Kiss Carlo

by Adriana Trigiani

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. I was a prompter, mostly. I didn’t know how to explain what I did. I feed the actors their lines from offstage when they forget them. It didn’t seem like something I could explain.”

  “Three years is a long time not to explain where you go and what you’re doing and that you’ve taken on a second job. That’s not a hobby. That’s a commitment. It’s almost like a career. How did you get the job?”

  “I wasn’t looking for it. Aunt Jo gave me a ticket to see a play one night when I got back. The sodality had a group going, and she wasn’t up to it, so I went in her place. They performed As You Like It. I had never seen a Shakespeare play, but I liked it right away.”

  “A show can do that to a person. When I saw my first ice show in Atlantic City, it was as if the world changed. Gretchen Merrill in person on skates! The figure eights! The jumps! The rink. The music. The costumes. All that handwork and beading and ermine fur.” Peachy’s eyes sparkled like sequins just thinking about it.

  Nicky was encouraged that Peachy understood how he felt. “Yeah, those are important. That’s called spectacle. And then there’s the words.”

  “There aren’t words in an ice show.”

  “Right. But in Shakespeare, it’s all about the words. And they spoke to me. The words seemed familiar. The story held my attention. I felt I knew it. ”

  “Maybe you studied the play in school.”

  “No, we read Romeo and Juliet, and that was it. Anyhow, I stuck around afterward and one thing led to another, and I could see they needed help, so old man Borelli gave me a job. I started out in the box office, and then I worked my way up to the crew—”

  “Worked your way up?”

  “Yeah. There’s a pecking order in the theater.”

  “There’s a pecking order in everything, Nicky. It’s the way the world in general works. But you have to be in line in the first place to be promoted.”

  “I understand that. Then I became a prompter.”

  “Okay. Whoa. Hold on. You’re going to Borelli’s a couple nights a week, and you’re working your way up in the company, and you forgot to tell your fiancée?”

  “I’m telling you now. But, I think it’s important to have things that are just for myself. I hope you have that.”

  “I don’t. You know everything.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “I mean, nothing I can think of.”

  “You never asked me where I went.”

  “I figured you were working an extra shift in the cab.”

  “But you called the garage, and I wasn’t there. It happened a lot.”

  “I didn’t leave a message on purpose.”

  “Where did you think I was?”

  “I thought maybe you were gambling with your cousin Gio.”

  “Why wouldn’t you ask me if I gambled?”

  “I don’t like bad news,” Peachy said, then bit into her sandwich.

  “So what did you think of the play?”

  “It was cute. I still don’t understand how you wound up in it.”

  “Peter Menecola, one of our actors, had to leave the theater, and we don’t have a budget for understudies. Well, what usually happens is we have a guy named Enzo who understudies all the parts, but he was already in the scene, filling in for Paulie.”

  “Why did you have to do the love scene?”

  “There was no one else to do it.”

  “And nobody but Calla to do the lover part?”

  “Nobody.”

  “She was pretty good,” Peachy admitted. “She cried. I would think crying is the hardest of all.”

  “I agree!” Nicky didn’t know much about acting technique, except what he had observed onstage and picked up in rehearsals directed by Sam and now Calla, but he knew you had to be pretty good to weep.

  “Honestly, Nick? A lot of the play went right over my head. The whole thing was very murky to me.”

  “It can be confusing,” Nicky admitted. “I understand why you might get lost. The same actors play two or three different roles in the play, who’s a man in one scene becomes a woman in the next, who’s a woman dresses like a man, it goes back and forth.” Nicky gave up trying to explain the plot of Twelfth Night. He would, however have liked to talk to her about his accidental role in it. He would have liked to share how panicked he was when he was yanked from his position on the crew as prompter from behind the podium and pushed into the play. Nicky would have liked to share what a thrill it was when the scene began and he felt a connection to the words and the other actors, but Peachy wasn’t a fan of the theater. So what? They didn’t agree on everything. She liked pink, he didn’t. She liked white sauce, he liked red. The sound of Jeanette MacDonald’s voice made his teeth ache, while Peachy could watch her movies four times in a row. They were different. Men and women were different, and that was that.

