All This Talk of Love (36 page)

“Leave it to the Italians,” says Frankie. “How come you never told us this, Dad?”

“I’m hearing it for the first time,” Antonio says.

“
Ganzo,
” says Kelly Anne, and Vito laughs.

“Maddalena would think so, too,” says Antonio.

“She already knows,” says Donatella. “Zia Celestina told her in one of her letters. Zia loved that story, for some reason. She wanted to tell everyone. She believed it was the image of Saint Cecilia herself, painted onto the earth by God.”

Maddalena never read any of those letters, Prima could say, but she stops herself. Her father and Frankie, too, say nothing.
Th
ey found all the letters in the basement, tied with a ribbon, unopened. Behind those, letters to her mother written years after she was already dead.

Prima’s lower back aches, and her leg, her crushed but functional leg, starts to throb.
Th
e long day is catching up with her. Her family must be tired, too, especially her father. It seems impossible that just yesterday she was in Wilmington madly packing her suitcase, and this morning she landed in Rome. It was as easy as she always thought it would be to get here, but she takes no comfort in that. She wishes Tom were with her. She wants to talk to him, tell him everything that’s in her heart. It’s surprising—she’s been thinking of him more than of her boys. She’s been wondering what he’ll do for Saturday dinner, which of his T-shirts he’s put on to mow the lawn. She wants to tell him about the miracle of the bicycle, the shape of the village, the sky. She wants him to know she picked him for a reason, whether she knew it at the time or not, and has no regrets.

“Listen,” says Vito. “Keep very quiet. Don’t even breathe. You can hear it.”

“Hear what?” asks Frankie.

“
Th
e river.”

TH
E SAME GROUP
gathers two nights later on the Piccinelli terrace. Prima’s glad that Maddalena is with them this time, eating the
merenda,
drinking the white wine chilled by the creek, wearing sunglasses though the evening light is fading. She’s in a lounge chair beside Carolina, who has become a new friend.

Th
ere are four languages on this terrace, Frankie thinks: Italian, English, the hybrid that Vito stammers through, and the mystery tongue spoken by the sisters.
Th
e words are real Italian, of course, but the sentences don’t follow a track. Still, Maddalena and Carolina laugh and answer each other’s disconnected questions, and when one of them mentions a name, the other places it and offers news of the person they’re discussing, something no one else on the terrace can do.

In the morning, Maddalena will leave and Carolina will stay and they will never see each other again. To Prima, it seems cruel not to tell them this so they can say good-bye, but then again, it’s all been cruel.
Th
e years of silence between them.
Th
e ocean that kept them apart.
Th
eir minds rotting before their bodies.

It doesn’t take long for Vito Leone—a chatterbox if there ever was one—to again steer the conversation to his favorite topic: when will Francesco propose to this pretty Kelly Anne?

Prima’s embarrassed for the poor girl, sitting beside Vito in a strapless yellow dress that shows her sunburnt shoulders. She’s a good sport, all smiles through the teasing and his hand on her knee and his asking, over and over, how she can be so
simpatica
and not Italian. Is she sure her grandfather, maybe, or great-grandmother, didn’t have some Italian blood? To Frankie he says, up close in his face like an accuser, You don’t realize how lucky you are?

“Leave them alone, Papà,” says Donatella.

“I won’t,” he says.

Prima sits beside her father, her hand on top of his. How strange it must be for him, she thinks, hearing Vito’s advice on love when he knows that he means every word for the Maddalena of sixty years ago, for the life Vito would have had with her if it weren’t for him. Even so, she can see in her father’s eyes that he’s sad to be leaving. She’s already suggested they stay a few more days, change their tickets, who cares about the money, Ryan and the restaurant and Tom will be fine, but he said no, it was time.

“All this talk of love,” Prima says to him while Vito rambles on to Frankie and Kelly Anne on the other side of the terrace, “—it reminds me: Do you know whatever happened to Dante Marconi? Is he still in Wilmington?”

He looks at her. “Dante Marconi? Why?”

