All This Talk of Love (28 page)

Moments later, before the regret takes her nerve away, she dials the other number and hears, after many rings, the voice of Vito Leone. It’s been fifty years, but there’s no mistaking it. It is as clear and near-sounding as Frankie’s from Boston. She closes her eyes and feels Vito’s breath on her cheek. His hand on her hip guides her to the back room of her father’s store.

He calls out the same words Claudio used—“Hello? Hello!”—and the same question—“Who are you?”—but she can’t answer.

She listens for more voices in the background. Is Carolina there? Does she remember her? In a few seconds, Vito will hang up and be lost to her again. What a hypocrite I am, Maddalena thinks. What an American.
I should have loved him with my heart only, from the beginning, but somehow along the way I let him slip into my soul.

“Vito,” she says.

“
Sì.
Vito Leone.
Chi parla?
”

“
Mi dispiace,
” she says. I’m sorry.

“
Ma chi parla?
” he repeats. But who’s speaking? His voice is quiet, just above a whisper. She imagines him on the edge of his bed, in his slippers and shirtsleeves. Is Carolina asleep beside him? She has no right to disturb them, she should leave them in peace, but still she holds the phone against her ear.

“
Mi dispiace,
” she repeats. It’s not a lie. She is sorry for never writing to them, for leaving them in the first place, for never knowing the people they went on to be. What she would have given, all these years without her beautiful Tony, to find a number in a drawer and use it to call him, just once, to hear the voice of the man he’d have become, to tell him, I miss you, to ask him, Why did you give up on us? What could we have done to save you? Everything is the answer. She’d have done everything. And to think that she’d had Vito and Carolina and Mamma and all the others at the other end of the line most of her life and never reached out for them—she recognizes this now as her deepest sin. Antonio, Frankie, Prima—they recognized it all along.
Th
ey kept trying to tell her, but she’d convinced herself otherwise. Heartlessly. Cruelly.
Th
ose words that suddenly sound like her.

She stays quiet as long as she can. Doesn’t Vito recognize her voice? Has it changed so much? She listens to him ask his questions—Who are you? Who are you?—until he gives up, and the line goes dead.

ONE MORNING, ANTONIO
is dressing for the Al Di Là when Maddalena comes home early from church. She sits on the edge of their bed, her hands in her lap, watching him put on the polo shirt and pants she laid out for him the night before. She’s got a dark look on her face, and Antonio thinks maybe the priest scared her again with his talk of hell. Her face is dark a lot lately, like she’s pulled a veil over it, but then, sometimes in the same minute, she’ll lift up the veil and her face will fill with light again.

“
A cosa pensi, tesoro?
” he asks her. What’s on your mind, my treasure?
Th
ey speak mostly in Italian these days.
Th
e old words, he’s noticed, come easier.

“I’m sorry we’re not going to Santa Cecilia,” she says. “You wanted to go, and now we’re not going, and it’s my fault.”

He kneels beside her, his belt half looped around his waist, in just his socks. “It’s not your fault,” he says. “You don’t remember this, but Prima, she had an accident—”

“I know about the accident!” Maddalena says. “It’s my fault, too. She had too much on her mind. She was worried about me. She wasn’t paying attention.”

“Maddalena, no.”

She shakes her head. “I need to tell you: we won’t go next summer, either. I heard them talking.
Th
ey’re going by themselves, as soon as Prima can walk. A second honeymoon. I ruined our chance, and I’m sorry.”

“Please don’t worry,” says Antonio. “You get yourself worked up for nothing. You think I can’t change Prima and Tom’s mind about some second honeymoon? Listen: I talked to Claudio yesterday. He sounds so happy. Like a teenager. He says Carolina’s doing much better. She’s keeping up her garden. When she heard you were coming, she started making you a
crostata
with figs. Her daughter’s been asking her every day, ‘How long before we meet our famous American
zia
Maddalena?’ ”

“Prima and Tom are going alone,” Maddalena repeats. “
Th
at’s the only trip anybody’s taking. As soon as she’s out of the wheelchair.
Th
ey won’t want anyone else around, not even the boys, and especially not me, not anymore. I’m not strong enough. And they should have their romance.”

