She didn’t stick around to press the point. The dining room was cleared already so she bounced downstairs to the kitchen. Mary Bernice was there, looking aggrieved, while Nonna bashed about the kitchen, assembling bowls and ingredients. “There you are, Laura; what a morning to dawdle! Late for breakfast. You cleaned up that awful mess upstairs that I was smelling, I hope. I thought it was sewage backing up. Just the way to welcome our guests tomorrow night. Put them off their dinner. Mary Bernice, the eggs, the eggs, the eggs, you have only four eggs? Sei pazza?”
“I’ll pick up some more this morning when I make my rounds.”
“Miss Agnes places a telephone call to me this morning, Laura; so many ladies needing their perms, she is opening two hours early today. She reschedules me to come in at eight-fifteen. So we’ll do the pasta later. Your grandfather is bringing the fish home tomorrow morning but the eels come tonight. So today is the pasta and the antipasti platters, and we’ll have time to set the table. Mary Bernice will hang the mistletoe, or we’ll ask one of those boys upstairs. We’ll have to do the fish and the profiteroles tomorrow. It’ll be a peasant’s day of work but we’ll strike it rich. Gesù wouldn’t dare give up on us now, not when we’ve come so far.”
“Jesus isn’t known for taking direction, not in my church,” murmured Mary Bernice.
Nonna had no time to argue. She was running through the shopping needs and consulting her recipes, scrawled in Italian. For this meal, Mary Bernice was sidelined, which made the cook cross. “Festa dei sette pesci, Mary Bernice.”
“I know, the feast of the seven fishes, you tell me seven times already.”
“I already picked up the dried salt cod; don’t tell Signore Ciardi but it’s the Portuguese brand. We’ll soak it when I get back. Also we can do the shrimp tonight and keep them in the icebox. The calamari, the mussels, they come tomorrow; and the fresh eels! They come into de Gonzague’s today in those tray-boxes. We’ll do the smelts at the last minute in olive oil, my my. And finally, this year, lobster tails.”
“Lobster tails!” said Mary Bernice. “Plated in gold leaf, by the sound of it?”
“Yes,” said Nonna, “and we’re going to ornament them with Mr. Corm Kennedy’s initials in little diamonds. Mind your business, Mary Bernice. I don’t see the yellow onions or the cremini.”
“Pantry,” said Mary Bernice. Opening the Frigidaire, she waggled a forefinger. “You got your sour cream, your parmijohnny, your milk. This morning I’m collecting the courgettes and the purple thingy, the eggplant, and the carrots, and the store-bought bread crumbs. Leaving any minute now.”
“Garlic, tinned anchovies, capers, green peppercorns in brine?”
“Pantry pantry pantry pantry.”
Nonna looked put out. “I’m sure we’re forgetting something, but I’ve read through my recipes twice. Well, we can always call Ovid to pick it up on his way home, that is, if there are any groceries still open. He’ll keep late hours tonight.”
“Go permanent your hair, Mrs. C., while they’re holding you a chair.”
“Laura, you’ll help Mary Bernice if she gets back before I do?”
Laura nodded but added, “I have some things to do.”
“Christmas surprises,” said Mary Bernice. “Don’t bother with my own personal Oldsmobile, Miss Laura, I’d have no place to park it on my block.”
Nonna left the kitchen, huffing. Mary Bernice sat down and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She put it quickly under her left haunch when Nonna swung through the door again. “But do we have enough salt for killing the eels, Mary Bernice? We don’t want to run out.”
“I got in four honking great canisters of salt, don’t you be worrying about salt. See to your hair, now, and leave the prep work to me.”
Nonna pulled on a plastic head scarf to protect her steel-grey chignon, wiped her eyeglasses on a paper towel, and left without further comment, though the silence was comment enough. Christmas cooking was a grim business.
Laura wanted nothing more than to cadge some breakfast for Hans, but she had to get Mary Bernice out the door, too. “When are you going shopping?” she asked.
“After you eat your hot cereal. I put it back on the stove since you were lollygagging this morning.”
“I can get it for myself.”
