by Tony Romano
He tried to recall his wedding vows and could remember only one. The one about never parting. The one that had caused an itchy dryness in his throat and a hoarse whisper. But one he knew he’d honor. The only sacred one. Did he also agree to be faithful? He couldn’t remember. Those three weeks back in his homeland—and it had felt like home, like he should stay—those weeks had raced by so rapidly that even his wedding lodged itself in his memory as a blur. Festina tarde, his new family urged. Make haste slowly. Three weeks suffused with celebration—sterling china cups clinking gilt-rimmed saucers, wine corks strewn along never-ending walnut tables. He had sewn mother-of-pearl buttons to the back of Angela Rosa’s gown. Chose wedding bands from the suitcase of a neighbor who specialized in soft karat golds.
He returned to America of course, his new home, where the concept of an arranged marriage baffled his children. Finding a wife as he did seemed like some bizarre shopping trip to them. But what other choice did he have back then? He worked at the store day and night. His English was marginal. Where would he meet a wife? A real wife. Not like that blonde of Vince’s. Besides, an arranged marriage came with certain understandings, both partners acknowledging that whatever passion grew out of their union would flourish only in time. The partners gave each other ample space. They took their time with each other. Time was the one commodity they could count on. In some ways, then, his marriage was created not in haste as his children believed. What else should he expect from them—they were American children after all. And his was not a marriage of convenience, a phrase that made him laugh. There was nothing convenient about learning to love a woman he’d never met before.
What did he know about love then anyway? A long courtship wouldn’t have revealed any deeper truths to him. Love was a matter of will, a matter of agreement and duty. His was a marriage of making things work. Putting food on the table. Protecting the family.
And what did he know now about love? Only that he loved his wife, another certainty, a realization that hit him at once the day she told him she was pregnant. He recalled thinking, I now share a life with the mother of my children. Our children. Love became a natural outgrowth of that.
“I called Dr. Giannini,” she said.
“The doctor was here?”
She nodded and placed a pan on the stove, poured olive oil to cover the bottom, and dropped in a handful of garlic wedges.
“Why didn’t you come for me?”
“What would you do?”
“Do? Do? I want to know.”
“Now you know.”
He could never predict her anger or know whether it was directed at him or if it was simple worry disguised as anger. He felt dull during these exchanges, a spongy numbness settling in around his temples and blurring the edges of his vision. He’d slept late, left abruptly, hadn’t returned for lunch. That was the cause, he decided. And she was worried. She worried all the time.
“What did the doctor say?”
“Stupid doctors. They don’t know anything. He didn’t know. I have to call him again tomorrow if Benito won’t drink.”
“Benito won’t drink?”
“No.”
“Maybe I can try.”
She shot a look at him. If his own mother can’t get him to drink…
“What can it hurt if I try?”
“Go. Try.”
“I should wake him?”
“Yes, wake him.”
Benito was sitting in his crib with his hands on his knees, staring at a shaft of light that fell on the hardwood floor.
“Piccolo, Benito,” Agostino crooned. “Piccolo.”
Benito turned his head toward his father but didn’t break his gaze. Agostino picked him up. “Bello bambino.” Benito rubbed at his nose with the palm of his hand.
Whenever Angela Rosa asked Agostino about one of the children looking pale, he could never tell. Pale was not a thing he could detect on his own. But Benito was pasty white, his skin nearly translucent. He radiated heat. Agostino took him back to the kitchen and asked Angela Rosa if they should call the doctor again.
“Give him to me,” she said.
“Let me try a cup.”
Agostino set him on the table, then sat down before him. “Benito, time to drink,” he said.
Benito sighed and gazed blankly over his father’s shoulder. Agostino tried to place the plastic mug in his son’s hand, his favorite mug, the one with an orange sun and a smiling face with red cheeks on it, but Benito showed no signs that he intended to grasp it.
“Benito, drink.”
