Vatican Waltz (10 page)

Dear Miss Piantedosi:

Cardinal Rosario will meet with you at 10:30 o'clock on the 8th of September at the address shown above.

Father Clement, Assistant to the Cardinal

I sat holding the sheet of paper in both hands, feeling as though the objects around me—tablecloth, curtains, dials on the stove, the glass jars of vinegar peppers sitting on the counter—were props in a movie set and I'd been jerked out of my real life and thrust into a role. Those ordinary things simply did not fit with the letter in my hand. The Vatican! The Vatican was as familiar to us as the planet Mars, and as distant. It existed, yes, we all knew that, but as part of another world, or at least another dimension of life so far from our own that it might have been a Hollywood creation. I rubbed the stationery between my thumb and second finger, as if testing it for actuality. Without yet believing in the possibility of going, I thought about that date, September 8. Two months after the clinicals finished, five weeks before I took my Boards. It would be possible to leave then, for a short while. But I wondered how much it would cost—plane ticket, hotel, food. I glanced into the living room and saw only my father's legs from the knee down: brown jeans, work boots. He was listening to the news, a report from Afghanistan, another distant planet. I read the note again, folded it back into its envelope, and carried it up to my room.

THAT SAME WEEK, STILL CAUGHT
in what felt like a surreal fog, I made a slightly unusual detour on the way home from work. Instead of going to St. Anthony's as I usually would have, I got off the subway—the line runs just inland from the beach—crossed over Revere Beach Boulevard, walked for a little while along the sand, and sat on the seawall, facing east. As is often the case on early-summer nights there, a cool breeze drifted in off the water. I remember that it blew against me in such a way that I had to hold my dress down between my knees. When there's a wind from that direction, jets headed for Logan Airport circle around to the north and then turn and come in to land directly over our long stretch of beach. That night, as I'd enjoyed doing all my life, I watched them make their circular approaches.

I followed one plane as it looped over the Nahant Peninsula and then Lynn Beach and Revere Beach. As it came closer, I saw the green stripe along the fuselage and the lettering. It made me smile because I remembered being at the beach as a very young girl with my grandmother and having her point out a plane that had flown all the way from Italy. It made no sense to me then, that she and the plane had come from the same place far on the other side of the water in which we waded and splashed. My world consisted of two or three square miles; anything beyond that was insubstantial, imaginary, impossible to hold in thought.

I decided, walking home alone from the beach, that it was time to expand my small world, time to have a better understanding of my heritage, time for me to try to do something on my own without the support system of grandparents or parents or friends or teachers or an institution like a college or hospital. It was time, in other words, to cast myself off the comfortable perch on which I'd lived for twenty-two years, make one brave, gracious swan dive, and let God catch me, if He wanted to, before I crashed to earth. I don't know that I took the airplane as any kind of sign. I don't think that was it. I think it was simply the case that some piece of fruit had finally come ripe in me. I'd been thinking about the letter from the Vatican almost without stopping for four days, working it over in my mind, trying to make it real. Maybe seeing the Alitalia jet had been the last stage of that.

When I arrived home, I found that my father had felt like cooking—Italian sausages and peppers—and, as he often did, had left some for me on a covered plate. Before I ate it, though, I went and sat with him for a little while in the living room. He muted the television and looked up. I said, “I'm going to Rome.” He nodded, and it was as hard as always to read his thoughts. Was he hurt? Surprised? Relieved? Worried? I couldn't tell. “Will you come with me?”

He shook his head, the
no
not as firm and determined as it had been during our conversation on the beach, but a no all the same.

“Why not? You speak Italian better than I do. We could visit the Vatican, see the sights. You could take me to Naples and show me the place you were born.”

Another shake of the head. “My cousin Franco can show you. He lives near Rome now, he can show you.”

“Wouldn't you like to see him?”

“Franco?” He shook his head again, as if it were a foolish question or as if there were some old bad blood between them. He held my eyes for another second or two and then turned back to the TV.

