by Laura Newman
Liliana had been living with us for three years now. “Did Mamma know you were a blow-up doll when she let you move in?” I’d never wondered this before because by the time I realized her profession, she was just Liliana to me.
Liliana glanced at me. “I know what you’re thinking—how could she let someone like me be around her daughter?”
I tried not to blink; it would be a judgmental blink.
“Sometimes in the summer I was sleeping in the plaza. I’d take showers in the fountains at godforsaken hours.”
I pictured her, a nude marble statue, sluiced by the rush from some ancient, carved water urn. Beautiful, really.
“Alberto was the one who noticed me; you know he collects the little lost souls. And your mamma? Well, judging by Alberto and Parrot, so does she.”
I think she forgot I was there; her eyes were in her heart. Then Liliana shook herself back, looked at me, and said, “Three true things about me—I’m twenty-two years old, I’m technically a virgin, and you’re right, I need a new gig.”
“Movie star?”
“Movie star.”
We giggled, I took a puff of her Spanish cigarette, and she took a swig of the milk.
The following morning, I fell off my shelf. I really need a bed.
There was a turn in the weather, a shading in the air. Mamma took the day off and we walked together to the Vatican. On Via della Lungara we rummaged through the outdoor book stalls and moved on with the scents of mold and faded ink on our fingers. We drank espresso under the shedding bark of the plane trees, mottled green-and-gray patterns that remind me of paint by numbers.
Of course there were tourists in St. Peter’s Square, but we waited. I knew why we were there. Last night Alberto had coughed and coughed and left a small trail of bloody saliva that plumed his bedsheet like a lost tail feather of the Firebird.
We weren’t there for a mass, or to climb the steps of the dome, or even to get on our knees and pray, although we knew how. Mamma turned directly to the right when we entered the basilica and we slowly made our way up to Michelangelo’s Pietà. A crazy geologist attacked Mary with a rock pick in 1972, condemning her ever since to solitary confinement behind a bulletproof screen. Every time I see Mary and her fallen son, I long to be closer to the single most beautiful, most human thing ever made by the hand of man.
“That’s how Alberto looked,” Mamma whispered. She wasn’t really talking to me. Jesus, skinny as a Treblinka Jew, held in the strength and grief of his mother, who is somehow still a young woman. He did look like Alberto.
“This morning?”
“No, no. Back then. When he overdosed and almost died. You were there, but I know you don’t remember.” I didn’t. I was two. I knew Mamma was asking Mary to save Alberto again. To have pity.
It was at that moment that I had my epiphany. “Mamma, I want to be an altar boy.” She looked at me with one raised eyebrow. I decided to go for broke. “Also, is Alberto my father?” Mamma took my hand and we found our way to a quiet café where all of Rome was our backdrop.
I always knew my mother was an American. Not the Lia she was called now, but Amelia Watkins from Gary, Indiana. In 1975, most Americans were watching helicopters dangle people over Saigon or wondering what Patty Hearst was doing with a machine gun. The ‘60s were a fading peace sign in the rearview mirror. But Mamma had just graduated from high school and she wanted to be bigger than Maple Street, more than an apple pie. She considered herself a feminist and an artist, but all she had done was burn her bra and sell one landscape to her grandfather. So she took her graduation money, bought a backpack and a one-way ticket to Milan. She was going to make herself into the things she chose. These were my bedtime stories, knitted into my growing bones. She taught me about America. If ever I get there I am going to eat Nacho Cheese Doritos.
We ordered pompelmo ices. “When I arrived in Milano, I knew it was too big for me,” Mamma began. “I took the train to Cinque Terre on the coast, where the five tiny villages are stacked like a jumble of children’s building blocks. I can’t begin to tell you how I felt. The color of the Mediterranean—I mixed up whole new color wheels of blues and greens based on that water. And the buildings grafted into the cliffs—I learned umber, ochre, vermilion. I would never have become an artist in Gary. Plus, basically I was starving, and I’m telling you, when you are hungry all colors take on a watery, intensified hue. I wanted to dip my fingers into everything. But I had to eat. I really had to eat. Because I was pregnant with you when I left Gary.”
