Dreaming August (13 page)

She gasped. “How did you…Tim.”

“Of course, Tim. He called and asked if you were all right. Thank goodness I answered and not Ma.”

The walls she built around her secret were crumbling, and with them went the ones she had unwittingly erected around her life. Benny pressed her hands to her cheeks.

“You won’t tell, will you?”

“It’s not for me to tell anyone anything,” Peter answered. “Just don’t be afraid to come to me, okay?”

Benny nodded. She let her hands fall. “When did you grow up, huh?”

“I’m not quite there yet.” He said. “I love you, Ben. I can’t stand seeing you cry.”

“I’m kind of tired of crying myself.”

They sat together in silence. Peter’s love and concern prickled like clicks of static electricity flicking up and down her arms. When he was a baby, and she, nearly a teen, he had been her favorite plaything. Tim had no use for the squalling, often stinky bundle of baby boy, but Benny fell completely in love. Peter was her shadow, one she never tired of trailing alongside her. On the day she married Henny, he was twelve and completely enthralled by his brother-in-law. When Henny died, Peter had been all of twenty and still enthralled with the brother-in-law suddenly gone from his life.

“Oh.” She sniffled. “Peter, I’m sorry.”

“For?”

“Being so selfish. Grief does that, I guess. It narrows your vision down to a little pinprick that only lets you focus on yourself. But you lost him too. We all did.”

“Yeah. You know what the worst part is, though?”

She shook her head.

“Seeing your light go out, Ben. You were always, I don’t know, a free spirit. Always smiling. Laughing. Now, all you do is cry.”

“I know.” Benny rested a hand to her belly. The instant joy edged out the lingering sorrow. They were only flickers, but happiness was trying hard to flare back to life. “But things are changing, I think. I’ve got a better reason to stop letting grief being my whole world.”

Peter rested his hand atop hers. “You are reason enough.”

Her nose tickled. Her eyes stung. But Benny smiled a watery smile. Blowing her nose, she nudged him with her knee. “So? What’s going on with Charlotte McCallan?”

Groaning, Peter flopped back into the couch. “We’re just friends.”

“You were flirting with her.”

“I flirt with everyone.”

“No interest, then? She’s awfully pretty, and smart, and fun to be around.”

“She also talks. A lot.”

“True. You really going down to Cape May?”

“She gave me the cookies.” He laughed. “It’ll be fun. I have to get out of this town every once in a while.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t bolted yet. I always thought you’d be the one to fly, not Tim.”

“I did too.”

“So why haven’t you—”

“Got any names picked out yet?”

They didn’t speak quite at the same time. Benny was close to certain he’d cut her off. She let it go. Reluctantly. “Until today, I thought Cricket was a boy.”

“Cricket?”

“That’s what I’ve been calling her since I saw her jumping around on the screen. I have no idea what to name her.”

“Cricket is kind of cute.”

“If you’re a celebrity who smokes a little too much weed, sure.” She grimaced. “You have any other ideas?”

“Clarice?”

“After Ma?” Benny crinkled her nose. “No offense, but I’ll pass. She’s going to smother this baby girl enough as it is. Last thing I need is Ma making them matching outfits or something.”

“Well, you’ll think of something.” He sat forward, propping himself with an elbow. “And maybe Dan will have an idea or two of his own.”

“Let’s not go back that way again, okay?”

“Okay.” He pushed out of the couch and, simple as that, the subject dropped. “You want dinner? Ma put a plate aside for you.”

“What did she make?”

“Chicken cutlets, a salad and corn on the cob. And biscuits.”

“Hers?”

“Yup.”

“Yum. Sounds like I want dinner.”

Peter bent and kissed her cheek. Benny closed her eyes and let the joy of talking to him bloom. How long had it been since she allowed these little bursts of joy? She’d felt it, certainly, but curtailed it as quickly as it came. Like Valentine’s Day, when she woke to the stars and the cold and Dan’s body keeping her warm as a gooey marshmallow, when the joy burst so bright she would weep, only to remember Henny and grief and leave Dan where he slept.

Stop, Benny. Now.

“I’ll be down in a few.” She rose from the couch, adjusting the jeans riding up on her. She had to go shopping, buy some hippie-dresses she’d be more comfortable in. Dresses that would let her hide just a little longer. “I’m going to wash up a bit.”

