by Lynne Hinton
They found that they liked the mid-Atlantic region, the mild seasons and the starry open nights; and he soon made enough money to buy his own farm and sell vegetables to restaurants up and down the eastern seaboard.
He sold tomatoes, cherry and pear ones mostly, that were sweet enough for sauces and salads and strong enough for easy shipping. He almost cornered the market on spring onions because everyone knew his were delicate and tender, without too much of that customary sharp sour taste. He grew carrots and asparagus, did well with okra and squash; but he was mostly a tomato and onion man because the plants were easy to maintain and the climate and soil where he lived were just right for their growing.
It was said that by the time Mr. Lucetti sold his farmland and retired, he was one of the wealthiest men in eastern North Carolina. Lilly says they never wanted for much but that her grandfather sent a lot of the money home to his sisters and brothers in Sicily and never approved of a lavish lifestyle. He was hardworking and frugal, but he did not trust the banks or the government. So while he left a good nest egg for his wife and daughter, he had not taken care of necessary taxes and insurance.
Much of the couple’s life savings, therefore, was soon tied up in overdue payments to the IRS and given to doctors and hospitals and ambulance drivers since his progressive and later terminal illness of lymphoma devastated the family for more than fifteen years. They learned the hard way about the health care system in America, how a rich man can quickly become poor dealing with cancer and the experimental treatments every oncologist wants to try and every insurance company refuses to fund.
He died sometime in the early 1990s, much like he sailed from Europe to America, rugged and worn, ready for anything and certain that he had already seen the worst. Maria stayed by his side, curled next to him in the bed, and his daughter and granddaughter slept on the floor at his feet. When he took his final breath it was said he lifted his head and faced the women whom he loved and said “Mi vede,” translated from Italian to mean, “He sees me,” and then he closed his eyes and passed.
Like an obedient wife always just behind her spouse, Lilly’s grandmother, Maria, died a few weeks later, her hand to her chest and a look on her face that made it clear that she had once again done as she was told and was able to carry out her duty as Vincent’s partner. It was what made her happiest.
Together Lilly and Clara cleaned the house and sold it, finished paying the incurred debts, sorted and saved, and reminisced about the lives her grandparents had lived. It was bittersweet and nostalgic as Clara told story after story about their beginnings in this country as immigrants and the journey that had brought her this far. And so it had been on a clear Monday, the same day her mother was scheduled for her mammogram, the second in three weeks, that Lilly was finally told about her father, a farmer like her grandfather who was kindhearted and doting but had a wife he would not leave.
12
At first I wanted to know, and both the desire and the story seemed harmless. After the funeral I convinced myself that hearing details might help me see things more clearly, sort through events, order the chaos. I believed that it would bring together the loose ends of my life, of my marriage, that it would tie the unstrung cords together again.
I thought that if I had some kind of an understanding of who Clara was and how she fell in love with my husband, it would answer all of the other questions of my life. I thought it would unburden me, free me. I had not considered the power of it, the memories it would unleash, or how much it could sting.
Lilly refused me in the beginning. When I asked her the day after the funeral to come and tell me about her mother’s love, she said it was not hers to speak. She did not think it was something that I should hear or even something she had the right to tell since Clara herself had waited so long to share with her daughter the story of her lover.
I called again a week later. I told her that she was the only one who knew, the only one who bore some kind of witness to the contents of my husband’s heart. I confessed to her that I needed to hear the story to balance out the grief. And reluctantly, four days later, she drove up from Durham, sat in my kitchen, and told me everything.
There were moments that I had to leave the room. I feigned the need to go to the bathroom or to fetch a tissue, but the truth is, I left to catch my breath. Hearing the story of my husband’s infidelity, the news of a love I had not known, felt, at times, like a swift, hard blow to the ribs. But each time I went down I got up, shook off the hurt, and finished the ride. I heard it all, slowly and completely, until it no longer kicked, until I understood.
Clara met O.T., Ollie, when she was twenty-nine, almost thirty. He was almost ten years her senior, although the differences in how old they were never surfaced. He had aged from the war, but his heart seemed young enough that he could at least appear to have overcome the deep but critical scars.
They saw each other three, maybe four times before he ever had the courage to speak; and when he finally did, it was only “Good morning” and a comment about the color of her dress. It was pink, dusty rose really; and he had said it reminded him of the sun at dawn.
She blushed at the attention and the intimacy of what had passed between them. And even though it was ever so slight, unnoticed by anyone around them, unregistered, and insignificant, Clara and O.T. both recognized it, knew it, knew the magnitude of it, the possibilities of it, and the danger in it. Only one of them, however, understood fully the betrayal that took place the moment the relationship was merely considered.
Clara was the head waitress for the morning and lunch shifts at a small restaurant. She had never waited tables before; but she discovered that she liked serving food and making her own money, so she worked at the job for a number of years.
