Advice for Italian Boys (25 page)

“Come,” said Nonna, and she seized the near hand of the ponytailed woman. Paola took hold of the woman’s jacket, and she and Nonna pulled her around so that the woman stood between them, in the path of the looming vehicle.
NO MORE EMPTY PROMISES
, read her sign, which was now turned forward and could be read. Nonna kept a firm grip on the woman’s hand, and Paola on her jacket. Their captive turned her head away from the bright lights and lifted her sign to shield her eyes. The rest of the people on the picket line cheered and regrouped. Seeing the sign hoisted higher, they linked arms so that again they formed a single unbroken chain.

The truck came to a halt less than a metre from the tip of Nonna’s nose. The roil of its engine made the bones of her chest shudder, and she felt herself shaken and then fully awakened, everything coming sharply into focus, like the picture on the television when one of the boys would come to adjust it for her. It was her first true wholly rounded conscious experience since coming here all those years ago.

She looked to her left, and saw Massimo and the boys out of the corner of her suddenly clear vision. On her right was steadfast Paola, who had loved her and protected her and understood her for more years than had her own mother. She had traded a country and a language for a family. Things of such different sizes and significance. Filomena thought of the words from the book of Ruth that Peppino had recited to her when he returned from Ferramonti, to show her what he had learned. She remembered how he had lowered the pitch of his voice; he had wanted his knowledge to remain a secret between them.

Ma Rut rispose, Non insistere con me perché ti abbandoni e torni indietro senza di te: perché dove andrai tu andrò anch’io; dove ti fermerai mi fermerò; il tuo popolo sarà il mio popolo e il tuo Dio sarà il mio Dio.

Dove morirai tu, morirò anch’io e vi sarò sepolta. Il Signore mi punisca come vuole, se altra cosa che la morte mi separerà da te.

And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.

Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.

Paola reached behind the rigid back of the woman between them and held tight to Nonna’s hand. Nicolo suddenly appeared. He turned and inserted himself in front of them, facing the truck. He held himself straight and reached his arms wide against the glare of the headlights and the noise of the engine.

N
icolo and Zoe arrived at St. Francis of Assisi parish church at the same time on the day of Mario and Angie’s wedding, a few minutes after eleven, but they entered the church through different doors and so did not see each other. Zoe came in through the front door, in the company of her sisters Emma and Stephanie. They had the job of setting out the flower arrangements and attaching white paper flowers and pink pleated garlands to both ends of each pew. Angie was still at home, being dressed by her mother and her bridesmaids.

Nicolo, Paul, Frank, Angie’s brother Joe, and Angie’s cousins from Vancouver, Nick and Guido, came in from the parking lot through the vestry door, into the small redcarpeted
room where Nicolo and Frank had robed as altar boys a decade before. This time they were carrying wooden hangers on which hung their tuxedos, zippered into black covers. Nick and Guido, who were older by three or four years, and more experienced, had brought sustenance—a bottle of
vin santo
and a tin filled with hard
biscotti di Prato.
Frank found some glasses in one of the cabinets and persuaded Mario to drink down two glasses of the
vin santo
right away, one after the other, for courage and for luck. Nick and Guido toasted Mario and began to throw out scraps of advice for Mario’s life ahead.

“Have your kids young. That’s what my father said.”

“Wives cry a lot in the first year, my uncle said. Just ignore it and it’ll stop eventually.”

“They like to get flowers even after you’ve been married forever. I don’t know why.”

“You’ll need to watch out for your stuff. A friend of mine couldn’t find his hockey stick for a game and it turns out his wife used it to stake the tomatoes.”

Nicolo kept mostly silent and listened, laughing with the others when they laughed. If only it were really as easy as that, a few simple rules and guidelines—say, no more than ten or twelve—advice like fresh eggs in their neatly divided container. There would be no mistaken marriages, no separations or long-term grievances or divorces. But as it was, nothing was simple or clear between the sexes, and maybe that was how it had to be for the fascination to have been sustained over so many years. Look at how complicated Zoe was, although she appeared as clear and simple as a pool of water. Ideas and past joys and losses flashed in her like fishes. It would take a
lifetime to understand her. She had told him that most of what she had learned so far in life was provisional and untried. She had the pale, unlined skin of the untested. She said that she found it inexplicable how readily some people jumped into the concerns of others and offered solutions to problems, when answers eluded them in their own lives. Her life so far, and her visits with her mother on the west coast, had left her with an apprehension of acting impulsively, without careful, reasoned thought. Nor did she like to judge the behaviour or mistakes of other people. She felt that there were always unknown, mitigating circumstances.

