All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  They were Tony’s official godparents, they had stood beside him in the church a month after he was born and poured water over his head, but they, too, rarely mentioned him. Like his mother, they insisted to Frankie that he was worthy of great love. They saw something special in him. They made him promise he’d someday move to New York and open a bookstore/art gallery/jazz lounge, where no-names could perform alongside the celebrated. Helen believed that fame rotted the soul. Giulio believed in the underdog. They weren’t hippies, they said; in fact, they’d voted twice for Reagan and disapproved of women who’d traded their God-given maternal destiny for careers. And yet it was Giulio who introduced Frankie to Amnesty International and Helen who admired Neruda’s poetry and activism. They made Frankie read Inherit the Wind together with the Bible. If you asked them what they were—Libertarians? Reformed Catholics?—they’d say simply, “We’re educated.”

  It’s what Frankie decided he wanted to be.

  Though by ninth grade he no longer required a babysitter, he frequently walked the few miles to Little Italy at the end of the school day. He’d do his homework at the kitchen table while Helen taught piano in the dining room and Giulio napped in the leather recliner beside the bay window. It was in the unexpected harmony of these three rooms—the stuttering piano, Giulio’s snores, Helen’s exaggerated coos, the metronome ticking—that Frankie filled a journal with sappy sestinas, read C. S. Lewis, and traced the barbed-wired Amnesty candle logo on the front of all his notebooks. It was the least lonely place he has ever known.

  One February afternoon, Zio Giulio came home carrying a large burlap sack stuffed with chestnuts. He dropped the sack on the coffee table, reached in, grabbed two handfuls of the chestnuts, and let them slip through his fingers like diamonds.

  “Five bucks!” he said to Helen. “For all these!”

  She stood over the sack, hands on her hips, picking over the contents with her eyes. “Full of worms, I’ll bet.”

  “Say half are no good,” he said. “It’s still a steal. For five bucks? And Frankie loves them. Don’t you, uaglio?”

  Frankie didn’t. They tasted like burnt rubber and made him thirsty. “I do,” he said. Lately, Giulio had been getting little things mixed up, and Frankie didn’t want him to realize he’d misremembered this, too. It was Tony who’d loved chestnuts.

  “See?” he said to Helen.

  “Well, I’m not roasting all those,” she said as she walked back to the sour-faced girl at the piano. “Frankie will help when he’s finished his homework.”

  So they cleared the kitchen table, Giulio handed Frankie a knife, and they sat cutting slits into the chestnuts for an hour by the heat of the oven. They arranged the chestnuts on trays and rotated them in and out every twenty minutes. While one tray cooked, they peeled the roasted ones and distributed them among brown paper lunch bags. Giulio marked the bags with the names of friends to whom he’d deliver them later that night.

  Frankie had imagined a good, educated man like Giulio Fabbri fading away in his recliner, Emerson’s essays clutched to his chest, Julius LaRosa on the turntable. Or in his sleep beside Helen, who’d rescued him from one life and could ease him with fortitude and tenderness into the next. He didn’t expect him to drop a tray full of chestnuts and then—scrambling on his hands and knees to gather them before Helen caught him—collapse on the kitchen floor, splaying his arms and legs every which way. He didn’t expect his cheek smashed against the greasy linoleum, his eyelids twitching, his fist around a burnt, tasteless chestnut. Frankie wanted a final blessing from the man, an assurance that the world he was leaving him was not vicious. He wanted his uncle’s life to come to more than the sum of his days and nights in his little house.

  But it didn’t. As he watched Helen lay her body beside her husband’s, her arm across his back, waiting for the ambulance, Frankie wondered what would become of all the words and stories and lyrics and notes Giulio had accumulated in his now-stopped brain. At the time, Frankie imagined it all melting out of his ears, invisible, irretrievable, wasted. Thirteen years later, in his bedroom on Christmas Eve, he has yet to develop a more sophisticated or philosophical or mystical grasp of the afterlife. All he knows is that he wants more from his years of study than to die an anonymous Soldier of Literature. He wants something to outlast him—a body of work. If not, then one book, one definitive text that shows ambitious ideas, something that says Frankie Grasso’s Life Meant Something. Is that too much to ask? Is that not why his father opened a restaurant, and Kelly Anne McDonald seeks to transform inner-city youth? For what other reason do people have children?

