One day, Antonio overheard Lucio asking one of the other busboys, “What’s the Prince always scribbling?” He was the worst gossip of all, Lucio. Still is.
“Who knows,” said the busboy. “He’s a smart kid. He’s probably doing his homework.”
“In the summer? In the check book?” said Lucio. “It’s not normal, all that writing. It’s too many words.”
“Ask the Princess,” said the busboy, pointing to Prima, and the two men laughed.
Antonio ignored this at first. He couldn’t blame Lucio for not liking Tony or Dante because of all the teasing they did about his high voice. Then he watched his son more closely. Tony took that book of checks everywhere. Whenever he got a free second, he’d write in it, with a kind of concentration Antonio didn’t see again in anyone until Frankie. At the end of every day, just before he and Antonio would get in the car to go home for dinner with Maddalena and Prima, Tony tore out a handful of pages, stuffed them in his pocket, and threw the rest of the book in the trash. Antonio fished it out, but there was nothing: Table 6. 1 Lasagna, 1 Veal Scallopine, 2 House Red. $9.50.
One day, the widow Ida called to say she needed help in her kitchen. Could Antonio send over somebody tall and strong? He sent Tony, who left his apron behind, on a hook in the kitchen, and in its front pocket the book of checks.
Ida did not live far. Antonio had only a few minutes. From the window of the Al Di Là, he watched Tony cross Union, jog over to Eighth Street, and turn the corner toward his zia’s. He had long legs and thick dark curls and a smart head on his shoulders. He was so young, just fourteen, innocent and decent, with a long life ahead full of every possible good thing. This is another way Antonio chooses to remember him, his son who turned the corner that day and came back somebody else.
Antonio flipped through the lined green pages. First, more specials, more lists. A running tally of tips. The middle was blank. Then he got to the back pages. Tony’s handwriting, small and scratched, filled the lines. He’d crammed his words into every inch, like he was a prisoner and these were the last scraps of paper he’d get. They were letters, some to himself, some to Dante Marconi. Dante’s name was on every page. But as letters they made no sense. No boy in his right mind sent letters like this. Tony Grasso, where will you go? he wrote. You can’t go anywhere without him. There’s no place for you. Stop yourself before it’s too late. Go to the bridge before it’s too late. Do SOMETHING before it’s too late. Find a priest before it’s too late. Your mother will be better off. It’s too late already. Too late too late. What was he talking about? Too late for what? What was Dante doing to him? You have flour all over your legs today. You are the beginning and the end. Take me for a ride with Bruce and Mikey and the guy with the broken arm. Take me anywhere. Why aren’t you talking to me today? Then some kind of poem about a field in the spring. Then a dream about the ocean. In my dream, a wave knocked you down, and when you came up for air you had a hole in your back like a whale. At the top of the dream page, that name again: Dante.
Antonio didn’t understand. The black and blue ink marks blurred into a loud mess of nonsense. Scarabocchi, his teacher back in Santa Cecilia used to call sloppy handwriting. Scarabocchi, she taught him, was a sign of disrespect. When Tony and Prima did their homework, Antonio sometimes stood guard over them as they wrote, watching like a hawk for scarabocchi. He couldn’t necessarily help them get the right answers, but he could insist that their handwriting showed respect: straight rows of neat letters, clear numbers. Not this disgraceful mess of Tony’s. You don’t write so sloppy and small unless you are ashamed.
He tore out the last three pages and hung the apron back on the hook. He went to the dessert fridge, where Dante was scooping out portions of tiramisu onto a plate.
“Go home,” Antonio said, grabbing the plate. “You don’t work here anymore.” Fuck Marconi and his free repairs. Who cared that Dante chased after him, asking why, saying, Please, please, Signor Grasso! What did I do? Antonio didn’t say another word. All that boy’s sissy begging made him want to punch him in the face.