Shy, close to her parents, she had not made a lot of friends in high school. She was well liked and easy to be around; but her father was strict, and she had therefore missed out on most of the social activities for young people her age. At the restaurant she was no longer under her father’s thumb; and she found she enjoyed the attention she received from her customers, mostly men, who liked the way she filled out her uniform and the effortless way she served them.
She worked as a server for eight years before she was promoted to manager. Clara was good with figures, reliable, smart in crisis situations, and got along well with all the other staff. The waitresses liked her because they knew she understood what the job entailed. And she took care of them, filling in for them if they were not able to make it to work, switching off the busiest and most profitable sections so that everyone got the chance to make a little money, and letting them take breaks when they needed them. The cooks liked her because she wasn’t afraid to work in the kitchen alongside them.
All in all, Clara and the restaurant business were a perfect match. The owner valued her work highly, paid her well, and even allowed her the opportunity to buy him out on several occasions. She never would, however. She liked the arrangement as it was; and when the owner moved to Miami and the restaurant was sold, she was happy to go back to waiting tables, finishing her career just as she had started it.
Clara told Lilly that she was sure O.T. had noticed her on his first visit to the diner. Usually, he had told her, if he stopped in Durham on his way home from the tobacco sales or the state fair, he went to a hot dog place way off the highway in the rear of a gas station. He liked how they kept the buns steamed and soft and that the chili was homemade. The grill was quickly shut down, however, after a grease fire and the health department’s immediate response.
It was Billy Barker who told him about the diner where Clara worked and the blue plate specials that were always hearty and never more than three dollars. Once he drove into the parking lot just off the interstate, had a bowl of the Italian wedding soup, and caught the eye of the woman who seemed to be doing everything, O.T. soon found himself needing to take more and more trips into the Raleigh-Durham area.
He stayed with Clara for two years be
fore he broke it off because his wife, I, had lost our baby. Lilly stopped at this point, nervous that what had been said had upset me. I nodded to show her that I was okay, placed my hand across my rising chest to convince myself, and then she continued.
Clara spoke very little, Lilly said, about the two years she and O.T. shared. She told her daughter only that she had never before or since felt the passing moments of her life so deeply. She noticed things like the smell of flowering jasmine that draped along fences on her way to work, tiny yellow blooms that had been there for years but she had never seen. She heard sounds that people made, the hum of old songs while they worked, the heavy sigh when someone they loved walked away.
She noticed colors, soft subtle colors in the sky, along the lips of teacups, and in corners where tiny pieces of glass had been swept. She felt alive, she told Lilly, alive the way she thought we were born to live but that we rarely understood, alive and attentive, the way we are at those significant transitional moments, she told her daughter, the way we are when we’re in love.
As Lilly recounted the story, I remembered the night during those two years that O.T. and I shared one rare event of intimacy. I remembered the night when I slipped aside the disappointment of all the years of infertility, all the years I had been barren, all the years we had tried and failed. I remembered, as Lilly ordered the history, the night that Emma was conceived.
When I was in my late twenties and the doctor reported to me that I was unable to bear children, that my ovaries were too small, too unproductive, I did not want to believe him. I spent many months the way I had spent more than ten years, filled with desperation, calculating my temperature, counting down days, and regulating intercourse, until eventually I grew exhausted. Ultimately, I gave up hope and gave up sex.
It had been more than a year since O.T. and I had been together; but on that night when our baby was created, I forced my husband to try again. I surprised him when I begged him to lay with me; but I did so because my monthly cycle was just right for conception and because earlier in the evening I had dreamed of the coming of spring.
I saw the sky open and fire falling upon meadows, flowers blooming, dead trees filled up with life. Later I awoke with the sense that everything, for the very first time in my reproductive system, was right and ready. That my egg would not die.
That my body had somehow shifted and made room for another.
When O.T. came in from working I was crazed with desire, not because I wanted and now had my husband, not because I even wanted him to share in the depth of what I was feeling. I pleaded with him to have sex with me because I was finally and once again in the position of considering the possibility of motherhood.
I did not even notice the way he would not look at me. I did not pay attention to the obvious lack of kissing and tenderness. I did not even see that he was in love with and committed to a woman whose child, unlike mine, would live. I only wanted to have that baby. Once it was confirmed that I was pregnant, I would not have another sexual encounter with my husband again. After all, it was then no longer necessary.
When Emma died and I ran to the beach, O.T. made one last trip to Durham to tell the woman who had learned life’s secret of love that he would have to be loyal to his wife. Because, he would tell her as she turned her head away so as not to show him her tears, it was his unfaithfulness, his bitter lies that had killed the baby I had wanted and that together we had chosen to deliver.
