Eventually she’ll have to talk to Frankie. It’s the reason for Italy that she’s been holding back, but she may not be able to hold it back much longer. Forget what she told Frankie and Maddalena in the car in the mall parking lot. Forget what Nadine said about pleasing others. The kids know nothing about any plans to switch tickets, to substitute Paris for their homeland. As far as the Buckley boys are concerned, they will join the Grassos on the flight to Italy in August. It’s a blessing that they’re smart enough not to talk about any of this in front of Maddalena.
Yes, Prima wants her boys to see their ancestral village with their grandparents; yes, she and Tom could use a real vacation, a second honeymoon, with good food and wine and fresh mountain air and a midlife kick-start; yes, she wants to give her father the gift he’s been dreaming of since the day his brother died; but what she wants most of all is for her mother to complete the circle of her life while she’s still able. To have no regrets. To go back to the place in the world where she was happiest. And the realest reason of all? Prima believes that the return to such a place of pure happiness has the power—a magic kind of power—to heal her.
Frankie may talk to his mother every night, but he’s not around enough to see all that Prima sees. He doesn’t look in credenzas or notice dirty wineglasses; if he did, he’d never leave this little house. But Prima fears she won’t be able to protect Frankie much longer. She needs his help. After she finds the courage to tell him what she thinks she knows, he will take her side for sure.
“You really believe this hocus-pocus?” she hears Frankie whisper to Ryan after they’ve both received Communion.
Quickly, discreetly, Prima covers her ears. She doesn’t want to know what her son does and doesn’t believe. That’s a different fight. She is a person of faith, all sorts of faith, and if she has to have enough for the entire Buckley-Grasso clan, so be it.
THE HOUSE IS finally quiet. Antonio, in his chair, in this room of unwrapped presents and empty, tossed-aside envelopes, watches Midnight Mass at the Vatican on TV. The sound’s on Mute because the picture is all that matters. Get the camera off the pope, he thinks. Show the people, show the piazza, and, if you can, swing the lens over the mountains forty miles to Santa Cecilia buried in snow. Show me my old house, the chestnut trees, the frozen spring.
But the picture doesn’t change. The pope mumbles on.
From the window he can see St. Mary’s, the church that holds his family. Most of his family. Not Tony. Not Mario. Someone is always missing. The parking lot is packed with the cars of hypocrites. He’s not one of them. When he needs God, he turns over in his bed and puts his arm around his wife and says, “Tesoro, tesoro.”
He doesn’t need a new red sweater or a Polo wallet or a gift certificate for a haircut at some overpriced salon. He hates to see his kids and his wife spend money on stupidaggini. He feels every dollar they waste on him, on anything, as an insult. You want to show me you love me? Then save your money. Show me respect. Finish your school. Take me to Santa Cecilia, where I belong. I can count on one hand the years we have left together.
He is there now in his village, a boy again, in his heavy coat, the grown-ups around him with candles in their cupped hands, the church cold as a crypt. There is the ceramic baby Jesus at the altar to kiss and adore—or maybe it’s plastic? Did they have plastic back then? When did plastic start? The years are a jumble. Antonio was a boy of seven and Maddalena a baby. He remembers the day her parents announced her. They sat her on the counter of the grocery, and customers came to welcome her to the world. Antonio looked up at her wiggling toes, at her chiacchierone sisters pinching her cheeks. The Piccinellis lived down the street from his family. They owned that big store, and the Grassos owned a pezzetto of land, a three-room house, and a few chickens. The baby Maddalena Piccinelli was pure white, no dirt under her fingernails, no marks on her skin. She glowed in the sunlight of the grocery window. Antonio may have invented all this—the light, the baby on the counter—but it’s as real as the fire crackling beside him on this Christmas Eve seventy-two years later. He reaches up to tickle Maddalena’s toes. His father is not there to slap his hand away. His father has been gone forty years.
