The Islands of Divine Music

by John Addiego

  That’s the way he did things. He tears down a house with the big hammer, and you see him swing up there like Tarzan of the Apes and shout he wants his lunch.

  Grazia laughed and shook her head. She was the smallest and most jovial of the daughters, a lively swing dancer, even in her late sixties, mother of four children, grandmother of seven. So, he yells for lunch?

  Yes. I threw him a banana. What’s your son up to?

  Which one?

  I forget the names.

  They’re fine, Ma. They’re busy, all three of them.

  So, he finds one right there one day, and he jumps so high you think he’s a bullfrog.

  I don’t understand. Grazia tried to feed Rosari more porridge. He finds what, Ma?

  One of them, come on the banana boat. Oh, you don’t think that one knows?

  Knows what, Ma?

  It’s my time.

  Don’t say that, Mama. It’s his time, not yours.

  Hey, what do you think I am, Methuselah? He knows.

  Janine slept in the family’s cellar, and when she woke it seemed that her spinal meningitis had evolved to Hodgkin’s disease. Her neck was no longer so stiff, but its glands were swollen, and she was sweating and feverish, and her skin felt itchy. She had other symptoms as well: weakness, fatigue, weight loss. She consulted the dogeared medical dictionary and wondered if she’d need to go back to Rome for the radiation therapy. It was all a matter of time and luck.

  The mother and daughter could see that she wasn’t well, and they made her drink something bitter and lie under a pile of blankets. They showed her photographs of the young woman, and from these she started to piece together a story: Marie was the widow of the man in the wedding picture featured on their mantel under black bunting, and Lucia, the toddler who usually balanced on her hip and squished pasta in her fist at the table, was her daughter, not her sister. Straight, knocked up, married, widowed. Damn, thought Janine, what a waste. She herself had only dated a few guys and then, in college, a few girls, far from home and the eyes of an enormous extended Italian American family in the Bay Area. Her sexual orientation was a Rosetta stone hidden in some cave, unknown to the parents and aunts and cousins who kept setting her up with eligible bachelors, though she hoped, she imagined, that her little grandmother somehow understood.

  Marie leaned over Janine and sponged her brow, and the sad beauty of that face, the look of so many Italian women who hold their young and their dying loved ones like Mary holding Jesus in the pieta, stung her to the quick. Then that mischievous sidelong glance, that hidden joke, and the little pinch to her cheek: What was the woman thinking? Janine’s heart fluttered in its cage.

  The symptoms changed to severe abdominal cramps and diarrhea that afternoon. It was now reasonable to assume that she had Crohn’s disease instead of Hodgkin’s, given the evidence. This was a relief of sorts. However, further reading informed her that cholera was a possibility, too, especially in this part of the world.

  Two days of being nursed and staring up into Marie’s face passed, and Janine got off the bed and the toilet and didn’t die. She felt well enough to find a telephone, and gestured to her ear, and Marie led her to the scooter (which one of the brothers had been using quite a bit) and got on the back. The family didn’t have a phone, but there was a telephone office next to the post. Janine spoke with her mother about Rosari and learned that her father’s family was in a heated debate about letting her die at home or putting her in a hospital. What about Marge, the nurse who came by? Janine wanted to know. Well, half the family says Marge has it made in the shade, her mother said. The sisters do all the work, and she comes by to take her pulse and gets paid a bundle. How about you? Are you sick?

  I’m all right.

  You sound sick. How do you know if you’re all right?

  I’m tired, Mama.

  That usually means you’re sick. Are you eating oranges?

  Of course.

  Janine and Marie took Lucia on the scooter to the market and bought oranges, then rode into the mountains and walked across a cornfield. They sat together and played with the little one and shared an orange and pointed at things with the segments, a distant stone hut, the face of a mountain. They said the names for things, repeating each other’s words. Marie opened her dress and nursed Lucia until the little one fell asleep. Janine watched breathlessly.

  They looked through the sketch book and spoke of America. Now and then the young woman’s hand fell on hers, or her milky breast pressed against her shoulder. Janine put her arm around her waist, and Marie kissed her cheek. Friends, they said to each other. They kissed, mouth to mouth. The bushy eyebrows rose. Lonely, they said to each other. They kissed again and laughed.

