Earthquake I.D. (32 page)

Barbara was trying to see past his sweet-faced Irish blarney. But the Jaybird beside her knew the way she was leaning. The husband heaved a sigh, okay okay, and asked if the boys had a figure, “ballpark,” for what this stuff would cost.

“I know this,” Chris said. “With the situation we've got here, the PX discounts, we can forget about the sticker price.”

“Figure back in New York,” JJ said, “the best deal on the street. Then take off another, hmm, twenty percent.”

Jay couldn't be sure what Roebuck would be willing to do for him. There were a lot of Americans over here…

“Hey,” JJ said. “Aren't we still Americans?”

“Pop,” Chris said. “Haven't you heard what I've been saying? This project, it's something for any American. We all want to return to home ground.”

Barbara used to be the one pulling the strings around here. Straightening the front of her dress, she suggested that the boys might not need so much high-tech equipment. Didn't Chris keep saying this was all a myth? Maybe he would be better off trying to write a novel.…

The younger boy was shaking his head. Had Mom even been listening? What good would it do to write a novel? “In the first place, everybody knows how to write a novel by like, age ten. JJ and me, we need to learn something. Like, to
get
somewhere.”

“Word,” said John Junior.

And in the second place, the younger brother went on, their project involved real outreach; “it's big, Mom.” It wasn't about one person sitting alone writing, and then one other person sitting alone reading.

Again the mother heard the nick of authentic ambition, in the boy. She figured JJ had something similar working at his nervous system, the rough grain of desire for a greater impact from his “on-location footage,” a greater reward than sneaking another kiss or two. Barbara shared a different sort of look with Jay, the okay-look. The husband was perhaps the lone remaining family member who still would wait for her approval. And even after as the Jaybird turned back to the boys, admitting for starters that he'd been thinking they could use a laptop, Barb sat thinking it over.

“One day at a time,” Jay was saying. “This is on a provisional basis.”

The boys weren't about to quibble. Looking very young all of a sudden, they erupted in a loud high-five. With that the mother sat up formally and made another stipulation. Barbara insisted that, on the days when Paul joined them on the shoots, Dora and Syl would have to go along too.

“Uhh,” John Junior said.

“You said this was about everybody taking part,” Barbara said.

What else can a mother do, when her children go through the change? What option did she have except another touch of underhandedness, using the boys' new freedom against them? While her seventeen-year-old had been developing additional clout around the home, he must've also been brought up short by the dawning sense of what he owed his brothers and sisters. Dawning complication and guilt—Barbara knew all about it. And these days, if the younger sibs were around, the oldest would rein in whatever else he might be up to. If the sibs were on hand (plus some of the new security team), and if the police too cruised the shoot (the cops would be given the boys' schedule), that should keep any clandestine make out sessions from going too far (and also put the kibosh on any other illegal activity).

All this had come to mind in the time it took the boys to raise their spread hands and slap them together. Anyway, what else could Barbara do?

Also she handled the call to Roebuck. If the mother was still working the angles, still speaking in codes, she might as well use them on an Alpha. With no more than a well-placed silence or two, the next morning she scored a laptop of the coming generation. Chris and JJ got fifty-hour batteries, beefed-up wireless reach, and well-nigh bottomless storage, plus a couple of scan-disk sticks as a throw-in. The software came straight out of Industrial Light & Magic. On top of that, the boys had the stuff in their hands by lunchtime. It arrived in a fortified Hummer, maybe one of Kahlberg's old vehicles, and the brothers had the driver wait in the piazza while they whipped through their installations.

Naturally Barbara tried talking to her priest. A couple of days later, in the kitchen with the old man, she had to ask: “Is that all this is? You know what I'm saying?”

Cesare met her look, something he hadn't done much since he'd arrived.

“Think about it, Father. Cesare. This family goes through six time zones, three miracles, three thousand years of history, and one walloping, super-size self-delusion. That's the short list, you know? But then, what's the big diff? I lose a little and the kids gain a little. Is that all this is, the same as would've happened anyway?”

