He wishes he could see Maddalena as she was then, climbing the stairs to the terrace in her sister’s blue sundress, holding her mother’s hand. It was a cool night and she wore a shawl, but after she’d seen Antonio waiting for her at the bar, she removed the shawl. As they danced, cheek to cheek, left side, then right side, he couldn’t take his eyes from her shoulders. That she had left them there, bare, for him to admire, was a sign. A week later, they were husband and wife.
Antonio and Mario opened the American version of the Al Di Là in 1955. Their father was gone by then, and with him went the daily reminders of the inferiority of Italy. Slowly, as the restaurant grew into a success, memories of the Old Country, the innocence between the wars, found Antonio. He and Mario talked about buying back their old house in Santa Cecilia, making it a second home for their families. More and more Italians, Antonio included, left the city for the suburbs and surrounded themselves with the Irish and Polish and, worse, people who couldn’t even tell you what their blood was made of. In the years after moving out of Little Italy, Antonio came to feel fear, not pride, when Prima spoke perfect English to her friends without the hint of an accent. He searched through the basement for the trunk of clothes he wore as a child and asked Maddalena to dress Tony in his old short pants and jackets and noticed, as if for the first time, the high quality of the material. The American brands they paid a fortune for in the stores seemed cheap by comparison. He became one of those fathers who told the same stories from his youth long after his kids stopped listening, and as he got older, it occurred to him that he did not tell these stories to teach Prima and Tony and Frankie about their heritage but to keep the stories alive for himself. The Italy of the 1920s and 1930s—the mountains in his bedroom window, the young women in furs taking their passeggiate, the horse-drawn carriages bringing food and mail to Santa Cecilia from the cities—came to him in dreams, and when he woke he’d feel guilty, like he’d been cheating on America, until he learned that he could love them both, but differently, the way he loved his children.
He took nostalgia’s hand, and it pulled him under. Then Tony died, and grief held him there. He’s been drowning ever since. If Antonio can get back to Santa Cecilia, where his son never walked or slept or played the piano or looked up at his father with love and need, maybe he will breathe again. And if he takes his last breath there, so be it.
In the meantime, he has business to finish. The first call he made after Prima’s announcement was to DiSilvio to set up this meeting. The way it stands today, Maddalena gets the Al Di Là and every penny of the savings. Then after she goes, the kids and grandkids split the savings that are left: 40 percent to Prima, 40 percent to Frankie, 5 percent each to the boys. Fair and square. The problem is the afterlife of the Al Di Là. He can’t count on Prima or Frankie. They don’t love the place the way Tony did. Worse: they have their own lives. They don’t come to the Al Di Là much as it is. After he’s gone, they’ll let things go, make too many friends, trust the wrong people, lose trust in each other. So he will go over the will and the restaurant papers again. He doesn’t know what the papers will tell him and DiSilvio today that they didn’t tell them last year or five years ago, but he needs DiSilvio at least to help him think.
Antonio always thought both Mario and Tony would be around for this part. Since the day the Al Di Là opened, it was the two Grasso brothers running the show together, and their two sons who would take it over. He never imagined putting all three men in the ground, one at a time, his brother at fifty-five, his nephew at twenty, his son at fifteen. Without Mario, there’d be no Al Di Là in the first place. Antonio would still be working for peanuts on the assembly line at Ford.
Every Sunday, after he drops Maddalena off at church, Antonio drives to the cemetery. The cemetery is his church: the headstones and the dirt and the fresh air and flowers. Half a day it takes to visit the people he knows. So many Italians came to this country over the years. Some paid a lot of money to get buried back in their village, but most ended up here. Giulio Fabbri and Gianni Martino are on the far side near the highway, both waiting for their wives to join them. Mario’s in the quieter part, under a thick stone with an angel and deep engravings that Antonio wipes clean of grime. For his son, Antonio chose a crypt in the St. Jude section, high up off the ground but not so high he can’t place his lips and palms against it. Next to Tony is a spot with his own name. Beside him, Maddalena.
