Julie and Romeo

by Jeanne Ray

  “I’ve got to straighten things out, with you, with your family.” I wanted to be serious and brave. I wanted to melt into him forever.

  “I’m going to take this out to the living room,” Plummy said, scooping the ice back into the bag. She smiled at me on her way out. “Hi, Mrs. Roseman.”

  “I love that girl,” I said to Romeo. “I didn’t get the chance to tell you that before.”

  He kissed me gently, because of his lip. The kitchen door swung shut, swung open. Two young men I didn’t know walked in. By the expressions on their faces you would have thought they had caught us dissecting Junior, the family dog.

  “Julie,” Romeo said with some hesitation. “These are my sons. This is Alan and this is Nicky. Nicky came all the way from Germany with his family for the party.”

  “Julie Roseman?” Nicky said. Alan went back through the door.

  In half a minute they were all there. I could hear Nora’s voice rise above the others in the living room. Then we were all back in the living room and everyone’s voice seemed to go up. The accordion player stopped in the middle of his song and the last note dangled for a moment in the air and then faded.

  “Rosemans!” I heard the old woman yell. “There are Rosemans in my house!” We were easy to spot. We were the ones without hats.

  “Oh, dear God,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I turned to Romeo. “Listen to me, this is so important. I would never have come otherwise. I know about your store, the lease.”

  Romeo put his eyebrows down. “Let’s do this later,” he whispered.

  “What about the lease?” Raymond said.

  I was looking for Tony and Sarah. I wanted to make sure they were all right. They were wearing hats, picking icing roses off the side of the cake with three other children who they would probably grow up to hate someday. Nobody knew they were Rosemans. Nobody cared about them.

  “Nora bought your building.”

  “Your Nora bought it?” Romeo said.

  At the mention of her name, Nora squared her shoulders and came across the room. “I’m Nora Bernstein,” she said. “I bought the building.”

  “You evicted us?” Romeo said.

  “She evicted us?” Raymond said.

  “I was going to tell you after the party,” Romeo told his son. “I didn’t know who bought it.”

  “Get them out of my house!” the old woman screamed. She was wearing a blue pantsuit and had a pink paper hat that was bigger than everyone else’s. It said I’m 90! on the top. I couldn’t believe they got it on her. She was pretty far away from me, which gave me some peace of mind.

  “Come on,” Raymond said, and put a hand on Nora’s arm. “Let’s go.” Nora stared at him until he took it away.

  “I bought it because I was trying to protect my mother. You cut off all her flowers. She’s ruined because of you.” This was less than true, since Nora had bought the building before she knew about the flowers, but she should be allowed to keep her dignity.

  “I cut off her flowers?” Romeo said. “What are you talking about?”

  “We don’t need to get into that,” I said to Nora.

  “Yes we do. You said this is honesty time.” She turned around to the crowd and clapped her hands three times. “Listen up, people. There’s going to be a game at this party. It’s called True Confessions. I bought Romeo’s flower shop and evicted him. He contacted every flower distributor in the area to cut off my mother’s supply and ruin her business.”

  The crowd collectively inhaled at this piece of information.

  “Wait a minute,” Romeo said. “I never did that.”

  Joe lumbered forward from the crowd. His 90! hat seemed barely bigger than a folded Kleenex sitting on his head. I wondered if he had ever owned a shirt that could be buttoned at the neck. “I did that,” he said. “She’ll never get her hand on another flower as long as I live.”

  “You ruined her?” Romeo stepped toward his son. “You blackballed her?”

  “You were right, Mom,” Nora said. “This is so much better.”

  I took Romeo’s arm. “It went both ways. That’s the whole point. We have to stop this right now.”

  “Come in the kitchen,” Romeo said to me, then he raised his voice in the crowd. “Cacciamanis, Rosemans, in the kitchen. No cousins, no kids. Mother, in the kitchen.”

  “I’m not going in there with them,” she said.

  Nora went over and whispered something in her ear. The old woman looked furious but followed us in.

  “How did you do that?” I whispered to Nora.

  “I told her she wasn’t allowed in the kitchen.”

