All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  The music stops, and after the clapping the place returns to its dull roar. Ryan hasn’t cued another song. He’s occupied, cheek to cheek with some girl who showed up at the front door asking for him, whispering into her ear. “More!” Maddalena calls out. The customers go back to their pastas and desserts. Antonio sits down. Frankie and Kelly Anne are chatting with one of the chefs.

  “More!” Maddalena calls again. She shakes her head. She looks over at Prima from across what used to be the dance floor. “That’s all we get?” she asks. “One little song?”

  LABOR DAY, AND Frankie’s still home. Maddalena tries to ask how, and why, but he snaps at her. He tells her he’s stressed out and that “things just aren’t coming together” with his paper, but it’s not the mother’s business to ask for more details than that? The snapping is like Prima, but it’s also like the Frankie of three years old and the Frankie of fifteen years old, so much the same Frankie, it’s true, as the Frankie of almost thirty years old, locked in his room with his books. Now that he’s been home more than two months, it’s funny, they don’t talk as much as they did when he was in Boston. Eleven o’clock comes and the phone doesn’t ring and there’s no “good night,” no “I love you,” only the light under his door that doesn’t go off until three in the morning, when Antonio’s been snoring already four hours but Maddalena’s awake, walking in and out of the rooms because she can’t sleep praying for Tony, who’s upside down in a way no one will explain.

  If Maddalena could drive, she’d go out and look for Tony. He goes walking after school sometimes, to clear his mind. She’d like to see where he walks, but she doesn’t know the streets and won’t be able to find her way back, and Antonio is no help, he lies to her, him and Prima and Frankie, they all tell her lies about Tony that don’t make sense, they just don’t understand him the way she does. The only one who’s not a liar is Frankie’s fidanzata, the Irish, who calls five times a day and will talk to Maddalena when Frankie’s too busy to stay long on the phone, which is always. When Prima comes over, she brings yogurt and blueberries and vitamin B tablets and starts to wash the dish Maddalena’s just eaten her lunch from, but Maddalena takes the dish from her and washes it herself and asks her what happened to her leg, and isn’t she embarrassed to have to use a cane like an old woman? She has no reason to be embarrassed, Prima tells her, and she’s fine, she can wash a dish, she’s not a cripple, and then she shakes her head and promises to come over again tomorrow to bring more blueberries and yogurt, but how much blueberries and yogurt can a person eat?

  In the meantime, Maddalena has Frankie to watch over. Every day when he gets up, never before noon, he bangs his door open, half-asleep, on his way to the bathroom. Soon as Maddalena hears the bang, she runs to the kitchen to microwave the coffee Antonio made before he left. The coffee and one biscotto are waiting for Frankie on his desk when he’s done on the toilet. His room is a disaster. Piles of papers everywhere, bedsheets all twisted and full of crumbs, drawers open with clothes hanging out. The only chance she has to straighten up is when he’s in the shower, usually around four o’clock after he watches General Hospital, but if she’s not out of the room before he comes out, he snaps. She tries to read his papers, but they make no sense. She’s never seen such words. She copies out as many letters as she has time for. HETEROGLOSSIA. INEXTRICABLE. BOOMERANG EFFECT. She’ll never understand what he’s doing with these words, why they matter so much to him, make him angry with himself and with her and with the world. Frankie tries to explain his degree to her, but she gets lost the first minute. No one’s a tailor or a doctor or a priest anymore. The jobs are so complicated nowadays, and people go from one to the other like rides at a carnival.

  Around two o’clock every day she brings Frankie a frittata with extra onions or leftovers from dinner the night before. For dessert, a peach and two hard chocolate chip cookies (his favorite kind, in the blue wrapper). If she has time, she cuts up a watermelon and picks out the seeds and brings him the chunks. If he’s in a good mood, he’ll say, “Hey, hang on,” and she’ll sit on the edge of his bed feeling like she’s won a prize, and they’ll talk about Days of Our Lives or the nice cool air conditioning or the dances she’d like to learn at the studio, but never about Tony or anything serious, like how he’s really making out with his big paper, and doesn’t he have students to teach up in Boston? Will he get fired if he doesn’t show up? She’s afraid to upset him with her questions. If she upsets him too much, he will leave for real, like Tony did. If Maddalena has her way, he will stay forever and ever in his room like the Frankie of three years old and the Frankie of fifteen and twenty-two years old, and she will keep bringing him whatever she can, plates of food and cups of coffee and armfuls of clean underwear, to make his life easy.

