by John Domini
The priest had come closer again. “You have your doubts, but you don’t know for certain? You can’t bring yourself to ask him?”
“But haven’t you heard what I’ve been telling you, Father? Haven’t I been saying, inside a marriage, power is just as real as out on the street?”
“Well, power of a kind, I suppose. But you made your own choices. Didn’t you just see fit to remind me that you have five children?”
Do the math, Barbara. Three boys plus twin girls equals enough to keep you happy. Or it used to be enough, as she’d explained to the old Jesuit the last time.
“Oh listen,” she reiterated now, “the mother scene, that’s over for me.”
Cesare folded his arms, more sticks in sacks. “Really, Mrs. Lulucita?” Barbara had told him how she used to thrive in parenting, its snot and intimacy. “I heard you say that even on your first morning in Naples, on the most bewildering streets in Europe, you were such a dedicated parent that you could enter the mind of an eleven-year-old boy.”
“I know what I said, Father. Cesare. And I’ll tell you something, I know the girls even better than I know Paul. But those girls are out of third grade now.” Barbara faced the speckled altar wall again; she didn’t want to whine. “After this, the way their social life takes over, it’s as if they’ve gotten their driver’s license. The best part of being a mother, that was over before I left Bridgeport.”
Cesare might’ve shown some sympathy, a softening in his posture. But to hear him clear his throat, you would’ve thought he was grinding gears.
“Mrs. Lulucita.” His tone frosted the name’s musicality. “You know, Christ wasn’t nailed to the cross for unhappy wives.”
In his half-disgusted wave, Barb caught a glimpse of an alternative life. The man would’ve made a homosexual of the old school, courtly.
“In Dublin too, don’t you know, the complaining was quite interminable. The song of the unhappy bourgeois.”
‘You’re my priest,” Barbara told him. “I have to ask again, do you want me to lie? To live in a lie?”
“Well, let’s rehearse what we have here, shall we? Children grow up and leave home, isn’t that a fact of our existence? And lovers lose their charms, inevitably.”
Then with two knobby fingers still extended, Cesare reminded her that he went downtown three times a week, where he worked with people in real trouble. “The very sort of clandestini you’d find out at your husband’s worksite.”
“So.…” Barb needed another look around the church. “So what you’re saying is, before I book a flight for New York, I should go see what he’s up to.”
“We live in a time of a great challenge, Mrs. Lulucita, one that seems to have come straight from Christ’s teaching. This city, whether it can continue as a place of justice or not, seems now at the heart of that challenge.”
When Barbara cast her eyes up, the stony heights tweaked her knees with vertigo. ‘You remember I worked with broken families, Father? I never got the credentials for actual counseling, but I’ve done some good for families. For children.”
“But the effort Christ calls you to here in Naples, signora, requires no greater credential than a caring heart.”
She went on staring at the ceiling, her head on the back of the pew.
“A caring heart, Mrs. Lulucita.” The afternoon sun had sunk low enough to fill the stained-glass windows, and Cesare had leaned into a patch of these airborne colors. “When you adopted that girl, that time, what did you require, except—?”
“The adoption failed.” Barbara sat up and heaved to her feet. “If you ask me, I required a whole lot more.”
“Be that as it may, our clandestini brothers and sisters are lost children too.” Cesare moved with her, the kaleidoscopic glimmer shifting down his robe. He asked whether Barbara knew that some of these outcasts had started a hunger strike.
“A hunger strike?”
“Mrs. Lulucita, what did you expect, coming to Naples? Better pizza? Kisses under the Moorish wall?”
“Moorish? A Moorish—what?”
But the old Jesuit appeared to think the conversation was over. Unfolding from the pew, he broke into an unexpected smile, wrinkle-lifting. He declared that she and her family too were “strangers at the door, don’t you know.” The culture might be different, he said, the skin color, “but Christ’s challenge remains the same.”
