All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  “Keep an eye on Frankie” is what her parents have begged her to do since Tony died, so she does. Patrick’s confirmation is a big deal, not only because the kid finally came to his senses, but because she and Tom are spending a fortune on the party, not to mention the surprise Frankie should be there to hear. If he doesn’t show up, it will be another crack in a family that could fall apart at any moment. You have to tend to family like you tend to a garden. That’s what’s wrong with America, if you ask her, why no one’s as happy as they used to be, like in the fifties.

  Prima raised her own boys the old-fashioned way. All four of them kiss their nonna and nonno and say “I love you” every time they leave them, whether their buddies are around or not. It’s a requirement. She’s dragged them with her and Tom to Mass every Sunday, and to all the sacrament parties and birthdays, and they’ve given up meat on Christmas Eve and on Wednesdays and Fridays during Lent no matter how much they’ve bellyached. Ask her boys about their mother, and they’ll say she’s their best friend, one of their buddies, like they’re on the same team. Zach calls her his “wingman.” She’s gone to all their games—Ryan and Matt’s football, Zach’s soccer and tennis, Patrick’s baseball—and watched how they act with the guys, and the truth is they act no differently than they do with her. It’s almost a shame to say, but they’re closer to her than they are to Tom, and maybe even than they are to each other. She’s picked them up from parties after they’ve passed out drunk. She’s paid more speeding tickets and police fines than she can add up. Where were their buddies then? Where was their father? She’s the one person they can trust without hesitation, she’s told them, so they share everything, sometimes more than she wants to know. Ryan, the oldest—it’s like it’s his life’s mission to shock her with his stories. He doesn’t realize how much it would take to shock her.

  The past few years, with Ryan and the twins away at college, Prima has had to work extra hard, spend more money, make more phone calls, to keep everyone together. Just because your kids grow up and don’t live at home anymore doesn’t mean they stop being members of the family. And sometimes, to fall asleep at night, she pretends that this isn’t Patrick’s last year of high school, that he won’t be leaving them next fall. She likes to imagine Patrick at the other end of the kitchen table, his hands folded in front of him, nervous and guilty maybe, telling her and Tom that he’s decided not to go to college right away, that he wants to take a job in Wilmington for a year, live at home, save money. If Prima doesn’t pretend this is at least a possibility, then all she can see is Tom and her alone in their big house—the TV on but no other voices, no boys in the yard hitting chip shots, nobody in the basement sneaking swigs from the bar—and she feels like she’s tied to train tracks and a big one’s coming at her full force.

  Patrick’s at her bedroom door, knocking and turning the knob. “What’s this locked for?” he calls out.

  Prima and Maddalena slip on their dresses and let him in. He’s still in his school clothes—blue blazer and tie and backpack—with his shirt untucked and his Phillies cap backward.

  “Check you two out,” he says. “Very fancy.” He kisses his nonna on the cheek and asks her, “You wanna be my date tonight?”

  “If we go dancing, yes,” she says. She takes his hands in hers, pulls him close, then pushes him out to arm’s length, then pulls him back to her again. He picks up the rhythm right away.

  “You’ve got a one-track mind,” he says, giving her a twirl. “The dancing track.”

  Maddalena smiles. Her life is dancing, yes, she thinks, but more than that, it’s Frankie and Prima and her husband and keeping up her house and some sewing work on the side for extra money. For many years she wanted more, or different, or to go backward—once, long ago, she wanted romance and adventure, like a woman in a movie—but then she lost Tony, her beautiful son, and after that, she stopped wanting anything and needs one pill to sleep and another to wake up, and what may be true, what the years have taught her, is that a son and a daughter and a husband and dancing and a little house and some paying work and to sleep through the night are as much as anyone has a right to ask for in this life. More.

  “Handsome boy like you,” she says to Patrick now, and she pats his cheek. She stares at him a moment, her hand still on his cheek, struck by his smooth skin, his big blue eyes, broad shoulders, blond hair. She wants to say more, to tell him he is one of the lucky ones to be good looking and strong and young, but his sudden beauty, and the explosion in her heart, have stopped her mouth. She can’t form words. His name disappears from her lips. She just stares.