Antonio left out the back door and walked down Union in the direction of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. If he stood at the top and stared down at the water, an answer would come to him. If he could stop time and think, think hard, Tony’s words would make sense. He shoved the pages back into his pocket. He wandered the streets, passed the old men in their folding chairs without a wave, made a left and then another left, forgot where he’d turned. At the next intersection, he got so confused, here in the Little Italy neighborhood he knew better than his backyard, that he couldn’t decide which direction to take to the bridge. He stood for a long time, paralyzed, dizzy. Cars rushed past. The traffic lights blinked. Then someone called his name.
Giulio Fabbri stood on the other side of the street—Seventh Street, so he’d gone in a big circle—and waved. “Antonio Grasso!” he called again. He was standing in front of his house. “You here for a visit?” He walked toward him, arms out. “Come in,” he said.
Giulio led him into his little empty row house. Helen was at the store. He talked on and on. Politics, the weather, neighborhood gossip. Antonio was paralyzed. Every month, Giulio said, more Italians moved out of the city. It made him sad to see them go. His stepson, Michael, Helen’s son, had just left for college in DC, and her daughter, Abigail, applied to study music in London; their leaving made Giulio wish that he’d had children of his own, young children like Tony and Prima, and that he hadn’t met Helen so late in life. “You and Maddalena got lucky,” he said. “Two children, two angels. A boy and a girl. Balance. Did you hear, by the way, about DiSilvio’s jailbird son—”
Tears were forming in Antonio’s eyes, and Giulio stopped. “What is it, uaglio?”
Antonio took out the pages, now crumpled and smudged, from his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” He laid them on the table between the glasses of wine Giulio had poured. “Tell me what they mean.”
They called Giulio Fabbri the Professor of Little Italy. He understood poems and dreams. Antonio hadn’t ended up on Seventh Street by accident. The Professor would find a normal reason for Tony’s letters, tell Antonio not to worry, they were harmless. The boy was so young; we all get crazy ideas when we’re young.
Giulio put on his glasses. He read all three pages twice. Then he took a sip of wine, folded the pages in half, and slid them back over to Antonio. He looked Antonio in the eyes. “I’m sorry, compare,” he said. “This is bad. Very bad, maybe. But it doesn’t have to be.”
“Tell me.”
His son had an unhealthy crush, Giulio explained. An infatuation. What made it bad news, of course, was that the infatuation, the romantic idea he should have for a girl, was for the Marconi boy. This idea got him twisted the wrong direction. You see men like this on the news, he said; you read about them in literature—the Greeks, even some Romans; but you never think they can be someone you know, someone of your own blood.
The good news, according to Giulio, was, first, that Tony was young, there was still time for him to grow out of it. And second, that the Marconi boy didn’t share his feelings. Nothing had happened between them. Giulio pointed to the bottom of the first page: You don’t even know I’m alive. You don’t see me. You will never drive me to New York. Dante Dante Dante Dante. “That tells me there’s nothing happening from the other side.”
“He’s only fourteen,” Antonio said. “What kind of feelings can he have yet?”
Giulio smiled. “What kind of feelings did you have when you were fourteen? And he’s almost fifteen, yes? In two months?”
Antonio stood and walked to the other end of the kitchen. “This Dante, he’s got a ponytail. He looks like a girl.”
“That’s a good sign,” Giulio said. Then: “You know, some of the greatest artists in history . . .” But he didn’t finish the thought.
“It can’t be,” Antonio said. “You can’t tell anything from that mess.” He waved his arm toward
the checks, still folded on the table. “You can be wrong. It could just be a joke he’s playing.” He took the pages and tore them into pieces. “That part you read, it doesn’t even make sense. ‘You’ll never drive me to New York.’ That could mean anything.”
“Like what?”
“Like he wants to go to New York!” Antonio said. “See the Statue of Liberty! It can’t be what you’re saying. You can’t tell me there’s no chance you’re wrong. Just because you read books.”
“I never said there was no chance. I hope I am wrong,” said Giulio Fabbri. “That boy is like my son, too. And Helen’s. You think we want this for him?” He folded his hands. “It’s more common than you think, especially these days. It’s a scary time, all those crazies in California. Sometimes, I think, kids get ideas that don’t turn out to be real. Just keep an eye on him. It can go away, I think. It’s not impossible. It can be what they call a phase.”
