And he was. He gave most everything to Lorna, who under Leopold’s will, recently revised, was left the apartment for her lifetime. After she died, it was to be sold and the money was to be added to the boys’ inheritance. Except for an old peacoat Andrew had asked for and a watch that was intended for Justin and a few other bits and pieces that even unsentimental Henry thought his sons might like to have, Henry gave Leopold’s clothes to his synagogue’s thrift shop. His books went to Henry, but Henry left them behind. He would look through them one day, he told Lorna. The only thing he brought back from Brooklyn was a box of photographs and the silver candlesticks his mother used on Friday nights.
He put the candlesticks away in the cupboard where he kept Leopold’s china. The photographs he set down on the drop-leaf table in the library. For several weeks he didn’t even glance at them. To Costanza the box seemed to vibrate. She didn’t understand how he could keep from looking at them—she had pored over pictures of her father after he died, seeking consolation but also an answer, a fragment of an answer. Leopold obviously did not leave quite such an enigma behind; but still.
When Henry did finally open the box one evening after dinner it was well into March. Costanza was nearly finished with her translation, and she was tensely anticipating both her mother’s visit and the next cycle of IVF. She felt a strong sense of being at a pause, at that moment before the tide pulled back to form the next wave. She would have liked to find peace in this interlude but felt the pull of the undertow instead. Having Leopold die had not helped. Having Henry withdraw and turn so remote had not helped. What helped was when, for the first time since Leopold’s death, Henry sought her out and said, “Shall we take a look at these photographs together? Would you mind?”
“The opposite,” Costanza said, as she sat down next to him on the sofa.
Henry uncorked a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. Then he opened the box and took out several albums. Costanza found herself thinking back to the mass of loose pictures she’d come across when she was preparing to paint Henry’s apartment. They had presented the story of his life in reverse. These pictures instead told it in a forward direction. They were meticulously pasted into volumes of now-flaking black paper, mostly black-and-white images with tiny gummed corners holding them down onto the page.
The albums were all about Henry. He began as a smiley baby, swaddled tight, held tight, by a stolid-looking woman—Nina. Or balanced in the lap of a clearly delighted man—Leopold. Henry was photographed on a lambskin rug, naked. He was photographed in his bathtub, in his high chair, being fed, being walked along a gravel path in a park. There were birthday parties with tiny pointed caps and homemade cakes and a clutch of freckled boys in attendance. In several photographs Henry played doctor with equipment that over the years became increasingly realistic. “Leopold was not exactly subtle about his vision for me,” Henry said when they came to the fourth iteration of the young doctor in training. “This one was a real stethoscope. He asked Dr. Marx, our family physician, to order it from a medical supplier as a birthday present. I was nine. Nine!”
Henry present peered at Henry past. “I’d just like to know how it would have felt to have come to doctoring more on my own.”
“Would you have?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Many things interest me, as you know. Left to my own devices, who knows what forks in the road I would have followed. What mistakes—what interesting mistakes—I might have made.”
They moved on to the next album. Henry at his bar mitzvah. Henry at a picnic. Henry playing tennis. Henry at his senior prom.
“Henry, Henry, Henry,” said Henry.
“Well, you were an only child.”
“Yes, but there are so few pictures of me with other people, or of us together as a family. Or even of my parents before I came along. Most people hand cameras off, you know. To friends or relatives—and we did have one or two who survived. Just to—just to broaden the subject. To vary it. But not Leopold.”
“He loved you.”
“Yes…”
“You sound doubtful.”
“One thing Leopold certainly did was love me. In his way and on his terms.”
“Isn’t that how we all love, and are loved, typically?”
Henry, sipping his wine, retreated again. But not so much away from Costanza as to somewhere private. Somewhere down deep with Leopold’s love, and all it meant to him.
“He told me what a fine person he thought you were,” he said after a moment.
