The Apprentice Lover

S
urprising even myself, I dropped out of Columbia during my last term, in 1970, just three months short of graduation, and went to live on Capri. I left behind my college friends, my parents, and everything familiar in an attempt to cut loose from the overfilled barge of my youth, which had become too heavy to drag. My departure was hard on everyone, especially me, but I had no choiceâor that's how it seemed then.

It had been a terrible winter, and spring had so far been worse. I lay awake at night, disoriented, as if tumbling into a well, fading and falling. Alice with no Wonderland at the bottom of the hole. And nothing seemed to help: barbiturates, prayer, pot. The world, by day, was tinny and artificial, a 3-D movie watched from a seat in a darkened theater, looking in on life from outside, alternately depressed or anxious, always distracted, sure I would never live beyond the age of twenty-five. (Always a slight hypochondriac, I now read minor ailmentsâovergrown pimples, tension headachesâas signs of melanoma or brain cancer, thus giving my spiritual unease a convenient physical location.)

In calendar years, I was twenty-two, but emotionally I was younger. That winter and spring, I read a great deal, as usual, but everything seemed, overtly or covertly, about love or war, the two subjects that sat like deadweights on my chest. I marveled at the passion of Ovid in his love poems for Corinna, wondering what it might feel like to care so much about someone, full of a vaguely disembodied sexual longing that
made me queasy at times, ill with dissatisfaction. I would have liked to make contact, physical and emotional, with some of the women at Columbia, but the effort seemed beyond me. On the subject of war, the rhetoric of Virgil struck me as verbiage, however stirring. I didn't care a feather about the fate of Rome or its empire. Caesar's Gallic wars were not mine. I'd had enough of wars, ancient and modern.

My only brother, Nicky, had been killed in Vietnam a few months before my departure. He died near Quang Tri, in winter, having volunteered for what his lieutenant in the obligatory letter to my parents called “a routine reconnaissance mission.” He had stepped on a land mine, which meant you didn't get to see the body, or its remnants, when they shipped it home in a medically sealed bag. I can still see my poor father, standing bereft at the back of the church, shaking his head and fumbling with a rosary. Nicky had been dear to him, a son who had reflexively obeyed the call of his country, as he had, during the Second World War.

The steel casket was draped in a flag. They had played taps in the cemetery in Pittston, an honor guard standing by from the local VFW, where my father went most Saturday nights to play cards with old friends and fellow veterans, all of whom believed adamantly in the righteousness of the Vietnam War. “Nick was a real hero,” the letter from the lieutenant had said, without elaboration, leaving the details (supplied by countless war movies) to our imaginations, which was probably just as well.

I knew something about Nicky's war and how it felt to him. He had taken to writing me letters from Vietnamâthe first real communication with him that I'd ever hadâand I knew exactly what he thought about this particular war. He hated it, and would have found the flag-draped casket deeply ironic. “This war is about nothing I understand or believe,” he wrote. “The whole thing stinks. It's not just stupid, a well-intentioned adventure that somehow went wrong. It's fucking evil. And the worst evil is always one that follows from ignorance.” Nicky had become a student of that ignorance, and took pleasure in going over the details with me.

Perversely, my brother's death guaranteed that my draft board, in Luzerne County, would let me alone. The members of that august body knew my father and grandfather well, and it was tacitly agreed that families should suffer only one death per nuclear unit in Vietnam. I would
never be drafted, despite my low number in the national lottery. “You're free,” my mother, in a hoarse ironic voice, had whispered as we passed beneath the leafless, iron-colored beech trees, walking away from Nicky's grave, which overlooked the Susquehanna River.

Freeâa lovely word. Yet I felt less free than ever before. Nicky had been the one my father assumed would join the family company, Massolini Construction, founded by my grandfather and now managed by my father. Nicky was the one who was “good with his hands,” and his death had interrupted that plan. In an ill-conceived moment, thinking it would comfort them, I told my parents I would return to Pittston myself, to work in the company, upon graduation from Columbia. They had been surprised, but pleasedâeven delighted. “Why not?” my father said, suppressing an outright smile. “We can use a good man, somebody with your brains. You're gonna run the company yourself pretty soon.” My grandfather had simply kissed me on either cheek: the ultimate blessing.