  Marie’s hair came unfastened and mingled with the grass and corn litter. They snuggled together, wrapped in each other’s arms, with the baby between. Friends. Marie’s eyes closed, and she opened her dress again to let the sun strike her breasts. Janine trembled to see her beauty. They sunned together in the swaying light of corn leaves and nearly fell asleep embracing in the warm breeze until the spider intruded.

  Marie sat up with a sudden shriek that awoke Lucia. The hairy arachnid dropped from her hair, and Janine crushed it into a paste with the top of her roadster cap. Marie grabbed her neck and wept onto her bare knees. They buttoned up quickly and returned to her home.

  The old woman’s days and nights were becoming much the same, propped in a recliner or rocker under quilts or sitting up in bed, talking to family or looking for the dark shape to appear above the stove. Her sons and sons-in-law took a crack at it and discussed poison gas and traps. Her eldest, Narciso, brought his grandson’s dart gun and hit Pepe with one on a practice shot. She shook her head and lost track of their names and faces. She shrugged dramatically. What can you do? There are some things where there is nothing you can do.

  It waited for them to leave and came to her bedroom some nights, a black hand creeping across the ceiling. She told it to shoo. Go back to your bananas, she said. Sometimes she couldn’t tell if it were there or not. Shadows moved the same way near the Venetian blinds and the bed lamp, from the window with the Japanese maple. I’m not scared of you, she said in Italian. Her youngest daughter sat on the bed beside her and asked what was wrong. When Mary looked and couldn’t see it, Rosari realized that sometimes only she could. Hey! Baciagalupe, she said. Kiss of the wolf! Get out of here.

  Sometimes her children gathered in the living room to discuss her death when they thought she was asleep, the eldest ones silver-haired old men and women themselves, shuffling on unsteady knees or coughing up decades of cigarette smoke. They raised their voices to make a point, laughed, cooed like mourning doves. Hey, Lu-dovico, she yelled, and her second son hurried to her side.

  Ma’s awake, he said. Hey, how’s my mama doing? You look like a million bucks, Ma!

  Right. And you’re the king of Prussia. Listen, did what’s-her-name feed Pepe that calamari?

  Calamari? You feeding squid to that dog, Ma?

  Who’s here? Who’s in the house? I heard you because you got the loudest mouth.

  We’re all here, Ma. The whole family’s here.

  How about the old man. I thought I heard him, too.

  Ludovico’s voice broke. Papa? Ma, Papa’s been gone for twenty-five years.

  Oh, yeah? She stared at her little hands. I thought I heard him in there.

  Back in her home Marie wept and pulled her hair back to show her mother her neck. Her brothers ran off, and Janine assumed it was to fetch a doctor. Meanwhile, the mother held the toddler and spread several rags and scarves across a bed, and Marie fingered them like tomatoes in the market. She would lift one near her nose, then put it down. More scarves and garments were placed on the bed, including Janine’s black wool neck-warmer, each with its own hue. Janine took off her cap, and the young woman seized it and turned it inside out to expose the bright red lining. This she clutched to her bosom.

  Two scrawny old men came
with the brothers. They carried musical instruments instead of doctors’ bags. Janine was puzzled by the rapid verbal exchanges, the rearrangement of the furniture to clear a space around the girl. Marie swayed back and forth, and the bald old men began playing various squeaky tunes on a violin with tambourine accompaniment, each piece a mournful jig, to which the young woman moved her hips and arms. It seemed that one melody was finally the right one for her because she leaped and capered around the room to it. The fiddler played this same tune over and over, and the girl closed her eyes and danced madly.

  A third man arrived with an old guitar with only five strings. He cried out and shrugged, and it seemed that the guitar was handed to everybody in the room except the girl until it landed in Janine’s lap. Self-taught on guitar, she tuned it and immediately mimicked the violinist, to the obvious glee of the assemblage. She plucked the jumpy melody note for note and put chords to it. The two men and Janine kept playing without variation for the rest of that day, and Marie danced and moaned in the center of the room.

