Full of Grace (4 page)

I laughed with him, got up to bring the cookie jar back to the kitchen table, and when I sat down again I said, “So he does stem-cell research. Big deal. He’s a Rhodes scholar, for God’s sake.”

“The only Rhodes Big Al cares about are the ones he paved himself, lemme assure you.”

“Yeah, well, Michael says that if we can manage to stay alive until
2050
, we can live to be five thousand years old and in perfect health.”

“Five thousand years? Who wants to live for five thousand years? Would you?”

“I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’m not so sure it will work on people anyway, except that they have some pretty amazing evidence on age reversal with rats.”

“It always starts with the poor lab rats, right?”

“Well, Professor, they share like ninety-nine percent of our genetic code or something…or maybe it’s mice?”

“Immaterial. No, I know that. I mean, think about it. It does proffer some extremely interesting ethical questions, like how would you end life—when you hit your five thousandth birthday?”

“Seriously. Can you imagine what you’d look like in a bathing suit at five thousand?”

“Let’s not go there. It’s bad enough now,” Frank said. He got up and
poured himself a glass of water. “So how’d you like old Nonna ripping Connie a new one at dinner? She’s getting meaner than hell.”

“She’s always been mean to Mom, but now she’s mean in front of anyone. I think it’s a little weird that Dad doesn’t ever come to Mom’s defense, but I guess he figures Nonna is old and all.”

“Who knows? Anyway, I wouldn’t get too shook up over their opinions of Michael. Remember Sophocles said, ‘The good befriend themselves.’ As long as you are happy and satisfied with your relationship, that’s all that matters.”

“You guys still up?” Regina came around the corner in an oversize Rutgers jersey and flip-flops. “I’m so tired I could die.” Frank got up and pulled out a chair for his wife. She sank into it and put her head on her crossed arms on the table.

“I’m an old woman tonight,” she said. “All I see when I close my eyes is interstate.”

I smiled and tried to remember if Michael had ever pulled out chairs for me. I wasn’t sure, and I decided if I wasn’t sure, then it probably wasn’t something that really mattered. Still, it was a nice gesture and Regina kissed her husband in thanks. They had an easy tenderness between them that was enviable.

“Want booze or milk?” I said, pushing the biscotti in her direction.

“Do I have to pick? Can’t I have both?” Regina said.

“How about Kahlúa and cream?” Frank said.

“There’s some that Dad made in the bar,” I said. “It’s in the Colavita bottle.”

“Perfect,” Regina said. “With ice please, sweetheart?”

“It’s about two hundred proof,” I said, “so go easy. You don’t want Regina to get brain damage.”

“I’m already brain-damaged,” she said. “I’ve got kids.”

“You’ve got great kids,” I said. “They’re growing like weeds!”

“Growing. Lemme tell you something,” Regina said, winding up for the pitch. “I gotta watch Tony like a hawk—if he’s not smoking something, he’s snitching a drink of something…”

“I saw him smoking today behind the grill,” I said.

“I’ll smack him in the head first thing in the morning,” Regina said. “And my Lisa? The good Lord gave her all my estrogen. I’m a thousand degrees and all of a sudden she’s got these breasts. And the boys are calling! Mother Mary, pray for us. No, just pray for me!” She blessed herself and looked up to heaven for emphasis. “She’s not even thirteen and shaving her legs already.”

“Well, Paulie is a sweetheart,” I said. “Lisa’s normal. Everyone says girls are tough.”

“They are. And Paulie’s an eating machine! Did you see the fat on his belly?”

“Make him play football,” I said.

Regina nodded and said, “If sports were the answer to everything, life would be very simple.”

“Life’s not so easy, is it? This whole family drives me crazy,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Frank said, and put Regina’s drink in front of her.

“Oh, come on, Grace,” Regina said.
“Salute!”

“Think about it. I come in today and there’s pasta hanging everywhere, Nonna’s crocheting like a bat out of hell…”

“She talked to Nonno yesterday,” Regina said in a whisper. “She told me almost first thing when we got here.”

Nonno was Nonna’s husband, who had been certified dead and well buried for ten years.

“See what I mean?” I said in a hushed tone.

“What did he say?” Frank said. “Is he coming for her?”

“Shh! Bite your tongue!” Regina said. “She said he was dancing, like he was at a big party—a wedding maybe?”