“It’s OK, Dad,” Prima says with a laugh. “I know why you fired him. You don’t have to pretend.”

He blinks at her, seeming confused.

“You don’t remember.
Th
at’s a good thing. Or maybe you really didn’t know? When I was sixteen and working at the Al Di Là? We used to sneak around, me and Dante Marconi. Before Tony died. And . . . and after, too. For just a little while. It was nothing big. But there was no way I could tell you back then. It was obvious you didn’t like him.
Th
at ponytail—”

“You and Dante?”

“Yes. Why do you think I was such a terrible waitress? All I could concentrate on was him. I thought I was in love. Can you imagine.” She laughs. It’s a relief to get that part of it, at least, out in the open, even though she could have done so a long time ago, after she’d settled down with Tom, when it wouldn’t have mattered anymore to her father. “I thought for sure Gilberto told you. He caught us in the alley once. We both assumed that’s why you fired him all of a sudden.”

“Who are you talking about?” Frankie calls out from the other side of the terrace.

“Nothing,” Prima says. “Just a crush I had once.
Th
is guy Dante Marconi. A waiter at the Al Di Là.”

“
Dante,
” Frankie says. “How literary of you, Prima.”

“
Dante e Beatrice,
” says Vito, who’s half following them and half gazing at Kelly Anne’s shoulders. “An Italian love story.”

“It wasn’t a love story,” says Prima.

“What was it?” asks Kelly Anne.

“You OK, Dad?” Prima asks him. “You’re not mad at me, are you? It was such a long time ago. I was stupid. You can’t be mad at me for something like that—”

“Did Tony know?” he asks.

Everyone’s looking at him because now he’s shaking. “Dad, what is it? Why does it matter?”

“Just tell me if Tony knew about you and Dante Marconi.”

Prima casts her mind back. “At first, no,” she says. “
Th
en—yes, I think I did tell him. Because I was worried he’d find out from Gilberto and tell you. I made him swear not to. I remember for sure now. We were sitting on his bed one night after a shift. He didn’t rat on me, though, did he?”

“No,” Antonio says.

“We kept each other’s secrets,” she says. “I would have done anything for him.”

“He hated you, too, then. Not just me.”

“What did you say?” Prima asks. “He didn’t hate me, Dad. He didn’t hate any of us. You shouldn’t talk like that. Do you need a glass of water?”

He shuts his eyes and squeezes them tight like he’s trying to stop tears. “I’m sorry,” he says.
Th
en he stands up. He’s still shaking. “I’m going for a walk.”

“I’ll go with you,” Frankie says, shooting Prima a look that means, Don’t worry, I’ll figure this out.

“No,” says Antonio. “Stay here.”

He goes to Maddalena, kneels beside her, and whispers something in her ear. She nods. He takes her hand and helps her to her feet and together they go into the house without a word to anyone.

Minutes later they appear on the street, walking toward the piazza. Prima and Frankie watch them. From above, they look like any white-haired village couple: the lady in a housedress, the man with a sweater tied around his shoulders. Except she can only be Prima’s mother and he can only be her father, and Maddalena was always going to pick Antonio over Vito Leone, and their first son was always going to jump from the bridge, and they were never not going to grow old together or take one last walk hand in hand through the village, up to the church. In their long lives, Prima thinks, she and Frankie have played only small parts.

When they turn toward the gorge, Frankie asks, “Do you know what that was about?”

“No idea,” Prima says.

Kelly Anne comes over to stand with them. “So you lost track of Dante?” she asks. “How sad!”

“It’s not so sad,” says Prima. “He hates me.”

“For what?”

