Big Stone Gap (25 page)

Since Mama died, I have prayed to her. I haven’t had any sense that she’s around me, but I do believe she’s up in heaven. Iva Lou told me for six months after her mother died that, whenever she’d turn a light on, the bulb would blow, even if it was new. Iva Lou believes that souls are full of energy. And they channel into our energy sources to talk to us. A lamp is a perfect object for them to communicate through because it runs on electricity, and that is similar to the frequency in the afterlife. All I know is that I haven’t changed a bulb in this house since Mama died.

I do say my prayers every day. Mama told me to pray even if it was just mindless repetition. “You may not need your prayers today, but trust me, eventually everyone needs to pray.” I remember Reverend Gaspar’s face as he was dying. “Faith,” he said. I hope I find it someday.

I put my hair up in a towel and put my makeup on. I go with the full Kabuki: moisturizer, spot concealer, and base applied with a sponge. Pearl taught me how to do it, and I must say, my skin looks like alabaster. She taught me how to line my lips and fill them in with lipstick on a brush, not straight from the tube. I’m not big on eye makeup, so I don’t do the shadow thing, just mascara. Pearl told me that long lashes are my best asset. Maybe she’s right.

The sun pours through the skylight, giving my hair a sheen when I take it out of the towel. I dry it and it doesn’t frizz. It’s too early in the year for humidity. I have a three-week window in the seasonal calendar when my hair behaves. This is the first week. I’m going to miss the rest of the good-hair weeks, but I don’t care—my hair can do whatever it wants on a gondola in Venice.

Mama had a bottle of Chanel No. 5 in her dresser; I dab it on sparingly. I know I can always buy another, but this was hers, so every drop is precious. I don’t want to use it up. I guess I feel that when it’s gone, she is really gone. I screw the cap on tightly.

When I go downstairs, Otto and Worley are in the kitchen eating their lunch. They whistle at me. I give them a look, and we all laugh.

“We just ain’t never seen you all gussied up like that, Miss Ave,” Otto says.

And they’re right. They haven’t.

“Pearl says she wants to drop some of her and her mama’s stuff by later,” Worley offers.

“That’s fine.”

“Where you off to?” Otto asks.

“I thought I’d go and see a movie in Kingsport. I’m getting jumpy waiting for Friday to get here. I need something to do.”

Otto and Worley look at each other and smile.

“Did I say something funny?”

“Nah,” Otto says. “It’s just that you’ve always been so busy, running here, running there, that it’s funny to think you don’t got nothing to do.”

“Are you all packed?” Worley asks.

I nod.

The doorbell rings. It’s probably Pearl. She has keys, though. So why would she be ringing the bell?

I open the door. For a moment, I feel as though I have entered a dream. Through the screen, I see a familiar face. It’s the same face that appears in an ad in
The New York Times
travel section every Sunday. The hair is different and the arms aren’t extended over her head in welcome, but the same face, the same big eyes, the same big smile greet me with the same largesse and joy that’s in the picture. Except she’s not in the paper; she is here on my porch. It is Gala Nuccio.

“Are you Ave Maria?”

“I am.”

“Oh, my God! It’s me! Gala!” She pushes me into the house and embraces me. We hug like sisters, and it’s so funny—she could be my sister. She’s shaped like me but smaller, and she has hair that could frizz. She’s much more down-to-earth and less dramatic in real life.

“What are you doing here?” I ask without letting her go.

“Before I tell you, believe me, I wanted to call and explain, but they wouldn’t let me.” I’m thinking, who are “they,” and why would Gala come over a thousand miles to see me when she would have seen me two days from now at the C luggage area at Newark Airport in New Jersey? My nerve endings feel as though they are pushing tiny needles from the inside of my body through to the outside. I am overcome with a deep fear. Gala, my sister, can tell.