Oh, I let out a gasp! “Before you left home?!”
“No. Gary. Well, yes, and home too. My boyfriend was Gary Petersen.”
Gary Petersen. That’s my dad’s name. Sounds like he would wear a football jersey.
“He was cute, Vittoria. Wore his baseball cap backwards and he was going to be a farmer. He was all yes, ma’am and haystacks. And I just couldn’t do it, Vittoria, I couldn’t put that apron on. So I got on a plane, four months pregnant, and I never told him. Just said I was leaving and don’t come lookin’.”
“That’s why I was so hungry. You were stretching out your legs! Alberto found me in Vernazza and he took me in. He was already a successful solicitor. He was taking a summer vacation on the coast. He fed me every shape of pasta and huge slabs of tiramisu. He was kind to me. He took me back to Rome with him when the summer was over, and then you were born.”
I already knew the story of Alberto’s accelerated quest for drugs and cocktails that came out of the stress of his big-city job. The paper said he was destined for politics! The people loved his crusade for the working class, his Armani suit, his Fabio hair. “But it was too much for him,” Mamma reminded me. “One morning I found him looking like Jesus in the Pietà, and I saved him. Mary and I saved him. As best we could.”
I was getting so much information; I couldn’t stop now. I really wanted my own room. “Mamma, are you and Liliana in love?”
“Oh my goodness, no! Why do you think that?”
“She goes into your room … ”
“Oh, Baby, Liliana is just a lost little girl! Sometimes she just needs a mamma too. She climbs in and we sleep. We are not in love like that.”
There goes that idea.
We fell quiet and the buzzy sound of the city’s Vespas reached us like swarms of killer bees. There was the clink of silverware and the smell of grapefruit and ice. “So, now tell me about the altar boy thing,” said Mamma.
“Why can’t I be an altar boy?” I asked in a guileless, innocent tone. And I knew I could get her. I knew the feminist in her, the bile of repression would burn her heart to pieces. This entire city is filled with women in black muumuus while the men wear red-and-gold-threaded gowns with lacy collars, big-stoned rings, embroidered, pointy-toed shoes. I knew she loved Jesus and Mary, but she was always uncomfortable with the discrimination against women in the clergy. I saw the conflict in her body language; she sat back, folded arms. Could a professed feminist let her daughter deny her sex? She leaned in.
“Well, of course you can be an altar boy. How dare those pious shits say you can’t? Joke’s on them, at least until your boobs come in. Let’s go cut your hair even shorter.”
I didn’t tell her I wanted to be an altar boy so I could pilfer coins from the collection baskets. Why spoil a really good day?
I took my comforter down from my shelf, folded it in half, and started sleeping on the velvet couch. Once I woke up with Parrot standing on my chest, three small, downy-white feathers in his beak that he had pulled out of my quilt. “What are you, some sort of cannibal?” he said with his eyes, then spit the feathers in my face.
Mamma took my quest for altar boy service seriously. But it was my job to do reconnaissance. I went to masses of masses. I took notes:
Basilica di Santa Maria—Too rich. Altar boys look like they are in prep school for the University of Bolog
na.
Santa Cecilia—Locked collection boxes / slot on top. When did that start!?
Chiesa di San Francesco d’Assisi—Too many nuns / sharp eyes.
There are so many churches in Trastevere that if I walked in the two o’clock shadows of the bell towers I could make it all the way to the Vatican without stepping out into the sun.
Then I found Santa Bernadette. Santa Bernadette’s is not a tourist church. No thirteenth-century gold mosaics, no baroque statues. Just cool stone and a wash of blue color from high stained glass windows. There were a lot of Marys but only one depiction of Jesus, and he did not look you in the eye. Best of all, there were only two altar boys and the collection was done with open baskets. Best, best of all, Father Nicola looked about twenty-five and I was going to marry him. I threw away all my childish Roberto hearts.
