Tess turns to her husband. “Is that true?”
Charlie shrugs that it is.
“Well, then—” Tess explodes. “Guess what? Our next vacation destination is Buenos Aires! That’s right! We’re camping out with the South American side of the family!”
Charlie, embarrassed to be outed, reaches to put his arm around Tess. She lurches away from him.
“I’ve listened to you people complain for eighteen years, and I’m over it! If it wasn’t politics, it was religion. If it wasn’t RC Incorporated, it was your almighty gravy.” Pamela holds her hands tightly in fists and shouts. “I don’t care if you use garlic powder or real cloves in your gravy! It’s just sauce! Tomatoes and water! Eat it and shut up already! Stop complaining!”
“Who complains? I don’t hear any complaints,” Feen says.
Pamela ignores her and continues. “Thank God I didn’t let myself go! I wanted to—believe me. I wanted to wear Uggs and eat potato chips and watch The Real Housewives of South Bend, but I didn’t! I kept it all together! I hung on! It’s a damn good thing I kept my figure, because now I’m gonna be on my own—and this body is gonna be my revenge!” Pamela holds her hands high in the air in victory. “It’s my ticket out! You watch me.”
Gabriel is draped over the kitchen counter with his face propped in his hands as though he’s riveted to Night 3 of The Thorn Birds on TCM. Without taking his eyes off the theatrics, he dips a spoon into the bowl of cannoli filling and eats it. Aunt Feen cackles with glee under her breath as our family crumbles like blue cheese on greens before her eyes. My mother weeps into her napkin.
I read the crumpled e-mail silently to myself.
Dearest Alfred,
Our time was not now, our days were not our own, but our feelings were real. Never forget how much I love you. Happy Thanksgiving, dear Fredo, I will always be grateful for the time we had together. My love always, Kathleen
The laptop computer, open on the kitchen counter, rings once. Then again. Then a third time.
“It’s Gram on Skype,” I say.
“Close the lid!” my mother shouts, turning to Gabriel. “Close it!”
Gabriel turns as Gram’s face comes up on the screen. He snaps the screen shut, then takes the moppeen from his shoulder and wipes his brow.
“Let her hear! Let Gram hear it all! I got nothing to hide! I don’t care if the whole country of Italy knows I’ve been besmirched!” Pamela shouts.
“It’s not you.” Alfred tries to calm his wife down.
“I know it’s not me! It’s you. You’re one of them, even when you tried not to be. You’re just like them. You turned on me too.”
“Pamela…,” he says gently.
“She calls you Fredo.” Pamela pushes against Alfred’s chest as he holds her close. “I call you Fredo. I call you that.” She weeps as Alfred puts his arms around her. “Let me go. I want my boys. Where are they?”
“At the park,” Tess and Jaclyn say in unison.
Pamela breaks free of Alfred’s grip and turns to go.
“Pam, please sit down. Please don’t go.” My mother stands. “Maybe we can help.”
“You? What are you gonna do? Tell me I didn’t read the e-mail? Tell me it’s not true? You don’t see Alfred denying anything.” Pamela places her hands in the prayer position. Through her tears, she says, “Thank God I watch Oprah.”
My father moans.
“That’s right, Dad.” She glowers. “Oprah helps me. She did a show on money management, and I watched it because, you know…” And then Pamela does the strangest thing. She puts her hands on her hips like Susan Boyle when she was flirting with Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan on Britain’s Got Talent. She shimmies her hips from side to side as she says, “My husband was fired from the bank…”
“I thought you resigned,” Feen pipes up, gleeful at all the misery. “Some resignation. Turns out it was Das Boot!”
My mother glares at her.
“Oprah was giving women tips about how to save money during tough times. I followed her advice, because why? Because I’m a good wife and I want to ease my husband’s burden! Fat chance of that! He was easing it on some government employee!”
“Thank you Pope-rah!” Aunt Feen licks her lips, hopeful for more gory details.