  Lanterns were lit, and the music and dance continued. Janine’s arms ached and her brow dripped sweat onto the strings, but she kept playing, as did the old violinist and tambourine player. These men had sunken eyes and push-broom mustaches, and their performance was mechanical and somber, even if the tune was lively. Now and then Janine found a way to make the smallest embellishment on the melody, the slightest brush stroke of variation. The girl’s sweat mingled with the smells of candles and lantern oil. She shivered and spun, shook her hips and arms, and rubbed her face with Janine’s inside-out cap. A couple of times she opened her dress enough to nurse Lucia while rocking her hips slowly in dance.

  Janine’s fingers ached and her fever raged and abated, but she kept playing, and the girl kept dancing, and the old men kept working at their instruments like coal miners under the whip. She watched Marie’s face turn gaunt, bloodless, waxen. Sometimes the room appeared to spin around her stationary body. Sometimes her hands flew about the room independent of her arms and left streams of colors in the air.

  When Janine closed her eyes she was in a dark church. It was not the church of her childhood in California, but similar, a cool and musty place of darkness and incense. Instead of the crucified savior there was a dying woman on the cross whose face kept changing, and Janine felt herself fly about the rafters, up to this sorrowful figure, but she could never quite get the face right. She might be Marie; she might be Janine’s oldest sister, the one who’d disappeared long ago; she might be her grandmother as a young woman. Then again, she might be a woman who’d lived in these mountains and had been killed by the men who feared or hated her for being strange to them.

  A new day’s first light wove its beams through the window blinds, and the lanterns were snuffed. All night they had made the tarantella until, at first light, the young woman suddenly stopped and opened her eyes, as if awakening from a dream, and told the musicians to go home. So haggard was she that Janine imagined Marie an old woman for a moment. The guitar was placed on the floor, gently, a warm thing vibrating life, as the two young women collapsed beside it.

  Several thousand miles away the little grandmother listened to the voices of family and watched the black fingers move above her until she smiled. The shadowy movement was not the baciagalupe, the painful kiss-of-the-wolf love of her ne’er-do-well husband, Giuseppe, entreating her to come once again to his side. It’s you, she said.

  Her granddaughter set the instrument down and lay on the cold floor and held the hand of a strange young woman in a strange land. She surrendered to the ageless sorrow and mystery of those who elect to share their hearts, against danger and prejudice, while the grandmother watched the spider’s legs take the shape of a woman’s tresses floating in a bath, floating behind the head of a woman who’d died more than eighty years ago. She smiled and opened her heart. Ciao, Mama, she said.

  THE ISLAND OF PELICANS

  Samantha

  Angelo’s wife left him for their chiropractor that spring, and though they hadn’t begun mediation he had unofficial custody of their eight-year-old daughter, Samantha, for the month of June. He took her to visit his family in the Bay Area and talked up the excitement of the chocolate factory, the cable cars, and some place his daughter remembered where you could Whack a Mole with what she thought was a tortilla-shaped hammer. Pier 39 was a showcase for linguistic cute, and it made Angelo’s flesh crawl reading the signs. I Left My Harp in San Francisco. It’s My Parsley, and I’ll Cry if I Want To. Between a Rock and a Hard Roll Pretzels.

  Why is that an especially cute name, Daddy? They were at the end of the pier, giving money to the cart vendor.

  Well, you can see Alcatraz Island right there, he said, as well as on this cute pretzel logo. Alcatraz was called the Rock, and it meant a lot of different things to prisoners and to the Indians who tried to take it back in 1970, and because everybody agrees that it was such a cute prison nobody thinks much about the quality of the pretzel or whether or not it’s hard as a rock, they just buy it and laugh.

  Samantha stared across the bay at the island and the sailboats. You’re being sarcastic again, she said.

  No, not me. Never.

