All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  “Leave them alone, Papà,” says Donatella.

  “I won’t,” he says.

  Prima sits beside her father, her hand on top of his. How strange it must be for him, she thinks, hearing Vito’s advice on love when he knows that he means every word for the Maddalena of sixty years ago, for the life Vito would have had with her if it weren’t for him. Even so, she can see in her father’s eyes that he’s sad to be leaving. She’s already suggested they stay a few more days, change their tickets, who cares about the money, Ryan and the restaurant and Tom will be fine, but he said no, it was time.

  “All this talk of love,” Prima says to him while Vito rambles on to Frankie and Kelly Anne on the other side of the terrace, “—it reminds me: Do you know whatever happened to Dante Marconi? Is he still in Wilmington?”

  He looks at her. “Dante Marconi? Why?”

  “It’s OK, Dad,” Prima says with a laugh. “I know why you fired him. You don’t have to pretend.”

  He blinks at her, seeming confused.

  “You don’t remember. That’s a good thing. Or maybe you really didn’t know? When I was sixteen and working at the Al Di Là? We used to sneak around, me and Dante Marconi. Before Tony died. And . . . and after, too. For just a little while. It was nothing big. But there was no way I could tell you back then. It was obvious you didn’t like him. That ponytail—”

  “You and Dante?”

  “Yes. Why do you think I was such a terrible waitress? All I could concentrate on was him. I thought I was in love. Can you imagine.” She laughs. It’s a relief to get that part of it, at least, out in the open, even though she could have done so a long time ago, after she’d settled down with Tom, when it wouldn’t have mattered anymore to her father. “I thought for sure Gilberto told you. He caught us in the alley once. We both assumed that’s why you fired him all of a sudden.”

  “Who are you talking about?” Frankie calls out from the other side of the terrace.

  “Nothing,” Prima says. “Just a crush I had once. This guy Dante Marconi. A waiter at the Al Di Là.”

  “Dante,” Frankie says. “How literary of you, Prima.”

  “Dante e Beatrice,” says Vito, who’s half following them and half gazing at Kelly Anne’s shoulders. “An Italian love story.”

  “It wasn’t a love story,” says Prima.

  “What was it?” asks Kelly Anne.

  “You OK, Dad?” Prima asks him. “You’re not mad at me, are you? It was such a long time ago. I was stupid. You can’t be mad at me for something like that—”

  “Did Tony know?” he asks.

  Everyone’s looking at him because now he’s shaking. “Dad, what is it? Why does it matter?”

  “Just tell me if Tony knew about you and Dante Marconi.”

  Prima casts her mind back. “At first, no,” she says. “Then—yes, I think I did tell him. Because I was worried he’d find out from Gilberto and tell you. I made him swear not to. I remember for sure now. We were sitting on his bed one night after a shift. He didn’t rat on me, though, did he?”

  “No,” Antonio says.

  “We kept each other’s secrets,” she says. “I would have done anything for him.”

  “He hated you, too, then. Not just me.”

  “What did you say?” Prima asks. “He didn’t hate me, Dad. He didn’t hate any of us. You shouldn’t talk like that. Do you need a glass of water?”

  He shuts his eyes and squeezes them tight like he’s trying to stop tears. “I’m sorry,” he says. Then he stands up. He’s still shaking. “I’m going for a walk.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Frankie says, shooting Prima a look that means, Don’t worry, I’ll figure this out.

  “No,” says Antonio. “Stay here.”

  He goes to Maddalena, kneels beside her, and whispers something in her ear. She nods. He takes her hand and helps her to her feet and together they go into the house without a word to anyone.

  Minutes later they appear on the street, walking toward the piazza. Prima and Frankie watch them. From above, they look like any white-haired village couple: the lady in a housedress, the man with a sweater tied around his shoulders. Except she can only be Prima’s mother and he can only be her father, and Maddalena was always going to pick Antonio over Vito Leone, and their first son was always going to jump from the bridge, and they were never not going to grow old together or take one last walk hand in hand through the village, up to the church. In their long lives, Prima thinks, she and Frankie have played only small parts.