  “This was a one-time occurrence, right?” Peachy said gingerly.

  “That Enzo couldn’t understudy? I don’t know.”

  “What I’m asking, this is a thing where you do it once and then you’re done?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about. I got fired tonight.”

  Peachy tried not to show how relieved she was that Nicky’s theatrical career was over. “Fired?”

  “Calla fired me. There’s your proof that there are no sparks between us. I don’t know how long the theater can stay open. It’s struggling. We’re not selling enough tickets.”

  “Well, it’s all for the best, Nicky. You won’t have a lot of time once we’re married. We’ll be fixing our house and planting a garden and taking trips.”

  Nicky put his head into his hands.

  “Oh, Nick, I’m sorry. You liked working at Borelli’s.” Peachy patted Nicky on the back and rolled her eyes.

  “I did.”

  “I understand about the pushing scenery and prompting the lines, but the acting part—” Peachy’s voice caught. “Do you want to continue such a hobby?”

  “I don’t think I’m any good.”

  “From what I saw tonight, judging from the rest of the cast, that’s not really a criterion for participation.”

  “Tony is a fine actor. I could never be as good as him.”

  “Well, not to compare, but who could tell? You only had one scene.”

  “I know.” Nicky didn’t want to admit that he’d felt a charge go through him that he had never known before. And after Peachy’s reaction to the play, his second job, and his having been fired, he figured this wasn’t the moment to share his epiphany.

  Peachy shrugged. “You’re better off. Borelli’s is a fleabag joint. It’s on its way out.”

  “It needs renovation.” Nicky took a sip of his birch beer.

  “It needs more than that. Nobody thinks to go there. Nobody says ‘Let’s go to Borelli’s on a Saturday night.’ No, they say ‘Let’s go see a movie.’ Or ‘Let’s go see Louis Prima and Keely Smith at Sailor’s Lake Pavilion,’ or ‘Let’s go into New York and see a Broadway show and hit the Vesuvio after for a nightcap.’ Nobody says ‘Let’s go see Twelve Nights.’ ”

  “Twelfth Night.”

  “Whatever it’s called. It’s attracting moths. It’s like the hair my nonna used to collect in a ceramic dish with a lid—now we backcomb. We don’t save our hair. Things go out of style or become redundant. Like Borelli’s.”

  “It is old-fashioned. I guess.”

  “Whenever a man wears leotards, it’s not au courant. It’s of a time when people rode horses and wore suits of armor. In the program it said ‘Carriage arrives at 9:20 p.m.’ ”

  “That’s just a tip of the hat to when the theater first opened. They used to put that on the box-office window so patrons would know when the show was over.”

  “Okay, Nick, anything that you have to explain in that kind of detail is out of style. It’s for the history books no one reads because no one cares. We’re young. We can’t live in the past, in an attic full o
f dust and trunks and musty pantaloons. We belong to the here and the now. When we get married, we are all about the future, about a life together. About our own kids and our own house with new appliances in the kitchen. We’re living on the cusp of 1950. Everything is new. It’s even called new. Think about it. Even the dresses—they’re calling them the New Look. We are going to be the 1950s!”

  Peachy took Nicky’s hands into her own. “Do you really want to hang around a place like that? We’ll have a car and go places. We’re modern! On the move! We’ll drive into the city and go to clubs. New York—there’s another new for you, the city—is an hour and twenty minutes through Jersey and over the bridge. It’s nothing for us to go to a museum and get culture and have dinner at Sal Anthony’s and dance at the Latin Quarter! We can see the world top to bottom once we’re married. You can see all the plays you want. Good ones. With real actors like Ernest Borgnine. Not with guys that deliver A-Treat soda to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Labor Day picnic in Twelfth Street Park. You know what I’m saying?”

  Nicky nodded.