“Don’t be afraid,” she says, sounding like Moses if he had been raised in New Jersey. She puts her arm around me. Otto and Worley stand in the doorway of the kitchen and watch silently. Gala leans out the door and motions for someone to enter.

There in my doorway is the man in the picture: my father, Mario da Schilpario. I put one hand on my heart and the other over my mouth, as if to make sure I am still in my body and standing here. He smiles at me. Just like he did in the picture. He is about my height, and his black hair is full and curly, peppered with streaks of white. His eyes are large and brown and turn up at the corners, like mine. He has the same slight overbite I do, but he has a dimpled chin, which I don’t. He is dressed impeccably, with a long-sleeved beige cashmere sweater tied around his shoulders like Jean-Paul Belmondo in all those French movies. I am stunned that my father could be so dapper. Then he says, in very rehearsed English, “I am Mario Barbari. I am happy to meet you.” He takes both of my hands and kisses them. Then he embraces me. It is not a phony embrace either, and not a pitiful “I’m sorry I was never there for you all these many years” embrace; it is one of genuine joy. He
is
happy to meet me.

Finally, I am in the arms of my real father. Why, then, do I see the face of Fred Mulligan? Fred, who taught me how to peel an apple, play gin rummy, and open a checking account? Fred Mulligan, who I thought never loved me because I asked “why” too much. Fred Mulligan, who died and left my mother everything he had, knowing that someday I would benefit from that. Fred Mulligan, who didn’t know how not to hurt me, because he, too, was asked to live a lie.

When I cry, Gala weeps. My father cries too, but they aren’t shameful tears; they are empathetic, like he knows how important this moment is to me.

Mario looks at me with the same wonder I feel looking at him. He is much more imposing in life than he is in his picture. I take a moment to examine the details of his face in person as I have in the photograph all these months. He has a firm jaw (decisive), thick eyebrows (a healthy libido; surprise, surprise) that frame each eye from one corner to the other (a woman would kill for such perfect arches!), and a straight nose, but it is his smile, with full lips revealing perfect teeth, that draws you in. In face-reading, his is the face of a king. He isn’t very tall for a man, but his posture and carriage are so regal, you don’t notice.

Gala touches my shoulder, and I look at her as though I am looking into the face of an angel. I am very grateful, but I cannot thank her. How do you begin to thank someone for something so incredible? Then she says, “Would you like to meet your grandmother?”

Through the door steps my grandmother. She looks me up and down and over like she’s buying an eggplant. She is tiny but broad-shouldered. She wears a simple blue serge suit. Her hair is in a white braided bun. She has a long nose and clear blue eyes. She shoves her son out of the way and says, “Ave Maria!” And then she hugs me hard, right from the gut; I think my tailbone will snap in two. “Nonna?” I say to her. She grins at me. “You speak Italian?” I nod. She is so overjoyed she slaps my arm hard. Nonna, or “Grandma,” speaks in a hard-to-follow mountain dialect. She understands my Italian, though. I speak too fast when I am excited too. It is a wonder to me that she exists. I have dreamt of this all my life, and now it is real. Nonna does not stop talking. She tells me that I am her only granddaughter and she prayed all of her life to have a grandchild. She is sorry she never held me as a baby. Do Italians tell you everything they feel without censor? I think so. Then, she says,
“Dove è cucina?”
I point to the kitchen and she trundles off. Then the most magical thing happens.

Zia Meoli and Zia Antonietta walk in together. They are identical twins, and they look exactly like my mother! The same high forehead, the same golden skin, the same smile! They were ten years older than she, but their hair is still black; they wear it in the same long braid. I embrace them both at once, and I feel like I am in the arms of my own mother again. They smell like Chanel No. 5, just like Mama. They are followed by a tall, distinguished man, my Uncle Pietro, Meoli’s husband. She introduces him, speaking in Italian, referring to her descriptions of him in her letters. I look off and see my father trying to communicate with Otto and Worley, using some sort of sign language. It is so funny that I start laughing; soon we are all laughing. The laughter clears my head, and I can think. I turn to Gala. “How did they get here?” She tells me she put the tour together. She reads my mind: I’m thinking,
Who paid for this?
Gala tells me someone sent the family the tickets. Who? She shrugs and looks out on the porch.