  “I am a swordsman,” Patrick says. “It cannot be denied.”

  “What on earth is that expression?” Prima asks.

  “Think about it,” he says.

  Prima shakes her head. It sounds dirty. She looks over at Maddalena. “You still with us, Ma?”

  “Of course,” says Maddalena. The spell breaks. She takes her hand away. “I was just thinking, Prima, you need to bring your handsome son here to the dance studio. We get lots of young men from the University of Delaware. They take lessons and practice for the competitions. More the young men these days than the old men are coming. When I dance with the college ones, I feel like I’m a teenager again, back in my village before your father took me—”

  “Yeah, too bad all those dudes are gay,” Patrick says, laughing. He walks over to Prima, gives her a peck on the cheek, and rests his elbow on her shoulder. He’s more than a head taller.

  “Some, yes, it’s true,” Maddalena says. “Not every one of them, though. I can tell. I see everything. The ones that look like you, they not. Just the funny-looking ones. I don’t dance with the funny-looking ones. Or the geezers. You should see how the college boys ask for me. All those pretty young girls around, and they ask me to dance—an old lady!”

  “See what I’m saying?” Patrick says. “Gay.”

  “Go take a shower,” Prima tells him. “You’ve got BO.” It’s beer on his breath, actually, and she needs him out of the room before her mother notices. “You weren’t running around outside in those pants, were you?”

  “I was just over at the Gooch’s,” he says.

  “The Gooch,” says Prima. “Don’t you love these kids’ names, Ma?”

  After the door’s closed and the music starts up from Patrick’s room, Maddalena says, “He’s so full of life, that one. Two big things you did right in your life: marry Tom and raise those boys.”

  They take off their dresses and Prima covers them with plastic. She sits with Maddalena on the deck for a while, watching Tom trim the hedges. She has come through life OK after all. A quiet childhood with a thousand friends and weekends at the shore and the lead in Saint Joan even though she was just a sophomore. Then, the morning of opening night, Tony went missing, and for years after, there was just a kind of blankness she never imagined could be filled. Until Tom. Until her boys. And now she considers herself one of the lucky ones to have seen through the blankness—blessed, in fact, smiled upon by the God she visits each and every Sunday. Her tragedy came early in life, and since then other tragedies have sideswiped her but never crashed full on. A lump in her mother’s breast, suspicious at first, diagnosed as benign. Tom almost getting transferred to Omaha, then finding a new job here that paid twice as much. And just last month, a boy on Patrick’s team—the shortstop, All-American kid, stands next to Patrick in the all-star photo—drops dead swinging at strike three. Prima should thank God a hundred times a day, but she forgets, and then on Sundays she has to ask his forgiveness for forgetting. She wonders whether anyone can be grateful enough to satisfy him and, if they are, whether God rewards or keeps testing you.

  These are the questions Prima asks herself that night, and the night after, and the night after that, the one before the confirmation, when she’s awake at 1 a.m. next to her husband, so tired from the day that her eyes burn and the pins and needles pinch her legs, and she gets that train-track feeling again and hears t
he whistle screaming closer and feels the vibration on the rails beneath her, and sleep—that fickle hero—won’t cut her loose.

  FRANKIE LIGHTS THE front burner on his kitchen stove. He fills a medium pot with water and watches it come to a boil. He takes a small box from the cupboard, slices it open with a steak knife, and pours pasta shells into the water. Eight minutes later he drains the shells, returns them to the pot, and pours in a half cup of milk, a tablespoon of butter, and a packet of powdered orange cheese. He brings the pot to the couch and turns on the television. The bottom of the pot warms his lap. He’s not tired. It’s past 1 a.m. and he can’t get tired as hard as he tries. He flips through the six channels that come with basic cable and settles on PBS. An old astronomer stands in front of a poster-size photograph and points to a blur surrounded by smaller, brighter blurs. It’s a low-budget documentary on the Hale-Bopp comet, and though it’s yesterday’s news, it captivates him. The comet, the greatest natural spectacle of the nineties, is long gone and won’t be back for two thousand years. The thirty-nine brainwashed believers who followed it into oblivion won’t be back at all. Meanwhile, the earth remains in a perpetual state of loneliness, welcoming but never visited, a host whose friends drive by once in a while but don’t stop in.

