The Godmothers
Page 40
“Salute!” said Petrina’s new husband, Doug, who’d been listening quietly.
“Salute!” the others chorused, laughing and drinking.
“Cent’anni!” Frankie said, kissing Lucy.
“What’s that mean?” Doug inquired.
Petrina explained, “‘A hundred years.’ As in, ‘May you live a hundred years.’”
But Filomena thought elders shouldn’t toast themselves. Gazing tenderly at all the younger faces smiling at her, she just lifted her glass and said softly, “Ai bambini.”
Pippa, Gemma, Chris, Vinnie, and Paulie all glanced at one another guiltily. This was not lost on Teresa and Nicole, who exchanged a look, vowing to find out why.
But the adults only clinked their glasses and agreed, “To the young ones!”
Epilogue
Nicole
Mamaroneck, 2019
After I went to see Godmother Filomena, I wrote down all that she’d told me that day, just so I wouldn’t forget anything; our discussion was so cathartic to me, and I wanted to keep all the details straight in my mind. But then I put it away for years, to honor her request: At least wait until I die, she’d said.
I didn’t think much more about it, until many years later, when I was up in the attic going through my notebooks. And then my cousin Teresa called to say that her mother was very ill. I knew I had to go back, right away.
It was early September, still summer by the calendar, a warm day with a sky of dazzling blue. When I arrived at my godmother’s house, Teresa was waiting on the porch overlooking the sea, where sailboats dotted the view. “Can I go see her?” I asked.
Teresa shook her head. “Not yet. The doctor is with her. Mom threw me out.”
I sat down beside her on the porch glider. “How is she?” I asked, impressed that Filomena, now in her mid-nineties, was still feisty enough to boss everybody around.
But Teresa just shook her head. All our uncles and the other Godmothers were gone now. After Frankie’s death, Aunt Lucy had moved back here, so she and my mother, Amie, became closer again in their final years together. Filomena was the last to survive.
Teresa gazed at me with those big, luminous eyes and said, “Remember when we hid in the pantry and eavesdropped on my mother?”
“Yes,” I said fondly. We sat in silence awhile, then spoke about our cousins. The fearless Pippa had married her violinist suitor, and they owned a dance and music academy; Gemma, who’d been a sought-after fashion model in the early sixties, had married a photographer and started up a series of beauty spas. As for my twin brothers, Vinnie did become a lawyer, always insisting on looking at any contracts that we were about to sign; and Paulie, “the doctor in the house,” never failed to make a house call no matter how late at night it was, right up until the day he retired to Florida. And our “wild” cousin Chris owned several restaurants, always keeping a special table for our family, which had grown with all of our marriages.
Then we discussed our own work. Teresa was a concert pianist, and I was on sabbatical from teaching journalism at Columbia University. When she asked what I planned to do with my time off, I confessed, “I’m thinking of writing a book about the Godmothers.”
Teresa said reflectively, “You should, Nicole. It’s astonishing that they tangled with all those gangsters and lived to tell the tale. Mom and I discussed those Bosses just last week.”
“Whatever happened to them all?” I asked.
“She told me that Lucky Luciano was deported to Italy and died there, just before drug agents were about to arrest him. Costello lived into his old age and raised prizewinning flowers in his garden; he died at home, which, for a mobster, is pretty good. The guy who ousted him, Genovese, went to prison on a stiff narcotics charge soon after he took over Costello’s operations, so Genovese died in jail. And Gigante, the ex-boxer who shot Costello, eventually became Boss of Costello’s ‘Family’; but Gigante started wandering onto the streets in his bathrobe, half-crazy, or pretending to be to elude the cops—yet, he died in jail, too.”
“And Strollo?” I asked, intrigued. “What became of him?”
“They say that Genovese believed Strollo set him up with the drug arrest, so Genovese may have ordered a hit on Strollo—because, one day in the early 1960s, Strollo left his house and was never seen again. Just disappeared. His remains were never found. But some say that Strollo faked his own death, to avoid being killed.”
I shuddered. “Well, I guess we’re lucky, to be living in less dangerous times.”
Teresa grinned. “That’s just what I told Mom. But she gave me an odd look and said, ‘Think so?’ Then she talked about all the shady mortgage deals and predatory loans that crashed the economy not so long ago, and scandals about the high-and-mighty laundering and sheltering their money in offshore havens, and sharky payday loans, and students saddled with college debt, and pharmaceutical companies pushing addictive painkillers more powerful than heroin. And she said, ‘Sounds like racketeering and extortion to me, my dear.’”
