“I haven’t found the right person yet, Ma.”
“Do you honestly think the right person’s going to be sitting next to you some night at the Scupper?”
I sighed; I could see we weren’t getting far. “Change of subject,” I said. “What did you mean earlier, about changing jobs?”
“One of my customers at the bank is looking for an accountant. We’ve been talking.”
“What kind of business?”
“He runs a magazine in one of the converted buildings down on the waterfront. He’s the smartest guy I’ve ever met, a real Renaissance man. He knows a lot—art, science, business. Like Leonardo da Vinci. I feel I could learn a lot from him.”
“How long has he been in business?”
“About ten years. The magazine is solid, doing well. And he’s thinking about expanding. That’s why he’s hiring.”
“So what are you waiting for? You have any doubts about this?”
“I guess, despite my party-boy reputation, I’m still a numbers guy, and I want to run a few more before I make a commitment. I think I learned that from you, if I’m not mistaken.” He smiled.
“I don’t think you’re asking for my advice—or are you?”
“You’re a good businesswoman, Ma. Not just a great cook and mother. What do you think I should do?”
“Bring me a copy of this magazine. And invite him to dinner next week.”
And so, instead of figuring out where Mike was headed in his love life, I got to pass inspection on his possible new boss. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Mike’s description. Was he going to be an egghead, talking over my head? I had subscriptions to Life, Ladies’ Home Journal and a restaurant trade magazine. If I had time to sit down and read, it usually wasn’t a magazine. So I couldn’t really be helpful on that front. But I’d always been a pretty good judge of people. I knew I’d be able to tell if he’d do well by Mike.
I liked Graham Bennett the moment he looked me in the eye and shook my hand. He wasn’t a big man physically, but he carried himself with confidence. His eyes behind his black-rimmed glasses were warm and direct. In spite of how smart Mike claimed he was, he wasn’t showing off his intelligence at my table. He showed respect for Al and me, and seemed to understand what it took to run a successful restaurant. I wouldn’t have been able to tell if his magazine ideas were going to work, but his answers to my questions about how he ran his business satisfied me.
I gave Mike my thumbs-up in the kitchen when he helped me get the coffee. Mike handed in his notice at the bank a week later and right after Christmas started working at the magazine.
If only finding him a steady girlfriend could be this easy, I thought.
Changes
PAPA PASSED AWAY in the spring of 1974. He was eighty-nine and it seemed as if he’d decided it was time to go. His failing eyesight had excluded him from the card games he loved to play at his club, and most of his compares, who for years had whiled away the afternoons with a demitasse of espresso and a cigar with him, had one by one slipped away. He was practically the last one left. Once again the whole family gathered for a funeral, ten years after Mama’s death. The last month I’d spent almost constantly at his bedside, watching the life seep out of him. The little he spoke was in Italian, as if the closer he got to the end, the more his mind returned to his beginning, his childhood in Italy. With his passing, I was now the oldest generation. Both my mother and father were gone, and without them as anchors, we started to drift apart as a family.
Thanksgiving 1974 was the first time that all my sisters and brothers and their families didn’t gather together at Paradiso.
“The family’s getting too big and the kids are too widespread for us all to come to Boston,” my sister Bella said, calling from Albany to excuse herself and her family.
My brother Sal and his wife decided to take a cruise since their kids were going to their in-laws.
It bothered me. It is not that I took it personally, that they suddenly weren’t coming to my place. It was just how quickly, without Papa, they no longer considered it important for the family to be together. Maybe I should’ve seen it as less work for me and less agita all around. In a family as large as ours, somebody always had a beef; there was always a burning topic that people were never in agreement on—the Church, the president, the football game.
I should’ve appreciated the fact that it was going to be a quieter holiday than we’d had in many years. Even Toni, Bobby and the baby were going to Indiana. I knew I’d cook too much food. Nobody ate the way we used to. For days before, I was slamming cupboard doors and making and remaking lists as one family member or another called with his or her excuses.
“Rose, what’s eating you?” Al asked me. “Is it too much to do Thanksgiving this year after Papa’s death? You want somebody else to take it on?”
“No! That’s the last thing I want. I’m disappointed, that’s all. I feel like the family’s splintering and I should be able to hold it together, like Mama did.”
Al gave me a neck rub as I sat at the kitchen table refiguring quantities.
“Your sister Bella hit the nail on the head. The family is now so many families, with all the kids getting married and having babies. Maybe it’s time for them to each have their own traditions.”
“I know you’re probably right, but I’m not ready. Thanksgiving to me is a room full of people, all talking at once and enjoying my food.”
“So, let me get this straight. It’s a room full of people, not necessarily family?”
“Well, if I can’t have the family, I guess, yes, I’d still want a full house.”
“Then let’s fill the house. I bet Mike’s got friends with no family in town. And I bet those classmates of Manny’s from other parts of the country aren’t going home.”
And that’s how we made up for my own family’s absence that Thanksgiving and began to throw open the doors to friends who had nowhere else to go.