The priest was barely with it. He made a faltering mention of things she couldn't have expected to happen, like living with twenty-four hour security.

“But even that—today when the boys went out, all they had was the driver.”

“Well, one can see the logic in that. There's little threat of kidnap.”

“So it's just like I'm saying. We might as well be back in Bridgeport.”

His crumpled eyelids drooped again, and he glanced away again, looking out the kitchen door. The man might've been some fleshy-faced animal, sniffing round an unfamiliar space. Between them she had out the garlic and onion, the cans of crushed tomatoes and tomato paste.

“I was thinking, signora.” Now he was addressing the crimson show-biz lettering across the larger can. “About your boy's idea for his film, don't you know. I was thinking about the wanderer's return, to the—the home ground.”

Barbara began with the garlic. If the old man wasn't going to pay attention, she didn't want to be working on the onion and maybe breaking into tears.

“What your boy seems to be up to, it strikes me as peculiarly Italian. Italian-American, I would say. The very idea of ‘home ground,' don't you know, of keeping the old country close. As if a person needed to take communion at the ancestors' table.”

“Cesare.” Barbara left off peeling the first clove. “Did you bring the handout for this lecture?”

“I do realize, it's irresponsible to generalize.” The way that beak of his shifted directions, the priest looked like he was trying to screen out the makings for the sauce, to catch a subtler scent. “But I must say, I've seen it a good deal of this by now. Seen my share of the families, asking how they might find where
nonna
was born. Or they tiptoe into the rectory and request all the birth records between 1914 and 1921.”

“Huh. Do you remember what happened when I had a chance to visit where my mother came from?”

“It's got me thinking, don't you know. Do immigrants from the Punjab need this sort of thing? Some
nan
out of the old ovens? Or let us say some transplanted Dubliner, some man now happily producing memorial videos for a mortuary in Texas…”

Barbara slapped down the knife. “Memorial videos? A mortuary?”

The old man's chin dropped into his robe, and he crossed his legs the other way. He offered a mumbling apology and a scrap of justification: only thinking of the boys. Didn't want the boys to waste time reinventing the wheel.

“Father, Cesare. So what if they are? So what if Chris and John Junior are out there doing the same thing as everyone else?” Barb got her hands back on the garlic. “It's still new to them, isn't it? Everyone they run into, everyone who's just like them, they've still got something to teach the boys.

“Listen,” she went on, “Chris and JJ showed us rushes last night. They actually used that word, ‘rushes.'”

At a noise outside the apartment, on the stairway landing, the priest put his back to her. The walk from the church, Barbara saw, had soaked him through the robe.

“Not that they showed us anything,” Barb went on. “They were out all day and all they showed us was five minutes. Another lecture, Chris at the Sibyl's Cave. Now, what do you think, Cesare? You think, it's time Jay and me asked a direct question?”

The noise in the hall had disappeared. Cesare swung round again, slumping, eyes on the floor. If he was so unhappy here, Barb thought, she could easily have made the trip to the church. These days she could climb the Vomero stairs without risk, taking along the guard assigned to her. And Barbara's man was the least impressive on the crew. He was the youngest, with curls that hung in his eyes. He liked to read a comic books, her bodyguard, and he liked to pile on the gelato. But why not let the boy eat? Anyone could see that
Mama Santa
was no longer at risk. So what if some underfed
clandestino
trailed her a while, seeking a long-distance blessing? So what if some white churchgoer held up a crucifix? Barbara took care of them with a nod and a word. Even Maddalena had backed off, lately. The morning before last, Barbara had allowed the girl ten minutes with the family, a Q-&-A down on the stoop. The priest had shown up that day too, and the pretty young media climber had also caught Barb and Cesare bent together over the rosary. Good TV, that prayer—Barb and Cesare were getting wider play than Barb and the interviewer. Latest word on Maddalena was that she'd been offered a position on a national digest.