Theodore, Fleeta, Pearl, Iva Lou, and Lyle are waiting for me. They are crying, all except for Lyle, who keeps biting his lip. I go to embrace them, but none of them can wait, so we glob into one group and hug and cry. Pearl, like the great makeup artist she is, dabs the runny mascara off my face with a Kleenex.

“Thank you for this. Thank you so much.” My dear friends must have pooled all their money to bring my family to me. How will I ever repay them for this priceless gift?

“Don’t thank us,” Iva Lou says simply.

“What do you mean?”

“Thank him.” Iva Lou points to the end of my front walkway. A man stands there with his hands in his pockets, his back to us. He turns slightly and kicks a rock with his foot. It is Jack MacChesney.

“He did this for me?” My friends nod at me solemnly and look at one another.

“But why?”

“I guess you’ll have to ask him that yourself, honey-o,” Iva Lou says tenderly.

I turn to go down the steps that lead to the walkway that will lead me to him. I take a deep breath, but I don’t move. I see him there; he does not see me yet. The mountains rise behind him in green folds that peel back, back, back, until they reach the end of the sky. How small he looks at the foot of those hills. How singular. How lonely. I know I must go to him. I look at my friends on the porch, and they agree. What can I possibly say to him? I’ll think of something. I hope.

Jack Mac is deep in thought when I reach him. I touch his arm, and he looks at me.

“You did this for me?”

He nods.

“Thank you.” I step toward him to embrace him. I am so full of gratitude; I want him to know that no one in the world ever did anything like this for me before.

He takes a step back and looks off into the middle distance. I am stunned that he rebuffs me. But I don’t press it; he is not the sort of man you back into a corner.

“Why did you do this for me?” I ask him softly.

He looks at me, bewildered that I could ask such a question.

“This is something I planned a few months back . . .” A few months back? The night he came over with the apple butter? All shiny and dressed up like a boy attending his first Sunday-school class? The night he asked me to marry him out of the blue? Is this what he means?

“Obviously things have changed. I still wish you all the best. I’m glad this all worked out for you.” Worked out for me? He didn’t fix my stove or paint my fence, for God’s sake. He brought me my family. Why is he so cold, and what is he talking about?

“Take care of yourself.” He pats my hand and turns. He walks up the street toward town. I have an impulse to shout after him, but he is walking fast. What would I say to him, anyway? This is so strange. Where is he going? Why is he acting like this? Can’t he see how grateful I am? How happy this has made me? Why won’t he stay?

“Ave Maria!
Andiamo!
” Nonna calls out to me from the porch. She waves a hanky at me to come back to the house. Theodore waits for me by the gate.

“What was that all about?” I ask him.

“You are so dense.”

“Can you please explain? I don’t understand.”

“Ave. The man sold his new truck to bring your family here. He is in love with you.”

“He is not!”

“Who does something like this for somebody he’s not in love with?”

“Theodore, you don’t know about Jack Mac.”

“What’s to know? He’s generous? He’s a good man?”

“I’m sick of hearing about what a saint he is. Believe me, he’s not perfect.”

“Oh, well, if it’s perfect you want . . .” Theodore throws his hands up.

“Stop! If he was ever in love with me, he isn’t anymore. I was the second course between Sweet Sue Tinsley and Sarah Dunleavy. But that’s okay. He was very polite about it. Now I’ll be the one with good manners. I’ll reciprocate. He did a beautiful thing for me and I will pay him back. I will.”

“Okay, okay,” Theodore says, looking toward the house.

“Come on,” I growl. “I’ve got company. Be entertaining!”