Pam continues, “They brought on a therapist who said that men were very vulnerable right now—that women should be sensitive to their…” And then she does it again, she wiggles her hips and says, “huzz-bands, because of the economic downturn. Now, I didn’t think too much of it, because Alfred seemed so happy here with the elves making the shoes. And our life at home was fine. That’s right, even our sex life!”
My father puts his face in his hands. This diatribe might kill him.
Pamela screeches, “But the expert on Oprah said, ‘Check the man’s e-mails.’” She lowers her voice and growls like Linda Blair after the head spin. “And so I did. That’s how I found Kathleen Sweeney.” Tears roll down Pamela’s face.
“Wait, Pam.” Alfred reaches for her. She won’t let him touch her. “You told me you’d never cheat on me. You said you never would because your father cheated on your mother.”
“Now, just a minute…” My mother stands.
Pamela looks at my mother. “Well, he did. And you put up with it. But I think a little more of myself than you ever did of yourself.” She looks at Alfred. “You stay here. With your crazy sisters and your cheating father and your vain mother and your drunk great-aunt—”
Aunt Feen throws her head back and laughs. “That’s me!”
“Because…” Pamela tightens the belt on her size 2 coat. “I’m getting my boys and going home. Do you remember where that is? Home. The place where I made a life for you.”
Pam goes down the stairs. Her stilettos go clickety-click, clickety-click all the way down. Alfred follows her out.
The entrance door downstairs snaps shut.
“Anyone for dessert?” Gabriel says from behind the counter. “I could use a digestivo. Fernet Branca? Bitters, anyone?”
“Gimme a slab of tiramisu,” June says. “This is the goddamnest Thanksgiving I have ever spent.”
“I’m sorry, June.” Mom dries her tears. “I’m sorry you had to hear that.”
“This family needs to grow up.” June pushes her plate aside.
Aunt Feen applauds. “The wheels are off the bus. Off the bus! Off the bus!”
“Shut up, Feen.” June turns to my great-aunt. “You’re a mean old broad. You got a camel’s hump of misery on your back.”
“That hump is from osteo. Bone deterioration. I had a difficult menopause,” Feen explains.
“I don’t care where you got it. You’re the only old lady I know that gets dumber as the years roll on. And all these people dance around you in fear. I’m not afraid of you.”
“You attack a lonely widow on Thanksgiving. Nice,” Feen says quietly, milking any pity her blood relatives may still have for her.
“Poor Feen.” June turns and faces her. “It’s never enough for you. Is it? Your sister kowtowed, your niece, everybody’s afraid of you. Everybody fears your temper. Not me. I see who you are. You’re just an ungrateful old nag. You never got your portion. Never got a fair shake. And when you did, it was never enough. Nobody could fill the empty sock of your awful childhood. So you never got what you wanted. Boo hoo. Most people don’t. But the difference between you and other people is that they move on. They don’t calcify. They don’t blame everybody else for their troubles, and call the lawyer to sue the city every time they take a spill on the sidewalk. Put down the wineglass and pick up the magnifying glass and look in the mirror. Face yourself.”
Aunt Feen’s spine straightens in self defense. “Why you—”
“I’m not done.” June levels her gaze at Charlie, who looks away.
“Shame on you, Chuck. Open your eyes. The world isn’t black and white anymore—it isn’t even brown—it’s shades of something completely new. And not a minute too
soon. Time for God to liven up the paint box. So your sister-in-law gets on a plane and finds out you have black people in the family—hardworking people who make their own way, and speak Spanish and grow olives—what’s it to you? Really, how does that affect your life? Do you really want to spend the precious moments of your life hating people you’ve never met from two continents away? If that’s your idea of living, then that’s your business, Chuck, but don’t bring the rest of us down to your idiot level. You’re embarrassing yourself with your ignorance.”
“June,” Tess warns.
“Shut up, Tess. I’ve known you since you were a baby. I’m talking to your husband.” June turns back to Charlie. “Let me tell you this about black people—and I know, because I’ve loved ’em all, black, white, Filipino—or at least I think he was—maybe, come to think of it, he was Hawaiian. It doesn’t matter. I have tasted God’s smorgasbord from Boston to Buhl, and I’m better for my experience. Does that offend you?”