How strange to be at the end of life so soon. Seventy-two years from one midnight to another. The boy at the counter looking up is now the old man in the chair looking back. So what if he feels sorry for himself. He’s not allowed? He’s never been a brave person. He’s not one of those immigrants to write a book about, the ones who came to America with empty pockets. He had a mother and father to lead him by the hand on and off the ship, find him his first job, give him a house with a finished basement and a yard with a grape arbor; he had friends, cars, girls, a brother to put up half the money for a restaurant, a faithful wife. An ordinary life split between two worlds. Soon, when he’s gone, a few of those people over at St. Mary’s will cry, but only for a little while. Their lives are full enough without him. The customers will still come to the Al Di Là for their calamari and stuffed shells. They’ll sit waiting for their tables under the framed black-and-white photo of Antonio and Mario with their arms around each other, and if they notice the photo at all, they’ll say, maybe, Aww.
Strange to be a sad old man in an easy chair, the years settling on him like dust, and yet not strange at all. He and his bocce friends at the Vespucci Club talk of nothing but the years. Moments ago, they say, I was a man of twenty-five leaning over the railing of a ship, watching Italy sink into the ocean. Their kids, like Antonio’s, like all kids, appeared one day like magic, then disappeared. Why did nobody warn them of the grief of fatherhood: not that your kids grow up and leave you, in every possible way, but that they’re strangers from the start. They don’t stand still long enough, they let you get only so close, and you work too many hours, and they tell their friends their secrets, and they love you, but with their souls only, the way they love their country or God. Their hearts belong to other people.
He is the only person alive who knew the secret of Tony’s heart. He keeps it closer than any he’s ever known. It’s like a heavy stone in his pocket, one he takes out day after day, turns over, rubs with his thumb, as if it’s beautiful and precious, when—he almost has to remind himself—it was the one bit of ugliness in Tony, and it proved powerful enough to kill him. It might have killed him the other way if he’d lived. And yet lately, Antonio wonders if he might one day have made peace with the truth about his son, as his own flesh and blood, the way other fathers have done. (He watches the news; he’s paid attention. It’s not impossible to imagine.) But Tony didn’t give him that chance.
He can’t forgive him for that.
His family safely at church, Antonio climbs the stairs to Tony’s room. The door sticks. Inside, the air is warm, with the heating vents kept open and the drapes always closed. Antonio can’t bear to switch on the lamp. The hallway light is enough. Stepping into this room is like falling back asleep into the same dream you woke from. He runs his hand along the sailboat wallpaper they were just about to replace with a solid, young-man blue; over the stack of records on the bureau; over the desk with his pens and pencils in their ceramic cup. He falls to his knees, his elbows on the edge of the bed. Antonio Grasso has no faith in God, of course, or he’d be standing now with his family at St. Mary’s, but there’s no one else for him to turn to, afraid as he is to confess to anyone real—DiSilvio, a priest at another parish, a stranger on Union—and so every Christmas Eve at midnight, this is where he can be found.
They are alone together here, the way believers must feel they are alone with God in their churches. He hears Tony’s voice calling, “Babbo!” as he pushed open the door of the Al Di Là after a day at school. He’d throw his schoolbag in a booth, run to his father, and wrap his arms around his waist. It doesn’t matter that, by fifteen, Tony had found things about the restaurant to complain about and that he pouted in the corner with his guest checks—the boy calling, “Babbo!” and racing toward him was always there.
> If Antonio were a believer, he’d pray for Tony’s young soul in the afterlife. But no one’s soul, not even an innocent’s, can be saved. Instead he comes every year to ask for forgiveness. Because it was his own hand on his son’s back that night, pushing him off the bridge. He might as well confess this crime to God, who will never hear him and never forgive him. He doesn’t want forgiveness. He deserves to suffer for the crime of failing his precious child, of not reading the signs right, keeping closer watch, stepping in. No good father would have let the boy disappear and then pay no attention to the words he’d written: Go to the bridge before it’s too late. Did Antonio ignore these words on purpose? Did he not believe them? But then again, how can you believe such a thing can come from your son when he’s so full of life, when you think, every time you look at him, You are too alive ever to leave this world?
When Tony got back to the restaurant from his zia Ida’s that day, the guest checks were gone from his apron pocket and Dante had been fired. The boy was no dummy. He knew why Antonio sent Dante away. Tony wrote more poems, both on the guest checks and in a brown notebook he hid behind his dresser, one of the few places Maddalena wouldn’t look in her weekly cleaning. Antonio read every word. And after Tony died, he burned most of the pages, but not all.
