All This Talk of Love (16 page)

“We’ll leave after the next song,” Tom leans over to say, without opening his eyes. Since the band retook the stage, he’s been one with the music, rocking back and forth like a man in a trance. She wills herself to put Dante out of her mind for now, here beside her husband. It’s not right. A sin. Instead she tries to see in the jazz what Tom sees, but it’s lost on her, a haze of seemingly random notes strung together with gibberish lyrics. In this way, too, she has disappointed him.

She should do something to smooth things over. Maybe later tonight—as soon as they get home, before her buzz wears off and Tom falls asleep—she’ll go down to the basement, slip on an old pair of hiking boots, strip down, and stand before him in their bedroom. It’s the least she could do.

She won’t chicken out. She’ll summon that sixteen-year-old girl who dared to let Dante Marconi hold her and kiss her against the alley wall while her father and brother worked on the other side of it. What a thrill it was—not the fear they’d be discovered, but the risk that Dante, who needed that job to make his car payments, took on her, a girl he barely knew, who wasn’t even the prettiest waitress at the Al Di Là. Her father fired him, anyway, of course, without explanation, a few weeks after their first kiss, and Prima has always wondered whether he’d come upon her and Dante himself, watched them from behind a stack of empty boxes in the alley, or whether one of the managers snitched. She and her father have never spoken about it, but she knew Dante was not the kind of boy she’d ever be allowed to bring home. Still, for a year afterward, Prima and Dante met in secret, in his car, at Wildwood, under the Hagley Bridge after school.

She’s lost focus again, takes another sip of her hurricane, tries again to love the music. No luck. After a while she takes a chance and puts her arm around Tom’s shoulders. He opens his eyes immediately—had he fallen asleep already?—and turns to her. “Last song,” he says. “I promise.”

5
Turn Up the Music

I
T’S THE MORNING
of Christmas Eve, and no one is speaking to Maddalena because she has broken their hearts.
Th
is is a day of God, but how can she concentrate on him when Antonio’s playing the silence game, Prima hasn’t returned her calls since the Black Friday trip to the mall, and Frankie’s train’s not coming for six more hours? Frankie’s the only one who will talk nice to her, but he won’t be here long, and when he leaves it will be winter in every way.

Th
ere are worms in the flour she’s set aside for the batter.
Th
ey are signs: the worms, and Frankie’s late train, and Prima’s giving up on the trip so soon without more of a fight. Signs of what, Maddalena doesn’t know, but they can’t be good, and she is worried.

At Mass she asked God her questions, but because of all the work she has to do today, she left early, after Communion, like the teenagers do, before he had a chance to answer. As she walks home, she checks off what’s done and not done:
Th
e dining room table was set the night before, the house is clean, and Antonio’s shirt ironed.
Th
ere are seven fishes to cook—two to fry, one to chop into the sauce, three to bread, one to fillet.
Contorni
to prepare. Wine to dust off and uncork. Traditions. As long as she’s alive, her children will spend Christmas Eve in her house, no excuses. She made them promise this long ago, and even though she hasn’t spoken to Prima for two weeks, she knows without a doubt that she and Tom and the boys will be here at five thirty tonight, just as they were here at five thirty last year and the years before.

In the kitchen she finds Antonio on the telephone, face guilty. “Is it Prima?” she asks, removing her gloves.

He shakes his head.

“Francesco?”

Th
e counter is a mess of flour and salt and dripped egg yolk from Antonio’s trying to finish the pasta before she got home.
Th
e call must have interrupted.

He holds the phone up to her ear, and there is the voice of her brother, Claudio, in Santa Cecilia, talking like he thinks Antonio is still listening. She pushes the phone away, runs down the hall, and locks herself in the bathroom.

“
Scema!
” he calls to her. Crazy woman! It’s the first word he’s spoken to her in a month.

She holds her hands over her ears and paces from one end of the room to the other, but still she can hear Antonio’s voice in the kitchen shouting, “
Auguri, Auguri!
” to her family across the world, so she climbs into the empty tub and pulls the glass door shut.

Scema,
Antonio has called her, since June 6, 1977, the day Claudio’s
voice on the phone said their mamma was dead.
Th
at was the last conversation she’s had with him or any of her sisters or nephews or cousins in Italy.
Th
ere were eighteen of them at last count, from the babies to the old ladies, enough for their own little village. To the grave with Mamma went them all.

