All This Talk of Love (17 page)

Next it comes for me.

Antonio looks at her. She’s the youngest in the family. He reads her mind: “Don’t be scared,
tesoro,
” he says. “You live in the United States of America.”

“What’s that have to do with it?”

“You lived a different life.”

“But I was born there. My head is the same as theirs.
Th
e same blood. Sometimes my head goes blank. I don’t remember things. What’s it matter where I lived?”

“
Th
e brain is a muscle,” Antonio says. “Do you know that? I bet you don’t. I asked that doctor we saw. I’ve been worried. You don’t think I got worried, with your spells, knowing this all these years?” He moves closer, but she has her arms folded against her chest and is biting her lip, her body so stiff nothing can reach or relax her. “Every brain starts the same way—equal, like you said—but it can grow as big and strong as you make it. You have to exercise it to make it strong. Like a weight lifter. Your sisters, your mother—they did nothing with their brains.
Th
ey let the muscles go to fat in the kitchens and fields of Santa Cecilia. Look how you’re different: you learned to speak a new language, even to read and write a little; every day you use math when you’re sewing; you learned the fox-trot and the tango and all those other complicated dances at the studio.
Th
at’s exercising your brain, believe me.”

“Teresa worked in the butcher shop.”

“Wrapping up pig parts?” he says. “
Th
at’s not enough. Not even close.”

He takes her hands. His are a knot of veins, dry as paper, and cold, the hands of an old man.

She lets them go. “We have a lot of cooking to do,” she says.

“Believe me,” he says. “I know more than you. I won’t let you suffer.”

She goes downstairs to her fabric drawer, takes out the letters from her sisters and brother and from Mamma. She arranges them on the table and ties them in bundles with a colored ribbon. She presses her fingers to the handwritten names on the backs of the envelopes and places them behind the ones to her mother at the back of the drawer.

In the years before Prima was born, when Maddalena was in her early twenties, the possibility that Vito Leone might find his way to America gave Maddalena something to hope for. She dreamed of his finding her and returning her, like a princess in a maid’s dress, to her real home, that magical village, with much celebration. She’d find Carolina there, in love with a German soldier maybe, or a widower from another town, and all would be well. But Vito turned out to be as ordinary as any other man. Maddalena, too, was ordinary, not a princess at all. She stopped dreaming of rescue. What she has wanted, above all, from her life, from this Christmas, is peace. Calm. To ask for happiness is to ask for too much.

It’s 11:02 a.m. on the stove clock. In four hours and six minutes, Frankie’s train will pull into the little station in Wilmington, where Antonio will greet him and drive him home. While she’s been in the basement with her letters, he’s washed the kitchen countertops clean. On the table the little nests of pasta dry in rows. Two coffee cups, washed, sit upside down on a dish towel. He’s set out the ingredients for the fish batter and covered the bowls with the old linen napkins they use as rags. He filled the fryer with oil and turned it on high, knowing that she would be up soon from the basement.

GET FRANKIE ALONE
in his old bedroom, and before long he’ll raid the shopping bags at the back of the closet. On this day, Christmas Eve, he chooses the one magic-markered “9.” He dumps its contents—letters and photos and notebooks from ninth grade—at the foot of the bed and sits cross-legged among the artifacts.
Th
e less preciously he treats them, the more likely he will be to uncover a gem, to spark a revelation. Instead he finds a mawkish poem he composed on the back of an algebra test, his first checkbook (blank), and a pink construction-paper Valentine from Charlotte Lemke, who drowned in the Atlantic the first night of senior week. He summons Charlotte’s face from the newspaper photos—freckles, frizzy hair, spokesmodel smile—and wonders what might have happened if he’d reciprocated her freshman-year Valentine, asked her out, dated through the proms. She might never have taken up with the senior-week crowd. She might now be a grad student herself, on her way back to Wilmington this rainy afternoon, in traffic on the interstate, singing.

