“Hey!” he yelled toward the kitchen. “Franco’s taking me to watch tonight’s fight!” But even as the last word left his mouth Lena appeared, grocery receipt in hand, a look on her face to sour fresh milk.
“Why do you do this to me? This sneaking! What, you want to kill yourself?”
Nick folded his big hands, put them in his lap and looked at them as if they could help. “One candy bar won’t hurt,” he said. “What time is Franco supposed to get here?”
“You want me to show you, I’ll show you,” she said, swooping to the couch next to her tidy stack of health and senior magazines. “It’s all here. Read it yourself for once.” She began flipping the pages as if spanking them. She wanted him to see what she had seen in those pages, learn what she had learned, fear all that she feared. Lena had decided there would be no third stroke; after the last one Nick had stayed three weeks in Hartford Hospital, losing weight and color until his skin looked chalky as bread dough. She sat with him as long as the doctors would let her. She watched every pulse count, read every note on his chart. She challenged their choice of drugs and the amounts until they sent her away—sent her away!—as if she didn’t know how to take care of her husband. They certainly didn’t. Would they have bathed him if she hadn’t complained? What young Dr. Kildare would have noticed that Nick fell asleep with a mouth full of oatmeal? He could have choked if she hadn’t come to visit at that moment. No, no more strokes. You stay in the hospital too long, you get hurt. Or you die. Only God in heaven decided when that would happen, and He didn’t need the help of doctors. She thumbed to an article—“Stopping Strokes at the Supper Table”—and reared to show him, but he shuffled past.
“Where are you going?”
“Blizzard’s coming. I’m checking the furnace.”
“That’s silly, honey, the oil man was just here last month.”
He walked past. He did not remember the visit of any oil man. Even if one had come, oil men could make mistakes that Lena couldn’t catch. To her the furnace worked or it didn’t.
At the cellar steps he balanced by holding the rail, each move made as if on ice. She held her breath, watching where he placed his slippered feet among the years of bundled newspapers, empty coffee cans, and paper grocery bags that crowded each narrow step. Something inside her clutched as if to keep him from falling. Going down was always the worst part. Even when he was young she had worried. “They’re tricky, these steps,” he used to say before dancing down them, showing off his agile footwork, then returning with a can of tomato sauce when she had asked for tuna, or sliced pineapple instead of pears, because (he would say) he had been dreaming of the delicate spray of freckles on her shoulders. Down he’d go again with a wink and a promise. Always gallant, that man, but so easily distracted by her even when she wasn’t trying. And when she was trying, well—but so much had changed since his hands last touched her with the weightlessness of summer. Her back had bent, her knuckles gnarled like peach pits. His hands trembled now. His heart needed rest, not romance.
The cellar smelled of fusty cardboard. Drafts blew cold through the windows, which, at ground level outside, already cradled drifts of snow. Nick squinted through his bifocals at the oil gauge. He wet his thumb with the tip of his tongue and rubbed the glass, then leaned close. Rising on her toes behind him, Lena peered over his shoulder.
“We’re safe,” he said.
He folded his bifocals and tucked them in the pocket of his cardigan, then turned for a long, surprised look around the cellar: at his speed bag, so dry the leather had split like a lip; at a framed map of Italy, hung crooked, with the glass cracked from Bergamo to Genoa; at boxes of Christmas decorations hidden behind his workbench, untouched since he and Lena started spending the holiday with Franco and his family in balmy Atlanta, or Denise and hers in California. All of it, everything, made junk by time, dulled by a fuzz of dust.
“Jeez,” he said. “Guess I’ve shirked my duties down here.”
He pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket, his brow already sweating at the thought of cleaning, organizing, discarding. Lena patted his back.
“Leave this be,” she whispered.
“Well, if it isn’t the lovely Mrs. Gionfriddo,” Nick announced. With a sweep of his arm, he welcomed Ava to the house. She stumbled in, shimmying like a squirrel to shake snow from her green wool overcoat and her thin, impossible hair.
“C’mon in, honey,” Lena said from the kitchen. “I didn’t expect you today with the weather.”
