All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  “I know about the accident!” Maddalena says. “It’s my fault, too. She had too much on her mind. She was worried about me. She wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Maddalena, no.”

  She shakes her head. “I need to tell you: we won’t go next summer, either. I heard them talking. They’re going by themselves, as soon as Prima can walk. A second honeymoon. I ruined our chance, and I’m sorry.”

  “Please don’t worry,” says Antonio. “You get yourself worked up for nothing. You think I can’t change Prima and Tom’s mind about some second honeymoon? Listen: I talked to Claudio yesterday. He sounds so happy. Like a teenager. He says Carolina’s doing much better. She’s keeping up her garden. When she heard you were coming, she started making you a crostata with figs. Her daughter’s been asking her every day, ‘How long before we meet our famous American zia Maddalena?’ ”

  “Prima and Tom are going alone,” Maddalena repeats. “That’s the only trip anybody’s taking. As soon as she’s out of the wheelchair. They won’t want anyone else around, not even the boys, and especially not me, not anymore. I’m not strong enough. And they should have their romance.”

  Antonio doesn’t tell her what Claudio really said: that he’ll never forgive Maddalena if she doesn’t come to see him one last time in Santa Cecilia, if she doesn’t make peace with her sister before she dies. It’s a matter of months for Carolina, not years, according to Claudio. There’s no garden. No crostata with figs. Claudio, too, eighty-eight this spring, weakened by emphysema, wonders if he will see Christmas.

  Antonio’s lies, which he will keep telling as long as he can, are for Maddalena’s own good. So no matter what Prima and Tom want from a second honeymoon, no matter what new excuse Maddalena will come up with not to go, he will find a way to get her on a plane with him before long. This summer. Next week, if it comes to that. He doesn’t know how this will happen, but he has to imagine it’s possible.

  “You can go with them, just you,” Maddalena says, and her face lightens. “Prima won’t mind. She loves to have you around. They can drop you off in the village so they can have a few days in Portofino for the romance. I’ll be OK here. Frankie will stay with me. I think you should go, Antonio. It would make me happy to see you go back.”

  “Maybe I will,” he says, bluffing, thinking, I’ll never leave you alone, thinking, Before you know it, you and I will be walking together up the steps of the church of Santa Cecilia. We’ll drink a toast on your father’s terrace, where I asked your father for your hand. We’ll lean over the railing and wave to the customers at the Al Di Là across the street. I’ll play cards with Claudio late into the night, and you’ll sit next to me with your hand on my knee. You won’t deny me that, will you?

  “Good,” she says. “It’s about time somebody had some common sense.”

  Later, as he leaves for the restaurant, she reminds him: “Talk to Prima. Tell her we have a new plan.” She’s in the living room, spraying Pledge on tables that are already shiny.

  “If you promise to rest,” he says, “I promise I’ll talk to Prima.”

  DiSilvio comes to the Al Di Là for lunch. Ryan is there, serving them and managing the rush. Antonio’s been watching Ryan since he started two weeks ago, and he was right: the boy is a natural. The customers love him. The kitchen guys listen to him. He earned their respect right away. Just yesterday, when some rude big-shot business-guy customer with gold rings complained that his meatball sandwich was cold and that his floozy of a girlfriend’s salad had too much dressing, and called the restaurant an “overpriced dump,” Ryan replaced both dishes right away with a smile and threw in two glasses of (bottom-shelf) wine, and nobody got agitated. Gilberto would have told the big-shot guy to warm up the meatballs between his floozy’s legs; Maurizio would have given him a free dinner and a hand job. But Ryan has a way of calming people down without too many freebies; he makes them feel right, even when they’re wrong. He speaks to the dishwashers in the Spanish he learned in college, and un miracolo, the dishes come out cleaner. He stays past midnight to get the books right and still has time for fun with the girl waiting for him at the bar. Already he knows the loyal customers by name and walks them to the sidewalk at the end of their meals.

  For two weeks, Antonio has watched his grandson like a girl watches a boy serenading her. It brings him back to the early years with Mario, and more than that, it gives him hope, for the first time since his brother passed, that the Al Di Là will end up in good hands. It’s not too soon to tell, no matter what his lawyer might say. The signs are always there.

