“Your intentions are always good, Prima. I’m sorry.”
Prima looks up at the gray sky, watches the ice fall and settle onto the red berries, making them glisten deliciously, looks at Tom crouched under the bay window. He’s stringing these lights for her, on the first possible day it’s OK to do so, despite the rain, because he knows how much she loves them. Some nights, she’ll bundle up and take a walk around the block just so she can turn the corner onto their street and come upon their house aglow. Watching Tom, his strong back, his full head of blond curls, his act of kindness, something in her stirs. It’s a rare urge these days, and this, too, she blames on the new season of departures and decay in which she finds herself.
“Let’s go out tonight,” she says. “I don’t feel like cooking.”
“Really? In this weather?”
“Why not? We’re not so old yet.”
He looks over his shoulder and gives her a quick smile back. “Sure,” he says. “Give me ten minutes.”
“You don’t have to finish this tonight,” Prima says, and when he turns back to her again, his smile widens. He hops up onto his feet and brushes the dirt from his knees.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” he says, and he kisses her.
They decide to try a new place called the Bourbon Street Café, out on Kirkwood Highway. There’s live jazz on Fridays and half-price appetizers and a soft-shell crab entrée that won Best of Delaware. Prima would have preferred a longer drive, even in the rain, but Tom’s a big fan of Cajun food and she never cooks it, so she’s happy enough with the pick. Like her mother, Prima finds car rides soothing, especially when her husband’s behind the wheel. She could ride all the way to New Orleans, him beside her with his eyes fixed seriously on the road, her with her head resting on the window, shoes off, heat blasting.
Tom doesn’t fiddle with the radio, never drives faster than the speed limit, and doesn’t talk much unless he’s safe at a stoplight. He’s driven this way ever since his twin sister, Amy, was killed in a car wreck when they were twenty-four, a year after he married Prima. It’s a wound that opens each time he steps into a car. Prima understands this. It’s one of the many reasons she’s confident they will be together forever, why the cord that binds her to her husband is as strong as the one that binds her to her family.
Tom still dreams about Amy, he’s said, still talks to her on his drive to work. He keeps her photo on the wall behind his desk and talks about her with his clients. He comes from the kind of family that believes in this type of public mourning, of making your lost loved ones part of your daily life. The Grassos—like most Italians Prima knows—are different. After you say your good-byes, after you’ve thrown yourself on your brother’s or your son’s body for one last touch as the casket closes, you keep your grief to yourself. The rest of your life is a long silence.
At the Bourbon Street Café, Prima and Tom sit side by side at the one available booth, closest to the stage, where an old black man with a white goatee blares a saxophone in their faces. They yell their orders to the waitress—conch fritters, two soft-shell crabs, and two hurricanes—then sit with their legs up and crossed on the opposite side of the booth, his arm around her shoulders, like they’re in bed watching TV. Prima’s not a jazz fan (she likes the singer to tell a story, and here there’s no singer, much less a story), but Tom loses himself in it. She watches him close his eyes and let the music wash over him. It’s nice how at peace he is. When the set ends and the sax player drifts outside to smoke, she tells him that they’ll come to this place more often, once a month if he wants, that he works too hard and could use a little music.
“You know,” he says, midway through his second hurricane, “the more I think about it, the more disappointed I am about Italy.”
“Me, too.”
“The food, the historic stuff, the boys all together, your mom and dad in their native habitat. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why it’s so complicated.”
Prima can’t bear to go over her mother’s reasons again. Anyway, the layers of family dynamics are all lost on Tom, who grew up Irish Catholic. When the Buckleys had disagreements, they simply stopped talking; no wonder they don’t know each other’s hearts the way the Grassos do.
“I’ll tell you this,” Prima says. “I’m not dragging my parents and Frankie to Paris just to go somewhere. Not if they’re going to be ungrateful. If it’s not Italy, it’s nothing.”
“OK,” Tom says as Prima sips her hurricane.