Antonio reaches behind the dresser and, in the dust, finds the twelve torn-out pages he stapled into a book with a guest check on top. Even in the half light, he can make out every letter because he has read them over and over for the past twenty-eight years. I hate him I hate him I hate him covers every line. This is the kind of poem Tony wrote for his father at the end of his life.
The next page is from the brown notebook. There is no way out. He’ll never understand. I’m a bird in a cage. He’ll never give me the key. I see the way he looks at me. He hates me and I hate him and I love him but does he love me? HE WILL NEVER LOOK AT ME THE SAME WAY.
The next: It’s not fair It’s not fair what did I do to deserve this my God it’s never going to end, is it? Daddy, it’s never going to end. You’re never going to let it end and Dante is never coming back and there is no one in the cage but me so why not just let me die It’s not fair You’re never and Dante and God and coming back and Daddy
The next: Where are you, Tony Grasso? Who are you, Tony Grasso? You are a boy with a father who hates you and a mother who doesn’t see you and no friends who know you in a world that will destroy you Get out before it’s too late before he tells and sends you away before he kills you with his own hands
The next and the next and the next. There were more pages, but over the years of Antonio’s holding them and pressing them to his chest, the thin paper tore and disintegrated. Each time he reads the words is like the first. The same knife to his heart. The blood it draws is a kind of relief. He wants the blood, the questions, the tears, the rage, the thing beyond sadness that there is no word for in Italian or English because it belongs only to him.
If Antonio Grasso were ever to write his son a poem, it would be this: I want you back. Give me another chance. But he’s not a writer. He says it out loud. Once, then again. Then again. Again.
He rests his head on the side of the bed, the pages in his lap. Behind the closet door, Tony’s school uniform hangs with his belts and jackets and clip-on ties. Maddalena still changes the sheets once in a while, vacuums the carpet, dusts the shelves. Everything is as it was. He wants to stay here. He won’t tell Prima or Frankie about Maddalena’s conversation with Carolina. He won’t tell Maddalena what he read in the paper about heredity. He won’t tell anyone about his meetings with DiSilvio. But in this room, with Tony, there are no secrets.
A sharp pain shoots from his lower back down to his leg, as if to remind him he can’t stay here long. He slides the pages back behind the dresser, far enough so Maddalena won’t notice them, and tries to stand, using the dresser for balance. But his old joints and bones fail him, and he falls onto the bed. For a few moments he lies there on his back, catching his breath. The bed is already wrinkled, so there is no reason not to cover his face with Tony’s pillow. Except that the boy’s smell is long gone.
It’s one o’clock in the morning. From the hallway window he sees cars leaving the church parking lot. He goes downstairs, turns on the spotlight, and walks to the end of the driveway without his coat. Before long, his family rounds the corner. Then they say their good-byes and “see you tomorrows” and Prima and Tom and the boys get into their cars—too many cars for one family, a waste of gas and mileage, an extravagance. He takes Prima aside and thanks her for not mentioning the Italy trip the entire night, for helping to give her mother a peaceful Christmas Eve without a single argument.
“I’m on my best behavior,” she tells him.
“Tomorrow, too?”
“Tomorrow maybe.” Then she sees his face. “Yes, Daddy. Tomorrow, too.”
Before Frankie can disappear into his room, Antonio asks him, “So, how was church?”
“How do you think?” Frankie says, smiling. “Smoke, mirrors, and hypocrites.”
They share this, at least. Neither of them trusts the Catholic Church to do anything for you except take your money.
“Thank you for going,” Antonio says. “It means a lot to your mother.”
Frankie shrugs. “It’s good people-watching.”
They can talk like this only when Maddalena is not in the room. Just as Antonio is about to ask Frankie more questions (isn’t he glad he got it out of the way tonight instead of having to get up early tomorrow morning? Are any of his friends in Boston religious? What does he think keeps people coming back year after year for the same nonsense?), Maddalena comes toward them, Frankie winks, and they kiss each other good night.
“I love you, Son,” says Antonio.