  Antonio says as much to DiSilvio, who for thirty years has helped keep him and his books legal. Now on a Monday afternoon in the middle of June, Antonio is finally redoing his papers. The meeting is eight months overdue.

  It takes Ryan to show Antonio what he should have seen all along: that Frankie will never give up on his degrees and fall in love with the Al Di Là the way Tony did. Only now that Ryan is a possibility can Antonio fully remember how Frankie suffered through his summers as a waiter, how nervous and impatient and clumsy and resentful he was.

  DiSilvio asks, “You don’t worry this is just a passing phase for your grandson? Two weeks is nothing to judge, especially at his age.”

  Antonio shakes his head. He knows people. He listens. It’s maybe the only joy of being old: you’re allowed to sit on the couch and rest your eyes during the family parties, the quiet hours of the Al Di Là afternoon, take in all the gossip, the complaints, the secrets. He’s learned a lot this way, eyes closed, arms folded, mouth hanging open so people think he’s asleep. But he doesn’t sleep; he studies. Antonio’s been studying each of his grandsons since they stopped being kids, but it wasn’t until the twins’ birthday party in October that they came clear to him. The twins and Patrick have too strong a wild streak, but Ryan, who showed up to surprise them, who had tears in his eyes when he hugged his brothers even though he’d seen them just a few weeks before, is a man of the family.

  DiSilvio is skeptical. But Maddalena, if Antonio discussed such things with her, would agree that Ryan is the Al Di Là’s best chance. Lying beside her in bed at night, after the soap opera is over and she’s hung up with Frankie, he tells her a lot more than he used to, but he still won’t discuss what will come after them. His talking helps to settle her mind, she says, it’s what she’s wanted for many years, to hear what he’s learned from his day. So he tells her that Ryan is the strongest of the four, that Patrick drinks too much, that Matt’s not as smart as Zach, but Zach’s not as good at sports. He tells her that one of the line cooks is cheating on his wife with a girl who works at the Rite Aid next door. He tells her that Frankie won’t stay in Boston forever, that, like Ryan, he won’t last long so far away from them; that Tom’s got a temper Prima tries to hide from them; that Prima is lonely. Most of these, Maddalena claims to know already. Only when he tries to tell her things about herself—that she’s a better dancer now than when they first met, that Arlene is jealous whenever the teacher picks her to demonstrate, that she wants nothing more than to make peace with Carolina and Vito—will she say, “Close the light,” and turn her face away.

  There are some things Antonio won’t say. They wake him long after Maddalena’s finally fallen asleep, and won’t let him rest, and take him downstairs and outside to the yard, where he walks under the neighbors’ dark windows. But he’s not safe here, or anywhere. What follows him is the certainty that he will outlive her, the beautiful baby girl he first saw asleep on the countertop of her father’s store, the young woman he met again years later, his love of fifty-four years. That her end will come soon, and hard. That he’ll not last long without her, alone in their house of dreams. That there’s more. That Tony, the son they loved more than anything in the world, much more than they loved each other, was cursed, and fought a war of his own, and lost. To know all this is a heartbreak Antonio can’t bear. It comes to mind in the night and when DiSilvio forces him to open his eyes to the future.<
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  “The way you have it now,” DiSilvio reminds him, wiping the crumbs from his second dessert off the documents between them, “your wife inherits one hundred percent of your assets, should you precede her in death. After she passes, all assets, including the house, are to be divided equally among your two children, minus the sum you’ve set aside to be distributed among your grandsons, and minus the sum you have put in trust for Ryan Buckley should he fulfill your wish to inherit the Al Di Là and all its assets and liabilities outright. ”

  “Yes,” says Antonio. “And if he doesn’t want it, you sell it to the highest bidder and give the profits to the kids, fifty-fifty.”

  “You don’t want to include an option for another grandchild—or Prima or Francesco—to take it on?”

  Again Antonio shakes his head. “It took me twenty-five years to buy that land and make that business what it is. If they don’t want it now, they’ll never want it. After I’m gone, they might think they should hold on to it, for—”

  “For sentimental reasons,” interrupts DiSilvio.

