Second Nature (47 page)

BOOK: Second Nature

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Only once, at the Chicago opening of the “Face-to-Face” exhibit, had Hollis, whose courage was ever insufficient when it came to personal matters, asked about the father of Sicily’s little girl.

“I don’t see him,” Sicily had said. “It’s not that he doesn’t care. Vincent’s life is there. My life is here. One of us would have to give in and change everything or go back and forth. Maybe that would have been possible once, but … he’s old now. He’s an old guy. He’ll be forty in a couple of years.” Sicily wasn’t even sure that Gemma should see Vincent, at least for an interval—until she was old enough to comprehend a father at a distance. Vincent’s brother, Ben, was a spectacular uncle, Sicily said. And Sicily did have a boyfriend, a great one. “Beth says Vincent doesn’t have anybody serious,” Sicily said. “I guess I’m not that unhappy for him.”

“You were always selfish,” Hollis had teased.

“Yes, but I’m not sorry. Obviously. Your kid … I mean, you know: She’s the idea that inspired civilization. And sometimes I think, maybe there are people who are meant to make great babies together. Like born to be mated up just once for that purpose. I’m crazy about Ben. Ben’s the closest person on earth genetically to Vincent. But when I see Ben, I guess I feel about the same way Vincent does when he sees Ben. You know?”

“That’s biology,” Hollis said.

“Exactly what I tell people,” Sicily said.

Hollis wished she could stay and celebrate with this hardheaded young woman who had become a friend. Indeed, all Hollis’s patients became friends. Pediatric surgeons had loyal patients. Heart-transplant patients were loyal, too. But, in her experience, the longer they had their faces the more likely transplant recipients were to get in touch. They reveled in their restored appearance. They sent cards and emailed photos of things they might never have done—of a father dancing with his daughter at her wedding, of a young Grandma reading to a class of preschoolers, a minister with his first congregation.

Even among all those fine people, Sicily was extraordinary. What had first seemed to be the most extraordinary of her gestures—the documentary art—was shouldered aside by the baby drama. And yet, the art was Sicily’s lasting gospel.

A large formal print of one of the black-and-white photos—Sicily leaning over a dreamy-eyed Emma Cassidy, who appeared to be lolling among pillows beneath her pink quilt, held pride of place on a well-lighted wall outside Hollis’s conference room. Hollis worried that patients and their families would find it grotesque, like the Beauty and the Beast. Instead they saw it as an affirmation of simple human grandeur, and were comforted.

Hollis needed to go back to the hospital now, for a surgery this afternoon. Turning to leave, she sent her thoughts toward the podium, as she’d mailed a card to Sicily’s home days before. As Hollis slipped through the double doors at the back of the auditorium, a slight, fair-haired man held the door for her. He was dressed in a light linen jacket over an open-collared yellow shirt. Hollis almost stopped. Did she know this guy? He seemed to put her in mind of someone. She was, certainly, the kind of person who never forgot a face. But so many people resembled others superficially. It was not until Hollis was on the train, headed for the hospital, wishing, not for the first or fiftieth time, that Chicago could be just ten degrees more forgiving on the cusp of spring, that it popped into her mind why she recognized the man she’d passed at the door of the auditorium.

After she received her badge, Sicily sought Beth out in the crowd. Beth caught Sicily’s brief, conspiratorial wink but then noticed how it instantly vanished, like a raindrop from a clean windshield, replaced by a solemn and hyperalert gaze. As someone who knew the palette of Sicily’s face probably as well as anyone on earth, Beth was alarmed.

What was it? The other graduates filed past Sicily to accept their handshakes and certificates. For Sicily, they were clearly invisible. Sicily watched a fixed point at the back of the room. Unobtrusively, Beth turned to try to see what Sicily was seeing.

Because of the unaccustomed clothing he wore—sort of church clothes—and because his presence here was as unexpected as … well, catching sight of him sitting next to Rosie and Angelo in their dedicated pew at Holy Angels, for a trace instant Beth did not recognize her own son.

Why was Vincent here? Not in Chicago but here, at this place, now? This was pomp but … essentially a nonessential ceremony. Just to do a good turn? To wish Sicily well? For the first time in two years?

