The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

  But virtually all of her speech returned by the third day. Possessed of a natural glibness, she seemed nearly as articulate as before. She told the story of waking in the middle of the night, the numbness, the luncheon, the seizure, her friend’s reaction. The convention had ended the day after the incident and everyone had left. But at the Miami airport on their way home, suddenly the friend from the luncheon was there with her husband. The woman leaned over Marie’s wheelchair, unable to hide her worry at how tired and drawn Marie looked. And for that moment, perhaps because she was startled, Marie was not able,to speak very well. She stammered and the woman began to cry, then was embarrassed, murmured an excuse and rushed away, followed by her husband. Well, Marie said, looking up and widening her eyes.

  An uneasy and artificial aura of the normal took hold. Everyone was aware of the illusion that nothing important had happened. In Max’s mind, Dan’s accident and coma, followed by his mother’s stroke, was an indication of the beginning of a long progression, a spiral, a ripple effect. Each phase of the cycle led inexorably to the next.

  One Easter, when they were children, his sister Robin was given a white duckling. For a few months they kept it indoors, in a carton littered with droppings and limp lettuce. When it was big enough they set it out on the river, like an ingenious toy that could float. It fitted immediately into a well-established flock of white ducks, former gifts, that lived on the river, and within a moment all of its graceless, carton-bound existence on land seemed obliterated. Afternoons, on his way home from school, Max would stop and try to pick out their duck from the others. To attract the flock one day he pulled bits of paper from his pocket, bits, he thought, of a candy wrapper. But as a few of the ducks and then the rest of the flock wafted over, he noticed the thrown bits were the wrong color; not brown but green. He was feeding money to the ducks. To retrieve the pieces, which anyway the ducks were rejecting with disdain, he took a rock from the water’s edge and lobbed it into their midst. With a flurry of alarm they fled in a broken circle of escape, into the center of which, like an overplayed force of destruction, the rock fell. The ducks slid away, certain of them turning to look at him closely, as if to memorize the face and form of such treachery. But the bits of money were gone, and Max, filled with remorse, stood on the grassy bank watching the ripples widen. Five or six concentric circles were followed by smaller ones in a diminishing series, which slid smoothly across the water and disappeared.

  THREE WEEKS AFTER RETURNING FROM MIAMI, Marie had another seizure. She was taken to the hospital in Manhattan, one floor up from Dan’s old floor and identical to it. Her symptoms this time were more pronounced—a limp and numbness on the right side, serious aphasia and forgetfulness, and a feeling of complete fatigue.

  The doctor called them all together. He said he was sorry. It was not a stroke but a tumor, located in the center of Marie’s brain and therefore inoperable. She might live another six months, perhaps longer. The name was glioblastoma; he expected it would grow quickly. He said that radiation therapy would have some effect, would extend her life for a time, six months, perhaps a year; although with side effects. She will lose her hair, he said. I suggest you make arrangements to get a wig.

  Max went home. He did not cry until he filled the bathtub and got into it. It was an amniotic bath. If somehow he could have filled the room itself with water, with rain, with billowing steam, he would have. When the tears burned his eyes he slid beneath the surface. He was calmed, as if he had drowned, except that the water flowed out, not in, a drowning in reverse. When he stood up and saw his reflection in the mirror, he realized the danger he was in. Everyone was sick and dying: his mother, his uncle Dan, perhaps himself and anyone else who came too close. It was a force that drew him in, or on its own drew near. In her present state of sedation his mother seemed suddenly to have caught up with Dan. She might not outlive him.

  John told Marie what Dr Feeney had said. The word tumor was avoided. It was something in her head; although some weeks later she herself said the word to Max. Nor did John tell her about the prognosis of six months, mainly, Max thought, because John could not make himself believe it. Nor did he say, You are dying. Several times during those days, however, she forced out the words herself—I want to die, I want to die. She said it when she cried, as a kind of keening that made Max think of all the generations of women who had taught her these reactions.