“Your father and I, we had some—exchanges of substance,” Costanza said with feeling. “He was someone I wish I could have known for a longer time. But I feel lucky to have met him. To have met him was to know you better. To know where you come from.”
“Where I come from … Where I come from is a very forceful, dominating, clear-thinking man who had, or thought he had, all the answers, when I was young. What I would do when I grew up. How much schooling I would need to get there. What kind of sports I should play. What I should believe: ‘Despite everything, in this family we believe in God,’ he once said to me, when I questioned—well, when I questioned. We? Did I have a choice? About God? About religious school, keeping kosher, being bar mitzvahed, attending every Friday-night and Saturday-morning service for most of my childhood and adolescence? Or about being kept inside on the Sabbath, doing nothing? All I wanted was to be out in the world, getting some air, seeing some other kids. Do you know that until I was sixteen years old my father made me wear a T-shirt all year long, July and August included? I didn’t even have a choice about my underclothes.”
“Was it all bad?”
“Of course not. But there were times, many times, when I felt imprisoned by Leopold’s authority. I mean, what do you say to a man who lived through what he did? ‘I’d prefer not to attend shul this week, Father. I’d rather go see a movie.’”
Costanza took Henry’s hand. They sat in silence for a moment. “It seems like Leopold was the opposite of my father. My father saw nuance and complication everywhere. The depression made it difficult for him to make up his mind about anything, including staying alive.”
“Actually he did make up his mind about that, didn’t he?”
“Well, yes—in the end.”
Costanza came to a photograph of Judith. Wearing a short skirt and carrying a bouquet of zinnias, she was standing in front of the entrance to Leopold’s building in Brooklyn.
“They were a gift for my mother. It was the first time they met, a Sunday in mid-July. My mother made a pot roast—in the summer. My parents preferred to eat early, so that my father’s evenings could be free for reading.”
“How did it go?”
Henry shrugged. “I thought fine. Judith said Leopold disliked her. She maintained that never changed, all through our marriage.”
Costanza turned the page. The next one was blank, all the others too. “The story ends here?”
“It continues elsewhere.”
Costanza picked flecks of black paper off her lap and set them in a little pile on the coffee table in front of them. “You know, it was Leopold who tipped me over into deciding about this next cycle.”
A line appeared in Henry’s forehead. “I didn’t know you two ever discussed…”
“Well, we did. He did. He and you did too, obviously.”
Henry inhaled deeply, as though he were about to apologize, or explain.
“That’s all right. It was helpful. Leopold gave me a nudge.”
“He was big on nudging.” Then: “I guess there are surprises, even after the end.”
“In my experience, the surprises never stop, Henry. It’s like the understanding. It goes on pretty much forever.”
* * *
And then there she was: her mother, Maria Rosaria, sitting in an Upper East Side hotel lobby, absorbed in the Times.
She sat, as ever, with perfect old-school posture, erect and with one leg neatly crossed over the other just above the
knee. She was wearing a smart tweed suit, an ivory silk blouse, and on her right wrist a chunky gold bracelet that had belonged to Costanza’s grandmother. A trench coat was draped over the arm of her chair, a pair of reading glasses balanced at the tip of her tiny nose. All of this was familiar to Costanza; she recognized it as her mother’s city look, the sort of outfit she wore and the carriage she adopted when she went into Genoa or traveled to European cities. Yet something else was different, disconcertingly so. What? Her hair. That was it. Her mother’s thick silver hair had been given a crisp new cut. It made her look years younger.
Costanza approached her mother, who stood up with energy. They embraced, and Costanza remarked on her haircut, and asked about her flight and if she wanted to have a rest.
“I’ve been resting for eight hours. I’ve come here to see and do. So let’s go see, let’s go do.”
