Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  “I’m not asking you to. Just listen for a few minutes.”

  “I don’t want to hear your explanations. I’ll never understand how you can do this to us, so don’t bother trying.”

  “No explanations, and no expectations. I just wanted to tell you that I told Bobby no tonight. No to the commission, no to his intrusion into my life. I won’t let him back in.”

  Silence at the other end of the phone. I waited.

  “Mom? I’m so sorry I opened the door to let him in!” She was crying.

  “Oh, honey. This wasn’t your fault!”

  “But if I hadn’t contacted him, he’d never have—”

  “He’d have found another way. You did nothing to cause this, Vanessa. And now it’s over.”

  “Really?”

  “I promise.”

  “I’m so relieved. I was so scared you were going to leave us and go back to him.”

  “I will never leave you, Vanessa. Ever.”

  “Okay.”

  “I love you, sweetie. And now I’ve got to get some sleep.”

  The next morning I sat by the window in my bedroom, the eastern light illuminating the open page of the sketchbook in my hand. It’d been several months since I’d drawn anything new. Preparing for the show at Miles’s gallery had involved translating the rough work of my notebooks into finished etchings and lithographs, and I’d put aside the daily discipline of the sketchbook. But my night of introspection at the studio had reminded me how important a record my sketches were—like a writer’s journal.

  My hand moved quickly on the page, the soft charcoal pencil leaving traces that revealed the shape of my brother’s arm draped protectively around my shoulders; my mother reaching across the table to stroke my hand. And then, emerging under my strokes, a face. Strong, chiseled, with eyes whose gaze was direct, open, vibrant. Peter’s face.

  An Open Book

  WHENEVER PETER AND I traveled separately we didn’t see each other off or welcome the other back at the airport. The North End was just on the other side of the tunnel from Logan and it made more sense for the traveler to hop in a cab and be home in ten or fifteen minutes. But this time I decided I couldn’t wait at home for the sound of his key in the door. I wanted to see Peter’s face when he walked out of customs and throw my arms around him.

  I was nervous. We hadn’t spoken since the afternoon I’d gotten back from New York, when he was so angry. I stood with at least fifty other people clustered around the international arrivals gate. I realized that many of them were probably the parents of the students Peter had been shepherding.

  Finally, passengers began trickling out of customs trundling their suitcases, weary from the long flight. Peter didn’t see me when he first emerged. Unlike the others who were scanning faces for family or friend or lover, Peter was focused on getting out of the building.

  I called out to him and he turned. I didn’t trust myself to read the expression on his face. Was it relief that I was there and hadn’t run off with Bobby? Or questioning and suspicious that I’d shown up at the airport?

  I moved toward him, needing to close the distance between us. An urgency fueled me. I was moving so swiftly that my knapsack was flying behind me. I hadn’t closed it securely, and as I reached Peter my sketchbook fell out and landed open at his feet.

  We both bent to pick it up. He touched it first and, as he started to close it, glanced at the open page. His own image.

  His fingers traced the charcoal on the page. My fingers traced his face itself.

  He closed the book, tucked it back in my knapsack and took me in his arms.

  ROSE

  2009

  Epilogue

  I DON’T THINK OF myself as an old woman. In my heart, I’m still the young bride sweeping out her first home on the bluff at Chaguaramas and setting out Thanksgiving dinner on plank tables in the sunlight.

  I can’t even count anymore how many Thanksgiving dinners I’ve cooked for my family. Some have been more memorable than others. This year was especially so. We had much to celebrate. Toni and Peter’s anniversary. Al’s survival from cancer. The christening of my first great-granddaughter. Even a trip to Washington to visit Marianne, Al Jr.’s old girlfriend, who lives there now with her family. I found Al Jr.’s name on the wall at the Vietnam Memorial, close to the beginning, and ran my fingers over the letters.