  He called about the wig and made an appointment. She went in a wheelchair, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and dark glasses—the radiation caused an extreme sensitivity to the sun—a costume that made her seem romantic and powerful. Mutely she commanded cars, arrangements, appointments, deference, respect. The proprietor, whose name was Romeo, led them into a mirrored cubicle. Here there were six or seven Maxes, Maries, Johns and Romeos; although Marie, whose chair was aimed at the big mirror in front of her, hardly took her eyes from her principal reflection, as if this sight, at such a close, well-lighted range, came as a sudden surprise, causing disbelief or a startling new fear that soon she would be unrecognizable even to herself. After some discussion Romeo produced a gray wig with a single-length, spiky, lifeless look. He placed it on a wooden stock and within a few minutes had given it the general configurations of Marie’s hair, minus the curl and a certain lightness of color, a silvery gray she’d been cultivating for years. Then he combed her own hair back and placed the wig on her head.

  Max saw the color rise in her cheeks. The wig sat too low on her forehead, and stood out in a single unconvincing fingerwave at the nape of her neck. Suddenly she was a very old woman. Her eyes went to Max in a precise ricochet off the mirror. Romeo stepped out of the cubicle to choose another pair of scissors, and John, who had been standing in the doorway of the tiny room, stepped back to let him pass. Marie’s eyes seemed to plead with Max to be her witness, to remember that while she was one thing now, with her drooping mouth and lined skin reflected around her in fifty ways, the fake hair like a comical hat on her head, that she once had been so much another: lovely, vivacious and young, and perfectly at home in a room of mirrors.

  He took her hand. There was nothing to say, no gallantries, no lies, no explanations of how this could have happened; no excuses, no compensations. It became simply a question of whether she was going to cry in front of a stranger. She drew in a sharp breath and blinked. Romeo returned. He promised that when it was finished, the wig would suit her. When he offered his hand as they were leaving, she pressed it to her cheek.

  Later, Max accompanied her to the radiotherapy lab in a slab-walled, subbasement of the hospital. She lay on a table with wheels, her head taped in place, a black dot marked in ink on her temple. He was disappointed to learn that the huge machine was twelve years old, although still considered effective. The nurses retreated behind a lead door as if into a bunker at the height of an air raid. He regarded his mother on the television monitor. She held herself absolutely still. He had an elaborate fantasy—of her health returning, of a trip to Mexico for radical cosmetic surgery. Miraculously she would be restored to herself, to that woman from the past who, one summer day, driving home, had looked over and said, Let’s stop at the farm and get some peaches. I’ll bet they’re sweet as sugar.

  IT WAS JUNE. They brought her home from the hospital. She lay wrapped in a blanket on a chaise in the garden. She drowsed, listening to the birds. The big house, white and luminous in the spring air, gave off sounds—a whisper from the sliding door as they checked on her, voices within, doors, bells. The house and its trees loomed up around her, over a ledge of terrace and flowers. The fresh, leafy air had a percussive silence, a quality of distant padded sound that wafted across the parklike yards of neighboring lives.

  She fell brink to brink down a well of sleep. Her uncle Leo, with tight red hair and rolled sleeves, confronted her at the top of the stairs. She was sixteen. Where have you been? he said. She stopped two steps below him. At the pictures with my friends. Mama knew.

  Don’t lie! he shouted. It’
s already dark. You’ve been with a boy! He raised his hand to strike her and she fell backward down the narrow flight of stairs. She lay at the bottom listening to two things—her uncle’s howls of anguish, and something else, something smaller: a buzz like an insect in her ear. Was that the first time she heard it? Her uncle Leo again appeared before her, this time with white boxes of sweets from the bakery. She cried out and swatted him away. In a moment Robin was saying, Mom, wake up, Mom. And Marie looked up into her daughter’s eyes and thought to say, Do you remember, Robin, when I asked you to hold your head next to mine and listen closely? Do you remember that buzzing you heard? But this question came out only in her eyes, so that Robin said, What is it, Mom? Can I get you something?

