Julie and Romeo

by Jeanne Ray

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by Rosedog, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Harmony Books, New York, New York. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

  Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland

  www.randomhouse.com

  Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ray, Jeanne.

  Julie and Romeo : a novel / by Jeanne Ray—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. 2. Florists—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.A915 J85 2000 00-23539

  eISBN: 978-0-307-98676-4

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “What’s in a name?

  That which we call a rose

  By any other word

  would smell as sweet.”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  Romeo and Juliet

  chapter one

  THE FIRST TIME I HEARD THE NAME CACCIAMANI I WAS five years old. My father said it, and then he spit. The spitting I had seen before. I watched my father spit out his toothpaste into the sink. I had seen him spit once while mowing the lawn when he claimed to have taken in a mouthful of gnats. But this particular spitting, the spitting done in association with the word Cacciamani, was done directly onto the cement floor of the back room of Roseman’s, our family’s florist shop. That floor, like everything else in my father’s world, was kept meticulously clean, nary a leaf hit that floor, and so even as a child I recognized the utter seriousness of his gesture.

  “Pigs,” my father said, referring not to himself for what he had done to his floor but to the name that had led him to do it.

  I wish I could remember the rest of this story, how the Cacciamanis had come up in the first place, but I was five. Fifty-five years later, only the highlights of such childhood memories remain.

  Commentators, the people reading their opinions on the news, the people on the op-ed page of the Globe, love to say that hate is a learned thing. Children mimic the appalling racial slurs of their appalling parents, every bitter, contemptible piece of narrow-mindedness is handed down from generation to generation like so much fine family silver. I doubt it is as easy as this, as I know my own two daughters have picked up a few things in this world I will not take responsibility for, but then I think of my father and the small, shimmery pool of his spit on the floor. I hated Cacciamani with all the passionate single-mindedness of a child without even knowing what or who it was. I decided it was a fish. My father, who loved just about everything, was not a fan of fish, and so I assumed the conversation must have gone something like this:

  MY MOTHER: Howard, I got some nice fresh

  Cacciamani for dinner tonight.

  MY FATHER: Cacciamani! [Spit] Pigs!

  For the next several years I imagined pale-fleshed, rubbery bottom feeders, the dreaded Cacciamani, snuffling around blindly at the bottom of Boston Harbor. No doubt my mother intended to fry them and serve them up in a buttery lemon sauce.

  When exactly I made the transition from fish to family, from family to rival florists, I don’t know (again, remember, this was the distant past). It hardly ruled my life. My path did not cross with the Cacciamanis’, and when it did, they had to be pointed out to me like a patch of poison ivy I could have walked right into. We did not go to the same school. Their son went to the idol-worshiping, uniform-wearing Catholic school, while my brother and I attended perfectly normal public school. Their name was rarely spoken and when it was there was a great fanfare of unexplained wrath that I gladly participated in. We were a liberal family, aware of the recent persecution of our people and therefore unlikely to persecute others. As far as I knew, the only prejudice we had was against the Cacciamanis. It didn’t extend to other Catholics or all Italians, just those people, those wretched, worthless fish. A prejudice can be a lovely thing to have, which is exactly why so many people have them in the first place. A prejudice is a simplification: Every member of this group is exactly the same and therefore I never have to think about any of them. What a time-saver! Of course, it didn’t save me much time because back then there were only three Cacciamanis for me to hate, a father, a mother, and the son. I remember seeing the mother at Haymarket several times on Saturdays. She was beautiful, tall and thin, with black hair and red lips. Still, I thought it was an evil sort of beauty. Then their son grew up, married, and had six children, many of whom married and had children of their own. The Cacciamani clan grew by leaps and bounds and as far as I was concerned the whole lot of them were worthless, a fact that was reinforced when Tony Cacciamani tried to marry my daughter Sandy when they were in high school.

  So that was how I came to hate Cacciamanis. Now let me tell you how I stopped. It was five years ago when I came to hate my husband, Mort. Mort ran off with Lila, the thirty-eight-year-old bouquet-grasping bridesmaid he met at a wedding while delivering flowers. Apparently he met her at several weddings. She was practically a professional bridesmaid, many friends, few dates. There went Mort and Lila. After that I knew what it was to really hate someone on your own terms, for your own reasons, which is much more poignant than hating on someone else’s behalf. I didn’t know I had ceased to carry an axe for the Cacciamanis. There was no conscious moment: I hate Mort and so expunge the record of the Cacciamanis. I simply hadn’t thought of them for years. And then one day, while attending a seminar at the downtown Boston Sheraton called “Making Your Small Business Thrive,” I practically walked into a man with the name tag ROMEO CACCIAMANI. I probably would have recognized his face, but I saw the name first. I steeled myself for the great wave of fury that was surely coming. I planted my feet and took a breath, but nothing, not even a twinge. What came instead was this thought: Poor Romeo Cacciamani; his shop must be going bust, too, if he’s at this thing.