Mamma took me to Santa Bernadette’s and waited until after mass to talk to Father Nicola. I stayed in the pew. I knew her plan was to explain that we lived in the neighborhood and had been going to Santa Maria. Lately I had fallen in with some Sicilian immigrants and although she knew we were all lambs in God’s eyes, these boys were smoking cigarettes and had tattoos. I was sixteen years old, but looked young for my age. Santa Maria was perhaps too (and here she played on what she hoped would be Father Nicola’s vanity) interested in, well, history, and maybe not so much the problems of its congregation. She thought I would do better at a smaller church devoted to Mary. Could he use another altar boy? Vittorio knows all the altar boy rules.
I was in!
Autumn came with a fading grace. The stone pines withstood the season’s change, but here and there a birch or aspen ignited with color and burned in effigy. I divided my time between school, Piazza Navona, and Santa Bernadette’s.
The only problem with pretending to be a boy was I didn’t know boys are such idiots. I became Sunday friends with Mario and Daniele, the other altar boys, but everything was fica-this and cazzo-that. I’m surprised those two could get through a mass without masturbating. I had no interest in these children. I put on my bright red cassock with my white surplice edged in lace on the hem and sleeves and was dedicated to my duties. Now that there were three altar boys, Mario, the tallest, carried in the cross and Daniele and I carried lit candles. We proceeded through the smell of beeswax, silver polish, and damp stone. The service was as choreographed as a performance at Teatro dell’Opera, and in my opinion just as daffy. Maybe Liliana is right—nothing dies in Rome. Not even poor Jesus.
I did get to carry a basket for offertory collection. What a golden goose! I watched the lire pile up in the basket and thought about this going on in every Catholic church in Rome. What a bunch of beggars. They say they are collecting for the poor, but there’s a translucent life-sized Carrara marble statue of Mary and the candlesticks have rubies. It’s like a rich man panhandling on the corner, you can see his polished Berluti shoes, and still you put lire in his hand. It was easy for me to block myself from view with my wide cassock and long lace sleeves as I made the turn at the back of the nave. I self-identified as one of the wretched poor. I was just taking out the middle man.
Mario and Daniel, the service, the censer with its billow of incense that is supposed to be a symbol of prayer rising to heaven (but we all know it is to cover the smell of the unwashed and the farts)—none of this was my true concern. Not even the money, which was really more of a bad habit and only a few lire a week just to keep my hand in the game, since I gave up my Four Rivers gig. My true concern quickly became Father Nicola.
Father Nicola looked like the cover of a romance novel. All the sexy saints are men. Think Saint Sebastian with the arrows. Sebastian’s the patron saint of athletes, but I think he might also be the patron saint of masochists, tied to the tree, a look of transcendental ecstasy on his face.
I hung around after mass, after Mario and Daniele left, pushing each other down the church steps. I went to the cleaning closet and got out cloths and lemon oil and polished the wood of the altar, refilled the large rack of cheap candles in the red glass jars, thirty lire to light a candle and increase the potency of prayer, or buy an indulgence. I prayed that Father Nicola would indulge me.
Autumn yawned into December. Days ended abruptly, but Rome is ever a city strung with café lights and candles melting over Chianti bottles. Father Nicola added a late afternoon mass on Sundays because when Christmas draws near, everyone’s a Catholic in Rome. Christmas lights crisscrossed the alleys of Trastevere like star-crossed lovers. Signora Bianchi put a twelve-meter tree, heavy with twinkle lights and strands of popcorn, out in the piazza by the Stella. Parrot took to sitting on top, gaudy as a Vatican Swiss Guard, eating the popcorn whenever Signora Bianchi wasn’t looking. When she caught him she would shake her fist, but honestly I think she strung that popcorn as Parrot’s Christmas gift.
On Christmas morning we overslept and then drank dark cups of espresso and exchanged our presents. Liliana gave me a lace-edged white silk bra and matching panties so soft they slipped through my hands. Madonna, they were beautiful! And at last I had some itty-bitty-bit of boobie to put in them! I was certain their emergence was the result of my months of lusting after Father Nicola. Thoughts that intense were sure to change a body. My breasts were not visible under my surplice, but the way Father Nicola sometimes glanced at me, he saw them. I thought he saw them.
We lazed through the morning and then had ham in a pecan sauce, cordial glasses of ice wine from the Aldo Adige and chunks of chocolate and pomegranates. When we could eat no more, Alberto wheeled round the table to Liliana and offered her a small velvet box. Liliana held out her hand but said, “Alberto, we are done with gifts.”
