All This Talk of Love (4 page)

“All that money wasted,” says Maddalena. She takes her fork and pushes a bite of cake around her plate. “It’s a shame. I’m staying here. Call the airplane company and tell them I died.”

“Jesus Christ,” Prima says.

“
Th
is is supposed to be exciting,” says Tom. “Prima and I have been wanting to make this happen for years, not just for us, for everybody. Since the day we met we’ve been talking about a Grasso-Buckley family trip to Italy. Doesn’t it sound like a movie?”

“Good news is long overdue in this family,” says Prima. “
Th
at’s all we’re trying to do: give the Grassos a happy memory.”

Maddalena stops listening to this nonsense. Why bother?
Th
ey speak for her. Always people speak for her, tell her what she really means, how to pronounce the words so they sound not only like correct English but less angry, less sad. First her mother and father spoke for her; then, when she was just a teenager—barely nineteen!—Antonio Grasso came along in his suit and his
zio
’s car and did the talking. She has never been back to Santa Cecilia, not even for a visit, not once in the fifty years since Antonio married her and brought her to America, and she’s not about to start now. Unlike him, she still has her people in that village. She remembers them how they were when she left them in 1946. Now most of them are bones in the ground behind the church. Mamma and Babbo, her sisters and brothers, Teresa, Celestina, Maurizio, Giacomo. Too much family to lose in one lifetime. It’s not enough to bury your own son; now they want her to go back for the bones of the others, too? She has only one brother left, Claudio, and one sister, Carolina, but she hasn’t spoken to them in twenty years. She won’t see them old and sick, not after working so hard, every day, to keep them young and beautiful and full of life in her mind. No. She won’t let that happen.

She could be loud about it now, but she won’t, not here, not on her grandson’s special day. Not with Frankie beside her. If she makes a fuss, she’ll scare him off. So she pushes the slice of cake around her plate until it hardens to a paste. Her eyes wander the room. She notices the spill stains on the carpets by the bathroom, the chips in the saucers, the dust on the drapes. In the corners of Prima’s eyes—look how she’s talking now, on and on, her and her surprises—are a web of wrinkles, and not just when she smiles. Liver spots cover her once-perfect wrists. No, that’s Maddalena’s own face in the mirrored wall; that’s her spotted, wrinkled old-lady skin. Santa Cecilia was the one place on earth where she was young. She was a beauty and a talker there, an expert at voices, an actress in the making. What belongs to her and her alone is that village during those nineteen years, her memories of it, of who she might have been, the view from the terrace above her father’s store, the stairs to her bedroom made of marble, the tops of the trees scraping the sky. Go back now, see it all changed, and that, too, will be taken away.

“DON’T WORRY ABOUT
my mother,” Prima says to Tom on the way home. Patrick’s in the back seat with his headphones on, staring out the window.
Th
e other boys are safely on trains back to Syracuse and to Penn State. “She’ll come around. Who can’t come around to a trip to Italy?”

“Her,” Tom says. “Maybe it’s wrong to push her. You saw her face—she went white. And she was
mad.
Like,
rage
.
I’ve never seen her that way. You told me this trip would be a tough sell, but I wasn’t expecting such an extreme reaction. You think she’s hiding something about that village?”

“She’s got nothing to hide, trust me. She’s an open book. She needs that push. She doesn’t know what’s good for her. And she’s so dramatic. Ryan got that gene, didn’t he? Somehow it skipped me.” She smiles and pinches him.

More than that, though, she explains to Tom, it’s unhealthy for her mother to pretend Santa Cecilia stopped existing the day she left it, to treat her childhood in the village the way she and Prima have both treated losing Tony. It’s time for that to change. She read in a magazine that decades of denial build up in a person, that closing yourself off, never giving yourself a release, pretending things are one way when they’re another, is unhealthy, can even lead to cancer or Alzheimer’s or high blood pressure. It makes sense. You hold something in long enough and it turns to poison.

“It was Tony’s forty-third birthday last week,” she says to Tom now. She’s testing how it feels to say his name out loud, to make him a part of the day. It’s never too late, the magazine said, to chip away at the buildup of denial, but mentioning his birthday to Tom so casually, the way she’d mention the birthday of someone in his firm, feels like a betrayal of the unspoken pact she’s had with her mother.

Even so, she continues. “I went to my mother’s house on the actual day,” she says. “I didn’t tell her why. I just stopped in. We sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking about the party, and I said, ‘Let’s walk down to St. Mary’s and light a candle,’ but she pretended not to hear me. She got up and emptied the espresso maker.”

