Augie laughed, a good sound, and not like skittering leaves. “I am learning how to move faster, yes. And I have been anxious to see you.”
“I have too,” she said. “A strange thing happened last time.”
“Stranger than listening to the tale of a man dead more than thirty years as told by a woman a century in the grave?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Well then, I am curious. But what do you say we walk together, instead of sitting at your husband’s grave or mine?”
“Walk?”
“Use your imagination, cara mia. I cannot feel the air or the sunshine, but I can move about and pretend.”
“Then why did you have me chasing a wrapper the other day?”
“I have learned much since I first whispered my name to you,” he said. “Like never doubt Harriet’s word on anything.”
“Such as?”
“Remembering.” His tone sobered. “It used to be I could escape my shame by moving closer to life. I cannot any longer.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing. It probably means you’re getting ready to move on.”
“I had not thought of that.”
Benny started walking, hands behind her back and head bowed. “I guess I fell asleep on you, huh?”
“You must have. Where you went, I could not follow.”
“What do you mean? I was dreaming.”
“Precisely.” Augie asked her, “What did you dream?”
“I dreamed of Henny. He asked me to walk with him, and I didn’t go.”
Augie was silent long enough for Benny to wonder if he’d gotten pulled back to a deeper place, but he said, “A wise choice, cara mia. Life without him might be a sadder existence, but it is still life. As far as I know, it is the only one you will get.”
Benny let that settle in. The crumbling walls of her secret were starting to let in light. Something like hope wriggled inside her, like Cricket did. Or maybe they were one in the same.
“Last thing I remember you saying to me,” she said, “was you needed me to help you reach your daughter and beg her forgiveness on your behalf. Oh, and maybe introduce her to your children from your second marriage, if they are still among the living.”
“My daughter, Adriana, was the youngest. She was born in 1945. She must still be alive, no?”
“She’d be...” Benny calculated. “About seventy. It’s very possible. And you have no idea where she’s living?”
“I can tell you where she was when I died. But…”
“But?”
“There was more to my story that I did not get to tell you, Benedetta. More to my shame than simply abandoning my child.”
“Uh-oh.” Benny halted. “Do we need Harriet?”
“Ah, no.” Again his voice sobered. “As I said earlier, I now remember all too well. Have patience, cara mia, and I will tell my tale. But let us keep walking, so you do not fall asleep again.”
* * * *
Augie told her about growing up in a small village within the vast Campania region of southern Italy, a happy boy who never dreamed of living anywhere else. Then came the Great War and harder times. He had been a child, but he remembered family and friends leaving their homes to travel across the sea—to America, where the streets were paved with gold. By the time he finally made the trip, he was a man of twenty, a husband and father, unhappy in the arrangement made for him before he took his first steps. When the opportunity to join an uncle overseas came, he took it.
“My wife, Carmen, I was happy to leave. If you could see me now, you would know I give the maloik’ when I say her name. Nasty woman. But she loved our little Flora. At least, in this, I have no fear.”
“What did you do when you got here?”
“Construction, like many Italians.” He chuckled. “The country was still growing then. I took what work came my way, and sent every spare penny back home. After the Crash, it became harder and harder to send anything home. I grew thin in those days. My uncle and I lived with four other men in a tenement apartment meant for two. It was during this time Carmen decided I was good for nothing and invented my death so she could marry again.”
“That must have hurt.”
“It was a relief,” he said. “My poor little Flora. I abandoned my child and it was a relief to know I would no longer need to send money I did not have. What sort of man does this?”
“But she didn’t know that. She thought you died in America.”
“This does not lessen my guilt.”
Benny suppressed the urge to face him. It was strange, talking to someone without looking at him, seeing his facial expressions, his hand gestures. She imagined them, instead. And him. “Is this the more part?”
“It is.”
“Worse than bigamy and abandoning a child?”
“You make it sound so sordid.”
“Is it?”
