by John Domini
Barb didn’t trust herself to respond.
“Really, I’ve been the soul of discretion, around here. It’s hardly as if I’ve gone looking for dirt about you and Jay. It’s hardly as if, in order to learn that you two have been squabbling, I needed to bewitch a priest.”
Behind Barbara, from the room down the hall, came the small sounds of sneakers and toys. “Aurora,” she asked, “what do you know about it?” She kept her voice under control. “What goes on in a family, what commitment even means, what do you know? Twenty years ago I took a vow in front of God—”
“Hey,” Jay said. “Both of you. Down off the high horse.”
“Precisely, John. How many apologies does your wife require? Why won’t she admit the least responsibility? Rushing everyone home without so much as a phone call.”
“Mother of God! You monster, weren’t you just saying you don’t want some kind of big, apocalyptic dance?”
“All I’ve ever said to you, Barbara, is stop pretending you’re a saint. Telling me you stood up in front of God, now really. The truth is, you’re blundering around having emotions like the rest of us.”
“I’m—I’m a wife and a mother. I took a vow.”
“And I was there, in case you’ve forgotten. Then more recently I was out on Capri, and even my carriage-driver was talking about trouble between you and my son.”
At some point the grandmother had slipped on pants. Balloony Arabian velveteen, she’d pulled them on while Paul was still over Cesare, a hand at each of the old man’s breaking points. In those same swarming moments—while Barb had stood dumbstruck, unable to manage more than a silent prayer for her priest—Chris and JJ had hustled the twins down the hall to their room. Jay had done what he could, using his upper body as a screen. As near as Mama could tell, the girls hadn’t seen anything.
But even now with Cesare breathing normally under his blanket, with the girls out of harm’s way and Mr. Paul parked in a chair, she had so much turning over within her that she might still have been praying. Turning over like the beads on a rosary. She grabbed the mother-in-law by the lapels.
“What kind of a woman are you?”
“Barb!” Jay said. “We’ve got enough trouble.”
“Jaybird, I swear, if you don’t back me up on this, if you don’t…”
“Then what, Barbara dear? What do you intend to do, to your husband?”
As soon as Barbara let go, the in-law fisted her kimono back together. Its bright threads sparkled against the shadows of her wrinkled neck.
“Both of you. Last thing we need is this kind of playground stuff”
“Jay, how can you let her turn it around like this? How can you let her talk as if today, as if everything were wide open to any kind of way she—”
“But Barbara, you’re the one who’s left something open. First you announce that this man is your husband, eternally, before God. And then you tell us that should he neglect to ‘back you up,’ well—what? What’s the truth?”
“Mom, Mom and, Aw, Aw… Mom and Grandma,” said Paul. “I’m tired of this.”
Jay had gotten a hand on each of the women, under the murmuring fan. He’d taken his mother by her shoulder and Barbara by a hip.
“I’m tired o-of it. It’s, it’s like—I can see this o-on any street corner.”
The Jaybird, with the hand on Barb, lightly aligned a finger with the top of his wife’s panties. Between that familiar tickle and what her middle child had to say, his exasperation, she found herself cooling improbably. She blinked and saw how silly she and her in-law looked.
Silly, a whipsaw a deux, choreography for the end of everything. As if they could! As if either she or Aurora, with no more than a harsh word or two, could erase a way of life this long in place and thick with sediment.
Paul spoke, Jay touched her, and with that Barb pictured the opposite. She saw herself and this woman knocking off the Siren song and instead brokering a whole series of practical solutions. She blinked again and her imagination kept on like this, so sizeable a shift in her thinking that Barbara looked to Cesare. Was this something for confession? The old man hadn’t moved from the couch but he was watching closely, from that angle he could see how Jay was stroking his wife’s hip, and chagrin rose hotly up Barbara’s neck even as she couldn’t stop thinking that she and this old woman had now spit up the filthiest business between them. Now, with that out of the way, they might find what they had in common. They had the city, for starters. No one else in the family had made such intimate connections here as Aurora and Barb.
“You got it now?” Jay was asking. “The big picture?”