Twenty-two years of their letters unopened and shoved to the back of the fabric drawer with Tony’s pictures and Mother’s Day cards, of looking away from the photos of their weddings and christenings that Antonio left on her dresser, of rushing down the hall every time he got on the phone with one of them. Can no one but Frankie understand her when she says it’s easier to pretend they’re all dead?

She doesn’t deny Antonio the connection to her family, doesn’t insist he abandon Santa Cecilia the way she has. His own brother gone, let Antonio have her brother and her sisters, too. He made his peace with them long ago, and they’ve forgiven him for taking her away from the village, so let him be the one worrying day and night about their cancers and their broken hips, their daughters pregnant without husbands, how their long lives of suffering and regret will finally end. Not her. She wants only the here and now.

Prima asks her what kind of person can talk like this, can give up her entire family and never look back, but if Prima knew how the death of a child changes a mother, she wouldn’t have to ask. Prima knows only a sister’s grief, and that bleeds you, it does, but not the same way.

I hope you never find out how different it bleeds, Maddalena has told her.

After Tony died, Maddalena came to fear the ringing telephone, even though Mamma was still alive and called her a few times a month from Santa Cecilia. Antonio went along, explained to everyone for seven years that the last time she picked up the phone, the policeman on the other end told her they had found her son.
Th
en Mamma died, and with her went Maddalena’s last reason to think that anyone could be calling for a happy reason. Since then, twenty-two years have gone by, and not once has she picked up except at 11:01 when she’s sure who it is. Evenings, she sits sewing next to the ringing downstairs extension as Antonio jumps out of his recliner and, muttering
“Crazy woman,”
marches into the kitchen to grab the phone.

She blesses the wonderful invention called the answering machine. It’s given her a system that respects everyone.
Th
ese days, when the phone rings and she’s home alone, Maddalena climbs the stairs from her basement workroom, stands over the machine, and listens first to Frankie’s voice telling the person that no one is home (Frankie’s voice because they don’t like to hear their own accents) and then to the person’s message. If it’s a voice from Santa Cecilia, she pushes Mute, calls for her husband, and disappears. If it’s Frankie or Prima or the dance studio or someone from St. Mary’s, she happily interrupts them.

All these years, Antonio has put up with her system without much argument, but not today, not Christmas Eve 1999. A bad sign. “Open up!” he says, losing the silence game. He pounds his fist on the bathroom door. “God’s watching you. You hear me? Get out here and say ‘Merry Christmas’ to your brother. If you won’t go see him, you can at least tell him ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”

Twenty-two years she’s spent blind and deaf to Italy. But lately, since the spring, it’s been coming back to her in flashes when she doesn’t expect it. She can’t stop the flashing, she doesn’t even know how to try to stop it, and when it comes, all of a sudden she’s walking on the dirt road to the spring in the early morning with her empty water pail, and the sun coming up over the mountains is warm on her neck, and when she wakes up in real life sometimes she’s in a different part of the house, or it’s nighttime when it was daytime just seconds before. Antonio took her to the doctor, but all he could do was tell her to sleep more or see a psychiatrist, so she tells Antonio she’s trying to sleep more, and because he’s always asleep before she is, it’s an easy lie.

She opens the bathroom door and takes the cordless, but not without shooting her husband an angry look. “
Pronto!
” she says, making her voice sunny. Antonio watches her, arms folded. “
Buon Natale,
Claudio!”

No one is there. She hears only a beep, then an echo of the beep, then the shaky four-thousand-mile-away voice of a different person, not Claudio, but a woman. Carolina. Carolina, her only sister alive.
Th
e sister who’d married Vito, the boy Maddalena loved, the boy of the bicycle and the secret meetings in the back of her father’s store. He had married Carolina, the sister of spite, who in thirty-five years never gave Maddalena the chance to ignore her letters, because she never sent a single one.

“
Sorella mia?
” Carolina’s voice asks. “
Sei proprio tu?
” My sister, is it really you?

She should throw the phone at Antonio for tricking her. But once you’re pulled underwater like this, you lose strength in your arms.

“Carolina,” says Maddalena, to which her sister replies, “Maddalena!” and at first all they can manage is to repeat their names over and over, like they’re convincing each other they’re real. What else can break a lifetime of silence?
Th
ey were once the best of friends. First a man came between them, then an ocean, then the grudges and pride of sisters. Mamma and Babbo and the twins, Celestina and Teresa, all died before them, and now it is just the two of them and Claudio.
Th
ey have grown children neither has met.