She was thin as ever and, on those hill-toughened Ligurian legs, stockinged and shod in low-heeled pumps, ready to march across Manhattan. Jet lag, she declared, was a state of mind, and one she chose to have nothing to do with. She adored the bustle of New York. She found the clothes in shop windows enchanting. For once in her life, she appeared not to care about money. She had gotten her first ATM card and delighted in taking dollars out of “the wall,” as she put it. She did not once complain of being hot or cold or tired or disappointed by whatever Costanza showed her. Her attention span was fierce, which wasn’t much of a surprise, but her eagerness to taste new food was. “There’s only so much pasta one can eat in a lifetime,” she said gaily, as they sat down to an early spicy Vietnamese dinner. “I think if you ever moved home again, you would be bored by our repetitive habits.”
Lo vedo ora, ora lo capisco: she saw, she understood, she appeared not to judge. Had Maria Rosaria undergone a late-in-life softening? It was known to happen. Henry had more than once told Costanza that the Leopold she met, and liked, was not half as fierce as he used to be. As some people aged, they lost their tooth, their bite. Was her mother among them?
* * *
Morton hadn’t been so tolerant of Maria Rosaria. “Too judgy,” he said after the first time they met. She reminded him of his New Jersey aunts, the kind of hard, critical, unforgiving Jewish women he had so witheringly captured in his early novels. Henry, by contrast, was graciousness incarnate. He left work early the following evening, and he and Costanza walked to Maria Rosaria’s hotel hand in hand. He assured Costanza everything would go well: “Just leave it to me.”
When Maria Rosaria joined them in the lobby, he drew the old lady into his arms with commanding warmth. He turned on the Henry charm, which could be formidable, and kept it going all through dinner. He had been to Genoa to give a lecture once and drew on his memories and his reading (both also formidable) to reminisce about the port, the caruggi, the mysterious inward-facing palazzi, and via Garibaldi, “the one Rubens called the most handsome street in all of Europe, yes?”
Maria Rosaria melted. “You visited so many years ago, you remember so much.”
In truth he had given himself a quick Google refresher during his lunch break.
“I remember all the Van Dycks in the museums, and that stunning black-and-white-striped cathedral—San Lorenzo, right? And the cemetery. Staglieno. All those Victorian portrait statues covered in soot, and then rained on, so that the faces appear to be weeping. I’ve never seen a cemetery like that anywhere. It goes on for miles and miles.”
The old lady had many other passions, but none went quite as deep as her passion for the place she came from, Genoa and the patch of Ligurian coast south of the city where her family had lived forever. “If you visit, I will show you the hill that belonged to my grandfather,” Maria Rosaria told Henry. “He had his olives there, his grapes. It’s all divided up and mostly sold off now, but whenever I look at it, I see the place as it was when I was a girl and my grandfather would invite me to walk the hills with him and he would say to me, ‘Remember to stay close to the land, remember it is important to have a piece of earth that is entirely your own.’”
“A Ligurian Scarlett O’Hara!” Henry exclaimed with delight. In exchange he described Leopold to her, if in a capsule version. Henry told her about his sons and where they were in their lives. Because she asked, he told her about his work, this too in abbreviated form. As she listened, Maria Rosaria fell (to Costanza’s mind) worryingly quiet before saying, “You have to realize that we are still a very Catholic country at heart. For worse or for better the Church’s opinion on such matters has a powerful effect on the thinking of ordinary people like me.”
Because Costanza knew her mother, she knew how clever she was to speak of her country’s attitude and not her own. And because Costanza knew Henry, she knew how hard he was refraining from saying what he thought about the Church and its “powerful effect” on assisted reproduction. He merely nodded and said, “That’s what makes it all—interesting, doesn’t it? To explore different points of view.”
Henry’s sidestepping was a work of art, a debonair little Van Dyck of phrasing unto itself. As he delivered it, Costanza’s heart swelled with love for him, for the skill with which he seemed to grasp Maria Rosaria and modulated his normally vivid outspoken self. Maybe spending a lifetime as Leopold’s son had prepared him for parents of a certain alpha cast. However he got there, Costanza was grateful, and told him so.