  Between him and Prima coming by and the girl calling and Arlene and Father Larson visiting all the time, it seems like Maddalena is never alone. If it’s late enough in the afternoon, she drinks a glass of red wine with whoever’s there with her, or if it’s not too cold or dark now that the time’s changed, she goes for a walk. Prima tells her to eat more bananas and take her fish oil pills (so many pills!) and do what the doctor tells her, and to stop worrying about Tony or Frankie or anyone, and to let go, let go, let go, because, according to Prima (who never takes her own advice), to worry is not healthy, and it must be the worry that’s making her spells worse. What Prima and Tony and Frankie don’t know is that there’s no hope, that fish pills and bananas and yogurt and blueberries and vitamin B and doctors can’t change the plan God put in her brain and her blood, the same brain and blood that killed her sisters at her age.

  One day it’s freezing and the wind is blowing the dead leaves around outside, and someone lets himself in the front door and Maddalena gets scared when she sees him in the hallway. But then she sees it’s not a man but a woman and she looks just like Mamma in the light, and right away Maddalena thinks it’s a trick, that what Tony’s been doing all this time away at a special school—that’s what Antonio said, a special school for smart people, a place far away where he can concentrate and learn—is finding Mamma in Italy and bringing her over as a gift. Then the worry melts away and Maddalena is so happy, because there is Mamma, after fifty years without her and a thousand letters and pictures, there she is, with that bump in her nose and her shoulders Roman-straight, there for Maddalena to run to and fall to her knees and grab around the waist. And then, when Mamma bends down to lift her off the floor, kiss every inch of her face, the face switches, and it isn’t Mamma’s face anymore; it’s Prima’s full of tears, yelling at her like she’s a stupid child, pulling her out of the dream, then taking her onto the porch for air. It stays with Maddalena, though, the dream that was real, the surprise gift, her arms around Mamma again, touching her lips to her smooth skin, her clothes smelling of Santa Cecilia ashes. She didn’t want her to turn into Prima. She wanted her to stay Mamma so she could show her the little house she had in America, all the rooms she’d decorated herself, the pots of violets, and Frankie working hard at his desk like a professor, and sit her down on the sofa to ask what to do about Tony, and never let her leave.

  If Teresa and Celestina and Carolina had to go like this, it’s only fair that Maddalena should, too, and if it means she can see her sisters again, alive, here on earth instead of in heaven, when there’s still time to introduce them to their nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews, it’s not the most terrible thing, it’s like falling asleep into a dream in the middle of the afternoon on a chair in the sun. It’s what old people do. But Frankie will be leaving before she can prepare herself to say good-bye.

  As it is, he’s around less and less lately, her Frankie. He’s disappearing like Tony did, except not all at once. All night he’s gone sometimes and for a few hours in the afternoon. At first it was lonely, but then Celestina and Teresa and Carolina came to keep her company. They’re here off and on all day, gossiping about the boys back from the war in their uniforms, how handsome they
are, and the movie that’s showing in the piazza on a big screen brought over from Avezzano. For years they’ve been waiting for a movie to come to Santa Cecilia. If Babbo lets them, they’ll bring blankets and sleep in the square to save a spot in the front, does Maddalena want to come?

  Yes, she does. She wants very much to come. She wants to lie beside them on the soft grass, with the stars so close she can reach up and scoop them into her hand and dab them on her face like glitter. There’s a man coming from America, she’s been told, a man with money and a ticket on the boat across the ocean, and she has to look as pretty as she can if she wants to be his wife.

  No one has told Maddalena the trouble Tony’s in, but she knows it’s big, it’s not a camp for smart boys because it’s not summer and no camp goes on so long except prison. She knows this like she knows the hole in Frankie’s eyebrow he thinks he’s hiding, like she knows Prima’s lonely heart she won’t admit to. Mamma agrees. She’s around most of the time now. She doesn’t like that Maddalena’s hair is getting so long and gray, so she has to ask Prima to color and brush it, like Maddalena used to do for Mamma Nunzia, the nights Antonio stayed out all night with his derelict friends. Prima stands behind Maddalena on the cushioned chair in the vanity in front of the mirror, brushing one hundred strokes on one side of her head, one hundred strokes on the other. They count together.

