Advice for Italian Boys (2 page)

Nicolo was generally content through his high school years. He enjoyed the anonymous but privileged feeling of being among the teenagers, many of them first- or second-generation Italian Canadians like himself, who thronged Our Lady of Perpetual Help’s generous, glossy halls and filled its many high-ceilinged classrooms over which banks of fluorescent lights played their part in the elucidation of the next generation of Marias, Marcos and Anthonys. Nicolo had a gift of insight and he knew by comparing his life with what he had heard about life in Arduino from his parents and his nonna that he was lucky to be sitting virtually idle at a desk, studying equations and French verbs and the trading systems of ancient Mesopotamia instead of breaking his back trying to coax vegetables to grow in some
padrone
’s rocky fields, a destiny he had missed by the sheer chance of a few years and a continental shift by his father and then his mother. But it was in the Our Lady of Perpetual Help weight-training room, a dim, cool cube at the north end of the basement of the school, with its three high windows that filtered dusty sun in the fall and spring and were almost entirely blocked by grey-blue banked snow in the winter, that Nicolo felt most as if he was doing something to become, create and shape the person he might be intended to be. He spent hours there with his friends Paul Felice, Frank
Cecci and Mario Santacroce, whenever they weren’t playing hockey or basketball or training for a game or tournament, doing sit-ups, step-ups and bench presses, curls, crunches and calf-lifts, pulldowns, pushups and pec decks. This was the centre of his life outside of his family home; this place of blunted, echoing noises, male sweat, modulated intimacy, brief exchanges of advice and observation. The four of them spotted one another on the major lifts, lean flesh leaning into flesh. They wore last year’s gym strip and, since their mothers all used the same detergent—Sunlight, with its readily recognizable yellow box—they looked and smelled much the same, and they had many of the same thoughts and feelings. They talked about everything except girls; they felt toward women then, at age fifteen and then sixteen and seventeen, a kind of respectful, mystified awe that inspired the occasional silent reverie. These were not the kinds of feelings that could readily be compressed into the short, declarative words appropriate for a gym.

Sometimes, when Nicolo was working out alone, he recited aloud inside the small room the lines he had memorized back when he was in grade one. He was not ashamed of this. The questions and answers had an admirable rhythm and they filled the mental space that the levers and weights left empty. They pulled the separate parts of his day toward a strong, central, mysterious place located somewhere between his mind and his body. He breathed in on the questions and out on the responses as he pushed and pulled and hoisted.

Do you know who made you?

God, the Maker of all things, made me.

Out of what did God make all things?

He made them out of nothing.

How were they made?

God spoke, and it was done.

What did God make on the first day?

He made light.

What did God call the light?

He called it day.

What did God call the darkness?

He called it night.

What did God make on the second day?

He made the waters and the sky.

What did God make on the third day?

He made the land and water.

What did God make on the fourth day?

He made the sun, moon and stars.

What did God make on the fifth day?

He made the fishes of the sea and birds of the air.

What did God make on the sixth day?

He made horses, cows, sheep and many other animals.

What else did God make on the sixth day?

He made man.

What was the name of the first man?

His name was Adam.

What was the name of the first woman?

Her name was Eve.

What did God tell them not to do?

God told them not to eat of the fruit of one tree.

Did they obey God?

No, they did not. They ate the fruit that God told them they must not eat.

Did God punish them?

Yes. He forced them to leave the garden.

Nicolo sweated and pressed and pulled the weights so that they rose and fell, and he wondered what would have become of Adam and Eve if they had followed God’s advice instead of the serpent’s propositions. Would he, as one of their descendants, be living still in Eden with his brothers and parents and nonna? Nicolo knew little of the art of the narrative, but even at seventeen he had felt that generation after generation sheltered in a garden thronged with godly, obedient people would be an unsatisfactory tale, and that a story that follows a straight path, with no deviations, was likely to be no story at all. Nicolo also wondered if there was a connection between the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden and his nonna’s word for snake,
cursùne,
which seemed infinitely more ancient than the English word, or even the Italian,
serpente.
The word
cursùne
still retained to his ears the echo of the ancient malediction that was invoked beneath the limbs of the fruited tree. Everything turned, it seemed to Nicolo, on the snake and its sibilant misdirections, which had sent Adam and Eve, defenceless, out into the world to make their own way.

