All This Talk of Love (19 page)

Prima goes downstairs and finds Maddalena at her worktable, wrapping a present.
Th
e basement smells of apples and vinegar and grease. “I thought of something else for your father last minute,” she says. “It’s a joke. Don’t ask me what it is because I won’t tell you.”

Like the dorm room she never had, Maddalena’s basement lair is decorated with what defines her: yardsticks and pincushions, bolts of fabric stacked in neat rows, dozens of wire hangers hanging from a clothesline, and gift boxes and ribbons and wrapping paper saved from decades of Christmases.
Th
ere’s a second oven, an older one, so they can keep the kitchen oven gleaming clean. For company she has a television with a senior-size remote, and a radio–CD player set to a dance music station. Prima’s ancient dorm fridge hums emptily in the corner by the washer and dryer and the tub in which a pair of Antonio’s sauce-splattered pants seem always to be soaking. Framed photos line the shelf above the worktable, where Prima, perpetually thin and twenty-two, kisses Tom at the altar of St. Anthony’s; where Frankie stands in his white tux at his high school graduation; where Tony goofily smiles through the huge gap in his two front teeth. Under the padded worktable are school notebooks and report cards, uniforms, and art projects that Maddalena can pull out at any time, show Prima, and say, “You made this for me, you see? I keep everything.”

Prima rarely ventures down here. It’s filled with too many memories of Tony, of the two of them playing 45s while their mother sewed or making up plays in their own secret hideout behind the old mattresses. But tonight she’s on the lookout for signs, and they would be here if they were anywhere. Yet nothing seems to be out of place. “
Th
ese are ready?” she asks, lifting the tinfoil from the various covered dishes on the stove top (burners off, good) and finding peas and onions, roasted peppers, apple and cauliflower
frittelli
,
and potatoes in oil, vinegar, and parsley. She tastes each one, and each is perfect, prepared the same way it’s been prepared for as long as she can remember. “You’ve still got it,” she says.

“I’m not a cook,” says Maddalena. “I was lucky your father didn’t need one. But I can make a few things.”

For the rest of the night, Prima studies her. Serving the food, washing the dishes between courses, playing
tombola,
as each gift is unwrapped. Maddalena remembers each gift she’s given, and why. She keeps track of her numbers on her little
tombola
card, wins two rounds.
Th
e dishes she washes sparkle in the light.

At Midnight Mass, Maddalena recites every word of the Our Father. Still, all throughout the service, Prima can’t stop thinking about the spoiled cream, sitting there where it shouldn’t belong, its heaviness and stench. She’s read the articles, knows the signs to watch out for. She’s been watching for a while now, noting each of her mother’s “spells,” each time she forgets a name, bracing herself for the day she forgets her own. Her father has assured her that her doctors know about it, that they’ve done scans and blood tests and are not worried, it’s just part of getting old, but Prima doesn’t believe him. It’s Grasso tradition to keep bad news secret, to hide your trouble until you have no choice but to admit it, and Prima is as much a Grasso as anyone.

Eventually she’ll have to talk to Frankie. It’s the reason for Italy that she’s been holding back, but she may not be able to hold it back much longer. Forget what she told Frankie and Maddalena in the car in the mall parking lot. Forget what Nadine said about pleasing others.
Th
e kids know nothing about any plans to switch tickets, to substitute Paris for their homeland. As far as the Buckley boys are concerned, they will join the Grassos on the flight to Italy in August. It’s a blessing that they’re smart enough not to talk about any of this in front of Maddalena.

Yes, Prima wants her boys to see their ancestral village with their grandparents; yes, she and Tom could use a real vacation, a second honeymoon, with good food and wine and fresh mountain air and a midlife kick-start; yes, she wants to give her father the gift he’s been dreaming of since the day his brother died; but what she wants most of all is for her mother to complete the circle of her life while she’s still able. To have no regrets. To go back to the place in the world where she was happiest. And the realest reason of all? Prima believes that the return to such a place of pure happiness has the power—a magic kind of power—to heal her.