  Manny went crazy with the food for Thanksgiving dinner. There’s a reason Boston Magazine named him chef of the year and the Globe has given Paradiso four stars. It was paradise to eat that meal. Al and I sat at the head of the table, taking turns holding Olivia, Vanessa’s baby. After she graduated from Harvard she went to Italy for two years and got a master’s degree in Italian. We teased her about meeting an Italian boy and falling in love, and sure enough, that’s what she did. It kills me that she’s so far away, but she and Marcello come to Boston every year. Now, of course, with the baby we want to see them more often.

  Al, thank God, got the best treatment at Dana-Farber, and beat kidney cancer five years ago. That’s when we decided to make the most of what time we had left. We turned Paradiso over to the kids and moved to Bal Harbour in Florida. He still plays cards every afternoon and we go dancing on Saturday nights.

  Toni and Peter are as much in love as ever. He retired in June and my bet is Toni will follow soon, now that Olivia has arrived. They’ve been talking about buying a place in Umbria to be near Vanessa, and I don’t blame them.

  Joey and Ben also got married. Joey to a nurse he met when Al was in the hospital; Ben to Jennifer Conti, who was in his fifth grade class at St. John’s and has been his best friend ever since. Each couple has a son—Joey’s Al, and Ben’s Matthew.

  Mike “came out” to the family a few years ago. Like me, most of them had figured it out. Even Al. I have to hand it to Al. Of all of us, it was hardest for him to accept. But the cancer changed him. Made him recognize what was precious in life. When Mike told us he and Graham were committed to each other, we both said they had our blessing.

  We were surrounded by all of them at the table and, after grace, raised our glasses.

  “Salute!” we said. “To life.”

  LINDA CARDILLO

  Dancing on Sunday Afternoons

  A Graziuccia e Federigo Cardillo

  Per la vita!

  Acknowledgments

  I am so grateful, first of all, to the members of my family who were the caretakers of Graziuccia’s and Federigo’s letters: my parents, Lena and Fritzie Cardillo, and Aunt Susie Lauricella—as well as Aunt JoAnn Petrillo, whose kitchen-table conversations nourished my imagination.

  I am blessed with a wonderful, supportive family: my husband, Stephan, who does countless loads of laundry and washes piles of dishes so that I can hole up in a library and write; my children, Luke, Nicola and Mark, who have been my champions, my techies, my fashion consultants and my photographers.

  I am also indebted to my circle of Italian ladies in Springfield, Massachusetts—Christina Manzi, her daughter Rosa Anna Ronca and the assorted aunts, cousins and friends who fed me eggplant and meatballs and helped me translate many of the letters.

  I thank my writing friends—Adele Bozza, Julie Winberg and Sharon Wright—who read, advised and encouraged me through many drafts and who asked the tough questions; and my agent Maura Kye-Casella, whose unfailing enthusiasm and insightful comments sustained and mentored me.

  And finally, my deepest appreciation for my editor, Paula Eykelhof, who guided me through a rigorous process, mined the manuscript for the best material and helped me shape a compelling story.

  Prologue

  Two Husbands

  Giulia D’Orazio

  1983

  I HAD TWO HUSBANDS—Paolo and Salvatore.

  Salvatore and I were married for thirty-two years. I still live in the house he bought for us; I still sleep in our bed. All around me are the signs of our life together. My bedroo
m window looks out over the garden he planted. In the middle of the city, he coaxed tomatoes, peppers, zucchini—even grapes for his wine—out of the ground. On weekends, he used to drive up to his cousin’s farm in Waterbury and bring back manure. In the winter, he wrapped the peach tree and the fig tree with rags and black rubber hoses against the cold, his massive, coarse hands gentling those trees as if they were his fragile-skinned babies. My neighbor, Dominic Grazza, does that for me now. My boys have no time for the garden.

  In the front of the house, Salvatore planted roses. The roses I take care of myself. They are giant, cream-colored, fragrant. In the afternoons, I like to sit out on the porch with my coffee, protected from the eyes of the neighborhood by that curtain of flowers.

