When the World Was Young

by Tony Romano

  In the midst of her praying, a glimmer of hope began to rise in her. She thought suddenly of cupping her breast to Benito’s lips and could almost feel his warm mouth pulsating, greedily sucking in her milk. She thought of his brown eyes peering over the top of a bottle as he swallowed and swallowed, one satisfying gulp after another. She hadn’t tried hard enough. That was all. She would force-feed him. Whatever it took. She was his mother. He would eat for his mother. When you eat, you never die, her father used to tell her. Those words had always kept her safe.

  The towel. The towel had been less bloody the second time. The hard cough had caused the blood. Nothing else. Something had ruptured while he coughed. But the coughing had stopped now and the healing had already begun. Children were resilient. If mothers paralyzed themselves with worry over every ailment—The doctor should have arrived by now. She leaned into the window well and touched the screen with the ends of her fingers. If she pushed hard enough the wooden-framed screen would fall to the bushes below. She couldn’t count the number of times Anthony and Alfredo had pushed out the screen as they jockeyed for a better view of the street. A lifetime ago. She’d have to scold them each time. You’ll fall out, she told them. You’ll fall.

  Distant street noises filtered in through the window. Middle-of-the-night noises. The beginning of birdsong. A bus clanking along somewhere. Where did people go at three in the morning?

  Angela Rosa pushed herself up and marched to the kitchen for a bottle, warming it in a pot of water. Something like elation filled her. Everything would be all right, she kept repeating, thinking of feeding her son. She tilted the bottle and let a drop fall to her wrist and licked it clean. The doctor would arrive in minutes, and when he saw Benito sucking at his bottle, he’d wonder why he was called in the middle of the night. Crazy woman, he’d think. She didn’t care. He could think what he pleased.

  She marched back to the living room and found Victoria sobbing. A torrent of shrill, muffled cries shook out from her. She clutched onto Benito, her body heaving with each sigh. Angela Rosa gently pried her baby from her daughter’s arms and placed him over her shoulder. The bottle fell and rolled to the crease between two cushions. Victoria picked up the bottle and, with both hands, brought it to her own cheek, sobbing uncontrollably now, curling into herself.

  Angela Rosa turned away. She held tightly to her son and walked the length of the apartment, an audible ache rumbling from her chest. She strained to feel the warmth of her baby’s breath on her neck, she strained to feel his breath, but felt only her own arms go cold and a trembling in her legs. She thought she might collapse. If she could breathe she would wail. She would wail until the entire block awoke. But no, not yet. She wouldn’t allow that quite yet. She held on. Hoping now that the firm taps on the door would never come.

  What could he possibly say to his son? What lessons could he impart? Sew your dick to your pants? That was something. A lesson Agostino himself had never heeded. Not until it was well past too late. Besides, why should Santo listen to him now? Here he was approaching fifty, still groundless, still making seventeen-year-old blunders. At seventeen, Agostino thought, a young man had the energy to correct his mistakes. A young man had the advantage of inexperience. He could call himself a stupid, reckless prick. At one time Agostino had even taken a measure of pride in acting recklessly. But a reckless middle-aged man was pathetic.

  If he only knew why Santo needed to dig into his private affairs, then he might know what to say to his son. He could probably make up a story about the old woman at the feast and hope Santo wouldn’t ask about the rest. If Santo persisted, well…Her name is unimportant, my son. What’s important is she came to me. She was needy. And I have weakness. What I did was foolish, but the old woman’s claims of blood ties…the old woman is even more foolish.

  Agostino recalled the first time he suspected his own father of straying. He was about Santo’s age and couldn’t imagine his father being intimate even with his mother, let alone another woman. While sitting in Capallano’s tailor shop one day, Agostino spotted his father stepping out from Elena’s bakery without so much as a loaf of bread in his hands. His father glanced up and down the cobblestoned street and gave his shirt one last tuck before stepping from the entryway. Son of a bitch, Agostino thought. What stuck with Agostino was his father’s skittish gaze, his dark face that otherwise rarely revealed any emotion.

