She blesses the wonderful invention called the answering machine. It’s given her a system that respects everyone. These days, when the phone rings and she’s home alone, Maddalena climbs the stairs from her basement workroom, stands over the machine, and listens first to Frankie’s voice telling the person that no one is home (Frankie’s voice because they don’t like to hear their own accents) and then to the person’s message. If it’s a voice from Santa Cecilia, she pushes Mute, calls for her husband, and disappears. If it’s Frankie or Prima or the dance studio or someone from St. Mary’s, she happily interrupts them.
All these years, Antonio has put up with her system without much argument, but not today, not Christmas Eve 1999. A bad sign. “Open up!” he says, losing the silence game. He pounds his fist on the bathroom door. “God’s watching you. You hear me? Get out here and say ‘Merry Christmas’ to your brother. If you won’t go see him, you can at least tell him ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”
Twenty-two years she’s spent blind and deaf to Italy. But lately, since the spring, it’s been coming back to her in flashes when she doesn’t expect it. She can’t stop the flashing, she doesn’t even know how to try to stop it, and when it comes, all of a sudden she’s walking on the dirt road to the spring in the early morning with her empty water pail, and the sun coming up over the mountains is warm on her neck, and when she wakes up in real life sometimes she’s in a different part of the house, or it’s nighttime when it was daytime just seconds before. Antonio took her to the doctor, but all he could do was tell her to sleep more or see a psychiatrist, so she tells Antonio she’s trying to sleep more, and because he’s always asleep before she is, it’s an easy lie.
She opens the bathroom door and takes the cordless, but not without shooting her husband an angry look. “Pronto!” she says, making her voice sunny. Antonio watches her, arms folded. “Buon Natale, Claudio!”
No one is there. She hears only a beep, then an echo of the beep, then the shaky four-thousand-mile-away voice of a different person, not Claudio, but a woman. Carolina. Carolina, her only sister alive. The sister who’d married Vito, the boy Maddalena loved, the boy of the bicycle and the secret meetings in the back of her father’s store. He had married Carolina, the sister of spite, who in thirty-five years never gave Maddalena the chance to ignore her letters, because she never sent a single one.
“Sorella mia?” Carolina’s voice asks. “Sei proprio tu?” My sister, is it really you?
She should throw the phone at Antonio for tricking her. But once you’re pulled underwater like this, you lose strength in your arms.
“Carolina,” says Maddalena, to which her sister replies, “Maddalena!” and at first all they can manage is to repeat their names over and over, like they’re convincing each other they’re real. What else can break a lifetime of silence? They were once the best of friends. First a man came between them, then an ocean, then the grudges and pride of sisters. Mamma and Babbo and the twins, Celestina and Teresa, all died before them, and now it is just the two of them and Claudio. They have grown children neither has met.
“Ma dove sei?” Carolina asks. “Dove sei andata?” Where are you? Where did you go?
“You know where I am,” says Maddalena, in Italian. Carolina’s voice sounds deeper and scratchier than she remembers. To hear it is a miracle. She wants to ask: Do you smoke now? Do you drink hard liquor, like Mamma used to do, to kill germs? She has so many questions that she can’t get them out fast enough. The most important: “Tell me: Are you well? And your children?”
“Che cosa stai dicendo?” says Carolina. “Quali figli?” What are you talking about? What children?
“It’s OK,” says Maddalena. “I know about them. A boy and a girl. Sergio, Donatella. I follow your life even though I don’t say.”
“Non ho figli,” Carolina says. I don’t have any children.
Maddalena looks at Antonio, confused. By now he’s on the other cordless and has been listening along with her. His face, all smiles two seconds ago, goes guilty again.
There are other voices in the background of Carolina’s house. It’s midafternoon in Santa Cecilia, and the Vigilia guests must be starting to arrive. They must be carrying covered dishes packed with fish; they must be removing their fur coats; they must have sugar on their lips from the cookies they ate on the walk over.
“What happened to your son, Carolina?” Maddalena tries again, but there’s no response, only the voices behind her getting louder and music switched on. “Your son, Sergio. What happened to him?”