T
he Pavone boys had all worked since their early teens and had avoided most of the fiscal indulgences of their peers. Nicolo’s friend Frank Cecci had poured his money into a succession of recently painted ten-year-old sports cars that had leaking cams and suspiciously soft suspensions. Mario Santacroce had squired a series of indulged girlfriends with high-pitched voices and a fondness for leather jackets, beaded purses, perfume and dinners out in good restaurants. Paul Felice had given full vent to an early fondness for well-cut clothes and shoes imported from Italy. But not the three Pavone brothers. Aside from transportation—they bought gently used cars and babied them—sports equipment and
unexceptional clothes, all of their needs were met and their wants were kept under control.

Older Enzo’s money was gone now, of course, sunk into the four-bedroom, faux-gabled house, with its honey-beige siding and dark brown trim and an attached two-car garage on Alpha Avenue just south of Major Mackenzie Drive, where he and Mima lived with their children Zachary and Isabella. And almost all of the younger Enzo’s savings had been spent on university tuition and books. But Nicolo’s account at the Maple Credit Union still had in it almost every cent he had earned since he was twelve years old and was paid a dollar an hour to help Mr. Ariani down the block stake and weed and harvest his vegetable garden, plus what he had earned in interest and a few cautious investments. It wasn’t Mr. Ariani who had paid Nicolo, but Nicolo’s nonna, who knew that Mr. Ariani lived alone on his pension and was almost blind from cataracts and too proud to ask for help from anyone. Nicolo was directed to profess that it was his desire to learn about gardening that carried him down the street to knock on Mr. Ariani’s door. This became an increasingly difficult pretense to keep up as Nicolo grew to thirteen, then fourteen, and the dollar Nonna paid him was decreasingly enticing. Mr. Ariani died (in his garden, in his chair, under his hat) early one spring evening a few days after Nicolo turned fifteen, and a week later Nicolo’s nonna arranged for Alviero and Giuseppina Rossi, who owned the small grocery store across the street from the Vaughan Bakery, to hire Nicolo, and that part-time job—carrying boxes, stocking shelves, organizing produce, washing floors—lasted him until he was hired on full time at Caruso’s Gym.

Alviero did the ordering, stocking and receiving. Giuseppina ran the store and maintained control over the customers and the profits. She taught Nicolo how to keep orderly books of account. Giuseppina recorded the accounts in the proper manner, in wide flat ledger books that were arranged by date under the counter at the front of the store, going all the way back to opening day on October 12, 1959. It took a long time before she permitted Nicolo to handle the money or make the entries, but she insisted that he watch her so that he would learn, and she showed him how to make the count at the end of the day, sorting fives, tens and twenties into neat stacks, and pouring the change into a machine that, when you turned the handle, jostled the coins into funnels that fed them into tubes that held them in perfect stacks. Nicolo learned how to wrap paper covers around the columns of coins and twist the papers closed on each end like a sausage skin. Nicolo eventually was trusted to handle the paper money as well as the coin-sausage machine and, later, to make entries into Giuseppina’s books, carefully emulating her pencilled numbers, which lined up as tidily as the coins in their paper wrappers. The books balanced to the odd dollar and would have been faultless except that occasionally, despite Giuseppina’s vigilance, cans or boxes disappeared from the shelves into pockets and purses, and, even more rarely, coins fell into the cracks between the wide wooden floorboards or rolled under shelves and could not be retrieved even by Nicolo fishing with a bar magnet taped to the end of Giuseppina’s battered wooden yardstick.

“Self-reliance. That’s what’s most important,” Giuseppina often advised Nicolo.
“Fiducia in issu stessu.”
She tapped her
chest with her fist. “You need to be responsible for yourself. Never make the mistake of counting on anyone else. Everyone will disappoint you sooner or later. Let them look out for themselves.
Un fhare male ca è peccatu, ’un fhare bene ca è sprecatu.
To act badly may be a sin; but good deeds—bah—good deeds are a waste.”

