What a meathead he is.
“This is a university fellowship,” he tells her. “Not an arms deal. It’s barely on the English Department’s radar! No one else on campus has even heard of it!” As his voice rises with each new sentence, he realizes how much he’s using his hands and the full wingspan of his arms. His Italianness is bubbling over, its unseemly passion on display. It could work against him here, he thinks, make him appear hysterical. She has claimed to admire his passion, but he knows that, in the academy at least, passion is sentimentality’s ugly cousin, and neither is welcome at the party. So he lays his palms flat on the table, calibrates his voice. “And besides, Professor Birch, people expect advisers to play favorites. Why else do we kiss your asses?” He checks himself again. “No one would blame you for advocating for your advisees, is what I’m arguing.”
“People are whispering,” she says. “I think Amos might already suspect another man—not you, specifically, but this would raise those suspicions.” She pulls her hair into a ponytail again, holds it there for a second, lets it fall. This time it makes her look like a middle-aged actress. “I’m so sorry, Frankie. What you’re saying is probably true, and I’m just paranoid. I don’t have the stomach for a scandal. I hate the idea of gossip centered on me. I just want to keep doing what we’re doing, undisturbed. Don’t you? Don’t you think it would be easier for both of us if you just didn’t submit at all?”
“How is that easier for me? I’ve earned that fellowship!” he yells. “I’m just as qualified as anybody! More! Not to mention how hard I’ve worked. Not to mention how alone I am here, no family, no friends, day and night in the library. You want me just to throw that away because you think we might get caught? How is that even remotely fair?”
She goes quiet, bites her bottom lip, releases it, bites it again. “You do work very hard,” she says, with the tranquillity of a guidance counselor. “Harder than anyone, for sure. In that race, you’ve got pretentious twerps like Annalise Theroux and Hector Billings beat by a landslide. But Frankie—and this is my fault, I take as much of the blame as you—what you’ve got so far of the diss, it’s not . . . how do I say this? Up there, you know? It’s safe. I think, for this particular fellowship, the department wants to make a splash, bring an edgier voice to the fore, someone they can parade around MLA. Your stuff is solid, but it’s, in some ways, old fashioned.” She clenches her fists. “It’s good, though, Frankie. Really good and solid, and good, as I said. I wouldn’t be working with you if it weren’t. You know that. You know my reputation.”
He stares at her. She looks down. Her hair is parted down the middle, hippie-style, but the part is clogged up with curly gray roots like little pubic hairs. He crosses the room and stands with his hands behind his back, gripping the cold cracked porcelain sink. He wants to shut her up, but he’s too stunned to figure out how. It’s the first time she’s questioned the quality of his work. He’s fully aware that he has a way to go in terms of the organization and focus of the chapters he’s written so far, but his faith in their quality has been like a jewel in his pocket. When he’s felt low, the nights he’s walked through the neighborhoods surrounding his university, he’s taken out that jewel and admired it in the moonlight, told himself, You may be lonely, you may not know where you’re headed, you may question why you’re even bothering, but at least you have this, Frankie Grasso—at least this, no one can take away from you.
“I think about you when I’m not here,” Birch says. “You might not believe me, but I do. I think about your brother who died. I wonder, Is that why Frankie tries so hard, so he can make up for the brother?”
“Don’t say ‘the brother,’ ” Frankie says. “His name was Tony. And you’re wrong. Every time you make some point about Tony and me, you’re wrong.”
From the day Frankie told Birch about Tony, the third or fourth time she came over, over cereal, like today, she’s been on a mission to convince him that every one of his problems are somehow tied to him, that Frankie’s life is a desperate attempt to compensate his parents for the loss of their oldest son. Now, apparently, even his very practical need for a fellowship—for time and space to write, for perfectly reasonable validation and justifiable reward—has its roots in Tony.