In the bathroom, splashing water on her face, Benny looked closely at her face in the mirror. She looked the same as she did ten years ago, in her estimation. Her skin was still soft, unlined, and unblemished. She had never believed herself extraordinarily pretty, but cute was a word she could live with.

She pressed a towel to her face and rubbed it a little too roughly. Dan’s image appeared in the sparkles behind her eyes. He was handing her the lily from his garden.

Benny’s round, dimpled cheeks were rosy when she let the towel fall. She ran a comb through her hair, pinned back the bangs growing out. The aroma, conjured or real, of her mother’s chicken cutlets made her belly rumble. Sticking the ultrasound picture to the fridge, she ignored the little voice telling her not to be so bold. She trotted down to her parents’ place. After dinner, she was going to make Clarice Grady a cup of tea. They would sit out on the swing, sipping and chatting, exactly like they used to.

Sing For Her An Elfin Mass

“Why so quiet, August?”

“I haven’t much to say.”

“That’s a new one. For you.”

“Be nice to me, Harriet. I am miserable. I have given Benedetta an impossible task, and only now that I’ve given it to her do I know how hopeless it is. I am doomed to this cemetery for all eternity.”

“There are worst ways to be doomed.”

“True enough. True enough. At least there are visits from Benedetta to look forward to.”

“Until she’s done grieving and doesn’t come here anymore.”

“
Fanabala
, woman, see what you’ve done? I am even more miserable than I was before.”

“Well perk up, y’ gobshite. Here she comes.”

* * * *

The sky was overcast, and the temperature quite cold for late June, even in Bitterly. Benny wished she wore more than a hoodie to work. Tempted as she was to forgo the cemetery and get home early, she drove straight through town and out the other side. Augie would be waiting, she was certain.

Before she put the kickstand down, there he was. The sensation was akin to the concerned clicks of static electricity she had felt from Peter the night prior. Benny kept her eyes carefully averted. “It’s okay, Augie. I’m not looking.”

“
Bene, bene.
It is good to see you, Benedetta.”

“Wow. You came right to the top of the pool, huh?”

Augie laughed, a good sound, and not like skittering leaves. “I am learning how to move faster, yes. And I have been anxious to see you.”

“I have too,” she said. “A strange thing happened last time.”

“Stranger than listening to the tale of a man dead more than thirty years as told by a woman a century in the grave?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Well then, I am curious. But what do you say we walk together, instead of sitting at your husband’s grave or mine?”

“Walk?”

“Use your imagination,
cara mia
. I cannot feel the air or the sunshine, but I can move about and pretend.”

“Then why did you have me chasing a wrapper the other day?”

“I have learned much since I first whispered my name to you,” he said. “Like never doubt Harriet’s word on anything.”

“Such as?”

“Remembering.” His tone sobered. “It used to be I could escape my shame by moving closer to life. I cannot any longer.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing. It probably means you’re getting ready to move on.”

“I had not thought of that.”

Benny started walking, hands behind her back and head bowed. “I guess I fell asleep on you, huh?”

“You must have. Where you went, I could not follow.”

“What do you mean? I was dreaming.”

“Precisely.” Augie asked her, “What did you dream?”

“I dreamed of Henny. He asked me to walk with him, and I didn’t go.”

Augie was silent long enough for Benny to wonder if he’d gotten pulled back to a deeper place, but he said, “A wise choice,
cara mia
. Life without him might be a sadder existence, but it is still life. As far as I know, it is the only one you will get.”

Benny let that settle in. The crumbling walls of her secret were starting to let in light. Something like hope wriggled inside her, like Cricket did. Or maybe they were one in the same.

“Last thing I remember you saying to me,” she said, “was you needed me to help you reach your daughter and beg her forgiveness on your behalf. Oh, and maybe introduce her to your children from your second marriage, if they are still among the living.”

“My daughter, Adriana, was the youngest. She was born in 1945. She must still be alive, no?”

“She’d be...” Benny calculated. “About seventy. It’s very possible. And you have no idea where she’s living?”

“I can tell you where she was when I died. But…”

“But?”