  He tilted his head a little and squinted at me. I think Romeo Cacciamani needed glasses. “Julie Roseman,” he said, reading my tag.

  And there he was, a nice-looking Italian guy sitting right at sixty. He was wearing pressed khaki pants and a white polo shirt with a sprig of chest hair flourishing at the throat. No gold chains. I was so surprised by my utter lack of hostility that I wanted to laugh. I wanted to shake his hand, and I would have except I had a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee in one hand and several folders of tax spreadsheets and workmen’s comp advice in the other. “Romeo Cacciamani,” I said with wonder.

  “It was something el
se, wasn’t it? Roth?”

  I nodded. “Roth,” I said. “And Roth no more.”

  He raised his eyebrows in a not-unfriendly way, as if he should be shocked and wasn’t. Something occurred to me then: Did Cacciamanis still hate the Rosemans? I knew that Mort and Romeo had gotten into it over the years, but now Mort was gone and my parents were dead and my younger brother, scarcely a Roseman at all, was making twig furniture in Montana. That left me and my daughters, Sandy and Nora. “Are your parents …”

  “My father’s been gone”—he lifted his eyes to the acoustical ceiling of the conference hall as if the answer might have been contained there—“eleven years now? Ten? My mother lives with me. Almost ninety. When is the last time I saw you?”

  No sooner had he said it than he remembered the answer to his own question. I could see the edges of his ears turn red. “Fifteen years,” I said, and left it at that. That was the last time we had seen each other, but that was not the last time I had seen him. Over the years I had seen Romeo plenty, as we drove past each other in our cars, as I turned my grocery cart into his aisle at Demoula’s and then caught the mistake in time and wheeled off in the other direction. You know what they say, “See you later”—“Not if I see you first.” For all I knew, he had been studiously avoiding me as well. We both lived in Somerville, which is hardly a bustling metropolis but a big enough place to avoid someone for years. We owned the only two florist shops in town, so it stood to reason that if one of us was providing the flowers for a wedding or funeral, the other one wouldn’t be there.

  “How’s Sandy?” he said.

  “She’s good,” I said. He was a better person than I was. I wasn’t going to be asking about his Tony.

  “Things turned out for her okay?”

  I shrugged. “You have kids. You know how it is. Her marriage didn’t work out. She’s back home with me now. Two children.” I felt awkward. I wanted to say everything was fantastic for her, a lifetime of happiness and she never looked back for a second. I wanted to say it not for myself but for Sandy, who, in her weaker moments, still felt the loss of Tony Cacciamani.

  He scratched the top of his head, where all of his hair appeared to be intact. “That was a sad thing,” he said, as much to himself as to me. “A very sad thing. What my son was doing with a Roseman—”

  “A Roth,” I corrected. “Sandy was a Roth.”

  Romeo smiled. “You’re all Rosemans as far as I’m concerned. And your husband was the biggest Roseman of them all.”

  So at least that answered that question. We were not fighting our battle alone. “My husband only looked like a Roseman. In the end he proved to be otherwise.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m better off,” I said, though my very presence at this seminar of hopelessness proved otherwise, at least on the business front. “He met somebody else.” I don’t know what possessed me to include this last bit of information, but once it was said, there was no taking it back.

  Romeo nodded sadly. Maybe he thought he’d known what kind of guy Mort was all along, or maybe he felt sorry for me, but either way I knew it was time for our reunion to come to an end. “I need to get going,” I said, struggling to get a look at my watch. “I want to get a seat for the advertising panel.”

  He let me go graciously, said something about it being nice to see me again. Had he always had such a nice face?

  “Romeo?” I said. I don’t think I had ever called him by his first name. It was always “Mr. Cacciamani” even though we were the same age. I had never wanted to appear familiar, and besides, I thought Romeo was a ridiculous name for an adult. He stopped and turned back to me. “I read in the paper about your wife. I was sorry about that.” It was so long ago, three years, four? After Mort left, I know. I should have sent a card at least.

  He nodded a little. “Thank you.”

  “I didn’t know her. I mean, I think I only met her that one time, but I had a lot of respect for her. She seemed like a lovely woman.”

  “Camille was a lovely woman,” he said sadly, and then he turned away.

