“Hah! Don’t be blind and stubborn, Toni. Are you ready for him to ask you to marry him? Because that’s what this trip to Indiana is all about.”
“So are you going to let me go?”
“Tell him to have his mother call me. Then I’ll decide.”
After my mother talked to Bobby’s mother, she discussed the invitation with my aunt Cookie, my godmother Patsy and finally my father. The women had concurred. I was old enough and Bobby serious enough about his intentions; I would be allowed to go. My father, faced with these three women and their conviction, threw up his hands and gave his approval. I hugged him.
My mother, in the midst of preparing Thanksgiving dinner for the family, made extra for me to take to Belle Arbor. We were driving with Bobby’s sister, Sandra, and her husband, who lived in Portsmouth. My mother made a lasagne with the handmade fennel sausage that she got from my uncle Sal, the butcher who supplied the restaurant.
“I froze it so it’ll keep in the cooler while you’re driving. Tell Bobby’s mother, one hour at three hundred and fifty degrees and keep it covered with tin foil till the last ten minutes.”
She also put together a basket of her own preserves—a quart of plum tomatoes with whole basil leaves floating among them; eggplant strips pickled in olive oil, wine vinegar and hot pepper flakes; marinated wild mushrooms she’d picked herself in some secret pocket of the urban landscape she’d discovered years ago.
Belle Arbor, Indiana, is a long way from the North End. I should have recognized what that trip foreshadowed about my marriage to Bobby.
Hazel, Bobby’s mother, while politely grateful for the provisions I had brought, clearly had never encountered anything like them and didn’t know what to do with them. Out of deference to me she did actually bake the lasagne and we ate it for supper on Saturday night—not as a preturkey course on Thanksgiving Day as my own family did.
The meal we sat down to in Hazel’s elegantly decorated dining room, with monogrammed silver on the table and striped silk upholstery on the Chippendale chairs, resembled nothing I had ever eaten, except for the turkey itself. She served scalloped oysters, which, I discovered, consisted mostly of crushed soda crackers and lots of cream and butter; succotash with corn, lima beans and an ample amount of paprika; corn bread stuffing—which Hazel called “dressing”—and an aspic made with V8 juice that had stuffed olives, celery and green peppers suspended in its shimmering middle.
The rest of my stay in Belle Arbor featured equally unfamiliar meals as Bobby, Hazel, Sandra, her husband and I were invited to the homes of one after another of Hazel’s social circle. I was fed breakfasts of cheese grits and scrapple, lunches of Smithfield ham salad coated in homemade mayonnaise and dinners of pork tenderloins smothered in cream gravy. I consumed more dairy products in four days than I’d tasted in four months back in Boston.
The culinary journey wasn’t the only revelation. I noticed that everyone in Belle Arbor—at least, everyone Hazel knew—had a green living room. Various shades and textures of green, to be sure, but all green. Refined, subdued, punctuated by bowls of freshly cut flowers and untouched coffee-table books about the Silk Road or the Great Barrier Reef. The bookcases were filled with books and not overflowing with family photographs. I encountered no flocked velvet wallpaper or white-and-gold furniture upholstered in wine-red brocade—the staples of my mother’s and aunts’ living rooms.
Throughout the visit I felt as if I were on display, like Pocahontas in London. The strange native of the Eastern city who had captivated Bobby and turned his head from the daughters of Belle Arbor, who were waiting with their Tupperware containers full of tuna casserole and braised short ribs—if only he’d sit at their tastefully decorated tables.
We returned to Boston with a slab of Smithfield ham and a container of Quaker grits to which Hazel had thoughtfully taped the recipe for cheese grits. For Christmas, she sent me a copy of the Joy of Cooking with all of Bobby’s favorite dishes carefully bookmarked. It was the first cookbook I’d ever used. I grew up watching my mother cook with no recipes at all except what was in her head. She would taste and adjust, with a handful of chopped parsley or a fragment of cheese hand-grated and tossed into the pot. I used to think she’d been born with the knowledge of how to cook, something she’d absorbed in the womb.
