Mafia Chic (3 page)

“No, I don’t think we’ve met before,” I said firmly.

“But now we have. Can I invite you to dinner? I promise I’m not a serial killer. Just an honest boy from Philadelphia.”

Di dug her heel into my instep, urging me to say yes. I glared at her, then nodded at Robert.

We spent the rest of the night making small talk. Turned out the “honest boy” from Philadelphia was from Main Line Philly and old money. I cringed. Talk about worlds colliding. We ordered more champagne and discovered that Robert liked horses, specifically polo, and had attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. And yes, there was some relation to the original Wharton way back in his lineage.

“Is Teddi your real name?” he shouted over the music.

I shook my head. “Theresa. But my grandfather called me Teddi Bear, ridiculous as that sounds, and it stuck.” Of course, I didn’t point out that Angelo Marcello, one of the most celebrated of the old-time mobsters, was my Poppy. I was his teddy bear, his angel, and if anyone thought about touching a hair on my head, there wouldn’t be a federal safe house safe enough for the man, whoever he was.

“That’s really cute.”

I shrugged. “I like it better than Theresa, that’s for sure.”

Lady Di stood and waved to a client. “Back in a jiff, Teddi.”

Robert focused on me again. “I wish I could place you. I just have this feeling we’ve met before.”

“I promise you, we haven’t.”

“I know this is the oldest line in the book, Teddi, but if we haven’t met before, then I have a serious case of déjà vu. I must have known you in another life.”

He was near enough to me that when he bent his head to better hear me, I could smell his cologne. Maybe it was the loud music, but he leaned in so close to me that he gave the impression that he wanted to hear every word I said.

“Maybe…” Anxious to change the subject, to steer him away from the Marcello and Gallo family names, I asked him how he got into journalism.

“Please. Every kid who ever saw
All the President’s Men
wanted to be the next Woodward or Bernstein and packed off to college…and I was no exception. I changed my major from business. I found I had the stomach for journalism. I wasn’t squeamish at crime scenes. I didn’t mind working my way up from the bottom. I was always comfortable at public speaking, so speaking in front of a camera wasn’t a big deal.”

“I’d rather do just about anything than speak in front of a group of people.”

“Number-one fear for most people.”

Should I tell him that in my neighborhood, the number-one fear is having my uncle Lou show up to collect a bad debt? I opted to shut up.

Around two o’clock in the morning, I realized my alarm was going to ring mighty early for opening the restaurant. By this time, Di had rejoined us, and we’d ordered another
bottle of champagne. As we poured the last of it into our glasses, I nudged Di and said we had better go.

“What time is it?” Robert pushed up the cuff of his shirt and read his Rolex. “Jesus! The night flew by.”

We all stood. Robert kissed my cheek, took a card from the restaurant and promised to call to arrange dinner. (If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that line, I could have bailed out my uncle Jackie the last time he was arraigned.)

Lady Di and I said goodbye and made our way through the packed main club, its dance floor so crowded you couldn’t fit a slip of paper between the dancers, and went outside. The doorman hailed us a cab. Nestled into the back, Di was both drunk and ecstatic for me.

“Robert Wharton…old money, handsome and a high-profile job on top of it. I think this is your lucky night, Teddi, you Chinese mouse, you! Or is it a rat?”

“Lady Di,” I slurred, the champagne long since gone to my head. I could only imagine the hell of standing over a hot stove the next day. “Given the unfortunate incarceration of half my family, and the fact that there are one hundred hijacked Betsey Johnson dresses in the basement of my parents’ house, do you really think a high-profile relationship is such a good idea?”

“Fuck it all,” she said. “Then a toss in the hay and you’re done with him. But really, Teddi, do they expect you to marry a mobster?”

I frowned. “No…I guess not.”

“Trust me, darling. He seemed positively mad about you. If this works out, your parents will be delighted.”

“I doubt it. But let’s take it one step at a time.”