Clara would then decide not to tell him that she had missed her period for more than two months, that she was often queasy and fatigued in the morning, that she noticed a faint stirring within her belly, and that she had felt, a time several weeks before when they had made love, an unusual sensation that something more had happened. She did not in any way let on to her lover that she was pregnant with his child. The weight of his guilt was already so overwhelming she was sure the news would crush him forever.
Clara said good-bye to O.T., gently let him come and now go, without demand or claim or even an announcement that she was now left to raise a child alone.
As I heard the conclusion of Clara and O.T.’s love story, the end of the one she told her daughter, I understood that once he said good-bye, once he left the desire of his heart, my husband came back to the house I had started building while he was away at war, returning fully this time, completely.
Clara stayed on at the restaurant, never betraying the identity of her baby’s father, never sharing the secret with an understanding waitress or a cook who would have married her and made the child his own. She never told a soul, never asked for assistance, and never seemed to need anyone.
Even her parents could not persuade her to confess her lover’s name. And though they were angry at first, ashamed, they did not turn away from her, they did not put her out. She stayed with them, and they raised the child with her; and as Lilly says without needing to be believed, it was a peaceful and lovely life.
Lilly said that she came searching for O.T. only to see his face, only to see the other half of herself. Her mother had told her who he was simply because she thought her daughter had the right to know. She did not tell out of spite or bitterness or because she had now changed her mind and wanted to upset her former lover’s life. She said that she had always expected their affair would not last, that he was much too much of a gentleman to leave his wife and that she had always respected his decision to go home.
She did not make her daughter promise that she wouldn’t tell or that she wouldn’t try and find him; she knew Lilly would have to make up her own mind about these matters. She only asked that Lilly remember and honor the love her mother had freely given, a love that bears and believes and endures.
It had been this love that had kept her from telling O.T. and forcing him to make a decision that was more painful and difficult than she could ever imagine. It had been this love that kept her silent and strong; and she only asked that her daughter hold this in her heart when she got ready to do something with the name she now knew. He was more than just her father. He was a husband, somebody else’s husband, a man who had not known the consequences of his affair.
“Be careful with what you know and with what could hurt him,” Clara would say before she died. “He was the man I loved.”
And so Lilly had come, quietly and unobtrusively. When she realized that O.T. was institutionalized, she thought she could come and go and not be discovered. She had not wanted to upset me, she said. And I smiled. For she had actually calmed me down.
She told him who she was, but he had not seemed to understand until she said her mother’s name. When she said the word, Clara, he turned and faced her, his eyes filled with tears, and then he reached out and took his daughter’s hand.
There, with his hand on top of hers, they cried together. And Lilly says she thinks he knew who she was. And she is satisfied that even though she had not felt as if any large or significant piece of her puzzled life had really ever been missing, she had kept a space, not filling it with anything or anybody else. And that when she finally met O.T. and told him who she was, the grasp of his hand, the tears in his eyes, all of whom they became in that whirling, unclouded moment had fit. Mercifully, my husband’s daughter said with an unspoiled assurance, for her it had fit.
We sat in my kitchen on that cold winter day, the story spread out before us like pieces of clean laundry snapping on a line. And when my ribs finally quit hurting and I could breathe, I was suddenly reminded of a difficult period in my parents’ marriage.
When I was thirteen, my father became convinced that my mother was leaving him. He was prophetic, of course, because it was only two years later that she died. But at the time of his premonitions, like Maude and her water dreams, he was not clear about the details, only that she was going to go. He believed that she would leave him for another man.
I remember it was the only time in my life that I ever saw him curse his blindness. Throughout all of my childhood he never acted worried or troubled because
of his loss of sight. He never seemed disabled or handicapped because he always managed to do what he wanted to do. He was never to be pitied. But there, in those tortured few months as he grew more and more certain of my mother’s betrayal, he clawed at the sockets of his eyes, praying that he would finally be able to see.
I would hear him late at night behind the house, crying and ranting at God for making him less of a man, making him unable to peer into the eyes of his wife. He would scream, “If I could see, then I would know that she was lying, know that she was in love with someone else! I could see it for myself!”
Mama heard him as well; and night after night she would go out and lie at his feet, begging him to believe her that she was not going away, begging him to come inside and lie with her in bed. I would watch from my window as she took his fingers and slid them across her brow, pulled them along the curve of her neck, then gently placed his hand inside her gown, to feel the beating of her heart, she would tell him.
“John,” she would say in just the way only she could, “feel my heart. Feel my heart. It will tell you what your eyes cannot. It will tell you that I only have love for you. I will never leave you.” She would cry to him, “I am yours for all time.”
And they would fall into each other while he begged for mercy and assurance and she gave him all that she had. Then he would come in, ragged and afflicted, and she would love him back to life.
