Ryan, shirt untucked, returns from the men’s room, glances around at his parents and brothers and grandparents and uncle all sitting quietly. “What’d I miss?” he asks.
“Your mother has something to say,” Tom tells him.
“Oh, right!” says Ryan. “The big finale.”
The folded papers in Prima’s hands suddenly take on a weight. For weeks she’s been eager to hand them to the seven people gathered around the table, but now, inexplicably, she wants to keep them to herself a bit longer.
“Can I guess?” asks Matt.
“Sure.”
“Really? OK, hold on. Let me think.”
“You’re buying a boat,” says Maddalena. She’s sitting up straight in her chair, ready to be proud of what her daughter can afford.
“Nope,” Tom says. “But that’s not a bad idea.”
“You bought both those plots in Greenville,” Maddalena guesses again. “So me and your father can live with you.”
“Colder,” says Tom. “We’re selling that lot for a nice little profit, by the way. We’ll need it.”
“This news involves us all,” Prima says. “Not just me and Tom.”
Maddalena narrows her eyes. “Why does that make me nervous?” she says. “Don’t tell me you’re moving somewhere far. You can’t go chasing your kids—”
“No, of course not,” says Prima. “But actually, yes, temporarily we’re all moving. Far, far away.” She takes a deep breath, locks eyes with her mother. “We’re going back to the Old Country, all of us. To the Grassos’ ancestral village, Santa Cecilia, where it all began. For two weeks.”
“Awesome!” says Matt.
“Talk serious,” Maddalena says, crossing her arms.
“I’m very serious,” Prima says. “It’s not difficult. I buy the tickets. I call a few relatives. We get on a plane.”
“I’m there,” says Ryan.
“Oh yes, it’s very easy,” Maddalena says. Everyone’s looking at her. She shakes her head, folds her arms more tightly across her chest, the way Patrick used to do when he wouldn’t eat his peas. “You knew about this, Frankie?”
Frankie shakes his head.
“I didn’t think so.”
“It’s like a resort now,” says Tom, gently. “There are five or six hotels, right smack in the village of Santa Cecilia. And even if there weren’t, there’s so much to see in Italy. Prima’s mapped out a bunch of day trips. We want the family to learn its history.”
“I know my history,” Maddalena says. “So does he.” She ticks her head toward Antonio. “I don’t tell you enough times I’ll never go back there? You call it a gift to force me?”
“You weren’t kidding,” Tom says to Prima under his breath.
“I knew you wouldn’t be thrilled,” Prima says to her mother. “But this isn’t only about you. There are other people at the table here today. Do you ever think about what Dad wants? How about your grandsons? Us? Do you know how embarrassed I get every time I tell somebody I’ve never been to my homeland?”
“Embarrassed?” says Frankie, again with the smug face.
“She’s got such a sad life, doesn’t she, Frankie?” Maddalena says. “She wants to go to Italy so bad, why doesn’t she go herself?”
“I’m still here, Ma,” Prima says.
“Nobody’s stopping you, Prima. You’ve got money. I tell your father all the time, ‘Let your daughter take you back. Don’t drag me into it.’ ”
“You haven’t heard her say that, Prima?” mutters Frankie. “Did you two just meet?”
Prima shakes her head at her brother. “I’ve heard it,” she says. “I live here. I know her better than anybody. Without her in Italy, though, it won’t be the same. And what, she’s supposed to stay here by herself when we all go?”
“I don’t have to go,” Frankie says.
“I’ll say one thing,” Antonio says. He leans back in his chair, presses his fingertips to the edge of the table. “This is the best idea I’ve ever heard.”
“Finally!” Tom says. “Somebody likes it.”
“We like it!” Ryan adds.
“There’s only one mistake you made,” Antonio continues. “No way in the world you’re spending all that money on us. I’m paying the tickets for everybody.”
“Save your breath, Dad,” says Prima. “Because—and hear me on this—it’s already done.” She waves the folded envelopes at them. “Right here, eight prepaid travel vouchers. Nonrefundable. Departure date: August tenth, 2000. Return date: August twenty-fifth.”
“No shit!” says Patrick.
