The Queen of the Big Time (31 page)

“How long are you here?” I ask him.

“A few days, and then it’s on to Rome.”

I look at the students. “May I borrow your professor this evening?”

The students laugh. One of the girls smiles. “He’s a priest, you know.”

“Oh, I know all about it,” I tell Renato. “I’m at 127 Testa Street.”

“I’ll see you around seven.” He turns to his students. “Let’s see the frescoes.”

I walk down the hill slowly, afraid to trip. It is so steep; in my mind’s eye, I see myself falling on the rocks and rolling like a tire all the way to the Adriatic Sea. What strange fate to see Renato here. What does this mean? As I walk down Primo Street, I catch my reflection in the windows of the grocery. I look at myself sideways and stop. I turn forward. In the sun, with my hair a wavy mess and my skirt gently swaying around my calves, I could be a girl. I know I’m not anymore, but I could almost pass for one.

There’s a restaurant at an old inn outside Roseto Valfortore on the Fortor River called Juno. The setting is lovely, an old stone fortress with outdoor gardens. The main dining room has a gravel floor and is under a tent. Renato leads me to a table overlooking the wide blue river.

“How’s this?” he says, pulling my chair out for me.

“Fine.” I smile.

I borrowed a white linen skirt and a light pink cashmere sweater from Agnese. She insisted, as the clothes I brought were too formal for the inn.

“Where’s your collar?” I ask him.

“I don’t wear it when I’m traveling.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

“You’d think the collar would be a deterrent. But actually it’s the opposite.”

I hold my hand up. “Enough! I don’t want to know any more.” We laugh, and it’s as though it were yesterday and we were on the banks of Minsi Lake. “Renato, you’ve known me since I was sixteen.”

“Fourteen.”

“Right. Fourteen. How do I look?”

Renato sits back in his chair.

“You’ll have to excuse my vanity, Renato, but I just turned fifty. I never felt old before, but now I do. The number scares me. Franco is gone. I’m a widow. I just feel like everything has ended. It’s over for me.” My true feelings pour out of me. I’m in the company of someone who knew me when I was a girl, and I feel safe. It’s almost like the tears from the first night I was here. I can’t help myself from sharing my feelings; I need to talk. The waiter comes over. Renato chooses a wine. The waiter speaks to him about the food.

“Just bring whatever is good,” Renato says to the waiter. The waiter is happy to take that request to the chef.

“You’re not old. You’re still beautiful. More beautiful.”

“You’re just being nice.” I run my hands through my hair, which feels thick and soft. Never again will hair spray come near my head. I’m a convert to the natural look, thanks to Agnese.

“I’m being nice, yes. But I’m being honest. You’re lucky. You have a face that will always be young.”

“Maybe it’s just how you remember me.”

“No, it’s how you are.” Renato pours me a glass of wine. “What happened to you?”

“What do you mean?” I sip the wine and feel my face get hot immediately.

“You never asked me anything like this before. You were always a girl without vanity.”

“Well, I never felt old before.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. You’re self-aware somehow. You need to understand something, maybe?”

“I’m trying to understand why I’ve failed at everything. How can anybody be this old and feel so stupid?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve learned nothing. Franco died before we ever had a real vacation. Celeste thinks I was a terrible mother. Frankie jokes about it—
like he had a mother who was a stevedore instead of a cuddler. They think all I did was work, that all I cared about was making money.”

“Is any of it true?”

“I was always ambitious, Renato. Always.”

“So, they had a good life, right?”

“They wanted for nothing. Grandparents all around. They had a wonderful childhood.”

“So what are they complaining about?”

“Me.”

“They wanted more of you; is that bad?”

“I guess not.”

“There are days when I would give my life to have my father back,” he begins. “My mother was gone when I was five; I looked for her in every woman I ever knew, and in a sense I still do. We all wish things could be different, but we choose a way to live, a way to be, and you can only choose one way.”

I think about this for a moment. “You’ve heard a lot of confessions, haven’t you?”

Renato laughs. “Too many.”

“You’re never surprised in there? In the black closet?”

“Not anymore.”