Anyway, Barbara asked herself, wasn’t the older Lulucita a natural for this chameleonic town? Couldn’t she stand in for a Neapolitan mother?
“Goodness,” Aurora said. “I thought for a moment there we were going to end up like something from a bad movie.”
“Yeah, yeah like a, a movie I’ve seen a, a thousand times.”
Barbara looked to Paul, square-eyed, refusing to blink again. She thought of the jump-cuts back on Whitman’s screen, the faces altered in an instant. Could she trust this latest edit?
“Owl?” her husband was asking. “We all on the same page, now?”
Then there was Aurora, her little nonna. The in-law’s smile no longer looked so jagged; Barb couldn’t help thinking it looked like an olive branch. A lipstick-red olive branch, a strange image but one Jay seemed to see as well, since he eased back and took his hands off the women. The big son and husband gave himself a breather, while Barbara found herself smiling back at the old woman, guarded about about it but nevertheless finding words for what she’d just been imagining.
Needed to get some things off my chest…get it out in the open…some on both sides, sounded like.
Aurora made the same noises, give or take. In her voice, conciliation took on a greater refinement, the melody of the Alpha. The younger woman didn’t lose her smile, but she cast around for a place to sit. Both the sofa and the nearest chair, however, remained spaces for the handicapped. Cesare’s color was back, but the lines around his eyes had deepened. He looked as if he’d fallen into thoughts as intense and surprising as Barbara’s. And while Paul too was himself again, what did that mean? What, really? The boy had lowered his teeming head, holding his belt in one hand while with the other he poked between pants and shirt, tightening the tuck. The mother went to him, sidling past the displaced coffee table.
“Remember, Mr. Paul.” She squatted before the boy. “It could be any of us.”
Over the child’s shoulder, she saw the priest kick the blanket off his black-stockinged feet.
“That’s what you said, right?” she continued. “These episodes, whatever’s in them, it’s there all around us all the time. It could be any one of us, laying on hands, if we could only feel it.”
The buzzer for the palazzo’s front door sounded, a racket under the high ceilings. The priest sat up, revealing shoulders tufted with shocking white hair.
“I’m saying,” Barbara went on, “you’re not so strange. We’re the strange ones, the ones who don’t ever feel it.”
She stroked his cheek, its hint of hair. Meantime the buzzer kept coming on—the police of course. Police and paramedics both had rushed to the Vomero in response to the American family’s pronto soccorso. But in the ten or fifteen minutes since the older boy had gotten off the phone, a big public to-do had become the last thing anyone wanted. Even Cesare, at the word polizia crackling over the intercom, shook his beaky head. Jay was the first to think of the balcony. He stepped outside, the room’s overhead fan sucking in a fresh dose of the sulfur air. Barbara, hearing her husband call down to the cops, was surprised at how good his Italian had become. The Jaybird reeled off four or five different kinds of reassurance, even working up a laugh as he shouted that the family was fine. Nevertheless he seemed to need reinforcements. He poked back inside and asked Barbara to join him.
Out over the piazza, the sun surp
rised her, still noon-bright. The wife had to squint, and though she made nice, though she tried to sound trouble-free, her act was out of synch with Jay’s. When the Jaybird said the call was a big mistake, false alarm, she shook her head, and when he asked her whether anyone was hurt she nodded. Below, a camera or two went off, with a scratch and fizz like faulty matches. Against the high railing, the s-curved childproof bars, Barb realized she was the wrong person for this job; she was still too raw from thrashing things out with Aurora. She hadn’t gotten back on her feet, or gotten her head back on its feet. Then there were “the symptoms that generally follow the healing event,” according to Nettie’s recommended reading. Fatigue, disorientation—pretty ordinary symptoms, when you thought about it. In any case Barbara wasn’t much help. She frowned, reminding herself why she’d come back home in the first place; she still needed to sit down with Chris and JJ. But when she waved to the cluster of folks below, she felt like she was doing a high-school version of Evita. She was Evita next to Mussolini, and the act didn’t appear to be working. Down on the spirals of paving-stones, the police and the medics wouldn’t leave. The lights on both vehicles kept flashing, and now they’d attracted additional onlookers, maybe as many as twenty-five. The biggest crowd for the family in days.