“
Ma dove sei?
” Carolina asks. “
Dove sei andata?
” Where are you? Where did you go?

“You know where I am,” says Maddalena, in Italian. Carolina’s voice sounds deeper and scratchier than she remembers. To hear it is a miracle. She wants to ask: Do you smoke now? Do you drink hard liquor, like Mamma used to do, to kill germs? She has so many questions that she can’t get them out fast enough.
Th
e most important: “Tell me: Are you well? And your children?”

“
Che cosa stai dicendo?
” says Carolina. “
Quali figli?
” What are you talking about? What children?

“It’s OK,” says Maddalena. “I know about them. A boy and a girl. Sergio, Donatella. I follow your life even though I don’t say.”

“
Non ho figli,
” Carolina says. I don’t have any children.

Maddalena looks at Antonio, confused. By now he’s on the other cordless and has been listening along with her. His face, all smiles two seconds ago, goes guilty again.

Th
ere are other voices in the background of Carolina’s house. It’s midafternoon in Santa Cecilia, and the
Vigilia
guests must be starting to arrive.
Th
ey must be carrying covered dishes packed with fish; they must be removing their fur coats; they must have sugar on their lips from the cookies they ate on the walk over.

“What happened to your son, Carolina?” Maddalena tries again, but there’s no response, only the voices behind her getting louder and music switched on. “Your son, Sergio. What happened to him?”

Carolina says something Maddalena can’t understand, but she thinks she hears the word “
tedesci.
” Germans. She seems to be talking half to herself, half to someone else in the room, but not at all to Maddalena. Still, Maddalena tries again.

“Is your daughter helping you cook? Donatella is such a pretty name. Does she have a
fidanzato
yet? Carolina?”
Th
en the line goes dead. “Carolina!”

She shakes the phone at Antonio’s face. In English she says, “What’s going on? What are you trying to prove? What’s wrong with her?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, head down. He goes into the hallway to escape her, but she follows him. He moves around as if looking for something to do—change a lightbulb, dust the grandfather clock. But the house is in perfect order, as always. Finally she corners him, forces him to meet her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” he says again.

“I don’t understand,” she says. “You’re punishing me?”

“No,” he says. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Something’s wrong with her, isn’t it?” says Maddalena. “Tell me.”

“You don’t want to know. You’re better off.”

“Tell me.”

“Goddamn it,” he says. “Claudio told me she was OK today. ‘She knows where she is,’ he said. I talked to him an hour ago. ‘She knows
who
she is,’ he said. I thought, I’ll show Maddalena life is still beautiful there. I’ll show her she can go back and everything will be the same. She’ll make up with her sister. I’ll be the hero for once.”

“What are you talking about?” Maddalena says, though she can guess. She steps closer.
Th
ey’re pressed up against each other in the narrow hallway, the glass Nativity set on the lowboy beside them, the Christmas lights blinking around the mirror.

“Her mind’s gone,” says Antonio. “She’s like a little baby. Worse.”

“Old-timer’s?”

He nods.

Th
e first thing Maddalena thinks is that their nephew, Marcello, Celestina’s son, is a doctor. Maddalena doesn’t know what kind, only that her sister took great pride in him, called him a genius. “Marcello doesn’t help her?” she asks.

“What can he do?” says Antonio. “His mother had the same thing. It’s backward over there. If you get sick, all they do is take some of the pain away.
Th
ey don’t try to stop anything, to turn it around.”

Already it’s starting to come out, everything Maddalena’s tried to keep on the other side of the ocean since Mamma died, a lifetime of miseries and diseases and deaths.
Th
is is what she tried to tell Prima, what her trip would have made happen.

“Not just Celestina,” Antonio continues. “Teresa, too. And your mother.
Th
e same way.”

“All of them, then. Why not just say ‘all of them’?” She’s been afraid to ask, to imagine. Every time she’s been tempted to pick up the extension and listen to Antonio’s conversations with her family in Santa Cecilia, she’s reminded herself, You don’t want to hear about cancer, strokes, old age, all the different ways they are being taken away. So she never listened. She’s thought of old-timer’s, but she figured one of them might get it, not all three.