by Jeanne Ray
Mort turned to me. “Are you on his side?”
“Please. Let’s just all walk away from this.”
“After everything he did to me?”
Romeo said, suddenly enraged, “Did to you? If he wants a fight, I’ll give him a fight. I swear to God I had put the past in the past. I forgot what had happened.” He turned toward Mort. “But if you want to bring it up, I’m sure I can make myself remember.”
“A fight?” Mort said, his eyes bright as dimes. “You want to fight me?”
Who said these things? People screamed, they bullied, but fighting was something done only in the movies.
“If that’s what you’re looking for, come on.”
No sooner were the words out of Romeo’s mouth than Mort had the cyclamen in his hand and was hurtling it straight at Romeo’s head. Mort had been state-ranked in baseball when he was in college, and in all his years in Somerville he played on a softball team. He could pitch a crumpled-up paper towel through a window. They called him The Arm.
It was a clay pot. I was especially sorry about that. It hit Romeo on the left temple and exploded into a fan of dirt, petals, stems, and terra-cotta shards. Romeo went down.
I hardly knew which way to go. Did I comfort Romeo or try and take Mort out? For all his fits of rage, I had never seen Mort strike another person. He didn’t even spank the girls when they were little. I knelt beside Romeo. His head was bleeding spectacularly and I was trying to brush the dirt out of his eyes. I loved him. It was one of those moments in life when you’re sure.
“Mort, you stupid son of a bitch, you could have killed him!”
I thought he was on the floor for the count, but at the very mention of being killed, Romeo, bleeding and coated in potting soil, rose up from the ground and flew at my ex-husband like a creature with wings. I don’t believe his feet once touched the floor until he got his hands around Mort’s throat and started beating his head into the counter. Mort somehow pulled up an arm and landed a hook on the exact spot where Romeo’s head was already split open.
Romeo, reflexively, brought up his knee.
I hadn’t seen many fights in my life. A couple of brawls in Harvard Square. Two teenaged boys in the street outside my store once. I called the police then. I was wondering if I should call them now. It never occurred to me that intelligent grown men still fought, and yet there I was watching it as if the whole thing were taking place underwater. I thought that fighting had rules. There were certain things people restrained themselves from doing. I was wrong. They were slugging, pulling. I think I saw Mort bite. The Siberian irises had been overturned and mashed into a soggy purple smear on the floor. They knocked over the card rack and smashed the African violets. “Stop it!” I screamed. “Stop it!”
With that simple command they fell apart, rolled away from each other limp and panting, bloody and dislodged. They were ready to stop. They had only needed someone to ask them. They lay on my floor amid the dirt and the blossoms, both of them unable to stand. In less than a minute they had both been ruined, the store had been ruined, I had been ruined. I went to Romeo, whose whole head was covered in blood. Both his forehead and his lip were bleeding now and his left hand was turned at an unnatural angle. He said my name and tried to touch his face to see if anything was left. There was a bright red pool forming under his head.
But it was Mort who really concerned me. At first glance, you’d say he was the better looking of the two. I think most of the blood on him was Romeo’s, but there was a horrible swelling on the side of his head where the skin was taut and shiny yellow. I couldn’t get him to respond to me. He lingered in a mumbling, half-conscious state and then slipped out of it. I put my head down on his chest and listened to his heart.
Romeo dragged himself into a sitting position, wincing at every inch. “Dear Mother of God,” he said, looking at me listening. “Tell me I didn’t kill him.”
“You didn’t kill him,” I said. “But I’m calling an ambulance.”
Time happened in a dream. The hospital was very close, and yet it seemed like the second the phone was in the cradle, the ambulance guys were rushing through the door. Because I had told them, when asked over the phone, that the cause of injury was a fight, they sent the police as well. Blue and red lights flashed brightly through the window of the store, and Ginger, the woman who runs the dress shop next door, came over to see if I’d been murdered.
“Do you know these men?” the young officer asked me as two paramedics started working on Mort and the third applied pressure to Romeo’s head.
