Earthquake I.D. (38 page)

As her driver poked through the gathering afternoon traffic, Barbara could extrapolate. She could apply the teenagers' problems to a far older pair, Aurora and Cesare. Barb could practically pick up of the vibrations of Merry Widow and Gloomy Cleric, two rhythms woefully out of synch. Yet she doubted Aurora would prove as smart as her oldest grandson, should she and the priest ever share that first kiss.

Barbara could hear, as well, how Cesare would speak of such differences. The guerilla Jesuit would sound a little like Romy, calling for revolution in the streets, raging about skin color and the socioeconomic. And Barbara knew what she'd say in reply, too. She'd say that Franz Fanon and Karl Marx didn't know JJ and Romy. Fanon and Marx couldn't tear their eyes from their own pet projects, worked to death on their private screens, but if they did, they'd make out the new freedoms available at this cracked and upended moment in history. Border-crossing hooking up, Barbara would say, was the inevitable future. Border-crossing, skin-blurring, bank-account-tangling—all of that was coming on at digital speed, a message texted to the entire phone book, wireless and instantaneous. Plus this was Naples, where it wasn't just the Twenty-first Century of Our Lord, but something like the thirty-first century of multi-culti barter. In this theater of operations, more than in most, the young and hormonal were free to try on any role they felt like. When Barbara's priest started dithering over which lover had the fatter wallet or the kinkier hair, he sounded as if he still thinking Montagues and Capulets.

Now if a person wanted to talk about relationships as business, as politics, the case in point was Silky Kahlberg. The late Lieutenant Major, too, had a place in Barbara's meditations on her way back into the city. According to today's news flash, the White Shadow had preferred his sex man-on-man, and Barb had figured out already that he must've been just the opposite of someone like Whitman. Kahlberg would've preferred the kind of dynamics you found in prison, where every man's forehead was stamped either Boss or Bitch. After all, even when he'd been dealing with Jay, a quintessential Kinsey Zero, the NATO officer had manipulated the situation in order to achieve all the additional clout he could. Therefore whenever the liaison man had found a more ambivalent business partner, he must've gleefully gone for every advantage, private as well as public. He must've run roughshod over the guy.

Now Barbara was into some roughness herself, as the Fiat jostled onto the stones of downtown. They swung around the San Carlo opera house, where the backstage wall used to open onto the Royal Gardens. The singers had performed love songs by Mozart out among the birds and the bees.

Barbara didn't want to think about it. Love songs,
basta
—because she still lacked a strategy, a way to begin, once the family got back to the apartment. All things considered, she'd prefer it if Aurora weren't home. After picking up Jay, it was easy enough to fill him in, though with the driver in mind the wife stripped her explanation down to shorthand. Still, it wasn't difficult to share the information, thanks to the code of the long-married. In words of one syllable, Jay had agreed they needed the meeting, and in the Vomero gelateria there was no sign of Aurora.

Better yet, the kids were behaving themselves. Nobody appeared all sugared up, though Dora and Sylvia had each gotten a free scoop, the usual treat for the “American dolls.” So Jay and the boys went into the palazzo before Barb and the girls, best to leave any gelato mess out on the stoop, and the mother could use a stretch anyway. In the elevator Barbara laid her hands on her girls' heads, with a silent prayer for help.

But as soon as she reached her landing, even before the cage clanked open, Chris showed her worse trouble.

His look showed something more childish than could be blamed on his nerd's glasses, and he took the girls' hands. He might've said that his sisters should wait with him outside the apartment, or Barb might've inferred it, picking up yet another code, reading it first in his gaze and posture and then in the spasmodic moaning and gulping that came from the apartment. The mother got the same message from the wide middle-aged back of her husband, in the doorway.

Keep the little ones away
, was the message. Keep Dora and Syl from seeing Mama's priest stretched out naked and fighting a heart attack.

