Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  “I want her close, too, Al. I hurt for her in ways I didn’t know were possible. Let’s give it time. Look how much more often she’s with us. She’s not keeping us at arm’s length like before. If it makes sense for her to stay in the suburbs, let her be.”

  Toni was the first one on either side of our family to get a divorce. She wouldn’t be the only one, but in 1980 it was still cause for shame and disapproval. People who didn’t know what they were talking about and who had no business saying anything saw fit to criticize my daughter. Someone even had the nerve to suggest that Toni was at fault.

  “Who’d walk away from his children unless he thought they weren’t his?” That was one of the outrageous comments that got back to me. Of course, nobody dared say anything like that to my face. But the phone lines were humming the minute after Toni told my niece Annette, the cousin she was closest to. Naturally Annette told her mother, my sister Ida. By the time word got to Bella in Albany, I was bracing myself for the questions and advice.

  “Is she going to get an annulment? Tell her to talk to the priest. If she doesn’t, she’ll be cut off from the Church. How’s she going to raise those children if she can’t receive communion?”

  I didn’t bother to tell my sister that Toni probably hadn’t taken communion in years, and that I didn’t think a little wafer would make any difference in how well she brought up her kids. She was already doing a fantastic job.

  I have to admit the idea of divorce was unthinkable to me, too—until it happened to my own. You see the world changing all around you but you don’t believe it’ll reach in and grab your family. I used to think that people who couldn’t keep their marriages together were weak, quitters, selfish. But after what I saw in my daughter’s house and how she struggled to make peace with her situation, I began to understand why, for some families, it’s the only choice.

  Accepting Toni’s divorce, as painful as it was, made me realize that sometimes the ideas we’ve believed for a lifetime get shaken up and tossed in the air—like clowns on one of those round nets at Ringling Brothers. When those ideas come back down, they’re slightly lopsided.

  I thought I’d made enough adjustments in what I expected to see in my children’s lives. The little things, like Manny’s taste in music or the length of his hair—a ponytail! Let me tell you, Al was not happy. The bigger things, like Mike’s lack of a girlfriend. But nothing prepared me for the blow that seemed to come out of nowhere one day in June 1981.

  I never go to Beacon Hill. My friends don’t live there. The stores on Charles Street charge prices that might impress the people who shop there, the kind of people who like to carry around the fancy shopping bags proclaiming that they’re rich enough to afford the baubles inside the bags. But on this particular day I was down there to pick up a small painting Toni had taken to be framed at Boston Art & Framing. I didn’t know it was a parade route. Lots of people were milling around on the sidewalk and, in spite of gray clouds that were spitting rain now and then, people in apartments and offices on the upper floors had their windows open and were looking up the street. I got caught in the press of people and couldn’t make it across, so I waited along with everyone else.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the woman next to me.

  “Gay Pride Parade,” she said, as if I were an idiot. That’s what I mean about Beacon Hill. Am I somehow stupid because I live on the other side of the expressway? Do I have Italian from the North End tattooed on my forehead?

  I inched my way to the curb, curious to see why the parade was attracting so much attention. I could hear the strains of music approaching and then a wave of applause from the onlookers lined up along Charles Street. Men and women passed by in lavender T-shirts and carrying banners—Harvard, BU, UMass were the ones I could read. They didn’t all look like college kids, though. Some were older. Behind them came more groups, some without signs. They didn’t seem to mind the rain; they were waving and dancing to the beat of the music coming over a loudspeaker on a van. And then my heart stopped.

  Approaching the corner, in the middle of a small group, was Michael. Next to him was Graham Bennett, and they had their arms around each other. He was smiling.

  I slipped back into the crowd and almost dropped the package with Toni’s painting. You think you know your children, understand their heart’s desires.

  I walked slowly back home, the sounds of the music and the cheering from the parade growing fainter as I put more distance between myself and Charles Street. I tried to figure out how I’d missed that Mike was gay. Maybe he wasn’t, I told myself. Maybe he was just marching to support gay people, the way he’d protested for civil rights when he was at Holy Cross. But I reminded myself that he’d never been serious about a girl. Other than that, he didn’t fit the idea I’d always had of gay men.

  I didn’t consider myself a naive woman. I read the Globe; I went to the movies. I knew there was something called a “gay subculture,” especially in cities. I just never imagined that my son was part of it.

  I didn’t really know what to do with what I’d learned about Mike. He’d been keeping it a secret from us. Did he think we wouldn’t understand? Did he think we’d be angry with him for not meeting our expectations?

  My heart ached with the knowledge. I knew it couldn’t be easy for him to be a gay man in our neighborhood. There’s always been too much emphasis on being a “tough guy” in the North End. No wonder he’d spent so much time at the bars on the waterfront that attracted an outside crowd of more sophisticated young people. I’d assumed it was because he was more educated than a lot of the boys he grew up with. The ones who did well had become cops and firemen. The ones who didn’t went in the other direction. He didn’t have much in common with either group.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Al or Mike what I’d seen on Charles Street. How many secrets do mothers hold in their hearts? I remember Mama telling me she never stopped worrying about us, even after we were adults.