As the cabbie raced through the streets of Manhattan, I tried to quell the feelings of nausea in my stomach. But
whether it was from the champagne or the prospect of telling “old money” Robert Wharton about my family tree, I wasn’t exactly sure.

The next day I walked the twenty blocks to work. I’m one of the few New Yorkers blessed with an easy commute—a brisk walk instead of clinging to a subway strap for dear life, or exhaust fumes filling my nostrils as I ride the bus. The only tough thing is three days a week I work early. As in really early.

At six-thirty, on three hours’ sleep, and my head pounding as if some heavy-metal drummer had taken up residence in my left temple, I was already starting a pot of gravy—what we Italians call spaghetti sauce—which would be used for the manicotti, as well as several pasta dishes. I took out fresh parsley and began chopping, finding a rhythm as the sharp knife hit the cutting board—chop, chop, chop—my fingers curled to control the blade. My cousin Quinn only worked nights, and the sous chef, Leon, wasn’t due in until nine-thirty, so I had the place to myself. Leon favored a serious hip-hop station on the radio. Chopping to DMX and Eminem can be kind of therapeutic. It can also get on your nerves. So I spent my mornings alone in silence, humming to myself, thinking of nothing in particular. This morning, however, I was thinking that Lady Di and her wild nightlife were going to be the death of me very soon. And I was thinking that Robert Wharton was very cute in a nonethnic kind of way. I couldn’t imagine someone with the last name of Wharton being struck by the thunderbolt. Somehow, I found that comforting—if he even called, which I doubted. So I put him from my mind and concentrated on the simmering pot after popping two aspirin.

Next, I busied myself making the soup of the day—a pasta fajioli—then went to the front of the house—restaurant talk for the dining room—and fetched a cold club soda from the bar. I looked around the restaurant—my place. Or at least half mine and half Quinn’s. Though to be technical about it, the bank owned a big chunk, too.

I had wanted my own restaurant since I could remember. My grandfather owned a restaurant in Brooklyn, and though he owned it for business reasons—Mafia business reasons—I had spent much of my childhood sitting at its checkered-tablecloth tables, eating authentic food prepared by men who spoke only Italian.

When Quinn and I found our place, it was suffering from neglect. The floors were filthy, the lighting dim and roaches roamed freely across the stainless counters in the kitchen. But Quinn and I saw past all that. Now, with room for twenty-two tables, Teddi’s sparkled. We had the walls painted with a faux finish that resembled stone walls, vaguely reminiscent of Florence, sort of ancient-looking. The ivory tablecloths were crisp, and the plates on each table bore handpainted flowers on the rim. When nighttime came and the small votives on each table were lit, with fresh flowers in each bud vase and a crowd at the bar waiting for a table, it was magical. At the end of every shift, Quinn and I would each have a sambuca with three coffee beans floating for good luck and go over the night and unwind. I had never, not even for a moment, wanted to do anything else, despite the long hours. Despite the fact that it was back-breaking sometimes. Despite the fact that I had a hangover and was staring at a double shift.

I went back into the kitchen—my domain—and continued prepping for lunch. Around ten o’clock the back office phone rang. “Teddi’s,” I answered on line two.

“Is Teddi there? The owner Teddi?”

“Who’s calling?” I was used to food and beverage sales guys calling, trying to get our account. Linen companies. Wine sales reps.

“It’s Robert Wharton.”

“Robert? It’s Teddi.”

“Thought that was your voice.”

I managed to sputter out a hello. A man in Manhattan who actually
called
when he said he would?

“You gave me your card,” he offered, as if the reason I sounded a little stunned was I didn’t remember him. As if I could forget his anchorman smile.

“Of course.” I finally regained my composure. “It’s nice to hear from you, Robert.”

“Listen…I would love to take you to dinner.”

“Um…great.” Nit-twit, as Di would call me. So much for witty repartee.

“What’s your schedule like?”

