All This Talk of Love (2 page)

All Maddalena’s clothes she gets as gifts from Prima. Birthday, Mother’s Day, Christmas, even Easter. Her favorite thing in life, she says, is for Prima to take her to Christiana Mall and for them to window-shop for a while, stop for a bite to eat at the sit-down restaurant, get their nails done if they have a coupon. Maddalena does have a few friends her own age, Italian ladies who came over after the war, but their idea of a good time is to sit at kitchen tables and gossip and show off vegetables from their gardens and tell each other how old they’re getting.
Th
ey’re round and fat, these Italian ladies; Maddalena calls them
le patate,
the potatoes.
Th
ey prefer terry cloth housecoats to sleeveless velvet; they don’t color their hair or pluck their moles or learn to drive. Maddalena has never enjoyed cooking, never planted a garden, and never left the house without makeup. She’s worked in factories and drapery shops. It is one of Prima’s many promises to help her mother stay young, to keep her from what they call
la vita patata
.

Th
e surprise Prima’s planned for the confirmation party fulfills that promise. Prima is such a junkie for surprises that even this one, which will make her mother furious, gives her a buzz.
Th
e juggling of information, the giddy expectation of her sons’ hands thrown in the air, of her father’s happy tears and fierce embrace, thrill her. It’s the stuff of life! It will take willpower to keep the surprise to herself for three more days. When she reveals it, her mother will put up a big fuss before Prima can even get all the details out, but eventually she will come around. Prima has studied her mother’s patterns all her life, talks to her many times a day, knows her better than she knows herself.
Th
ey are bound both by that sacred covenant between every mother and daughter and by a cord of grief.
Th
e grief is like a living thing, silent but always present; they stand guard over it the way they would a child of their own, which, in a way, it is. It comforts Prima that the surprise is something Tony would have loved.

“Frankie should be at the party,” Maddalena says. “You need to call him. He listens to you.”

“Since when?”

“He tells me he had some speech to do at the Harvard, but he made it up. I can tell. Not once he mentioned it this week. He forgets to cover up when he lies.”

Prima has never understood her youngest brother, and not only because he was born so late, when she was already a teenager. He’s had dark curtains over his heart from the beginning and rarely gives anyone a peek behind them, least of all his sister. Unlike her and Tony, who were born two years apart and had dozens of other friends their age around them, Frankie was a loner as a kid, never played sports, never even broke curfew on the weekends.
Th
e night of his senior prom, Prima found him sitting at home in bed, still in his school uniform, reading a book of Polish poetry. Prima sat next to him and acted Big Sister as best she could, asked if he wanted to go out for pizza. But Frankie just kept reading. When Prima finally asked if he was OK, he said, “Of course I’m OK. Why wouldn’t I be OK?” and read her a poem out loud from the book.

“Aren’t your exams over by now?” Prima asked, which really meant, What’s a healthy red-blooded Italian American boy doing at home reading Polish poems on prom night? His solitary existence worried her. She was, and still is, looking for any sign of trouble. But again Frankie ignored her, so she stood, kissed him on the forehead, and let him be.

“Keep an eye on Frankie” is what her parents have begged her to do since Tony died, so she does. Patrick’s confirmation is a big deal, not only because the kid finally came to his senses, but because she and Tom are spending a fortune on the party, not to mention the surprise Frankie should be there to hear. If he doesn’t show up, it will be another crack in a family that could fall apart at any moment. You have to tend to family like you tend to a garden.
Th
at’s what’s wrong with America, if you ask her, why no one’s as happy as they used to be, like in the fifties.