“Miss Nick’s birthday? Nothing doing,” Ava said. “But it wasn’t easy. What is it? Twenty yards from my door to yours? It felt like it took ten years to get here.”
“If it took ten years,” Nick said, “that must make me eighty-four.”
“Not a day over sixty, good-looking.” Ava set aside a paper grocery bag in which she carried something, then worked the buttons of her coat. “Nick, would you?” she sang, lifting her arms and allowing him to help her. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re a prince. Happy birthday, sweetie.”
Smiling, he pulled from the bag a pie still warm in its tin. Lena inhaled a deep breath of patience. “Sit,” she said. “Everything’s ready.”
“Radio says we’re in for it,” Ava said. “More than twenty inches.”
Lena ladled soup from a pot on the stove. “Did you stock up?”
“A volunteer from the senior center brought me some things last night.”
“Why didn’t you go out yourself? You can still drive. You stop doing things for yourself, you’ll forget how.”
Ava rolled her eyes at Nick as if they shared a private joke. “You think I’ll forget how to grocery-shop?” she said to Lena. “I could be dead a dozen years, and if Stop & Shop had a special on Neapolitan ice cream I’d find it.”
Lena served Ava first, then set before Nick a half bowl of steaming minestrone and a small plate of low-fat lasagna reheated from the night before.
“That’s all?” he asked. “I’m pretty hungry.”
“What I gave you is good.”
“Lena,” Ava said, “you know what they say. The way to a man’s heart …” She reached over the margarine container and saccharin dish to pat Nick’s belly.
“Any more stomach,” Lena said, “and I’ll lose the heart.”
“A larger helping won’t kill me. It’s not like chocolate candy.”
Lena glared as she sat down to her lunch. “Say grace,” she ordered.
Nick led them through the blessing. That done, they talked of how the potholes would be wider once the snow melted and of how they worried about losing power, and they remembered shoveling out from the storms in ’54 and ’78 (“Backbreakers,” said Nick). Ava sipped from her teacup and left lipstick prints on the edge. Lena had told her years before to blot, but Ava refused, and now lipstick leaked into the age lines above her lip. Lena kept silent and tried not to look at Ava’s lips or the teacup. Nor did she speak when she noticed the snugness of Ava’s dress. Ava had put on her winter pounds, the ones that had returned every year for the last thirty only to fade away in time for swimsuits. Ava was a miracle in that and so many other ways, the belle of the ball among men at the senior center.
Toward the end of lunch the telephone rang, and Nick pushed away from the table to answer. Lena shouted after him, “Is it Franco?” “It’s Denise,” he yelled, “wishing me a happy birthday.”
A few moments later he returned, thumbing toward the other room. “She wants to talk with you,” he said without looking at his wife. “I don’t know. Something about … I’m not sure what.”
After Lena left for the phone, Ava edged her chair nearer to Nick, so near he noticed her purple eye shadow, his favorite color, and it reminded him of past purples: the silk tie from his sister on his twentieth birthday, the bicycle he’d found at the dump and rebuilt so Franco could ride with friends to school, the bruises over his ribcage from Tommy Duncan. “You want some apple pie?” Ava asked. He nodded, leaning nearer, and she
cut him a slice. He forked a chunk, admiring it as if it were caviar. After he finished she said, “Nick, I’ve got to get back. I’d wait for Lena but I’m expecting a call myself, and I wonder would you walk me home? I worry about slipping.”
He helped her into her coat, then retrieved his own from the hall closet. His galoshes he had left by the door after grocery shopping, and he felt pleased to remember. Fully bundled, he and Ava stepped outside into the wind and snow. Ava took Nick’s arm, and his spine snapped straight. He flexed his biceps and his triceps, hoping that even through his heavy coat she would notice. “Don’t let me fall,” she shouted, and the two started next door, trudging through drifts, shoulders hunched and heads lowered against the gusts. At Ava’s door she pecked him on the cheek good-bye.