She had to laugh, and hearing herself, was surprised at the pleasure in it. You would’ve thought they’d had a reassuring heart-to-heart. Then back outside in the siesta quiet, the odor of volcano, Barb reconsidered the man. The old curmudgeon. He’d been forged by the preaching of John XXIII, the liberation theology and new liturgy, and he’d been taking shots at the bourgeois since he’d first heard a call.
Yet she was confused, no point denying, out under the maples blotched by a constant exposure to diesel exhaust. Estranged and confused, she stood dappled with shadow. Yet she’d found her Duomo, the place that afforded the shiver she needed. At Cesare’s she’d felt her spirit flex, a muscle tremor hard to place but easy to recognize, if you’re a believer. She couldn’t say whether she’d chosen her church and her priest or they’d chosen her, but either way she’d been out of parochial school long enough to know that the movements of faith didn’t always follow the syllabus—that confusion often played a part.
A car shrieked to a stop behind her. Naples traffic, typical.
It might be in keeping with her soul’s exercise, she told herself, it might help strengthen her for life outside marriage to end the moping around and instead try something like Cesare suggested.…
Doors were slammed, above a couple of rough shouts, a man’s voice. Barbara didn’t give it a thought until one of the policemen took her arm. Carabinieri, this guy, not city police. He and the one with him wore braided hats and uniforms, like U.S. state troopers. They shuttled her into their sedan so expertly that at first Barbara had to marvel at it, Italian efficiency and a wide back seat. But then she recalled her kids. The thought branched at once down to the pit of her gut, spiky and cold. She couldn’t be bothered with a seatbelt; she started shouting.
“Sono sicuri. Safe, safe.” This was the officer in the passenger seat, shouting back. “Tutti sicuri.”
Barbara got her first decent look at the policemen, a handsome young duo. The one riding shotgun had lips as fine as John Junior’s. Then by the time the mother could confirm that the problem had to do with her husband, not her children, she could see John Junior himself. The oldest, along with the other four, were in the precinct house. They were two minutes from the church, in a drab suite of offices that overlooked the funicular.
The kids had been put in some sort of holding cell, fronted by a broad window. It seemed to take longer to unlock the door than to drive here from the church. Barb could see at once, anyway, that they didn’t share her anxiety. When she at last got into the cell, into the child-sweat, none of them made a fuss. The girls remained cross-legged on the linoleum floor, talking across a soccer ball. Paul and the two oldest had the three chairs in the room, and they’d set themselves in a row in front of the room’s big window. Only the willowy eleven-year-old turned from the glass as Mom walked in, and then only for a glance. Barbara wound up checking the window herself. From this side, it turned out to be a mirror.
What was a mother supposed to do in here? “Your Pop’s going to be fine,” she said. “On the way over the cops told me it’s not really a kidnapping. They told me it was more like a standoff”
John Junior didn’t need the explanation. “They might take all of us out to the Center next.”
“That’s the way it works,” Chris said. “They bring the family if they think it’ll help negotiations.”
“That’s what they tell you,” JJ said. “That’s what they tell you, Crisco. But actually the plan is to give you to the bad guys instead.”
“Uh-huh. Well you notice nobody’s even talking about giving them you.”
The boys wer
e looking forward to the trip. Why had dumb old Mom and Pop dragged them off to a disaster area like this if it weren’t going to be an adventure?
“E un ostaggio, signore Jay.” This came from a trooper who’d moved into the holding cell with them. The scent of his gun oil cut through the closeness.
“Che brutti, ipoveri.”
Barb looked up at their new protector, his uniform piping and chest strap. She concentrated on the translation: apparently the brutes, the poor out at Jay’s Center, had made a move on the big American. As soon as the news had come from the camp, the law had rounded up the wife and children. They didn’t want another ostaggio, a hostage; the quake had left desperate animali everywhere, even in this neighborhood.
“Animali, i poveri.”
The next to speak up was Dora, always the more adult of the girls. “Mister, hey. Nobody could possibly hurt our Papa.”
The trooper in the room was the one with the great lips. But the smile he offered appeared so smudged and vacant, it could’ve have been one of the downtown prayer offerings, ten years after it was hung on the chapel wall.