Angela Rosa placed two fingers along Benito’s neck to check his temperature. She touched his forehead. “Dear God,” she said. “My God.”
“What should we do?”
She turned to shut off the flame on the stove. “Bring him here.”
He followed her to the bathroom, where she started a bath of cool water. Benito whimpered when they placed him in it but then sat there glassy-eyed as he’d done in his crib.
“He feels a little cooler,” Agostino said after a while.
Angela Rosa explained that the same thing happened that morning. She and Victoria worked with wet towels to bring down his temperature, but the moment they stopped, his fever shot up again.
“What do we do?” he said.
She would prepare dinner, she told him. Maybe he would eat something now. Everyone would be home soon for supper. No sense that they should go without supper.
Yes. Supper, thought Agostino. No sense they shouldn’t eat. They pulled Benito out of the tub, and Agostino whispered the beginning of a prayer. Later, when darkness descended on the house and the voices from the street spun out, replaced by night birds and crickets, he would confess what he could to his wife. He would tell her what she needed to know.
June 23, 1977
ALFREDO PECCATORI
If it weren’t for our June meetings at the cemetery each year, I probably would never talk to the cocksucker. My big brother Anthony. Eleven months older than me and still thinks he can pull rank. Lectures me on the soul. Tells me I got to get back to the church. My brother Anthony who dropped out of the seminary after a year telling me about where I should stand on heaven and hell and all the rest of that bullshit. Why the hell should I care? He says now that Jinny is pregnant I have to think about someone other than myself. I ought to do it for the baby. Maybe he’s right. And maybe I will. But not because he tells me.
One of these years, I think, we’ll run into someone at the cemetery. Maybe the old man or Vicky or some old neighbor. But we never do. Or maybe they see Anthony and me milling around and they wait until we’re gone ’cause they don’t want to disturb us. I like that idea. The old man seeing Anthony and Freddy back together again, thinking about times past when no one could separate us. Anthony…Freddy. Like the two names belonged together. You called out one, and the other answered. Together we were anonymous, which made us tighter. We held our secrets to our chests and spoke in schoolyard code. We even had secret-agent handshakes that I’m embarrassed to admit I still remember. For a while, about ten years ago, I could still get a laugh out of Anthony by putting out my twisted hand.
Even if Benito hadn’t passed away, the two of us would have still drifted apart, I’m sure. No sense blaming our little brother for what’s come between us. Fact is, Benito’s death pushed us closer for a long while. Back then no one talked about a baby dying. They didn’t have the words not to mention the balls to deal with the whole mess. So Anthony and me, we disappeared like they wanted us to. We became the plaster walls and the carpet and the kitchen table. We walked outside and became the street and the goddamn school and the softball game. What I wouldn’t have given for someone to sit on the edge of my bed and explain to me that I wasn’t going to get a fever myself. You think someone would have figured out that there was no way me and Anthony could have been doing as well as we looked like we were doing. We were thirteen fucking years old.
When we got back to school in September, the nuns
they got in my face and offered their rosaries and scapulars. Sister Rosaline on the very first day began to talk about what it means to lose a brother. Finally someone could answer the thousand questions I had. I leaned forward in my little wooden seat, waxed new over the summer, a smell I’d looked forward to for weeks, and then slowly began to shrink and squirm as Sister Rosaline reminded us of how special Benito was. He was in a special place now and God loved him more than we could ever know and we should be so lucky to be in that place. I wanted to kick something, rip the habit off her skull. I could feel the eyes of my classmates boring in on me. It was because of me that they had to listen to all this crap. And we’re not special? I wanted to shout. Fuck special. Tell me about fevers. Tell me about death and cemeteries. Tell me about when the hell I could stop tiptoeing around the house. Tell me how I can get Mama to stop crying. Instead, we prayed every hour on the hour so that by the end of the day Sister Rosaline had traveled up and down her rosary about a trillion times.