Following a cookbook was a new experience for me, but I threw myself into learning how to produce the dishes Bobby had grown up with. Once a week I took the T to his apartment in Kendall Square near MIT, carrying a shopping bag filled with ingredients I’d never seen in my mother’s pantry. I made pot roast with carrots and potatoes, Cornish hens stuffed with rice and onions, and pork chops with sauerkraut.
After I started to cook for him, Bobby and I became lovers. We’d leave the dishes on the drop-leaf table, a hand-me-down from Hazel, and slide into his narrow bed. I never spent the night. I lived at home and there was no way my mother and father would have condoned or understood such behavior. They didn’t even know I was cooking for him, because they would’ve disapproved of my being alone in his apartment.
On the nights I did cook, I told them we were going out to dinner.
“Why do you always go to strangers to eat?” asked my mother one night. “What’s wrong with bringing him to Paradiso once in a while?”
I rolled my eyes, memories of the dining rooms in Belle Arbor rising up alongside the dusky interior of Paradiso, its mural of the Bay of Naples stretching like a fresco across the rear wall, the bud vases of silk flowers on each table, its antipasto table covered with platters of provolone and soprasatto, olives, anchovies and cherry peppers. I had a hard time envisioning Bobby finding something he’d want to eat on the menu.
I slipped further from my family and my neighborhood with each recipe I mastered in the Joy of Cooking. I made buttermilk pancakes from scratch, separating the eggs and beating the whites into lofty peaks. I made hors d’oeuvres. Hors d’oeuvres! A nonexistent concept in my family, along with the daily Belle Arbor ritual of cocktail hour. My mother and father didn’t drink before dinner. They were too busy cooking it. But I learned how to pile crabmeat and cocktail sauce on cream cheese and surround the platter with Triscuits. I hard-boiled eggs and deviled them with Hellmann’s and paprika and mustard. I wrapped bacon around water chestnuts and chicken livers to make rumaki.
Bobby ate it all, reveling in each dish. When the weather got warmer, I prepared foods we could take on picnics. He bought a Kawasaki motorcycle in April and on Sunday afternoons, when Paradiso was closed and I didn’t have to waitress, we headed out Route 2 to Walden Pond or Mount Wachusett and ate homemade biscuits stuffed with ham salad and sweet pickles and drank iced tea laced with mint.
Bobby was brilliant and funny and wild about me. I sketched him as he leaned against a tree, his leather-clad legs stretched out, his calf nestled against my hip as I quickly moved my charcoal across the page. He smiled as he watched me, his blue eyes intently following the movement of my hand.
“Have you thought about what you’ll do when you graduate?”
“I’ve applied for teaching jobs. If that falls through, I can always increase my hours at Paradiso. My parents would be happy to see more of me.” I spoke those words dryly. As much as they were true—that my mother and father wanted me close to home and in the business—Paradiso was the last place I intended to spend my future.
“I just got a job offer out here in Concord. I was thinking about moving out of Cambridge, finding an apartment closer to work.”
“That would certainly alter our pattern. I can’t exactly hop on the T and get out here.”
“Actually, I was thinking you could move in with me.”
“Right. Over Rose’s dead body, as my mother so colorfully likes to emphasize when one of her kids wants to do something she regards as outrageous.”
“Would she say that if I were to marry you first?”
I stopped sketching and looked up, into his face, at the smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.
He leaned forward and pulled me into him, crushing the sketch pad between us, blurring the lines of the face on the page.
“Will you marry me, Toni?”
And I said yes, for all the reasons, right and wrong, that we say yes when we’re twenty-two and the future looks vast and lonely. Did I love him? Yes, in that sense of wonder and awe I had for this gorgeous man who knew how to make me feel alive and beautiful. Did I acknowledge to myself that he was my escape route from the confines of Salem Street and all it represented? I knew deep in my heart that the only way my parents would let me go would be in marriage. My memory of the twinkle in my mother’s eye and her conviction—that the only reason a boy invites a girl home for Thanksgiving is because he wants to marry her—was floating in my brain. I had resisted the idea back in November, hadn’t really considered marriage for myself—with Bobby or anyone else—despite the fact that girlfriends and cousins were busy getting fitted for bridal gowns and asking casts of thousands to be in their wedding parties.
