All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  He picks up the other book, which isn’t a book at all but two pads of guest checks from the Al Di Là held together with a rubber band. In it are random disconnected phrases, the letters in all caps, blocky, with little Old World loops at the tips. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A SPECIAL DAUGHTER. FREE OFFER FOR SUBSCRIBERS. HAPPY HOUR SPECIAL. Some of the S’s are backward. There are periods where commas should be. NEW SUMMER PASS SCHEDULE. REMEMBER TO VOTE THIS TUESDAY. He keeps flipping through. The front section of pages are filled, one after the other, with these odd phrases, some in pink marker, some in pencil, some in ink, whatever she had lying around probably. FIFTY PERCENT OFF SALE. PHILADELPHIA PRIDE.

  The other pad of guest checks is different. Starting from the last page and going backward, she’s copied out the same sentence—I love you—over and over. The words are scrunched onto the lines in tiny lowercase letters. She’s separated the sentences with commas and dated the dozens of sections going back two years. The ink is smeared in places, the paper torn loose at the edges from the spiral hooks.

  Thousands of times, over dozens of pages: I love you, I love you, I love you.

  “What are these?” Frankie asks. He’s got the word games in one hand and the rubber-banded guest checks in the other.

  She looks up, smiling. Then her face falls. Fear comes to her eyes. “O Gesù mio,” she says. She knocks over the iron as she rushes to him and wrenches the books from his hands. “Those aren’t for you to see.”

  “But what are they?”

  She shakes her head and stuffs the books in her pocket, where they don’t quite fit. “I’m just—I’m silly.”

  “What are you trying to do?”

  She shrugs, her head down. “It’s just to pass the time.”

  “But what does it mean?” Frankie asks. “You know, if you want to learn English, there are plenty of night-school classes you can take. I think they’re even free.”

  “I know English,” she says. “I went to night school five years when I first came over. I know English. I just can’t write, I don’t know the spelling, so I practice on what I see in the mail or the newspaper or cards people send me. To keep my mind sharp.” She goes back to the pants, determined. She turns them inside out. “I saw it on the Lifetime channel,” she continues, not meeting his eyes. “They say the senior citizens, they should try to learn something new every day to help the brain. So that’s what I do. It’s like a muscle, the brain. I get a little confused sometimes, Frankie, I forget what I’m doing, my head goes cloudy. You know some of that already, yes? You’ve noticed? It’s nothing to worry about. But then I think, why not try to help myself? Maybe I can make my mind stronger on my own. I don’t want to go to night school again, with all those strangers. I’m too old, anyway, so I try to learn myself.”

  “You’re never too old,” says Frankie.

  She waves him away. “Only the young person believes that.”

  “But what’s with all the ‘I love yous’? What are you teaching yourself there? And why are they on guest checks?”

  She’s still looking down at the pants. For a few seconds she says nothing. “You saw that, too, then.” She turns the pants over. “It’s another silly thing. Don’t pay attention.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Oh, Frankie. It’s nothing! Every time I say my prayers, I write down, ‘I love you,’ so I don’t forget to say them as many times as I should. I keep count. It takes a long time—I pray for you and Prima and all the kids, and Tony, and my brothers and sisters and my father and Mamma, and my friends, I have a lot of people—and if I don’t get them all done, I don’t sleep, I feel scared, like I didn’t do enough for them, for you. I’ve been praying now, the whole time you’ve been here, in my head. One prayer after another. And when you go upstairs, I’ll write again ‘I love you’ in the book. And at the end of the day I count to make sure I’ve said the prayers enough times in case I forgot.”

  “I can get you a real notebook,” he says. “So you don’t have to scribble on guest checks. Dad’s too cheap to get one for you?”

  “The checks—they were your brother’s. From when he used to be a waiter. He still had empty ones in his room.” She shakes her head, looks down at her ironing.

  He goes to her, and without asking, without resistance, he takes one of the pads from where it sticks out of her pocket. He turns to the back, counts. Beside each date are at least ten “I love yous” crowded onto the lines, covering the back to the middle over fifty pages at least, like she’s afraid to waste the paper. Her hands move over the pants as he reads. He slips the pad back in her pocket.