“We should take our own trip,” Prima says. “Just us.”
“You read my mind,” Tom says. He sits up straight, his hand still around her shoulders. “I was just thinking as you were talking: my buddy from college has a cabin in northern Michigan. He tells me it’s gorgeous up there. You have to take a little plane from Detroit, but once you get there it’s . . . like Paradise. Unspoiled land and all that. Romantic. I’d love to see you in hiking boots.”
“Oh,” says Prima. “You mean, just the two of us?”
“That’s not what you meant?”
She can’t come up with a decent answer, and luckily the sax player’s back. What would they talk about, she wonders, just the two of them in the Michigan woods for a week? It’s one thing to take a Sunday drive or splurge on a hotel room overnight in Philly, but it’s another to stretch out all that alone time over a week. When they were dating, they had a circle of friends to gossip about, career decisions to deliberate, wedding and honeymoon plans to make, and, until Amy died, only happy memories to bring forth in conversation. Now they have the boys and the house and baseball, but those only go so far, and besides, Tom, who was never a talker to begin with, has gotten even quieter in his forties.
“You take care of other people enough,” Tom says at the next break. “Let me take care of you for a change. I’ll teach you how to fish. I’ll buy you the entire L.L. Bean catalog. It’ll be an adventure.” He leans over and whispers, “Plus, you’d look sexy in flannel. And the hiking boots. Or just the hiking boots—”
“Where’s this coming from?” Prima interrupts, blushing. The people in the next booth can hear.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not like you.”
“Is that bad?” He puts his hand on her thigh.
“No. It’s just not like you.”
“I saw the way you looked at me back at the house,” he says. “It’s been a while, but I still recognize that look.”
“Tom!”
“ ‘We’re not so old,’ you said.”
“I was talking about driving in the rain.”
“Listen,” he says. He pulls her closer. “Next fall’s gonna be strange as hell. Alone in the house. I know you’re worried about it. The truth is, I am, too. So let’s take some steps. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Empty nest, second honeymoon, all that jazz?”
Prima can almost see Tom checking off the “second honeymoon” box in his head. He has always been conscious of life’s schedules, and holds himself and his family to them. When he turned forty, he took up golf. At forty-five, he bought a sailboat. At forty-six, he sold it. His predictability has been a comfort to Prima over the years, but she didn’t expect him to check off this latest box so soon. She’s not quite ready.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It doesn’t feel right to abandon everyone so soon. We should see how Patrick does in school. It’ll be a big transition for him. You remember how Ryan lost all that weight his first term? What if Patrick needs to come home all of a sudden, and we’re in some cabin in the middle of nowhere? Does this Michigan place even have a phone?”
Tom narrows his eyes at her. The waitress stands awkwardly behind him, trying to get their attention. “Never mind,” he says, and suddenly there’s a space between them. Their legs meet but don’t touch. They watch the stage for a while, the crew adjusting the lights and arranging the chairs and various instruments for the headliners. When the waitress goes by, he signals for the check, even though Prima’s hurricane
is still half-full.
“It’s still early,” says Prima. “We don’t have to go. You’re enjoying this.”
He shrugs.
“I screwed up again, didn’t I?” she says.
Again he says nothing.
“How much was it?” she asks him as he hands the waitress his Amex.
“All I asked you to do,” he says, “was spend one week with me and be excited about it—as excited as you were about spending two weeks with your family in Italy. I didn’t even ask you to do it, just to consider it. But I guess that’s asking too much.”
“I’m excited about the idea. I’m just—the timing. Remember Ryan, when he left—”
“You’re too close to those boys,” Tom continues. “I love them just as much as you do. I pay attention. I remember how Ryan was at Syracuse that first term. I argued religion with Patrick for two years, even drove up to that monastery he was infatuated with! But there’s such a thing as being too involved. You have to let go.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not possible,” Prima says. “I don’t even want it to be possible.”