“A wedding. You watch,” I said. “Nicky’s gonna marry that twit and then I’ll have to look at her every holiday for the rest of my life.”

Frank and Regina stared at me and then burst out laughing.

“What? You all don’t think she’s obnoxious?”

“Not obnoxious…” Frank said.

“More like, I don’t know…all that baby talk is a little…” Regina said.

“Ridiculous,” I said.

“Well, Grace? There’s nothing you can do about your family. They just are as they are.”

“I just don’t see Michael fitting in here, that’s all. And it worries me because I really love this man.”

“If Marianne can fit in, so can Michael,” Regina said, and then covered her mouth, stealing a glance behind her as though she might have been overheard.

“How do you define fitting in?” Frank said. “Anybody want a glass of wine?”

Regina declined and I said, “Sure, why not? Never mind, I’m drinking milk.”

Frank pulled the cork on an unfinished bottle from dinner and poured out two glasses. “If we don’t drink it, it will go bad.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling at my brother. “Mud in your eye.”

“
Salut.
Look, it’s late but I’d like to throw in my two cents on this. You’re over thirty, Grace. Them’s the facts. If you want to have a family and Michael’s the man for the job, then it’s your decision. Regina and I are gonna love whoever you love as long as he’s good to you. You can’t live your life trying to please everyone else. Will he fit in? Who fits in?”

“I never worried about fitting in,” Regina said. “I mean, maybe a little in the beginning.”

“Yeah, because it’s easy for you,” I said. “You play by all the rules, Regina. You’re Italian, you go to church, you have really nice kids that do the normal stupid stuff but they are seriously nice kids…”

“Not so hot in school,” Frank said.

“Not that terrible, Frank.”

“You cook, you keep a nice house…”

“Uh! The house is a disaster all the time!” Regina said.

“Whatever! When Connie and Big Al and Nonna look at you and Frank, they are thrilled. Connie and Nonna say novenas of thanksgiving and Big Al spreads his feathers like the NBC peacock. They look at me and think, Oh my God, where did we go wrong?”

“No, they don’t, Gracie,” Frank said. “You’re paranoid.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know what to think. All I know is that
every time Michael’s name is even breathed, the sharks start to circle like there’s blood in the water. They don’t know what he’s been through.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well for one thing, he had a little brother that died when he was just two months old.”

“Mother of God!” Regina said. “Let me tell you what that can do to a family!”

“What did he die from?”

“They think it was SIDS. I mean, you can imagine, right? His mother was never the same. And he grew up terrified of little kids.”

“So needless to say, he’s a little ambivalent about having a family? Am I right?” Frank said.

“You got it! And I don’t blame him. He says his mother became very morbid, and when his father died, that was it for her. She started fading away.”

“Look,” Frank said, “you have to live your life. And think about this: If Big Al, who still suffers from the terrible twos, can adjust to living with his mother-in-law under the same roof for the past ten years, he can get used to anything. And anybody. Kids or no kids. Stem-cell research. Humph. So what? Scientists will always search for answers. That’s their purpose.”

“He has worked with bone marrow, too,” I said.

“Look, I’m a nurse,” Regina said, “and I’m a Catholic. I understand the Church’s objection—they don’t want the medical world to clone life to be used as an organ bank or to create life designed to be destroyed. Who does? But so far, nobody’s cloning anybody. Maybe a couple of Korean doctors.”

“Who Michael says will probably be exposed for fraud…”

“Who knows? I think everyone knows it’s an ethical conundrum. It’s the biggest ethical conundrum since a woman’s right to choose! All that said, if I had a child who was critically ill and their disease could be reversed with stem cells, you’d better believe that I’d be on line for stem cells. I see too many children get sick and die that shouldn’t.”

Everyone fell silent then. Regina’s words summed up the larger part
of the issue with a stunning succinctness. No one disagreed and no one applauded. Stem-cell research was a grave concern of Regina’s because she was a devout Catholic living in the medical community. As a philosophy professor, Frank had wrestled with the ethics of it. And me? I was in love with a man whose general livelihood already compromised the affection of my parents and grandmother.

“It’s late,” Frank said.

Regina and Frank hugged me and said good night.