I had vague plans to develop my craft as a printmaker. My master teacher at the Museum School, Peter Ricci, sat with me one night while I waited for an acid bath to complete the etching on a plate I’d finally finished—a portrait of a wild-haired man I’d sketched one afternoon at the Boston Public Library.
“You have to make a commitment.” Peter was frustrated by what he saw as my divided loyalties. He knew I was taking courses to get my teacher certification and he thought it was pulling me away from my true work, diluting my art.
“You have talent, Toni. But you’re not putting time and energy into developing it. I thought you were serious about your art, but this last year you’ve become—I don’t know—conventional, predictable.”
He threw up his hands, weathered, nicotine-stained, bearing fine white scars where gouging tools had slipped.
“Go be a teacher, if that’s what you want. Find some nice middle school in Lexington where you can demonstrate the color wheel and show them how to do collages of their favorite sports or animals. Don’t take risks or experiment. Because that’s where you’re heading, and you’ll never be an artist if you think you can straddle both worlds.”
I recoiled emotionally as if he’d struck me. I loved the work I did in the print studio. It was in the basement of the school, a warren of rooms lit by hanging lamps that cast pools of warm light on the scarred wooden workbenches and left pockets of dim shadow in the corners that reminded me of the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s Christ at Emmaus. The play of light and dark, illuminating and obscuring. Even the smells were familiar and comforting—the bite of the hydrochloric acid in the shallow tubs that lined the wall; the metallic taint of the inks; the distinctive odor of the hard rubber rollers I used to ink my plates. We were a secret society, we printmakers. Unlike the painters who craved the light, we were a clan of cave dwellers working in the dark because of the light-sensitive films we used on our silk screens. We were pale, our eyes attuned to seeing what others often missed.
The hours I spent in that basement were precious to me. A hiding place. But I knew I couldn’t stay there permanently. For one thing, my parents had imbued me with a work ethic. You had a duty, a responsibility—to your family, to yourself—to put food on the table, keep a roof over your head. We all worked in the restaurant—me, my brothers Mike and Manny, even my grandparents.
My parents were proud that I had gone to college, but as far as they were concerned, there was a straight line—unbroken—from graduation to a job. Printmaking was not a job. My father called art “a casino,” a gamble as tenuous as sitting at a blackjack table in Vegas.
“I don’t care how beautiful your work is. If it’s not bringing in a steady paycheck, it’s not work.”
“You could teach, Toni. A girl as smart as you. Look at Marie Filizolla. She gets the summers off. You could help out in the restaurant during the tourist season.”
Little by little, I felt my mother shaping my unfinished parts, rounding me out to fit the mold of Italian womanhood. Slightly updated, of course, for the education she had never attained. Marriage, a teaching job and beautiful hand-printed Christmas cards that she could hang in Paradiso and boast about to customers. “My daughter’s artwork. She’s the one who painted the mural on the wall.”
Let’s face it. I was too scared of the unknown, too unsure of my own talent to embrace Peter’s view of my possible future as an artist. I got the teaching job. I married Bobby. I knew what I was doing. I was staying safe.
Return to the Neighborhood
I SHOULD HAVE UNDERSTOOD that safety is an illusion, especially after reading C. S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle stories to my children. Heroes and heroines don’t hide from danger and the unknown. They plunge into it, even though they’re terrified, and come out the other side scarred but wiser and in possession of whatever is necessary to save the world.
All I wanted to save was my children, and at first, after Bobby left me, I thought I had to do it on my own. I felt like the cliché of my generation—educated professional woman, single mother, in possession of half the wedding gifts. I got the Cuisinart and the vacuum cleaner. He got the stereo system and the color TV. Bobby traveled light when he left on his Kawasaki, but his lawyer made sure his share of the household goods were shipped to Colorado, along with half the proceeds from the sale of our raised ranch when the time came.