  His mother knocks on the door, then pushes through before he can respond. She holds a forkful of baccalà, white and flaky and parsley-perfect, her hand cupped under it to catch any crumbs. Without either of them saying a word, he takes the fish in his mouth and hands back the fork. She leaves, and minutes later, his father appears with three frittelli wrapped in a paper towel. Soon after, his mother again, with a single smelt impaled on a toothpick. One after the other, for the rest of the two hours Frankie was promised undisturbed solitude, the offerings keep coming, and how can he refuse them?

  CHRISTMAS EVE, PRIMA drives alone to Graylyn Ridge, the middle car in the caravan. Tom and Patrick are in the BMW in front, and the older boys follow in Ryan’s Jeep. Wrapped boxes fill her trunk and backseat, along with trays of home-baked cream puffs and sugar cookies. In her rearview mirror, the three boys are singing; through the windshield, she can see Patrick’s head turned toward his father, listening closely. She turns down the radio and, in the luxurious quiet, says aloud, “I am surrounded by gifts.” She could keep driving to the ends of the earth in this formation, never stopping, never growing hungry, never needing any blessing other than the safe passage of her men.

  Someone—a woman—once told her, offhand, that the secret of a happy life is to live for yourself. “Forget about other people,” she added, finger wagging, bracelets jangling on her wrist. “Any businessman will tell you to pay yourself first,” or some such nonsense. Prima was too shy to disagree to her face, but if she’d had a daiquiri or two she might have told this woman—Nadine was her name, some hippie receptionist at Tom’s office—that her husband and children, those people it was her job to feed, had kept her full her entire life. As long as they’re alive, she’ll never go hungry.

  Prima does not love her sons and Tom with her heart only. The heart—she might have told Nadine, after the daiquiri—is inadequate. It tears and skips without warning. It’s open to attack. Everyone knows where to find it, how to break it. No. Prima loves with her soul, that chamber protected by God. There is no such thing as a broken soul, not for a person of faith, anyway, which she is.

  Prima was not surprised when she learned not long ago that Nadine had gotten divorced and lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment behind the Tri-State Mall. She seemed like the type who would max out her credit cards, smoke pot before work, and spend the Christmas holiday on a Caribbean cruise. Prima should have felt pity, but instead she felt—still feels—a nagging prickle of alarm at the thought of the woman, as if she were the carrier of a deadly virus who should not be permitted on board her ocean liner.

  Prima turns up the music, which helps to push ugly thoughts away. It’s five fifteen. Five thirty on the dot when she pulls into the driveway of her parents’ house. The Buckleys are right on time, as usual. Prima is still furious with her mother, but for her father’s sake, she’s decided to put that aside tonight and tomorrow.

  Earlier, her father had called from the Al Di Là so Maddalena couldn’t eavesdrop. “You have to make peace with her,” he told her, his voice thin and agitated. “Please, Prima. She’s wrong, you’re right, no question, but not talking to her, not calling her back, is the wrong way to fight. You don’t know how it upsets her.”

  “I want her to be upset,” Prima said. “It’s the only way she’ll change her attitude. Besides, how many times have I watched you two play the silence game over th
e years? Where do you think I got the idea?”

  “I talked to my mother every day of my life,” he said angrily. “Even in the middle of a fight. Even when she didn’t know my name. It’s about respect.”

  If there was one thing her father could never tolerate, Prima knew, it was a lack of respect. And yet respect was what she hoped to show by bringing her family, especially her sons, to Santa Cecilia. Why could no one understand this? She waited a few moments, listening to the clang of pots and pans in the Al Di Là kitchen. “I’ll see what I can do, Dad,” she said. “I’ll try and act normal. But I can’t control what I feel. I’m not Irish, you know.”

  At this he laughed. Another thing Prima learned from her father is that she could always break the tension with a crack about the Irish.