Frankie may talk to his mother every night, but he’s not around enough to see all that Prima sees. He doesn’t look in credenzas or notice dirty wineglasses; if he did, he’d never leave this little house. But Prima fears she won’t be able to protect Frankie much longer. She needs his help. After she finds the courage to tell him what she thinks she knows, he will take her side for sure.

“You really believe this hocus-pocus?” she hears Frankie whisper to Ryan after they’ve both received Communion.

Quickly, discreetly, Prima covers her ears. She doesn’t want to know what her son does and doesn’t believe.
Th
at’s a different fight. She is a person of faith, all sorts of faith, and if she has to have enough for the entire Buckley-Grasso clan, so be it.

TH
E HOUSE IS
finally quiet. Antonio, in his chair, in this room of unwrapped presents and empty, tossed-aside envelopes, watches Midnight Mass at the Vatican on TV.
Th
e sound’s on Mute because the picture is all that matters. Get the camera off the pope, he thinks. Show the people, show
the piazza,
and, if you can, swing the lens over the mountains forty miles to Santa Cecilia buried in snow. Show me my old house, the chestnut trees, the frozen spring.

But the picture doesn’t change.
Th
e pope mumbles on.

From the window he can see St. Mary’s, the church that holds his family. Most of his family. Not Tony. Not Mario. Someone is always missing.
Th
e parking lot is packed with the cars of hypocrites. He’s not one of them. When he needs God, he turns over in his bed and puts his arm around his wife and says, “
Tesoro, tesoro.
”

He doesn’t need a new red sweater or a Polo wallet or a gift certificate for a haircut at some overpriced salon. He hates to see his kids and his wife spend money on
stupidaggini.
He feels every dollar they waste on him, on anything, as an insult. You want to show me you love me?
Th
en save your money. Show me respect. Finish your school. Take me to Santa Cecilia, where I belong. I can count on one hand the years we have left together.

He is there now in his village, a boy again, in his heavy coat, the grown-ups around him with candles in their cupped hands, the church cold as a crypt.
Th
ere is the ceramic baby Jesus at the altar to kiss and adore—or maybe it’s plastic? Did they have plastic back then? When did plastic start?
Th
e years are a jumble. Antonio was a boy of seven and Maddalena a baby. He remembers the day her parents announced her.
Th
ey sat her on the counter of the grocery, and customers came to welcome her to the world. Antonio looked up at her wiggling toes, at her
chiacchierone
sisters pinching her cheeks.
Th
e Piccinellis lived down the street from his family.
Th
ey owned that big store, and the Grassos owned a
pezzetto
of land, a three-room house, and a few chickens.
Th
e baby Maddalena Piccinelli was pure white, no dirt under her fingernails, no marks on her skin. She glowed in the sunlight of the grocery window. Antonio may have invented all this—the light, the baby on the counter—but it’s as real as the fire crackling beside him on this Christmas Eve seventy-two years later. He reaches up to tickle Maddalena’s toes. His father is not there to slap his hand away. His father has been gone forty years.

How strange to be at the end of life so soon. Seventy-two years from one midnight to another.
Th
e boy at the counter looking up is now the old man in the chair looking back. So what if he feels sorry for himself. He’s not allowed? He’s never been a brave person. He’s not one of those immigrants to write a book about, the ones who came to America with empty pockets. He had a mother and father to lead him by the hand on and off the ship, find him his first job, give him a house with a finished basement and a yard with a grape arbor; he had friends, cars, girls, a brother to put up half the money for a restaurant, a faithful wife. An ordinary life split between two worlds. Soon, when he’s gone, a few of those people over at St. Mary’s will cry, but only for a little while.
Th
eir lives are full enough without him.
Th
e customers will still come to the Al Di Là for their calamari and stuffed shells.
Th
ey’ll sit waiting for their tables under the framed black-and-white photo of Antonio and Mario with their arms around each other, and if they notice the photo at all, they’ll say, maybe, Aww.

