“Mom, it’s more than three years since Bobby left. Peter and I have spent two years learning about and loving each other, and we had four years before that, as well. I’m sure of him, Mom. He makes me happy. And I know I do the same for him.”
We held the reception at Paradiso. Faculty members from the Museum School with their funky hairstyles and shabby-chic clothes mingled with our Italian relatives—mine from the neighborhood and Peter’s from Rochester—in their beaded dresses and flashy sports jackets. My boys got their first suits for the wedding, and Vanessa was old enough to be a flower girl. My mother went overboard and got her a dress from Priscilla of Boston, the shop that created Grace Kelly’s wedding dress.
On my mother’s dresser was a photograph of her in Trinidad that had been there for as long as I could remember. In it, her back is to the camera, her arms outstretched touching the frame of the open doorway in which she’s standing, and her head is turned over her shoulder. She is wearing a Japanese kimono, embroidered in flowers.
“Where is the kimono now?” I asked her one afternoon before the wedding. “Do you still have it?”
She did, packed away with other mementos of Trinidad. It was exquisite—navy blue silk with a riot of color spilling down the back. I asked her if I could wear it for the wedding.
“Are you sure?” she asked, recalling that I’d worn her gown for my first wedding.
“This is something else, Mom. Daddy gave it to you, right?”
We agreed that a gift of love, like the kimono, could only be a good omen, and that is what I wore.
Manny created the menu. Because of the larger crowd than we normally fed at Thanksgiving, he decided to make rolled turkey breasts instead of roasting whole turkeys. He flattened the breasts and layered a mixture of sausage, cheese and eggs with fresh sage leaves and slices of mortadella, then rolled the breasts up and roasted them, basting them with white wine. We had the usual accompaniments of sweet potatoes, stuffed mushrooms and broccoli and cauliflower florets sautéed in olive oil with garlic and lemon peel.
Between courses Peter and I circled the room to greet our guests. He kept his hand on the small of my back, a point of connection that he didn’t break. It was a source of energy for me, propelling me, warming me, protecting me, as I stepped into the next stage of my life. One of the first things I did was let go of the Templeton name and take back Dante.
We decided to keep both our homes. Peter moved into my apartment when we married. It was large enough for all of us and didn’t disrupt the kids’ lives. We kept Peter’s loft on Union Wharf as a studio for both of us—a place to retreat and to work.
I kept filling sketchbooks and began turning my pen-and-ink interpretations into prints. I experimented with etchings and lithographs until I found a process that conveyed what I was trying to achieve. I held my first show as part of the faculty exhibition at the school.
I loved teaching at the Museum School. The atmosphere was so charged and the ideas so explosive that I was continually challenged by my students about the definition of art. Peter and I started a tradition of dinners at our home for our students; they often evolved into spirited debates that went on into the early hours of the morning.
Peter embraced my children and gave them time to accept him as their stepfather. We tried to have another child, but it wasn’t meant to be. Instead, we became surrogate parents to our students and the friends of our children who gravitated to our home.
After the exhibition of my work at the faculty show, I was invited to participate in shows at Smith College and Brandeis. A publisher of art books saw my work at the Smith gallery and approached me to do a collection of prints entitled “Faces of the North End.”
In fifteen years of marriage, the passion that had brought us together that first cold winter night continued to burn. We never grew tired of each other or bored in bed. We were bound together, our connection forged in the soul-baring heat of our lovemaking.
We weathered the challenges any marriage faces—the adolescent traumas of the children, the aging of our parents, upheaval at work. My worries that any of the children might inherit Bobby’s bipolar disorder faded as they reached adulthood.
We were content. When Vanessa graduated from high school and started her freshman year at Harvard, we had dinner alone and toasted each other. We thought we’d not only survived, but flourished. That we’d made it up the steep side of the mountain and had earned a glimpse from the summit. But we were wrong.
VANESSA
1998
Freshman
I GREW UP ABOVE my grandparents’ restaurant—Paradiso on Salem Street in the North End of Boston, the city’s Little Italy. My grandparents, Rose and Al Dante, live on the second floor of the four-story brick building; my mother and father, my two brothers and I on the third; and my uncle Mike on the fourth.