  “I mean, it’s nice that you have a place to go after work, that you have extracurricular activities you enjoy outside of the garage and me. My dad plays cards. My mother? She enjoys the sodality meetings at the church. It’s camaraderie. And I can see where Borelli’s is a social thing for you, with people you wouldn’t normally run into at work or at church. I mean, I’m sure they have receptions and you meet people and make friends and have conversations about interesting topics. But it’s not real life. It’s make-believe—there’s that guy who is an accountant by day and by night he’s in your play in a sword fight wearing tights.”

  “Hambone?”

  “Whatever. Or that lady with the bosoms playing come-hither to a guy that clearly doesn’t want to hither.”

  “You mean Josie.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s not authentic.”

  “Legitimate, you mean.”

  “Not that.”

  “Legitimate theater means professional.”

  “Then that’s what I mean. This is not professional.”

  “But it is. We sell tickets. We’re paid.”

  “Okay. So people pay to see it—that doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s the Borellis holding on to a family business that’s obsolete, clutching an old dream like some poor slob hangs on to a frayed rope when he’s dangling over a cliff. Eventually that rope will break and he will plummet to his death on sharp rocks that will rip him into hamburger. But if he holds on, what has he got? Rug burn on his hands. That’s it. Borelli’s is hanging on but it’s not going to be around much longer. That building is about to be condemned.”

  “Did you hear something?”

  “No, I just went to the ladies’ room and my foot went through the linoleum when I washed my hands.”

  “You really didn’t like the play, did you?”

  “I don’t want to go back there again, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Never?”

  “Not if I have a choice.”

  Nicky bit into the sandwich and chewed slowly. The tender steak, warm cheese, and hot peppers were delicious, but he wasn’t enjoying the flavors. He was thinking about the possibility of never going back to the Borelli Theater again, and what that might mean to him, what that would do to him. He could imagine a life where he never drove a cab again, but he couldn’t imagine his life without Borelli’s.

  “Nick, you take so long to eat.” Peachy had finished her sandwich and wiped her hands on the paper napkin. The camellia on her hat had slipped to the back of her head, and she looked like a little girl, all eyes, no chin, just longing and need in her face, with her head framed by a halo of pink organza. “Did I say something wrong?” she asked. “I went too far. Ma says I go too far and pile on. I piled on.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I don’t know, sometimes I can’t say anything right.” Her brown eyes filled like fish tanks. “I can’t do anything right either.”

  “Come on. Don’t cry, Peachy.”

  “All of a sudden I’m bereft.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I’m not supposed to say what I’m feeling. Like I’m supposed to hold it in.”

  “I never want you to do that.”

  “Good. Because I can’t. We’ve been together too long to start acting with each other.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Plus it will give me a migraine. And I don’t need that. I got enough to worry about.” She extended both of her hands to him. Her purse dangled from her thin wrist. “Come on. I gotta go to work early tomorrow.”

  “Should we hop a bus? They let me take the bike onboard at night.”

  “Nah, the air is good for us.” Peachy kissed Nicky lightly on the lips. “It’s swell. It’s fine. As long as we’re together.”

  Nicky wrapped up the rest of his sandwich neatly and handed it to Peachy. She put it in her purse. He hopped on the bike and put up the kickstand. She slipped up onto the handlebars, and Nicky centered her between them. She gripped the handles, and as he began to pedal, he leaned forward and kissed the back of her neck.

  * * *

  Frank Arrigo drove slowly across the bridge because he wanted to make the evening with Calla last. She was just what he was looking for, a gutsy Italian girl from South Philly, younger than he but not silly. He loathed silly. She was pretty too, but not in the way that he’d be afraid to touch her. She didn’t seem to care about her hair, she just let it blow around. He liked that he could just leave the top down on his convertible. He liked that she ate everything on her plate and drank wine. She didn’t order drinks with paper umbrellas in them. If he had to bet, he’d guess that she drank beer when the weather was hot. Calla slid closer to him in the front seat and took his hand.

  * * *

  Nicky and Peachy sailed across the bridge on the walkway, two silhouettes in the dark as they passed Frank and Calla.

  “Those poor souls on a bike,” Frank commented.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Calla watched as the two figures turned off the bridge onto the river road.

  “I don’t know. They don’t have a car.” Frank patted the dashboard of his Pontiac Torpedo.