Carolina says something Maddalena can’t understand, but she thinks she hears the word “tedesci.” Germans. She seems to be talking half to herself, half to someone else in the room, but not at all to Maddalena. Still, Maddalena tries again.
“Is your daughter helping you cook? Donatella is such a pretty name. Does she have a fidanzato yet? Carolina?” Then the line goes dead. “Carolina!”
She shakes the phone at Antonio’s face. In English she says, “What’s going on? What are you trying to prove? What’s wrong with her?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, head down. He goes into the hallway to escape her, but she follows him. He moves around as if looking for something to do—change a lightbulb, dust the grandfather clock. But the house is in perfect order, as always. Finally she corners him, forces him to meet her eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” he says again.
“I don’t understand,” she says. “You’re punishing me?”
“No,” he says. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Something’s wrong with her, isn’t it?” says Maddalena. “Tell me.”
“You don’t want to know. You’re better off.”
“Tell me.”
“Goddamn it,” he says. “Claudio told me she was OK today. ‘She knows where she is,’ he said. I talked to him an hour ago. ‘She knows who she is,’ he said. I thought, I’ll show Maddalena life is still beautiful there. I’ll show her she can go back and everything will be the same. She’ll make up with her sister. I’ll be the hero for once.”
“What are you talking about?” Maddalena says, though she can guess. She steps closer. They’re pressed up against each other in the narrow hallway, the glass Nativity set on the lowboy beside them, the Christmas lights blinking around the mirror.
“Her mind’s gone,” says Antonio. “She’s like a little baby. Worse.”
“Old-timer’s?”
He nods.
The first thing Maddalena thinks is that their nephew, Marcello, Celestina’s son, is a doctor. Maddalena doesn’t know what kind, only that her sister took great pride in him, called him a genius. “Marcello doesn’t help her?” she asks.
“What can he do?” says Antonio. “His mother had the same thing. It’s backward over there. If you get sick, all they do is take some of the pain away. They don’t try to stop anything, to turn it around.”
Already it’s starting to come out, everything Maddalena’s tried to keep on the other side of the ocean since Mamma died, a lifetime of miseries and diseases and deaths. This is what she tried to tell Prima, what her trip would have made happen.
“Not just Celestina,” Antonio continues. “Teresa, too. And your mother. The same way.”
“All of them, then. Why not just say ‘all of them’?” She’s been afraid to ask, to imagine. Every time she’s been tempted to pick up the extension and listen to Antonio’s conversations with her family in Santa Cecilia, she’s reminded herself, You don’t want to hear about cancer, strokes, old age, all the different ways they are being taken away. So she never listened. She’s thought of old-timer’s, but she figured one of them might get it, not all three.
Next it comes for me.
Antonio looks at her. She’s the youngest in the family. He reads her mind: “Don’t be scared, tesoro,” he says. “You live in the United States of America.”
“What’s that have to do with it?”
“You lived a different life.”
“
But I was born there. My head is the same as theirs. The same blood. Sometimes my head goes blank. I don’t remember things. What’s it matter where I lived?”
“The brain is a muscle,” Antonio says. “Do you know that? I bet you don’t. I asked that doctor we saw. I’ve been worried. You don’t think I got worried, with your spells, knowing this all these years?” He moves closer, but she has her arms folded against her chest and is biting her lip, her body so stiff nothing can reach or relax her. “Every brain starts the same way—equal, like you said—but it can grow as big and strong as you make it. You have to exercise it to make it strong. Like a weight lifter. Your sisters, your mother—they did nothing with their brains. They let the muscles go to fat in the kitchens and fields of Santa Cecilia. Look how you’re different: you learned to speak a new language, even to read and write a little; every day you use math when you’re sewing; you learned the fox-trot and the tango and all those other complicated dances at the studio. That’s exercising your brain, believe me.”
“Teresa worked in the butcher shop.”
“Wrapping up pig parts?” he says. “That’s not enough. Not even close.”
He takes her hands. His are a knot of veins, dry as paper, and cold, the hands of an old man.