“I told you I was serious.”
“But Frankie has school,” Antonio says.
“In August?” Prima answers. “Even Frankie doesn’t go to school in August. The details we can work out as we go forward, but for now we’re all going to clear our schedules for August tenth. That’s ten months away, plenty of time to plan, cover the restaurant, knock some sense into you, Mom, whatever we need to do.”
“All that money wasted,” says Maddalena. She takes her fork and pushes a bite of cake around her plate. “It’s a shame. I’m staying here. Call the airplane company and tell them I died.”
“Jesus Christ,” Prima says.
“This is supposed to be exciting,” says Tom. “Prima and I have been wanting to make this happen for years, not just for us, for everybody. Since the day we met we’ve been talking about a Grasso-Buckley family trip to Italy. Doesn’t it sound like a movie?”
“Good news is long overdue in this family,” says Prima. “That’s all we’re trying to do: give the Grassos a happy memory.”
Maddalena stops listening to this nonsense. Why bother? They speak for her. Always people speak for her, tell her what she really means, how to pronounce the words so they sound not only like correct English but less angry, less sad. First her mother and father spoke for her; then, when she was just a teenager—barely nineteen!—Antonio Grasso came along in his suit and his zio’s car and did the talking. She has never been back to Santa Cecilia, not even for a visit, not once in the fifty years since Antonio married her and brought her to America, and she’s not about to start now. Unlike him, she still has her people in that village. She remembers them how they were when she left them in 1946. Now most of them are bones in the ground behind the church. Mamma and Babbo, her sisters and brothers, Teresa, Celestina, Maurizio, Giacomo. Too much family to lose in one lifetime. It’s not enough to bury your own son; now they want her to go back for the bones of the others, too? She has only one brother left, Claudio, and one sister, Carolina, but she hasn’t spoken to them in twenty years. She won’t see them old and sick, not after working so hard, every day, to keep them young and beautiful and full of life in her mind. No. She won’t let that happen.
She could be loud about it now, but she won’t, not here, not on her grandson’s special day. Not with Frankie beside her. If she makes a fuss, she’ll scare him off. So she pushes the slice of cake around her plate until it hardens to a paste. Her eyes wander the room. She notices the spill stains on the carpets by the bathroom, the chips in the saucers, the dust on the drapes. In the corners of Prima’s eyes—look how she’s talking now, on and on, her and her surprises—are a web of wrinkles, and not just when she smiles. Liver spots cover her once-perfect wrists. No, that’s Maddalena’s own face in the mirrored wall; that’s her spotted, wrinkled old-lady skin. Santa Cecilia was the one place on earth where she was young. She was a beauty and a talker there, an expert at voices, an actress in the making. What belongs to her and her alone is that village during those nineteen years, her memories of it, of who she might have been, the view from the terrace above her father’s store, the stairs to her bedroom made of marble, the tops of the trees scraping the sky. Go back now, see it all changed, and that, too, will be taken away.
“DON’T WORRY ABOUT my mother,” Prima says to Tom on the way home. Patrick’s in the back seat with his headphones on, staring out the window. The other boys are safely
on trains back to Syracuse and to Penn State. “She’ll come around. Who can’t come around to a trip to Italy?”
“Her,” Tom says. “Maybe it’s wrong to push her. You saw her face—she went white. And she was mad. Like, rage. I’ve never seen her that way. You told me this trip would be a tough sell, but I wasn’t expecting such an extreme reaction. You think she’s hiding something about that village?”
“She’s got nothing to hide, trust me. She’s an open book. She needs that push. She doesn’t know what’s good for her. And she’s so dramatic. Ryan got that gene, didn’t he? Somehow it skipped me.” She smiles and pinches him.
More than that, though, she explains to Tom, it’s unhealthy for her mother to pretend Santa Cecilia stopped existing the day she left it, to treat her childhood in the village the way she and Prima have both treated losing Tony. It’s time for that to change. She read in a magazine that decades of denial build up in a person, that closing yourself off, never giving yourself a release, pretending things are one way when they’re another, is unhealthy, can even lead to cancer or Alzheimer’s or high blood pressure. It makes sense. You hold something in long enough and it turns to poison.