  Chocolates, Marie thought, and said aloud, Chaucer. Robin took her hand and said she didn’t understand. Marie closed her eyes again. She sat at a little table in a large, high-ceilinged shop, amid forty such tables, at each of which sat a woman or young girl like herself, her hair in a net, wearing a white apron, one hand resting in her lap. With the other hand Marie took a little ball of mocha candy and rolled it in a tray of melted chocolate in front of her. She could fashion fifteen a minute; a delicate crossover loop at each tip, the thick smell of sugar in the air, one of the women a few tables over saying, Dammit, it’s hot, my loops are melting.

  Marie threw off the blanket and turned her face to cooler air. Robin said, You’re warm. Would you like some juice? Marie reached up and touched her daughter’s face.

  It seemed they were going on ahead without her. Wasn’t that it? They were leaving her behind. They were all so far off from her now that she saw them only when they presented themselves, when they came right up and put their faces a few inches from her eyes.

  Mama? It was Max. I’m going now, he said. I’ll be back to see you tomorrow. She nodded her head and he kissed her. She looked behind him and saw other faces. A row of people sat there in a semicircle. Well! she said. What is this?

  What is what? Max said.

  Them! she thought, but she said, vehemently, I! She had meant also to point behind him for emphasis, but her right arm only jerked up weakly in a spasm, like a dreaming animal.

  She sighed deeply. Penny and her little girl came up beside Max and leaned over her. Marie could see that Penny’s smile was the rueful kind. The little girl was awed.

  Penny said, Give Nanny a kiss. A delicate, blond cheek hovered without touching hers, then withdrew. Marie rifled through her mind as through a bin of old clothes. Amanda. The child’s name was Amanda.

  Mandy, she said clearly, and held out her left hand. Mandy returned and this time firmly planted a kiss on her grandmother’s cheek. Was that right? Marie thought, and raised her eyebrows inquisitively at Max.

  She dreamed often of Dan. They said hello to each other at the beginning of each dream. Or they called to each other until they met in the context of the dream—in a field, on a beach, or in a room they had played in as children. In the dreams Dan had lost something, a penknife with an ivory handle. She helped him look for it, in the field, on the beach, under the snow. They never found it. She saw him down on the ground, a young boy now, searching in the grass.

  That knife is lost, she said. Why don’t you give up? Dan didn’t answer. He never answered.

  II.

  MARIE TOLD MAX THIS STORY:

  In 1907 young Danilo Defilippo, Marie’s father, was walking through a sewing factory owned by his family in Messina when he noticed a beautiful girl working at one of the tables. In those days in Sicily, and given the difference in their lives, the only next step in his interest in her was a proposal of marriage. He was, however, already engaged to a young woman of means from Calabria, directly across the Straits of Messina. Danilo didn’t love this woman but had been prepared to marry her because she was pleasant, agreeable and rich. Her family and his had formed a marriage pool for several generations, and in a complicated way they were cousins. Her dowry would include three hundred acres of forest in Calabria. For years artisans there had painted wood to look like marble. Now trees were scarce and they painted marble to look like wood. Danilo and this Calabrian would already have been married if the forest in question had not recently caught fire and burned, necessitating a postponement of the marriage and further talks between the families.

  The beautiful girl in the factory was named Angela Leone. She was tall and fair with green eyes, and her people had been fishermen. Her parents were dead but her brother Leo eagerly agreed to the match and gave her away.

  Danilo and Angela were married in 1908 amid a flap of intricate ritual accompanied by family disappointment amounting to indignation. Angela of course brought no dowry. Even the clothes on her back were unsuitable. To Danilo’s three sisters in particular this marriage to a poor peasant was catastrophic. They cursed the fact that their Calabrian cousin’s forest had burned and even pictured Angela racing wild-eyed through the flaming trees with a torch.

  Max was curious about the idea that Angela would stop the marriage by burning her rival’s forest. What did that mean? Could she ever have been thought capable of such a thing? Her saints did it for her, Marie said. Angela’s saints fought the Calabrian girl’s saints and won.