“You don’t know about this family,” Dora said. “You don’t know anything about Mama and Papa and us.”
Barbara worked on her own smile.
“Mama is a very, very good person. You don’t know, she works in a church.”
Barbara stepped over beside the girls and put her fingers in that petal-soft hair. Now Sylvia had taken up the argument. “Mama works with children,” she said. “Some children have been badly abused.”
“Some children have been badly abused. Mama brought home a DVD.”
The two eight-year-olds were possessed by such a dreamlike seriousness that they must have worked these ideas out at bedtime, after the adults had left them alone.
“That’s why we moved to Italy.”
“That’s why we moved. Back in America, sometimes she even yelled at Papa about it. ‘Don’t you care about suffering children?’ she yelled.”
“All right,” Barbara started, “all right now you two…”
“That’s why,” Sylvia said, “Paul was able to bring Papa back from the dead.”
“That’s why no one can ever hurt Papa now,” Dora insisted, raising a finger. “Mama turned Papa into someone like her. Like, a saint.”
Barbara seemed to choke on her objections, like Jay had choked a week ago—the last time he’d come up against the poveri. Once more she looked over her children, first the two big teenagers in primary-color soccer gear, then the two stocky fourth-graders-to-be in crayon-bright jumpers and tees (easy to spot in case they got separated), and last the odd, fragile, not quite adolescent boy in black and white. Paul was staring at the girls, thinking it over. The mother had by no means ignored the boy, these last few days; both she and the Jaybird had sat down with him, their riddle-some middle child. What’s more, both had come away with the same understanding, on one point at least. They agreed that Paul didn’t know what he’d accomplished over his father’s choking body. But Mr. Paul needed better than that; if Mama was a saint, she had to do better.
The cell door opened, not far, not even halfway. Another carabiniero called the first into the hall. The two conferred in a whisper, but they couldn’t hide anything from Barbara. She could read the pretty boy’s smile, full Elvis all of a sudden.
“E sicuro, Jay?” she barked. “Tutto skuro?”
The man who’d come to door met her look. He didn’t smile, or not quite, but he gave a very different sort of shrug from what she’d seen downtown.
“Your father’s safe, guys.” Barb made it a point to catch Paul’s eye first. “The man is safe.”
Now both the policemen were nodding.
“And as soon as we can,” she went on, “we are all of us going out to the Refugee Center. It could be tomorrow, it could be the next day, but we are going to get some backup from NATO and ride out to Papa’s place.”
The middle child was grinning more broadly than either of the carabinieri. He thrust a pair of fingers inside his open collar, exposing an inch more of hairless chest.
“It’s time,” Barbara went on, “we stop playing around.”
Chapter Four
“Water buffalo?” Dora said. “Like in Africa?”
“This isn’t Africa,” Sylvia said, forcing a laugh. “This is Italy. Don’t try to tell us they’ve got water buffalo.”
JJ went on pointing out the Humvee window. “Guys, hey. Even I wouldn’t try to confuse you about what continent we’re on.”
“Girls, look, what do you think those things are?” Chris was pointing too. “Moose? The mozzarella, like, the cheese? That’s where it comes from.”
Around them the landscape seesawed, here a scabbed, balsitic ridge and there the grass velvet of a creek plain. Across the more level areas sauntered the buffalo, hefty-shouldered and brick-brown, their horns like question marks. The NATO caravan had first taken the family through the Phlegrean Fields, north of the city—a low-rising outbreak of the same magma that underlay Vesuvius to the south. In the Fields the ground turned to dust around smoking fumaroles, mounds of pale flinders, like smoking dumps of extracted teeth. Two thousand, three thousand years ago, these badlands were said to house a gateway to the Underworld, the poisoned spring where Ulysses spoke with the dead. Yet soon enough the gravel and chalk gave way to actual fields, rippling with mid-June vitality. Low hillsides sprouted mixed greens in mouthwatering layers, while others flowered lavender, crimson, milk-white. Vest-pocket orchards and grape arbors cut rows and terraces across the flatter spaces, squeezing every workable inch of the nutrient-rich soil. Farther inland still, between the vine-rows and fruit trees, there began to appear the small herds of buffalo.