With a certain uneasiness, Beth thought of the video clip she had sent Vincent a month before—something lasting less than a minute that she’d filmed at a children’s party, a fund-raiser for the zoo, which Ben loved. On a rare simultaneous day off, Eliza and Ben had come to the fund-raiser together. The big heated tent was crammed with food tables, a dance floor, and even a tiny petting zoo. An elaborately bored Stella tried to pretend she wasn’t enchanted by the newborn lambs and dwarf goats, while sturdy two-and-a-half-year-old Charley chased everything on four feet or wings. Oddly, there had been an old-timey rock ’n’ roll band called Nervous Breakdown or Midlife Crisis or something. When they played a samba, Ben and Eliza started to dance, with Charley between them and Stella ruefully, gracefully, on the edges. That was the part Beth had filmed with the video function on her Nikon. Just behind them, to one side, Sicily and her boyfriend, Adam, an actor who was a staple in Chicago theater, began to dance too. Adam scooped Gemma up, and the little girl stroked Adam’s cheek while Sicily swayed to the music. But the two of them weren’t goofing around. They really danced, bringing the Latin beat down to their hips. Sicily was laughing; her hair, long again, was coming undone from a careful French braid. Adam held Gemma in one arm and caught Sicily around the waist with the other.

Beth regularly sent photos of Gemma to Vincent, snapshots and portraits, with the family and without them.

Never did they include Sicily.

The video clip had been a slipup. At least, Beth hoped it had been a slipup. Was it true that there really were no mistakes? Beth was regularly surprised, in hindsight, to hear how unacquainted she was with her own motives.

Vincent stopped just inside the door of the hall.

He didn’t approach his mother or acknowledge her beyond a single taut smile. Beth smiled back but stayed put in the midst of a small huddle of family. Pat had left them to go up to the front with Sicily and Marie, to take a picture of the new firefighter and her little girl. As the last graduates were named and the hall pitched into the throes of hugs and cheers and backslaps, Pat gave Gemma into Sicily’s arms—planting a kiss on each of Sicily’s cheeks as he did. Marie began snapping photos. At that moment, Beth thought, if this were a movie, Sicily would see Vincent and burst into diamond-pendant tears as she set Gemma down. Whereupon Gemma, guided by instinct like a heat-seeking missile, would run straight to Vincent, who would sweep her into his arms.

In fact, Gemma didn’t know Vincent from a parking meter. The only time Vincent had seen his daughter in the flesh, she weighed about as much as a half gallon of milk and wore tiny patches to shield her eyes from the heat or the liver lamps that blared down upon her small, red, half-finished self. Now Sicily did slowly set Gemma down. A brother firefighter hugged Sicily, and Sicily returned the embrace, her eyes watchful over the man’s shoulder. When the classmate squatted down to greet Gemma, the little girl stiffened, embedding her face in the sharp crease of Sicily’s uniform slacks. There was a moment of awkward familiarity, the guy apologizing and Sicily brushing it off, smiling absently, never, not once, making eye contact with her friend.

Shaking her own eyes away, Beth made her way briskly through the crowd, up to the front. She took Pat’s arm, installing herself in a chain between him and Marie. The moment Pat saw Vincent, Beth knew, he would start waving and yelling. She also could tell that the rest of the relatives had by then seen Vincent and were doing their best not to look at him, poised on instinctive red alert to stop Pat from raising a bellow in the form of a hello. They succeeded. Pat barely noticed as Sicily reached down for Gemma’s hand and walked toward Vincent.

As Sicily grew near, she held out her hand.

They’re going to shake hands?
Beth thought.

Well, what else should they do?

Vincent did take Sicily’s hand, but carefully, without pressure, he pulled Sicily into a light hug. Beth knew that Sicily could have escaped if she had tried, but she let Vincent hold her, going so far as to let her hands rest, ever so briefly, on his shoulders. Gemma grabbed a firm fistful of her mother’s slacks. There was a long beat of silence, during which everyone who knew either of them and had been concentrating on the opposite direction could no longer restrain themselves and turned to stare. Her face flushed, Sicily stepped back, stepped forward again, and then swept Gemma up into her arms. Vincent tried to touch Gemma’s nose with his finger and got his hand kicked for his trouble. Instead, while Gemma hid against Sicily’s shoulder, he petted her hair, the little girl reaching back to bat at him with one small fist. Beth could see only a slice of Sicily’s profile, but whatever Vincent had said when Gemma socked him, as he drew his hand up like a bird’s wing in a parody of being injured, made Sicily shrug and grin.