  When they turn toward the gorge, Frankie asks, “Do you know what that was about?”

  “No idea,” Prima says.

  Kelly Anne comes over to stand with them. “So you lost track of Dante?” she asks. “How sad!”

  “It’s not so sad,” says Prima. “He hates me.”

  “For what?”

  It’s been torn down now, Prima’s checked, but back in her day, there was an abandoned house in the woods behind Brandywine Creek State Park. Kids called it the devil house, but it was really just a small cabin people had stopped living in. The land was owned by two old women, cousins, or so they said, who lived in a big house up the hill from the shed. There were lots of rumors about the shed. You never heard the same one the same way twice. The most famous rumor went that devil worshippers gathered there to sacrifice animals and there was a hole in the floor that led straight to hell. Kids used to go driving around drunk at night looking for the devil house but never finding it. It was just a little workman’s cabin hidden from the road by trees. What some of them must have known, though, and kept mostly to themselves, was that it was a place where a girl could get a doctor to come if she needed one. The two women in the main house were connected to the doctor. You had to go through them first, and pay the money, which is what Prima did, with her friend Linda, and then a night or two later, when she told her parents she was going to Linda’s house, instead she went to the cabin.

  “He caught me with his best friend,” Prima says to Kelly Anne. “We were just making out, but—it was enough.”

  “Classy,” says Frankie.

  “I know, I know,” Prima says, with an “I surrender” wave and a smile she forces through, though her heart is breaking in the same raw place it broke that night in Linda’s car on the way home from the cabin, and has broken, again and again, with the same ache immediately following, each time she’s with her sons.

  “I never saw him again after that night,” Prima says, and this part is true. “It really hurt him, what I did. He had so much pride. I didn’t know then about an Italian man’s pride. I was just figuring it out.”

  Prima can still see him, Dante, beside her on the hood of his blue Camaro, in his jeans and white T-shirt, arms out, making her promise that she wouldn’t do it, that she’d think as hard as she could about marrying him and living in his grandmother’s house at the Jersey Shore with their son, their daughter, whatever God gave them. He was too young and stupid to be angry or scared. He felt nothing but joy at their twist of fate.

  I promise, Prima had said.

  “He’s forgiven you by now,” says Kelly Anne.

  “Seriously,” Frankie says. “No offense, but he probably doesn’t even remember it. We Italian men go through lots of women in a lifetime.”

  “Is that right?” asks Kelly Anne.

  The next morning, when they’re gathered outside the store with their luggage, and the entire village, it seems, comes to wish them off, Vito Leone’s face is full of tears. Carolina can’t understand why. Maddalena, too, is confused. But he makes sense to Prima. He’s a romantic. And because Prima is not—not anymore, at least—she envies him.

  Maddalena sits in the backseat of the rental car next to her husband. Up until the last possible second, even after Frankie’s turned on the ignition, she holds Carolina’s hand through the open window. Then they pull away, and Prima’s last glimpse of Santa Cecilia is her army of a family, who’d been strangers just days before, walking fa
st toward them in a pack down the middle of the street, waving their handkerchiefs, shouting their names, calling, ciao, ciao, buon viaggio, arrivederci, see you soon, see you again!

  12 More

  LATER THAT SUMMER, Frankie and Kelly Anne take a proper vacation. A week in Rehoboth, just the two of them, with nothing to do but read and swim and play games on the boardwalk. They spend a couple of mornings on the stretch of beach where Matt and Zach work as lifeguards. Kelly Anne looks delicious in a swimsuit, the freckles across her chest, her hair a strawberry blond for just a few precious weeks. The beach trip is a gift from her parents, offered and accepted without fuss. They don’t want the week to end but aren’t sad when they leave. Their little life together in Newark is a satisfying one. So in the car headed north on Route 1 they turn up the radio and sing.