At twelve-fifteen, Nicolo walked his parents and Nonna and Enzo and his family to their seats on the left side of the church. At almost half past the hour, Enzo arrived, with Nandita beside him. She wore an orange and pink sari with a gold-threaded border and her dark hair was loose on her shoulders. None of the family had seen Nandita before. It meant something that she was here: a change in Enzo, a change that each of them interpreted differently. Massimo perceived that it signalled a switch from Enzo’s singleminded devotion to his studies. Older Enzo thought that his brother might simply want to display Nandita’s beauty. Nicolo understood that Nandita’s presence represented an unspoken announcement to the family. Nonna searched Nandita’s face for the signs of a pure heart, and was satisfied. Paola approved of Nandita’s glossy hair and the way she held herself, with her back perfectly straight and her head tipped forward attentively, but she thought that Nandita’s outfit might signal something showy or stubborn in her. When she herself had arrived in Canada it had taken
her only a month or two to adopt the habits of the people around her, as much as she had been able to decipher them. She thought that it might be seen as self-regard to try to keep up distinctions in a country in which everyone was supposed to be equal.

Enzo stepped to one side and Nandita slid along the pew to sit beside Paola, with Enzo following to sit on Nandita’s right. Paola read into this arrangement that Enzo might intend for some sort of approval to be extended. She placed a hand on Nandita’s arm and whispered into her ear, a comment on the bride’s beautiful dress, because Angie had now begun her procession down the aisle, on her father’s arm, toward the altar, where Mario waited, flanked by his handsome groomsmen, her own Nicolo among them. Everything was well done—the rich white flowers, gardenias, masses of them, the long silk dress perfectly cut, a plain piano instead of the organ. The Trapassos were experts at this kind of ceremony. Paola closed her eyes against an odd effect of the soaring music and warm, closely packed bodies. She felt as if her brain and her stomach were sloshing like sea water inside her. She thought with a sudden, acute distaste of her morning cup of coffee. It had tasted bitter. At the reception, she sent Massimo in search of a piece of bread to settle her stomach.

“My client at the gym gave me tickets to the Frankie Donato opening in Las Vegas. Do you think you could go with me?” Nicolo asked Zoe.

“So it came together after all?”

“Apparently. They made a few changes. Irony. That’s what did it, Patrick said. They made it more ironic. I thought they
should just let him sing, but they went with something different. What do I know anyway?”

“If you’re like most people, you probably know more than you think.”

They were in the queue at the buffet table. Zoe frowned at the salad, which was principally composed of white wedges of iceberg lettuce, with pallid tomato slices among them. Then she turned to look at Nicolo, and her expression took on the kind of lustre that Nicolo had seen, his entire life, in the faces of his mother and his nonna, a gaze of interest and mindfulness.

“Irony,” she said. “Will that make the show better or worse?”

“Worse, probably. But would you come anyway?”

“Yes. I’d like to. Yes.”

Zoe took hold of Nicolo’s arm, and it seemed as if the next words she spoke had been tucked away for another purpose entirely, but were brought thriftily to use, without forethought.

“Couldn’t we simply start and see how it goes?” was what Zoe said. “What’s stopping us?”

Nicolo felt as if, with these words, a seed was planted in his chest. No, more than a seed—a sapling, already started, already on its way to becoming what it would become. He set his plate down on the long table, on the white tablecloth with the lines of the folds still on it, and he put his arms around Zoe and held on to her for so long that the long line of patient people began to flow around them.

“How did your exam go?” asked his older brother later on in the day, as evening drew around them.

“I didn’t study as much as I planned to. I had too much on my mind toward the end. I had to guess at some of it.”

“You always do well. You and Enzo. You have the right head for tests and things. Remember you were asking about that guy who used to work with Dad?”

“Vito Greco.”

“I asked Dad about him and he said that Nonna took a dislike to him and wanted Dad to fire him, but then before he could decide what to do, Vito quit, just stopped coming to work. Later they heard that he had turned up downtown, at one of those places that’s more of a salon than a barbershop. Pop said Vito was a good worker, just quiet. And then Len came along, remember, and rented the other chair, and Dad said he almost never thought about Vito again after that.”