  “How do your clothes always look and smell so good?” Frankie’s girlfriends, in college, used to ask him.

  “My mother,” he’d say, and, exaggerating her accent, “I clean you clothes with love.” Then the girl would unbutton them and pull them down and throw them in a heap on the bed.

  “Try to look good tonight,” his mother says now. “For me. For this girl you bring. To be dressed up is not so bad once in a while. It’s a special occasion: you back, the birthday of Ryan . . .” She looks him in the eyes. Hers are welling with tears. “I still can’t believe it, you here. When you’re in the house, I don’t worry as much. I feel safe.”

  Has Frankie not known how hard she’s been trying to keep her mind strong? To protect him, to protect all of them? How much she prays and begs God? Of course he’s known; she’s told him on the phone every night for years. But to see it, the sum of her life, scratched into the little pads, Tony’s pads, dazzles him. He goes to her, puts his arm around her shoulders, looks down at the bargain khakis she’s treated like silk—they look brand-new. He casts his eyes around the room, the swags and cornices and pillows all sewn and arranged by hand. “I’m amazed by what you do,” he says. “It takes real talent. Rare talent. I hope you know that.”

  “This?” she says. “This is nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing,” he says. It’s almost a scold. She needs to understand him, to hear him loud and clear on this. He holds her by the shoulders. “It’s beautiful,” he says. “It’s your work. It’s everything.”

  THE WAITERS HAVEN’T brought the antipasto, and already Prima’s a little drunk. She’s not the only one. Frankie, too, keeps refilling his glass, and the twins aren’t shy, either. There will be no surprises tonight. No speeches or tricks. No arguments.

  On the table are candles and the good white linens and fresh flowers. “All Ryan’s idea,” Prima’s father told her, when the sight of it, and her son standing in front of it in his black graduation suit, took her breath away. Ryan’s at the head of the table now, explaining the dinner, as if the Grassos haven’t eaten here a hundred times, as if the carpets and the ovens and the very air aren’t in their blood. But it’s charming. Her son will charm the diners here for years to come.

  When Prima can train her focus on Ryan, on not only his summer at home but the other Al Di Là restaurants that he and his charm and his business degree will open and scatter over the tristate area, she is happy. Otherwise it’s a great deal of work for Prima to convince herself that the battle she’s fighting is worth it. She talks to herself like this now, like a soldier, and she hates it. The talk has led her here, to the rocky border between one kind of life and another. Rage comes in waves, and though Tom won’t tolerate self-pity, she has to lash out every once in a while, at him or at one of the boys, or at her mother. It’s unfair, but she has no control over it. Prima waited all her adult life for another terrible thing to happen to someone she loved, but instead it happened to her, and she wasn’t prepared.

  Tomorrow morning, Tom will pack her into the car and take her to a rehab facility in Princeton. She’ll be an outpatient for a month, three weeks if they’re lucky. Her doctor is optimistic that his new idea, which he explained to her and two other doctors in incomprehensible detail, will work. She and Tom will stay in a hotel nearby, one of those efficiencies with a kitchenette, where Tom will work from the room. So much for a se
cond honeymoon.

  He sits on one side of her, Patrick on the other. Her mother across. Frankie and his shockingly normal-looking girlfriend and the twins are with her father at the other end. Prima forbade Allison Grey’s presence, and Zach didn’t fight her. The girl has sent Prima at least a dozen cards since the accident, but Prima hasn’t opened a single one. Did she not know from the start that somewhere, somehow, the girl would ruin her? Zach’s lucky that Prima still lets him talk to her, let alone call her his girlfriend.

  Ryan’s explaining about the complexity of the wine. Then he brings the pasta—“Penne ah-ma-tree-cha-na,” he says, in forced but technically correct Italian—and then veal Milanese, and then bowl after bowl of sides: roasted peppers, sautéed onions topped with bread crumbs, peas, broccoli rabe, all of which they scoop up with thick cuts of warm bread. The restaurant fills around them. Music piped through the corner speakers—crooners from the fifties—gets louder, and Tom, of all people, sings along. He must be drunk. Prima looks at him with a bemused pride, nudging Patrick in the ribs. Frankie tells a Clinton joke that nobody quite gets and that may be too dirty for a family dinner.