The loneliness and exhaustion were nothing new to me. Bobby had been emotionally missing from our lives long before he walked out the door. I joined a single-parent group that had just formed in Cambridge, people who were exploring the idea of living communally, or at least matching up fragmented families. It was like “let’s see if my jagged edges fit into your empty spaces.” I met with three different people and their kids—a tortured dad who seemed to have self-pity oozing out of his pores, a British woman, several years older than I, whose main interest in the arrangement was to find a live-in babysitter, and a woman about my age whom I liked well enough but whose child drove me bananas. With three children of my own, including an infant, I wasn’t considered a prime catch. I made a list for myself, one of those two-column charts, placing in the plus or minus column the issues I’d identified in each household. Some were as simple as “not enough bedrooms,” while others were more complicated, like “doesn’t believe in setting limits.” I had almost nothing in the plus columns for any of them.
The kids and I went to Sunday dinner at my parents’ shortly after the robbery. My mother got down on the floor with Vanessa and played finger games with her. Manny and Mike taught the boys how to play Pong. The sweet aroma of Mom’s chicken salmi wafted into the living room from the kitchen. Outside the windows the sun was shining and the street was bustling. The plus column was getting crowded. After we ate, I spoke to my parents.
“Mom, Dad, when did you say that apartment would be vacant?”
We waited until the school year was finished, and then the kids and I moved in over the summer. I enrolled Ben and Joe at St. John’s and kept my job at Bedford High. I spent July and August showing the boys the neighborhood—how to cross the street safely, where the playgrounds were, who had the best lemon ice.
When Mom sent Joe on his first errand, to walk down to Giuffre’s fish market on the corner and pick up an order of octopus and squid, he started out looking over this shoulder as he passed each doorway while Mom stood on the stoop at Paradiso, smiling and waving at him. He finally ducked into the store and out of sight.
Mom remained in the doorway, her eyes glistening with tears.
“How many times have you stood here, watching one of us walk down the street?”
She picked up the corner of her apron and wiped her eyes. “I’ll never tire of it. It’s the first taste of independence any of you got. And you always knew I’d be waiting for you right on this spot when you came home.”
A few minutes later Joe strode down the sidewalk carrying a bag that was almost as big as he was. He was bursting with what he’d see
n.
“Big bloody buckets of fish heads the guy was chopping off, and spiky things with slippery insides and black ropy things he said were eels. It was really gross!”
For a kid who’d grown up in a subdivision with three different models of houses repeated endlessly along winding streets with names like Meadowlark and Robin and Cardinal, Joe adapted to city life with unbridled gusto. Sharing a playground with a bunch of other kids—especially one on the edge of the harbor—was far superior to playing with his kid brother on his own swing set.
Ben, on the other hand, was slower to warm to all the changes in his life. No longer the baby, not quite understanding where his daddy had gone and having to sleep in a strange room for the second time in a few months, all took their toll. He didn’t want to go to the playground. He would only eat pasta with butter and cheese. He would’ve been quite happy to spend the whole day in front of the TV playing Pong if I’d let him.
“Give him time,” Mom said. “Once he goes to school in September and makes some friends in the neighborhood, he’ll be a changed boy.”
I wanted to believe in my mother’s simple conviction that the rhythm and patterns of life in her familiar and close-knit world would heal us. But I knew enough about Bobby’s mental illness to be aware that his children were more likely to develop it than children who didn’t have a parent who was manic depressive. In her own way, though, my mother was right. Biology wasn’t the only determinant. I was most concerned about Ben, but I was determined to give all three of my children the love and stability that coming back to the neighborhood represented.
I kept them occupied with treks to the aquarium and the Children’s Museum, the children’s room at the library, the wading pool in the Boston Common. We put Vanessa in her stroller and set out on foot with juice boxes and animal crackers. If nothing else, the excursions exhausted them and they fell asleep without complaint at the end of the day. If I’d learned anything growing up in my mother’s house, it was that keeping busy dispelled, or at least disguised, sadness. I raised the activity level for Ben’s sake, but I was doing it for myself, as well. I didn’t want to sit still for too long, because that gave me time to think about my life.
Across the Table Page 18