  She came to me, Santo. Do you understand? How many other men did she go to? Son of a bitch, she came to me. Santo wouldn’t listen. Maybe he simply wanted to meet the bastard boy. Little Benito was gone, and Santo wanted to embrace this boy who could or could not be his brother. Agostino had considered seeking out the boy himself. How could he not? There were moments when he shut his eyes and tried to recall the boy in the stroller at the feast, but no images came to him. Which was just as well. If he had a clear picture of the boy’s thick hair or round Peccatori face, he probably couldn’t keep himself away as he intended. The boy would be just as much a child of his as the others. Agostino worked instead on convincing himself that the boy was not his. Another child out there was an unthinkable burden.

  Just after one o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, Agostino decided he wanted to touch his wife. They had gone too long, barely brushing up against each other as they passed in the apartment’s narrow spaces. When he brought home the television last week, he had squeezed her shoulder as she sat dazed in front of the shadowy images flickering on the screen. With his thumb and finger he lightly massaged the soft curves at the back of her neck. But that was all. She hadn’t taken his hand and pressed it into her shoulder as she could have. She hadn’t turned or leaned into him. She just sat there at the end of the couch, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap as if she were waiting for the bus. And now Agostino ached for more.

  He found her sitting on their bed, folding laundry, the volume on the radio turned low to a station that played instrumental versions of popular tunes. Supermarket music, Agostino called it. Never Sinatra. As he moved toward her, he longed to hear her mock reprimand—Did the store burn down? What’s wrong with you? Get to work. When she saw him, she glanced up and offered a trace of a smile and went on with her folding. She wore one of her black blouses and the dark wool skirt he’d made for her years ago. She’d lost weight and the skirt was a sheet on her.

  “Where is everyone?” he asked, knowing this was a foolish question.

  She gave him a tired look. “School. They are all at school.”

  “Of course. School,” Agostino muttered.

  “And Santo?” she said.

  “He’s working. Santo’s…He’s a good boy.” Agostino eyed the basket at Angela Rosa’s feet. “What can I do?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  He moved to the window and peered down to the alley. The garbage men had been by, and all the trash-can lids were strewn along the ground. “I need to help you,” he said. His voice sounded thin against the glass.

  “You need?”

  “Yes, I need.”

  She tossed a pair of his socks toward the dresser. “And I am the one who will help you, then?”

  “Don’t turn my words around. We are both alone in this house.”

  She stopped and glanced out the doorway. “This apartment is too big,” she said, more to herself than to Agostino. “Maybe we should rent a small house.”

  “You want to move?”

  She let out a deep sigh. “I do not know what I want.”

  He eased down next to her on the bed and touched her shoulder, as if to balance himself, then pulled back his hand. “Maybe,” he said, “we will buy the building from old man Dominick. He wants to sell.”

  “I can’t think about that. I can’t think.”

  He put his hand on the bed, close to her, close enough to feel her warmth. The corner of her eye began to redden and a slow tear fell down the side of her face. She hadn’t let him see her cry in some time. “I should have never stopped,” she said.


  “Stopped?”

  “I should have never stopped feeding him. If we had been back home in…I would have never stopped with my milk.”

  Agostino felt an odd mix of relief and remorse. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t see him as the source of their pain. But they would remain apart. That much was clear. There would be no touching. She brushed away the tear with the inside of her wrist. If they had been back home, in their own country that’s what she had wanted to say—none of this would have happened.

  “It was no one’s fault,” he said, hoping to convince himself. “We could not have known.”

  A long silence engulfed them. He took his hand from the bed and rubbed his forehead, resigning himself to not touching her. She didn’t want to be touched. She continued to fold. She folded with an efficiency that frightened him. He could see that there would be no more tears either.

  “I keep dreaming,” she said.

  Agostino glanced at her, then turned his gaze back to his hands. What she said, the way she said it, reminded him of confession. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear.

  “It is always nighttime in the dream. The lights from the automobiles are going by. And Benito, he is sitting in the middle of the dirty street. Hungry. But he does not cry. He just wants to eat. And I cannot reach him.” She told him how her legs wouldn’t move, how she saw him then in his crib, the bars like steaming radiators, the steam burning her eyes. And still she couldn’t reach him to feed him. Her own baby.