  Tony and Sandy were already in there. I don’t know how they had managed that. They were sitting at the table holding hands. The night he had tried to take her out of her bedroom window fifteen years ago they had sat on our living room couch, rain-soaked and crying, holding hands the same way. They looked surprised to see us.

  “That’s the girl! That’s the one!” the old woman said. “Get her off of Tony.”

  Romeo held his hand up to his mother. “Hang on a minute. So Joe, you went behind my back to ruin Roseman’s?”

  “She had it coming.”

  “Out,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Out of my house.” Romeo stood with his feet apart and his arms crossed over his chest. It was a stance that meant business.

  The point was to figure out how to make peace between Cacciamanis and Rosemans, not stir up trouble between the Cacciamanis. The last thing I wanted to do was separate Romeo from his thuggish firstborn. “No,” I said. “You can’t do that. We’re going to fix this.”

  “Don’t you tell my father no,” Joe said. He pointed a finger at me, and I wondered if he had inherited his grandmother’s inclination toward poking.

  “Christ,” Nora said. “This never ends.”

  “We just need to stop it,” I said, my voice sounding a little frantic. “We need to make an agreement once and for all. If you and I can’t see each other anymore, I can accept that, but I don’t want to live like crazy people.”

  “We can’t see each other?” Romeo said. He looked at me as if such a horrible outcome had never occurred to him before. I thought at that moment I would cry for loving him so much.

  “At least you’ve got that straight,” said one of the sons—who knew which one?

  Plummy, who was wearing a little lavender sundress with a black cardigan sweater, clapped her hands together. She was clearly ready to make order out of chaos. “Okay,” she said. “Once and for all we’re going to get to the bottom of this and then we’re going back to the party.” She looked at her brother Tony, who smiled hugely.

  “Plummy, this is Sandy,” he said.

  “Hi, Sandy,” Plummy said, and leaned over to shake her hand. “Now somebody here knows this story.” She bit her lip and looked around the room as if she hadn’t quite made up her mind who to call on first. She gave me a look, then my daughters, her father, and each of her brothers. “Grammy,” she said finally. “What’s the story?”

  “The Rosemans are pigs,” she said.

  “Okay, that’s a start. Now, why are the Rosemans pigs?”

  That was the question. When you boiled everything down to the lowest common denominator, why were Rosemans pigs? Why were the Cacciamanis slimy fish? I assumed my parents knew the answer, but they were both dead. Mort didn’t know. I didn’t know.

  “Come on,” Plummy said.

  “It’s my birthday,” the old woman said. She reached up and touched her hat as if to drive her point home. Unlike many members of the party, she had had the good sense to put her elastic strap in the back.

  “Happy birthday,” Plummy said. “Everybody wants to eat the cake and watch you open your presents, but that isn’t going to happen until you fess up.”

  “I want to go now.” She was trying to pass herself off as feeble, but it didn’t wash.

  “I’m really sorry,” Plummy said, somehow so
unding genuinely sorry. “But you can’t go until you tell us what happened. We’ve all waited long enough.” The clear fact was that Plummy Cacciamani was the one who ruled this world. She was a kind and modest dictator, no doubt, but she was a dictator nonetheless.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said. “Don’t you believe these lying Rosemans.”

  “You don’t know anything?” Plummy asked.

  The old woman looked away from her. “Nothing about them. Who’d want to know about Rosemans?”

  It was not a particularly warm day, but it was becoming a warm kitchen by the minute. Cacciamanis tried very hard not to brush shoulders with Rosemans, except for Tony and Sandy, who were inching their chairs closer and closer together. I was pressed against an ancient gas stove and hoping no one would think to reach over and turn it on.

  “What about the letters?” Plummy said, as if this was one possibility.

  “What letters?”

  Plummy looked like the very picture of innocence. She reached up and twisted one of the gold hoops in her ear. “The letters under your mattress. The ones in the pink silk handkerchief. The ones that all start ‘My Darling …’ ”

  The eldest Cacciamani turned with flames in her eyes. She raised a finger to poke, but Plummy gently pushed it down. Everyone shifted to make sure they had a very clear view of the action. “Why are you reading my letters?”