By age twenty-four Nicolo had, in this manner, and out of his steady earnings at Caruso’s, and through prudent and sometimes providential investment, accumulated slightly more than forty thousand dollars, a remarkable sum. The mothers and fathers in his neighbourhood had an intuition for financial worthiness, a highly attuned, quasi-mystical sense for it, almost as if they roamed the streets dowsing with unseen forked sticks for dollars instead of water, and those of them with unattached daughters of approximately the right age—anywhere between seventeen and thirty-four—would lie awake in their beds at night figuring out how it might be possible to put their daughters in Nicolo’s way. Nicolo had had enough to do with girls and women over the years to take most of the air out of any possible rumour that he might be, just possibly, because here he was at twenty-four still living at his parents’ home without wife or fiancée or girlfriend, a
finocchio,
not entirely a regular man.

His first date, as it happened, although also his last for almost two years, had been with Jessica Santacroce, Mario’s only, younger sister. It was Nicolo’s mother’s idea that he invite Jessica to the graduation dinner and dance that was held in June at the end of his last year at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Nicolo had planned to go alone and meet his friends there, but his mother caught him by the elbow on his
way out the door to a pickup softball game one evening late in May. She had seen that he, unlike his brothers, had not made his way toward girls on his own and she thought that this might be natural, but that it was also somewhat unsatisfactory. He had grown up in a houseful of brothers and he could need persuading that girls wouldn’t bite. His mother had already talked with Jessica’s mother and the two of them had agreed that Nicolo would fetch Jessica in his father’s old brown Thunderbird after the afternoon graduation ceremony, which only family attended, about an hour before the celebration dinner was to start.

Nicolo had at that time the straightforward ways of a middle child, and he had no strong feelings about Jessica one way or the other, so he twisted his neck inside the collar of his shirt, said, “Okay, Ma,” and kissed her in the golden middle of her soft and giving cheek as he stepped past her and through the door.

An image—a bright vision—drifted into his mind as he walked down to the patchy field of grass behind Corelli’s six-bay service station, of himself in a light blue suit and Jessica in some dress or other, white or pink or yellow, frothy at the neck like the foam at the top of a cappuccino, and of the two of them together, dancing the old-fashioned way, one of his hands resting lightly on her waist, the other pressed against the bare skin of her back. The vision brought a spread of itching heat behind the zipper in his jeans, but the warmth and the daydream both dissolved into the bright evening air in the instant that his bat made contact—solid, square, true—with the ball, which soared up into the sky at an angle that made it disappear into the beaming late-June
sun. Impossible to catch a ball like that, errant, lost in the sun, on its own unknowable, arching and triumphant trajectory, and Nicolo ran easily, lightly, safely under that sun around all three bases and then slid into home in a shower of dust and grass.

On the night of the grad, as soon as the Thunderbird reached the end of the long, curving block of orderly houses where the Santacroce family lived, Jessica sent a glance back over her right shoulder, then reached down and pulled her scoop-necked, long-sleeved white lace shirt up and over her head. She tossed the shirt free of her dark hair with two craning motions of her head, first dipping right, and then left, scrunched it up and launched it into the back seat of the car. Then she manoeuvred her legs underneath her lap, kneeled up, wriggled her bottom and slid her long black knitted skirt down her legs. She rearranged herself in her seat, kicked the puddle of black fabric up with the toes of one foot, caught it and pitched it over her shoulder to join her blouse. Her thick, beige pantyhose followed, and next her flat, black polished shoes. Jessica was left with bare, gleaming legs, shoulders, arms and feet, and had exposed a second layer of clothes that had been concealed beneath the first. She was wearing a white halter top that was shot with silvery, shimmery threads, and a glossy black, pleated, very short skirt. Nicolo watched this transformation with darting sideways glances. Jessica’s writhing and shedding reminded him of a nature program he had watched on television with his nonna, in which, in an extended time-lapse sequence, a drab mud-coloured snake had worked itself free of its old dull skin, revealing a new, taut, shining surface that glistened with its bright hatched pattern.

Jessica opened her purse, took out a pair of high-heeled silver sandals and hooked these onto her feet. She jabbed enormous hoop earrings hung with banks of pink transparent discs through her earlobes, fished for a lipstick and painted a glistening kiss-shape the colour of a ripe plum onto her mouth, dropped the golden tube back into the purse, snapped the clasp of the purse shut, stretched her long, white legs and arms, groaned and wriggled her toes. Her toenails were slick with purple lacquer. She shook her head, tossing her long hair around the car.

“God, I could use a cigarette,” she said.