Antonio doesn’t tell her what Claudio really said: that he’ll never forgive Maddalena if she doesn’t come to see him one last time in Santa Cecilia, if she doesn’t make peace with her sister before she dies. It’s a matter of months for Carolina, not years, according to Claudio.
Th
ere’s no garden. No
crostata
with figs. Claudio, too, eighty-eight this spring, weakened by emphysema, wonders if he will see Christmas.

Antonio’s lies, which he will keep telling as long as he can, are for Maddalena’s own good. So no matter what Prima and Tom want from a second honeymoon, no matter what new excuse Maddalena will come up with not to go, he will find a way to get her on a plane with him before long.
Th
is summer. Next week, if it comes to that. He doesn’t know how this will happen, but he has to imagine it’s possible.

“You can go with them, just you,” Maddalena says, and her face lightens. “Prima won’t mind. She loves to have you around.
Th
ey can drop you off in the village so they can have a few days in Portofino for the romance. I’ll be OK here. Frankie will stay with me. I think you should go, Antonio. It would make me happy to see you go back.”

“Maybe I will,” he says, bluffing, thinking, I’ll never leave you alone, thinking, Before you know it, you and I will be walking together up the steps of the church of Santa Cecilia. We’ll drink a toast on your father’s terrace, where I asked your father for your hand. We’ll lean over the railing and wave to the customers at the Al Di Là across the street. I’ll play cards with Claudio late into the night, and you’ll sit next to me with your hand on my knee. You won’t deny me that, will you?

“Good,” she says. “It’s about time somebody had some common sense.”

Later, as he leaves for the restaurant, she reminds him: “Talk to Prima. Tell her we have a new plan.” She’s in the living room, spraying Pledge on tables that are already shiny.

“If you promise to rest,” he says, “I promise I’ll talk to Prima.”

DiSilvio comes to the Al Di Là for lunch. Ryan is there, serving them and managing the rush. Antonio’s been watching Ryan since he started two weeks ago, and he was right: the boy is a natural.
Th
e customers love him.
Th
e kitchen guys listen to him. He earned their respect right away. Just yesterday, when some rude big-shot business-guy customer with gold rings complained that his meatball sandwich was cold and that his floozy of a girlfriend’s salad had too much dressing, and called the restaurant an “overpriced dump,” Ryan replaced both dishes right away with a smile and threw in two glasses of (bottom-shelf) wine, and nobody got agitated. Gilberto would have told the big-shot guy to warm up the meatballs between his floozy’s legs; Maurizio would have given him a free dinner and a hand job. But Ryan has a way of calming people down without too many freebies; he makes them feel right, even when they’re wrong. He speaks to the dishwashers in the Spanish he learned in college, and
un miracolo,
the dishes come out cleaner. He stays past midnight to get the books right and still has time for fun with the girl waiting for him at the bar. Already he knows the loyal customers by name and walks them to the sidewalk at the end of their meals.

For two weeks, Antonio has watched his grandson like a girl watches a boy serenading her. It brings him back to the early years with Mario, and more than that, it gives him hope, for the first time since his brother passed, that the Al Di Là will end up in good hands. It’s not too soon to tell, no matter what his lawyer might say.
Th
e signs are always there.

Antonio says as much to DiSilvio, who for thirty years has helped keep him and his books legal. Now on a Monday afternoon in the middle of June, Antonio is finally redoing his papers.
Th
e meeting is eight months overdue.

It takes Ryan to show Antonio what he should have seen all along: that Frankie will never give up on his degrees and fall in love with the Al Di Là the way Tony did. Only now that Ryan is a possibility can Antonio fully remember how Frankie suffered through his summers as a waiter, how nervous and impatient and clumsy and resentful he was.