“It was Tony’s forty-third birthday last week,” she says to Tom now. She’s testing how it feels to say his name out loud, to make him a part of the day. It’s never too late, the magazine said, to chip away at the buildup of denial, but mentioning his birthday to Tom so casually, the way she’d mention the birthday of someone in his firm, feels like a betrayal of the unspoken pact she’s had with her mother.
Even so, she continues. “I went to my mother’s house on the actual day,” she says. “I didn’t tell her why. I just stopped in. We sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking about the party, and I said, ‘Let’s walk down to St. Mary’s and light a candle,’ but she pretended not to hear me. She got up and emptied the espresso maker.”
“Like I said, maybe it’s wrong to push her.”
“If you don’t push people, Tom, they don’t change. What if I didn’t push this one?” She ticks her head back toward Patrick, then leans in to whisper. “He’d be bald right now, begging for change at the train station.”
Tom laughs. “That’s a Hare Krishna, not a Buddhist.”
“Still,” says Prima. “If it weren’t for me and Father Larson sitting him down, explaining his roots, you think he’d be confirmed today?” And here’s another reason for the Grasso trip to Italy: to show her sons the beauty they came from, walk them through St. Peter’s Square, fill them with a history that will ground them for life. Though Prima’s never been to the Old Country, she’s seen enough movies and read enough articles to know that it can transform and unite them, keep them from wandering too far from each other.
It’s a school night, but Patrick’s had a big day, so they let him stay up and watch TV in his room and go through his gifts. He’s zonked, though, and Prima’s not surprised when, on the way to the laundry room, she finds him asleep on his bed fully clothed, cards and unwrapped boxes around him. She stands in the doorway a moment, watching his easy breathing, his hand still clutching the remote. He is her most precious, fragile, extraordinary gift, made only more precious, more fragile, by the simultaneous existence of his extraordinary brothers. It seems that every time she looks at one of her boys, it’s to fix him there before her, to stop time and fate and circumstance from stealing him away. Her mother must have looked at Tony this way, too, while he practiced the piano he’d begged for, while he cruised through his homework at the kitchen table in half the time it took Prima to finish hers, but it didn’t work. Prima doesn’t need a magazine to explain the guilt Maddalena will always feel for that, because it’s a guilt that Prima shares.
2 Two Lives
ANTONIO GRASSO AND his mother loved the Ristorante Al Di Là like it was one of their own children. The last time he saw her alive, she was in her wheelchair by the window, at the restaurant’s fortieth anniversary party. They had built this place together—he and his mother and his brother, Mario—and together they’d watched it grow and settle and slide into middle age. “Forty years!” his mother had said, amazed, clutching his hand, and he’d said, “Che brutta cosa come passano gli anni.” What an ugly thing, how the years pass. Twenty-two of them already, since Mario died. Two, since Mamma. Twenty-eight, since Tony. If he blinks, another year will go. He doesn’t blink.
After a certain age, you’re no use to the world. Everybody knows this, of course, but you’re not supposed to put the words together out loud. What you’re supposed to do is make enough money to leave to your kids. Set your wife up with a pension and annuities. Pay off your house and the funeral parlor. Get out of the way.
Antonio is seventy-nine years old. He can’t work like he used to, can’t keep as strong an eye on the cooks and the managers. He showed up this morning and directed Olindo, the newest manager, to open the drapes in the main dining room to let in the light, but if Antonio hadn’t shown up and the drapes stayed closed, the Al Di Là would have made just as much profit. Each day when Antonio walks down Union Street, through the neighborhood once filled with Italians, he doesn’t recognize the faces. They’re all strangers, the men on the sidewalks and the young women leaning out the windows, and he is the last man standing from an era that matters to no one.