I struggled to find sleep but was consoled that I had something like allies in Frank and Regina. It had been a long time since I had felt at home with my family, and what tormented me into the early hours of morning was the
why
of it. Indeed. Why? Well, I was willing to admit I had changed. I loved Charleston society and the way my friends there lived. I loved my work and traveling like a billionaire. It made me feel like one. And getting away was my specialty. My parents had remained the same, and if anything had become even more provincial. But the real kernel of the problem didn’t lie with them and I knew it.

I was afraid that if Michael met them, he would love me less or maybe stop loving me completely.

I wondered what Frank would have said if I had told him that. I knew exactly what he would have said—that it wasn’t morally right to enjoy our father’s generosity if I was ashamed of him—to stick up my nose while I stuck out my hand. For all my worldliness and sophistication, I had become a hypocrite. That was the despicable truth I saw in myself as the sun cracked the dark on the dawn of the Fourth of July.

T
he entire Fourth of July celebration at my parents’ house was very bittersweet. While I was always glad, even if it was in a halfhearted way, to be with my family, I had never felt like more of an outsider than I did that weekend. I went for Mom’s sake because of the walkway. Messy and inconvenient as it was, it really only represented a few hours’ work to put it all back together again. It was hardly the travesty my mother had described. Why, then, had old Connie been so insistent about my presence? Maybe because Frank was there with his family and Mom really did want to see us all together around the table? Yes, I decided, that was probably it. After all, wasn’t she the sentimental one who took the only pictures that ever recorded our history?

I felt a twinge of guilt because earlier in the weekend I’d had thoughts that the solo invitation was another attempt to relegate Michael to the sidelines. And Michael, sensitive to my family’s positions and accustomed to being slighted by them, had announced his own plans to save face. But after my late-night talk with Frank I realized my parents were acting the only way they knew how to act. Provincial. Inflexible. Judgmental.

I couldn’t have the relationship with my parents I wanted as long as Michael was in my life. Dad thought he was satanic, Nonna thought he was a horrible influence, and even though Mom said nothing, I knew what she thought. It was exasperating. The minute I walked into my
parents’ home, I was made to feel like a child again, pushed into corners and outwitted by everyone. That was one source of my discomfort. And the straight-out refusal of my family to accept my adult life as it was. I knew that at some point I was going to have to discuss it with them. We were going to have to find some peace about this because there were better-than-even odds that Michael was going to be with me long into the foreseeable future.

It was nearly seven o’clock when I reached the city limits of Charleston. I dialed Michael’s cell.

“Hey, sweetheart! I’m almost home. Want to meet me somewhere for supper? Where are you?”

“Welcome home! I’m just leaving the hospital. I missed you! How was your trip?”

“Fine. You know. The usual sociology experiment—see how much food you can eat before you explode.” I sighed and Michael laughed a little. “Want to meet at Rue de Jean’s? I could really go for a bowl of mussels.”

“Sure. I’ll head over and get us a table. See you in a few.”

“Okay. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

We clicked off, but with that one statement of
Love you, too,
I slipped right back into my life with Michael. For the larger part of the drive back to Charleston I had worried about where I belonged in the world, and then inside of a one-minute conversation with Michael, I knew.

I only ever saw the world as worth the effort it took to navigate when I was looking at it through his eyes. With him my worldview was complete, or maybe the world had become so complicated that it took two brains to digest the daily struggles. No, I decided, Michael was my perfect partner. He was all that I was not. I had become addicted to the balance his point of view offered for sorting out everything. I loved the way his thoughts were so carefully constructed, and I loved everything else about him, too, especially his professional work, which provided hours of thinking about and talking about the very real future of hu
manity. And he did so much charitable work that I wondered how he found the time for it all. When he wasn’t raising money through baseball, he was gathering donated children’s books for hospitalized kids or large-print novels for folks in his mom’s nursing home.

I parked on historic John Street and locked my car. Rue de Jean was located right next to Gallery Chuma, which housed the work of Jonathan Green, one of the South’s most revered artists, who painted startlingly beautiful images of the Gullah culture. His work was one more instance of the unique gestalt of the Lowcountry’s living history. Someday, I thought, I would love to have a small piece of his work.

Looking up and down the street, I thought about how much I enjoyed summer nights, the fading light that lit the streets and streaked the sky with color until almost nine o’clock. To call the summer weather of Charleston sultry was the understatement of the year. There was something about the toasted air and the diffused light that was a drug. I was happily addicted.