Strange to be a sad old man in an easy chair, the years settling on him like dust, and yet not strange at all. He and his bocce friends at the Vespucci Club talk of nothing but the years. Moments ago, they say, I was a man of twenty-five leaning over the railing of a ship, watching Italy sink into the ocean.
Th
eir kids, like Antonio’s, like all kids, appeared one day like magic, then disappeared. Why did nobody warn them of the grief of fatherhood: not that your kids grow up and leave you, in every possible way, but that they’re strangers from the start.
Th
ey don’t stand still long enough, they let you get only so close, and you work too many hours, and they tell their friends their secrets, and they love you, but with their souls only, the way they love their country or God.
Th
eir hearts belong to other people.

He is the only person alive who knew the secret of
Tony’s heart. He keeps it closer than any he’s ever known. It’s like a heavy stone in his pocket, one he takes out day after day, turns over, rubs with his thumb, as if it’s beautiful and precious, when—he almost has to remind himself—it was the one bit of ugliness in Tony, and it proved powerful enough to kill him. It might have killed him the other way if he’d lived. And yet lately, Antonio wonders if he might one day have made peace with the truth about his son, as his own flesh and blood, the way other fathers have done. (He watches the news; he’s paid attention. It’s not impossible to imagine.) But Tony didn’t give him that chance.

He can’t forgive him for that.

His family safely at church, Antonio climbs the stairs to Tony’s room.
Th
e door sticks. Inside, the air is warm, with the heating vents kept open and the drapes always closed. Antonio can’t bear to switch on the lamp.
Th
e hallway light is enough. Stepping into this room is like falling back asleep into the same dream you woke from. He runs his hand along the sailboat wallpaper they were just about to replace with a solid, young-man blue; over the stack of records on the bureau; over the desk with his pens and pencils in their ceramic cup. He falls to his knees, his elbows on the edge of the bed. Antonio Grasso has no faith in God, of course, or he’d be standing now with his family at St. Mary’s, but there’s no one else for him to turn to, afraid as he is to confess to anyone real—DiSilvio, a priest at another parish, a stranger on Union—and so every Christmas Eve at midnight, this is where he can be found.

Th
ey are alone together here, the way believers must feel they are alone with God in their churches. He hears Tony’s voice calling, “Babbo!” as he pushed open the door of the Al Di Là after a day at school. He’d throw his schoolbag in a booth, run to his father, and wrap his arms around his waist. It doesn’t matter that, by fifteen, Tony had found things about the restaurant to complain about and that he pouted in the corner with his guest checks—the boy calling, “Babbo!” and racing toward him was always there.

If Antonio were a believer, he’d pray for Tony’s young soul in the afterlife. But no one’s soul, not even an innocent’s, can be saved. Instead he comes every year to ask for forgiveness. Because it was his own hand on his son’s back that night, pushing him off the bridge. He might as well confess this crime to God, who will never hear him and never forgive him. He doesn’t want forgiveness. He deserves to suffer for the crime of failing his precious child, of not reading the signs right, keeping closer watch, stepping in. No good father would have let the boy disappear and then pay no attention to the words he’d written:
Go to the bridge before it’s too late.
Did Antonio ignore these words on purpose? Did he not believe them? But then again, how can you believe such a thing can come from your son when he’s so full of life, when you think, every time you look at him, You are too alive ever to leave this world?

When Tony got back to the restaurant from his
zia
Ida’s that day, the guest checks were gone from his apron pocket and Dante had been fired.
Th
e boy was no dummy. He knew why Antonio sent Dante away. Tony wrote more poems, both on the guest checks and in a brown notebook he hid behind his dresser, one of the few places Maddalena wouldn’t look in her weekly cleaning. Antonio read every word. And after Tony died, he burned most of the pages, but not all.