  “That’s right, sentimental, because maybe they miss me, but then soon enough they stop missing me, and they’re left with this business they don’t want and don’t understand, and they start to hate it, and they fight with each other, and the whole thing’s a mess. I’d rather a stranger buy it and tear it down, and the kids and grandkids get the money, than for any Grasso to hate it. Mario and I built this place from love.”

  Heavy wood pedestal tables line the dining room, upside-down glasses twinkle above the marble bar, photos of mayors and senators line the front hallway. The dessert fridge hums, filled with homemade zuppe inglese and tonight’s special, palle di neve. “Ciao, Ciao Bambina” plays on the stereo. Antonio could run up and down kissing the walls and the floor and every woman and man who steps through the door. If only he could hold this room as it is today, keep it from passing into the next stage, whatever that stage would be—but that’s more sentimental feeling.

  “In a few days, then,” says DiSilvio, “I’ll come back with the papers ready to sign.”

  Mario stands on a chair in the corner, opening night 1955, tapping his wineglass to get the room’s attention. Maddalena’s at the front door, at the five-year anniversary party, to welcome the customers, take their coats, show them to the bar. Tony’s at her feet, his arms around her knees, and then, as she turns to kiss one of the guests, he’s grown, he’s carrying a tray of dishes to the kitchen. Prima’s at the far booth taking an order, her hair long to her shoulders—when did she cut it? These rooms have held them all—even Frankie, over at the chalkboard, writing down the specials when he should be memorizing them. They’re all still here.

  “You’ll talk this over with your family in the meantime?” DiSilvio asks. “Antonio?”

  “Of course,” Antonio says. He shakes his old friend’s hand. He has no intention of discussing this conversation with anyone, and DiSilvio must know this, too. It’s not what their fathers would have done.

  FORSAKEN, WANDERING. SUCH is Frankie’s life, the life of the scholar, in summer in a college town. The libraries close at dusk and open at noon, equipped with a skeleton crew of international students who can’t help Frankie locate the men’s room, let alone the obscure journal that just might include the missing piece of his jigsaw-puzzle dissertation, the piece that will convince his new adviser of the brilliance that is the Big Idea. For weeks, Frankie’s traversed alone the stark, sunbaked terrain of Boston’s many educational institutions, his knapsack of provisions (Fanon, Freud, Foucault) strapped to his back, searching for that missing piece among the various archives and special collections with which Boston is famously lousy. He avoids BC, lonesome at any season, unbearable with Kelly Anne in Jersey. Most days he ends up back on his home turf, beleaguered, grouchy, squeezing what blood he can from the familiar stones.

  The view from Frankie’s West Hall office is of inner-city kids on the quad, shrieking in their cornrows and tennis camp T-shirts, gobbling up boxed lunches. Last week he watched a garden club tour the flower beds and peel bark from the ancient elm behind the admissions building. It’s distressing how the college whores itself out to such groups. He knows of at least one professor forced to hold his seminar in his apartment because the university rented all leftover classrooms to a national conference of phlebotomists. If the trustees treat the place like a low-rent convention center, should it be a wonder the students and faculty don’t aspire to excellence? There is a direct correlation, in Frankie’s unsolicited opinion. He doubts Harvard would allow thousands of needle-packing phlebotomists to trample its sacred ground.

  Today, restless, Frankie wanders up and down the corridors of West Hall reading outdated flyers, inanely checking his mailbox every half hour, chitchatting with one of the work-study kids about the creatures thriving in the communal fridge, and generally wasting time. In an hour he’ll head home for lunch and his soap. There’s that, at least, to look forward to.

  The mailboxes have been newly updated for the incoming fall master’s candidates. Gone are the slots for the two (two!) students who managed to finish and defend this academic year: old Maud Benson and, of course, Annalise Theroux. Frankie harbors no ill will toward Maud, who began her dissertation in the late sixties, survived two forms of cancer in the seventies, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in the eighties, and spent the nineties revising. Maud’s ideas are long irrelevant, and she’ll never find a job in the current market, but good for her for closing the loop. Not so Annalise. Much ill will remains harbored, fellow loser or not. Her work is unfailingly au courant, and rumor has it she’ll soon jump full steam onto the tenure track at Amherst.

  As for Chris Curran, he’s used his windfall to spend six weeks in England, where, he assured Frankie the last time he raided his stash, the landscape will serve as his muse.

