Leo’s mom chews her food, says nothing.
Back at the kids’ table, cousin Tina says, “Hey, fog boy, I hear you’re going to be an old witch in a play.”
Leo is thinking that he’d like to dump the butter in her lap. “It’s old crone, not witch,” Leo says, “and it’s a very important part.”
Cousin Joey chants, “Old crone, old crone, the sardine’s an old crone!”
Over at the big table, Grandma Navy says, “Why can’t he play an old man? Why does he have to play an old woman?”
Grandpa says, “Where’re the potatoes?”
Leo says, “Hey, Grandma—”
She says, “Hay is for horses.”
Leo tries again. “Grandma, who is Rosaria?”
Papa gasps. “Leo!”
Auntie Maddalena gasps. “Leo!”
Grandma Navy rushes off to the bathroom, saying, “Oh, oh, oh.”
Papa ushers Leo to the kitchen. He says, “Where on earth did you—why on earth—how did you—why did you ask about Rosaria?”
“I—I—”
“Who told you about Rosaria?”
“I—I—”
“Was it Auntie Angela?”
“I—I—”
“Go back to the table. Do not ever mention Rosaria again, you hear me?”
As Papa proposes a new toast, the room fills up with blinding light, and the table and the dishes and the glasses all turn into solid gold. Emeralds rain down from the ceiling. Everyone says, “Wow!” except for Tina and Joey, who have been turned into donkeys. They say, “Hee-haw.”
PAPA
Leo wakes in the middle of the night, thinking about Papa. He’d been having a dream, and in it, Leo was younger, and he was in the garage, afraid, looking for Papa.
It is dark in Leo’s room. He hears Pietro snoring and Nunzio turning in his bed. Leo grabs a flashlight and opens Papa’s Autobiography, Age of Thirteen.
I love to swim. The water is quiet and I feel like a fish. I am weightless and free in the water. Sometimes I dive down, down, and I feel as if I could live in the water, rolling and diving and splashing all day long.
Leo tries to picture his father rolling and splashing in the water.
When Leo was younger, Papa had thick, curly hair, and he seemed to Leo to be big and strong and handsome, like a movie star. He taught his children how to swim, sometimes took them fishing, and loved to pile them all in the car and go for drives in the country. They would stop at a park and have a picnic, and Papa would throw baseballs and footballs, laughing his deep laugh.
Sometimes on Sunday, Papa would take his children to see old Mrs. Tonnelli, who used to work in his office. Papa would give her vegetables from his garden, or, in the winter, a basket of oranges or apples. Mrs. Tonnelli would let Leo play her piano while she and Papa visited.
Once, Papa took Leo to his office on a Saturday. Papa was an accountant, and normally he did not work on the weekend. Papa let Leo sit in his chair and open his desk drawers, and he let Leo use the stapler and the red and blue pencils on clean white paper, and Leo looked around at the maze of cubicles and desks and thought how terrific it would be to work in a place like this, with your very own desk and stapler and pens and pencils and paper.
And Leo remembers one other thing, too. Each night Papa used to go into his children’s rooms and say good night to them, one by one, sitting on the side of each bed, listening to whatever important things they had to tell him, and then he would smile and kiss them, and wish them bello dreams, no bad ones allowed.
Three years ago, Papa had a heart attack. Leo had gone out onto the front porch after dinner. He leaped off the porch and climbed the maple tree and jumped down again and raced alongside the house, down one side of the yard, around the birdbath, and there, as he started up alongside the vegetable garden, he saw Papa lying in the dirt, alongside the tomato plants.
Leo froze. He couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, couldn’t think. A crow shrieked from the top of the garage, jolting Leo. He touched his father’s leg and then he crawled into the row and touched his father’s arm.
“Papa? Papa?”
Papa’s eyes were closed, his face ashen. Leo thought he was dead.
He ran to the house, but still he could not speak. He grabbed his mother, pulling her outside.