  What’s at play all those miles beyond him shouldn’t matter. What should count, his friends might say—and doesn’t he agree, officially?—is the here and now. And yet, in the here and now, with the screen flickering and the old astronomer circling the blurs with a red marker, Frankie longs to know, with the certainty of a scientist, a few more whats and whys of the cosmic plot. Like, what did he hope to find in this city, and when will he find it? Like, why did one son embrace oblivion and the other merely run away? Like, why does Frankie feel that the Grassos—his mother and father, Prima, his nephews, himself, and even, strangely, Tony—are at the end of something?

  IN THE BALLROOM of the Wilmington Country Club, Prima buzzes from table to table. Each round holds eight of her gussied-up friends and family, whom she hugs and waves at in a blur of kisses and smiles. Before each course goes out, she rushes to the kitchen to scrutinize its preparation: first the arugula salad with its crispy Parmesan ring, then her father’s lasagna trucked in from the Al Di Là, then lollipop lamb chops with a mint sauce and sides of asparagus and rosemary potatoes. The chef and servers shoot her dirty looks, but too bad. She is Antonio Grasso’s daughter.

  She goes over again and again how she and Tom will bring the confirmation to its dramatic close. She’ll wait until the desserts and coffee are cleared, and then just as her family considers heading for the coatroom, she and Tom will join hands and tell them to hold their horses. We have a second gift to give you today, she will say. By that point, the other guests will have gone; the three-piece orchestra will be packing up; the sunset will be spilling its pink light through the French doors of the terrace; the only missing element will be a film crew, a sound track, a bubbly host/model/reporter shoving a microphone in each of their faces, asking, How do you feel? What does this act of love and generosity mean to the Grasso family?

  All that, and Frankie.

  Prima can’t help looking for her brother in the crowd, but she sees no shock of dyed jet-black hair, no John Lennon glasses, no silver bracelets. She should know better than to expect Frankie to rise to the occasion. She regrets having bribed him with the promise of the surprise, but at least she didn’t reveal it. Besides, it’s not Prima’s role to begin with—or at least it shouldn’t be—to enforce Frankie’s obligations, to make him a better man. It’s her father’s. It would have been Tony’s. Whatever the case, once you prompt a person like Frankie to do the right thing, it’s impossible to gauge his sincerity; and then you have to put up with his sullen “I’m here, happy now?” whiny self-righteousness. Who needs it? And what would Prima even say to him? Even though you’ve ignored your nephews all your life, I appreciate your presence at Patrick’s official transition into Christian adulthood?

  But that would be stooping to his level. Sarcasm. It seeps into you like a stain; it blinds you; it makes you think you’re superior, but Frankie is not superior to anyone, not even to Prima, who might never have gone to graduate school but has just as much of a college degree as he does, and in something practical. She shouldn’t have to defend herself or her choices to anyone, let alone Frankie, and another thing—

  Zach, her quietest, appears. “Ma,” he says, “dance with me?” He holds his arms out. He wears the suit she bought him on his sixteenth birthday, made of imported English wool hand-cut by their Italian tailor, Ernesto, who looks proudly over from his seat near the grand piano. Like every Ernesto suit before it, this one infuses Zach with strength and pride in the way it hugs his arms and slims his waist and falls sculpturally at his ankles, announcing its quality to even the most casual observer. If you didn’t know Zach, you’d think he was the teen heartthrob from your soap opera or the class president; you’d be surprised to hear he’s just a kid, not a man, barely a young man. He has his nonno’s ambition and long legs and his father’s freckles; from his mother he has practicality and deep brown eyes and a head of unruly curls; with his twin, Matt, he shares not an identical face but a delirious faith that life is a carnival designed to amuse and delight them. Prima shared that same faith once.