Nonna was walking behind the boys, holding a plate from the buffet table, when, through all the noise and talk, she thought she heard Enzo utter the name of that
furfante
—that scoundrel—from when the boys were small. She had gone to the shop on a Saturday afternoon with a mop and rags and detergent to clean it from back to front. She brought Nicolo with her to push the broom and get at dust and hair in places she couldn’t reach. He tried hard to dissuade her from opening Vito’s cupboard, stood in front of it with his back to the doors, and was almost tearful when she insisted
that it would have to be put in order like everything else. The cabinet was filled with
sporchezza
—dirt—that spilled out when the doors were pulled open, and she questioned Nicolo closely about what he knew about its contents. He knew more than he told her—that was clear. His expression was locked, evasive, and his answers were mumbled toward the floor. Who knew what the boy was hiding or covering up? She felt her blood surge like fire inside her veins.

Later that day, she extracted the address from Gianna and took a bus to Vito’s apartment, carrying Vito’s comb and scissors and vials of cream and salve loaded into two plastic bags. These she threw on the floor at his feet and told that
disgraziato
that he had better be on his way, that he had no business contaminating with his presence the homes or businesses of honest people.

Poor Vito, who had never got around to removing Guido’s stash of magazines from the cabinet behind his chair, believed that Massimo had been so undermined by Vito’s challenge to his skills that he had been reduced to sending his mother to effect Vito’s dismissal from the store. Never mind. Vito had saved a bit of money and knew his way around the city. He wanted to work somewhere that had music playing and a bit of style, where the clientele spoke English and might want something more than long at the front and short at the sides.

“I talked to Pietro and he thinks that where this is all going is that some of the students will have to sit out next year as a
penalty. The group may or may not include me. Pietro said it could go either way in my case, but I’ve decided that I don’t want to wait. Whatever they decide, I’ll take next year off school and do something else. I don’t like the idea of letting someone else make decisions for me.”

“But what would you do?” Nicolo remembered that before Enzo had been accepted into law school he had talked about getting a master’s degree. He imagined Enzo at the same university, but in a different building, wearing jeans and a sweater and studying systems of governments and the uses of international diplomacy to settle trade disputes. What Enzo said next forced him to erase this quick mental sketch and replace it with an entirely different one.

“The Vaughan Bakery is up for sale. The Gerussis are going to retire and their son doesn’t want to run it. I’m thinking of buying it from them.”

In his imagination Nicolo pulled Enzo out of the classroom and put him back into a business suit. “You mean, as an investment?”

“No, I’m thinking of running it myself. I can do it if I get a loan for the setup and a line of credit to cover the operating costs. I’ve been over there a lot in the last few days, and I have some ideas about how I can improve it. The wire shelves need to go, and the menu could be expanded and updated. The staff wants to stay on. It’s not a bad setup. Most of it’s marginal. The coffee is where the profits are, the lattes and cappuccinos. Good markups. And what you want to do is arrange it so people don’t stay too long, taking up tables.”

Nicolo mentally replaced Enzo’s suit with jeans and a black shirt and dropped him behind the counter of the
bakery. “What if a Starbucks opens up across the street?”

“That doesn’t worry me. Not everyone likes the chains, and I can offer a better product. The old machines will need to go. There’s a distributor from Italy who’s willing to give me an exclusive for the area on these new machines that make a better coffee. It’s a science as much as an art. The right beans, the right water—it’s got to be filtered—the right temperature and pressure and extraction time. Even though they’re more complicated, these machines are easier to operate, and they’re more reliable. The manufacturer will fly over and train the staff if I make a commitment to their products. It’s a good location and the store’s already got good turnover. With a few improvements, I think it could do very well.”

Nicolo tried to imagine how his parents would react. They might be slower than he had been to accept his younger brother’s move from law school to coffee shop. Enzo anticipated his concern.

“Don’t worry about Ma and Pa. Nonna said she’d talk to them.”

“You told Nonna?”

“Yes. You know, you don’t give her enough credit. She understands a lot more than she lets on.”

“What did she say?”

“
Fai l’arti chi farai. Si non ricchisi, campirai.
Do the craft you were meant to do. If you don’t grow rich, at least you’ll live.”

“Good advice, eh?”

“Yeah, good advice.”

“I could go in with you, and Enzo too. Both of us need a change. We could try it and see how it goes. What’s stopping us?”