The Deep End of the Ocean (33 page)

“I will not ask the Cappadoras to stand, not only because you all know them well, but because they have already stood too much scrutiny, too much examination of their personal Calvary. But I will ask you to join with them today in their gratitude and their faith, faith that sustained them, which never wavered when the faith of those less strong would surely have collapsed, to welcome, with them, the return of Ben—” he stopped, glanced down, then looked up, straight into Beth’s face—“of Sam Karras Cappadora”—Beth felt Sam, next to her, straighten his shoulders—“to his family and to our family of worship.

“Though not every celebration of the Eucharist at Immaculata is televised on worldwide TV,” he continued, over yet another appreciative ripple, “we have made the decision to allow a certain level of media today in our sanctuary, because we wish to allow those who cannot be here to share today in this community of worship, in this festival that reaffirms the strength of a community, and its heart…. And we are asked to remind all of you that Angelo and Patrick Cappadora and their families invite you to a luncheon at Wedding in the Old Neighborhood, 628 Diversey Street, Chicago, Illinois, immediately following the service, and that it is the hope of the family that each and all of you will attend. Maps are available on a table in the baptistery. And now we wish to begin this festival, in ordinary time, by saying, The Lord is with you.”

“And also with you,” the crowd murmured as one.

“Lift up your hearts,” Father Cleary commanded, in his old but still sonorous voice.

Beth did not know what made her look over her shoulder—a rustle of sound at the back of the church? Simple discomfort with the beginning of the liturgy, which she, lapsed and lacking, had to struggle to follow?

But she did look, and just to the left of the aisle, small in his pinstriped blue suit, stood George Karras. From a distance of thirty yards, Beth could feel his agonized unease, the effort it took for him to stand still, without straining at his tie or shooting his cuffs. She did not think about it very long. Had she stopped to think, she might have thought of a dozen things that would have stopped her from moving—the media possibilities, the imagined wrath of various Cappadoras, even the clutch of pity and dismay at her own stomach.

She got up, eyes turning speculatively to follow her, and walked quietly to the back of the church and extended her hand, which George, gulping in humiliation and relief, took. She led him back, toward the first pew, and it was only as she neared the family, the last few feet, that she dared to look up—and it was Sam’s face she saw, turned on her and George, with a look she had never seen on it before.

It was, she later guessed, joy.

Pleading a sudden urge to spend a few hours alone, loosening up and practicing, Reese gave it his best try, getting out of going to the restaurant for the big hooha lunch after church.

After all, he reasoned, his dad didn’t know anything about what had happened at school with Teeter, that fat bastard; so in Dad’s mind, Reese was still toying with the idea of going out for the basketball team next fall. And Reese was content to let Dad think that, as long as it lasted. Wherever the hell he was really going, Dad seemed to assume he was at the rec center or somewhere, doing drills. “Working on the free throws?” Dad would ask him every so often, just to prove that, even though no one else in North America knew there was a kid in the whole Cappadora family besides Sam, his dad at least still knew Reese existed.

“Sure, Dad,” Reese would say. “Workin’ on ’em.”

“’Cause you know, the team that gets the free throws wins the game,” his dad would say. “And height doesn’t count for tick on the free-throw line.”

“Right, Dad,” Reese would agree. Dad would look all content then. Just the mention of Reese doing anything “constructive,” as his dad put it, got everyone off Reese’s case. Which was fine by him.

But he should have known better than to pull the old sports hole card today; it was actually fairly stupid, given that tryouts were a half-season away anyhow. There was no way he was going to get out of playing his part in the goddamned manger scene. When Reese brought it up, Dad gave him one look, and it wasn’t a “Please, Vincenzo,” look, either. It was a “Don’t screw with me” look, and there was no use arguing. Dad could be as stubborn as a pit bull when it came to some things, and it was for damn sure that one of them was the full-out “Aren’t we happy” treatment for the benefit of the masses.

In fact, Reese felt damned sorry for Sam, who looked like his underwear was about six sizes too small, and he only looked worse outside the church after that poor little guy George gave him a kiss on the forehead and told him he wouldn’t “bother the family” at the party. Dumb shit. Didn’t he know the kid already felt like a piece of crap for leaving his father? George was an adult, and he could have managed to come down there and have a sausage sandwich if it would make Sam feel better.