I will not ruin this day for my family with my own problems. Obviously, Jack Mac has changed his mind about me. It is done. He’s found someone new. He and Sarah Dunleavy are happy now. I can settle up with him about his truck later.
I have a family,
I think as Theodore and I climb the porch steps. They need me. And I have so many questions.

 CHAPTER TEN

Nonna has made a delectable lunch of risotto and wine and bread. Iva Lou has never had risotto before; she is surprised—she thought all Italian food had red sauce. Nonna explains Northern Italian cuisine, using Gala as a translator. I ask Nonna how she smuggled her ingredients through Customs. Nonna looks at Gala, who shrugs and says, “My Frank works in Customs.”

Iva Lou corners my father and tells him how she’s always wanted to have a wild international romance with an Italian gentleman, but it was not to be because Lyle Makin changed all that. (
Ciao
, Matterhorn.) My father listens intently, nodding a lot and making Iva Lou feel important. I hear my father tell her that very few Italian men live up to their amorous reputations. He convinces Iva Lou that she hasn’t missed a thing having secured monogamy with a good American mountain man.

After lunch Mario sets up a card game, which attracts the men and Zia Antonietta. It surprises me that my mother and father’s families get along so well. There don’t appear to be any hard feelings about what happened. No anger. There doesn’t seem to be any guilt either. This helps me. So much time has been wasted, it seems silly to waste more of it in sadness and regret.

As I help my nonna clear the table and set up dessert, I hear Gala telling Iva Lou the saga of her boyfriend, Frank DeCaesar, in detail. Iva Lou is fascinated by the twists and turns of Gala’s volatile love affair. If there’s anyone on earth who can steer Gala through the jungle of love with common sense, it’s Iva Lou.

Zackie Wakin knocks on the screen door. Iva Lou lets him in.

“Zackie, did you smell the risotto from town?” I yell from the kitchen.

“No ma’am.” He smiles. “Spec and me heard about the surprise you was going to get today and thought you could use some beds, since you done give yours away. If you’d like, we could set up a little hotel for ye.”

He and Spec set everything up quickly. Zackie’s been to Italy; he knows about
la siesta
. The family will stay for a few days; how wonderful that the boys can turn this old empty house into an instant hotel.

After we talk, the relatives are tired and beg for a nap. Everyone except Mario, who wants to go for a walk. I have been waiting all afternoon to be alone with him. I kept looking over at him throughout the meal. I cannot believe he is here. It is an amazing thing to get what you want in life.

Mario wants to see the neighborhood. We set out for a walk, but you can hardly call it that. No more than five steps from the house, he stops. He looks all around, carefully. He lingers at each house and studies the architecture. He asks me questions about the trees, what sorts of things we grow in our gardens, and what the weather is like from season to season. It’s as though he is trying to place me in the world. How did his child get so far from home? And what is this place that she grew up in? As beautiful as our neighborhood is—and it is, all fresh and green and pink with the dogwood trees in full bloom—I know a better place to take him. I ask him if he’d like to go for a ride. He brightens up and says he’d love to. “Are you sure you’re not tired?” I ask him in Italian. He shakes his head vigorously. Italians really are very expressive. Mario has such deliberate gestures; he is so alive. I am not used to this. I see similarities between us, though. He is stubborn like me. When his mother tried to sprinkle extra cheese on his risotto he waved his hand over the dish in a chopping motion, like he was wielding an ax. I do that sort of thing, and it always surprises people around here. These are the sorts of discoveries I will make with my family, and it thrills me.