“Good for you.” I smooth Agnese’s sweater into the belt of the skirt. “You mastered something.”

“I didn’t say anything about mastering it. I’m just telling you that it seems that we all have the same demons.”

“A man of God talking about demons.”

“Let’s not talk about me in the context of the priesthood.”

“Why not? You’re a priest.”

“I don’t know anything more than the next man, really. I’m flattered that you think I have an inside track, but I don’t. I’m as doubtful and full of questions as you are. What do you think about that?”

“I wish I could say I was surprised.” I lean back in my chair and put my hands on the arms of it.

Renato laughs. “This is why I always loved you.…”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Renato!” The word “love” embarrasses me.

“No, I’m serious. I always loved you because you saw through it all.”

“Through the charm?”

“Through the charm, the bluster, the intellect, the poetry, the ideas, through all the layers of all the stuff I pride myself on possessing. You, however, cut right to the heart of the matter and force me to be honest.”

“Then why did you leave me?” As soon as I say it, I feel a terrible pang of disloyalty to my husband. I wish I could take the words back. I wish I didn’t wonder about why Renato left, and I wish I could take back all those times in my marriage when I would get angry with Franco and think to myself, You may not love me in this moment, but I know a man who once did. What a terrible thing to do in a marriage, to turn away from the moment and reach back into the past, where everything seems perfect. “Never mind. I don’t need to know.”

“But maybe I need to tell you.”

“No, it’s not right. I loved Franco. I chose him. I don’t want to know why you left; it will only make me feel that I chose Franco second, and I never want to feel I did that.”

“But isn’t that what happened?”

“Dear God, Renato. Please.”

“Isn’t that what happened?” he presses.

“No!”

“That’s what Franco thought. I know that’s why you had to leave Our Lady of Mount Carmel for St. Elizabeth’s, and I have always blamed myself for that. The day they assigned me to Roseto was the worst day of my life. I begged them to send me anywhere else, but they were convinced I was the next Father DeNisco. For fifty years, the diocese looked for a priest with the talent, vision, and diplomacy of DeNisco. I told them there was only one Father DeNisco, and that man was a saint. They wouldn’t hear of it. They were sending me
home, to Roseto. No arguments. And you didn’t disagree then; you would be thrown out. We did what we were told.”

“But you were like Father DeNisco. You accomplished great things.”

“Oh, the diocese and their big plans. A school, a hospital, a rest home. They were going to make Roseto the model for their highest Roman Catholic aspirations.”

“They succeeded.”

“In some ways. But I didn’t want to come back. I didn’t want to hurt you. I felt like I ruined your wedding.”

“You didn’t ruin it. I loved Franco.”

“Good.” Renato sits back, relieved.

“I knew I could keep Franco interested for a lifetime, but you, I wasn’t so sure.”

“You could have, Nella.”

The waiter places small plates of local delicacies on the table. We sample lobster ravioli in truffle sauce, veal sautéed in wine with artichokes, and fresh greens. I ask Renato about his life now. As Renato talks about being a professor, and life at St. John’s University, and what it’s like to live in New York instead of a small town, I start to feel for him again. My heart, still healing from the deep wound of losing Franco, is longing for connection. I want to push through the grieving and feel like a woman again. But that is not right, and I know it. It would be like the night that Renato and I made love. We would connect out of sympathy and a need for comfort, not real love, not the kind Franco and I had all along. That love was authentic, and it took this long and even his death for me to realize it. Maybe I’m not so stupid, maybe I know a little more about myself than I let on. Maybe this evening at a romantic table in this old Italian fortress is the symbol of what Renato and I ultimately meant to each other; his love was just a flicker in time, a sparkle of a star far away that once guided me.

“Why did you do it, Renato?”

“Do what?”

“Become a priest.”

“Oh, that question.” Renato smiles. “Well, at first it felt as though I was led to it. I was living a pretty fast life without consequences—”

“Except for me, of course.”

“Except for you. And I looked around and wondered what I could do with my life. I prayed about it. For a young man in 1927 who loved to read and write and think, it was a perfect profession. I loved solitude, and yet I like serving people. I enjoy giving a good sermon. I can’t explain it; in a sense, it chose me.”