“Stop that,” she said. “What on earth is the matter with you?”
Leo pulled at her arm, still unable to speak.
“This better be important,” she said.
Leo and his brothers and sister had to wait at home with Auntie Maddalena while Papa was taken to the hospital, and for the next week, while Papa was being operated on. Leo was sure Papa was going to die, and he and Nunzio and Pietro and Contento all cried and wailed like banshees, completely inconsolable, not wanting ice cream or chocolate cake or any of the things that Auntie Maddalena offered them to take their minds off Papa in the operating room.
Leo hid in the bathroom, wishing he had been able to do something for Papa when he found him in the garden. Leo was unable to imagine his life without his papa in it and felt desperate to fix him, to make everything better, the way it was before.
One evening, Leo found Nunzio curled in a ball on the floor of their room.
LEO:
Nunzio? Nunzio-bunzio? Don’t cry.
NUNZIO:
Papa ith dying.
LEO:
No, no, he’s not dying. He’s not. He’s getting an operation. He’s getting fixed.
NUNZIO:
Dying.
LEO:
No, no, you’ll see. Soon he’ll be home and he’ll be fine. That’s what Auntie Maddalena says.
NUNZIO:
Promith?
LEO:
Promith.
But Leo didn’t believe what he’d promised, and even when his mother called later that evening to say the operation went well, and that Papa was in recovery and they would be able to see him in a few days, even then Leo knew Papa was going to die before Leo saw him again.
Fortunately, though, his papa did not die, but he was never the same as the papa that Leo remembered before the heart attack. Papa seemed to move more slowly and tentatively. No more running or jumping or throwing baseballs. He started to lose his hair, little by little, until a round shiny patch replaced the thick curly hair. He no longer liked to take drives in the country, and in the evenings he would rest, and when Leo would go in to say good night to him, sometimes Papa would be sleeping already.
Papa seemed to lose his patience for even the smallest things. He called the can opener a “ratty, useless hunk of metal” as he bashed it on the counter, and he had a regular fight with the side door, kicking it and calling it names (“mumble-mumble rickety piece of tin!”) when it stuck.
But every now and then, on the weekend, Leo’s father will laugh, and sometimes Leo can hear the old laugh in there, and sometimes if Leo closes his eyes, he imagines it is still the other Papa.
THE BIRD
Saturday! Huge red and gold leaves are falling, falling, sifting through the air, landing on Leo’s head and coating the ground, as if someone has spread a magical carpet all around. In the maple tree, Leo studies the whole neighborhood in all its red and gold, and he hears Nunzio singing in the driveway, lo de do, lo de do. He sees Pietro with the neighbors down the block, jumping into piles of leaves.
Leo leaps from the branch, poof, and over the rhododendron bush, runs alongside the house and down one side of the backyard, and he is just rounding the birdbath when he sees, barely visible in the leaves, something silvery. It’s a spoon, bent. Leo sticks it in his pocket, and as he scrambles up the pear tree and onto the garage roof, he remembers Nunzio digging with the spoon last month.
LEO:
What are you looking for, Nunzio-bunzio?
NUNZIO:
Petie.
LEO:
The parakeet? Is this where Papa buried him?
NUNZIO:
Yeth. I think.
LEO:
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And you’re digging him up?
NUNZIO:
Yeth.
LEO:
Do you think that’s a good idea?
NUNZIO:
Yeth.
LEO:
Why?
NUNZIO:
I want to see if he’th thtill there.
LEO:
Where else would he be?
NUNZIO:
Heaven, of courth.
Leo sat there, watching Nunzio dig with the spoon, not wanting him to find Petie, not wanting him to be alone when he discovered the moldy shoe box with its moldy remains of Petie. Nunzio dug a long time, and at last he said:
NUNZIO:
I gueth he’th gone.
LEO:
Petie? To heaven, you think?
NUNZIO:
Yeth.
LEO:
You think he took the shoe box with him?
NUNZIO:
Yeth.
