“By calling it accidental you deduce—correctly—that I am not really a book person. I go through many books, but they don’t always end up on my shelves.”
“Costanza’s father was the same. Everything stayed up here.” Maria Rosaria tapped her head. “I’m different. I keep most of my books, and in fairly good order.”
“She has them alphabetized by room,” Costanza said. “A to F is in the front bedroom, G to L is in the hall…”
Maria Rosaria smiled. “Well, I have time in my life for such things. The doctor has more important matters on his mind.” She moved on to the desk in the window. “This room is very accogliente—I’ve always had trouble with that word in English.”
“It doesn’t really exist,” said Costanza. “Inviting comes close. Cozy.”
“Cozy.”
“That’s thanks to your daughter,” Henry said. “The apartment was kind of … neglected, before she gave me a hand with it.”
“She’s always liked to fix up places. Even as a girl.” Maria Rosaria indicated the desk. “And is this where you work?”
“Yes,” Costanza said.
“You’re able to concentrate here?”
“Quite well.”
“When there’s so much distraction? All these windows to peer into?”
“It gives me something to look at when I’m struggling with a word or phrase.”
“And also you cook, I imagine, while you work.”
Costanza heard a criticism in that sentence that she knew Henry missed. Her mother’s remarks, on the surface merely observational, often contained such hidden barbs.
“Yes, I do.”
“My daughter is a very good cook, you know,” Maria Rosaria said to Henry.
“And I am the beneficiary.” Henry patted his stomach.
“It can be quite time-consuming, to cook well. To cook well means always keeping a train of thought on what’s going on in the kitchen.”
“Well, I, for one, envy her,” Henry said. “I’ve always found that I do my best thinking when I step away from a problem and do something unrelated for a while.”
But Maria Rosaria would not be deflected. “There’s another way to look at it. Women, I hardly need to tell you, no matter how intellectual or professional, have always been tugged into the duties of the household. I felt it myself when Costanza’s father was alive, and of course afterward, when there was only me and I was teaching full time and at home had to try to do everything, be everything, to my daughter. Running a home well can take you very far from your work.”
“But, Mamma, I don’t run this home. Henry has a housekeeper, a wonderful woman who has been with him for years. I cook because I love it. And I am at my desk almost every day.”
“I had hoped you would start writing for yourself again, that’s all.”
This was new information to Henry. He looked with puzzlement at Costanza, who said, “In Italy, before Morton came into my life, I published some poetry and maybe a dozen stories. But it wasn’t so easy to write when I was married to him.”
“So you see,” said Maria Rosaria. “Less stirring and more typing, please.”
* * *
Even after this exchange, Costanza couldn’t get Henry to understand. Wasn’t that how it always was with a parent who had the ability to unhinge a grown child with criticisms and recriminations, however subtle or suggested? The web was often secretly claustrophobic. “She wants you to be the best you can be,” Henry said as they went to bed that night. “It’s what all parents want for their children. You’ll see—I mean, let’s hope you’ll see.”
“My mother always puts her finger on the thing that’s missing. If you tidy up a room, she finds the pair of shoes you left out. If you give her your most recent translation, she draws up a detailed list of the inaccuracies and fails to comment on all the rest. Instead of seeing that I have a good life here, she looks for what I don’t have, what I’m not doing. Even after all these years she still makes me feel so small.”
Yet it was manageable, mostly manageable, until mother and daughter went to see the Vermeers at the Frick.
Costanza was familiar with these paintings. She had always thought that their theme was time. Time, stopped in paint. Time expressed through light, caught on a sleeve, a sheet of paper, a face. Maria Rosaria, advancing her theme from the night before, had a different idea. She contended that they were all about the confining or limiting of women. Standing in front of Girl Interrupted at Her Music, she chewed her lip for a moment, then said, “Do you honestly think this young girl will continue to study her music once that fellow comes into her life?”
This personalizing of the paintings irritated Costanza—and was surprisingly transparent besides. Maybe her mother was showing her age. “I sense you have something on your mind, Mamma.”
“Since you ask, well, yes, as it happens I do.” Maria Rosaria turned her sharp eyes away from the paintings and toward her daughter. “I think the doctor is an attractive man. A man of substance.”
“I do too.”
“But, amore mio, you have known him so briefly. How can you move into the house of a man in winter when you only met him the summer before?”
“It was fall when I moved in, Mamma. In some ways I scarcely knew him at all.” Costanza said this almost provokingly. Triumphantly.
“All the more so. And this is not for the first time. You dove in with Sarnoff too.”
“That’s right.”
“You remember how miserable he made you.”
“And also how happy, ridiculously happy, for a time.”
“You didn’t get out of bed for days. You told me yourself.”
“That was at the end.”
“Before that there was the professor. And you remember what happened there…”
“Actually, I don’t. But, Mamma, quite honestly, who are you to pronounce on whom I should choose to love? What makes you such an expert judge of who will make a lasting companion?”
Maria Rosaria didn’t flinch. “I married the sunny exchange student who loved me from afar for ten years and with whom I had a beautiful ten years after that. The man who took his own life emerged later on. We’ve been over this many times before.”