  Mother and son hold their hands on each other’s waists, sway back and forth to “As Time Goes By.” Four or five couples join them on the large square of hardwood: her mother with Tom; Mark Krouse from the firm with his new wife; and, on the periphery, ancient Aunt Helen with her son, Michael.

  “So, Ma,” Zach says, “don’t get mad, but Dad told me the secret.”

  She stops moving for a moment, looks at his overeager eyes, then gets back to the sway. “No, he didn’t.”

  “He did!”

  “OK, then you tell me.”

  “You first.”

  “Son,” she says, “you really think I’d fall for that old trick?”

  “What old trick?”

  Soon the song ends, Zach, defeated, kisses her on the cheek and strides off, and dessert arrives: generous sampler plates of pear-and-ginger tarts, apple cobbler, and chocolate-pecan truffles. The expression alone on her guests’ faces when they notice the supplemental buffet with fresh fruit and cake and ice cream swells Prima’s already bursting heart. Across the room, her mother catches her eye, mouths “Beautiful!” and folds her hands as if in prayer, as if the sweet little delights before her are too perfect to touch. Still Prima can’t relax enough to sit with her. She paces in the back of the ballroom near the kitchen, watching and waving and occasionally crossing the dance floor to wish the early departures good night.

  “A lovely affair,” they say. And to Tom: “First class, Buckley. First class all the way.”

  “Thank you,” they say as she squeezes their hands and kisses the cheeks of the overcologned accountants and their jittery wives. “Thank you so much.”

  All her life, Prima has put her faith in the grand gesture. In middle school she organized elaborate study parties with themed food and music and mnemonic games. As a child she reenacted Lucille Ball skits in the basement for her mother and Tony, memorizing the jokes and the pratfalls. On Tom’s twenty-first birthday, after they’d been dating only a month, she filled his dorm room with twenty-one presents of various shapes and sizes.

  “Excuse me,” someone says, behind her. “You must be the mother of the bride?”

  She turns and—no mistake this time—there’s Frankie. Frankie in a wrinkled shirt, no tie, and khakis with frayed cuffs. Frankie after all. Her first instinct is to throw her arms around him, but she stops herself. He’s two hours late. The look in his eyes is smug. She checks her watch. “How’d you get here?” she says. “You couldn’t have called?”

  “I drove,” he says. “I got up at the crack of dawn and sat in traffic all day. That’s why I’m late. But maybe I shouldn’t have bothered.”

  Prima has steeled herself to fight her moth
er today, not Frankie. So she says, “You know what? You’re right,” and apologizes, thanks him for making the effort to drive all the way down, and offers him gas money, which he refuses. Finally she throws her arms around him like she wanted to when she saw him. He is her only brother. She’s happy he’s here, even two hours late, even smug.

  “Did I miss the big announcement?”

  “You’re in luck,” she says.

  She takes him by the hand and leads him toward the head table. When they reach the dance floor, their mother spots him. It occurs to Prima at this moment—as Maddalena jumps out of her chair and runs to greet her son—that all Frankie needs to do to fill his mother’s heart is walk into a room. There are tears in Maddalena’s eyes like he’s a soldier stepping off a warship. She’s seen him as recently as the Fourth of July, when he came down to Prima’s beach house for a few days, but it might as well have been a decade. When you have lost one of your own children, every day apart from the ones who survived seems endless. Prima lets go of her brother’s hand, steps to the side as their mother embraces him, and searches the room for other early departures to bid good night.

  Before long, the guests have all gone, taking with them the heavy glass vases of orange dahlias, the cake in wax-paper bags. Prima and Tom stand at the head table, her arm around his waist, her head on his shoulder. Their family sits before them: her mother and father, three of their boys, Frankie eating a warmed-up plate of lasagna. Behind them, the violinist snaps his case shut and shakes hands with the cellist. It is six o’clock, nearly dark, and through the windows they can see the last of the golfers carrying their gear to the parking lot.

  “Oh well,” says her mother, rubbing her arms and standing. “They’re going to kick us out, I guess.”

  “Hold on one second, Mamma,” says Tom.

  Antonio puts his hand on his wife’s leg. “What’s your rush?” he says.