“Ex-husband,” I said, pointing. “New boyfriend.”
He nodded and closed his book.
“We’ve got a concussion here,” the paramedic said of Mort.
“This one is losing a lot of blood,” Romeo’s paramedic said. “We’ve got to get going.”
I thought he might put up an argument, but Romeo simply slumped down into the man’s arms and allowed himself to be hoisted onto a stretcher. They already had Mort’s limp body tied onto a gurney, and side by side, like bunk mates at camp, they were slid into the ambulance. I got in between them for the short ride, just to make sure nobody woke up and tried to get things going again.
I watched Somerville spin behind me out the back window while the ambulance wailed and cried. I had one hand on each of their chests, Romeo to my left and Mort to my right. They both had their eyes closed and their breathing was labored and sharp. I knew it would never be like this again, this minute when I was able to give a little comfort to both of them.
I had plenty of blood on me by the time we got there, and a good-looking doctor helped me out of the back and then asked me if I had been hit in the fight. I said no, though all of my actions seemed to disprove my statement. I was dizzy and confused. I’d read somewhere that there were people who do very well in the moment of crisis but then fall apart once the worst of it has passed. When I thought of Romeo’s blood, I had to put my head between my knees to keep from fainting. Inside the emergency room they took Mort and Romeo off quickly. The nice policeman brought me a paper cup full of cold water and pointed to the pay phone.
“Call someone,” he said.
I called Sandy. “Listen carefully,” I said. I told her to call Gloria to come and watch the kids. Then she should call Nora and come to the hospital. “Your father has been in a fight.”
“The two of you were fighting?” Sandy said. “Fistfighting?”
“It was Romeo,” I said. It didn’t matter if she knew or Nora knew or any of them knew. It was over. No one could come back from something like this.
“How bad is it?” Sandy said, her voice tentative.
“Not bad like death. Not even bad like permanent injury. But bad.”
“How’s Romeo?”
“Um, I’d guess about the same. It’s so hard to know. I have to call his family. He’s pretty messed up.”
“Don’t call them until I get there,” Sandy said pragmatically. “They’re going to kill you.”
I wasn’t sure how Sandy planned on saving me from the impending wrath of the Cacciamanis, but it was sweet of her to think of me. I sat with the phone in my hand for several minutes before I pulled myself together and called the store.
“Romeo’s,” a voice said.
I asked to speak to Raymond Cacciamani. Despite our unpleasant first meeting, I remembered Romeo saying he was the most rational of his sons.
“You bet,” the voice said, so cheerful, so helpful. It sounded like the place was packed. It sounded like they were having a party there. “Ray-mond.”
There was a pause and I tried to keep from sobbing. A different yet very similar voice came on the line. “Raymond Cacciamani.”
I cleared my throat. “Raymond, don’t hang up the phone. There’s been an accident and your father’s in the hospital. This is Julie Roseman.” I thought it was best to put that fact at the end.
“Somerville Hospital?” he said as if he was taking an order for a delivery.
“Yes
.”
Raymond hung up the phone. Personally, I would have asked a couple of questions. With that much information, for all he knew, Romeo was dead. I was planning on begging him to come alone. I was going to tell him it was only a cut and everything was fine. Too late for that. I didn’t think there was any point in trying again.
I went to the nurses’ station and made inquiries.
“Are you a relative?” the nurse asked without looking up.
“Ex-wife to one and friend to the other—girlfriend.”
“So not exactly family in either case. Nobody’s ready to have company right now, anyway. Why don’t you just wait another minute?”