  Frankie’s day will come. It’s just a matter of time. Patience is required, along with thoughtful synthesis of his ever-multiplying dissertation chapters, ruthless cutting, and the connection of seemingly randomized dots. His new thesis adviser, Professor Avery Gadkari, himself a biracial product of postcolonial India (a human emblem of the document’s most salient arguments! Why did he not choose him from the start?) has been clear about the above requirements, much clearer than Professor Rhonda Birch, herself a tangent, a digression, a symptom of the dissertation’s fatal flaw: its ambitious, at times radiant, but ultimately incoherent sprawl.

  When Frankie told Gadkari he just needed one more text to bring the New Idea together before he could start pruning, Gadkari eyed him skeptically. It was the end of the term, and no doubt he’d hoped to wash his hands of Frankie before summer, given how far along the boy was and how “enthusiastically” Dr. Birch had recommended him. “Addition by subtraction,” Gadkari told him. “Trust me. The last thing this thesis needs is another text.”

  Gadkari, like most of the professors, rarely appears in West Hall in the summer. Mostly it’s Frankie and work-study college kids and the department secretary, barricaded in her air-conditioned room at the top of the stairwell. Still, when he passes the professor’s office, he stops for a few moments to listen for shuffling or the tapping of keys.

  Frankie’s mailbox, when he checks it for the last time before lunch, contains, to his astonishment, a single sheet of department letterhead. He looks quickly around. Birch’s door has been shut all morning, he’s sure of it. What would she be doing here, anyway? Last he’d heard, she’d planned to spend the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, where Amos had built her a house; but that was back in April, when they’d run into each other in the hallway and were forced to speak. The note is unmistakably Birch’s: a smiley face and, beside it, a question mark. Frankie stares at it and then, because he is a weak man and has little, if not nothing, not even his pride, to lose, now that she’s initiated the backslide, crosses out the question mark, writes “why not” in lowercase letters (uppercase would be too conciliatory), slips it under her door, and waits a few moments for h
er shadow to pass across the slit. It does.

  Halfway down College Ave, just before Vinny’s Pizza, he senses her. When he turns, she is there, a block and a half behind, keeping discreet pace. After the Oak Room snub, she’d sent him a maddening e-mail apology at 1 a.m., one that, if he read it correctly, blamed Frankie—yes, Frankie—for getting himself stood up, for not recognizing her idea as terribly unwise, un-Birch-like, and unlikely to transpire. If he truly understood her, the e-mail had implied, he wouldn’t have shown up, either. He didn’t write back.

  Rather than acknowledge him now on the street, Birch checks her watch. He speeds up. As he turns the corner, his hand’s in his right pocket to adjust his boxers, to maintain discretion.

  His room’s a wreck. Two weeks ago, he’d printed out all 478 pages of his dissertation—200 or so too many—and arranged them in piles on the dresser, desk, bed, and floor. Among the stacks of paper: dirty and half-dirty clothes, coffee mugs, plates crusted with peanut butter, shoes, books, mix tapes. Earlier this summer, at one of their rare house meetings, Anita had asked him to be “more mindful” of the common areas now that her “friend” Whitney was visiting 25 Stowe on a regular basis. Now all his stuff has moved into his bedroom.

  The front door slams, and he stands, arms crossed, at the top of the stairs to greet her. “So, look who actually showed up.”

  “Let’s not talk,” she says. “Not yet, OK? We’ll ruin it.”

  “Fine,” he says, because what other response can a man have—even a man of letters, even a man scorned—to her too-tight “Rosie the Riveter” T-shirt, jean shorts rolled up at the thigh, tanned legs, and red toenails, her body moving closer, removing her sunglasses, crooking her arm around his shoulder? They kiss right there in the dining room in full view of the neighbors, a first, until he pulls her into his room and guides her around the trash to his futon. Her eyes are closed. She could be kissing anyone, he thinks, but he doesn’t mind, not in this moment, at least. He’s missed their electricity. They fall onto the mattress, half on, half off the Ngugi chapter he’d needed her opinion on nine months ago. Below her navel is a new tattoo, a goddess—Athena?—whose face he kisses. He unsnaps the top button of her shorts, scoots her toward the window. Her ass smashes the pages. He goes for the second button, but she stops his hand.