“I like a tough old bird,” Henry said. “And you may have trouble seeing it sometimes, but your mother has a big heart.”
* * *
Costanza often had trouble seeing her mother’s heart, whatever its size, but this wasn’t one of those times. In these first few days she was aware of Maria Rosaria’s tenderness and something else, something unfamiliar: her sensitivity. At more than one juncture her mother held her tongue or softened one of her involuntary assessments with a little self-deprecating joke. If Costanza didn’t know better, she would have thought Maria Rosaria had had some therapy. Maybe it was simply that she missed her daughter and was enjoying this taste of a world quite a bit wider than the rather limited points on her regular compass. At eighty she couldn’t have that many more ambitious trips in her, after all.
Maria Rosaria had brought Costanza a large container of pesto wrapped in bubble paper, a package of trofie, and a brick of Parmigiano, and on her second night in New York she and Costanza prepared dinner together for Henry and Andrew. The pesto in particular, which had been made by Ines, Maria Rosaria’s housekeeper, had decidedly transporting powers: one whiff and Costanza knew, from years of experience, that the basil had been picked when the leaves were small and soft, the pine nuts had likely come from Pisa, and the oil from her mother’s own olive trees—the handful of them that were still in the family. The pesto Costanza had made for Henry and the boys the fall before was a pale approximation of this one, which released a scent that acted as a kind of magical potion. As she tossed the sauce on the warm pasta, Costanza closed her eyes, inhaled the fragrant steam, and was in an instant transported.
Maria Rosaria observed her. “So it still pleases you, this humble aroma of ours?”
“Of course it still pleases me, Mamma. There’s nothing like pesto from home. You can’t make it here. I’ve tried. It just doesn’t come out the same.”
“You must use basilico di prà. I know from when I lived in Palermo. I could never get it to come out right there either.” Maria Rosaria paused. “I am pleased to see that home stays with you.”
“Mamma, I dream of home all the time. In my … thoughtful moments, do you know where I go?”
“The Punta.”
“How did you guess?”
“Because it is the most special place. Because you and your father loved to swim there.” Then: “I’m sorry to hear that you have so many down moments.”
Costanza bristled. “I said ‘thoughtful.’”
“Yes, but you meant down.”
She had lowered her guard and her mother had jumped right in, as ever.
Maria Rosar
ia changed direction. “I wish I had the legs to do the walk. I retrace it sometimes in my mind, when I have trouble falling asleep. Certain details I don’t remember so well. There is an abandoned house, yes? Just after the church at San Nicolò?”
This drew Costanza in. “The chimney is still standing. I saw it last summer. You can tell where the kitchen was. There are tiles like ours, blue dots on a white ground, only charred.”
“And your name? Is it still in the cement near the fontanella? Your father was so delighted when we came upon the wet cement that day. You must have been seven or eight.”
“I was eight. We were walking to lunch.”
“Yes, I remember now. Your eighth birthday.”
The two women fell silent.
“I hope to bring Henry next year. You could come by boat. We could swim, have lunch at Drin.”
“I would like that very much.”
Over dinner at Henry’s apartment the ballet continued: a careful choreography of good behavior and safe talk. Andrew, joining them briefly, was even more reserved than usual. Maria Rosaria asked him what he would be studying at college; his answers were abbreviated and noncommittal but polite. Later he told Costanza that the way she kept looking at Henry, then Costanza, then at him, one-two-three, as if her eyes were moving around some kind of private pinball machine, made him want to run and hide.
“Imagine that kind of assessing eye on you all through your childhood and teens and beyond,” Costanza said. “No hiding, no running—unless you run away.”
After dinner Andrew excused himself, saying that he had a paper to finish for English. The others retreated to the living room to finish their wine. Maria Rosaria, scanning the spines of Henry’s books, remarked on the wide range of his interests, at least as reflected in the accidental accumulation of his library.
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