Then Cesare joined them, back in uniform. Out in the volcanic breeze, with the Bay visible behind him, the man’s collar suggested some fresh-scrubbed temple on the horizon. He hadn’t yet pulled on his shoes, but the people in the piazza couldn’t see that, and when he spoke he came across in terrific voice. A voice Barbara had never heard from him, it turned out: the local accent and slang. She couldn’t translate the bawling, the abbreviations, but neither of the American’s could miss the old Jesuit’s point.
“O’ cane arragia‘ ne reste ‘e pille!”
Cesare put a lot across without a word, with body-Neapolitan, the shaping hands and shifting hips. He quickly had the cops and medics grinning.
“O’ puorco!” Cesare shrugged, whole-body. “‘Na sbaglia!”
Before the men in whites and blues headed back to their vehicles, the priest even threw in an exhortation that they come to Mass.
How long‘s it been, homeys? Words to that effect, anyway.
“Cesare,” Jay put in quietly. “I owe you one.”
The rest of the crowd dispersed while the ambulance and the police car were still circling the piazza, but the old man carried on until the last one had found some shade. He turned a last head or two, bellowing in more straightforward Italian that he held a service every evening. Meantime the cops paused again, at the edge of the piazza, pulling up beside a couple of tobacco-brown beggars. The police asked to see I.D.
“Okay,” Jay said. “Party’s over.”
He brushed past the priest and headed inside. While the others followed, he spoke up again. “Father, Cesare, thanks. Thanks, okay? Okay. But now, it is over.”
Barbara hoped her husband wasn’t about to launch into the same thing she’d gone through with Aurora, this time with testosterone flavor. The mother looked for Paul. In the absence of the other adults, it turned out, the grandmother had gotten the boy to help straighten up the room. Now the two of them were bent over either end of the coffee table, lining it up in front of the sofa. The blanket was folded and lamp and chairs were back in their places.
“Enough,” Jay went on. “Know what I mean?”
From down the hallway came a cry, one of the girls: That‘s it! The priest nodded and reverted to schoolbook English, saying he understood.
“Time for you to leave my family alone. You know?”
“John!” Aurora straightened up.
“I’m talking Barb, me, and the kids. My family. What you do with my mother, that’s your business. Hey, been there. Been there, and good luck. But so far as the rest of us are concerned, it’s got to be on a different basis.”
“John, honestly. What on earth makes you think you’ve got the right—”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Cesare said.
“This isn’t about you and the Church, either. Like I say, that’s your business.”
“Well, the Church and I, as for that. I’d say the worst strain on my relationship with the church is the harm that I’ve done your family.”
Paul settled on the sofa, one stovepipe leg over the other, and Barb sat beside him. From that angle, looking up, she noticed the two men stood eye-to-eye. Jay cocked his head, and after a moment Cesare went on.
“I’ve done worse than you know, signore. I stand before you the worst of all.”
“Oh, now, really.” Aurora might’ve put an elbow into Jay’s ribs, though gently, as she stepped between him and the priest. “Chezzo, we’ve been through this a hundred times. Nowhere in the Gospels does Christ suggest that it’s a sin to have sex.”
Cesare backed away from her, glaring. “You dare speak for Christ, woman?”
“Wo-man?” Aurora put a hand to her neck, so slowly the arm might’ve been developing an exoskeleton as it moved.
“You know,” she said, “what Our Savior condemns, actually, is hypocrisy.”
The old man’s look lost something.
“Really, Chez-zo. You ought to look at yourself, you absolutely ought to see the torment in you face. Now, dear man. Talk to me.”
He managed a sputter. Jay too backed off a step, glancing at Barbara and Paul.
“Your Aura, you called me—less than an hour ago, was it? Then tell me, do. What madness are you proposing now?”
“Cesso,” the priest said finally, shaking his head. “Cesso. Woman, do you know what this pet name of yours means, in this country?”
Aurora’s smile had become a spiked extension of her vivid nails. “I hope this isn’t another of your lectures, Chezzo. I cannot abide a man who lectures.”
“It means ‘toilet,’ this name. You call me your toilet.”