  “I have a joke, too,” Maddalena says. She raises her hand like she’s in school. “How does a cat eat spaghetti?”

  They all look at her.

  “He puts it in his mouth,” she says. She throws her head back in full-throated laughter. No one else laughs. “You don’t get it?” she says. “The cat eats spaghetti like everybody else!”

  “Stick to making drapes, Ma,” Frankie says playfully, and he flicks a bit of crust at her.

  “I’ll get you!” she says, still laughing at her joke, and she flicks one back.

  “It’s a little corny,” says Patrick.

  “The priest told it,” she says. “I was going to save it for Thanksgiving. I’m glad I didn’t!”

  “Yeah, stick to dancing, Nonna,” says Ryan, now seated at the table beside his father.

  “I’ll get you, too,” Maddalena says, tearing out a big chunk of the bread. “You watch out!”

  “Have another drink,” Antonio says with a smile. When Maddalena tries to protest, she knocks her glass of wine into the bowl of onions. Kelly Anne starts laughing, too, and soon so does everyone.

  “She’s invented a new recipe,” says Zach.

  “Who says I don’t cook?” says Maddalena.

  Prima thinks she should be enjoying this laughter, and this celebration, and this teasing of her mother, who has her very good days and her very bad days, and the food fight with her sons and the buzz that’s warming her in her chair, but she’s so tired, and this celebration’s not planned the way she would have planned it. If Prima had had her way, they’d have taken Ryan to a nightclub, to make up for not doing anything for his twenty-first, and invited some of his friends down from Syracuse. If she’d had her way, they’d be here retelling stories from the trip to Italy, passing around photos of the Grassos in front of various monuments, of her mother with her arms around her brother and sister. They’d have memories of arriving in Rome, driving first to Terni for a day, then Rieti, then Santa Cecilia in time for the feast on the fifteenth, then Florence, then down to Assisi, and finally back to Rome for three days of guided tours. Prima had it all organized. Ten magical days it would have been.

  Instead, the guidebooks and brochures, once arranged in personalized gift bags in the backseat of her car, have become the trash run over daily by tractor trailers and motorcycles on Route 41. The tickets and reservations are partially refunded, the Buckleys are out thousands of dollars, and doors are shutting and dead-bolting around her. In the thin air of the restaurant, all the laughter and love that surround her—it’s the happiest she’s seen her family in a year—is a cruel kick in the gut. She’s doing an adequate enough job passing for happy for the sake of her sons and husband.

  From her seat she can see cars pass on Union. The occasional driver looks over, catches her eye for a moment, then moves along. The headlights make shadows on the windows, which are open on this warm June night. The honking horns rattle her. Coffee appears, and plates of tiramisu, and a bowl of sliced fruit passed around family-style. When the plates are cleared and someone mentions grappa, Frankie stands.

  “I know this day is half in my honor,” he says, “and it’s probably bad form to make a speech, but since Ryan’s working on his birthday, I guess we’re not following any rules.”

  Oh my, Prima thinks, is he going to propose to this girl? Right here in front of everyone? She watches Kelly Anne, who looks as confused as the rest of them. Frankie is not the speech-making type, and Prima can think of nothing else important enough for him to say. Kelly Anne seems nice enough, and not wild in any way, rather like Tom; when Prima realizes this and sees her mother and father light up at the sight of their son, her love of surprises kicks in. No one can resist a man getting down on one knee in a restaurant. But how could he afford a decent ring?

  “I just want to say happy birthday to Ryan and a big thank-you to Dad and Mom for the delicious dinner, and for, well, the free rent the next couple months.”

  “Free?” jokes Antonio. “Who said it was free?”

  “Stai zitto,” says Maddalena. “Let him talk!” She’s thinking, With that shirt on, and your hair not a mess, and standing tall with your hands in the pockets of your dress pants, you look like a professor, Frankie, like someone who knows things. “You can stay a hundred years for free!” she calls out.