Mike’s boss, Graham Bennett, came that year. It surprised me that he wasn’t married, a successful man like him and nearly thirty-five. But I figured when you start a company, there’s not much time for starting a family, too. Al and I were lucky that we were together and had already begun having kids when we opened Paradiso. I couldn’t imagine not having a family.
The next few years were peaceful ones for us. To begin with, nobody died. Manny graduated from the Culinary Institute in 1976 and came home with his hair four inches longer and his head full of ideas. He and Al jostled each other so much for control of the stove that, for the sake of my sanity, I told them they had to work different shifts. It was time Al got a break, anyway.
In the winter of 1977 we took a whole month off for our trip to Florida. As Joey had gotten older and Toni got pregnant again, she was more willing to leave him with us so she could get some rest. And when her second son, Benjamin, was born, it seemed like the right moment to take Joey to Florida with us for his first excursion to Disney World. That gave Toni a chance to devote all her attention to Ben and us a chance to spoil our grandson.
Around this time, the neighborhood was changing, ever since the city had spruced up Quincy Market, a derelict collection of old warehouses, and turned it into shops and food stalls and restaurants. One of the restaurants was a high-end Italian place and the owners had a cooking show on public television. She was British and he was Italian, and frankly, she made him out to be a buffoon. She was supposedly explaining Italian food as if she were the expert and he’d get all emotional over the seasoning in the meatballs. It was embarrassing. I also went to eat at their restaurant and it wasn’t so good. They were trying too hard to make the food elegant instead of satisfying.
But Quincy Market turned out to be good for our business. It attracted a lot of tourists following the Freedom Trail, which guided people around all the historical sights in Boston. Even though Quincy Market was on the other side of the expressway, people would come over to the North End to find Paul Revere’s house and the O
ld North Church and then stay for dinner.
Manny should’ve had a cooking show. He had a flair in the kitchen and was a lot better looking than Luigi and his snotty wife.
Manny had learned growing up in the restaurant that we treated our customers like family. Al always came out from the kitchen during the evening to see how people were enjoying their meals, especially if they were regulars. Manny started doing that on the nights he was cooking. Some of the old-timers remembered when he’d been a busboy. He had an excellent memory and would greet people by name the second time they came to eat.
He also began to attract a new clientele for us—young, very pretty women. Once word got out about the good-looking chef at Paradiso, the girls from the offices and banks along the waterfront started to flock to the restaurant on their lunch hour or on Friday nights.
The place was packed. When we heard the building next door was going up for sale, Al and I both had the same idea. We could break down the wall on the first floor and expand. We’d hesitated to do it before; the original restaurant had been all we thought we could handle. But with Manny, who was eager to do more—enlarge the menu, open up the kitchen so diners could see the meal prepared as it if were a show—we decided it was the right time.
Manny joked about naming the new section the Inferno and having an open-hearth brick oven in the front of the house to bake pizzas. But Al nixed that idea.
“Not everybody will get the joke, and I don’t want people saying, ‘I’m going to Hell,’ when somebody asks where they’re eating dinner.”
It took more than a year to get everything done once we’d made the decision. Permits, loans, an architect who cost an arm and a leg but who came recommended by one of Manny’s teachers at CIA. The whole thing was a headache for me, especially acting as a buffer and a go-between for Al and Manny. Al liked the tried-and-true, the traditional, comfortable place we’d built from nothing over thirty years. Manny, a little too full of himself and his education, kept pushing for this or that.
“Everything has a cost. Show me how we make them up at the cash register, your fancy ideas. We’re not Stella Mare down on the waterfront. We’re on Salem Street.”
In the end, we compromised. We deferred the brick oven but put a half wall in the back of the new section so people could watch the grill; we also added more Northern Italian to the menu.
When we finally had the grand reopening Al and Manny were speaking to each other again, Toni was pregnant for the third time and Mike, at twenty-nine still wasn’t married.
He did, however, decide to move out. He just went upstairs. The Boscos, who’d rented the apartment on the top floor for forty years, decided after the blizzard of 1978 that they’d had enough of Boston winters and bought a mobile home in Palm Beach Gardens.
Mike jumped at the place when I started worrying about finding someone to rent it.
“Let me take it, Ma, and pay the rent. You said yourself you don’t want me still living with you when I’m forty.”
“I meant that you should be living in your own home with a wife.”
But I gave in. He needed his own place, married or not, and if he didn’t go upstairs, sooner or later he’d move, maybe out of the neighborhood. I half expected Manny to want to go with him, but Mike was pretty quick to quash that idea, and we wouldn’t have let him, anyway. He was too young, too headstrong and there were already too many beautiful girls chasing after him at the restaurant. I didn’t need them trooping up the stairs, too.
For our fortieth wedding anniversary, Al took me to Italy. I didn’t think he’d be willing to leave the restaurant for that long, but Manny was proving himself, even at twenty-four. What a trip! We treated ourselves to la dolce vita, staying at first-class hotels and eating at the best restaurants in Rome and Florence and Venice. Al and I made mental notes on the dishes, comparing them to what we offered at Paradiso.
