Sacred Time (2 page)

Upstairs, my mother and aunt were screaming at each other like opera divas, even though my mother had told my grandfather that opera was melodramatic. “They're always screaming, and it takes them half an hour to say, ‘Come into my embrace,' or to recognize a long-lost brother. Then they scream the same thing again, and you can't even understand the words.” My grandfather had listened closely, just as he always did, without rushing you, even though my mother went on and on, and when she'd exhausted herself and said she admired drama that relied on the power of words, the power of silence, my grandfather had smiled and said, “I like silence, too.”

I climbed on his knees. “The Alexander people had their birthday sale and Mama and I were waiting for the doors to open but firemen were guarding them and people started shoving and squashing me.”

“How awful.”

“Some people got pushed through the windows and cut and mannequins got knocked over and then I heard sirens. I don't like Alexander's.”

He nodded. “Have you considered trading time with your mother?”

“How?”

“You could ask her if, for every ten minutes in Alexander's, she'll give you ten minutes in the toy department.”

“And for every hour in Alexander's I get one hour at the five and ten?”

“You could ask, Antonio.”

“At Kress, not Woolworth, because it's bigger and next to Gorman's hot-dog stand.”

For a while, the quarrel above us continued, but later that same evening, my mother and Aunt Floria danced to
Make Believe Ballroom
on WNEW, the way they liked to at family parties, my mother—despite high heels—not nearly as tall as my aunt, who had delicate ankles although the rest of her body was solid, like my father's. By far the best dancers in the family, my mother and aunt took pleasure in each other's grace and skill as they went spinning and dipping past us. And if there were words that passed between them, they must have been gentle.

Since the men didn't like to dance, they smoked and watched the women—including Riptide Grandma and Great-Aunt Camilla—do the rumba and the fox-trot and the tango. That evening, Uncle Malcolm wasn't Elsewhere yet. Sweating and laughing, he accompanied the radio by pumping long, shimmering breaths from his accordion as though he were part of Count Basie's orchestra. Uncle Malcolm was the only one in my family who wasn't Italian, and he seemed exotic to me because of that. His pale hair was damp, and his eyes chased Aunt Floria, who became girlish and light as she danced with my mother.

When my grandfather stepped next to Great-Aunt Camilla and whispered something in Italian, she laughed and, gently, pushed him away with her palm against his chest.

“It's true,” he said, “even if I were a woman, I'd still rather touch women than men.”

“That's brave of you, Emilio.”

He sat down on the couch. “You go, Antonio. You go dance with the ladies.”

My mother and Aunt Floria opened one side of their dance for me, and I rushed into the warm knot of their bodies, spinning with them. Spinning and dipping long after my father and Uncle Malcolm joined my grandfather on the couch, slumped toward him as if to make a triangle, and took the customary nap.

Afterwards, in the kitchen, Aunt Floria and my mother washed the dishes and argued, but we were used to them being quick-tempered with each other and then confiding and dancing as if they were the closest of friends. When they returned to the living room with brown coffee and black coffee and a silver tray of sfogliatelles and cannolis, the men stirred and uprighted themselves, and we all sat around and told stories the way we always did, with great passion, listening with equally great passion while one of us would take one thread of a story and spin it along, and the listening would evoke further memories, so that—with laughter or tears—we'd leap into a story and become part of its weave. It was best when the stories were already familiar, because then we could take delight in how they changed and yet stayed the same with each telling. And as we urged each other on, I felt the presence of untold stories—there already, beyond all of us in the future—shaping themselves within the body of my family, waiting for us to live these stories.

And to tell them.

Great-Aunt Camilla found her stories in foreign countries. Since she enjoyed traveling alone, she was a mystery to my family, but I liked mysteries, liked picking her up at the West Side docks, where the water was dark green and murky with oil slicks and trash, where the air smelled of tar and hot dogs, and where I got to see ocean liners when she returned with her faraway stories and faraway presents. One day, Great-Aunt Camilla gave me a tour of the
Mauretania.
Four other ocean liners were tied to the docks, and a barge with long rollers was alongside the
Île de France,
painting the hull. When my mother bought me a hot dog, I tossed the end of my bun to the seagulls, and as they fought over it, the horn of a tug-boat shut them out. It had a big
M
on its stack. “That means ‘Moran,'” Great-Aunt Camilla had told me, and I'd wished she would take me on one of her trips.

My favorite story of all was how my grandmother had saved my grandfather from drowning. My mother had named her Riptide. If it were not for Riptide, none of us would be alive. Not that she had rescued all of us, but she had rescued my grandfather when he was not my grandfather yet, not her husband yet, but just Emilio Amedeo, standing in the surf at Rockaway Beach up to his waist.