With a little reluctance to leave the pretty scene, I went inside the restaurant and spotted Michael at his table.

Rue de Jean was a popular place for its old-world ambience as well as its fare. It was a classic bistro in the Parisian Left Bank style offering the dishes you would expect in such a place—croque monsieur sandwiches, salade niçoise, steak au poivre with pommes frites and, of course, the mussels steamed with garlic and white wine that were on my mind.

The hostess brought me to the table and Michael stood, giving me a polite kiss on both cheeks, barely brushing my skin.

“Très Frrrranche, mon cher!”
I said, in exaggerated and poor but humorously executed French.

“Très bien,”
he said as the hostess held my chair and handed me the menu. “You are zee sight for zee poor eyes.”

“I think we can drop the French,” I said with a giggle. “The foreign-language police have a warrant out for our arrest.”

“And the grape police are just around the corner. I’m doing my bit for California’s agricultural products. Not France. Gosh, you look wonderful! You’ve got nice color. Did you go to the beach?”

The waitress appeared and said, “Can I start you off with something to drink?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll just have a glass of whatever he’s having.” The waitress nodded and left. “The beach? No, no. We just hung out at Big Al’s version of Nikki Beach. There were too many moving parts to try and organize a trip to the actual ocean. Besides, Big Al hates the sand.”

Smirking, Michael stared at me and said nothing.

“What?” I said, knowing he was about to lob a cherry bomb my way.

“No, it’s okay. I was just thinking how funny it is to buy a house at a beach resort when you don’t like the beach…”

“You know he moved there for the golf,” I said.

“Yeah, I know, but still…”

“Right, they could’ve gone to Palm Springs or something…”

“Right. And I was thinking how much better I feel just to see you sitting there in front of me.”

We went into our lovers’ trance of smiles, stares, then sweet leering and thoughts of lying down together at the end of the evening. Our fingers were intertwined and I said, “Oh Lord! Isn’t love just about the most wonderful thing in the world?”

“Yes. It’s amazing.”

The waitress put the glass of wine in front of me and said, “Ahem? Specials, anyone?”

We listened, and after a cursory glance at the menu, we ordered.

“I’ll have the mussels with a lot of bread to soak up the sauce,” I said.

“And I’ll have the roasted chicken with string beans and French fries. And a bottle of the Merryvale.”

“Very good,” she said, and left.

“A bottle plus two glasses? Are we bingeing?”

“No, just easing the stress.”

“The stress of what?” I said, and before I could finish that thought I realized I hadn’t asked about his mother. “Oh, God, sorry…how’s your mom?”

“Considerably worse than the last time I saw her,” Michael said,
rubbing his temple in a circular motion with two fingers. “She never recognized my voice, not even for one second. She thought I was my father, that it was a Sunday afternoon in the sixties and what did he want for dinner…Then she just stops in midsentence and drifts away again. My own mother doesn’t know me. Nice, right?”

“Oh, Michael, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine such a thing.”

“Yeah, and I can’t stand seeing her like this. You know?”

Changing the subject, I said, “Do you have a headache?”

“Yeah, probably pollen…”

“Or stress…”

“Yeah, maybe. I’m fine. I’ll take an antihistamine and it will be fine. Listen, Bomze called.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. I tried calling you on your cell, but it didn’t go through.”

“I hate cell phones. I wonder what…Well, I’ll call him back when we get home.”

Eric Bomze and his elegant third wife, the famous Romanian baroness Adriana Katerina Kovacs, were the designer travel source for successful executives and their families. They were known throughout the industry as Bomze and the Baroness. I was their favorite rising executive in a cast of sixty or so others in assorted offices around the world. They’d nicknamed me La Principessa.

If you wanted to book the rambling eight-bedroom chalet at Suvretta House in St. Moritz that had once belonged to Reza Pahlavi, the former shah of Iran, you called Bomze Platinum Travel. If you wanted to cruise the Mediterranean on the yacht once held by Niarchos or Onassis, you called them. In fact, every CEO, COO and CFO spending their retirement years as
a guest of the state
once had the Bomzes’ personal cell-phone numbers on speed dial—before they were confiscated, that is. It was true enough that all the SEC investigations had cut into their business, but not enough to cause substantial alarm to Bomze and the Baroness. They merely raised their fee by six percent to cover the losses and continued on their merry way.