  After the panel moderator announced that it was essential for every small-business owner to set aside ten percent of his or her gross revenues for advertising, I stopped listening. A great idea, unless you plan to make payroll or have dinner every now and then. Instead my mind drifted back to something Romeo had said about Mort being the biggest Roseman of all. It hit the nail on the head, and I wondered how a Cacciamani could have so much insight into my life. The whole time I was growing up I worked in my parents’ shop. Even as a little girl I was sitting in the back room filling up the stik-piks or wrapping florist tape around the bottom of corsages. When I got older, my father moved me out front to work the cash register, and when I was in college, I came in early to do the arrangements for the day. I loved the shop when I was young, the cool, dark world of the walk-in on a hot summer day, the bright yellow light of an African daisy in February. I loved the lush piles of discarded leaves in the trash cans and the constant, dizzying perfume of the gardenias. But then I met Mort and he started hanging around the store, so helpful, so polite. From our second date my mother was saying, When is he going to marry you? Like he’d been stringing me along for years and I was about to let my best chance get away. I was all of twenty-one, just minutes away from being yesterday’s fresh pick. Six months later Mort asked my father if he could marry me, which might have been construed as charming and old-fashioned, but nobody asked me anything. Me they told. “Julie, Julie!” my mother said when I walked in the store, and my father’s eyes were beaming from all the tears and Mort was just standing there, a grinning idiot, like I was going to be so proud of him. It was a good ten minutes before I could figure out what in the hell was going on. They’d sold me off, or at least that’s what it felt like. My brother, Jake, had bailed out on the business and in Mort they had found a responsible son to assume the Roseman mantle. I was nothing but the conduit for the transaction. But this isn’t the truth. This is my memory speaking. I am telling the beginning of the story when I am the one who knows the end. I’m sure I was happy at the time. I have a vague idea that I loved Mort then.

  I made my own bouquet for the wedding. My parents did everything else, but the bouquet was mine—white tuberoses, white hydrangeas, white peonies, and a few orange blossoms for luck. It was the most beautiful work I’d ever done, good enough for Grace Kelly, and I wrapped a silky white ribbon around the stems. Then at the end of the reception I walked up a few stairs at the front of the banquet hall. The band was playing “Satin Doll” and everyone was yelling, “Throw it! Throw it!” All my single girlfriends were there: Gloria, my maid of honor, all the bridesmaids, such a pretty semicircle of well-wishers. I turned my back on them and with all my might I threw my beautiful bouquet up over my head. The flowers sailed right out of my hands. It was nearly thirty-five years before I got them back again.

  Mort didn’t want me in the shop. This was rule number one when we got back from our honeymoon. My parents agreed. They could only afford one employee, and since Mort would be taking over sooner or later what mattered was that he learn the business. I could use my college education working as a secretary for an insurance company with the understanding that I would quit work as soon as I got pregnant. Nobody was drugging me. Nobody put a gun to my head. That was just the way things went, and it didn’t even seem strange to me then. Marriage, babies, long afternoons ironing shirts and watching daytime television—those were all the things I aspired to anyway. Mort became the Roseman and I became his wife. Who would have believed it was my name on the front of the store and not his? When people called the house and asked for Mr. Roseman, I just handed him the phone. It was a beautiful name, a florist’s name, why shouldn’t he want it?

  My parents retired safe in the knowledge that Mort was there and they died before he got around to proving them wrong. For this I am grateful. At least he didn’t cause my parents any pain. To say they loved him like a son w
ould be something of an understatement and I think his departure would have been a greater blow to them than it was even to me. But for all their love and unquestioning trust, they did one very strange thing: They left me the shop. Me. Just me, everything in my name. Mort cursed and raged for weeks. “What a slap!” he said. “A betrayal!” I didn’t understand what he was talking about. It wasn’t like they left it to my brother, who got the savings and the assets from the sale of their house.

  “It’s ours,” I said. “My name, your name, what difference does it make?”

  Mort said it made a difference, a big difference, and soon he was after me to sign over the title. While I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life, I am pleased to report that this wasn’t one of them. He groused. I stalled. He left. It turns out Lila had her eye on my parents’ shop. Mort and Lila’s Flowers. The very thought of it makes me weak.

  A lot can change in thirty-five years. While I was driving car pools and taking Nora and Sandy to tap and ballet classes, the world of flowers was moving forward. I volunteered at adult literacy centers, worked on my overhead serve, and perfected the art of stuffing fresh herbs beneath the skin of a chicken, but I didn’t learn one thing about the business. Sure, I went into the shop from time to time. I dropped things off or picked things up. I helped myself to a bunch of roses if we were having a dinner party. But I was surprised one day when I noticed that the cash register was a computer and no one had told me about it. Shipping, billing, trucking, taxes—the depth of my ignorance was bottomless. I had never noticed that we now sold fancy ribbon and vases. There was even a wire rack of greeting cards beside the door. Mort didn’t leave a manual when he and Lila packed off for Seattle. Nor did he leave much money. He just left.

  What a beautiful story this would be if the wronged wife pulled it out of the fire and took the business straight to the Fortune 500. I believed that I would be doing the arrangements for the Ritz-Carlton lobby in no time. It didn’t work out that way. I stayed in bed for a while and when I got up I found a lot of rotted flowers and unpaid bills. I couldn’t sell the store. It had been my parents’ entire life, and as little as I knew about flowers, I knew less about just about everything else. I went to work.