Mario climbs into the Jeep. He adjusts the front knot on his sweater, pushes his thick hair back, and nods for me to go. We drive toward Appalachia, our neighboring village and the gateway to all the roads up into the mountains. Mario notices the Powell River immediately and wants to know where it goes and whether it floods. He makes me stop on the side of the road when we get to the coal transom, a long white pipe that transports coal on a conveyor from the top of the mountain, where the mines are, to the rail yard at the foot of them. He looks at the train cars. In his thick Italian accent he sounds out
Southern
, the name of the railroad company, stenciled on the sides of the cars. I explain that Southern is what we are around here. When we drive down the main drag in Appalachia, Mario wants to stop for something to drink. So I pull up to Bessie’s Diner, the best burger joint in Southwest Virginia. Bessie’s is always packed.

When we enter, the dull roar of conversation trails off to a quiet din of whispers. Can they sense I just brought a stranger into town? What are they looking at? Then I see, it’s not the men; they look up and see us and go back to their eating. It’s the women. They can’t take their eyes off Mario. One woman yanks up her bra straps by her thumbs; another wipes the crumbs from the side of her mouth with her pinky and smiles; another, at the counter, straightens her posture and gives him a sideways glance. I look at Mario. He, in turn, is surveying the women in the room as though they are each individually delectable, like pieces in a box of expensive chocolates. No woman can resist. Even a baby girl in a high chair bangs her spoon for his attention. I remember what Zia Meoli told me about Mario’s reputation. I order a couple of Cokes to go, and Mario asks me more questions about geography. How far are we from Big Stone Gap? Are we going up the mountain? Do I come to Appalachia often?

Once we’re back in the Jeep, I am feeling more comfortable with Mario, so I begin to ask him questions.

“Are you married?” He tells me that he is not, then he looks out the window offering no further information.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” This question makes him laugh for some reason.

He shrugs and lights a cigarette.

“Why aren’t you married?” I ask him.

“Why aren’t you?” he asks me.

I’m sure he didn’t mean that to be as snippy as it sounds. Hasn’t anybody told him I’m the town spinster?

“You are beautiful,” he says simply. “I don’t understand.”

I think it is very sweet that he compliments me, even though it is somewhat to his credit, as I resemble him. I am happy, though, that he doesn’t think his only daughter is a troll. How am I going to explain why I’m not married? I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that question.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “It just never happened for me.”

He throws back his head and laughs.

“What is so funny?” I’m getting annoyed.

“A woman can always, always, always get married,” he says. “She must want it.”

I don’t know how to say “Give me a break” in Italian, so I begin a long-winded speech about all the reasons I’m not married. Right man, wrong timing. Love living alone. Ambivalent about children. Job all-consuming. Other interests. Taking care of sick parents. I go on and on until he stops me.

“Ridiculous,” he says, and waves his hand with a grand gesture of dismissal.

The man is my father, and I cannot leave him on the side of the road. But I have just bared my soul to him, and he has waved it off like a summer fly.

“When a woman wants to marry, she lets the man know she is interested. That is all I am saying.”

Now I feel foolish for being so loud and defensive and yapping on and on. He senses this, too, and redirects the conversation to himself.

“I am the mayor of Schilpario.”

I nod.

“When you come to Schilpario, you will see that we have mountains, too. The Italian Alps. They are much higher and the peaks are sharp. The snow stays on the peaks year-round. We ski in the winter. We rest in the summer. Wild berries grow all over the mountainside—delicious, sweet blackberries. All we do is squeeze a little lemon on them and eat them. No sugar. They are sweet enough. Delicious.” He smiles.

We drive up the mountain in silence. Mario looks all around and seems to enjoy the quiet and the view. He looks over the side of the mountain where there are no guardrails, but he isn’t scared; dangerous heights remind him of home. We drive past Insko and up to a clearing. I want to show him the waterfalls of Roaring Branch.

I park the Jeep. We walk into the woods and up the path. I watch the expression on his face as he sees the falls for the first time. He smiles and stands still and looks at it. He opens his hands, palms up, and stands there just like my mother’s statue of Saint Francis of Assisi in the backyard.

“It is beautiful!” he says. “Wonderful!”

I take him on the path that leads up the side of the falls and show him the way the water cascades over the rocks, leaving caverns of dry space in the overhang.