Prima raised her own boys the old-fashioned way. All four of them kiss their
nonna
and
nonno
and say “I love you” every time they leave them, whether their buddies are around or not. It’s a requirement. She’s dragged them with her and Tom to Mass every Sunday, and to all the sacrament parties and birthdays, and they’ve given up meat on Christmas Eve and on Wednesdays and Fridays during Lent no matter how much they’ve bellyached. Ask her boys about their mother, and they’ll say she’s their best friend, one of their buddies, like they’re on the same team. Zach calls her his “wingman.” She’s gone to all their games—Ryan and Matt’s football, Zach’s soccer and tennis, Patrick’s baseball—and watched how they act with the guys, and the truth is they act no differently than they do with her. It’s almost a shame to say, but they’re closer to her than they are to Tom, and maybe even than they are to each other. She’s picked them up from parties after they’ve passed out drunk. She’s paid more speeding tickets and police fines than she can add up. Where were their buddies then? Where was their father? She’s the one person they can trust without hesitation, she’s told them, so they share everything, sometimes more than she wants to know. Ryan, the oldest—it’s like it’s his life’s mission to shock her with his stories. He doesn’t realize how much it would take to shock her.

Th
e past few years, with Ryan and the twins away at college, Prima has had to work extra hard, spend more money, make more phone calls, to keep everyone together. Just because your kids grow up and don’t live at home anymore doesn’t mean they stop being members of the family. And sometimes, to fall asleep at night, she pretends that this isn’t Patrick’s last year of high school, that he won’t be leaving them next fall. She likes to imagine Patrick at the other end of the kitchen table, his hands folded in front of him, nervous and guilty maybe, telling her and Tom that he’s decided not to go to college right away, that he wants to take a job in Wilmington for a year, live at home, save money. If Prima doesn’t pretend this is at least a possibility, then all she can see is Tom and her alone in their big house—the TV on but no other voices, no boys in the yard hitting chip shots, nobody in the basement sneaking swigs from the bar—and she feels like she’s tied to train tracks and a big one’s coming at her full force.

Patrick’s at her bedroom door, knocking and turning the knob. “What’s this locked for?” he calls out.

Prima and Maddalena slip on their dresses and let him in. He’s still in his school clothes—blue blazer and tie and backpack—with his shirt untucked and his Phillies cap backward.

“Check you two out,” he says. “Very fancy.” He kisses his
nonna
on the cheek and asks her, “You wanna be my date tonight?”

“If we go dancing, yes,” she says. She takes his hands in hers, pulls him close, then pushes him out to arm’s length, then pulls him back to her again. He picks up the rhythm right away.

“You’ve got a one-track mind,” he says, giving her a twirl. “
Th
e dancing track.”

Maddalena smiles. Her life is dancing, yes, she thinks, but more than that, it’s Frankie and Prima and her husband and keeping up her house and some sewing work on the side for extra money. For many years she wanted more, or different, or to go backward—once, long ago, she wanted romance and adventure, like a woman in a movie—but then she lost Tony, her beautiful son, and after that, she stopped wanting anything and needs one pill to sleep and another to wake up, and what may be true, what the years have taught her, is that a son and a daughter and a husband and dancing and a little house and some paying work and to sleep through the night are as much as anyone has a right to ask for in this life. More.

“Handsome boy like you,” she says to Patrick now, and she pats his cheek. She stares at him a moment, her hand still on his cheek, struck by his smooth skin, his big blue eyes, broad shoulders, blond hair. She wants to say more, to tell him he is one of the lucky ones to be good looking and strong and young, but his sudden beauty, and the explosion in her heart, have stopped her mouth. She can’t form words. His name disappears from her lips. She just stares.

“I am a swordsman,” Patrick says. “It cannot be denied.”

“What on earth is
that
expression?” Prima asks.

“
Th
ink about it,” he says.

Prima shakes her head. It sounds dirty. She looks over at Maddalena. “You still with us, Ma?”

“Of course,” says Maddalena.
Th
e spell breaks. She takes her hand away. “I was just thinking, Prima, you need to bring your handsome son here to the dance studio. We get lots of young men from the University of Delaware.
Th
ey take lessons and practice for the competitions. More the young men these days than the old men are coming. When I dance with the college ones, I feel like I’m a teenager again, back in my village before your father took me—”

“Yeah, too bad all those dudes are gay,” Patrick says, laughing. He walks over to Prima, gives her a peck on the cheek, and rests his elbow on her shoulder. He’s more than a head taller.