More than once since my graduation from high school, my father had made it clear to me that I shouldn't stay at home only for fear of hurting him. “I can take care of myself,” he reminded me every few months.

But I saw no need to move out. It wasn't a matter of caring for him, and it wasn't a matter of getting free housing. I suppose it might have been partly a kind of laziness on my part, an inertia that kept me there. I was comfortable with the routine. I liked being close to St. Anthony's and the beach. Lisa had moved away, but I had two friends who still lived in the neighborhood, one married and pregnant, the other with a fiancé, and every couple of weeks we'd get together for a glass of wine or dinner. That, and the occasional night out with nursing school friends was all the excitement I wanted. It wasn't because of any feeling of loneliness that I'd stayed living with my father, and it wasn't about money—I'd been working and saving for as long as I could remember.

I think I felt responsible, in part, for being the only female company in his life. After my mother's death, he hadn't dated anyone and had never voiced so much as a syllable about the idea of remarrying. He'd had a fairly strange relationship with his wonderful mother-in-law. They lived in peace, on the one hand, but on the other they barely said a word to each other through the course of a day. He'd bring in a basket of tomatoes from the garden and place them on the counter near the sink, and the understanding would be that she'd wash them and slice them up into a salad or cook them with onions, garlic, and oil and put them into a canning jar to make gravy in the winter.

I never saw them touch each other, never heard them call each other by name, yet there was a kind of comfort in the way they shared that home after my mother was gone. When my grandmother died, it was as if I took her place. Now my father brought the tomatoes to
me
. We had that same, almost completely wordless relationship, something that would have been awkward with any other person I knew. There was a great comfort in it for me, a sense of home, of my true place.

I went and heated up the food and ate it, cleaned the kitchen as I always did, kissed my father good night before I went up to my room. But I was held in the territory just this side of sleep by a sharp-edged sadness. I wanted to have a richer intimacy with my father, not just a wordless understanding or a moment here and there like the ones we'd recently enjoyed, but an ongoing closeness, the two of us welded together by the shared experience of what it meant to be alive on this earth. Growing up, I'd had no mother, no brothers or sisters, and though I'd always been close to my cousins, aunts, and uncles, I wanted the particular kind of love relationship that goes with daily contact. It wasn't that my father had ever been hurtful to me. He could be kind in his own way, but at my age I wanted more than that. Even though I didn't have a boyfriend or a husband or children or a flashy job or car—the markers for adulthood where we lived—I wanted him to see me in my fullness; that's the only way I can express it. Not just as a grown daughter but as a full human being.

I realized, after his second refusal to consider a trip to Italy, that I'd never really had that, not completely, not to the extent I wanted. My grandmother had seen me that way. Father Alberto had seen me that way. And I believed with all my heart that God saw me that way. Still, I felt partly cheated. Whenever I bought a cup of coffee in the subway station before getting on the train to come home, I looked at the person in the kiosk. Even if she didn't look back at me, I looked at her, and when I took the cup and thanked her and gave her the money I tried as best I could to make it an exchange between two full souls. That was all I'd ever wanted in my own home. Probably, I thought, I'd never get married, never have the love of a husband or children. That understanding made me sadder than it ever had. My father's small nod, his slight acknowledgement of my kiss, that was all the intimacy I'd ever know.

But I'd made my decision. If I couldn't enjoy the kind of human intimacy I wanted, I'd try to have the deepest possible intimacy with God. And waiting around passively, dreamily, hoping for the courage to act—what kind of partner would that make? What kind of
rapporto
was that?

The next morning when I woke up, ready to make my travel plans, my father wasn't there. On the kitchen table I saw that he'd left a small stack of new bills, all twenties. Eight hundred dollars, a fortune for a man like him. He had set my empty coffee cup on top of the bills and put them in a place where I couldn't help but see them. There was no tender note, no explanation, just a piece of paper with his cousin's name and a telephone number on it; he'd purposely left the house and gone out early, something he didn't usually do, so he wouldn't have to face me. But he'd left all that money, probably taken it from a stash he kept in his bedroom, hidden for some imagined emergency—war, death of a spouse. Sudden departure of the last person left in his life.