“I suppose it is a matter of opinion, of course. But for me? Yes. Perhaps you should sit on the bench, right there.”
“I’m okay walking.”
“It might take a while to tell.”
“You’re stalling.”
Birdsong. Footsteps. Traffic beyond the cemetery.
“Yes. I am. All right, Benedetta. I shall hope you will still help me after I’ve confessed my ultimate shame, for Flora’s sake if not mine. You see, I found my daughter in Brooklyn. It was 1955...”
Augie told Benny of being discovered by an old friend from Italy, while in Yonkers on a job. He had become an accomplished builder by then. Word of mouth among paesan’ sent him to New York often during the milder months.
“It was inevitable,” Augie said, “being discovered alive and well in America. So many came from the Old Country, especially after the war. They mostly ended up in New York or New Jersey, working in construction of some kind.”
President Roosevelt’s New Deal provided hope as well as work. By the 1950s, Italian immigrants already there a decade or more were well established in the trades. Augie proved to his wife’s pretentious family that a man with an accent wasn’t a lesser being, but a man who could provide and provide well for his family, without their money or influence.
“They did not like me when I swept their daughter off her feet.” Augie chuckled. “They forbid her to see me, then tried to stop our marriage. I was not only foreign, I was a Catholic. A heathen as far as they were concerned. But my Katherine, she was not like them. I could not have loved her if she was. She threatened to run away and never see them again, live in New York with all the miscreants. I did not know what the word meant, but I knew it was something awful, because her mother wept and her father relented. They even gave us property as a wedding gift. We both knew it was so Katherine would stay in Bitterly. It was okay. Neither of us really wanted to leave.”
Augie’s old friend told him of the family left behind in Italy who believed him dead, of his brothers forced to fight in the war. Only one of the three survived and, as far as he knew, still lived in the village in Campania. Carmen—her name accompanied by maloik’—also died during the war, the fate of too many women left to starve in the countryside, including Augie’s mother. Flora would have starved as well if the old man Carmen married had not insisted on sending her, at the start of the war, to family he had in America. He, himself, only barely survived. He joined his beloved daughter—never stepdaughter—Flora when the war was over. By then, she had married, a good Italian boy who adored her. The last time his friend saw her, she had two little girls and another baby on the way. And though he had not been to their restaurant, On the Fire, in a while, as far as Augie’s friend knew, they were still in Brooklyn.
“He told me she was very beautiful,” Augie said. “For all her faults, I must admit that Carmen was as well. I did not give myself time to change my mind. I swore my friend to secrecy, got on a train and went to Brooklyn.
“It was an easy thing to find the restaurant. A very popular place. Meals wer
e served family style, just like at home. The menu was whatever was cooking on the fire that day. My Flora cooked. Her husband, Anthony, played host. The children and, eventually, grandchildren served. Even the old man she called Papa had a job pouring wine he made himself. The moment I walked in the door, I was surrounded by family.
“I am not embarrassed to say I wept, Benedetta. Anthony came to me as if he knew, and in a way he did. I told him I had not felt home in many, many years. He said every paesan’ who came had the same reaction when they first stepped through the door. A good man, my son-in-law. Kind and generous. My granddaughters brought platters of rabbit and vegetables and roasted potatoes. I ate my daughter’s food and it was like eating my mama’s again. Katherine, she never was a very good cook, but my Flora? A genius in the kitchen. Anthony insisted she come out of the kitchen and meet the new paesan’. I saw for myself her great beauty. It was like looking at Carmen on our wedding day, when I knew only what my eyes showed me and not what was to come.”
“Was she really that bad?” Benny asked. “Or do you remember it worse, do you think?”