So I slumped down into a yellow plastic chair and I waited, waited for Nora and Sandy and all the Cacciamanis. Waited to pay the price for a little happiness.
chapter sixteen
A BROKEN EX-HUSBAND, A BATTERED NEW LOVER, TWO hysterical daughters, and a whole host of raging Cacciamanis—that was what I braced myself for. What I forgot, amazingly enough, was the one thing that would truly, deeply disturb me: Lila the wife. It was understandable, I guess, in my deranged mental state that I would suppress her, and yet when she clicked through the electric doors in her high heels, I felt the last bits of whatever inner glue I had holding me together give way. Lila Roth, both bridesmaid and bride. We had met before, or if not met, passed each other in the driveway while she was helping Mort move out and I was leaving so as not to watch. She wore cutoff denim shorts that day and a red halter top. I will remember that outfit on my deathbed. It’s all transference, I know. Not one thing that had happened today could in any way be construed as Lila’s fault, and yet every fiber in me blamed her as she pounded the white tile floor toward me. Nora was close behind.
Lila was a blonde. Maybe real, maybe not. Who was I to say? I wasn’t her hairdresser. She had a certain kind of thinness that smacked of self-obsession. She was wearing eye shadow, her nails were shell pink, she wore stockings with open-toed shoes, her teeth were bleached a toilet-bowl white. Need I go on? Not a single detail escaped me.
“Did you kill him?” Those were her first words to me. Her breath was sweet with peppermint.
“Mort’s going to be fine.” I had absolutely no data with which to support this. They were the first of the masses to arrive. I guessed that Sandy had called her sister and was still home waiting for Gloria to come help with the children.
“Where is he? What have you done with him?”
What have I done with him? Like maybe I had put him in a storage closet? “He’s being seen by the doctors now.”
“The doctors!” she said. “He’s with doctors!”
“This is a hospital.”
“Mother, what happened?” Nora said. She was as well-dressed as ever, but looking a little less confident, as if perhaps even she understood her own culpability in the day’s events.
“Your father showed up at the flower shop and then Romeo showed up at the flower shop. I wasn’t expecting either one of them. They got into a fistfight.”
“So your boyfriend did this. You admit it!” Lila said.
“I admit it,” I said.
“Nora, you’re my witness.” She turned to me. “I will sue you, so help me God.”
But Nora was falling down in her witnessing duties. She was punching numbers on her cell phone and pacing off across the lobby for privacy. I had a sudden chilling vision of Nora testifying against me in court. She would point me out to the jury, say, That’s her. “I don’t know what you’re going to sue me for exactly. I don’t have any money. I wasn’t involved in the fight.”
Lila was only stumped for a second. “It happened in your store. That means you’re liable.”
“Well, seeing as how Mort threw the first pot of flowers, I would say you were liable, if I was the kind of person who sued other people, which I’m not.”
“You contemptible bitch,” Lila said. “I told Mort this was lunacy, flying across the country to try and straighten out your love life. But he had to help you. He had to be the good guy. This is how you thank him.”
“This is how I thank him,” I repeated, and then reminded myself of Romeo. “Aren’t you a little curious about how he’s doing? Don’t you want to go and talk to his doctors?”
Lila flashed her blinding incisors at me in something between a growl and a snap. For a second I thought she really did mean to bite me. Then she stomped off. Never did one woman get so much sound out of such a small heel.
“I can’t believe you let this happen,” Nora sighed when she came back. She watched Lila’s retreat to the nurses’ station but did not follow. “Alex is on his way over. If she talks about suing again, maybe he can shut her up.”
I hit Nora once when she was fifteen. She came home drunk at four in the morning after I had spent the night on the phone with the police and local area morgues. She came in the front door and proceeded up to her bedroom without stopping to say hello. When I called out her name in a mixture of relief, joy, and fury, she told me to drop dead. I slapped her open handed across the face, exactly the way every child psychologist will tell you you must never do. I replayed that scene over in my mind for years, trying to think how I could have handled it differently, properly, but I never came to any other conclusion. It was my failing as a parent, but to this day smacking her seemed like the only logical response to her actions. There in the hospital waiting room I put my hand on her shoulder. “If you want to see your father and his wife, you invite them out to see you. Buy them plane tickets, I don’t care. But don’t you ever, ever conspire against me with anyone again and expect me to forgive you because I am your mother. I am sick and tired of forgiving you, Nora.”