  Once a month, every month now for the past year or so, they meet Prima and Tom for dinner at the Al Di Là. When they do, Antonio cooks the meal himself to show the cooks who’s boss and to keep up the old recipes. Frankie’s in constant disagreement with Prima—over politics, whether Patrick should join a frat, why he and Kelly Anne don’t need to get married, all the conversations they had in Santa Cecilia rehashed and added to—but at the end of the night they put their arms around each other and say how fast the months go and promise to see each other more. Ryan’s always there buzzing around the tables in a tie and blazer. A newly minted graduate of Syracuse, he spent a small fortune of his parents’ money to secure the job at the family restaurant he could have had out of high school, but nobody complains.

  This fall, Assistant Professor Frank Grasso is on the U of D campus five days a week. A Monday three-hour lecture, a Tuesday-Thursday intro course, and a Monday-Wednesday-Friday postcolonial survey. Not to mention office hours (Tuesdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to noon, the time most popular with the students, and by appointment). Not to mention the endless thesis-committee meetings, and the reams of essays he grades in the cafeteria between commitments. Throw in research time on new papers for MLA and the Pitt and BU conferences, and the revision of his dissertation-about-to-become-a-published-book, and his volunteer role with the Graduate Student Union, and his schedule becomes unmanageable. Yet he takes more when more is offered to him. Because every minute on campus, hard at work, at the podium in front of scribbling coeds, is one of distraction.

  It’s not until he gets in his car—a 2001 Toyota, the first car he’s bought with his own money—and tosses his satchel and empty thermos on the passenger seat, that he’s reminded what a fool’s paradise more has turned out to be. More is never enough. The undistracted minute always arrives, and there beside him is his sadness, that hulking giant that follows him wherever he goes.

  The one magic afternoon in Santa Cecilia was the last time Frankie’s mother recognized him. He conjures it up more often than he should: Maddalena calling his name, taking him in her arms. A miracle. Conjuring up the day gives him hope when hope is necessary. Once something beautiful unfolds before you, isn’t it human nature to replay the moment over and over, take it like a drug when you need it?

  He calls Kelly Anne on his cell phone to plan dinner. She’s a decent cook, but neither of them is much of a housekeeper. Against her religion and her parents’ wishes, they rent an apartment off Academy Street. She teaches in the Delaware public school system. He helps her with her bulletin boards, making sure she doesn’t pass along the naive understanding of America’s reprehensible colonial history her professors at BC taught her. She drags him to church once a month. In these ways, they corrupt each other. Though she’s patient with Frankie’s skittishness, he knows she’d like a ring, to feel legitimate in the eyes of the priests at St. Ann’s, and one day he’ll break down and get her one, but for now he prefers not to mess with a good thing.

  At night, if he doesn’t have too many papers to grade, they watch documentaries. Or they grab a beer at Klondike Kate’s and hope they don’t run into any of Frankie’s students. Whatever they do, most nights they’re home by ten, an old unmarried married couple. And at 11:01, in bed beside her, he calls his parents’ house from the extension on his nightstand.

  His father plays bocce on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the nights Prima and Frankie take turns sitting with their mother. There’s a new nurse in the daytime, an expensive one Tom and Prima pay for.

  Tonight’s a Wednesday. His father answers on the second ring, groggy, startled, half-awake. They make sure they’ve each had dinner, that their cars are running OK, the same conversation they had yesterday, and have been having for two, five, fifteen years, and will have as long as they can. In the middle of it, his mother picks up. She’s in a different room, the cordless always beside her.

  She tells him about people he’s never heard of, who may not even exist. She mixes Italian and English in the same sentence. He recognizes some of the names from previous conversations, on the Piccinelli terrace and elsewhere, but most of the names are inaccessible, unattached to any of the multiple story lines that have been building over the years. But how happy she sounds tonight to know these strangers, to report on their progress.

  Their soap is on in the background; it plays over and over most of the day in her room; he can hear it, it’s on so loud; and though she may or may not understand him, he fills her in on what’s going on, who’s in love, who’s missing, who was thought dead but has come back to life. All the silliness and drama and sex and heartbreak that is the stuff of life. It’s too late to go on for long, they are all three so tired, but the time is tradition.

  His clock radio says 11:13. “Good night to you both,” he says. “I love you.”

  “Good night, Son,” his father says. “Be careful.”

