Wild Roses

by Deb Caletti

  The front rows are still making their way up the ramp when we hear it. This animal cry of rage. You son of a bitch! We turn to look, and in spite of everything that has happened up to that point, in spite of all that we have lived with over the past few months, the cry is a surprise, and I have no idea whose voice it is or what is happening. There is that sudden disorientation of trying to make sense of something unexpected.

  And then I see him. Billowing white shirt, black tuxedo pants, and he leaps from the stage and stumbles. Andrew Wilkowski is the first one to understand that it is Dino, and that this is a disaster. He rushes down the ramp with a surprising degree of athleticism, but misses Dino coming up the side aisle. Dino is pushing past startled people, reaches the man who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Dino Tiero Cavalli’s brother. He grabs a chunk of the back of the jacket the man wears and spins him around. He raises his fist, and with the force of the agony and pain of his lifetime, punches the man in his face, sending him reeling and crashing to the floor.

  There are screams—my mother screams beside me. Dino is kneeling beside the man. He is putting his hands to the man’s throat. Blood is coming from the man’s nose. Andrew Wilkowski reaches them.

  Dino looks into the face of the man, and realizes what we already know. He realizes that this is just a man, an aeronautics engineer who played the bass in his high school orchestra and who lucked into good seats through an online auction. This is not William Tiero, who he is certain tried to ruin him financially by getting him the psychiatric help he needed. Who shared the ugly history that Dino tried to escape from but feared he never could. As my mother said, his nose and chin are too round.

  This is when Dino rises. The part of him that is sane and rational, if still a perfectionist asshole, looks shocked at what he has done.

  Two ushers and a security officer are trying to move down the crowd of people to get to the injured man. Andrew Wilkowski has his arm around Dino’s shoulder. But he doesn’t know Dino’s strength if he thinks he can hold him there. Dino wrenches himself free. He flees out the side door, the fire exit.

  He runs out into the night.

  Later, after the police had gone, the one thing I kept thinking about was Siang Chibo. I wondered if she had seen what had happened, or if she would only read about it in the morning. I thought about her reaction to this night even more than Ian’s. I had such a profound feeling of having disappointed her. I kept seeing her finger, straightening that painting of Wild Roses.

  Andrew Wilkowski was snoring on the couch, and my mother was sitting up in bed with the lights on. She’d told me to go to sleep, and I told her that sleep would be impossible. Now, she had said, and I guess she just needed some time alone to think. She had a lot to think about.

  I’d been able to sleep, but it was a deep, dark sleep of restless dreams, full of Dino’s music, full of the knowledge that he was gone, and that Ian was going away too. Finally I slept hard, woke up late, and emerged from haziness to the awful memory of what the night before had brought. It seemed so unreal that I had to convince myself that it was true. Dino was still gone. I called Ian quickly, and we spoke only long enough to arrange a meeting. There were things he needed to tell me. There were things I needed to tell him, too.

  I stayed with Mom all day, on the Dino vigil. Andrew Wilkowski hid the newspaper and made sure the television and radio weren’t played. There was no news of Dino from the police or anywhere else. After we tried to eat grilled cheese sandwiches and soup, I left Mom in the capable hands of Andrew Wilkowski, still in his suit, looking wrinkled and exhausted, his music-note tie discarded sometime the night before. Dog William snoozed on the living room rug, looking inappropriately content.

  I walked down to the ferry docks. The day had been freezing but bright, too cheerful for what Mom was going through. White wisps of a foggy evening were beginning to form in the dusk, looking as if they could be cleared with a puff of my breath. Ian was there already when I arrived. I saw his dark coat all the way from the ticket window, where Evan Malloney’s dad was working late.

  Ian faced me, watched me walk toward him. He held out his arms and I got in. I let myself sink there and disappear.

  “You saw,” I said.

  “Yes,” Ian said into my hair.

  “I heard about you, too, and Curtis.”

  “Bunny told me he saw you. There’s so much to say that I don’t know where to start.”

  “I don’t either,” I said.

  “I knew Dino was … difficult. But Cassie, did he just snap?”

  “No, not really. I knew something like this was coming. My Mom and I both did. There’s been so much happening. … I was embarrassed to tell you. There was so much …” I still couldn’t say the words. Crazy. Mentally ill.