  Salvatore died in this house thirty-five years ago. In the last months, he lay on the sofa in the parlor so he could be in the middle of everything. Except for the two oldest boys, all the children were still at home and we ate together every evening. Salvatore could see the dining-room table from the sofa, and he could hear everything that was said. “I’m not dead, yet,” he told me. “I want to know what’s going on.”

  When my first grandchild, Cara, was born, we brought her to him, and he held her on his chest, stroking her tiny head. Sometimes they fell asleep together.

  Over on the radiator cover in the corner of the parlor is the portrait Salvatore and I had taken on our twenty-fifth anniversary. This brooch I’m wearing today, with the diamonds—I’m wearing it in the photograph also—Salvatore gave it to me that day. Upstairs on my dresser is a jewelry box, filled with necklaces and bracelets and earrings. All from Salvatore.

  I am surrounded by the things Salvatore gave me, or did for me. But, God forgive me, as I lie alone now in my bed, it is Paolo I remember.

  Paolo left me nothing. Nothing, that is, that my family, especially my sisters, thought had any value. No house. No diamonds. Not even a photograph.

  But after he was gone, and I could catch my breath from the pain, I knew that I still had something. In the middle of the night, I sat alone and held them in my hands, reading the words over and over until I heard his voice in my head. I had Paolo’s letters.

  Chapter 1

  The Cigar Box

  Cara Serafini Dedrick

  1983

  THE PHONE CALL didn’t come at two in the morning, but it might as well have. I was on my way out the door of my office at four, hoping to catch an early train out of Penn Station and make it home to New Jersey for an early start to my vacation. I run a catering company in Manhattan called Artichoke and in the last weeks of August my clients have retreated to their summer homes, giving me and my staff a breather before fall. Celeste, my secretary, waved to get my attention, receiver nestled between her ear and her capable shoulder.

  “It’s your mother.”

  “Tell her I’ll call when I get home—got to make the 4:25.”

  “She says it can’t wait. A family emergency.”

  My body stiffened and I could feel the color drain from my face. My mother was not the kind of woman who called with reports of every hospitalization or divorce or out-of-wedlock pregnancy in our large extended family. With eighteen aunts and uncles and twenty-nine first cousins, plus both grandmothers, there was ample opportunity for a family emergency. But I trusted my mother’s sense of what was urgent and what was merely news, and knew she wouldn’t insist on talking to me now if it wasn’t someone close. Had my father gone into diabetic shock? Was my brother in a car accident?

  I turned back to my desk and picked up the phone. “Mom?”

  “Cara, thank God you’re still there! It’s Nana.”

  My father’s mother, Giulia, was a robust woman in her nineties who ran circles around most of us. Three weeks before, against the wishes of all eight of her children, she’d flown to Italy to be at the bedside of her dying older sister. Zia Letitia—we used the Italian form to refer to the aunts of my grandmother’s generation—Zia Letitia had graciously managed to wait until Nana arrived before taking her last breath. After she died, Nana had assumed the task of arranging her funeral and organizing her financial affairs. Zia Letitia had been a widow and her only son had died many years before, so there was no one left in the family to wrap up the loose ends of her long life except for Nana. As far as I knew, those tasks were almost finished and she was expected back early the next week.

  “What’s happened?” I couldn’t imagine what could have disrupted my grandmother’s determined and vigorous grasp on life.

  “She fell last night. It was in Zia Letitia’s house. She was alone, and no one found her until this morning. Emma, the woman who looked after Zia Letitia, called to let us know.”

  “Oh, my God! Is she all right? Where is she now?”