“Thursdays are good. I usually work Friday night. My sous chef does Thursday night. I do lunch Thursday instead.”

“What about Sunday? I’m off on Sundays.”

I crinkled up my face in a wince he couldn’t see. Sunday was sacrosanct—family dinner in Brooklyn. “Sundays are no good.”

“Thursday then. Next Thursday okay?”

“Sure.”

“I’m a little nervous taking a chef out for dinner. You probably have high standards.”

“No. I was born in a family of professional eaters. But honestly, I’m not that fussy. I like to enjoy someone else’s cooking for a change.”

“How about if we meet at a little Japanese place called Yama’s at Fifty-fifth and Seventh?

“I’ve heard of it.”
Heard
of it? I’d heard it was one of the priciest new restaurants in the city—and the sushi chef was a temperamental master. I knew I’d love to scope out their menu. Japanese was a style of cooking I’d longed to experiment with. My mother mocked my Manhattan eating adventures. “Raw fish,” she’d once said. “What’s next? Cold monkey meat?”

“I’ll make reservations for eight-thirty. Okay? Does that sound all right?”

“Okay. See you then.”

“I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Me, too.”

I hung up the phone by pressing down on the reset button. Then I immediately speed-dialed Lady Di on her cell, which she wore attached to her hip at all times, with a tiny little earpiece set in her ear. Di also carried a Palm Pilot and had her laptop at home perpetually plugged in. Besides dressing to the nines, she was wired to the nines.

“Diana Kent here,” she answered.

“It’s Teddi.”

“Hello there, flatmate,” she said, never getting used to calling me her roommate or roomie.

“He called.”

“Who?”

“Who…
him!
”

“That Robert fellow?”

“Yes, that Robert fellow.”

“How fantastic, Teddi! Are you going to see him?”

“Next Thursday.”

“Smashing.”

“I need your help, though.”

“What?” she asked. “Want to borrow my little black dress? Oh…what about the Roberto Cavalli one?”

“Too wild.”

“My Donna Karan. The black wraparound one?”

“No. That’s not why I called. Well…now that you mention it, that dress might be good. But no…I need you to distract my ‘bodyguards.’”

“Right-o. No problem.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little ridiculous that I’m a woman in my mid-twenties and I’m still being baby-sat?”

“Yes. But one of your baby-sitters is your cousin Tony. And I find him positively delicious. So, for purely selfish reasons, I rather find it amusing.”

“You’re impossible.”

“But that’s what makes me so irresistible.”

“Look, just help me duck out unnoticed.”

“You can count on me. I always feel all James Bond when we do this, you know.”

“I feel a little Godfatherish when we do it. But either way, next Thursday keep them busy. I’d like to get in a first date without them looking over my shoulder. And the black dress would be nice, too.”

“It’s yours.”

“We have six days to plan.”

“And plan we shall. Must run now.”

“Ciao.”
I put the phone down. I had stopped going to church years ago, but if I
was
still a church-goer, I would have said four novenas and five Hail Marys that my date with Robert Wharton went off without a hitch.

C
alling what my family does on Sundays “dinner” is like saying the pope is just another priest with a fancier hat.

Lady Di and I arrived at Sunday dinner to the usual chaos of the Marcello clan with a couple of Gallos thrown in for good measure. In the kitchen my mother was making an immense pot of gravy. Not only was the pot big enough for one of my little cousins to use as a fort when not filled with gravy, but Ma couldn’t even move it from one burner to the next without the help of my cousin Tony.

My aunt Marie, aunt Gina, aunt Connie and assorted other aunts, and wives and fiancées of my male cousins were all crowded into the kitchen as well, supervising my mother. This routine goes on until my mother has had it with the lot of them and chases them all out with a wooden spoon. For every infraction I committed as a child, the wooden spoon was threatened. Not that she ever actually
spanked me with it. She just chased my brother and me throughout the house, screaming in Italian.

The women all clustered around the stove. “Add more oregano, Rose.”