  She looked out the window. “If I had never stopped…I can’t stop thinking. And now the women around here, they avoid me. Their tongues become like cardboard around me. They think I bring trouble. Well, I know what to say to them. Go to hell. That’s what I say to them. I do not need them.”

  Agostino marked her rage as a good sign. Continue to rant, he thought. Keep breathing fire. Though rage had always been more or less foreign to Agostino, he understood its usefulness. He saw its power in his wife and in his daughter, and he would welcome it now in his own life. Even as a boy, Agostino would retreat during scuffles, just enough to defuse any attack—one step back and a quarter turn away, slightly out of reach, harmless. With each passing year he became more and more deft at sidetracking whatever anger sprang up in him. He’d been stepping back his entire life.

  He stood up and moved to the window again. He decided to stoke Angela Rosa’s rage. Anything to drive her out of her stupor. “Maybe you and Lupa should take a trip. Go home for a while. Visit your mother.”

  She snapped one of Santo’s shirts and folded it in two sharp tucks. “Go to work. You can talk foolishness with your brother. You and he can talk foolishness all day.”

  “A short trip. That’s all.”

  “I cannot take a vacation from my dreams. Do you think—”

  “No, but—”

  “It is the idea of a…a buffoon idea.” She pointed to the jumble of unfolded laundry. “And who will do this? A maid will come when I am gone?”

  “Victoria can—”

  “Ha!”

  “Victoria would do it.”

  Her hands moved nimbly, tucking and folding. She wouldn’t look at him. “And the money?”

  “The money will always—”

  “You buy television, you order a telephone. You want to buy from Dominick. Buy buy buy. I don’t—” Her voice broke. Her hands collapsed to her lap. She had to breathe through her mouth. “I want my son.”

  The dull burn began in his throat and radiated through his chest. He’d felt dead for so long that he welcomed the heat that brimmed his eyes. I want my son. He thought his wounds had begun to heal, but he had only covered them over. He wanted Angela Rosa to see him cry. He wanted her to embrace him, to cradle his head. He wanted to fall into her and sob.

  But the hot tears were slow in coming. He stood by the window and didn’t make a sound. Look at me, Angela Rosa. I feel. I hurt. When she stood up and set the basket on her hip, he reluctantly choked back all that had welled up in him. Maybe another time. There would be another time to show her his pain. Another day.

  She slipped out the door. Another day, he told himself. After a while, he heard the muffled sound of dresser drawers opening and closing. The sound seemed unusually distant, reaching him in thin screeches. And that’s when he stumbled to the bed, collapsing in a heap, letting the tears come now. His hand brushed against a rosary beneath the cold pillow, and he swept it to the floor. What had always served him well—living only in the moment—mocked him. He didn’t know what to do with now, how to get through it.

  He listened to Angela Rosa’s footsteps. Each bedroom had its own pattern of creaks, and he knew exactly where she was treading. He followed the creaks from dresser to closet to window, where she pulled down a paper shade. He recalled more peaceful times, lying there with his face in the pillow, listening to her familiar stride. He could always tell when she had the baby in her arms. Her steps would be lighter, more deliberate. Late mornings, she would sometimes bring Benito to him, deposit him on Agostino’s chest, and the two of them, father and son, would lie there together until the smells of breakfast billowed toward them. Then he’d take Benito’s fingers one by one and pretend to eat them. He recalled this now with such clarity that he could taste the milky sweetness of those fingers and hear his son’s gurgling laugh. That laugh would fill both of them. Benito’s brown eyes would hold him. Just before Angela Rosa called them to the table, Agostino would gaze at whatever light poured in through the window and listen to his son’s shallow breaths, taking inventory of his life, always struck by his good fortune. A father and his son getting ready for the day.

  He heard Angela Rosa slip out the kitchen now, the screen door slapping shut behind her. She’d be back with a fresh load of laundry, her steps plodding and heavy. It was hard not to feel pity for himself, for Angela Rosa, too, and he let that wash over him for a while.