  But there was nothing romantic or ethereal about the new bride. To the genteel Defilippo sisters Angela was exuberant and coarse. They misunderstood her as if she were foreign; they were ungenerous and at times plainly rude. Angela did her best to appease them, but a streak of obstinance sometimes caused her to flaunt the traits they despised.

  For the honeymoon Danilo took her to Florence and Rome, her first trip anywhere. With him Angela was quiet and even graceful. The sisters had seen to it that she was beautifully dressed. Now she realized that demureness in a first-class train or hotel passed for breeding. She could be demure, although she was taller than her husband and felt dishonest at it. The honeymoon was a trip to another world, another life; of afternoons of love in hotels, of parks and bell towers, long carriage rides and antiquities, a softer sunshine. They returned to Messina just two weeks before the great earthquake of 1908, a catastrophe that reduced the city to rubble, flattening it as if with bombs. Seventy-five thousand people died; and among the Defilippos two of Danilo’s brothers, many inlaws, cousins, countless friends. Every family had its stories of disaster. Destroyed in the quake were the large Defilippo house in the city, several businesses connected with the family, the sewing factories and warehouses, odd pieces of real estate, and a white stone villa, called Contemplazione, which overlooked the straits from a promontory outside the city.

  Angela sat on the terrace with most of the family for an outdoor lunch, dreamily describing to a young cousin a night at the Rome Opera. Then someone said, Oh Dio, what’s that! and every head went up. Suddenly a gigantic cracking sound split the air, like hundreds of lightning bolts hitting trees. The terrace and the ground beneath it began to shake. Plates and glasses fell and broke on the stone. A deep, terrifying rumble rolled along under everything. Out in front of the villa, halfway across the straits, the sea floor split, and water from both sides rushed into the fissure. They saw a boat go into the rising steam as if over a waterfall. The water was swirling and black, the steam rose up, and high on the terrace their faces were drenched with a hot mist. Now the split appeared on the beach, like an animal coming out of the water; it began to move up the hill toward the villa. The women screamed. They picked up the children and ran. The whole family ran. The fissure moved up the hill and under the house, which fell open like a cantaloupe.

  In the city everything that could fall, fell. There followed days and weeks of fires, disease, of digging out the traumatized survivors, the mutilated dead. On the third day, one of the three Defilippo sisters was found in the rubble of her house, her two babies in her arms, one of them dead; and her husband, also dead, nearby. Concetta, whose arm and leg were broken, had fed her child on the scattered remains of another grossly interrupted lunch.

  Marie was bom a year later; a se
cond girl named Victoria died in infancy. Marie’s earliest memories were of visits to this child’s crypt in the Defilippo mausoleum, a horror of nineteenth-century Sicilian gloom, tastelessly spared by the earthquake. Its centerpiece was a glass coffin containing the preserved remains of her grandmother, Danilo’s mother, then in her twentieth year of eternity. Every fifth anniversary of her death, her breakaway gown was changed and her hair carefully dusted. Then the glass case was resealed and a deafening compressor sucked out the useless air.

  In the spring of 1913, when Marie was four, Danilo was forced by the threat of a second conscription into the Italian Army to flee the country. After Unification, the government had made a late and disorganized effort to colonize. Everywhere small wars, which were not strictly legal, were being fought with mercenaries and what remnants of the Army could be spared: in North Africa, the Aegean, in Turkey where the Ottoman Empire was coming apart like the hassock with which henceforth it would always be associated. An uncle who was a general advised Danilo to flee rather than certainly and foolishly risk his life a second time. To be sent to any of the fronts meant death. He left one night by boat for Genoa, from there sailing on the White Star Line to New York. He planned a stay of six months, or until his uncle and other friends could rearrange affairs to permit his return.

  Max wondered also about this part of the story. Why was it necessary for his grandfather to go all the way to America? Why not have gone to London, or over the Alps to Switzerland? People came to America to stay, not to visit. Perhaps he had chosen New York as an adventure, to cover the anguish of leaving Angela and Marie behind.