All This Talk of Love (13 page)

She crossed her arms and looked at him with some defiance. “
Th
e uninformed are not permitted to be dismissive. Mary’s doing some really excellent and difficult recovery work with Native American folktales. You don’t cast someone aside because she’s had a few kids in between chapters.
Th
at’s what got me riled up, actually.
Th
e way the men on the committee—Arbuckle in particular, your new champion—would react whenever her name came up.
Th
e sexism of that place—”

“But it didn’t rile you up that your advisee was floundering in fourth place.”

“Frankie, we’ve been down this road. It worked out in the end. I made my spirited defense of Mary, they chose you instead, and now we can just let it go. I wanted to tell you, not to launch us into some debate over the relative merit of your work or the absurd biases in English Departments across the land, but because I don’t want to keep any secrets from you.
Th
at’s the beauty of what we have here, right?
Th
e honesty of it, our flaws on display? You know what lying does to me.”

She’d expressed her discomfort with lying before, as a way of explaining her unique (and, to Frankie’s mind, primitive) code of morality. She and Frankie had had many discussions about her marriage, which, by Birch’s code, was an honest one simply because she’d never officially lied to her husband. For example, she’d never told Amos she was in the library or grading papers when she was really in Frankie’s bed. When he’d asked, she’d said, “I was in a long session with an advisee,” or “I went for a nice walk,” or whatever could technically be considered true. Speaking the truth and lying at the same time had both thrilled and shamed her, she said to Frankie, and she expressed gratitude that Amos rarely asked questions, rarely concerned himself with the details of her weekdays on the campus they shared. He had no reason.
Th
ey spent plenty of time together.
Th
ey drove in and home together from Chestnut Hill on the days she taught, and on the weekends they had their Vineyard house, and fund-raisers for various causes, and lots and lots of hours to sit beside each other and read. After twelve years, she was as demanding of Amos in bed as she was of Frankie, a fact she liked to brag about whenever Frankie acted “all lazy and worn out” in the afternoon. It was Birch’s code, which allowed her to keep her lives with Frankie and Amos separate but still “honest,” if not equal.

Yesterday, too, he was so relieved to make it to the final fellowship round, and so eager to celebrate a rare victory, that he willed himself not to blow her confession, or her blind spot when it came to the defense of women, out of proportion. Instead he nodded, unwrapped her scarf, unzipped her jacket, grabbed her big, chunky belt, and pulled her to him. Other than her revelation that the third finalist was none other than Chris Curran, the pothead, nothing more was said.

It was after she’d gone, as he lay naked on his rough sheets, the late-afternoon skies already darkening, that his fourth-placeness settled on him like a fine layer of dust. He did some accounting: fourth place in his third-rate department, second place behind Amos in Birch’s attentions, and second place behind Tony in his family’s affections. In only one competition would Frankie be declared champion: the marathon of self-pity. And yet—what did Birch say?
You just keep going, don’t you?
She admired him for that. He admired himself for that. He was not Tony. Whatever design flaw had existed in his brother’s brain did not exist in his.

And now there is Kelly Anne McDonald, his new friend on this wobbly trek down the Eastern Seaboard, who has a great respect for what she calls Frankie’s “interesting perspective on things.” BC people look and talk the same, she says. No one disagrees or is disagreeable.
Th
e college is an “orgy of politeness,” she says, without blushing. She’s tried to branch out—to BU, to Harvard—but claims to have no talent for meeting left-of-center people and keeps settling for clones of herself and her current circle.

Sometime around Trenton, Kelly Anne gives Frankie her phone number and campus address. She still lives in a dorm, though her friends have moved into apartments or sorority houses, because she’s afraid she’ll never get her work done otherwise. Tomorrow she’ll be attending
Th
anksgiving Mass, and Frankie, a twelve-year veteran of Catholic school, has to admit he didn’t even know there was such a thing. He’d always thought of
Th
anksgiving as free from religious overtones.