“But you could have been a doctor or a politician or anything, really, if leading and serving people is what compelled you. Why that life? The priestly life?”

“When I was in the seminary I would look around at my classmates and wonder what the one thing was that we all had in common. You would think it was a love of God and a desire to serve Him, but that wasn’t it. It was a detachment. It was as if we were comfortable being separate. I had my excuse; my mother died when I was a boy. I always felt that I was wandering through, unable to connect because I didn’t have Mama to teach me how. I can’t speak for my fellow seminarians; they had their own reasons for choosing a life that meant at its very core that you could not have intimacy with another person. That intimacy was reserved for God.”

“And you were okay with that?”

“It’s all I knew to be true. I learned that I couldn’t find myself in the arms of a thousand girls. I tried, but it didn’t work. I was never satisfied.”

When Renato mentions other girls, I wince. I knew there were other girls before me, and after, but I wanted desperately to believe that I was special. Now I know I wasn’t special enough to keep him out of the priesthood. “I found that intimacy you speak of with my husband,” I begin. Maybe I shouldn’t confide these things to Renato, but I continue. “Franco and I were connected. I didn’t value that enough when he was alive. I took it for granted that there was someone to get me an aspirin in the middle of the night, that there was
someone at the mill who could look across the desk and understand exactly what I was feeling when he heard a particular sigh. We didn’t just share a life, we grew it.”

“I envy that,” Renato says quietly. “And now I wish I had it. I don’t think any good comes from separating yourself from people. Ultimately, it is the least blessed state.”

“Celibacy?”

“Oh, it’s not just celibacy. It’s knowing that for your whole life, you have promised not to become close to anyone because it will interfere with your work, your relationship to God. When I was young, that separation made sense to me. Now it seems foolish.”

“Why do you stay?”

“I’m an old man.” Renato laughs. “What do I have to offer a woman now?”

“I see what you mean. I feel the same way. I had what I had with Franco, but I feel done. I had one good marriage, two excellent children, and a life. What else is there for me? I had the best. I can’t top it.” I throw my hands up.

“I love teaching. First and foremost, I’m a teacher. The students are terrific. I take a group from Queens to Italy every year, and they see the real art, the inspiration behind it. It opens up their world.” Renato looks away. “But every day when I get up, I think, Is today the day I leave? And then I go on with my day, and there are things about the life that still work, so I stay in.”

“I didn’t think you’d have such doubts.”

“Constantly. That’s why I signed up.” He shrugs. “Maybe I thought I’d find the answers giving them to others. Not so.”

“What about women?”

“What about them?” He smiles. “Do I miss it?”

I nod.

“I’m not perfect,” he says slowly. “I’ve made mistakes.”

“Oh.” How naive I am. I thought there was some secret ingredient in the holy oil that keeps a priest celibate, but obviously I was wrong.

“You’re shocked?”

“No, but I assumed as a priest, you’d give all that up. Don’t you
have
to?”

“You try. But that’s the whole nature of sin: you try and fail, and try and fail. That’s how it works. There would be no redemption without sin.” He pours me another glass of wine. “But as time goes on, it isn’t the physical contact you miss so much, it’s the emotional part. The intimacy. The deepest level of love. The knowledge that someone understands you, is rooting for you, is sharing your life. Even though I feel I’ve deepened my faith as a priest, I’m well aware of what I’ve lost.”

“If it’s any comfort to you, I still struggle. I always feel alone. Maybe that’s my cross to bear.”

Renato reaches his hand across the table and takes mine. “And mine too.”

Renato walks me home to my uncle’s house. Maybe at fifty years old, all you get from an old love is a window of what you were when you were young. Maybe a first love exists to reaffirm the best parts of yourself, the choices you made when you didn’t worry about the consequences. Maybe a first love exists to remind you to be brave in the moment, to stand up for your feelings, instead of shrinking back in the face of potential loneliness. It’s old-fashioned guts that we gave each other, I think as I hold Renato’s hand and feel the warmth of him near me. When we reach the doorway, there is a small light on in the window. It is very late, and everyone is in bed.