“The first day I saw him, I rescued him.” That's how she always started the part of the story that was hers, the part where
she's sunning herself, wearing her new white swimsuit, when this young man suddenly topples and is pulled out to sea. One of his arms shoots up, then his face, open-mouthed. While she leaps up, races toward the water, dives in, and swims out to where he's drowning. “Hold on to me,” she shouts and reaches for him. She's swimming on her back, one arm around him as if they were hugging, and he floats with her, resting on her body. “If we fight against the current, it'll tire us,” she tells him. “All we need to do is wait…let the tide take us to where it weakens…then swim out of it.” For a minute or so my grandfather floats with her, but when the tide sweeps them out farther, he panics, because it's obvious she's some rare kind of water-being, a manatee, or a siren, luring him deeper into her territory. As he struggles to free himself, she flips from beneath him, emerges behind him, grasps him around the middle. “I'm going to save you,” her woman-voice shouts into his ear, “you have no choice there. But you…can make it easier for me to save you…if you quiet down. If you can't do that…I'll knock you out and…drag you to shore.” He feels her breath against his left ear, against the left side of his neck, breath that rides on her shouting. “But save you I will. The one…choice you have is to make it look like we're swimming back…together. And then you don't have to admit to anyone that a woman saved you.”

But it's my grandfather who revealed the story of his rescue. Who still liked to tell it, urged on by us.

“Let Emilio tell that part.”

“He does it so well.”

He'd wait till Riptide finished and then he'd continue the story from the moment when he quieted.
Against all panic. Because, out there, in this woman's fierce embrace, he understands that she'll make true on her promise to save him. In her fierce embrace, he understands that he'll ask her to marry him—water-being or woman—once they're back on shore. And because he's afraid of her slipping away from him forever once they reach the sand—more afraid than he is of drowning—he asks her name, Natalina, relieved to hear that she, too, is Italian, and then proposes to her while the tide is still pulling them out.

It has become the story of their marriage.

And it was not long before they had their first child, Victor, named after Victorien Sardou, who'd written the play that my grandfather's favorite opera,
Tosca,
was based on. And since my grandfather loved Puccini's operas above all other operas, it only followed that the girl, born two years after Victor, would be called Floria.

My father and Aunt Floria liked to tease their parents about that first swim, how they had made it last because they got to touch each other in ways that would have been inappropriate had they just met on land.

“It would have destroyed Natalina's reputation,” my grandfather would say.

Riptide continued to swim, one mile every morning, in the pool of the building where her sister, Camilla, shared an apartment with Mrs. Feinstein. Both worked as teachers in Manhattan, but Mrs. Feinstein didn't travel and saved her money for a Persian-lamb coat and elegant furniture. Their apartment had a fireplace and was two blocks from the East River on 86th Street.

Sometimes I'd wear my swimsuit instead of underpants to Sunday mass, and afterwards Riptide would take me to Manhattan. I liked being on the Jerome Avenue El because it went by apartments and I'd see people cooking or sleeping or watching television. Whenever there was a game at Yankee Stadium, people on the El would stand up and lean toward the windows on the right, catching a moment of the game.

Uncle Malcolm liked to take me to baseball games. Usually the twins would skutch, and he'd tell them, “No girls allowed at Yankee Stadium.”

“I got us the best seats in the house that Ruth built,” he said the first time he invited me.

Everything was exciting that afternoon: coming into the courtyard, where Uncle Malcolm bought me a program; going through the turnstiles, where he presented our tickets to the ticket takers; following him up steps so steep I really had to climb, steps to the top bleachers up in heaven; and squeezing into seats that were grimy and sticky from stale beer.

“From here we can see everything that's going on, not just part of the field—” He motioned to the box seats close to the third-base line. “—like those poor schmucks over there, who have to keep moving their heads.”

I loved being this high up, loved the noise, the scoreboard with the numbers lit up, the vendors yelling: “Hot dogs, peanuts, soda, here.”

Uncle Malcolm showed me how to fill out the program with a pencil, play by play, who got a strike, who got a ball. A couple of times he tapped the shoulder of the man in front of us. “Could I just borrow your binoculars for a second for my kid here?”

He bought us peanuts and Coca-Cola and beer, nudged me so I'd shout whenever he shouted. Such noise…I'd never heard such noise before, shouting and fighting and vendors yelling, while I sat in our best seats, feeling hot and stuffed and thrilled.