“What the hell?” Pat said. He was perhaps the only person among them who had not yet realized that the guy with the long hair graying in two fingerprints over his ears—Beth noticed this with a shock that squeezed her throat—was his son. Beth heard Pat draw in a breath to call to Vincent.

Forearmed, Beth hushed him. “Don’t.”

“But it’s Vincent.”

“No way,” Beth said. “I think you’re right, Pat. Are you sure?”

Pat squeezed his eyes and brushed off Beth’s jest. “Ha-ha, Bethie. I mean, why is he here? Did you invite him?”

“Nope.”

“So what’s the deal?”

“I don’t know,” Beth said. “Let’s wait until he tells us.” They watched as Vincent continued to talk to Sicily, telling her something that she acknowledged minutely, dipping her head, tossing back her hair. Whatever it was, her response didn’t savor of a passionate declaration. Vincent raised his hands, palms not quite meeting, then pointing to himself. After a moment, Sicily shrugged.

“You don’t think of seeing your kid as a father,” Pat said.

“You see your kid as a father every day,” Beth replied.

“Well, Ben, sure. Ben’s not like Vincent. Ben was always responsible.”

“Vincent’s responsible.”

“You know what I mean.”

Beth did, but she wasn’t about to let her husband have the point so easily. “People trust Vincent to make movies with millions of dollars. Not even his dollars.”

“With family. You don’t see Vincent as the type,” Pat said. “The family type.”

But Vincent was exactly that, Beth realized suddenly, as if she was waking up. Not in this way, not as a father and a husband, at least not until now, if indeed now at all. When he was a child, though … Beth might have believed, after thirty years, that she could forget Vincent’s famished eyes, turned on his mother and father, and on Ben, all of them, wakeful, willing all of them home. Vincent was exactly that—the family type. He wanted family so much that he was afraid of it. A door stuck open was as useless as one for which everyone had lost the key.

So far as Beth knew, Vincent didn’t even own a shirt like this pale-yellow broadcloth. He didn’t own one that wasn’t emblazoned on the back with a political slogan or the name of an airport. No, that wasn’t quite right. There was one other shirt, the kind meant to be worn with a tuxedo.

The hall was emptying, as graduates and their families headed off to restaurant lunches or parties at home. Sicily and Vincent seemed not to notice the relatives waiting to congratulate her, and how few people were left in the hall. Staff had begun to untie the bows and fold the chairs.

Finally, Gemma kicked to be released from her mother’s arms and ran toward Beth, colliding hard with her grandmother’s knees. Gemma’s parents turned away from each other to follow her with their eyes. Sicily absently continued to rock from side to side, as women do, an attitude at odds with her quasi-military garb. Vincent visibly took a breath—they all did the same thing, along with him—and raised both hands to comb through his hair. Then he didn’t seem to know what to do with those same hands and looked at his palms as he again began explaining something to Sicily—a monologue, because she wasn’t answering, although she did turn back to face him. Resting lightly, her feet in the same dancer’s turnout they would assume all her life, Sicily gave Vincent her full and grave attention. When Sicily took a step closer, Eliza did the same thing, and then, simultaneously (unnoticed except by Beth), so did Angelo. They were all crazy, Beth thought—crazy people whose blood was overheated. They all seemed to expect Vincent to fall to one knee in lustrous slo-mo to win Sicily’s heart, which was absurd. Grandstanding wasn’t Vincent’s style. Beth knew that. And yet it also wasn’t his style to fly four hours for nothing. Perhaps Vincent was on his way to New York and changed his itinerary, just to stop by? Just to stop by at Navy Pier, a full two-hour drive south of his parents’ house on a hunch that the whole group—including his daughter and … well, her mother—would be there, just at this moment?

Or perhaps he actually had come, to plight his troth, to try to claim both his girls—only two years too late, in the way Vincent always did everything, just when everyone had given up all hope?

What were the odds of that?

They were statistically impossible.