“What’s this,” Jay said, “Round Two? No way, guys.”
Barbara figured her job was the eleven-year-old. She bent to Paul’s ear and whispered that she’d like him to join the other kids. The boy narrowed his thick-lashed eyes, about to make some objection, but then Cesare swept round to face him. Swept round, his robes lifting, and Barbara figured that only she and Aurora noticed the exaggeration in the move, the message for the grandmother in the way he turned his back.
“Miracolino.” The priest spread a hand across his chest, lowering his head.
“Hey,” Jay said. “We had a deal. Enough with this.”
“Holy child, I thank you. I must thank you. You’ve ripped me out of…”
For the next long moment, as Barbara took in the transformation of her guerilla priest—Cesare seemed about to prostrate himself across the coffee table—mostly she went on thinking about Aurora. Now the old playgirl rolled her eyes, now she looked sympathetic and called his actual name, in good accent: “Oh, Cesare.” As for Jay, he’d gone slack; his mother had just gottenjilted: his mother. Barbara in fact had half a mind to snatch the blanket off the sofa and fling it once more over the old Dominican’s face. But that face appeared ecstatic, nothing less, like something off the family website. Then too, she recalled her own recent convulsions, regarding this same mother-in-law.
“Cesare, come on.” She kept her voice level. “What were we just saying?”
“My daughter-in-law’s right.” Aurora found a chair. “She’s entirely right.”
Paul huddled against his Mom, the still-damp hairs at his neck tickling along her collar. “I can’t,” the boy was saying, “I can’t really say it’s ah, a-about God. What hap, what ha-happens with me…”
The priest waved a soft hand, eyes closed, quieting them both. He appeared to have come out of his fervor, his bare feet whispering against the marble floors as he shuffled back from the table. Jay closed the distance between them again, glaring, taking hold of the man’s skinny arm. But Cesare kept his eyes shut, shaking his head as if the Jaybird weren’t there. Quietly he declared that his worst sinning,
“the very blackest mark” against him, concerned the boy.
“What?” Jay asked. “You sinned against Paul?”
Barb put an arm around her boy, getting set to haul him out of the room.
“The worst I did,” Cesare went on, “was to hurt this consecrated brood.”
“Hey. How many times do I have to say it?”
“Now Cesare, please.” The old woman leaned over velveteen legs, her hands between her knees. “This isn’t the man I fell in love with.”
“Just, I mean, speak English. Hey? Plain English.”
“I fell in love,” Aurora said, “with a beautiful Black Irishman who used to say the Holy Spirit dwelt in our desires. ‘Dwelt,’ oh my Chez-ah-ray. The only proof of God you could take seriously, you used to say, was the sheer variety of human yearning.”
Jay remained at the man’s arm, frowning. For the first time in a while Barbara noticed that her husband was wearing a uniform too: his hospital whites.
“Oh my Cesare,” Aurora repeated, then at a glance from her son fell silent. Her doctored looks hardened.
“You and Mom,” Jay said, “that’s your business. But what’s this about Paul?”
Cesare had fallen so still that Barb could spot a wet streak along his jaw-line, a mark left by her child. The boy himself was worming in closer, under her arm, and so when the old man began to speak, to murmur, a priest at confession, at first she could only pick out the words in Italian. Or was it Neapolitan, that drawl, those dying final syllables? Even when Cesare said a word she knew well, clandestini, Barbara couldn’t be sure she’d heard him right till he put it together with another one she recognized: scippatori.
She shifted her grip on Paul, blocking his body if they shared a car seat and were skidding towards a collision. “Mother of God,” she said.
Jay let go of the priest and gave her a look. He asked something she didn’t catch. Aurora too faced around, pant-legs flopping, looking glad for the distraction. Meanwhile Cesare continued his explanations, the murmur of troubling thoughts, and Barbara began to regret how easily she understood them. She regretted everything she’d learned during this last clue-spattered month. For her there could be no mistaking this old man, her lone Vomero friend, with whom she’d spent hours in a church otherwise deserted—except, that is, for a couple of fugitives in the basement. And those two, there could be no mistaking, had been something more than lost sheep.