But a phone call from Bomze on a holiday weekend was unusual and I knew something must have happened.

“I’ll call him later,” I said again.

As we talked and ate and drank, the round and square pegs of our life fell back into their round and square holes and our comfort with each other was easily reestablished. But it was only so easily established because somebody—both of us actually—weren’t exactly forthcoming with the facts.

I skirted the details of my weekend at my parents’ home like an Olympic dodgeball gold medalist—Nonna’s jungle of hanging pasta, her OCD for yarn and communion with her dead husband, the Niagara Falls of Big Al’s dees, dems and dozes, the sheer mass of my brother’s children and how the noisy choir of their voices and Regina’s shrieking reprimands sent me scouring my makeup bag for ten milligrams of something, anything to smooth the edges of my ruffled nerves. Never mind my brother Nicky and his idiotic Marianne and all the rest of it. It was just better left unexplored.

Michael’s recounting of the holiday was equally false. He didn’t tell me until much later about his mother and how he had found her half-naked and crying. That she had screamed bloody murder at his arrival. He said not one word to me about his mother’s violence when he tried to dress her and wash her face. Or that Michael had wept all night in the dark silence of our carriage house wondering what kind of loving God would do such a thing to his beautiful mother, who had never hurt anyone in her entire life.

His mother had been a dignified woman, every inch of her refined and lovely. When his father was alive he remembered seeing them waltzing to recordings of big-band music in their living room on Murray Boulevard, Dom Pérignon chilling in one of his mother’s ancient silver wine buckets—one of many alleged treasures I had never seen, all of them stored away with antiques and other things for Michael to have if and when he needed them to furnish a house.

The lives his parents led had been elegant, privileged, and they were highly sought after among the bastions of Charleston’s elite society
for every event of the season. But then his father died suddenly in Michael’s seventeenth year. Heart attack. Just forty. What a sin, everyone said. The world stopped after the funeral, the flowers and the procession of obligatory visits, and Michael thought his mother would never stop crying.

Michael went off to college at Duke and returned that first Thanksgiving to find his mother withdrawn and distracted, her voice reduced to whispers. By Easter the principal trustee of his father’s estate recommended a full medical workup for her. The best diagnosis the neurology team at the Medical University of South Carolina could offer was that she was extremely depressed, and so Laura Higgins became another guinea pig in the emerging medicine of psychotropic drugs. The private nurses, the extensive visits to sanitariums, the experimental medicines didn’t matter except that they depleted his father’s estate and his mother disappeared into her own world anyway. Every time Michael visited his mother, he was filled with self-loathing that he was unable to stop her deterioration.

But Michael persevered as I did, him doing his duty, me doing mine and neither of us discussing it too much. Discussing our families at any length would have made Michael’s mother and my family real and three-dimensional, an extension of our own relationship. There was only miserly space in our world for all the trouble and ill health of Laura Higgins, Al’s patriarchy and the unending peculiarities of the entire Russo clan. It was too dangerous.

Later, at home, Michael flipped through the four hundred stations on our television and I called Eric Bomze.

“Bomze? It’s me. Is this a good time to talk?”

“Ah! La Principessa! I’m with the Baroness, and as we uncork this very excellent bottle of Pétrus, I have a special favor to ask you. Tell me yes right now!”

“Yes! Of course the answer is yes. What do you need?”

“Well, there’s good news and bad. Which do you prefer?”

“Bad first.”

“Missy Belton in the Atlanta office was in a terrible automobile accident and broke her leg in fourteen places.”

“Oh! God! That’s awful! Is she gonna be all right?”

“Of course! She’ll be fine after a year or two of physical therapy and hopefully she won’t limp for the rest of her life.”

“Good Lord! What can I do? Can I send flowers?”

“What? Oh, of course. If you want to. But she’s not in a room yet, so I’d wait a few days…”

“She couldn’t get a room? That’s awful! What exactly happened?”

“What happened? An eighteen-wheeler came flying down an exit ramp in the pouring rain and didn’t see her little Toyota. Mashed it like a bug. And a Honda and a minivan loaded with gospel singers. She’s lucky to be alive. They all are. But apparently it caused a lot of commotion at the ER. Anyway, she was supposed to take a group of execs and their families to Sardinia next week for five days. I need you to take her place.”