I could tell by the tight look on his face as he walked out of school that first day that Anthony was hearing the same bullshit from his teacher. And I knew that the next day would be different. The next day and every day after would be like home. Everyone turning quiet around us. And no one would mention Benito ever again. As if nothing ever happened. Even our classmates would steer clear of us for a while, the two lepers.
So today we meet at the cemetery and my big brother says I should get back to the church. I look at him and hope that the look is enough to remind him about what the church ever did for us, but I’m wasting my time. It’s twenty years today, he says. I say, No, I didn’t know that, and wonder what the hell difference that makes. Nineteen, twenty. Dead is dead. Like he knows what I’m thinking, he says, Two decades. It’s a milestone. Maybe it’s a reminder. To get back to what’s important. The Church has changed, he tells me.
You’re right, I tell him. Absolutely right. With Anthony you agree with everything he says. He’s always looking for a tiny crack of light he can crawl into. And I guess I admire that. Once a year I admire that. But mostly I’m reminded of how brick-wall dense he is if he thinks I’m going to paw my rosary like a sixth grader at Wednesday-morning mass. I know what he thinks. He thinks, if I come back to the Church I’ll come around more often. I’ll get back to my roots. I’ll march in the Columbus Day parade and wave the flag. I’ll make red gravy on Sundays. Like old times. Well, I’ve got news for you, brother. All that Catholic bullshit is tied in with all that Italian-American bullshit and I don’t want a thing to do with either one. It’s all bullshit propaganda to me.
There are no old times. There’s only now. There’s this warm stone in the sun with Benito’s name scratched into it. And there’s this grass trying to grow tall around it. Benito’s gone and he’ll be two years old forever, less than two. And I’m here and you’re there and that’s all there is.
How’s Jinny feel? he says.
Good. She’s big as a house, I tell him.
You worried?
I wish I could tell you I wasn’t, Anthony.
And he knows exactly what I mean. We’re quiet for a while, the kind of quiet that seems right for a graveyard. We’re reading the names on all the stones, all young kids, and he says, You ever feel like our family is cursed?
I used to think that, I tell him. I used to buy into that. But what good would that do? Look what it did for the old man. And Mama. Hell, the rest of them, too.
Anthony smiles.
What?
I was just thinking, he says, what Uncle Vince would say. Americano, he’d call you. Americano, hey.
He kind of spit whenever he said it. Remember?
We both laugh. A small cemetery laugh.
So why do you come here, he says?
Why do I come here? Don’t tell me you come here to remove the family curse?
I just want to know, he says, why you come here. I didn’t say anything about a curse.
Sure you did.
Forget the curse, he says.
I don’t know why I come here. Not to be with you. That’s for sure. You’re a royal pain in the ass, you know that.
Anthony doesn’t come back quick enough and there’s this silence between us that’s unnerving, like we both sense some truth in what I said and now I’m sorry for saying it.
I come here, I tell him, because I have to. Because he was my little brother. The reasons don’t go much deeper, I don’t think.
Anthony seems satisfied with that.
What I don’t tell him is that when they laid out Benito at the store, moved all the tables to the side and covered all the mirrors along the walls, and I walked in and weaved my way through the crowd and saw him for the first time all drained of color except for that grayish-pink powder all over his face, I about fell back. That’s me, I thought. That’s my nose, and my hair all slicked down. And they even put him in the pint-size royal-blue suit I wore one time when I was four. My suit. Too big for Benito but they’d folded up the sleeves and cuffs to fit him. He was all ready to be buried. And sometime during that night between the wailing and the people shuffling in and out, I made a promise to the little guy that I wouldn’t forget him. A promise between brothers. It seemed the right thing to do. I didn’t know then the shape the promise would take.