My earliest memories are redolent with the aroma of Grandma Rose’s gravy. Huge vats of her Neapolitan marinara bubbled softly on the back of the range in the restaurant kitchen. If I was hungry before dinner she tore off a chunk of crusty Campobasso bread full of air pockets and skimmed it across the top of the pot, where the pockets filled up with tomatoes and basil and garlic. She put the bread on a saucer and handed it to me.
“Mangia, sweetheart. But not too much or you won’t have room for macaroni later.”
When I was ten, I helped Grandma Rose fill the lidded bowls of grated Parmigiano on every table. When I was fourteen, I folded the napkins that came in every morning from the laundry. Grandma Rose didn’t believe in paper napkins. When I was sixteen, I waited on tables on the weekends.
My mother, Toni, is Paradiso’s weekend hostess. During the day she usually wears jeans and a Cape Cod sweatshirt picked up in Orleans during the two weeks in summer when the restaurant closes and we all go down the Cape to the same cottage we’ve rented since I was a baby. But in the evenings, when Paradiso opens for dinner, my mother puts on a black V-necked sequined sweater, a tight-fitting black skirt, high heels and makeup.
Watching my mother get dressed late every Friday afternoon was my first lesson in transformation. She might’ve been scrubbing the toilet or making my brother Joe sit at the kitchen table and do his algebra homework, but once she puts on those clothes, her mascara and her Estée Lauder #148 Hot Kiss lipstick and goes downstairs, she’s like an actress stepping out of a limousine onto the red carpet.
She’s the first impression people have when they walk into Paradiso. She greets everyone with a voice that flows over them and makes them feel like she’s been waiting all night for them to arrive and she saved the best table just for them.
I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
My mother was okay with my waitressing at Paradiso—after all, the whole family is involved in the business. But she wanted more for me and my brothers.
“You’re too smart to go to the nuns for high school,” she declared the summer before I went to eighth grade. High school was a whole year away, but everybody in the neighborhood went to Catholic high school when it was time.
“I want you to study for the entrance exam to Boston Latin,” she said. And that was that. I studied. I got in. While my girlfriends at St. John’s were buying their uniforms for Cathedral, I was at the library checking out books on the summer reading list. Chaucer. Milton. Emerson. Aristotle. Even Dante.
My grandfather Al liked to tell us how the family got its name when his father landed on Ellis Island from Calabria. His name was Bernardo Alighieri. The immigration clerk couldn’t pronounce or spell it.
“Like Dante!” my great-grandfather exclaimed in exasperation. And that’s what the clerk wrote down on his papers.
I did my summer reading sitting at a corner table in the restaurant before the dinner crowd showed up. Some people think my mother pushed me during high school, like I was her last hope. My two brothers, Ben and Joe, are five and seven years older than I am. Ben was a sophomore at Northeastern studying computer science when I started Boston
Latin. Joe had gone to Bunker Hill Community College, but stopped there. My mother’s uncle Carmine got him an apprenticeship in the electricians’ union and he’s happy enough.
But people who think it was my mother’s thwarted ambitions rather than my own that propelled me out of the North End would be wrong. It wasn’t just the gap in our ages that made me different from my brothers; we have different memories because of that gap.
Joe and Ben remember our biological father, for example, and I don’t. A month after I was born, Bobby Templeton quit his job, emptied his closet in our suburban raised ranch in Bedford and took off for Boulder, Colorado. Joe and Ben remember a daddy who occasionally played catch with them in a backyard that had a sandbox and a wading pool. But they also remember a household that was cast in the shadows of our father’s mental illness—or lack of moral compass, depending on which member of the family is describing it.
I have none of that. I don’t even remember the apartment in Arlington that my mother rented after she couldn’t afford to keep the house in Bedford. Where she tried to be independent and strong and hold our fragile family together.
My memories and my boundaries are tightly defined by the bricks and mortar of Salem Street, by the demands of a family restaurant, by the enveloping and, yeah, sometimes smothering love of my Italian family.