Frankie has accused her of the same crime, of being too close to her kids. Her mother, too, and her magazines. But Prima’s not going to change, not one little bit. Because if she lets go of her boys, she’ll have to replace them with something else, and nothing else compares. Not even you, Tom, she thinks. I’m sorry.
He keeps talking, painting the picture of their bright future as “empty nesters,” but as soon as Prima hears that awful word, she tunes out. Cruises? Golf? A time-share in the Keys? She has little patience for relaxation. Volunteering? As a Catholic, she’s as loyal as Tom, but she’s unmotivated to nurture the poor if neither the Buckleys nor the Grassos will benefit directly. She’d rather sweep the sidewalks outside the Al Di Là than serve soup to homeless strangers. Unlike every other Grasso, Prima has never embraced paid work. She’s been more than content as a mother and housewife, compensated with trust and gratitude. Retirement from such a career, with such benefits, might as well be death.
For a short time, at sixteen, Prima thought she might have a passion for the kind of career her father had—the management of a busy restaurant, which, it turns out, is much like running a family—but in retrospect that passion had everything to do with Dante Marconi. They used to kiss in the alley behind the Al Di Là. They fell in love there, the summer before Tony died, when Prima had no reason to think life wouldn’t keep handing her one beautiful thing after another. In the blur of years that followed, it was Dante who helped numb Prima’s mind. Memories of him keep coming back to her lately, in dreams and in her waking life, more often in the past year than in the twenty-seven before. Like tonight, after too many hurricanes and with Tom talking romantic getaways, she is thinking of the weekend they spent in Wildwood in a sleeping bag on the floor of Dante’s cousin’s beach house. There was no planning that weekend, just Dante surprising her one Friday at the door of her parents’ house, his car packed with the sleeping bag, a cooler of beer, a swimsuit, and little else. Dante Marconi was my great love, she once thought. Now she wonders if love can earn its greatness only with history.
“We’ll leave after the next song,” Tom leans over to say, without opening his eyes. Since the band retook the stage, he’s been one with the music, rocking back and forth like a man in a trance. She wills herself to put Dante out of her mind for now, here beside her husband. It’s not right. A sin. Instead she tries to see in the jazz what Tom sees, but it’s lost on her, a haze of seemingly random notes strung together with gibberish lyrics. In this way, too, she has disappointed him.
She should do something to smooth things over. Maybe later tonight—as soon as they get home, before her buzz wears off and Tom falls asleep—she’ll go down to the basement, slip on an old pair of hiking boots, strip down, and stand before him in their bedroom. It’s the least she could do.
She won’t chicken out. She’ll summon that sixteen-year-old girl who dared to let Dante Marconi hold her and kiss her against the alley wall while her father and brother worked on the other side of it. What a thrill it was—not the fear they’d be discovered, but the risk that Dante, who needed that job to make his car payments, took on her, a girl he barely knew, who wasn’t even the prettiest waitress at the Al Di Là. Her father fired him, anyway, of course, without explanation, a few weeks after their first kiss, and Prima has always wondered whether he’d come upon her and Dante himself, watched them from behind a stack of empty boxes in the alley, or whether one of the managers snitched. She and her father have never spoken about it, but she knew Dante was not the kind of boy she’d ever be allowed to bring home. Still, for a year afterward, Prima and Dante met in secret, in his car, at Wildwood, under the Hagley Bridge after school.
She’s lost focus again, takes another sip of her hurricane, tries again to love the music. No luck. After a while she takes a chance and puts her arm around Tom’s shoulders. He opens his eyes immediately—had he fallen asleep already?—and turns to her. “Last song,” he says. “I promise.”
5 Turn Up the Music
IT’S THE MORNING of Christmas Eve, and no one is speaking to Maddalena because she has broken their hearts. This is a day of God, but how can she concentrate on him when Antonio’s playing the silence game, Prima hasn’t returned her calls since the Black Friday trip to the mall, and Frankie’s train’s not coming for six more hours? Frankie’s the only one who will talk nice to her, but he won’t be here long, and when he leaves it will be winter in every way.