There was simply no winning with Maria Rosaria. No reasoning, no give-and-take. It was her point of view, only. “When you first arrived, you were so careful. I was so full of love for you. I thought you had changed.”
“I was careful. I wanted to see with my own eyes how you were. I didn’t want to jump in. I’m not a fool. I know I have strong opinions. I know, because you’ve made me see, that they are not always easy for you to hear.”
“So why are you saying all this now? What’s different?”
“My plane. It leaves in two days.” She set her hand on Costanza’s. “Do you never think of coming home to Genoa, where you belong? With your people, who love you?”
“The Genovesi are not my people, Mamma. I’ve always been an outsider, because of Papa.”
“Are you one of them here, then?”
“That’s just it. There is no ‘them’ to be one of. That’s the beauty of New York. Of America.”
Maria Rosaria turned again to the painting of the young woman looking up from her music. “There’s something else.”
“Yes?”
“I wonder if you have realized that the boy is infatuated with you.”
“Andrew?” Costanza’s face colored. “He and I are friends.”
“Have you noticed the way he looks at you? Follows you at the table, listens to what you have to say? Watches as you eat and drink?”
“Mamma, Andrew is in love with a girl his own age called Charlotte, who does not love him back. It’s a sad story.”
Maria Rosaria fixed her eyes on her daughter. “How old am I, Costanza? You should trust me sometimes, trust what I see.”
Costanza emitted a long slow sigh.
“And one more thing. I’m just curious.”
“Don’t hold ba
ck at this point,” Costanza said acidly.
“Why always the Jews?”
This she did not expect. “Do you have something against Jews?”
“No. But I have been wondering. First Sarnoff, now the doctor.”
“I suppose they remind me of Papa. There is a strength, a kindness. An intelligence.”
“But your father was not Jewish, and Sarnoff was not especially kind.”
“Morton had his moments. And Papa had a grandfather who was Jewish.”
“Who died before he was born. What does that mean? Nothing.”
“To you it means nothing. To me it is a connection. Slight, but there.”
“Your whole life has been too much about your father’s death, Costanza. Still after twenty-five years you live in the past.”
“The truth, Mamma,” Costanza said with a flare of temper, “is that right now my life is very much about life. It’s not about the past. It’s about the future.”
“Oh? How so?”
So it happened that, reactively and with a trace of defiance in her voice, and not at all the way she intended to, she told her mother about the first failed cycle of IVF and the next one coming up.
It was not easy to reduce Maria Rosaria to silence. Costanza’s erect, fierce, formidable mother softened her posture and looked away.
“That is your response? You turn away from me?”
“I’m happy for you?”
“I hear the question mark. I know it’s not what you feel.”
“Quite honestly, it’s alien to me. This whole meddling with biology.”
“Meddling?” Costanza’s voice rose. Fortunately, at eleven o’clock in the morning the museum was nearly empty. “What Henry and his colleagues do is alter people’s fates. They change their lives. Do you know what my chances are of conceiving a child on my own? A healthy child? And besides, I love this man! And he loves me!”
In a more moderate voice Maria Rosaria said, “I must think about all this. Really you have taken me by surprise. I thought—”
“You thought I no longer wanted a child or a family of my own.”
Her mother nodded.
“It is what I most desperately want. You think my life has been too much about Papa’s death? Maybe there’s some truth in that. Do you know what would make my life about something else—something more? This. A baby. A child. A chance to express all the love that I have in me—a chance to turn my heart away from the grief.”
“You don’t think that being expected to cure your grief is a terrible burden to place on a child?”
Costanza stepped into the adjacent gallery and lowered herself onto a bench. She felt weak, spent. Analyzed, assessed, doubted down to exhaustion.
Maria Rosaria joined her after a moment.
“I haven’t spoken to you this openly in years,” Costanza said. “Even this you judge, you criticize. I don’t see how you can. I just don’t see…” She trailed off into silence.
“I had you late in life, as you know. There are things I understand that you cannot. How altered your life becomes. How difficult the experience can be, physically. How much time you lose…”
Costanza had heard objections like these before, from Morton—but from her own mother? What mother didn’t want her daughter to become a parent? “Your pregnancy was miraculously lucky and, I realize now, probably not intended either.”
“It doesn’t mean I love you any the less. It’s simply the truth. I don’t regret—”
“You don’t regret having me? Is that what you were about to say?”
“By the time I became pregnant, I knew your father very well, Costanza.”
“Did you really?”
Her mother’s face darkened. “Well, I thought I did. No, certainly I did. Know him then. In that period, before he became sick. Because that is how I have to see the sadness that seized your father in the last years of his life. He was a different man then. He—” She stopped, put herself back on course. “Do you know the doctor well? Do you truly, honestly believe that?”
“I wish you would stop calling him the doctor. Yes, I do know Henry. I know him well.”
“Henry is a very clever man. Educated. Charismatic. Clearly in possession of a nimble mind, a wonderful memory—Rubens and the weeping statues and all that. Charming with us old ladies but, even so, I think, ultimately hidden.”