“It needs a pinch of…something. Hold on…maybe some more garlic.”

“Can’t have too much garlic.”

For my mother, the red stuff she slaves over is a religion. She has been known to actually break out in a cold sweat at the sight of a jar of Ragú. That’s sacrilege of the highest order.

Lady Di and I always gather in the kitchen because it’s what we do, feminism aside. The men watch football during the season, and with most of them heavy gamblers and bookies, it’s either a joyous occasion or the cause of a lot of screaming. Either way, the language flying through the room would make Sister Mary Catherine of my old grammar school roll over in her grave.

Lady Di is considered an oddity, being as she comes from way across the Atlantic, and she had never even eaten true gravy before meeting my family, nor had she ever teased her hair, or even discovered the wonders of Aqua Net hairspray—the aerosol-can variety. I’m not even sure if the Aqua Net company still makes it, thanks to the ozone layer’s problems. However, my mother and her sisters have enough stockpiled to take them into the next decade.

“Diana, honey, can you stand a little advice?” My aunt Gina cornered us in the kitchen. Diana had no time to answer before Gina, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, was pinching her. I don’t mean like a little pinch on the cheek, either. I mean she was pinching her upper arm
for all it was worth—Lady Di showed me a bruise later. “You could stand a little meat on these bones.”

“Well…I—”

“Honey…men don’t like bags of bones. You wonder why you’re not married?
This
is why.” She stated this with such certainty, oblivious to Di’s beauty.

“Actually, Aunt Gina—” I felt the need to defend my pinched roomie “—Diana has a lot of boyfriends, and she’s been proposed to three different times. She’s not married because she doesn’t want to be married.”

“Bullshit.” Aunt Gina pinched her again. “Look at this. You see this, Andrea?” She motioned to one of my other aunts. “You see this? Both of them. Really, Theresa Marie, you, too. You think you’re all fancy living off in that city, but when your uncle Rocky proposed to me, I was the babe of Brooklyn.”

I stared at Aunt Gina and glimpsed, beneath the pile of big hair, the perfumed face powder and the sixteen gold-and-diamond necklaces she wore stacked around her neck like a snake’s coils, the beautiful neighborhood girl she once was. I still love looking at old pictures of them, just as I loved looking at them as a little girl. I laugh when I see pictures of them all from back then, the girls in eyeliner and Pucci dresses—the first time Pucci was in—the boys in zoot suits too big for them. They all have highball glasses in one hand, cigarettes in the other. You can see the smoke swirled around their faces and can almost smell it, as well as hear the giggles and tough talk, mixing together as they lived “the life” then.

“I’m sure you were, Aunt Gina.”

“I was. Ask your mother, Theresa. Ask her.”

Lady Di humored her. “So come on, Mrs. Gallo, were you girls ‘it’ back then? The bomb?”

My mother usually waves off such talk with a flick of her spoon and a roll of her eyes. But her sisters wouldn’t let it rest. “Come on…” Aunt Marie snuck up behind my mother and pinched her on the arm. “Tell the girls about when we used to go out in the city.”

“Honey…” Aunt Gina gestured with her thumb toward the living room where we could hear screams and cheers erupting after various plays in the game. “They may not look like much now, those balding bastards, but way back when they were all catches, every last one of them.”

My mother twirled around. “Theresa…every girl was in love with your father. But his family was considered trouble. He was a bad boy, you know. But underneath it, I could tell he was a real softie. Now, all of you—” she glared at the room full of us, packed tight around the table “—get outta my kitchen!”

We scattered—not before Aunt Connie reiterated for the twentieth time that the gravy needed both garlic and oregano. In the living room, my male cousins, three of whom are named Tony, clustered around Lady Di. She chose to sit next to the “hunky” Tony, who had staked out our apartment not three days before. His massive biceps belied the fact that I knew he liked nothing better than to cook pastry. He sometimes came up to our apartment and I taught him recipes. He was a fast learner. I know he liked being up there with Diana and me. Whenever he was around her, he stood a little taller, and he never cursed. He was an amateur chef in the making, but he’d never let the family know that. Pizza was one thing—maybe—pastry was another.