“She’s right,” I admitted.
“You know what Mama showed me, just yesterday?” Teresa whispered in awe. “A million dollars’ worth of gold coins she’d kept squirreled away in a row of shoeboxes! A whole row of them, beneath the real shoeboxes, in a secret storage area under the floorboards of her closets. Been there for years; she never spent any of it. I asked her why, and she said, ‘In case any of you run into trouble.’ She was so determined that none of us be saddled with debt.”
The doctor emerged from the house, and he said we could see Filomena now. When the telephone rang, Teresa said softly, “You go ahead. I’ll be in shortly.”
Filomena’s bedroom had big bay windows. She lay dozing, propped up on many pillows, as if she’d been gazing out at the view. The sun was casting gentle, warm rays of light across her bed. On her night table were reading glasses and a peculiar, sculpted stone hand that, as long as I could remember, had always held her blue rosary beads.
She was so quiet that I considered tiptoeing out, but then, suddenly, she spoke.
“Dammi la mano. Per favore. La tua mano!” she said plaintively, stretching out her open right hand. The gesture was so imploring that I did as she asked and put my hand in hers. She opened her eyes but didn’t really recognize me, for she was looking beyond, to the sea. Yet at my touch, she seemed calmer, and a gentle, surprised smile spread across her soft cheeks with such undisguised delight that she looked just like a little girl.
“Mi ami?” she asked in a childlike voice. “Sei tornato per me—è vero? Andiamo a casa ora?” She cocked her head expectantly, waiting for the answer. I’d studied many languages in the good schools that she’d insisted on sending her little goddaughter to. So I understood that she was asking if someone who loved her had finally come back to take her home.
“Si, si! Ti amo,” I murmured.
Teresa entered quietly now and motioned for me to stay put. Filomena didn’t really see either of us. She just sighed contentedly and squeezed my hand in response. “Resta con me.”
Stay with me. So I did as she asked, and I stayed with my godmother, holding her hand, until the doctor finally told me that it was time to let her go.
THE END
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the many people who contributed to the making of The Godmothers. I am so grateful to the talented professionals at William Morrow, starting with my special thanks to Liate Stehlik. And my deepest appreciation to my fine editor, Rachel Kahan, for her careful attention, advice, and enthusiasm. I also give many thanks to the great team of Kelly Rudolph, Holly Rice, Julie Paulauski, Ryan Shepherd, and Carolyn Bodkin. And I wish to thank Alivia Lopez, Dale Rohrbaugh, Aja Pollock, and Joe Jasko.
Heartfelt thanks to Susan Golomb of Writers House, for her warmth, astute guidance, and encouragement. Also at Writers House, I’d like to thank Amy Berkower, Maja Nikolic, Sarah Fornshell, and Mariah Stovall. At the Gersh Agency, I wish to thank Joseph Veltre and Tori Eskue fo
r their support and encouragement.
For their insights into Italian culture, language and history: I am deeply grateful to Edward F. Tuttle, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, and Professor Emereti at UCLA. And I give special thanks to ethnographer/folklorist Luisa Del Giudice. I also wish to thank Paola Sergi of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York.
I continue to appreciate the encouragement, advice, and friendship of Margaret Atwood. And I give special thanks to Jacques Pépin not only for his superb culinary expertise but for his lovely human spirit and generosity.
Most of all, I wish to express my eternal love and gratitude to my husband, Ray, a beacon of unfailing wisdom, intelligence, and wit; my pal in work and play, in research and travel, in cooking and celebrating our way through life.
Finally, I want to thank all the intrepid and supportive booksellers who introduced me to such wonderful readers, and to my readers themselves from the many corners of the globe—for all the e-mails you’ve written just to let me know that my “message in a bottle” was received by kindred spirits—I give you all my most joyful thanks.
About the Author
CAMILLE AUBRAY is the author of the novel Cooking for Picasso, chosen for People magazine’s Picks for the Best Books of the year, and the Indie Next List for Reading Groups. Aubray was an Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellowship winner and a writer in residence at the Karolyi Foundation in the South of France. She was also a staff writer for the daytime dramas One Life to Live and Capitol. Aubray studied writing at Humber College in Toronto with her mentor, Margaret Atwood, and was a finalist for the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award and the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the godmothers. Copyright © 2021 by Camille Aubray LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JUNE 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-298371-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-298369-5
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