“Like I said, maybe it’s wrong to push her.”

“If you don’t push people, Tom, they don’t change. What if I didn’t push this one?” She ticks her head back toward Patrick, then leans in to whisper. “He’d be bald right now, begging for change at the train station.”

Tom laughs. “
Th
at’s a Hare Krishna, not a Buddhist.”

“Still,” says Prima. “If it weren’t for me and Father Larson sitting him down, explaining his roots, you think he’d be confirmed today?” And here’s another reason for the Grasso trip to Italy: to show her sons the beauty they came from, walk them through St. Peter’s Square, fill them with a history that will ground them for life.
Th
ough Prima’s never been to the Old Country, she’s seen enough movies and read enough articles to know that it can transform and unite them, keep them from wandering too far from each other.

It’s a school night, but Patrick’s had a big day, so they let him stay up and watch TV in his room and go through his gifts. He’s zonked, though, and Prima’s not surprised when, on the way to the laundry room, she finds him asleep on his bed fully clothed, cards and unwrapped boxes around him. She stands in the doorway a moment, watching his easy breathing, his hand still clutching the remote. He is her most precious, fragile, extraordinary gift, made only more precious, more fragile, by the simultaneous existence of his extraordinary brothers. It seems that every time she looks at one of her boys, it’s to fix him there before her, to stop time and fate and circumstance from stealing him away. Her mother must have looked at Tony this way, too, while he practiced the piano he’d begged for, while he cruised through his homework at the kitchen table in half the time it took Prima to finish hers, but it didn’t work. Prima doesn’t need a magazine to explain the guilt Maddalena will always feel for that, because it’s a guilt that Prima shares.

2
Two Lives

A
NTONIO GRASSO AND
his mother loved the Ristorante Al Di Là like it was one of their own children.
Th
e last time he saw her alive, she was in her wheelchair by the window, at the restaurant’s fortieth anniversary party.
Th
ey had built this place together—he and his mother and his brother, Mario—and together they’d watched it grow and settle and slide into middle age. “Forty years!” his mother had said, amazed, clutching his hand, and he’d said, “
Che brutta cosa come passano gli anni
.” What an ugly thing, how the years pass. Twenty-two of them already, since Mario died. Two, since Mamma.
Twenty
-eight, since Tony. If he blinks, another year will go. He doesn’t blink.

After a certain age, you’re no use to the world. Everybody knows this, of course, but you’re not supposed to put the words together out loud. What you’re supposed to do is make enough money to leave to your kids. Set your wife up with a pension and annuities. Pay off your house and the funeral parlor. Get out of the way.

Antonio is seventy-nine years old. He can’t work like he used to, can’t keep as strong an eye on the cooks and the managers. He showed up this morning and directed Olindo, the newest manager, to open the drapes in the main dining room to let in the light, but if Antonio hadn’t shown up and the drapes stayed closed, the Al Di Là would have made just as much profit. Each day when Antonio walks down Union Street, through the neighborhood once filled with Italians, he doesn’t recognize the faces.
Th
ey’re all strangers, the men on the sidewalks and the young women leaning out the windows, and he is the last man standing from an era that matters to no one.

He wants to go home. One last time to the village, that’s all. One last time to walk with his arm around Maddalena’s waist through the streets where they met as children, to the church where he married her, to the terrace of her father’s house. One last time in a place where people want him and where his memories are happy. In the three days since he saw the tickets in Prima’s hands, Antonio has been in Santa Cecilia in his mind. He’s left behind the country club, the arguments, the Al Di Là, all of it. When thirsty, he goes to kneel at the spring in the piazza. His
zio
Domenico waits in line behind him for the clear, crisp water, and behind Domenico his mother and father wait in their summer clothes, and behind them stands Antonio himself at the age of seventeen. A horse and carriage go by, driven by Aristide Piccinelli; beside Aristide is his youngest daughter, Maddalena, eighteen years old, hiding her golden hair under a wide-brimmed hat.
Th
ey are on their way to Avezzano to buy supplies for their grocery store. And then it begins to snow, and he is seven years old, tackling his brother in a drift. Mario escapes and runs deeper into the woods, where it’s summer again and the leaves are thick and he and ten other boys are playing war . . .