  “I also want to say”—here Frankie turns to Prima and Patrick—“how lucky we are that you guys are all right.” He picks up his glass. “To the Grassos!”

  They all fumble for whatever’s on the table in front of them: coffee mugs, water glasses, half-empty glasses of wine. They reach toward the middle and hold there, until everyone’s touching.

  “To Ryan and Zio Frankie!” Zach says.

  “Welcome home and buon compleanno!” says Antonio.

  “To my beautiful wife,” says Tom.

  “Yes, beautiful!” says Maddalena.

  Prima wants to say something, the right thing, to convince them, and herself, that she’s grateful, too, but she can’t, not yet, and so she’s left with only a feeble “thank you” fading on her lips.

  “She’s speechless,” says Tom. “That’s a rare sight.”

  Maddalena looks at each of them, all of them together, here in this circle, half-drunk and silly. She wants to hold them here as long as she can. But the moment doesn’t last. Just a few minutes later, the waiters take the last of the plates and glasses away, and Antonio and Frankie are yawning.

  “Already?” she says to no one in particular.

  “It’s late,” someone says.

  “It’s only ten o’clock!” Maddalena says. In the early years, Saturday nights like this, they used to push the tables against the wall and make room for a few couples to dance. All the men liked dancing with her. She knew how to follow in a way that made them feel like Fred Astaire. She’d try to sit down and they’d come after her, sometimes two at a time, with their hands out. She won’t suggest dancing now, not with Prima how she is, but she wishes she could. “When’d you all get so old?”

  “I’ll stay,” Matt says. “Nonno?”

  “Whatever she wants,” Antonio says.

  “I’ll put music on,” says Ryan, and he disappears into the kitchen.

  Tom takes his wife’s hand, squeezes it, checking in, the way couples do. One squeeze asks, Is it OK if we stay another half hour? Are you tired? Will we be OK? She squeezes it back, saying, Yes, yes, and yes, I guess we will.

  Music comes on, and Ryan returns from the kitchen to take a bow. Taking charge suits the kid. It’s as if he’s always been here, calling the shots. Maddalena gets up and stands beside him. She sings the words. Eventually he joins in. The others stand around them, and then Antonio joins in, too, and the customers turn to watch, whispering. Crazy Italians, they must be thinking. But isn’t this why they come to a place like the Al Di Là? Why they’l
l keep coming to the Al Di Làs that her son will build for them? To sit among people so full of life. To soak up the color and the drama and the love.

  The song is “Volare.” Frankie puts his arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder. Neither of them sings along. They must not know the words. Prima does, but she’s too embarrassed. She hasn’t sung in public since high school.

  Let’s fly way up to the clouds . . .

  Antonio walks over to Maddalena, takes her hand in an invitation to dance. She says, “No, no, I can’t.” She looks over at Prima. She’s asking for permission.

  “You should dance, Ma,” Prima says, and, no argument, that’s all it takes. The bus boys move the chairs on the other side of the table and push it against the wall to make more room. Maddalena and Antonio dance a fox-trot or a cha-cha, Prima doesn’t know the difference. The entire restaurant watches them. Tom keeps holding on to Prima, squeezing her hand with more questions, but it’s OK, she can handle it. She’s aware that other people will keep dancing whether she can or not. She keeps her eyes on Zach and Matt and Patrick, who stand beside each other, clapping along to the beat. They sing a little bit of the chorus, the only part they know—all those oh oh oh ohs—then Matt grabs Zach by the belt, and they’re dancing, too, with the customers laughing and pointing.

  Patrick flicks the chandeliers on and off, rapidly, to make a strobe. Service comes to a halt. The kitchen guys come out and wave their spatulas at Antonio and Maddalena, the owner and his wife, the reason they are all there in the first place. The flames from the grill leap up behind them. The honking of the horns from the cars on Union is in beat with the music. The headlights are fireworks on the windows.

  Penso che un sogno cosi non ritorni mai piu . . .

  The song speaks the truth, Prima thinks. It will never happen again, such a dream.

  She is right.

  It is the last time she will see her family together like this, fully alive, happy enough. When she gets back, in five weeks, from New Hope, she will be walking, as back to normal as will be possible, but everything else will have changed.