He doesn’t believe in anything after, like she does. He won’t see Tony or Mario or Mamma or Papà or his friends again in heaven. Maddalena and his kids won’t see him or each other. There’s no big garden party with butterflies and fountains and trays of pastries. He’d bet money on it, if he could ever collect the winnings.
How is Antonio spending his last days? First of all, he doesn’t sleep. He puts his head on the pillow and closes his eyes, but sleep never finds him. At seven o’clock he gets out of bed to make the coffee. He eats two Stella D’oro cookies and sits in his chair in the den. He watches the local news and The Flintstones. Eight thirty he brings coffee to Maddalena. Eight fifty-five on the stove clock he makes sure she’s out the door for church. If it rains or is too cold, he drives her. If the weather’s good, she walks. He reads the American paper on the toilet for a good long hour, and by then she is home and has made the bed and started the day’s cleaning. He showers and shaves and checks the VCR to make sure it’s taping her soap opera. Then he takes the car to Union Street and eats lunch at the Al Di Là with the Corriere della Sera. Lunchtime is busy. They get a lot of businessmen, and most of the time he has to give up his seat, which he is happy to do. After the rush, he makes sure the tables are set for dinner and the silverware is clean. Sometimes he walks over to Eighth Street to visit Mario’s widow, Ida, all alone in her big house. She has a broken right leg and a knee replacement in the left, and since her husband died and her son got killed in Vietnam she’s never had a happy thing to say. “We had some good years,” he reminds her. “When we lived here all together, us and Mario and Mamma and Papà. You don’t remember the Sunday dinners and the bingo games and Nina’s little dog?” But she makes a face and turns up her game shows.
For dinner, Antonio brings something home from the restaurant, or he just fixes it himself for the two of them. Little by little over the years, Maddalena stopped cooking. She’s in the kitchen one day out of 365: Christmas Eve, to fry the fish. No other husband in America has cooked as many meals or washed as many dishes as he has, but he doesn’t mind. He just wants a little credit once in a while.
After dinner he drives back to the Al Di Là, stays an hour to shoot the shit and look over the receipts, then hits the Amerigo Vespucci Club to play bocce. Yesterday he beat the new guy, Tomasso, who’s ten years younger and some kind of champion from Trenton. If you win, the club buys you a drink, but Antonio doesn’t drink much anymore. He lost the taste for it. Soda and iced tea and coffee are enough, and maybe that’s why he doesn’t sleep? The doctors don’t believe him when he says he hasn’t slept since Ronald Reagan was the president. Not that Reagan was ever his president.
Antonio should be grateful for these days, but he can’t help it, he hates to be old. It’s ugly and sad punishment for sins he never committed. He would prefer to live to see the next election, and the one after that, and on and on, mostly so he can keep reminding the younger generations that the working man built this country. He hates the sunset because it brings on the night, and the night scares him with its ghosts and silence. The night is thick with memories in a way that the day never is. Nobody wants to hear any of this. So he pretends that he’s happy and at peace, that when he closes his eyes he’s not falling from the bridge with his arms out, reaching for his son just out of reach, calling his name over and over. Only if he is “upbeat” (that’s Prima’s word) will his kids and the customers talk to him for a few minutes in a row, and for just that little bit of time he’s supposed to thank the Lord.
There’s only one person Antonio should stick around
for, one reason why he and Maddalena shouldn’t move back to Santa Cecilia for good, and that’s Frankie. Prima is more than settled, but Frankie’s up in the clouds somewhere. Where he came from, where he’s going, nobody knows. Thirty years old almost, and still fooling around with school and master’s degrees and jobs that don’t pay. (“How can you live on prestige?” Antonio has asked him. “Does prestige put food on the table?”) Sometimes he thinks it’s a good thing Frankie lives in Boston, so Antonio doesn’t have to see his mixed-up life up close.