On the other hand, Uncle Joey and a couple of the others had been standing around outside the church doing the Italian hand-jive, and that could only mean they were talking about the nerve of that guy showing up at the mass at all—they were the Cappadoras! Whatever else he was, George was that bitch’s husband! Probably George had a good idea of what might happen if Joey got a few Seven and Sevens in him downtown. Uncle Joey was pretty decent, generally, but he was a hothead—as were, Reese realized, about sixty-five percent of all the adult men he knew.

As they all piled into the car, dodging yelling reporters, Reese reflected that some of it, to tell the truth, wasn’t all bad. The media thing was ultra-boring, though some of the guys, even Jordie, had this totally kidlike idea that being in the newspaper would make you feel important or something. The good part was that Heather Bergman and about five of her equally foxticular friends had decided to become his mother hens over the past couple of weeks. The other girls were okay, but the way Heather’s blunt-cut blond hair moved at the exact level of her lips when she turned her head could transform Reese into one giant bulge in about fifteen seconds. And before all this, she’d been like, “Cappadora, that little hood.” Now it was, “I never knew you were so sensitive, I never knew you went through all this….” Where had she been living, Zaire? Last week, as they’d walked home from the library, after what had been for Reese a fairly agonizing two hours of trying to remember Civil War dates while inhaling the smell that seemed to come from the hollow directly below the scooped neck of Heather’s jersey, he’d managed to back her (and she wasn’t protesting) against the wall of the unfinished library addition, and in the course of making out for maybe twenty minutes, he had not exactly felt her up, but his forearms had made definite contact when she’d thought he was just touching her cheek with his hands.

At least, he figured she just thought that. Or did girls know exactly what you were doing, too? And just pretend they had no idea? And she was like, “Reese, you’re sweet,” afterward, instead of looking like she wanted to belt him, which was okay, too, as long as it lasted.

But this. Shit. When they got there, the parking lot at Wedding and the street in front looked like the biggest concession for used Eldorados in Chicago.

They managed to get through another press gang, and went inside. It never failed; Reese was always surprised at the sheer goofy magnificence of Wedding, every time he walked in. This time, he got a kind of kick out of watching Sam, who’d never seen it before—watching him look up and take in the stained-glass rose windows and the replica women (even Reese thought they were beautiful, although nuts), Juliet and Santa Lucia and the one he always thought of as the Tuscan Goddess of Sexual Intercourse. He had no idea why there were women in balconies in the eaves of Wedding in the Old Neighborhood, and he always thought it made the place kind of look like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World; but everyone seemed to either love them or get a chuckle out of them, or both. He followed the kid around the banks of linen-covered tables, as Sam goggled the frescoes, stopping particularly long in front of the Gian Carlo Menotti one—was it possible that he actually recognized his own face? And then Reese took Sam by the arm and brought him out to the bar area, where the model of the Fontana di Trevi gushed Champagne out of a jug in the arms of the sea god. They got Scottie to give them a glass and each had a sip. It was cheapie stuff—Angelo always insisted that he wasn’t going to run Moët et Chandon through plastic pipes. But Sam seemed to like it.

And then, of course, Mom caught up and nabbed the glass, and then they sort of hung around the cloak room while ten thousand relatives streamed past. The place was all set up as if it were the “big” night at Wedding, Saturday night, when people brought their out-of-town relatives to visit the restaurant. There was usually just one bride and groom, but today there were two: the sweet, pretty bride, who looked like his cousin Moira would look when she grew up, and the hot one, who looked like she belonged in the swimsuit issue of
Sports Illustrated
. He remembered that one’s name, Claudia. There were two others, but he could never keep them straight. He was fairly certain that two of the three grooms were gay—one was a dancer, even—but they were all great-looking and big. The two here today, one was the one Grandpa Angelo called “the Nazi” behind his back, because the guy looked like something out of
The Sound of Music.

By the time Mom actually got herself calmed down enough to walk into the banquet room, the tables were all filled. People were eating.

“Vincent,” she said, “come over here. I want us all to walk in together.” Big production, Mom, Reese thought. Shit. Oh well. He looked behind him for Sam, who was goofing around running under the coat racks with Kerry. His size fooled you: he was only this little twelve-year old. Reese’s stomach felt another tug of pity.

When they came out of the bar area into the room, the band leader caught sight of them and struck up that old song about “I’ll be loving you always,” which Reese thought was intended for nothing except to get everyone chewing on their sausage to start bawling; even Father Cleary was in tears.