  Frankie goes out more and more. The coffee she brings him gets cold on his desk. A girl in a blue truck picks him up, and when he gets into the passenger side he kisses her. If she’s the Irish girl from the phone, why doesn’t she stop in to say hi? Maddalena watches from the powder room window, and after they’re gone she goes into Tony’s room and covers herself with his sweet-smelling sheets and sleeps in his bed for hours and hours, and only a few times does someone catch her and lead her by the arm to her own room down the hall, where Antonio’s put in a new TV-VCR on a stand so she can watch her stories with her feet up on a pillow and the phone next to her on the table with framed pictures. So many more framed pictures than there used to be! There are as many pictures as pills. Too many. Frankie’s much better now about the mess in his room, there aren’t as many papers in piles as there used to be, and he’s bought new clothes—ties and dress shirts that show up in his hamper, clothes she’s happy to wash and iron when she can, when she can hold the iron without losing the strength in her arms. When that happens, she has to stop or she’ll fall down, even with Antonio or the nurse lady there next to her propping her up so she can do what gives her so much happiness: iron the shirt of her handsome son so he can wear it with one of his professor ties and look so good, so grown up, walking to the car with his briefcase to go teach his class at the university.

  The nurse lady is strong for a girl so skinny, and she smiles and speaks in a soft voice, but Maddalena hates the little moles across her nose that look like cockroach shit, and every time she comes, Maddalena hides, but the rascal girl always finds her, calls out her name, and says it the wrong way, with some Spanish accent, and it’s a disgrace to have that girl in the bathroom with her doing what she has to do to keep her clean. Maddalena hates her for that most of all. And in the meantime Antonio and Frankie and Prima (not Tony, Tony is gone) are in the kitchen making their plans and not inviting Maddalena to anything anymore, not letting her even walk outside by herself, not even with her coat and scarf. They talk loud, not caring if she hears, but who needs them? Sometimes she hates them more than she hates the Spanish girl.

  She has Mamma to help her put the garland on the chandelier and crack open the chestnuts and wrap the gifts Prima bought and left on the workroom table next to the yards of fabric she can’t make into drapes anymore. She tries. She tries so hard. The measurements keep coming out wrong. One time she tries and rips up the fabric afterward and throws it into the oven and turns the knob to Broil to destroy it so she’ll never have to see the mistake again, and after that the fabric disappears from the table, along with the gifts, and it’s not Christmas anymore all of a sudden, the tree in the backyard is raining down its pink petals on the lawn, but Prima and Antonio and Frankie (not Tony, Tony is gone) are still in the kitchen making their plans. It’s where they always are anymore, and Maddalena loves them so much, she misses them so much, all she wants is for one of them, any one of them (and Tony? What did she do to Tony to make him hate her?) to visit her for longer than a minute and put their hands on her cheek and kiss her hair, and she wants to tell them, Don’t forget me, I can still see you, Prima, you are so pretty, Antonio you have a hole in your sweater, Frankie, you’re getting fat in the middle, and you know what, it looks good on you somehow. But the words don’t come, and she tries to call them to her but their names don’t come, either. It’s just her in the room where not even Antonio sleeps anymore, with the blond actress on the TV screen jumping up and down because finally the man she’s been chasing all her life is on his knees in front of her with the ring, and Maddalena thinks, Good luck, both of you, it’s a long sad life you’re in for, and when she calls out this time, it works, she makes noise from her mouth, loud, like a siren, but nobody comes.

  Part 3 Summer 2003

  11 Miracles

  THE NEW DOCTOR at Christiana is not the first to make the suggestion. He’s the first Italian specialist they’ve seen, though, and his last name, amazingly, is Grasso, and if a sign like that worked for Prima and Patrick, it can work for Maddalena.

  “Take her home,” Dr. Grasso tells Antonio.