He would be very lucky to live long enough to see Frankie settled and happy, with his own kids, out of danger from a lonely life, or worse. If he could get DiSilvio to put that on paper, make it official and guaranteed, he would, no matter what the price. But DiSilvio is later than ever, and there are some things even a lawyer and all the education in the world can’t do. Maddalena prays every day, but Antonio doesn’t think that does any good, either.
MADDALENA PICCINELLI GRASSO and her mother talk every day. For ten minutes after Mass each morning, Maddalena stays and talks to her, and then at night, while Antonio sleeps, she writes her letters. One a month. From the day she arrived in America, Maddalena’s been writing to her. She keeps the pages—hundreds now—hidden in the back of the middle drawer in her dresser of fabrics. After she’s gone, her kids will find the pages and think she was crazy most of her life. But she is not crazy. Her mind goes blank sometimes, and she’ll forget a name or a face or the point she was about to make, but otherwise she’s got it all upstairs. She knows her mother’s been dead twenty years. The letters and the talking keep her close.
Domenica scorsa c’ è stata la Cresima . . . , she writes. Last Sunday was the confirmation of your great-grandson Patrizio. She describes in detail the boy’s pin-striped suit, the kind priest, the desserts. She doesn’t mention Prima’s surprise. The letter takes an hour, but afterward Maddalena’s still not tired. Though she’ll sleep through the night until Antonio wakes her for Mass, it is the act of falling asleep that gives her trouble. The little pink pill’s not strong enough to stop her mind from going over all there is to do, to plan, to change, to check, to remember. She longs to redecorate this bedroom with new wallpaper—an ivory moiré, maybe, or something more modern—to replace the big blue flowers a generation out of style.
She pictures what each of her children is doing: Frankie at the library in Boston, Prima on one last walk through her big house to sweep and straighten up, Tony in heaven in his pajamas eating a TV dinner in front of The Beverly Hillbillies. Maddalena blesses them, one by one, at the start of her prayers. Then another hour it takes for her to pray for all the other people in her life, living and dead, in this country and in Italy. Seems like every week she makes a new friend—a lady from church or the dance studio, or one of her sewing customers who wants to take her to lunch—and each new friend is one more person who keeps her awake.
All the complaining about sleep her husband does, and listen to him now, snoring so loud he’s waking up dead people. One night she’ll put a tape recorder in front of his nose and the next day play him the snoring, but just watch, he still won’t believe her. He’ll keep singing his favorite song, the one about how he’s too old to sleep, that he’s no good to anybody anymore, why won’t God just take him. Maddalena hates that song. She tries to lift him up. “We have to keep moving at our age,” she’s always telling him. “Once you slow down, you make it easy for God to catch you. You think it’s no trouble for me to drive to the studio twice a week, with all those lanes to merge, and take lessons like a teenager?” And no matter what griping Antonio does, she knows he wants to keep living. Why else does he run to the doctor every time he’s got a cough?
Maddalena is seventy-two years old, and in America that’s a spring chicken. When she’s dancing at the studio, when she tries on with Prima the new dresses of the season, when her children and grandchildren are sitting around her at the dining room table Christmas Eve, and she’s able to forget what’s come before, she’s twenty-five again. She thinks, I’m too alive to ever leave this world. All the time people waste! Why don’t they realize? It takes hard work not to look back. So she turns her bedside radio to the fast-music station, and if she gets three clean hours of sleep, that’s plenty to give her the energy she needs to accomplish the day.
She wants to look especially fresh for tomorrow at the studio—the “fall fling,” they call it—where she’ll wear her new gold Dance Naturals shoes. So she closes the light and lies down next to Antonio, who’s wrapped like a sausage in the sheets even though the heater’s on. She puts her arm around him and thinks of Frankie, whose voice tonight on the phone sounded sad, lost. She worries he’s not eating enough, that he’s drinking too much to sleep, and that somehow it’s her fault. Each time she talks to Frankie, he’s a different man. At the confirmation party and for days afterward, he agreed with her about the Italy trip, told her not to let Prima push her around; then tonight he snapped at her, told her she was acting selfish. Both times he was right. She knows she’s making too much of the trip, but once she admits that to Frankie, to anyone, they’ll have her. It’s a shame Antonio was off the phone already; he would have liked hearing Frankie take his side for once. Nothing the boy does is good enough for him. It’s right to discipline, but if you ask Maddalena, Antonio tries too hard to be tough.