“Give me a chance to collect my wits.” Mary Bernice ladled out the Maypo and sat down across from Laura. “I have to set out my own campaigns for the day. How to do everything your bossy grandmother wants me to do, and how to keep my sanity while doing it. The stakes are higher this year, no getting around it.”
“I know her sister is coming with the new husband, but we have company every Christmas Eve. Why is this so, so . . . extra?”
“It’s the Mr. Corm Kennedy element.”
“Is it that he’s not Italian?”
“Not really. He’s Irish, so he’s Catholic, so that’s not it either. It’s that he’s rich, see, and without meaning to gossip behind closed doors”—she leaned forward and lowered her voice, gossiping behind closed doors—“your grandfather is asking him to come in as a business partner. Put up some financing. Mr. Ovid’s business is off, don’t you know, and this house was probably a mistake, even if they got it at a bank auction. That’s my understanding from little clues here and there. I keep my ears clean so I hear what I hear. Isabella thinks that if her sister and her fella come here and get a notion that the business is struggling, they won’t invest. Your folks aren’t lying by pulling out all the stops, mind; they just have a cash flow problem. In Las Vegas it’s called going for broke, and in the bank they call it a bridge loan, but this isn’t a bank, this is family. Why else do you think those poor lads are upstairs, painting and scraping away and dragging the little owls from the ceiling? To make the Ciardis look prosperous and able to carry all this off. To make the business look as if it’s going full steam and no complaint. To make the investment look like a sound idea. They need Mr. Corm Kennedy’s pretty pile of greenbacks to keep the outfit up and running.”
“They’ve asked him already?”
“I believe Isabella asked her sister Geneva to ask him, and he hasn’t given them an answer. But if he was offended or was going to say no, would they have accepted an invitation to dinner? I ask you. He lives up in Boston, you know, where they grow Kennedys by the dozen, all around Harvard Yard. Geneva hasn’t been for a visit in too many years to count. She’s showing her new man off to her big sister, and her big sister is trying to show off her nice house and the great business her husband started after the war. Christmas Eve, and all attention should be on the little Babe, but what are you going to do? They have to eat, and so do you. Are you done?”
“They’re not doing this for me.”
“And you think that convent school in Montreal is, what, a fleabag motel?”
“They asked Geneva and Mr. Corm Kennedy for Christmas Eve long before I got thrown out of Driscoll.”
“Yes, but your going away to board doesn’t make things any easier. I’ll say no more.” She ground out her cigarette. “Do the washing up after yourself, Miss Laura, and I’ll pop round to the shops in two shakes and a skiddle-skaddle.”
Mary Bernice scooped up her coat and scarf and a tam-o’-shanter beanie that made her look like a plaid mushroom. After collecting the grocery carrier from the back storeroom, she dragged it through the kitchen toward the downstairs entrance under the front stoop. “I never asked you what that heavenly aroma was upstairs,” she remarked, “and I don’t think I want to know, but I hope you took care of it.”
“I think it was the painting materials they’re using.”
“That’s a crock of hooey, but I have no time to sort you out now. I’ll be back soon as shank’s mare can carry me.”
After she had gone, Laura grabbed two apples, an orange, another bowl of Maypo and a spoon, and three Nabisco wafers. She raced upstairs. In the front hall, the workers had already installed a new puzzle-piece of ceiling, constructed out of prefabricated Sheetro
ck of some sort, and were busy applying grout to the seams. “For a girl on Christmas break she’s in a mighty hurry,” said John Greenglass. “She might have brought us a cup of New York coffee, don’t you think, Sam?”
“Later,” she called over her shoulder. Upstairs, she set down the breakfast and picked up the rejected lasagne, which Garibaldi had ravaged. She hoped he got sick on it. Then she retrieved the bad-smelling clothes from the fire escape and rushed down the back staircase with them. She plowed through the kitchen to the laundry room. She used one and a half cups of granulated Tide, hoping it would work. She added a healthy dribble of some other cleaning agent on the laundry shelf whose precise charms she couldn’t understand from the label. It had a powerful antiseptic pong and was sure to do some good. The washer began to fill, the bubbles hid the clothes, chemistry went to work on the outfit that her dream had worn upon his arrival in her real life.