  “I think it’s romantic.” Calla watched as the pair on the bicycle dissolved into the black night.

  “You leave the romance to me.” Frank picked up speed and turned on the radio.

  * * *

  As Nicky pedaled his fiancée on the road, a tiny sliver of the moon came out, enough to guide him along the river.

  Peachy closed her eyes and let the cool night air whisk away any worries and cares she may have had and blow them out of reach.

  There weren’t a lot of girls in the world who would settle for a sandwich in the park and a bike ride home, but Peachy DePino would, and she did. In Nicky Castone’s mind, that made her a keeper.

  TO: E. GUARDINFANTE

  FROM: C. GUARDINFANTE

  10 MAGGIO, 1949

  VIAGGIO PIACEVOLE. PIÙ DALL AMERICA ALL’ ARRIVO.

  The MS Vulcania had been sailing across the Atlantic for five days when a handwritten invitation was slipped under Ambassador Carlo Guardinfante’s cabin door in second class.

  The pleasure of your company is requested this evening

  For dinner and dancing

  At 8:00 p.m. in the Grand Hall

  Carlo’s eyes widened.

  We will be joined by Captain Jack Hodgins

  He nodded, impressed.

  Mr. and Mrs. Joseph (Isabel) Scacciaferro

  Mr. and Mrs. Attila Mario Seltembrino (Dorena Fata) Castellani

  and

  Mrs. Patricia Zampieri

  The ambassador’s heart began to race. The Scacciaferros, the Castellanis, and the widow Zampieri were titans of American industry, importers of Italian marble with family ties to the quarries in Tuscany. They provided American contractors with exquisite Carrara marble for use in buildings, churches, an
d monuments. This invitation presented the kind of company that the ambassador had hoped to keep on the MS Vulcania.

  His eyes fell on one last detail.

  Formal dress required

  Carlo would dazzle them in his regimentals. Elisabetta had seen to it.

  3

  Concetta DePino placed neat stacks of hot-pink tulle in front of each place setting on her dining room table. She anchored the squares with a box of Jordan almonds tied with a pink satin ribbon and a tag bearing the name of each of Peachy’s bridal attendants and her aunt-in-law Jo Palazzini. Two work baskets, filled with craft scissors, rolls of pink ribbon, and additional boxes of Jordan almonds were placed at either end of the table.

  The mother of the bride checked the centerpiece, a large, white honeycomb paper wedding bell that folded out in three dimensions, which she’d borrowed from her neighbor, Dolly Farino, who had a closet full of whimsical table decorations on hand for every occasion.

  Dangling from the cut-crystal chandelier over the table was the wedding date: October 29, 1949, spelled out in cardboard letters and numbers dipped in silver glitter. If Concetta DePino could have hung those digits in pavé diamonds etched in gold bricks, she would have, as the single highest achievement of her career as a mother was the confirmation of the wedding date of her daughter and Nicholas Castone.

  Only the Second World War and Nicky’s procrastinating had stood between her daughter and the altar celebrating the DePino/Castone high nuptial mass, and now, the path was clear. In a few short months, Peachy would have her dream, the paperwork filed, and the gold band on her finger. Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Castone would be recorded in the chancery for all eternity. Concetta was as ebullient as she was relieved.

  Connie looked into the mirror hanging over the bar cart and examined her changing face. It was framed by her hair, dyed a soft apricot to cover the white. Her eyebrows remained black and thick from her youth, nicely contrasting with her brown eyes, but her lips needed something extra. Concetta had taken to using three shades of coral lipstick, from light to dark, blotting in between applications to plump up what nature had taken away. She pulled the clasp from the back of her pearls to the front so that the pavé diamonds threw light, which Concetta believed gave her a glow. She stepped back, turned sideways, and tilted her face to the mirror as she pulled in her stomach and threw back her shoulders. Since her sixty-fifth birthday, Concetta’s shape had shifted from that of a violin to a duck. Her small waist had broadened; it was shot, loose like elastic found in old underpants. It would be a longline girdle for her for the rest of her life. She hummed a sigh of surrender. At least she still had the face.