Cesare lay on the couch, his arms and legs splayed up along the wall and down onto the floor, splayed and flailing, as if trying with all four limbs to grab some fat and invisible balloon lifting away from his midsection. Never mind if he exposed his distended cock and iron-gray pubic hair. Never mind if he fell off the couch, though Aurora held him in place, kneeling with one kimono-clad arm across his chest. Nothing mattered except to get hold of that escaping balloon, that ghost of a parade blimp, and the skinny old man pawed after the swollen impalpable thing even with the foot that was still in its black nylon sock. Indeed his drowning reach, his cold feet, all appeared more human than his face: a mottle of brick and chalk, with wrinkles like seismic fissures.

Here was another first morning in midtown, a cityscape so vivid as to suggest that her husband had melted out of Barbara's way. Here again she needed to sort out the hard surfaces on which she'd stubbed her bones earlier from those against which she was banging for the first time. Banging, to see her priest in cardiac arrest and her mother-in-law beside him, an old couple discovered in the act—and yet Barbara also thought of the Latin, the dead language:
in flagrante delicto
. Banging and up-to-the-minute, the undone belt on Aurora's kimono, the small nipples a brighter pink than Barb's own—and yet what could be more basic, more timeless, than nakedness? What language was simpler than the Braille of the erogenous zones? Barbara could see that she sent the priest into worse convulsions, his eyes leaking tears and his gasps growing louder. His arms and legs trembled, all but losing hold of whatever it was they clung to, his nails scratching the wall and floor. But she couldn't move, neither to spare Cesare the sight of her nor to help John Junior, on the phone in the corner, gabbling away like a frightened tourist:
Aiuto
!
Aiuto
! Barb couldn't budge from between old hurts and new, like what she'd seen on Whitman's computer, a boy's heart and nerves tucked into a file. Only Paul could defeat the paralysis, getting round his mom, his outstretched hands electric. Only Paul could keep on surprising them, laying one of his hands across the priest's spasmodic chest, above the grandmother's, while with the other going to the cracked wall of a face, to the mouth already open around a wordless but fluttering language-muscle…

“What kind of a woman are you?”

“Barbara, I apologize again. I'm so sorry you had to see this. But you must realize, you absolutely must, that Chezzo and I would never have—”

“Chezzo? What kind of a woman
are
you?”

“Oh, here we go.”

“Here we go? Are you saying, this is some kind of
dance?”

“A dance indeed. Patently a dance. We've all known from Day One that it was only a matter of time before you cleared the floor and called me out for the big finale.”

“The finale? Aurora, a finale would be the answer to my prayers. Don't you know how you stick in my craw? Can't you imagine how many times I've wanted to tell you off once and for all?”

Aurora heaved a showy sigh, a movement that called attention to how small she was. Barefoot, in a flimsy kimono, the old playgirl barely came to Barbara's chin. She wouldn't get into a staring contest either. Instead the grandmother looked to Cesare, still flat on the sofa. One of the boys had covered the priest with a summer bedspread. Light cotton, powder blue, the blanket set off the man's long face, its flush of color showing the good that Paul had done.

“That's right,” Barbara said, “look at the poor guy. And he's only the latest victim. He's practically got holes in his neck.”

“Barb,” Jay said.

The in-law's painted face seemed smaller, doll-like. Her hair might've been a kid's, rumpled and glossy, jittering under the ceiling fan. She must've turned the thing on to help her and Cesare get comfortable.

“This isn't the time,” the husband said.

“Oh, Jay. Are you saying there is a good time? There's some better time for our kids, for instance? The father was
dying
, here, till Paul stepped in! So Jaybird, tell me. When's a good time for them to at last understand what a, what a
monster
they've got living in their own—”

“Barbara, excuse me. If I may interrupt.” Aurora finger-combed one of her unruly patches of hair. “Am I correct in assuming that you had some reason for rushing everyone home like this?”

“Mother of God.” Barb suffered the whipsaw too, jam and recoil across the ribcage. “You've got no respect, no—no
limits
. Now you want to tell me how I should run my family?”

“Owl, hey. Think about it.”

“Your family, precisely. Would one be correct in assuming that it was some pressing new crisis for the family, that had you so suddenly rushing home?”