Anthony gets in his car and I get in mine behind him. He takes off and I sit there awhile longer. Why rush? To get back to work so I can throw one more goddamn piece of luggage onto the airport conveyor? I close my eyes and go back twenty years. I try to remember what I was doing that day, what could have been so important to keep me away from my little brother on his last day, but everything that came before is hazy. I don’t think about those days enough. That’s the problem. I always thought they’d be there for me, like an old friend. Maybe that’s another reason I come here each year. To hold on to the little that’s left of before.
3
SEPTEMBER 5, 1957
The front page of the Chicago Daily News had a photograph of the Arkansas National Guard standing at attention at the head of the stone stairs of Central High School in Little Rock. They stand there without expression, bayonets resting across their shoulders. Walking up the stairs is a Negro girl who clutches a folder to her chest. She’s wearing a plain white top and long plaid skirt, as if she’s on her way to a late summer picnic. The girl looks at no one through her thick-rimmed glasses. There is no one to look at. Just beyond her a mob of women with twisted mouths stare after her. And behind them a few blank-faced men with straw hats and wide hatbands look on. Victoria Peccatori studied the girl’s fingers, the tight grip, as if the school folder were a precious jewel. Victoria saw hope in the empty folder, work sheets to be tucked into the pockets, an extra pen to be clipped onto the sleeve, the folder growing thicker and more tattered as the days trudge by.
Before reading the caption, Victoria assumed the National Guard had been called to ensure the safe passage of the girl into the school. But soldiers were stationed there to keep her out. And Arkansas needed a small army of them. With bayonets. What did they expect from this girl? During the last couple of months, Victoria had been keeping a mental tally of stories like this one, stories that affirmed for her that the world was a nasty place and that her baby brother had been spared all the ugliness. Wars and bombs and bayonets. He’d been spared even death. Dying as young as he did, Benito couldn’t have known anything about what was happening to him.
None of these thoughts had the effect of lifting Victoria’s gloom, as she sometimes anticipated. Instead, they made her more bitter, made her more inclined to zero in on the corrosive details in even the most benign stories. And she’d become so comfortable in her gloom that even her closest friend failed to notice.
“What’re you reading now?” Darlene asked. She’d gotten a page-boy haircut before the school year began and kept touching the edges with the back of her fingers. They sat in the school’s makeshift cafeteria, a hall used for Christmas plays and Sunday-night bingo a
nd potluck dinners. This would be the last year Victoria and Darlene would have to endure the canker-green walls and the hissing pipes.
“Just the newspaper,” Victoria said.
“I can see that. Read me my horoscope.” She cracked her gum at the side of her mouth.
“What do you want to know? I can tell you. You’re going to marry Stick. And you’re going to have twelve kids and they’re all going to look like Stick but you’re going to be this blimp this whale and you’re going to sit in your house in the suburbs all day eating chocolate. Did I get it about right?”
“Jealous?”
“You bet.” Victoria pushed the paper across the table.
Darlene eyed the headlines and asked, “Which lawn today?”
Victoria shrugged.
Darlene opened the paper to the horoscopes. “Says here there was a girl sent to jail for twenty years for swiping newspapers off lawns.” She glanced over the top of the paper, her green eyes bright. “At least she’ll have a lot of time to read.”
“Does it have anything in there about the girl’s friend who steals cigarettes from the A&P?”
“Yeah, they’re cell mates, it says. Bad girls.” Darlene put the paper down and touched her hair. She leaned over the table and sighed. In a low voice she said, “How are we going to make it through another year, Vick?”
Victoria glanced across the cafeteria at the clock. She’d been wondering the same thing. Everything about the day felt wrong, beginning with the picture in the newspaper. “Come on,” she ordered.
“What?”
“Just shut up and follow me. Take the paper.”
They walked out of the cafeteria, turned down the janitor’s hallway, and slipped out the door that led to a ramp where deliveries arrived. They sauntered down the ramp, forcing themselves not to rush. They were in the stone courtyard now, the church towering over them on one side, the squat, two-story convent on the other. If they could get past the sacristy to the far end of the courtyard and through the tunnel without anyone springing out, they’d be free.