“I don’t smoke,” Nicolo offered, inadequately it seemed, since Jessica sighed heavily and turned away from him to examine through the window the passing view of garages with houses appended and strip malls each with an almost identical arrangement of 7-Eleven, video store and hair-dressing salon.

Jessica was only a couple of years out of middle school. As a peripheral player in Nicolo’s life to date, she had seemed a safe enough candidate to accompany him to the grad dance—a simple, comfortable and undemanding companion, likely to be thrilled to be asked and readily impressed by his gift of a pink carnation backed with camellia leaves, ribbon and tulle netting fixed to a fabric-wrapped pin, and by an Italian-style hot-and-cold buffet served in the staff room of Our Lady’s, followed by a dance to canned music in a crepe-paper–decorated gym.

Jessica drummed her fingers on her purse, which was black and gathered into thick leather folds; it rested in her lap balefully, like a pug dog. When Nicolo pulled the car into a parking space a block from Our Lady’s, Jessica sat forward and
assessed the number of cars parked on the street ahead of them.

“We’re early,” she declared, slumping back in her seat. “Let’s go get some smokes and then come back.”

“We wouldn’t be able to get as good a parking spot,” Nicolo said. He glanced at her feet. “If we go and come back you might have to walk a few blocks in those shoes.”

“You could drop me off at the front door,” Jessica countered. “That would be the gentlemanly thing to do.” The word
gentlemanly
emerged from her shiny mouth with a slick coating of something, mockery or irony or an unnameable quality in between. Nicolo shifted one shoulder and then the other under the grey suit jacket that he had borrowed from his older brother, and then turned to look squarely at Jessica.

“Look,” he said. “Smoking isn’t good for you. You’re what, sixteen years old? I’m supposed to be responsible for you. I am not buying you cigarettes.”

Jessica frowned. She gave Nicolo a hard, considering look.

“Okay, but we’d better not be the first people here.”

No more than a dozen people were in the staff room when they got there, mostly caterers and teachers and parents and student council members moving tables and setting out chafing dishes and stacks of plates and cutlery. The room was stiflingly hot. One or two other early couples hovered uncertainly near the doors. Nicolo saw Carmina Vitale, the chair of student council, struggling to untangle the legs of a table. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said to Jessica, and he went to help Carmina. Moments later, Sandra DiNardo came up and asked if he could figure out the system of ropes and pulleys that opened the upper bank of windows to let air
into the room. When Nicolo got back to where he had left Jessica, she had disappeared. He reflected for a moment on where she might have gone, and then walked along the main corridor to the east end of the school, to the door where student smokers congregated. Jessica was there with a half-dozen boys and girls, dragging hard on the last inch of a cigarette. A lively conversation stopped and several sets of eyes fixed themselves on Nicolo.

“Hey, Nicco,” Jessica said. She waved her right hand toward him, trailing a plume of blue smoke from between her first and second fingers. “I’ll come find you in about half an hour, okay?” she proposed.

Nicolo nodded. He was still struggling to think the best of Jessica; it was possible that she had joined the group at the side door out of an overdeveloped sense of social obligation and that she would come to spend the rest of the evening at Nicolo’s side after spending a requisite few minutes with her friends. He went back to the staff room, where rectangular stainless-steel containers of pasta and meatballs and sausages and potato gnocchi and broccoli were being set out over gas warmers.

He located Jessica three times more during the evening, once when he took her a plate of spaghetti and wilted salad and a glass of warm pink punch. She was sitting on the same steps where she had been smoking an hour earlier, talking intently to a skinny, short-haired boy Nicolo didn’t recognize. An hour later, Nicolo pulled her by the hand into the gym and they danced together without exchanging a word to “I’ll Be There” by Mariah Carey, and to Eric Clapton lamenting about “Tears in Heaven.” Two dances were enough, appar
ently. “I’ll be outside,” Jessica breathed into his ear, and she pulled herself out of his clasp. Her skin was soft and damp and she smelled of some perfume sweet as bubblegum, and of sweat and cigarette smoke. Still later, when all the food had been eaten, and the banners and crepe ribbons had begun to droop, and it was time to go home, Nicolo found her on the same back steps, with the same guy, although this time Jessica was sitting on his lap, her round rump nested into his faded jeans, nuzzling at his thin neck, her pink tongue sweeping her lips, and murmuring who-knows-what into the boy’s ear.