  He recalled the newspaper Vince had left out for him that morning. People building bomb shelters in their cellars, stocking them with cans and dry goods and jugs of water. All you had to do was hide under a school desk, he had told Vince, and they laughed. If this were a real emergency. But there was nowhere to go, nothing a man could do, no one to tell him how to walk through his own house.

  June 23, 1977

  ANTHONY PECCATORI

  Freddy calls me the almost priest. I like that.

  This is what he does as he says it. With his right hand he slashes a slow cross before his eyes in solemn benediction and shifts his gaze just beyond me, adopting an air of ceremonial awe that doesn’t suit him well. Those hands are better suited for lifting and moving than blessing, though the lifting and moving possess their own grace and substance. Anyone can see we’re not close anymore, but when he calls me that, we’re twelve again, back when we could say anything to each other across the flinty darkness between our beds.

  It was twenty years ago to the day. That’s what I tried to tell him at the cemetery. But I’m sure he didn’t hear. After Benito passed on, Freddy was the baby for a while, and the loss may have hit him hardest. He was the solid, stocky brother, broad like Mama, with two feet on bedrock. Any kind of abstractions bored him, and he didn’t know what to do with Benito’s death. Half the time he walked up and down the apartment looking like he wanted to throw something, and sometimes I wished he would.

  One time he caught me praying the rosary on the back porch and started calling me Saint Anthony after that. I didn’t mind. It was the closest I’d ever felt to a calling. Sometimes he’d pass me and offer up a mock prayer. Lord, let my brother, Saint Anthony, help me find my little cobra-eyed marble that I don’t know where the hell it could of gone except maybe in the bottom of his drawer where he keeps all the other stuff he steals from me. I usually chased and tackled him, pretending to be angry, labeling him on the shoulder a few times to sting him. After a while, though, when I started spending more and more time looking past him, distracted, wanting to be alone, he became genuinely annoyed. I didn’t mean to
get under his skin and I wasn’t fully aware at the time that I was acting any differently. I needed to pray. That was all. To be by myself and pray.

  It seemed at the time that I was the only one to sense Benito’s presence in the apartment. If he had died somewhere else, in the car on the way to the hospital or at the hospital or anywhere other than the apartment, maybe that would have changed things. But he was in Mama’s arms. She cradled him, carried him from room to room. For weeks afterward, death filled that apartment like a scream. I’d sit on the living-room floor and sweep my hand along a spot on the carpet where Benito had lain that last night. I tried to picture the slight indentation his head would have made and imagined how that spot must have felt warm to the touch, and for just a moment or two, my fingers felt a quiver of heat. I sought all the other places he touched, and those places shimmered.

  For months the door to his room remained half-open, but I was the only one to pause before the doorway and peek in at the empty crib. Everyone else quickened their pace and averted their gaze, as if Benito never was. So I prayed. I asked God to keep me poised for other signs of my brother’s presence, increasingly embarrassed by the shrine my father was erecting in Benito’s room. I wouldn’t interfere with Papa’s obsession with some starlet—perhaps this provided solace, I reasoned—but I wouldn’t stop praying either. Then He sent us Nicholas.

  I couldn’t stop feeling guilty at first, thinking that Nicholas was a replacement. God’s give-and-take. Which seemed silly even then, but there seemed to be something right about the idea. Nicholas was sent to save us. That’s how it felt sometimes. That Nicholas was no ordinary baby.

  For starters, he was the only Peccatori child to be born in Italy. Papa had urged Mama for months to take a trip back. Stay a month, two months. And that’s what she did. She stayed three, maybe more. No one bothered to tell me that Mama was pregnant when she left. Maybe no one knew. But I remember the flurry of phone calls between Papa and her. They had to decide whether he should go back or she should come home. She didn’t want to fly while she was pregnant, she insisted, so she stayed. She wanted plenty of bed rest. She wanted to do everything she could to ensure a safe birth. And she was in good hands. Everyone else should stay put. There was no need to disrupt everyone’s life. She’d have the baby and bring it home as soon as arrangements could be made.