Her hand is soft and creamy white. He holds it a moment too long as the train approaches
Th
irtieth Street and they say their good-bye and “we should get togethers.” He enjoys his first sustained gaze at her ass as she drags the bag of gold bullion behind her. She looks back once before stepping off.

He’s glad Kelly Anne McDonald is not around to see him take the ring out of his nose, replace his Holden Caulfield cap with the Timberland hat Prima gave him for Christmas, drop his bracelets into the front compartment of his backpack, and put on a J.Crew sweater over his Dead Kennedys T-shirt. He now looks as agreeable and cooperative as a kid from BC.

Th
ough it’s past midnight, the crowd on the train remains thick, having disembarked and replicated itself at each stop for the past six hours. Only a scant few of these people will disappear with Frankie into the vast metropolis of Wilmington, Delaware, or, as his friends used to call it, “the Town Fun Forgot.” On the approach, the view from their smudged windows is the charming oil refineries of Marcus Hook, twinkling and pumping noxious clouds into the air, the stadium-size lots jammed with cars, and the squat downtown office buildings blank and empty as Sunday in Brasília. A good place to raise your kids, they say about this town. A short drive to Philly, New York, Atlantic City, Baltimore, and DC, but without as many “problems,” by which they mean “crime,” by which they mean “blacks.” Everything is postcolonial, even here. He should write a chapter on the neighborhood around St. Anthony’s Church, dominated by Italians for decades, then abandoned for the suburbs.
Th
e Grassos are complicit in this narrative, of course, though Frankie has gained some distance from it. He is the first member of his generation of the extended family to live more than thirty miles from Little Italy, to have the luxury of Boston culture at his fingertips—the lectures, the readings, the ghosts of Emerson and
Th
oreau taking his hand as they cross the common in perfect exhilaration. In this way, he reminds himself, he’s lucky. If he’s even luckier, he can catch the train back Saturday morning instead of Sunday night, ring up Kelly Anne McDonald, and take her to
Th
e Battle of Algiers
at the Brattle.

But then, as he struggles to wrench his backpack from between two boxes of anvils in the overhead, he sees his mother and father standing on the platform.
Th
ey are holding hands, searching every window for a glimpse of their son, relieved, when they find his profile, that Amtrak has delivered him safely home.
Th
eir faces say how grateful they are for this silly American holiday that reunites them, how they’re planning every meal they’ll eat this weekend, every visit to his
zia
and
compari
in the old neighborhood.
Th
e moment he sees them, Frankie knows he will not catch the early train home. He will stay with them until the last possible moment.

His mother has had her hair frosted and her nails painted pumpkin-orange. His father wears his leather jacket with the sheepskin collar. Frankie embraces him and rests his head for a moment on the fur. His father has grown shorter.
Th
e tremor in his arm, noticed in the summer but never discussed, is more pronounced.
Th
ey bicker over where they parked, which neither one remembers, and how long it’s been since they’ve seen Frankie. His mother smells of Nina Ricci and baby powder. She felt tired for no reason all day, she says, her mind foggy, but now that Frankie’s here, the fog goes away.

All his life, Frankie’s kept his mother and father from the fog. Antonio denies they planned it that way, but Maddalena has told him many times about the nightgown with the holes in the underarms, the roses. It is one in her extensive repertoire of stories, beginning always with the village boy, Vito Leone, her first love, who romanced her with a bicycle he made from scraps he found lying around three towns. It was Vito who’d rebuilt her parents’ house after the Allied bombing and who would have been her husband if he’d had as much money as Antonio pretended to have. She has no end of Vito stories or memories from Prima’s and Frankie’s childhood, but only a few stories of Antonio. Of Tony she tells no stories at all. She rarely mentions him by name, and sometimes Frankie feels her trying too hard to remind him that he may not have been the first son born in the new country, but he inherited the promise of a great future for the Grassos.
Th
e best idea they ever had, his mother likes to say, was to bring Francesco Grasso into the world. Frankie has seen a hundred pictures of Tony, heard his voice on the one audiotape that survives, been reminded many times by his father and Prima of the little boy’s energy and piano playing and love for the Al Di Là, but he can’t summon much love for his brother beyond the theoretical: Without him, I would not exist, is the most he can do.