  He’s stressed out tonight, standing before a ten-quart pot of tomato sauce, adding pinches of last-minute herbs. The dining room table is set with a new red tablecloth, gold reindeer candlesticks, cut-crystal wineglasses, and garland strung around the chandelier. It’s the one night of the year that they don’t let Prima help cook, that they’ve insisted she relax “like a queen,” and so Maddalena and Antonio run in circles, testing each other’s food, straightening knives and forks and lighting candles, as if expecting a food critic. It’s like this every year. If it weren’t, something would be wrong.

  Prima gives her mother a kiss on the cheek. “Merry Christmas,” she says.

  “Buon Natale,” Maddalena says. “Figlia mia.” She steps back. “You see I’m wearing the dress you gave me.” It’s the red one with the three-quarter sleeves and the sequined flower at the left shoulder. On her feet are flats, but as soon as the first course is on the dining room table, she’ll switch to heels.

  “You don’t want to wear an apron?”

  “I don’t spill,” she says. “Not like that one.” She ticks her head toward Antonio. “You should see his pants when he comes back from the restaurant. More food on his lap than in his mouth. But I make them brand-new again.”

  Frankie walks in, a glass of whiskey in one hand and a smelt in the other. “You just missed Aunt Helen,” he says to Prima, embracing her. “And Zio Gilberto. And Lucio. It’s like a relay race. When one shows up, it’s the other’s cue to leave.”

  Prima inspects the fruit baskets and wine bottles and poinsettias on the kitchen table. “Looks like they brought some good stuff.”

  “Frankie tell you the new guy came by?” says Antonio. “Olindo. He’s a good kid. Pretty young wife, too, don’t you think, Frankie?”

  “She was all right. And he’s kind of a suck-up, if you ask me, but whatever.”

  “All the managers are brownnosers,” Antonio says. “They know I’m writing my will.”

  “They think they’ll end up in your will?” says Ryan, from the hallway. He knows the managers from the one summer he and Zach waited tables the Al Di Là. Zach quit by the Fourth of July, but Ryan stayed on and made a fortune in tips. “Are they on crack?”

  As soon as the will is mentioned, Prima notices, Frankie leaves the room. He knows where the rest of the conversation is headed—that their father is about to go on and on about this being his last Christmas alive, how they need to learn how to live without him, they need to take care of Maddalena and the Al Di Là and each other. Every time he talks like this, Frankie shuts down. Prima’s never met someone with such a hard shell, but so soft on the inside. “Dad,” she says, her hand on his shoulder, when the conversation turns again and Ryan and his nonna disappear into the dining room to fix drinks. “Don’t talk like that in front of Frankie.”

  “What did I say?” says Antonio. “That I have a will? That boy’s too sensitive. He has to face facts. How many more years does he think I have . . .”

  “Just tone it down,” Prima says, and she squeezes his shoulder. “Nobody likes to hear that kind of talk. Not on Christmas. It’s not sad enough this year?”

  “Every year is sad,” says Antonio.

  She stands for a few minutes, quietly, beside her father, watching him taste and correct the sauce with one hand and arrange lemon wedges on a tray of flounder with the other. On another burner, a different sauce simmers for Ryan, who doesn’t eat anchovies; on another tray, the baccalà decorated with finely chopped parsley and garlic. He might be a klutzy eater, but his hands don’t shake as he fine-tunes each dish he prepares. Decades of work have kept him slim, and while he’s gone gray, he’s kept most of his hair. Like Maddalena, he’s dressed sharply, in a tie and pleated pants. His apron, a gift from one of the managers a few years back, says, “I Don’t Need A Recipe—I’m Italian.” Prima thinks, You’re too alive, too on your game, ever to leave this world. If she’d made different choices in her life, she might have stood beside him like this at the Al Di Là week after week, perfecting the dishes, his right-hand woman, in a team of generations. But that place was Tony’s, and once he threw it away, how could she take it, even if she wanted to?

  There’s a tray of wineglasses on the counter next to Prima. She picks one up to pour herself some chardonnay, but it’s streaked and crusty. All the glasses, she notices, are filthy. “You want me to wash these?” she asks her father.

  “Your mother already did,” he says without looking up.

  Prima nods. She wipes the crud from the glasses with a wet dish towel and pours one tall.