“Some, yes, it’s true,” Maddalena says. “Not every one of them, though. I can tell. I see everything.
Th
e ones that look like you, they not. Just the funny-looking ones. I don’t dance with the funny-looking ones. Or the geezers. You should see how the college boys ask for me. All those pretty young girls around, and they ask
me
to dance—an old lady!”

“See what I’m saying?” Patrick says. “Gay.”

“Go take a shower,” Prima tells him. “You’ve got BO.” It’s beer on his breath, actually, and she needs him out of the room before her mother notices. “You weren’t running around outside in those pants, were you?”

“I was just over at the Gooch’s,” he says.

“
Th
e Gooch,” says Prima. “Don’t you love these kids’ names, Ma?”

After the door’s closed and the music starts up from Patrick’s room, Maddalena says, “He’s so full of life, that one. Two big things you did right in your life: marry Tom and raise those boys.”

Th
ey take off their dresses and Prima covers them with plastic. She sits with Maddalena on the deck for a while, watching Tom trim the hedges. She has come through life OK after all. A quiet childhood with a thousand friends and weekends at the shore and the lead in
Saint Joan
even though she was just a sophomore.
Th
en, the morning of opening night, Tony went missing, and for years after, there was just a kind of blankness she never imagined could be filled. Until Tom. Until her boys. And now she considers herself one of the lucky ones to have seen through the blankness—blessed, in fact, smiled upon by the God she visits each and every Sunday. Her tragedy came early in life, and since then other tragedies have sideswiped her but never crashed full on. A lump in her mother’s breast, suspicious at first, diagnosed as benign. Tom almost getting transferred to Omaha, then finding a new job here that paid twice as much. And just last month, a boy on Patrick’s team—the shortstop, All-American kid, stands next to Patrick in the all-star photo—drops dead swinging at strike three. Prima should thank God a hundred times a day, but she forgets, and then on Sundays she has to ask his forgiveness for forgetting. She wonders whether anyone can be grateful enough to satisfy him and, if they are, whether God rewards or keeps testing you.

Th
ese are the questions Prima asks herself that night, and the night after, and the night after that, the one before the confirmation, when she’s awake at 1 a.m. next to her husband, so tired from the day that her eyes burn and the pins and needles pinch her legs, and she gets that train-track feeling again and hears the whistle screaming closer and feels the vibration on the rails beneath her, and sleep—that fickle hero—won’t cut her loose.

FRANKIE LIGHTS THE
front burner on his kitchen stove. He fills a medium pot with water and watches it come to a boil. He takes a small box from the cupboard, slices it open with a steak knife, and pours pasta shells into the water. Eight minutes later he drains the shells, returns them to the pot, and pours in a half cup of milk, a tablespoon of butter, and a packet of powdered orange cheese. He brings the pot to the couch and turns on the television.
Th
e bottom of the pot warms his lap. He’s not tired. It’s past 1 a.m. and he can’t get tired as hard as he tries. He flips through the six channels that come with basic cable and settles on PBS. An old astronomer stands in front of a poster-size photograph and points to a blur surrounded by smaller, brighter blurs. It’s a low-budget documentary on the Hale-Bopp comet, and though it’s yesterday’s news, it captivates him.
Th
e comet, the greatest natural spectacle of the nineties, is long gone and won’t be back for two thousand years.
Th
e thirty-nine brainwashed believers who followed it into oblivion won’t be back at all. Meanwhile, the earth remains in a perpetual state of loneliness, welcoming but never visited, a host whose friends drive by once in a while but don’t stop in.

What’s at play all those miles beyond him shouldn’t matter. What should count, his friends might say—and doesn’t he agree, officially?—is the here and now. And yet, in the here and now, with the screen flickering and the old astronomer circling the blurs with a red marker, Frankie longs to know, with the certainty of a scientist, a few more whats and whys of the cosmic plot. Like, what did he hope to find in this city, and when will he find it? Like, why did one son embrace oblivion and the other merely run away? Like, why does Frankie feel that the Grassos—his mother and father, Prima, his nephews, himself, and even, strangely, Tony—are at the end of something?