“This is some Thanksgiving.” My father sighs.
June looks at Charlie. “Well, does it?”
Charlie shakes his head.
“Didn’t think so,” June continues. “You should be proud to tell your daughters they have family in another country and that those folks have a little different patina from you. But let’s cut to it here, Charlie. You’re Sicilian, your people are a mere paddle in a canoe from North Africa. And you know it, and yet you have the temerity to act as though Sicily is the land of pilgrims and Wonder Bread. I got news for you—you’re already family—you are African. It’s just pigment, Charlie. Pigment. So knock it off. I’m annoyed with you already.”
Gabriel places June’s tiramisu in front of her.
“I’m sorry,” my brother-in-law says meekly.
“Let me tell you who your daughters will marry. They will marry men exactly like you, Charlie. So if you want them to bring home a couple of small-minded bigots with a size twenty-two and a half collar, well, then, you’ll get your wish.”
Gabriel pours June a cup of coffee. He places the cream and sugar in front of her. June dumps cream into her coffee and stirs. “It’s a café au lait world, people.” She sips. “Get used to it.”
I help Aunt Feen into the back seat of a town car. She grips the Macy’s bag full of Thanksgiving leftovers on her lap like they’re gold bricks hot off a Brinks truck. I ask the driver to see Aunt Feen to her apartment door, and he agrees. She waves me off.
I push the entrance door open and see a light on in the workshop. I kick off my shoes; the heels are killing my feet. My toes throb like my head, everything hurts after the worst holiday I’ve ever spent, anywhere, anytime.
I poke my head into the workshop. Alfred sits at the desk, his head down. My father sits at the worktable, watching him.
“Hey guys,” I say, pushing the door open. “Alfred, are you okay?”
He doesn’t answer. I look at my father. Dad looks at me and shakes his head.
“Alfred?” Dad says softly.
Alfred doesn’t respond.
“Son?” Dad gets off the worktable and goes to Alfred, placing his hands on Alfred’s shoulders. Alfred begins to weep. “It’s going to be all right, Al,” Dad says.
Alfred turns around and stands. He puts his arms around my father and buries his face in his shoulder. He is now heaving with tears. My dad looks at me as he pulls Alfred close to him.
“I’ve ruined everything, Dad. Everything.”
“It’s a dumb mistake, but you didn’t ruin anything.”
“She’s leaving me.”
“She’ll forgive you, son.”
“Why would she?” Alfred asks.
“Come here.” Dad helps Alfred sit down. Then he pulls up a work stool next to him. He takes my brother’s hands in his own. “You’re a good son. A fine man. I’ve been proud of you every day of your life. Even when you weren’t proud of me. I’ve done things that weren’t right in my life, and the goddamn thing still haunts me. And now I’ve visited it on you.”
“And I judged you, Dad. I judged you, and then I did the same thing.”
“That’s okay that you judged me. It meant that you knew I did wrong.”
“I’m a hypocrite.” Alfred hangs his head.
“Hey. Listen to me. I left my marriage for a while, and I’m not proud of it. I was in a dark place when I had that affair. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, I wasn’t thinking straight. I felt like my life was over—I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. And I blamed your mother that I wasn’t a big cheese. I don’t know, I grew up in a household where my mother pushed my father. I guess I thought that’s what a wife should do. I’d missed out on a promotion in the Parks Department, and I went home to your mother and she said, ‘Dutch, don’t worry. It’ll come around. Try harder.’ I should have appreciated her even more, but it just made me feel bad about myself, and I couldn’t shake it. I needed to feel good about myself again. So, I went looking for trouble because that made me feel alive, back on my game. But it was a temporary fix. And when I went with the other woman…my heart…”
My father wipes away a tear, but he recovers, and focuses on my brother.
“My heart was breaking because I turned away from the people who loved me, for someone who was looking for the love I already had. Now, this seems like a…like a…contradiction…”
I exhale softly as my father at long last finds the exact right word.