On the afternoon I left for Italy, a perfect September day, I hugged my father good-bye and went out and stood on the sidewalk in the sun. Not only had I never flown on an airplane in my life, I'd never even taken a taxi. It didn't make sense for us. I could walk to church, walk to Broadway to buy what we needed in the stores there. For food shopping I took my father's car. Boston meant a short bus ride to the subway station and then about fifteen minutes on the train into downtown.

But, using part of the money my aunt left me, I'd gone out and purchased a plane ticket and two pieces of luggage—one carry-on, one rolling suitcase—and I felt as though I was starting a new chapter of my life, and so, rather than struggle with the suitcases on the bus and train or accept my father's offer to drive me and make him deal with the airport traffic, I decided to call a cab.

When the taxi pulled up to the curb, I recognized the driver as a girl I'd known in high school. She popped the trunk but stayed behind the wheel. I put my own bags in, and as I slid into the seat and we started away, I turned and looked at the front door and saw my father standing there behind the screen, not waving or smiling, just watching me go. I lifted a hand to him, kissed my fingers, waved. He put both hands up, palms forward, to touch the screen. I had the sense, I don't know why, that I would never see him again.

“Going on vacation?” the driver asked. As soon as I heard her voice, the name came to me: Laura Annina. She'd been one of the cool kids in our class, always flirting with boys instead of paying attention to the teacher, having a couple of minor run-ins with the police at night on Revere Beach. We'd existed in different orbits and never had much to say to each other. I wasn't sure she even remembered me.

But when I told her where I was going, she said, “Well, you were always one of those kids who did things right. And I was always one of those kids who did things wrong. And look at us now. You're going to Italy, and I'm stuck here, still with the same boyfriend. Remember Jinty?”

“Sure,” I said. “Handsomest boy in the school.”

“Yeah, for what that's worth. I'm living with my aunt, still. Embarrassed to say it, but it's true.”

“I live with my father,” I said. “There's no disgrace in that.”

“Nah,” she said, and it was the same
nah
I used to hear at Revere Beach (from a distance of twenty yards or so, cool circle to uncool) when friends asked if she wanted to go clubbing that night or into town or up to Hampton Beach for the weekend. Nah, I can't. Nah, Jinty wouldn't like that much.

“Just, ya know. Things haven't really worked out the way I wanted.”

“We're still young.”

“Nah, yeah,” she said, in a tired voice. “I just never went nowhere, and I'm probably never goin' nowhere. Jinty and I will probably get married someday, if he ever gets around to askin'. And I'll probably drive a cab until we have kids, or maybe my uncle will get me on at City Hall or somethin'. And then you'll see me pushin' a stroller down Broadway and then yellin' for my kids at the football game and then drinkin' beers on the front porch after they leave to get married.”

“You could go back to school.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, and she blasted the horn at a car in front of us and I could tell she didn't want to continue the conversation.

There was something sad in it for me. I knew so many people like Laura, so many friends whose dreams had been stunted while they were still in diapers, who'd put their life in a box and pulled the lid on over themselves, and lay there in the dark believing that was the whole world. Nothing good existed outside that box, or if it did exist, it was part of a system designed for other people, not them. A boyfriend with a car, money for cigarettes—those were the big hopes. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the life Laura lived, except that she seemed so prematurely tired and unhappy living it, as if there were chains on her wrists and ankles that only she could see. I knew her, understood her from the inside. Doing something that made her happier—going back to school, trying to find a job where she could move up the ranks and make more money and have her own apartment, or even telling Jinty straight out she wanted to get married and start a family—those things were as alien to her as becoming a brain surgeon and settling in the suburbs. As alien, I thought, as the idea of going to Rome had been for me a few months ago. There was a comfort in living the way we lived, in seeing people you knew, day after day, year after year, on the streets of the city where you'd been raised. There were fewer surprises in a life like that.