“I remember his name,” Birch says defensively. “Even though you’ve only said it once yourself. I’ve come to think that’s why—he’s why—you haven’t finished the diss yet, why you keep revising chapters I’ve approved and writing new chapters you don’t need, why no fellowship in the world is going to get you to put this thing to sleep. You’re afraid that if you finish, and it’s still not good enough, you won’t have anything left.” She comes over to him, puts her hands around his waist, but doesn’t look him in the eyes. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Why not just kick me in the nuts?” says Frankie. He breaks free of her embrace, grabs their cereal bowls and spoons, and tosses them in the sink with a clatter. With the water running, he says, “Better yet, give me another reason why I won’t win that fellowship. Some more armchair psychology, if you please. Or are these all the reasons you’ve got? How many are you up to now, ten?”
“I’m on your side, Frankie. I promise. I’m your friend. I am your advocate. You don’t realize what an advantage you have, being an as yet unknown voice. But you don’t get an infinite number of chances to impress people. I want you to go out in the world putting your strongest foot forward.”
He shakes his head. “You must think I’m really pathetic.”
“Not at all, baby. The opposite. I don’t put this much energy into a pathetic person.”
“Well, I’m applying, anyway. And I’ll win.”
“I want to root for you.”
“That’s generous, Rhonda. Really.”
“Frankie—” She stops. Apparently she’s said all she’s going to say, but he wonders—will always wonder, maybe—what she reconsidered telling him. If only she’d begun with that preamble: No one deserves this award more than you, my darling Frankie. If only she’d surprise him and say it was all a joke, a twisted attempt to rile him up for a good, punishing fuck. But she doesn’t, and it isn’t, and on Thursday when he finds her note in his mailbox, he’ll still run home to meet her.
From the hallway, arms crossed, he watches her pull on her jeans, lace her boots, get on her knees on his futon to retrieve her sweater from behind it. By the time she’s gone, it’s the middle of the afternoon. There is nothing to do, no refuge, but his work. So he finds his pants, wipes down his chest with a warm, wet towel, grabs his coat and his box of floppy disks and his backpack, and treks uphill to the library to finish his letter.
4 Scarabocchi
ANTONIO GRASSO LOVES the game of bocce. God bless the man who invented it. He had to be an Italian, or maybe a Chinese, who they say invented pasta, too, which is hard to believe. The point is, a seventy-nine-year-old man, good for not much else, can play bocce for hours, three or four rounds in a night if he wants, with as much skill as he had when he was young. Antonio loves the deadweight of the ball in his hand, the perfect smoothness on his callused skin, the sound it makes when it spocks the other team’s ball and sends it flying down the court. When he was a boy, he and Mario used rocks. Now the Amerigo Vespucci Club stocks three brand-new imported regulation bocce sets, in fancy wood carrying cases. He loves that one team is red, the other green, and the pallino is white, so that when the balls sit on the court together, they make the Italian flag. What will they think of next?
Antonio is happy at the club. He knows a lot of the men. Most are two-faced and gossip worse than women, but they tell jokes and stories from the Old Country and some even sing, so he puts up with the rest of it. Mixed drinks cost seventy-five cents, and wine and beer in short plastic cups are a quarter each. Thirty bucks a year for dues. A dollar for a plate of pasta and some salad. It’s a good deal. More than that: for every bocce game you win, you get a free drink. And the dues count for two tickets to three parties: a sum
mer picnic, a wine tasting in the winter, and, around Thanksgiving time, a steak dinner after the Memory Mass for all the members who died that year.
Tonight, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, is the steak dinner. Antonio doesn’t care about the steak, which tastes like sawdust, or the Mass for the Dead, which he skipped. He’s here to ambush DiSilvio, who stood him up at lunch a month ago and who hasn’t returned his calls since. DiSilvio never misses the Vespucci steak dinner.
Earlier, while the other men were at St. Anthony’s, Antonio walked up and down Union Street on the opposite side from the Al Di Là, watching the customers in the window seats. He does this sometimes, on nights when nostalgia’s got him by the balls, which is most nights lately. He likes to see the customers’ excited faces when the plates arrive, the grateful expression they make at the first bite. He wants to make sure that the waiters stand up straight when they recite the specials—with their hands behind their backs, like he taught them, nothing written down—and that the busboys don’t let the tables sit dirty too long. When Antonio’s inside and the workers know he’s there, it all goes the right way; from the outside, though, he sees what really is, like a camera. He keeps his head down and wears a Phillies cap and an old pair of eyeglasses so he won’t be recognized.