People at the dance studio ask Maddalena to tell them about her kids, but she says there’s no word for the feeling that her heart is full and breaking and refilling again, all at the same time, every moment of every day. If they know the word for that, would they tell her, please?
“No,” they say. “Not how you feel to be a mother. We want to hear: Do your kids like to dance? Do they have good jobs? Why don’t they ever come to the studio to watch you do the tango in the competitions? Why don’t you ever mention them, never pull out pictures from your purse? . . .”
How can Maddalena explain? The studio is one life, her kids another. Santa Cecilia another. The years she had Tony, that was another, too, a separate life. In this way only can she understand how the pregnancy faker can do the evil things she does. When she explained this to Frankie the other night on the phone, he told her, “That’s compartmentalization, Ma. It’s not exactly considered healthy.”
“Call it whatever big word you want,” Maddalena had told him. “It’s the only way a person can survive.”
There are parts of her soul that are dark, like the room where Tony slept. When you walk into it, you can only throw yourself crying onto the bed. No one will ever convince her she’s wrong to avoid that room, to pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s hard enough passing the door every day, remembering the life on the other side of it. She can forgive herself for pressing her body against the door, even for turning the knob once in a while, but afterward she always wishes she’d been more strong.
No one at the studio knows she once had a life that included a son named Tony, or if they do know, they don’t ask about it. A long time has passed since anyone—usually a woman, another mother—looked at Maddalena and put her arms around her in comfort. It’s a relief for Maddalena to be free of those stabs in the throat. The woman’s comfort always came first, but then, before long, she’d add up Frankie’s age and ask how Maddalena could have had another child so soon—two years, could that be right?—after losing her son, which would force Maddalena to say, “How could I not?”
These women weren’t in the Grasso house in 1971, when Prima was taking the Chevy out without asking and sometimes not coming home at all; when Maddalena cooked for the three of them every day, then ate alone from the pots on the stove and put away the rest because Antonio would stay late at the Al Di Là and Prima disappeared for days without calling. Those nights, when Antonio finally got home, almost always after midnight and more than a few whiskeys, Maddalena would be in her rag clothes scouring the refrigerator or wiping down the shelves of the china cabinet. She’d begun to iron their underwear and towels and paint the skinny lines of g
rout in between the kitchen and bathroom tiles with a Q-tip. At the time, she was still working nine to five at the drapery shop, and Antonio would try to get her to rest during these late-night hours—watch TV, read one of her Italian romances—but she was afraid of having nothing to do but think, because when she had nothing to do but think, she dug her nails into her scalp. Besides, she said, a house could never be too clean. People were always stopping by to tell her how sorry they were and what a tragedy it was that Tony couldn’t go to heaven. She’d scream at them until they left, and the next day they’d come back with more food.
One of those nights, Antonio was sitting at the kitchen table with her at his feet. She was on her knees scrubbing the ceramic tiles. It was almost one o’clock, and they were alone in the house. They didn’t know where Prima was or if she’d be coming home. Maddalena wore a flowered housedress with holes in the underarms, looking, he said, like his peasant nonna in her old age.
“Have you ever thought—” He stopped.
She sat back on her ankles. They looked at each other.
“Yes,” she said. She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “I’ve thought. I want to.”
“You don’t know what I’m asking.”
“I think I do.” She looked up beyond the doorway to the stairs. Their house was a split-level with the master bedroom on the first floor and three small bedrooms on the second. “After all these years, you still don’t believe I can read your mind.”
“I’m talking about another child.”
All This Talk of Love Page 4