“What makes you say that?”
“My experience of life. My intuition.”
“Your suspicious nature is closer to the truth.”
“It’s a feeling I have, Costanza. I watch people and I think about them. I’m simply offering you my impression, unfiltered.”
“And unasked for.”
“I’m nearly eighty. You can’t expect me to change, now after all these years to begin holding my tongue. And why should I, when I feel something so strongly? You are my child…”
“Mamma, your feelings are judgments. Call them what they are, please. You never embrace anyone, or anything, outright. You are cautious, critical. It’s not how I want to live my life. I want to be free. I want to be open to possibility, this possibility.”
“You are very passionate, my daughter.”
“And you, Mamma, are very hard. So very hard on me. Why?”
Maria Rosaria didn’t say anything. She looked across the room at a painting without, it seemed, quite taking it in. A glaze thickened over her eyes—not tears. Costanza couldn’t remember when she had last seen Maria Rosaria cry. But even a misty eye, from her mother, was noteworthy.
Then it struck Costanza. It was like a curtain being drawn from across a window, and a view opening up. “You’re mad at me for leaving, aren’t you?”
Maria Rosaria didn’t answer.
“Are you, Mamma? Angry at me? For going to live far away?” Costanza sat back. “How can I never have seen that before?”
* * *
On the day of Maria Rosaria’s departure, Costanza accompanied her mother to the airport. It rained heavily, which seemed fitting, and for most of the taxi ride the two women discussed the weather, the things they’d seen during the week, and old family recipes that Costanza wanted to make sure she knew: safe topics, topics without land mines lurking in them.
When the first signs for JFK appeared, Maria Rosaria said, “If you truly love the doc—Henry, then you should marry him.”
This Costanza did not expect to hear. “But why do you say this now?”
“I’ve given it a good deal of thought. I think that if you are really determined to go ahead with this treatment, then you should do it out of the deepest commitment a man and a woman can make to each other. If you’re married, who knows, maybe this time it will work.”
“That’s not very scientific of you, Mamma.”
“Possibly not, yet…”
So her mother was still capable of surprises. She was still capable, possibly, also of insights.
“Do you want to marry him?”
“I do. I would.”
“You do. You would. I see. And Henry?”
“He wanted to.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“After Morton, I’m hesitant.”
“No two marriages are alike, just as no two people are alike. Here too, as you know, I speak from experience.”
They pulled up in front of the terminal. “I’m not exactly angry that you left,” Maria Rosaria said when the taxi pulled over. “But I am sometimes sad. It’s not very pleasant to be sad and alone, all alone, at the end of your life, or in view of the end. It’s natural to want to be together.”
Maria Rosaria opened the car door. “I prefer to go in by myself. I’ll wait for you, you and Henry, to visit this summer. We’ll go to the Punta, you will swim, and we’ll eat at Drin. Before then, you’ll send me news. I hope it is the news you want. Truly I do.”
Costanza got out of the car with her mother. The driver unloaded Maria Rosaria’s suitcase from the trunk. It came with a sturdy handle and was compact like her.
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“It doesn’t have to be a production, Costanza. You’re both grown-ups. You can do what you did with Sarnoff. I’ll give you a dinner when you come to Italy. You can have your grandmother’s ring. I have no use for diamonds anymore.”
* * *
On her way to her second City Hall marriage, Costanza couldn’t help but think of her first. With Sarnoff her trips downtown had been especially joyous. “Trips” because New York State law mandated a waiting period of twenty-four hours between obtaining a marriage license and having the actual ceremony, even if the ceremony was only a handful of words spoken by a civil servant in a shabby little wedding chapel next to the city clerk’s office, where the rug was frayed and the roses, she well remembered, were made of plastic. Sarnoff regarded this cooling-off period with wry delight. He said, “I wonder how many people change their minds. Imagine the dramas. Well, we won’t forget these twenty-four hours”—and he made sure of that. He hired a navy blue Rolls-Royce to chauffeur them downtown to take care of the license. Afterward the driver waited for them while they had a Chinese lunch in a restaurant on Mott Street where the menu was entirely written in Mandarin. They had no idea what they were ordering and only maybe half an idea what they were eating once it came. Sarnoff had brought a magnum of champagne; their fellow diners applauded when the cork popped, and Sarnoff asked their waiter to pour a glass for everyone in the place. Between the appetizers and the main course he gave Costanza a delicate Edwardian necklace set with topazes, which he had chosen because topazes represent fidelity and love. After lunch they climbed back into the car to go shopping for whatever Costanza wanted or needed for their trip to Paris. “I don’t want anything, I don’t need anything,” she said, “other than this.” This: their shared adventure, the luxuriously hermetic silence of the car—and each other. But Morton insisted: “A coat, a bag, something. Lingerie. Socks. Come on.” Socks it was, for each of them, half a dozen pairs in bright colors, pink and orange and lime green, bought at Barneys and, back in the car, put on to cascades of mutual laughter while they drove around the whole of the island of Manhattan, as close to the water as they could go, a loop of a drive for a loopy day.
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