Across the Table
Page 48
But that Christmas Eve we were still together, talking over one another, raising glasses of pinot noir, my cousins and I keeping our kids from climbing the walls in anticipation of Santa Claus, our husbands—most of them not Italian—trying to avoid the baccala and octopus. And over it all presided Giulia at the head of the table, her oldest son—my father Paolino—and her youngest son, Sal, on either side of her. Three of her children had already passed away before her, and Mariangela had moved to Florida. Only her sons, Caterina, and the baby of the family, my aunt Elena, were still there, held together, as we all were, by the threads that bound us to Giulia.
During the following winter, a bitterly cold January and February filled with record snowstorms, Giulia began to deteriorate. She rarely left the house, and Caterina moved in to take care of her. Once a month I drove up from Jersey to spend a Saturday afternoon with her, stopping first at Artuso’s bakery to pick up a cannoli. We sat at the little table in the kitchen to drink our espresso and then she led me into the living room, pushing a walker ahead of her.
The family had ordered a hospital bed and had it set up in the living room so she didn’t have to climb the stairs anymore, but she still got up every day, dressed and held court with whoever stopped by to visit her.
Our ritual was the same every time I came. She sat in her chair in the corner, near the votive candles she’d moved down from her dresser in the bedroom. The Metropolitan Opera broadcast played softly on the radio. I sat in front of her as she closed her eyes and I reached up and began to circle her brow.
She was the only one I dared touch in that way, the only one who’d heard me recite the ancient incantations that had sprung from my lips that night in the hospital in Avellino. I didn’t trust that what happened when I touched her was anything more than a granddaughter comforting a grandmother. I didn’t think it was anything I was doing. It seemed only to be Giulia placing her trust in me and feeling better simply because I was there.
I remember once watching a movie about a young woman who marries into a California wine family with an incredibly powerful matriarch who becomes the young woman’s nemesis. Ultimately, the young wife triumphs, replacing the matriarch, but in doing so she takes on a striking resemblance to the older woman, even wearing her long, flowing hair in the severe wrapped braids that had been the matriarch’s signature. It was as if the older woman had inhabited her.
I wasn’t about to start wearing my hair in the style Giulia had favored ever since I’d known her. In a photo taken on my first birthday, Giulia hovers over me as I blow out the candle, her wavy hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck. In fact, true to my baby boomer quest for perpetual youth, I still wore my hair the same way I’d worn it in my high-school yearbook photo. No, I had no intention of imitating my grandmother’s looks. But I was also uncomfortable taking on this most mysterious aspect of her life. Like my great-grandmother, who’d dismissed the spells of Giuseppina as so much mumbo jumbo, I did not believe that Giulia’s power had anything to do with me.
I wasn’t with Giulia when she died. It was 8:00 p.m. on a Thursday night in early August when my mother called me. I had just read my four-year-old twins, David and Matthew, their nightly chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Joshua, my ten-year-old, was trying to teach my husband, Andrew, how to play Zelda on his new Nintendo, and my only daughter, Julia, was engrossed in dressing the Barbie doll my mother had insisted on giving her for her sixth birthday.
“It didn’t do you any harm, so I see no reason why I can’t give her one, too,” she’d told me over my objections in May.
I sat alone with the news of my grandmother’s death, perched at the top of the stairs, remembering the lines of her face under my fingertips.
We buried Giulia in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in New Rochelle, with Paolo and the two babies she had lost, Carmine and Emilia. The grave is far in the back, against a crumbling wall covered with ivy on the northern edge of the cemetery. The plot, though remote, had been well tended. My father told me that after Salvatore had died, Giulia had arranged for him to be buried in Connecticut with his first wife, the mother of Patsy and Nicky and Mariangela. Giulia made annual visits to that grave but, in her second widowhood, it was to Paolo’s grave she returned almost monthly, restoring it from its overgrown and forgotten condition to a neat patch of grass and flowers. She had left instructions with my father and Caterina that it was there she wished to be buried.
The dates on the headstone tell a striking story. Giulia outlived Paolo by seventy years. Carved under their names is a phrase I recognized from his letters:
Per la vita. For life.
That was twenty years ago. Although I resisted taking on Giulia’s persona and her gift for healing in those last months of her life, I found I could not escape the connection that had been forged between us in our lives together. I look back now and see Giulia’s imprint.
Like my grandmother, I had two husbands. Although the first one didn’t die as my grandfather Paolo had, like Paolo, Jack Peyton left me with an infant and disappeared quite emphatically and finally from our lives. He might as well have been dead.
And like Giulia, I turned my culinary skills into a business, opening a catering company to support Joshua and myself. I had absorbed the drive and seriousness of purpose Giulia had called upon to survive the loss and hardship in her life, and I became as successful a businesswoman as she’d been.
When I met Andrew Dedrick, we were both trying to rebuild our lives after difficult divorces and were as tentative and cautious of new love as Giulia and Salvatore had been in their courtship. But we plunged ahead nevertheless and created a family, bringing three more children into the world—Julia, Matthew and David—to join Joshua.
Although he didn’t play the accordion, Andrew brought music into my life in other ways. He filled our home with his eclectic collection of Mozart and Dylan and later, Loreena McKennitt and Jesse Cook and obscure singers from remote corners of the world whose music he’d heard on equally obscure NPR broadcasts. He encouraged Joshua to play the violin and go on to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And he enthusiastically endured the twins’ experimentation with drums and electric guitars. A rock band performed in our family room throughout their years in high school, with Andrew ever at the ready to haul equipment to a gig on a Saturday night.
Although I resisted taking on Giulia’s mantle as a healer, I learned something about the power within myself when David and Matthew were born early and spent the first weeks of their lives hovering precariously between life and death, health and impairment, in a state-of-the-art neonatal intensive-care unit. I sat with them every day between their Isolettes, holding one or the other in my arms, the wires attached to their many monitors draped across my lap. The NICU nurse on duty drew my attention to the monitors one afternoon. The irregularities in their heartbeats and the unevenness in their respiration disappeared as I stroked and murmured to them. When they were released a month after their births, the pediatrician told me, “I’m sending home two normal, healthy babies, and I’m not entirely sure how that happened.”
The last echo of Giulia that emerged in my life came about when Andrew taught me how to dance the tango. In his arms I shed one layer of my grandmother’s influence—my reserve—to discover another. Her passion for dancing.
Now, when the children return home at Christmas, after we’ve finished decorating the tree and before we sit down to the feast of the seven fishes, they insist on a tango. Joshua plays a haunting and vibrant tune on his violin, and Andrew and I glide across the floor as our children watch.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-5621-1
ACROSS THE TABLE
Copyright © 2010 by Harlequin Books S.A.
The publisher acknowledges the copyright holder of the individual works as follows:
ACROSS THE TABLE
Copyright © 2010 by Linda Cardillo
DANCING ON SUNDAY AFTERNOONS
Copyright © 2007 by Linda Cardillo
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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