“They’re using rosemary in this bean dish.”
“I like what they did with the prosciutto and figs. We could do it in the summer.”
After a whirlwind tour through the famous sites, we relaxed on Capri for a weekend. I’d bought a new maillot swimsuit for the beach but I felt like an old woman when I saw everyone else, even women my age, in bikinis. Al noticed, too.
“You could be wearing one of those, Rose. You’ve still got the body for it.”
At lunchtime, when we walked back up from the beach, he stopped at a shop that had bathing suits displayed in the window and pulled me in.
He flipped through the rack and pulled out a couple of colorful bikinis, all in shades of aqua and green. I tried each of them on and watched Al’s face light up in admiration. We bought one of the suits and then strolled back to the hotel arm in arm. The Italians have the right idea about siesta. There’s nothing more relaxing than going to bed in the middle of the afternoon with the sound of the sea outside your window and a ceiling fan rotating slowly above your head.
I couldn’t remember when Al and I had last been able to enjoy lovemaking with such disregard for everything else in our lives. We had no responsibilities. Not an aging and ill father or kids struggling through one crisis or another on the way to adulthood or a business that demanded so much of our energy and attention. That was the true luxury of this vacation, not the fancy hotels or the celebrated restaurants. We’d been so busy swallowing up as much of Italy as we could that we’d forgotten to take the time just to enjoy each other. But Capri changed that.
Al couldn’t wait to get me back to the hotel. He took me in his arms as soon as we were inside the door.
“Do you have any idea how good you looked to me back in the store?”
“I think so.” I smiled through the kisses.
We pulled back the covers on the bed and stretched out. That delicious first contact of skin on skin sent ripples through me. Even though I knew every muscle, every line and scar on his body, it still felt thrilling to me. I hoped we’d never tire of this, because in many ways it was what had helped us survive. We were crazy about each other. In all the years of our marriage, through all the ups and downs, Al’s arms wrapped around me, holding me close, always reminded me what was important.
In the final days of the trip we rented a little Fiat and drove to Calabria to visit cousins of Al’s on his father’s side. They didn’t have much, a small farm in an out-of-the-way village. The women, my age or younger, looked years older, worn out by the hard work and their large families. I saw old women in the marketplace who could have been my mother, their heads wrapped in the kind of kerchief Mama wore when she was cleaning the house. They were bent with age but still moving with purpose, haggling over the price of a sack of onions or half a pound of tripe.
If Mama and Papa hadn’t left for America, this was the life she would’ve led. Who am I kidding? This was the life I would’ve led. I shook my head at the poverty in the village. Most of the houses didn’t have toilets. Al’s cousin at least had plumbing in his house and even a washing machine, but it was like the tub and wringer Mama had used forty years ago. I felt that Italy was two countries—the postcard country of the Sistine Chapel and gondolas, and this forgotten place in the hills of the south, where time seemed to have stopped a hundred years ago. Some people might think it was romantic, like the hippies in America living in communes. But I thought it was horrifying.
When Al and I were getting ready to leave, I felt we needed to do something for his cousins, who, despite how little they had, willingly shared it all with us.
“Do you think they’d be insulted if we gave them money as a gift? They need so much, I don’t know where to begin to help them.”
“Tino has his pride. I’m sure he’d refuse it if we tried to give him an envelope.”
“What if I gave it to his wife? Or we put it on the dresser with a thank-you note? I remember when my aunt Cecilia came back to visit her sister, she told Mama she felt she couldn’t go without leaving some cash, even though she’d brought gifts for everybody.”
We wound up tucking several hundred-thousand lire notes in a card I’d picked up at St. Peter’s in Rome. Maybe all I was doing was easing my conscience, since we were the lucky ones, the ones who’d made it in America. But I can remember my parents sending money to Italy when we were young. When Papa came home every week with his pay, Mama would parcel it out into envelopes—so much for rent, so much for food, so much for those left behind in Italy. It was what you did for family.
ROSE
1980–81
Disintegration
THE SPRING AFTER we returned from Italy, our granddaughter, Vanessa, was born. I went up to Bedford and stayed with the boys while Toni was in the hospital. Joey was already in first grade and Ben was in nursery school, and Toni didn’t want them to miss any days.
We had fun, the boys and I. We baked cookies and built Lego space stations and I even got them to sit still for a couple of Tomie dePaola stories that I found on the bookshelf in their room. I liked that Toni had Italian stories for the boys. Strega Nona made me laugh, reminding me of the old women in the neighborhood with moles on their chins and bowls of water and olive oil for warding off the evil eye. They used to scare me to death when I was a kid. But The Clown of God was my favorite. One of the nuns at St. John’s had told us the story one day in church, in front of the statue of the Madonna with the Christ Child on her lap holding the golden ball. After I heard that story as a seven-year-old, I used to sneak into church to see if He ever played with the ball the juggler in the story had tossed Him.
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