  “They got her to a hospital in Avellino, but apparently she’s broken her hip. She needs surgery. We thought we could fly her home, but the doctors there said it was too dangerous—the risk of an embolism’s too high. Which is why I’m calling you.” So it was more than just to inform me of my grandmother’s accident.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We don’t want her to go through this alone. It was one thing for her to go off by herself to hold her sister’s hand, but now it’s simply out of the question. I’d go, but with Daddy needing dialysis every three days, there’s no way I can leave him. Nobody else in the family has ever been to Italy—I don’t think they even have passports.

  “Honey, you’ve lived in Italy, you speak Italian, and she’d listen to you sooner than one of her children, anyway. I need you to say yes about this, especially for Daddy’s sake. He’s angry with her for going in the first place, angry with himself for letting her go, and now he’s feeling helpless—although he won’t admit it—because he can’t go and rescue his mother. Will you do this, Cara?”

  “Do you realize what you’re asking me to do?” I groaned. I thought of the two weeks left of summer that I’d planned on spending with my kids. A week at the shore, then a week getting ready for school.

  “If you’re worried about the kids, I can look after them for a few days, and Paul and Jeannie offered to take them to her mother’s house at the lake. There really is no one else who can do this, Cara. I know you think of Nana as formidable and indestructible, but she’s in a precarious state.”

  I listened in silence, watching the minutes pass on the clock on my desk. I’d already missed any chance of making my train. I was both dismayed at my grandmother’s situation and frustrated that the competence and independence I had developed in my life apart from my family were now the very things pulling me back. I did not want to go. But I knew I would. I fought the resentment that I was the one my mother had turned to—me, with a very full plate of full-time job and four children—when she could have asked my sister or my cousin, both younger, freer, teachers with summers off and no children. But I was also proud that she’d called on me, knowing she was right when she said I was the only one who could do this.

  “I’ll need to talk to Andrew and sort everything out with the kids. I’ll ask Celeste to book me on a flight to Rome tomorrow and I’ll take the train from there to Avellino. Do you have some contact information for me—the hospital, Emma?”

  I heard my mother exhale in relief.

  “Thank you, honey. I knew I could count on you. I’ve got all the numbers right here. Let me read them off to you.”

  I spent the next half hour writing down the information provided by my mother, phoning my husband and giving Celeste the task of getting me to Italy within the next forty-eight hours. I finally collapsed in a seat in the second-to-last car on the 5:43 to Princeton, scribbling lists to myself and trying to remember a language I had not spoken regularly in seventeen years.

  The next afternoon, with my husband and children heading off to Beach Haven, my bag packed and my passport in my purse, I drove up to my parents’ house in Mount Vernon, just outside New York City. When my mother had called Giulia that morning to tell her I was coming, Giulia h
ad dictated a list for me—things to do, things to bring. I picked up the list and the key to Giulia’s house from my parents and said my goodbyes, recognizing the gratitude in my father’s eyes despite his gruff warnings about watching out for both my grandmother and myself.

  I left my parents’ neighborhood of manicured lawns and stately colonials and drove south to the neighborhood my grandmother had lived in since she’d arrived in America. I climbed the steep steps to Giulia’s front porch, past the rose garden her husband Salvatore—my father’s stepfather—had planted for her in the middle years of their marriage, well before I was born. With Giulia in Italy for the last three weeks, many of the blooms were long past their peak. Had Giulia been here, I know she would’ve trimmed the flopping, untidy heads.

  I let myself in the front door, but not before glancing up and down this so-familiar street. To my right, a row of pale stucco houses, many of which Giulia owned. To my left, the beginnings of commerce—the butcher, the barber, Skippy’s Bar & Grill—and on the corner, Our Lady of Victory elementary school. I remembered how one frigid November morning, when I was in kindergarten, I had dutifully exited in a silent, straight line as we’d been trained by the nuns to do when the fire alarm sounded. I’d been careful to line up along the side of the building, trying to keep still in the cold. It had been at that moment that Giulia had emerged from Lauricella’s grocery store across the street and observed the shivering children and the sisters bundled in their black shawls.