“I know what a phase means,” Antonio said. “I don’t have as much school as you, but I know the basic words. And I have common sense. And common sense tells me this can’t be.”
There are always signs, they tell you. The newspaper and TV shows, all they talk about is signs. You’re supposed to look for them and then know what they mean when you find them, but Antonio’s never trusted himself to read signs right. He is a man, a father, easily blinded by love, by the faith that if you want something badly enough, for you or your children, and work hard to get it, it will come to you. After that day in Giulio’s kitchen, he was as blinded as ever by love for Tony, more blind, if you can be such a thing, and wanted more fiercely than he’d wanted anything in his life for Giulio to be wrong, for his son to turn out normal. Healthy. Untouched.
So he watched him. He stole more checks, read more pages of the same scarabocchi about Dante, always and only Dante, long after Antonio chased him from the Al Di Là. He went through every scrap of paper in Tony’s room, looked in the back of his dresser drawers, under his bed, in the corners of his closets. He smelled his clothes, checked behind the mirrors. He listened in on his phone calls. He followed him home from school, kept two blocks behind him in his car. He waited in the parking lot while Tony sat with his friends—normal-looking girls and boys—in a booth at the Charcoal Pit, looking happy enough, right up to the day.
When he didn’t come home from school that Friday, Antonio drove straight to the bridge. But he was too late.
They searched his room. Prima pulled out his desk drawer and turned it upside down. Index cards, notebooks, and a stack of rubber-banded guest checks fell to the floor. Quickly, Antonio slipped the guest checks into his pocket. He kept them with him, reading them over and over for a clue to where his son might have run off. Two days later, they dragged his body from the river.
Tony left his family with ugly words. Antonio burned them in a garbage can in the backyard. At the funeral, he avoided Giulio Fabbri’s eyes and never spoke to the man again. When Giulio visited the house at holidays, Antonio walked past him without a nod, talked over him when he tried to tell a story. After a while, Giulio stopped coming to the Grassos altogether, and not long after that, he was dead, too, and there wasn’t a person left who knew Tony’s heart the way his father did.
Lately, that miserable time keeps coming back to Antonio, like a movie in his head that he can’t turn off. It doesn’t take the men’s gossiping at the club to remind him. The words on the guest checks won’t stay down. They shout at him from the dirt behind the garbage cans. The flour on Dante’s legs, the body falling from the bridge, Tony asking him, with his heartbroken face, when he got back from helping his zia Ida, why he’d sent his best friend away.
And then there are times, like now, when Antonio’s walking out of the Vespucci Club without saying good-bye to anyone, not even Tomasso, when he feels—can he even admit it?—relieved, almost grateful, that Tony died when he did. As Antonio’s learned more of the ways of the world, seen it change and rot before his eyes, he’s come to convince himself that his son would never have survived it. Forty-year-old men dying from “pneumonia.” Teachers at the dance studio prancing around in their tight pants unashamed. Protests in San Francisco and DC, parades in New York, celebrating. Would that have been Tony’s life? A Grasso’s life? He’d have been forty-three this year. What does forty-three look like for that kind of man? Would he be wasting away, too, a talking skeleton, like Rock Hudson, who’d once been handsome and rich and on top of the world?
As impossible as it’s been for Antonio to imagine Tony’s adult life, as much as it turns his stomach and fills him with fear, it’s worse to feel this relief, this sickening gratitude. So he pushes it away. He stands in the parking lot, jangling his keys, scanning the rows for his car. So many cars. So much fuss for a free steak dinner and a Mass for the Dead. He paces up and down the Union Street side. Where is his goddamned car?
“Compa,” says a voice behind him.
“DiSilvio.”
“You lost?”
“I played like shit.”
“No—lost here. In the parking lot,” DiSilvio says. “Never mind. Your car’s over there.” He points.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll come see you next week. After the holiday. Festa del tacchino. Only the Americans would make a holiday for a turkey.”