“But what about guilt?” Birch likes to ask, but that, too, is theoretical. Once, in response, he quoted Emerson: “In the death of my son . . . I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me . . . It leaves no scar.”

Birch had looked at him, puzzled. “
Th
ere’s no colder passage in all of American Literature,” she said.

“And you’ve never known me to be cold.”

“My point exactly. It’s so unlike you, in such opposition to the Frankie Grasso I’ve come to know, that I have to think it’s some sort of block. I suggest psychoanalysis.”

“I suggest we pretend you didn’t suggest that.”

If anything, Frankie strives to be colder, to keep his distances. He’s already deep in emotion; the last thing he wants is to go down the rabbit hole of Freudian exploration. Emotion continually threatens to disarm him. Like all the Grassos, he’s a junkie for it. It is to avoid wallowing in emotion, and to train his mind to focus on reason and analytics, that he walks through sleeping neighborhoods and abandoned parking lots until he’s too tired to feel anything, until all he can do is stumble up the stairs and pass out on his futon. It was to avoid emotion that he chose to live apart from his mother and father in the first place. He’d have gladly leapt into their mouths. And if he’d stayed, they’d have swallowed him whole.

Frankie’s problem is that already, in the first minutes of a five-day visit, in his parents’ company, he misses them.
Th
ey wander through the parking lot, his mother’s arm around his waist, his father’s hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t realize until he’s with them how unsteadily he’s been walking. As the emotion junkie can’t help doing upon homecoming, as Frankie does too often lying in bed alone in Boston, he adds up the years he’s been given with his parents and compares them to those he’ll spend on people and ambitions beyond their reach, like PhDs and selfish lovers and pretty Irish middle school teachers.
Th
ese are years Tony both granted his brother and denied him, and they are too short. To be the youngest child, his mother has told him, is a curse of sadness.

Frankie imagines the day when the train will pull into Wilmington and no one will be waiting for him on the platform. It’s always with him, that day. And so already—as he takes the wheel of the enormous Sedan Deville and drives out of the shadow of the Delaware Memorial Bridge and onto the highway—he wants to tell his mother and father,
Th
ank you for letting me go, and thank you for welcoming me home, and if you ask me right now to stay for good, I just might say yes and never look back.

BLACK FRIDAY, AND
Christiana Mall’s all jazzed up. Prima drags Frankie and her mother here to help them with their Christmas lists—they’re hopeless shoppers—but she’s got an ulterior motive.

She loves the festivity of the mall, however manufactured it might be. She loves the archways of green garland above each storefront, the roving carolers in petticoats and top hats, the wraparound lines of kids jumping up and down waiting for Santa Claus. Even Frankie’s eye roll at the human toy soldier that welcomes them to the food court doesn’t kill her mood. As obnoxious as her brother is, it’s a blessing that he comes home, and she remembers, once she spends a little time with him, that he has his charms.
Th
ough they have few everyday things in common, his very presence, his Grasso heart beating close to hers, calms her.

Caffè Meditteraneo is offering free samples of Sicilian pizza. Prima takes three. “Between the holidays and a month in Italy,” she says, “I’ll be fat as a house.”

“Don’t let that happen,” says Maddalena.

“I’m just so hungry these days,” Prima says. “It’s all the planning. I need an assistant.”

“Dancing’s very good exercise,” says her mother. “Instead of being so busy for no reason, you could take a samba class.
Th
ey’re opening a new studio up near you. I promise, the more you dance, the less tired you look.”