Nunzio seemed happy and satisfied. The next day, Leo probed in the garden, in a nearby spot. He was sure Nunzio had dug in the wrong place. Leo found nothing. He tried another area. Nothing. He got the shovel from the garage and dug some more.
Papa had brought the bird home one day in a small white cage. This was about a year after his heart attack, and it was an unusual thing for Papa to do. He’d always said pets were too messy, and when they’d once seen parakeets in a pet shop, Papa had said it was a shame, that birds shouldn’t be caged, that they should be allowed to be outside, flying free.
So the whole family was surprised when Papa walked in the door, carrying the cage with a blue and white parakeet. Papa tried to look serious, but he kept grinning at the little bird. He said, “Somebody at work couldn’t keep it.” He shrugged, as if there had been nothing else he could do but take it. “Its name is Petie.” Papa bent toward the cage. “Hi there, Petie.”
At first, everyone wanted to touch the bird and feed it and talk to it, but soon Mama, Contento, and Pietro lost interest, and it was only Papa and Nunzio and Leo that paid any attention to Petie. Every day when Leo would come home from school, he’d open the cage. Petie would jump onto Leo’s outstretched finger and cock his head at him, saying the only word he knew: “Pretty. Pretty. Pretty.”
Petie would sit on Leo’s shoulder as Leo went up to his room and as he did his homework. Petie hopped onto the desk and sometimes flew a lap around the room. “Pretty. Pretty. Pretty.”
At school, when Leo told his friends he had a parakeet, one of them said, “A bird? What can a bird do?” Another said, “A dog is much better than a bird.”
One day, Petie stopped talking and tweeting. He’d hop onto Leo’s finger, but he wouldn’t fly. He didn’t look right. A few days later, while Leo was holding him, Petie pressed his tiny head against Leo’s chest, as if he were trying to rest there. Leo held him for a long time, stroking his feathers. When Papa came home, he touched Petie, still in Leo’s hand, still pressed against his chest.
“Leo?” Papa said.
“I know,” Leo said. “I think he died.”
When Papa lifted Petie from Leo’s hands, there was such a look on his face, troubled and sad. Leo felt so heavy, as if his clothes were made of concrete, and as if the air were too thick to breathe. At night, under his covers, he cried. The next day at school, Leo wanted to tell his friends about Petie, but he couldn’t do it. How could you say your bird died? Who would understand what that meant?
Leo was remembering all this as he dug in the garden. He dug and dug and dug. Nothing. Maybe Nunzio was right. Maybe Petie had flown off to heaven, taking his shoe box with him.
THE ABYSMAL CAST
Sometimes the cast is awful. Half the people don’t know their lines yet. Hardly anyone has learned cues. Characters enter and exit whenever they remember, which is rarely at the right time, and actors fall out of character as soon as they say their lines: the donkey/Ruby blows her nose, and Lucia/Melanie twirls her hair like a ditz. Melanie, who thinks the whole play revolves around her, stands in front of other characters and coughs or yawns when the old crone or the villagers have lines.
They rehearse the first of the porch scenes, where Rumpopo tells the two abandoned children the story about the feather turning into an emerald table. Everyone is suddenly curious as to how this will happen onstage, and if there will be a real emerald table, and so Mr. Beeber has to stop and explain about the set and lighting and music. “It’ll all work, just trust me,” he says.
“But will the table be real?” Melanie asks.
“Yes, it will be real.”
“But how are we supposed to rehearse without the real table?”
“Just imagine,” Mr. Beeber says. “Please.”
Next, they rehearse a scene between Leo and the donkey.
DONKEY:
(to old crone) This is an opp-opp-port—this is an upport—this is an—what is this word anyway? Do you really think a donkey would say this?
OLD CRONE:
Just say it, Ruby.
Mr. Beeber interrupts: “Stay in character! Stay with the script!”
LUCIA:
If there’s going to be a real dog in the real play, why don’t we use a real donkey?