“Love you, too, Dad. Merry Christmas.”
“Buon Natale.”
The dining room table is cleared, the dishes are clean, and the hallway swept. Only the den remains a mess: the presents, the wrapping paper crumpled into balls, the pine needles. Antonio and Maddalena will take care of this tomorrow, together, before they drive with Frankie out to Prima’s. Now it’s time to rest.
Maddalena closes all the lights. She lies on the couch in front of the tree, using her old flowered housedress for a blanket. Antonio goes back to his chair, then changes his mind and sits beside her, her feet and ankles in his lap. They don’t talk. They’re both so tired.
“Another year,” she says.
The TV stays on Mute. The tree glows. They fall asleep this way, eventually, and when they wake it’s morning and the tree lights are still on, and Tony’s still gone, and they’re still older than they’ve ever been, and it’s like any other day, except when Antonio says, “I’ll make the coffee,” Maddalena asks, “But who are you?”
6 Beautiful Everything
FRANKIE HAS BEEN hoping for the phone call. Instead, a week after the January 20 notification date, he gets a letter. There sits the envelope, thin and cold and bone-white, his name scrawled longhand across the middle like a seppuku scar.
Quickly he snatches it and stuffs it into the front pocket of his backpack. The rest of his mailbox consists of predictable flyers announcing study groups forming for the spring term, a beer night in Davis Square to welcome grad students joining the program midyear, and a long-delayed postcard from a jock in his eight thirty composition class thanking him for an “awesome fall” in which he “learned a ton.” The postcard was sent from Bali, as if that’s a reasonable place for an eighteen-year-old to spend Christmas vacation. There are no postcards or Post-its or postscripts from Birch. In fact, he’s heard nothing from her since January 20 came and went. Before that, she and her husband were on their own exotic trip: a Christmas cruise to Alaska.
For the rest of the day, through his nine thirty History of Ideas class, through a lunch meeting with the Graduate Student Union, through an afternoon lecture called “Derrida’s Parenthesis”—at which Annalise Theroux sits in the front row nodding and furiously
scribbling notes—he keeps the letter unopened in his bag. As long as it stays there, he still has a chance. He avoids eye contact with Annalise and Dr. Lexus and Professor Yarrow. He skips the postlecture wine and cheese.
The campus is covered in snow. He walks across it, bundled against the blustery wind, and just as he’s about to enter the library, where he plans to spend the next three to five hours grading the semester’s first set of essays, he changes his mind and heads home. He wants to be alone. And according to the chatter he overheard at the lecture, a foot of snow is expected by midnight.
He’s in the hallway unbuttoning his coat when he hears Anita’s voice through her closed bedroom door. He walks to the door and shouts into it. “Anita, are you talking to me?”
It sounds like she says, “A mister called.”
“Mr. who called?” he shouts back. His heart is pounding. Mr. Yarrow? Mr. Arbuckle?
“YOUR SISTER CALLED,” she says, still not opening the door.
“Oh,” he says. “Great.” He breathes. “When?”
“Like, two minutes ago.”
“How’d she sound?”
“It’s not an emergency,” shouts Anita. “She said, ‘Make sure you tell Frankie it’s not an emergency.’ ”
“OK.” He can barely hear her and doesn’t understand why she doesn’t just open the door.
“She said she had a ‘work-related question’ and that you can call her back whenever.”
“She doesn’t work,” Frankie says.
“I’m just the messenger,” she says, or maybe it’s, “Well, just ask her.” Either way, Frankie has a stack of persuasive essays to grade and no time to go over the same muddy territory with Prima. The next four hours must be spent making marginal notes that complicate his students’ generalities about abortion, cloning, and the death penalty. Their syntax must be wrestled with and ultimately tamed by annotating every instance of awkward phrasing and mangled grammar. The end result will be a treasure map that leads to a perfect revision, handed to them by their graduate student lecturer like a gift and with the faith that, by the time the class ends in four short months, they will be able to draw their own treasure maps from essays he will never have to read. He is one of the few GRSLs (“Gristles,” they call themselves) who works this hard, who doesn’t resent wholesale the hours required to complete his responsibilities as a teacher.
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