The story of the slap was especially fitting because Nora now wore the same look of utter incredulity that she had worn at fifteen, the red imprint of my hand still fresh on her cheek. “I was trying to help you,” she said. “I called Daddy so he could talk some sense into you. Clearly Mr. Cacciamani is a dangerous man—don’t you understand that now? Do you still think he’s so wonderful after what he did to my father?”
“Nora,” I said, trying very hard to keep my voice steady, “I think you should go and comfort your stepmother because if I have to talk to you about this for one more minute, I’m going to say something we’ll both feel bad about later.”
Again with the open mouth, the disbelieving hurt. I was sure I was doing the wrong thing. I could not help it. Not every relationship works out. It hadn’t worked out with Mort, it wasn’t going to work out with Romeo. Was it possible that it might not work out with Nora? Could I ever come to such a point with a daughter to say “Enough’s enough” and “See you around”? The very thought of it made me want to run to her and beg forgiveness, and I might have, had there been time.
God forgive me for what I know to be a small-minded slur against Romeo’s family, but when they came in the door I couldn’t help but think of West Side Story, the Jets walking down the streets of Hell’s Kitchen snapping their fingers together in a way that was supposed to establish them as dangerous characters. There were so many of them and they all looked so much alike. The wives all looked like sisters, and though I had met four of his sons before (counting Tony, who was still in Ecuador), I could not tell one from the other. It wasn’t like they were twins, mind you, I just couldn’t remember which was which. My only lucky break was that the old woman didn’t appear to be in attendance. They came toward me in a block, a mass, and while I was ready to defend myself against Lila and Nora, I knew I could not offer the slightest resistance to them. Just as I thought they were going to run me down, stomp me to death, the whole pack veered to the left and went to the nurses’ station. There was a flurry of inquiries, some raised voices, and then every last one of them disappeared through the swinging double doors marked NO ADMITTANCE: HOSPITAL PERSONNEL ONLY. That was it.
Two minutes later Father Al came in looking flustered and concerned. “Al,” I said, and waved him down.
I could
see the confusion on his face. He was trying to place me as a parishioner and then he remembered. “Julie, oh. Julie. Are you all right? Were you hurt?” He patted my hand. It was such a relief to have someone pat my hand.
“No, I’m fine.”
“What about Romeo? Raymond called me. He said there was an accident and he said something about you.”
I could imagine what the something was, but Al was a priest and wouldn’t say. “He’s going to be fine, I think. Oh, God, I hope he’s going to be fine. There will be some stitches, maybe a broken bone at worst. He got into a fight with my ex-husband.”
“Mort? Mort’s in town?”
“You know Mort?”
“I don’t know him myself, no, but I’ve heard plenty about him over the years. I certainly feel like I know Mort.”
“Well, they ran into each other.” I thought of how that sounded, but then decided to let it stand.
“And Romeo’s children …” He looked around nervously. “Have they come in yet?”
I nodded. “They’re already in the back with him. I don’t even know if they saw me.”
“This is going to be bad,” he said. “Romeo will be fine. He’s had his share of stitches before. He was such a scrapper when we were in school. I thought he had outgrown it.”
“He probably had. He was provoked.”
“We’ll keep that between us.” Al looked toward the doors. “I really should go in there.”
“Do me a favor, will you? Let me know how he is. Tell him I’m out here. I know they’ll never let me in to see him, but I don’t want him to think I just walked away.”
“He knows that.”
I suddenly felt a great sob come up from my chest, and it got halfway out before there was time to properly suppress it. “I’m absolutely prepared to give him up. I don’t mean to sound so melodramatic, but I can’t keep causing him all this trouble with his family. I love Romeo. I only want what’s best for him—you know that, don’t you?”
Al took me in his arms and let me cry on his black shirt for a minute. Gloria would have done the same thing if she hadn’t been home with the kids. I pulled myself upright and ran my hands beneath my eyes. “Go on,” I said. “I’m fine.”