A half hour, and one Giants touchdown and an interception later, it was halftime and that meant we would shovel food in as fast as possible before the game resumed.

The first course was eggplant parmigiana, as well as a heaping bowl of homemade ravioli stuffed with ricotta that Ma got special from the Italian deli. Then she brought out huge bowls of gravy, teeming with large sausages, meatballs and whole lamb chops on the bone. This was served on pasta, also homemade. Garlic bread, a large salad, bowls of olives and plates of sliced pepperoni and fresh mozzarella, which, if you’ve never had it, has the consistency of congealed I-don’t-know-what. It’s beyond gross, wet and rather tasteless, but the Italian deli carries that, too.

And we were just warming up.

Later, a huge ham came out. Followed by a seafood course, including an Italian version of octopus, legs flopping over the side of the bowl, looking like they were trying to make a run for it. Through it all, as bowl and pan, and plate and platter made their way from the kitchen to the table and everyone started fanning himself or herself as the temperature in the house rose from the oven opening so often and boiling pots on the stove, my mother never sat down. She moved from kitchen to the dining room, back and forth, back and forth. She sat down occasionally, but watched over the table like General Patton, waiting for a movement of the troops that might signal we needed something, then she’d leap up and fetch it. Bottle after bottle of good red wine was opened. Forget letting it breathe. Around our house, a bottle of wine never sits still long enough to breathe.

I loved watching the insanity of it all. Sundays were sacred when I was growing up. I think that’s why I ended up being a chef. I didn’t go to culinary school. I was
raised
in culinary school, standing on a stool with a makeshift apron on—a towel tied in the back. I learned, as a little girl, that the way to my father’s heart was through his stomach, and
by the time the whole stereotype of the “little woman in the kitchen” was something to resent, I was hooked. The kitchen was where I felt content and happy; cooking was a way to relax, a way to create.

The men ate huge mouthfuls of food, occasionally grunting their approval. Poppy Marcello was especially happy with the sausage. Lady Di consumed five glasses of red wine and got giddy enough to ask Uncle Rocky to sing a Louis Prima song, then some Frank Sinatra. Call it the Marcello version of karaoke. We laughed and ate, but I noticed my mother wore a pair of house slippers and, not for the first time, I could see how Sundays wore her out, even when she wasn’t hosting. But if I offered to help her she would turn me down flat. This was her show, just like, I guess, at my restaurant, the kitchen was my show. I hated when Quinn came back, lifting lids to pots and looking over my shoulder. “Go back to chasing the waitresses,” I’d yell at him.

The women all rose and began clearing as soon as the game came back on. The men would take plates in front of the television for further eating while my mother readied dessert. At one point, Ma and I were alone in the kitchen.

“I wish one of these Sundays you’d bring home a man, Theresa Marie. None of us are gettin’ any younger.”

“I know, Ma.” I rolled my eyes and tried to find room in the overstuffed fridge to put leftover eggplant. It didn’t look like I’d fit a single black olive in there.

“I don’t understand what’s so hard. There are what, forty million men in Manhattan? At this point, I give up on you even finding someone from Brooklyn. Manhattan would be fine. Non-Italian would be fine. You can marry an Irishman. Hell, a nice Jewish boy. Just someone. A warm body, for
God’s sake. Though Catholic would be good. Your father would like that.”

“First of all, Ma, there aren’t forty million men in Manhattan. Second, however many there are…forty percent of them are gay.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m not kidding.”

She slammed down a pan. “You should move back home.”

“I’d rather eat fifty pounds of scungilli and explode.”

“Outta my kitchen!” She slapped my arm.

Moving back into the living room, I saw five of my cousins and my father on their cell phones. Placing bets, checking on the book they’d taken. The women were martyrs. The men were criminals. Me? I was just certain that I’d never find someone who would understand the dance of it all.