He sits in a booth by the window, with a view of sunny Union Street and the
Corriere della Sera
before him on the table. He has a lunch meeting with his lawyer, DiSilvio, but DiSilvio is always late, so Antonio keeps reading.
Th
ere’s another story—a different one every week, it seems—about the drop in the Italian population, the growing fears that the country will have no one to carry on its traditions, now that Italian girls feel no shame living childless with their boyfriends, choosing careers in politics and banking and the law over motherhood.
Th
e article confirms for Antonio that he will die at the right time: before Italy loses its Italian altogether. He circles the headline—
A
RRIVEDERCI, ROMA
—to show DiSilvio.

Antonio’s first years as an immigrant in America, he lived alone and single and with his back turned to the Old Country. It had served its purpose by giving him life, but after that, he’d asked himself, what good did Italia do?
Th
e Grassos’ farm, stuck at the rocky bottom of the hill, struggled to produce enough to feed them, let alone trade. For every child born to Antonio’s mother and grandmother, another died before the age of five.
Th
e wars came through like tornadoes, spinning good people and bad people together up in the air and spitting them out in pieces.
Th
e few left on the ground stayed dumb and believed whatever they were told, afraid of tomorrow, afraid of today, happy only when they remembered yesterday and tried to repeat it, even if yesterday punched them in the gut.

America, on the other hand, was never without a smile on its face and a big idea in its head. It did stupid things—the government was a bunch of crooks, of course, show him a government that wasn’t—but the stupid things it did still put the country a step ahead. It knocked people over on the way, and didn’t apologize, and kept that smile on its face the whole time, and that was how it earned respect.
Th
is is, at least, how his father explained America to Antonio in those first years he and Mario and their mother lived with him in the row house on Eighth Street. He convinced his sons that Italy was a dying world, that eventually everyone they’d known in the village would have to find their way across the Atlantic, and that they were lucky to have beaten them to it.
Th
eir mother was not convinced. Sunday afternoons at four, she would turn on Radio Italia, and the men would leave the room. Nostalgia was not allowed. Nostalgia was not honest, their father said; it got you drunk and tired worse than whiskey. It was better to pretend that Italy, and all their memories of it, had sunk into the sea.

When Antonio named the Grasso restaurant after the Al Di Là Café in Santa Cecilia, he meant it as a tribute not to his country or his village but to Maddalena. He had brought her to the café late one Saturday night, soon after he and Mario had returned to Santa Cecilia to find wives. He was twenty-six then, Mario twenty-four.
Th
e Al Di Là Café was the only place to take a girl dancing. By day, customers ate their meals outside on the terrace, surrounded by a wrought iron fence, but a few times a month, a band showed up from another town, colored lights were strung across the walls, and the terrace became a nightclub.
Th
at night, with her chaperone father watching, Antonio and Maddalena slow-danced across the stone floor to the music of a young guitar player from Terni. Maddalena was nervous.
Th
e boy who loved her, Vito Leone, might be watching, too, she said, along with her father, so her body was stiff, and when the song ended she had tears in her eyes. She’d known Antonio less than a month at that point, but he’d made a good impression on her parents—the farm boy turned rich American businessman!—and they insisted she marry him, and then the boy who loved her married her sister Carolina, and in that village way, life started for them all.
Th
e only guilt he felt at the time was for separating her from her family, but he trusted that one day she’d thank him for giving her a bigger life. He’s been waiting for that gratitude ever since, but she is stubborn and still angry, and maybe he deserves it, but maybe, too, this trip will show her he’s been right all along.

He wishes he could see Maddalena as she was then, climbing the stairs to the terrace in her sister’s blue sundress, holding her mother’s hand. It was a cool night and she wore a shawl, but after she’d seen Antonio waiting for her at the bar, she removed the shawl. As they danced, cheek to cheek, left side, then right side, he couldn’t take his eyes from her shoulders.
Th
at she had left them there, bare, for him to admire, was a sign. A week later, they were husband and wife.

Antonio and Mario opened the American version of the Al Di Là in 1955.
Th
eir father was gone by then, and with him went the daily reminders of the inferiority of Italy. Slowly, as the restaurant grew into a success, memories of the Old Country, the innocence between the wars, found Antonio. He and Mario talked about buying back their old house in Santa Cecilia, making it a second home for their families. More and more Italians, Antonio included, left the city for the suburbs and surrounded themselves with the Irish and Polish and, worse, people who couldn’t even tell you what their blood was made of. In the years after moving out of Little Italy, Antonio came to feel fear, not pride, when Prima spoke perfect English to her friends without the hint of an accent. He searched through the basement for the trunk of clothes he wore as a child and asked Maddalena to dress Tony in his old short pants and jackets and noticed, as if for the first time, the high quality of the material.
Th
e American brands they paid a fortune for in the stores seemed cheap by comparison. He became one of those fathers who told the same stories from his youth long after his kids stopped listening, and as he got older, it occurred to him that he did not tell these stories to teach Prima and Tony and Frankie about their heritage but to keep the stories alive for himself.
Th
e Italy of the 1920s and 1930s—the mountains in his bedroom window, the young women in furs taking their
passeggiate,
the horse-drawn carriages bringing food and mail to Santa Cecilia from the cities—came to him in dreams, and when he woke he’d feel guilty, like he’d been cheating on America, until he learned that he could love them both, but differently, the way he loved his children.

