Jr.,” I said to him. “We agreed when we
adopted Manny that he’s not a substitute for what we lost. He’s having a hard enough time measuring up to his own dreams. Don’t saddle him with that, as well.”

  By Thanksgiving of his senior year in high school, Manny’s arm had healed sufficiently to let him prepare simple dishes in the restaurant, not just plating entrées and putting salads together. He cooked on Saturdays and was often downstairs before either Al or me, chopping onions and garlic and taking deliveries. He’d have trays of lasagne assembled and waiting in the refrigerator before Al and I had finished our first cup of coffee.

  He worked side by side with Al and me that year to prepare the Thanksgiving meal for the family. The crowd had grown, with so many of my nieces and nephews getting married. We invited Hazel to join us. I didn’t want to have Toni gone a second year in a row, but I felt bad if that meant Hazel would be alone for the holiday; Bobby’s sister, Sandra, was going to her in-laws’ with her husband. I thought she might say no, since she’d never seemed very comfortable at our place, but I guess the pull of being with Bobby and Toni, now that Toni was pregnant, was strong enough to give her a reason to accept. She was older than Al and me, in her sixties. She’d married and had her children late in life. So the prospect of a grandchild was one she’d waited for a long time.

  But I knew even she had questioned whether Bobby and Toni had rushed into marriage because Toni was pregnant. I guess she was looking for reasons her son had married someone as “unexpected” as Toni. I could never shake the feeling that Hazel thought Bobby had married into a family that was beneath him.

  I’d hoped that Toni would get to the restaurant early to arrange the antipasto platters like she always did. But apparently Hazel had prepared one of Bobby’s favorite breakfasts—pork tenderloin in cream gravy and cheese grits—and it was almost noon by the time they’d finished.

  They walked in the door of the restaurant just before 2:00 p.m., Toni arriving like a guest instead of one of the family who contributes to putting the meal together.

  “What’s the matter, Rose?” Al had asked me when I realized Toni wasn’t coming to assemble the antipasto. It wasn’t that I resented the extra work. Most of the dishes had been prepared in the days before—cannellini beans marinated with garlic and parsley, tuna mixed with onions and capers, my own eggplant and mushrooms pickled in August. It was just my sense of a shift, a slight change that shouldn’t have been a big deal to me, but was.

  Al came up behind me and kissed my neck as I was rolling prosciutto to put around the edge of the platter.

  “You’re going to make the antipasto too salty,” he murmured as I dabbed my tears with the handkerchief I kept in my apron pocket. “She’s married now. She’s got her mother-in-law staying with her. Give her a chance to be a good daughter-in-law, like you are.”

  Al had a way of easing me into a better frame of mind. He knew he could soothe me with a nuzzle or a kiss. I was fifty years old but I felt like a teenager when he put his arms around me. And he was right. I remembered how I’d felt trying to adapt to Al’s family when the difference was only the distance between Naples and Calabria—a few more hot peppers than I was used to. Toni had a lot more to cope with, and I had to stop myself from wishing time could stand still.

  “She’s coming to dinner, even if she isn’t here in the kitchen,” Al murmured.

  When Manny had a free minute, he danced over to the counter and rolled a few dozen slices of Genoa salami before slicing the fennel and arranging it on platters with green and black olives.

  “We’ll get it done, Mama Rose.”

  And we did.

  Manny whisked the turkey gravy at the last minute, freeing my hands to fry the batter-dipped broccoli and cauliflower in hot oil.

  Al and Mike each carried out one of the thirty-pound turkeys we’d roasted; a third one we kept in the warmer for second helpings.

  The place was pandemonium that year—so many kids. We had a children’s table for the ones old enough to sit by themselves, although more than one of my nieces had to cut the turkey on their kids’ plates. We had at least three in high chairs at the big table.

  Hazel seemed overwhelmed at first by the noise and confusion, but I saw how attentive Toni was to her mother-in-law, introducing her to aunts and uncles, serving her graciously. And I have to admit, I watched to see if Hazel appreciated it—my daughter’s care and our food. She ate like a bird, only putting little spoonfuls on her plate of the unfamiliar parts of the meal, but at least she tried things and didn’t turn her nose up at the antipasto or manicotti before tasting them. And each bite seemed to soften her expression, widening the smile on her lips the more she ate.

  After Thanksgiving, Mike sat on Manny to get his college applications done. He even drove him down to Rhode Island to see a school where he could get both the chef’s training and the management courses he’d need. But while they were there, they heard from one of the other families visiting the school about the new Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Manny’s attitude up to this point had been resignation. He knew we weren’t willing to back down from insisting on college but his heart wasn’t in it and he was just going through the motions.