She lets them go. “We have a lot of cooking to do,” she says.
“Believe me,” he says. “I know more than you. I won’t let you suffer.”
She goes downstairs to her fabric drawer, takes out the letters from her sisters and brother and from Mamma. She arranges them on the table and ties them in bundles with a colored ribbon. She presses her fingers to the handwritten names on the backs of the envelopes and places them behind the ones to her mother at the back of the drawer.
In the years before Prima was born, when Maddalena was in her early twenties, the possibility that Vito Leone might find his way to America gave Maddalena something to hope for. She dreamed of his finding her and returning her, like a princess in a maid’s dress, to her real home, that magical village, with much celebration. She’d find Carolina there, in love with a German soldier maybe, or a widower from another town, and all would be well. But Vito turned out to be as ordinary as any other man. Maddalena, too, was ordinary, not a princess at all. She stopped dreaming of rescue. What she has wanted, above all, from her life, from this Christmas, is peace. Calm. To ask for happiness is to ask for too much.
It’s 11:02 a.m. on the stove clock. In four hours and six minutes, Frankie’s train will pull into the little station in Wilmington, where Antonio will greet him and drive him home. While she’s been in the basement with her letters, he’s washed the kitchen countertops clean. On the table the little nests of pasta dry in rows. Two coffee cups, washed, sit upside down on a dish towel. He’s set out the ingredients for the fish batter and covered the bowls with the old linen napkins they use as rags. He filled the fryer with oil and turned it on high, knowing that she would be up soon from the basement.
GET FRANKIE ALONE in his old bedroom, and before long he’ll raid the shopping bags at the back of the closet. On this day, Christmas Eve, he chooses the one magic-markered “9.” He dumps its contents—letters and photos and notebooks from ninth grade—at the foot of the bed and sits cross-legged among the artifacts. The less preciously he treats them, the more likely he will be to uncover a gem, to spark a revelation. Instead he finds a mawkish poem he composed on the back of an algebra test, his first checkbook (blank), and a pink construction-paper Valentine from Charlotte Lemke, who drowned in the Atlantic the first night of senior week. He summons Charlotte’s face from the newspaper photos—freckles, frizzy hair, spokesmodel smile—and wonders what might have happened if he’d reciprocated her freshman-year Valentine, asked her out, dated through the proms. She might never have taken up with the senior-week crowd. She might now be a grad student herself, on her way back to Wilmington this rainy afternoon, in traffic on the interstate, singing.
He tosses Charlotte’s heart back on the pile. What’s wrong with him, anyway? What compels him not only to seek the sad stories but to wallow in them?
“You’re a child of tragedy,” Birch told him soon after their first drink on Elm Street, her arm around his shoulder chummily. They were walking in the woods, one of their rare trips out in fresh air. “But you don’t acknowledge it. You don’t let it touch you. Once you do, you’ll have enough tragedy, and you won’t go courting more.”
“I’ll have so much time on my hands.”
“It’s not funny,” she said. “And don’t get excited. You won’t use the extra time wisely. You’ll waste away watching TV. Sports. James Bond movies.”
“I loathe sports.”
“I’m being serious.”
She’s right, he thought. The death by suicide of his older brother has not touched him. Isn’t that a lucky break? Hasn’t he been spared?
“I misspoke,” Birch said. “It’s not that it hasn’t touched you. It’s that it’s touched you and you don’t realize how.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know you well enough yet,” she said.
With the door closed and the drapes drawn, Frankie’s old bedroom—which was Prima’s, not Tony’s—is pleasantly hermetic. The aroma of garlic and fish, which will permeate every square inch of the house by the end of the night’s holiday feast, can’t find him here. His parents’ raised voices, debating parsley distribution on the baccalà and the crispiness of the frittelli, come through the walls muted and garbled, as if from an adjoining movie theater. Here in his own theater, Frankie’s been granted two luxurious hours to himself before Prima and Tom arrive with their brood and the Al Di Là managers stop by with their wives and their obligatory panettone and boxes of Italian chocolates.