16
As she reached the first floor and catapulted toward the second, the doorbell rang.
“Well, we’re not going to get it,” called John Greenglass in a growly manner. He was lying on the plank applying that gunk to the ceiling with a trowel, and Sam Rescue was halfway up one of the ladders, holding backup supplies.
“Could be the owl’s mother come looking for him,” said Sam. Another wink.
She set the foods upon the hall table. Mother: the fault-line word, the three-alarm-fire word. A special mail delivery, a present from her mother. Then the thought: mother—raised in her a grassfire flame of hatred, anxiety, and need, tinder catching along her spine and racing to her roasting fingertips. She threw open the door as if going to battle.
The world glared so hard with sudden sun on snow that at first she only saw a silhouette in the spangle. Whoever it was, it wasn’t Renata di Lorenzo Ciardi, arrived from the wilds of Albany County. “The hell do you want?” asked Laura.
“That’s an unusual Christmas greeting,” said Maxine Sugargarten. “Do you think Joseph said that to We Three Kings when they knocked on the stable door?”
“I mean it, I’m busy,” said Laura.
“Can I come in,” said Maxine, and came in without waiting for a reply. “Hi,” she said to the guys on the ladders.
For privacy Laura would have taken Maxine into the dining room, but the pocket door was stuck in the wall because the floor had warped. The front room, with its big bay window and its wooden shutters folded neatly into the window woodwork, had functional doors. It wasn’t set up as a parlor, which was one floor above it; it was mostly a kind of waiting room. Sometimes Nonno used it for store overstock if the tiny basement of Ciardi’s Fine Foods was out of room. Today the front room held a Christmas tree and two or three fancy chairs Nonna had just picked up as a bargain in some church bazaar. The wallpaper showing the Bay of Naples was so new you could nearly smell the harbor. “Why did you come here?” asked Laura.
“I know why you’re mad at me.”
“You never came here before. We’re not friends. What are you up to?”
Maxine unwrapped her long white scarf, as if expecting to be asked to sit down, and she tossed her chin high. She was practiced at that. The bandaged nose was grotesque. “Last night I heard that you got expelled because of attacking me. I thought you were only suspended.”
Laura shrugged. It wasn’t her job to clear up Maxine’s confusion. “Where’d you pick up that good news?” she said, as if it weren’t true.
“My big sister is going steady with Mr. G.’s son Raymond. Raymond told her, and she told me. I came to say I’m sorry about the whole thing.”
“Nothing to do about it now,” said Laura, “except I never meant to hit you in the face, by the way. That was an accident. So much blood, you probably can’t believe me. I probably wouldn’t believe you.”
Maxine sighed with the self-effacing glory of the martyr. “I’m sorry about treating you like a moron. We were mean to you. We weren’t nice.”
“Is this news to you, because it isn’t to me.”
“We made you be late that day,” said Maxine. She had something in her hands. It was a wrapped present. Oh please. “We started it. I know that. I feel terrible.”
“You didn’t make me steal your record.”
“No, but we made you late for the class. We wanted to hear you stumble in your writing, just so we could laugh some more.”
“I was late. Fatto, capito. Can you leave now, I have to be somewhere.”
“No,” said Maxine. “Mr. G. is always talking about honor, and I am trying to be honorable, even if you did slash my face with Bobby Vee. We made you late. Don’t you get it? Donna Flotarde pulled over Doll Pettigrew’s shower bench into the stall next to yours, and she climbed on it and while you were taking your shower she was leaning over the top of the partition.”
“I know,” said Laura. “I heard the bench scrape on the floor.”
Maxine said the next part slowly, as if Laura were just off the boat. “She had a bottle of shampoo and she was leaking a very slow stream of it onto your head so it wouldn’t rinse out in time. The rest of us were dressing or already dressed. We were making you have to stay in the shower so you would be the last one to arrive in English.”
The thought of Donna Flotarde looking over the top of the shower wall at Laura without any clothes on. “She’s a bitch.”