He tosses Charlotte’s heart back on the pile. What’s wrong with him, anyway? What compels him not only to seek the sad stories but to wallow in them?

“You’re a child of tragedy,” Birch told him soon after their first drink on Elm Street, her arm around his shoulder chummily.
Th
ey were walking in the woods, one of their rare trips out in fresh air. “But you don’t acknowledge it. You don’t let it touch you. Once you do, you’ll have enough tragedy, and you won’t go courting more.”

“I’ll have so much time on my hands.”

“It’s not funny,” she said. “And don’t get excited. You won’t use the extra time wisely. You’ll waste away watching TV. Sports. James Bond movies.”

“I loathe sports.”

“I’m being serious.”

She’s right, he thought.
Th
e death by suicide of his older brother has not touched him. Isn’t that a lucky break? Hasn’t he been spared?

“I misspoke,” Birch said. “It’s not that it hasn’t touched you. It’s that it’s touched you and you don’t realize how.”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know you well enough yet,” she said.

With the door closed and the drapes drawn, Frankie’s old bedroom—which was Prima’s, not Tony’s—is pleasantly hermetic.
Th
e aroma of garlic and fish, which will permeate every square inch of the house by the end of the night’s holiday feast, can’t find him here. His parents’ raised voices, debating parsley distribution on the
baccalà
and the crispiness of the
frittelli,
come through the walls muted and garbled, as if from an adjoining movie theater. Here in his own theater, Frankie’s been granted two luxurious hours to himself before Prima and Tom arrive with their brood and the Al Di Là managers stop by with their wives and their obligatory panettone and boxes of Italian chocolates.

He could call Kelly Anne McDonald, but they’ve already set and twice confirmed their plans to meet for a late movie tomorrow in Philly. Movies are what Frankie and Kelly do together. Movies followed by a thoughtful exegesis over dessert and coffee, followed by twenty minutes of jerky over-the-sweater action in the front seat of her car, as if they are teenagers in 1953. “OK, that’s a wrap,” she’ll say, flushed, when they’ve gone far enough. And yet, after they part, Frankie feels not frustrated but exhilarated.
Th
e delay, her coy deferral, thrills him; and if it’s part of some elaborate plan, some kinky
American Graffiti
role-play, all the better. In the meantime he’s still got Birch, with whom thoughtful exegesis (in bed or at the kitchen table) is strenuously avoided. Some days they barely utter a greeting or farewell, and even then, each empty phrase—each “see you” and “take care”—wields the destruction potential of a grenade. He would enjoy pointing out to her the irony of two literary scholars communicating primarily in Neanderthal-like grunts, but he can’t seem to break from this new code they’ve established. For future reference/ammunition/amusement, he has been transcribing their entire conversations in a spiral notebook. He’s kept the journal faithfully every Tuesday and
Th
ursday over the past month but has yet to fill two pages.

Frankie hates to cop to this sentimental streak of his, but it keeps revealing itself. As it should, the academy frowns on sentimentality, that last refuge of the lazy and shallow minded. Among English lit types, sentimentality is a cancer that distorts the analyses of all texts, in particular those authored by marginalized or oppressed peoples. Frankie ruthlessly excises any and all traces of it in his work, but in life he saves every card and letter, every passed note, every flimsy token.
Th
e vestiges of the first twenty-three years of his life remain in this bedroom closet in the shopping bags arranged by academic year (he knows no other type of year); the most recent he keeps in neatly stacked plastic bins in the basement of 25 Stowe.

What would Birch say if she knew this about him? What about Kelly Anne?

One would laugh in his face and then, aroused, wrestle him to the floor.
Th
e other would squeeze his hand, look down, and ask, “So what have you saved of us?”

(
Th
ree ticket stubs. A cappuccino-stained napkin from Caffè Vittorio. Her phone number on a page of notebook paper from the night they met on Amtrak.)