  Frankie’s reading in the armchair by the tree. She sits across from him, but he doesn’t budge from his concentration, not even when he reaches over to sip his whiskey, and she can’t think of a single thing to say to him that he might find interesting. She wants to turn on the TV, find a Christmas special, but they don’t make good ones anymore, the way Andy Williams did, and besides, she’s sure Frankie will hate it.

  Having nothing to do makes Prima panicky. Her mother’s in the basement and will send her away, demand she relax and enjoy the break, if she goes to visit. She opens the cupboard of the credenza, looking for a magazine or something to help pass the next half hour until dinner’s ready, and is struck by a foul smell. At the top of a stack of Town and Country magazines, she finds an open pint of heavy cream, spoiled.

  She stares at it a moment. Not everything has to be a sign, and yet her heart is pounding. She grabs a cocktail napkin from the coffee table, picks up the carton, takes it outside, dumps the chunky mess onto the grass, the carton into the trash can.

  Back in the kitchen, her father is still correcting his anchovy sauce.

  “Dad,” she says, “did Mom say she washed these wineglasses?”

  “What? I told you, yes. Why?”

  “They’re filthy.”

  “Ask Frankie to wash them. He’s not doing anything. You need to relax—”

  “I took care of it already.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Nothing,” she says. He looks at her funny, and she walks away.

  Prima goes downstairs and finds Maddalena at her worktable, wrapping a present. The basement smells of apples and vinegar and grease. “I thought of something else for your father last minute,” she says. “It’s a joke. Don’t ask me what it is because I won’t tell you.”

  Like the dorm room she never had, Maddalena’s basement lair is decorated with what defines her: yardsticks and pincushions, bolts of fabric stacked in neat rows, dozens of wire hangers hanging from a clothesline, and gift boxes and ribbons and wrapping paper saved from decades of Christmases. There’s a second oven, an older one, so they can keep the kitchen oven gleaming clean. For company she has a television with a senior-size remote, and a radio–CD player set to a dance music station. Prima’s ancient dorm fridge hums emptily in the corner by the washer and dryer and the tub in which a pair of Antonio’s sauce-splattered pants seem always to be soaking. Framed photos line the shelf above the worktable, where Prima, perpetually thin and twenty-two, kisses Tom at the altar of St. Anthony’s; where Frankie stands in his white tux at his high school graduation; where Tony goofily smiles through the huge gap in his two fron
t teeth. Under the padded worktable are school notebooks and report cards, uniforms, and art projects that Maddalena can pull out at any time, show Prima, and say, “You made this for me, you see? I keep everything.”

  Prima rarely ventures down here. It’s filled with too many memories of Tony, of the two of them playing 45s while their mother sewed or making up plays in their own secret hideout behind the old mattresses. But tonight she’s on the lookout for signs, and they would be here if they were anywhere. Yet nothing seems to be out of place. “These are ready?” she asks, lifting the tinfoil from the various covered dishes on the stove top (burners off, good) and finding peas and onions, roasted peppers, apple and cauliflower frittelli, and potatoes in oil, vinegar, and parsley. She tastes each one, and each is perfect, prepared the same way it’s been prepared for as long as she can remember. “You’ve still got it,” she says.

  “I’m not a cook,” says Maddalena. “I was lucky your father didn’t need one. But I can make a few things.”

  For the rest of the night, Prima studies her. Serving the food, washing the dishes between courses, playing tombola, as each gift is unwrapped. Maddalena remembers each gift she’s given, and why. She keeps track of her numbers on her little tombola card, wins two rounds. The dishes she washes sparkle in the light.

  At Midnight Mass, Maddalena recites every word of the Our Father. Still, all throughout the service, Prima can’t stop thinking about the spoiled cream, sitting there where it shouldn’t belong, its heaviness and stench. She’s read the articles, knows the signs to watch out for. She’s been watching for a while now, noting each of her mother’s “spells,” each time she forgets a name, bracing herself for the day she forgets her own. Her father has assured her that her doctors know about it, that they’ve done scans and blood tests and are not worried, it’s just part of getting old, but Prima doesn’t believe him. It’s Grasso tradition to keep bad news secret, to hide your trouble until you have no choice but to admit it, and Prima is as much a Grasso as anyone.