He wants to go home. One last time to the village, that’s all. One last time to walk with his arm around Maddalena’s waist through the streets where they met as children, to the church where he married her, to the terrace of her father’s house. One last time in a place where people want him and where his memories are happy. In the three days since he saw the tickets in Prima’s hands, Antonio has been in Santa Cecilia in his mind. He’s left behind the country club, the arguments, the Al Di Là, all of it. When thirsty, he goes to kneel at the spring in the piazza. His zio Domenico waits in line behind him for the clear, crisp water, and behind Domenico his mother and father wait in their summer clothes, and behind them stands Antonio himself at the age of seventeen. A horse and carriage go by, driven by Aristide Piccinelli; beside Aristide is his youngest daughter, Maddalena, eighteen years old, hiding her golden hair under a wide-brimmed hat. They are on their way to Avezzano to buy supplies for their grocery store. And then it begins to snow, and he is seven years old, tackling his brother in a drift. Mario escapes and runs deeper into the woods, where it’s summer again and the leaves are thick and he and ten other boys are playing war . . .
He sits in a booth by the window, with a view of sunny Union Street and the Corriere della Sera before him on the table. He has a lunch meeting with his lawyer, DiSilvio, but DiSilvio is always late, so Antonio keeps reading. There’s another story—a different one every week, it seems—about the drop in the Italian population, the growing fears that the country will have no one to carry on its traditions, now that Italian girls feel no shame living childless with their boyfriends, choosing careers in politics and banking and the law over motherhood. The article confirms for Antonio that he will die at the right time: before Italy loses its Italian altogether. He circles the headline—ARRIVEDERCI, ROMA—to show DiSilvio.
Antonio’s first years as an immigrant in America, he lived alone and single and with his back turned to the Old Country. It had served its purpose by giving him life, but after that, he’d asked himself, what good did Italia do? The Grassos’ farm, stuck at the rocky bottom of the hill, struggled to produce enough to feed them, let alone trade. For every child born to Antonio’s mother and grandmother, another died before the age of five. The wars came through like tornadoes, spinning good people and bad people together up in the air and spitting them out in pieces. The few left on the ground stayed dumb and believed whatever they were told, afraid of tomorrow, afraid of today, happy only when they remembered yesterday and tried to repeat it, even if yesterday punched them in the gut.
America, on the other hand, was never without a smile on its face and a big idea in its head. It did stupid things—the government was
a bunch of crooks, of course, show him a government that wasn’t—but the stupid things it did still put the country a step ahead. It knocked people over on the way, and didn’t apologize, and kept that smile on its face the whole time, and that was how it earned respect. This is, at least, how his father explained America to Antonio in those first years he and Mario and their mother lived with him in the row house on Eighth Street. He convinced his sons that Italy was a dying world, that eventually everyone they’d known in the village would have to find their way across the Atlantic, and that they were lucky to have beaten them to it. Their mother was not convinced. Sunday afternoons at four, she would turn on Radio Italia, and the men would leave the room. Nostalgia was not allowed. Nostalgia was not honest, their father said; it got you drunk and tired worse than whiskey. It was better to pretend that Italy, and all their memories of it, had sunk into the sea.
When Antonio named the Grasso restaurant after the Al Di Là Café in Santa Cecilia, he meant it as a tribute not to his country or his village but to Maddalena. He had brought her to the café late one Saturday night, soon after he and Mario had returned to Santa Cecilia to find wives. He was twenty-six then, Mario twenty-four. The Al Di Là Café was the only place to take a girl dancing. By day, customers ate their meals outside on the terrace, surrounded by a wrought iron fence, but a few times a month, a band showed up from another town, colored lights were strung across the walls, and the terrace became a nightclub. That night, with her chaperone father watching, Antonio and Maddalena slow-danced across the stone floor to the music of a young guitar player from Terni. Maddalena was nervous. The boy who loved her, Vito Leone, might be watching, too, she said, along with her father, so her body was stiff, and when the song ended she had tears in her eyes. She’d known Antonio less than a month at that point, but he’d made a good impression on her parents—the farm boy turned rich American businessman!—and they insisted she marry him, and then the boy who loved her married her sister Carolina, and in that village way, life started for them all. The only guilt he felt at the time was for separating her from her family, but he trusted that one day she’d thank him for giving her a bigger life. He’s been waiting for that gratitude ever since, but she is stubborn and still angry, and maybe he deserves it, but maybe, too, this trip will show her he’s been right all along.
All This Talk of Love Page 3