  “You should have told me. Look at us. We didn’t tell each other the most important things.”

  “I was afraid of what you’d think.”

  “I was afraid of what you would think. God, we can’t be so afraid of losing each other. I won’t judge you. I love you.”

  I squeezed him under his coat. “But I am going to lose you.”

  “You’re not going to lose me.”

  “But you’re going away.”

  “Yes.”

  We stood there, just holding each other.

  “It’s what you have to do,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I said. “I don’t even want to talk.”

  “Okay.”

  “No sound. No music, no talking.”

  “Quiet as space,” he said. “Is space quiet?” I held my finger up to his lips to tell him to shush. We walked down the dock. We didn’t talk about where we were walking; we just kept going forward, in step with each other. We walked back toward town, went to the planetarium. Dave was just leaving, let us in and told me to lock the door behind me when I left. We walked into the dark auditorium, and I kept the lights off, turned on the projector and lit the ceiling with stars. We sat in the plush chairs, side by side and holding hands. Ian leaned over and kissed me, and we stayed there for a while like that. It got uncomfortable, and we lay down on the floor together for a while. What happened after that is nobody’s business. It’s my sweet, good memory. But I will say that I got my wish for quiet. Quiet except for the sweet, tender notes of Amore Dolce Della Gioventù playing in my head, and Ian’s breath in my ear.

  Alice came over and stayed with Mom when Andrew Wilkowski went home for a little bit. There was still no news of Dino. Alice seemed to know a lot about our life. Mom told more about what went on in our house than I ever did, it seemed. I wonder if my parents’ divorce made me get too good at keeping secrets.

  Alice brought tea and scones in a white bag. I guess she didn’t have time to make them herself. A white bakery bag is one of the reasons life is good, if you ask me, and Alice’s calm presence and kind voice did appear to work magic on Mom. Alice had her laughing, telling a story about someone else they knew, and I was glad to see that Mom had good people around her.

  So it was Alice, anyway, not Andrew Wilkowski, who was there with Mom when she got the phone call. The call was from William Tiero. Mom was so happy and relieved to hear from him. Dino may have been right in his paranoid feeling that Mom and William kept in contact. They were two people who loved Dino, and they were looking after him. Mom’s voice was warm, grateful.

  “They found him. Thank God,” she said, after she hung up. Dino had boarded a plane, flew to Milan. He had checked into the Principe De Savoia Hotel, was there now. He was alone, in bad shape. She needed to go immediately.

  Mom phoned Dino’s doctor and Andrew Wilkowski, who insisted on coming with her. The kind Alice called for plane reservations as Mom packed.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “How can I help?” I asked.

  “Can you look in the top dresser drawer for my passport?”

  I hunted around until I found the small blue book. I opened it up, looked at her pict
ure. It was taken a few years ago, just before they were married. They had gone to Paris for a week for their honeymoon. She looked so young in the picture. I couldn’t believe how much she’d changed. “Found it.”

  “I’ve never been to Italy,” she said. “This wasn’t exactly the way I intended going. This is not something I could have ever imagined. I cannot even believe what I am doing right now.”

  “Is he okay?” I thought about the Wild Roses painting. I thought about what Siang Chibo had told me. About what had happened with Vincent van Gogh after he’d painted it.

  “You know what Dr. Milton said? Have I ever told you how much I can’t stand Dr. Milton? Born with a reptile heart, I swear.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said I should commit Dino when I get to Milan. If he’s alive by the time I get there. That’s actually what he said. ‘If he’s alive by the time you get there.’”

  “I still think he’s a liar,” my father said.

  “He had reason. It’s not that simple,” I said.

  “Crazy, then. I don’t think anyone will dispute that anymore. That poor man. His nose is broken. I can’t believe he isn’t going to sue. And that violin. Imagine how much that cost.”

  I hadn’t seen a newspaper in a few days, but Dad had them all. He even had a few from other cities, for God’s sake. Nannie was sitting in the chair with the pop-up footstool. She was doing the crossword puzzle in the Chicago Tribune. I saw it sitting open on the coffee table later. For “Elvis hit, 1956” she had written artichoke dip and had left two squares blank, and for “Hockey legend” she had written puck, leaving three squares blank. It just goes to show that if it works for you, great.