  “Good night, Dad. I’ll see you tomorrow night at the restaurant. You be careful driving.”

  “I’ll be there,” he says. “Love you, Son. Good-bye.”

  His father is always the first to hang up.

  “Good night, Ma.”

  “Bye, bye!” she says brightly.

  “I love you.”

  “Love you, too. Bye, bye!”

  “Good-bye,” Frankie says. “I love you, good-bye.”

  Acknowledgments

  FOR THEIR GENEROUS and expert feedback on early drafts, I am forever grateful to Heidi Pitlor, Antonia Fusco, Bret Anthony Johnston, Kristin Duisberg, Ladette Randoph, Mary Evans, and Margot Livesey.

  Thank you to my editor, Kathy Pories, for giving this manuscript a chance and then making it better with her invaluable time, attention, and insight. I feel lucky to be part of the dynamic Algonquin family.

  My agent, Janet Silver, is supremely wise, dedicated, savvy, and more patient with me than I could ever have hoped for.

  The following people have helped me in crucial ways by offering their encouragement, space, advice, and/or companionship: Eve Bridburg, dear friend and mentor; Sonya Larson, Whitney Scharer, Michelle Toth, and everyone at Grub Street, my happy and inspiring home for over a decade; Jennifer Grotz, Michael Collier, and the pure joy that is Bread Loaf; C. Dale Young, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and the faculty and students of Warren Wilson; Steve Almond, Maud Casey, Stacey D’Erasmo, Scott Heim, Michael Lowenthal, Steve McCauley, Tom Mallon, Anita Shreve, and Sebastian Stuart; Steve Buckley, Adam Lavielle, and the Diesel Café; Jenna Blum for three months at Sweet 5; Wolfgang Wesener; Rachel Careau; Elisa Piccinelli (no relation?), who corrected my very bad Italian; Jonathan Jensen and the Latchis Hotel; and my brother, Emidio Castellani, who has shown extraordinary acceptance and love.

  Speaking of love: Michael Borum has it all.

  All This Talk of Love

  A Note from the Author

  Questions for Discussion

  A Note from the Author

  In December 1995, my parents took me back to Italy for the last time. They had grown up in Sant’Elpidio, a small village at the top of one of the highest mountains in the Valle Del Salto, and it was the return to this village that I most eagerly anticipated. I’d visited Sant’Elpidio
and the major Italian cities as a child, but my memories were distant and dreamlike. I recalled kicking a soccer ball between two olive trees to score an imaginary goal; sticking my hand between the stone lips of the bocca della verita, the mouth of the truth; and sitting at my mother’s feet over long, rambunctious feasts, begging her to translate what my relatives were saying.

  In fact, my most enduring memories of Italy consisted of my mother’s face smiling down at me as she smoothed my hair and retold the stories, jokes, and legends that formed the centerpiece of every family gathering. A few of the stories, she said, would have to wait until I was older; some of the jokes wouldn’t make much sense in English; but most of what my relatives discussed she faithfully and patiently recounted to me there at the table or later in the night, as I fell asleep. In that strange and beautiful world, my mother was always my guide, my voice.

  We didn’t go to Italy to sightsee. We went so that my mother could visit the family she’d given up to marry my father, who’d emigrated to America after World War II. We went so that my parents could introduce me to the “real” world—vivid, honest, and unspoiled—and so they could escape the harsh and colorless “new” world. We went because my mother missed her best friends, her six brothers and sisters, who were still relatively young and very much alive.

  In 1995, I was a shy young man of twenty-three. I was a student of literature with the dream of becoming a writer, and I was also anxiously closeted. Compared to my parents’ lives and the ones led in their ancestral village, my future seemed unchartable, unprecedented. The apparent simplicity of Sant’Elpidio, little more than a cluster of stone houses linked to other clusters by one narrow and bumpy road, bewitched me. Wandering through the village with my parents at my side, I thought, All the answers are here! If only I observed it and my mother’s family closely enough, I thought, I’d understand more fully her nagging sadness, and my father’s pride, and, somehow, my own inexpressible longings. By seeing where we came from, I’d find out who we were.