  “I clean your room, Grammy. I flip your mattress every month. I never thought it mattered before, but now I think it does.”

  I was very impressed to think that Plummy would turn the mattress every month. I managed to do it maybe once a year. Who still hid things under the mattress? The old lady probably kept all her money in a sock.

  “They’re none of your business.” Grammy Cacciamani was gasping a little now. Her eyes searched the kitchen counters, and I wondered if she was looking for tiny nitroglycerine tablets.

  “I know that,” Plummy said calmly. “That’s why I never mentioned them before. But now we have this problem.”

  The old woman took a deep breath and thought it over for a minute. She leaned against the refrigerator, which was covered in children’s drawings. She looked trapped. “I’ll tell you later,” she said.

  Plummy went and put her arm around her grandmother. She kissed the old woman’s cheek. “You tell me later and I’ll just have to get everybody together again so I can tell them what you said. Tell me now,” she whispered kindly.

  We were all waiting, five sons, three wives, my two girls, Plummy, me and Romeo. Mattresses? Letters? We leaned toward her mesmerized. Nobody said anything. Only two people were allowed to talk now, the oldest Cacciamani and the youngest. The oldest didn’t say a word and Plummy waited, letting her grammy twist in the wind. If this was a test of wills, I had no idea who was more likely to break.

  “Come onto the porch,” the old woman said weakly.

  Plummy nodded her head and patted the old woman’s hand as if she was the police interrogator who knew a signed confession was on the way. She led her grandmother past the rest of us and out onto the back porch. The accordion started up again in the other room. We waited.

  “How’s your head?” I asked Romeo.

  “Stupid,” he said. “My head is stupid.”

  “Does it hurt anymore?”

  “Nah, just the ribs a little when I breathe. How about Mort?”

  I told him that Mort had healed up and gone home to Seattle this morning.

  Romeo smiled. “That guy has a hell of an arm.”

  We waited and waited. In the other room people had started laughing again. They had forgotten about us. They had forgotten about the birthday. They were there for a party and it didn’t matter whose party it was. Finally Raymond went and looked out the back window.

  “Can you see anything?” Romeo asked.

  “Grammy’s in the chair and Plummy’s kind of leaning over her. It looks pretty intense. I can’t see what they’re saying.”

  “I don’t know why we have to shake her down on her birthday,” Alan said. His pretty Italian wife stood next to him, nodding.

  “Because we’re not going to come back and do this again next week,” Nora said. “It isn’t that much fun.”

  It occurred to me that if the old woman didn’t give her secret up to Plummy, she would have to take on Nora in the next round. It would be a different kind of shakedown altogether.

  “What letters?” Tony said.

  “Wait, wait!” Raymond pulled back from the window. “She’s coming in.”

  I imagine that I now have some idea of how the defendant feels when the jury files back into the courtroom with a folded-up piece of paper. Plummy came back alone. She pulled her hair away from her face and twisted it into a knot, which miraculously held itself in place without the aid of pins. “Where’s Grammy?” Raymond said.

  “She’s sitting down outside for a minute. She wanted some air.”

  “So what’s the story?” Nora said. Nora, more than anyone else, wanted to get the hell out of there.

  “The story is this.” Plummy leaned back against the counter and spread out her arms behind her. She spoke to Nora. “My grandmother and your grandfather had a love affair.”

  “My grandfather?” Nora pointed at her chest.

  “The hell they did,” Joe said.

  Plummy held up her hand but didn’t look at him. “Please,” she said. “This was a very long time ago. The Rosemans had their shop in Somerville and Grammy and Grampy had a shop in the North End. Grammy met Mr. Roseman buying vases and they fell in love. I guess it was all pretty hot. Grammy wanted to be closer to Mr. Roseman, so she talked Grampy into moving their shop to Somerville. She told him it was a better place to raise children. Daddy was three years old then and they called the place Romeo’s. The way I understand it, Mr. Roseman strung Grammy along big-time. He kept promising Grammy that he was going to run away with her, but every time she was ready to go, he would come up with some lame excuse and they never did it. After a while Grammy got really angry, and I guess she started doing things to the Rosemans. She said it started out small at first—she’d bad-mouth their flowers to other people, she threw a rock through their window once. Then she hid a dead fish in their storeroom, a flounder. That was when Mr. Roseman got mad at her and he paid a kid to dump a box of fleas in their store. It was back and forth, one thing and then another. Grammy told Grampy that the Rosemans were trying to ruin them to get their customers, that the Rosemans were trying to force them out of the neighborhood and that they had to fight back. Who knows what Mr. Roseman told Mrs. Roseman? No one actually got ruined until now. There were some other details, but I think that’s pretty much the story.”