  “Dino’s suicidal in some hotel, Dad. I don’t think they’re thinking about that aspect of things right now.”

  “Look at what she chose. And our life together was so bad?”

  I kept my mouth shut. Watched Dog William out the window, checking out Dad’s backyard with a confused excitement. The gray whales had begun their migration in the sound that stretched out before us. But no one was thinking about whales, and that seemed sad and wrong.

  “Flower parts, six letters,” Nannie shouted. “What’s a flower part, six letters?”

  “Petals,” my dad said.

  She ignored him. “Flower!” Nannie said. She counted the letters. “Yep, that’s six.”

  “I guess if your mother puts up with this, she’ll never leave him,” my father said.

  I didn’t tell him that I’d had the same thought. Instead, I took his hands across the table where we sat. The Dutch girls were still paired with the chefs—Dad had at last given up on Nannie’s rearranging, at least with the salt and pepper shakers.

  “I love you, Dad,” I said. “I just … I wish you would let go, you know? Move on.”

  “I have moved on,” he said.

  “Dad.” I gestured to the newspapers, spread out all over the living room.

  He sighed. “Cassie?” he said. “There’s one thing I know. You can’t tell a heart what to do.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Oh give me a home, where these roam. Seven letters,” Nannie said. She was quiet a moment. Dad and I just sat there, our hands clasped together.

  “Monkeys,” Nannie said finally.

  Mom’s voice was there, coming across the ocean by phone. She sounded so close, she might have been phoning from the grocery store.

  “I’ve got to get that doctor’s home phone number,” she said. “You’ve got to help me. It’s an emergency.”

  “I can ask Dad to help me. He’s a master sleuth. What’s going on?”

  “Just hurry. Call me back as soon as you can. He’s gone, Cassie. We got here, and he’s gone.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Something’s happened to him. I can feel it. It’s like I feel this … separation. I feel him gone in my gut.”

  After writing his Principia, Sir Isaac Newton collapsed in a nervous breakdown. Abraham Lincoln had several breakdowns, and was obsessed with thoughts of premature death and of going mad. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were the dysfunctional couple of the century. He was wracked by alcoholism, and she died in a fire at a mental hospital. So much painful living, even for the seemingly most chirpy—Dolly Parton (depression), Charles Schultz (anxiety), Dick Clark (depression), Donny and Marie Osmond, for God’s sake (anxiety and depression, respectively).

  “What if he’s dead, Ian?” I said into the phone. “What does dead even mean?” I couldn’t get my mind wrapped around the thought. I couldn’t picture him really gone. Forever gone, gone where? “I wanted him out of my life, Mom’s life. But I never wanted this.”

  “I know”

  “Tell me what dead means,” I said.

  “I don’t know, Cassie. I just don’t know.”

  • • •

  Here is what happened, according to my mother. Dino took a cab, all the way down to the center of the country. A cab, if you can believe it, some 130 miles. Through Milan and Bologna. On to Florence, and a short while farther to San Gimignano, Tuscany. From there, just a few miles south to the hilltop town of Sabbotino Grappa.

  My mother and Andrew Wilkowski took the train. They paid a man in an old Renault to drive them from the station to Sabbotino Grappa. The man drove with one hand, and held a cigarette in the other, dangling it out the open window. They told him they were in a hurry, and he accommodated, although it seemed that all the cars on the roads drove with the same fury and absentminded recklessness, Mom said. Lots of veering and honking and driving up the curb until they were out of the city and the driver calmed down a bit. It was hot, Mom said, and they had to drive with all of the windows rolled down. You could see Sabbotino Grappa before you arrived there—from the highway it was a tiny town that looked balanced on a pinnacle. The town was built on the lofty hilltop location in the medieval days, so the townspeople could see who might be arriving to destroy them. Dino had done a good job in choosing Sabbotino Grappa, Mom realized. It was too far and too small to be of interest to tourists, and the trip up the winding road to the top too arduous. The village shared one phone, and traveling to that place in an attempt to check facts with the handful of people who lived there and who spoke only Italian would give anyone incentive to believe first Dino’s and then Edward Reynolds’s version of events. One look at this place, though, Mom said, and you knew that Edward Reynolds, the author of An Oral History made a decision about which story he would give to the world. Because there would be no canals up here. No canals in which to throw a bicycle.