“This is one more small thing for you, mia dolce. I am so proud of you.” Liliana had started working in Alberto’s solicitor’s office; she had a gift for making uncomfortable people comfortable. She had quit her daylily job. We all leaned in. Inside the box was a folded-up piece of paper. A check! “For school, Liliana; it’s time to go back to college. This will get you started,” said Alberto. Liliana and Mamma both started to cry.
“Don’t cry,” said Alberto to Mamma. “I have one for you too, il mio cuore.” He placed an identical box on the table in front of her. Midnight blue velvet.
“Alberto, I’m not going back to school!” But she took the box.
“Open it, Mamma!”
We all leaned in. Inside was a slender silver ring, runed and tarnished. A star sapphire. “Lia, will you have a poor excuse like me?” Alberto asked. He could not get down on one knee. Liliana and I couldn’t breathe.
My mother bit her lip and looked at Alberto with watery eyes. Did she see the albatross? She did not; or she only saw him in flight. “Si. Perché ci hai messo tanto tempo?”[What took you so very long?] Now we all were crying and laughing and hugging like Italians. Mamma and Alberto kissed and I realized that although Alberto was not my father, at least from time to time he had been my mother’s lover.
Alberto turned to me. “So. Now, something for you, Vittoria.” he said. “A puzzle. What won’t fit in a box, but is a box?”
I threw my hands up in the air. “My own room!”
“We will decorate! Everything new,” declared Alberto. And then he handed me a slender ring of twined silver and said, “For my daughter.”
God, what a day! And it wasn’t over.
Everyone had meant to go with me to the late afternoon Christmas mass, but when it was time to go, they were in the Christmas coma. I didn’t care, in fact didn’t want them. I put on my new silk lingerie, pieces so fine they were a dictionary away from the word underwear. As I layered my black slacks and black top with the buttons on the boy’s side, I felt for the first time the power that a woman feels when she puts on back-seamed fishnets, stilettos, cat eyes. Two little pieces of silk opened that door for me. And out that door I went, to Santa Bernadette’s.
Now this part is hard to tell.
Memory is smoke.
After mass I returned my cassock and surplice to the closet. I waited until everyone had gone and followed Father Nicola into his study, nervously inhaling the smell of stone and books and coffee. He looked up from his desk to my face. A smile. “Vittorio, go home now. It’s Christmas, be with your family.”
“I have a gift for you, Father.”
“Oh, no need for that,” he dismissed. But I had already taken my hand from behind my back and brought forth a pomegranate. No one could say no to such a simple gift of edible rubies. So he amended, “Thank you, Vittorio,” and put out his hand. But I came round his desk. His desk was old and scarred but his chair was wide and new and swiveled toward me. I did not stop. I climbed right up into his lap, legs wide, and held the pomegranate between us like a third, exposed heart. I leaned over and kissed him in a way to match my lingerie. A very grown-up kiss that tasted of communion wafer. This was the extent of my bravery. If he had repulsed me, I would have flown.
He kissed me back.
He took the fruit and let it drop to the floor and I pressed into his chest. This, I was sure, was the kiss of two people who had been thinking about it for seasons. Neither of us intended it to end in a kiss. It wasn’t as if we could go out on a date. Our breathing was wild. I feared I would break out in hiccups and ruin everything. Father Nicola unzipped my pants. I thought he would start with my shirt, as lovers do in movies. But then I remembered The Godfather, where they did it standing up against a wall half undressed, and this only excited me more. His hand went inside my silk panties.
Then his hand came out of my silk panties.
Father Nicola pulled back, a horse running full speed who had reached the edge of a cliff. “Vittorio, you are a girl.” It wasn’t a question. He almost whispered it. He got up so quickly I fell, landing awkwardly on the pomegranate. He was a completely different person. All sexuality had drained from him like dirty water down a stone sink. He started to say he was sorry, or words I will never remember. He reached out a hand to help me up. It was then that I knew Father Nicola had always believed, until his hand was down my pants, believed I was a boy. He was rejecting me only because I wasn’t.