My mother was quietly satisfied by this turn of events. “You're a good boy, Alex,” she said. “We need you around here.” Nicky was lost, but she would have me forever. This decision of mine made sense in Pittston, since everybody in the town already thought of me as my mother's son. And they were not far wrong. I loved her, and she loved me, and my father had never been quite allowed into the intimate circle that we drew around us. As a kid, I went shopping with my mother every Saturday afternoon, just the two of us, and we'd stop at Bellino's, a soda fountain in Wilkes-Barre, for milkshakes and hamburgers. We had picnics together by the river in late spring, under heavily scented cherry blossoms, and her pannier overflowed with things I loved: imported vanilla biscotti, parmesan and provolone cheese, sardines, and Genoa salami. In summer, she would take me into New York to see musicals on Broadway while my father and Nicky went to Yankee Stadium. All her aspirations had been put into one basket by the name Alexander Massolini.

Yet I bolted. Without bothering to explainâto my parents or myselfâI abandoned the United States and Massolini Construction and my college career, taking an unlikely position in southern Italy as secretary to
Rupert Grant, the eminent Scottish writer, who had lived for the past decade in a villa on the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples. My parents (neither of whom had gone to college) were more confused than angered by this move. They had lost Nicky, and now I was disappearing into the unknown. To them (and both were Italian Americans) Capri was outer space. I might as well be sending myself into orbit, with no promise of return.

“All the money we put into your education,” my mother said, sighing, “and this is what comes of it? You don't even get your degree? You don't even want a normal job?” She complained that I showed her and my father “no respect.” She could never have imagined treating her own parents in such a way. (“It would have killed your grandmother, God bless her, and may she rest in peace.”)
Respect
, my mother said, again and again. That was the essential filial act, and it was a word she dropped like a stone into our conversations, an incontrovertible truth. But I was tired of showing respect. What I needed now was something more difficult to demonstrate: self-respect.

The scene at the hotel in New York, on the night before I sailed on the S.S.
Genovese
, was more harrowing than I'd feared. My mother, whose heart was famously bad, could not pull herself together for the occasion. Her blood pressure, which my father had dutifully learned to take, approached life-threatening levels in these circumstances, and it wavered into dangerous territory that night. Palpitations ensued. You could see the thumping in her temples, her pulse like some native drumbeat in the jungles of New Guinea, manic and relentless.

“You got to calm yourself, Margarita,” my father said. “The bottom number is over a hundred. Dr. Senna told me that's not okay. You're gonna get a stroke with that kind of number.” We had worried relentlessly about her blood pressure ever since she had been taken to the hospital a couple of years before with dizziness and shortness of breath. “This is nothing cardiac,” she maintained, with the medical equivalent of false modesty. “The doctor, he said, âMrs. Massolini, your heart is holding up fine. But you're not a young woman anymore.'” Her blood pressure, however, had to be brought under control. “You ever see what happens when you don't take the lid off the marinara?” she said. “Splatâ
the sauce explodes over the wall.” I had heard this before, and often imagined my mother splattered like tomato sauce on the walls, her eyeballs stuck there, staring.

“First Nicky leaves me, then you,” my mother said, her baleful eyes fixed on me. What I heard was
How can you be doing this to me, the one who raised you?

“Nicky is dead,” I said, holding her gaze. “He didn't leave you, Mom. He's goddamn dead.”

My father, a slight man in his mid-fifties, with a bright gold tooth that glinted when he smiled, stepped from the shadows and slapped me, a quick backhanded swipe that stung my cheek and brought tears to my eyes. This was the first and only time he ever hit me. Horrified, I pressed my back against the paisley wallpaper behind me, trembling. Briefly, I hated him. Not only because he had hit me, but because he had once again succumbed to my mother's whims, playing into her narcissism, her need to control the lives around her and make every figure in her gaze an extension of her own imagination and sensibility. He had failed me, now as before. He had not protected me from the perpetual warfare waged on my independence by my mother. She wanted to absorb me, and my father understood this, and he had been unwilling, or unable, to help. If anything, he had helped Nicky moreâdefending him against her, making excuses for his escapades, even admiring them. Not surprisingly, my studious character, my love of reading and writing, baffled and threatened him.