Lena loved her daughter as much any mother has ever loved a child, but Denise talked too much. And now, having heard the kitchen door open and shut, Lena searched for a moment to interrupt Denise, sent love, and said good-bye. She found the deadbolt unlocked and Nick’s galoshes missing. Through the window she saw snow ruffled in a wide path leading toward Ava’s. Lena snatched her shawl from a peg near the door and stepped outside to the back stoop. Snowflakes pelted her face and dissolved in her eyes, their wetness like tears distorting her sight so that she couldn’t be sure it was Nick walking toward her until she recognized his overcoat.
She bristled—a colicky child would be easier to nurse—but then he paused to look at something across the street, and she noticed how upright he seemed, how high he carried his head. He looked familiar, but in an out-of-context way, much like the time she met their parish priest, out of collar, at a city pool. With her shirt cuff she wiped snow from her eyes, but he remained unchanged from the moment before—still her husband but not her husband. And then she placed him: She had thought this Nick lived only in photo albums, in Christmases and birthdays past, lifting little Franco on his shoulders or playing third base at the company picnic. This Nick she had thought lost after his first stroke, but here he was, beautiful again and vital, and she felt a great reward for all her work. This, then, was the reason she gave so much, sacrificed her days to his care: this twinkling of health that brought his old self back to her, strokes be damned.
For a moment she lingered, admiring him as he faced across the street. Then, as she had when he was younger (working on the lawn or the car, and it was time to eat), she called his name. He turned toward her, saw her on the steps, but before she could wave his back curved, his shoulders slumped. He grimaced and looked at the place where snow collected around his feet. Her beautiful husband vanished quick as death.
She stopped breathing, then panicked, overwhelmed by a fear biting and sudden as a hot iron, and whose fault was that? The need to scold him knocked her like a spasm.
“Nick!” she shouted over the wind. “Nick! Come inside!”
And in that moment when she saw him as a child, when she wanted only to spank him and confine him to the safety of his recliner, she saw herself through his eyes—as a bitter medicine, punishing him with care. He shuffled inside, and when she touched him he stopped in complete obedience, clumps of snow sliding off his shoulders, turned to her and let her unbutton his wet, cold coat.
She led him to his recliner and wrapped him in a quilt she had sewn the winter before. His breath came in impatient snorts as if he awaited some chastisement.
“What were you doing out there, honey?” She tried to sound interested and casual.
“Ava worried about walking home, so I went with her.”
“Ava could have waited for me,” Lena said, then regretted it.
He said, “She thought I could handle it.”
Lena tucked the quilt tighter, her fingers jabbing, cocooning him. “Well then, you did the right thing, didn’t you? Ava’s lonely. She needs the attention.”
“Ava’s all right.” He rested his head against the pillow of the recliner, watched her face a moment and realized there would be no yelling. He relaxed, let a pleasant tiredness settle his breathing, push his eyelids closed. “Those Putnam boys,” he mumbled. “Did you see them across the street? Building snowmen already. Can’t be that fierce a blizzard if kids can play in it.”
She said, “Maybe you should nap.”
He nodded, eyes still shut, and she could count white bristles where he’d missed shaving along his jaw. She wanted suddenly to shave him. She had not shaved a man since her father when he could no longer hold a straight edge. His death had lasted a year and three months. A year and three months of profanity-laced rants against Roosevelt, the communists, and even against his daughter, who did not scrape his beard close enough to the skin. When he died she cried first with grief, then with joy, then with shame at her joy.
With a finger she stroked Nick’s jawline and, noticing Ava’s lipstick smear, wiped it away with her thumb, then cleaned the thumb on her apron. On her way to the kitchen she stopped at the living room window. The Putnam boys still rolled snow boulders around their yard. Already they’d created a family of snowmen.
“Nick?” she called, because she remembered a time the two of them had built snowmen together, and dressed them, and then in a giddy romp knocked them over with fists and shoulders and snow shovels. At the sound of her voice he opened his eyes a moment, then closed them. He drifted toward his own sleepy memory: of his sister the day before she died—in a fire so many decades past that no one talked about it anymore. They had met that day on Main Street outside Sage Allen’s department store, an accident of chance that inspired her to throw her arms around him and laugh in his ear, leaving her lipstick on his lobe. She wiped it away between her forefinger and her thumb; the next day she vanished in a fire. In the world, then out.