“She hit me,” Augie said. “All the time. With a wooden spoon. She would lie in wait for me when I came home from work and knock me about the head, my back, my legs. Whatever she could reach as I ran from her. I believe she wanted me to hit her back, to give her reason to leave. She was an angry woman, Carmen was. Perhaps with reason. It was not an easy thing, being a daughter in so poor a village. She was given away, to me, when she was an infant. I wondered, had she been given a choice, if she might have loved me. Once she threw a brick through the window as I was coming up the steps and I knew then she never would, and for all her beauty and good cooking, I could not love a woman who hated me so much no matter how hard I tried. She was pregnant at the time, and Catholics were not permitted to divorce. There was no way out. At least, I believed there wasn’t.”
Augie fell silent. Benny continued walking, hoping he was still with her. She thought she could feel his presence, but whether it was him or his story causing goosebumps to rise, she wasn’t certain until he spoke again. “My daughter kissed both my cheeks before I left. She let me hold her little son, a boy she named Alessandro Augusto after the father who raised her, and the one she had lost. I should have told her then. I should have taken her into my arms and begged her forgiveness. But I was a coward, Benedetta. She had such a happy life. A good life. The man who raised her had been devoted and loving. Who was I to step in and claim what was rightfully his?”
“That was a tremendous sacrifice, Augie,” Benny consoled. “You did a noble thing.”
“Perhaps if I was not also afraid to lose my own happy life in Bitterly, I might have allowed myself to believe this was true at the core. But I kept silent for myself, as much as I did for Flora. I was afraid I would lose Katherine, my children, the kind regards of her family I fought so hard to gain. I feared more than I loved, Benedetta. That is a great sin.”
“Did you ever go back?” Benny asked. “To the restaurant?”
“Many times. Many times. Each time, I was greeted as an old friend. Once, when I went back after two years away, I learned the old man, Sandro, died. I could have told her then. When my in-laws died, I could have told her. When my children were grown, when Katherine died, so many times I could have told her. The more years that passed, the more impossible it became. Then it was too late. And now I am here.”
“Oh, Augie.” Benny wished to turn and hug him, to let him know with more than just words that her heart ached for his past. He was there, in her periphery. Just a blur. And a presence accompanied by the distinct sensation of being watched.
“Was that an, ‘Oh, Augie, of course I will help you,’ or an, ‘Oh, Augie, you miscreant. Why would you ever think you deserved assistance?’ Tell me, Benedetta, please.”
“The first one.”
Benny felt his relief as a physical thing. Breath on her neck. Electrical currents racing over her skin. She rubbed at her arms but the sensation remained.
“You’ve been dead a long time,” she reminded him. “I doubt the restaurant is still there.”
“But it will be remembered,” Augie said. “Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.”
“I know Bensonhurst. Kind of. I mean, I’ve been there. My mother’s family is from there, originally. It’s still very Italian.”
“Ah, perhaps your mother remembers On the Fire. Or a relative will. It is a place to—”
“Benny!” Charlie’s shout spun Benny to his voice, and there was Augie. No indistinct blur, but a spectral glow with features aghast and flickering. As if a gigantic hand grabbed her, four fingers clung, stretching, grasping, and losing purchase.
Sound crackled between her ears. Benny wobbled.
Augie was sucked away like a spider in the vacuum.
And silence.
Benny shook her head clear. Part of her saw Charlie coming her way, baby Valentine in his arms. Another part saw Augie swirling in a vortex back to the bottom of the pool.
“Augie?” she whispered. “Are you there? Augie?”
No answer. No presence Benny could even pretend to sense. Charlie was saying something, handing her the baby. Benny spoke words, later hoped she made no promises she wouldn’t keep. The next thing she became fully aware of was riding slowly through the cemetery, taking the circuit twice. And though she tried first Henny’s grave, then Augie’s, he did not reappear.
* * * *
“You’re a fool, August. Worse than a fool.”
“How can I be worse than a fool?”
“You let her see you.”
“I have never been so exhausted.”
“Of course you are. You almost went out like a candle.”
“Is that possible?”
“Sure it is. Seen it happen in my time.”