  He was ready to get in the car and go back to Boston, but Mike decided they should keep driving and take a look at the Culinary Institute.

  “What have we got to lose, except a few hours?” he said to Manny. “Who knows, maybe this is the one.”

  And it was.

  When Manny and Mike got back from New York, Manny couldn’t shut up about what he’d seen and the people he’d talked to. He also realized how hard it was to get into and was suddenly on fire to put together the best application he could.

  Al wasn’t crazy about the fact that he was only going to get an associate’s degree and I wasn’t happy that the school was hours away in New York instead of just down the expressway in Providence. But Mike spoke up for Manny.

  “I talked to some of my restaurant clients at the bank, and they all say this place is the best. If he’s accepted, it’s like going to the Harvard of the cooking world. If you make him go to a lesser school, even if it’s close to home and he comes out with a bachelor’s degree, he’ll just be wasting his time. Look, we’ve finally got him excited about school. Let him try for this. To him, it’s like being drafted for a Red Sox ‘A’ team.”

  When the acceptance letter arrived in the mail, I could hardly wait for him to come home from school. I propped the envelope up against a glass at the table. When he came into the kitchen for something to eat, he headed first for the refrigerator and grabbed some leftover pasta e piselli. He was going to eat it cold, but I took it from him.

  “Sit and let me warm it up for you.” I steered him to his chair and waited for him to see the envelope staring him in the face. He let out a whoop and then held it for a minute, weighing it in his hand.

  “Okay. Time to face the music.” His hands were shaking as he picked up a knife and slit open the envelope. Then he read out loud from the letter: “‘Dear Mr. Dante, we regret to inform you…’”

  My heart sank. It wasn’t what I’d expected. Oh, boy, he was going to need a lot more than my pasta. And then I noticed the impish grin and the sparkle in his eyes.

  “‘…that we have turned down countless qualified candidates to make room for someone as brilliant and talented as you.’”

  I flipped the dish towel in my hand at him. “That’s not what it says!”

  “You’re right. It says, ‘Congratulations! Now you’re really going to work your ass off.’”

  I hugged him and he got up from the table to dance me around the room.

  “Go downstairs and tell your father. And call Mike!”

  We sent Manny off to CIA in September and suddenly the house and the restaurant were too quiet. Mike and Papa were still with us, but Mike was almost never home, between his job and the social life he had, which seemed, as it always had, to center around the bars that were flourishing down near the waterfront.

/>   The run-down wharves on the edge of the neighborhood were being bought up and turned into offices and apartments right on the harbor. They drew a lot of young people and Mike, never one to miss an opportunity to make friends, had quite a circle that made the Rusty Scupper bar their home away from home. When they got hungry, he led them like the pied piper to Paradiso.

  He was usually surrounded by friends but never seemed to have one special girl. I knew young people were taking more time than our generation had to settle down, but he was already twenty-six with no one in sight.

  I asked him about it one night when he was actually home before midnight and he sat in the kitchen with me. It was a chance I didn’t want to lose, and although I was bone-tired, I heated up some ’scarole soup with the little meatballs he’d loved as a kid.

  “Ma, you don’t have to feed me. I can do it myself. Why don’t you go to bed?”

  “It’s okay, sweetheart. I don’t see you much, even though you live under the same roof. How’s work?” I started out with the easy stuff.

  “It’s fine. But I might make a change. I don’t think banking is the right place for me.”

  “I have to tell you, Mike, knowing who the bankers were when I was at Shawmut, I didn’t think you were cut from the same cloth. You like your good times too much.”

  “Is this going to be a lecture on my extracurricular activities?”

  I threw up my hands. “Excuse me, I’m only your mother.”

  “Don’t worry, Ma. I know you think I spend too much time partying. I bet you want to ask me when I’m going to settle down. It’s all I heard at Thanksgiving, not just from the aunts but also from my overly fertile cousins, who seem to believe it’s their mission in life to triple the Italian-American population of Boston.”

  “I want you to be as happy as Daddy and me, that’s all. I’d hate to see you go through life alone. Sometimes I wonder if you have it too good here at home. Not that I want you to leave. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I don’t want you to become a mama’s boy, so tied to my apron strings that you can’t find a girl who lives up to your expectations. Like your father’s brother Rocco, who still eats at your grandma Antonella’s every night and never got married. If you ask me, he got trapped taking care of his mother twenty years ago and wound up feeding her cats instead of his own children. I’d kick you out in a minute if I thought you’d still be here when you’re forty.”