  “Especially after you were adults,” she said. “The hurts when you were small were easy to fix. When you grew up, I couldn’t fix anymore.”

  I thought I was spiraling into despair. A daughter abandoned with three children; a son leading a double life. I felt betrayed by motherhood. I wanted to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head. I wanted to blame somebody and call curses down on them. But then I remembered the last time I’d felt like this. I had hidden in the stupor of pain and forgetfulness after Al Jr. was killed in Vietnam.

  The next day, I drove out to the cemetery. I spent about an hour weeding and cleaning up in front of Al Jr.’s headstone and I planted an azalea bush, a purple one. By the time I was done, sweat was running down my forehead and my fingernails were caked with dirt. I sat back on my heels and cried.

  And I said to myself, Toni and Mike are alive. Toni’s children may not have a father, but they have a loving mother and grandparents and uncles who adore them.

  I picked myself up and went home.

  I didn’t ask Mike about the parade. I decided when he was ready, he would tell us. In the meantime, I welcomed Graham like another son and stopped pressing Mike to find a girlfriend and get married. As well as I could, I started preparing Al so that he’d be ready to hear what Mike had to say. I began by telling him about my trip to the cemetery and the peace I found there, grateful for what we had in Mike and Toni and Manny and the grandchildren.

  And I let Toni take her time figuring out what was best for her family.

  TONI

  1980–98

  Safety

  I GAVE UP TRYING to live on my own with my kids after my apartment was broken into. I walked into the front hall with six-month-old Vanessa asleep in her car seat. The boys, thank God, were at school.

  I heard clattering at the back of the house and thought one of the neighborhood cats or, worse, one of the brats from upstairs had somehow gotten into the pantry.

  “Hey!” I yelled and marched over there i
n a fury to chase away the nuisance.

  But as I moved through the dining room into the kitchen, my eye caught the disarray. The drawers of the built-in china cabinet were pulled open and the Venetian lace tablecloths I’d received as wedding presents and never used were strewn about the floor. The glass door above the drawers hung ajar, swinging gently on its hinges as if someone had just pulled it open.

  I was still furious, thinking the kids had done more mischief than I’d imagined they would dare. When I got to the kitchen and saw that my bedroom door was open I thought they’d hidden in there. In an instant of recognition, though, coupled with a sickening sensation in my stomach, I realized it couldn’t have been cats or kids. The contents of all my drawers had been dumped on the bed. My jewelry box was wide-open and empty. The pillowcase had been stripped from one of the pillows and was missing. Like the teenagers in the neighborhood who marched around on Halloween with pillowcases as their trick-or-treat bags, the intruder had taken one of mine and filled it with everything valuable in my crummy apartment.

  It made me want to throw up. Some stranger’s hands going through my underwear, fingering the pieces of jewelry my ex-husband, Bobby, had given me, back when he was still in love with me. Even my diaphragm case had been opened.

  I turned from the chaos and saw where the door to the porch had been jimmied open. Still seething, I ran out onto the porch, but all I saw was the rustle of leaves on the lilac bush where the thief had probably jumped the fence.

  Vanessa started to whimper.

  I picked her up and dialed 9-1-1. Then I called my brother Mike.

  “Don’t tell Mom and Daddy yet. But I need somebody here tonight. I don’t want to be alone and I don’t want to scare the kids. Can you come?”

  I knew I could turn to Mike. We’d always had each other’s back—he, the big brother who’d defended my independence when my parents thought I was defying them; I, the sympathetic and accepting listener when he revealed to me that he was gay. I knew it hadn’t been easy for him, growing up in a neighborhood like ours with its macho culture. I’d hurt for him, knowing how unhappy he was at not being able to be himself. But then he met Graham Bennett, and their relationship evolved from colleagues turning out a hip magazine to life partners who loved and cared deeply about each other. Although they hadn’t come out to my parents, Rose and Al treated Graham like another son. Both men were wonderful uncles to my kids.

  Having him with me that afternoon was a solace.

  When he arrived he found a board in the basement and nailed it across the back door. The police weren’t hopeful of tracking down the thief.

  “Probably some addict just grabbing enough easily fenced stuff to buy his next fix. You got insurance?”

  I pulled myself together and cleaned up the dining room, where the thief had emptied my silver chest. Everything was gone, including the baby spoons my three kids had received at their baptisms. I couldn’t deal with my room or even think of sleeping in my bed that night. The only thing I did was bundle up the sheets with my clothes piled in the middle and carry it to the washing machine in the basement.

  Mike met my boys, Joe and Ben, at school and told them we were going to Friendly’s for dinner. They ate their burgers and fries, then listened solemnly and wide-eyed as I told them what had happened.

  “Did the robber take my Transformers?” asked eight-year-old Joe.

  “No, honey. He didn’t touch any of the stuff in your room. He only wanted jewelry.”

  “Why would a robber want jewelry? He couldn’t wear it, could he?”

  “That would be pretty silly, wouldn’t it? No, he took it to sell so he could get money.”

  “Mommy, is he going to come back and take more stuff?” It was six-year-old Ben, who worried enough for us all.

  “No, Ben. He’s not coming back.”