DiSilvio asks, “You don’t worry this is just a passing phase for your grandson? Two weeks is nothing to judge, especially at his age.”

Antonio shakes his head. He knows people. He listens. It’s maybe the only joy of being old: you’re allowed to sit on the couch and rest your eyes during the family parties, the quiet hours of the Al Di Là afternoon, take in all the gossip, the complaints, the secrets. He’s learned a lot this way, eyes closed, arms folded, mouth hanging open so people think he’s asleep. But he doesn’t sleep; he studies. Antonio’s been studying each of his grandsons since they stopped being kids, but it wasn’t until the twins’ birthday party in October that they came clear to him.
Th
e twins and Patrick have too strong a wild streak, but Ryan, who showed up to surprise them, who had tears in his eyes when he hugged his brothers even though he’d seen them just a few weeks before, is a man of the family.

DiSilvio is skeptical. But Maddalena, if Antonio discussed such things with her, would agree that Ryan is the Al Di Là’s best chance. Lying beside her in bed at night, after the soap opera is over and she’s hung up with Frankie, he tells her a lot more than he used to, but he still won’t discuss what will come after them. His talking helps to settle her mind, she says, it’s what she’s wanted for many years, to hear what he’s learned from his day. So he tells her that Ryan is the strongest of the four, that Patrick drinks too much, that Matt’s not as smart as Zach, but Zach’s not as good at sports. He tells her that one of the line cooks is cheating on his wife with a girl who works at the Rite Aid next door. He tells her that Frankie won’t stay in Boston forever, that, like Ryan, he won’t last long so far away from them; that Tom’s got a temper Prima tries to hide from them; that Prima is lonely. Most of these, Maddalena claims to know already. Only when he tries to tell her things about herself—that she’s a better dancer now than when they first met, that Arlene is jealous whenever the teacher picks her to demonstrate, that she wants nothing more than to make peace with Carolina and Vito—will she say, “Close the light,” and turn her face away.

Th
ere are some things Antonio won’t say.
Th
ey wake him long after Maddalena’s finally fallen asleep, and won’t let him rest, and take him downstairs and outside to the yard, where he walks under the neighbors’ dark windows. But he’s not safe here, or anywhere. What follows him is the certainty that he will outlive her, the beautiful baby girl he first saw asleep on the countertop of her father’s store, the young woman he met again years later, his love of fifty-four years.
Th
at her end will come soon, and hard.
Th
at he’ll not last long without her, alone in their house of dreams.
Th
at there’s more.
Th
at Tony, the son they loved more than anything in the world, much more than they loved each other, was cursed, and fought a war of his own, and lost. To know all this is a heartbreak Antonio can’t bear. It comes to mind in the night and when DiSilvio forces him to open his eyes to the future.

“
Th
e way you have it now,” DiSilvio reminds him, wiping the crumbs from his second dessert off the documents between them, “your wife inherits one hundred percent of your assets, should you precede her in death. After she passes, all assets, including the house, are to be divided equally among your two children, minus the sum you’ve set aside to be distributed among your grandsons,
and
minus the sum you have put in trust for Ryan Buckley should he fulfill your wish to inherit the Al Di Là and all its assets and liabilities outright. ”

“Yes,” says Antonio. “And if he doesn’t want it, you sell it to the highest bidder and give the profits to the kids, fifty-fifty.”

“You don’t want to include an option for another grandchild—or Prima or Francesco—to take it on?”

Again Antonio shakes his head. “It took me twenty-five years to buy that land and make that business what it is. If they don’t want it now, they’ll never want it. After I’m gone, they might think they should hold on to it, for—”

“For sentimental reasons,” interrupts DiSilvio.

“
Th
at’s right, sentimental, because maybe they miss me, but then soon enough they stop missing me, and they’re left with this business they don’t want and don’t understand, and they start to hate it, and they fight with each other, and the whole thing’s a mess. I’d rather a stranger buy it and tear it down, and the kids and grandkids get the money, than for any Grasso to hate it. Mario and I built this place from love.”