  He’s young and tan and has a degree from Harvard. He doesn’t say, Take her to Santa Cecilia. But that’s what he means. He says, too: Forget her resistance to the trip two years ago. She might as well have been a different woman. Her body is healthy enough for the plane ride, her heart and bones are strong. Flood her mind with the happy memories of youth. The stage she’s in, she’s regressed to her childhood and can only be made more peaceful if what she sees with her eyes matches what’s going on in her head.

  These last words Antonio hears most clearly. She can only be made more peaceful. Your wife, Signor Grasso, can only be made more peaceful. They leave the office and drive straight to another Italian, Ombretta, the travel agent Antonio’s never had the chance to use until now. She gets Frankie on the phone, then they call Prima, and then she’s buying them four tickets for Saturday’s Alitalia flight from Philadelphia to Rome. It’s crazy. It’s not like Antonio to act this fast. But nothing is as it used to be. His life has changed more in the past two years than in the fifty before.

  The fourth ticket is for Kelly Anne, not Prima. She doesn’t agree with Dr. Grasso’s prescription. She calls other doctors and begs Antonio and Frankie to listen to their concerns, to consider the dangers of taking a woman so frail on such a long trip. But she’s wrong. She can only be made more peaceful. If she were Prima’s child, she’d do whatever it took to help her.

  When Saturday comes, Prima shows up early in the day to say good-bye. Maddalena sits in the living room in the flowered dress Prima bought her last Christmas, a dress Kelly Anne helped her put on for the plane ride, and right there on the spot, seeing Maddalena in that dress, Prima changes her mind. She calls Alitalia and buys a last-minute ticket for the flight. Two thousand dollars. But nobody blinks.

  Antonio and Maddalena have flown only twice in their lives: once to Las Vegas, once to Miami. Both times on senior citizen vacations organized by the dance studio. Both times, Antonio had to take tranquilizers for his nerves. Tonight he wants nothing deadened. He presses his face to the window through the long night hours, while everyone around him sleeps. Then, shade by shade, the sky lightens, and when Italy finally appears below him, it’s like a woman stretched out on a bed in the morning. He can climb on top of her and wake her with his kisses, or he can watch her sleep a little longer, taking in her beauty. Either way, she is his.

  At the Rome airport, they rent a car, and before long they’re on the superstrada, which cuts through the mountains like a thing from the future. Frankie, from behind the wheel, tells
Antonio it’s called science fiction, the kind of movie Antonio feels like he’s in, where everything’s real and familiar and at the same time impossible and strange. Maddalena sits beside him in the backseat, humming, her hand gripping his. Prima’s on the other side of her. Kelly Anne’s in the front reading the map. All of them, even Maddalena, are talking, pointing at the views of Valle del Salto, Antonio talking most of all. He can’t shut up. The stories come one on top of the other, so many stories as they climb up and up and around the mountains, where memories hang from the trees and are soaked into the heavy stone. And then the sign for Santa Cecilia appears (a tall green metal sign, the same as you’d see in Rome or on the Jersey Turnpike, impossible!), and they exit the superstrada. The road up the hill through the olive grove used to be dirt. Now it’s paved. The olive trees, though, are in the same place, like they’ve been waiting for Antonio all these years. At the first row of houses the car goes quiet, or at least Antonio can’t hear a word they say. He’s crushing the tiny bones in Maddalena’s hand, his heart is exploding, it’s been fifty-seven years, and he is home.

  They pass his father’s house with the crack above the door. “Slow down, Frankie!” he says. He points out the Grasso farm that never grew enough, and now, look, it’s bursting green. There’s the stoop where the old witch Guglielma Lunga used to sit, and there’s the window where Gabriella Puzo used to stand and change her blouse. He says these names aloud, watching Maddalena’s eyes for a spark, but the spark doesn’t come. Still he keeps talking.

  After the bend in the road, they come upon the grocery store that once belonged to the Piccinelli family. They park in front. Antonio can’t bring himself to step out. Not yet. He leans across Maddalena, points through the back window, and reads her the sign in the window: DROGHERIA PICCINELLI. “Can you believe that?” he says to her. “That’s your old name—you remember it? Before you were a Grasso, you were a Piccinelli.” She smiles, but maybe only to match the wide smile he gives her, like a baby does for her father before she’s old enough to know it means she’s happy.