I wasn't so different. At least, not so different in the way I lived on the outside. Inwardly, though, my father was right: there was a streak of bravery in me. Even as a young girl I'd taken the lid off the box of my interior life. I believed there was no limit to what could happen there, and I don't really know where that belief came from. Not from Father Alberto, because I'd felt that way long before my conversations with him began. Not even from my grandmother. Maybe my mother had been a brave woman and had passed it down to me in her genes. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was descended from people who'd had the courage to leave the familiarity of their birthplace and sail across the ocean in steerage looking for something better. But Laura was descended from those same people. Her great-grandparents had left the Old Country, too, and traveled to a world where they didn't know anyone besides maybe a cousin or two, where they didn't speak the language, didn't like the food, where they had no place to live, no job, where there was snow and ice instead of olive trees and earthquakes. They'd had the courage to do that, as my own parents had, yet the generations they'd given birth to seemed to put roots down into the soil of eastern Massachusetts and never want to go anywhere else for the rest of their given days.

In my inner life, at least, I'd always been a kind of explorer, unafraid to venture into unmapped lands. So it felt right on that day to finally be matching my interior spirit to visible events. Sitting on the leatherette seat, glancing at the side of Laura's face and sending a silent prayer in her direction that her life, however she lived it, would lead her to a happy place, I felt a perfectly wonderful excitement take hold of me, fingers against my skin. There was a nervousness, yes, but much larger than the nervousness was this thrill at finally breaking out of my comfortable world. Anything could happen to me in Italy, anything good or bad. I'd been standing on the bridge over the Point of Pines tidal inlet all my life, watching the water come in and go out, frozen there, paralyzed by fear but wanting, at the same time, to feel the excitement of being airborne, the stomach-wrenching drop and hard splash. Finally I was making my leap.

At the airport, Laura parked, jumped out of the cab, and set my new bags on the sidewalk in front of the terminal as tenderly as if they were the luggage of a queen. The fare was $19.80, and I gave her a twenty and a ten. She looked up and for a second I thought she'd embrace me. But she only shook my hand in a congratulatory way, said, “You're sweet,” and jumped back in her cab to hurry home.

I'd gone past the airport in cars and on the subway thousands of times but never once set foot inside the terminal buildings. When I stepped through the automatic door, holding one bag over my shoulder and rolling the other behind me, the gritty world of Greater Boston shifted, instantly, into a futuristic universe, all glass and metal and echoing announcements. The floor was so well polished you almost could have used it as a mirror. In front of me was a confusion of lines, passengers repacking overstuffed bags, people running, saying their good-byes, standing nervously with tickets clutched in their hands and purses draped over their wrists. For a moment, a small lizard of fear crawled across the back of my neck, and I had an urge to turn around, call Laura to come get me, show up back at the house on Tapley Avenue, and tell my father I just couldn't do it.

But then a woman from one of the airlines came over and asked if she could help, and she guided me into a long line and stayed nearby explaining the whole process. I showed my ticket and driver's license, checked one bag, and then, since I was two hours early, spent a little time in the airport bookstore, where I was surprised to find one of Thomas Merton's lesser-known books,
The
Wisdom
of
the
Desert,
something Father Welch had mentioned more than once. I bought it, went to the café area, and had an expensive cup of coffee and a bagel, and sat there reading the marvelous introduction. I still remember this line about the desert monks of the third century: “They sought a God whom they alone could find, not one who was ‘given' in a set, stereotyped form by somebody else.”

Yes, I thought. That's why I'm doing this.

When the time came, I went through the security line, telling myself I was setting out to find that God, too, and then I was sitting in a black, cushioned chair looking out the window at the Alitalia plane that would carry me across the Atlantic. Half the other waiting travelers were speaking Italian. I observed them carefully, their fine shoes and neatly creased pants, their stylish dresses and jewelry. They were tourists, obviously, having come to Boston on vacation, and that idea seemed amusing and surprising. It had never occurred to me that people in the rest of the world would choose my neighborhood for an exotic trip. Maybe some of them had taken the subway out to Revere or been given a recommendation to eat at Rossetti's. Maybe my father and I had sat near them on our happy night or had seen them walking on the beach. I had an urge to strike up a conversation with a mother and daughter sitting nearby, to ask them a hundred questions about Rome. But, in their expensive clothes and fancy hairstyles, they seemed so much more sophisticated than I felt, and I was afraid of looking stupid. I concentrated instead on listening to the language, realizing that my father's stubborn return to Italian coincided exactly with the first time I'd told him I might go to Rome. Maybe he'd been preparing me, then, all those weeks.