WHRT announced a weather bulletin, and Lena stopped adding sugar to the ricotta to listen. Fourteen inches of snow, the man said, with at least ten more record-breaking inches expected. Bradley International Airport is closed, he added, nothing allowed in or out, as are all government offices except fire and police.
Franco won’t make it, she thought. She poured the rest of the sugar and whipped the ricotta with her electric mixer until it swirled like cream. He would miss her cannoli. A special batch, too, made with a little extra cinnamon. More, then, for his father. Yes. She repeated it to herself. More for Nick on his birthday. Anything Ava could do for Nick, Lena had decided, she could do better. Flirt? Feed? Yes. If such things could return to her the husband she had married, then by God, more for Nick! She pulled the silver flatware from its place on a high shelf, dusted the box, and listened as those dessert forks rang against each other in a musical way, a sound she hadn’t heard in her kitchen for so long, a song to herald Nick’s resurrection, and with it her own. As she stuffed the shells, a glimpse of his pill container on the kitchen table gave her doubts. She repeated quietly to herself, “The only thing we have to fear… the only thing we have to fear …” and remembered how he had looked standing in the snow.
“Oh, hey … honey,” he said later, ricotta stuck to a corner of his mouth. “This is ambrosia.”
He watched her as he chewed the shells, as his tongue spread the ricotta around his mouth. She blinked, and he asked if she had a dust speck. “Eat,” she said, then closed her eyes as if shutting something back. He took a second cannoli onto his plate. It was his birthday, but he ate fast before she changed her mind.
“Happy birthday, dear Nick,” she sang, her voice almost a whisper, and she kissed his forehead. The phone interrupted. That would be Franco, she thought. Nick hurried to answer.
“Franco! We’ve been waiting to hear from you, kid.” Nick leaned on the high back of the desk chair, too eager to sit. “Your plane get in okay?” He nodded into the phone, focusing on the desktop where they kept snapshots of Franco, Denise, the grandchildren, and the daily calendar with doctor appointments penciled in Lena’s tight-looped cursive.
“LaGuardia’s not that far. Why don’t you rent a car and drive up? The fight’s not until late. It’s i
n Vegas, right? They’re not snowed in there.”
With the toe of his left slipper he bumped the desk leg and bumped it again. He shrugged, listened, bumped a few more times.
“So rent a four-wheel drive. C’mon, Franco. You’ve lived in Georgia too long. Kids are outside playing. The plows will clear the roads.” He waved his free hand, chopping at the air, attacking it. Then he raised his arm over his head, palm forward, as if asking for quiet. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. That’d be crazy. So it’s back to Atlanta, then? No, no. Sure. Yeah. There’ll be other fights. You bet, Frankie. Sorry you couldn’t make it. We’ll see you another time.”
He hung up, finger pressing the hook switch. With his other hand he lifted the receiver like a club, then thought better of it and rested it in its cradle. Nick started toward his chair, then stopped, moved another direction, slowly, randomly, like a used candy wrapper tossed by wind. He mouthed angry words as he clenched and unclenched his big fists.
Lena took up her mending. Since the first stroke this frightened her most, his confusion coupled with anger. She knotted the thread and bit it clean.
“Sit down,” she said. “You’re making me nervous.”
He pitched himself into his recliner, then picked at threads in its upholstered arms, pulling them tight until they snapped.
“Big fight,” said the grinning sportscaster on the six o’clock news. Yeah, yeah, thought Nick. “Snow will keep falling,” said the frowning weatherman, “though winds have died. Watch for that freezing rain around midnight.” Nick switched off the television, then stood at the front window. Outside looked as threatening as a Christmas card. The snow, floating toward lawns, roads, bushes, mailboxes, settled knee-deep. The lights of Preston Street reflected off the clouds and the snow so everything looked purple, even the smoke drifting from chimneys. Nobody stirred; only the Putnam boys’ snow family dared the weather, and no vehicles drove the roads. How could Franco worry so much over an accident when no car was out there to hit? Hang that Franco, he thought. I’ll drive myself.
The Greatest Show Page 15