“There was more to my story that I did not get to tell you, Benedetta. More to my shame than simply abandoning my child.”

“Uh-oh.” Benny halted. “Do we need Harriet?”

“Ah, no.” Again his voice sobered. “As I said earlier, I now remember all too well. Have patience,
cara mia
, and I will tell my tale. But let us keep walking, so you do not fall asleep again.”

* * * *

Augie told her about growing up in a small village within the vast Campania region of southern Italy, a happy boy who never dreamed of living anywhere else. Then came the Great War and harder times. He had been a child, but he remembered family and friends leaving their homes to travel across the sea—to America, where the streets were paved with gold. By the time he finally made the trip, he was a man of twenty, a husband and father, unhappy in the arrangement made for him before he took his first steps. When the opportunity to join an uncle overseas came, he took it.

“My wife, Carmen, I was happy to leave. If you could see me now, you would know I give the
maloik’
when I say her name. Nasty woman. But she loved our little Flora. At least, in this, I have no fear.”

“What did you do when you got here?”

“Construction, like many Italians.” He chuckled. “The country was still growing then. I took what work came my way, and sent every spare penny back home. After the Crash, it became harder and harder to send anything home. I grew thin in those days. My uncle and I lived with four other men in a tenement apartment meant for two. It was during this time Carmen decided I was good for nothing and invented my death so she could marry again.”

“That must have hurt.”

“It was a relief,” he said. “My poor little Flora. I abandoned my child and it was a relief to know I would no longer need to send money I did not have. What sort of man does this?”

“But she didn’t know that. She thought you died in America.”

“This does not lessen my guilt.”

Benny suppressed the urge to face him. It was strange, talking to someone without looking at him, seeing his facial expressions, his hand gestures. She imagined them, instead. And him. “Is this the more part?”

“It is.”

“Worse than bigamy and abandoning a child?”

“You make it sound so sordid.”

“Is it?”

“I suppose it is a matter of opinion, of course. But for me? Yes. Perhaps you should sit on the bench, right there.”

“I’m okay walking.”

“It might take a while to tell.”

“You’re stalling.”

Birdsong. Footsteps. Traffic beyond the cemetery.

“Yes. I am. All right, Benedetta. I shall hope you will still help me after I’ve confessed my ultimate shame, for Flora’s sake if not mine. You see, I found my daughter in Brooklyn. It was 1955...”

Augie told Benny of being discovered by an old friend from Italy, while in Yonkers on a job. He had become an accomplished builder by then. Word of mouth among
paesan’
sent him to New York often during the milder months.

“It was inevitable,” Augie said, “being discovered alive and well in America. So many came from the Old Country, especially after the war. They mostly ended up in New York or New Jersey, working in construction of some kind.”

President Roosevelt’s New Deal provided hope as well as work. By the 1950s, Italian immigrants already there a decade or more were well established in the trades. Augie proved to his wife’s pretentious family that a man with an accent wasn’t a lesser being, but a man who could provide and provide well for his family, without their money or influence.

“They did not like me when I swept their daughter off her feet.” Augie chuckled. “They forbid her to see me, then tried to stop our marriage. I was not only foreign, I was a Catholic. A heathen as far as they were concerned. But my Katherine, she was not like them. I could not have loved her if she was. She threatened to run away and never see them again, live in New York with all the miscreants. I did not know what the word meant, but I knew it was something awful, because her mother wept and her father relented. They even gave us property as a wedding gift. We both knew it was so Katherine would stay in Bitterly. It was okay. Neither of us really wanted to leave.”

Augie’s old friend told him of the family left behind in Italy who believed him dead, of his brothers forced to fight in the war. Only one of the three survived and, as far as he knew, still lived in the village in Campania. Carmen—her name accompanied by
maloik’
—also died during the war, the fate of too many women left to starve in the countryside, including Augie’s mother. Flora would have starved as well if the old man Carmen married had not insisted on sending her, at the start of the war, to family he had in America. He, himself, only barely survived. He joined his beloved daughter—never stepdaughter—Flora when the war was over. By then, she had married, a good Italian boy who adored her. The last time his friend saw her, she had two little girls and another baby on the way. And though he had not been to their restaurant, On the Fire, in a while, as far as Augie’s friend knew, they were still in Brooklyn.