It’s been torn down now, Prima’s checked, but back in her day, there was an abandoned house in the woods behind Brandywine Creek State Park. Kids called it the devil house, but it was really just a small cabin people had stopped living in.
Th
e land was owned by two old women, cousins, or so they said, who lived in a big house up the hill from the shed.
Th
ere were lots of rumors about the shed. You never heard the same one the same way twice.
Th
e most famous rumor went that devil worshippers gathered there to sacrifice animals and there was a hole in the floor that led straight to hell. Kids used to go driving around drunk at night looking for the devil house but never finding it. It was just a little workman’s cabin hidden from the road by trees. What some of them must have known, though, and kept mostly to themselves, was that it was a place where a girl could get a doctor to come if she needed one.
Th
e two women in the main house were connected to the doctor. You had to go through them first, and pay the money, which is what Prima did, with her friend Linda, and then a night or two later, when she told her parents she was going to Linda’s house, instead she went to the cabin.

“He caught me with his best friend,” Prima says to Kelly Anne. “We were just making out, but—it was enough.”

“Classy,” says Frankie.

“I know, I know,” Prima says, with an “I surrender” wave and a smile she forces through, though her heart is breaking in the same raw place it broke that night in Linda’s car on the way home from the cabin, and has broken, again and again, with the same ache immediately following, each time she’s with her sons.

“I never saw him again after that night,” Prima says, and this part is true. “It really hurt him, what I did. He had so much pride. I didn’t know then about an Italian man’s pride. I was just figuring it out.”

Prima can still see him, Dante, beside her on the hood of his blue Camaro, in his jeans and white T-shirt, arms out, making her promise that she wouldn’t do it, that she’d think as hard as she could about marrying him and living in his grandmother’s house at the Jersey Shore with their son, their daughter, whatever God gave them. He was too young and stupid to be angry or scared. He felt nothing but joy at their twist of fate.

I promise, Prima had said.

“He’s forgiven you by now,” says Kelly Anne.

“Seriously,” Frankie says. “No offense, but he probably doesn’t even remember it. We Italian men go through lots of women in a lifetime.”

“Is that right?” asks Kelly Anne.

Th
e next morning, when they’re gathered outside the store with their luggage, and the entire village, it seems, comes to wish them off, Vito Leone’s face is full of tears. Carolina can’t understand why. Maddalena, too, is confused. But he makes sense to Prima. He’s a romantic. And because Prima is not—not anymore, at least—she envies him.

Maddalena sits in the backseat of the rental car next to her husband. Up until the last possible second, even after Frankie’s turned on the ignition, she holds Carolina’s hand through the open window.
Th
en they pull away, and Prima’s last glimpse of Santa Cecilia is her army of a family, who’d been strangers just days before, walking fast toward them in a pack down the middle of the street, waving their handkerchiefs, shouting their names, calling,
ciao, ciao, buon viaggio, arrivederci,
see you soon, see you again!

12
More

L
ATER THAT SUMMER,
Frankie and Kelly Anne take a proper vacation. A week in Rehoboth, just the two of them, with nothing to do but read and swim and play games on the boardwalk.
Th
ey spend a couple of mornings on the stretch of beach where Matt and Zach work as lifeguards. Kelly Anne looks delicious in a swimsuit, the freckles across her chest, her hair a strawberry blond for just a few precious weeks.
Th
e beach trip is a gift from her parents, offered and accepted without fuss.
Th
ey don’t want the week to end but aren’t sad when they leave.
Th
eir little life together in Newark is a satisfying one. So in the car headed north on Route 1 they turn up the radio and sing.

Once a month, every month now for the past year or so, they meet Prima and Tom for dinner at the Al Di Là. When they do, Antonio cooks the meal himself to show the cooks who’s boss and to keep up the old recipes. Frankie’s in constant disagreement with Prima—over politics, whether Patrick should join a frat, why he and Kelly Anne don’t need to get married, all the conversations they had in Santa Cecilia rehashed and added to—but at the end of the night they put their arms around each other and say how fast the months go and promise to see each other more. Ryan’s always there buzzing around the tables in a tie and blazer. A newly minted graduate of Syracuse, he spent a small fortune of his parents’ money to secure the job at the family restaurant he could have had out of high school, but nobody complains.