What it did, though, was make everyone stand up, and as soon as they stood up, they started to applaud. And once they started to applaud, it seemed like they would never stop.

Sam sort of hid his head against Mom’s shoulder, and Reese tried unobtrusively to move over a little so that he was shielding Sam from most of the faces in the crowd. But everybody kept on applauding and yelling for about six hours, and the band kept playing cheesy songs, like “Danny Boy,” and everybody cried harder. Reese thought he was going to puke. Even he felt like he might start bawling.

But at last, the bandleader, Billy, got everybody to quiet down and said, just, “Welcome home.” Not the name, thank God. Nobody really knew exactly what to call Sam. And Sam kind of waved, and everybody clapped a little more then, and finally they sat down to eat. Which was good, because Reese, who normally didn’t eat much of anything, was starving. And Sam was eating like they were going to outlaw ravioli tomorrow.

By the time they set up the table with tiramisu and cannoli, the busboys were moving the front tables back a little to clear the dance floor—boy, thought Reese, they’re going to do the whole deal. The first bride, the one who looked like his cousin, had bustled the back of her dress and was getting ready to dance with the fag groom. What they did first, on a regular night at Wedding, was dim all the lights and have the bride and groom dance to “Sunrise, Sunset,” usually with Grandpa Angelo cutting in at some point to represent the father. Reese’s dad even cut in sometimes, even though he didn’t like to dance. So they did that now, and then the lights came up, and the bride picked up her skirts. The sweet bride just picked them up a little; but Claudia, Reese recalled, hiked them up way high, so you could see her garter on her thigh—tough luck it wasn’t her. He knew then that they were going to do the tarantella, and sure enough, pretty soon half the joint was up dancing, too.

It always killed Reese to see people who weren’t Italian do the tarantella; it was like watching people who weren’t really Polish or married to Polish wives trying to polka. They thought all you had to do was stand there and kick your feet, one after the other—boomba boomba boomba boom—when in fact there were steps to it. Vincent knew them, had since he was a kid, but would rather have been burned at the stake than actually do them. To his surprise, though, his father got out there and put his hands palms-up on the back of his hips, the way you were supposed to, instead of just putting your hands on your waist, the way Grandma Rosie did when she was mad—which was the way people usually did it. Back when the place first started, in fact, Grandpa had to demote a really beautiful bride to waitress because she couldn’t get the hang of doing the tarantella like what Grandpa called “a real madonna.”

Today, though, the Cousin Moira bride was in top form, her satin shoes flying like little pistons, and when everybody was out of breath, the band started playing it faster, and Dad started motioning for Sam to get up and dance too. Reese thought he’d pee from shame for the kid. But Sam, affable the way he was, he got up, and he started talking to Dad, and Dad motioned to the bandleader. Billy stopped right away. “My son doesn’t know the tarantella, but he knows the miserlu.” He stopped and bent down to hear what Sam was saying. “The sertu—it means ‘the tail.’ Do you know that?”

“But of course.” Billy smiled, and he started playing, real slow, “Never on Sunday.” Grandpa Angelo came over and gave Sam one of his great big linen handkerchiefs with the A and the C embroidered on them in red. Reese figured this was part of the dance; he’d seen it once, at a Greek wedding on TV. Sam stood there, holding the handkerchief and looking around him, until—My God, Reese thought, no way—Mom got up and walked over and put out her hand. And Sam started to show her the steps, which were slow, right foot over left, then behind, then a little hop and a turn. Mom wasn’t much of a dancer, but she looked dreamy, like she was drunk; she looked almost beautiful. And then Dad took Mom’s hand, and Sam pointed out how you had to hold your arm up, in an arch, and Grandpa Bill got Grandma Rosie up…it was enough to gag you.

In a while, his mom had the hang of it. She was weaving and dipping gracefully, her shoulders swaying, smiling up at his dad, and there must have been fifty people in concentric rings, Sam right at the middle, still leading, still holding the handkerchief, kind of laughing even, his reddish hair a little plastered up with sweat. He caught Reese watching and rolled his eyes.

Oh, Ben, Reese thought. He looked away from the kid and up, away from the kid, at the frescoes on the walls. At Ben’s face, the wise and wondering angel face of a little crippled boy seeing God, and then at himself, his face proud and probably better-looking than he actually was, but painted to represent some bastard whose biggest contribution to history was getting some pretty Japanese chick to off herself.

He went out to the bar to see if Scottie could be talked into letting him have another glass of Champagne.