Going to Boston Latin, even though it was only across the city, blew open my world. Some people might think it didn’t lead me far. After all, I’m only across the river now in Cambridge. But let me tell you, Harvard Yard’s a world away from the North End.
It’s a little weird, being a freshman at Harvard when you’ve grown up in an enclave like the North End. It’s especially a disconnect because people don’t get that I’m Italian. Not only do I have Bobby’s quintessentially Middle-American last name, but I also have his blond hair and blue eyes. So all the private-school, country-club kids believe I’m one of them and don’t understand why I’m not flying to Jackson Hole or Saint Kitts for Thanksgiving break. And all the gritty, urban, ethnic kids who wear their heritage on their hard-working, rolled-up sleeves believe I’m some privileged legacy, with a long line of alumni in my family preceding me.
But frankly, I’m working too hard to worry about it. Boston Latin was a piece of cake compared to this. My mother was right: I’m a smart kid, but so is everybody else here. I hole up in Widener Library until it closes, my yellow highlighter furiously moving back and forth across the pages of my plant physiology textbook. I AP’ed out of bio, chem and American history, so I’m taking 200-level courses. Grandma Rose fusses that I don’t come home often enough.
“What could it hurt to get on the T and come for a good meal now and then, Vaness’?” she asked me when she’d called me one Sunday afternoon.
“Tell me when you’re coming and I’ll make your favorites—the ravioli with the porcini mushrooms and a torta Milanese with spinach and red peppers.” Rose accepted my being a vegetarian, unlike my brothers, whose idea of a balanced meal is a steak and a beer.
“I can’t, Grandma. I’ve got two papers due this week and a midterm. I’ll be home for Thanksgiving.”
“Okay, sweetheart. I’ll see if I can find that fake turkey you told me about. What’s it called again?”
“Tofurkey, Grandma. Hey, thanks. Gotta go—my study group’s meeting before supper. I’ll see you soon.”
“Vaness’, before you go. You know if you’ve got any friends that have nowhere to go for Thanksgiving, you invite them here, you understand?”
“Yeah, Grandma. Thanks. I’ll do that.”
I didn’t think about Thanksgiving again for another week. Too much to do, to worry about, like keeping my scholarship. When the Monday before Thanksgiving rolled around, I was in the dining hall with my dorm mates. I live in Canaday, an anomaly—architecturally speaking—in Harvard Yard. If you’re thinking ivy-covered, eighteenth-century, high ceilings and fireplaces in the common rooms, you’d be totally wrong. Canaday was built in the 1970s and, although it’s brick, that’s the only resemblance it has to anything else on this hallowed ground. It’s all sharp angles and flat roofs, with six separate pods, each possessing its own utilitarian entrance cluttered with bikes and an overflowing bulletin board. The floors alternate male-female, something my mother and I mutually agreed not to share with my grandparents. Mom was cool about it, though. I feel she’s come to terms with the ramifications of pushing me out of the nest at such a high altitude.
So I was at dinner in Annenberg Hall with the other girls on my floor—my roommate, Megana, who comes from Roslyn on Long Island, but whose parents are from Mumbai; Sonja, from Minnesota, who grew up in a town exactly like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon; Elise, from Savannah via Miss Porter’s School; Kelly, a hockey player from Buffalo; Naomi, from the Bronx High School of Science, another urban exam school, like Latin; Jessica, from Salt Lake City and the first Mormon I’d ever met; and Raquelle, from San Antonio, who had once regaled us with the extravagance of her Quinceañera. Harvard Dining Services, like every other institutional dining room in the Boston area, seemed to think that students needed more than one Thanksgiving dinner that week. Turkey with all the trimmings—sweet potatoes, gravy, corn, cranberry sauce—was arrayed on the steam tables of the cafeteria line. They had thoughtfully provided tofu burgers for us vegetarians.
The menu, of course, got us talking about the holiday—plans for trips home, families we missed or could live without. Everybody was babbling away except for Sonja, who seemed focused on her plate.
After the meal, walking back to the dorm, I caught up with her.