“Your mother hasn't suffered enough, is that it?” he asked, furious but already backing down emotionally. A man who prided himself on self-control, he could not contain his own trembling. Now his eyes glistened, and he sucked quick breaths. I thought he might faint.

Recognizing his weakness, I softened. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I really didn't meanâ¦”

“You didn't mean,” he said, shaking his head. “The problem with you, Alex, is you don't mean. Sometimes, I swear, you don't think. A college boy, and you don't think about what you mean and what you don't mean.” There was more sadness in his voice than anger, and I felt ashamed. Always, in my family, it was considered a failure, a mistake, for
a male to show emotion, to lose his temper and lash out. Men controlled themselves. They managed to stifle emotions before they could root and grow into visible feelings.

My motherâa woman of two hundred and thirty pounds in her bare feetâcollapsed on the bed, sobbing quietly. Her shiny black hair fanned out against the tangerine swirl of the bedspread. Her pulpy hands were tucked beneath the pillow, supporting her head. The hem of her red polka-dot dress, which had been a gift from me on her fiftieth birthday the year before, rode up to her thighs. I could not look at her. She had provoked a crisis, it had crested violently, and the denouement continued. The narrative pattern was familiar but no less painful.

My father stepped closer to me, face to faceâa rare move for him. I was four inches taller, but still cowed by this compact, muscular man of few words and little in the way of formal education. His silences unnerved me. “You go to Italy if that's what you want to do,” he said. “But you're breaking her heart. Look at her, Alex. And don't forget what you see.”

How could I forget it? I'd been so close to my mother, and breaking her heart was the last thing on earth I wanted. I didn't want to break anything, but I had no choiceâor believed I had no choice. To stay would have meant being overrun. My interest in literature, and my going to Columbia, had taken me rapidly along paths leading away from northeastern Pennylvania and home. Had I really attempted to take Nicky's place by going back, the results would ultimately have dismayed everyone. My expectations for myself, and my parents' vision of me, were deeply at odds.

Nicky was thirteen months older than me, and not a likely soldier. A delicate, intelligent child, prone to asthma attacks and ear infections, he made up for his frail start by taking karate lessons at the Catholic Youth Center in Scranton. The sport had “brought him out,” as my father said, and he became a black belt at fourteen. This mastery of a violent art had borne some dark fruit, and twice he got himself expelled for kicking ass in the schoolyard. In senior high, he resisted every attempt to tame him, acting like a young Marlon Brando, appropriating all the hackneyed symbols of rebellious youth: T-shirts, Lucky Strikes, motorcycles. Nicky was
smart enough, probably smarter than me, but he never did a stroke of work or paid attention in class. That he got into King's (a small Catholic college only a few miles away) had seemed a miracleâa tribute to my grandfather's influence in the communityâbut he dropped out during his sophomore year, worked briefly in a car parts store owned by a friend of the family, then enlisted in the army before the draft board could make its move. (My father, of course, roundly approved of Nicky's decision.) Fairly soon after basic training in North Carolina, he'd been shipped to Vietnam. Only a few months were left on his tour of duty when it suddenly and sadly ended.

My mother loved Nicky, but she had put her hopes on me. Second in my class at Scranton Prepâa good Jesuit high schoolâI'd turned down Georgetown for Columbia, and done well there, majoring in classics. My mother thought I might return to my old school in triumph, as a Latin teacher. “Father Gallucci keeps asking about you,” she said, though I knew she was making this up. Gallucci hated me, ever since an infamous theology class where I questioned the Argument from Design, wondering why God, if he had designed the universe, had screwed up so badly. Gallucci's feral stare dissolved into a smirk. “Mr. Massolini,” he said, “please tell the class exactly what God has âscrewed up' so badly.” Without missing a beat, I had said, “Why, this school, Father. In an ideal universe, could this school exist?”

Other books

Taxi to Paris by Ruth Gogoll

Love the Way You Lie (Stripped #1) by Skye Warren

The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You by Lily Anderson

The 9th Girl by Tami Hoag

A Rare Murder In Princeton by Ann Waldron

Finding My Forever by Heidi McLaughlin

El caballero de la Rosa Negra by James Lowder

Ana Seymour by Jeb Hunters Bride

Texas Christmas Bride: The Gallaghers of Sweetgrass Springs Book 6 by Jean Brashear

Advance Notice by Cynthia Hickey