Dov’è il mio villaggio? Antonio wonders on these incognito night walks alone on Union, a bum up ahead asleep on the stoop, cars rumbling past, drowning out the church bells. Where is my village? He has to get through the winter, then a few short months of spring and a taste of summer, and then in August, no matter what Maddalena says, he will get on a plane with her and their children and grandchildren, and the plane will carry them in its belly all the way to the real village, the only village, Santa Cecilia, the village immigrants like him tried to make again in these square blocks of Wilmington but failed, because there’s never two of anything.
The plan for Santa Cecilia is first to find his old house. The last he heard, from his cousin Vincenza in Avezzano, the pink stone walls had deeper cracks but were still standing, still attached to the little farm on the south side of the olive grove. No, the Grasso home was not in the center of town, at the top of the mountain, like Maddalena’s family’s, the Piccinellis; it was farther down, on a slope, all by itself. The Grassos were not rich then. Papà Franco used to borrow from Aristide Piccinelli. But things have evened out, moneywise. Not that it matters for what Antonio wants, which is to breathe the mountain air again, to stand on the stone wall at the edge of the gorge and listen to the water below. To kneel in the graveyard before the stones of his friends and uncles and cousins and pay his respects. There are stories locked in his brain, memories he can’t find the key for, but that key can be found in the old village.
August. Ten short months. Ten long months. Enough time, either way you look at it, to put his affairs in order, arrange his papers with DiSilvio, just in case. Old people die on trips. He has to prepare. His kids call him morbid. Every time Prima or Frankie says the word, Antonio hears the Italian morbido, soft. They are the same thing, in a way. Is Antonio not softer now—in the brain, in the legs and stomach—than he’s ever been? Maddalena says he depresses her, going on and on as he does about his age, about “the end,” but that kind of talk does not depress him. The opposite. The more he talks, the less afraid he is. When Maddalena says, “With that mouth of yours, you’ll live to be a hundred,” he replies, “Don’t do me any favors.”
“Signor DiSilvio,” says Antonio when his old friend comes through the door of the Vespucci Club, “what a surprise. You’re too busy to call me, but not too busy for a free steak?”
“Antonio,” he says with a red face, “I’m so sorry—”
He could make a crack about DiSilvio’s giant belly, which hangs over his belt like dough, but it’s too easy. “Come on, compa,” he says. “I’ve known you forty years. If you want me to start paying you, just ask. Don’t hide from me like a coward.”
“You didn’t hear?” DiSilvio says.
“Hear what?”
“I should have known,” says DiSilvio. “Nobody wants to bring up such a thing with you.”
He pulls Antonio into a corner of the club, away from the men gathered at the bar. “Two weeks ago,” he says, “my son-in-law, Patrizia’s husband, drove his car into a tree. Drunk. But on purpose, Antonio. Thirty-eight years old. Father of my grandchildren. On purpose.”
“Gesù mio, no,” says Antonio. “I read the paper every day. I didn’t see it—”
“He didn’t die. But he’s messed up in the head. Says he can’t remember anyone, but he’s a faker. That’s what I think. He wants to forget he has a wife and three girls. He was trying to get rid of his life, why would he want it back? He’s crazy, a maniac—”
Men come toward them to pat DiSilvio on the shoulder and back, to calm him down, to ask, How is Patrizia? How did this world get so terrible? The news is two weeks old, but it’s DiSilvio’s first time at the club since it happened, and because of this he gets all the attention, as he should. They look out for each other, even the two-faceds and the gossips. Antonio steps away. He should have known his friend wouldn’t abandon him without good reason. He feels sorry for DiSilvio, but it could have been worse. It could have been Patrizia or one of the girls. Also, Antonio needs him. He wonders if Christmas will be long enough to wait until he can call on him again, sit his lawyer down, and ask his advice on how to make sure the Al Di Là stays in the right hands, or no hands at all, if Antonio dies in Italy.