Th
is fall, Assistant Professor Frank Grasso is on the U of D campus five days a week. A Monday three-hour lecture, a Tuesday-
Th
ursday intro course, and a Monday-Wednesday-Friday postcolonial survey. Not to mention office hours (Tuesdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to noon, the time most popular with the students, and by appointment). Not to mention the endless thesis-committee meetings, and the reams of essays he grades in the cafeteria between commitments.
Th
row in research time on new papers for MLA and the Pitt and BU conferences, and the revision of his dissertation-about-to-become-a-published-book, and his volunteer role with the Graduate Student Union, and his schedule becomes unmanageable. Yet he takes more when more is offered to him. Because every minute on campus, hard at work, at the podium in front of scribbling coeds, is one of distraction.

It’s not until he gets in his car—a 2001 Toyota, the first car he’s bought with his own money—and tosses his satchel and empty thermos on the passenger seat, that he’s reminded what a fool’s paradise
more
has turned out to be.
More
is never enough.
Th
e undistracted minute always arrives, and there beside him is his sadness, that hulking giant that follows him wherever he goes.

Th
e one magic afternoon in Santa Cecilia was the last time Frankie’s mother recognized him. He conjures it up more often than he should: Maddalena calling his name, taking him in her arms. A miracle. Conjuring up the day gives him hope when hope is necessary. Once something beautiful unfolds before you, isn’t it human nature to replay the moment over and over, take it like a drug when you need it?

He calls Kelly Anne on his cell phone to plan dinner. She’s a decent cook, but neither of them is much of a housekeeper. Against her religion and her parents’ wishes, they rent an apartment off Academy Street. She teaches in the Delaware public school system. He helps her with her bulletin boards, making sure she doesn’t pass along the naive understanding of America’s reprehensible colonial history her professors at BC taught her. She drags him to church once a month. In these ways, they corrupt each other.
Th
ough she’s patient with Frankie’s skittishness, he knows she’d like a ring, to feel legitimate in the eyes of the priests at St. Ann’s, and one day he’ll break down and get her one, but for now he prefers not to mess with a good thing.

At night, if he doesn’t have too many papers to grade, they watch documentaries. Or they grab a beer at Klondike Kate’s and hope they don’t run into any of Frankie’s students. Whatever they do, most nights they’re home by ten, an old unmarried married couple. And at 11:01, in bed beside her, he calls his parents’ house from the extension on his nightstand.

His father plays bocce on Tuesdays,
Th
ursdays, and Saturdays, the nights Prima and Frankie take turns sitting with their mother.
Th
ere’s a new nurse in the daytime, an expensive one Tom and Prima pay for.

Tonight’s a Wednesday. His father answers on the second ring, groggy, startled, half-awake.
Th
ey make sure they’ve each had dinner, that their cars are running OK, the same conversation they had yesterday, and have been having for two, five, fifteen years, and will have as long as they can. In the middle of it, his mother picks up. She’s in a different room, the cordless always beside her.

She tells him about people he’s never heard of, who may not even exist. She mixes Italian and English in the same sentence. He recognizes some of the names from previous conversations, on the Piccinelli terrace and elsewhere, but most of the names are inaccessible, unattached to any of the multiple story lines that have been building over the years. But how happy she sounds tonight to know these strangers, to report on their progress.

Th
eir soap is on in the background; it plays over and over most of the day in her room; he can hear it, it’s on so loud; and though she may or may not understand him, he fills her in on what’s going on, who’s in love, who’s missing, who was thought dead but has come back to life. All the silliness and drama and sex and heartbreak that is the stuff of life. It’s too late to go on for long, they are all three so tired, but the time is tradition.

His clock radio says 11:13. “Good night to you both,” he says. “I love you.”

“Good night, Son,” his father says. “Be careful.”

“Good night, Dad. I’ll see you tomorrow night at the restaurant.
You
be careful driving.”

“I’ll be there,” he says. “Love you, Son. Good-bye.”

His father is always the first to hang up.

“Good night, Ma.”

“Bye, bye!” she says brightly.

“I love you.”

“Love you, too. Bye, bye!”

“Good-bye,” Frankie says. “I love you, good-bye.”