My father stood up to stretch. Sometimes he liked to go outside on the front steps of our house and smoke a cigarette. I saw him go out the front door, and I followed him.

“Hey Dad.”

“Teddi Bear, come ’ere.” He stretched out an arm and wrapped it around me and kissed the top of my head. “I come out here for a little quiet. Those women are like a gaggle of friggin’ geese.”

“I know…. Ma’s giving me the ‘hurry up and get married’ speech again.” I looked up at my father. He slicked back his hair in a pompadour and favored polyester shirts in ugly colors like lime green. He wasn’t Manhattan stylish, but he was still handsome, his jaw square with a dimple in the middle, and his eyes nearly black and penetrating.

“She’s kind of a broken record with that one.”

“What about you, Dad?”

“What about me?”

“Am I this big disappointment because I haven’t found Mr. Right? Should I marry some Brooklyn boy and live around the corner from you and Ma?”

My father smiled a half-sad, sort of mysterious smile. Then he took my chin in his fingers and tilted my head up so I was looking right into his eyes. “Teddi…when I first set eyes on your mother, believe it or not, I knew she was the one.”

“Struck by the thunderbolt?”

“Not quite. The thunderbolt is like crazy love. We were just high school kids, you know. I was a player. She was the prom queen. But I knew what I wanted. I wanted a nice girl I could have babies with. A good cook. Pretty.”

“And?”

“And don’t tell your mother I said this or nothin’, but that was then. This is now. I don’t want to see you like my brother’s kid—Angela. Divorced with four fuckin’ kids to feed. You take your time. And who knows? You just might get struck by the thunderbolt.”

“I hope not.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Aunt Mariella and Uncle Mario.”

He nodded. After my uncle Mario had been paroled, he married Mariella in Las Vegas two weekends later, and they never left Sin City. They never came to Brooklyn to visit. Too many painful memories, they said. But once, my grandmother and Poppy had gone to see them in Las Vegas, before my grandmother died a few years back. When they returned, my grandmother wouldn’t speak about what they’d seen for the longest time. I found out what happened from my mother, whispering—which in my mother’s case is more like what other people call a normal speaking
voice—to my father one night, when they thought I couldn’t hear.

Mariella, crushed by waiting for her true love all those years, had long since gone mad. She was no longer the beautiful woman from the picture in the photo album. Her beauty was still there, but her eyes, so fiery in the photos, were flat. She was extremely childlike—she wouldn’t go to the grocery store by herself, or even cross the street. But my uncle Mario remained true to her, doing all the shopping, even cutting her meat for her and helping her do her hair. I suppose some people might think that’s romantic in a tragic way. I just thought it was tragic. Period.

“You know, Teddi…it doesn’t matter who you marry. I just want you to be happy.”

“I’m happy in my restaurant, Dad.”

“Yeah…but when you’re old and gray, it’s not like you can curl up next to a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, Teddi.”

I didn’t see the point in telling my father that was the stupidest thing I ever heard. I just nodded as if he’d told me the sagest wisdom a father can impart to a daughter.

He lit his cigarette, and I kept him company while he smoked it. Then we both turned to go back inside.

“You know, Teddi,” Dad said as he pulled open the door. “I do just want you to be happy. An’ no pressure or anything, but the reason your mother acts this way is that you’re your mother’s only hope. That brother of yours…he’s dating a girl he met at the Playboy mansion this week.”

“I know,” I said, and rolled my eyes. Where my brother Michael was concerned, forget being struck by the thunderbolt. He was blinded by brainless blondes with boobs.

“I’m so full I could positively vomit.” Lady Di clutched her stomach as she rocked slightly on the couch back in our apartment later that night.

“It’s truly torture. It’s a week’s worth of calories. Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t skip it once in a while.” I was ensconced in our overstuffed living room chair—a descriptor that matched my own swollen belly.