He could call Kelly Anne McDonald, but they’ve already set and twice confirmed their plans to meet for a late movie tomorrow in Philly. Movies are what Frankie and Kelly do together. Movies followed by a thoughtful exegesis over dessert and coffee, followed by twenty minutes of jerky over-the-sweater action in the front seat of her car, as if they are teenagers in 1953. “OK, that’s a wrap,” she’ll say, flushed, when they’ve gone far enough. And yet, after they part, Frankie feels not frustrated but exhilarated. The delay, her coy deferral, thrills him; and if it’s part of some elaborate plan, some kinky American Graffiti role-play, all the better. In the meantime he’s still got Birch, with whom thoughtful exegesis (in bed or at the kitchen table) is strenuously avoided. Some days they barely utter a greeting or farewell, and even then, each empty phrase—each “see you” and “take care”—wields the destruction potential of a grenade. He would enjoy pointing out to her the irony of two literary scholars communicating primarily in Neanderthal-like grunts, but he can’t seem to break from this new code they’ve established. For future reference/ammunition/amusement, he has been transcribing their entire conversations in a spiral notebook. He’s kept the journal faithfully every Tuesday and Thursday over the past month but has yet to fill two pages.
Frankie hates to cop to this sentimental streak of his, but it keeps revealing itself. As it should, the academy frowns on sentimentality, that last refuge of the lazy and shallow minded. Among English lit types, sentimentality is a cancer that distorts the analyses of all texts, in particular those authored by marginalized or oppressed peoples. Frankie ruthlessly excises any and all traces of it in his work, but in life he saves every card and letter, every passed note, every flimsy token. The vestiges of the first twenty-three years of his life remain in this bedroom closet in the shopping bags arranged by academic year (he knows no other type of year); the most recent he keeps in neatly stacked plastic bins in the basement of 25 Stowe.
What would Birch say if she knew this about him? What about Kelly Anne?
One would laugh in his face and then, aroused, wrestle him to the floor. The other would squeeze his hand, look down, and ask, “So what have you saved of us?”
(Three ticket stubs. A cappuccino-stained napkin from Caffè
Vittorio. Her phone number on a page of notebook paper from the night they met on Amtrak.)
Frankie Grasso, ninth-grade version, had no friends, certainly no girlfriends. In summer in Graylyn Ridge, the fifties-era suburb to which his parents had fled, he suffered in silence among mute trees, the white noise of lawn mowers, and the absence of kids other than the mongoloid, who never left his fenced-in yard. Frankie spent long hours in the woods behind his neighborhood, building little huts with sticks and mud, then exploding them with firecrackers. By August he’d destroyed every plastic toy in the house—the generic green army men, the Smurfs, Prima’s bald and dented Barbies.
It was also in ninth grade that he saw Zio Giulio die.
Zio and Aunt Helen looked after Frankie in the afternoons while his father worked at the trattoria and his mother at the drapery shop. They lived in a little brick row house around the corner from St. Anthony’s grade school, in Little Italy. There were real books on their bookshelves, not picture frames or figurines or extra plates. Aunt Helen, the only non-Italian in the Grasso family before Prima married Tom, taught piano at St. Ann’s but could play any instrument: guitar, clarinet, even harp. On holidays, Zio Giulio would break out the accordion and she’d sing traditional Italian songs for everybody like a paesana.
When Frankie arrived at their house each afternoon, he’d find them sitting on the porch or in their living room, reading. Zio Giulio would look up, startled, and say, “Oh, Francesco! Is it that time already?”
Giulio and Helen rarely watched television. They shrugged at exercise. They fed Frankie, made him finish his homework, double-check his arithmetic, revise his compositions, and, if time permitted, read aloud to them from his religion primer. From time to time they’d fight loudly in front of Frankie, who absorbed every word. This is how he learned that Helen had saved Giulio from a life of loneliness and disorder, that he did not deserve her, and that it was she who earned every penny of their meager savings; he also learned that Giulio had saved Helen from her own lonely and unbearably routine life, that she did not deserve him, and that if it weren’t for Giulio’s inheritance they would be sleeping in the gutter.
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