  He had to carry her on his shoulders part of the way to Ghi-rardelli Square because the tourists loitered in huge clumps. Occasionally a woman with his wife’s hair or figure would pass, and his heart would palpitate. The sensation was less like grief or longing than panic, as if some nemesis had tracked him down and were poised for attack. He made a rude comment about some people paying to take a picture with a cross-dresser, and Samantha giggled. This used to be a neighborhood, he told his daughter, where people actually lived. Your great-grandparents, your grandpa and all of his brothers and sisters, they actually lived here and bought groceries on the wharf. We used to hang out here, before the entire city became a theme park.

  This isn’t a theme park, she said.

  Oh, it is, the city council voted to make it a theme park. You park and pay to get in, and all the people who aren’t tourists are actors. You saw the guy in the pink dress and mustache.

  Right. Where are the rides, then?

  Tour boats to see the cute prison. Genuine turn-of-the-century cable cars, genuine Chinese and Italian people talking funny.

  Turn of what century?

  That means the end of the Gay ’90s and beginning of the 1900s.

  The Gay Pride started in the ’90s?

  Angelo chuckled breathlessly. You could probably say that and get away with it, he said. His shoulders ached, and he wondered for the five hundredth time if becoming a father at age forty-five had been such a good idea. With his wife, soon-to-be-ex-wife, Jennifer, it had seemed like the only idea. They’d taken infant brain development and midlife memory-loss workshops, slipped on bifocals before pinning diapers.

  Angelo followed a crowd of people holding camcorders through an obstacle course of stationary homeless vagrants, even stepping over one man on a grate. The rich smells of roasted garlic and coffee filled his nostrils. Okay, he panted, as I believe you know, your great-grandparents came here from Italy and lived in this neighborhood about a hundred years ago. That was the turn of the century.

  Why isn’t this the turn of the century?

  From Angelo’s knapsack came a muffled tinkling. Angelo found a vacant square of brick on the edge of a fountain, and Samantha pulled the small laptop out. Hey, it’s Aunt Naomi! Tell her we’re at the chocolate factory!

  Don’t call her your aunt, Angelo said. She’s my Jewish fairy godmother.

  Why is she your Jewish fairy godmother?

  She’s just kind of out there flapping her wings.

  I thought you liked her.

  I do like her, but sometimes she pisses me off. I don’t know, some people in big cities do things that cause a wake of pain in other people’s lives and waltz away like it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just New Yorkers in general.

  Whatever. Did she sell your Wyoming screenplay to Hollywood?
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  Let me read this. Huh.

  Naomi asked about his family, as she always did, before she got down to business, which was really not much to report. A producer on location in Wyoming was excited but not committed. He already knew that.

  Hey, Monkey, Angelo said as he put the laptop away, do me a favor. When you get married, don’t hyphenate your name to something horrible like Naomi Ginsburg-Menendez. It sounds like a yuppie bar where they serve matzo burritos.

  I’m not getting married!

  Well, not this week. How badly do you want a hot-fudge sundae?

  Badly. You never answered my question. Samantha climbed onto his shoulders. The line stretched from the chocolate factory restaurant’s doors to the edge of the fountain in the bricked square. She took her shoes off and waded among the turtle sculptures. Why isn’t this the turn of the century?

  I guess you could call it that and get away with it.

  Who is that man? He keeps staring at me.

  Don’t look at him. What man? What’s he look like? Angelo bent over the edge of the fountain and held his daughter’s shoulders, peering across the water and turtles at the crowd of people.

  I can’t tell you if I don’t look at him.

  Okay, look quickly, then look away.

  Samantha’s eyes darted to the side, then returned to her father’s face. Didn’t see him. Oh, wait. He’s right behind you.

  Angelo turned. The sun was in his eyes, but he made out the figure of a tall, broad-shouldered man with a long white beard, so bushy that it glowed like a halo. A vagrant. Yes? Angelo said.

  She’s beautiful, the man said.

  Excuse me? Angelo said.

  She looks like Penny. Her eyes, I mean. The mouth is like Nona Rosari’s.

  Angelo stood. Paulie, for Christ’s sake! He hugged the man and felt himself simultaneously lifted off his feet and overwhelmed by his odor. Samantha, he croaked, this is your uncle, my older brother, Paulie.

  It’s Paul now. He reached to shake her hand across a yard of water.