Mr. Beeber interrupts: “Stop! Stop! This is abysmal! Abysmal!”
Leo leans against the wall and closes his eyes.
Orlando and Melanie get sick. Mr. Beeber selects Leo to play Rumpopo and Ruby to play Lucia. They are brilliant. They also respect the donkey and the old crone because, as Mr. Beeber says, “Every part is important; every line contributes to the whole.” Mr. Beeber is so impressed that he announces that Ruby and Leo are being transferred to a special school where they will get to do drama all day long, and they will not be donkeys or crones, either.
“Leo? Leo? You walking home or not?”
“What? Oh, sure, Ruby, sure.”
MANY PAPAS
Leo is all confused about Papa. There is not just the papa who was his papa when Leo was little, and the papa who is now, but also the papa-before-he-was-a-papa, the one in his Autobiography, Age of Thirteen. For Leo, reading Papa’s book is like reading a story about someone else. There is a boy in a big family, who likes to swim and to tap-dance, and he talks fondly of Rosaria, the missing sister.
One chapter makes Leo shudder:
One incident that stands out clearly in my mind dates back to when I was seven. My father had an old motorcycle which he kept down in the cellar of our apartment building. Rosaria and I decided to go down and play with it, to pretend we were riding.
Another boy in the building, Morris, was down there, and he didn’t seem to like the idea that we got to play on the motorcycle. He situated himself before the furnace and poked the coals.
Suddenly a bright idea came to him. How about putting the hot poker on somebody’s neck? Sure enough, on somebody’s neck he put it. Whose neck? My neck. I wasn’t sure what had happened. I began to scream. The rest is obvious. I was taken to the doctor. I was out of school for twenty-six days.
And from there, Leo’s father moves to something else. Leo rereads the hot-poker passage. The rest was obvious, Papa says. But it isn’t obvious to Leo. How long did Papa scream? What had that felt like, a hot poker on his neck? Was he scared? Did he cry? Was Rosaria scared? What happened to the boy, Morris?
Leo wants to ask his father all these questions, but he doesn’t know how to do it without Papa knowing that Leo has been in his things, that he is reading his book. In the garage on the day Leo reads this chapter, he stands behind his father, studying his neck. On the left side are ripples of puckered skin. Scars. Leo had seen this rippled skin before but hadn’t thought it was unusual. He hadn’t wondered how it got that way.
“Papa? What’s that on your neck?”
His father’s hand brushes at his skin. “What? Is there grease on there?”
“No, that—that scar.”
His father dumps a tin of screws onto the worktable. “Oh that,” he says. “It’s nothing.
Why can’t a person find the right screw when he needs it? Look at this mess.”
“But how did you get it, that scar?”
Papa shrugs. “I got burned. When I was little. Sardine, go ask your mother if there are any more screws in the house. Stupid screws.”
So, there is this whole other person who is Leo’s father, before he was Leo’s father, and Leo doesn’t know him, except for what he reads in his book. When he finishes Papa’s book, will he know all about this other person? Leo doesn’t think so, because Papa does not tell if he cried, if he hurt. But then, maybe the fact that he does not say that he cried or hurt says a lot about him.
At night Papa used to gather Leo and Contento and Pietro on his lap (this was before Nunzio was born), and he would tell them the story of What We Did Today, and somehow he made whatever they had done seem exciting and adventurous. If they’d only walked to the corner store, he’d make it seem as if they had been on an adventure.
“We crept down the sidewalk,” he’d say, “in the early morning. We were on a mission: to find the miracle bread! Someone was following us . . .” and on he would go, like that, spinning the story for them.
Once, when Nunzio was a baby and was sick with a fever, and crying, Leo took a turn rocking him. Leo sang to Nunzio a while, and then he told him the story of What We Did Today. Leo can no longer remember the exact story he told, but it was something about a baby whose crying turned into singing, such beautiful singing that everyone said, “More, more, baby! More of that sound!”
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