He took nostalgia’s hand, and it pulled him under.
Th
en Tony died, and grief held him there. He’s been drowning ever since. If Antonio can get back to Santa Cecilia, where his son never walked or slept or played the piano or looked up at his father with love and need, maybe he will breathe again. And if he takes his last breath there, so be it.

In the meantime, he has business to finish.
Th
e first call he made after Prima’s announcement was to DiSilvio to set up this meeting.
Th
e way it stands today, Maddalena gets the Al Di Là and every penny of the savings.
Th
en after she goes, the kids and grandkids split the savings that are left: 40 percent to Prima, 40 percent to Frankie, 5 percent each to the boys. Fair and square.
Th
e problem is the afterlife of the Al Di Là. He can’t count on Prima or Frankie.
Th
ey don’t love the place the way Tony did. Worse: they have their own lives.
Th
ey don’t come to the Al Di Là much as it is. After he’s gone, they’ll let things go, make too many friends, trust the wrong people, lose trust in each other. So he will go over the will and the restaurant papers again. He doesn’t know what the papers will tell him and DiSilvio today that they didn’t tell them last year or five years ago, but he needs DiSilvio at least to help him think.

Antonio always thought both Mario and Tony would be around for this part. Since the day the Al Di Là opened, it was the two Grasso brothers running the show together, and their two sons who would take it over. He never imagined putting all three men in the ground, one at a time, his brother at fifty-five, his nephew at twenty, his son at fifteen. Without Mario, there’d be no Al Di Là in the first place. Antonio would still be working for peanuts on the assembly line at Ford.

Every Sunday, after he drops Maddalena off at church, Antonio drives to the cemetery.
Th
e cemetery is
his
church: the headstones and the dirt and the fresh air and flowers. Half a day it takes to visit the people he knows. So many Italians came to this country over the years. Some paid a lot of money to get buried back in their village, but most ended up here. Giulio Fabbri and Gianni Martino are on the far side near the highway, both waiting for their wives to join them. Mario’s in the quieter part, under a thick stone with an angel and deep engravings that Antonio wipes clean of grime. For his son, Antonio chose a crypt in the St. Jude section, high up off the ground but not so high he can’t place his lips and palms against it. Next to Tony is a spot with his own name. Beside him, Maddalena.

He doesn’t believe in anything after, like she does. He won’t see Tony or Mario or Mamma or Papà or his friends again in heaven. Maddalena and his kids won’t see him or each other.
Th
ere’s no big garden party with butterflies and fountains and trays of pastries. He’d bet money on it, if he could ever collect the winnings.

How is Antonio spending his last days? First of all, he doesn’t sleep. He puts his head on the pillow and closes his eyes, but sleep never finds him. At seven o’clock he gets out of bed to make the coffee. He eats two Stella D’oro cookies and sits in his chair in the den. He watches the local news and
Th
e Flintstones
. Eight thirty he brings coffee to Maddalena. Eight fifty-five on the stove clock he makes sure she’s out the door for church. If it rains or is too cold, he drives her. If the weather’s good, she walks. He reads the American paper on the toilet for a good long hour, and by then she is home and has made the bed and started the day’s cleaning. He showers and shaves and checks the VCR to make sure it’s taping her soap opera.
Th
en he takes the car to Union Street and eats lunch at the Al Di Là with the
Corriere della Sera
.
Lunchtime is busy.
Th
ey get a lot of businessmen, and most of the time he has to give up his seat, which he is happy to do. After the rush, he makes sure the tables are set for dinner and the silverware is clean. Sometimes he walks over to Eighth Street to visit Mario’s widow, Ida, all alone in her big house. She has a broken right leg and a knee replacement in the left, and since her husband died and her son got killed in Vietnam she’s never had a happy thing to say. “We had some good years,” he reminds her. “When we lived here all together, us and Mario and Mamma and Papà. You don’t remember the Sunday dinners and the bingo games and Nina’s little dog?” But she makes a face and turns up her game shows.