  “And they fell for it?” Nora asked her. “My grandmother and old man Cacciamani? They just picked up the feud and ran with it without any more information than that?”

  “Well, all of us did, too. Our families hated each other, and we didn’t even have the fleas to deal with.”

  “You expect me to believe that?” Raymond said.

  “Go ask her. She’s told it once now, I bet she’ll tell it again. Or go and read the letters under the mattress. They’re pretty steamy.”

  “But she hated Mr. Roseman,” Nicky said. “She hated him more than any of them.”

  “That’s the way it works sometimes,” Plummy said thoughtfully. “Big love makes for big hate.”

  “I still hate him,” old Mrs. Cacciamani said. She was standing at the door, suddenly looking older than ninety. Her blue pantsuit was wrinkled. Her party hat was tipped to one side. I’m 90! it reminded us. “And I’ll hate every last one of them until I die.”

  My father? I thought. My father and the Wicked Witch of the West? The woman he hated above all other life-forms? I could still hear his voice clearly in my head. I could hear every terrible name he called her. Of all the possible explanations, I had to admit this one seemed the most implausible to me.

  “Mama, are you sure about this?” Romeo ask
ed.

  “Of course I’m sure about this. What do you think, I don’t know who I was in love with?” Then, with the surprising vigor of a woman in love, she slammed through the kitchen door and back into her party. It swung open, shut, open, shut, behind her.

  The rest of us stood there listening to the accordion music coming through the wall.

  “Just to recap,” Nora said, taking a drink from a cup of red punch that was sitting on the counter. “What this means is that the birthday girl was in love with my grandfather, my mother is in love with your father, and my sister is in love with Tony here.”

  Sandy looked mortified.

  “That’s what it’s looking like,” Plummy said.

  Nora continued. “So the basis of this tedious, never-ending fight is that three generations of Cacciamanis and Rosemans have been in love with each other.”

  The room took a moment to digest this piece of information. Then Nora started to laugh and pretty soon Sandy was laughing, too. Then Plummy joined in. She put her hand over her mouth, but she was laughing. At that point none of the rest of us got the joke.

  “Mr. Cacciamani,” Nora said. “Keep your store. Think of me as your benevolent landlord. You,” she said, pointing to Joe. “Turn the delivery service back on for my mother’s flowers tomorrow. Now I want very much to get out of here. I’m taking my car.” She looked at me and Sandy. “Something tells me you two will find rides home.”

  epilogue

  THE STORY ENDS WITH A WEDDING, RIGHT? THESE STORIES practically have to. This wedding was on the first of July. Some people said it was awfully quick, but once they heard the whole story, they had to agree it was, in fact, a long time coming. There were no peonies that late in the summer, but the roses were fantastic. We’re talking garden roses, not the kind you buy in stores. When we were done, it looked like we had gotten our hands on every rose in Massachusetts. Romeo and I did the whole thing together. That was how we got the idea of combining our stores in the first place. We worked together like a dream. I made the bride’s bouquet. I had long been liberated from the idea of white. Every color I could find went into that bouquet. It was even better than the one I had made when I married Mort. The wedding was in my backyard. We had a justice of the peace so that no one would get their toes stepped on religion-wise, but Father Al was there and I saw him moving his lips. Nora was the maid of honor. She insisted on the title. She said she couldn’t bear to be anybody’s matron of honor. Joe was the best man. Tony and Sarah did the rings and the flowers. It was a small wedding, except that no Cacciamani wedding could ever really be considered small.