“What happens, Harriet? To those who go out like candles?”
“Nothing good, Augie. Nothing good.”
Chapter 13
She Murmurs Sleep
Benny chewed slowly. Her thoughts, as they had been these last days, on Augie. She went to the cemetery every day after work. Three days, and still no sign of him. Not even a whisper inside her head.
“I didn’t mean to,” she told Harriet one day, while tending her garden. “It was a reflex. If he can’t come back because of me, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
No reassuring pat on the shoulder. No presence or glow in her periphery. Just the silence of a cemetery where even ghosts kept to themselves. Her only consolation was, maybe, Harriet might be able to let Augie know she would do whatever she could to help him keep the promise he made to his daughter.
On this task, Benny had more success. A quick internet search showed her On the Fire still existed in Brooklyn. The proprietor was Tina Giadetti. The delicious-looking menu appeared a bit too extensive to still offer only whatever was on the fire, yet the black-and-white portrait embellishing the online menu and every page of the website was of a small, extraordinarily beautiful woman, her cheek pressed to that of a smiling, elderly man.
In the days since Augie’s confession, Benny gathered information about the establishment itself, almost nothing on the people behind it. She had no idea what Flora’s married name was, or if she’d taken her stepfather’s name when her mother remarried. The name Fiore got way too many hits for her marginal internet skills, and calls to the restaurant were answered by staff that, wisely, would give out no personal information. She would have to go to Brooklyn herself, just as Augie had done all those years ago, and see what she could find firsthand.
Benny finished the pastafazool in her bowl and set it empty into the sink. Gone was the queasiness, as well as the heartburn. Her appetite lately was the stuff of legend, if one’s goal was to win an eating contest. Her mother had eyed her with wary pleasure as she filled her second bowl.
“Thanks, Ma,” she said. “Delicious, as always.”
“Thank you, sweetheart.” Clarice ba
rely looked up from the pot she scrubbed. “You going upstairs?”
The hopeful tone in her mother’s voice didn’t escape Benny’s notice. “Not unless you want me to make tea while you finish up.”
“If you want. Sure. I won’t be much longer.”
She hadn’t missed the hopeful tone, and neither did she miss the quickly quelled smile flash on her mother’s lips. Benny put the kettle on, and took two mugs out of the cabinet. Irish breakfast tea for her mother, raspberry for her. Waiting for the water to boil, she leaned against the counter while Clarice tidied the kitchen.
Even as kids in need of chores to earn allowance, she and her brothers never got kitchen duties. This was her mother’s domain, and she guarded it zealously. Filling the dishwasher, wiping down the counters, putting every pot and pan back into the right place was her religion. Aside from the occasional goodie-baking, cooking of any kind was a forbidden sacrilege. Food was her mother’s medium, and she an artist of great skill and exacting temperament. Benny used to think her mother had some kind of disorder. In the course of her adult years, she came to understand it was pride. The kitchen belonged to Clarice Irene Grady, end of story.
The kettle whistled. Clarice wiped the last counter. Benny poured the tea, handed one to her mother and headed out to the swing. Sunset spread its last rays from behind the mountains, the trees. The day had been mild, and the evening was on the chilly side. Benny wished for her hoodie, but was too lazy to go upstairs and get it. Bats swooped at the rising insects. The mosquitos had already gotten her twice. Slapping at the spot, she told her mother, “I’m not sure how long I’m going to be able to stay out. The bugs are ridiculous.”
“I have spray.” Clarice held up the can, her finger on the button. Benny’s hands shot up.
“No. Thanks. I can’t stand the smell.”
“Don’t be silly. Would you rather be bitten? West Nile and all.” Clarice moved closer with the insect repellant.
Benny leapt out of the swing, nearly spilling her tea. “I said no!”
“Goodness, Benny. No need to be sassy about it. Fine. Get bitten.”
Dreaming August Page 11