I said a prayer for him. I tried to imagine his life before I came into it: a child in a fascist society with its bluster, violence, and lies. German occupation. American bombs and soldiers. Wreckage everywhere, lines for food, the decision to leave, and then the harrowing boat trip in early adolescence. I knew from stories my uncles told that there had been widespread anti-Italian feeling in 1940s and 1950s Boston. Instead of finishing school, my father had lied about his age and found a job as a laborer on the subway, laying track and stringing wire. An older Italian man had taken him on as an apprentice mechanic, and he'd ended up learning those skills, becoming a master mechanic, and doing that work for almost fifty years.

What I didn't know, what I'd never had the courage to ask, was why he'd waited until age forty-two to marry, then eleven more years to have a child. What had a woman so many years his junior seen in him? “My aunt, she introduced us once at a wedding” was the story. But my mother had been twenty then, a few years younger than I was. My father was thirty-nine. What kind of life made a twenty-year-old, Italian-born beauty fall in love with a man her father's age? And why had I neglected to ask? In the photographs I saw, they were standing close, arms around each other's waists, seemingly in love. But what had the fiber of that love been made of? A common heritage? A lopsided physical attraction? A comfort she took from him, surrounded, as she was, by a hostile, half-alien world? I had wanted to be seen by my father as a full soul. But had I ever really done that for him?

Soon we were being summoned to the gate, showing boarding passes, striding down the long walkway with its bouncy floor. I felt another surge of excitement and then a small jolt of nerves as I actually stepped onto the plane. Again I just did what everyone else did. I found my seat. I saw people stuffing things into the overhead compartment, so I put my bag up there, too, saving out
The
Wisdom
of
the
Desert
and a pharmaceuticals textbook. It seemed to take a long time for passengers to settle in, and then the flight attendants gave us a miniclass on what to do if we crashed in water or ran out of oxygen. There was a swelling knot of nerves in my belly as the plane backed out of its parking place and rolled toward the runway. I was holding tight to the arms of the seat.

“First time flying?” the person in the seat beside me asked.

He was a nice-looking man, fifty or sixty years old, dressed in a suit, and he looked as comfortable there as my father did in his chair in front of the television. I told him it was, that I was going on vacation to Rome, and he said, “Rome is simply the greatest city in the world. I've been there dozens of times on business, and my life's dream, when I retire, is for my wife and me to sell our house, and rent an apartment in Trastevere, do you know it?”

“I don't know anyplace there.”

“It was the working-class section years ago. Then the movie stars and artists discovered it, and now it's the Italian SoHo.”

I nodded and smiled, afraid to reveal how little I knew of the world.

“Rome,” he said, as if he was speaking the name of a lover. “I just want to walk the streets all day for the last ten or twenty years of my life, go into museums, have great meals, stroll in the parks. You're not going to drive, I hope.”

I told him I had a distant relative who was going to help me get around. I was hoping he'd meet me at the airport.

“That's wise. The only bad thing about the city, the only bad thing about the country, really, is that the people drive as if they're constantly showing off for one another. It's like a hockey game. Do you know hockey?”

“No.”

“In hockey, which is a beautiful sport, the players are constantly trying to show who's tougher. They fight, they whack each other with sticks, they elbow each other in the face. It's exactly the same in Italy with the drivers.” But he was smiling as he said all this, making it seem as though Italy, or at least the Italian road, was a kind of comic strip. “You'll have a great time,” he said, in an encouraging way. “Which part of the city are you staying in?”