There are worms in the flour she’s set aside for the batter. They are signs: the worms, and Frankie’s late train, and Prima’s giving up on the trip so soon without more of a fight. Signs of what, Maddalena doesn’t know, but they can’t be good, and she is worried.
At Mass she asked God her questions, but because of all the work she has to do today, she left early, after Communion, like the teenagers do, before he had a chance to answer. As she walks home, she checks off what’s done and not done: The dining room table was set the night before, the house is clean, and Antonio’s shirt ironed. There are seven fishes to cook—two to fry, one to chop into the sauce, three to bread, one to fillet. Contorni to prepare. Wine to dust off and uncork. Traditions. As long as she’s alive, her children will spend Christmas Eve in her house, no excuses. She made them promise this long ago, and even though she hasn’t spoken to Prima for two weeks, she knows without a doubt that she and Tom and the boys will be here at five thirty tonight, just as they were here at five thirty last year and the years before.
In the kitchen she finds Antonio on the telephone, face guilty. “Is it Prima?” she asks, removing her gloves.
He shakes his head.
“Francesco?”
The counter is a mess of flour and salt and dripped egg yolk from Antonio’s trying to finish the pasta before she got home. The call must have interrupted.
He holds the phone up to her ear, and there is the voice of her brother, Claudio, in Santa Cecilia, talking like he thinks Antonio is still listening. She pushes the phone away, runs down the hall, and locks herself in the bathroom.
“Scema!” he calls to her. Crazy woman! It’s the first word he’s spoken to her in a month.
She holds her hands over her ears and paces from one end of the room to the other, but still she can hear Antonio’s voice in the kitchen shouting, “Auguri, Auguri!” to her family across the world, so she climbs into the empty tub and pulls the glass door shut.
Scema, Antonio has called her, since June 6, 1977, the day Claudio’s voice on the phone said their mamma was dead. That was the last conversation she’s had with him or any of her sisters or nephews or cousins in Italy. There were eighteen of them at last count, from the babies to the old ladies, enough for their own little village. To the grave with Mamma went them all.
Twenty-two years of their letters unopened and shoved to the back of the fabric drawer with Tony’s pictures and Mother’s Day cards, of looking away from the phot
os of their weddings and christenings that Antonio left on her dresser, of rushing down the hall every time he got on the phone with one of them. Can no one but Frankie understand her when she says it’s easier to pretend they’re all dead?
She doesn’t deny Antonio the connection to her family, doesn’t insist he abandon Santa Cecilia the way she has. His own brother gone, let Antonio have her brother and her sisters, too. He made his peace with them long ago, and they’ve forgiven him for taking her away from the village, so let him be the one worrying day and night about their cancers and their broken hips, their daughters pregnant without husbands, how their long lives of suffering and regret will finally end. Not her. She wants only the here and now.
Prima asks her what kind of person can talk like this, can give up her entire family and never look back, but if Prima knew how the death of a child changes a mother, she wouldn’t have to ask. Prima knows only a sister’s grief, and that bleeds you, it does, but not the same way.
I hope you never find out how different it bleeds, Maddalena has told her.
After Tony died, Maddalena came to fear the ringing telephone, even though Mamma was still alive and called her a few times a month from Santa Cecilia. Antonio went along, explained to everyone for seven years that the last time she picked up the phone, the policeman on the other end told her they had found her son. Then Mamma died, and with her went Maddalena’s last reason to think that anyone could be calling for a happy reason. Since then, twenty-two years have gone by, and not once has she picked up except at 11:01 when she’s sure who it is. Evenings, she sits sewing next to the ringing downstairs extension as Antonio jumps out of his recliner and, muttering “Crazy woman,” marches into the kitchen to grab the phone.
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