Then Mario kneels down next to the stream just like I did when I was little and Mrs. White took our second-grade class up to Huff Rock and taught us how to drink of the stream. My father cups his hands the very same way, and without disturbing the sediment he skims the surface of the clear water and then takes a drink. He motions for me to do the same. I kneel next to him and drink from the stream.

There is a place above the waterfalls where folks sit and have picnics. You can see the creeks connecting that feed into one small river that spills over and creates the Roaring Branch. We sit on the rocks and are quiet for a long time. In my mind I rehearse several ways to bring up the subject of my mother, but as I try them out, they don’t seem right to me, so I don’t say anything. Again, he senses something and solves my problem.

“Tell me about your mother,” he says.

I really don’t know where to begin. And I don’t want to get emotional. It’s too late for all of that now because it can’t change anything. I want to know his side of things, but the lump in my throat won’t let me make words.

“Perhaps I should tell you what I remember,” he says kindly.

“Please.”

“Fiametta Vilminore was a very beautiful girl from a very good family in Bergamo. She was a hard worker. I fell in love with her when I saw her at her father’s shop in town.” He shrugs as though this is the most natural thing in the world, to meet a beautiful girl and to fall in love. He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his shirt; he offers me one, which I decline, then he lights his own.

“She was strong-willed. Once, when I drove her up the mountain, she gave me orders about how to handle the horses. I just laughed at her. I think she liked that.”

“Why did you end your romance with her?”

Mario’s face changes from a slight smile to no expression whatsoever. He thinks about his answer.

“I had to,” he offers. “I had a wife already.” He looks at the water. His eyes follow it as it seeps over the rocks and down to the falls.

“I thought you said you weren’t married.”

“I’m not married now. I was then.”

“Did my mother know?”

“Yes. I told her in a letter.”

This explains why Mama panicked when we were ready to go to Italy. She was afraid she would see him again, and he would reject her again. And what if he rejected me? She wouldn’t have put me through that. She wanted more for me. She didn’t want me to be the child of a brief affair with a woman he hardly remembered. What mother would? Of course she couldn’t go back there.

“What happened to your wife?”

“She went home to her parents. I wasn’t a good husband.”

No kidding. Somebody should tell this guy you’re not supposed to date after you marry. But what good would it do now? One look at this man, and you can see that he would never change for anyone. Mario does not pretend to be a man of great virtue; I don’t even get the sense he cares about that. He seems a little vain, but what great-looking man isn’t? He is comfortable with himself and accepts himself, including whatever this thing is he does with women. If he weren’t my father, I’d be fascinated by him. He knows himself, and he’s not about to let anyone, any woman that is, possess him.

As we walk back down the mountain to the clearing, we don’t say much. I wish I could hold Mario responsible for everything that has happened, but I can’t. He was a seventeen-year-old boy. My mother was just a girl. I think of her; she spent her whole life pining for her first love. She was so loyal to Mario Barbari. I remember when she had a few minutes to herself, she would stack several records on the stereo, sit in her chair, close her eyes, and listen. She did not nap; she was dreaming of someone. I am sure that it was Mario. He is too compelling for her to have ever forgotten him or replaced him in her heart. For the first time in my life I am not sad for my mother. She had a beautiful dream. A dream of a faraway land and a dashing man who made love to her and gave her a baby. Maybe she knew he could never live up to what she imagined him to be. Or maybe when she realized that he was never going to come and rescue her, she did what all strong women do: She found a way to save herself. Very practical. So very much my mother’s way.

I wish my mother could have told me this story herself. I find myself angry with her, not him—even though he is here and I could express my anger to him. I don’t know him well enough yet to do that. My mother and I were so close, practically inseparable. It hurts me that she could not tell me the truth. Even shameful mistakes can be rectified, healed, and forgiven once they are dealt with. How sad for us that Mama could not let go of her shame.