“Mom, you too. Easy.”

Barb looked to her husband, but he was checking down the hallway—the older boys and the twins had scurried off into the girls' room. When the Jaybird swung round again, he glowered at his mother. “Look at you. Hardly any bigger than Paul, here. Plus, what, seventy-five years old, now? Hey. It's lucky we didn't find you and the father both having heart attacks.”

“Oh, John.” The grandmother fingered her kimono together at the throat, drawing in her bantam frame. “Really now, do I seem so frail?”

“You,” Barbara began, “you're seventy-five years old. You're a
mother
!”

“Easy there, Owl Girl. Think about it.”

Barbara dropped her head and tugged at an armpit. She hadn't been wrenched around so badly since the museum.

“John has a point, Barbara. Think about the things I've learned, living under your roof these last ten days or so.”

What the mother thought of, seeing Aurora square her flinty shoulders, was of Roebuck and all the Alpha Moms before her.

“I mean to say, the children have been talking to me. They've told me a thing or two, you know. For that matter, so has Cesare here.”

“Him? Cesare?” The words came out quietly, surprising her. “What kind of a woman are you, getting a priest to talk?”

“Oh, here we go—you're calling me a witch. It was inevitable, I suppose.”

“When I visited with the father, it was a sacrament.”

“I suppose I'm that witch Ulysses had the problem with. The woman who turned men into swine.” Her bright mouth crooked up smartly. “You know, Barbara, whenever I was lucky enough to enjoy a private moment with my Chezzo, the last thing I was interested in talking about was you and your secrets.”

Barbara tried to get her bearings. The space around her might still have been that first morning downtown. She might've come across Cesare in the niche of a catacomb, the tunnels
of Napoli Sotterraneo
, The only person who'd taken a chair, normal living-room activity, was the miraculous eleven-year-old. Meantime the grandmother was pressing her point, arguing that if she'd wanted “to start playing the bull in the china shop, around here, I could've found a far less humiliating way than this.” Today, the last thing Aurora and the fallen priest had expected was to have the rest of the family burst in on them.

“On the contrary, we had a more than reasonable expectation of privacy. And do you mean to tell me that you and Jay have never made love on a couch?”

Barb didn't trust herself to respond.

“Really, I've been the soul of discretion, around here. It's hardly as if I've gone looking for dirt about you and Jay. It's hardly as if, in order to learn that you two have been squabbling, I needed to bewitch a priest.”

Behind Barbara, from the room down the hall, came the small sounds of sneakers and toys. “Aurora,” she asked, “what do you know about it?” She kept her voice under control. “What goes on in a family, what commitment even means, what do you know? Twenty years ago I took a vow in front of God—”

“Hey,” Jay said. “Both of you. Down off the high horse.”

“Precisely, John. How many apologies does your wife require? Why won't she admit the least responsibility? Rushing everyone home without so much as a phone call.”

“Mother of God! You monster, weren't you just saying you don't want some kind of big, apocalyptic dance?”

“All I've ever said to you, Barbara, is stop pretending you're a saint. Telling me you stood up in front of God, now really. The truth is, you're blundering around having emotions like the rest of us.”

“I'm—I'm a wife and a mother. I took a vow.”

“And I was there, in case you've forgotten. Then more recently I was out on Capri, and even my carriage-driver was talking about trouble between you and my son.”

At some point the grandmother had slipped on pants. Balloony Arabian velveteen, she'd pulled them on while Paul was still over Cesare, a hand at each of the old man's breaking points. In those same swarming moments—while Barb had stood dumbstruck, unable to manage more than a silent prayer for her priest—Chris and JJ had hustled the twins down the hall to their room. Jay had done what he could, using his upper body as a screen. As near as Mama could tell, the girls hadn't seen anything.

But even now with Cesare breathing normally under his blanket, with the girls out of harm's way and Mr. Paul parked in a chair, she had so much turning over within her that she might still have been praying. Turning over like the beads on a rosary. She grabbed the mother-in-law by the lapels.

“What kind of a woman
are
you?”