All around her, people were going through changes. But here in Barbara's kitchen, this afternoon, she was getting nowhere even with her priest. Likewise the old man looked as if nothing short of another earthquake could move him.

Once more the mother banged on the table. “She isn't here,” she said.

That brought his eyes up.

“Aurora. She thought today she'd help JJ and Chris.”

Apparently the Jesuits hadn't taught him how to handle getting caught. The priest blushed with such heat that for a moment he might've been a stranger, a blistered stranger, here at her table. But then Barb had never known him, had she? She'd been clueless, hadn't she, when it came to his cranky old heart? She'd completely misread the stillness that had fallen over the man during his first meetings with Aurora.

She didn't understand his first words either, some bitter dialect. Then: “Oh, my.” The priest appeared to test his joints, his legs toggling around beneath the robe. “There's, there's a cliché, don't you know,” he stammered. ‘“No fool like an old fool.'”

She went to the fridge, yanking the handle and the drawer, pulling out a bell pepper. “Father—Mother of God! Of all the women in the world.”

“I, I realize how you feel about her, signora. What am I to say?”

A good big bell pepper, she could use the chopping.

“What would you like, Mrs. Lulucita? Shall we put an end to our talks?”

“Oh sure.” She couldn't sit yet. “That's just what I need, more sneaking around.”

The man's wrinkles multiplied around an uncertain squint.

“If I say you can't visit”—Barb pointed at him with the pepper—“then I'll have two pairs of lovebirds sneaking around.”

Cesare didn't quite nod.

“Do you know what that's
like
, Cesare? Do you know what it's like, living with
doubletalk?
If I say you can't visit, I'll never be able to think straight again. If it's not JJ and Romy sending signals, it'll be you and Aurora.”

The old man plucked at his sweat-stuck shirt, and the gesture unexpectedly softened her. With that Barbara could see how he lonely he'd gotten, caught between a comfortable parish and radical dreaming. For years and years, his own heavy-knuckled hand must've been the only touch he'd known.

“Plus,” she said more evenly, “I won't even have a priest to tell about it.”

“Perhaps then we should do as the Romans do.” He too was regaining control. “We should say
Dio boia
, ‘hangman God,' don't you know. An apt blasphemy.”

She sat and attacked the garlic again.

“Apt,” he went on, “when everyone's got their neck in a—”

“Cesare, don't. Don't give me that Irish wit, pseudo Irish, can you imagine how it sounds? Your lying pretend Irish? I mean, I
am
trying to understand. I'm trying to tell myself, a priest is as human as the rest of us. That's sort of the point, isn't it?”

“The point, oh my. The point.”

“Please.” Her wrist was burning; she set down the knife. “Cesare.”

“Signora Lulucita, it's high time we stopped this charade. You call me your chosen priest, as if I were some boy at a dance.”

“Can I help you here, Father? Can I try? Aurora, you know, she didn't—”

“Fa-ther, oh my. Really, signora, this has to stop. You're more than bright enough to have realized, long since, just what a miserable excuse for a proper Catholic father I've become.”

Barbara's turn to pluck at her clothes. Whatever she hoped to accomplish by staying in town, she'd counted on her priest to help. When the guard downstairs had announced the man's arrival, she'd taken a moment with her hair and exchanged her frayed slippers for her best flats. Jesuit, Dominican, whatever, he still carried a communion kit. He still conducted the Mass. The old man even held a weekly service for the head cases, down at DiPio's clinic.

“Cesare,” she tried, “you said yourself, it's Christ who calls you.”

“But what if I no longer hear him, signora? What if my faith has become, as you say, mere lying and wit? I daresay you could see the truth the moment we met.”

The garlic had been reduced to crumbs, and the onion and pepper looked overwhelming, far too much to start on.

“Signora, my faith—it's dwindled to nothing. A heap of offal.”

Barbara shook her head. “Cesare, please. Can you understand, Aurora's not worth it? You know how many men have fallen for the merry widow?”

The man flushed again. This time the red-and-white contrast, cheeks and hair, suggested one of the local cameos.