At the bar, the men who just had their arms around DiSilvio are already gossiping. Was the son-in-law having an affair? Did he owe a lot of money? Married to someone else? In the mob? (No to that one, says Tomasso, the bocce champion from Trenton. He was an Armenian with an Italian-sounding name; they’d never let him in the mob.) There has to be a reason, the men agree. You don’t just decide one day to wrap your car around a tree. What do you think, Antonio? asks one of the men. You’re close with DiSilvio. You ever meet this son-in-law? What kind of man . . . ?
But Antonio has nothing to say to these questions, or to the man who asks them, one of the new guys, a calabrese, who must not know that Antonio’s son was cut from the same cloth as this Armenian who married Patrizia. A maniac, DiSilvio called him. A crazy.
Tomasso rescues him. “We here to play bocce or what?” he says. “You’re on my team tonight, Grasso.”
“Not fair,” says the calabrese. “The two best players?”
For the first few minutes, Antonio throws well enough, can concentrate on getting his green ball close to the pallino. As the game goes on, though, he loses his touch. Tomasso doesn’t tease him. He must know, somehow, the way men do but never discuss, that Antonio is now lost in a jumble of years and the memories of his son, and that he won’t find his way back for a long time.
When Antonio can shut the rest out, this is how he remembers Tony best: a boy who loved his father and the place his father built. From the age he could walk and talk, the only thing Tony liked more than walking and talking at Antonio’s side was walking and talking at Antonio’s side at the Al Di Là. No one, including Antonio, has loved the restaurant so strong since.
After school, Tony would come straight to Al Di Là and sit for hours in a booth doing his homework. When his homework was done, he’d help fold napkins, arrange the forks and knives on the tablecloths, cut the slices of cheesecake and store them in the refrigerator. He drew new logos and signs for the restaurant on the backs of the place mats and showed them to his father, joking that when he grew up and the restaurant became his, he’d make it more modern. He had a talent for design, for making the perfect crease in the napkins, for spacing the knives and forks exactly the right distance apart, for drawing heart shapes on the cheesecake plates with strawberry sauce. Prima worked a few shifts as a waitress, but she didn’t have the knack for it, was distracted and too chatty with the customers.
By the time Tony was fourteen, in 1970, he was doing the work of a busboy, making better tips
than Prima, because who couldn’t fall in love with him? He was already tall, already handsome, the shadow of his first beard growing, his legs strong, his face lit up always for the old ladies; he was the owner’s sweet, intelligent, smiling son, the hope of the generations to come.
There was a waiter that summer, Dante, the son of Marconi the electrician. Antonio hired him as a favor to his father, even though he had no experience. Dante was nothing special; worse, he had a tattoo on his left leg and big horse teeth and a ponytail. He was on his way to becoming a derelict, another of those children who wasted their parents’ sacrifices. But he had charm. The customers asked for him by name and left him big tips, and Tony followed him around like a puppy dog. It was after Dante came, in June of ’70, that Tony changed.
Dante brought him albums and taught him to do mean but perfect imitations of the managers, Gilberto and Lucio. Lucio had a high, girly voice, Gilberto a stutter, and both imitations made everybody laugh. Dante pushed Tony to play pranks on the dishwashers and cooks and his sister, to hide their aprons or their salt until they got so mad they started fighting with each other. He made it Tony’s job to cover his tables while he snuck off for a cigarette with his long-haired friends, who hung around outside the restaurant near the bus stop, waiting for the end of his shift. Dante’s act bothered Antonio from the beginning, but he put up with it because of his friendship with Marconi and the free electric work, and because Tony liked having him at the Al Di Là. When the two had different schedules, Tony sulked and yawned and sat in the corner, writing in a book of guest checks he carried around in his apron so he would feel like a real waiter.
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