  I answered him with conviction, keeping my voice calm and my eyes focused on his, willing myself to see his innocence and absolute trust in me instead of my pink bra dangling over the edge of my bed, my stockings spilled in a crumpled pile on the floor.

  I had to protect them from my fears as well as their own. It had been easy to sweep away the monsters under their beds, even after Bobby left me and the kids. He’d stopped taking his meds and decided he needed his freedom.

  When he left for Colorado, I felt only relief. I believed I could hold my family together. While Bobby was disintegrating in front of my eyes, it took all my strength, all my energy. After he was gone, I no longer had to take care of him and the kids. I wasn’t waiting up at night till three in the morning, listening for his car in the driveway or the phone call from the police telling me he’d driven into a tree. I didn’t have to bite my tongue to hold back the accusations and doubts that had already spilled into every crevice of our lives together. After he was gone, I took a deep breath, gathered my kids around me and promised to be their strength and protection.

  Now, faced with my shattered back door and equally shattered confidence, I faltered.

  “You know what?” I said to them to gain some time. “Let’s have a slumber party tonight! We’ll all sleep in the same room with our sleeping bags.”

  “Even Uncle Mike?” Joe looked at Mike hopefully.

  “Yeah, squirt. Even me.” Mike smiled at him.

  We made a big deal out of pulling mattresses onto the floor in the boys’ room and shaking out sleeping bags that had been rolled up in the closet since before Bobby left. He’d gotten excited about introducing the boys to the “wild” outdoors during one of his manic phases and ordered a pile of gear from L.L. Bean that, like many originally enticing objects, he quickly lost interest in. I had neither the time nor the desire to take the kids camping. I was a city girl, whose entire experience of nature growing up had been class trips to the Boston Public Garden.

  Joe and Ben whooped, jumping from one mattress to the next, as Vanessa watched, propped up in her infant seat, sucking on her binky.

  I finally got them settled enough to listen to a story and they crowded around me, sprawling across my lap, giddy with the novelty of sleeping on the floor. I read several chapters of The Chronicles of Narnia, not wanting to dispel the lulled mood that came over them as they listened. I was grateful they’d become lost in the story instead of caught up in remembering that an intruder had violated our home.

  Ben nodded off first, his head heavy and damp on my thigh. Joe asked for one more chapter and I acquiesced. He was asleep before I finished.

  I eased myself out from the tangle of their limbs and checked on Vanessa, asleep, as well—at least for a few more hours.

  Mike was in the living room, sipping a beer he’d found in the back of my fridge and watching TV.

  “Do you think you’re going to want to stay here—long-term, I mean?”

  I hadn’t really thought about it yet. I’d moved to the duplex in Arlington two months before, after I’d sold the Bedford house Bobby and I lived in for the seven years of our marriage. I’d never been comfortable there, a brand-new house in a suburban development with no sidewalks. But Bobby, a WASP from Indiana, had this vision of what home was supposed to be. I remember the first time he brought me to meet his widowed mother. It was for Thanksgiving in my last year of college. I was an art student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, studying printmaking. I’d met Bobby at a bar in Kenmore Square one night after a Red Sox game. He’d been at the game with a bunch of his buddies. I’d stopped for a beer after working late at the studio to finish a project. My cousin Annette worked as a bartender there and we often took the Green Line home together late at night.

  I had paint in my hair and was wearing one of Mike’s discarded work shirts, spattered with the inks and chemicals I used. Apparently Bobby found me intriguing and struck up a conversation with me at the bar, where I was listening to Annette complain about her mother, my mother’s sister Ida. He bought me another beer; we talked. There was no way I was going to leave with him that night, not with Annette watching
and ready to take whatever she saw straight back to the neighborhood. But I agreed to meet him for supper and a movie later in the week.

  We saw The African Queen at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square and afterward ate roast-beef sandwiches with Russian dressing at the Wursthaus. It always astounded me, this kitschy German restaurant, complete with leaded glass windows and flower boxes filled with geraniums to look like some Bavarian village inn, serving bratwurst and schnitzel, and it was owned by Italians.

  Bobby astounded me, too, back then. He was so American, so unhampered by the snarled web of family that seemed to enmesh me anywhere I went in Boston. He was exuberant, curious, full of boundless energy—and interested in me. I assumed his fascination with me had to do with what must have appeared to him as my exoticism. I was an artist, ethnic and urban. He was a six-foot-six blond engineer from a Midwestern suburb whose mother belonged to a garden club. But he continued to pursue me, and I was both flattered and curious myself. What I didn’t realize until later—much later—was that his exuberance and intense interest in me had more to do with the manic phase of his illness than it had to do with loving me. But as I said, that was later.

  When he invited me to Belle Arbor, Indiana, for Thanksgiving, I said yes. My mother, however, voiced her objections.

  “What do you mean you’re going to Indiana for Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is here, with the family, like always.”

  “He wants me to meet his family, Ma. Please let me go.”

  “When a man takes a woman to meet his family, it means something. He’s looking for their approval of someone he sees as more than a movie date. You ready for that?”

  “You read too much into things, Ma. He’s just doing what Americans do—invite guests for Thanksgiving.”