  The man in the Renault told them about all of the Americans he knew, asked if they lived in New York City. He’d been there once, and from what he saw of America, he hated it. They wound their way up the hill, arrived at a town so ancient and quiet, my mother was sure it was deserted. The man in the Renault let them out, and Andrew paid him. My mother took a big drink of warm air, looked out over the Tuscan valley, which stretched beneath them. The man in the Renault waved good-bye, the cigarette still smoking in his hand, and beeped his horn. As he headed back down the winding road, my mother worried about letting him go—the town, all yellow stone and small alleyways, seemed completely empty. It looked like an abandoned film-scene set, with its narrow passages and stone walls and buildings so old it was hard to believe anyone that lived there knew what year it was.

  In the center of the town was a square, cobbled, with a church and three small stores, just as Dino had described. Just as Edward Reynolds had said. It just seemed so deserted, Mom thought; until she caught the movement of a curtain, saw the bulk of an old woman moving away who’d been watching them. Then she saw the window shade of a store pulled closed, a pair of shutters yanked shut, an old man hurrying off down an alleyway They walked to the church and went inside. The church was freezing. There were three long rows of lit red candles, and a huge image of Jesus painted right onto the wall, chipped in an unfortunate place. Andrew Wilkowski called out, and an a
ncient priest shuffled into the church. He stank so strongly of wine, my mother thought she could get drunk just smelling his breath.

  The old priest spoke only Italian, and Andrew Wilkowski made his best attempt to speak to him. The old man just shook his head No, no, no, until Andrew Wilkowski said Dino’s name. When he heard this, he took Andrew’s arms in his hands and nodded, gestured to the open doorway. My mother said she felt the most profound relief, until the old priest started shaking his head and mumbling softly, as if it was so sad, so sad.

  They followed the priest out of the church and into the warm air of the piazza, followed him across the cobblestones and down a narrow alley. Up a flight of steps to a large wooden door. The old priest knocked with his fist. Honoria! He shouted. Honoria! Apra il portello!

  The old priest kept banging, but no one answered. A cat appeared and curled around his legs, and he swatted it aside with his foot in a very unpriestly fashion. Honoria!

  Finally he tried the doorknob. My mother and Andrew exchanged a look. Dread filled my mother. She thought she might throw up. The priest pushed the door open, and not knowing what else to do, they followed him into the house, through a dark hall with crooked hanging pictures, and into a kitchen. By that time my mother said she was expecting anything. An empty room, another crazy ride to another strange place, the news of Dino’s suicide.

  But she did not expect what she saw. He was lying on a couch, an old blanket tucked around him, his mouth hanging open. The nearly deaf Honoria Maretta was setting down a tray of tea and cookies beside him. Dino woke up, propped himself against some pillows, and smiled before he saw the trio come down the hall. He was smiling because he saw what was on the tray. Honoria had made him pizzelles.

  As I said, the desire to be near fame and greatness can do odd and amazing things to people. That night, all the good people of Sabbotino Grappa came out to feast the returning son that was never theirs. Mom and Andrew were greeted warmly, now that the villagers knew they were strangers to be welcomed rather than feared. It wasn’t too often, after all, that they got visitors. Antonia Gillette, the baker’s wife, set up a table in the piazza and everyone brought food. The forever squabbling Mrs. Salducci and Mrs. Latore, both old as time, brought pinzimonio and risotto, and broke into an argument about where to place their dishes. Peter, the baker, made focaccia, though his daughter had to carry the plate as she held her father’s arm to help him walk. Francesca and Lutitia Bissola arrived, clutching each other for steadiness, chatting and arguing and kissing everyone in sight after they had a few glasses of the wine that Father Abrulla brought from the church. Even Karl Lager came, bringing pomegranates from his store, and bruised apricots and olives. Father Minelli was dead and gone, as was the reclusive Frank Piccola. Almost everyone else, Mom said, was over eighty. She wondered what would happen to the town when everyone was dead, wondered who would live there anymore. The youngest people there were Maria and Eli Manzoni, and they were older than Dino, though Pia and her brothers arrived by car, bringing grandchildren that hid under the table and feasted on Honoria’s cookies.