“Mozzarella?” Dora was asking.
“Best mozzarella in the world,” Silky Kahlberg said. “Da bufalo, know what I mean? Vera da bufalo.”
“Sure,” said JJ. “The truth comes from buffalos. Old Neapolitan saying.”
The NATO man chuckled, paternal, or the movie version.
“Yeah well,” Chris said, “JJ, if the choice was between asking you and asking a water buffalo.…”
Kahlberg chuckled again, and Barbara allowed herself a laugh as well. She was going to have to learn to relax around the Lieutenant-Major. Certainly she enjoyed the benefits that came with having him somehow on call. She liked his van’s state-of-the-art air conditioning, for starters, a terrific relief on a morning when she’d woken up itching. Last night Jay had put something extra into his thrusts; he’d wanted to kindle a special glow for today’s visit. Then too, the mother was glad they didn’t have to share the ride with a machine gun. Instead Kahlberg had arranged for a pair of soldiers in a second vehicle. This escort looked serious, bulked up in powder-blue helmets and vests, with a semi-automatic and a pistol each. But Barbara and the kids rode weapon-free. So it appeared, anyway; the mother couldn’t help wondering about what the liaison man wore under his jacket. A white jacket, this time, and before the abbreviated caravan set off, as he’d huddled with the soldiers, he’d kept touching his lapel. His lapel or whatever he carried under it.
“Actually,” the man was saying now, “out in your father’s camp you’ll find some folks believe that kind of thing. These people, they’ll fall for every kind of superstition you could name.”
These people? Barbara looked to Paul, but he’d cupped his eyes against the tinted window. Her Lakota child, following the buffalo.
“For this population,” Kahlberg continued, “a lot of them anyway, the quake set off, mn, millennial fever. You understand?”
Chris turned from the window. “They thought it was like, The Rapture?”
‘You got it, son. Some of these old boys, they figured it was the end of the world. That quake, it did leave them at the end of their ropes, anyhow.”
Was that a reference to Jay’s near-kidnap? A desperate stunt at the end of someone’s rope, the day before yesterday?
Barb and Kahlberg had bee
n circling the subject since she’d first gotten in touch to set up the visit. This morning too, though the mother had taken care not to sound nervous in front of the children, she’d fished for a guarantee that she wasn’t exposing them to real danger. Give the liaison credit, he’d said all the right things. He’d echoed the children’s father almost word for word.
Papa swore that the worst weapon brandished against him had been a piece of kitchenware. Also his would-be kidnappers never even got off the campgrounds, let alone came close to a getaway car—and not because the former Fordham lineman had put up much of a struggle, either. Rather, Jay explained, other Center refugees had stepped in. The people on the Jaybird’s side had far outnumbered the troublemakers, a handful of clandestini only. Five or six young men, no more, claimed they acted out of solidarity with a downtown group on hunger strike.
Pretty strange, hey?, the father had said. A hunger strike in Naples.
Barbara, listening, sensed a different sort of urgency in her man’s chatter. His hope for the marriage, that’s what she heard, a hope bucked up by the mere mention of a family trip to the Center. So his storytelling came across as one part brag, one part gee-whiz, and overall nothing to be frightened of During the brief struggle, he assured them, a crowd of refugees had surrounded the would-be abductors and made sure il capo Americano never suffered a scratch. By the time the carabinieri had picked up Barbara outside the church, the worst was over. By the time Jay was through talking, that night, the whole business had dwindled to nothing more than another story about Papa’s job. And like all such stories it came with a moral.
My people in the tents, the husband declared, they’ve seen enough destruction.
At the opposite end of the table, Barbara drained her wine. She liked the taste anyway, a local vintage, the Tears of Christ.
Destruction, Jay went on, that’s never the answer.