“…but it wasn’t. The best thing about me was that I had a good wife and four children. That was my calling card in the world. That’s what made me a cut above. But I had to throw it all away to find that out. I had built, with your mother, a bee-you-tee-full family. But at that time, I thought I needed more, attention, appreciation. Whatever the hell you want to call it.”
“I don’t want to lose her,” Alfred says.
“You won’t, Alfred. You won’t. But you gotta persist. And when she’s ready to forgive you, you’ll get a chance to start over. You’ll have to build your life with her again.”
“I don’t know if I can do that. If she’ll let me.”
“It’s not easy. The hardest thing I ever had to do was win your mother over a second time. And every man is different. But you’re made of far better stuff than me. You’re smarter, you’re more loyal, and you’re stubborn. You can turn it around. And I’m here to help you however I can. If you’ll let me.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“You owe me nothing, son. Not an apology. Nothing.”
“I hurt you, too.”
“Because I hurt you. That only makes us even.”
Dad holds Alfred close.
I watch them for a long time. I never thought this day would come.
“I suffer, too,” I say aloud. I didn’t intend to speak, but the words just come out of me. I place my hand over my mouth.
My father looks up at me.
“Dad, I know you love us, but there’s a reason I’m not married. There’s a reason I can’t…” I feel tears coming, but I stop them. “I can’t trust any man. It’s really hard for me. I forgave you, but I never beat my own fear. I’m still afraid of loving someone and being disappointed.”
“I’m sorry, Valentina,” my father says.
Only two men in my life ever call me Valentina, my father and Gianluca. Instead of making me sad, it makes me smile for a moment.
Gianluca did everything he could to help get through my fear, and I turned him away because I couldn’t face myself. I wouldn’t show him who I really was, so at the end, he had to go because he didn’t recognize me anymore. I didn’t even fight for him. I didn’t chase him when he left our room at the Four Seasons, I just stood there, frozen, inside and out, unable to move. I guess I thought if I went after him, I wouldn’t know what to say when he stopped, I wouldn’t have known what to do. So instead, I let him go. I let a good man, rare as an emerald, go because I couldn’t think of one reason to make him stay.
“Alfred?”
My brother and father look at me.
“At least you know what happens when you break a promise. I can’t even make one.”
I leave Alfred and Dad in the shop. I pick up my shoes and climb the stairs. I think about the pithy letter I wrote to Gianluca to woo him back. I was being funny after I broke the man’s heart. Now, that’s inappropriate. No wonder he didn’t write back. He sat there in Italy and thought, “She still doesn’t get it.” Maybe someday he’ll forgive me for my ignorance. I wish, on this Thanksgiving night, that there was some way to reach out to him. But this isn’t one of Gabriel’s soufflés that fell on the way to the table from the oven. This is Gianluca’s happiness I destroyed. What I couldn’t know then was that I destroyed my own as well.
“Feen is on her way out of Manhattan,” I announce to my sisters and mother who sit around the farm table after an endless meal that was long on courses and family drama.
“Where’s your father?”
“He and Alfred are talking in the shop.”
“Oh, good,” my mother says, ever the optimist.
I pull up a seat at the table. I place the wooden nut bowl in front of me, and commence cracking walnuts. My sisters and mother have small piles of shells where their plates once rested.
“June and Gabe are on the roof. They said they were roasting chestnuts, but I think they’re smoking pot,” Tess says. “That, or they’ve charred the chestnuts.”
“Good for them,” I say. “Either way.”
“I agree,” Tess says. Then she looks around the table. “What are we going to do?”
“Well, clearly, I’m going to go on a serious diet after the holidays,” Mom says.
“Oh, God, Ma, Pam was just taking potshots,” Jaclyn says.
“I only did Jenny Craig twice. I never saw myself as a yo-yo dieter.” Mom hacks the meat out of a walnut with a small, silver pick. She chews. “Do you?”
“No, Ma,” we say in unison.
“You know what? I like her,” Jaclyn says.
“Who? Pam?”
“Yeah. She’s got moxie. I had no idea she was that tough. I thought she was weak, and look at her, she stood up for herself.”
Brava, Valentine Page 27