“See me when you can,” says Antonio. They walk toward the car. He pushes the button to make it beep and flash. “In the meantime, take care of your daughter.”
“Thank you. I will.”
“One thing I don’t understand, though,” Antonio says, turning to him. He can’t let it go. “Why didn’t you show up for lunch three weeks ago? We had a date. I had my papers ready. You’ve never missed a date in your life. It bothers me. And don’t tell me your son-in-law. That was before.”
DiSilvio shrugs. “I have a girlfriend,” he says with a smile. “What can I say? I lost track of the time.”
It’s dark, the streetlight is weak, but still Antonio can see his friend blushing. “You?” Antonio says. And just like that, the dark spell breaks. The men are both laughing. “You fat thing?”
“She likes it,” says DiSilvio. “I got lucky, huh? She has a big bowl of pasta waiting for me when I get there and then we—”
“Che abbondanza,” Antonio says before DiSilvio can go on. He doesn’t need him to paint a picture. Then he puts his arm around him and they laugh awhile longer.
This is how Antonio’s life has been since 1971. A long darkness lit up by flashes of light that come all of a sudden, then fade just as fast. If only he could go back to the day Ida called the Al Di Là and asked him to send over somebody strong. Instead he settles for Santa Cecilia, where the darkness never touched.
He drives down Union Street, toward home, the music loud to flood his mind.
AN EMPTY TRAIN at night puts Frankie in the mind of Hitchcock, of Wharton, of James. He loves the grimy rumble over miles of desolation, the potential secret of the mustached conductor in the black coat removing his gloves, the lonely tolling of the bells as they chug past abandoned stations. Frankie is his best self on an empty train. He can read undistracted. Recollect his emotions in tranquillity. Anywhere else, his dissertation shoots up around him thick and noisy and unchartable as a rain forest, but on an empty train he’s a conquistador, armed with a harquebus, out for blood and order.
A rain forest seems downright pleasant compared to the Wednesday- before-Thanksgiving Amtrak Northeast Direct, and if the crowds and smells and constant shoving put him in the mind of anyone, it’s not a literary figure. Try Manson, or John Wayne Gacy, or Mussolini. Mostly he feels as though he’s being slowly lobotomized over the course of the wobbly seven-hour trek from Boston to Wilmington.
Or something like that. He rolls his eyes at his own pretentious simile. What does Frankie Grasso know from lobotomies? His primary association is a story his father once told him about an old woman back in the village, someone called L’Abbandonata because her husband and daughters abandoned her for
the new country. She went off the deep end waiting for them to return, and some traveling country quack tried to cut the crazy parts out of her, which, of course, killed her altogether. It made Frankie think of Dora—Freud’s Dora—and how much better L’Abbandonata might have fared had she lived in Vienna instead of Santa Cecilia and had access to the kind of help Sigmund and his minions could have given her. Wretchedly ignorant as Freud was when it came to the complex sensibilities of women, at least he didn’t advocate making mincemeat of their thalami and frontal cortexes, as far as he knows. If Frankie is guilted into going to Italy next summer, he will leave some flowers on the grave of L’Abbandonata, but he doubts he’ll get that chance.
He is settled firmly on his mother’s side in the trip tug-of-war. Much to his relief, he won’t have to fight that battle over Thanksgiving dinner, which Prima and Tom will spend with Tom’s family in Lancaster. It will be a quiet Thursday night at the Al Di Là, just the three of them and a few families from the neighborhood. When he reunites with the Buckleys on Friday, it will be the first time he’s seen Prima since she delivered her edict at the confirmation, and while he expects her to harangue him with reasons and ultimatums, at least she won’t spoil the turkey and stuffing and lasagna and broccoli rabe and strawberry cheesecake of a Grasso Thanksgiving.
Frankie would prefer to keep his homeland free of family tensions and obligations and the ghosts of his mother’s sadness. The idea of watching her suffer pains him; why does it not pain Prima? In a few years, on sabbatical from whatever university hires him, he’ll go alone or with his father. The two Grasso men: one in search of art and wine, the other of memories. Until then, Italy will wait patiently for them.
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