“Hey, are you heading back to PBSville on Wednesday?”
She shook her head. “I’m hanging out here. Don’t really have time to go back.” She didn’t seem to want to expand on the reasons.
I remembered Grandma Rose’s directive and considered asking Sonja to come home with me. I hesitated, surprised by my own ambivalence about opening a window into the life I’d left in the North End when I was trying to figure out my new life here at Harvard. I didn’t want to acknowledge that I was feeling slightly embarrassed by my family. There were just too many of them to control. But I also thought about how, despite their rough edges, it was hard to feel lonely or unloved in their midst. And Sonja looked truly adrift at the prospect of spending five long, empty days in the dorm. I pushed aside my reservations and plunged in.
“My grandmother has issued an open invitation to her Thanksgiving feast. She doesn’t believe in eating alone, no matter what the occasion. Why don’t you come across the river to Grandmother’s house with me? It’s not exactly through the woods, but I can promise you a meal better than you got tonight.”
She wavered for a minute, the Norwegian martyr—“Oh, no, I couldn’t trouble you. Just let me eat my bread and water here by myself”—trying to emerge. But then I told her it would be a favor to me if she came. It would put my family on their best behavior with a stranger at the table.
She said yes. I gave her the address, but told her I’d meet her at the Park Street T station if she wanted me to. She seemed grateful for that, not having ventured very far beyond the environs of Harvard Square in her three months.
I warned her. “My grandparents shut down Paradiso for the day and cook for the family. Um, that means there’ll be about forty people—aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws. Just so you don’t think it’s going to be a nuclear family event. It’s an ever-changing guest list that shows up at Paradiso on Thanksgiving.”
I didn’t want to frighten her away or overwhelm her. It probably would’ve been better for both of us if I’d said, Hey, I’ll stay here, too, and we can go eat Indian or Chinese and watch movies. But that would’ve been an impossible choice for me, incomprehensible to Grandma Rose and unacceptable to my mother. So Wednesday afternoon I packed up my knapsack, pulled on my Harvard sweatshirt and went back to the neighborhood.
Dangerous Games
PETER RICCI HAS BEEN the only father I’ve known. He
taught me how to roller-skate, suffered through my piano recitals and made me apologize to my mother when I was thirteen and the daughter from hell, slamming doors and yelling, “You’re ruining my life!” because she wouldn’t let me hang out at Waterfront Park after dark. He adores my mother and resides only a notch below my grandpa Al in the eyes of Grandma Rose.
“Peter is cut from the same cloth as my Al. He gives with his whole heart. Take my word for it, Vaness’. When it’s time for you to choose a man, compare him to your father to see if he measures up.”
In spite of everything Peter had done and been for me, in spite of how much I loved him, I found myself one dreary winter afternoon in Widener Library looking for Robert Templeton on the Internet. I was mildly curious. What becomes of a man who decides to reinvent himself, freed of familial responsibilities? What did he look like?
Any photos my mother had of the early years of her marriage to Bobby had been put away by the time I had memory. When I was sixteen I found their wedding album among some old boxes in the basement and had turned the stiff and yellowing pages in secret, trying to see in Bobby Templeton’s eyes some reflection of the demons that had driven him away from us. But he looked content, optimistic and a lot like me. Maybe that’s why I let the seed grow inside my brain, why I allowed myself to wonder where he was, what had become of him.
Although Grandma Rose has preferred to wipe his existence from our family history, my mother has been relatively comfortable with it, considering. Her attitude is, “Hey, this happened and it sucked. We can let it eat away at us, or we can thumb our nose at it and move on.” Until my other grandmother, Hazel, passed away, my mother kept in touch with her. She always ordered extra copies of our school pictures and had us make cards for her on Mother’s Day and her birthday.
My brothers wrote Bobby Templeton off a long time ago, especially Joe, who seems to have absorbed my grandmother’s philosophy of “He’s dead to me.” Ben is more closed about his internal life. If he cares at all about who Bobby Templeton is, he doesn’t share it with any of us.
Across the Table Page 22