Frankie Grasso, ninth-grade version, had no friends, certainly no girlfriends. In summer in Graylyn Ridge, the fifties-era suburb to which his parents had fled, he suffered in silence among mute trees, the white noise of lawn mowers, and the absence of kids other than the mongoloid, who never left his fenced-in yard. Frankie spent long hours in the woods behind his neighborhood, building little huts with sticks and mud, then exploding them with firecrackers. By August he’d destroyed every plastic toy in the house—the generic green army men, the Smurfs, Prima’s bald and dented Barbies.

It was also in ninth grade that he saw
Zio
Giulio die.

Zio and Aunt Helen looked after Frankie in the afternoons while his father worked at the trattoria and his mother at the drapery shop.
Th
ey lived in a little brick row house around the corner from St. Anthony’s grade school, in Little Italy.
Th
ere were real books on their bookshelves, not picture frames or figurines or extra plates. Aunt Helen, the only non-Italian in the Grasso family before Prima married Tom, taught piano at St. Ann’s but could play any instrument: guitar, clarinet, even harp. On holidays, Zio Giulio would break out the accordion and she’d sing traditional Italian songs for everybody like a
paesana.

When Frankie arrived at their house each afternoon, he’d find them sitting on the porch or in their living room, reading. Zio Giulio would look up, startled, and say, “Oh, Francesco! Is it that time already?”

Giulio and Helen rarely watched television.
Th
ey shrugged at exercise.
Th
ey fed Frankie, made him finish his homework, double-check his arithmetic, revise his compositions, and, if time permitted, read aloud to them from his religion primer. From time to time they’d fight loudly in front of Frankie, who absorbed every word.
Th
is is how he learned that Helen had saved Giulio from a life of loneliness and disorder, that he did not deserve her, and that it was she who earned every penny of their meager savings; he also learned that Giulio had saved Helen from her own lonely and unbearably routine life, that she did not deserve
him,
and that if it weren’t for Giulio’s inheritance they would be sleeping in the gutter.

Th
ey were Tony’s official godparents, they had stood beside him in the church a month after he was born and poured water over his head, but they, too, rarely mentioned him. Like his mother, they insisted to Frankie that he was worthy of great love.
Th
ey saw something special in him.
Th
ey made him promise he’d someday move to New York and open a bookstore/art gallery/jazz lounge, where no-names could perform alongside the celebrated. Helen believed that fame rotted the soul. Giulio believed in the underdog.
Th
ey weren’t hippies, they said; in fact, they’d voted twice for Reagan and disapproved of women who’d traded their God-given maternal destiny for careers. And yet it was Giulio who introduced Frankie to Amnesty International and Helen who admired Neruda’s poetry and activism.
Th
ey made Frankie read
Inherit the Wind
together with the Bible. If you asked them what they were—Libertarians? Reformed Catholics?—they’d say simply, “We’re
educated.
”

It’s what Frankie decided he wanted to be.

Th
ough by ninth grade he no longer required a babysitter, he frequently walked the few miles to Little Italy at the end of the school day. He’d do his homework at the kitchen table while Helen taught piano in the dining room and Giulio napped in the leather recliner beside the bay window. It was in the unexpected harmony of these three rooms—the stuttering piano, Giulio’s snores, Helen’s exaggerated coos, the metronome ticking—that Frankie filled a journal with sappy sestinas, read C. S. Lewis, and traced the barbed-wired Amnesty candle logo on the front of all his notebooks. It was the least lonely place he has ever known.

One February afternoon, Zio Giulio came home carrying a large burlap sack stuffed with chestnuts. He dropped the sack on the coffee table, reached in, grabbed two handfuls of the chestnuts, and let them slip through his fingers like diamonds.

“Five bucks!” he said to Helen. “For all these!”

She stood over the sack, hands on her hips, picking over the contents with her eyes. “Full of worms, I’ll bet.”

“Say half are no good,” he said. “It’s still a steal. For five bucks? And Frankie loves them. Don’t you,
uaglio
?”