“She did it.” Maxine Sugargarten heaved a great sigh. “But it was my idea. I set you up. Then when you got back at me, everything went out of control. I didn’t mean for you to get expelled. So I’m sorry, so I’m here. I brought you a sorry present.” Maxine looked as if she thought she deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor for the courage to confess her stupid crime.
“I don’t want a present.”
“I don’t care, I want to give it to you. You can give it to somebody else.”
“I hate Bobby Vee, just so you know.”
“It isn’t Bobby Vee. It’s this new group called Peter Paul and Mary. They’re really something else.”
“You are a disgusting person,” said Laura.
“I know that,” said Maxine. “Don’t rub it in. I don’t have anything else to say.”
“Then get out. And Merry Christmas.”
She marched Maxine to the door but didn’t slam it for fear of bringing down more of the ceiling. “Well, that was brisk,” said John Greenglass.
“Here’s a record album you can have. Peter Paul and Polly or something like that.”
“No thanks,” said John. “I prefer good ole Johnny Cash.”
“I’m more a Nina Simone fellow,” said Sam, “or Sam Cooke. Anyway, it’s all wrapped up for you, it’s a present from that white girl.”
“I’m a white girl.”
“You know what I mean,” said Sam. “She extra white.”
The record album had its uses; it could be a tray for carrying the food upstairs for Hans. “So long, fellows.”
“You’re in a really good mood today,” called Sam. “Better hang that mistletoe quick so I can steal a kiss and cheer you up some.”
17
She brought the breakfast into her bedroom. Light was slanting in across the FDR Drive and across Queens, light from way out over the cold green Atlantic. On the faded wallpaper on the far side of Laura’s room it cast a mottled overlay because those windows it passed through sure could use a washing.
The light skipped over the bed. In sedate shadow Hans, in Nonno’s robe, lay on his stomach. His wing was retracted, covering part of his back and the top of his legs, like a huge fan. His face was turned toward the door that Laura had entered. His arm lay on the bed beside him. His eyes were closed and gummy, as if he’d been crying in his sleep.
Laura set down the record album–breakfast tray. She pulled from the corner a small wicker chair afflicted with a lazy leg—you had to sit in it with care or it could give out. Here she perched, just out of the light, and kept a sort of morning vigil. The light inched along. Soon enough the shaft of morning fell upon his hand. Th
e hand—his only hand—was lovely to look at. Clean now, it lay beside him, turned open to the ceiling, and its thumb curled into the palm. A strong hand—the pump of flesh at the base of the thumb was rounded like a bulb of fennel. The top of the hand had roughly the same articulation as his behind, which now that he was asleep Laura could dare to acknowledge she had seen. She had seen a naked young man, at least from the back. His caboose, his culo. She could tell under the drape of Nonno’s robe what was there and what it looked like, and how it resembled the open, waiting hand. This realization was calming and shocking at once.
The hand was pink; she wanted to rest something in it. A seashell. A strawberry. An owl feather. Her lips—to sink her lips there and let him cup a kiss from her without knowing it.
She was becoming demented. She couldn’t sit here and gawk all day. It was probably against the law, even in the privacy of her grandparents’ home. In any case it was, as Nonna straight from deportment class might say, unseemly.
“Are you awake?” she asked. She could use a normal voice now; the repair guys were two flights down and banging away at something with hammers, and everyone else in the house was gone except Garibaldi, whom she had again closed in the kitchen. “Shouldn’t you wake up and eat something?”
He stirred, the slightest of movements, a dawn wind in the sawgrass at the Jersey shore. His eyes opened. She waited for him to smile but he did not smile.
“Are you awake?” she said again, inching the chair forward. It buckled and sent her on her knees. He changed the angle of his wing and rolled on his side, and used his right arm to push himself to a sitting position. He rubbed his eyes with his fist. It must be hard to rub your left eye with your right fist.
“I brought you something to eat,” she said, feeling servile, on her knees and all that. She sat back on her heels as if she’d intended to kneel, thank you very much, like a Japanese maiden in some kind of tea ceremony.
“This is nothing to eat,” he said, looking at it and looking away. “Affald.” She felt obscurely affronted by his tone but kept on.
A Wild Winter Swan Page 9